Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

The comrade took a deep breath, took off his glasses, and rubbed them clean with a corner of his white cotton shirt.

“We alone have kept the faith-we, the members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist). We alone remain true to the dialectics. And do you know what the strength of our membership is?”

He put his glasses back on and inhaled with satisfaction.

“Two. Murali and me.”

He gazed at the grille with a wan smile. He appeared to be done; so the old woman placed her hands on her daughter’s head and said, “She is unmarried, sir. We are begging of you some money to marry her off, that is all.”

Thimma turned to the daughter and stared; the girl looked at the ground. Murali winced. I wish he’d have more delicacy sometimes, he thought.

“We have no support,” the old woman said. “My family won’t even talk to me. Members of our own caste won’t-”

The comrade slapped his thigh with his palm.

“This caste question is only a manifestation of the class struggle: Mazumdar and Shukla definitively established this in 1938. I refuse to accept the category of ‘caste’ in our discussions.”

The woman looked at Murali. He nodded his head, as if to say, Go on.

“My husband said the Communists were the only ones who cared about people like us. He said that if the Communists ruled the earth there would be no hardships for the poor, sir.”

This seemed to mollify the comrade. He looked at the woman and the girl for a moment, and then sniffed. His fingers seemed to lack something. Murali understood. As he went to the pantry to boil another cup of tea, he heard the comrade’s voice continue behind him:

“The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) is not the party of the poor-it is the party of the proletariat. This distinction has to be understood before we discuss assistance or resistance.”

After turning the kettle on once more, Murali was about to toss the tea leaves in; then he wondered why the daughter had not touched her tea. He was seized by the suspicion that he had put too much tea into the kettle-and that the way he had been making tea for nearly twenty-five years might have been wrong.

Murali got off the number 67C bus at the Salt Market Village stop and walked down the main road, picking his way through a bed of muck while hogs sniffed the earth around him. He kept his umbrella up on his shoulder, like a wrestler keeps his mace, so that its metal point wouldn’t be sullied by the muck. Asking a group of boys playing a game of marbles in the middle of the village road for directions, he found the house: a surprisingly large and imposing structure, with rocks placed on the corrugated tin roof to stabilize it during the rains.

He unlatched the gate and went in.

A hand-spun cotton shirt hung on a hook on the wall next to the door; the dead man’s, he assumed. As if the fellow were still inside taking a nap and would come outside and put it on to greet his visitor.

At least a dozen framed multicolored images of gods had been affixed to the front wall along with one of a potbellied local guru with an enormous nimbus affixed to his head. There was a bare cot, its fibers fraying, for visitors to sit down on.

Murali left his sandals outside, and wondered if he should knock on the door. Too intrusive for a place like this-where death had just entered-so he decided to wait until someone came out.

Two white cows were sitting in the compound of the house. The bells around their necks tinkled during their rare movements. Lying in front of them was a puddle of water in which straw had been soaked to make a gruel. A black buffalo, snippets of fresh green all over its moist nose, stood gazing at the opposite wall of the compound, chewing at a sackful of grass that had been emptied on the ground in front of it. Murali thought, These animals have no concern in the world. Even in the house of a man who has killed himself, they are still fed and fattened. How effortlessly they rule over the men of this village, as if human civilization has confused masters and servants. Murali was transfixed. His eyes lingered on the fat body of the beast, its bulging belly, its glossy skin. He smelled its shit, which had caked on its backside; it had been squatting in puddles of its own waste.

Murali had not been to Salt Market Village in decades. The previous time was twenty-five years ago, when he had come searching for visual details to enrich a short story on rural poverty that he was writing. Not much had changed in a quarter century; only the buffaloes had grown fat.

“Why didn’t you knock on the door?”

The old woman emerged from the backyard; she walked around him with a big smile and went into the house and shouted, “Hey, you! Get some tea!”

In a moment the girl came out with a tumbler of tea, which Murali took, touching her wet fingers as he did so.

The tea, after his long journey, felt like heaven. He had never mastered the art of making tea, even though he had been boiling it for Thimma for nearly twenty-five years now. Maybe it was one of those things that only women can truly do, he thought.

“What do you need from us?” the old woman asked. Her manner had become more servile; as if she had guessed the purpose of his visit only now.

“To find out if you are telling the truth,” he replied calmly.

She summoned the neighbors so he could interview them. They squatted around the cot; he insisted that they sit on the same level as him but they remained where they were.

“Where did he hang himself?”

“Right here, sir!” said one old villager with broken, paan-stained teeth.

“What do you mean, right here?”

The old man pointed to the beam of the roof. Murali could not believe it: in full public view, he had killed himself? So the cows had seen it; and the fat buffalo too.

He heard about the man whose shirt still hung from the hook. The failure of his crops. The loan from the moneylender. At three percent per month, compounded.

“He was ruined by the first daughter’s wedding. And he knew he had one more to marry off-this girl.”

The daughter had been lingering in a corner of the front yard the whole time. He saw her turn her face away in slow agony.

As he was leaving, one of the villagers came running after him: “Sir…sir…I mean, an aunt of mine committed suicide two years ago…I mean, just a year ago, sir, and she was virtually a mother to me…can the Communist Party…”

Murali seized the man’s arm and pressed his fingers deeply into the flesh. He peered into the man’s eyes:

“What is the name of the daughter?”

Slowly he walked back to the bus station. He let the tip of his umbrella trail in the earth. The horror of the dead man’s story, the sight of the fat buffalo, the pain-stricken face of that beautiful daughter-these details kept churning in his mind.

He thought back twenty-five years, when he had come to this village with his notebook and his dreams of becoming an Indian Maupassant. As he walked down the twisting streets, crowded with street children playing their violent games, fatigued day laborers sleeping in the shade, and with thick, still, glistening pools of effluent, he was reminded of that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy that is the nature of every Indian village-and the simultaneous desire to admire and to castigate that had been inspired in him from the time of his first visits.

He felt the need, as he had before, to take notes.

Back then, he had visited Salt Market Village every day for a week, jotting down painstakingly detailed descriptions of farmers, roosters, bulls, pigs, piglets, sewage, children’s games, religious festivals, intending to juggle them into a series of short stories that he crafted in the reading room of the municipal library at night. He had not been sure if the party would approve of his stories, so he sent a bundle of them under a nom de plume-“The Seeker of Justice”-to the editor of a weekly magazine in Mysore.