Between the Assassinations

DAY SEVEN: SALTMARKETVILLAGE

If you want a servant you can trust, a cook who won’t steal sugar, a driver who doesn’t drink, you go to Salt Market Village. Although it has formed part of Kittur Corporation since 1988, Salt Market remains largely rural and much poorer than the rest of the town.

If you visit in April or May, you must stay to watch the local festival known as the “rat hunt”-a nocturnal ritual in which the women of the suburb march through the rice fields bearing burning torches in one hand as they pound the earth with hockey sticks or cricket bats in the other hand, shouting all the time at the tops of their voices. Rats, mongooses, and shrews, terrified by the noise, run into the center of the field, where the women pound the encircled rodents to death.

The only tourist attraction of Salt Market Village is an abandoned Jain basadi, where early Kannada epics were written by the poets Harihara and Raghuveera. In 1990, a portion of the Jain basadi was acquired by the Mormon Church of Utah, USA, and turned into an office for its evangelists.

MURALI, WAITING IN the pantry for the tea to boil, took a step to his right and peeped through the doorway.

Comrade Thimma, who was sitting beneath the framed Soviet poster, had begun to grill the old woman.

“Do you understand the exact nature of the doctrinal dif ferences between the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist)?”

Of course she doesn’t know, Murali thought, stepping back into the pantry and switching off the kettle.

No one on earth did.

He put his hand into a tin box full of sugar biscuits. A moment later, he was out in the reception area with a tray holding three cups of tea and a sugar biscuit next to each cup.

Comrade Thimma was looking up at the wall opposite him, where it was pierced by a grilled window. The evening light illuminated the grille; a block of light glowed on the floor, like the tail of an incandescent bird perched in the grille.

The comrade’s manner strongly suggested that the old woman, considering her state of complete doctrinal ignorance, was unworthy to receive assistance from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist), Kittur branch.

The woman was frail and haggard; her husband had hanged himself two weeks ago from the ceiling of their house.

Murali placed the first cup before Comrade Thimma, who picked it up and sipped the tea. This improved his mood.

Once again looking high up at the glowing grille, the comrade said, “I will have to tell you of our dialectics; if you find them acceptable, we can talk about help.”

The farmer’s wife nodded, as if the word “dialectics,” in English, made perfect sense to her.

Without taking his eyes from the grille, the comrade bit into one of the sugar biscuits; the crumbs fell around his chin, and Murali, after handing the old woman her tea, went back to the comrade and wiped the crumbs off with his fingers.

The comrade had small, sparkling eyes, and a tendency to look high up, and far away, as he delivered his words of wis dom, which he always did with a feeling of suppressed excitement. This gave him the air of a prophet. Murali, as prophets’ sidekicks often are, was physically the superior specimen: taller, broader, with a large and heavily creased forehead and a kind smile.

“Give the lady our brochure on dialectics,” the comrade said, speaking straight to the grille.

Murali nodded, and moved purposefully toward one of the cupboards. The reception area of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) was furnished with an old tea-stained table, a few decrepit cupboards, and a desk for the secretary-general, behind which hung a giant poster from the early days of the Soviet Revolution, depicting a group of proletarian heroes climbing a ladder up into heaven. The workers bore mallets and sledgehammers, while a group of Oriental gods cowered at their advance. After digging into two of the cupboards, Murali found a pamphlet with a big red star on the cover. He brushed it with a corner of his shirt and brought it to the old woman.

“She can’t read.”

The soft voice came from the woman’s daughter, who was sitting in the chair next to her, holding on to her teacup and untouched sugar biscuit. After a moment’s hesitation Murali let the daughter have the brochure; keeping the teacup in her left hand, she held the pamphlet between two fingers of her right, as if it were a soiled handkerchief.

The comrade smiled at the window grille; it was not clear if he was reacting to the events of the past few minutes. He was a thin, bald, dark-skinned man with sunken cheeks and gleaming eyes.

“In the beginning we had only one party in India, and it was the true party. It made no compromise. But then the lead ers of this true party were seduced by the lure of bourgeois democracy; they decided to contest elections. That was their first mistake and the fatal one. Soon the one true party had split. New branches emerged, trying to restore the original spirit. But they too became corrupted.”

Murali wiped the cupboard shelves, and tried to realign the loose hinge of its door as well as he could. He was not a peon; there was no peon, as Comrade Thimma would not allow the exploitative hiring of proletarian labor. Murali was certainly not proletarian-he was the scion of an influential landowning Brahmin family-so it was okay for him to perform all kinds of menial work.

