Zero Degree Read online

  Words on the walls of a prison, on the walls of an asylum, on the walls of public toilets; words on school desks, on condom boxes, in textbooks, on a judge’s judgment sheet, in university corridors, on city buses, in the mouth of a policeman who’s high on zarda beeda, in the prime minister’s diary; words scattered all over the place like this; a little girl gathers them up, now she goes to sell them at the ironsmith’s shop; who is that now, walking around in her dream? Come on now, Mr. Roland Barthes, please, stay out of there.

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  The following is Ninth-Century-A.D.-Dead-Brain’s review of Muniyandi’s book:

  The most completely absurd feature of this book is its attempt to equate common thieves with revolutionaries. Muniyandi does not seem to grasp the difference between righteous rebellion and everyday poverty-driven crime. It appears that, having read somewhere that the revolt by the Santhal tribe against the moneylenders later turned into an uprising against the British, Muniyandi has modeled the climax of his novel after these events, and believes that this gives his work revolutionary credentials. But Muniyandi’s “revolutionaries” do not stop at looting banks. They also loot textile showrooms and kill policemen.

  The “revolutionary” hero, Mayta, seems to me to be a mere burglar. I fail to see how his protest is motivated by any ideology.

  I once treated Muniyandi to a quarter-bottle of whiskey and chicken biryani at Sri Ramalinga Vilas, and we gossiped generally about the literary scene. In a drunken emotional state, he let slip that he had stolen the idea of modeling non-fictional documentary narrative based on some true events from Tres Tristes Tigres, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

  The revolutionary hero of Muniyandi’s story Mayta (What kind of a name is this? What language is it? Maybe Muniyandi would have done better if he had gone ahead and written his novel in this strange foreign tongue, rather than in Tamil) and his textile-showroom-looting comrades have been cleverly depicted as modern-day Santhal revolutionaries. If we accept this comparison, then we must also accept that when all those government clerks who travel by the 27C from Anna Nagar to the Secretariat for work and jot down stories for little magazines in their spare time start picking the pockets of their fellow passengers on the bus, they can claim that their actions are not shameful, but rather a form of protest against the imperialism of America and the IMF.

  Muniyandi boasts that his novel is based on real events. To investigate the truth behind it all, I traveled to the location of those events, along with a friend of mine from Nagercoil. We met some women carrying pots of water, and questioned them. This is what we learned. A few unemployed dimwits had started gibbering about Mao and his revolution, and eventually decided to go and loot a tiny 18’ x 9’ textile shop for a mere four hundred forty- one rupees. And these nincompoops were compared with the rebels of Santhal Revolution by our progressive writer Muniyandi. The poor shop owner, Paalvannam Pillai, is a father of six daughters and three sons.

  After I finished my investigation and was on my way to the arrack shop, the police inspector who had come along as my traveling companion stopped at a certain place, took out his handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes, and blew his nose. I could tell these were no crocodile tears, nothing like the fake outpourings of sympathy for prostitutes and lepers with which Muniyandi has filled his book. I swear it on Camus. It was clear that the policeman’s grief was real, and so I asked him the reason for it. Apparently, this was the spot where his colleague, while in pursuit of the rebels, had tripped on a stone, fell, cracked the back of his skull, and died. I stared at the stone. What an absurd world this is, I thought; it was like something from Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I thought I could hear the stone whispering something: that all Muniyandi’s lies, wrapped up in a disguise of Marxism and structuralism, were falling apart.

  Muniyandi’s version of the tale is this. After the bank robbery attempt failed, Mayta and his friends took to their heels. The plainclothes policemen and villagers chased after them, throwing stones. Even though Mayta had an AK-45, he would not shoot back at them, for fear of hurting the innocent villagers, and so the band of “revolutionaries” was stoned to death. With these lies Muniyandi attempts to paint his hero as some great humanist, and get his readers to sniff their noses and shed tears for a false rebel.

