Blood Republic

The smell of boiling ragi never left our house. It soaked into the mud walls, the thatch, my mother's sari, my skin. Even now, standing in the dark outside the Collector's compound at two in the morning, I can smell it on myself. That's what they don't understand about us. We carry our hunger with us like a second skeleton.

My mother's hands were the first thing I remember. Not her face. Her hands. Cracked at the knuckles, dark as wet earth, always moving. She could roll a hundred rotis before the sun cleared the water tank, and she did it for other people's children. Not mine. I ate what was left, which was never enough.

"Jadal," she said that morning, "don't go to the pond today."

I was sixteen. I didn't listen.

The pond belonged to the Reddy family the way the sky belonged to God. They didn't use it. They didn't fish it. They didn't even let their cattle drink from it. But the moment our women walked down with their pots, the moment our children waded in to cool their feet, someone would appear on the ridge with a stick. That's how it worked. Not a wall. Not a fence. Just a man with a stick and the certainty that the law would arrive on his side if he needed it.

That morning I went anyway because my sister had a fever and Shamakka needed water to boil the neem leaves. My sister's name was Lakshmi. She was seven. She'd been coughing for three days, and the clinic in Bolarum wouldn't see us without a chit from the Reddy house, and the Reddy house wouldn't give a chit to people like us.

So I took the pot. Not the big one. The small brass one my grandmother brought from some village none of us could name anymore. I walked down the slope past the toddy trees, past the abandoned well where the British sahibs used to throw their garbage, and I filled the pot.

The water was warm. Green at the edges. I remember thinking that if Lakshmi died, I would kill someone. Not a specific person. Just someone. The thought didn't scare me. That's what I remember most about being sixteen. The absence of fear.

I was halfway up the slope when I heard the whistle.

Ravi Reddy. Nineteen, maybe twenty. He had a cricket bat and a white shirt that his mother must have bleached for an hour. He stood on the ridge with his legs apart like a man in a film poster.

"That's our water," he said.

"It's rainwater," I said. "It falls on everyone."

He laughed. Not a cruel laugh. A confused one. Like I'd said something in a foreign language and he was trying to decide if I was joking.

"You want me to call my father?"

I should have walked away. That's what Shamakka would have told me. Walk away, Jadal. Keep your head down. The pot is full. Lakshmi is waiting. But I was sixteen and I'd been keeping my head down since I was old enough to understand what my father's death meant. He died in a quarry. A rock fell on him. They gave us fifty rupees and a bag of rice and told my mother she should be grateful they didn't ask for the rice back.

"Call him," I said.

Ravi's face changed. The confusion hardened into something else. He looked at me the way you look at a dog that's started walking on two legs. He raised the bat.

I don't remember the swing. I remember the sound. The crack of wood on bone, and then the ground rising up to meet me, and the pot shattering somewhere to my left, and the water running down the slope back toward the pond, back to where it came from.

When I woke up, I was in my mother's lap.

She was sitting on the floor of our house, and my head was in her lap, and she was singing. Not a lullaby. A work song. The one the women sang when they transplanted paddy in the Reddy fields, back when they still let us work the fields. Her voice was low and cracked and it didn't stop when she saw my eyes open.

"You're bleeding," she said.

"I know."

"The pot is broken."

"I know."

She didn't ask what happened. She didn't need to. She'd spent forty years in this village. She knew the shape of every story before it started.

That night I couldn't sleep. The pain in my head was a living thing, a second heart beating behind my eye. I lay on the mat and listened to Lakshmi cough and my mother turn in her sleep and the rats in the thatch. And I made a decision. Not a big one. Not yet. Just this: I would not die in this village. I would not let Lakshmi die in this village. And if that meant I had to become something other than what they expected, something they couldn't recognize, then that's what I would do.

The next morning, I walked to Secunderabad.

It was twelve kilometers. I had no money and no shoes and no idea what I was looking for. But I knew the city was out there, past the railway tracks and the cantonment and the big houses with the red roofs, and I knew that in the city, nobody knew my father's name. Nobody knew which pond I was allowed to drink from. I could be anyone.

I found work at a mechanic's shed near the bus station. The owner was a man named Anjaiah who had one eye and a limp and didn't ask questions. He paid me four rupees a day to hand him tools and sweep the floor and listen to him talk about the old days, when the Nizam still ruled and a man could make a living without bowing to anyone.

"Things were bad then too," he said. "But they were bad in a different way. Now they've made it legal."

I didn't understand what he meant. Not then. I was sixteen and I thought the problem was Ravi Reddy and his cricket bat and the pond. I thought the problem was personal.

I was wrong. The problem was bigger than Ravi. Bigger than his father. Bigger than the whole Reddy family and all their land and all their men with sticks. The problem was a machine, and the machine had been running for a hundred years, and it had been built so carefully that most people couldn't even see it. They just felt the weight of it, every day, pressing down.

But I was starting to see it. That's the thing about leaving your village. You start to see the shape of the thing that's been holding you down. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I stayed in Secunderabad for two years. I slept in the shed. I ate what Anjaiah gave me. I learned to read from a secondhand newspaper and to fight from a man named Saleem who ran a gym behind the mosque and didn't care what caste I was because he was Muslim and had his own problems. I learned that the city was full of people like me, people who had run from their villages, people who had no papers and no rights and no one to speak for them. We were everywhere. We were invisible. And invisible people, I realized, could do things that visible people couldn't.

When I went home, it was because my mother sent word that Lakshmi was worse. The fever had come back. The clinic still wouldn't see her. And Ravi Reddy had been made the village headman.

I walked into our house and my mother looked at me and didn't recognize me for a moment. I was taller. Thinner. There was a scar above my eye where the bat had landed, and something else, something behind my eyes that hadn't been there before.

"You've changed," she said.

"I've come back," I said.

"That's not the same thing."

She was right. It wasn't. I had come back, but I hadn't come home. Home was a place where I belonged. I didn't belong anywhere anymore. I belonged to the thing I was becoming, and I didn't know yet what that was.

Lakshmi was lying on the mat in the corner. Her breath was shallow and her skin was hot and dry. I picked her up and carried her out of the house and down the slope past the toddy trees and the broken pot and the pond.

"Where are you going?" my mother called after me.

"To the hospital," I said.

"They won't take us."

"They'll take her."

I didn't know if that was true. I didn't know anything except that I was done asking permission. I was done waiting for a chit. I was done watching my family die while men with sticks decided whether we deserved water.

The road to Secunderabad was dark and empty. Lakshmi's head rested against my shoulder. Her breath was warm on my neck. I walked past the quarry where my father died. I walked past the temple where we weren't allowed to enter. I walked past the fields where my mother had worked for twenty years and owned nothing.

And I made a promise. Not to God. Not to the government. To Lakshmi. To my mother. To myself.

I would tear the whole thing down. Every stick. Every stone. Every man who thought his blood was better than mine. I didn't know how. I didn't know when. But I knew it would happen. I could feel it in my bones, the same way I could feel the monsoon coming before the first cloud appeared.

That was the night I stopped being Jadal from the village.

That was the night I became something else.