The comrade took a deep breath, took off his glasses, and rubbed them clean with a corner of his white cotton shirt.

“We alone have kept the faith-we, the members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist). We alone remain true to the dialectics. And do you know what the strength of our membership is?”

He put his glasses back on and inhaled with satisfaction.

“Two. Murali and me.”

He gazed at the grille with a wan smile. He appeared to be done; so the old woman placed her hands on her daughter’s head and said, “She is unmarried, sir. We are begging of you some money to marry her off, that is all.”

Thimma turned to the daughter and stared; the girl looked at the ground. Murali winced. I wish he’d have more delicacy sometimes, he thought.

“We have no support,” the old woman said. “My family won’t even talk to me. Members of our own caste won’t-”

The comrade slapped his thigh with his palm.

“This caste question is only a manifestation of the class struggle: Mazumdar and Shukla definitively established this in 1938. I refuse to accept the category of ‘caste’ in our discussions.”

The woman looked at Murali. He nodded his head, as if to say, Go on.

“My husband said the Communists were the only ones who cared about people like us. He said that if the Communists ruled the earth there would be no hardships for the poor, sir.”

This seemed to mollify the comrade. He looked at the woman and the girl for a moment, and then sniffed. His fingers seemed to lack something. Murali understood. As he went to the pantry to boil another cup of tea, he heard the comrade’s voice continue behind him:

“The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) is not the party of the poor-it is the party of the proletariat. This distinction has to be understood before we discuss assistance or resistance.”

After turning the kettle on once more, Murali was about to toss the tea leaves in; then he wondered why the daughter had not touched her tea. He was seized by the suspicion that he had put too much tea into the kettle-and that the way he had been making tea for nearly twenty-five years might have been wrong.

Murali got off the number 67C bus at the Salt Market Village stop and walked down the main road, picking his way through a bed of muck while hogs sniffed the earth around him. He kept his umbrella up on his shoulder, like a wrestler keeps his mace, so that its metal point wouldn’t be sullied by the muck. Asking a group of boys playing a game of marbles in the middle of the village road for directions, he found the house: a surprisingly large and imposing structure, with rocks placed on the corrugated tin roof to stabilize it during the rains.

He unlatched the gate and went in.

A hand-spun cotton shirt hung on a hook on the wall next to the door; the dead man’s, he assumed. As if the fellow were still inside taking a nap and would come outside and put it on to greet his visitor.

At least a dozen framed multicolored images of gods had been affixed to the front wall along with one of a potbellied local guru with an enormous nimbus affixed to his head. There was a bare cot, its fibers fraying, for visitors to sit down on.

Murali left his sandals outside, and wondered if he should knock on the door. Too intrusive for a place like this-where death had just entered-so he decided to wait until someone came out.

Two white cows were sitting in the compound of the house. The bells around their necks tinkled during their rare movements. Lying in front of them was a puddle of water in which straw had been soaked to make a gruel. A black buffalo, snippets of fresh green all over its moist nose, stood gazing at the opposite wall of the compound, chewing at a sackful of grass that had been emptied on the ground in front of it. Murali thought, These animals have no concern in the world. Even in the house of a man who has killed himself, they are still fed and fattened. How effortlessly they rule over the men of this village, as if human civilization has confused masters and servants. Murali was transfixed. His eyes lingered on the fat body of the beast, its bulging belly, its glossy skin. He smelled its shit, which had caked on its backside; it had been squatting in puddles of its own waste.

Murali had not been to Salt Market Village in decades. The previous time was twenty-five years ago, when he had come searching for visual details to enrich a short story on rural poverty that he was writing. Not much had changed in a quarter century; only the buffaloes had grown fat.

“Why didn’t you knock on the door?”

The old woman emerged from the backyard; she walked around him with a big smile and went into the house and shouted, “Hey, you! Get some tea!”

In a moment the girl came out with a tumbler of tea, which Murali took, touching her wet fingers as he did so.

The tea, after his long journey, felt like heaven. He had never mastered the art of making tea, even though he had been boiling it for Thimma for nearly twenty-five years now. Maybe it was one of those things that only women can truly do, he thought.

“What do you need from us?” the old woman asked. Her manner had become more servile; as if she had guessed the purpose of his visit only now.

“To find out if you are telling the truth,” he replied calmly.

