The crowd might’ve become a lynch mob, then, but Qasim Ali took charge of the scene immediately. He ordered the people to disperse, or stand back, and he told the men who were holding Joseph to keep him pinned on the ground. His next command astonished me. I thought he might call for the police, or have Joseph taken away. Instead, he asked what alcohol Joseph had been drinking, and demanded that two bottles of it be brought to him. He also called for charras and a chillum, and told Johnny Cigar to prepare a smoke. When the rough, home-brewed alcohol, known as daru, was produced, he instructed Prabaker and jeetendra to force Joseph to drink.
They sat Joseph in a circle of strong, young men, and offered him one of the bottles. He glared at them suspiciously for a few moments, but then snatched the bottle and took a long, greedy swig. The young men around him patted him on the back, encouraging him to drink more. He gulped down more of the extremely powerful daru and then tried to push it away, saying that he’d had enough. The young men became forceful in their coaxing. They laughed and joked with him, holding the bottle to his lips and driving it between his teeth. Johnny Cigar lit the chillum, and passed it to Joseph. He smoked and drank and smoked again. Then, some twenty minutes after he’d first stumbled from the hut with the bloody stick in his hand, Joseph dipped his head and passed out cold on the rubble-strewn path.
The crowd watched him snore for a while, and then they gradually drifted away to their huts and their jobs. Qasim told the group of young men to stay in their circle around Joseph’s body, and watch him closely. He left for about half an hour to perform the mid-morning prayer. When he returned, he ordered tea and water. Johnny Cigar, Anand, Rafiq, Prabaker, and Jeetendra were in the watchful circle. A strong, young fisherman named Veejay was also in the group, and a lean, fit cart-pusher known as Andhkaara, or Darkness, because of his luminously dark skin. They talked quietly while the sun rose to its zenith, and the sweltering humidity of the day clamped a moist grip on us all.
I would’ve left then, but Qasim Ali asked me to stay, so I sat down under the shade of a canvas veranda. Veejay’s four-year-old daughter, Sunita, brought me a glass of water, without my asking for it. I sipped the lukewarm liquid gratefully.
‘Tsangli mulgi, tsangli mulgi,’ I thanked her, in Marathi. Good girl, good girl.
Sunita was delighted that she’d pleased me, and stared back at me with a furious little smiling-frown. She wore a scarlet dress with the words MY CHEEKY FACES printed in English across the front. I noticed that the dress was torn, and too tight for her, and I made a mental note to buy some clothes for her and a few of the other kids in the cheap clothing bazaar, known as Fashion Street. It was the same mental note I made every day, every time I talked to the clever, happy kids in the slum. She took the empty glass and skipped away, the metal bells of her ankle bracelets jingling their small music, and her tiny, bare feet tough against the stones.
When all the men had taken tea, Qasim Ali ordered them to wake Joseph. They began to prod and poke him roughly, shouting at him to wake up. He stirred, and grumbled resentfully, waking very slowly. He opened his eyes and shook his groggy head, calling petulantly for water.
‘Pani nahin,’ Qasim said. No water.
They forced the second bottle on him, roughly insistent, but cajoling him with jokes and pats on the back. Another chillum was produced, and the young men smoked with him. He growled repeatedly for water. Every time, he found the strong alcohol thrust into his mouth instead. Before a third of the bottle was finished, he fainted again, collapsing to the side with his head lolling at an awkward angle. His face was bare to the climbing sun. No-one made any attempt to shade him.
Qasim Ali allowed him a mere five minutes to doze before ordering that he be woken. Joseph’s grumbling was angry as he woke, and he began to snarl and curse. He tried to raise himself to his knees, and crawl back to his hut. Qasim Ali took the bloodied bamboo stick, and handed it to Johnny Cigar. He spoke one word of command. Begin!
Johnny raised the stick, and brought it down on Joseph’s back with a resounding smack. Joseph howled, and tried to crawl away, but the circle of young men pushed him back to the centre of their group. Johnny struck him with the stick again. Joseph screamed angrily, but the young men slapped at him and shouted for silence. Johnny raised the stick, and Joseph cowered, trying to focus his bleary eyes.
