The Moors Last Sigh

players, in mimicry of whom we gave ourselves the heads of lions and tigers and bears. It proved a good decision, enabling us to enter the strikers’ consciousness as mythological avengers. We had only to appear on the scene for the workers to flee screaming into the dark gullies where we ran them to ground to face the consequences of their deeds. As an interesting side-effect of this work I got to know large new sections of the city: in ’82 and ’83 I must have gone down every back-alley in Worli, Parel and Bhiwandi in pursuit of union-wallah dross, activist scruff and Communist scum. I use these terms not pejoratively but, if I may so put it, technically. For all industrial processes produce waste matter that must be scraped away, discarded, purged, so that excellence may emerge. The strikers were instances of such waste matter. We removed them. At the end of the strike there were sixty thousand fewer jobs in the mills than there had been at the beginning, and industrialists were at last able to modernise their plant. We skimmed off the filth, and left a sparkling, up-to-date powerloom industry behind. This was how Mainduck explained it, personally, to me.
    I punched, while others preferred to kick. With my bare hand I clubbed my victims viciously, metronomically – like carpets, like mules. Like time. I did not speak. The beating was its own language and would make its own meaning plain. I beat people by night and by day, sometimes briefly, rendering them unconscious with a single hammer-blow, and on other occasions more lingeringly, applying my right hand to their softer zones and grimacing inwardly at their screams. It was a point of pride to keep one’s outward expression neutral, impassive, void. Those whom we beat did not look us in the eye. After we had worked them over for a while their noises stopped; they seemed at peace with our fists boots clubs. They, too, became impassive, empty-eyed.
    A man who is beaten seriously (as dreaming Oliver D’Aeth had intuited long ago) will be irreversibly changed. His relationship to his own body, to his mind, to the world beyond himself alters in ways both subtle and overt. A certain confidence, a certain idea of liberty is beaten out for good; always provided the beater knows his job. Often, what is beaten in is detachment. The victim – how often I saw this! – detaches himself from the event, and sends his consciousness to float in the air above. He seems to look down upon himself, on his own body as it convulses and perhaps breaks. Afterwards he will never fully re-enter himself, and invitations to join any larger, collective entity – a union, for example – are instantly rebuffed.
    Beatings in different zones of the body affect different parts of the soul. To be beaten for a long time upon the soles of the feet, for example, affects laughter. Those who are so beaten never laugh again.
    Only those who embrace their fate, who accept their thrashing, taking it like men – only those who put their hands up, acknowledge their guilt, say their mea culpas – can find something of value in the experience, something positive. Only they can say: ‘At least we learned our lesson.’
    As for the beater: he, too, is changed. To beat a man is a kind of exaltation, a revelatory act, opening strange gates in the universe. Time and space come away from their moorings, their hinges. Chasms yawn. There are glimpses of amazing things. I saw, at times, the past and the future too. It was hard to cling to these memories. At the end of the work, they faded. But I remembered that something had happened. That there were visions. This was enriching news.
    We broke the strike in the end. I will allow that I was surprised at how long it took, at the workers’ loyalty to scum and dross and scruff. But – as Raman Fielding told us – the mill strike was the MA’s proving ground, it honed us, it made us ready. In the next municipal elections Dr Samant’s party got a handful of seats and the MA won more than seventy. The bandwagon had begun to roll.
    And shall I tell you how – at the local feudal landowner’s invitation – we visited a village near the Gujarat border, where the freshly gathered red chillies stood around the houses in low hills of colour and spice, and put down a revolt of female workers? But no, perhaps not; your fastidious stomach would be upset by such hot stuff. Shall I speak of our campaign against those out-caste unfortunates, untouchables or Harijans