Between the Assassinations

far.

“There is a friend of mine who wishes to marry that girl. Sulochana.”

“The daughter of the fellow who…” The matchmaker pantomimed a hanging.

Murali nodded.

“Your friend is too late, sir. She has money now, and so she has a hundred offers,” the matchmaker said. “That is the way of life.”

“But…my friend…my friend has set his heart on her…”

“Who is this friend?” the matchmaker asked, and with a dirty, omniscient gleam in his eyes.

He caught the bus in the mornings, as soon as his work was over at the party office, and waited for her at the market. She came in the evenings to buy vegetables. He would follow her slowly. He looked at the bananas, at the mangoes. He had been buying fruit for Comrade Thimma for decades. He was expert at so many women’s tasks; his heart skipped a beat when he saw her choose an overripe mango; when the vendor tricked her, he wanted to run over and yell at him and protect her from his avarice.

In the evenings, he stood waiting for the bus back to Kittur. He observed the way people lived in villages. He saw a boy cycling furiously, a block of ice strapped to the back of his bicycle. He had to make it in time before the ice melted; it was already half gone, and he had no aim in life but to deliver the rest of the ice in time. A man came with bananas in a plastic bag and looked around; there were large black spots on the bananas already, and he had to sell them before they rotted. All these people sent Murali a message. To want things in life, they were saying, is to recognize that time is limited.

He was fifty-five years old.

He did not take the bus back that evening; instead, he walked to the house. Rather than approach the front door, he went around to the back. Sulochana was winnowing rice; she looked at her mother and went inside.

The servant went in to bring a chair, but the old woman said, “Don’t.

“Look here; you want to marry my daughter?” she asked.

So she had found out. It was always like this; you make an effort to conceal desire and then it is out in the open. The greatest fallacy: that you can hide from others what you want from them.

He nodded, avoiding her eyes.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Fifty.”

“Can you give her children at your age?”

He tried to respond.

The old woman said:

“Why would we want to get you into our family, in any case? My late husband always told me, Communists are trouble.”

His jaw dropped. Was this the same husband who had praised the Communists? Had this woman just made all that up?

Murali understood now; her husband had said nothing about the Communists. In their wanting they became so cunning, these people!

He said, “I bring many advantages to your family. I am a Brahmin by birth; a graduate of-”

“Look here!” The widow got up. “Please leave-or there will be trouble.”

Why not? Maybe I can’t give her children, at my age, but I can make her happy, certainly, he thought, on the bus back home. We can read Maupassant together.

He was an educated man, a graduate of the Madras University; this was no way to treat him. Tears flooded his eyes.

He sought out books of fiction and poetry, but it was the words of a film song he had heard on the bus that seemed to express his feelings best. So this is why the proletariat go to the cinema, he thought. He bought a ticket himself.

“How many?”

“One.”

The ticket seller grinned. “Don’t you have any friends, old man?”

After the movie, Murali wrote a letter, and posted it to her.

The next morning he woke up wondering if she would ever read it. Even if it reached the house, wouldn’t her mother throw it away? He should have hand-delivered it!

It was not enough to make an honest attempt. That was enough for Marx and Gandhi-to have tried. But not for the real world, in which he suddenly found himself.

After considering the matter for an hour, he wrote the letter again. This time he paid an urchin three rupees to deliver the message into the girl’s hands.

“She knows you come here to look for her,” the vegetable seller said, the next time he came to the market. “You’ve scared her away.”

She is avoiding me-his heart felt a pang. Now he understood so many more film songs. This is what they meant, the humiliation of being avoided by a girl you have come a long way to see…

He thought the vegetable sellers were all laughing at him.

Even ten years ago-in his forties-there would have been nothing unseemly about approaching such a girl, he thought, as he headed home. Now he was a dirty old man; he had become the stock figure whom he had worked into several of his stories-the lecherous old Brahmin, preying on an innocent girl of a lower caste.

But those fellows were just caricatures, class villains; now he could flesh them out so much better. When he climbed into bed that night, he took a piece of paper and wrote:

“Some thoughts that a lecherous old Brahmin might actually have.”

Now I know enough, Murali thought, looking at the words he had written. I can become a writer at last.

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 facade 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.”