The Gypsy Goddess (19 page)

While our village burned and smouldered, Annadurai, the short-statured, soft-spoken chief minister lay on his death-bed, looking forward to the fanfare of his funeral the following February, which fifteen million people would attend. News had reached his office at Fort St. George, as it was meant to. He summoned up some energy and he said: ‘This incident is so savage and sadistic that words falter and fail to express my agony and anguish.'

And when asked for more, he added, craning his neck: ‘People should forget this as they forget a feverish nightmare or a flash of lightning.'

Everybody quoted him again and again: the newspapers and the radio and his partymen. Everybody revelled in the
poetry of his flash-of-lightning expression. They marvelled at his unceasingly alliterative powers.

We were forgotten. That was all. This was it.

We think the problem with the politicians is that they have seen too many deaths. To them every death is only a funeral. Nothing more, nothing less. Or every death is like a marriage, or it is like a meeting, or it is like a procession. If they don't have to make a speech at a death, some of them are relieved and some of them are offended.

We knew that everyone came to our village because of death. We knew this because they never came when we struggled or when we starved or when we silently waited for death. The death was the climax. The death was like the moment in the movies that no one wanted to miss and where everyone cried.

In the movies, everyone soon goes back to whistling. We don't know what happened after they came here and cried. We never found out.

There were messages of condolence every day. Periyar EVR, the great old man that he was, condemned the massacre when he came out of hospital two days after our tragedy. Everybody was waiting for what he had to say. He
said it was time Indian democracy was destroyed. He said Indian people were barbarians. He said that after the white man left, the country went into the hands of charlatans. At ninety years of age, he had not seen anything so full of gore. He compared this incident to the assassination of Gandhi.

He spoke about the forty-two (plus two, silent) men and women and children who were burnt to death. He said that politicians committed this atrocity in broad daylight.

He said that such acts took place because capitalism prevented the creation of laws to hand down stringent punishment to criminals. He also said that there could be no hopes for justice in a land where ninety out of a hundred judges were revengeful, casteist and selfish. He said corruption was ruining this country.

He was angry and he showed it. There was little else that could be done when the government was actually run by his protégé. In his hopelessness, he foresaw our fate.

The future had been tied to the past, so we heard our history over and over and over again. We always ended up hearing this history wherever we started. Some days it was about the curse of capitalism. Some days it was about the scourge of feudalism and how it had to be fought with force. Some days it was about caste, but only at the edges, at the wing
tips, so that it could be brushed off before we would all launch into flight.

We were told about the tax-free lands that local kings showered on the Brahmins:
archanabogam
,
brahmadeyam
,
iraiyilinilam
,
chaturvedimangalam
. Banned by holy books from using a plough and believing that all manual labour was disgusting and degrading and fit only for the lower castes, the Brahmins would sublet their land. Because what was deemed fit for the Brahmin was deemed fit for everyone who wanted to feel superior and everyone who wanted to dominate, the landowning Naidus and the landowning Mudaliars and the landowning OtherCastes started to avoid all manual labour, too. We were told that this aversion to manual labour was a defining feature of ruling-class behaviour.

We were told that Marx had written about this. We were told that because we worked with our hands, we were the working class. We were also told that because we worked, and because they hated work, they hated us.

That explained the separate wells and the separate graveyards and the separate streets. That explained why we had to stay out of the schools. That explained why we had to stay outside their homes. That explained why our homes were in the
cheri
, outside their villages. That explained why our people had been killed. That explained everything that required explanation.

When the month-long curfew was finally lifted, our party held a procession to mourn our dead. Kilvenmani became communism, communism became Kilvenmani. Green fields, red flags, black bodies: our every single step was taking us towards revolution.

Since the Paddy Producers Association decided that it was their turn, they held a rival procession to show their strength. They said that Pallan-Paraiyan peasants were ungrateful dogs. They said Pallan-Paraiyan peasants were parrots who repeated whatever was taught to them. They said Pallan-Paraiyan peasants were foolish enough to fall headlong into the well just because their friend had dug it. They said that the arrogance and affectation of drummers and gravediggers was a result of the Communists. They warned everybody to give up the dream that the sickle could find work after the landlords came to ruin. They said that peasant associations were mental asylums for the untouchables. They said that the labour unions were whorehouses. They vowed that a hundred men like Gopalakrishna Naidu would burst forth. They said a hundred landlords were willing to go to the scaffold. They warned that the world would witness a hundred Kilvenmanis.

We burned all over again.

They were asking for a fight that we could not give.

They claimed that we had killed their agent to avenge our leader. A Pakkirisami for a Pakkirisamy. They boasted how Kilvenmani had become a cremation ground even before his body reached the graveyard. They said our village had asked for its massacre by killing one of their agents.

Even as they made a big fuss of his death, they taunted us with our tragedy: what happens to the saucy chicken that comes into the kitchen on its own accord? It ends up in a curry. What happens to frogs that croak endlessly? They are silenced when snakes find them.

They rejoiced in the revenge, but we were held responsible for inviting death.

The gunshots are confirmed. It is not a figment of our imagination. The reports from the forensic labs reveal that the stains on Raman's loincloth came from his own blood. That night he ran – having last seen his wife and son enter the fateful hut – and ran and ran in a bid to save his life, fainting outside a cattle-shed. The serologists also see the red in Palanivelu's
vehti
, Muniyan's underwear, Ratnam's towel, Kaliyappan's
banian
. Clothes that are red with fire, red with its tongues of flame, red as the River Cauvery in flood, red ochre as that river in haste, almost as red as spilled blood.

Like the forensic scientists, the police are also meticulous in their observations. Because it is a road to nowhere, their reports talk about gunshot wounds sustained by coconut trees. They talk of the height and dimension and marks seen on the trees. The trees cannot come to court, the trees cannot give testimony, the trees cannot depose, so they are spared the horror of being eyewitnesses.