She summoned the neighbors so he could interview them. They squatted around the cot; he insisted that they sit on the same level as him but they remained where they were.

“Where did he hang himself?”

“Right here, sir!” said one old villager with broken, paan-stained teeth.

“What do you mean, right here?”

The old man pointed to the beam of the roof. Murali could not believe it: in full public view, he had killed himself? So the cows had seen it; and the fat buffalo too.

He heard about the man whose shirt still hung from the hook. The failure of his crops. The loan from the moneylender. At three percent per month, compounded.

“He was ruined by the first daughter’s wedding. And he knew he had one more to marry off-this girl.”

The daughter had been lingering in a corner of the front yard the whole time. He saw her turn her face away in slow agony.

As he was leaving, one of the villagers came running after him: “Sir…sir…I mean, an aunt of mine committed suicide two years ago…I mean, just a year ago, sir, and she was virtually a mother to me…can the Communist Party…”

Murali seized the man’s arm and pressed his fingers deeply into the flesh. He peered into the man’s eyes:

“What is the name of the daughter?”

Slowly he walked back to the bus station. He let the tip of his umbrella trail in the earth. The horror of the dead man’s story, the sight of the fat buffalo, the pain-stricken face of that beautiful daughter-these details kept churning in his mind.

He thought back twenty-five years, when he had come to this village with his notebook and his dreams of becoming an Indian Maupassant. As he walked down the twisting streets, crowded with street children playing their violent games, fatigued day laborers sleeping in the shade, and with thick, still, glistening pools of effluent, he was reminded of that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy that is the nature of every Indian village-and the simultaneous desire to admire and to castigate that had been inspired in him from the time of his first visits.

He felt the need, as he had before, to take notes.

Back then, he had visited Salt Market Village every day for a week, jotting down painstakingly detailed descriptions of farmers, roosters, bulls, pigs, piglets, sewage, children’s games, religious festivals, intending to juggle them into a series of short stories that he crafted in the reading room of the municipal library at night. He had not been sure if the party would approve of his stories, so he sent a bundle of them under a nom de plume-“The Seeker of Justice”-to the editor of a weekly magazine in Mysore.

After a week, he received a postcard from the editor, summoning him from Kittur for a meeting. He took the train to Mysore and waited half a day for the editor to call him into his office.

“Ah, yes…the young genius from Kittur.” The editor searched his table for his glasses, and pulled the folded bundle of Murali’s stories from their envelope, while the young author’s heart beat violently.

“I wanted to see you…”-the editor let the stories fall on the table-“because there is talent in your writing. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike ninety percent of our writers.”

Murali glowed. It was the first time anyone had mentioned the word “talent” when speaking of him.

Picking up one of the stories, the editor silently scanned the pages.

“Who is your favorite author?” he asked, biting at a corner of his glasses.

“Guy de Maupassant.”

Murali corrected himself: “After Karl Marx.”

“Let’s stick to literature,” the editor retorted. “Every character in Maupassant is like this…”-he bent his index finger and wiggled it-“he wants, and wants, and wants. To the last day of his life he wants. Money. Women. Fame. More women. More money. More fame. Your characters”-he unbent his finger-“want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through accurately described village settings and have deep thoughts. They walk around the cows and trees and roosters and think, and then walk around the roosters and trees and cows and think some more. That’s it.”

“They do have thoughts of changing the world for the better…” Murali protested. “They desire a better society.”

“They want nothing!” the editor shouted. “I can’t print stories of people who want nothing!”

He threw the bundle of stories back at Murali. “When you find people who want something, come back to me!”

Murali had never rewritten those stories. Now, as he waited for the bus to take him back to Kittur, he wondered if that bundle of stories was still somewhere in his house.

When Murali got off the bus and walked back to the office, he found Comrade Thimma with a foreigner. It was not unusual for there to be strangers in the office: lean, fatigued men with paranoid eyes who were on the run from nearby states going through one of their routine purges of radical Communists. In those places radical Communism was a real threat to the state. The fugitives would sleep and take tea at the office for a few weeks, until things cooled down and they could return home.

But this man was not one of those hunted ones; he had blond hair and an awkward European accent.

He sat next to Thimma, and the comrade was pouring his heart out, as he gazed at the distant light in the grille up on the wall. Murali sat down and listened to him for half an hour. He was magnificent. Trotsky had not been forgiven, nor had Bernstein been forgotten. Thimma was trying to show the European that even in a small town like Kittur men were up to date with the theory of dialectics.

