The Gypsy Goddess (23 page)

The party builds a martyrs' memorial in our village. It is a single, red-hued stone sculpted in the shape of an eternal flame. The fire of communism was burning.

This fire spread. In Kilvenmani, we read about it in the news: the labourers seemed to have started striking everywhere. The peasants were fighting in North Arcot, they were fighting in Coimbatore, they were fighting in Madurai. Spinning-mill workers were fighting, teachers were fighting, electricity board employees, bus drivers, drainage workmen were fighting. They observed strike ballots and
lightning strikes and mass walkouts and absenteeism.

Everyday there were lockouts and sit-ins. We heard about the
lathi
charge inside the mills. We heard about police shootings inside factories. They often portrayed the workers as villains, but we knew these stories. The labour leaders were all placed under arrest. Workers died and we saw the red flag flying high. We saw the revolution was near. We were ready for anything, and we saw that they were ready for anything. We spoke about them. We shared these stories of revolution endlessly between us until the stories slipped through the sieves of our minds and other stories came to take their place.

It was our duty, so, when it was time, we went to court. We gave witness. We felt their flood of questions eat us away. We were interrogated. We were examined and cross-examined and dismissed. We were angry because we were made to appear like storytellers who had conjured this massacre out of our minds.

We knew that the lawyers did not really care. We could sense it in the manner in which they explained away things. They claimed to have devoted a great deal of their time towards this case, but the ultimate result was not in their hands. They blamed the police for drafting a weak case. They said that their vexation did not arise from the merits
of the case, which were clearly in favour of the state, which was fighting on behalf of the dead, but from the lack of substantive evidence.

We knew that we could not bring back the dead to give witness. We knew that the landlords knew this too.

The landlords everywhere played a simple game. It was the game of Outside Labour. In South Arcot. Or East Tanjore. The newspapers supported the landlords. They spoke of the constitutional right of the landlords to employ whomever they wanted to employ. We were discredited because we had been hungry, hungry for an increase in our wage year after year. They said we were clamouring to be like them. They said we should never forget that the crow who attempted to walk like a swan never managed to mimic its grace, instead he lost even his natural gait. They asked us to remember our station. They said even hawks could not carry away the sky, so scavenger crows like us should not have lofty dreams.

The newspapers put down this antagonism to our arrogance. They mislead the public about us. They blame the famine conditions on our strikes.

Nothing frightened them as much as the realization that we had stopped being frightened of them. Everything angered them, so we were punished on the slightest pretext. They did not allow our funeral processions to step into their streets – our dead would pollute them, just as we would. They wanted our lives to never go beyond Pallaththeru and Paraththeru. This was the punishment for being born as Pallars and Paraiyars. So, when we demanded our rights, we had to face the boycott from the caste-Hindus.

Even if we walked ten miles in search of a new job, some petty employment for the day, they would not give us work. They would not sell us things in their shops. We had to find a way around everything. That is what we did even for the burial ground. We could not use their streets to carry our dead, so we had to walk through the fields. When three of our people died in a week, no, not here, but from the neighbouring villages, they had the police file cases against us. They said we had ruined 125 sacks-worth of paddy by walking through their rice fields. When we had a dying person in the ten neighbourhood
cheri
s, we all died a little because of the fear. We did not fear the caste-Hindus alone. The police were always at their beck and call and we could face fresh prosecutions if we broke their diktat.

In the beginning, they stopped funeral processions when they reached caste-Hindu streets. Soon, they started posting policemen in our
cheri
s if one of us fell very ill.

They said they did not want us to wag our tails. They said that every untouchable who disobeyed them deserved to die in something similar to Kilvenmani.

We were used to it: the silence and the shouting. The songs and the tears. Wet from all our weeping, we saw the world in a blur. Death had been here, but life went on deliriously, as if it had been set on fire.

We do not know where our quest for justice will end. But we know that the police or the prosecution do not represent us. Our hopes for justice lie with the judge who is busy reconstructing the events of that night and shuffling them into a sequence. We wait for the Special Additional First-Class Magistrate to ask questions on our behalf. We want him to ask the accused why not even one of the forty-two (plus two, silent) people were able to escape their death? We want him to ask why they were unable to come out of the hut? We want to ask why the Paddy Producers Association cut off all the escape routes if their intent had not been to kill? We want him to ask the accused if they were all deaf and how they missed the screams of the trapped people if their intent had not been to kill? We want him to ask the prosecution the reason behind their belief that the door of the hut was unlocked? We want him to ask the prosecution why none of our people walked out of the hut when it was
set on fire if the door had been open? We want him to ask the prosecution what prompted these forty-two (plus two, silent) people to commit collective suicide? We want him to ask the prosecution why did the police come to know about the deaths only the morning after? We want him to ask these easy questions. He does not ask these questions. He breaks into poetry and calls this incident heart-rending. He slips into mathematics and wonders how all the dead could have fitted into such a tiny space. He scrubs his conscience clean.

He is clearly not in a mood to ask our questions. He is the one who can ask them, not any of us. You see, even if the hen knows it is day, it is the cock that must crow.

An empty ground overlooks the Nagapattinam Court.

We converged there every day when the hearings were in session. We were patient. The waiting became the blood in our heads. To the lawyers, who had spent the greater part of two years working on the case, any judgment was gratifying. To the party, it meant more meetings, more denouncements, more discussions. To the eighteen bereaved families, the case was the shell they made their home, it was the hut where their loved ones had remained on the night of the tragedy. We were all waiting as the days dangled before us.

Two years after the atrocity, the Special Additional First-Class Magistrate M. S. Gopalakrishnan delivered his verdict.
He came to conclusions: the accused took the law into their own hands, deliberately set fire to the huts, destroyed all homes in three streets, shot at agricultural labourers. He doubtless grieves that their ‘causing grievous harm' resulted in the loss of forty-two (plus two, silent) innocent lives and decides, in the circumstances of the present case, to impose a fitting punishment. He has a full meal in mind, but he skips the salt. He frees fifteen landlords. Eight of them get a token punishment of ten years in jail. No one is sentenced for life, no one is sentenced to death.

The Special Additional First-Class Magistrate also said that the accused who have been convicted by this Court of Sessions at the East Tanjore District on that the Thirtieth day of November Nineteen Hundred and Seventy should be handed over to the Tiruchy Central Prison.

Some issues are sidestepped. Most are buried. The court kept saying that the fire did the killing. At one point, the magistrate talked about the people who died because they were trapped inside a hut that caught fire. As if the hut of Paappa and Pandari Ramayya was waiting there, waiting to catch fire, waiting to self-immolate, waiting to commit suicide.

Our lawyers say justice has nothing in common with law. It is a late lesson.