by Manu Joseph
Many of her generation and class dug Marxism, though most of them needed heroin to go with it. Some of them, who are now reformed capitalists manufacturing steel pipes, rubber pipes, commodes and things one would not imagine someone actually mass-produces, come home even today to chat with Pa over cheese and wine. Much is said about Indian Marxists and their love for French wines when they wish to discuss poverty and revolution. Actually, they are happy with South African wines, too.
The friends laugh at the memories of ‘those days’ when they signed up for an armed rebellion. Three of them did get as deep as Ma but when the police captured them and started massaging their balls, they called their papas, who couriered the bribes, and that was pretty much the end of their revolution. They surrendered to the new money and made it more money. Now they laugh. Thousands of students who followed their lead, who had no rich daddies to call when they were captured, don’t laugh because they do not exist. Many just vanished from police custody.
Pa was made of the same strand as her. His family sent him to England to study chartered accountancy. Instead, he returned a radical with plans to overthrow the Indian government.
They had met at a ‘debate’, by which Marxists mean a discussion where everyone is saying the same thing to people who have the same views. One day, he went to her home, fell on his knees in front of her parents and asked them for her hand. They married without ceremony and drove to his beautiful house by the sea in Worli. They did not wish to have a child. Akhila was an accident. Mother probably thought she would be able to pull off the rebel-and-mother act. Something like the goddess with many hands that no-talent men draw as a gracious compliment to womenfolk. But Mother could not find the many phantom arms. Father transformed. Poor man, he chose the boredom of a gentle affluent family life over revolution, but Mother was too deep in. She tried to sit at home but that was just not her way. She was always looking at the door. Not metaphorically. She felt so stuck, she really did keep looking at the door.
A beautiful woman whose eyes keep wandering to the door – that woman exists in almost all the moments of her daughter’s severe memory of her. A woman in a vast sunlit home; a woman with long proud hair in love with her good-natured husband, the sort of man who, wherever he stands, makes his space the edge of the frame. There is laughter in that house, and long conversations; the woman bathes her girl, cuts her nails, buys her frocks, but those eyes, they are never still.
And there are those hugs, fierce hugs entangling mother and daughter, which mean Mother is leaving again – to do good in some miserable little factory town, or a village on the edge of a forest.
And the woman vanishes from the sunlit home, vanishes for days, weeks, but never months. And her presence is now somehow deeper. Akhila waits, that is what her childhood is mostly about – long waits. She waits on the steps, watching the end-of-days rains of Mumbai; she waits when she walks to school, in the class, and when she returns from school. Every single day when the girl returns from school she hopes to see an unfamiliar car in the porch, or the sound of happy guests, or the other signs of Ma’s return. Most days, there is just the silent indestructible unchanging house.
And when Mother does return, the girl goes crazy. Pa, on the fringes, looks on fondly. There are, once again, fierce hugs. Mother cries only when she returns, never when she leaves. One other time she cried. When she had slept with her daughter and discovered in the morning that the girl had tied her hands to her mother with a skipping rope.
A few days later, Ma vanishes again. And the girl resumes her wait. As Akhila goes in the back seat of a long car, through the happy lanes of Mumbai, she sees other girls with their mothers, and she condemns the vulgarity of love. How can people flaunt such luxury in plain sight in a world where other girls wait for their mothers? It is worse than the vulgarity of rich little girls going in big long cars.
Akhila has ‘active’ grandmas, as the active grandmas say. The old women get along even though they do not understand the language of the other; maybe that is why they get along. They have to depend on English to communicate, which tires them. They smell of oils; Ma smells like a forest. Once, the girl gets typhoid. Ma, in a jungle, gets to know and she rushes back. But she is desperate to just go back. There is a lot of work to be done before the Indian government is overthrown and all poor people are transformed into not-poor-but-not-too-rich by some kind of communist magic.
