Animal's People: A Novel

by Indra Sinha

  The outside world has changed. Gone is the burning heat of the Nautapa. A cool air’s leaning up through the forest, each leaf on every tree is clear and sharp in a green cloud light. Across the valley trees on another hillside are churning in an invisible storm. I’m lying on my side, looking up into the sky, which is dark, above me large birds are circling. Not all the potatoes did I eat, this is what comes into my mind, together with the thought that the birds are coming down, soon their wings will cancel the light. Zafar’s voice says, “What an ingenious equation.” I look for Zafar but everything’s dark. Later I become aware that I am still lying in the entrance to the cave, my face is wet. There’s a sound of roaring and rushing. It’s water. Rain is falling out there in the world softening the shapes of the forest, the lines of trees on the hillsides, all are misted in grey rain blowing across and water is dripping down from the rocks and pouring in white chutes down the slopes, the water is in my hands and my face and in my eyes, washing them clean, it’s in my mouth, tasting like no mere miracle. Again Zafar’s voice speaks to me, “If there is heaven on earth, it is this.” So that’s how I know I am in paradise. I drink and drink and drink till my stomach’s hard as a melon.

  Towards the end of my first day in paradise the rain clears, a red sun hangs in the west, sending long shadows into the cave. With newly wakened eyes I see what before I’d not noticed, there are scratches on the rocks, and daubs of colour that are not natural marks but like paintings done by a child’s finger. There are animals of every kind, leopards and deer and horses and elephants, there’s a tiger and a rhino, among them are small figures on two legs, except some have horns some have tails they are neither men nor animals, or else they are both, then I know that I have found my kind, plus this place will be my everlasting home, I have found it at last, this is the deep time when there was no difference between anything when separation did not exist when all things were together, one and whole before humans set themselves apart and became clever and made cities and kampanis and factories.

  Time in paradise is like in the Nutcracker, it ceases to have meaning, suns and moons migrate into the sky and tumble into the west. Days pass, or maybe it’s just one, or years, or thousands of years, I am immortal. There is nothing of me that will die. The memories of what happened to me in the forest when I was still alive are like pale forms glimmering in darkness and it comes to me what I thought was life was nothing but darkness. The time before the forest is a fading nightmare of a city of stinks and misery, I think of thousands and thousands dead in the last moments of Khaufpur. Our whole lives were lived in the dark. Those who were there with me are now in paradise, where’s no Khaufpur, no India, no trace of flames, hell is not visible from here. These hills, these forests go on forever. Such thoughts are like dreams that attach themselves to this or that, to a bird flying past, or a grass stalk bent under water drops. All things speak to me. From a tiny place inside the curl of a fern comes a voice, that old voice I love, “Now Animal, you are safe, you and all the people of the Apokalis, because he will shelter them, no more shall they suffer hunger or thirst, nor have to do heavy work, never again will they be tormented by the sun nor by burning winds, for he will care for them and lead them to the sources of living water, he will heal their sores and their coughs and fevers and he will wipe the tears from their eyes.”

  Thud. Something’s fallen near my head. High above in the arch of this jungle temple, with swallows darting round it, a beehive is hanging. On the ground is a lump of waxy bee-comb. I’ve grabbed it, bitten into it, honey’s running between my lips down my chin, never has anything tasted so good.

  Much comforted by this food and by Ma’s words I sleep, in my dreams blind bearded men weep over I don’t know what. Next thing sun’s streaming into the cavern. I’ve eaten more of the honeycomb, then crawled to drink from a pool that has filled among the rocks. In this pool for the first time I see my heavenly self. My new face is skin stretched around a skull, huge and dark are my eyes, my strong chest is a rack of ribs, plus here’s a great disappointment, in paradise I thought I would be upright, didn’t Ma promise it? but stretch as I might I’m still bent. Plus I soon learn that in heaven just as in the earthly world is no escape from crapping, my bowels are weak and watery.

  I get to wondering what has happened to all the others who died, not one of them have I seen. Somewhere in these endless jungles must be the city of god and there the poor will be gathered. Singing with joy they’ll be, like it says in Sanjo’s book. I eat more honey, drink water and try to sing, but although in my head I can hear music from my mouth comes nothing but croaking, like one of Somraj’s frogs.

