Dear Reader,The elections are here again, as they always are. But before the noise gets too loud, let me tell you a story.For the sake of discretion, let us call our man Mr Gorgeous. Not an English name, of course, but a Malayalee one—find any Malayalam equivalent and attach it to him if you like, you will know the type. When this story happened, he was in his late 30s, living in a particular village in central Kerala which you will find only in central Kerala: a place so politically overloaded that it had somehow produced, within the span of a few kilometres of paddy fields, rubber estates, and coconut groves, a naxalite chapter, three factions of the Communist Party, two breakaway cousins of the Congress, and a saffron outfit that, in those early-1990s days, still wore a lighter shade.The village itself was a beautiful, chaotic thing. In the mornings, mist sat in the low-lying paddy fields like something that hadn’t decided yet whether to stay or leave, and the banyan tree at the village square had roots that came down from its branches like grey old men reaching for the earth, and underneath it, the usual congregation: men with nothing urgent to do but plenty to say, tea in small glasses, the smell of coconut oil and agarbatti drifting from the nearby provision store. By evening the light went amber across the fields, and the frogs started up and the children came in from wherever they had been, and the whole place settled into itself with a kind of contentment that had nothing to do with politics, even if politics was all anyone talked about.Mr Gorgeous, contrary to the name we have given him, was not a good-looking man. Three moles clustered on his right temple, the kind that makes strangers stare for a moment longer than is comfortable. One finger on his right hand was twisted; it was bent slightly at the second joint, from a childhood fall from a cashew tree that had not healed right. You would not notice it ordinarily. You noticed it only when he painted. Which is to say: you noticed it was there and then you forgot about it, because what the hand produced made you forget the hand itself.He had grown up, as many men from families with fewer means grow up, carrying something that did not actually have a form or shape but was heavy: shame, mostly, the kind that attaches itself to boys who are told, in a hundred ways, that they are not quite enough. It was this, he would say later, that drove him to the party. “There I felt I belonged,” he told his father once. “Nobody called me ugly there. They gave me respect.” His father, who came from a long line of Congress workers and who regarded party membership with the seriousness of caste affiliation, took this as a wound. A son in the Communist Party was something close to treason.But Mr Gorgeous had found his people, and more than that, he had found his purpose. The twisted finger turned out to be a gift. When he held a brush, something happened—the bend in the joint, the particular angle it forced on his wrist, produced a line of unusual steadiness and grace. He could draw the hammer and sickle and star (the party’s symbol) with a beauty that nobody in that part of the world could match. The star especially: five perfect points, drawn freehand, in one smooth rotation of the wrist; the symmetry so exact that people would crouch down on the road to look at it more closely.He drew them everywhere. On the road in front of the provision store. On the compound wall of the old anganwadi. On the giant trunk of the banyan tree itself. Every season, as election day approached and the air thickened with loudspeakers and processions and competing colours of paint, Mr Gorgeous would appear with his cans and his brush, and the Communist symbols would go up—clear, bold, luminous. Children followed him at a distance, not quite daring to speak. Old men came out of shops to watch. It was, in its way, a seasonal ceremony.Then, as such things do, something snapped.Two boys from the village were found sitting on the ridge of a paddy field one evening watching the sun go down. They were hugging. Kissing, said the eyewitnesses, although the details multiplied in the telling. The village’s moral machinery turned and ground. It became a hushed scandal, the kind that nobody discusses openly but everyone discusses constantly. The father of one of the boys was a local leader in Mr Gorgeous’s party.When the story reached Mr Gorgeous, he said: “What’s wrong with it?”People stared at him. This was the early 1990s, and what he had just said was not something people said. The leader objected, as leaders do when their own families are involved. One thing led to another—an argument, then a confrontation, then the kind of brawl that in a village leaves marks that don’t heal quickly. It would have passed, perhaps, if Mr Gorgeous had simply apologised. He was not a powerful man; he had no faction, no following. He had only his brush and his convictions. But he did not apologise.His comrades, one by one, stopped