The Gypsy Goddess Read online

  Reverend Baierlein, translated from the German by a certain J. R. B. Gribble, observed in his book that the Danes docked at Nagapattinam, travelled north to Tharangambadi, the village where the Old Woman would one day be born, promptly named it Tranquebar, and set about preaching the purest gospel in place of all the gossip that was in circulation. This divinely preordained Danish coming involved the story of a shipwreck, an encounter with the king, and other recognizable features of Hollywood drama, but, for a brief while, there was difficulty in casting the sacrificial heroes. While merchants and sailors from Denmark travelled here for trade – and the Tamil women’s trusting eyes – no clergyman was man enough to take the Protestant missionary position in a strange, heathen land. Two Germans were dispatched instead, empty-handed, as the god and his son had asked them to go. With no recourse to evangelical funds, or medical insurance, Heinrich Plutschau stuck to the formula and proselytized without any fanfare and, after five years of puttering around, returned to Europe to defend the mission against critics.

  But his companion, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, began work zealously, rejecting both the Paulinian and Ottonian techniques of religious conversion, and formulating his own unique method for translating the word of God into heathen words. Not knowing the intricacies of what could be lost between slippery tongues, he learnt the local language by tracing the alphabet on a bed of sand, read all the 161 texts he could lay his hands on, sought a printing press (from the Danes, but the British supplied it), and placed orders for the Tamil typeface to be made in Halle. The type came, but it was too large and ate up all the paper, so he had the type cut out of lead covers of Cheshire cheese tins, and went to work. Thus, he kept forcing himself on Mother Tamil, who, in order to guard her honour, put up a stiff fight against this alien seeking entry. But he kept at it, tested by the testaments and taunted by Tamil, and had just finished rendering the New Testament into this ruffian, rape-resisting tongue when the contemptuous Copenhagen clergy decided to summon him home again.

  The German mangerman left for Madras – according to some reports, carried in a palanquin – in the hopes that he might eventually be able to board a ship to Europe, and the people of his tiny congregation took his disappearance as a manifestation of divine wrath. They decided against disbanding (should Ziegenbalg return) and, to curry favour with their own briefly neglected pantheon, they resorted to the tried-and-tasted technique of sacrificing bellowing chickens and goats to their local, loudmouthed gods and goddesses.

  Some poets are utter losers: unreliable when it comes to facts and incapable when it comes to fiction. Living in a territory that specialized in the development and deployment of torture devices to disfigure breasts, a lotus-eating bard deflected the demand for the appointment of a Special Rapporteur to the United Nations on this issue by playing with the people’s imagination: he linked love to life and life to livelihood and livelihood to the land and the land to the local river, and then, with a smiling simile he likened the lazy, white river to a pearl necklace on the bosom of the earth, and in his picture-perfect poetry that sang of the River Cauvery, the bleeding, blinded breasts of slave labourers in this delta district were forgotten. I stand the risk of ridicule – it is true, the United Nations did not exist at that point in time, breasts are a beautiful metaphor any day, and one has to understand the importance of poetic licence. I am just spreading out the mattress on the riverside, setting up the landscape, inviting you, dear reader, to join me and look beyond the trauma, with the aid of such romantic imagery.

  Kilvenmani, the village into which the Old Woman married, is irrigated by two tributaries of the Cauvery: Korai Aaru and Kaduvai Aaru. Korai, after the grass used to weave mats; Kaduvai, after a Parai drum special to the region. Parai as in Paraiyar as in the English ‘pariah’. Rivers are to rice cultivation what lies are to poets: the lifeblood, some might say. Some life, some blood, I will hasten to add.

  Initially, I wanted to put this section on poets and rivers down as a footnote and forget everything about the fictional element. Last time I wrote a footnote, however, I made the mistake of suggesting that Ponnar and Sankar, two local guardian deities, were Arundhatiyars, an oppressed untouchable caste, and a case was slapped on me by the touchy touchable caste-Hindus seven years after the book appeared. I received a summons to court, and was charged with wantonly giving provocation with the intent to cause riot, and creating and promoting enmity, hatred and ill-will between different classes. So, my attempts to create a piece of fiction out of facts by telling a story from long, long ago, about an Old Woman in a tiny village, have been shelved until it is time for the thousand and ninth narration. Be consoled that to make up for the form being frivolous, the subject shall be serious.

