A tamil month, p.9
A Tamil Month, page 9
‘Dhandasoru,’ said a grandfather, he who was a salary earner.
‘Not true,’ said Valiban, ‘he was a fisherman, an honest one, and he kept a family going, let us not take that away from him.’
‘So you are dialogue adichifying for him now?’ asked the old man. ‘For this street dog?’
Valiban said, ‘Maybe.’ There was always a ‘maybe’ when he wanted no argument and he had to get away too, take the cash from Timur’s pockets back to Pasupathy, each bloody note save one that he would be allowed to keep.
‘Pick one,’ said Pasupathy, a fat, swarthy goon used to smarmy underlings. He smiled at his new henchman, his beady eyes seeking out familiar weaknesses.
Valiban picked one. ‘Henchman I am not,’ he said, ‘neither is Kari. Not for you or anybody else, and no disrespect to you, sir.’
His life hung in there by a thread, prey to what went on in Pasupathy’s head but he was prepared for whatever was decided. Pasupathy was angry, furious that Valiban said this in front of his men. He let him be. ‘Dhandasoru,’ said Pasupathy. ‘I am deeply disappointed. But Kari and you are like my sons.’ That way he saved his face and Valiban and Kari lived.
Kari came to Valiban fresh from the incident. He came at him, this big burly man. Valiban loved him and he knew it. He held him. Kari was shivering. He cried, sobbing loudly. His big shoulders shook, he heaved and he brought up his insides. He wasn’t weak but he needed somebody to leach the chill the first kill brings.
‘Did you not see what happened?’ he asked. ‘How are you so calm, minor?’
‘You did what you had to do,’ said Valiban.
Kari recovered slowly. ‘Was I good, minor?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
Valiban kneaded his shoulders that had bunched into knots. Kari moved away to the window, stretched his arms above him and twisted his neck, making cracking noises.
‘Did you see the look on Timur’s face?’
‘I did. Timur wasn’t expecting it. He looked surprised even if he couldn’t see by then.’
Valiban had to help Kari out of his shirt. It was blood-soaked. He could not help running his hands up and down Kari’s broad back. Kari was exultant by now. Valiban stroked his shoulders again. Kari hit him. Valiban took it standing. He loved him more than he did anything else. Kari hit him again. Valiban sat where he fell. Kari towered over him, looking every inch a big bad ‘thimiru pudichavan’.
Kari became famous after this incident. Soon, he did not have to pay for the air he was breathing, that air belonged to a flat he did not own. He merely occupied it. Whose was it? No idea, said the owner who had been warned about Kari. He had no wish to be famous.
Nanban was oblique when it suited him. He heard Valiban relate the story and all through it, he remained expressionless. ‘Moving,’ he said finally. His protégé looked surprised and disappointed. ‘When did you first experience violence?’ said Nanban.
‘This was the first time,’ Valiban replied.
Nanban smiled. ‘Poverty is your neighbour and unemployment your friend and you still need a knife to get hurt?’
Kari was nervous for a few days after this incident. He expected police action. He did not know that cops wasted little time on gang killings. He looked gloomier and gloomier, day by day, looking like he had not evacuated his bowels. The amount he ate, he needed to clear inventory and if that did not happen, his sweat began to smell of garlic and onions.
Inspector Murthy called Kari to his station for a chat.
‘You are the next Timur?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Will the burglaries stop now?’
The gang members were open-mouthed. ‘He asked you that?’
Kari shifted his bums and leaned to a side. ‘Murthy followed us one day when we went around on bikes in Nanganallur, looking into Brahmin homes. I was testing the window grills, it seems. Thambi was looking up and down the street and Antony was making faces at the old men.’
‘I told you we were being followed,’ said Valiban.
‘Murthy said we are amateurs and catching goindas like us is beneath him. According to him, I am a weak leader.’
‘What did you tell him?’ asked Valiban.
‘I told him I will soon be a politician. He laughed. I told him he deserved a posting in the Dockyard Station where real crime happened. He agreed. He said Kotturpuram is too genteel. The morons here actually stop at red lights.’
NANBAN
The traffic is heavy despite the late hour. At day’s end, courtesy is missing. It takes a year’s internship on city roads to drive badly. Two cars screech to a halt ahead of me making way for an old woman who crosses the road, shaking her head in disbelief. An act of civility gets magnified into kindness.
My country is a fit case for Chaos Theory. The theory states that an earthquake happens in your backyard because a butterfly flapped its wings in another continent. This makes perfect sense in India because cause and effect do not form a logic chain out here. So much happens around us without our say that negotiating our way through daily life, we throw up our hands and entrust our karma to a greater being.
A week at this cinema will confuse the finest. Nothing will surprise them after a while. The first casualty is deep thinking and the second is precedent. Soon, like the locals, visitors begin to believe that in order to succeed all they have to do is try. The wheel of karma will turn their way. Frighteningly, it does. Even for people who don’t deserve it. Especially politicians. It is unnerving to watch them rise above their station.