The foreigner had nodded a lot and written everything down. At the end, he capped his ballpoint pen and observed:

“I find that the Communists have virtually no presence in Kittur.”

Thimma slapped his thigh. He glared at the grille. The socialists had had too much influence in this part of South India, he said. The question of feudalism in the countryside had been solved; big estates had been broken up and distributed among peasants.

“That man Devraj Urs-when he was leader of the Congress-created some kind of revolution here.” Thimma sighed. “Just a pseudorevolution, naturally. The falsehood of Bernstein once again.”

Murali’s own land had been subjected to the socialist policies of the Congress government. His father had lost his land; in return, the government had allocated compensation. His father went to the municipal office to receive his compensation, but he found that someone, some bureaucrat, had forged his signature and run away with his money. When Murali heard this, he had thought, My old man deserves this. I deserve this. For all that we have done to the poor, this is fit retribution. He realized, of course, that his family’s compensation had not been stolen by the poor, but by some corrupt civil servant. Nevertheless this was justice of a kind.

Murali went about his regular end-of-day tasks. First he swept the pantry. As he reached with his broom under the sink, he heard the foreigner say:

“I think the problem with Marx is that he assumes human beings are too…decent. He rejects the idea of original sin. And maybe that is why Communism is dying everywhere now. The Berlin Wall-”

Murali crawled under the sink to reach the hard-to-reach places; Thimma’s voice resonated oddly in the enclosed space beneath the sink:

“You have completely misunderstood the dialectical process!”

He paused, and waited under the sink for Comrade Thimma to come up with a better response.

He swept the floor, closed the cupboards, turned off the unwanted lights to save on the electricity bill, tightened the taps to save on the water bill, and went to the bus station to wait for the number 56B to take him home.

Home. A blue door, one fluorescent lamp, three naked electric bulbs, ten thousand books. The books were everywhere: waiting for him like faithful pets to either side of the door when he walked in, coated in dust on the dinner table, stacked against the old walls as though to buttress the structure of the house. They had taken all the best space in the house, and had left him a little rectangular area for his cot.

He opened the bundle that he had brought home with him:

“Is Gorbachev straying from the True Path? Notes by Thimma swami, BA (Kittur), MA (Mysore), secretary-general, Kittur regional politburo, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist).”

He would add them to the notes he was collecting on Thimma’s thoughts. The idea was to publish them one day, and hand them out to the workers as they left their factories.

This evening, Murali could not write for long; the mosquitoes bit him and he swatted them. He lit a coil to keep the mosquitoes away. Even then he could not write; and then he realized it was not the mosquitoes that were disturbing him.

The way she had averted her face. He would have to do something for her.

What was her name? Ah, yes. Sulochana.

He began to rummage in the mess around his bed, until he found the old collection of short stories that he had written all those years ago. He blew the dust off the pages and began to read.

The photograph of the dead man hung on the wall, beside the portraits of the gods who had failed to save him. The guru with the big belly, perhaps taking all the blame, had now been dismissed.

Murali stood at the door, waited, and knocked slowly.

“They’re working in the fields,” the old neighbor with the broken red teeth shouted.

The cows and the buffalo were missing from the courtyard; sold for cash, no doubt. Murali thought it was appalling. That girl, with her noble looks, working in the fields like a common laborer?

I’ve come just in time, he thought.

“Run and get them!” he shouted at the neighbor. “At once!”

The state government had a scheme to compensate the widows of farmers who had killed themselves under duress, Murali explained to the widow, making her sit down on the cot. It was one of those well-intentioned rural-improvement schemes that never reached anyone, because no one knew about it-until people from the city, like Murali, told them about it.

The widow was leaner, and sunburned; she sat there wiping her hands constantly against the back of her sari; she was ashamed of the dirt on them.

Sulochana brought out the tea. He was amazed that this girl, who had been working out in the fields, had still found time to make him tea.

When he took the cup from her, touching her fingers, he quickly admired her features. Having just come from a day’s hard labor in the fields, she was still beautiful-in fact, more beautiful than ever before. There was that simple, unpainted elegance to her face. None of the makeup, lipstick, or false eyebrows you see in cities these days.

How old was she? he wondered.

“Sir…” The old woman folded her hands. “Will the money really come?”

“If you sign here,” he said. “And here. And here.”

The old lady held the pen and grinned idiotically.

“She can’t write,” Sulochana said; so he placed the letter on his thigh and he signed for her.

