“Why didn’t you knock on the door?”

The old woman emerged from the backyard; she walked around him with a big smile and went into the house and shouted, “Hey, you! Get some tea!”

In a moment the girl came out with a tumbler of tea, which Murali took, touching her wet fingers as he did so.

The tea, after his long journey, felt like heaven. He had never mastered the art of making tea, even though he had been boiling it for Thimma for nearly twenty-five years now. Maybe it was one of those things that only women can truly do, he thought.

“What do you need from us?” the old woman asked. Her manner had become more servile; as if she had guessed the purpose of his visit only now.

“To find out if you are telling the truth,” he replied calmly.

She summoned the neighbors so he could interview them. They squatted around the cot; he insisted that they sit on the same level as him but they remained where they were.

“Where did he hang himself?”

“Right here, sir!” said one old villager with broken, paan-stained teeth.

“What do you mean, right here?”

The old man pointed to the beam of the roof. Murali could not believe it: in full public view, he had killed himself? So the cows had seen it; and the fat buffalo too.

He heard about the man whose shirt still hung from the hook. The failure of his crops. The loan from the moneylender. At three percent per month, compounded.

“He was ruined by the first daughter’s wedding. And he knew he had one more to marry off-this girl.”

The daughter had been lingering in a corner of the front yard the whole time. He saw her turn her face away in slow agony.

As he was leaving, one of the villagers came running after him: “Sir…sir…I mean, an aunt of mine committed suicide two years ago…I mean, just a year ago, sir, and she was virtually a mother to me…can the Communist Party…”

Murali seized the man’s arm and pressed his fingers deeply into the flesh. He peered into the man’s eyes:

“What is the name of the daughter?”

Slowly he walked back to the bus station. He let the tip of his umbrella trail in the earth. The horror of the dead man’s story, the sight of the fat buffalo, the pain-stricken face of that beautiful daughter-these details kept churning in his mind.

He thought back twenty-five years, when he had come to this village with his notebook and his dreams of becoming an Indian Maupassant. As he walked down the twisting streets, crowded with street children playing their violent games, fatigued day laborers sleeping in the shade, and with thick, still, glistening pools of effluent, he was reminded of that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy that is the nature of every Indian village-and the simultaneous desire to admire and to castigate that had been inspired in him from the time of his first visits.

He felt the need, as he had before, to take notes.

Back then, he had visited Salt Market Village every day for a week, jotting down painstakingly detailed descriptions of farmers, roosters, bulls, pigs, piglets, sewage, children’s games, religious festivals, intending to juggle them into a series of short stories that he crafted in the reading room of the municipal library at night. He had not been sure if the party would approve of his stories, so he sent a bundle of them under a nom de plume-“The Seeker of Justice”-to the editor of a weekly magazine in Mysore.

After a week, he received a postcard from the editor, summoning him from Kittur for a meeting. He took the train to Mysore and waited half a day for the editor to call him into his office.

“Ah, yes…the young genius from Kittur.” The editor searched his table for his glasses, and pulled the folded bundle of Murali’s stories from their envelope, while the young author’s heart beat violently.

“I wanted to see you…”-the editor let the stories fall on the table-“because there is talent in your writing. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike ninety percent of our writers.”

Murali glowed. It was the first time anyone had mentioned the word “talent” when speaking of him.

Picking up one of the stories, the editor silently scanned the pages.

“Who is your favorite author?” he asked, biting at a corner of his glasses.

“Guy de Maupassant.”

Murali corrected himself: “After Karl Marx.”

“Let’s stick to literature,” the editor retorted. “Every character in Maupassant is like this…”-he bent his index finger and wiggled it-“he wants, and wants, and wants. To the last day of his life he wants. Money. Women. Fame. More women. More money. More fame. Your characters”-he unbent his finger-“want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through accurately described village settings and have deep thoughts. They walk around the cows and trees and roosters and think, and then walk around the roosters and trees and cows and think some more. That’s it.”

“They do have thoughts of changing the world for the better…” Murali protested. “They desire a better society.”

“They want nothing!” the editor shouted. “I can’t print stories of people who want nothing!”

He threw the bundle of stories back at Murali. “When you find people who want something, come back to me!”

Murali had never rewritten those stories. Now, as he waited for the bus to take him back to Kittur, he wondered if that bundle of stories was still somewhere in his house.

When Murali got off the bus and walked back to the office, he found Comrade Thimma with a foreigner. It was not unusual for there to be strangers in the office: lean, fatigued men with paranoid eyes who were on the run from nearby states going through one of their routine purges of radical Communists. In those places radical Communism was a real threat to the state. The fugitives would sleep and take tea at the office for a few weeks, until things cooled down and they could return home.

But this man was not one of those hunted ones; he had blond hair and an awkward European accent.

He sat next to Thimma, and the comrade was pouring his heart out, as he gazed at the distant light in the grille up on the wall. Murali sat down and listened to him for half an hour. He was magnificent. Trotsky had not been forgiven, nor had Bernstein been forgotten. Thimma was trying to show the European that even in a small town like Kittur men were up to date with the theory of dialectics.

The foreigner had nodded a lot and written everything down. At the end, he capped his ballpoint pen and observed:

“I find that the Communists have virtually no presence in Kittur.”

Thimma slapped his thigh. He glared at the grille. The socialists had had too much influence in this part of South India, he said. The question of feudalism in the countryside had been solved; big estates had been broken up and distributed among peasants.

“That man Devraj Urs-when he was leader of the Congress-created some kind of revolution here.” Thimma sighed. “Just a pseudorevolution, naturally. The falsehood of Bernstein once again.”

Murali’s own land had been subjected to the socialist policies of the Congress government. His father had lost his land; in return, the government had allocated compensation. His father went to the municipal office to receive his compensation, but he found that someone, some bureaucrat, had forged his signature and run away with his money. When Murali heard this, he had thought, My old man deserves this. I deserve this. For all that we have done to the poor, this is fit retribution. He realized, of course, that his family’s compensation had not been stolen by the poor, but by some corrupt civil servant. Nevertheless this was justice of a kind.

Murali went about his regular end-of-day tasks. First he swept the pantry. As he reached with his broom under the sink, he heard the foreigner say: