The Gypsy Goddess (8 page)

Why can't you fucking follow chronology?

I can. If you observe carefully, you will not fail to note that everyone gets fucked in the due course of time.

Why can't you follow a standard narrative format?

If the reader wanted a straight, humourless version of the events that surrounded the single biggest caste atrocity in India, she would read a research paper in the
Economic and Political Weekly
or a balanced press report. If the reader wants to understand the myriad landowning patterns in the Tanjore district, she will read an academic treatise like ‘Rural Change in Southeast Asia' to find the ready-reckoner, drop-down list of hierarchies:

Landlords

–
Mirasdars

–
Minors
(only used for
mirasdars
who wear too much gold jewellery and are proven womanizers)

Rich Peasants

Middle Peasants

Tenant Cultivators

Farm Overseers

And, at the bottom of the list, the four kinds of landless labourers:

Hereditary Serfs

–
Velaikkaarar
(servants)

–
Pannaiyal
(bonded permanent serfs)

Hired Labourers

– regular coolies

– casual coolies.

In another essay, Professor Gough will say that formerly, in Tanjore, all the Brahmins were
mirasdars
, and all the untouchables were landless labourers. The education will be immediate, procedural and perfect; it will not display any of the haughty haphazardness of this novel. After such class-based classification, the reader will encounter many intermediary castes:
Vellalar
,
Naidu
or
Naicker
,
Agamudaiyar
,
Mudaliar
,
Chettiar
,
Reddiyar
,
Konar
,
Kallar
,
Vanniyar
,
Nadar
. She will be plagued by the plight of the untouchable castes:
Pallar
,
Paraiyar
,
Chakkiliyar
. The reader will be lost in such an alphabet soup. She will learn that life in these parts operates along lines of caste, and not just along structured feudal relations governing the modes of production. A reader cannot challenge what she does not comprehend. Beyond history lessons, she will find herself gravitating towards twisted tales. Hence, this rabble-rousing. Hence, this troublemaking. This craving for unintelligibility is a curse upon the postcolonial reader, who seeks me out. And I write for my readers.

Will this chapter tell the story of the intervening months, July to December?

Yes. The way
Science
or
Nature
tells the story of every individual lab rat. This chapter is the most clinical in this book that it actually borders on research. This is where the particulars are generalized to produce a reliable narrative.

Is there a single story?

No. Of course, I've consulted Chimamanda on this too.

Can every story be told?

Yes. I could do it if you were in the mood to read about how every landlord screwed the life of every labourer. Right now, I am concentrating on one story.

Were atrocities made into templates?

No. Not at all. That would be atrocious. It is just that being jerks, these feudal bastards did not have the fiction writer in mind and therefore they performed the same kinds of atrocities. Once in a while it totally went out of hand, but, otherwise, addicted to their trademark morbidity, they lacked imagination.

Are you writing for writers?

No. Writers who read are readers firstly.

Should we wait for a better writer to tell this story?

No. And yes. Irrespective of your decision, I have decided to tell this story. And once I am done with this, there are other stories waiting to be told. And can you now please move away, so that I can address my readers?

For all my shortcomings, I will not force you to follow any linear or non-linear logic where hate travels along a lattice-bridge and arrives at a predestined location. I suspect hate is haphazard, with a mind of its own, and a reckless impatience that prevents it from charting its own course with flowcharts. Even if we stylistically try and recreate the texture of every other old-maid's tale, we must remember that hate is not always obedient to plot. It has ambition,
it believes in unlimited possibilities and places its trust in tangents. And yet, we need to make peace, seek out the order in the chaos, the regularity in the randomness. That is why it is easier if you see some underlying formula that anchors you to the last vestiges of actuality. It would be better than making you chase every story on the caste violence unleashed on the untouchables in every
cheri
in every village. So, let us begin the quantification. I am giving you some options so that we formulate an atrocity-plot-generator for the East Tanjore district. All you will have to do is pick and choose. Never mind your own erratic choices, real news would have been far more frightening.

