Between the Assassinations

‘Two. Murali and me.’

  He gazed at the grille with a wan smile. He appeared to be done; so the old woman placed her hands on her daughter’s head and said: ‘She is unmarried, sir. We are begging of you some money to marry her off, that is all.’

  Thimma turned to the daughter and stared; the girl looked at the ground. Murali winced. I wish he’d have more delicacy sometimes, he thought.

  ‘We have no support,’ the old woman said. ‘My family won’t even talk to me. Members of our own caste won’t—’

  The Comrade slapped his thigh with his palm.

  ‘This caste question is only a manifestation of the class struggle: Mazumdar and Shukla definitively established this in 1938. I refuse to accept the category of “caste” in our discussions.’

  The woman looked at Murali. He nodded his head, as if to say: ‘Go on.’

  ‘My husband said, the Communists were the only ones who cared about people like us. He said that if the Communists ruled the earth there would be no hardships for the poor, sir.’

  This seemed to mollify the Comrade. He looked at the woman and the girl for a moment, and then sniffed. His fingers seemed to lack something. Murali understood. As he went to the pantry to boil another cup of tea, he heard the Comrade’s voice continue behind him: ‘The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) is not the party of the poor – it is the party of the proletariat. This distinction has to be understood, before we discuss assistance or resistance.’

  After turning the kettle on once more, Murali was about to toss the tea leaves in; then he wondered why the daughter had not touched her tea. He was seized by the suspicion that he had put too much tea into the kettle – and that the way he had been making tea for nearly twenty-five years might have been wrong.

  Murali got off the number 67c bus at the Salt Market Village stop and walked down the main road, picking his way through a bed of muck, while hogs sniffed the earth around him. He kept his umbrella up on his shoulder, like a wrestler keeps his mace, so that its metal point wouldn’t be sullied by the muck. Asking a group of boys playing a game of marbles in the middle of the village road for directions, he found the house: a surprisingly large and imposing structure, with rocks placed on the corrugated tin roof, to stabilize it during the rains.

  He unlatched the gate and went in.

  A handspun cotton shirt hung on a hook on the wall next to the door; the dead man’s, he assumed. As if the fellow were still inside, taking a nap, and would come outside and put it on to greet his visitor.

  At least a dozen framed multi-coloured images of gods had been affixed to the front wall along with one of a pot-bellied local guru with an enormous nimbus affixed to his head. There was a bare cot, its fibres fraying, for visitors to sit down on.

  Murali left his sandals outside and wondered if he should knock on the door. Too intrusive for a place like this – where death had just entered – so he decided to wait until someone came out.

  Two white cows were sitting in the compound of the house. The bells round their necks tinkled during their rare movements. Lying in front of them was a puddle of water in which straw had been soaked to make a gruel. A black buffalo, snippets of fresh green all over its moist nose, stood gazing at the opposite wall of the compound, chewing at a sack full of grass that had been emptied on the ground in front of it. Murali thought: these animals have no concern in the world. Even in the house of a man who has killed himself, they are still fed and fattened. How effortlessly they rule over the men of this village, as if human civilization had confused masters and servants. Murali was transfixed. His eyes lingered on the fat body of the beast, its bulging belly, its glossy skin. He smelled its shit, which had caked on its backside; it had been squatting in puddles of its own waste.

  Murali had not been to Salt Market Village in decades. The previous time was twenty-five years ago, when he had come searching for visual details to enrich a short story on rural poverty that he was writing. Not much had changed in a quarter-century; only the buffaloes had grown fat.

  ‘Why didn’t you knock on the door?’

  The old woman emerged from the back yard; she walked around him with a big smile and went into the house and shouted: ‘Hey, you! Get some tea!’

  In a moment the girl came out with a tumbler of tea, which Murali took, touching her wet fingers as he did so.

  The tea, after his long journey, felt like heaven. He had never mastered the art of making tea, even though he had been boiling it for Thimma for nearly twenty-five years now. Maybe it was one of those things that only women can truly do, he thought.

