Between the Assassinations (30 page)

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 favorite 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 pseudorevolution, 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 reach 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 to 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 neighbor 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 laborer?

I’ve come just in time,
he thought.

“Run and get them!” he shouted at the neighbor. “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 out 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 labor 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 makeup, 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 wanted 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 anymore.

He had not realized how badly he had been living all these years. 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 endeavor than could be found in a small town. After Murali’s 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.

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 programs, 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 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…