Attacking Force

Police, Paddy Producers Association, Landlords,
Landlord-employed rowdies

Chief of Command

Name of Inspector, Name of Landlord

Nature of Atrocity

Looting, Rampaging, Whipping, Rape, Murder, Burning homes, Mass arrest

Extent of Damage

Deaths, Rapes, Hospital admissions, Homes burnt, Items stolen, Livestock missing

Ruse for Attack

Protest, Assertion, Refusal to join PPA, Activities of Communist Party, Convenient excuse Number Five, and So On

Victims

Women, Men, Children

Venue

Name of
Cheri

Date and Time, etc
.

All that needs to be done now is filing a newspaper report. You have everything right here. Spend some time over that lead paragraph, please. And, yes, don't forget that inverted triangle format. Yes, yes, the chopping. Depends on the photos that we will run with it. Yes, yes, the captions have to be written. I will take care of it. Keep me posted.

Coming back to this chapter, the rest of
this
story that does not go into
your
story hangs like a snake around my throat. I am tired of the way it keeps moving in circles. I am
afraid that it will never allow me the space for annotations. I have to surrender everything to someone else, someone on the outside. I am content with writing; the readers can do the commentary. This is how one turns readers into great pillow sobbers like Messers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Period, place and people.

Shall we get started?

Yes. It is important to engage.

When women take to protest, there is no looking back. This time it is the tractors. This time it is a Polydol death. This time it is a disappearance. This time it is a strike for higher wages. This time it is the demand for punishment for a rapist – the issues came and went and came again. Sometimes their demands are related to women alone, like when they demanded daily wages instead of the weekly wage for women. Or when they demanded their right to take breaks to attend to their infants, because babies left under the shade of trees cried to their deaths in their makeshift sari cradles, or rolled over and drowned in the mud. Most of the time, they fight for everybody. Once they smashed pots to protest their poor wages. Once, when the Paddy Producers Association put up its yellow flag in their village, they hauled it down, set fire to it and broke the flagpost. Once they went to the fields to harvest in the middle of the night, saying that they alone would harvest the crops they sowed, and that the landlords had no business employing outside labour. They are arrested for such transgressions, and because the police are such a benevolent force, they arrest the infants, too. The jails are full of fighting Madonnas. They are not afraid. They are not afraid of arrests. They are not afraid of hurt. On any given day, they can outweep the wailing police sirens. The women are adept in all of this: for the last three years, they have been stopping every job-stealing tractor in its tracks, standing in front of it, screaming their choicest abuses. The
landlords punish these shrill-voiced women by stripping them almost naked and tying them to trees and whipping them in front of the whole village. The police punish them by making them kneel and walk a few miles on their knees until they have no choice but to crawl. These blows do not break them. They are bold beyond the bruised skin and the bleeding knee.

Since the stage is set, the stuntmen move in. The fear of violence makes the people of the
cheri
flee. The landlords lead from the front lines. They take turns in their attacks, a code of honour that allows them to swap and circulate their rowdies and create uniform dread. They select the poorest
cheri
s under their spheres of influence and pillage them. When they are on the rampage, they see no shame in looting from their own servants. They take away the goats and chickens and the brass vessels and all the small scraps of paper money that the women have carefully hidden inside. They steal all the stores of paddy. Sometimes, just out of spite, they burn roofs and clothes and they even spill the little salt they find. When the people of the
cheri
return, they are forced to start all over again.

When such things happen, the knee-jerk reaction of the people of the
cheri
is to go to the police. But they know that the policemen also practise untouchability: they have
seen how the police have filed false cases against them, how the police are nothing but a private army on the payroll of the landlords, how the police are waiting for their own revenge. The police, as puppets of the ruling classes, will not make the law work for the poor. So the people go to the party. Depending on the grievousness of the situation, the party sends out petitions, pastes posters, organizes public meetings and stages protests.

Police raids on the
cheri
are timed affairs. Pre-dawn heist, operation high-noon, or the late-night show: when the people are unprepared and can be swooped down upon and stashed into police trucks. Today the vans of the Madras Special Police come and pick up all the able-bodied men in this
cheri
. They will be able to return home three months later. Today, the Kisan Deputy Superindent of Police at Tanjore decides to send policemen to stand guard to the imported labourers anywhere in the district. Today, the local police handcuff the local Communist leader and drag him through the village as if he were an animal, as if this would frighten the people away from the red flag. This keeps the people away from the police. This draws them closer to the party.

How not to expect militancy from men who wake up before sunrise, wear nothing more than a loincloth, walk in line
every daybreak, wash their faces from any puddle of water, brush their teeth with red brick and are the colour of the earth they work? How not to expect anger from women whose friendliest banter involves swearing to cut off each other's cunts? How long will a people hold their patience when they earn their daily meal after sunset and have to hurry home to drop the handfuls of paddy into smouldering ash, wait for its wetness to waft away and then pound the grains and cook the dehusked rice into a formless
congee
that is never enough to douse their endless hunger? How can there be satisfaction, contentment, pleasure or the pursuit of happiness when women have to wake up every morning with a prayer that there is some tamarind, some dried chilli and half an onion in the home, anything to make the burning, red-hot chutney that can be licked from their fingers to let them tolerate the tastelessness of the leftover rice? Could the sight of a copper coin every week soften these women's curses? Just because they are paid
kallukkaasu
, a regular ration for drinking arrack, would their men give up on anger? In a land where the bullock walks of its own accord to the paddy field an hour in advance of sunrise, how long will it take before the men and women decide that they are not cattle, that they can break away, break free from their bondage, instead of hauling themselves to the field with a lantern in one hand and a sickle in the other? Could a people be silenced by not allowing them
to even store the seeds of their labour, by denying them the yields of their harvest? When starvation stares them in the face, do they forget to speak?

The Communists know that the police have sworn to shoot them like dogs. They know the witch hunting that awaits them. They know the perils of the underground. They have to fight several forces: the landlords, the landlords' rowdies and henchmen, the police, the caste mentality that divides the working classes, the slackness of their party's high command, the gossip that threatens to ruin the years of hard work. They are proud of the memory of their BSR, B. Srinivasa Rao, the Brahmin comrade who mingled caste-lessly, the tall man who spoke to the landlords in English too and asked them such biting questions that if there had been any sense of shame in their blood, these
mirasdars
would have pulled out their own tongues and died. They are proud of their comrades who have killed landlords and lived to tell the tale. They are happy that the people no longer run thirty miles at the sight of a police uniform. They compete with movements that talk of self-respect and movements that talk of charity. They are worried about the militant communism of Naxalites, who want to annihilate every class enemy and bathe in their blood. They move against the politics of mercy and the politics of identity. They talk about the instruments of production, the nature
of class struggle, the power of the proletariat. They explain the antagonism between the oppressed and the oppressing classes. It is not talk alone. They intervene when the landlords force a tenant farmer or a coolie labourer to place their black fingerprints on blank, white paper. They want to ensure that the bright, black grease of burnt hay and oil that slathers axle-rods of bullock carts can no longer be bartered for a man's freedom. The comrades promise a revolution they have never seen. They await a revolution that has been promised to them. They dream of red flags everywhere. But they know, too, how chopped up the party is. They know the lines of control. They know that they belong to the agricultural union that is affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist). It is a matter of pride. It is also a matter of limit. They always have to speak to the centre, wait and talk back again. Negotiations at the higher levels involve diplomatic parleys and tacit understanding – ideology is a grim word in that paradise. For all their limited agency, the local Communist leaders face false cases every day. These comrades quote the letters of Jenny Marx verbatim to their wives when asked to justify their poverty. They tell themselves to keep their trust in the people.