The Gypsy Goddess Read online

  ‘It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are – oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.’

  For the sake of clarification, its English is Taminglish.

  Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But, you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice can consume half a village. You will later learn that in the eyes of the law, the rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain.

  If you are finding this difficult to follow, remember that not only am I weighed down by the task of telling a story, but also that you are equally responsible for your misery. Art depicts people. So, this degenerate narrative merely mirrors the fact that all of you, my darling readers, have been living non-linear, amoral lives without any sense of purpose. Life is linear, I can hear you argue. It is, but it is cyclical, too. If you ask a mathematician, she will tell you that life possibly exists in the nth dimension, and beyond the third, none of your fucking senses can perceive anything at all. That’s where stories unravel themselves. Those of you stressed out by this haphazard storytelling, please relax. Stay, those of you who have thought too many times of wandering away. How far away from me can you stray? This is a joint venture. We collaborate on the critical condition that we do not abandon each other.

  Abandoning is old hat in literature, so this cry for commitment stems from insecurity.

  I have been dabbling in the art of abandoning, too. Once, being impressed with the French Anarchist writer Félix Fénéon and his Novels in Three Lines, I attempted to adapt his brilliant, fragmented form to continue to tell my version of the story of the Old Woman in a tiny village. Over the course of considerable time, I was able to write a few tiny excerpts of her history, but I gave up, unable to sustain my momentum. The entire story that I was waiting to tell seemed to lie outside her. Did she have it in her to hold a village together? Could I show everything in these snippets? Riddled with self-doubt, I stopped trying to make my story fit into this form.

  It was an interesting experiment while it lasted. Weeks later, I felt my jottings were not good enough to get into the book because the characters had not got into them. Once I realized that becoming a mistress of the compress-and-express form of storytelling was not for me, I played with the idea of moving on. Out of habit, I lingered, toying with these time-release capsules:

  One Karuppaayi of Thiruchuli village in the Ramnad district recounts that, during the great famine, she lost her husband and her three little sons. She managed to stay alive eating handfuls of mud. Taking pity on her because of her pregnant condition, a relief worker fed her congee every day.

  In December 1877, the Gundar River in Ramnad swelled suddenly, breaking her banks in her haste to meet the sea. Karuppaayi went to Tranquebar, finding shelter at the home of the relief worker who saved her life. Many others were not as lucky – they survived the famine but not the floods – the Royal Gazetteer recorded over a thousand deaths in the first week.

  Chinnamma of Irukkai died on 15 August 1925 from complications arising out of childbirth. The death, due to septic shock, resulted from the use of an agricultural sickle to cut her umbilical cord. The newborn was handed over to her grandmother, Karuppaayi, a domestic help of Europeans in Tranquebar.

  Tranquebar is reeling from the shock of witnessing the sixtieth rape of the last three weeks. Dragged from her grandmother’s home at the outskirts of the town, the fourteen-year-old girl heard nothing but her own screams through the night; the landlord-rapists did not stop, nor did they dignify her with a single word. Sources in Nagapattinam confirm that no case was filed.

  (Preliminary reports indicate the rape took place on the night of 16 December 1939. The gang-rape victim’s name has been withheld for reasons of anonymity. She will be referred to as ‘She’ in all reports, including in the regular, feel-good stories that we are committed to publishing.)

  She went to Sannasi, a wandering witch doctor, the strongest man She saw. Sannasi’s priesthood ended when She offered him the wondrous pleasure of her breasts. Before the next summer, they were married and She had given birth to his son.

  When the exiled Thayyan, the witch doctor’s brother, was found to have crept back to Kilvenmani to steal a look at his one-year-old nephew, he was beaten to death, doused in kerosene and set alight. For concealing information about their brother’s visit, Sannasi and Periyaan were whipped mercilessly. Police declared Thayyan’s death as an arson-related accident on the landlord Porayar’s farm.

  On 14 April 1965, untouchables around Keevalur dismantled a temple chariot in protest at not being granted the right to pull it through the streets. Caste-Hindus retaliated by burning the ‘defiled’ chariot. Sannasi, suspected master-mind of this protest, was abducted the next day, and his body turned up two weeks later in Karaikkal. Police have closed the case as a mysterious death.

  To avenge her husband’s death, Sannasi’s widow stepped out on the Communist Party circuit. Asked to describe her, a comrade in Kilvenmani said, ‘She knows what to say when, how to say what, when to start a why, where to cease the talk.’ Similarly pressed, a landlord said, ‘Oh! The Old Woman? That troublemaking Communist cunt? That untouchable whore? Get out of here.’

  This time, I moved on.

  Finally, if you want the phony and the polyphony, the hysterical and the polyhistorical, wait for the postcolonial version, where the dusky Old Woman of my story takes after the pale Janie of Zora Neale Hurston’s. They are both women who believe that the dream is the truth. They are both widowed women who learn to press their teeth together, who learn to hush. They are both women who find their wisdom poses a great challenge to others because, sometimes, God gets familiar with them and tells them secrets about men. They are both women full of life.

