(Recap: The writer and the narrator are making their way to Sesha's village to investigate an incident where a landlord's house was burnt down.)
Another song played on my faithful transistor as we were on the bus to Shesha’s village. A music teacher and her wards, on AIR Bangalore, were singing a paean to the new year.
In October.
The announcer, a humourless voice with perfect Kannada diction, didn’t seem bothered by this anachronism. I don’t remember the Kannada lyrics anymore, but I remember the main chorus (in English): the teacher and one section of her wards went “Happy, Happy, Happy New Ye-ear”; another section sang similarly, except, the “Ye-ear” landed on the harmony notes.
“A Kannada song to the Gregorian new year,
in October, with an English chorus and a harmony – sign of new India?”, I asked
the writer, who seemed to be preoccupied.
“Huh?” he said, shaken out of his reverie.
I pointed to the transistor.
“New India?”, he said, “More like the old
woman has lost her marbles … and is now trying to locate them with an electron
microscope.”
I laughed.
“Old woman? How can you tell – she could be
twenty-five, for all you know?”
“This is AIR Bangalore: you have to look a
certain type if you want a spot for you and your wards. And listen to her voice
– it’s got that MS-type quiver.”
I stared out of the window. It was an
unusually cloudy day: we were making our way through thin, winding paths that
bisected forests; the trees seemed to dance around us, the wind brought the
smell of firewood and wet earth; the hills, in the distance, stuck out like
poorly glued-paper to the grey cardboard that was the sky.
We got off to change buses at Narayana, a
prominent temple town back then, now rendered soulless by neo-pilgrims. The
writer and I drank tea and made small talk with the tea-seller. When we told
him we were going to Shadymane, Shesha’s village, a shadow crossed the
tea-seller’s face. He said, quietly: “You may get there, but will you return?”
The writer laughed: “Why do you say that?”
“Things are not so good now. They don’t
like your type.”
The hissing buses sounded oddly ominous.
*
The last mile and a half was to be
travelled on foot, on a narrow path by a river a hundred metres wide. The sun
was out now and it sparkled in the blue waters, like floating television
static. In the distance, a couple of fishermen cast their nets and waited. Time
seemed to give the impression of passing in discrete jumps, standing still
amidst the silence and, then, rushing past at once. Forty minutes of walking
and we were at a hanging bridge, on the other side of which lay Shadymane: a
collection of roofs and trees and walls.
We crossed the bridge to be greeted by
Chinna, Shesha’s uncle. He limped a little, his left foot was ostensibly larger
than his right. His face was a deep shade of red-brown, the colour of freshly
brewed tea. When he smiled, his teeth were stained maroon too. He spoke in
staccato conspiratorial bursts, had a penchant for non-sequiturs and his choice
of suffixes and intonations were unfamiliar.
Chinna guided us to his hamlet, a little
way away from the village centre which we had carefully circumvented. The
hamlet comprised a dozen houses.
His wife Dodda, a burly woman twice his
size – somewhat of an oddity in these parts – beamed at us:
“Hope this idiot did not bore you”, she
said.
Chinna didn’t seem to mind the slur one bit and proceeded to offer us water to wash our feet and quench our thirst. We drank greedily.
“So, I hear you want to meet the perverts”, Dodda said.
“Perverts?”, I asked, looking from her to
the writer, who seemed as taken aback as I was.
“Yes, the perverts of the jungle.”
“Ah, yes – the Naxals.”, the writer
offered.
“Why would you want to meet them?”, she
asked.
“Well, I hear when they are not doing each
other, they do some good too?”, the writer offered.
The joke was lost on both, Dodda and Chinna.
“Do good? Good trouble is all they are.”
“Why would you say that? Shesha said they have helped you settle scores with the landlord.”
“Auna tale”, she said, “That Shesha has gone to the town and now says all these stupid things that you city-folk blindly believe. Our Yajamana is not a bad man – last year, when those beedi-factory fellows didn’t pay us women our wages, it was he who stepped in. The landlord first made sure we got our wages and then publicly berated the beedi-factory owner and drove him away from the village. We are poor folks and all we want is a roof on our heads and food in our bellies … “
“… and birds on our trees?”, Chinna
offered.
I was the only one who seemed to notice that
Chinna had spoken.
The writer offered slowly:
“The beedi-factory fellows, will they come back this year too?”
“Why will they come back? They were given such a resounding send-off that they will never come back. Rascals.”
“Were they ever late in making payments in the past years?”
“They were always on time”, Chinna interjected.
Dodda scowled and asked the writer:
“Why are you obsessed with these beedi-factory people?”
*
The Naxals, of course, disagreed.
In fact, there was only one Naxal who spoke
and she didn’t as much disagree as dismiss.
We met in the night – one so dark that the
twinkling stars put up a spectacle, but not a fight. The silhouette of the
hills loomed ahead of us and we sat on either side of a fire, not in the
neat circle you’d have imagined. On our side, sat the three of us, Chinna, the
writer and I (Dodda had retired early, saying she had no interest in meeting
the perverts). On their side, were the three of them: two scrawny bearded men
on either side of a woman, a shadow thrown across her face; only her fingers,
slender and sensual, played with a pistol. She had a low, bass voice, like a
bar crooner who had smoked too many cigarettes.
When a match struck a beedi that dangled limply from her lower lip, I caught a glimpse of her face
and found my heart skip a beat.
“You see”, she said, speaking in fluent
convent-school English, “the Yajamaana is like this beedi. He makes you
dependent on him and sucks the life out of your lungs.”
“Don’t get me wrong”, she continued, “The beedi factory people are a bunch of
crooks. Never gave these women a fair deal. They made whopping profits – four-hundred-per
cent. But, do you know how much the landlord makes off these people?
Seven-hundred-and-fifty-three per cent. The calculations are all in my notebook.
The landlord makes over seven times the amount of money he puts in. Beedis may
be bad, but tying beedis didn’t break the backs of these women. In fact, it was
almost like we were back in the freedom era -
spinning wheels? same thing – you should have come in the off-season
last year, you’d find all these women, nearly half of them named Gulabi, tying
beedis and making money on the side, enough to buy their children notebooks or
themselves something. Now? All gone! Who sent the beedi factory guys away? The Yajamaana.
Who benefits? The Yajamaana. No more work for women on the side means
they all go back to him for work – and he exploits them. Exploitation, Marx
said, forms the core of feudal existence.”
“Not an exact quote”, the writer whispered to me.
I was honestly amazed Marx didn’t make an
appearance earlier. Or Chairman Mao. Or
Stalin.
I then tentatively brought up the topic of
the landlord’s house being burnt down. To my surprise, one of the men
responded, in a tone of nothingness that went perfectly with his personality:
“We have nothing to do with this.”
As I lay on the charpoy that night, under a
mosquito net that partitioned the sky into tiny jewelled squares – a solitary
firefly drifted past. It floated in a straight line and curved, before
flickering out of sight. I was reminded of the Naxal’s face when I asked about
the landlord’s burnt house: one end of her lips curved slightly, just enough to
suggest she knew.
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