The comrade’s manner strongly suggested that the old woman, considering her state of complete doctrinal ignorance, was unworthy to receive assistance from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist), Kittur branch.

The woman was frail and haggard; her husband had hanged himself two weeks ago from the ceiling of their house.

Murali placed the first cup before Comrade Thimma, who picked it up and sipped the tea. This improved his mood.

Once again looking high up at the glowing grille, the comrade said, “I will have to tell you of our dialectics; if you find them acceptable, we can talk about help.”

The farmer’s wife nodded, as if the word “dialectics,” in English, made perfect sense to her.

Without taking his eyes from the grille, the comrade bit into one of the sugar biscuits; the crumbs fell around his chin, and Murali, after handing the old woman her tea, went back to the comrade and wiped the crumbs off with his fingers.

The comrade had small, sparkling eyes, and a tendency to look high up, and far away, as he delivered his words of wis dom, which he always did with a feeling of suppressed excitement. This gave him the air of a prophet. Murali, as prophets’ sidekicks often are, was physically the superior specimen: taller, broader, with a large and heavily creased forehead and a kind smile.

“Give the lady our brochure on dialectics,” the comrade said, speaking straight to the grille.

Murali nodded, and moved purposefully toward one of the cupboards. The reception area of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) was furnished with an old tea-stained table, a few decrepit cupboards, and a desk for the secretary-general, behind which hung a giant poster from the early days of the Soviet Revolution, depicting a group of proletarian heroes climbing a ladder up into heaven. The workers bore mallets and sledgehammers, while a group of Oriental gods cowered at their advance. After digging into two of the cupboards, Murali found a pamphlet with a big red star on the cover. He brushed it with a corner of his shirt and brought it to the old woman.

“She can’t read.”

The soft voice came from the woman’s daughter, who was sitting in the chair next to her, holding on to her teacup and untouched sugar biscuit. After a moment’s hesitation Murali let the daughter have the brochure; keeping the teacup in her left hand, she held the pamphlet between two fingers of her right, as if it were a soiled handkerchief.

The comrade smiled at the window grille; it was not clear if he was reacting to the events of the past few minutes. He was a thin, bald, dark-skinned man with sunken cheeks and gleaming eyes.

“In the beginning we had only one party in India, and it was the true party. It made no compromise. But then the lead ers of this true party were seduced by the lure of bourgeois democracy; they decided to contest elections. That was their first mistake and the fatal one. Soon the one true party had split. New branches emerged, trying to restore the original spirit. But they too became corrupted.”

Murali wiped the cupboard shelves, and tried to realign the loose hinge of its door as well as he could. He was not a peon; there was no peon, as Comrade Thimma would not allow the exploitative hiring of proletarian labor. Murali was certainly not proletarian-he was the scion of an influential landowning Brahmin family-so it was okay for him to perform all kinds of menial work.

The comrade took a deep breath, took off his glasses, and rubbed them clean with a corner of his white cotton shirt.

“We alone have kept the faith-we, the members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist). We alone remain true to the dialectics. And do you know what the strength of our membership is?”

He put his glasses back on and inhaled with satisfaction.

“Two. Murali and me.”

He gazed at the grille with a wan smile. He appeared to be done; so the old woman placed her hands on her daughter’s head and said, “She is unmarried, sir. We are begging of you some money to marry her off, that is all.”

Thimma turned to the daughter and stared; the girl looked at the ground. Murali winced. I wish he’d have more delicacy sometimes, he thought.

“We have no support,” the old woman said. “My family won’t even talk to me. Members of our own caste won’t-”

The comrade slapped his thigh with his palm.

“This caste question is only a manifestation of the class struggle: Mazumdar and Shukla definitively established this in 1938. I refuse to accept the category of ‘caste’ in our discussions.”

The woman looked at Murali. He nodded his head, as if to say, Go on.

“My husband said the Communists were the only ones who cared about people like us. He said that if the Communists ruled the earth there would be no hardships for the poor, sir.”

This seemed to mollify the comrade. He looked at the woman and the girl for a moment, and then sniffed. His fingers seemed to lack something. Murali understood. As he went to the pantry to boil another cup of tea, he heard the comrade’s voice continue behind him:

“The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) is not the party of the poor-it is the party of the proletariat. This distinction has to be understood before we discuss assistance or resistance.”

After turning the kettle on once more, Murali was about to toss the tea leaves in; then he wondered why the daughter had not touched her tea. He was seized by the suspicion that he had put too much tea into the kettle-and that the way he had been making tea for nearly twenty-five years might have been wrong.

Murali got off the number 67C bus at the Salt Market Village stop and walked down the main road, picking his way through a bed of muck while hogs sniffed the earth around him. He kept his umbrella up on his shoulder, like a wrestler keeps his mace, so that its metal point wouldn’t be sullied by the muck. Asking a group of boys playing a game of marbles in the middle of the village road for directions, he found the house: a surprisingly large and imposing structure, with rocks placed on the corrugated tin roof to stabilize it during the rains.

He unlatched the gate and went in.

A hand-spun cotton shirt hung on a hook on the wall next to the door; the dead man’s, he assumed. As if the fellow were still inside taking a nap and would come outside and put it on to greet his visitor.

At least a dozen framed multicolored images of gods had been affixed to the front wall along with one of a potbellied local guru with an enormous nimbus affixed to his head. There was a bare cot, its fibers fraying, for visitors to sit down on.

Murali left his sandals outside, and wondered if he should knock on the door. Too intrusive for a place like this-where death had just entered-so he decided to wait until someone came out.

Two white cows were sitting in the compound of the house. The bells around their necks tinkled during their rare movements. Lying in front of them was a puddle of water in which straw had been soaked to make a gruel. A black buffalo, snippets of fresh green all over its moist nose, stood gazing at the opposite wall of the compound, chewing at a sackful of grass that had been emptied on the ground in front of it. Murali thought, These animals have no concern in the world. Even in the house of a man who has killed himself, they are still fed and fattened. How effortlessly they rule over the men of this village, as if human civilization has confused masters and servants. Murali was transfixed. His eyes lingered on the fat body of the beast, its bulging belly, its glossy skin. He smelled its shit, which had caked on its backside; it had been squatting in puddles of its own waste.

Murali had not been to Salt Market Village in decades. The previous time was twenty-five years ago, when he had come searching for visual details to enrich a short story on rural poverty that he was writing. Not much had changed in a quarter century; only the buffaloes had grown fat.