Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

The next morning order and reason returned. There was the comb on his hair, the breathing exercises before the mirror, the slow steady gait out the front door, the business of cleaning the party headquarters and making tea for Thimma.

But by afternoon he was on the bus to Salt Market Village again.

He waited for her to come to the market, and then walked behind her, examining potatoes and brinjals and stealing glances at her. All the time he could see the vendors mocking him: Dirty old man, dirty old man. He thought with regret of a man’s traditional prerogative in India -in the old, bad India -to marry a younger woman.

The next morning, back in the pantry at the party headquarters, boiling tea for Thimma, everything around him seemed dingy and dark and unbearable-the old pots and pans, the filthy spoons, the dirty old tub out of which he scooped sugar for the tea: the embers of a life that had never flared, never flamed.

You’ve been fooled, everything in the room said to him. You’ve wasted your life.

He thought of all his advantages: his education, his sharper wit, his brains, his gift for writing. His “talent”-as that Mysore editor had said.

All of that, he thought as he brought the tea out into the reception area, wasted in the service of Comrade Thimma.

Even Thimma had wasted himself. He had never remarried after his wife’s early death; he had dedicated himself to his life’s goal-uplifting the proletariat of Kittur. Ultimately it was not Marx; it was Gandhi and Nehru who were to blame. Murali was convinced of that. A whole generation of young men, deluded by Gandhianism, wasting their lives running around organizing free eye clinics for the poor and distributing books for rural libraries, instead of seducing those young widows and unmarried girls. That old man in his loincloth had turned them mad. Like Gandhi you had to withhold all your lusts. Even to know what you wanted in life was a sin; desire was bigotry. And look where the country was, after forty years of idealism. A total mess! Maybe if they had all become bastards, the young men of his generation, the place would be like America by now!

That evening he forced himself not to take the bus to the village. He stayed on, cleaning the party headquarters twice over.

No, he thought, as he strained to clean under the sink the second time, it was not a waste! The idealism of young men like him had changed Kittur and the villages around it. Rural poverty was halved, smallpox had been eradicated, public health was a hundred times improved, literacy was up. If Sulochana could read, it was because of volunteers like him, because of those free library projects…

He paused in the darkness under the sink. A voice growled inside him: Fine, she can read-and what does that do for you, you idiot?

He rushed back into the light, into the reception area.

The poster now came to life. The proletarians climbing up to heaven to overturn the gods began to melt and change. He saw them for what they were: a subaltern army of semen, blood, and flesh rebelling inside him. A revolution of the body proletariat, long suppressed, but now becoming articulate, saying, We want!

The Communists were finished. The European visitor had said as much; and all the newspapers were saying the same thing. The Americans had somehow won. Comrade Thimma would talk on and on. But there would soon be nothing to talk about; because Marx had become mute. Dialectics had become dust. So had Gandhi; so had Nehru. Out in the streets of Kittur, the young people were driving brand-new Suzuki cars blaring pop music from the West; they were licking raspberry ice-cream cones with red tongues and wearing shiny metal watches.

He picked up a pamphlet and threw it at the Soviet poster, startling a gecko that had been hiding behind it.

Do you think privilege has no place in Indian life? Do you think a Madras University man-a Brahmin-can be tossed aside so lightly?

In his hand, as the bus rocked, Murali held a letter from the state government of Karnataka that announced that another installment of the money was due to arrive for the widow of the farmer Arasu Deva Gowda, provided she signed. Eight thousand rupees.

Asking for directions, he found the house of the moneylender. He saw it: the biggest construction in the village, with a pink façade and pillars up the front supporting a portico-the house that three percent interest, compounded monthly, had built.

The moneylender, a fat, dark man, was selling grain to a group of farmers; by his side, a fat, dark boy, probably his son, was making a note in a book. Murali stopped to admire it all: the sheer genius of exploitation in India. Sell a farmer your grain. Get rid of your bad stock this way. Then charge him a loan for buying that grain. Make him pay it back at three percent a month. Thirty-six percent a year. No, even more-much more! Compound interest! How diabolical, how brilliant! And to think, Murali smiled, that he had assumed that communists had brains.

When Murali went up to him, the moneylender was sticking his hand deep into the grain; when he brought it out, the chocolate-colored skin was coated with a fine yellow dust, like a bird’s pollen-covered beak.

Without wiping his arm, he took the letter from Murali. Behind him, in an alcove in the wall of his house, sat a giant red statue of the potbellied Ganesha. A fat wife, with fat children around her, was sitting on a charpoy. And from behind them wafted the odor of a feeding, defecating beast: a water buffalo, without doubt.

“Did you know that the government has paid the widow another eight thousand rupees?” Murali told him. “If you have debts outstanding, you should collect them now. She is in a position to pay.”

“Who are you?” the moneylender asked, with small suspicious eyes.

Hesitating for a moment, Murali said, “I am the fifty-five-year-old Communist.”

He wanted them to know. The old woman and Sulochana. They were both in his power now. They had been in his power from the day they had walked into his office.

When he returned to his house, there was a letter from Comrade Thimma under the door. Probably hand-delivered, since there was no one else to deliver anything now.

He tossed it away. He realized, as he did it, that he was casting away for good his membership in the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist). Comrade Thimma, his mouth thirst ing for tea, would deliver lectures alone, in that dim hall, denouncing him. Murali would join Bernstein and Trotsky and the long line of apostates.

At midnight he was still awake. He lay staring at the ceiling fan, whose fast-rotating blades were chopping the light from the halogen streetlamps outside the bedroom into sharp white glints: they showered down on Murali like the first particles of wisdom he had received in his life.

He stared at the brilliant blur of the fan’s blades for a long time; then, with a jerk, he got up from the bed.

October 31, 1984

News reaches Kittur via the BBC that Mrs. Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, has been assassinated by her own bodyguards. The town shuts down in mourning for two days. Mrs. Gandhi’s cremation, broadcast live, proves a major boost to the number of TVs sold in Kittur.

November: General elections. Anand Kumar, the Congress (I) candidate and a junior minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet, retains his seat. His majority of 45,457 votes over Ashwin Aithal, his BJP opponent, is the largest in Kittur’s history.

1985

Reflecting the growing interest in the stock market, the Dawn Herald begins publishing a daily report on the activities of the Bombay Stock Exchange on page 3.