The Gypsy Goddess (25 page)

The High Court judges were defending the landlords better than their defence lawyers. As experts of ruling-class behavior, they used their understanding of caste and feudal practices to bail out all the accused.

Muthusamy translated their judgment for us. It said: ‘There is something astonishing about the fact that all the twenty-three persons implicated in this case should be
mirasdars
. Most of them are rich men, owning vast tracts of lands and it is clear that the first accused, Gopalakrishna Naidu, possessed a car. Such
mirasdars
might have harboured cowardly thoughts of taking revenge on
Communist agricultural labourers. However much they might have been eager to wreak vengeance on the peasants, it is difficult to believe that they would walk bodily to the scene and set fire to the houses, unaided by any of their servants. Owning plenty of lands, these
mirasdars
were more likely to play safe, unlike desperate, hungry labourers. Anyone would rather expect that the
mirasdars
, keeping themselves in the background, would send their servants to commit the several offences which, according to the prosecution, the
mirasdars
personally committed.'

Though we had slaved on the fields of these Naidu
mirasdars
, we did not know that they could be capable of rage but incapable of revenge. We learnt it from the High Court. The judgment also said: ‘It is truly regrettable that the forty-two agricultural labourers who sought refuge in the hut of Pandari Ramayya lost their lives because that house was set on fire. However, it is a little comforting to learn that the accused did not have any intention to burn them to death.

‘In our opinion, the onus for responsibility of the tragic incident that took place on the night of 25th December 1968 lies with the accused, who have to accept the blame. But we regret the fact that we have not found sufficient evidence on record to implicate the accused in this incident. We have tried our best to separate chaff from grain, to lengthen the punishment for at least a few of the accused, and at the
same time to ensure that the witnesses depose in a natural manner. But the subliminal shortcomings of the prosecution witnesses prevented us from punishing individuals whom we consider innocent. We believe the dependants of those who lost their lives in the holocaust will be generously compensated by the government.'

All the accused were acquitted. All of them walked free.

The fire of Kilvenmani had been rekindled. We were burning with outrage.

We told them that we did not want compensation.

We also did not want their justice.

EPILOGUE

Before this text is wrapped up and this book is mercilessly put down for being postmodern, here is a parting dose of Derrida:

‘The book is the labyrinth. You think you have left it, you are plunged into it. You have no chance to get away. You must destroy the work. You cannot resolve yourself to do so. I notice the slow but sure rise of your anguish. Wall after wall. Who waits for you at the end? No one…'

This direct address startles you. You. You, unable to leave a book. You, plunged in its text. You, seeking to destroy the work. You, you, you. Seduced into this labyrinth, with no means of escape, you prepare yourself for the immense task.

Wait. What if you don't want to take it up? What if you decry deconstruction? What if you believe Derrida is a fancy French philosopher whom only the snooty guys at university quote? I am with you. So are most of the others. We are in this together. We are the 99 per cent. Come and occupy the novel, dear reader.

You, being this you, you being no ordinary reader, you being the collective, you being the reader who rights the wrongs, you being the reader who fills in the blanks, you being not only evasive but also anonymous, enter this story.

You have done all the preliminary groundwork. You know well that between the closure of the book and the opening of the text, there will be moments of wandering. You are prepared for the travel, the trials and the tribulations (you can ignore my alliteration). You have discovered much more than what I stopped to say. You have studied beyond survey tabulations and statistical manipulations. You know, for instance, that the global market-economy made Tanjore a mono-crop region. You know that rice production under the colonial capitalist mode increased five times more than the population, but the working people's standard of living went in a downward spiral. You know all the strengths and sell-outs of communism in this dead-flat delta district. You know the trappings of agrarian resistance, you know the failings of a Tamil woman writing an English novel. You, being the perceptive reader, even know the history that I have glossed over. You don't take long to fault me for talking only about the white imperialists – you can quote someone's story that at the end of the eighteenth century, Hyder Ali's marching armies, aided by the French and Dutch, forcibly took away 12,000 children from Tanjore to Mysore. You know that at that time, men were massacred and that the
unmentionable happened to women and only those who escaped into the forests survived. You even speculate on the
mookkaruppu por
, where invading soldiers were said to have cut off the noses of the masses and collected them in sackfuls. You can reel off the dates of self-immolation of thousands of women of the Nayak royalty to save themselves from the fate that awaited them at the hands of the Marathas. You are not afraid, you are not the self-censoring kind, you point out that the Marathas spoke Marathi, the Nayaks spoke Telugu, and for a long, long time, Tanjore was never ruled by the Tamils themselves, and even if they got to rule, who would have had power but the feudal landlords? You can skip the soft-pedalling, you do the hard talk. You will get away with it. You have courage, dear reader, your words will never cost you a career.

Armed with all this knowledge, you visit Kilvenmani. You want to get the atmosphere right. You want to get the season right. You go there during harvest time, you go there in December, on the first day of the Tamil month of
Margazhi
, when dew begins to diamond the golden fields, you select a Sunday, you avoid the crowds and Christmas rush, you go there ten days in advance of the anniversary of the massacre.

You go and meet Maayi, you want to measure up the old woman in my novel against the original one, you want to know if justice has been done to her. She is busy
– this is the harvest season after all, she has to earn her daily wage. You curry favour by telling her about your visit to Tharangambadi – Tranquebar for the Danish – her birthplace, her mother's home. You have touched her at a tender spot. She reminisces about her wedding, about the day she left her coastal village, about coming to Kilvenmani as a bride. Things were bad in Tharangambadi, but she had no idea that Kilvenmani would be worse. She shares her shock at seeing that her wedding feast consisted of nothing but pumpkin fry, a dried fish curry and rice.
Burma arisi
. Tanjore grew the best rice in the world, but Maayi and people like her were slaves and were fed second-grade food, the cheaper Burmese rice. When the British left, the coarse rice vanished too, and in the years of monsoon failure, or cyclones, famine ate up the people.

