Vasantha and her sister, Kannagi, sat in the shade under the peepal tree to the east of the Senkurichi police station. Her head bent, Vasantha said in a broken voice, ‘God! Look at me sitting like this, after losing my son!’
Her eyes were filled with tears. Seeing her, Kannagi too started crying. Just then, they saw five men in lawyer’s robes and eight in ordinary clothes and a woman approaching the police station. All of them stopped once they were in the shade of the neem tree.
When Kannagi saw one of the lawyers heading for the police station alone, she wondered aloud, ‘These guys?’ Vasantha looked up and just nodded. ‘Which one is the teacher?’ Kannagi asked. ‘Look there, slim and fair, that’s the one.’ Vasantha’s voice was filled with venom. ‘All of them except the lawyers are teachers in that school,’ she said, gnashing her teeth. ‘All of them showing solidarity with that rogue. And they call themselves teachers!’
‘What is his name?’
‘Selvadurai.’
‘Stay here,’ Kannagi said and walked towards the men standing in the shade of the neem tree.
She called the man indicated by Vasantha. ‘Come here.’ She pointed at him as she summoned him.
Selvadurai wondered why this strange woman was calling him out of the blue and remained where he was. Kannagi lost her temper. ‘Dey, are you a man? And you dare to call yourself a teacher? You are probably married and have two or three children. Would you do this to your own child? Dey! You have killed an innocent child and are now standing like a “big ...”’ It was only after she had said this that Selvadurai and his companions realized that Kannagi had come with Vasantha. Selvadurai did not open his mouth.
The stout advocate standing next to him asked her, ‘What’s this racket you are making in front of the police station?’
Ignoring the advocate, she turned to the woman standing nearby. She guessed that this must be Selvadurai’s wife. ‘Look at her! Your wife looks quite ripe, like a pregnant cow...Why don’t you show your manhood to her? Why do it to a ten-year-old boy? Dog, rub your thing on the rough ground if you itch for it so badly.’ When Kannagi began her tirade, all the people there started shouting in a chorus to shut her up.
Kannagi was fearless and unapologetic. ‘Coming to support a killer?’ She rained curses on all of them.
The advocate, Anbuselvan, came along on his motorbike just then. ‘Don’t you know what to say where?’ He glared at Kannagi. But she did not stop even then.
‘Come away, amma.’ Anbuselvan went to Vasantha, dragging Kannagi along with him.
‘We’ll see. When you leave the station, I will kick you right on that thing of yours. I dare you to come to our village. I’ll pour pig’s shit on your face.’ Kannagi was going on and on in a loud voice.
‘You can’t use such language.’ When Anbuselvan said this, Kannagi saw red.
‘I thought you were our advocate. You talk as if you have come to support them.’
‘Can you use such bad words standing near the police station?’
Kannagi did not reply. She was hell-bent on cursing Selvadurai. ‘His wife looks puffed up and over-inflated, like urad dal batter. Why didn’t he try his macho thing on her? Why pick on a tender, innocent child? He is a man and I am a woman, let him try his act on me. I’ll flatten his balls. This is
a challenge.’
‘Be quiet, amma, please, be quiet,’ Anbuselvan pleaded again and again, but Kannagi paid no heed. Kannagi’s husband, Rajavelu, returned from the tea stall. And then he, the Melakkottai panchayat president, Ramani, Melakkottai Sakthivel, Murugan and Chokkalingam surrounded Anbuselvan.
‘Why hasn’t the inspector come yet?’ Ramani wanted to know.
‘He said he will come. I think he will come soon.’
‘We came here at ten in the morning. It is now past one. He will come only after having his food.’
‘Just a minute,’ Anbuselvan said, ignoring Ramani.
‘What law have you studied?’ Kannagi snapped when she saw him walk over to speak with the advocates who were with Selvadurai, and glowered at Vasantha.
Then picking up from where she had left off, she began, ‘If only I had been there that day, I would have crushed his thing with a stone. He doesn’t look like a teacher. More like a pimping bloke.’
Kannagi and her husband, Rajavelu, had arrived from Mumbai that very morning.
‘Why did you let him off ?’ she kept asking Vasantha every now and then. She repeated the question now too, but Vasantha did not know what to say. When she had been busy at work – an MGNREGA project for desilting the lake – Ganesamurthi, a schoolteacher, had come and told her that Vijayakumar had been injured by the town bus and taken to the hospital. She had gone to the hospital with the teacher on his bike. Vijayakumar had rushed out of the school and fallen in front of the bus on his own. He had died while in the ambulance, bleeding through his nose and mouth. Another
teacher had told her that since Vijayakumar had been taken to hospital, they would be given the body only after a post mortem. Another teacher had said that it was not possible to file a case against the driver, since the boy had himself dashed against the bus, which was unloading its passengers.
‘If the bus had run over him, you could have got compensation. Now even that is ruled out,’ said Ganesamurthi. Vasantha did not hear anything, neither what the teachers said, nor the village people who were accusing the teachers of letting the boy go out. She beat her breast and her head and was completely distraught.
It was six in the evening when they got the dead body from the hospital. The village people said the body should be taken to the burial ground without delay.
The washerman, who traditionally performed the last rites, said, ‘The body is going to be carried away now. Anyone who wants to see him should do so soon.’ Vasantha was almost deranged and did not know what was happening, how it was being done or who was doing it.
‘God! Where is my boy, my son, where is my child?’ She howled and screamed, beating her stomach with both hands. She fainted twice or thrice.
Selvadurai had taken Vijayakumar to the school’s toilet and sexually abused him. The boy had run out weeping. Selvadurai had chased him, shouting, ‘Go back to class,’ as he was afraid the boy might go home and tell the truth. Vijayakumar was scared that the teacher might beat him and ran out of the school, hitting a bus as he did so. It was only the next morning, when the schoolboys told everyone what had happened, that they learnt the truth.
Excerpted with permission from If There Is a God and Other Stories’, Imayam, translated from the Tamil by Prabha Sridevan, Ratna Books.
