Miss Mitten complained to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s rudeness, and about their reading backwards. She told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes. nataS ni rieht seye.
They were made to write—In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards. A hundred times. Forwards.
A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.
More buses and cars had stopped on either side of the level crossing. An ambulance that said SACRED HEART HOSPITAL was full of a party of people on their way to a wedding. The bride was staring out of the back window, her face partially obscured by the flaking paint of the huge red cross.
The buses all had girls’ names. Lucykutty, Mollykutty, Beena Mol. In Malayalam, Mol is Little Girl and Mon is Little Boy. Beena Mol was full of pilgrims who’d had their heads shaved at Tirupati. Rahel could see a row of bald heads at the bus window, above evenly spaced vomit streaks. She was more than a little curious about vomiting. She had never vomited. Not once. Estha had, and when he did, his skin grew hot and shiny, and his eyes helpless and beautiful, and Ammu loved him more than usual. Chacko said that Estha and Rahel were indecently healthy. And so was Sophie Mol. He said it was because they didn’t suffer from Inbreeding like most Syrian Christians. And Parsis.
Mammachi said that what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than Inbreeding. She meant having parents who were divorced. As though these were the only choices available to people: Inbreeding or Divorce.
Rahel wasn’t sure what she suffered from, but occasionally she practiced sad faces, and sighing in the mirror.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do. Than I have ever done,” she would say to herself sadly. That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A Tale of Two Cities.
She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.
Initially, when the level crossing had just closed, the air was full of the impatient sound of idling engines. But when the man that manned the crossing came out of his booth, on his backwards-bending legs and signaled with his limp, flapping walk to the tea stall that they were in for a long wait, drivers switched off their engines and milled about, stretching their legs.
With a desultory nod of his bored and sleepy head, the Level Crossing Divinity conjured up beggars with bandages, men with trays selling pieces of fresh coconut, parippu vadas on banana leaves. And cold drinks. Coca-Cola, Fanta, Rosemilk.
A leper with soiled bandages begged at the car window.
“That looks like Mercurochrome to me,” Ammu said, of his inordinately bright blood.
“Congratulations,” Chacko said. “Spoken like a true bourgeoise.”
Ammu smiled and they shook hands, as though she really was being awarded a Certificate of Merit for being an honest-to-goodness Genuine Bourgeoise. Moments like these the twins treasured, and threaded like precious beads, on a (somewhat scanty) necklace.
Rahel and Estha squashed their noses against the Plymouth’s quarter-windows. Yearning marshmallows with cloudy children behind them. Ammu said “No” firmly, and with conviction.
Chacko lit a Charminar. He inhaled deeply and then removed a little flake of tobacco that had stayed behind on his tongue.
Inside the Plymouth, it wasn’t easy for Rahel to see Estha, because Baby Kochamma rose between them like a hill. Ammu had insisted that they sit separately to prevent them from fighting. When they fought, Estha called Rahel a Refugee Stick Insect. Rahel called him Elvis the Pelvis and did a twisty, funny kind of dance that infuriated Estha. When they had serious physical fights, they were so evenly matched that the fights went on forever, and things that came in their way—table lamps, ashtrays and water jugs—were smashed or irreparably damaged.
Baby Kochamma was holding on to the back of the front seat with her arms. When the car moved, her armfat swung like heavy washing in the wind. Now it hung down like a fleshy curtain, blocking Estha from Rahel.
On Estha’s side of the road was a tea shack that sold tea and stale glucose biscuits in dim glass cases with flies. There was lemon soda in thick bottles with blue marble stoppers to keep the fizz in. And a red icebox that said rather sadly THINGS GO BETTER WITH COCA-COLA.
Murlidharan, the level-crossing lunatic, perched cross-legged and perfectly balanced on the milestone. His balls and penis dangled down, pointing towards the sign which said
COCHIN
23KM
Murlidharan was naked except for the tall plastic bag that somebody had fitted onto his head like a transparent chef’s cap, through which the view of the landscape continued—dimmed, chef-shaped, but uninterrupted. He couldn’t remove his cap even if he had wanted to, because he had no arms. They had been blown off in Singapore in ’42, within the first week of his running away from home to join the fighting ranks of the Indian National Army. After Independence he had himself registered as a Grade I Freedom Fighter and had been allotted a free first-class railway pass for life. This too he had lost (along with his mind), so he could no longer live on trains or in refreshment rooms in railway stations. Murlidh-aran had no home, no doors to lock, but he had his old keys tied carefully around his waist. In a shining bunch. His mind was full of cupboards, cluttered with secret pleasures.
