Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.
There were six of them. Servants of the State.
Politeness.
Obedience.
Loyalty.
Intelligence.
Courtesy.
Efficiency.
The Kottayam Police. A cartoonplatoon. New-Age princes in funny pointed helmets. Cardboard lined with cotton. Hairoil stained. Their shabby khaki crowns.
Dark of Heart.
Deadlypurposed.
They lifted their thin legs high, clumping through tall grass. Ground creepers snagged in their dewdamp leghair. Burrs and grass flowers enhanced their dull socks. Brown millipedes slept in the soles of their steel-tipped, Touchable boots. Rough grass left their legskin raw, crisscrossed with cuts. Wet mud farted under their feet as they squelched through the swamp.
They trudged past darter birds on the tops of trees, drying their sodden wings spread out like laundry against the sky. Past egrets. Cormorants. Adjutant storks. Sarus cranes looking for space to dance. Purple herons with pitiless eyes. Deafening, their wraark wraark wraark. Motherbirds and their eggs.
The early morning heat was full of the promise of worse to come.
Beyond the swamp that smelled of still water, they walked past ancient trees cloaked in vines. Gigantic mani plants. Wild pepper. Cascading purple acuminus.
Past a deepblue beetle balanced on an unbending blade of grass.
Past giant spider webs that had withstood the rain and spread like whispered gossip from tree to tree.
A banana flower sheathed in claret bracts hung from a scruffy, torn-leafed tree. A gem held out by a grubby schoolboy. A jewel in the velvet jungle.
Crimson dragonflies mated in the air. Doubledeckered. Deft. One admiring policeman watched and wondered briefly about the dynamics of dragonfly sex, and what went into what. Then his mind clicked to attention and Police Thoughts returned.
Onwards.
Past tall anthills congealed in the rain. Slumped like drugged sentries asleep at the gates of Paradise.
Past butterflies drifting through the air like happy messages.
Huge ferns.
A chameleon.
A startling shoeflower.
The scurry of gray jungle fowl running for cover.
The nutmeg tree that Vellya Paapen hadn’t found.
A forked canal. Still. Choked with duckweed. Like a dead green snake. A tree trunk fallen over it. The Touchable Policemen minced across. Twirling polished bamboo batons.
Hairy fairies with lethal wands.
Then the sunlight was fractured by thin trunks of tilting trees. Dark of Heartness tiptoed into the Heart of Darkness. The sound of stridulating crickets swelled.
Gray squirrels streaked down mottled trunks of rubber trees that slanted towards the sun. Old scars slashed across their bark. Sealed. Healed. Untapped.
Acres of this, and then, a grassy clearing. A house.
The History House.
Whose doors were locked and windows open.
With cold stone floors and billowing, ship-shaped shadows on the walls.
Where waxy ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps whispered papery whispers.
Where translucent lizards lived behind old paintings.
Where dreams were captured and re-dreamed.
Where an old Englishman ghost, sickled to a tree, was abrogated by a pair of two-egg twins—a Mobile Republic with a Puff who had planted a Marxist flag in the earth beside him. As the platoon of policemen minced past they didn’t hear him beg. In his kind-missionary voice. Excuse me, would you, umm … you wouldn’t happen to umm … I don’t suppose you’d have a cigar on you? No? … No, I didn’t think so.
The History House.
Where, in the years that followed, the Terror (still-to-come) would be buried in a shallow grave. Hidden under the happy humming of hotel cooks. The humbling of old Communists. The slow death of dancers. The toy histories that rich tourists came to play with.
It was a beautiful house.
White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack. Making it look older than it really was. Like sunken treasure dredged up from the ocean bed. Whale-kissed and barnacled. Swaddled in silence. Breathing bubbles through its broken windows.
A deep verandah ran all around. The rooms themselves were recessed, buried in shadow. The tiled roof swept down like the sides of an immense, upside-down boat. Rotting beams supported on once-white pillars had buckled at the center, leaving a yawning, gaping hole. A History-hole. A History-shaped Hole in the Universe through which, at twilight, dense clouds of silent bats billowed like factory smoke and drifted into the night.
They returned at dawn with news of the world. A gray haze in the rosy distance that suddenly coalesced and blackened over the house before it plummeted through the History-hole like smoke in a film running backwards.
