The Gypsy Goddess (20 page)

The doctors ape the police. Doctor Kausalya Devi submits a tabulated report of the pellets that she finds in our bodies. She finds three gunshot wounds on some-one's face and two on his chest and one in his neck but she cannot feel the pellets with her hands and she cannot remove them. She tabulates the other gunshot wounds, too. Name, number of wounds, location. The locations vary from the cheek to the eyebrow to the neck to the chest to the palm to the stomach to the left thigh to the right ankle. The table tells you how we have been sprayed with their shotguns.

It was easy for them to write of us. Big in the scheme of things, six measures of rice is a mouthful to them. They digested us easily. News of these police reports came to us. These are the light-hearted reports. Not like the sad post-mortem reports where these doctors are enacting the struggle to determine the gender or the age from a body that has been charred like a piece of wood.

Less than a month after this tragedy, another round of tripartite talks was held with the representatives of land-holders, agricultural labourers and legislators to revise the wage structure. Where the wage for harvest was four local measures for every sack of grain containing forty-eight measures of paddy, it became four and a half; four and a half measures became five; five measures became five and a half; five and a half measures became five and three-quarters; and six remained at six with no change. We knew nobody followed this agreement to the letter, that nobody would ever give us six measures. We knew what would happen if six measures were demanded.

When a Muslim
mirasdar
in Poonthalangudi acceded and paid six measures, there were calls for all landlords to follow suit. Demonstrations went on until all work in the fields came to a standstill. It was time to crack the whip, the landlords decided, and they brought in the police to put down the protests. The police – being more refined than their feudal friends – used wooden
lathi
s instead of whips, and when it really got out of hand, they fired on the crowd. A striking peasant died, a sub-inspector the culprit. History was already repeating itself.

Another deal was signed. This new agreement was used to silence us, to quell our fears, to placate us because we had paid with our lives. This agreement also contained
other standard conciliatory catchphrases: they agreed to allow the employment of outside labour after local labour had been employed. They made us agree that they would not be forced to employ
lazy
,
inefficient
and
recalcitrant
labourers, shorthand to denote Communist peasants. They agreed that disputes had to be addressed to a conciliation committee under the local
tahsildar
with two representatives of the landlords and two representatives of the labourers. To buy time, this settlement was proposed for the next three years.

We burst with rage but we know that the landlords live behind high walls where nothing can get to them.

Everything that has happened so far is held against us. Everything that is bound to go wrong is blamed on us. We know that the landlords never care about the agreements. They know that words on paper have a life only on the page. They know that nothing can bind them. They know that these words don't belong to anybody. They know that words are stillness, meant to arrest hostile action. They treat paper no more preciously than pubic hair.

During the harvest season of 1968, the landlords had hired the police to work for them. The police had come from their camp and provided protection. The landlords, under police protection, had used hired labour
from other districts; they went from village to village and they harvested the grain. This was part of their scheme of starving us to death: to deprive us of any employment, to deprive us of any means of subsistence. They planned to harvest the grain themselves with the police dogs standing guard and the hired hands slaving away. They wanted us to stand and watch and weep.

We did not let that happen. The soil we had toiled upon owed us food.

Just as fish know the depths of water and snakes know the sound of drums, we knew these paddy fields. So, we took them by surprise, too. At night, we harvested the crop because the land was imprinted on our hands. Days later, they too took us by surprise. At night, they killed us because death danced on their breaths.

We are told that action will be taken and arrests will be made only if we agree to the terms of the police. We knew that there was no one to arrest the police who had allowed the landlords to carry out Operation Kilvenmani.

Someone said: Do what they say or they will do to us what they did to Chinnasamy. The police could do anything. One matchstick was all it took for the Malabar Special Police to burn Chinnasamy's moustache. It was not enough to take away our moustaches to show that they were real men. They
went even further, killing us in custody, opening fire on our meetings. We had not suffered as much even under the white man's police.

Now, they construct our case according to instructions from the landlords and their politicians. Our testimonies are watered down, so that it appears as if we contradict ourselves and each other. Framing a flimsy case, the police prepare the ground for the landlords to have sufficient escape routes.

Then they turn their attention to nailing us. The
mirasdars
are furious after agent Pakkirisami Pillai's murder. They see his killing as an affront to their might, but they also see his death as their whip to crack down on us. It is a murder that will help them leverage the massacre. They order the police to fix us up in that single murder case.

That is why we end up in jail.

Twenty-two of us go to jail for two months after our village lost forty-four lives.

When we went to court, we heard that all the accused landlords were angry that this false case was being foisted on them. Twenty of them averred, in true son-of-a-shotgun fashion, that they did not own a gun, or a licence to hold a gun, or that any gun had been seized from them, or that they had surrendered a gun. Right away, all of them agreed
that they were members of the Paddy Producers Association. They denied all knowledge of the fires. They had fireproof alibis.

There was something they submitted to the knowledge of the court: some of them had been away on the night in question. Some of them had been absent.

We saw that all the absconding whoresons had since returned and we could not believe our ears when we heard them lie.

That night, Gopalakrishna Naidu (the first accused), had dropped in at the local talkies to enquire about something and then he had been with the police; the third accused had been away to attend his sister's father-in-law's cremation; the fourth accused had gone to his sister's house forty miles away to get his stomach ache treated by a doctor in that town; the sixth accused had been at his father-in-law's house tending to his sick wife; the seventh accused had remained home; the ninth accused also had remained home, where a six-member gang with four grievously injured members sought shelter because they were being chased by a Communist gang, which had started throwing stones at him and he had started bleeding and his mother fainted as she was too shocked and then the police came and the gangs dispersed and therefore he never went to the scene of crime because it visited him; the tenth accused had been in another city tending to his sister's husband
who had been hospitalized after an accident that damaged his teeth; the twelfth accused was at the night show at the talkies and having heard of the incident had stayed over at a friend's house; the thirteenth accused went to visit his son studying in Porayar where he had taken ill because of the tiring nature of travel and returned on the subsequent day; the fourteenth accused was only an occasional visitor to his village as he had resided in Nagapattinam for the last decade; the fifteenth accused was under detention; the sixteenth accused had slept at his rice mill in Parappannoor as was his usual practice; the seventeenth accused had gone to another village for harvesting; the twentieth accused had stayed home in his village along with prosecution witness number forty-four; the twenty-second accused had gone to Palayapalayam; and the twenty-third accused had gone with the local
panchayat
president on an election fund-raising mission to Tiruvarur to meet Sundaram Iyer, in whose home they had spent that fateful night.

The police, who had provided their lorries to these killers that night, did not produce any evidence that contested the claims of these landlords. They were mute puppets in khaki uniform.

Sometimes the disease is the cure, sometimes the cure is another disease. The police filed a case against the landlords,
but they also filed a case against us. Complaint and counter-complaint. We were angry that they had made out two cases: one for this side, one for that side; both for their entertainment. As if killing one agent of the landlords was equivalent to the killing of forty-four old men, women and children. Twenty-two of us became the accused in Irukkai Pakkirisami Pillai's single murder case. Twenty-three landlords became the accused in the Kilvenmani case. We didn't know, but that was how the law worked. Soon, we saw the agent's killing become a murder case, while the massacre was reduced to a connected arson case. We were sent to jail; most of us, in any case.