by K R Meera
The rain-soaked walk led me into the middle of the band of protestors shouting slogans. Sangeeta emerged from the crowd with an open umbrella as soon as she saw me. She had long flowing hair, neatly plaited with thin strands taken from either side of her head. One end of her sari—black flowers printed on white—was tucked along her belly. The changes in the body and face of a demure, newlywed and pregnant girl were apparent. Her dark, oily and shiny face glowed with an uncommon light of bravery and resolve. ‘Sister, I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding my place. Please come. My house is very close. Our strike has passed forty-five days today. Would you like tea?’
I looked at her while the rain streamed down my face and smiled. ‘I don’t need anything now. I came here to see you because of a letter from your mother. You look well.’
She blushed a little. ‘I think Mother might not have told you this. I am pregnant.’
I kept gazing at her without batting an eyelid. The teenager whom I had met long ago was going to become a mother. A thought crossed my mind just then: What if Sunanda had lived? What if she were alive, married to Das and pregnant? My heart was heavy. I wouldn’t have mattered in his life any more! My heart yearned to meet Yudas. I had to find him. I needed to make him my own. I must bear his child and smile in this rain under an umbrella.
The agitation became louder now.
‘The mud from the farmlands is going to be dug out starting today, sister,’ Sangeeta said. ‘They dig up all our lands. But we won’t back off until we put an end to this. One way or another. We need our lands to farm. We’ll sow the seeds. We’ll reap the harvest. Our cattle must have fields to graze on, and move about. Our wells must have water.’
I stood alongside Sangeeta on the edge of the road, close to the band of agitators. Presently a procession of cars arrived, among them the vehicles of the district collector and the superintendent of police. There was a sudden commotion. The collector and the police officer stepped out of the rear seats of their respective cars. They wore long pants and taut belts, but they had the swagger of feudal lords from olden times. Some in the group behind them rushed to hold umbrellas over their heads, exhibiting a servile reverence. The collector read something out loud from a paper. I could barely hear anything in the din. But I could see the man’s face, the muscles distended to their limits to give the impression of a rocky exterior on his fair-complexioned face. What troubled me was the scowl he sported as he faced a motley bunch of poor people shouting slogans. It betrayed his arrogance and hatred for them.
‘The law is against you. You have to submit to the court order,’ the collector announced. The crowd became silent. ‘We have to fulfil our duties. The court has ordered us to provide protection to the factory owners. You need to disperse, immediately.’
All of a sudden, Sangeeta, who’d been standing next to me, hurled her umbrella away and strode towards the crowd. I was stunned to see her push the crowd aside and confront the collector. ‘Mr Collector!’ I heard her razorsharp voice clearly. ‘Tell us how we—about two hundred and fifty poor people—shall live? Where should we go for water when the wells have been dried up?’ The collector stared at her contemptuously. But she wasn’t done yet: ‘Mr Collector, don’t forget the meaning and purpose of your position. It is not meant to serve only the rich, but to serve common people.’
The collector glowered at her as his face reddened.
‘The factory owners too have the same rights as you,’ he blurted out.
Sangeeta exploded in fury. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, sir, to say this to my face? One of the owners is a close relative of your uncle, isn’t he? That man is a millionaire. Does he really need to uproot the livelihood of these poor folks just to dig up a little more wealth?’
The crowd began to stir while I looked on in bewilderment. Sangeeta was shoved back—it may have been the cops. I too jumped in without even realizing what I was doing. Suddenly, the situation became tense. The officers were mobbed by the agitators. The police charged at the crowd with batons. People ran helterskelter. When I turned, a cop was viciously kicking a fallen Sangeeta. I discarded my bag and the umbrella and threw myself between them. I received a few blows and jabs, but I was able to rescue her. After most of the mob had been forced to flee, the police tossed Sangeeta, me and a few others into the jeep and drove us to the station. There, they registered a case against all of us and then let us go.
The rain had completely stopped when we left the police station. However, the leaves on the trees were still wet with raindrops. I scolded Sangeeta for behaving so irresponsibly in her condition. She listened with a warm smile, as we walked together. After I was done, she turned towards me.
