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.
The mornings passed without incident because there was work. Thangamma had to survive for the sake of the village. She had to go to the hospital to look after her husband. Whenever a journalist sauntered into Kilvenmani, she joined the others and spoke about what happened and how she felt. She told them how she saved her mother-in-law, Araayi, that night. She described how she led her little children, Shenbagavalli and Mani, to safety by herding them to the nearby school. She spoke of Kerosene Govinda pulling at her clothes and how she fought back fiercely. Why are you running away, you whore? She repeated his words verbatim.
She never cried so they listened to her and asked her more questions with the hope that she would start weeping and they could go back with a story of how strong women crumbled.
She never cried in front of them.
Tough during the day, Muniyan’s wife allowed the nights to torment her. She could not stay there. She walked wherever her legs carried her. She returned by daylight to her home. She wanted to be moving in the darkness. She wanted to be alone with her sadness.
Tongues would wag in any other village. Here, the men were too broken down to notice and the women were too scared to follow her on her nightly walks.
Living the nightmare, she had wandered very far away from the land of sleep.
She was in no mood to turn around.
He refused to talk. Death had driven a dagger through him, muting him.
His mind went in impossible loops: weeping people made the dogs go crazy, visiting journalists made the people weep. Politicians planned these fires, police obey the politicians, landlords control police battalions, women who were forced to sleep with the landlords did not murder them and that is why these tragedies happened.
With his voice trapped in his head and his words stuck in stranger corners, his memory healed, his memory hurt, his memory turned against itself.
On the sixteenth day, when the mourning village fed its dead ancestors, placated their tormented souls and told them to rest in peace, Karuppaiah’s memory seized him at a weak moment and drove him to take away the only life he had.
She would not allow a stitch of cloth to cover her body. She lay naked on the mat, through the day and through the night. She threw away all her clothes. When Maayi forced her to cover her shame with an inskirt, she tore it off. She was coherent when she talked about the Comm
unist Party, but she refused to talk about her hatred for clothes. Maayi confined her to their hut.
She waits for her to recover.
Caught by the hair, pushed to the ground, stripped naked, beaten up. Scars on her left cheek, a sickle split on the right side of her hip, red welts on her palm from fighting the men. Maayi, as Packiam’s mother-in-law, knows that night too well to wonder what went wrong.
Periyaan went about his work as usual. He was there at his son’s tea stall. He was there at the party office. He was there at the hospital. He was there, where he was required to be. But in the nights, when he was drunk on arrack, he would begin to scream. Gopalakrishna Naidu, come here and get fucked. Either this, or other colourful, powerful variations. Gopalakrishna Naidu, if you are a man and if you have balls, come here and get fucked. Gopalakrishna Naidu, if you are born of one father, come here and get fucked. Gopalakrishna Naidu, if you are not the son of a guest, come here and get fucked. Gopalakrishna Naidu, if you have not slept with your mother, come here and get fucked. Gopalakrishna Naidu, if you are not busy fucking your sister, come here and get fucked.
The screaming went on, all night long.
Come here. Get fucked. Come here. Get fucked.
Everyone agrees that no one deserved to die. Everyone believes that they should have been dead instead…
Instead of Muthusamy’s mother, Kaveri, who had gone away to her mother’s village, but had rushed back to Kilvenmani when she heard news of her son being beaten up by the landlords.
Instead of Thangavelu’s wife, Kunjammal, who had broken the news of her pregnancy to him only that morning. After her three-month-old daughter had died, Kunjammal, as if to punish herself, had not slept with her husband for three years afterwards, and now never would again.
Instead of Ratnam’s daughter, Virammal – with a one-year-old son – who had fought with her mother-in-law and husband to go to Kilvenmani to see her father and stay with her little brothers for a week.
And everyone wanted to be dead instead of Ramayya’s wife, Paappa. Nine months pregnant and expecting a baby any moment, she had kept calling them all to safety, she had offered everyone her hut for refuge.
Maayi alone sensed his mutinous intent. When she touched his hands, she knew how he spent his day. The dirt under his fingernails told her where he had been. She would have bathed him then and there – he was only a ten-year-old child. But she did nothing. She knew the boys who wanted to be treated like men and the men who wanted to be treated like boys. If it had been her grandson, she would have taken him on to her lap, rubbed his tiny toes, and told him that he could not do anything. Nandan was not like any of them.
Maayi was aware of the anger that stiffened this boy’s hands. She knew the knots behind his nerves, the bones burning in his knees. He had been throwing stones. Onnu. Rendu. Moonu. Naalu. He had been breaking things. Naapatthi-Onnu. Naapatthi-Rendu. Naapatthi-Moonu. Naapatthi-Naalu. He had been keeping count. He had not forgotten what he had seen.
Taking his restless hands in hers she tells him to send his anger to his heart, to his head. If you keep it in your knuckles or in your fists it will slip away from you in a blink. Even if you watch it all the time, it will vanish.
You have a big man’s anger, she tells him. You need an old man’s patience.
In the days following the tragedy, Maayi managed to keep a grip on her own sanity.
