by Anuradha Roy
The older Mr Rawat, who had a shop in the bazaar, had hung a red woollen globe at the entrance to it: it was as large as several footballs and tall people tended to bump their heads against it on their way into the shop. All over town, there were soggy posters with Ankit Rawat’s purposeful young face beaming from the centre of a ball of red wool. I had only encountered him before across the counter at his father’s shop, when he had sold me thermal vests, socks, and cardigans. “Now I will have to employ an assistant,” his father said in jovial tones. “My son will be too grand for my shop.” He gestured towards the sacred red circle of kumkum and rice grains on his forehead. “All God’s grace, all His wish.”
Ankit Rawat’s supporters, mostly young friends from his college days, tore through the market and Mall Road on motorbikes, shouting his election slogan into megaphones and telling people when and where to vote. “Send your son to Delhi! Uttarakhand needs a man from Ranikhet at the centre,” they urged, to cheers and jokes from the shopkeepers and the people in the streets. Ankit switched from his jeans and jackets to long white kurtas and a red chadar that billowed from his neck when he thundered past with his motorbike cavalcade. Surrounded at all times by his cohorts, he acquired a pop star aura that made people want to be noticed by him. He was clean-featured and tall, and when he posed next to toothless old village women or porters and farmers hunched by years of bending, people said he looked like a prince. He happened to pass by Ama’s cottage one evening at the end of his monthly Ranikhet Darshan, when he would meet common folk and discuss their problems. “He sat on that stool in the courtyard outside our hut, just like an ordinary man,” Ama said later, to anyone who would listen. “I had nothing in the house but some batashas and tea. Mud all over me because I had just come from the fields. He told me he had never drunk such sweet tea. He promised double water supply. And the electricity will never go off.”
Ankit’s opponent was a man from Nainital who had won election after election promising to serve the Hindu cause. Umed Singh was said to be a battle-hardened, canny politician, and had taken to calling Ankit “chota bachha” – little child. “Mind you, every child should be encouraged,” he said, to a Nainital journalist who used the comment as a headline. “Children need to learn the ropes.” Umed Singh had not yet come to campaign in Ranikhet: in the past he had never needed to. This year was different.
The Baba who had taken up residence at the temple near my favourite tea shack caused a flutter one day when he appeared in the market, where an orange and red marquee had been set up. He was greeted by singers who were bleary-eyed and hoarse-voiced from singing songs all night that were broadcast across the valley on loudspeakers. The occasion was Umed Singh’s first campaign visit to Ranikhet. The Baba blessed them, and he blessed Umed Singh’s campaign. One of his assistants read women’s palms and handed out amulets that guaranteed offspring to childless women so that Hindus were not outnumbered in the coming years by those who were allowed four wives.
Umed Singh appeared next on stage. For long minutes he did not speak, letting the crowd settle and expectation build. When he began, he spoke in a ponderous voice, with measured pauses during which he gauged the temper of his audience while it held its breath for his next aphorism. He said it was time the hills were released forever from foreign imperialists who had taken over the hills in British times and replaced ancient temples with churches and mosques. Everywhere, he said, Hindus were being falsely accused of violence when all they wanted was to preserve their way of life against terrorism and against their own people being converted to other religions. It was time to redress the balance. This was not a task that could be left to children who had sold wool the previous week and now on a whim had set out to turn the world upside-down.
“Now what?” I said to Diwan Sahib. “Do you still think the graveyard was vandalised by boys who’d drunk too much – and not by this lot? If Umed Singh wants to, he can make lots of trouble for Agnes W. Just to add some spice to his campaign.”
“It’s ‘Agnes W’ now, is it, behind her back? To her face it’s, ‘Yes Miss Wilson and No Miss Wilson’, “ Diwan Sahib said. “Your beloved principal! Be a little respectful. What do you call me when I’m out of earshot?”
8
The bazaar was not the only place to be transformed during the monsoon. Mr Chauhan’s deadline, the Regimental Reunion, was just over the horizon, and everywhere we could see evidence of his energy. Giant heaps of gravel and sand had been deposited at street corners, and in the rain they flowed onto the roads in little landslides. Some children, who found one such heap near their hut, squealed with pleasure as they pelted each other with balls of caked-up gravel. Their father rushed out with a bucket and scolded them, “Don’t waste it. We might need it. Here, let’s put it into this.”
