The Gypsy Goddess Read Free Page B

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 plantations 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 toTamil Nadu because the prisons in West