  ‘What do you need from us?’ the old woman asked. Her manner had become more servile; as if she had guessed the purpose of his visit only now.

  ‘ To find out if you are telling the truth,’ he replied, calmly.

  She summoned the neighbours so he could interview them. They squatted around the cot; he insisted that they sit on the same level as him but they remained where they were.

  ‘Where did he hang himself?’

  ‘Right here, sir!’ said one old villager with broken, paanstained teeth.

  ‘What do you mean right here?’

  The old man pointed to the beam of the roof. Murali could not believe it: in full public view, he had killed himself? So the cows had seen it; and the fat buffalo too.

  He heard about the man whose shirt still hung from the hook. The failure of his crops. The loan from the money lender. At 3 per cent per month, compounded.

  ‘He was ruined by the first daughter’s wedding. And he knew he had one more to marry off – this girl.’

  The daughter had been lingering in a corner of the front yard the whole time. He saw her turn her face away, in slow agony.

  As he was leaving, one of the villagers came running after him: ‘Sir…sir…I mean, an aunt of mine committed suicide two years ago… I mean, just a year ago, sir, and she was virtually a mother to me…can the Communist Party…’

  Murali seized the man’s arm and pressed his fingers deeply into the flesh. He peered into the man’s eyes: ‘What is the name of the daughter?’

  Slowly he walked back to the bus station. He let the tip of his umbrella trail in the earth. The horror of the dead man’s story, the sight of those fat buffaloes, the pain-stricken face of that beautiful daughter – these details kept churning in his mind.

  He thought back twenty-five years, when he had come to this village with his notebook and his dreams of becoming an Indian Maupassant. As he walked down the twisting streets, crowded with streetchildren playing their violent games, fatigued day-labourers sleeping in the shade, and with thick, still, glistening pools of effluent, he was reminded of that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy which is the nature of every Indian village – and the simultaneous desire to admire and to castigate that had been inspired in him from the time of his first visits.

  He felt the need, as he had before, to take notes.

  Back then, he had visited Salt Market Village every day for a week, jotting down painstakingly detailed descriptions of farmers, roosters, bulls, pigs, piglets, sewage, children’s games, religious festivals, intending to juggle them into a series of short stories that he crafted in the reading room of the municipal library at night. He was not sure if the Party would approve of his stories, so he sent a bundle of them under a nom de plume– ‘The Seeker of Justice’ – to the editor of a weekly magazine in Mysore.

  After a week, he received a postcard from the editor, summoning him from Kittur for a meeting. He took the train to Mysore and waited half a day for the editor to call him into his office.

  ‘Ah, yes…the young genius from Kittur.’ The editor searched his table for his glasses and pulled the folded bundle of Murali’s stories from their envelope, while the young author’s heart beat violently.

  ‘I wanted to see you’ – the editor let the stories fall on the table – ‘because there is talent in your writing. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike n
inety per cent of our writers.’

  Murali glowed. It was the first time anyone had mentioned the word ‘talent’ when speaking of him.

  Picking up one of the stories, the editor silently scanned the pages.

  ‘Who is your favourite author?’ He asked, biting at a corner of his glasses.

  ‘Guy de Maupassant.’

  Murali corrected himself: ‘After Karl Marx.’

  ‘Let’s stick to literature,’ the editor retorted. ‘Every character in Maupassant is like this…’ – he bent his index finger and wiggled it. ‘He wants, and wants, and wants. To the last day of his life he wants. Money. Women. Fame. More women. More money. More fame. Your characters’ – he unbent his finger – ‘want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through accurately described village settings and have deep thoughts. They walk around the cows and trees and roosters and think, and then walk around the roosters and trees and cows and think some more. That’s it.’

  ‘They do have thoughts of changing the world for the better…’ Murali protested. ‘They desire a better society.’ ‘They want nothing!’ the editor shouted. ‘I can’t print stories of people who want nothing!’

  He threw the bundle of stories back at Murali. ‘When you find people who want something, come back to me!’

