The Gypsy Goddess Read Free Page A

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 walkedtwo 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 thanBlacks. 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