The God of Small Things (36 page)

“Yes. He is good worker,” he said thoughtfully. “Highly intelligent.”

“He is,” Chacko said. “An excellent carpenter with an engineer’s mind. If it wasn’t for—”

“Not
that
worker, comrade,” Comrade Pillai said. “
Party
worker.”

Comrade Pillai’s mother continued to rock and grunt. There was something reassuring about the rhythm of the grunts. Like the ticking of a clock. A sound you hardly noticed, but would miss if it stopped.

“Ah, I see. So he’s a card-holder?”

“Oh yes,” Comrade Pillai said softly. “Oh yes.”

Perspiration trickled through Chacko’s hair. He felt as though a company of ants was touring his scalp. He scratched his head for a long time, with both his hands. Moving his whole scalp up and down.

“Oru kaaryam parayattey?
” Comrade Pillai switched to Malayalam and a confiding, conspiratorial voice. “I’m speaking as a friend,
keto
. Off the record.”

Before he continued, Comrade Pillai studied Chacko, trying to gauge his response. Chacko was examining the gray paste of sweat and dandruff lodged under his fingernails.

“That Paravan is going to cause trouble for you,” he said. “Take it from me… get him a job somewhere else. Send him off.”

Chacko was puzzled at the turn the conversation had taken. He had only intended to find out what was happening, where things stood. He had expected to encounter antagonism, even confrontation, and instead was being offered sly, misguided collusion.

“Send him away? But why? I have no objections to him being a card-holder. I was just curious, that’s all … I thought perhaps you had been speaking to him,” Chacko said. “But I’m sure he’s just experimenting, testing his wings, he’s a sensible fellow, comrade. I trust him …”

“Not like that,” Comrade Pillai said. “He may be very well okay as a person. But other workers are not happy with him. Already they are coming to me with complaints. You see, comrade, from local standpoint, these caste issues are very deep-rooted.”

Kalyani put a steel tumbler of steaming coffee on the table for her husband.

“See her, for example. Mistress of this house. Even she will never allow Paravans and all that into her house. Never. Even
I
cannot persuade her. My own wife. Of course inside the house she is Boss.” He turned to her with an affectionate, naughty smile. “
Allay edi
, Kalyani?”

Kalyani looked down and smiled, coyly acknowledging her bigotry.

“You see?” Comrade Pillai said triumphantly. “She understands English very well. Only doesn’t speak.”

Chacko smiled halfheartedly.

“You say my workers are coming to you with complaints …”

“Oh yes, correct,” Comrade Pillai said.

“Anything specific?”

“Nothing specifically as such,” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said. “But see, comrade, any benefits that you give him, naturally others are resenting it. They see it as a partiality. After all, whatever job he does, carpenter or electrician or whateveritis, for them he is just a Paravan. It is a conditioning they have from birth. This I myself have told them is wrong. But frankly speaking, comrade, Change is one thing. Acceptance is another. You should be cautious. Better for him you send him off.”

“My dear fellow,” Chacko said, “that’s impossible. He’s invaluable. He practically runs the factory—and we can’t solve the problem by sending all the Paravans away. Surely we have to learn to deal with this nonsense.”

Comrade Pillai disliked being addressed as My Dear Fellow. It sounded to him like an insult couched in good English, which, of course, made it a double-insult—the insult itself, and the fact that Chacko thought he wouldn’t understand it. It spoiled his mood completely.

“That may be,” he said caustically. “But Rome was not built in a day. Keep it in mind, comrade, that this is not your Oxford college. For you what is a nonsense for Masses it is something different.”

Lenin, with his father’s thinness and his mother’s eyes, appeared at the door, out of breath. He had finished shouting the whole of Mark Antony’s speech and most of Lochinvar before he realized that he had lost his audience. He re-positioned himself between Comrade Pillai’s parted knees.

He clapped his hands over his father’s head, creating mayhem in the mosquito funnel. He counted the squashed carcasses on his palms. Some of them bloated with fresh blood. He showed them to his father, who handed him over to his mother to be cleaned up.

Once again the silence between them was appropriated by old Mrs. Pillai’s grunts. Latha arrived with Pothachen and Mathukutty. The men were made to wait outside. The door was left ajar. When Comrade Pillai spoke next, he spoke in Malayalam and made sure it was loud enough for his audience outside.

“Of course the proper forum to air workers’ grievances is through the Union. And in this case, when Modalali himself is a comrade, it is a shameful matter for them not to be unionized and join the Party Struggle.”

“I’ve thought of that,” Chacko said. “I am going to formally organize them into a union. They will elect their own representatives.”

“But comrade, you cannot stage their revolution for them. You can only create awareness. Educate them. They must launch their
own
struggle.
They
must overcome their fears.”

“Of whom?” Chacko smiled. “Me?”

“No, not you, my dear comrade. Of centuries of oppression.”

Then Comrade Pillai, in a hectoring voice, quoted Chairman Mao. In Malayalam. His expression curiously like his niece’s.

“Revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.”

And so, having bagged the contract for the Synthetic Cooking Vinegar labels, he deftly banished Chacko from the fighting ranks of the Overthrowers to the treacherous ranks of the To Be Overthrown.

They sat beside each other on steel folding chairs, on the afternoon of the Day that Sophie Mol Came, sipping coffee and crunching
banana chips. Dislodging with their tongues the sodden yellow mulch that stuck to the roofs of their mouths.

