Between the Assassinations

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.

When he took the cup from her, touching her fingers, he quickly admired her features. Having just come from a day’s hard labor in the fields, she was still beautiful-in fact, more beautiful than ever before. There was that simple, unpainted elegance to her face. None of the makeup, lipstick, or false eyebrows you see in cities these days.

How old was she? he wondered.

“Sir…” The old woman folded her hands. “Will the money really come?”

“If you sign here,” he said. “And here. And here.”

The old lady held the pen and grinned idiotically.

“She can’t write,” Sulochana said; so he placed the letter on his thigh and he signed for her.

He explained that he had brought another letter-one to be delivered to the central police station near the Lighthouse Hill, demanding prosecution of the moneylender for his role in instigating the man’s death through usury. He wanted the old woman to sign that too, but she joined her palms together and bowed to him.

“Please, sir, don’t do that. Please. We don’t want any trouble.”

Sulochana stood by the wall, looking down, silently reinforcing her mother’s plea.

He tore up the letter. As he did so, he realized that he was now the arbiter over this family’s fate; he was the patriarch here.

“And her marriage?” he said, indicating the girl leaning against the wall.

“Who will marry this one? And what am I to do?” the old woman wailed as the girl retreated into the dark of the house.

It was on the way back to the bus station that the idea came to him.

He pressed the metal tip of his umbrella to the ground, and trailed a long, continuous line through the mud.

And then he thought, Why not?

She had no other hope, after all…

He boarded the bus. He was still a bachelor, at fifty-five. After his time in jail his family had disowned him, and none of his aunts or uncles had tried to fix an arranged marriage for him. Somehow, in the midst of distributing pamphlets and spreading the word to the proletariat and collecting Comrade Thimma’s speeches, he had never found time to marry himself off. He had not had any great desire to do so either.

Lying in bed, he thought, But this is nowhere for a girl to live. It is a filthy house, filled with old editions-books by veterans of the Communist Party and nineteenth century French and Russian short story writers-that no one reads anymore.

He had not realized how badly he had been living all these years. But things would change; he felt a great hope. If she came into his life everything could be different. He lay down on his cot and stared at the ceiling fan. It was switched off; he rarely turned it on, except in the most oppressive summer heat, so that he wouldn’t increase the electricity bill.

All his life he had been dogged by a restlessness, a feeling that he was meant for some greater endeavor than could be found in a small town. After Murali’s law degree from Madras, his father had expected him to take over his law practice. Instead, Murali had been drawn to politics; he had begun attending Congress Party meetings in Madras, and continued doing so in Kittur. He took to wearing a Nehru cap and keeping a photo of Gandhi on his desk. His father noticed. One day there was a confrontation, and shouting, and Murali had left his father’s house and joined the Congress Party as a full-time member. He knew what he wanted to do with his life already: there was an enemy to overcome. The old, bad India of caste and class privilege-the India of child marriage, of ill-treated widows, of exploited subalterns-it had to be overthrown. When the state elections came, he campaigned with all his heart for the Congress candidate, a young lower-caste man named Anand Kumar.

After Anand Kumar won, he saw two of his fellow Congress workers sitting outside the party office every morning. He saw men approach them with letters addressed to the candidate; they took the letters, and a dozen rupees from each supplicant.

Murali threatened to report them to Kumar. The two men turned grave. They stepped aside and invited Murali to go right in.

“Please complain at once,” they said.

As he went and knocked on Kumar’s door, he heard laughter behind him.

Murali joined the Communists next, having heard that they were incorruptible. The larger factions of the Communists turned out to be just as rotten as the Congress; so he changed his membership from one Communist Party to the other, until one day he entered a dim office and saw, beneath the giant poster of heroic proletarians climbing up to heaven to knock out the gods of the past, the small dark figure of Comrade Thimma. At last-an incorruptible. Back then the party had seventeen member-volunteers; they ran women’s education programs, population control campaigns, and proletarian radicalization drives. With a group of volunteers, he went to the sweatshops near the Bunder, distributing pamphlets with the message of Marx and the benefits of sterilization. As the membership of the party dwindled, he found himself going alone; it made no difference to him. The cause was a good one. He was never strident like the workers from the other Communist Parties; quietly, and with great perseverance, he stood by the side of the road, holding out pamphlets to the workers and repeating the message that so few of them ever took to heart:

“Don’t you want to find out how to live a better life, brothers?”