Can I express this philosophy to a disparate group seated at the high table in a TASMAC Bar? They are sharp, shrewd and extremely practical.
I am sure Chaos Theory will not impress them. I cannot tell Veerappan that you will win seats in the next election because, hey, shit happens in India. Serendipity cannot be the winning strategy even if the political landscape is chaotic. What I will tell him is, ‘We will create our own chaos. We will move the tectonic plates of Tamil Nadu by placing ourselves on its fault lines and flapping our wings.’
What Veerappan expects from me is a market research project on the Gounder community followed by an advertising campaign. This is the business school approach. He thinks this is what I am capable of doing. He is wrong. I am capable of a lot more.
‘Cheers,’ said Raman as I walked in. Narsimhan was there in his corner. He was down a few, his eyes were droopy and his shirt stuck to him like a wet towel.
‘Cheers brother,’ said the Sindhi financier.
‘Look who has come.’
‘Thangabalu, give him a drink.’
We met every other day yet we clinked glasses like long-lost brothers. My Sindhi brother turned towards Narsimhan. ‘Director Sir was telling us about his last film. I did not realise he is a filmmaker.’
‘Every TV reporter thinks he is a filmmaker,’ said Narsimhan. ‘I am no exception.’ He was holding onto the table to stay seated. When his elbows slipped, he collapsed.
A second glass of whisky came my way. The first I grasped, the second I held. I nodded at Veerappan who was observing everything with a slight smile.
‘Say something,’ he said. ‘I know you want to tell us something today.’
‘I do.’ I took a swig of whisky and waited for it to burn its way down my throat. ‘I have realised one thing Veera, market research and advertising are not enough for a fledgling political party.’
Veerappan turned towards the others for the umpteenth time and said, ‘He is an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. The Harvard of India.’ I tried to hide my embarrassment. I need not have bothered.
‘I hate MBAs,’ said Raman, the small-scale industrialist. ‘They question everything, that’s all they do.’
‘One young MBA told me I charge too much interest,’ said the Sindhi financier. ‘On declining balance, you are charging 36 per cent, he said. I said thanks but how much are they paying you to tell me that?’
Raman laughed loudly.
‘MBAs can be predictable,’ I said. ‘If I was to ask an MBA to help Veera, he would come up with this.’
I removed two files from my attaché and placed them ceremoniously on the table.
‘Each file contains a report from a study conducted on behalf of a national party. They paid a lot of money for them. The first report is Segmentation and the Art of Reaping the Caste Dividend. The second is Multivariate Analysis of a Caste and its use in Targeted Politics. If you hire a team of MBAs, this is what you will get.’
‘And what is wrong with that approach?’ said Veera. ‘It sounds scientific. Can you give me a copy?’
‘Mr. Veerappan, do not succumb to this language. This is the language of the clever. It is as sure as it is seductive. Your party is young. It needs doubt and revolution.’
‘I see,’ said Veera. ‘Now you don’t sound like an MBA.’
‘I get restless when what I planned happens, when what I predicted fructifies. Such easy outcomes give me no pleasure. Take the hard road, learn the hard lesson, join the real men who are risking enough.’
‘You may be a rash gambler and you may have succeeded,’ said Veera, ‘that by itself is not reason enough for me.’
It was hard to explain the nature of a political enterprise in India to a politician.
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘in politics, safe bets are what losers take.’
Veera looked confused. ‘Are you telling me I am a…?’
‘Sir, your idea of risk is not in sync with our political environment. The people are wilful. Our civil society is disobedient. There is no scope for safe behaviour. We need to forego our middle-class upbringing. We need to cut the Tamil population loose, disrupt their lives and make them uncertain.’
‘I am not convinced we need to start a disobedience movement, if that is what you are suggesting,’ said Veera.
‘Sir, the two parties in Tamil Nadu are well-entrenched. It is a duopoly, a worse situation than a monopoly. They take turns to rule. It is very hard to break these two silos, but we have to. How? Safe methods? A waste of time. We need interventions that will plunge the state into uncertainty, which will fracture the mandate.’
‘What kind of interventions?’
‘Large-scale interventions. Look at the political history of this Nadu. Fifty years ago, religion and caste were the entrenched silos. The Dravidian parties shattered them. They polarised resentment. They told people – you are not just Tamil, you are Dravidian. Your time has come. A Dravidian will not accept Hindi imposition. A Dravidian will cut the Brahmin’s noose. A Dravidian will break the yoke of religion. They embraced atheism. This was radical thought in a peaceful state that had more temples than pharmacies.’
‘It worked very well,’ said Veerappan.
‘Yes. The change agent was Periyar. He kickstarted the anti-Brahmin and anti-religion movement. He and his followers walked down the central arterial called Mount Road, carrying framed photographs of Hindu gods, each garlanded with chappals, sandals and shoes. Just imagine. The power of that public action blew people’s minds. Then came the occupation. Nobody has written about the occupation but just try and remember how the Dravidian parties took over Mount Road and Marina Beach, the two public spaces that matter. Cortège after cortège passed down Mount Road. First the leader Annadurai, then M G Ramachandran. Each time a sea of humanity that dwarfed the Bay of Bengal that day. And they buried them. Yes sir, no funeral pyre but a burial. On the iconic Marina Beach. They erected huge memorials. The act was one of occupation.’