Labourers appeared in fours and fives instead of the usual ones and twos. Squatting by the parapets, they began to knock at them in a dispirited way with hammers. The old stone parapets, lush with ferns and little pink lilies, were to be torn down and replaced with neater cement ones. Road rollers were on their way. As soon as the rains stopped, the pitted road was going to be re-laid all the way down Mall Road, past the officers’ mess, and up to Mr Chauhan’s house. The tin planters that hung on the arms of cement crosses along Mall Road had long been bereft of flowers; they were now filled with fresh earth and planted with geranium cuttings. Wrought-iron benches were ordered from Haldwani and placed at strategic points. Three of the benches went missing within days. One of them disappeared from near the Light House and the next morning a cantonment official arrived and asked us questions about dead trees and the branches that needed to be lopped, while he walked all over our garden, his eyes reaching into the corners and down the slopes. Diwan Sahib made him an offer of tea and said, “Sit, sit down. We may not have wrought-iron benches, but we do have chairs. Shall we donate them to the Army?”
Mr Chauhan was a familiar sight on the roads now, walking under a rain-sodden umbrella held over him by an orderly who followed him everywhere getting wetter and wetter. Other Administrators buzzed around in their jeeps – Mr Chauhan told us whenever he could – ”but I myself, the man in command, I need to be on the front line verifying the situation on the ground, not blindly accepting reports from juniors.” He went on inspection tours. He chivvied the workers breaking down the old parapets and hammering at blocks of stone. More signs appeared, to indicate places where cows and buffaloes were forbidden, so that overgrazed trees and shrubs would come back to life.
One morning Mr Chauhan spotted Puran, who was tying his cow to one of the metal posts on which a signboard stood. Mr Chauhan abandoned the protection of his umbrella and snatched the cow’s rope from Puran’s hand. He banged the writing on the sign above them with his stick and yelled, “Not here. Not here! No cow here!” His stick clanged on the metal so loudly that Gappu Dhobi ran out from his house to see what the matter was. Mr Chauhan flung the rope into Puran’s face and shouted again, “Not here, you illiterate village fool! You’ll be fined! You’ll be arrested!”
Puran shied away like a startled animal and fled. His feet had been in rubber slippers ever since his army-issue shoes had been burned by Mr Chauhan’s men. His bare ankles were bleeding from leeches that settled there to feed. The slippers slithered on the wet hillside. He plunged into tall grass and gradually disappeared from view into a valley whose lush undergrowth hid stinging nettles, snakes, scorpions, and more leeches. Puran was in too much of a panic to bother about any of this. His cows and goats followed him down the valley, precisely into the area Mr Chauhan had marked out of bounds. Their hooves flattened several new saplings Mr Chauhan’s workforce had planted there the week before.
Later, soaked and irritable, Mr Chauhan walked into his house, and when Mrs Chauhan said in a voice full of concern, “How did you get so wet?” he shouted, “In the line of duty! I got wet in the line of duty!” He had forgotten to take off his muddy shoes at the door. They left a trail over a new carpet as Mr Chauha
n went towards the bedroom, yanking his sopping shirt from the tight waistband of his trousers. Mrs Chauhan gave the carpet a look and slapped her forehead in exasperation. “Offo! What did I say? It’s become impossible to talk in this house, even a simple question.” She telephoned her sister in Lucknow for solace. “This job’s stress is really getting him down. Day and night, he’s never relaxed, not for one minute. And now I’ll have to send this carpet to you to be dry-cleaned. No dry-cleaner’s even seen a real Kashmiri carpet in this place or even in Haldwani.”
Mr Chauhan overheard her from the bedroom. He sat on the bed with his head in his hands. A damp patch grew around him as water seeped out from his wet clothes. He pressed his fingers on his Australia-shaped birthmark, which throbbed to the beat of his agitated pulse. He unearthed a hidden packet, lit a cigarette with a match that shook, and resolved that this time he would teach Puran a lesson he would never forget.