The journalists who come there seek her out. They want her old-woman ways, her old-woman words. They want her version of the story. The photographers treasure her – she without a blouse, she with the long dangling earlobes, she with tattoos all over her arms. They delight in her postures: how she sits like a bird about to launch into flight, how she spits tobacco as she speaks, how her hair comes loose when she sings a dirge, how her hands lift in the air to shape the desolation of the entire village. They watch her fling sand into the skies and slap her thighs as she curses the landlords. They capture her eyes when she bids the flowers of the graveyard to grow in the homes of the murderers.
The living in Kilvenmani lack life. Everyone is something else: there are the ones who do not eat, the ones who do not talk, the ones who do not bathe, the ones who do not step outside their homes, the ones who do not step inside their homes. It is strange, the way in which the village has exchanged its sorrow for insanity. She sees everything as if these are ordinary things. As if she has seen greater horrors. But she doesn’t tell their stories to the journalists. These stories are her village’s wounds of shame, they cannot be displayed to passing spectators.
Maayi heals the living.
Maayi also hears the dead.
On new moon nights, they sing the dirges of their death. In the silence of their lament, she senses that they have stolen her words.
14. What Happened Afterwards
They came with relief supplies, we shouted them away. Could they produce our dead back again, in flesh and blood? Could they give us back our wives and our children and our parents? What were we to do with their clothes and their utensils and their rations? Were suckling infants underground comrades? Were schoolchildren full-timer Communists giving speeches from big, public platforms? Was forty-four lives the price for an extra measure of paddy? Was this our sacrifice for staying with the red flag? Why were our people in jails when it was us who had died? Were they running a state or a slaughterhouse?
We told them that we did not want that blood-soaked, flesh-smoked rice.
We told them that we did not want compensation, we wanted justice.
They shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders and walked away.
Three days after the tragedy, Comrade P. Ramamoorthy, our party’s state secretary, came to the village. He came from Kochi, where he had been attending the party’s eighth congress. Communist leaders from neighbouring districts came, leaders from other parties were also here.
We knew that politicians would never skip an important death. If they could not be at the spot of death, they would come to the funeral. If they could not come to the funeral, they would come to the sixteenth-day ceremony. If they could not come to the sixteenth-day ceremony, they would come any day. Thukkam visarikka varuvaanga. They would come to enquire about our sorrow. How big it was, how deep it was, what were its dimensions, what was the death count? They wanted to know everything so that they could feel bad for the bereaved. We would cry and they would wipe away our tears. They would cry and we would tell them not to cry.
Karunanidhi, the man who was going to be the next chief minister, came to our village soon after the tragedy. He was from these parts, although he had left for the city to make it in politics. When he came and met us, the police and newspaper people followed him around. After the sorrow-questioning and sorrow-hearing, he said things that would give us strength. He swore his loyalty to us. He said he would make us an offer we could not refuse.
He asked all of us to move to Thirukkuvalai to be under his protection. He said we would be safe. He said he would give us land and schools and homes. We listened to him. We understood his good intentions.
The next day the papers carried this story. They carried it along with a picture of Maayi weeping as he spoke to her. She came running to Muthusamy’s tea stall to see the picture. And she said, ‘Even if all of us are going to die, we will die in Kilvenmani itself.’ Everyone agreed.
Everything hinged on the first complaint that we had given at the Keevalur police station. This had had to be any one of us – the one whose leg was operated upon, the one who got fifty-six pellets of birdshot, the one who lost eleven family members – and it was Jayabalan, because he had rushed to the police station that night itself.
The complaint read: ‘I am Jayabalan, son of Ayyavu, Hindu, aged about 30 years. I live in Pallaththeru in Kilvenmani. At about 10 p.m. tonight, Gopalakrishna Naidu and 20 or 30 men came to our village from Irinjiyur. They entered our street Pallaththeru, and set fire to my house and shot at me. I have sustained gunshot injuries on my neck and face. They also
set fire to other homes. I don’t know what happened to those inside the homes. Kathamuthu, the teacher at Melvenmani, brought me on his cycle to Keevalur. I asked this to be read out to me and it is as I said.’
It was as he said.
We were the complainants; our village, the wailing child.
Later this complaint would grow a pair of hands and a pair of legs and a dark face with only eyes on it and become our legal case. The police would half-heartedly appear to fight to prove this true.
The fate of our village went into strange hands, strange lands.
While our village burned and smouldered, Annadurai, the short-statured, soft-spoken chief minister lay on his death-bed, looking forward to the fanfare of his funeral the following February, which fifteen million people would attend. News had reached his office at Fort St. George, as it was meant to. He summoned up some energy and he said: ‘This incident is so savage and sadistic that words falter and fail to express my agony and anguish.’
And when asked for more, he added, craning his neck: ‘People should forget this as they forget a feverish nightmare or a flash of lightning.’
Everybody quoted him again and again: the newspapers and the radio and his partymen. Everybody revelled in the poetry of his flash-of-lightning expression. They marvelled at his unceasingly alliterative powers.
We were forgotten. That was all. This was it.
The Gypsy Goddess Page 13