‘I am not scared, sister,’ she said, ‘Don’t I have the blood of my aunt Sunanda and my grandfather coursing through me?’
I was speechless. My blood froze—the blood of my father. I felt like I had been defeated for a moment. Rage surged inside me. Sunanda was always ahead of me.
The agitators had declared that they would fast unto death. They built a makeshift shelter to continue the strike. That night Sangeeta took me to her modest house where she served me rice porridge and hot boiled tapioca in a plate made of clay. The rice, harvested from their own field, looked like the rosy fingertips of newborn babies. I was impatient to ask her about Yudas, but I didn’t get an opportunity as I listened to Sangeeta’s rant about the strike.
‘Poor people don’t deserve to live, do they? That is what the rich barons want. If there are no poor, how will the rich live? All by themselves? I don’t understand, sister, I am frightened by man’s capacity for greed and deception. What kind of world is this? Think of my little one who is about to be born into this wreckage!’
She left me at home and returned to the location of the strike. I couldn’t sleep at all. I tossed and turned on the bed made with unwashed sheets. I’d decided to find out about Yudas sometime tomorrow. I would not let him go this time. The next morning, I woke up only after Sangeeta’s husband came and knocked on the door. Panic struck me when he asked for Sangeeta. He too became alarmed when I told him that Sangeeta had gone back to the agitators’ late in the night. He said Sangeeta hadn’t come to the strike shelter last night.
It was a bleak dawn. We ran in all directions in search of her. The endless field was empty and silent. Our calls of ‘Sangeeta’ echoed eerily. Finally, someone found a plastic slipper in a gorge that had been mined deep for clay to bake bricks. The ravine was an unsightly spectacle; the crowd remarked that it was at least thirty or forty feet deep. Cattle usually drowned in there. I felt a chill racing down my spine. Tremors shook my whole body—it was not under my control any more. The possibility that Sangeeta could be following Sunanda’s fate hit me hard. History had begun to repeat itself, and I was desperate to get out of there.
Sangeeta’s husband bawled from the edge of the field. He attempted to jump into the gorge, but some in the crowd pulled him back. Nobody had dared to dive into the gorge. I hung around, not knowing what to do. Suddenly, I tucked the loose end of my sari into my waist, gathered my hair into a bun and sashayed from the elevation of the field into the gorge. I couldn’t help but remember a fifteen-year-old from another time, long long ago, who had run from Yudas’s home to throw herself into the lake. This wasn’t the same. A gorge isn’t a lake. I sank right into it. My white-dotted red cotton sari unfurled on the surface of the water like an umbrella. Someone in the crowd hollered. I didn’t pay attention. I had entered the water after a long time. The water received my quivering body warmly and I submitted myself to it. It had the odour of mud. The water beneath the meadows drew me in like a yawning well or a boundless tunnel. I felt blood ooze out of the ulcer wounds in my stomach. All the organs unhinged themselves within my body. Blood spurted as though it had come out of a newly dug well. The sour gooey blood filled my mouth.
I sank deeper into the water. I frantically reminded myself of Yudas. I loved him. I would go on loving him. Even at that moment wh
en fluids were beginning to explode out of me through my lungs and heart, I longed for him intensely. How warm was the hearth of his chest. I could feel the same warmth from the water in the gorge. The vision of Sunanda drowning in the slimy green reservoir at Kakkayam came back to me again. I must be sinking in the same manner. The pressure from the water shot up by each passing moment. I pushed downwards obstinately. Deeper! I commanded myself. This ravine, this one that is thirty feet deep, is mine. As my respiratory organs dilated to their limits, a sharp pain began to seep in. I couldn’t feel my limbs any more. I remembered Yudas. I remembered Sunanda. I remembered the youngsters from Kakkayam whom I hadn’t heard or met and I remembered the machinery of the state and the tools that crushed them to oblivion.