He thought that his writing too would contribute to that cause-although he was honest enough to admit that perhaps only his vanity made him think so. The word “talent” was now lodged in his mind, and that gave him hope; but even as he was wondering how to improve his writing, he was sent to jail.

The police came for Comrade Thimma one day. This was during the Emergency.

“You are right to arrest me,” Thimma had said, “as I freely and openly support all attempts to overthrow the bourgeois government of India.”

Murali asked the policemen, “Would you mind arresting me as well?”

Jail had been a happy time for him. He washed Thimma’s clothes and hung them out to dry in the mornings. He had hoped all the free time in jail would concentrate his mind and help him reshape his fiction, but he had no time for that. In the evenings, he took notes as Thimma dictated. Thimma’s responses to the great questions of Marxism. The apostasy of Bernstein. The challenge of Trotsky. A justification for Kronstadt.

He collected the responses faithfully; then he pulled a blanket over Thimma’s face, leaving his toes out in the cool air.

He shaved him in the morning, as Thimma thundered to the mirror about Khrushchev’s defiling of the legacy of Comrade Stalin.

It was the happiest period of his life. But then he had been released.

With a sigh, Murali rose from his bed. He paced around the dark house, looking at the mess of the books, at the decaying editions of Gorky and Turgenev, and saying to himself, again and again, What do I have to show for my life? Just this broken-down house…

Then he saw the face of the girl again, and his whole body lit up with hope and joy. He took out his bundle of short stories and read them again. With a red-ink pen he began to delete details of his characters, quickening their motives, their impulses.

It came to Murali one morning, on his way to Salt Market Village: They’re avoiding me. Both mother and daughter.

Then he thought, No, not Sulochana-it’s only the old woman who’s gone cold.

For two months now, he had been catching the bus to Salt Market Village on a variety of fictitious premises, only to see Sulochana’s face again, only to touch her fingers when she brought him his cup of scalding-hot tea.

He had tried to put it to the old lady that they should marry-hints could be delivered, and the topic would insinuate itself into the woman’s mind. That had been his hope. Then, purely out of social responsibility, he would agree, despite his advanced age, to marry her.

But the old lady had never divined his desire.

“Your daughter is excellent in the household,” he had said once, thinking that enough of a hint.

The following day, when he arrived, a strange young girl came out to meet him. The widow had moved up in life; she had now hired a servant.

“Is Madam in?” he asked. The servant nodded.

“Will you go get her?”

A minute passed. He thought he heard the sound of voices behind the door; then the servant came out and said, “No.”

“No, what?”

She turned her gaze toward the house again. “They…are not here. No.”

“And Sulochana? Is she in?”

The servant girl shook her head.

Why shouldn’t they avoid me? he thought, trailing his umbrella on the ground as he returned to the bus station. He had done his work for them; he was not needed anymore. This was how people in the real world behaved. Why should he be hurt?

In the evening, pacing around his gloomy home, he felt he had to agree with the old woman’s judgment: surely this was no fit habitation for a young girl like Sulochana. How could he bring a woman into it?

Yet the next day he was back on the bus to Salt Market Village, where, once again, the servant girl told him that no one was home.

On the way back, he rested his head against the grille and thought, The more they snub me, the more I want to fall down before that girl and propose marriage.

At home he tried writing a letter. “Dear Sulochana: I have been searching for a way to tell you. There is so much to say…”

He went back every day for a week, and was refused entry every day. I will never come back, he promised himself on the seventh evening, as he had for six evenings before. I really will never come back. This is disgraceful behavior. I am exploiting these people. But he was also angry with the old woman and Sulochana for treating him like this.

On the journey home, he stood up and shouted to the conductor, “Stop!” He had remembered, out of the blue, a story he had written twenty-five years ago, about a matchmaker who worked in the village.

He asked the children playing marbles for the matchmaker; they directed him to the shopkeepers. It took an hour and a half to find the house.

The matchmaker was an old, half-blind man sitting in a chair smoking a hookah; his wife brought a chair for the Communist to sit in.

Murali cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles. He wondered what to say, what to do. The hero in his story had walked around the matchmaker’s house and then left; he had never come this