by Ryan Lobo
‘And you?’ he asks a tattooed Adivasi sitting handcuffed and quiet at the rear of the boat. The man turns to look at Iyer, revealing a bruised face and broken teeth. He says nothing.
‘Don’t ask him, my dear, he has lost his voice,’ The Lover remarks, looking at the other convicts, who guffaw immediately.
Standing to his full height, Iyer speaks: ‘I am Bhīma of Benares, brahmachari! I took an oath to uphold justice. I grant you all release.’
For a few seconds no one replies, and all that can be heard is the sound of the river, except for the sounds of Bencho hurriedly trying to cover his body with the tarpaulin.
‘Shut up, you madman. Get lost,’ the constable shouts.
‘Sir, I have interrogated these men and I find them innocent!’ Iyer continues.
‘Fool. Do you even know who they are? What they are?’
‘Fool? You call the Bhīma a fool? I command you to release these innocents. Or you will feel my mace across your pitiful face.’
‘I, Constable Vikas, command you to fuck off! Before I shove this lathi up your arse,’ he says, spitting into the river to emphasise his point.
With a loud cry Iyer leaps onto the barge, swinging his staff wildly at the stunned constable, who steps backwards, grasping at his side for his ancient Lee Enfield rifle, which looks like it’s seen better days. Seeing his chance, The Lover gets up and, with a swift elbow jab, shoves the constable into the river. The other constable, who has never worked a rifle before, is trying frantically but unsuccessfully to draw the bolt, when it is twisted out of his grasp by another member of the gang. Within minutes, four men have divested the constable of his keys, bashed him about a few times and tossed him into the river.
They swim away as far as they can, trying to dodge the chains being flung at them from the barge.
‘Victory!’ Iyer shouts, while the convicts cheer him on wildly, slapping him on the back as Iyer raises his hands to the heavens.
Seeing The Lover picking up the rifle and raising it in the direction of the swimming constabulary, Iyer snatches it from him.
‘Let them go,’ he pleads, ‘they are our brothers too.’
‘Listen here, my dear,’ The Lover says with exquisitely gentle menace, delicately placing a hand on Iyer’s shoulder, ‘you’ve helped us so you get one chance from me. I will give you one chance. Now, you mind your own business,’ he says, abruptly moving his hand from shoulder to throat and squeezing. Iyer gasps for breath and falls to his knees.
‘Please leave him be,’ comes a tremulous voice, and Bencho appears from beneath the tarpaulin, trembling with fear and partly wishing he had remained hidden.
The constables have reached the other bank and run into the forest.
The Lover softens and releases Iyer, grinning at Bencho.
‘Sorry, grandpa. I guess I do owe you. You can come with us. I have a politician friend downstream who’ll help us.’
‘Why would I come with you?’ Iyer rasps, still on the floor of the boat, rubbing his throat.
‘We fight for freedom,’ The Lover says romantically. ‘No one dares enter our area.’
‘No thank you, Mr Lover. I will respectfully refuse your offer but, if you don’t mind, I have a request.’
Unsure of what to make of Iyer, The Lover listens.
‘I ask just one favour. Go to the beautiful lady Panchakanya of Benares, and tell her I did this for her. She’s the divine light of my life.’
There’s an amazed silence on the boat, broken by The Lover, who laughs in amazement. Hearing him, the rest of the convicts start whooping too.
‘OK. Right,’ says The Lover in patently mocking tones.
‘Sir, I freed you. Can you not do this one small thing for me?’
‘You made us throw two constables into the river, and that is a criminal case. Attempted murder! If you’d let me get rid of them we would not have that on our heads. The district magistrate is my cousin. I would have been released in a few weeks anyway, but now I’ve got to worry about this new charge!’
‘Darkness cannot free darkness, only light can do that. What you put out into the world, you receive back. Is that not true?’
‘Oh, you’re an educated fellow, are you? Lording it over us, are you? You’d better be careful, or we’ll finish you off right now.’
‘We’re all brothers here,’ says Iyer, finally concerned that the situation may not go as well as he’d hoped.
‘I killed my brother,’ one of the convicts says, to guffaws from the rest of them.