talking to him. The silence was not hostile exactly; it was cautious in a curious way, the way people go quiet around a man who has made himself inconvenient. Finally, fearing something worse—the village had its rough edges, some of its men expressed politics through their fists—he went back to his father. His party, after some time, received a new member. Soon, he left the village. Found a job in another district, something unremarkable. His father told people that his son “hated” his past.And things settled, slowly, the way things do in villages.Soon, another election season came. And it was then that Mr Gorgeous understood, with the particular clarity of a man who has lost something he loved, that the symbols he had spent 20 years drawing were no longer his to draw. Someone else would do it now.He began to visit home only when necessary, and quietly. One such visit brought him back past midnight. The road was empty, the air still warm from the day. He got down at the village square and stopped.The symbols were up. The hammer, the sickle, the star—on the road, on the provision store wall, on the compound of the anganwadi. In the moonlight they were clear enough. And they were wrong. Not badly wrong; they would pass; they would serve their purpose. But they were uneven. The curves of the sickle were not curves, exactly, but approximations. The star’s points were unequal. There was something effortful and graceless about the whole spread of them, as if the painter had been hurrying, or had not quite believed in what he was doing.Mr Gorgeous stood there for a while. The frogs were going, and somewhere a dog barked at nothing. The banyan tree was dark, its hanging roots barely visible.He walked home. Took a shower. Got into bed. But he couldn’t sleep. An hour later he was up again. He put on his working clothes—the ones with the old paint on the cuffs—and walked out into the dark. The party’s local office was a makeshift room near the square, a concrete box with a tin roof. The padlock was new but the bolt was loose; he had noticed this years ago. The paint cans were inside, and the brushes, stacked in the corner.He took a can and a brush and went to work.He did not repaint anything. That would have been too much, too legible. What he did was correct. A stroke added here, sharpening a line that had gone soft. A smudge removed there, where the sickle’s edge had bled. The star—he spent the most time on the star, going around each point with small, precise movements, evening out what the other painter had left uneven. His breathing was difficult; it always was when he was anxious, the asthma pressing against his chest like a hand. He paused, steadied himself, went on.He worked by moonlight and by the distant yellow of a street lamp at the far end of the road. No torch—a torch might bring the Gurkha who had patrolled this road for decades, a man who took his rounds seriously and whose footsteps were audible from 200 metres. Mr Gorgeous kept listening. The frogs continued, the dog had stopped, and the village slept.When he was finished, he stood back and looked at his work. The symbols glowed in the moonlight now. The star’s five points were equal. The sickle had its proper arc. The hammer sat solid and clean against the painted wall of the provision store. His eyes welled up, he gasped with a sob, then put the cans back and walked home, took another shower, changed his clothes, and slept—deeply.He left before dawn.The village woke to what it woke to. People came to the square for tea and arguments. They saw the symbols. Several stopped and looked longer than usual. A few crouched down, the way they always had, to examine the star. The provision store owner came out and stood with his hands on his hips, saying nothing. The leader came too. He walked slowly along the road, looking at each symbol in turn. He was not a sentimental man—he had survived too many elections. But eyewitnesses said his eyes were wet when he stood in front of the star.Nobody said anything about Mr Gorgeous and nobody asked questions. But the knowledge moved through the village—in the pauses between conversations, in the way people looked at each other, then looked away, in the expression on the provision store owner’s face when someone asked him what he thought of the symbols this year.The banyan tree, which had stood at the square since before anyone’s father could remember, was witness to it all, as it had always been.With the story of this man, this village, and the passion with which politics plays out in India, I welcome you to read Frontline’s election special package with reports from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, West Bengal, and Puducherry. We are posting new stories every day. Read them, and as always get back with your responses.Until my next,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor, FrontlineWe hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.inCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS