Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Over the next two years the political discord, fueled by the Congress Party and the Church, slid into anarchy. By the time Chacko finished his BA and left for Oxford to do another one, Kerala was on the brink of civil war. Nehru dismissed the Communist government and announced fresh elections. The Congress Party returned to power.

It was only in 1967-almost exactly ten years after they first came to power-that Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re-elected. This time as part of a coalition between what had by now become two separate parties-the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI and the CPI(M).

Pappachi was dead by then. Chacko divorced. Paradise Pickles was seven years old.

Kerala was reeling in the aftermath of famine and a failed monsoon. People were dying. Hunger had to be very high up on any government list of priorities.

During his second term in office, Comrade E. M. S. went about implementing the Peaceful Transition more soberly. This earned him the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party. They denounced him for his “Parliamentary Cretinism” and accused him of “providing relief to the people and thereby blunting the People’s Consciousness and diverting them from the Revolution.”

Peking switched its patronage to the newest, most militant faction of the CPI(M)-the Naxalites-who had staged an armed insurrection in Naxalbari, a village in Bengal. They organized peasants into fighting cadres, seized land, expelled the owners and established People’s Courts to try Class Enemies. The Naxalite movement spread across the country and struck terror in every bourgeois heart.

In Kerala, they breathed a plume of excitement and fear into the already frightened air. Killings had begun in the north. That May there was a blurred photograph in the papers of a landlord in Palghat who had been tied to a lamp post and beheaded. His head lay on its side, some distance away from his body, in a dark puddle that could have been water, could have been blood. It was hard to tell in black and white. In the gray, predawn light.

His surprised eyes were open.

Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Running Dog, Soviet Stooge) expelled the Naxalites from his party and went on with the business of harnessing anger for parliamentary purposes.

The March that surged around the skyblue Plymouth on that skyblue December day was a part of that process. It had been organized by the Travancore-Cochin Marxist Labour Union. Their comrades in Trivandrum would march to the Secretariat and present the Charter of People’s Demands to Comrade E. M. S. himself. The orchestra petitioning its conductor. Their demands were that paddy workers, who were made to work in the fields for eleven and a half hours a day-from seven in the morning to six-thirty in the evening-be permitted to take a one-hour lunch break. That women’s wages be increased from one rupee twenty-five paisa a day to three rupees, and men’s from two rupees fifty paisa to four rupees fifty paisa a day. They were also demanding that Untouchables no longer be addressed by their caste names. They demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan, but just as Achoo, or Kelan or Kuttan.

Cardamon Kings, Coffee Counts and Rubber Barons-old boarding-school buddies-came down from their lonely, far-flung estates and sipped chilled beer at the Sailing Club. They raised their glasses: A rose by any other name , they said, and sniggered to hide their rising panic.

The marchers that day were party workers, students and the laborers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new.

Through the Plymouth window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zindabad. And that the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.

Inside the Plymouth it was still and hot.

Baby Kochamma’s fear lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.

She tried to count the green beads on her rosary but couldn’t concentrate. An open hand slammed against the car window.

A balled fist banged down on the burning skyblue bonnet. It sprang open. The Plymouth looked like an angular blue animal in a zoo asking to be fed.

A bun.

A banana.

Another balled fist slammed down on it, and the bonnet closed. Chacko rolled down his window and called out to the man who had done it.

“Thanks, keto !” he said. “Valarey thanks!”

“Don’t be so ingratiating, Comrade,” Ammu said. “It was an accident. He didn’t really mean to help. How could he possibly know that in this old car there beats a truly Marxist heart?”

“Ammu,” Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, “is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?”

Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. “Washed-up” cut like a knife through a soft thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

Just then Rahel saw Velutha. Vellya Paapen’s son, Velutha. Her most beloved friend Velutha. Velutha marching with a red flag. In a white shirt and mundu with angry veins in his neck. He never usually wore a shirt.

Rahel rolled down her window in a flash. “Velutha! Velutha!” she called to him.

He froze for a moment, and listened with his flag. What he had heard was a familiar voice in a most unfamiliar circumstance. Rahel, standing on the car seat, had grown out of the Plymouth window like the loose, flailing horn of a car-shaped herbivore. With a fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo and yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.

“Velutha! lvidaj &’ Velutha!” And she too had veins in her neck.

He stepped sideways and disappeared deftly into the angriness around him.

Inside the car Ammu whirled around, and her eyes were angry. She slapped at Rahel’s calves which were the only part of her left in the car to slap. Calves and brown feet in Bata sandals.

“Behave yourself!” Ammu said.

Baby Kochamma pulled Rahel down, and she landed on the seat with a surprised thump. She thought there’d been a misunderstanding.

“It was Velutha!” she explained with a smile. “And he had a flag!” The flag had seemed to her a most impressive piece of equipment. The right thing for a friend to have.

“You’re a stupid silly little girl!” Ammu said.

Her sudden, fierce anger pinned Rahel against the car seat. Rahel was puzzled. Why was Ammu so angry? About what?

“But it was him!” Rahel said.

“Shut up!” Ammu said.

Rahel saw that Ammu had a film of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip, and that her eyes had become hard, like marbles. Like Pappachi’s in the Vienna studio photograph. (How Pappachi’s Moth whispered in his children’s veins!)

Baby Kochamma rolled up Rahel’s window.

Years later, on a crisp fall morning in upstate New York, on a Sunday train from Grand Central to Croton Harmon, it suddenly came back to Rahel. That expression on Ammu’s face. Like a rogue piece in a puzzle. Like a question mark that drifted through the pages of a book and never settled at the end of a sentence.

That hard marble look in Ammu’s eyes. The glisten of perspiration on her upper lip. And the chill of that sudden, hurt silence.

What had it all meant?