* * *
Burdened with her new preoccupations, Charu no longer remembered to steal grain from Ama’s store for Puran’s deer. He had to wait every morning for his mother to leave their rooms for the few moments that it took him to steal some of the hen’s grain from her storage tin, just a little bit every day so that she would not notice. This, combined with the freshest of the rotting fruits and vegetables that Charu brought back from the bazaar for her cows, supplied the food for his baby barking deer, which had grown steadily over the past five months, and was now more body, less leg. When he took the food to the shed and whispered, Rani, Rani, he saw her large, dimly-glowing eyes turn in his direction, but she did not get up until he had set the grain and fruit in the usual place and withdrawn some distance away.
One afternoon that August, when he called to Rani on returning from grazing the goats, he saw there was empty space in the place in the shed where her eyes should have been. The shed was tiny. Even so, he scrambled around as if the deer might be hiding under the heaps of hay and sacking strewn on the floor. She had wandered off twice in the past, and both times he had rushed about the hills like a man possessed, only calming down when he had found her and shepherded her back to the shed, all the while making mewling noises of relief. When he did not find her in the shed that afternoon, he ran down to the slope where he usually took her to graze and survey the world of commoners. She must have gone off without him again, he thought. He felt his heart turn into a cold, heavy stone at the thought of leopards, jackals, foxes, dogs – all waiting to savage her.
Puran walked the slopes calling for Rani in his loud, hoarse, hollow voice, until Charu heard his calls and came to see what the matter was. She searched the slopes with him: they went in different directions, came back, met, and asked each other, “Did you see her?” and separated again. They went deeper into the valley that led to the Dhobi Ghat; they walked every path through the pine forests to the north, the oak forests to the east, and then started searching the path through the woods to the bazaar. They clambered over the boulders near the stream that cut across the shortcut to the bazaar and at the narrow bridge over the stream they encountered Joshi, the forest guard. “Your deer is at the police station,” the guard told them. “You crazy fool, Puran, don’t you know it’s illegal to keep those deer at home? What were you thinking? It’s not a pet dog or a goat, it’s a deer. Chauhan Sa’ab’s order: it’s going to the Nainital zoo.” Charu and Puran hardly waited for him to finish what he was saying. They panted their way up the slope they had just run down and then over the short cut to Mall Road where the police station was, with the forest guard’s voice in their ears: “Don’t go, he’ll put you in the zoo as well. They have zoos for mad people in Nainital!”
The police station was on a hillock above Mall Road, a yellow, two-roomed cottage with a red roof. It had no more than a rudimentary lock-up that was occupied only sometimes, usually by drunk people who needed to sleep off their fog. The constable in charge was a tall, sharp-featured woman from the plains who had a reputation for being tough with lawless motorcyclists and water-thieves. She had a tight bun, she carried a stout, polished stick to brandish at the unruly, and was never seen dressed in anything but her khaki uniform sari that she pinned up like a neatly folded napkin.
Charu and Puran reached the door of the station gathering the courage to reason with her, and found it empty save for the chowkidar peeling onions in the veranda. Through the main room they could see the bars of the lock-up and Puran ran in, despite the chowkidar yelling “O Puran”, and getting up hastily to stop him. Puran was on his haunches before the bars in a moment.
Rani was pacing around behind the bars of the lock-up. Twice, as they watched, her hooves slid on the polished floor, and she knocked her head against the wall on the other side. Puran held the bars and rocked back and forth. Something between a moan and a sob burst from him, then turned into rhythmic keening sounds.
“Let her out,” Charu begged the chowkidar. “Let her out, she will die.”
The chowkidar ticked them off in a loud, hectoring voice. “How dare you,” he said. “This is a police station, not your house that you come in and do as you please.” He yelled to whoever might be listening, “We are the police, what do you think, that we have all the time in the world for lunatic cowherds?”
Puran sat by the bars of the lock-up groaning and calling Rani’s name. He had some of her grain in his pockets and he scattered it on the floor of the lock-up, but Rani paid no attention to him. It was as if she had not noticed him at all. The skin on her back trembled and shuddered in spasms of fright; the whites of her eyes were flecked with red. In despair, Puran pulled at the lock on the grille, banging it against the iron rods to break it. The chowkidar grabbed his arm and pulled him aside shouting, “Saala, this is government property. What do you think you’re doing?”
