Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

After a week, he received a postcard from the editor, summoning him from Kittur for a meeting. He took the train to Mysore and waited half a day for the editor to call him into his office.

“Ah, yes…the young genius from Kittur.” The editor searched his table for his glasses, and pulled the folded bundle of Murali’s stories from their envelope, while the young author’s heart beat violently.

“I wanted to see you…”-the editor let the stories fall on the table-“because there is talent in your writing. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike ninety percent of our writers.”

Murali glowed. It was the first time anyone had mentioned the word “talent” when speaking of him.

Picking up one of the stories, the editor silently scanned the pages.

“Who is your favorite author?” he asked, biting at a corner of his glasses.

“Guy de Maupassant.”

Murali corrected himself: “After Karl Marx.”

“Let’s stick to literature,” the editor retorted. “Every character in Maupassant is like this…”-he bent his index finger and wiggled it-“he wants, and wants, and wants. To the last day of his life he wants. Money. Women. Fame. More women. More money. More fame. Your characters”-he unbent his finger-“want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through accurately described village settings and have deep thoughts. They walk around the cows and trees and roosters and think, and then walk around the roosters and trees and cows and think some more. That’s it.”

“They do have thoughts of changing the world for the better…” Murali protested. “They desire a better society.”

“They want nothing!” the editor shouted. “I can’t print stories of people who want nothing!”

He threw the bundle of stories back at Murali. “When you find people who want something, come back to me!”

Murali had never rewritten those stories. Now, as he waited for the bus to take him back to Kittur, he wondered if that bundle of stories was still somewhere in his house.

When Murali got off the bus and walked back to the office, he found Comrade Thimma with a foreigner. It was not unusual for there to be strangers in the office: lean, fatigued men with paranoid eyes who were on the run from nearby states going through one of their routine purges of radical Communists. In those places radical Communism was a real threat to the state. The fugitives would sleep and take tea at the office for a few weeks, until things cooled down and they could return home.

But this man was not one of those hunted ones; he had blond hair and an awkward European accent.

He sat next to Thimma, and the comrade was pouring his heart out, as he gazed at the distant light in the grille up on the wall. Murali sat down and listened to him for half an hour. He was magnificent. Trotsky had not been forgiven, nor had Bernstein been forgotten. Thimma was trying to show the European that even in a small town like Kittur men were up to date with the theory of dialectics.

The foreigner had nodded a lot and written everything down. At the end, he capped his ballpoint pen and observed:

“I find that the Communists have virtually no presence in Kittur.”

Thimma slapped his thigh. He glared at the grille. The socialists had had too much influence in this part of South India, he said. The question of feudalism in the countryside had been solved; big estates had been broken up and distributed among peasants.

“That man Devraj Urs-when he was leader of the Congress-created some kind of revolution here.” Thimma sighed. “Just a pseudorevolution, naturally. The falsehood of Bernstein once again.”

Murali’s own land had been subjected to the socialist policies of the Congress government. His father had lost his land; in return, the government had allocated compensation. His father went to the municipal office to receive his compensation, but he found that someone, some bureaucrat, had forged his signature and run away with his money. When Murali heard this, he had thought, My old man deserves this. I deserve this. For all that we have done to the poor, this is fit retribution. He realized, of course, that his family’s compensation had not been stolen by the poor, but by some corrupt civil servant. Nevertheless this was justice of a kind.

Murali went about his regular end-of-day tasks. First he swept the pantry. As he reached with his broom under the sink, he heard the foreigner say:

“I think the problem with Marx is that he assumes human beings are too…decent. He rejects the idea of original sin. And maybe that is why Communism is dying everywhere now. The Berlin Wall-”

Murali crawled under the sink to reach the hard-to-reach places; Thimma’s voice resonated oddly in the enclosed space beneath the sink:

“You have completely misunderstood the dialectical process!”

He paused, and waited under the sink for Comrade Thimma to come up with a better response.

He swept the floor, closed the cupboards, turned off the unwanted lights to save on the electricity bill, tightened the taps to save on the water bill, and went to the bus station to wait for the number 56B to take him home.

Home. A blue door, one fluorescent lamp, three naked electric bulbs, ten thousand books. The books were everywhere: waiting for him like faithful pets to either side of the door when he walked in, coated in dust on the dinner table, stacked against the old walls as though to buttress the structure of the house. They had taken all the best space in the house, and had left him a little rectangular area for his cot.

He opened the bundle that he had brought home with him:

“Is Gorbachev straying from the True Path? Notes by Thimma swami, BA (Kittur), MA (Mysore), secretary-general, Kittur regional politburo, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist).”

He would add them to the notes he was collecting on Thimma’s thoughts. The idea was to publish them one day, and hand them out to the workers as they left their factories.

This evening, Murali could not write for long; the mosquitoes bit him and he swatted them. He lit a coil to keep the mosquitoes away. Even then he could not write; and then he realized it was not the mosquitoes that were disturbing him.

The way she had averted her face. He would have to do something for her.

What was her name? Ah, yes. Sulochana.

He began to rummage in the mess around his bed, until he found the old collection of short stories that he had written all those years ago. He blew the dust off the pages and began to read.

The photograph of the dead man hung on the wall, beside the portraits of the gods who had failed to save him. The guru with the big belly, perhaps taking all the blame, had now been dismissed.

Murali stood at the door, waited, and knocked slowly.

“They’re working in the fields,” the old neighbor with the broken red teeth shouted.

The cows and the buffalo were missing from the courtyard; sold for cash, no doubt. Murali thought it was appalling. That girl, with her noble looks, working in the fields like a common laborer?

I’ve come just in time, he thought.

“Run and get them!” he shouted at the neighbor. “At once!”

The state government had a scheme to compensate the widows of farmers who had killed themselves under duress, Murali explained to the widow, making her sit down on the cot. It was one of those well-intentioned rural-improvement schemes that never reached anyone, because no one knew about it-until people from the city, like Murali, told them about it.

The widow was leaner, and sunburned; she sat there wiping her hands constantly against the back of her sari; she was ashamed of the dirt on them.

Sulochana brought out the tea. He was amazed that this girl, who had been working out in the fields, had still found time to make him tea.