He explained that he had brought another letter-one to be delivered to the central police station near the Lighthouse Hill, demanding prosecution of the moneylender for his role in instigating the man’s death through usury. He wanted the old woman to sign that too, but she joined her palms together and bowed to him.

“Please, sir, don’t do that. Please. We don’t want any trouble.”

Sulochana stood by the wall, looking down, silently reinforcing her mother’s plea.

He tore up the letter. As he did so, he realized that he was now the arbiter over this family’s fate; he was the patriarch here.

“And her marriage?” he said, indicating the girl leaning against the wall.

“Who will marry this one? And what am I to do?” the old woman wailed as the girl retreated into the dark of the house.

It was on the way back to the bus station that the idea came to him.

He pressed the metal tip of his umbrella to the ground, and trailed a long, continuous line through the mud.

And then he thought, Why not?

She had no other hope, after all…

He boarded the bus. He was still a bachelor, at fifty-five. After his time in jail his family had disowned him, and none of his aunts or uncles had tried to fix an arranged marriage for him. Somehow, in the midst of distributing pamphlets and spreading the word to the proletariat and collecting Comrade Thimma’s speeches, he had never found time to marry himself off. He had not had any great desire to do so either.

Lying in bed, he thought, But this is nowhere for a girl to live. It is a filthy house, filled with old editions-books by veterans of the Communist Party and nineteenth century French and Russian short story writers-that no one reads anymore.

He had not realized how badly he had been living all these years. But things would change; he felt a great hope. If she came into his life everything could be different. He lay down on his cot and stared at the ceiling fan. It was switched off; he rarely turned it on, except in the most oppressive summer heat, so that he wouldn’t increase the electricity bill.

All his life he had been dogged by a restlessness, a feeling that he was meant for some greater endeavor than could be found in a small town. After Murali’s law degree from Madras, his father had expected him to take over his law practice. Instead, Murali had been drawn to politics; he had begun attending Congress Party meetings in Madras, and continued doing so in Kittur. He took to wearing a Nehru cap and keeping a photo of Gandhi on his desk. His father noticed. One day there was a confrontation, and shouting, and Murali had left his father’s house and joined the Congress Party as a full-time member. He knew what he wanted to do with his life already: there was an enemy to overcome. The old, bad India of caste and class privilege-the India of child marriage, of ill-treated widows, of exploited subalterns-it had to be overthrown. When the state elections came, he campaigned with all his heart for the Congress candidate, a young lower-caste man named Anand Kumar.

After Anand Kumar won, he saw two of his fellow Congress workers sitting outside the party office every morning. He saw men approach them with letters addressed to the candidate; they took the letters, and a dozen rupees from each supplicant.

Murali threatened to report them to Kumar. The two men turned grave. They stepped aside and invited Murali to go right in.

“Please complain at once,” they said.

As he went and knocked on Kumar’s door, he heard laughter behind him.

Murali joined the Communists next, having heard that they were incorruptible. The larger factions of the Communists turned out to be just as rotten as the Congress; so he changed his membership from one Communist Party to the other, until one day he entered a dim office and saw, beneath the giant poster of heroic proletarians climbing up to heaven to knock out the gods of the past, the small dark figure of Comrade Thimma. At last-an incorruptible. Back then the party had seventeen member-volunteers; they ran women’s education programs, population control campaigns, and proletarian radicalization drives. With a group of volunteers, he went to the sweatshops near the Bunder, distributing pamphlets with the message of Marx and the benefits of sterilization. As the membership of the party dwindled, he found himself going alone; it made no difference to him. The cause was a good one. He was never strident like the workers from the other Communist Parties; quietly, and with great perseverance, he stood by the side of the road, holding out pamphlets to the workers and repeating the message that so few of them ever took to heart:

“Don’t you want to find out how to live a better life, brothers?”

He thought that his writing too would contribute to that cause-although he was honest enough to admit that perhaps only his vanity made him think so. The word “talent” was now lodged in his mind, and that gave him hope; but even as he was wondering how to improve his writing, he was sent to jail.

The police came for Comrade Thimma one day. This was during the Emergency.

“You are right to arrest me,” Thimma had said, “as I freely and openly support all attempts to overthrow the bourgeois government of India.”

Murali asked the policemen, “Would you mind arresting me as well?”

Jail had been a happy time for him. He washed Thimma’s clothes and hung them out to dry in the mornings. He had hoped all the free time in jail would concentrate his mind and help him reshape his fiction, but he had no time for that. In the evenings, he took notes as Thimma dictated. Thimma’s responses to the great questions of Marxism. The apostasy of Bernstein. The challenge of Trotsky. A justification for Kronstadt.