  Are you still hunting around for the one-line synopsis and the sixty-second sound bite? Do you want me to compress this tragedy to fit into Twitter? How does one even enter this heart of darkness?

  Would you like to join Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! as she welcomes Krishnammal Jagannathan, the winner of an alternative Nobel Prize, a brave lady who espouses Gandhism and non-violence, who works to redistribute land to the tillers? Even as Goodman talks the old woman into revealing that she became an activist because of what happened at Kilvenmani, or that she cooked dosai for Martin Luther King during his India sojourn, watch for the bit where she gushes about the descendants of landlords coming in three cars and giving her all their title deeds. You can lean over and listen to them talk, but this sounds like a then-they-lived-happily-ever-after ending. It does not become a conflict-ridden start. Mere transcription is not an academically approved narrative style. Besides, the format of a video interview is a little too disciplined for a novel. This old woman is not the Old Woman of This Novel anyway.

  Since it did not work out with Amy Goodman, can we go in search of another white woman to tell this story? There’s Kathleen Gough, Left-leaning professor on the FBI’s Watch List, who occasionally toured Tanjore district for her field trips. Women in Nagapattinam were known to have walked two or three villages to ask her one of two questions: whether white women menstruated, and whether they bathed their newborns in whisky to make them white. Popularity among the local population is an added bonus, but what’s pertinent to this novel is the fact that she came here fifteen years before the tragedy. She also revisited eight years after. Years before I was born, she met some of the eyewitnesses I have met. Even her field notes from 1968 are still intact. If only I could get all of you to read her work, familiarize yourself with Marxist theory and take in all the information tucked away in the footnotes, I would have no need to write this novel. Sadly, you are too lazy for research papers.

  To strike a fair balance, would you like to look into old American newspapers? Some headlines say the whole story: Madras Is Reaping a Bitter Harvest of Rural Terrorism; Rice Growers’ Feud With Field Workers Has Fiery Climax As Labor Seeks Bigger Share of Gain From Crop Innovations.

  In a way, that is all there is to it. This novel has only to fill in the blanks.

  Should we go to the tiny village to learn its story? Or, should we stay here and continue studying history instead?

  Can we use a big word that will rock the boat? Slavery. It feeds White guilt and it deprives Brown folk of a golden opportunity to take pride in being treated better than Blacks. Disciplined novels are dead, well-behaved ones are damned, so allow me the opportunity to bring up this subject matter with a posh euphemism, emigration. In twelfth-century Tanjore, a slave could quote a price and sell himself. This practice did not fall into disuse – when the vellaikkaaran started coming, it evolved into a bazaar of manual labour. Like the dead disappearing into their graves, men going to the Coolie Export Depot at the Nagapattinam port were seldom seen again. If the landlords’ men didn’t manage to find the runaways at the harbour and drag them back to the fields, the coolies – they had become the word for their wage – ended up in Siam or Singapore or the Straits settlements as indentured labourers, becoming bonded to British plantati
ons and railroad projects. Tens of thousands died working but timid readers will not survive that history, so let us stick to the theme that concerns our novel.

  But, before that, a brief interlude anyway: would they have lived if they had stayed? In 1646, on a Portuguese vessel that came to Sumatra via our Nagapattinam, there were 400 hunger-starved slaves who couldn’t lift a limb. Sold half-price when they were brought ashore, they spoke of the famine in their land that had swallowed their old ones, their young ones and their talkative ones. Four hundred years later, famine and feudal torture keep throwing them about, and, in fear, they keep taking flight. (The more things change, the more they remain the same. Never mind.)

