The Gypsy Goddess (17 page)

Inspector Rajavel was worried about the business of death certificates: should he get one made out for every dead body? How could those certificates carry names
when only four corpses had been identified? Should they be numbered instead? The official count of the dead stood at forty-two. (The other two dead were habeas corpses. The police did not account for their deaths. Sankar: a one-year-old baby whose mother had thrown him outside the burning hut in the belief that he would be left to live but was caught by a gunman on his rifle bayonet, hacked into pieces and fed to the fire. Less spectacularly, a baby girl who had burned, leaving behind no distinct trace.)

Destination of the dead: Paappaan Sudukaadu, Nagapattinam. A cremation ground named after Brahmins but used for untouchables. The police van, meant for paved roads, takes the forty-two (plus two, silent) corpses through the main roads, through the caste-Hindu roads, through the banned roads, through the debarred roads. Having accompanied them on their final ride, Inspector Rajavel supervises the burning. In one common pyre, the bodies are piled one on top of another: as haphazard as they had been found, as haphazard as firewood. The cremation ground is infected with sufficient police presence to keep away the Communists who might launch a strike, retaliate and seize the bodies. None of the relatives is allowed to the funeral, not even the fourteen men with gunshot injuries who are held in custody at the government hospital, who refuse to eat unless they are allowed to visit the dead. Local villagers are roughed up. Schoolchildren turn up
to have one last look at the dead but they do not leave.

The cremation is no electric-powered paradise. The charcoal-like corpses are set alight. The firewood is not sufficient, and, in a final act of defiance, the bodies refuse to burn. Inspector Rajavel is angry with the disobedient, stubborn corpses. He calls up the district collector, gets his permission to buy and bring in another load of firewood. The fresh supply of fuel and the efficiency of kerosene ensure that the dead disappear into ashes.

With the air of a man who has charmed a dead snake, Inspector Rajavel prepares to prepare a catalogue of remains that will constitute evidence.

All that is left is a few bones. His efforts, however, have enabled him to be in possession of red paper shells, cartridge covers, shot-wads: signs of a shooting spree. Charred bamboo splinters represent a ghostly village of missing roofs, gutted mud-walled huts and half-burnt homes where only the grinding stone has withstood the fury of fire. A collection of pots and pans too, almost as if they were the remnants of a long-ago civilization.

And there is the seized material from the suspects: a Webley & Scott, a Stevens Arms Company firearm with 12-bore single barrel breech-loading capacity, and other, country-made shotguns.

A pile of paperwork awaits him. To link the crime with the guns, these suspect firearms have to be sent to the forensic laboratories. There is work with the doctors, work with the reporters.

He meets with Jameson – proprietor and photographer of the Eastern Studios – the man called in to capture this Christmas Day massacre. Like a Buddha in the backyard, the photographer has provided still-life renderings of destruction: thirty-five burnt huts, forty-something charred bodies heaped in mounds, dust that clouds the landscape. Inspector Rajavel refrains from looking at the
pictures of the victims. In these hard times, he derives strength from facts and figures bonded by facts and figures, not photographs that flicker like ghosts.

Constable Muthupandi has brought in the measurements of Ramayya's hut: the courtyard was seven feet by eleven feet, it led into a front room eleven feet long and an inside room that was eight feet long and nine feet wide. The walls were five feet and six inches tall. The roof has been completely burnt, the door and its frame have been charred, but the monkey door-bolt has stayed intact. From the inside room, the policemen have collected pieces of singed clothes. Then, Constable Nayagan lays out the metallic remains: two toe-rings, a talisman, and a silver fig leaf that covered some child's shame.

Everything is carefully sealed in a bag.

Every one of them knows that evidence will never be enough.

part four

BURIAL GROUND

13.
A Survival Guide

Everything would die its natural death. The visit of the politicians would fade out and journalists would stop being eager and this news would disappear from the headlines and fact-finding missions would be bored of report writing, and life in Kilvenmani would moodily limp back to normal. Even the men in uniform would stop being bothered. But, for the time being, that is all in the future. The men who have survived are nursing their wounds in the hospital, or in hiding, or huddling in jail. Every man in Kilvenmani over the age of seventeen has a case slapped on him. Back to work, the police are doing their duty. Most of the men are implicated in the Pakkirisami Pillai single murder case; the police, in love with variety, generously give everyone multiple sections of the Indian Penal Code.

Life, weighed down by death, weary of destruction, goes on.

So many women of the village have been wiped out, there is no one to sing the dirges of death. Men are not
allowed to see their loved ones' corpses; they take their mothers sisters wives daughters sons for dead because they have not been seen since that night. They secretly hope someone survived, they pray that those presumed dead send word. When someone appears after staying two days in a stranger's house in another village, Kilvenmani erupts in joy.

People are worried that those escaping death might have been captured alive. They think of Comrade Chinnapillai whose body has never been found, they remember their young women who were kidnapped and carried away and raped and killed and buried in some coconut grove. Until everyone alive turns up, the list of dead is not confirmed.

They are outraged by these inconceivable deaths: the young did not deserve to die and the old left them without any warning. Now burdened with mourning, it is beyond the means of the living to try and make meaning out of the randomness of death.

Remember that there lived, once-upon-a-time, in-a-tiny-village, an Old Woman who made her debut in the very beginning of this novel? You were promised that if you were patient enough, you would hear her speak and watch her move through these pages. Now, it's time for you to know her on a first-name basis. Meet Maayi. Before you make up your mind as to whether you want to greet her by shaking hands or falling at her feet or doing a combination of the above that takes into account your combined cultural sensitivies, remember that she is a busy woman. Once married to the village's witch doctor, it has now fallen upon her to hold her people together.

Before we rewrite history and relegate her man to the margins, a word about him. In the tiny villages where he was known, a certain religious hysteria surfaced whenever his name was mentioned.

