The paanwala reminded him that the game was the reason for Enumerator A’s lifestyle of a rural landlord in an urban metropolis with his own house and carriage. Twenty years had gone by and the paanwala was compelled to respond more harshly to Enumerator A’s apathy.
‘Who were you? A mere enumerator and a stupid one at that. “Sir, do you eat paan with or without cloves?” “Sir, how do you decide how far to spit?”’
‘I only asked that once, out of curiosity.’
‘Someday we will find him again, maybe his son,’ the paanwala said.
‘Why don’t we call it the Dara Kosh Pathan Competition?’ asked Enumerator A.
‘No!’ The paanwala was worldly wise. He knew how religious markers played out.
‘The Hindu participants will think the odds are stacked against them.’
Each year participants would enquire, ‘Where does he live?’
‘Herat.’
‘Where was he last seen?’
‘Herat.’
‘Does he have any words of wisdom for a young aspirant like me?’
‘Herat.’
‘Does he take disciples?’
‘Herat.’
‘I promise not to interrupt his meditation.’
‘Herat.’
~
The paanwala named his first son Dara, his second, Doro, his third, Duru and his first daughter, Diri.
~
As the paanwala’s hair turned from crude oil to grey, at a rate much slower than the rest of his generation—he was in the habit of drenching his hair in coconut oil after his bath—he accounted that none of the people who had enquired about Dara Kosh Pathan had returned with any news of his whereabouts, in Herat, in the dry, cold mountains of Khorasan, or anywhere else. Since no one had reached Dara’s milestone, the newer participants turned devotion to discontent and discontent to discovery. Each time the paanwala and Enumerator A attempted to prevent an unusual innovation or to disqualify a participant—there was one fellow who needed to slap his right ear, another who blocked his nose, a third who had drilled a hole through his cheek, a fourth who claimed the hole was congenital, he had not drilled it—they always referred to the game’s first ancestor.
‘But he did not say this.’
‘But he did not do this.’
‘But this was not his original intention.’
Slowly and steadily the commandments of the game were written and expanded. Over the years the only innovation that was permitted, unrelated to anything the founding father had said or done or intended, was a change in the criteria of measurement:
Everything else being equal, the taller you are, the further you can spit. Hence, with the blessings of Dara Kosh Pathan, we replace the raw measure of spitting distance with a more appropriate measure of a distance to height ratio.
Some whispered that it was a way to keep the pathans out. Eight of the first ten records were held by pathans. They were very tall. There were protests.
‘Come, all you eight-foot giants, with your drilled cheeks, distended jaws, opiate mixes, devices screwed into your throats,’ shrieked a poster of the underground movement that refused to abide by any rules.
‘Gumnaam log, Gumshuda shabd, aur peek auzaar ban gaya (Anonymous Men, Lost Words, and Spit Became Weapon).’
Among them too no one surpassed Dara Kosh Pathan.
‘It’s a lie. It’s humanly impossible. No innovation can help. That record is fake,’ they shouted from the top of everything they could climb.
~
A scientific community, operating in twenty odd countries, with various treatment and control groups, with mouths, jaws, and orthopaedic devices of all shapes and sizes, tried to surpass Dara Kosh Pathan’s record. Jointly, they issued a scientifically worded public statement with the appropriate disclaimer in the footnote: ‘To the best of our knowledge, it is humanly impossible to exceed 2.14, which is 0.36 less than Dara Kosh Pathan’s record.’
Meanwhile, the orthodox had come together and named the street, the one which was stained with red betel juice, Dara Kosh Pathan Street. A man who claimed to be a distant relative of Dara Kosh Pathan said he was surprised Dara was even there. ‘It is very unlike him to participate.’
The winner for that year overheard the conversation.
‘Look, now we know. Show us a birth certificate. Show us some identification. Show us any evidence that the man exists?’
‘We were not so well organized then.’
Some travellers brought the news that they had found Dara Koh Pathan in the Far East. He wore a white garb. He was old and wrinkled with a long beard. He was also the most prolific spitter in the region.
‘I was never in Herat,’ he said.
‘He has lost his memory,’ they whispered. He was over ninety.
‘Not “Koh”, it’s “Kosh”,’ responded the paanwala.
‘It is “Koh”. Look.’ When the paanwala turned around, to his surprise, the board read ‘Dara Koh’. Periodically the board was erased and rewritten. The ‘s’ had disappeared. Kosh had become Koh.
‘No, no. It is not “Koh”. The cleaner made a mistake.’
‘Why can’t he be a “Koh”? Have a problem with that?’ said a man from the Far East.
‘Christ! The name could be from anywhere. If you ask me, it’s Patten. Darren K. Patten. Just like everything else. Don’t you see a pattern?’ said the Scottish reporter.
‘It’s not “K”, it’s not “Koh”, it’s “Kosh”, Dara Kosh, Dara Kosh Pathan,’ argued another pathan. ‘If you have any doubt you’ll have to deal with me. I will protect his name until the day I die.’
‘We can wait for that.’
‘I am but one of his servants. I have children and they will have their own. We will protect his name until we live.’