This was my revolution, I thought to myself. I wasn’t sure whom it was against. Perhaps against the collectors and the police superintendents with ruddy faces who had never had to walk under a harsh hot sun in their lives? Or against the wealthy factory owners who had surpassed the limits of greed to dig, dig and dig dirt from the fields only to burn it to death so that he could fill their deep pockets? Or perhaps this was against history herself. It must be against myself too. The gorge was as dark as the room whose windows were sealed tight with blackened sheets of paper. The darkness thickened as I sank further. The hum in my ears became louder. Someone whispered in my mind that it was the fans at the IB office. I caught the sound of someone’s sobs. Beyond the layers of the past, from the valleys of Konippara hill to the roars of distant waterfalls, a thousand men and women were bellowing. I kept sinking amid the clamour of unrecognizable voices.
At last I caught hold of long hair! I pulled it towards me with all my strength. She sprang up. Her face shone slowly in the glow from the water. It seemed like she had a scornful smile on her face as she lay at the bottom of the gorge, on her back with crossed arms tucked underneath her head. I began to bawl. My hands and legs started to unwind. My lungs, heart and belly melted into the water. My eyes closed. Tugging at her stiff, frozen and lifeless body, I strained to yell: ‘Sangeeta!’
I heard a call back to me:
Oh, Liberty what crimes are committed in thy name …
Oh, Liberty!
Images of Sunanda and Yudas flooded my mind. I fell into a fit of rage and despair. Sunanda kept coming back. She had stolen Yudas away from me. He’d never love me. I knew my strength was gone. I preferred to die in the gorge next to Sangeeta. Only then would Yudas love me. He was nothing more than a dreamer. He could only love martyrs, the kind who were dead, who never did anything worthwhile, whose ribs had been smashed to smithereens at the merciless hands of mindless officers like my father.
When I regained my senses, I was lying in the field like a wet piece of cloth. A short distance away I saw some people trying to straighten Sangeeta’s lifeless body. Her husband’s cries echoed over the fields. Sangeeta too was gone now. I was the only one alive, I thought. I convulsed in a sudden spasm. Blood and churned-up mud came gushing out of my mouth.
The crowd carried Sangeeta and me to a hospital. By the time I was discharged after receiving primary medical care, Sangeeta’s asthmatic mother had arrived, having waded through the steep meadow and dreary fields. As soon as she saw me, she began to wail, ‘Isn’t she on her way to her aunt, Prema? Isn’t she?’
I silently embraced her. She thanked me every now and then, occasionally extolling the virtues of her daughter between whimpers. Sangeeta’s dead body had blue bruises. The post-mortem report confirmed that she hadn’t died by drowning. She’d been thrown into the water only after she was dead. Telltale signs of brutal torture and unspeakable suffering were visible all over her body. Her breasts and thighs bore marks of severe whacks; her left shoulder and head revealed signs of multiple strikes by a blunt weapon. Somebody whispered that the owners of the brick kiln might be responsible; or perhaps the cops; or maybe even the collector who looked like he had never touched dirt in his life!
When the body was brought back after the post-mortem, it was greeted with a heart-wrenching wail. ‘Sunandaaae!’ Sangeeta’s mother appeared to have lost her senses. She began to cry, hollering ‘Sunanda’. She cursed and dared Indira Gandhi to declare the Emergency again. She threatened to kill Jayaram Padikkal, the police officer. She banged her head on the floor until she collapsed from exhaustion. Thereafter she woke up every now and then and bawled.
Still reeling from almost drowning in the gorge, I could only sit like a pillar. I didn’t have the strength to move or even talk. Every time I thought about the gruesome manner of Sangeeta’s death, I had seizures. My mouth tasted bitter blood.
People poured in to see the dead body. I haughtily held my head up to see if the possessor of any pair of feet was Yudas. Sangeeta’s death had transformed me into another person. I wouldn’t bow before Yudas any more. I had repaid his debt. I had taken back what he’d given to the gorge. Proved that I had the courage for a revolution and that I could keep secrets. Yet I was alive. In this world, for poor people like us, shouldn’t the sheer act of being alive be counted as a revolution in itself ?
NINE
A traitor cannot settle down anywhere. He’ll be a renegade everywhere. His lover too won’t have a place of her own.
