The Great Indian Novel (49 page)

Despite the women, Arjun’s travels were not all pleasure. He saw the range and immensity of India and all its concerns. In rural Bengal he learned of the rage and frustration that led middle-class young intellectuals to throw bombs at lower-class old policemen - underpaid uniformed menials who were startled to find themselves branded by their betters as symbols of the injustice of an oppressive social order. He understood, in turn, the reciprocal ruth-lessness of the police, who felt closer to the proletariat than their highly educated assailants, and who beat and gouged and shot the Naxals on the principle of doing unto others before they did unto you. And then Arjun saw the tortured Naxalites languish in their cockroach-infested prison cells and did not blame them when they recanted, emerging to join commercial firms where they could dissolve their angst in the cocktails of a new conformity.

In the urban Bengal of the Maoists’ coffee-houses and second-hand bookshops and crowded theatres, Arjun met a young poet with piercing eyes and a goatee, who recited with painful intensity the refrain, ‘Calcutta, if you must exile me, blind my eyes before I go.’ Blind my eyes, Arjun understood, to the despair and the disrepair, the dirt and degradation, but also to the searing summer beauty of the
gulmohar
and cassia blossoms flaming insolent and tender along the dusty roadsides, to the awesome thunderclouds swallowing up the rooftops before a northwester storm, to the little boats gently bobbing on the Hooghly river at sunset against the shining steel frame of the massive Howrah Bridge. Blind my eyes to the rioters and the agitations and the human molluscs clinging to the outsides of smoke-spewing buses, but also to the kaleidoscope of brightly coloured kites leaping up at the blue sky, to the little boys playing cricket with makeshift gear in countless narrow lanes, to the compassion of students, housewives and nuns who strive to serve the city’s victims. Blind my eyes, finally, to the flimsy sheet-covered forms of the homeless sleeping under the arcades of fashionable hotels, to the resigned despair in the unblinded eyes of the woman, a small infant balanced on her hip and two ragged children trailing behind, who begged for help in a thin, melancholy wail which clung tenaciously to the air long after she had silently received Arjun’s alms and left.

Arjun left too, but each departure was a new beginning. In the foothills of the Himalayas he saw poor village women tying themselves to tree trunks in a defiant and life-saving embrace to prevent the saws of rapacious contractors cutting them down for commercial timber. In the deserts of Rajasthan he found how cheap it was to buy a woman for life at the district bazaar, and wrote savagely about his own purchase of such a girl for sixty rupees (when he told her she was free to go, she asked, ‘Where to?’). In urban Madras he marched alongside slogan-shouting Tamil demonstrators whose protests against the imposition of that alien and barbaric northern tongue masquerading as a ‘national’ language - Hindi - soon disintegrated into riots in which buildings and vehicles otherwise innocent of linguistic preference were stoned and burned in the angry flames of Dravidian cultural assertion. He saw the devastation wreaked by cyclones in the lush green lands of the Coromandel coast, and he dragged himself above the floodwaters to travel to drought- ravaged Bihar. There he walked on the parched, sun-scorched clay oven that had once been part of the fertile Gangetic plain, feeling the earth cracking and crumbling underfoot, learning the meaning of famine in the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes of mothers whose babies sucked at breasts as dry as the area’s riverbeds. Here too, in the cradle of Magadhan civilization that had ruled India more than 2000 years earlier, he watched a skeletal cow stumble and collapse by the side of a withered tree; and as he saw a village woman bend to pour the last precious drops of water from her own
lota
into the animal’s mouth, the thought struck him with overwhelming intensity: ‘This is my land’.

It was eye-opening, heart-rending - and exhausting. When the last sight and the last night had passed without either the event or the woman leaving an impression on him, Arjun realized he had seen and done too much. But he had to go on: the terms of exile were harsh.

It was thus a weary, jaded Arjun who arrived at the tip of the peninsula, at the last halt on his long traverse across the land, the obscure southern town of Gokarnam.

