The Beautiful and the Damned (21 page)

They didn’t sound very convincing, and the gathering itself seemed unfocused except in its air of Sunday leisure. Behind the hall where the singer was performing, a large tent had been put up over a lawn crowded with plastic chairs. The entire complex was enclosed by walls and palm trees, with swans in a small enclosure in one corner. It represented someone’s idea of a resort, and the people milling around looked like they were taking the day off. There were a few farmers, distinguishable by their hardened hands and feet and simple clothes, but the gathering otherwise spanned a middle class ranging from minor clerks to lawyers holding video cameras. Children played around the chairs and smoke billowed up from the kitchen where giants pots of rice were being made for the free lunch that would highlight the day’s events.

It was in this gathering that I was introduced to Prabhakar and Devaram, men who brought a coiled energy into the holiday atmosphere. They worked for a small left-wing party with a big name. It was called the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist New Democracy (CPIML-ND), a group that had been one of the numerous Naxalite underground factions but since the nineties had surfaced to work through more traditional methods of organizing and electoral politics while also maintaining a few armed squads.

Prabhakar, who was in charge of the agricultural workers’ union of the party in Nizamabad district, was a burly man. His hands were large and callused, and only his eyes, small pinpricks of brightness, seemed
out of proportion to his body. He was carrying a yellow notepad that said ‘Infosys’, and when I pointed at the incongruity of a Maoist union organizer carrying a notepad branded with the name of one of India’s biggest IT corporations, he guffawed loudly. His daughter worked for the company, he said, and she had given him the notepad as a gift.

As I talked with Prabhakar and Devaram, it became apparent that while they had some sympathy for those struggling for a separate Telangana state, they didn’t feel too strongly about the issue. Their own activities, which they had been engaged in for the past three decades, were unlikely to change even in a new state. They tried to ‘redistribute’ land and check atrocities by upper-caste people in the rural areas, for which purpose they maintained an armed squad. ‘We have to protect ourselves,’ Prabhakar said. ‘Otherwise, the thugs of the upper-caste landlords will finish us off.’ They organized women who rolled the handmade Indian cigarettes known as ‘beedis’ and tried to protect farmers who got trapped in debt after taking loans from private moneylenders. ‘These moneylenders are typically in the gold and jewellery business,’ Prabhakar said. ‘If you borrow one thousand rupees, you have to pay back two thousand to them after twelve months. We try to negotiate that interest rate. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes not.’

They were polite and confident, although obviously playing up the strength of their party. Prabhakar asked me to come to Armoor if I wanted to see how farmers were faring these days. When the government stopped the lending programmes of the public banks, the moneylenders had moved in, while the disbanding of the state agricultural offices had led to the rise of middlemen seed dealers. The state-run seed development corporation, which in the past had given farmers reasonable prices for their produce, had become virtually defunct, its warehouses abandoned and its offices empty.

After Devaram had shown me around Armoor, we went to the neighbouring village of Padgal to meet Sekhar, the 25-year-old farmer
who had been shot during the rampage around Mahipal Reddy’s house. The village appeared sleepy in the afternoon heat, smelling sharply of cow dung, while Devaram hammered insistently on a wooden door set into a stone wall. We were let into the courtyard of the house. Three women gathered around Devaram – Sekhar’s grandmother, mother and wife – speaking in hushed voices and looking worried. Sekhar was in a Hyderabad hospital and it would be a couple of weeks before he was well enough to come home.

We went back up National Highway 16, cutting through Armoor and emerging on the other side of the town. There was a massive heap of black rocks on the edge of the town, old volcanic formations. ‘It’s called Navnath,’ Devaram said. There was a temple on top of the rocks, but as a Dalit and as a Maoist, he felt no particular attachment to the temple. We left Navnath behind, the road opening on to fields of green. It was a pastoral scene, picturesque and hard to connect with the strife of red sorghum or the distress of farmer suicides. Poultry farms began to appear amid the agricultural plots, low-slung buildings with netting in place of walls, and then came the warehouses belonging to the seed dealers, at least twenty of them spread along a three-kilometre stretch. The warehouses were flat-roofed structures protected by high boundary walls. Most of them had the word ‘Ganga’ worked into their names, perhaps in part to evoke the protection granted by that faraway sacred river and perhaps partly out of a herd mentality. The warehouses were new, painted in pleasant shades of orange and green, unusual in a region where houses and buildings had not much more than a coat of whitewash, and the paint made the warehouses seem alien structures, seemingly disconnected from the land.