‘Start the engine,’ The Lover says. ‘Shut up and get lost now, old man,’ he says, all playfulness vanished.
‘But you must listen to me. I am …’ Suddenly a convict punches Iyer, and another leaps on Bencho, pushing him down. Iyer stumbles and is punched again. Picking up a rifle, The Lover nonchalantly strikes Iyer across the forehead with the butt, with a sound like an axe hitting a coconut. Iyer falls backwards into the shallows, the taste of metal filling his mouth, the sky darkening as his eyes close.
When he comes to, he’s still in the water and Bencho has his arms around him, holding his head above the water. Bencho is sobbing, his salty tears stinging a bleeding cut on Iyer’s forehead.
‘Don’t cry, Bencho,’ he says weakly, the sound of the barge now distant.
‘Sir,’ Bencho shouts, crying harder from relief.
‘Please don’t cry,’ he says again.
With consciousness comes the pain, shooting down the side of his face. Iyer cries out.
‘Bastards,’ Bencho mutters, his teeth clenched.
‘My friends! My friends! I freed you.’
Bencho starts pushing him through the water and towards the boat, which has run into some dead branches trailing over the water like a broken spider’s web.
17
‘There is no hope. The beaten of today will become the beaters of tomorrow. There is no end,’ moans Bencho, a cloud of mosquitoes buzzing like a halo around his head, adding to his misery. He gets Iyer into the boat, propping him against the mast.
The pain from Iyer’s broken tooth throbs with every heartbeat, and spreads past his jaw to his neck and shoulders. His ribs ache from the punches and hurt with every breath. Leaning against the mast, he watches mosquitoes settle on his skin and feed, unmolested. Iyer has a vision of himself blowing on a conch rallying the troops, the veins on his neck bulging with the effort. Fight. Fight. Fight.
‘Bencho! Are you with me? I watch my words from a long way off. It is like they belong to someone else,’ he groans, pressing his head against the mast, the wound on his forehead weeping onto the wood.
‘Maybe this is a bad dream. We will wake up soon, sir.’
‘Am I dreaming my wounds, Bencho?’ Iyer asks, touching his forehead and wincing, the vision dissipating, ‘or do these wounds dream me?’
‘I am tired of the beating and also sometimes of your wisdom, sir. Please stop,’ begs Bencho, his swollen face slick with tears that keep on coming.
‘It is a slight setback,’ Iyer says, pausing to spit out blood. ‘All is secondary to divine providence.’
‘Sir, you are like a fool with your actions but a wise man in your philosophy. Why, sir?’
Iyer looks at his hands as if they hold a clue, but sees only bruises and smudges of blood. ‘I am the residue of all my ancestors as we move backwards into time, and so on and on and on, until that which happened in the sludge at the bottom of swamps with writhing creatures – unholy things, terrible things – is also a part of me.’
‘OK!’ Bencho says, exasperated, raising one hand for Iyer to stop. He grabs the pole and starts punting the boat away from the bank. This man wasn’t a great thinker who was going to kick off his political career; he was a maniac.
‘All time happens at once, Bencho.’
Bencho transfers his frustration to a mosquito on his forearm, which he slaps with such vigour that the sting hurts more than a bite would have. He looks at Iyer with something bordering o
n disdain.
‘I do not know where my rages come from, Bencho,’ Iyer says, dropping his head. ‘But when I watch myself charge, it makes sense. A man must obey his own law. A life has to follow its own course.’
‘Course?’
‘Somewhere else in space and time I sat cowering, a boot on my neck, my hands joined in supplication during the Battle of Talikota – if my divine memory holds true. That has passed now. This too shall pass, Bencho. Have faith.’
‘Faith? In what? How can God let you be attacked by people you helped?’ Bencho asks, pulverising a mosquito and wondering – just like the mosquito – why, indeed, a God would unleash such monsters upon the faithful.
‘God is much better and much worse than that. Who says God is good?’ Iyer’s tooth rings with a fresh wave of pain, as if to prove this point. ‘The pain we feel is the divine accompaniment to the task at hand. Think of it as a song. Try singing, Bencho, that is what I do when the suffering is too much. But not a film song, or I will vomit.’
