After Anand Kumar won, he saw two of his fellow Congress workers sitting outside the Party office every morning. He saw men approach them with letters addressed to the candidate; they took the letters and a dozen rupees from each supplicant.
Murali threatened to report them to Kumar. The two men turned grave. They stepped aside and invited Murali to go right in.
‘Please complain at once,’ they said.
As he went and knocked on Kumar’s door, he heard laughter behind him.
Murali joined the Communists next, having heard that they were incorruptible. The larger factions of the Communists turned out to be just as rotten as the Congress; so he changed his membership from one Communist Party to the other, until one day he entered a dim office and saw, beneath the giant poster of heroic proletarians climbing up to heaven to knock out the gods of the past, the small dark figure of Comrade Thimma. At last – an incorruptible. Back then the party had seventeen member-volunteers; they ran women’s education programmes, population control campaigns, and proletarian radicalization drives. With a group of volunteers, he went to the sweatshops near the Bunder, distributing pamphlets with the message of Marx and the benefits of sterilization. As the membership of the party dwindled, he found himself going alone; it made no difference to him. The cause was a good one. He was never strident like the workers from the other Communist parties; quietly, and with great perseverance, he stood by the side of the road, holding out pamphlets to the workers and repeating the message that so few of them ever took to heart: ‘Don’t you want to find out how to live a better life, brothers?’
He thought that his writing, too, would contribute to that cause – although he was honest enough to admit that perhaps only his vanity made him think so. The word ‘talent’ was now lodged in his mind, and that gave him hope; but even as he was wondering how to improve his writing, he was sent to jail.
The police came for Comrade Thimma one day. This was during the Emergency.
‘You are right to arrest me,’ Thimma had said, ‘as I freely and openly support all attempts to overthrow the bourgeois government of India.’
Murali had asked the policemen: ‘Would you mind arresting me as well?’
Jail had been a happy time for him. He washed Thimma’s clothes and hung them out to dry in the mornings. He had hoped all the free time in jail would concentrate his mind, and help him reshape his fiction, but he had no time for that. In the evenings, he took notes as Thimma dictated. Thimma’s responses to the great questions of Marxism. The apostasy of Bernstein. The challenge of Trotsky. A justification for Kronstadt.
He collected the responses faithfully; then he pulled a blanket over Thimma’s face, leaving his toes out in the cool air.
He shaved him in the morning, as Thimma thundered to the mirror about Khrushchev’s defiling of the legacy of Comrade Stalin.
It was the happiest period of his life. But then he had been released.
With a sigh, Murali rose from his bed. He paced around the dark house, looking at the mess of the books, at the decaying editions of Gorky and Turgenev, and saying to himself, again and again: what do I have to show for my life? Just this broken-down house…
Then he saw the face of the girl again and his whole body lit up with hope, and joy. He took out his bundle of short stories and read them again. With a red-ink pen he began to delete details of his characters, quickening their motives, their impulses.
It came to Murali one morning, on his way to Salt Market Village: ‘They’re avoiding me. Both mother and daughter.’
Then he thought: no, not Sulochana – it’s only the old woman who’s gone cold.
For two months now, he had been catching the bus to Salt Market Village on a variety of fictitious premises, only to see Sulochana’s face again, only to touch her fingers when she brought him his cup of scalding-hot tea.
He had tried to put it to the old lady that they should marry – hints could be delivered, and the topic would insinuate itself into the woman’s mind. That had been his hope. Then, purely out of social responsibility, he would agree, despite his advanced age, to marry her.
But the old lady had never divined his desire.
‘Your daughter is excellent in the household,’ he had said once, thinking that enough of a hint.
The following day, when he arrived, a strange young girl came out to meet him. The widow had moved up in life; she had now hired a servant.
‘Is Madam in?’ he asked. The servant nodded.
‘Will you go and get her?’
A minute passed. He thought he heard the sound of voices behind the door; then the servant came out and said: ‘No.’
‘No what?’
She turned her gaze towards the house again. ‘They…are not here. No.’
‘And Sulochana? Is she in?’
The servant girl shook her head.
Why shouldn’t they avoid me, he thought, trailing his umbrella on the ground as he returned to the bus station. He had done his work for them; he was not needed any more. This is how people in the real world behaved. Why should he be hurt?
In the evening, pacing around his gloomy home, he felt he had to agree with the old woman’s judgement: surely this is no fit habitation for a young girl like Sulochana. How could he bring a woman into it?
Yet the next day, he was back on the bus to Salt Market Village, where, once again, the servant girl told him that no one was home.
On the way back, he rested his head against the grille and thought: the more they snub me, the more I want to fall down before that girl and propose marriage.
At home he tried writing a letter. ‘Dear Sulochana: I have been searching for a way to tell you. There is so much to say…’
He went back every day for a week, and was refused entry every day. ‘I will never come back,’ he promised himself on the seventh evening, as he had for six evenings before. ‘I really will never come back. This is disgraceful behaviour. I am exploiting these people.’ But he was also angry with the old woman and Sulochana for treating him like this.