  Murali had never rewritten those stories. Now, as he waited for the bus to take him back to Kittur, he wondered if that bundle of stories was still somewhere in his house.

  When Murali got off the bus and walked back to the office, he found Comrade Thimma with a foreigner. It was not unusual for there to be strangers in the office; lean, fatigued men with paranoid eyes who were on the run from nearby states going through one of their routine purges of radical Communists. In those places radical Communism was a real threat to the state. The fugitives would sleep and take tea at the office for a few weeks, until things cooled down and they could return home.

  But this man was not one of those hunted ones; he had blond hair and an awkward European accent.

  He sat next to Thimma, and the Comrade was pouring his heart out, as he gazed at the distant light in the grille up on the wall. Murali sat down and listened to him for half an hour. He was magnificent. Trotsky had not been forgiven, nor had Bernstein been forgotten. Thimma was trying to show the European that even in a small town like Kittur men were up to date with the theory of dialectics.

  The foreigner had nodded a lot and written everything down. At the end, he capped his ballpoint pen and observed: ‘I find that the Communists have virtually no presence in Kittur.’

  Thimma slapped his thigh. He glared at the grille. The Socialists had had too much influence in this part of South India, he said. The question of feudalism in the countryside had been solved; big estates had been broken up and distributed among peasants.

  ‘That man Devraj Urs – when he was leader of the Congress – created some kind of revolution here,’ Thimma sighed. ‘Just a pseudo-revolution, naturally. The falsehood of Bernstein once again.’

  Murali’s own land had been subjected to the socialist policies of the Congress government. His father had lost his land; in return, the government had allocated compensation. His father went to the municipal office to receive his compensation, but he found that someone, some bureaucrat, had forged his signature and run away with his money. When Murali heard this, he had thought: my old man deserves this. I deserve this. For all that we have done to the poor, this is fit retribution. He realized, of course, that his family’s compensation had not been stolen by the poor, but by some corrupt civil servant. Nevertheless this was justice of a kind.

  Murali went about his regular end-of-day tasks. First he swept the pantry. As he reached with his broom under the sink, he heard the foreigner say:

  ‘I think the problem with Marx is that he assumes human beings are too…decent. He rejects the idea of original sin. And maybe that is why Communism is dying everywhere now. The Berlin Wall…’

  Murali crawled under the sink to the hard-to-reach places; Thimma’s voice resonated oddly in the enclosed space beneath the sink: ‘You have completely misunderstood the dialectical process!’

  He paused, and waited under the sink for Comrade Thimma to come up with a better response.

  He swept the floor, closed the cupboards, turned off the unwanted lights to save on the electricity bill, tightened the taps to save on the water bill, and went to the bus station to wait for the number 56b to take him home.

  Home. A blue door, one fluorescent lamp, three naked electric bulbs, ten thousand books. The books were everywhere; waiting for him like faithful pets on either side of the door when he walked in, coated in dust on the dinner table, stacked against the old walls as though to buttress the structure of the house. They had taken all the best space in the house and had left him a little rectangular area for his cot.

  He opened the bundle that he had brought home with him: ‘Is Gorbachev straying from the True Path? Notes by Thimma swami, BA (Kittur), MA (Mysore), secretary-general, Kittur regional politburo, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist)’.

  He would add them to the notes he was collecting on Thimma’s thoughts. The idea was to publish them one day and hand them out to the workers as they left their factories.

  This evening, Murali could not write for long; the mosquitoes bit him and he swatted them. He lit a coil to keep the mosquitoes away. Even then he could not write; and then he realized it was not the mosquitoes that were disturbing him.

  The way she had averted her face. He would have to do something for her.

  What was her name? – Ah, yes. Sulochana.

  He began to rummage in the mess around his bed, until he found the old collection of short stories that he had written all those years ago. He blew the dust off the pages and began to read.

  The photograph of the dead man hung on the wall, beside the portraits of the gods who had failed to save him. The guru with the big belly, perhaps taking all the blame, had now been dismissed.

  Murali stood at the door, waited, and knocked slowly.

