Comrade Lonappan was
born a comrade. His parents’ photo is still dusted and displayed by the party
on Martyrs’ Day.
‘I was conceived in
hiding,’ Lonappan says.
His essay on that (‘Can martyrs copulate while fighting for a
cause?’), written when he was in school, made the party notice him. They
bought all the printed copies and the essay never reached the public. The party
wanted to admonish him for not seeking their approval but they could not. A
warning can be given only to a true comrade. Whether Lonappan belongs to that
category is a persisting doubt.
He has never claimed
to be a comrade, nor has he indicated he is not. A section of the party thinks
that that is a quality of a true comrade. He disagrees with the party’s views and
that too in public forum. The party cannot fault him till he agrees with someone.
His camaraderie cannot even be ascertained by the book of funds, as it is with
most. The annual membership fees are waived for those congenitally inflicted with
party membership. His looks do not help either. His usual costume of cotton
shirt, dark trousers, umbrella and sneakers fits well. His relationship with the
party is not mutually beneficial but that is the case with most comrades. He
uses his parents’ names when that helps to oil creaking official machinery. Every
party member listens to him; they think someone in the party listens to him. It
is true that the party does not want him, but that must be the case with all
true comrades. If and when the party finds a true one, they will have reason to
warn and discourage. He does not want the party either. Strong lasting bonds have
been forged with such mutual disregard.
His past, after the
essay on conception, is rather vague. After school, Lonappan followed the crowd
and left the state. He returned, many decades later, comfortably well-off. Some
claim he became a slave to capitalist imperialist firms. Others opine he
reached the highest levels of Academia and fell from grace. Many portray him as
a misanthropist. A rumour casts him as a survivor of many failed marriages.
After the incident
with the essay, Lonappan next caused a blip on the party’s radar when he turned
up at the Writers’ Corner shortly after his return from foreign lands. That was
the day the party organized, at the Writers’ Corner, a campaign against the
testing of nuclear weapons. Writers of every hue turned up. The left side of
the auditorium was with the party. The right side was vociferously against.
Lonappan sat at the back. (That farthest loneliest point became his regular
seat.) Lonappan caught everyone’s attention during question hour. He riled the
right side with, ‘Only idiots will support the test of nuclear bombs.’ His next
remark vexed the party on the left. ‘Is this a campaign against nuclear weapons
or is it a campaign of a party by a party for a party? Only idiots will mix the
two.’
Lonappan attends every
Saturday meeting at the Writers’ Corner, irrespective of the group in action. The
essay no one has read made everyone there regard him as a writer. That status,
like his comradeship, is dubious. It is not known if he still writes. His
questions and remarks sound like that of a writer. The smoky spectacled
seriousness definitely fits the stereotype. ‘Who is not a writer?’ Lonappan
asked at one session. If people knew the answer to that, Lonappan might not be
a writer. ‘That is surely a rhetorical question,’ writers dismissed him, not
wishing to rock their boat by finding an answer. No one, not even the clique of
backbenchers that has formed around him, wants him there. That is partly due to
the discomfort he causes during question hour and partly a result of his guarded
aloofness. Even then, no one ignores him because everyone thinks someone
considers him important.
He has not exhibited
any affinity to the place or to any group of writers. It is possible he turns
up at the Writers’ Corner because the city has few other distractions. There
are no decent libraries. The last good one decided to teach people how to read
instead of providing reading material. Education is more profitable than its
application. The expensive theatres show movies that should be freely
downloadable. There are clubs but none for those who do not like clubs. Eating
joints try to copy what they are not, to attract those with a fetish for the overpriced.
There is religion, plenty of it. Technology tried to be different, for a brief
period. For types averse to organized idiocy and smartphones, there is little
in the city. In that milieu, the Writers’ Corner has a peculiar charm.
Its central location,
close to the Zoo, and the free admission suits Lonappan. The half an acre plot remains green with old
trees and minimal concrete. Tweets, chirps, honks and curses, from within and
without, accompany the thoughts and words of the writers. Ugly flats surround the
place. Those residents tried to usurp the writers’ meeting ground for their
kids but failed. They continue to protest by displaying variegated innerwear on
balconies. Some go to the extent of dumping their garbage in the Corner. None
of that bothers the writers. They wear worse within, referred to as their fifty
shades of grey; and, after the closure of the city’s waste-treatment plant many
years back, no place in the city feels like home without refuse.
The Corner is fashioned
like an ancient Greek theatre, though not so barren or regular thanks to the
trees and natural landscaping. The stage is in a depression in the middle. The
audience rests on the upward sloping ground around. There is space to be alone,
even to smoke without offering passive comfort. The acoustics is good too. No
speaker can escape Lonappan’s deep gravelly voice from the farthest corner.