  They are both women who think alike of Death as that strange being with the huge square toes who lives in the straight house like a platform without sides or a roof and who stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for a messenger to bid him come and who has been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. They are both women who have come back from burying the dead.

  Not just the dead, but the sudden dead.

  Enough about the Old Woman. You will soon get to hear her speak, watch her move.

  Meanwhile, remember this: nobody lived happily. Nobody outlived the ever-after.

  2. The Title Misdeed

  When you are high on caffeine and contemporary authors, you begin to question the fundamentals of the publishing industry, which you think owes it to you to make your novel widely read. After all, for the sake of reading widely, you have contributed an unfortunately large amount of your small income to the said industry.

  Take the title for instance: it has to be catchy, it has to incite curiosity, it has to sound cool when you say it to others. That’s why I settled on this one. Well, almost. It satisfies all of the above criteria.

  The minute you realize that the novel is quite unlike the university dissertation, you gain the necessary courage to be experimental. You will soon realize, especially if you have been confounded by Derrida-Schmerrida at college, that a book does not have to be about its title. A title does not have to be about the book. Trust me, they are generous enough to co-exist with each other.

 
If you ask me upfront, I will tell you that this novel has nothing to do with the title. You are not my agent, anyway. A nice title would have been Long Live Revolution! Or, The Red Flag. Or, as Žižek once said, when asked to share a secret with the Guardian during an interview, Communism Will Win. Sadly, the Communists will be outraged to be glorified in such an archetypal bourgeois literary form such as the novel, which they will contend has been produced for the global market. The other trouble with these titles is that it could get my novel into serious, life-threatening situations. Customs officials in a few faraway lands could hammer spikes through it or it could be pulped by a paper-shredder in quasi-repressive states. My books of poetry have been burnt. This novel is a delicate darling, and I will not let this happen to her. She has to live. She has to be in love. She has to see the world. For all that, she has to be named.

  In the beginning, I did not want to cheat. I thought of good titles. Tales from Tanjore had an authentic ring to it, but those who picked up such a book would end up disappointed when they did not come across tigers, Tipu Sultan and the Pudukkottai royalty. Then again, Butcher Boys had the sound of a college music band, and little relevance to this novel except reflecting some of the bloodthirsty rage that romps around in these pages. Kilvenmani gave away the location, and a friend said it had a distinct Irish ring to it, so I dropped it as a gesture of goodwill because I didn’t want to mislead my readers. In a similar manner, Christmas Day gave away the date, but that title would make the reader imagine snow and reindeers and pine trees, and the entire seasonal marketing mania, instead of imagining peasant agitations. It would be the equivalent of using the word ‘holocaust’ somewhere in the title, only because you wanted reference to a massacre where sacrificial victims were completely burnt to death. (Christmas Day, did I say? In Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the fictional Cuyahoga massacre that involved industrial action and took place on 25 December. The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it.) So, I gave up on that title and, for some time, I wanted to name it 1968, the most tumultuous year of recent history, the year in which the central incident of this novel occurs. But Orwell has been there before me with this year-as-title thingy. What’s more painful is that he used my year of birth without my explicit consent.

  There go all my titles, and any effort at sincerity. Now I am out of choices. So I settle on the curiously obscure and mildly enchanting choice, The Gypsy Goddess.

  I have a great title. I have a great story.

  They don’t belong to each other. In this author-arranged marriage-without-divorce, these two will stay together.

  Considering the title of this chapter, I should have technically completed one obligation: unravel the mystery of the title. So, here is the abridged version of the legend of the Gypsy Goddess. Go ahead, read it. These are two minutes of your life that you are never getting back.

  This story begins with an epic novelist, who, having penned a racy thriller involving a hetero-normative love pentagon between three men and two women, enjoys enormous popularity and unparalleled critical, commercial and cultural success. At the zenith of his glory, he realizes that his characters have outgrown his epic and have become household names. Every day, he hears of fanclubs being started for his hero, beauty parlours and massage centres named after his heroine, and body-building gyms being inaugurated in the name of the hero’s side-kick brother. And, much as his characters inspire love, they also inspire hate. He witnesses the effigy of his villain being burnt at street corners across the country. He hears stories of men, reeling under the influence of his epic heroes, cutting off the noses of women who have lust in their eyes. This horror, this horror is too much to take. His greatest creation, his labour of love, has turned into a nation’s Frankenstein’s monster. He foresees a future of massacre and mayhem, bloodshed and bomb-blasts, deaths and demolition.

  So he fled to foreign shores.

  He travelled far and wide and here and there in search of anonymity and, finally, he decided to settle down in a Tamil village where the men had as many gods as their forefathers had found the leisure to invent, where the business of customized, cash-on-delivery idol-making flourished and kept up with the demands of the idol-worshippers, where the men and the women and the children called upon their lord gods every time they had a nervous tic or whooping cough or a full bladder or a mosquito bite or a peg of palm toddy or an argument with the local thug, where they boozed and banged around every day of every week, where they affectionately addressed their fathers as mother-fuckers, where they killed and committed adultery and stole and lied about everything at the court and the confession box, where they coveted each other’s concubines and wives, and where they did all of this because the script demanded it. Evidently, this village in Tanjore was an author’s paradise.