Some chaps have started a new party, something that says ‘Maoist’. The girl is sure they mean ‘moist’. Perhaps all the newspapers got it wrong. After all, Ma and comrades work in a tropical forest, which is most certainly a rainforest. But Pa says the word is not ‘moist’. Ma is a ‘Maoist’.
‘What is a Maoist?’
‘Her boss is Mr Mao. He is Chinese. That’s all you need to know.’
But the girl has a lot of questions. She figures that what Ma plans to do, as a Maoist, is tell hunters and farmers who live in forests and villages that they can become happier hunters and farmers if they win independence from India and if they chase away every private company that tries to give them a lot of money for their land. The girl begins to read about Mr Mao. In the first five minutes she is excited. He is dead. Mother’s boss has been long dead. She runs to Father and says, ‘Does Ma know?’ Mother knows. The girl is confused, dejected. She had thought that if the news of Mr Mao’s death is broken to Ma, she might shut up shop and return. But Ma knows. She works for a dead Chinese man. Right. The girl reads more about Mr Mao. She is even more confused. She figures that Mr Mao actually wanted farmers, at least most of them, to become factory workers. And he took away so much grain from farmers in China that millions of them starved to death. He seemed to have been a very cruel man. She runs to Pa. ‘Mao was not a Maoist,’ she says. ‘Does Ma know?’ Mother knows. Kind of. ‘Mao’s ideas were right,’ Pa says. They just didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to. Right.
Ma thinks she can make Mr Mao work better in India than Mr Mao could make himself work in China. But the Indian government thinks Maoists are enemies of the nation. It bans Ma’s party. She does not quit. She goes underground. Akhila is now eleven. Father whispers, though nobody is in the room, ‘Your mother is in hiding.’ She is in hiding with a band of armed malnourished tribals whom she is preparing for a revolution. Madam has progressive sclerosis. She can barely write her own name any more, but she has started carrying a gun in the forest. That is what a messenger says.
The messenger is a sliver of a man with no legs. He comes home crawling on his powerful arms. In the living room he sees a giant map of India on the wall and gets agitated. He asks Pa for a red pen. ‘Only red’. Akhila gives him her red sketch pen. The man asks Pa to carry him, which he does. The man begins to draw red circles on the map, scores of red circles until all of India is filled with red. ‘The revolution is coming,’ he says. Father, still carrying the messenger against his chest, looks nervously at the girl.
After the messenger is put on the floor, he tells a story about Ma. It is too late for Pa to send the girl inside, the man has begun his story and it is brief. There was a battle with cops in the forest. Malnourished tribals versus malnourished men in uniform. Mother, on the side of the malnourished tribals, lay behind a shrub and took aim, her finger shivering over the trigger because of the sclerosis. She did not shoot, he said. Somehow she escaped capture on that occasion.
The police in three states are looking for Ma. Akhila lives every moment in the fear that they will capture and torture that beautiful woman. Ma continues to come home, but not as often as before. And when she does, it is always in the cover of darkness. Then there are, once again, those fierce hugs. More than ever, Ma loves long steam baths and head massages given by her own mother.
Obviously, only the close family knows about her visits. On one of her visits, she is in a bad way. She has high fever. For security reasons she goes alone, in disguise, for a blood test. She goes to a cheap government hospital because she has accepted that she cannot be an
honest Maoist if she continues to enjoy things only a lot of money can buy. She scribbles a phone number for the attendant to call with the results. But her sclerosis is so bad that her numbers are indecipherable to the attendant. He calls a wrong number. What he wants to tell her is that she probably has cerebral malaria and she has to be admitted immediately. Days pass.
She gets into such a bad state that she is unable to move. Father has had enough. He takes her to the best hospital in the city. But it is too late. In thirty hours she is dead, cremated, her ashes flung. The girl, now fourteen, needs to wait no more.
On one of her visits, Ma had given the girl a photograph. It is of Mother standing with a dozen tribal women. The girl has taken a particular dislike to the photograph for reasons she does not understand. One day, two months after her mother’s death, the girl writes a caption on the back of the photograph. ‘Cool Indian feminist with prospective maids’. The girl cries for hours.