The accomplished writers often reminisce about
the heydays of the Writers’ Corner in the seventies and the eighties. There
were great writers then, they claim. Proximity to greatness and a great deal of
schmoozing contributed largely to their accomplishment, they admit.
Lonappan likes to
take on the accomplished. When they praise each other about form, structure,
minimalism and poetic wording, he butts in with the disruptive, ‘What’s new?’
or when he is more expansive, ‘What new thought have you contributed in that
hundred odd pages of trivial verbiage?’ That usually leads to literary
filibustering from the proficient writer, till the meeting is declared closed
and everyone races off for free tea and biscuits.
The party holds its
literary meetings there. These are ‘to encourage the talent of the
disenfranchised’, targeting the large vote-bank without enough great people in
its ranks to encourage accomplished sycophants. During the question hour of
those sessions, Lonappan makes one wonder if he would be safer trying to grab
meat from an attack dog’s mouth. How else can one view questions like, ‘Is it
insecurity or mercenary need that makes you put your writing under the banner
of some caste/religion/gender?’ He receives the vicious pillorying that ensues with
admirable equanimity. When refreshments
are served, he even mingles with that mob itching for his lynching.
He never asks
questions during the meetings of the right-wing groups. A party member mistook
his silence for affiliation. When confronted, Lonappan clarified, ‘What can I ask
a group allergic to imagination and freedom?’
The women-writers’
meetings also leave him speechless. That could be because of a woman named
Rajamma who dominates the question hour and attempts to commit hara-kiri, quite
like Lonappan during the party’s literary sessions. She asks the women-writers
questions like, ‘Isn’t it a bore if all of you sound angry all the time?’
Little is known about
her. She must be of the same age as Lonappan. Her costumes have more variety.
It is not always jeans, top and sandals; she wears cotton churidaar and sandals
too. She is elegant, careless, petite, tough and, according to most, ‘a bloody
nuisance’. She too has a regular seat, diagonally opposite to that of Lonappan,
a few rows from the front. She too refuses to ask questions during the sessions
of the right-wingers.
After one Saturday
meeting, she walked towards Lonappan’s seat. He watched her, eyes squinted
against the evening light, smoke curling from his cigarette, reminding many of the
Clint Eastwood in spaghetti westerns. She smiled at him from far. He sat up, then
looking like a kid at an ice-cream stall. She walked past him and took a
roundabout route to the exit. People heard him mutter, ‘Fuck.’
The next Saturday,
she approached him once again. He ignored her till she said, ‘Aren’t you
Comrade Lonappan? I am Woman Rajamma.’
Both kept a straight
face.
She came to the point
quickly, ‘You treat women like right-wing goons.’
‘What makes you think
so?’ he asked.
‘Your silence
speaks,’ she replied.
‘They are similar,
aren’t they?’ he taunted. He continued, ‘I am scared of angry types. Haven’t
you yourself protested about the anger of women?’
‘I was not protesting
about their anger,’ she said, ‘they have reason to be angry. I was protesting
about the anger in their writing.’
‘As if there is any
difference,’ he said.
‘Nuance is not your
strong point, is it?’ she retorted and left.
Their subsequent meetings
retained the same character, brief and quick to the point of discord. ‘Birds of
the same feather flock together,’ the unimaginative said. The romantics
wondered about, ‘the passion in their hearts.’ The writers said, ‘Now, we have
two. What bloody fucking luck.’
It is not as if they
ever teamed up. They prefer to attack from different flanks. They were quite
cruel with a liberal writer who spoke, with a queer Oxonian accent, about
reparations from old colonial powers.
Rajamma asked the
twit, ‘Do you really believe what you say or do you just want to sound good?’
Lonappan asked that
shaken toff, ‘Are you also for reparations from the privileged sections of
society to the less privileged? Surely your family must have screwed the lower
classes and castes for centuries to give you that accent.’
Those two nearly
agreed once.
After a
right-wingers’ meeting, Rajamma was depressed, ‘When these goons talk about
being secular, it feels like I swallowed rusty blades.’
Lonappan said, ‘I
feel like Edward II, ‘rectally impaled on a red hot poker’, quoting The
Economist. But, you have got to admit it, they are secular.’
Rajamma turned to
him, eyes red and all-over hot, ‘How you sound like them!’
Lonappan replied,
‘Look at all these idiots who carry their religion on their sleeves, idiots of
different gods. They are actually happy with each other. Do you think they
prefer the company of heathens like you?’
Rajamma said, ‘And,
you think that is being secular. Lonappan, you are an idiot.’
‘Rajamma, have you
thought of joining the party?’
‘Oh yes,
posthumously.’
Do they meet outside
the Writers’ Corner? No one knows. Nearly all hope that they will marry each
other and live disagreeably ever after.