On the fourth day after Sangeeta’s death, an unexpected event occurred that turned my life upside down. I was feeding Sunanda’s mother a bit of hot porridge at night by the light of the sole chimney lamp in the house. I was wiping away the trickling porridge from the corner of her lips when a boy from the agitators’ group came running past the hill and fields towards the house.
‘Sister, you’ve got to get out! Right now! Let’s go!’
I didn’t understand anything. Even as I wondered where I could go, he pulled me up by my hand. ‘Maoists have been captured. The cops will try to frame you as a Maoist. They are preparing to arrest you. If you surrender, you are a goner. That’ll be the end.’
I was aghast. My hair stood on end. I was about to be arrested … for having taken part in a revolution. My veins throbbed. My blood warmed up. For the first time in my life, I wanted to burst out laughing. My day had arrived. It’d be right here that I’d get to yell in the cops’ faces: ‘Long Live the Revolution, you mongrels.’
‘Sister, let’s get going—right now! We don’t have much time to spare. Let’s find you a shelter before the night is over! Imagine if we were to get caught!’
He was the one to find my leather bag and shove all my clothes into it. He didn’t even let me wash my hands. He simply threw away the plates and started running across the fields, towing me along. It was a cold night. The roads were slippery and I tripped a few times in the darkness. But I kept laughing all the way and he kept reminding me that the police was after us. I ran, heaving breath into my lungs, spitting out blood from the ulcers in my mouth every
The Gospel of Yudas now and then. I sprinted merrily. The passion and exhilaration of the fifteen-year-old girl who rushed out of Yudas’s shack surged within me again. Struggling to catch my breath, I called out as I ran, ‘Naxalbari Zindabad. Total Revolution Is Our Goal, Future Generations Belong to Us. Martyrs Zindabad …’
We ran until he reached some distance beyond the expansive field, crossing an alley and a bridge. He put me in a taxi there for the rest of the journey. The taxi avoided all the main roads to manoeuvre its way around. I lowered the window by the rear seat and enjoyed the nippy breeze, smiling as the night darkened outside. I must have dozed off in the car midway through the journey. When I opened my eyes we’d already arrived in Kumarakom, far away in the south.
‘Why are we here?’ I asked in surprise.
‘This is the place,’ said the old taxi driver.
Parking the car in front of one of the shuttered shops, he got out to survey the location. When he had made sure the area was safe, he instructed me to come out of the car. We walked briskly by the shoreline of a lake. Green frogs leapt across our path, cutting off the tiny light from the pencil torch that guided us.
A rooster crowed ominously above our heads. The warm breeze from the lake accompanied us. I felt relieved and happy. Finally we saw a slender but long beam of light falling on the lake from a chimney lamp. The driver headed in that direction. It was the beached wreckage of a boat whose top had a tarpaulin cover. From a distance I could see an angler perched on the other end of the boat that led into the lake. As I neared the boat, my limbs froze. I knew who it was—Yudas!
I stood motionless even after the driver asked me to step inside. Yudas brought the lamp to get a closer look at us. I will not forget the moment when the light from that chimney lamp fell on my face until my dying breath. My hair stood on end as the warm yellow glow caressed me. Creasing his forehead to take a better look, he came closer to me and called out in surprise, ‘Oh! Prema!’
This time I couldn’t talk to him like I used to when he would inquire about my whereabouts. He gently offered me a hand to lead me inside the boat. He gave me water from a clay pot which I gulped to quench my thirst. He had put on some weight. The bags under his eyes were red and sagging. In the yellow light his body looked like a cadaver that had been laid in the water for many days. Seeing his condition reminded me of the passage of time and it tore at my heart. I tried hard to hold back my tears. He seemed happier than I had thought he would be on our meeting.
‘I have been thinking about you,’ he said. He had seen the driver off and now we were walking to the thatched corner of a ramshackle house nearby.
‘That’s good.’
‘You must be mad at me.’
‘For what?’
‘Don’t be angry at me, Prema. You shouldn’t curse me either.’