Many of the factory workers, farmers and tribal hunters Mother tried to save were eventually saved by private corporations who either bought their land or employed them. They were saved by semi-literate merchants who had no intentions of doing good but who did more good in the way of making money than Ma ever did. That hurts.
Father does not wish to talk about all this. He is a merchant himself now who owns tea plantations in two states. But he is still a Marxist, he still says, ‘Capitalism is dangerous, so much inequality, so much.’
One evening, as he sits watching the news about a violent revolt of a car factory’s workers, he keeps making angry noises even as he sips his wine. Akhila can take it no more. ‘Why don’t you go live in Sweden?’
‘I don’t hate this place,’ he says.
‘You do. It whips you every day.’
‘India is a wound,’ he says in a professorial tone. He is a bit drunk. ‘But it is not a wound like a whiplash. It is a wound, like a spouse.’
THE MAJOR HAS cleared the compound by spreading the lie that there has been a gas leak. That persuades everyone to leave the plot and join the large mob outside on the street. The journalists are happy to go. The story has no visuals, and no prospects.
Now there are just the soldiers, four police officers and Akhila left on the site. She sits on the ground and does some stretches. And she crawls into the tunnel with a small bag strung to her back. In the bag, apart from the medicines, is a knife.
The crawl is easier than before. She does not shut her eyes to endure the slither over the stiff hand, but she does not feel the groping this time. For a moment it is eerie but it occurs to her that a soldier must have stuffed it back into the debris.
The man’s eyes are open and vacant. His pulse is better, feet not so cold. She is bringing him back. She shouts, ‘Can you hear me? What’s your name? If you can hear me, blink thrice.’ There is no response. She gives him the saline infusion in the tibia. She hides the pocketknife in her palm and slithers over the beam and on to his body. She looks carefully into his eyes. They look without focus. ‘Can you hear me?’ He does not respond.
She wears a pair of surgical gloves and unzips his trousers. He does not react as she picks his flaccid penis as though it is a flower and inspects it. He begins to mumble, which startles her. She shoves the organ back into his trousers and slides over his upper body. She puts her ear to his mouth, and listens.
12
A Telephone Conversation
FOR A MAN who is ashamed, Professor Vaid looks a bit too comfortable in the coir armchair. But that has more to do with the nature of the armchair. He has just learnt that Miss Iyer was assaulted in the morning. She was slapped and kicked and punched by patriots, but the attack was brief. The Sangh uses simpletons well, but on days there is a price it pays. He has since made some calls. The girl is safe, at least for now. She would be wise to take down the video, and hide for a few days before she is forgotten. But it is unlikely that she will.
She has survived the attack well though. Despite the injuries, she has been crawling in and out of a tunnel all day, and feeding a dying man.
The old men of the Sangh would argue that such attacks are not entirely unnecessary. Fear is important. They have said that for decades. They are among those men who have not read Chanakya or Machiavelli but love the synopsis.
Vaid has forgotten his old confused opinions about crafty practicality. There was a time, he does remember, when he believed that the practical were people who were incapable of being artistes. But now that he knows many in the arts, he is not so sure.
He had joined the Sangh for very clear reasons. Because he rejected the West, everything about it except its exquisite science, and he rejected the new world order that required the modern to imitate white people. He felt a deep revulsion for the posh imitators who then ruled India. They were an unspeakable human disaster. Their socialism starved hundreds of millions to death. The living fared worse. In the end, the socialists said, sorry, there has been a mistake, someone had read the wrong book. What India had practised was not socialism in the first place, they said. Nobody on earth knows its name. Decades of trauma had ensured that Indians had even forgotten the simplicity of pride. Even in that they imitated the white man. They searched for spurious scientific and cultural achievements to be proud. Does a person truly need victories to feel proud of his home, of himself? Vaid joined the Sangh to save his people from all this, save them from the epidemic of cultural retardation.