  Many of these Tamil emigrants ended up in Malaya, where they found themselves in every trade union of mine workers and dock workers and ferry workers. Then the government started swatting Communists like mosquitoes and some outspoken Tamil workers were charged with treason, their leader Comrade Ganapati was hanged, and even engaging Lee Kwan Yew as their legal adviser to fight the deportation case did not help matters. Comrade Veerasenan was shot on the high seas in Singapore and only a few men from Malaya – Senan, Iraniyan, and others – managed to get back to India and smuggle communism into their motherland. Labour export, communism import – it is too early to fetishize a foreign commodity that springs out of slave trade. Stay silent and perfect your solemnity. Let me search for its local roots.

  Everyone could, at some point, object to this narrative because it alternates between leading the characters and leading the audience. The story, working hard to break the stranglehold of narrative, does not dabble in anything beyond agriculture. All of fiction’s artefacts used in this novel – lining, holing, filling, mixing, planting, staking, topping, weeding, watering, manuring, threshing, winnowing – are borrowed from a peasant’s paradise. Here, stories grow like haphazard weeds. Here, ideas flow like rain through leaky thatched roofs.

  Thread One: communism thrived in East Tanjore because this place had the highest number of discussion-inducing tea stalls in the province. It was often suggested, by none other than the decaffeinated bourgeoisie, that communism would be eradicated if tea ceased to exist. Thread Two: communism crept up only along the railway lines. Thread Two Point Two One: twentieth-century Marxists would turn feudal, almost fascist, and seek to silence everybody who spoke of caste in place of class. Thread Two Point Four: the first posters of Chairman Mao begin to appear towards the end of 1968. Sometimes, Comrade Ho Chi Minh put in a special graffiti appearance. Thread Three: a young man (native informant, with the added bonus of being this author’s father) shudders first, then celebrates, on hearing the story of a class enemy (a landlord of Irinjiyur) being axed into four and forty pieces, his dead flesh wrapped in palm fronds and given away to peasant families as a souvenir of revenge. Thread Five: the first Communist protest in Tanjore seeking higher wages in agriculture takes place in 1943. Thread Six: if the people were to sight a Communist in hiding, they were asked to ring the temple bells in order to alert the police. Thread Seven: close to a thousand Naxalite Communists on remand are brought to Tamil Nadu because the prisons in West Bengal do not have the capacity to hold them all. Thread Eleven: every owner of a gun or revolver or pistol, or any other fire-arm, should deposit the weapon (with ammunition) at the local police station, obtain the safe-custody receipt, fill out a renewal form and wait until procedural formalities are finished over the course of a week. This bureaucratic procedure ensured that even the most trigger-happy landlords were left unarmed for a period of time. The militant Naxalites, with their liquidation-of-landlords programme, waited for ages for the arrival of this week of disarmament. Thread Thirteen: mobilization of the agricultural slaves by the Communists puts an end to inhuman feudal practices.

  Rest assured, dear reader: you are intelligent enough to find all the missing threads and tie up the loose ends. People in this land predict rain from the sound of faraway thunder, patterns of the dragonfly in flight, halos around the moon, answers of the spirit-possessed dancers, probability of picking vermilion over sacred ash and other random occurrences. Have hope, my fiction is much more fixed.

  Just because this is a novel set in rural India, do not expect a herd of buffalo to walk across every page for the sake of authenticity. Eager mothers who hold salt and dried red chillies and circle their hands over your head before asking you to spit into their palms three times to trick spirits of the evil eye into abandoning you have been held back at my behest because I do not want to lose you to nostalgia or exotica. The tinkling bells of bullocks could add music to these sentences, but they have been muted so that you can silently stalk the storyline.

