“My dear fellow,” Chacko said, “that’s impossible. He’s invaluable. He practically runs the factory-and we can’t solve the problem by sending all the Paravans away. Surely we have to learn to deal with this nonsense.”
Comrade Pillai disliked being addressed as My Dear Fellow. It sounded to him like an insult couched in good English, which, of course, made it a double-insult-the insult itself, and the fact that Chacko thought he wouldn’t understand it. It spoiled his mood completely.
“That may be,” he said caustically. “But Rome was not built in a day. Keep it in mind, comrade, that this is not your Oxford college. For you what is a nonsense for Masses it is something different.”
Lenin, with his father’s thinness and his mother’s eyes, appeared at the door, out of breath. He had finished shouting the whole of Mark Antony’s speech and most of Lochinvar before he realized that he had lost his audience. He re-positioned himself between Comrade Pillai’s parted knees.
– – flg œ-lapped his hands over his father’s head, creating mayhem in the mosquito funnel. He counted the squashed carcasses on his palms. Some of them bloated with fresh blood. He showed them to his father, who handed him over to his mother to be cleaned up.
Once again the silence between them was appropriated by old Mrs. Pillai’s grunts. Latha arrived with Pothachen and Mathukutty
The men were made to wait outside. The door was left ajar. When Comrade PiIlai spoke next, he spoke in Malayalam and made sure it was loud enough for his audience outside.
“Of course the proper forum to air workers’ grievances is through the Union. And in this case, when Modalali himself is a comrade, it is a shameful matter for them not to be unionized and join the Party Struggle.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Chacko said. “I am going to formally organize them into a union. They will elect their own representatives.”
“But comrade, you cannot stage their revolution for them. You can only create awareness. Educate them. They must launch their own struggle. They must overcome their fears.”
“Of whom?” Chacko smiled. “Me?”
“No, not you, my dear comrade. Of centuries of oppression.”
Then Comrade Pillai, in a hecronng voice, quoted Chairman Mao. In Malayalam. His expression curiously like his niece’s.
“Revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.”
And so, having bagged the contract for the Synthetic Cooking Vinegar labels, he deftly banished Chacko from the fighting rank of the Overthrowers to the treacherous ranks of the To Be Overthrown.
They sat beside each other on steel folding chairs, on the afternoon of the Day that Sophie Mol Came, sipping coffee and crunching banana chips. Dislodging with their tongues the sodden yellow mulch that stuck to the roofs of their mouths.
The Small Thin Man and the Big Fat Man. Comic-book adversaries in a still-to-come war.
It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pulai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and ribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.
He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.
Nobody ever learned the precise nature of the role that Comrade Pillai played in the events that followed. Even Chacko-who knew that the fervent, high-pitched speeches about Rights of Untouchables (“Caste is Class, comrades”) delivered by Comrade Pillai during the Marxist Party siege of Paradise Pickles were pharisaic-never learned the whole story. Not that he cared to find out. By then, numbed by the loss of Sophie Mol, he looked out at everything with a vision smudged with grief. Like a child touched by tragedy, who grows up suddenly and abandons his playthings, Chacko dumped his toys. Pickle Baron-dreams and the People’s War joined the racks of broken airplanes in his glass-paned cupboard. After Paradise Pickles closed down, some rice fields were sold (along with their mortgages) to pay off the bank loans. More were sold to keep the family in food and clothes. By the time Chacko emigrated to Canada, the family’s only income came from the rubber estate that adjoined the Ayemenem House and the few coconut trees in the compound. This was what Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria lived off after everybody else had died, left, or been Returned.
To be fair to Comrade Pillai, he did not plan the course of events that followed. He merely slipped his ready fingers into History’s waiting glove.
It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.
Velutha’s last visit to Comrade Pillai-after his confrontation with Mammachi and Baby Kochamma-and what had passed between them, remained a secret. The last betrayal that sent Velutha across the river, swimming against the current, in the dark and rain, well in time for his blind date with history.
Velutha caught the last bus back from Kottayam, where he was having the canning machine mended. He ran into one of the other factory workers at the bus stop, who told him with a smirk that Mammachi wanted to see him. Velutha had no idea what had happened and was completely unaware of his father’s drunken visit to the Ayemenem House. Nor did he know that Vellya Paapen had been waiting for hours at the door of their hut, still drunk, his glass eye and the edge of his ax glittering in the lamplight, waiting for Velutha to return. Nor that poor paralyzed Kuttappen, numb with apprehension, had been talking to his father continuously for two hours, trying to calm him down, all the time straining his ears for the sound of a footstep or the rustle of undergrowth so that he could shout a warning to his unsuspecting brother.
Velutha didn’t go home. He went straight to the Ayemenem House. Though, on the one hand, he was taken by surprise, on the other he knew, had known, with an ancient instinct, that one day History’s twisted chickens would come home to roost. Through the whole of Mammachi’s outburst he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.
When Velutha arrived, Mammachi lost her bearings and spewed her blind venom, her crass, insufferable insults, at a panel in the sliding-folding door until Baby Kochamma tactfully swiveled her around and aimed her rage in the right direction, at Velutha standing very still in the gloom. Mammachi continued her tirade, her eyes empty, her face twisted and ugly, her anger propelling her towards Velutha until she was shouting right into his face and he could feel the spray of her spit and smell the stale tea on her breath. Baby Kochamma stayed close to Mammachi. She said nothing, but used her hands to modulate Mammachi’s fury, to stoke it anew. An encouraging pat on the back. A reassuring arm around the shoulders. Mammachi was completely unaware of the manipulation.
Just where an old lady like her-who wore crisp ironed saris and played the Nutcracker Suite on the violin in the evenings-had learned the foul language that Mammachi used that day was a mystery to everybody (Baby Kochamma, Kochu Maria, Ammu in her locked room) who heard her.
“Out!” she had screamed, eventually. “If I find you on my property tomorrow I’ll have you castrated like the pariah dog that you are! I’ll have you killed!”
“We’ll see about that,” Velutha said quietly.