The big news of this week, though, is that the creators of Parasakthi-who are touring the eastern part of this region still known as Madras to present to their fans, live and in person, the beloved speeches and songs from the movie-will arrive in Pandiyoor in a few days’ time.
A dais is erected in the largest town square and decorated in ribbon-works with the DMK logo-a stylized rising sun-winking from the centre of every pouf. That day, the town is overrun; the square overflows. Every cinema-goer within seventy miles of Pandiyoor has come for the show, except most Brahmins, who stay home.
From the women’s room, Janaki and Thangajothi make out the faint boom and echo of miked and undiluted Tamil together with the growing echo and boom of the audience, which spreads along the streets radiating south, east and west from the square so the gathering takes the form of an immense, palpitating DMK logo.
Thangajothi sits on the floor, playing at sorting her collections: tamarind seeds, cowries, pebbles, beads. Her lips move in exact accord with the speeches from the squares. With the first song, her brothers burst through the doorway, fists and hips punching in time, “Caw! Caw! Caw!” and scattering her precious objets. She screams and Janaki suggests they all move out into the main hall and try to disturb Senior Mami a bit less.
The doors to the anteroom and veranda are open, and Baskaran sits outside with his father. He had insisted, like all the Brahmin-quarter parents, that the children stay home from school today. Despite this, the quarter is unusually quiet, and seems even more so than it is in contrast with the noise at the square. Two rays of the rally stretch past the northern entrance of Single Street.
The applause and cheering has built for nearly three hours when it hits a sustained note, the sound of an effort to prevent something from ending. The celebrities must now be descending the dais, bodyguards sheltering them from their admirers. The stars make jocund attempts to sabotage the cordon, reaching across it to tap hands and clasp fingers. The bodyguards push puny, persistent peasants to the sides, creating a corridor for the stars, and then another for the cars, which begin slowly to pull away. The crowd is thousands deep-over half those present dance an escort for their departing heroes, and then depart after them, elated; others sit or walk away; yet another faction of some hundreds, farthest from the cars and closest to the Brahmin quarter, take their feelings to the streets.
Seeing the crowd approach, the Brahmin quarter rises from its verandas, goes inside its houses, closes its doors. Janaki glimpses the distorted faces of the impassioned oppressed, trying to renounce God and caste for a better life, as Baskaran ushers his father into the vestibule and slides the great upper and lower bolts into place. “Janaki, make sure the back gate and the back doors are all locked.”
Janaki hurries to follow his instructions and finds Gopalan already carrying them out, while Baskaran enters his father’s and mother’s redoubts to close and bolt the shutters inside the barred windows, and then does the same for all the high windows facing Single Street. Janaki finishes by shunting into place the upper and side bolts for the garden doors, where little Thangajothi is sliding their lower bolts down into the floor.
“I want you all to stay together down here, is that understood?” Baskaran looks at each of their faces in turn. “I am going up onto the roof to keep track of matters.”
“No, pa, please,” blurts Janaki.
“It’s all right.” He pats her hand and mounts the stairs. “They won’t even be able to see me, much less reach me, but I want to watch what they’re up to.”
When Baskaran looks down from the edge of the roof, the horde has rounded from Single Street on to Double Street, filling the empty road as they pour toward the Krishna temple. Three or four other men are on their roofs and they acknowledge one another without sign or sound, lords now serving as their own sentinels. Some in the massing throng carry flags or pennants; three badmashes hold aloft a giant portrait of Ganesha, wearing an insult, a garland of sandals, and some others, when they reach the temple, pelt it with their shoes. Baskaran thinks it is this that causes one Brahmin man at the end of the quarter to point, then make gestures as though signalling someone to go. Another joins him. Baskaran shares their outrage at the insults, but thinks, Surely they can’t believe these deranged and unthinking semi-citizens will pay attention? But now one of his neighbours is shouting west, and the others on their roofs are turning, and their message, relayed without distortion, reaches Baskaran.
“It’s Shyama. He’s in the crowd. Below.”
Baskaran is at his stairs and dashing down even before he comprehends what has happened.
Shyama is a hard child to pen. He had arrived at the Krishna temple from the side near the river in time to meet and be engulfed by the swarm. A young man with a bright face had mounted the temple platform and begun declaiming the atheistic speech. The crowd recited along, as did Shyama, bringing to bear all his own powers of oratory. The men around him smiled down at him, so young, so cute, so full of conviction. Then one of them noticed his holy thread and signalled to his mates by running the point of his finger and thumb from shoulder to hip and back-Brahmin-a gesture that stilled a small ring of men around him.
Shyama stops singing when a shoe hits him on the forehead. He looks around and finds he is surrounded by a half-dozen leering, jeering men, calling him names whose literal meaning he doesn’t understand. The men lift their dhotis in thrusting gestures of insult, for forty or fifty seconds, a long time for a child, before their fellows set upon them and slap them resoundingly. Shyama is picked up, patted and placed on the shoulders of a man who either finds it amusing to have a Brahmin mascot for this exercise or thinks this the safest place to put the child for the moment.
Raised above the crowd, Shyama is spotted by the last man on Double Street, but, absorbed again in the action of the rally, he doesn’t see the man shout and wave to him, then start to run.
When Gopalan sees his young master run shouting from the stairwell, he slips out the back, telling the cook he is summoning the police, who are circling but not interfering with the demonstration. At the front, Janaki bolts the door behind her husband as he has told her to, and presses her ear against it, sobbing silently so she can open it the instant he returns. Baskaran’s father opens his window a crack and sees his son set upon with blows and kicks on his own doorstep, as have been his two equally reckless neighbours along the road.
Two police constables fight their way through the crowd with billy sticks now. With Gopalan’s help, they carry Baskaran inside, his nose broken, scalp cut, blood crimsoning his kurta. Five minutes later, Gopalan bangs on the door again, this time with an unhurt Shyama in his arms.
Janaki spends a week nursing her husband back to relative health. Fortunately, most of his wounds are superficial. The first time she sees Shyama, she castigates him.
“Can you see now, what kind of sentiments those are? All men are equal! Bah! Why would they hurt someone, then, who never harmed them?”
Shyama doesn’t respond, except to stop coming to their house after school.
Baskaran, once he recovers, speaks to his nephew and persuades him to return, though Janaki cannot help but have another talk with him, in a gentler but still firm tone, and with Thangajothi as well, who she feels is at an impressionable age.
“My own uncle, he is very progressive in his politics. And you know what? He doesn’t even speak to his own mother. Can you imagine?”
She hadn’t wanted to use Vairum as an example, but feels it is urgent to alarm Shyama.