You like her metaphors. You see that she speaks in the style of all old women, her words slur because of the absence of teeth, all her consonants are flattened as they roll out of her mouth and her vowels seem no different from each other. You find it easy to understand because she speaks of the familiar and she speaks with emphasis and her hands dance as she speaks and everything fits itself perfectly into the grand story that she is weaving. Her hands tell you of how she, and other women from the
cheri
, could not take water from the wells or the lakes, how she had to wait for a caste-Hindu woman to take pity and pour water into her
pot. She tells you that before petrol or
christoil
made its appearance, the coal-powered buses did not let the people of the
cheri
sit with the Hindus. In the cinema tents, she says, they were made to sit separately.

She shows how it looks, a
serattai
, the coconut-shell that the untouchables had to carry to the tea stall because they were not served in tumblers. Her husband had joined the Communists because they fought for these rights. Reeling under the spell of the Self-Respect Movement and the enticing militancy of early Communists, the people of the
cheri
had got together, entered the caste-Hindu village and dismantled the temple chariot. Word got around that Sannasi, her husband, had masterminded this protest. He was abducted one day, never to be seen again, until his body turned up two weeks afterwards, a hundred villages away. She beats her breasts, she weeps.

You stay silent for some time. You console her with stories of worse atrocities you have read about. She tells you that she does not know what is in those books you speak of. She has never gone to school. She tells you that caste is about having one set of people to read books, one set of people to be crooks, one set of people to misbehave, one set of people to slave. Impressed with you, she tells you that the young people of today have not seen anything.
Yes, they saw things like beatings, killings, police shootings, meetings but they did not see what these eyes have seen.
Women were always stripped bare before they were beaten. Yes, yes, I am telling you the truth. These eyes have seen that, these eyes just as they see you today. The landlords, those great souls, would not bear the sight of seeing clothes tear. Poor women, they shrivelled in shame. The ones who died from the beatings were silently buried. The ones who survived swallowed their shame and some poison. What could we do? What could be done? We beat our breasts, we wept. And so it went
. Since food was followed by drink,
saanippaal
would be waiting for the beaten woman or man – cow-dung mixed in water – a concoction that would drain them to death. When the Communists came with their red flag of resistance, hoarsely shouting and leading strikes, this revolting practice was put to an end. She traces the history of feudal torture: being forced to drink diluted cow-dung was soon replaced by being forced to drink a cocktail of fertilizer, so disobedience brought no disgrace, but death.

Seeing Maayi garnering all the attention, the women of Kilvenmani gather around you. You ask their names, you remember their stories, and you, being the people's person that you are, easily forge a conversation. You unravel them masterfully, telling them of a friend who lost a daughter, a sister who suffered sexual violence, and they talk to you in turn, filling you in with bits and pieces of other storylines. You learn of Veerappan's little daughter, who had
unaccountably stopped speaking and, because the words had left her, nobody knew what had made her stop. She died in the fire, and the memory of one night of rape and terror that she carried in her died that night. And because you probe, you also learn, dear reader, that Kunjammal lost her infant when an insect fell into the cradle – the child had wriggled, cried in pain and, scratching herself, had fallen face-down into the mud and suffocated. When Kunjammal went to feed the child, she came to an empty cradle, and the women stopped work and began singing dirges. They tell you stories and stories in this manner, of women who do not appear here, of children whose names are not printed on these pages. Constrained by this text and its subtext, you lose those threads.

Move ahead and march forward, dear reader. You are wanted in so many places. You haven't even met the men yet. I understand your compulsions. You want to follow a certain structure, stick to the semblance of some discipline.

Have you entered a paddy field at transplantation time? One foot in the silt, you think the other foot will help you break free, so you shift your weight, and that leg sinks too. You cannot come away unless you are knee-deep in trouble. That is how it is with the women who have started sharing their stories: one thing leads to another, and it goes on in endless circles, one foot down, the other follows, and then it is just wading through the mud, and it is difficult to
walk away. You are evidently in a hurry, and as you make no efforts to hide the fact, the women volunteer to walk you to where you want to go. They show you the martyrs' memorial where Pandari Ramayya's hut once stood, they point to the forty-four names, they take you to the tree where their village made its fatal decision to stick to the red flag. You can spot the coconut trees riddled with gunshot wounds; you can recreate the night from your readings.

The women make it easier for you. They tell you that the rice fields were not the dwarves that you now see in front of your eyes. In the sixties, the fever of Green Revolution was only catching up, so the old rice varieties were still around and these grew as tall as ten-year-old children – spraying them with pesticide was very difficult because of their height – and men and women and children who took shelter in these fields on that night were spared because they could not be spotted. The fields are golden and ripe for harvest, the women entreat you to taste the rice. They pull the ears of paddy, peel the husk, and the grains of rice they give you are milky in the mouth. You thank them profusely, you thank them politely, and you keep at it until they ask you, ‘
What next? What else?
' and you tell them, diplomatically of course, that you want to meet Nandan, little Nandan from
Part Three
,
Chapter Nine
, the angry young Nandan of page 210. Word is sent, and tiny messengers tear across the village, but he is nowhere
to be seen. You then ask about the other eyewitness you have encountered in the last 52,000 words, and a kid who went looking for Nandan remembers seeing Ramalingam at Muthusamy's tea stall, so you go there.