‘Do you know what you have done?’ Johnny demanded harshly. He brought the stick down with a whack on Joseph’s shoulder. ‘Speak, you drunken dog! Do you know what a terrible thing you have done?’
‘Stop hitting me!’ Joseph snarled. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Do you know what you have done?’ Johnny repeated. The stick struck again.
‘Ow-ah!’ Joseph shrieked. ‘What? What have I done? I’ve done nothing!’
Veejay took the stick, and beat Joseph on the upper arm.
‘You beat your wife, you drunken pig! You beat her, and maybe she will die!’
He passed the stick to Jeetendra, who used it to smack Joseph on the thigh.
‘She’s dying! You are a murderer! You murdered your own wife.’
Joseph tried to shield himself with his arms, casting his eyes about feverishly for some escape. Jeetendra lifted the stick again.
‘You beat your wife all morning, and threw her naked from the hut. Take that, you drunkard! And that! Just as you beat her. How do you like it, you murderer?’
The slow creep of a foggy comprehension stiffened Joseph’s face into a terrified anguish. Jeetendra passed the stick to Prabaker, and the next blow brought tears.
‘Oh, no!’ he sobbed. ‘It’s not true! I haven’t done anything! Oh, what will happen to me? I didn’t mean to kill her! God in heaven, what will happen to me? Give me water. I need water!’
‘No water,’ Qasim Ali said.
The stick came down again and again. It was in Andhkaara’s hand.
‘Worrying about yourself, dog? What about your poor wife? You didn’t worry when you beat her. This is not the first time you took this stick to her, is it? Now it is finished. You killed her. You can never beat her again, not her or anyone. You will die in the jail.’
Johnny Cigar took the stick again.
‘Such a big, strong fellow you are! So brave to beat your wife, who is half your size. Come on and beat me, hero! Come on, take this stick of yours, and beat a man with it, you cheap goonda.’
‘Water …’ Joseph blubbered, collapsing to the ground in tears of self-pity.
‘No water,’ Qasim Ali said, and Joseph drifted into unconsciousness once more.
When they woke him the next time, Joseph had been in the sun for almost two hours, and his distress was great. He shouted for water, but they offered him only the daru bottle. I could see that he wanted to refuse it, but his thirst was becoming desperate. He accepted the bottle with trembling hands. Just as the first drops touched his parched tongue, the stick came down again. Daru spilled over his stubbled chin, and ran from his gaping mouth. He dropped the bottle. Johnny picked it up and poured the remaining alcohol over his head. Joseph shrieked and tried to scramble away on his hands and knees, but the circle of men wrestled him back to the centre. Jeetendra wielded the stick, smacking it onto his buttocks and legs. Joseph whined and wept and moaned.
Qasim Ali was sitting to one side, in the shaded doorway of a hut. He called Prabaker to him, and gave orders that a number of Joseph’s friends and relatives should be sent for, as well as relatives of Maria, Joseph’s wife. As the people arrived, they took the places of the young men in the circle, and Joseph’s torment continued. For several hours, his friends and relatives and neighbours took turns to vilify and accuse him, beating him with the stick he’d used to assault his wife so savagely. The blows were sharp, and they hurt him, but they weren’t severe enough to break the skin. It was a measured punishment that was painful, but never vicious.
I left the scene, and returned a few times during the afternoon. Many of the slum-dwellers who were passing that way stopped to watch
. People joined the circle around Joseph, or left it, as they wished. Qasim Ali sat in the doorway of the hut, his back straight and his expression grave, never taking his eyes from the circle. He directed the punishment with a quiet word or a subtle gesture, keeping a relentless pressure on the man, but preventing any excesses.