  But here is the story I uncovered. Even while they were still inside the bank, a fight broke out between Mayta’s friends and the bank cashier, and Mayta did use his gun. This is proved by the fact that the cashier is still on medical leave. There are also several bullet holes in the walls. Somehow, in all that commotion (do you really expect me to call it an “uprising”?) nobody died; Muniyandi sees this as evidence of humanitarianism, but to me, it seems to indicate nothing more than that Mayta and his gang members had spectacularly lousy aim.

  In any case, I will relate the rest of what actually happened. The villagers chased them, in spite of the gun. They even threw stones at the thieves. Mayta aimed his AK-45 at a few brave-hearted young villagers who, determined not to let the bandits escape, started to pounce on them. Even as his finger was feeling for the trigger, a stone fired from a stranger’s slingshot hit poor Mayta right in the eyes. Blood poured out, and he was put to death by the following volley of stones. Seeing the demise of their leader, the gang went berserk and tried to fire their rifles—which, as we know, failed to work.

  According to the villagers, it was the divine grace of Nagercoil Velikkaruppan that prevented the gang’s guns from firing and changing the course of history.

  STORY Of MUNIYANDI

  SHE IS ON HER WAY somewhere when she passes a temple. On the street corner, preparations are underway for the idol to be paraded through the streets. There are white chrysanthemum garlands. When I decide to sit down in the crowd to watch, a woman cries that there is a dead body in the dumpster. She immediately takes a look at the frozen legs of the child, gets frightened, and runs off home thinking if there’s been a death near the temple, then the procession will be stopped. She puts down whatever it is she has in her hand, and, hearing a thud, looks down to see the dead child. As she looks at it, its eyes open; its limbs start to twitch; it begins to cry. It must have gone mad, she thinks, and takes hold of its neck, intending to strangle it, but doesn’t have the heart. The man comes, shouts something, seems to come to some decision, and leaves in a hurry. She is frozen again, staring blankly at the child. Now the child’s limbs start to take on strange shapes; they become the limbs of a snail, a gecko, a tortoise, a lizard, a spider, a snake, a scorpion, a leech, a fish. She brings the broom and dustpan; as she sweeps up the mess, it transforms into a wriggling cluster of worms. Trying to control her disgust, she goes out and dumps it in the dumpster.

  Bhuchi, lying uncontrollably drunk at the side of the road, climbs up and leans over the edge of the dumpster to puke, but sees the stiff body of the child and recoils in terror. The child’s stomach has been gnawed at by a rat that now lurks in the corner of the bin. A girl child is always useful for earning an income, thinks Bhuchi, so he brings it to Neena, who, on seeing the child, beats Bhuchi black and blue. “Are you so drunk you can’t even tell the difference between a boy and a girl?” Neena demands. She takes the child to a doctor. Though it has been lying in the dumpster in the cold, chewed by rats, for nearly the whole thirty-six hours since its birth, the child survives.

  And so, eighteen thousand million years after the world came into being, this child, born in the month of Margazhi, has survived to become a sentence on this page. All due to Neena and Bhuchi.

  Colostrum The yellow liquid that a mother’s breast

  lactates for a few days after delivery. It contains a lot of proteins and vitamins. It has antibodies against many common diseases especially those that the mother has had earlier. These antibodies from the mother’s breast milk protect the child until it is capable of generating antibodies on its own.

  Eating ice cream causes throat infection, and may ev
en require surgery. Bombay sweets are made of fish gills. Son Papdi sellers usually come around booming a horn. Kids buy the sticky sweets in various shapes—fish, wristwatches, planes, ships—and watch them till they begin to sweat and melt in the heat of the sun. The sweets are shaped with spit.

