Once Upon a Time in Kuilapalayam
“V. R. Arundeep, 17 years old, schoolboy.”
The traffic cop huffed through his moustache, but didn’t ask any further questions of Arun; only waved him through the blockade on his little scooter with a cursory gesture of his hand, before moving down the queue to inspect a mule-drawn cart filled to the brim with watermelons, the raucous family attached also eager to get on their way. Behind them, a great line of vehicles likewise frustrated by the hold-up on their passage to the arterial East Coast Road, and the administrative centre of Chennai beyond.
Standing under the harsh orange glare of a streetlamp in order to set his satchel to rights, then distracted for a moment by shadows cast by banana leaves onto the cruddy asphalt which stirred something within him, Arun wondered if that pencil scribble about him in the policeman’s notebook would really mean anything down the line, would ever even be read; or rather, wouldn’t his name simply disappear into that yawning abyss of text which is the State itself: that bureaucratic machine of which this officer’s pocket book is only the smallest quanta? This sudden exposure to the ‘official’ copy of himself - the version written-up in official documents such as this - confused Arun’s understanding of himself, and he began to speculate whether the government version of Arun could accommodate Arun’s own private understanding of himself, and he muttered aloud;
“And yet, this scribble is proof of life.”
The road blockade on route 38 outside Villupuram, along with many others located at strategic intervals connecting the interstate road, indicated the near proximity of a major political election. Arun looked back at the family behind him, the father now squabbling with the officer as he poked into their watermelons with his baton, ruining perfectly good fruits. It would be a problem for the family to move their watermelons by road any further as the police would be looking for bribe money being brought into the state to corrupt the election, and undoubtedly, a percentage of those officers would be looking for their share to allow that money to pass. A good many fruits would be lost through such careless inspections, Arun speculated, and yet this would be the least of the hazards that must yet be run by the watermelon family.
Arun reflected for a moment, then wrote an idea in his own notebook to share with his economics teacher after the holiday recess:
‘Nature teaches it can be easier and more lucrative to take what has already been gathered by others directly from them, rather than go to all the trouble - and risk - of amassing their own fortune. The moment you have something, once you are in possession of a thing, you become a target. You come to the attention of someone else because of the thing you’ve got. Possession is power; that’s what nature teaches. Thus reasoning, to avoid being a victim, become the thief yourself.’
Such disputes between being and becoming often plagued Arun’s thinking; though relatively young he was precocious, and delighted in holding and examining a serious thought for long periods of time. Looking back again at the watermelon family, having now passed the checkpoint, Arun wondered how many other pairs of eyes would be looking at those watermelons as a passing opportunity? How many different kinds of minds must be trying to get those melons! Arundeep was reminded of a cowboy movie he had seen on cable TV late one night that struck him forcefully, and which depicted a cattle drive to Alaska that was continually beset by opportunist thieves; not just the obvious ‘thieves in masks’ however, but law officers and even cynical politicians used their powers to obtain the valuable herd - provoking members of the drive team themselves to likewise plot to kill the owner, just to get at that fortune…
Peeling through the outer layers of his village, struck by the distorted music crunching through a tinny speaker wired to the temple on the corner, the street now flooded by rains in which floating flowers from discarded garlands gleamed, Arun glazed at his own, peculiar swagger. It was always this way, returning home from school. Goats and cows patrolled the dark streets, now largely vacant of people, making the road hazardous to pass by vehicle, muddled into the smoke of evening fires and pooja which had long-since confused the way ahead. Arun ditched his bike to grab some painkillers from a little kiosk, and then a coffee at some new hipster cafe which had only just appeared since he was last home, and which was delightfully cool inside.
As Arundeep sipped coffee from a stainless steel cup at the bar in Kuilapalayam, he watched the same watermelon family crawling along the street toward the lotus pond at the centre of the village, where they occupied a large, garbage-strewn layby usually populated by holy men waiting to dip in the water for ablutions. As the light was failing, and the dusky crimson sky reflected sadly in the brown pool, disturbed only by those silhouetted heads bobbing up and down, the family carefully removed their melons from the cart one by one, creating a pile by the side of the road. Once empty, one of the men took the mule and the cart and walked off, most likely back to the village where the melons came from.
‘Now, the watermelon family are on their own,’ Arun thought.
The following morning, after a joyful 5k run through the cashew groves, Arundeep passed back through the high street to take coffee again, stirred by further curiosity. The watermelon family were already awake, and there was a brisk passing trade from pedestrians and motorcyclists hankering for the sweet, red flesh, the black seeds which crack. A broken melon lay on the side of the road, its bright vermillion flesh bleeding wasted into unfinished tarmac. To Arun’s eye, the vast pile of fruits hardly appeared to have changed in size, and he wondered how many had been sold since the previous night, how many had been consumed by the large family itself in need of food, how many were damaged, spoiled by insects - stolen even - with their tiny profit margin dwindling away with each passing moment...