  They welcomed him with proverbial open arms. Being unrepentant idol-worshippers, they soon cast the charismatic novelist into the role of a demigod and rechristened him Mayavan, Man of Illusion & Mystery. He was consulted on every important decision regarding the village community. In perfect role-reversal, they told him stories.

  The exile ignored their stories for days on end, not allowing any character to have the slightest impact on him out of fear that he would slip into writing once again. But, as was bound to happen, one story about Kuravars, the roaming nomad gypsies, caught his fancy, drove him into a frenzy and rendered him sleepless.

  On one night, many many nights ago, seven gypsy women, carrying their babies, strayed and lost their way whilst walking back to their camp. When they came home the next day, the seven women were murdered along with their babies. Their collective pleading did not help. Some versions go on to add that there were seventeen women. Every version agrees that all of them had children with them. Some versions say these women and their children were forced to drink poison. Some versions say that these women were locked in a tiny hut and burnt to death along with their children. Some gruesome versions say that these women were ordered to run and they had their heads chopped off with flying discs and their children died of fright at seeing their mothers’ beheaded torsos run. It is said that after these murders, women never stepped out of the shadows of their husbands.

  The novelist, ill at ease, wants to teach a lesson to the village. In one stroke, he elevates the seven condemned women and their children into one cult goddess. He divines that unless these dead women are worshipped, the village shall suffer ceaselessly.

  Overnight, the villagers build a statue of mud of Kurathi Amman, the Gypsy Goddess, and say their first prayers. Misers come to ruin, thieves are struck blind, wife-beaters sprout horns, rapists are mysteriously castrated, and murderers are found dead the following morning, their bodies mutilated beyond recognition.

  Faith follows her ferocity. Over time, she becomes the reigning goddess.

  She loves an animal slaughtered in her honour every once in a while but, mostly, she is content with the six measures of paddy that are paid to her on every important occasion.

  Full disclosure: for all my irreligiosity, Kurathi Amman is rumoured to be my ancestral goddess. And Mayavan is the ancestral deity of a man I once loved. Our deities live the happily-ever-after fairy tale while we drift around with poetry and politics to numb and dissolve our pain.

  Sad story, indeed.

  Now, you can forget all about this, and move on to the novel.

  Fuck these postmodern writers.

  part two

  BREEDING GROUND

  3. The Cutthroat Comrades

  Gopalakrishna Naidu had inherited all of Gandhi’s adamancy, most of his self-righteousness and a wee bit of his desire to save humanity. Upon realizing that he was endowed with such a desirable mix of messianic attributes, he fashioned himself as a father-figure for the landlords of Nagapattinam and, therefore, had taken upon himself the timeless task of protecting their vested and invested interests. As required of self-made heroes who shou
lder such responsibility, he satisfied all the requisite criteria: he perfected the role of a leader who represented hope, claimed to symbolize change even as he continued to believe in age-old values, and unfailingly met his constituency on a regular basis. Having introduced this balding, middle-aged man in three-and-a-half formidable sentences, I step aside as a big-mouthed narrator-novelist, and instead invite you to catch him on his campaign trail.

  On a sultry afternoon in July when the sun sets the sky on fire, Gopalakrishna Naidu’s gleaming pleasure-car (simply called ‘pleasure’ by the villagers, and ‘car’ by those who have travelled in one) arrives at the doorstep of Ramu Thevar’s palatial bungalow, having traversed a picturesque Tanjore countryside replete with lakes and rivers and lushgreen rice fields and tropical coconut trees. In a cinematic wide-angle shot, the door of the ash-coloured Ambassador opens and we first spot Gopalakrishna Naidu’s gold-ringed right hand, and then we see the rest of him emerge, dressed in spotless hand-spun, hassle-free white cotton. As you visualize him walking from his car to his designated place, here’s the background song that should fill your eager ears: one in a million million/ he walks like a kingly lion/ one in a million million/ he wears red red vermillion/ one in a million million/ he’s here to crush the rebellion. Trust me, such music sounds really upbeat when rapped in Tamil; what you see here is the tragedy of translation while the central character makes a transition.

  Seated, saluted, and having sipped the customary filter coffee, he begins business without further ado. Out of a compelling need to hear his own voice, and also because of the curiosity of the other landlords to learn the precise tenor of a bachelor baritone which commands and controls the entire district, Gopalakrishna Naidu is the first to address the Emergency Executive Committee Meeting of the Paddy Producers Association. Reality competes with cinematic representation when he takes control of the floor: his audience looks keen; his speech stings; and his body, anaesthetized by this power-trip, appears motionless below the shoulders. He begins a rapid-fire round of attack.