He did not, of course, know that it was to be his last halt. Arjun was looking for a young political giant-killer who was not well enough known outside the south, the man who had unseated the formidable local Tammany Hall boss, Kamsa, in his first election and had made himself something of a legend in the area since then. He was the Gokarnam Party secretary, and Arjun thought it would make an intriguing story to feature a local hero who had refused to seek national office. He could already visualize a quick, five- hundred word despatch: ‘the man who would not be king’. Then he would move on.

The town’s Kaurava Party office was a long, musty room in the rutted main street with a painted aluminium board outside proclaiming its purpose. Inside, the busiest sound was the hum of a fly amidst the dusty stillness of scattered files. A young man in white - clerk or functionary, Arjun did not know - sat beneath a black-and-red Malayala Manorama calendar idly fanning himself with a yellowing
Mathrubhoomi
Azhichapadippu.

‘Secretary gone out,’ he informed Arjun with pleasure. ‘Some party work he is having in near-by village. If you are wishing to go there, I will explain you how.’

Arjun was indeed wishing to go there, having nothing better to do. He soon found himself stepping off a shuddering rural bus at an enormous family-planning hoarding that dominated the centre of the village of Karink-olam. Tea drinkers at the rickety stall near the bus stop, their
mundus
tucked up around their knees, grinned at his attempts to communicate the object of his search in English, Hindi and the universal language of signs.

‘Krishna, party secretary? From Gokarnam?’ the
chaya-kadakamn,
the stall- keeper himself, finally put Arjun out of his misery. ‘You will find at Ottamthullal - that way.’

Arjun followed the pointing finger down a dusty track that led from the village centre towards, and then through, the paddy-fields that covered most of Karinkolam. He paused at the crest of the road, overwhelmed by the breathtaking simplicity of the sight. The beauty of the Kerala countryside was the beauty of the commonplace: of the green of the rice stalks and the green of the palm fronds, of the glow of the sun and the freshness of the air, of the sweat of labour and the miracle of grain. Arjun walked on past the busy figures of
thozhilalis,
ankle-deep in muddy water, bending over the breeze- stirred plants, and he slowed his pace occasionally for a gaggle of giggly schoolgirls or a trundling bullock-cart. He was now walking through the fields themselves, on a narrow path of earth, in places barely a footstep wide. As he picked his way gingerly over an unexpected dip in the path, the rhythmic throbbing of an unfamiliar drum floated across the paddy-fields. Clearly something was going on, a local event at which he might find someone to lead him to Krishna.

The path turned a corner and Arjun suddenly found himself facing a rudimentary stage, sheltered by palm fronds. Over a hundred people had gathered before it, and were intently watching a performance of an art form Arjun had never seen before. A dancer, his head topped by a vividly painted papier-maché crown, bells dangling from a string around his waist and tinkling at his feet, was jumping - there was no other word for it - in large, flowing steps to the rhythm of the accompaniment of three musicians. There were also, on stage with him, three expressionless men with bare chests and
mundus
trailing to the floor, one banging vigorously at the taut sides of a
madallam,
one striking a kettle-drum with the flat of his palm, the third clashing tiny cymbals in time with the crashing of the dancer’s feet. A song, incomprehensible to Arjun but unquestionably of solemn, possibly religious, significance, droned on in the background.

Arjun looked round the appreciative crowd, then selected a bespectacled man attired in a Terylene shirt, with a pen in his front pocket.

‘Excuse me,’ he asked in English, ‘but can you tell me where is . . . er . . . Ot-tamthullal?’

The man turned and looked at him with interest. ‘What do you mean, where is Ottamthullal?’ he asked.

‘I’m a stranger here, and I may not be pronouncing it right, but I’m looking for a place, or house, called Ottamthullal. I’m hoping to meet someone there.’

‘You have found your Ottamthullal, but it is not a place or a house. It is a dance. This dance.’ The man gestured toward the stage, from which the dancer, to loud applause, was just descending. ‘Which seems now to have ended.’

