The Gypsy Goddess

by Meena Kandasamy

  We did not know how the law worked. Of course, ignorance of the law was no excuse. But we did not know why this judge refused to see the truth when it was staring him in the face. We did not know how to make these thoughts penetrate his frozen skull. We knew that even poking his brain with a cattle-prod could not help him. He seemed to be perpetually drunk. Those books in his room were as useless as fifty sickles hanging around the hip of a man who did not know how to reap.

  When heavy rains have passed, drops of water continue to trickle down the roofs of our thatched huts. That is how we felt when the police told the court that all three of the shotguns seized from the landlords were found to be in working condition by the forensics department. Muthusamy said that more than twenty guns were used that night alone, but we were happy that even small things were working in our favour. Everything would point to the criminals.

  Then, the police said that the time of last use could not be ascertained at all.

  A half-truth is not a lie, it is a long, long rope. When the guilty get a grip, they climb out.

  At Muthusamy’s tea stall, newspapers told us about a defeated censure motion.

  ‘This House censures and disapproves the policy of the Ministry in particular respect, namely its failure to protect law and order in Tanjore district, resulting in the ghastly incident of arson on 25 December 1968 in the village of Kilvenmani and the death of 42 innocent women, children and old men.’

  The newspaper also tells us that the motion was defeated. Like 36 to 125, but that doesn’t matter. A margin does not make a defeat in our name any better.

  Soon, the government appointed a commission. It was called the Commission of Inquiry on Agrarian Labour Problems of East Tanjore District. Everyone called it the One Man Commission. Everyone said the commission was a paper tiger. Someone said it was a joke. Someone else said it was eyewash.

  We went to the commission and repeated our stories. The party also sent a memorandum briefing the commission about the history of agricultural reform in East Tanjore.

  The commission gave its report the following August. It found the wages to be a pittance. It said the wage had to provide for minimum subsistence. It recommended a wage revision once every three years. The government tabled the commission’s report on the floor of the House. Nothing happened after that. Neither to the commission nor to the agrarian labour problems of East Tanjore district. We forgot the commission and the commission forgot us.

  Less than a year after the horror, children started to die in our district. In the beginning, it was a story from somewhere else, but then it became an everyday occurrence. The newspapers claimed these were mystery deaths. It was a mystery to people who did not know about starvation. Only the children of the toilers and coolies died, not the children of the landlords or the children of the shopkeepers or the children of the teachers. The newspapers did not notice this detail.

  We did not have any children to lose to death, because childhood has gone away from our village. Strangely, we have outlived our parents and our children. We live between the dead. The children who have survived sound like our parents.

  We told our stories to the court and to the commission. We testified on their terms. We were examined and cross-examined. In their words, we deposed. Since we saw with our eyes, we spoke about what we had seen. However, the Special Additional First-Class Magistrate was not very pleased with our versions.

  Perhaps he wanted a single story: uniform, end to end to end. The ‘Once upon a time, there lived an old lady in a tiny village’ story. Sadly, we are not able to tell such a story. A story told in many voices is seen as unreliable.

  In order to put us down, he quotes a big book. The big book quotes another big book. And it says, ‘Unless the testimonies of two or more witnesses corroborate, it will not be possible to verify the guilt of the accused.’

  We were men who were running to save our lives. We carried a different death in each eye. We cried. Our conches blew into deaf ears. They could see that the stories did not match. So the guilt would not be verified and the court would let them be, set them free. This is how the accused would be acquitted, this is how the guilty would turn innocent.

  We were bound to lose. Because we do not know how to tell our story. Because we do not rehearse. Because some of us are tongue-tied. Because all of us are afraid and the fear in our hearts slurs the truth in our voice.

  Hesitating would be of no help. We had made fools of ourselves with our speech and sloppy storytelling. Our silences made us traitors. We knew we had to fight. Fighting would bring us back to our right mind.

  So, the poster wars continued and Keevalur’s Chakravarti Press fattened on our hatred for each other and our love for catchy slogans.

  The next season, we formally called for a strike. During the time of harvest, even a rat has five wives. It is the time of the year when we find a voice, when we can ask for more.

  The farmhands are few and fields have to be reaped in a day, or two at the most. Landlords dread the overcast skies that could drench the paddy and damage their livelihoods. They spend sleepless nights, thinking of calamities that could befall them if they fail to act on time. They fear strangers from half a dozen villages away harvesting the entire crop by night, leaving the field as ravaged as a raped woman. It is the only time of the year when their arrogance climbs down its long ladder.

  Because life had to go on, they agreed to a round of talks because they needed us now more than ever. Even the state stepped in to provide machinery for the settlement of their disputes. But the landlords thought of our gain as their loss, so they never yielded ground. The three-cornered talks went in circles.

  The prime minister of India was to come to our state. The DMK government begged the Central Government to give 100,000 tonnes of food grain in aid, preferably rice. That is what the newspapers said. Preferably rice. It was nice when the newspapers got these tiny details right.