  Comrade, let’s get this clear. There are only two possible ways of going about this. If you were able to get your papers stamped in the right places, if you have purchased your tickets, I could take you to the village of Kilvenmani and let you immerse yourself in the lifestyle there. I could let you live with them through the seasons, teach you to whistle as you work alongside them in the rice fields in a half-hearted attempt to declass yourselves, hold your hand as you watch the sunset and call it spectacular every single time, let you walk back home with my women. I could teach you what it means to winnow when the wind blows, how to sweep up the leftover grain on a threshing floor, how much the various measures hold, and how to walk with a bundle of firewood on your head. I could cook you gruel and watch you greedily relish it with raw onion. I could show you the sculpted shoulders of the working men; I could make you swoon at the sight of their sweat. I could make you listen to a grandmother’s curse, a mother’s lullabies, an aunt’s dirges. I could ask the roving gypsy woman to tattoo your arms and your legs with an ink made from mothers’ milk. I could provide you the pleasure of being an economy-class voyeur on this exotic time-travel. And this would continue ad nauseam and you would be sick of the cloying sweetness. And chances are, you would never learn.

  The only other way of doing this is the way I am doing it.

  The gods in these lands outnumber the people. The demons in these lands outperform Satan. The devils are whirlwinds during daylight; they toss every twig and trembling leaf that comes their way. At night they assume other lives – turning into flickering lights, or stealthy, lamp-eyed cats or a corpse-lady walking backwards. They compete in cross-country racing in the dark, riding on invisible horses. Some demons are held responsible for failure in trade, most of them specialize in ruining crops. At some point of time in their lives, most demons are said to have taken part in stone-throwing and vandalizing public property. On drunken nights, they have caused whole villages to be deserted. If the Old Woman were to be believed, the primary agenda of these demons is to cause terror, and the most malicious of them have been known to set fire to thatched roofs. Watch out for these terrorizing demons, going about setting fire to thatched roofs.

  Like the lone monkey in a coconut tree that has nothing better to do than mock itself, I perform these narrative gimmicks to amuse myself. Much later, like the monkey, I might get a decent audience; I might even do these tricks for a living. I could launch into an enumerative, explanatory list of the tricks employed to tell any story in the magic realism mode. I desist because it is an unfair playing field. I am in no mood to give the game away. So, let us trot back to realism. There is Maayi the Old Woman. There is Muniyan the Village Headman. There is Gopalakrishna Naidu the Landlord. There is Muthusamy the Communist. There is Sikkal Pakkirisamy the Slain.

  Keep in mind, though, that this narrator-novelist draws inspiration from Tamil mystics – shrinking to a microscopic speck, burgeoning into a ten-headed demon, assuming weightlessness, turning leaden, taking flights of fancy, transmigrating into other bodies, assuming authority and charming everybody. This fatal flaw in her prose follows her faithfully.

  Do you suspect a murder merely because of this fancy prose style? Do you want a puppet-show in place of all this meandering prose? Do you rue the fact that modernism and postmodernism have killed our storytelling
traditions? I am willing to try everything to get this story across. So, here I am, pitching a tent under a tree, propping up a blank screen, pulling out my puppets. Come, take a peek. Authority is easy to caricature. The puppets with the overgrown handlebar moustaches are landlords. The puppets with a stoop worked into their back and a squeal stamped into their voice are the landless. The stiff-necked puppets who march as a pack are the policemen. And the mysterious Old Woman: she’s the puppet with a head that shakes during the storytelling. She’s the puppet who beats her sagging breasts to mourn, to make a point, to curse, to cry a call to arms. You do not see her face, the fading brown of her eyes, the skin collapsing into wrinkles. You do not get that close to the storyteller. The play of light here works with a binary logic – bright lamps cast dark shadows. And the shadows tell their stories as you watch them move and mimic the voices of men and women and birds and animals. Squatting, arms around your knees, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, you take away the story as the puppets walk the talk. When they are done, most puppets disappear. Some stay. Some drop dead.

  If you are the emotional type, the puppet-show is not any easier than this book.

  How does this work of art seek to declare itself?

  It plagiarizes the most scathing criticism, it prides itself on its ability to disappoint. Why bother about the pain of accomplishing something and arriving somewhere, when failure has been made a flashy trophy in itself? Humility is a convoluted highlight. Even this book’s obituary is a copy; it steals verbatim from someone else’s words to describe its own shortcomings; it keeps the reproduced text from all knowledge of the original – assuming that never the Twain shall meet; and thus, the borrowed barbs glow like golden back-cover blurb: