gurrukkal flips through a book on plant medicine as he describes “communist pacha” to me, one of the indigenous plants of the region. it is large and pointy like a castor leaf. part of it’s medicine, he explains to me, is that this plant concealed communists in hiding. it helped them temporarily win the battle against the landlords and big bosses in kerala, preventing them from taking over everything. Temporarily.
i get the sense that gurrukal and his family are communists. didi, gurrukal's sister, walks around the neighborhood helping the fisherman fill out government forms so they are not fined for fishing. gurrukal is always talking about and living about service to the community. it's what some of my yoga friends talk about as karma yoga, but just talk about, or do in the ashram, or in internal events. they don't come to the villages, the busthees, the hood, just like the yogi's who visit America n give talks on nonattachment on the upper west/eastside, park slope n dumbo.
as a believer in the yogi way, one who has looked for guidance n gurus, didi is the kind of yoga teacher i've been wondering about like Christians losing their religion, wondering about the possibility of the trinity, of the father, son n holy ghost. didi points at the handkerchief with the hammer and sickle on the dysfunctional lamppost, next to the green handkerchief with the islamic moon n star. she smiles like someone sharing a favorite dish that they are proud of.
as gurrukal and I study the medicinal values of the communist pacha, didi closes the door behind her, after the last of the fishermen or their kids and wives have walked in for the free yoga sessions didi hosts every morning.
i look behind gurrukal, who holds the communist pacha up like a flag and waves it at his boy anu, who cougars in, who flips through the fat book gurrukal's mother is reading - biography on subhash chandra bose - the revered bengali communist who led a guerilla movement against the british.
there are no posters in gurrukal's neighborhood that warns them about helping the poor, as there r in nyc subways: if u want to help, give to valid charities. everyone here is poor. gurrukal's family isn't into charity, the way middle-class people in a capitalist system maybe. they don’t believe in making that daddy war-bucks n feeling guilty that they been getting fat – clothes, cars, drinks – the capitalist way of accumulation - and then giving to dirt-faced kids singing about the sun will come out tomorrow.
for some reason in babylon, we see our ability to purchase a hundred jeans and have a beamer and throw all our phones n furniture out - cause there is newer, the latest, edgier stuff - as freedom. our
guilt exists for a reason.
for many of the people i know, the sound of a community that is not Facebook, that is not a club or social networking sounds like a cross and garlic to a vampire. the belief, -ism, in community is so scary to us babylonians that community-ism (=communism) is worse than the f word, can land us in jail, is enough to dismiss someone in an argument on issues - s/he's a communist - really? Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah.
gurrukal, gets up to treat the patient who has stumbled off the bike holding his back. d places the communist pacha carefully on the ledge of the porch like a sacred ganesha statue. he continues on the topic with me, even as he is pressing marma points and sliding to arteries with his thumb on the hefty injured dude. d admits it. he's down with communism.
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