Between the Assassinations

sobs.

“Forgive me, mother…The gods have given us each our punishment. They gave you a uterus of stone, and they have smashed the heart in my son’s chest…”

After they had put the old lady to bed, Mr. Rao let his wife climb the stairs first. When he joined her, she was lying on the bed with her back turned toward him.

He walked onto the veranda and turned the radio off.

She said nothing as he picked up his helmet and headed back down the stairs. The kick-starting of his engine rent the quiet of Bishop Street.

In a few minutes, he was heading down the road that went through the forest toward the sea. On either side of the speeding bike, serried silhouettes of coconut palms bristled against the blue coastal night. Hanging low over the trees, a bright moon looked as though it had been cleaved by an ax. With its top right corner sliced off, it hung in the sky like an illustration of the idea of “two- thirds.” After a quarter of an hour, the Yamaha bike swerved off the road onto a muddy track, thundering over stones and gravel. Then its engine went dead.

A lake, a small circle of water inside the forest, came into view, and Giridhar Rao stopped his bike, leaving his helmet on the seat. Fishermen had cleared a small shore around the lake, which was bounded on the far side by more coconut trees. At this hour, there would be nets all over the lake, but there was not another soul to be seen. A heron, walking through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, was the only other living thing in sight. Giridhar had stumbled upon his lake years ago, on a drive through the forest at night. He had no idea why no one came here; but a small town is like that, full of hidden treasures. He walked beside the lake for a few minutes, then sat down on a rock.

The water, its glossy surface broken by black ripples, looked like sheets of molten glass settling one on top of another.

The heron flapped its wings and rose into the air. Now he was all alone. He hummed softly, a tune from his bachelor days in Bangalore. A yawn expanded his face. He looked up. Three stars had emerged from the tatters of a gray cloud; together with the two-thirds moon, they composed a quadrilateral. Mr. Rao admired the structure of the night sky. It pleased him to think that the elements of our world were not cast about at random. Something stood behind them: an order.

He yawned again and stretched his legs out from the rock.

His peace was broken. It had begun to drizzle. He wondered if he had remembered to fasten the windows above their bed; the rain might strike her face.

Leaving his private beach behind, he sprinted to his motorbike, donned his helmet, and kicked the machine to life.

One morning in 1987, all of Bishop Street woke to hear the dull thack-thack-thack of axes hacking away at the trees. In a few days, chain saws were buzzing, and cranes were scooping up huge portions of black earth. And that was the end of the great forest of Bajpe. In its place, the inhabitants of Bishop Street now saw a giant pit filled with cranes, trucks, and an army of bare-chested migrant workers carrying stacks of bricks and cement bags on their heads like ants moving grains of rice. A giant sign in Kannada and Hindi proclaimed that this was to be the site of the SARDAR PATEL IRON MAN OF INDIA SPORTS STADIUM. A DREAM COME TRUE FOR KITTUR. The racket was incessant, and dust swirled up from the pit like steam from a geyser. Outsiders who returned to Bajpe thought the neighborhood had become a dozen degrees warmer.

DAY SEVEN: SALTMARKETVILLAGE

If you want a servant you can trust, a cook who won’t steal sugar, a driver who doesn’t drink, you go to Salt Market Village. Although it has formed part of Kittur Corporation since 1988, Salt Market remains largely rural and much poorer than the rest of the town.

If you visit in April or May, you must stay to watch the local festival known as the “rat hunt”-a nocturnal ritual in which the women of the suburb march through the rice fields bearing burning torches in one hand as they pound the earth with hockey sticks or cricket bats in the other hand, shouting all the time at the tops of their voices. Rats, mongooses, and shrews, terrified by the noise, run into the center of the field, where the women pound the encircled rodents to death.

The only tourist attraction of Salt Market Village is an abandoned Jain basadi, where early Kannada epics were written by the poets Harihara and Raghuveera. In 1990, a portion of the Jain basadi was acquired by the Mormon Church of Utah, USA, and turned into an office for its evangelists.

MURALI, WAITING IN the pantry for the tea to boil, took a step to his right and peeped through the doorway.

Comrade Thimma, who was sitting beneath the framed Soviet poster, had begun to grill the old woman.

“Do you understand the exact nature of the doctrinal dif ferences between the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist)?”

Of course she doesn’t know, Murali thought, stepping back into the pantry and switching off the kettle.

No one on earth did.

He put his hand into a tin box full of sugar biscuits. A moment later, he was out in the reception area with a tray holding three cups of tea and a sugar biscuit next to each cup.

Comrade Thimma was looking up at the wall opposite him, where it was pierced by a grilled window. The evening light illuminated the grille; a block of light glowed on the floor, like the tail of an incandescent bird perched in the grille.

The comrade’s manner strongly suggested that the old woman, considering her state of complete doctrinal ignorance, was unworthy to receive assistance from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist), Kittur branch.

The woman was frail and haggard; her husband had hanged himself two weeks ago from the ceiling of their house.

Murali placed the first cup before Comrade Thimma, who picked it up and sipped the tea. This improved his mood.

Once again looking high up at the glowing grille, the comrade said, “I will have to tell you of our dialectics; if you find them acceptable, we can talk about help.”

The farmer’s wife nodded, as if the word “dialectics,” in English, made perfect sense to her.

Without taking his eyes from the grille, the comrade bit into one of the sugar biscuits; the crumbs fell around his chin, and Murali, after handing the old woman her tea, went back to the comrade and wiped the crumbs off with his fingers.

The comrade had small, sparkling eyes, and a tendency to look high up, and far away, as he delivered his words of wis dom, which he always did with a feeling of suppressed excitement. This gave him the air of a prophet. Murali, as prophets’ sidekicks often are, was physically the superior specimen: taller, broader, with a large and heavily creased forehead and a kind smile.

“Give the lady our brochure on dialectics,” the comrade said, speaking straight to the grille.

Murali nodded, and moved purposefully toward one of the cupboards. The reception area of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) was furnished with an old tea-stained table, a few decrepit cupboards, and a desk for the secretary-general, behind which hung a giant poster from the early days of the Soviet Revolution, depicting a group of proletarian heroes climbing a ladder up into heaven. The workers bore mallets and sledgehammers, while a group of Oriental gods cowered at their advance. After digging into two of the cupboards, Murali found a pamphlet with a big red star on the cover. He brushed it with a corner of his shirt and brought it to the old woman.

“She can’t read.”

The soft voice came from the woman’s daughter, who was sitting in the chair next to her, holding on to her teacup and untouched sugar biscuit. After a moment’s hesitation Murali let the daughter have the brochure; keeping the teacup in her left hand, she held the pamphlet between two fingers of her right, as if it were a soiled handkerchief.

The comrade smiled at the window grille; it was not clear if he was reacting to the events of the past few minutes. He was a thin, bald, dark-skinned man with sunken cheeks and gleaming eyes.

“In the beginning we had only one party in India, and it was the true party. It made no compromise. But then the lead ers of this true party were seduced by the lure of bourgeois democracy; they decided to contest elections. That was their first mistake and the fatal one. Soon the one true party had split. New branches emerged, trying to restore the original spirit. But they too became corrupted.”

Murali wiped the cupboard shelves, and tried to realign the loose hinge of its door as well as he could. He was not a peon; there was no peon, as Comrade Thimma would not allow the exploitative hiring of proletarian labor. Murali was certainly not proletarian-he was the scion of an influential landowning Brahmin family-so it was okay for him to perform all kinds of menial work.

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