The man from the Far East remained quiet. When he reached home, he sent a note which said that they would no longer participate in the event. They would organize their own competition instead, with the support of everyone in the Far East. When they drew Dara Koh Pathan in their own make, dissent brewed. Dara Koh Pathan could no longer be represented.
~
Ethnographic evidence mounted that he was, in fact, Dara Singh. When his family moved from Punjab to Herat, the ‘Singh’ was dropped and ‘Pathan’ adopted. Because both signified warrior races, they must have assumed that the names were interchangeable. This time both the pathans and the men from the Far East protested.
‘He’s a Singh. Singh is King,’ the Sikhs responded.
Finally, the Sikhs, the pathans and the men from the Far East met, and erased the contentious letters. He became Dara Ko.
~
As the signs of mortality began to press upon him, on a daily basis, the paanwala wondered what was holding him to this life. He had already impressed Darako on his children. Even his grandchildren were named after him—Koko, Kiki, Kaka, Kuki, Kuki2. Yet, why was Enumerator A, long after his timely death, haunting him in his dreams? Perhaps a duty remained. His own soul and the soul of Enumerator A would not pass through to the next world unless he had resolved their doubts about Darako. His legs were long lost to arthritis. It was an occupational hazard. He employed a private agent to undertake the arduous journey from Bombay to Herat to investigate what had become of Darako. To the dismay of his relatives, the paanwala allocated a substantial endowment to this task. They would have been happier to coax a crow.
‘No monthly report, no money,’ he warned the agent.
The agent did not send any report in the first month. Over the year, reports arrived sporadically.
~
‘. . . there’s no one by the name of Darako here, not even by the name of Dara Kosh Pathan . . .’
‘Persist,’ replied the paanwala.
~
‘. . . I am closely pursuing a lead. But last night there was a calamity. The informant’s camp was attacked by four lions. He, and three of his camels, died . . .’
~
‘. . . he is pe
rhaps Haji Abdullah Hassan, the Somali dervish, who launched a liberation movement against the English. He fought the Indian troops towards the end of the World War. He is a Sunni, an Ogaden tribesman from the lineage of Habr Suleiman. Unable to capture him for over fifteen years, the English have aerial-bombed the place and killed most of the dervishes. Abdullah Hassan has escaped. The British agents call him the mad mullah and are scouring the country for him, from Kashmir to Kandahar. No Englishman has ever seen him though. He could be anywhere . . .’
~
‘. . . I’ve spoken to some of the tribes here. They know very little. They say Abdullah Hassan has never walked upon the sands of Arabia let alone Afghanistan. A friendly man working for the British Protectorate said that the Somali dervish, in his earlier days in Aden, had joined a liner as a fireman. There is no reason why he could not have travelled aboard one of the many ships heading for Bombay. They know of another Somali, Musa Farah, a servant of the British Protectorate, not an insurgent, who had been to Bombay and worked alongside the Sikh and other regiments.’
~
‘. . . there is less reason to believe that Haji Abdullah Hassan was Dara Kosh Pathan. The Haji himself had agitated against drinking tea and chewing kat. He was too puritanical to be eating paan, let alone being a champion at spitting. They tell of a Singh who was a good spitter. He was here with his battalion. They are not aware of his desire to be called a pathan. I probed them on the Spitting Singh and his whereabouts.
“Must be Guru Raam Singh,” one of them said.
“That was fifty years ago Kookay,” the other responded. They are quite opiated and have lost their sense of time . . .’
~
It was then that the relatives of the old paanwala bribed the doctor to declare him mentally unfit and seized control of his finances. When he asked them whether the private agent had been paid, they nodded. When he asked whether there was any news from the agent, they read him the same letter over and over again. He responded by saying something cryptic:
‘Get him to Peshawar by train.’
‘Give him a hundred gold coins from our royal treasury.’
‘Where will he spit? Make arrangements.’
‘Dispatch an elephant. No, maybe not. The mahout cannot be trusted.’
He also spoke in other languages.
‘It’s Persian,’ said his grandson, who had begun boasting at school that his family, through his grandfather, was linked to royal blood.
‘No one lies on their deathbed. My grandfather had a royal treasury full of gold. We became poor because he distributed it to the scoundrels in the north. I remember he mentioned your father,’ he said to Baghel who had moved to Bombay city from the Rajputana Presidency and had told everyone he was a prince with a four-gun salute.
‘There were many Rajputs in our court, many,’ the grandson continued, ‘we had a hundred-gun salute.’
‘There is no such thing as a hundred-gun salute.’
‘Yours is a lineage of a small princeling. What do you know about our ways?’
26
The mill worker wondered where the others were. Was this the right place? He had slept on the pavement the previous night. The breeze there was better than his room’s stale air.
The policeman walked around him but did not touch him. Could be the plague? But that was years ago. Why bother? the policeman thought. If he is around tomorrow, I’ll call someone.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’ The cleaner from the municipal corporation was surprised to receive a response.
‘Don’t you have a place to stay?’