  ‘They’re working in the fields,’ the old neighbour with the broken red teeth shouted.

  The cows and the buffalo were missing from the courtyard; sold for cash, no doubt. Murali thought it was appalling. That girl, with her noble looks, working in the fields like a common labourer?

  I’ve come just in time, he thought.

  ‘Run and get them!’ he shouted at the neighbour. ‘At once!’

  The state government had a scheme to compensate the widows of farmers who had killed themselves under duress, Murali explained to the widow, making her sit down on the cot. It was one of those well-intentioned rural improvement schemes that never reached anyone, because no one knew about it – until people from the city, like Murali, told them about it.

  The widow was leaner, and sunburned; she sat there wiping her hands constantly against the back of her sari; she was ashamed of the dirt on them.

  Sulochana brought out the tea. He was amazed that this girl, who had been working in the fields, had still found time to make him tea.

  When he took the cup from her, touching her fingers, he quickly admired her features. Having just come from a day’s hard labour in the fields, she was still beautiful – in fact, more beautiful than ever before. There was that simple, unpainted elegance to her face. None of the make-up, lipstick or false eyebrows you see in cities these days.

  How old was she? he wondered.

  ‘Sir…’ The old woman folded her hands. ‘Will the money really come?’

  ‘If you sign here,’ he said. ‘And here. And here.’

  The old lady held the pen and grinned idiotically.

  ‘She can’t write,’ Sulochana said; so he placed the letter on his thigh and he signed for her.

  He explained that he had brought another letter; one to be delivered to the central police station near the Lighthouse Hill, demanding prosecution of the moneylender for his role in instigating the man’s death through usury. He wante
d the old woman to sign that too, but she joined her palms together and bowed to him.

  ‘Please, sir, don’t do that. Please. We don’t want any trouble.’

  Sulochana stood by the wall, looking down, silently reinforcing her mother’s plea.

  He tore up the letter. As he did so, he realized that he was now the arbiter over this family’s fate; he was the patriarch here.

  ‘And her marriage?’ he said, indicating the girl leaning against the wall.

  ‘Who will marry this one? And what am I to do?’ the old woman wailed as the girl retreated into the dark of the house.

  It was on the way back to the bus station that the idea came to him.

  He pressed the metal tip of his umbrella to the ground and trailed a long, continuous line through the mud.

  And then he thought: why not?

  She had no other hope, after all…

  He boarded the bus. He was still a bachelor, at fifty-five. After his time in jail his family had disowned him, and none of his aunts or uncles had tried to fix an arranged marriage for him. Somehow, in the midst of distributing pamphlets and spreading the word to the proletariat and collecting Comrade Thimma’s speeches, he had never found time to marry himself off. He had not had any great desire to do so, either.

  Lying in bed, he thought: but this is nowhere for a girl to live. It is a filthy house, filled with old editions – books by veterans of the Communist Party and nineteenth-century French and Russian short-story writers – that no one reads any more.

  He had not realized how badly he had been living until he tried to imagine living with someone else. But things would change; he felt a great hope. If she came into his life everything could be different. He lay down on his cot and stared at the ceiling fan. It was switched off; he rarely turned it on, except in the most oppressive summer heat, so that he wouldn’t increase the electricity bill.

  All his life he had been dogged by a restlessness, a feeling that he was meant for some greater endeavour than could be found in a small town. After his law degree from Madras, his father had expected him to take over his law practice. Instead, Murali had been drawn to politics; he had begun attending Congress party meetings in Madras, and continued doing so in Kittur. He took to wearing a Nehru cap and keeping a photo of Gandhi on his desk. His father noticed. One day there was a confrontation and shouting, and Murali had left his father’s house and joined the Congress party as a full-time member. He knew what he wanted to do with his life already: there was an enemy to overcome. The old, bad India of caste and class privilege – the India of child marriage, of ill-treated widows; of exploited subalterns – it had to be overthrown. When the state elections came, he campaigned with all his heart for the Congress candidate, a young lower-caste man named Anand Kumar.