  Dear Lady Reader, you should also know how Muniyandi converted to existentialism. When he was in his adolescence—perhaps even earlier—and already thirsting to become a writer, he began to imbibe all the reading material he could lay his hands on. He read Einstein, Brihadharnyaka’s commentary on the Upanishads, Kurumbur Kuppusami, Gramsci, Ambedkar, Manu Shastra, the Mahabharata, The Arabian Nights, Robert Musil, pig genetics, Aandal, Che Guevara, Alejo Carpentier, body politics, the history of Bolivia, biographies of mountain trekkers, criminal statements, innumerable love letters, the geology of volcanic landforms, marine biology, legends about pilgrim- age sites, Gershom Scholem, René Descartes—the list went on and on. Eventually he came across an interview with Parveen Babi in which she declared that she was an existentialist. At first, Muniyandi had trouble pronouncing the word. He said it aloud to himself several times, then looked it up in the dictionary. He immediately fell in love with the meaning, and proclaimed that he, Muniyandi, was an existentialist. “I am an existentialist,” he wrote in his notebook, over and over again, loving the word more and more each time. His English lecturer happened to notice this while looking over his notes. “Are you an existentialist?” she asked him. Muniyandi stood up and replied shyly, “Yes, Ma’am.”

  A landowner in Suththa, a village in the state of Bihar, shot down a nine-year-old boy, reportedly because the boy had stolen a Petromax lantern from the landowner’s house. Muniyandi did not know who his birth parents were, but he did know his foster mother was a sex worker. He was never ashamed about this fact; still, he made no mention of it in his autobiography. In a village in Mirzapur District, near Kalipur, the husband of a woman named Mira Bai borrowed a hundred eighty rupees from a carpet-maker. Ananthasami, having done some research on Muniyandi’s neighborhood and the street’s prostitution, exposed the lie to the public in his review of the autobiography, saying that although Muniyandi had deliberately tried to hide his mother’s profession and present her has a woman of great chastity, he had failed miserably in the attempt. Since he was unable to pay back the loan, his family became bonded laborers to the carpet-maker. I took this matter to the court, with the help of the Children’s Freedom Association in that district. As hard as Muniyandi tried, he could not come up with a reason why he had not revealed the truth about his mother. The court decided that Mira Bai’s son Umashankar, age nine, should be awarded thirty-six thousand rupees in compensation for having been forced to work as the carpet-maker’s slave for twenty-seven months. All through his childhood, Muniyandi had slept under his mother’s cot. But with the complicity of the local police, the carpet-maker managed not only to avoid paying the amount, but also to have Umashankar’s elder brother—a bonded laborer as well—arrested on false charges. But he wouldn’t start out there; when the lights were switched off, he would drop off to sleep next to his mother. The boys and Mira Bai’s husband received a thrashing from the police. He could only go to sleep with his head resting on his mother’s chest, listening to the rhythm of her heart. They were warned that they would be dismembered if they ever spoke about it publicly. The lub-dub sound, the way her breast rose and fell, gave him the comforting feeling of a long train journey. I also saw for myself that thousands of children were working in the stone quarries in Faridabad. Otherwise, he would toss and turn, but never really fall asleep. The Association’s Pakistan branch reports that there are ninety lakh child bonded laborers in that country. The rhythm of her heart and her warm embrace would lull him to sleep in spite of his hunger. Most of them were employed in brick factories. But on waking up, he would find himself under the cot.

  Ninety young men were killed and thrown into the Ganga. It is that same sound that woke me up several times at night. Because Kuchi Devi’s husband refused to lend his wife to his employer, he was burned alive. When he woke up for the first time like that, he could not understand why he was under the cot or make sense of the strange noises coming from above, so he rolled out, and saw a dark shape moving up and down on top of his mother. It was only then that he began to understand what was going on. She was pregnant then. When he was slightly older, he tried doing the same thing those dark shapes had done to his mother to the neighbor’s daughter and her mother happened to see it and started screaming and because of that his mother and her mother had a huge fight where they tore at each other’s hair and rolled around in the streets. Because the local police refused to register Kuchi Devi’s case, she came to Delhi. Since that day, whenever someone came to see my mother, I would go out.