‘I will leave you at your brother’s house. And I will sing for now, though if I sing I will start crying, sir,’ Bencho says, losing the riverbed with the pole and pulling it back into the boat. Sitting down, he starts to sing.
Suddenly tilting his head, Bencho freezes. ‘Where are the oars?’ Bencho asks, looking about.
‘I don’t know,’ Iyer replies, going through his sodden pockets, trying to remember if he’d brought any Crocin with him.
‘Why does this happen to us, sir?’ Bencho cries, looking for the oars under the floorboards, and realising that they must have got lost somehow in the earlier fracas. Perhaps they slid out of the boat?
‘Why can’t we succeed once? Just once?’
‘Don’t worry, Bencho, you will become a politician very soon,’ Iyer says, scouring his pockets again and finding nothing.
‘Really, sir?’
Iyer does not miss the sarcasm.
‘Lord Krishna told me so. He is with us on our journey.’
‘Where did you see him?’ Bencho asks. ‘Couldn’t he have kept an eye on the oars earlier?’
‘I saw him in my dreams.’
‘Where are the oars?’ Bencho repeats, louder this time, searching the river bottom with the punting pole again, not finding the silt again.
‘I don’t know, Bencho. But have faith, Ganga Maa will always take us to where we are headed.’ And saying so, Iyer put his head in his hands.
They float along in silence. Bencho, grateful that the stove is still on board, starts preparing spinach, cooking it to mush so that Iyer’s teeth can withstand it. The river grows so wide that he cannot see the banks any more. Comforted by the smell of food, Bencho dozes off.
He dreams of another boat. It is a much larger one which both he and Iyer row. Other men sit alongside, also rowing, pulling on long oars and cursing. Iyer has only one arm. Grinning, he tries to attach an oar to his stump, clicking it into place.
Click.
Click.
Bencho wakes up to see Iyer holding the Major’s gun, the cylinder clicking as it rotates.
‘Where did you get that?’ he asks startled, springing upright.
‘An old friend gave it to me,’ Iyer says, spinning the cylinder again.
‘Sir. Give it to me. Please,’ says Bencho, forcing a smile.
‘The world may deprive a man of life, but it cannot deprive him of death,’ Iyer says, sounding like his old assured self.
‘Sir, enough philosophy. Give me the gun,’ Bencho says, all traces of sleep obliterated by horror-driven adrenaline.
‘All it will take to send me back to the heavens is a little pressure from this finger.’ Iyer raises the revolver to his temple, pulling the hammer back with his thumb.
‘Sir. You must give me the gun,’ Bencho says, his mouth dry.
‘Why?’
‘We have not finished what we set out to do. We have not filed for my corporator seat and you have not …’
‘There is nothing wrong in choosing release, Bencho. They tell us that suicide is cowardly, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man is more entitled to than his own life. Many a great sage has meditated until he has released himself from the world.’
‘I will wait until you release yourself with meditation, but please give me your gun. What about your family? Your brothers, their children ... how will they feel?’
Iyer looks out over the water, still holding the gun to his head.
‘Let’s go and see them. They would love to see you, no? You can tell the children about your adventures. They’re downstream, aren’t they, in the village near the paper plant? No?’
‘Yes.’
‘The gun, sir.’
Bencho looks hard at Iyer, who stares back at him. The moment Iyer lowers his hand, he snatches the gun and throws it overboard. ‘What do you care, Bencho?’ he asks.
‘About what?’
‘About me shooting myself.’
‘You are my guru, sir, and my friend.’
Iyer starts to say something but thinks better of it.
‘I am the guru who will help you with your nomination so you can become a corporator who loots people? Politicians have no morals, Bencho, not in this country.’
‘No sir. I have morals,’ Bencho replies, adding, ‘And my country is great. We must be proud.’
‘What pride is there in being Indian?’ Iyer asks angrily. ‘We are the lowest of the low, the most piteous, servile slaves that have ever lived in the history of humanity. We are the armpit of Asia. We have had the boot on our neck these last five hundred years. Nothing has changed. No one respects us. We don’t respect ourselves.’
‘Sir, we chased the British out,’ Bencho says, taken aback by Iyer’s criticism of the motherland.
‘Chased? Who told you that? The British were looters. What does that make us when so many of us were ruled by a few looters? We were too busy molesting the peasants to fight back. The Mohammedans were no different, except that they liked chopping off heads. When Vijayanagara fell, all was lost. We are still recovering. Then we replaced those looters with bigger looters.’
‘We had Gandhiji, sir,’ Bencho says quietly. ‘Remember, one old man booted out the powerful British.’
‘The deification of that crackpot Karamchand is one of the main reasons for our intellectual gutter today. If he were born in any other time, his bald head would have been a decoration on a gate spike. Karamchand was a suitable boy for the West because we aren’t supposed to fight the white man. They’ve used him to make villains of anyone who rightly used force against the looters,’ Iyer fumes.
‘Sir, listen …’
‘No, Bencho, I know exactly what people like you think. That he is above criticism, well …’
‘No, sir, listen. Well, yes, that too, but LISTEN!’
A faint roaring can be heard in the distance, ahead of the river’s next bend. It is the sound of water, muted but full of terrible promise.
‘It’s a waterfall, sir!’ Bencho says, his eyes wide with fear. ‘And we have no oars!’
The sound grows clearer as the boat approaches it, the roar growing deafening as, turning the bend, the waterfall comes into sight: a plume of vapour rising into the heavens a kilometre downstream.
Iyer takes the pole as the boat enters the rapids, dirty whitecaps filling a brown river. The boat hits some rocks, nearly capsizing it, but slides back into the water. It careens along, Bencho sobbing with fear, with his head pressed against the mast. Iyer begins singing at the top of his voice.
Pachai ma malai pol meni. Oorile kaani illai uravu martoruvar illai
Paaril nin paadhamoolam patrine paramamoorthy.
I have no place; no properties; no relatives; none other than you
I have got hold of your lotus feet, o Lord of the universe.
The boat enters the rapids. Seeing rocks ahead, Bencho tries to use the pole to push it away, but it gets wedged between two boulders and snaps
in two. With superhuman effort, he steers the way with the half-pole, trying to reach the banks until that, too, is snatched from his hands by the raging cataract.
Shouting in fear and throwing himself at the bottom of the boat, Bencho grabs onto the mast as the boat hurtles towards the chasm, completely out of their control.
Karolee vannnane en kannnane kadaarugindren
Paaril nin paadhamoolam patrine paramamoorthy.
O Krishna, you are my only refuge, I am crying for salvation at your feet
I have got hold of your lotus feet, o Lord of the universe.
A mist rises like smoke, marked by shimmering rainbows.
‘We’re going to be dashed on the rocks!’ Bencho shouts, cowering in the boat.
‘It is only death. Do not fear,’ Iyer shouts back, reaching across and taking Bencho’s hand and holding it firmly. The boat crashes to a halt, shuddering against a rock, teetering at the edge of the waterfall. Iyer looks into the mist rising from the river some fifteen feet below, and has a vision.
He is carrying a butcher’s cleaver – the kind that needs daily sharpening and goes black in the monsoon. He runs through a battle between British redcoats and Indian sepoys, everyone fighting hand to hand around him. Corpses float downriver. A blonde child of about ten, dressed in a dirty white smock, runs through the shallows, her hair in disarray, catching the sunlight. She looks at Iyer and begins to sob.
The vision passes. He opens his eyes and sees Bencho with his eyes closed tight against the spray, his brows furrowed in prayer.
Three cormorants fly over the river in formation, their heads turning from side to side as if they’re looking for something. Iyer sees them and feels a calmness descend over him. He sees himself as if he’s floating over the boat with them, and closes his eyes.
The boat dislodges and plunges into the chasm.
18
Cutting into the depths of the water, the boat goes completely underwater for a second before it rockets back up to the surface, its hull leaking like a sieve. Iyer and Bencho clasp the mast, disoriented and knee-deep in water. The vessel is pushed out into a vast stillness, a speck in the midst of a bankless lake, leaning to one side again.