‘Yes, the goshala (cow shelter). I live in the goshala.’ The worker remembered going there two nights ago. He did not remember that he was not allowed in.
‘This is for cows,’ they had said.
~
The cow shelter, set up by the leaders of the cow protection movement, was run by volunteers. They diligently groomed the cows, collected their urine, patted their dung into cakes, made their beds, covered them with blankets at night and slept alongside them in their sheds. The prospective volunteers who applied last week did not even ask for food, which was when the insiders began to worry that the cow shelter would soon have more humans than bovines and the purpose of their initiative would be lost. No cow needed more than one servant—that would be extravagant. Soon, the outsiders had begun to bribe the watchmen to let them in for the night. The leader would do the rounds at random hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, to check on the watchman, among other things that needed a good checking.
‘Don’t you know we have a zero tolerance for corruption? You will pack your bags and leave in ten minutes,’ the previous watchman had been ordered.
The watchman did not defend himself. He did not feel guilty either. He rationalized that he had followed the Gita. He was dutiful towards those in need and had protected them. What else is a watchman’s duty?
A young graduate, one of the first to be trained in the field of industrial psychology, and turned down by several cotton mills, arrived at the cow shelter.
‘Let me in. I am a cow psychologist.’
‘What is this “cow psychology”?’
‘I am trained to understand the emotional lives of cows.’
‘Which cow?’
‘All cows.’
‘I have lived with Dulari for twelve years, yet there are times when I don’t know what’s going on in her mind,’ said the sceptic among them. The rest of the committee which decided who to take in and who to reject, was excited. They ignored the sceptic and offered the psychologist a room, minimal but independent. There were no cows in it. In the first month, he had already diagnosed four cases of trauma.
One of the cows was in the habit of running into a wire fence each time she was called ‘mother’. He said that this was because she was seven years old; the man who called her ‘mother’ was seventy-seven and he would proceed to milk her right after.
‘What if your mother was seven and a seventy-seven-year-old man called her “mother” and then fondled her breasts?’
‘How dare you insult my mother?’
‘Exactly what I am saying. Imagine what the poor animal must be going through.’
‘Main uska khoon pee jaonga (I would suck his blood).’
‘We should not allow men over seventy near our cows.’
‘I am seventy-three and I’ve never molested any cows. Let the cow psychologist ask them. If any cow accuses me of having ever looked at her with an evil eye, I will renounce everything and retire to the Himalayas.’
‘My mother died when I was very young. Since then I have always seen my mother’s face in a cow,’ said another committee member.
‘If we introduce purdah the cows will be fine. No perverted old lecher will go around looking for the right type of cow to fulfil his debaucheries.’
Then there was another cow, Champa, who took to dowry negotiations. One day she was casually grazing in the outskirts of the village. Members of the khap panchayat, on their way to a prospective bride’s house, happened to walk by. She followed them. The sarpanch took to her keenly and by the end of their journey, about an hour long, they were inseparable. The sarpanch was seen petting her lightly here and there. They nudged each other often, as if sharing an old joke. The cow sat beside the sarpanch’s charpoy while the panchayat negotiated the dowry. When the bride’s family declared that they were broke and had nothing to give the groom, the cow rose and ambled into their farm and found a bull hidden behind the shed. The bride’s family was forced to concede their only draught animal. Since then, under one pretext or another, families of many grooms took her along. Her reputation preceded her. In the hundred-mile radius of the village, brides’ families were often told: ‘Yahan se pachas pachas kos dur, gaon mein, jab beti ka buddha baap dahej chupata hai to beti ki maa kehti hai, “Sab sach sach bata do, nahin to champa aa jayegi.” (In remote villages, far far away, when the bride’s old father hides the dowry, the br
ide’s mother warns him: ‘Tell them the truth, else Champa will pay us a visit.’)’ Some of the more rational-minded speculated that Champa had a coterie of informers.
‘She is old. She should rest. It is time for us to give back to her, not extract from her,’ recommended the cow psychologist.
A committee member voiced his support. ‘We have developed this cow shelter so that cows can rest and spend their remaining years in dignity and peace. It’s a pension scheme, a social security system, a welfare programme. The villagers are abusing her good nature.’
There was a cow who could only follow instructions in English.
‘Ha! Roast beef! Sell her off to the abattoir,’ jeered a committee member. ‘When she finds herself on their Sunday roast, let’s see how her English will help.’
‘It is not her fault that she was taught in English. We should not discriminate between English-speaking and Hindi-speaking cows,’ said the cow psychologist. ‘Or against cows that speak any other language—they learn when they are mere calves.’
Then there was a cow who would stroll into the kitchen and tip the jar of kerosene onto the cook.
‘The cow must have been the cook’s daughter-in-law in her previous life. She seeks revenge,’ deduced one of the committee members.
‘She must be attempting sati,’ said another. ‘O mother cow, are there no limits to your godliness?’
‘Ridiculous,’ the psychologist argued. ‘These cultural explanations are unscientific. The cow was procured from an abattoir. Each time she sees a kitchen she is reminded of steak. Cows have a good sense of smell, you see. She is now fixated on burning the kitchen down.’
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