rolled up his window.
Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously. He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea.
Once he even took a group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They went by bus and returned by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and flowers in their hair.
Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing
As the marchers approached, Ammu put up her window. Estha his. Rahel hers. (Effortfully, because the black knob on the handle had fallen off.)
Suddenly the skyblue Plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow, pitted road. Like a wide lady squeezing down a narrow corridor Like Baby Kochamma in church, on her way to the bread and wine.
“Look down!” Baby Kochamma said, as the front ranks of the procession approached the car. “Avoid eye contact. That’s what really provokes them”
On the side of her neck, her pulse was. pounding. Within minutes, the road was swamped by thousands of marching people. Automobile islands in a river of people. The air was red with flags, which dipped and lifted as the marchers ducked under the level-crossing gate and swept across the railway tracks in a red wave.
The sound of a thousand voices spread over the frozen traffic like a Noise Umbrella.
Inquilab Zindabad!
Thozhilali Ekta Zindabad!
“Long Live the Revolution!” they shouted. “Workers of the World Unite!”
Even Chacko had no really complete explanation for why the Communist Party was so much more successful in Kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in India, except perhaps in West Bengal.
There were several competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large population of Christians in the state. Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom St. Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he traveled East after the Resurrection. Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments.
The trouble with this theory was that in Kerala the Syrian Christians were, by and large, the wealthy, estate-owning (picklefactory-running), feudal lords, for whom communism represented a fate worse than death. They had always voted for the Congress Party.
A second theory claimed that it had to do with the comparatively high level of literacy in the state. Perhaps. Except that the high literacy level was largely because of the Communist movement.
The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
Though Chacko was not a card-holding member of the Party, he had been converted early and had remained, through all its travails, a committed supporter.
He was an undergraduate at Delhi University during the euphoria of 1957, when the Communists won the State Assembly elections and Nehru invited them to form a government. Chacko’s hero, Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the flamboyant Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala, became Chief Minister of the first ever democratically elected Communist government in the world. Suddenly the Communists found themselves in the extraordinary— critics said absurd—position of having to govern a people and foment revolution simultaneously. Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad evolved his own theory about how he would do this. Chacko studied his treatise on “The Peaceful Transition to Communism” with an adolescent’s obsessive diligence and an ardent fan’s unquestioning approval. It set out in detail how Comrade E. M. S. Namtoodiripad’s government intended to enforce land reforms, neutralize the police, subvert the judiciary and “Restrain the Hand of the Reactionary anti-People Congress Government at the Center.”
Unfortunately, before the year was out, the Peaceful part of the Peaceful Transition came to an end.
Every morning at breakfast the Imperial Entomologist derided his argumentative Marxist son by reading out newspaper reports of the riots, strikes and incidents of police brutality that convulsed Kerala.
“So, Karl Marx,” Pappachi would sneer when Chacko came to the table, “what shall we do with these bloody students flow? The stupid goons are agitating against our People’s Government Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren’t People anymore?”
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:
