The Gypsy Goddess (2 page)

Although the Communist leaders and the gullible workers who follow them have trespassed on our lands, illegally harvested our crops and caused us immense suffering, we, as the members of the Paddy Producers Association, are committed to a policy of staunch non-violent opposition. To protect ourselves from such routine blackmail and misguided attacks in the future, it has become incumbent upon this petitioner to appeal to your Honourable Self to deliver justice. East Tanjore district is in dire need of protection in order to sustain its honour and tradition of being the granary and rice bowl of the entire
land. If the Communists are allowed a free rein, famine is imminent, and it will prove to be calamitous to the people.

In your exemplary book,
Thee Paravattum
, your Honourable Self has written about the fire of reason destroying the dogma of superstitions. Now the time has come to destroy the dogma of communism that has divided the people into classes and set them against each other. If left unchecked, these weeds in our society will choke the hope of any future harvest.

It is respectfully prayed that as the Honourable Chief Minister, Your Excellency shall interfere in this grave matter at the earliest and take necessary steps to restore the lost confidence of the terror-stricken landowners who are living in a constant state of fear, and thereby liberate Nagapattinam from the clutches of Communists in order to prevent violence and bloodshed.

I have the honour of being, Sir,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

Date: 1st May 1968
Station: Irinjiyur

GOPALAKRISHNA NAIDU
President

part one

BACKGROUND

1.
Notes on Storytelling

It is difficult to write a novel living in a land where despotic bards ensured that for more than a thousand years, literature existed only in the form of poetry – alliteration under the armpit, algebra around the rhyming feet. Meter was all that mattered. But every language put forth its own share of Bacons and banyans and so, Tamil prose was born. A child actor, it made an odd public appearance here and there, every now and then, but the absence of reality TV in those times made a recluse out of this little rebel, who soon refused to speak or sing, and instead opted for solitary confinement. Years later, the first signs of a moustache and breasts began to show, hair sprouted in downward spirals, and prose attained puberty without much fanfare. Riddled with teenage angst and burdened with an androgynous voice, it did not take long for this youngster to realize that poetry could never be replaced. Emerging from a bat-ridden library, the self-sentenced one broke into the system deviously, under the pretext of praise. Copious
critical notes of the works of the afore-referred tyrannical poets came to be written, and, what's worse, read. Poetry was the multiversal megastar; prose began its humble career as a dubious philological commentator. Betrayal and backstabbing belonged to another day, close at hand but hidden away. Centuries later, dedestructionists would study this phenomenon and tweet their findings – Poetry: fucked up by flattery and falsehood; Prose: proved talk is not cheap, turned purple, never got rid of its inclination to comment.

Back to this novel: Tamil in taste, English on the tongue, free of all poetry and prosody, dished out in dandy prose. Forgive this text its nagging tendency to try and explain, its disposition to tag its opinion at every turn of phrase. Please understand that staying verbose is a part of the process of prose. And also, please kindly understand that such underselling is clear evidence of my commitment to a supreme mission of self-sabotage.

Now, allow me an auspicious start.
Amen
and
Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim
. And so on and so forth. And, six times for the sacred sake of my mother-sexed tongue,
Murugamurugamurugamurugamurugamuruga
.

Once upon a time, in one tiny village, there lived an old woman
.

Writing in the summer of the Spring Revolution, I anticipate everybody to be let down by an opening line that does not contain one oblique reference to a grenade, or a crusade, or even the underplayed and taboofied favourite, genocide. Homemade as slave trade and clichéd as conveyed, this beginning is meant to disappoint and devalue the great importance placed on grand entrances.

A first-generation woman novelist evidently working in a second language from that third-world country, literary critics may pooh-pooh and pin me down with prize-orange tartness after reading such a tame line, and prepare to expect nothing more than a domestic dramatic-traumatic tale. Let them jest in peace.

Once upon a time, in another tiny village, there lived another old woman
.

This transplantation falls flat on its face, the fatal forehead first. Such a strategic shift of location and the introduction of a new population seems to have no effect on anybody's perception of a story. My Facebook fans, who have flocked around me in eager expectation of the clinching first
line, have already deserted me. My family seems ready to disown me, friends prepare to fly away, and former lovers disappear. It dawns on me that readers have no patience for over-familiar tales or shared experiences. And how can I go ahead with the story when the first line itself has not instantly received a hundred thousand Likes?

Most people are tired of history, and also tired of history repeating itself, so I am constrained to try a new way to chart and plot my way past their boredom. Since fiction is all about reaching out to an anonymous audience, I shall try and drown my story in non-specificities for the first thousand and eight narrations.

Once upon some time, in some village of some size, there lived an old woman
.

English, with its expertise of having administered the world, requires more efficiency. Not these breaks and starts. Perhaps the first line should frame the conflict and grip the reader with the revelation that this old woman eventually loses her extended family during a massacre. Or perhaps the first line should not bother about one old woman, and, instead, it should reflect on a universal issue: untouchability or class struggle. Or perhaps the first line should not concern itself with character or conflict, and instead
talk about the land that fed the world but forgot to feed all of her own people.

From what I have heard, place is always a good place to start. Nagapattinam, the theatre of the Old Woman's teary, fiery story. Tharangambadi, the village of her birth, land of the singing waves. Kilvenmani, the village into which she married, the village that married itself to communism. To handle that kind of an overloaded opener, I need to dig up a lot of history.

It is common knowledge that no land would ever be found interesting until a white man arrived, befriended some locals, tried the regional cuisine, asked a lot of impertinent questions, took copious notes in his Moleskine notebook and then went back home and wrote something about it.

Ptolemy – part ethnic Greek, part Hellenized Egyptian – like other white men of dubious descent, took great pride in his knowledge of far-flung places, and, succumbing to the pressures of the publication industry and his own mounting bills, set out to write a Lonely Planet guidebook, in which he made a passing, one-off reference to a Tamil port-city called Nigamos. Hurtled into history in this desperate fashion, Nagapattinam would patiently wait until a Tamil woman came along and decided to write a half-decent novel set in its surroundings.

Between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, Nagapattinam went from the very white hands of the Portuguese to the Dutch to the British. Even as she dallied with any of these varieties and every other walk-in
vellaikkaaran
, she kept intact her liaisons with the Arabs and the Chinese. Everyone stole her rice, and left religion as a souvenir. She lived with their gods, like old women often do. And because she managed to sink into their stories and make them her own, she rose above the other towns, metamorphosing from a sleepy port into a self-contained pilgrimage circuit.

In this land abounding in legends, one temple promises that God will be the Ender of Death; at Sikkal, Murugan receives the spear from his mother before he sets out to battle oppressive demons; bathing at a temple pond in Thirunallaru saves anybody from Saturn's seven-and-a-half-year itch. Religion reverses its role of divisive troublemaker: everybody flocks to the Nagore Sufi
dargah
; everybody with a desperate prayer walks on their knees to Our Lady of Velankanni. There is no accounting for taste, either: here, the usually bloodthirsty Kali is sated with
sakkarai pongal
, a sweet feast of rice cooked in jaggery, while the locals, a little distance away, will show you the exact place where the Buddha came with his lamp and sat under a tree and disappeared. Even St Anthony, who specializes in finding lost objects, came floating into their midst during a flood. Famed for its large chariot and its
buxom
devadasis
, the temple at Tiruvarur once ensured that both gods and men are assured of a good ride. Then there's the temple for the pubescent Neelayadakshi, the only Tamil goddess with blue eyes. Clearly, some in the steady stream of visiting white men had spilled their seed.