‘Let us say we postpone my funeral,’ said Veera. Everybody laughed.
‘Uncertain conditions will produce a confused mandate,’ I said. ‘Once voting patterns get fuzzy, we have a chance. In the first-past-the-post system, we need just 30 per cent of the popular vote. That is our magic number.’
‘Gounders are a large enough population?’ asked Veera.
‘Yes, but we have to polarise them,’ I said. ‘Gounders have to realise that history favours only those that write their own.’
‘And how will this work?’
‘Sir, the scale of our movement has to be large. We have to swamp the state and gain mindshare. Meaning newspaper columns, television and social media. Periyar was the butterfly in the Dravidian backyard. He caused a shift. We will have to come up with something similar.’
I had in mind the bogey of a separate state for Gounders. At some point, Veera would have to raise it. Right now was too early.
‘I see,’ said Veerappan.
‘I will finish my preamble with a quote. “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”.’
‘Who said that?’ said Veera.
‘A man called Einstein,’ I said.
I had not won them over. I was convinced that elections had taught voters more than candidates. They had developed a resistance against familiar entreaties, hoary incentives and cheap strategies. Most of all, the voters in Tamil Nadu hated having to choose between the same two parties, who had informally formed a mutual benefit society. An inefficient duopoly had seen the emergence of a visible inept feudal political class.
‘We will set up gangs,’ I said, ‘like your ancestors did. Gounder history speaks about gangs they called kootams. We will mobilise young men, hundreds of them, wherever Gounders have a presence. These youngsters will build your future.’
‘You mean graduates?’ said Veera. ‘Educated, intelligent youngsters?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘The unemployed, the hungry and the street-smart. The less successful. Those who have faced rejection, experienced deprivation, suffered isolation. An example is this quartet that hangs around here. People like Valiban and Kari and the two others called Antony and Thambi. You will have hundreds of such examples.’
‘Raw material,’ said Veera, emphasising raw.
‘But potent,’ I said. ‘Anxiety, shame and fear drive them. We can do wonders with this energy.’
‘And what will these gangs do?’
‘They will disrupt. They will misbehave. They will scare the shit out of the status quo. Their behaviour will be unpredictable. Imagine hundreds of these uncontrolled elements in a civil society that can be easily affected.’
‘I see,’ said Veerappan, staring into his glass.
‘You need a private army, Veera, a Gounder force filled with youngsters straining at the leash. People will notice them and begin to fear them. The key to fear is unpredictability. There will be unrest and, most importantly, the press will come after you. Your image will change.’
‘What will happen on the ground?’
‘Political rallies, diktats, protests, bandhs and other forms of disobedience. Dheeran Chinnamali fought the British; you will fight the Dravidas.’
‘That’s it?’
‘We will make a film,’ I said. ‘We will make a film starring Dheeran Chinnamalai. We will make an icon out of Dheeran. He will be able to stand next to Tipu Sultan and not fade.’
That got his attention.
‘We will make a movie that will capture people’s imagination. We will do for Dheeran what Shivaji Ganesan did for Veerapandia Kattabomman.’
‘And I will be in it?’
I counted until three and took the plunge. ‘No, you will not be in it.’
‘And why is that?’
Now was the time. ‘Because you need to win an election first. Once you are in power, you may treat the whole state as your fiefdom, plastering your face in every street corner, even on state-subsidised products. Right now, this film cannot be a vanity project.’
Inside, he must have smarted but all Veera said after a pause was, ‘And when will you learn?’
‘Learn what?’
‘Learn how to mince these big words that you use?’
Everybody in the room breathed again and some even laughed in relief.
‘And he will be the director?’
We all looked at Narsimhan. His right hand came up, the small finger extended. Nobody was paying him attention.
‘You need a capital city, Veera,’ I said. ‘Chennai won’t do. You need to go back to your ancestral place Odanilai that the British razed to the ground, to Sankagiri Fort where they hanged Dheeran. This is the historic centre you need to resurrect and make your own.’
The next day Veerappan came home for dinner. My mother cooked for him. I told her who he was, the leader of one of the biggest caste groups in Tamil Nadu, a successful farmer, a budding politician and a friend. She slaved over the meal and she was an inspired cook when she was in the mood. Veerappan came in his traditional finery – crisp cotton, some gold jewellery and slick combed black hair – and he arrived in his Prado with an escort vehicle. He removed his footwear, washed his hands, touched my mother’s feet and sat on the floor. He was served mutton in pumpkin gravy, prawns with ladies’ fingers, mutton sukka and crisp dosai. He ate heartily and carried out a detailed conversation with my mother on ingredients and he promised to send her some produce from his farm. After that, we retired to the living room, lit up and smoked, and I poured us some cognac. When we settled down, he had questions but my mother joined us and despite my frowning at her, she stayed.