He still has faith in everything that first led him to nationalism. But then faith is a form of fatigue. The tired body calling an end to ceaseless doubt, the body preserving itself through the myth of absolute certainty, isn’t that what faith is in its very core? Isn’t that what love is, and the final draft of a poem, and all of finished art? The body claiming, ‘It’s good,’ when what it is really saying is, ‘It’s enough.’ You stare long enough at the world, you see fatigue.
His phone rings. It’s AK again.
‘Professor, there is a girl.’
‘A girl?’
‘There is a girl, Professor, with Jamal. He picked her up along the way. That’s what our friend in the debris is saying.’
‘They are in a car?’
‘Yes, they are in a car.’
‘Where are they going?’
‘We don’t know, yet.’
‘So the cops don’t know where to look?’
‘They are going mad. Now they know there is a couple carrying a parcel around but they don’t know where to look. But there is something more interesting. The man in the debris says the “Bureau” knows.’
‘By Bureau he means … You’re not saying…’
‘The Intelligence Bureau. The IB knows about the movements of Jamal and the girl. That’s what he means.’
‘Did he say “Bureau” or “Intelligence Bureau”? Bureau can be a word for a sleeper cell?’
‘I’ll tell you how specific he is. He says, SIB knows. I’ve got an audio file of Akhila’s recording. He says SIB.’
‘That’s State Intelligence Bureau?’
‘No, it’s Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau, but yes, it means the same thing. It’s the state division of the Bureau. Not many people call the Bureau SIB.’
‘And what did you mean by audio recording?’
‘The cops asked Akhila to record the man’s mumbles. They would need it later as evidence in court and for their own records.’
‘She is fully cooperating, then.’
‘No. She said she is not handing over her phone to anyone after this thing is over. She is clever. She knows that if she records him on her phone she will have to surrender it to the police or the court.’
‘So how is she recording the man?’
‘She is using a cop’s phone.’
‘Alright. What do we have here, AK? A Muslim couple is on the loose and the IB is on to them. But your friends in the Bureau are saying they have no idea what’s going on.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Doesn’t make sense at all.’
‘I know. I’m in touch with the top guys. They won’t hide anything from me. Not today.’
‘True. They have to suck up to you.’
‘The director of IB swears there is no operation under way.’
‘Maybe the man in the debris only means to say he is afraid the Bureau might be shadowing the couple?’
‘Possible, but his language is … but then he is just a man who is not in his senses.’
‘What else is he saying, AK?’
‘He is saying, “Someone get the girl out of that car fast.” He keeps saying that. The same thing over and over.’
‘Get the girl out of the car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you think he wants the girl to leave the car?’
‘Maybe Jamal is going to blow up the car.’
‘Why do you think our man is so concerned about the girl alone?’
‘Maybe he likes her. Or, maybe she doesn’t know what she has got into.’
13
Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous
MUKUNDAN IS UNABLE to guess the nature of the relationship between Jamal and the girl. He is yet to see an indisputable sign of love in the blue Indica, like kissing, or a hand reaching out to squeeze flesh or a man throttling a woman. But then the Indica has been travelling at over eighty kilometres an hour, and it has not stopped or slowed down since it left Mumbra. Some lovers are careful on the highway, perhaps.
He has tried to gather some information about the girl from his friends without revealing that he is shadowing her at the moment. They had the tone a lot of people in the Bureau have when they speak to him. They talk down; they are affectionate, but they talk down because he has always made it very clear he is not as smart as they are. It is not entirely a lie. There is something about speech he has not fully mastered. He has thoughts of reasonably good quality but they do not emerge as speech. It is as though he is always forced to speak in a foreign tongue. Even to him he often sounds intellectually austere, like when brown cricketers are forced to speak in English during post-match press conferences. But he does not mind his handicap, which probably does not have a name, hence not considered a handicap. When people speak to him, they lower their guard, say things, a lot of things.
