The Gypsy Goddess (5 page)
Authors: Meena Kandasamy
Abandoning is old hat in literature, so this cry for commitment stems from insecurity.
I have been dabbling in the art of abandoning, too. Once, being impressed with the French Anarchist writer Félix Fénéon and his
Novels in Three Lines
, I attempted to
adapt his brilliant, fragmented form to continue to tell my version of the story of the Old Woman in a tiny village. Over the course of considerable time, I was able to write a few tiny excerpts of her history, but I gave up, unable to sustain my momentum. The entire story that I was waiting to tell seemed to lie outside her. Did she have it in her to hold a village together? Could I show everything in these snippets? Riddled with self-doubt, I stopped trying to make my story fit into this form.
It was an interesting experiment while it lasted. Weeks later, I felt my jottings were not good enough to get into the book because the characters had not got into them. Once I realized that becoming a mistress of the compress-and-express form of storytelling was not for me, I played with the idea of moving on. Out of habit, I lingered, toying with these time-release capsules:
One Karuppaayi of Thiruchuli village in the Ramnad district recounts that, during the great famine, she lost her husband and her three little sons. She managed to stay alive eating handfuls of mud. Taking pity on her because of her pregnant condition, a relief worker fed her
congee
every day.
In December 1877, the Gundar River in Ramnad swelled suddenly, breaking her banks in her haste to meet the sea. Karuppaayi went to Tranquebar, finding shelter at the home
of the relief worker who saved her life. Many others were not as lucky â they survived the famine but not the floods â the
Royal Gazetteer
recorded over a thousand deaths in the first week.
Chinnamma of Irukkai died on 15 August 1925 from complications arising out of childbirth. The death, due to septic shock, resulted from the use of an agricultural sickle to cut her umbilical cord. The newborn was handed over to her grandmother, Karuppaayi, a domestic help of Europeans in Tranquebar.
Tranquebar is reeling from the shock of witnessing the sixtieth rape of the last three weeks. Dragged from her grandmother's home at the outskirts of the town, the fourteen-year-old girl heard nothing but her own screams through the night; the landlord-rapists did not stop, nor did they dignify her with a single word. Sources in Nagapattinam confirm that no case was filed.
(Preliminary reports indicate the rape took place on the night of 16 December 1939. The gang-rape victim's name has been withheld for reasons of anonymity. She will be referred to as âShe' in all reports, including in the regular, feel-good stories that we are committed to publishing.)
She went to Sannasi, a wandering witch doctor, the strongest man She saw. Sannasi's priesthood ended when She offered him the wondrous pleasure of her breasts. Before the next summer, they were married and She had given birth to his son.
When the exiled Thayyan, the witch doctor's brother, was found to have crept back to Kilvenmani to steal a look at his one-year-old nephew, he was beaten to death, doused in kerosene and set alight. For concealing information about their brother's visit, Sannasi and Periyaan were whipped mercilessly. Police declared Thayyan's death as an arson-related accident on the landlord Porayar's farm.
On 14 April 1965, untouchables around Keevalur dismantled a temple chariot in protest at not being granted the right to pull it through the streets. Caste-Hindus retaliated by burning the âdefiled' chariot. Sannasi, suspected master-mind of this protest, was abducted the next day, and his body turned up two weeks later in Karaikkal. Police have closed the case as a mysterious death.
To avenge her husband's death, Sannasi's widow stepped out on the Communist Party circuit. Asked to describe her, a comrade in Kilvenmani said, âShe knows what to say when, how to say what, when to start a why, where to
cease the talk.' Similarly pressed, a landlord said, âOh! The Old Woman? That troublemaking Communist cunt? That untouchable whore? Get out of here.'
This time, I moved on.
Finally, if you want the phony and the polyphony, the hysterical and the polyhistorical, wait for the postcolonial version, where the dusky Old Woman of my story takes after the pale Janie of Zora Neale Hurston's. They are both women who believe that the dream is the truth. They are both widowed women who learn to press their teeth together, who learn to hush. They are both women who find their wisdom poses a great challenge to others because, sometimes, God gets familiar with them and tells them secrets about men. They are both women full of life.
They are both women who think alike of Death as that strange being with the huge square toes who lives in the straight house like a platform without sides or a roof and who stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for a messenger to bid him come and who has been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. They are both women who have come back from burying the dead.
Not just the dead, but the sudden dead.
Enough about the Old Woman. You will soon get to hear her speak, watch her move.
Meanwhile, remember this: nobody lived happily. Nobody outlived the ever-after.
2.
The Title Misdeed
When you are high on caffeine and contemporary authors, you begin to question the fundamentals of the publishing industry, which you think owes it to you to make your novel widely read. After all, for the sake of reading widely, you have contributed an unfortunately large amount of your small income to the said industry.