An alarm clock. A red car with a musical horn. A red mug for the bathroom. A wife with a diamond. A briefcase with important papers. A coming home from the office. An I’m sorry, Colonel Sabhapathy, but I’m afraid I’ve said my say. And crisp banana chips for the children.
He watched the trains come and go. He counted his keys.
He watched governments rise and fall. He counted his keys.
He watched cloudy children at car windows with yearning marshmallow noses.
The homeless, the helpless, the sick, the small and lost, all filed past his window. Still he counted his keys.
He was never sure which cupboard he might have to open, or when. He sat on the burning milestone with his matted hair and eyes like windows, and was glad to be able to look away sometimes. To have his keys to count and countercheck.
Numbers would do.
Numbness would be fine.
Murlidharan moved his mouth when he counted, and made well-formed words.
Onner
Runder
Moonner
Estha noticed that the hair on his head was curly gray, the hair in his windy, armless armpits was wispy black, and the hair in his crotch was black and springy. One man with three kinds of hair. Estha wondered how that could be. He tried to think of whom to ask.
The Waiting filled Rahel until she was ready to burst She looked at her watch. It was ten to two. She thought of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer kissing each other sideways so that their noses didn’t collide. She wondered whether people always kissed each other sideways. She tried to think of whom to ask.
Then, from a distance, a hum approached the held-up traffic and covered it like a cloak. The drivers who’d been stretching their legs got back into their vehicles and slammed doors. The beggars and vendors disappeared. Within minutes there was no one on the road. Except Murlidharan. Perched with his bum on the burning milestone. Unperturbed and only mildly curious.
There was hustle-bustle. And Police whistles.
From behind the line of waiting, oncoming traffic, a column of men appeared, with red flags and banners and a hum that grew and grew.
“Put up your windows,” Chacko said. “And stay calm. They’re not going to hurt us.”
“Why not join them, comrade?” Ammu said to Chacko. “I’ll drive.”
Chacko said nothing. A muscle tensed below the wad of fat on his jaw. He tossed
away his cigarette and rolled up his window.
Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea.
Once he even took a group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They went by bus and returned by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and flowers in their hair.
Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade! Comrade! An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood.
As the marchers approached, Ammu put up her window. Estha his. Rahel hers. (Effortfully, because the black knob on the handle had fallen off.)
Suddenly the skyblue Plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow, pitted road. Like a wide lady squeezing down a narrow corridor. Like Baby Kochamma in church, on her way to the bread and wine.
“Look down!” Baby Kochamma said, as the front ranks of the procession approached the car. “Avoid eye contact. That’s what really provokes them.”
On the side of her neck, her pulse was pounding.
Within minutes, the road was swamped by thousands of marching people. Automobile islands in a river of people. The air was red with flags, which dipped and lifted as the marchers ducked under the level-crossing gate and swept across the railway tracks in a red wave.
The sound of a thousand voices spread over the frozen traffic like a Noise Umbrella.
“Inquilab Zindabad!
Thozhilali Ekta Zindabad!”
“Long Live the Revolution!” they shouted. “Workers of the World Unite!”
Even Chacko had no really complete explanation for why the Communist Party was so much more successful in Kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in India, except perhaps in West Bengal.
There were several competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large population of Christians in the state. Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom St. Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he traveled East after the Resurrection. Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments.
The trouble with this theory was that in Kerala the Syrian Christians were, by and large, the wealthy, estate-owning (pickle-factory-running), feudal lords, for whom communism represented a fate worse than death. They had always voted for the Congress Party.
A second theory claimed that it had to do with the comparatively high level of literacy in the state. Perhaps. Except that the high literacy level was largely because of the Communist movement.
The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
Though Chacko was not a card-holding member of the Party, he had been converted early and had remained, through all its travails, a committed supporter.