As the holiday week progressed onward, Arundeep watched the pile grow ever smaller, day by day. One of the youngest children in the family, a boy, had taken to sleeping on the pile, most likely to defend it against the ravenous world, and in the growing heat of morning was still slumped over the green, stripy mass with his gangly legs twitching due to a passing dream. The rest of the family slept strategically around the pile so as to prevent easy access to thieves, with the exception of one adult who remained awake nights, and who later crashed-out under the cool banyan canopy until early afternoon. As the day wore on, Arun began to conjecture about the less obvious hazards that might be faced by the family; not least the integrity of the patriarch, who kept all the money accrued thus far, stuffed deep into the folds of his dhoti:
‘Let us hope the man is not prone to gambling, drink, or sketchy investments: any impulse that might allow him to cheat himself out of his profit and his means of purchasing another cart of fruit!’
Arun had positioned himself all week at the little row of streetside cafes and shops facing the pond to give him vantage over the watermelon family, conveniently permitting him to take notes of the trials the family faced. There had been many sundry incidents of small-time theft constrained only by what the thieves could manage to carry away by hand or motorcycle, with one particular incident resulting in a collision between a pair of boys on a little Honda, who grabbed a globe way too big for the boy on the back of the bike to balance, slamming into a gleaming black Enfield coming the other way which sent the boys thrashing across the asphalt, their bike crushing the leg of a passing woman in a tangle of arms and legs. The weighty Enfield smashed at least four or five fruits, ruining many more. Then there were the numerous offerings made by the watermelon family to others in need which likewise ate into their profits, such as the local beggar woman and her child, plus every night a few fruits were offered to the holy men of the lotus pond - even to the great heifer who swings past the broken pavement to visit her lady friend, the woman who fries vadai over a small barbeque in the gutter.
On Tuesday passed however, there was a great upset when a local official, (who had ostensibly heard about the pile of fruits,) suddenly appeared with a gaggle of men and a big TATA digger, threatening to scoop up all the melons and impound them for trading without the correct permit, and who disappeared only after haggling for a bribe which probably cost the watermelon family half their spoils in just one fell swoop. In the upset, the digger purposely crushed half a dozen fruits just to show the patriarch they meant business. This episode gave Arundeep much to speculate on. And even as the mound continued to dwindle, the little watermelon boy slept on top of the warm, softening fruits, his legs tickled by the breeze, just as the insects, after much effort, began to penetrate the mound from underneath. Arun could not work out whether the patriarch would increase the price of the melons as they were running out, or whether they would decrease in value due to the inferior quality of the remaining fruits; but in the end, the price remained constant.
By Thursday lunchtime, just as the festivals were ending, all the fruits had gone. Three holy men with matted locks were swimming in the opaque pond water, chatting occasionally whilst trying not to collide with each other, or to avoid becoming tangled in the mass of lotus leaves choking the edges of the pool. Arun remembered from when he was a child that there had been a terrible incident in which an anchorite had become tangled-up in the lotus stems and drowned in the pond. That man, Arun remembered, had had no family. Jerked back to the present, Arun now saw the watermelon family sitting by the kerbside, passing around a few green, tender coconuts to scoop at the refreshing jelly and counteract the encroachment of the day’s crushing heat. It wasn’t yet obvious to Arundeep what they were still hanging around for - unless perhaps they had arranged another deal, or they simply were waiting for transport back home. The watermelon boy, dreaming of his own pile, was now awake and talking to a monkey perched on top of a motorcycle repair shack beside the great banyan, and Arun’s final note on the matter remarked that:
‘Everything dwindles away, dwindles into entropy - even dreamed-up piles of fruits. We snatch at what we can.’
At just that moment, a white Hindustan Ambassador bearing Ministry of Justice plates came clattering past in a cloud of petrol fumes, followed by numerous other cars and a couple of motorcycle cops escorting front and rear; the roaring convoy of chariots forcing all oncoming traffic into a ditch at the side of the road. A passing dignitary, demi-god forcing minor souls aside on its march through history. Arundeep carefully packed his satchel for the return trip to college, his battered paperback copy of Tagore’s Sādhanā poking out of his back pocket, the faded cover illustration of a lotus pond, and thick, lush vegetation...
Become a Patron of Daniel O'Reilly and support avant-garde literature
