Chapter Two
Gora da’s little house had the polite humility of something that had been forgiven long ago by the sun. The paint flaked in maps; the verandah sagged under jars of brushes and a row of basil that refused to hurry. Inside the room smelled of cardamom and smoke—tea and linseed oil and the thin musk of old paper. The portraits on the far wall watched like old men at a wedding; now, in this light, they were less judges than companions waiting for a story.
Ayansh halted in the doorway, the city’s impatience still twitching in his shoulders. “Who are they?” he asked, pointing at Marx first, then letting his finger drift to Engels and Lenin as if naming a crew.
Gora da wiped his hands on a rag, then reached for a stick of charcoal. He began to sketch without looking up, the pencil making a soft, familiar scrape. “Troublemakers and teachers,” he said. “And, sometimes, friends who argued like soldiers.” He drew a tiny ant before he spoke again, a black comma on the paper. “Sit. The kettle’s singing. The tea will be hot enough to scald off pretence.”
Ayansh sat. The cardamom in the cup opened like a palm. “Give me the short version,” he said. “Cinematic, abridged—before my phone files a complaint.”
Gora da’s smile made the room softer. “Shortness steals the margin where thinking grows,” he said. “Still—listen.” He tapped the charcoal, then the paper. “Karl, Trier, books and arguments. Engels, Barmen, looms and coal. They met in Paris, not because the city was romantic—Paris is hardly sentimental—but because it gathers restless people like leaves. They sat in a café. They fought with sentences and stayed friends. That’s the bare scaffold.” He drew two ants now, one carrying a flake, the other running to meet it. “But the rest—how the thing was read, how it was tasted—happened after the paper left their hands.”
Ayansh watched the ants on the page, then the real ones on the sill, carrying crumbs with a devotion that looked almost like prayer. He pushed. “Gora da calls them friends who argued. Your story sounds… tidier than I expected. Where’s the quarrel in it? Where’s the mess?”
Gora da’s charcoal stopped. He shaded the ant’s back with a thumb, making it slightly clumsy. “Recipes promise the same cake every time,” he said. “Marx and Engels did not give a recipe. They planted a seed. Some people planted that seed in rocky soil. Others in ice. It grew different where it landed. That’s the quarrel. The seed does not decide its soil.”
He paused and, with the quickness of a man who loves detail, told a small, sharp story: “Helen Macfarlane — remember her? Scotswoman. Ink-stained cuffs. She sat with Marx’s snarled German and bent it into English that could be read aloud in a London back room. Picture her: hair pinned, sleeves turned, whispering the thunder into rain people could understand. She was the first English drop in a monsoon. Without her, the words might have stayed like a private quarrel between two lonely men.”
Ayansh imagined the woman and the image stuck: ink on fingers, a lamp, the wash of rain. “So a translator is a kind of traitor and saint,” he said. “She changes it and yet makes it possible.”
“The translator is a bridge,” Gora da said. “Sometimes broken; sometimes strong. Always necessary.”
He set the charcoal down and told Ayansh not the catalogue of dates but a single, windy picture. “The Manifesto was thinner than a roti,” he said, and Ayansh smiled at the odd, domestic measure. “They wrote it in January. It walked into the street in February. Then came June—barricades, smoke, shouts. Words met blood. Always the way. The pamphlet was paper; the people were flesh. Paper can point, but fingers must lift the stone.”
Ayansh interrupted, sharper now. “And Lenin—did he read it or rewrite it? I mean, someone can read a book and keep it like a lamp. Someone else reads it and changes the house.”
Gora da sketched another ant, legs flurried. “Lenin read and tasted,” he said. “He found the original bitter. He added his spices: discipline, secrecy, a press that sparked in the dark. Herzen’s bell taught him that a paper could shout across borders; Iskra was his echo. Some call that betrayal. I call it cooking with what’s in the pantry. The point is not purity—the point is what you do with the thing.”
He set the charcoal aside and reached for a thin book on the table, opening to a leaf where his own small notes curled in the margin. “Engels walked Manchester,” he said, voice low, as if the city might overhear. “Fog, wet cobbles, tenements with children asleep against the cold. He wrote with his eyes. Not theory—witness. He sent those pages to Marx like a case of evidence. Marx built the scaffold. Together they made a light you could use to see under the machine.”
Outside, a woman called for her buffalo; somewhere a radio murmured, stopped, then coughed. Gora da smudged the charcoal, turning one ant into a small, pulsing knot of motion. “Understand this: ideas travel on the palms of people. Printers smuggle them. Translators baptise them. A pamphlet moves, and a thousand hands read it in a thousand rooms. Some keep it like scripture; some burn it for a stove.”
Ayansh, who until the last hour had been the fast-forward man of the city, surprised himself by asking a soft question. “Did you—when you were young—believe? Truly?”
Gora da’s eyes, under the lamplight, held a small, public past. He smoothed the paper with his thumb as if it were the cheek of an old friend. “I believed in the hunger,” he said. “I joined hands; I argued in the streets. I thought the map was clear. Time humbles. You see how plans look on paper and then in practice: mess, bright spots, dark corners. I still want dignity for the small work of living. I will not abandon that. But I distrust anyone who offers tidy fixes.”
A moth tapped the window and slid away. The charcoal line of the ant blurred beneath a finger; Gora da blew the dust fine and the mark softened. He looked up at Ayansh. “Listen: even ants bite when the nest is threatened.” He pointed to a real ant on the sill, which had found a dead fly and was dragging it like a prize. Two others joined. “See them? Engels would have liked that. He watched men drag their heavy things and wrote it down.”
Ayansh watched the ant for a long time. He thought of the book in his lap, the charcoal on his thumb, the smell of cardamom and smoke that tied this room to the tea stall. “So the Manifesto,” he said, tasting the word, “wasn’t a recipe. More like a taste you get on the tongue.”
Gora da’s mouth tightened into something that might have been a laugh. He picked up the charcoal, made the ant’s legs frantic, then stopped. “A taste that makes you hungry,” he said. “Hungry for more, for better. That hunger can feed. Or it can starve. It depends on the kitchen.”
Outside, the neem breathed and the village’s sounds braided thinly into the night. Indigo sky thickened like stew left unstirred. Ayansh lifted his now-cool cup and found, in the cardamom smoke, a memory of linseed oil and pages turning. He touched the book as if to check it was still real.
“Tomorrow,” he said finally, and his voice carried a different weight than the one with which he had arrived, “tell me about Paris—about streets that chose to be loud. And tell me how the people sounded when the guns came.”
Gora da set the charcoal down in a small, precise arc. He did not promise he would answer all of it. Instead he drew a tiny, impatient ant at the paper’s edge, the line almost mocking in its rush. “Tomorrow,” he said. “And the day after, we will read a few lines and poke them like a pot to see if they’re done. You will shout. I will tut. We will get tired and come back. That’s the work.”
Ayansh laughed—a soft, surprised sound—and the two men, one old enough to remember marches and the other young enough to think in reels, sat with that unfinished feeling between them. On the wall, the faces watched. On the sill, the ants argued over their prize. The charcoal curled, a black smoke of thought. The conversation stayed open, like a door left ajar, and the night grew full of questions that asked to be fed.
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