The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy

was only in 1967—almost exactly ten years after they first came to power—that Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re-elected. This time as part of a coalition between what had now become two separate parties—the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI and the CPI(M).

      Pappachi was dead by then. Chacko divorced. Paradise Pickles was seven years old.

      Kerala was reeling in the aftermath of famine and a failed monsoon. People were dying. Hunger had to be very high up on any government list of priorities.

      During his second term in office, Comrade E. M. S. went about implementing the Peaceful Transition more soberly. This earned him the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party. They denounced him for his ‘Parliamentary Cretinism’ and accused him of ‘providing relief to the people and thereby blunting the People’s Consciousness and diverting them from the Revolution’.

      Peking switched its patronage to the newest, most militant faction of the CPI(M)—the Naxalites—who had staged an armed insurrection in Naxalbari, a village in Bengal. They organized peasants into fighting cadres, seized land, expelled the owners and established People’s Courts to try Class Enemies. The Naxalite movement spread across the country and struck terror in every bourgeois heart.

      In Kerala, they breathed a plume of excitement and fear into the already frightened air. Killings had begun in the north. That May there was a blurred photograph in the papers of a landlord in Palghat who had been tied to a lamp post and beheaded. His head lay on its side, some distance away from his body, in a dark puddle that could have been water, could have been blood. It was hard to tell in black and white. In the grey predawn light.

      His surprised eyes were open.

      Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Running Dog, Soviet Stooge) expelled the Naxalites from his party and went on with the business of harnessing anger for parliamentary purposes.

      The march that surged around the skyblue Plymouth on that skyblue December day was a part of that process. It had been organized by the Travancore-Cochin Marxist Labour Union. Their comrades in Trivandrum would march to the Secretariat and present the Charter of People’s Demands to Comrade E. M. S. himself. The orchestra petitioning its conductor. Their demands were that paddy workers, who were made to work in the fields for eleven and a half hours a day—from seven in the morning to six-thirty in the evening—be permitted to take a one-hour lunch break. That women’s wages be increased from one rupee twenty-five paisa a day, to three rupees, and men’s from two rupees fifty paisa to four rupees fifty paisa a day. They were also demanding that Untouchables no longer be addressed by their caste names. They demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan, but just as Achoo, or Kelan, or Kuttan.

      Cardamom Kings, Coffee Counts and Rubber Barons—old boarding school buddies—came down from their lonely, far-flung estates and sipped chilled beer at the Sailing Club. They raised their glasses. ‘A rose by any other name…’ they said, and sniggered to hide their rising panic.

      The marchers that day were party workers, students, and the labourers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new.

      Through the Plymouth window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zjndabad. And that the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.

      Inside the Plymouth it was still and hot.

      Baby Kochamma’s fear lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers, too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.

      She tried to count the green beads on her rosary, but couldn’t concentrate. An open hand slammed against the car window.

      A balled fist banged down on the burning skyblue bonnet. It sprang open. The Plymouth looked like an angular blue animal in a zoo asking to be fed.

      A bun.

      A banana.