He collected the responses faithfully; then he pulled a blanket over Thimma’s face, leaving his toes out in the cool air.

He shaved him in the morning, as Thimma thundered to the mirror about Khrushchev’s defiling of the legacy of Comrade Stalin.

It was the happiest period of his life. But then he had been released.

With a sigh, Murali rose from his bed. He paced around the dark house, looking at the mess of the books, at the decaying editions of Gorky and Turgenev, and saying to himself, again and again, What do I have to show for my life? Just this broken-down house…

Then he saw the face of the girl again, and his whole body lit up with hope and joy. He took out his bundle of short stories and read them again. With a red-ink pen he began to delete details of his characters, quickening their motives, their impulses.

It came to Murali one morning, on his way to Salt Market Village: They’re avoiding me. Both mother and daughter.

Then he thought, No, not Sulochana-it’s only the old woman who’s gone cold.

For two months now, he had been catching the bus to Salt Market Village on a variety of fictitious premises, only to see Sulochana’s face again, only to touch her fingers when she brought him his cup of scalding-hot tea.

He had tried to put it to the old lady that they should marry-hints could be delivered, and the topic would insinuate itself into the woman’s mind. That had been his hope. Then, purely out of social responsibility, he would agree, despite his advanced age, to marry her.

But the old lady had never divined his desire.

“Your daughter is excellent in the household,” he had said once, thinking that enough of a hint.

The following day, when he arrived, a strange young girl came out to meet him. The widow had moved up in life; she had now hired a servant.

“Is Madam in?” he asked. The servant nodded.

“Will you go get her?”

A minute passed. He thought he heard the sound of voices behind the door; then the servant came out and said, “No.”

“No, what?”

She turned her gaze toward the house again. “They…are not here. No.”

“And Sulochana? Is she in?”

The servant girl shook her head.

Why shouldn’t they avoid me? he thought, trailing his umbrella on the ground as he returned to the bus station. He had done his work for them; he was not needed anymore. This was how people in the real world behaved. Why should he be hurt?

In the evening, pacing around his gloomy home, he felt he had to agree with the old woman’s judgment: surely this was no fit habitation for a young girl like Sulochana. How could he bring a woman into it?

Yet the next day he was back on the bus to Salt Market Village, where, once again, the servant girl told him that no one was home.

On the way back, he rested his head against the grille and thought, The more they snub me, the more I want to fall down before that girl and propose marriage.

At home he tried writing a letter. “Dear Sulochana: I have been searching for a way to tell you. There is so much to say…”

He went back every day for a week, and was refused entry every day. I will never come back, he promised himself on the seventh evening, as he had for six evenings before. I really will never come back. This is disgraceful behavior. I am exploiting these people. But he was also angry with the old woman and Sulochana for treating him like this.

On the journey home, he stood up and shouted to the conductor, “Stop!” He had remembered, out of the blue, a story he had written twenty-five years ago, about a matchmaker who worked in the village.

He asked the children playing marbles for the matchmaker; they directed him to the shopkeepers. It took an hour and a half to find the house.

The matchmaker was an old, half-blind man sitting in a chair smoking a hookah; his wife brought a chair for the Communist to sit in.

Murali cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles. He wondered what to say, what to do. The hero in his story had walked around the matchmaker’s house and then left; he had never come this far.

“There is a friend of mine who wishes to marry that girl. Sulochana.”

“The daughter of the fellow who…” The matchmaker pantomimed a hanging.

Murali nodded.

“Your friend is too late, sir. She has money now, and so she has a hundred offers,” the matchmaker said. “That is the way of life.”

“But…my friend…my friend has set his heart on her…”

“Who is this friend?” the matchmaker asked, and with a dirty, omniscient gleam in his eyes.

He caught the bus in the mornings, as soon as his work was over at the party office, and waited for her at the market. She came in the evenings to buy vegetables. He would follow her slowly. He looked at the bananas, at the mangoes. He had been buying fruit for Comrade Thimma for decades. He was expert at so many women’s tasks; his heart skipped a beat when he saw her choose an overripe mango; when the vendor tricked her, he wanted to run over and yell at him and protect her from his avarice.