Joseph passed out twice more before he finally broke down. When the end came, he was crushed. All the spite and defiance in him were defeated. He sobbed the name of his wife over and over again. Maria, Maria, Maria …
Qasim Ali stood, and approached the circle. It was the moment he’d waited for, and he nodded to Veejay, who brought a dish of warm water, soap, and two towels from a nearby hut. The same men who’d been beating Joseph cradled him in their arms, then, and washed his face, neck, hands, and feet. They gave him water. They combed his hair. They soothed him with hugs and the first kind words he’d heard since the beginning of his chastisement. They told him that if he were genuinely sorry he would be forgiven, and given help. Many people were brought forward, myself included, and Joseph was made to touch our feet. They dressed him in a clean shirt, and propped him up, their arms and shoulders supporting him tenderly. Qasim Ali squatted close to him, and stared into his bloodshot eyes.
‘Your wife, Maria, is not dead,’ Qasim Ali said softly.
‘Not … not dead?’ he mumbled.
‘No, Joseph, she is not dead. She is very badly injured, but she is alive.’
‘Thank God, thank God.’
‘The women of your family, and Maria’s family, have decided what is to be done,’ Qasim said slowly, firmly. ‘Are you sorry—do you know what you have done to your wife, and are you sorry for it?’
‘Yes, Qasimbhai,’ Joseph wept. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry.’
‘The women have decided that you must not see Maria for two months. She is very ill. You almost killed her, and she must take two months to recover. In this time, you will work every day. You will work long hours and hard. You will save your money. You will not drink even one drop of daru or beer or anything but water. Do you understand? No chai or milk or anything but water. You must observe this fast, as part of your punishment.’
Joseph wagged his head feebly.
‘Yes, yes. I will.’
‘Maria may decide not to take you back. You must know this also. She may want to divorce you, even after the two months—and if she does, I will help her in this. But at the end of two months, if she wants to accept you again, you will use the money you have saved by this extra hard work, and you will take her on a holiday to the cool mountains. During retreat in that place, with your wife, you will face this ugliness in yourself, and you will try to overcome it. Inshallah, you will make a happy and virtuous future, for your wife and yourself. This is the decision. Go now. No more talking. Eat now, and sleep.’
Qasim stood, turned, and walked away. Joseph’s friends helped him to his feet, and half-carried him to his hut. The hut had been cleaned, and all of Maria’s clothes and personal articles had been removed. Joseph was given rice and dhal. He ate a little of it, and then lay back on his thin mattress. Two friends sat near him, and fanned his unconscious body with green paper fans. A cord was tied around one end of the bloody stick, and Johnny Cigar suspended it from a post outside Joseph’s hut for all to see. It would remain there for the two months of Joseph’s further punishment.
Someone turned a radio on in a hut not far away, and a Hindi love song wailed through the lanes and gullies of the busy slum. A child was crying somewhere. Chickens scratched and pecked at the place where Joseph’s circle of torment had been. Somewhere else, a woman was laughing, children played, the bangle-seller sang out his enticement-call in Marathi. A bangle is beauty, and beauty is a bangle!
As the pulse and push of normal life returned to the slum, I walked back to my hut, through the winding lanes. Fishermen and fisherwomen were coming home from Sassoon Dock, bringing baskets of sea-smell with them. In one of those balancing contrasts of slum life, it was also the hour chosen by the incense-sellers to move through the lanes, burning their samples of sandalwood, jasmine, rose, and patchouli.
I thought about what I’d seen that day, what the people did for themselves in their tiny city of twenty-five thousand souls, without policemen, judges, courts, and prisons. I thought about something Qasim Ali had said, weeks before, when the two boys, Faroukh and Raghuram, had presented themselves for punishment, having spent a day tied together in work at the latrine. After they’d scrubbed themselves clean with a hot bucket-bath, and dressed in new lungis and clean, white singlets, the two boys stood before an assembly of their families, friends, and neighbours. Lamplights fluttered in the breeze, passing the golden gleam from eye to eye, as shadows chased one another across the reed-mat walls of the huts. Qasim Ali pronounced the punishment that had been decided upon by a council of Hindu and Muslim friends and neighbours. Their punishment, for fighting about religion, was that each had to learn one complete prayer from the religious observances of the other.