  We did not know if the 100,000 tonnes came. The newspapers forgot to write about that part of the story. In any case, we did not see the rice. In any case, it does not befit a starving man to ask the price of rice. We had seen our share of community inter-dining events, so we knew that what went by the name of a free lunch had a taste and an after-taste: spit of a mad mob, slag of its slur words, sour blood on a violent afternoon. Our hunger, accustomed to die on the mat, knows not to ask too many questions.

  After the famine years, our state’s budget could not make its ends meet. The Central Government said it would refuse to allow our state to present a deficit budget. The newspapers reported that the states had been warned not to overdraft or overdraw from the Reserve Bank. We felt that the country and states and the cities were no different from us. They were all villagers: some of them were landlords and some of them were peasants. Like us, some states were running in debt. Like us, they were lining up for help. Like us, they suffered under bad moneylenders. Like us, some states had no escape. Pledged for a pittance, we knew that our loans would outlive us. We assume that they too are aware of such simple truths.

  Like newspapers that wrote that we had set fire to our own huts, we know that cinema is also a lie. We know that cinema changes the truth: it takes our eyes by the arm and shows them around. It can conceal and reveal, it can rush at speed or crawl in slow motion. It can show demons entering a home by breaking through a tiled roof; it can show a man riding a flying lotus to meet a god and his wife in the clouds. Cinema loves the courthouse because it is full of drama and dialogue, because it is a chance for the lie to become the truth.

  Cinema comes into our case too. Two men who run the Thevur Rajarajeswari Touring Talkies come into the picture. Chellaiyan. Chellamuthu. They give evidence of having seen Gopalakrishna Naidu when he dropped in at the cinema tent on the night of the incident at 8.30 p.m. The timing was during the interval they say. The rest of the picture remains there, waiting to be seen. According to Chellaiyan and Chellamuthu, Gopalakrishna Naidu came by car. He spoke with them for five m
inutes and then went away. He had asked them if they were aware of the clash at Kilvenmani. He had asked them if they had seen Harijan gangs passing by. Chellaiyan and Chellamuthu had replied that when it had started to darken, they had seen some Harijans going to bury a body. Gopalakrishna Naidu then left the place. Chellaiyan and Chellamuthu add that the police head constable came later and made more inquiries. When asked under oath, the head constable remained loyal to the same story.

  When the landlord drives a car, many cinematic events unfold. On that fateful day, when Gopalakrishna Naidu was variously spotted driving to and from Kilvenmani and Irinjiyur in his ash-coloured Ambassador, he stops at the cinema tent to enquire about a clash, he stops upon seeing the police lorry and offers to help, he gives money to Mrs Porayar to look after the medical expenses of her injured husband and son, and so on.

  The court sees the picture as the landlords have painted it. But the picture in our minds is different. Aadugal a nanainchadhu enru onaai aludha mathiri. Here, the jackal weeps because the goats are getting wet from the rain. Here, the jackal weeps because the goats are on fire.

  On the night of the tragedy, the Rajarajeswari Touring Talkies was showing the movie Vivasaayi, where MGR played the role of a humble farmer to perfection. In the course of two and a half hours, the hero milked motherhood out of Tamil women, tamed a lipstick-and-frock-wearing English-speaking Tamil shrew, ran an agricultural research laboratory that contained innumerable varieties of grain, repaired tractors and settled disputes, handed over the surplus paddy from his farm to the government, prevented his father from switching to cash crops, saved the shrew’s honour by saving her from a field-hand ready to rape her, saved his father’s life, saved his father’s potential killer’s life, forgave his enemies and traitors, excelled in exhibiting his fighting prowess, and sang continuously about the importance of being a farmer.

  Paddy smuggling became the new highway robbery. Sometimes the policemen would fight smugglers. Sometimes they would overpower them but often these gangs overpowered the police. Sometimes the police would take a bribe and allow them to escape.

  Sometimes, the rice-mill owners pose as government rice-procurement agents and they cheat the landlords. Or this is what the landlords claim; maybe there is a nexus between the mill owners and the landlords, and together they cheat the government. They always figure out new ways to steal.

  First we heard it happen, then we saw it with our own eyes, and then it was in the papers, and, after a year, we saw these scenes played out even in the movies.

  Our party was fighting. When the monsoons failed, the party wanted loans to be waived by the government. When famine hit, the party wanted relief measures. The party was fighting on the streets and inside factories. The party was fighting on the floor of the House and outside mills. There were indiscriminate arrests and wide-spread harassment.

  This struggle was official. The truth about the wages was something else. We knew about it, the landlords knew about it, the Communist Party knew about it, the government, which brokered these talks, knew about it. Whether we asked for five measures or six measures was only a reinstatement of rights. Every farm used a mottai marakkal. The harvest would be measured in a container that could hold five measures of rice, but the container to dole out the wages would hold only four measures. The scale used to pay the workers was smaller than the scale used by the landlords to take their own share. We wrote to the tahsildar to stop this practice, we complained to the party, we took it up during the talks. Nothing changed, really. They had new containers now, shiny ever-silver cylinders, but they knew how to cheat. But we knew we were being cheated and we were fighting against it. It would not take long to dismantle them.