  Maa aap sanket karte hain, to me apne kamre ke jhoothe banaata houn. The room he called home was only three by six feet, so he had no other option. The 1980 census report says that there are 180 lakhs of child laborers. They had to bathe and shit on the streets. They work in factories, hotels, cinema halls and small shops. They do not cook. They roll beedis. They break stones. They work the night shifts in hotels and glass factories. Even now Misra is surprised. Most of the employees in these factories are children. If they wanted to shit in the day, where could Amma—or any other woman—go? The temperature in the factory was 40.5 degrees centigrade. I have seen my mother, and other women too, go off before dawn with a small pot of water to the open ground across the road. 72% of India’s matchboxes are manufactured in Sivakasi. How many children there are, working from dawn to dusk in these factories! “Arrey bachche, teri maa kidhar gayee?” asked a customer. The Indian Industries Act says that children should not be put to work more than 270 minutes daily. It was then that I began learning English. Yet they are forced to work throughout the day. “My mother is funking,” said Misra to the customer. From that day onwards, the other children called Misra funky funky funky.

  IF ANYONE ASKED Fuckrunissa how many rooms were there in the huge mansion—palace might be a better word—she would just shrug.

  “Who knows? You think I have nothing better to do than to count them all?” she would ask, wearily, but with just a touch of pride.

  For the mansion belonged to her. It really did have an extraordinary number of bedrooms, as well as a swimming pool at the side, a few ballrooms, and a row of servants’ quarters behind the building for the horse cart drivers, palanquin bearers (Fuckrunissa preferred to travel in a palanquin—she hated horse chariots), cooks, punkawallahs, washerwomen, and other sundry maids. Behind these quarters was the garage for the palanquin and the horse shed.

  As if this was not enough, Nawab Mirza Ali Khan wanted to have a canal dug from the Yamuna River to the garden of the fort, so that fishermen could row right up to the doorstep to provide them with the freshest fish. Just imagine! Nawab should have been the Sultan of this whole world for his generous heart but he was destined to possess just a small piece of earth.

  Out of all the women in his zamin, the Nawab’s love was only for Fuckrunissa. She knew that no other could take her place in his heart.

  In the beginning, before he understood her character, the Nawab kept asking Fuckrunissa to come and join his harem. But she refused.

  If she were to go and live there, Fuckrunissa thought, she would vanish, become subsumed. She had not been born for such a fate. “Nawab Sahib, I am your slave,” she told him. “All of us here in the zamin are your slaves. We go wherever you order us to go. But we have grown up as wild parrots, breathing the free, open air of your land. Please, do not cage us in your harem. I was born with bells on my feet—I cannot be walled in.” Hearing such eloquent speech, the Nawab was eventually convinced.

  That was the night when Fuckrunissa gave an enchanting recital of ghazals and dancing, and those in the audience claimed that they had never before enjoyed such a musical feast. The Nawab, with his poet’s heart, felt the same. He melted in
the romance of her voice that night.

  “How do you come to be so talented, woman?” asked the Nawab. “Women from royal households, who have studied for years under the best teachers, cannot match you.”

  “Fuckrunissa must have enjoyed that life, Misra,” said Neena.

  “Oh, I disagree. How can you say that? Wasn’t it after reading her diary that you decided to give up your hedonistic lifestyle and get married?”

  But Misra was wrong about Fuckrunissa. She loved every instant of her life in the fort. In her diary, she wrote pages about her teacher Maulvi Nizamudeen, and about his lessons on swimming, dance, astronomy, philosophy and logic.

  The Maulvi was a great linguist who knew Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Greek. He had read all the great epics and mythologies. But his direct experience of the world had taught him more than all the books ever could.

  “It was only after reading some of the stories the Maulvi told Fuckrunissa that I began to take an interest in my own sexuality,” said Neena.

  The Maulvi told me the story of a dove who, having lost its partner, picked up a stone in its beak, flew up as high as it could, swallowed the stone, and then dropped to the ground to crash and die.

  “‘Brother, when you brought Mandodhari here, I was so overjoyed I kissed you. When you made the strings of your veena sing with that joy, I traveled along with you through that ecstatic musical space. But Brother, you have now become old. You have grown children. To have abducted Seetha, at this age, is not right,’ said the younger brother to the elder. But Ravana did not pay heed. So his younger brother left him, and took refuge with the epic hero Rama.

  It was then that Rama narrated the dove story to explain the concept of surrender,” said the Maulvi in his soft voice.