He was an undergraduate at Delhi University during the euphoria of 1957, when the Communists won the State Assembly elections and Nehru invited them to form a government. Chacko’s hero, Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the flamboyant Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala, became Chief Minister of the first ever democratically elected Communist government in the world. Suddenly the Communists found themselves in the extraordinary—critics said absurd—position of having to govern a people and foment revolution simultaneously. Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad evolved his own theory about how he would do this. Chacko studied his treatise on “The Peaceful Transition to Communism” with an adolescent’s obsessive diligence and an ardent fan’s unquestioning approval. It set out in detail how Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s government intended to enforce land reforms, neutralize the police, subvert the judiciary and “Restrain the Hand of the Reactionary anti-People Congress Government at the Center.”
Unfortunately, before the year was out, the Peaceful part of the Peaceful Transition came to an end.
Every morning at breakfast the Imperial Entomologist derided his argumentative Marxist son by reading out newspaper reports of the riots, strikes and incidents of police brutality that convulsed Kerala.
“So, Karl Marx!” Pappachi would sneer when Chacko came to the table, “what shall we do with these bloody students now? The stupid goons are agitating against our People’s Government. Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren’t People anymore?”
Over the next two years the political discord, fueled by the Congress Party and the Church, slid into anarchy. By the time Chacko finished his BA and left for Oxford to do another one, Kerala was on the brink of civil war. Nehru dismissed the Communist government and announced fresh elections. The Congress Party returned to power.
It was only in 1967—almost exactly ten years after they first came to power—that Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re-elected. This time as part of a coalition between what had by now become two separate parties—the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI and the CPI(M).
Pappachi was dead by then. Chacko divorced. Paradise Pickles was seven years old.
Kerala was reeling in the aftermath of famine and a failed monsoon. People were dying. Hunger had to be very high up on any government list of priorities.
During his second term in office, Comrade E. M. S. went about implementing the Peaceful Transition more soberly. This earned him the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party. They denounced him for his “Parliamentary Cretinism” and accused him of “providing relief to the people and thereby blunting the People’s Consciousness and diverting them from the Revolution.”
Peking switched its patronage to the newest, most militant faction of the CPI(M)—the Naxalites—who had staged an armed insurrection in Naxalbari, a village in Bengal. They organized peasants into fighting cadres, seized land, expelled the owners and established People’s Courts to try Class Enemies. The Naxalite movement spread across the country and struck terror in every bourgeois heart.
In Kerala, they breathed a plume of excitement and fear into the already frightened air. Killings had begun in the north. That May there was a blurred photograph in the papers of a landlord in Palghat who had been tied to a lamp post and beheaded. His head lay on its side, some distance away from his body, in a dark puddle that could have been water, could have been blood. It was hard to tell in black and white. In the gray, predawn light.
His surprised eyes were open.
Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Running Dog, Soviet Stooge) expelled the Naxalites from his party and went on with the business of harnessing anger for parliamentary purposes.
The March that surged around the skyblue Plymouth on that skyblue December day was a part of that process. It had been organized by the Travancore-Cochin Marxist Labour Union. Their comrades in Trivandrum would march to the Secretariat and present the Charter of People’s Demands to Comrade E. M. S. himself. The orchestra petitioning its conductor. Their demands were that paddy workers, who were made to work in the fields for eleven and a half hours a day—from seven in the morning to six-thirty in the evening—be permitted to take a one-hour lunch break. That women’s wages be increased from one rupee twenty-fi
ve paisa a day to three rupees, and men’s from two rupees fifty paisa to four rupees fifty paisa a day. They were also demanding that Untouchables no longer be addressed by their caste names. They demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan, but just as Achoo, or Kelan or Kuttan.
Cardamon Kings, Coffee Counts and Rubber Barons—old boarding-school buddies—came down from their lonely, far-flung estates and sipped chilled beer at the Sailing Club. They raised their glasses: “A rose by any other name…” they said, and sniggered to hide their rising panic.
The marchers that day were party workers, students and the laborers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new.
Through the Plymouth window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zindabad. And that the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.
Inside the Plymouth it was still and hot.
Baby Kochamma’s fear lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.
She tried to count the green beads on her rosary, but couldn’t concentrate. An open hand slammed against the car window.
A balled fist banged down on the burning skyblue bonnet. It sprang open. The Plymouth looked like an angular blue animal in a zoo asking to be fed.
A bun.
A banana.
Another balled fist slammed down on it, and the bonnet closed. Chacko rolled down his window and called out to the man who had done it.