All day they slept, the bats. Lining the roof like fur. Spattering the floors with shit.
The policemen stopped and fanned out. They didn’t really need to, but they liked these Touchable games.
They positioned themselves strategically. Crouching by the broken, low stone boundary wall.
Quick Piss.
Hotfoam on warmstone. Police-piss.
Drowned ants in yellow bubbly.
Deep breaths.
Then together, on their knees and elbows, they crept towards the house. Like Film-policemen. Softly, softly through the grass. Batons in their hands. Machine guns in their minds. Responsibility for the Touchable Future on their thin but able shoulders.
They found their quarry in the back verandah. A Spoiled Puff. A Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. And in another corner (as lonely as a wolf)—a carpenter with blood-red nails.
Asleep. Making nonsense of all that Touchable cunning.
The Surpriseswoop.
The Headlines in their heads.
DESPERADO CAUGHT IN POLICE DRAGNET.
For this insolence, this spoiling-the-fun, their quarry paid. Oh yes.
They woke Velutha with their boots.
Esthappen and Rahel woke to the shout of sleep surprised by shattered kneecaps.
Screams died in them and floated belly up, like dead fish. Cowering on the floor, rocking between dread and disbelief, they realized that the man being beaten was Velutha. Where had he come from? What had he done? Why had the policemen brought him here?
They heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib.
Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.
They were opening a bottle.
Or shutting a tap.
Cracking an egg to make an omelette.
The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.
Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men’s Needs.
What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audien
ce.
There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.
History in live performance.
If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.
Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.
After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.
In the back verandah of the History House, as the man they loved was smashed and broken, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan, Twin Ambassadors of God-knows-what, learned two new lessons.
Lesson Number One:
Blood barely shows on a Black Man. (Dum dum)
And
Lesson Number Two:
It smells though,
Sicksweet.
Like old roses on a breeze. (Dum dum)
“Madiyo?” one of History’s Agents asked.
“Madi aayirikkum,” another replied.
Enough?
Enough.
They stepped away from him. Craftsmen assessing their work. Seeking aesthetic distance.
Their Work, abandoned by God and History, by Marx, by Man, by Woman and (in the hours to come) by Children, lay folded on the floor. He was semi-conscious, but wasn’t moving.
His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured and hemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his kneecaps were shattered.
Still they brought out the handcuffs.
Cold.
With the sourmetal smell. Like steel bus rails and the bus conductor’s hands from holding them. That was when they noticed his painted nails. One of them held them up and waved the fingers coquettishly at the others. They laughed.
“What’s this?” in a high falsetto. “AC-DC?”
One of them flicked at his penis with his stick. “Come on, show us your special secret. Show us how big it gets when you blow it up.” Then he lifted his boot (with millipedes curled into its sole) and brought it down with a soft thud.
They locked his arms across his back.
Click.
And click.
Below a Lucky Leaf. An autumn leaf at night. That made the monsoons come on time.
He had goosebumps where the handcuffs touched his skin.
“It isn’t him,” Rahel whispered to Estha. “I can tell. It’s his twin brother. Urumban. From Kochi.”
Unwilling to seek refuge in fiction, Estha said nothing.
Someone was speaking to them. A kind Touchable Policeman. Kind to his kind.
“Mon, Mol, are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
And not together, but almost, the twins replied in a whisper.
“Yes. No.”
“Don’t worry. You’re safe with us now.”
Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat.
The pots and pans.
The inflatable goose.
The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes.
The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them.
Socks with separate colored toes.
Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.
A watch with the time painted on it.
“Whose are these? Where did they come from? Who brought them?” An edge of worry in the voice.
Estha and Rahel, full of fish, stared back at him.
The policemen looked at one another. They knew what they had to do.
The Qantas koala they took for their children.
And the pens and socks. Police children with multicolored toes.
They burst the goose with a cigarette. Bang. And buried the rubber scraps.
Yooseless goose. Too recognizable.
The glasses one of them wore. The others laughed, so he kept them on for awhile.
The watch they all forgot. It stayed behind in the History House. In the back verandah.
A faulty record of the time. Ten to two.
They left.
Six princes, their pockets stuffed with toys.
A pair of two-egg twins.
And the God of Loss.
He couldn’t walk. So they dragged him.
Nobody saw them.
