Urban Naxal

Fiction

“We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day.

“In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.  

Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.”

“Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brain with his silly dreams.”

“Uncle, shall we go for an outing?” Alice asked. They two were alone at Mathew’s residence. Mathew’s wife had gone to work.

“Where do you want to go?” Mathew asked as they sat in his car.

“To the Taj Malabar Resort,” she said.

“What!” Alice had expected that sharp reaction. Asking Uncle Mathew to join her in Taj Malabar’s pub was like inviting Karl Marx to the shareholders’ meeting of Microsoft India.

“Come on, uncle, just for my sake, a change from your dusty books and your country’s antediluvian politics.”

Mathew smiled. “That word – antediluvian – is antinational, my dear. The Deluge was biblical.”

Alice laughed. She was happy that her uncle’s seriousness had softened a bit at least.

“If it’s a beer you want, we can go to…” He paused. Where? To which pub in Kerala can he take a young and beautiful girl, wearing tight Jeans and Tee, smelling, though faintly, of expensive perfume and expansive freedom? People would stare. This is Kerala, an antediluvian patriarch’s paradise, in spite of all the progressiveness it proclaims on billboards.

“Go to…?” Alice asked. She knew very well that there wouldn’t be very many pubs – or bars, as they are called in Kerala – where she could sit with a man and have a drink in peace. And laugh heartily.

“Go to Taj Malabar,” he said.

“Cheers,” she signalled a thumbs up.

The gentle light, the wafting semiclassical music, the obsequious waitress with the exotic look of a North-easterner – the very ambience was alien to the urban Naxal in Mathew’s heart.

“I still remember how you led a whole movement for the rights of the poor fisherfolk when I was a little girl,” Alice said.

“That agitation got trawling banned in Kerala’s ocean limits during the breeding season of fishes. The rule remains to this day.”

“Do you think similar agitations would achieve anything today?”

“The farmers agitated for over a year in Delhi recently and nothing happened,” Mathew said. “More recently the ASHA workers of Kerala had to end their strike which went on for 265 days. Without achieving anything, again.”

“The real Naxalites are sitting in their luxurious offices and governing us, right?” Alice sounded a little provocative.

“Or sitting in a luxury pub and sipping Heineken beer,” Mathew retorted.

“Instead of declaring the death of history, Fukuyama should have proclaimed the death of ideology, isn’t it, uncle?”

“And the victory of fraudulence,” Mathew said as he took a long draught of beer.

The waitresses moved like silent ghosts serving clients who would be paying bills that amounted to the monthly wages of people Mathew knew.

“This is your world, Alice. I can’t breathe here for long. We have to go.”

The air outside was thick with the smell of vehicular emissions and blocked drains.

The car stopped at a traffic signal. A man with a crutch limped up to them, selling roses. Mathew took out a fifty-rupee note and bought a rose bud.

“For you,” he presented it to Alice. “Love lingers.”

She took it awkwardly. “You’re impossible, uncle.”

“Maybe,” he smiled. “Some people have to be.” 

Back home, she placed the rose bud in a glass of water by her bed. The next morning, its unopened petals had begun to fade – fragile, beautiful, and doomed.

 Acknowledgement: Illustration by Gemini AI