In the evenings, he stood waiting for the bus back to Kittur. He observed the way people lived in villages. He saw a boy cycling furiously, a block of ice strapped to the back of his bicycle. He had to make it in time before the ice melted; it was already half gone, and he had no aim in life but to deliver the rest of the ice in time. A man came with bananas in a plastic bag and looked around; there were large black spots on the bananas already, and he had to sell them before they rotted. All these people sent Murali a message. To want things in life, they were saying, is to recognize that time is limited.

He was fifty-five years old.

He did not take the bus back that evening; instead, he walked to the house. Rather than approach the front door, he went around to the back. Sulochana was winnowing rice; she looked at her mother and went inside.

The servant went in to bring a chair, but the old woman said, “Don’t.

“Look here; you want to marry my daughter?” she asked.

So she had found out. It was always like this; you make an effort to conceal desire and then it is out in the open. The greatest fallacy: that you can hide from others what you want from them.

He nodded, avoiding her eyes.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Fifty.”

“Can you give her children at your age?”

He tried to respond.

The old woman said:

“Why would we want to get you into our family, in any case? My late husband always told me, Communists are trouble.”

His jaw dropped. Was this the same husband who had praised the Communists? Had this woman just made all that up?

Murali understood now; her husband had said nothing about the Communists. In their wanting they became so cunning, these people!

He said, “I bring many advantages to your family. I am a Brahmin by birth; a graduate of-”

“Look here!” The widow got up. “Please leave-or there will be trouble.”

Why not? Maybe I can’t give her children, at my age, but I can make her happy, certainly, he thought, on the bus back home. We can read Maupassant together.

He was an educated man, a graduate of the Madras University; this was no way to treat him. Tears flooded his eyes.

He sought out books of fiction and poetry, but it was the words of a film song he had heard on the bus that seemed to express his feelings best. So this is why the proletariat go to the cinema, he thought. He bought a ticket himself.

“How many?”

“One.”

The ticket seller grinned. “Don’t you have any friends, old man?”

After the movie, Murali wrote a letter, and posted it to her.

The next morning he woke up wondering if she would ever read it. Even if it reached the house, wouldn’t her mother throw it away? He should have hand-delivered it!

It was not enough to make an honest attempt. That was enough for Marx and Gandhi-to have tried. But not for the real world, in which he suddenly found himself.

After considering the matter for an hour, he wrote the letter again. This time he paid an urchin three rupees to deliver the message into the girl’s hands.

“She knows you come here to look for her,” the vegetable seller said, the next time he came to the market. “You’ve scared her away.”

She is avoiding me-his heart felt a pang. Now he understood so many more film songs. This is what they meant, the humiliation of being avoided by a girl you have come a long way to see…

He thought the vegetable sellers were all laughing at him.

Even ten years ago-in his forties-there would have been nothing unseemly about approaching such a girl, he thought, as he headed home. Now he was a dirty old man; he had become the stock figure whom he had worked into several of his stories-the lecherous old Brahmin, preying on an innocent girl of a lower caste.

But those fellows were just caricatures, class villains; now he could flesh them out so much better. When he climbed into bed that night, he took a piece of paper and wrote:

“Some thoughts that a lecherous old Brahmin might actually have.”

Now I know enough, Murali thought, looking at the words he had written. I can become a writer at last.

The next morning order and reason returned. There was the comb on his hair, the breathing exercises before the mirror, the slow steady gait out the front door, the business of cleaning the party headquarters and making tea for Thimma.

But by afternoon he was on the bus to Salt Market Village again.

He waited for her to come to the market, and then walked behind her, examining potatoes and brinjals and stealing glances at her. All the time he could see the vendors mocking him: Dirty old man, dirty old man. He thought with regret of a man’s traditional prerogative in India -in the old, bad India -to marry a younger woman.

The next morning, back in the pantry at the party headquarters, boiling tea for Thimma, everything around him seemed dingy and dark and unbearable-the old pots and pans, the filthy spoons, the dirty old tub out of which he scooped sugar for the tea: the embers of a life that had never flared, never flamed.

You’ve been fooled, everything in the room said to him. You’ve wasted your life.

He thought of all his advantages: his education, his sharper wit, his brains, his gift for writing. His “talent”-as that Mysore editor had said.

All of that, he thought as he brought the tea out into the reception area, wasted in the service of Comrade Thimma.