I asked Devaram if there was a way to meet Mahipal Reddy.

‘Of course. His warehouse is just a little bit further on,’ he said.

I wondered if Mahipal’s men would recognize him.

‘Only too well,’ he said, speaking belligerently. ‘I gave them a lot of trouble during the red sorghum agitation. How could they forget me?’

I said that it might not be a good idea for me to try and see Mahipal in his company – perhaps the seed dealer would speak more freely if I went with someone else.

Devaram became even more aggressive. ‘Let’s just go. Let’s see how they stop us from meeting him, or how he doesn’t talk to us,’ he said.

It was with difficulty that I convinced him to hold off from visiting Mahipal and instead give me just a drive-by of the warehouse.

Devaram slowed his scooter down as we passed Mahipal’s den. There was little I could see at first because of the canopy of trees and the boundary wall surrounding the warehouse. His business was called Godavari Seeds Company, and I found it interesting that he had chosen a local river for the name of his business instead of using ‘Ganga’, as most dealers in the area seemed to have done. There was a touch of confidence in this display of individualism, a sign of the brashness that had led him to become the biggest seed dealer in the area, and it made me even more curious about him. Devaram stopped in front of the gate, caught between the temptation to go in and start a fight and his promise to me that he wouldn’t create any trouble. I could make out the long, horizontal shape of the main warehouse, with a couple of tarpaulin-covered trucks parked in front. To the right, there was a house, a white, two-storey concrete building that was as functional as the Armoor mansion had been ostentatious. There were a few people inside, but the atmosphere was low-key, with no indication that all this belonged to the biggest seed dealer in the area. According to people I spoke to later, Mahipal had offered farmers 15.4 rupees for a kilo of red sorghum when the market rate had been only 9 rupees a kilo. In fact, he had actually paid some of the farmers, I discovered later, clearing 34 crore rupees of the outstanding amount, although he owed an even greater sum of 44 crore rupees to the remaining farmers.

We drove back down the highway and stopped at a farmers’ market in a village called Ankapur. There were vegetables and cobs of maize being weighed on large scales in an open shed, while bagged produce, the green leaves sticking out of the loosely tied sacks, was being loaded into tractors and trucks. On one side of the road, stunted, sunburned women with cropped hair (they had probably consecrated their hair to a local deity) sold roasted maize to people
driving by, swishing bamboo hand fans over piles of coal and dabbing lime juice and salt on the cobs.

The Ankapur farmers looked nothing like the wiry, dusty men I had seen earlier that morning around the municipal office. They were sitting on plastic chairs drinking tea, their white clothes spotless, their wrists gleaming with gold watches. Devaram had told me that Ankapur was a prosperous, upper-caste village where farmers owned fifteen to twenty acres of land when the average landholding of an Indian farmer tends to be five acres or less. Devaram introduced me to the farmers, but he didn’t join me as I sat down. He seemed to dislike them for their upper-caste prosperity, and if the farmers weren’t openly hostile towards him, that was probably because of Devaram’s ability to create trouble.

The farmers called for more tea and began talking in Hindi. Rajamma, a former sarpanch or village council chief, even spoke English. He was a slim, good-looking man in his early sixties, dressed in crisply pressed white clothes. He seemed quite interested in me, asking me to sit next to him. He wanted to talk about America. His son was an engineer there, he said, and so were the sons of many of the farmers gathered around. There were sharp nods, and as Rajamma asked the men to tell me where their sons were settled, the foreign names rang out in the marketplace, accompanied by the background noise of the maize sellers shouting out their prices to slowing vehicles and the grunts of migrant workers loading sacks of vegetables on to trucks. ‘America’, ‘Germany’, ‘Australia’, ‘Scotland’, the men cried out, as if these were the names of the crops they grew. Then they settled down, listening quietly as Rajamma talked about his visit to the United States.