It began when he tamed a notorious, anklet-wearing vampire. It was rumoured that this bloodsucker walked backwards and that those who saw the fire burn in her eye sockets dropped dead. But he had convinced her to go away. He had made the meanest ghouls promise him that they would move to other graveyards. He offered arrack to angry spirits. He sorted out every squabble between husbands and wives, brothers and cousins, shopkeepers and neighbours. Mute children, left at his doorstep by dejected parents, returned home talkative brats. Men went
straight to him when they fumbled and failed their wives night after night. Possessed women were brought to him to have their devils driven away. He gave them sacred ash, healing their frenzy with nothing but
neem
leaves and his honest eyes. It worked as effectively as his peacock oil concoction for epilepsy.

The people of Kilvenmani would always touch his feet and ask for his blessing. They loved him for the comfort with which they could share their secrets. The gods spoke through him and the demons listened to him and there was nothing more any man could ask for. This man, with the matted hair, was the soothsayer and the spell-maker.

Sannasi could have brought solace to this bereaved village if he had not been murdered three years before.

The strangeness in Letchumi's head never subsided. She had become so dizzy that police battalions and hired rowdies and armed landlords kept running away as flag-bearing Communists and the dead chased them through her, ear to ear, in unceasing waves.

One day, when Maayi came to her carrying food, since she had not eaten in days, she took the old woman's hands and put them on her forehead, on her eyelids, at the base of her throat and told her that she could feel a hundred fights inside her body and nobody retired to take rest and their madness made her fly. Sometimes they made her hurt herself. She also told Maayi that she thought her dead mother, Kaveri, was inside her, that her dead friends, Virammal and Sethu, were inside her and that their hearts were beating in her breast. She was sure that their bodies had been burnt, but their souls had escaped to safety and now they were alive within her and soon they would begin to speak. Her complaints varied, but the relentless throbbing never stopped. The dead were devouring her from the inside. Again and again, she collapsed in the chaos.

When Muthusamy saw the state of his sister, he broke down. Maayi told him that Letchumi was not alone. Everyone in Kilvenmani carried the ghosts of their dead.

In that village of overnight widowers, Muni's sorrows never cease. His family has been virtually wiped out. He has lost his father and mother, he has lost his wife and two daughters. And he has lost two sisters-in-law, three nephews and a niece. Eleven members, a quarter of Kilvenmani's dead. Muni's father had been the village gravedigger, so death held no novelty. What has happened now was not in the realm of death, it went way beyond.

His infant son, Paneer, who was still suckling, is now motherless. His first son, Selvaraj, whom he had given in adoption to his own parents, is also an orphan. His elder brother, Ratinasamy, lost his wife and all their children. His younger brother, Seppan, lost his wife and little son. He and his two brothers are now orphans. No family, only the three brothers sticking to each other for solace.

Every evening, they drown their sorrows with drink.

Arumugam is afraid for his daughter. Asked to identify the dead, he points out Jothi, her classmate. That is when the dread enters him.

He cannot move, but he will not let his little girl out of sight. She is caught between his fear and her lack of any idea of what happened. The terror talks to her body in strange ways. She shivers when she is alone. She has seizures in her sleep. She needs to be held by someone. She needs that smell of armpits to soothe her, breasts to rest her head on. She keeps asking about the others, her friends. She calls them all, one by one. They are dead, but to her it doesn't matter. Perhaps they come and stand in a line. Or perhaps they hold each other's hands and form a neat circle. Perhaps they clap their hands for her. Perhaps they dance too, one leg in the air, half-bent, and then the other. Perhaps they can only stay still. She doesn't tell the elders about her friends. After she's called their names, after she is sure that all the boys and the girls have come, after she has finished playing, she spins like a top under a frenzied whip, and falls down in a swoon.

That is when Maayi is summoned.

Maayi thinks the men who were wounded by the guns are lucky. The men who were beaten up too. The men who were hurt, then the men who work in the party, then the men who are friends of the men who were hurt and who work in the party, and thus, almost everyone is lucky. Their pain grounds them, prevents them from hurtling down into other worlds, from disappearing into the abyss.

Pain. And anger.

Anger prevents Kilvenmani from disorienting itself. Maayi sees how the anger keeps the people together, injects them with life, provides them a reason to live, pushes them into action. Sometimes, the rage borders on madness. She can see it everywhere, just as she can see the sorrow and the sudden emptiness. She does not want that rage to turn inwards. She does not want the sorrow to eat up the men and the women and the teenagers and the children. She is afraid for her people. The full-hands, the three-quarter-hands, the half-hands and the quarter-hands. Every one of them.

Everyone.

The ochre sparrows are on fire. The pigeons in white flight are on fire. The sun is on fire. The clouds are burning at the edges. The flaming yellow of the moon is on fire. The stars pour with sparks that will scorch the earth on touchdown. The gold of the paddy fields is on fire. The burning brown mounds of grain and mountains of hay are on fire. The red flag at noon is on fire. The gutted huts have roofs of fire. The ponds are bright and burning as they splice up the sunlight. The roads catch fire whenever a stray vehicle kicks up dust. The sand is speckled with fire sparkles. The gods have blackened into death and the camphor only lights up their charred corpses. Women carelessly wind the fire around their hips and across their breasts. Girls carry fire in the ends of their curling hair and they pretend not to notice at all. Men swallow the fire as if their stomachs were stoves. Children catch fire when they run because the wind shaves their skin and sets them alight. The air is full of golden fire-dust. Everything is ablaze. Everyone is glowing. He cannot save any of them but he screams all the time. He shouts at them to stop. No one pays heed. No one stops to douse the fire. Everyone is hurtling towards death and Veerappan can only watch them burn away like his red towel.