The Small Thin Man and the Big Fat Man. Comic-book adversaries in a still-to-come war.

  It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.

He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.

Nobody ever learned the precise nature of the role that Comrade Pillai played in the events that followed. Even Chacko—who knew that the fervent, high-pitched speeches about Rights of Untouchables (“Caste is Class, comrades”) delivered by Comrade Pillai during the Marxist Party siege of Paradise Pickles were pharisaic—never learned the whole story. Not that he cared to find out. By then, numbed by the loss of Sophie Mol, he looked out at everything with a vision smudged with grief. Like a child touched by tragedy, who grows up suddenly and abandons his playthings, Chacko dumped his toys. Pickle Baron dreams and the People’s War joined the racks of broken airplanes in his glass-paned cupboard. After Paradise Pickles closed down, some rice fields were sold (along with their mortgages) to pay off the bank loans. More were sold to keep the family in food and clothes. By the time Chacko emigrated to Canada, the family’s only income came from the rubber estate that adjoined the Ayemenem House and the few coconut trees in the compound. This was what Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria lived off after everybody else had died, left, or been Returned.

To be fair to Comrade Pillai, he did not plan the course of events
that followed. He merely slipped his ready fingers into History’s waiting glove.

It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.

Velutha’s last visit to Comrade Pillai—after his confrontation with Mammachi and Baby Kochamma—and what had passed between them, remained a secret. The last betrayal that sent Velutha across the river, swimming against the current, in the dark and rain, well in time for his blind date with history.

V
elutha caught the last bus back from Kottayam, where he was having the canning machine mended. He ran into one of the other factory workers at the bus stop, who told him with a smirk that Mammachi wanted to see him. Velutha had no idea what had happened and was completely unaware of his father’s drunken visit to the Ayemenem House. Nor did he know that Vellya Paapen had been sitting for hours at the door of their hut, still drunk, his glass eye and the edge of his ax glittering in the lamplight, waiting for Velutha to return. Nor that poor paralyzed Kuttappen, numb with apprehension, had been talking to his father continuously for two hours, trying to calm him down, all the time straining his ears for the sound of a footstep or the rustle of undergrowth so that he could shout a warning to his unsuspecting brother.

Velutha didn’t go home. He went straight to the Ayemenem House. Though, on the one hand, he was taken by surprise, on the other he knew, had known, with an ancient instinct, that one day History’s twisted chickens would come home to roost. Through the whole of Mammachi’s outburst he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

When Velutha arrived, Mammachi lost her bearings and spewed her blind venom, her crass, insufferable insults, at a panel in the sliding-folding door until Baby Kochamma tactfully swiveled her around and aimed her rage in the right direction, at Velutha standing very still in the gloom. Mammachi continued her tirade, her eyes empty, her face twisted and ugly, her anger propelling her towards Velutha until she was shouting right into his face and he could feel the spray of her spit and smell the stale tea on her breath. Baby Kochamma stayed close to Mammachi. She said nothing, but used her hands to modulate Mammachi’s fury, to stoke it anew. An encouraging pat on the back. A reassuring arm around the shoulders. Mammachi was completely unaware of the manipulation.

Just
where
an old lady like her—who wore crisp ironed saris and played the
Nutcracker Suite
on the violin in the evenings—had learned the foul language that Mammachi used that day was a mystery to everybody (Baby Kochamma, Kochu Maria, Ammu in her locked room) who heard her.

“Out!” she had screamed, eventually. “If I find you on my property tomorrow I’ll have you castrated like the pariah dog that you are! I’ll have you killed!”

“We’ll see about that,” Velutha said quietly.

That was all he said. And that was what Baby Kochamma in Inspector Thomas Mathew’s office, enhanced and embroidered into threats of murder and abduction.

Mammachi spat into Velutha’s face. Thick spit. It spattered across his skin. His mouth and eyes.

He just stood there. Stunned. Then he turned and left.

As he walked away from the house, he felt his senses had been honed and heightened. As though everything around him had been flattened into a neat illustration. A machine drawing with an instruction manual that told him what to do. His mind, desperately craving some kind of mooring, clung to details. It labeled each thing it encountered.

Gate.
He thought as he walked out of the gate.
Gate. Road. Stones. Sky. Rain.

Gate.

Road.

Stones.

Sky.

Rain.

The rain on his skin was warm. The laterite rock under his feet jagged. He knew where he was going. He noticed everything. Each leaf. Each tree. Each cloud in the starless sky. Each step he took.

That was the first lesson he had learned in school. A poem about a train.

He began to count. Something. Anything.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine
…

The machine drawing began to blur. The clear lines to smudge. The instructions no longer made sense. The road rose to meet him and the darkness grew dense. Glutinous. Pushing through it became an effort. Like swimming underwater.

It’s happening
, a voice informed him.
It has begun.

His mind, suddenly impossibly old, floated out of his body and hovered high above him in the air, from where it jabbered useless warnings.

It looked down and watched a young man’s body walk through the darkness and the driving rain. More than anything else that body wanted to sleep. Sleep and wake up in another world.
With the smell of her skin in the air that he breathed. Her body on his. He might never see her again. Where was she? What had they done to her? Had they hurt her?