He had gone to see a farm in Michigan with his son, Rajamma said. He had been astonished that a 125-acre plot could be farmed by just three men. The other farmers laughed, more with wonder than envy. They looked rather well rested, and I remembered that Devaram had said that few of them worked on the land any more, depending on hired labourers to do the farming. When I asked Rajamma if he had workers cultivating his land, he grew sanctimonious, saying that it was his social obligation to give jobs to people. Later, I would find
out that most of the workers were migrants, and almost none from the Telangana region.

But when I asked Rajamma who would run the farm after him, his smile faded into a wry look. His son would not return to the village life. Even his grandchildren, when they visited from America, grew restless after the initial few days of excitement. The other farmers nodded their heads in agreement. They had all done well enough to educate their children and send them to the West, but now there was no one to carry on the farming after them.

It was almost dusk when Devaram and I headed back towards Armoor, where I planned to stay the night at the Mamatha Lodge. Around seven, just as I was getting off Devaram’s scooter, I got a call from Prabhakar. He wanted me to check out of the hotel and take a bus to Nizamabad town. ‘You will stay the night here,’ he said. ‘I’ve arranged for you to meet several people. You can go back to Armoor later.’ I had no idea where I would be staying, but ever since the morning I had been possessed by the feeling that nothing was under my control. So I succumbed to Prabhakar’s request, feeling a little as if I had been recruited into the lower ranks of his organization as what they called a ‘courier’.

I took my bag from Mamatha Lodge, giving the old man a tip on the way out, and went to the bus station. It had been stifling all day long, but now, as the bus began to make its way to Nizamabad, past the black rocks of Navnath, the warehouses, the empty market of Ankapur and Mahipal’s headquarters, the skies opened up with rain.

As the bus rattled and rolled its way through the darkness, the rain began to pour in through holes in the roof, drenching people and forcing them to move aside. In an hour, the seats were mostly empty, while the aisle, somehow less leak-prone, was packed with crouching passengers. The young man next to me, an electrical worker who had been playing loud and bad Hindi film music from his mobile phone, looked at the people in the aisle with self-satisfaction. We were on the
one seat that would not get wet, he declared. He had boarded the bus well before Armoor and had had time to observe the topography of the leaks. The bus entered the outskirts of Nizamabad town, the shops and houses appearing as a blaze of blurry lights through the rain-smeared windows, and water cascaded down over the electrician. He cursed, stood up, squeezed himself into the crowded aisle and did not look at me again.

Prabhakar was waiting for me at the bus station, smiling happily through the rain. He led me through the people gathered at the bus station, past shops selling cheap household items and eating places where pakoras were being fried in bubbling oil. The brands and consumerism of urban India had disappeared, and although I felt an acute sense of displacement, I was also oddly comforted by the rough utilitarianism of the place, which reminded me of the India I had grown up in. Here, there would be no escape from the self in objects or in technology. There were no cafés where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop, no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships, and for that I was utterly dependent on Prabhakar speeding through the rain on his motorcycle.

He had planned everything out for me. I would meet his colleagues, including a senior comrade who had spent much time in jail. Then, at nine in the morning, I would go with Prabhakar to the office of the district collector, the highest government official in Nizamabad, where I could ask him questions about farmers and the red sorghum agitation. After that, I would visit a village far less prosperous than Ankapur, with a greater concentration of lower-caste farmers, many of whom had taken part in the agitation in Armoor. As for the night, I could sleep in Prabhakar’s house, although he had reserved a room at a hotel near the bus station just in case I felt more comfortable that way. ‘You’re a city person, right?’ he said, chuckling. ‘Maybe you will not feel relaxed in my house.’

Prabhakar’s house was packed with people who seemed to be a blur of names to me in my state of disorientation and tiredness. They were all members of the party, an assortment of shopkeepers,
lawyers, waiters and mothers who seemed to have an extra edge imparted to their functional identities by their political activism. I met Prabhakar’s wife, Godavari, a dark, good-looking woman with a slight limp who worked as a schoolteacher as well as for the party. Then, after we had tea and I dried myself off, I was taken to a house a short distance away to meet K. Yadhagri, a senior comrade who was the district secretary of the party.