Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

by Manu Joseph

In the first five minutes she is excited. He is dead. Mother’s boss has been long dead. She runs to Father and says, ‘Does Ma know?’ Mother knows. The girl is confused, dejected. She had thought that if the news of Mr Mao’s death is broken to Ma, she might shut shop and return. But Ma knows. She works for a dead Chinese man. Right. The girl reads more about Mr Mao. She is even more confused. She figures that Mr Mao actually wanted farmers, at least most of them, to become factory workers. And he took away so much grain from farmers in China that millions of them starved to death. He seemed to have been a very cruel man. She runs to Pa. ‘Mao was not a Maoist,’ she says. ‘Does Ma know?’ Mother knows. Kind of. ‘Mao’s ideas were right,’ Pa says. They just didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to. Right.

Very funny.