Bats, of course, are blind.
CHAPTER 19
SAVING AMMU
At the police station, Inspector Thomas Mathew sent for two Coca-Colas. With straws. A servile constable brought them on a plastic tray and offered them to the two muddy children sitting across the table from the Inspector, their heads only a little higher than the mess of files and papers on it.
So once again, in the space of two weeks, bottled Fear for Estha. Chilled. Fizzed. Sometimes Things went worse with Coke.
The fizz went up his nose. He burped. Rahel giggled. She blew through her straw till the drink bubbled over onto her dress. All over the floor. Estha read aloud from the board on the wall.
“ssenetiloP,” he said. “ssenetiloP, ecneidebO.”
“ytlayoL, ecnegilletnI,” Rahel said.
“ysetruoC.”
“ycneiciffE.”
To his credit, Inspector Thomas Mathew remained calm. He sensed the growing incoherence in the children. He noted the dilated pupils. He had seen it all before … the human mind’s escape valve. Its way of managing trauma. He made allowances for that, and couched his questions cleverly. Innocuously. Between When is your birthday, Mon? and What’s your favorite color, Mol?
Gradually, in a fractured, disjointed fashion, things began to fall into place. His men had briefed him about the pots and pans. The grass mat. The impossible-to-forget toys. They began to make sense now. Inspector Thomas Mathew was not amused. He sent a jeep for Baby Kochamma. He made sure that the children were not in the room when she arrived. He didn’t greet her.
“Have a seat,” he said.
Baby Kochamma sensed that something was terribly wrong.
“Have you found them? Is everything all right?”
“Nothing is all right,” the Inspector assured her.
From the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice, Baby Kochamma realized that she was dealing with a different person this time. Not the accommodating police officer of their previous meeting. She lowered herself into a chair. Inspector Thomas Mathew didn’t mince his words.
The Kottayam Police had acted on the basis of an F.I.R. filed by her. The Paravan had been caught. Unfortunately he had been badly injured in the encounter and in all likelihood would not live through the night. But now the children said that they had gone of their own volition. Their boat had capsized and the English child had drowned by accident. Which left the police saddled with the Death in Custody of a technically innocent man. True, he was a Paravan. True, he had misbehaved. But these were troubled times and technically, as per the law, he was an innocent man. There was no case.
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“Attempted rape?” Baby Kochamma suggested weakly.
“Where is the rape-victim’s complaint? Has it been filed? Has she made a statement? Have you brought it with you?” The Inspector’s tone was belligerent. Almost hostile.
Baby Kochamma looked as though she had shrunk. Pouches of flesh hung from her eyes and jowls. Fear fermented in her and the spit in her mouth turned sour. The Inspector pushed a glass of water towards her.
“The matter is very simple. Either the rape-victim must file a complaint. Or the children must identify the Paravan as their abductor in the presence of a police witness. Or.” He waited for Baby Kochamma to look at him. “Or I must charge you with lodging a false F.I.R. Criminal offense.”
Sweat stained Baby Kochamma’s light-blue blouse dark blue. Inspector Thomas Mathew didn’t hustle her. He knew that given the political climate, he himself could be in very serious trouble. He was aware that Comrade K. N. M. Pillai would not pass up this opportunity. He kicked himself for acting so impulsively. He used his printed hand towel to reach inside his shirt and wipe his chest and armpits. It was quiet in his office. The sounds of police-station activity, the clumping of boots, the occasional howl of pain from somebody being interrogated, seemed distant, as though they were coming from somewhere else.
“The children will do as they’re told,” Baby Kochamma said. “If I could have a few moments alone with them.”
“As you wish.” The Inspector rose to leave the office.
“Please give me five minutes before you send them in.”
Inspector Thomas Mathew nodded his assent and left.
Baby Kochamma wiped her shining, sweaty face. She stretched her neck, looking up at the ceiling in order to wipe the sweat from crevices between her rolls of neckfat with the end of her pallu. She kissed her crucifix.
Hail Mary, full of grace…
The words of the prayer deserted her.
The door opened. Estha and Rahel were ushered in. Caked with mud. Drenched in Coca-Cola.
The sight of Baby Kochamma made them suddenly sober. The moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts spread its wings over both their hearts. Why had she come? Where was Ammu? Was she still locked up?