  The party builds a martyrs’ memorial in our village. It is a single, red-hued stone sculpted in the shape of an eternal flame. The fire of communism was burning.

  This fire spread. In Kilvenmani, we read about it in the news: the labourers seemed to have started striking everywhere. The peasants were fighting in North Arcot, they were fighting in Coimbatore, they were fighting in Madurai. Spinning-mill workers were fighting, teachers were fighting, electricity board employees, bus drivers, drainage workmen were fighting. They observed strike ballots and lightning strikes and mass walkouts and absenteeism.

  Everyday there were lockouts and sit-ins. We heard about the lathi charge inside the mills. We heard about police shootings inside factories. They often portrayed the workers as villains, but we knew these stories. The labour leaders were all placed under arrest. Workers died and we saw the red flag flying high. We saw the revolution was near. We were ready for anything, and we saw that they were ready for anything. We spoke about them. We shared these stories of revolution endlessly between us until the stories slipped through the sieves of our minds and other stories came to take their place.

  It was our duty, so, when it was time, we went to court. We gave witness. We felt their flood of questions eat us away. We were interrogated. We were examined and cross-examined and dismissed. We were angry because we were made to appear like storytellers who had conjured this massacre out of our minds.

  We knew that the lawyers did not really care. We could sense it in the manner in which they explained away things. They claimed to have devoted a great deal of their time towards this case, but the ultimate result was not in their hands. They blamed the police for drafting a weak case. They said that their vexation did not arise from the merits of the case, which were clearly in favour of the state, which was fighting on behalf of the dead, but from the lack of substantive evidence.

  We knew that we could not bring back the dead to give witness. We knew that the landlords knew this too.

  The landlords everywhere played a simple game. It was the game of Outside Labour. In South Arcot. Or East Tanjore. The newspapers supported the landlords. They spoke of the constitutional right of the landlords to employ whomever they wanted to employ. We were discredited because we had been hungry, hungry for an increase in our wage year after year. They said we were clamouring to be like them. They said we should never forget that the crow who attempted to walk like a swan never managed to mimic its grace, instead he lost even his natural gait. They asked us to remember our station. They said even hawks could not carry away the sky, so scavenger crows like us should not have lofty dreams.

  The newspapers put down this antagonism to our arrogance. They mislead the public about us. They blame the famine conditions on our strikes.

  Nothing frightened them as much as the realization that we had stopped being frightened of them. Everything angered them, so we were punished on the slightest pretext. They did not allow our funeral processions to step into their streets – our dead would pollute them, just as we would. They wanted our lives to never go beyond Pallaththeru and Paraththeru. This was the punishment for being born as Pallars and Paraiyars. So, when we demanded our rights, we had to face the boycott from the caste-Hindus.

  Even if we walked ten miles in search of a new job, some petty employment for the day, they would not give us work. They would not sell us things in their shops. We had to find a way around everything. That is what we did even for the burial ground. We could not use their streets to carry our dead, so we had to walk through the fields. When three of our people died in a week, no, not here, but from the neighbouring villages, they had the police file cases against us. They said we had ruined 125 sacks-worth of paddy by walking through their rice fields. When we had a dying person in the ten neighbourhood cheris, we all died a little because of the fear. We did not fear the caste-Hindus alone. The police were always at their beck and call and we could face fresh prosecutions if we broke their diktat.

  In the beginning, they stopped funeral processions when they reached caste-Hindu streets. Soon, they started posting policemen in our cheris if one of us fell very ill.

  They said they did not want us to wag our tails. They said that every untouchable who disobeyed them deserved to die in something similar to Kilvenmani.

&n
bsp; We were used to it: the silence and the shouting. The songs and the tears. Wet from all our weeping, we saw the world in a blur. Death had been here, but life went on deliriously, as if it had been set on fire.

  We do not know where our quest for justice will end. But we know that the police or the prosecution do not represent us. Our hopes for justice lie with the judge who is busy reconstructing the events of that night and shuffling them into a sequence. We wait for the Special Additional First-Class Magistrate to ask questions on our behalf. We want him to ask the accused why not even one of the forty-two (plus two, silent) people were able to escape their death? We want him to ask why they were unable to come out of the hut? We want to ask why the Paddy Producers Association cut off all the escape routes if their intent had not been to kill? We want him to ask the accused if they were all deaf and how they missed the screams of the trapped people if their intent had not been to kill? We want him to ask the prosecution the reason behind their belief that the door of the hut was unlocked? We want him to ask the prosecution why none of our people walked out of the hut when it was set on fire if the door had been open? We want him to ask the prosecution what prompted these forty-two (plus two, silent) people to commit collective suicide? We want him to ask the prosecution why did the police come to know about the deaths only the morning after? We want him to ask these easy questions. He does not ask these questions. He breaks into poetry and calls this incident heart-rending. He slips into mathematics and wonders how all the dead could have fitted into such a tiny space. He scrubs his conscience clean.

  He is clearly not in a mood to ask our questions. He is the one who can ask them, not any of us. You see, even if the hen knows it is day, it is the cock that must crow.