On the journey home, he stood up and shouted to the conductor: ‘Stop!’ He had remembered, out of the blue, a story he had written twenty-five years ago, about a matchmaker who worked in the village.
He asked the children playing marbles for the matchmaker; they directed him to the shopkeepers. It took an hour and a half to find the house.
The matchmaker was an old, half-blind man sitting in a chair smoking a hookah; his wife brought a chair for the Communist to sit in.
Murali cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles. He wondered what to say, what to do. The hero in his story had walked around the matchmaker’s house and then left; he had never come this far.
‘There is a friend of mine who wishes to marry that girl. Sulochana.’
‘The daughter of the fellow who…?’ The matchmaker pantomimed a hanging.
Murali nodded.
‘Your friend is too late, sir. She has money now, and so she has a hundred offers,’ the matchmaker said. ‘That is the way of life.’
‘But…my friend…my friend has set his heart on her…’
‘Who is this friend?’ the matchmaker asked, and with a dirty, omniscient gleam in his eyes.
He caught the bus in the mornings, as soon as his work was over at the Party office, and waited for her at the market. She came in the evenings to buy vegetables. He would follow her slowly. He looked at the bananas, at the mangoes. He had been buying fruit for Comrade Thimma for decades. He was expert at so many women’s tasks; his heart skipped a beat when he saw her choose an over-ripe mango; when the vendor tricked her, he wanted to run over and yell at him and protect her from his avarice.
In the evenings, he stood waiting for the bus back to Kittur. He observed the way people lived in villages. He saw a boy cycling furiously, a block of ice strapped to the back of his bicycle. He had to make it in time before the ice melted; it was already half gone, and he had no aim in life but to deliver the rest of
the ice in time. A man came with bananas in a plastic bag and looked around; there were large black spots on the bananas already, and he had to sell them before they rotted. All these people sent Murali a message. To want things in life, they were saying, is to recognize that time is limited.
He was fifty-five years old.
He did not take the bus back that evening; instead, he walked to the house. Rather than approach the front door, he entered through the back. Sulochana was winnowing rice; she looked at her mother and went inside.
The servant went in to bring a chair, but the old woman said: ‘Don’t.’
‘Look here; you want to marry my daughter?’ she asked.
So she had found out. It was always like this; you make an effort to conceal desire and then it is out in the open. The greatest fallacy: that you can hide from others what you want from them.
He nodded, avoiding her eyes.
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Fifty.’
‘Can you give her children at your age?’
He tried to respond.
The old woman said: ‘Why would we want to get you into our family, in any case? My late husband always told me, Communists are trouble.’
His jaw dropped. Was this the same husband who had praised the Communists? Had this woman just made all that up?
Murali understood now; her husband had said nothing about the Communists. In their wanting they became so cunning, these people!
He said: ‘I bring many advantages to your family. I am a Brahmin by birth; a graduate of—’
‘Look here!’ The widow got up. ‘Please leave – or there will be trouble.’
Why not? Maybe I can’t give her children, at my age, but I can make her happy, certainly, he thought, on the bus back home. We can read Maupassant together.
He was an educated man, a graduate of the Madras University; this was no way to treat him. Tears flooded his eyes.
He sought out books of fiction and poetry, but it was the words of a film song he had heard on the bus which seemed to express his feelings best. So this is why the proletariat go to the cinema, he thought. He bought a ticket himself.
‘How many?’
‘One.’
The ticket-seller grinned. ‘Don’t you have any friends, old man?’
After the movie, Murali wrote a letter and posted it to her.
The next morning he woke up wondering if she would ever read it. Even if it reached the house, wouldn’t her mother throw it away? He should have hand-delivered it!
It is not enough to make an honest attempt. That was enough for Marx and Gandhi – to have tried. But not for the real world, in which he suddenly found himself.
After considering the matter for an hour, he wrote the letter again. This time he paid an urchin three rupees to deliver the message into the girl’s hands.
‘She knows you come here to look for her,’ the vegetable seller said, the next time he came to the market. ‘You’ve scared her away.’
She is avoiding me – his heart felt a pang. Now he understood so many more film songs. This is what they meant, the humiliation of being avoided by a girl you have come a long way to see…
He thought the vegetable sellers were all laughing at him.
Even ten years ago – in his forties – there would have been nothing unseemly about approaching such a girl, he thought, as he headed home. Now he was a dirty old man; he had become the stock figure whom he had worked into several of his stories – the lecherous old Brahmin, preying on an innocent girl of a lower caste.
But those fellows were just caricatures, class-villains; now he could flesh them out so much better. When he climbed into bed at night, he took a piece of paper and wrote: ‘Some thoughts that a lecherous old Brahmin might actually have.’