‘In this way is justice done,’ Qasim Ali said that night, his bark-coloured eyes softening on the two young men, ‘because justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’
I knew those words by heart. I’d written them down in my work journal, not long after Qasim Ali had spoken them. And when I returned to my hut on that day of Maria’s agonies, that day of Joseph’s shame, I lit a lamp, and opened the black journal, and stared at the words on the page. Somewhere close to me, sisters and friends comforted Maria, and fanned her bruised and beaten body. In Joseph’s hut, Prabaker and Johnny Cigar took the first shift to watch over their neighbour as he slept. It was hot, then, as evening’s long shadows became the night. I breathed a stillness of air, dusty and fragrant with scents from cooking fires. And it was quiet, in those dark, thinking moments: quiet enough to hear sweat droplets from my sorrowed face fall upon the page, one after another, each wet circle weeping outward into the words fair … forgiving … punish … and save …
CHAPTER TWELVE
ONE WEEK became three weeks, and one month became five. From time to time, as I worked the streets of Colaba with my tourist clients, I ran into Didier, or Vikram, or some of the others from Leopold’s. Sometimes I saw Karla, but I never spoke to her. I didn’t want to meet her eyes while I was poor, and living in the slum. Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.
I didn’t see Abdullah at all during that fifth month, but a succession of strange and occasionally bizarre messengers came to the slum with news of him. I was sitting alone at the table in my hut one morning, writing, when the ghetto dogs roused me from my work with a fury of barking more frenzied than anything I’d ever heard. There was rage and terror in it. I put down my pen, but didn’t open my door or even move from my chair. The dogs were often vicious at night, but that was the first time I’d ever heard such ferocity in the daylight hours. The sound was fascinating and alarming. As I perceived that the pack was coming nearer and slowly nearer to my hut, my heart began to thump.
Shafts of golden morning stabbed through rents and gaps in the fragile reed walls of my hut. Those mote-filled rays stuttered and strobed as people rushed past in the lane outside. Shouts and screams joined the howling. I looked around me. The only weapon of any kind in my small house was a thick bamboo stick. I picked it up. The riot of barking and voices concentrated outside my hut, and seemed to be centred on my door.
I pulled open the thin piece of plywood I used as a door, and dropped the stick at once. There, half a metre away, was a huge, brown bear. The animal towered over me, filling the doorway with awesome, muscled fur. It stood easily on its hind legs, with its enormous paws raised to the height of my shoulders.
The presence
of the beast provoked the ghetto dogs to madness. Not daring to come within reach, they turned on one another in their fierce rage. Ignoring them and the excited crowd of people, the bear stooped and leaned in toward the doorway to stare into my eyes. Its eyes were large, sentient, and topaz-coloured. It growled. Far from threatening, the bear’s growl was a rumbling, tumbling, oddly soothing roll of sound, more eloquent than the prayer that muttered through my mind. My fear slipped away as I listened to it. Across that half-metre of air, I felt the reverberations of the feral noise throb against my chest. It leaned closer until its face and mine were centimetres apart. Froth dissolved to liquid, and dripped from its wet, black jaws. The bear meant me no harm. Somehow, I was sure of it. The eyes of the beast were speaking of something else. It was seconds only, but in that thudding stillness the communication of an animal sadness, undiluted by reason and complete in its passion, was so intense and pure, from eye to eye, that it seemed much longer, and I wanted it to go on.
The dogs slashed at one another, whining and howling an agony of hate and fear, wanting to rip at the bear, but more afraid than enraged. Children screamed, and people scrambled to avoid the thrashing dogs. The bear turned, ponderously slow, but then lashed out swiftly and swept a massive paw at the dogs. The dogs scattered, and a number of young men seized the opportunity to drive them further away with stones and sticks.
The bear swayed from side to side, scanning the crowd with those large, dolorous eyes. With a clear view of the animal, I noticed that it wore a leather collar studded with short spikes. Two chains were fastened to the collar, and they trailed away into the hands of two men. I hadn’t seen them until then. They were bear-handlers, dressed in vests, turbans, and trousers, all of which were a startling electric blue colour. Even their chests and faces were painted blue, as were the metal chains and collar of the bear. The bear turned and stood to face me again. Impossibly, one of the men who held its chains spoke my name.
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