Even Thimma had wasted himself. He had never remarried after his wife’s early death; he had dedicated himself to his life’s goal-uplifting the proletariat of Kittur. Ultimately it was not Marx; it was Gandhi and Nehru who were to blame. Murali was convinced of that. A whole generation of young men, deluded by Gandhianism, wasting their lives running around organizing free eye clinics for the poor and distributing books for rural libraries, instead of seducing those young widows and unmarried girls. That old man in his loincloth had turned them mad. Like Gandhi you had to withhold all your lusts. Even to know what you wanted in life was a sin; desire was bigotry. And look where the country was, after forty years of idealism. A total mess! Maybe if they had all become bastards, the young men of his generation, the place would be like America by now!

That evening he forced himself not to take the bus to the village. He stayed on, cleaning the party headquarters twice over.

No, he thought, as he strained to clean under the sink the second time, it was not a waste! The idealism of young men like him had changed Kittur and the villages around it. Rural poverty was halved, smallpox had been eradicated, public health was a hundred times improved, literacy was up. If Sulochana could read, it was because of volunteers like him, because of those free library projects…

He paused in the darkness under the sink. A voice growled inside him: Fine, she can read-and what does that do for you, you idiot?

He rushed back into the light, into the reception area.

The poster now came to life. The proletarians climbing up to heaven to overturn the gods began to melt and change. He saw them for what they were: a subaltern army of semen, blood, and flesh rebelling inside him. A revolution of the body proletariat, long suppressed, but now becoming articulate, saying, We want!

The Communists were finished. The European visitor had said as much; and all the newspapers were saying the same thing. The Americans had somehow won. Comrade Thimma would talk on and on. But there would soon be nothing to talk about; because Marx had become mute. Dialectics had become dust. So had Gandhi; so had Nehru. Out in the streets of Kittur, the young people were driving brand-new Suzuki cars blaring pop music from the West; they were licking raspberry ice-cream cones with red tongues and wearing shiny metal watches.

He picked up a pamphlet and threw it at the Soviet poster, startling a gecko that had been hiding behind it.

Do you think privilege has no place in Indian life? Do you think a Madras University man-a Brahmin-can be tossed aside so lightly?

In his hand, as the bus rocked, Murali held a letter from the state government of Karnataka that announced that another installment of the money was due to arrive for the widow of the farmer Arasu Deva Gowda, provided she signed. Eight thousand rupees.

Asking for directions, he found the house of the moneylender. He saw it: the biggest construction in the village, with a pink façade and pillars up the front supporting a portico-the house that three percent interest, compounded monthly, had built.

The moneylender, a fat, dark man, was selling grain to a group of farmers; by his side, a fat, dark boy, probably his son, was making a note in a book. Murali stopped to admire it all: the sheer genius of exploitation in India. Sell a farmer your grain. Get rid of your bad stock this way. Then charge him a loan for buying that grain. Make him pay it back at three percent a month. Thirty-six percent a year. No, even more-much more! Compound interest! How diabolical, how brilliant! And to think, Murali smiled, that he had assumed that communists had brains.

When Murali went up to him, the moneylender was sticking his hand deep into the grain; when he brought it out, the chocolate-colored skin was coated with a fine yellow dust, like a bird’s pollen-covered beak.

Without wiping his arm, he took the letter from Murali. Behind him, in an alcove in the wall of his house, sat a giant red statue of the potbellied Ganesha. A fat wife, with fat children around her, was sitting on a charpoy. And from behind them wafted the odor of a feeding, defecating beast: a water buffalo, without doubt.

“Did you know that the government has paid the widow another eight thousand rupees?” Murali told him. “If you have debts outstanding, you should collect them now. She is in a position to pay.”

“Who are you?” the moneylender asked, with small suspicious eyes.

Hesitating for a moment, Murali said, “I am the fifty-five-year-old Communist.”

He wanted them to know. The old woman and Sulochana. They were both in his power now. They had been in his power from the day they had walked into his office.

When he returned to his house, there was a letter from Comrade Thimma under the door. Probably hand-delivered, since there was no one else to deliver anything now.

He tossed it away. He realized, as he did it, that he was casting away for good his membership in the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist). Comrade Thimma, his mouth thirst ing for tea, would deliver lectures alone, in that dim hall, denouncing him. Murali would join Bernstein and Trotsky and the long line of apostates.

At midnight he was still awake. He lay staring at the ceiling fan, whose fast-rotating blades were chopping the light from the halogen streetlamps outside the bedroom into sharp white glints: they showered down on Murali like the first particles of wisdom he had received in his life.

He stared at the brilliant blur of the fan’s blades for a long time; then, with a jerk, he got up from the bed.