Charu recognised that she was up against a force too powerful for her. Why would a police chowkidar – far less someone as elevated as the constable – pay attention to her? She thought of the only person she knew she could turn to. His words would count with the police. They would have to obey him. She ran to Puran to explain, then sped off, bounding over every available shortcut, her pink plastic slippers slipping and sliding on the monsoon-mossed rocks.
9
It was no use trying to finish reading the newspaper. Ama had arrived with the story of a certain Mangesh who worked for Missis Gracie long ago. He put her into one of those orphanages for old people, she said, and swindled her house away. And his wife, “That woman Asha, you’ve seen her, of course – tall and thin as a bamboo pole, with a voice that reaches the next valley even when she whispers, but she thinks she’s pretty – she has put a spell on my cow Ratna, she gives no milk at all any more.” Ama moved a ball of chewing tobacco from one of her cheeks to the other as she spoke and sat down with a groan on the staircase leading to Diwan Sahib’s veranda.
Diwan Sahib scowled at me and at Ama, and hauled himself out of his chair, retreating behind a line of dripping blue hydrangeas that separated his garden from the nettles below. I glimpsed his hands fumbling at his waist, and after a moment’s pause heard the sound of trickling water on grass. All else was quiet but for the tapping of a woodpecker making its way up a nearby tree trunk, grub by grub. Ama sighed, then said: “He is half mad. Pisses into the bushes like some common villager and they say he was a prince before. He drinks so much he keeps falling down. Did you hear, he fell down yesterday too? His shoulder has a big black mark. Himmat Singh told me.”
Diwan Sahib was hidden by the bushes. I could hear thumping, as if someone was beating carpets. Then my landlord was yelling, “Arre O! Can you hear me? What are you doing?”
The monotonous “whump-whump” from below stopped for a minute, then started again. Diwan Sahib stumbled down the slope clutching his pyjama’s waistband and yelling, “Leave the nettles alone, you donkey!” Now we could see him through a gap in the hydrangeas, tall, thin, teetering at the very edge of the slope, looking as if he would trip and roll downhill with his next step.
I half got up, started to call out, “Be careful!” but stopped myself. He detested what he called “clucking”.
“It’s only nettle,” a man’s voice said from below. “I’m not cutting your precious bushes, am I?” His stick hit the bushes again. I stood up to look, and saw that the man had already beaten down many of the high, overgrown nettle bushes into damp green rags. The nettles formed a barrier around the house and protected it from the road a few metres below. The more impenetrable they grew, the more Diwan Sahib rejoiced at keeping prying people out. The nettles would spring back in a month, so there was no need for an argument. But once annoyed, Diwan Sahib was difficult to reason with. He shouted back, “I planted those nettles!”
“Oh yes? Who plants nettle? Weeds – dirty, stinging weeds! He plants them he says.” “Whump!” The man’s stick began hitting the nettle bushes with even greater force. As the stick came down on the bushes again and again, I winced, imagining the man behind me on a lonely forest road, armed with that stick. “Useless old fool,” we heard the man shout in a harsh voice. “Sanki lunatic! Says he plants nettles!”
“You aren’t young yourself,” Diwan Sahib yelled. “Have you seen how old you are?”
Diwan Sahib came back towards the garden. “Have you seen how old he is? And he has the insolence to call me old.” His white hair stood on end, from his having torn off his cap in a hurry. His dressing gown flapped around his ankles. He had climbed back too quickly and now each gasping breath was accompanied by a whistling sound. He stooped and searched for a glass, one he must have flung into the bushes earlier that morning. He wiped it on his shirt and splashed rum into it from the bottle at the table next to him. Then he sat back in his chair and laughed until it turned into a hacking cough. “Someone’s been attacking the nettle for days, and I’ve never managed to catch the fellow in the act before,” he wheezed. “I recognised him today. He’s that retired forest guard – Himmat says he’s lost his mind.”