Now I know enough, Murali thought, looking at the words he had written. I can become a writer at last.
The next morning order and reason returned. There were the comb on his hair, the breathing exercises before the mirror, the slow steady gait out the front door, the business of cleaning the Party headquarters and making tea for Thimma.
But, by afternoon, he was on the bus to Salt Market Village again.
He waited for her to come to the market and then walked behind her, examining potatoes and brinjals and stealing glances at her. All the time he could see the vendors mocking him: dirty old man, dirty old man. He thought with regret of a man’s traditional prerogative in India – in the old, bad India – to marry a younger woman.
The next morning, back in the pantry at the Party headquarters, boiling tea for Thimma, everything around him seemed dingy, and dark, and unbearable – the old pots and pans, the filthy spoons, the dirty old tub out of which he scooped sugar for the tea: the embers of a life that had never flared, never flamed.
‘You’ve been fooled,’ everything in the room said to him. ‘You’ve wasted your life.’
He thought of all his advantages: his education, his sharper wit, his brains, his gift for writing. His ‘talent’ – as that Mysore editor had said.
All of that, he thought as he brought the tea out into the reception area, wasted in the service of Comrade Thimma.
Even Thimma had wasted himself. He had never remarried after his wife’s early death; he had dedicated himself to his life’s goal – uplifting the proletariat of Kittur. Ultimately it was not Marx; it was Gandhi and Nehru who were to blame. Murali was convinced of that. A whole generation of young men, deluded by Gandhianism, wasting their lives running around organizing free eye clinics for the poor and distributing books for rural libraries, instead of seducing those young widows and unmarried girls. That old man in his loincloth had turned them mad. Like Gandhi you had to withhold all your lusts. Even to know what you wanted in life was a sin; desire was bigotry. And look where the country was, after forty years of idealism? A total mess! Maybe if they had all become bastards, the young men of his generation, the place would be like America by now!
That evening he forced himself not to take the bus to the village. He stayed on, cleaning the Party headquarters twice over.
No – he thought, as he strained to clean under the sink the second time – it was not a waste! The idealism of young men like him had changed Kittur and the villages around it. Rural poverty was halved, smallpox had been eradicated, public health was a hundred times improved, literacy was up. If Sulochana could read, it was because of volunteers like him, because of those free library projects…
He paused in the darkness under the sink. A voice growled inside him: ‘Fine, she can read – and what does that do for you, you idiot?’
He rushed back into the light, into the reception area.
The poster now came to life. The proletarians climbing up to heaven to overturn the gods began to melt and change form. He saw them for what they were: a subaltern army of semen, blood, and flesh rebelling inside him. A revolution of the body proletariat, long suppressed, but now becoming articulate, saying:
We want!
The Communists were finished. The European visitor had said as much; and all the newspapers were saying the same thing. The Americans had somehow won. Comrade Thimma would talk on and on. But there would soon be nothing to talk about; because Marx had become mute. Dialectics had become Dust. So had Gandhi; so had Nehru. Out in the streets of Kittur, the young people were driving brand-new Suzuki cars, blaring pop music from the West; they were licking raspberry ice-cream cones with red tongues and wearing shiny metal watches.
He picked up the pamphlet and threw it at the Soviet poster, startling a gecko that had been hiding behind it.
Do you think privilege has no place in Indian life? Do you think a Madras University man – a Brahmin – can be tossed aside so lightly?
In his hand, as the bus rocked, Murali held a letter from the state government of Karnataka that announced that another instalment of the money was due to arrive for the widow of the farmer Arasu Deva Gowda, provided she signed. Eight thousand rupees.
Asking for directions, he found the house of the moneylender. He saw it: the biggest construction in the village, with a pink façade and pillars up the front supporting a portico – the house that 3 per cent interest, compounded monthly, had built.
The moneylender, a fat, dark man, was selling grain to a group of farmers; by his side, a fat, dark boy, probably his son, was making a note in a book. Murali stopped to admire it all: the sheer genius of exploitation in India. Sell a farmer your grain. Get rid of your bad stock this way. Then charge him a loan for buying that grain. Make him pay it back at 3 per cent a month. Thirty-six per cent a year. No, even more – much more! Compound interest! – how diabolical, how brilliant! And to think, Murali smiled, that he had assumed that Communists had brains.
When Murali went up to him, the moneylender was sticking his hand deep into the grain; when he brought it out, the chocolate-coloured skin was coated with a fine yellow dust, like a bird’s pollen-covered beak.
Without wiping his arm, he took the letter from Murali. Behind him, in an alcove in the wall of his house, sat a giant red statue of the pot-bellied Ganesha. A fat wife, with fat children around her, was sitting on a charpoy. And from behind them wafted the odour of a feeding, defecating beast: a water buffalo, without doubt.
‘Did you know that the government has paid the widow another eight thousand rupees?’ Murali told him. ‘If you have debts outstanding, you should collect them now. She is in a position to pay.’