But not quite. As Arjun looked in dismay at his informant and at the applauding audience, a white-shirted figure - apparently at the urging of a section of the crowd - rose from the audience and leapt on to the platform. The crowd greeted his appearance with a thunderous roar. Even the expressionless musicians smiled briefly to acknowledge their new companion, and thumped their instruments with celebratory verve. A few young men in the audience whistled in loud excitement. Grinning unselfconsciously, the intruder pulled off his immaculate shirt, revealing a dark, gleaming and undeniably pudgy torso. He tossed the garment into the crowd and deftly caught the gaily coloured dancer’s head-dress and bells that were tossed back to him. As he tied them on, the music built up into a steady rhythm, clearly more cheerful than the dirge that had preceded it. Arjun found himself waiting to see what would happen: the happy expectancy of the crowd had infected him too.

The man on the stage stepped forward, knees apart and bent, feet pointing in opposite directions. His right foot came down in a decisive thrust; the crowd cheered. His body swerved, his feet pounding, the stage, the tempo of the music accelerating. Then he began to sing. Arjun could not understand the words, but it was a strange, droll lyric, the man’s almond eyes widening and shrinking expressively with each turn of phrase, his hands turning and flowing in gestures of mock classicism, his every movement punctuating the verse with bursts of laughter from the ground. Arjun turned in puzzlement to his informant.

‘It is very funny,’ the man in the Terylene shirt explained. ‘You see, the Ottamthullal is normally a dance that illustrates songs from our
Puranas,
especially the
Ramayanam
and the
Mahabharatam.
But what this man is doing is a very good parody. A very good dance, with very good lyrics written by T. Chandran, a Malayali immigrant in England. It is all about learning English manners and ways of behaviour. Very funny.’ The man chortled. ‘But, ah, of course, you do not understand Malayalam. Naturally, naturally. How foolish of me. But wait - if you listen carefully, you will find it is not so difficult, after all.’

Arjun strained dutifully to catch the words chanted by the dancer, and by many members of the crowd in ragged unison, but they seemed to have little in common with the languages of the north that Arjun knew. One refrain stuck tantalizingly in his ear:

Thottathin ellam ‘Thank you, thank you’,
Ottu mushinyal ‘Sorry, sorry’. . .

He gave up, and concentrated on the dance. The man on the stage, his body glistening with sweat, was executing ever more vigorous steps. His feet pounding, his trunk swaying, his hands and legs flailing the air, bells ringing furiously with each movement, the dancer twisted and turned, leapt and flew, rose and fell.

There was neither beauty nor elegance in the dance. Its cadences, its vigour, were wholly foreign to Arjun’s experience. Yet Arjun felt an involuntary stirring within him, a quickening of his spirit in response to the movements of this strange, magical man. The drums throbbed, and the dancer strode and jumped and sang, his arms and legs moving to the tempo of the rhythm of life. Arjun was suddenly seized by the sense that everything he had seen around him in Kerala that day was embodied in this man: the surge of the sea at the shore, the swaying of the palm trees, the rippling green of the sun-drenched paddy- fields, the laughter of the children running in the village street. The dancer’s energy flowed into him: Arjun felt his earlier satiety and tiredness lifting.

On stage, the dancer’s movements accelerated in a fast, flowing piston- burst of motion till, with an enormous crescendo that seemed to shake the platform, he swivelled, back arching, to a feet-scudding stop. The audience rose to its feet and applauded, cheering him loudly. Grinning in open delight, the dancer waved at them and stepped off the stage.

‘How did you like it?’

‘Very much,’ Arjun answered truthfully. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. Is that man your village Ottamthullal expert?’

‘Not at all,’ the man in the Terylene shirt replied. ‘He is not even from here. In fact, he is the local M L A, and the Kaurava Party secretary for the
taluk.
His name is D. Krishna Parthasarathi.’

And Arjun knew that he had at last come to the end of his search.