Take the title for instance: it has to be catchy, it has to incite curiosity, it has to sound cool when you say it to others. That's why I settled on this one. Well, almost. It satisfies all of the above criteria.
The minute you realize that the novel is quite unlike the university dissertation, you gain the necessary courage to be experimental. You will soon realize, especially if you have been confounded by Derrida-Schmerrida at college, that a book does not have to be about its title. A title does not have to be about the book. Trust me, they are generous enough to co-exist with each other.
If you ask me upfront, I will tell you that this novel has
nothing to do with the title. You are not my agent, anyway. A nice title would have been
Long Live Revolution!
Or,
The Red Flag
. Or, as Žižek once said, when asked to share a secret with the
Guardian
during an interview,
Communism Will Win
. Sadly, the Communists will be outraged to be glorified in such an archetypal bourgeois literary form such as the novel, which they will contend has been produced for the global market. The other trouble with these titles is that it could get my novel into serious, life-threatening situations. Customs officials in a few faraway lands could hammer spikes through it or it could be pulped by a paper-shredder in quasi-repressive states. My books of poetry have been burnt. This novel is a delicate darling, and I will not let this happen to her. She has to live. She has to be in love. She has to see the world. For all that, she has to be named.
In the beginning, I did not want to cheat. I thought of good titles.
Tales from Tanjore
had an authentic ring to it, but those who picked up such a book would end up disappointed when they did not come across tigers, Tipu Sultan and the Pudukkottai royalty. Then again,
Butcher Boys
had the sound of a college music band, and little relevance to this novel except reflecting some of the bloodthirsty rage that romps around in these pages.
Kilvenmani
gave away the location, and a friend said it had a distinct Irish ring to it, so I dropped it as a gesture of goodwill because
I didn't want to mislead my readers. In a similar manner,
Christmas Day
gave away the date, but that title would make the reader imagine snow and reindeers and pine trees, and the entire seasonal marketing mania, instead of imagining peasant agitations. It would be the equivalent of using the word âholocaust' somewhere in the title, only because you wanted reference to a massacre where sacrificial victims were completely burnt to death. (Christmas Day, did I say? In
Jailbird
, Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the fictional Cuyahoga massacre that involved industrial action and took place on 25 December. The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it.) So, I gave up on that title and, for some time, I wanted to name it
1968
, the most tumultuous year of recent history, the year in which the central incident of this novel occurs. But Orwell has been there before me with this year-as-title thingy. What's more painful is that he used my year of birth without my explicit consent.
There go all my titles, and any effort at sincerity. Now I am out of choices. So I settle on the curiously obscure and mildly enchanting choice,
The Gypsy Goddess
.
I have a great title. I have a great story.
They don't belong to each other. In this author-arranged marriage-without-divorce, these two will stay together.
Considering the title of this chapter, I should have
technically completed one obligation: unravel the mystery of the title. So, here is the abridged version of the legend of the Gypsy Goddess. Go ahead, read it. These are two minutes of your life that you are never getting back.
This story begins with an epic novelist, who, having penned a racy thriller involving a hetero-normative love pentagon between three men and two women, enjoys enormous popularity and unparalleled critical, commercial and cultural success. At the zenith of his glory, he realizes that his characters have outgrown his epic and have become household names. Every day, he hears of fanclubs being started for his hero, beauty parlours and massage centres named after his heroine, and body-building gyms being inaugurated in the name of the hero's side-kick brother. And, much as his characters inspire love, they also inspire hate. He witnesses the effigy of his villain being burnt at street corners across the country. He hears stories of men, reeling under the influence of his epic heroes, cutting off the noses of women who have lust in their eyes. This horror, this horror is too much to take. His greatest creation, his labour of love, has turned into a nation's Frankenstein's monster. He foresees a future of massacre and mayhem, bloodshed and bomb-blasts, deaths and demolition.
So he fled to foreign shores.
He travelled far and wide and here and there in search of anonymity and, finally, he decided to settle down in a
Tamil village where the men had as many gods as their forefathers had found the leisure to invent, where the business of customized, cash-on-delivery idol-making flourished and kept up with the demands of the idol-worshippers, where the men and the women and the children called upon their lord gods every time they had a nervous tic or whooping cough or a full bladder or a mosquito bite or a peg of palm toddy or an argument with the local thug, where they boozed and banged around every day of every week, where they affectionately addressed their fathers as mother-fuckers, where they killed and committed adultery and stole and lied about everything at the court and the confession box, where they coveted each other's concubines and wives, and where they did all of this because the script demanded it. Evidently, this village in Tanjore was an author's paradise.