  At some point I’ve heard leaves rustling, may be a boar, or a deer. Then such joy. It’s Jara. Thrilled I’m to see her, I give a great shout, which stumbles out croaking. So she did die in that cloud of poison, surely Ma’s with her, they’ve come to join me in heaven. Jara comes whining to the foot of the rocks. She’s a loud ghost of a dog, because then she’s barking, attracting other ghosts. Soon they too appear before me. Climbing up the hillside through the trees is the shade of Farouq and behind him comes a ghostly Zafar, thin and slow on his spirit feet. Of course, these two were the first to die. I am outside my rock fastness at the top of the slope, they’ve not yet seen me, but Jara raises her head and sniffs. Then she’s leaping forward, up the hill.

  With all my strength I call, “Farouq, you were wrong! There are bees in paradise!”

  “Zafar,” comes the distant voice of Farouq. “We have found him.”

  Both of them begin to run. Behind them, other figures are appearing out of the trees. Looks like Chunaram, so he too’s dead, plus Bhoora, following after these come Ali Faqri plus some lads from the Nutcracker. So Ma was right, the whole city must have perished.

  Then Jara’s on me, licking and whining, tail’s a blur. “Welcome to paradise,” says I as the dog jumps at me, licking my face, whining, placing her paws on my shoulders. “What took you so long?”

  Zafar’s ghost comes up and stands smiling down at me and Jara. He kneels and puts his arms around me. “By god in whom I refuse to believe, we have found you.”

  “Welcome to Paradise,” says I, “there’s honey and water for all. The Apokalis and the bad times are over.”

  “Fucker,” says the ghost of Farouq, all grin he’s. “So you are alive.”

  I have to be honest, at the sound of his rough tongue, great gladness fills my heart. “This is heaven,” I say happily, “and we are all dead.”

  “Cobbler’s arse, do I look dead to you?” He’s given me a tight hug till my bones are cracking.

  “Who are you calling cobbler’s arse? Bordel de merde!”

  “Heap! Dungpile!”

  “Type of a fart!”

  Ha ha ha, we’re rolling on the grass with our arms round one another, then he looks at me and says, “In the name of god in whom Zafar refuses to believe, get dressed, or we’ll all die of fright.” He holds out something, it’s my kakadus. “Found in a ditch. The truck driver who dropped you, he showed us the place. Eight days we’ve been combing these jungles.” He lifts me up and says, with a tenderness I’ve never before heard, “You fucking cunt.”

  “You who’re the cunt,” I says. “Don’t need kakadus here. We are in paradise, where there’s clean water and honey, delicious to eat, every and all things in the forest talk to you, just listen, you too will hear.”

  By now they’ve all come up, this speech of mine they’ve heard in silence, then one after the other my friends kneel down and embrace me and whisper their fond greetings in my ear.

  “Why Bhoora,” says Zafar, as the good auto-wallah with arms around my neck’s kissed me with tears rolling, “I am thinking this too is a chicken day.”

  “What chicken?” It’s Chunaram. “Today is a kebab day. At my place. All are invited.” He takes a great breath. “Today, kebabs are free!”

  Says Farouq to me with a wink, “See how he loves you?”

  Ali Faqri say
s, “Praise god you are alive. Abdul Saliq sends wishes plus safe return to Khaufpur.”

  “Don’t you understand?” I say to them. “Khaufpur’s gone. No more of that misery, here we are all free in paradise.”

  “Animal, you just take it easy,” says one of my Nutcracker chums. “We’ll soon have you down from here.” To Zafar he remarks, “He must have a fever.”

  “Pity Elli doctress has left,” says another.

  “We’ll take him to my place,” says Zafar. “He shall stay with me.”

  “What? Where are you taking me? I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  But already they are lifting me up. “So light he’s. Hardly weighs at all.” Then we’re all moving down to the trees. I weep, I struggle, I say, “Do not take me away from here, not unless it’s to the city of god.”

  “Animal brother,” says Zafar kindly. He has me by a shoulder and I can see his face. “Try to understand. You did not die. By a miracle you are alive and we are taking you home.”

  “This is my home now, it’s my place.”

  “Then we shall come back again when you’re better. You have a fever, you are starving. One more day up here you would have died.”

  But still I don’t get the message. For a while I’ve raved on about how dying was no big deal, that living in darkness and poverty was the real problem. “Zafar, it’s paradise for us. We’ve left behind the world of suffering.”

  “Alas,” he says, “I fear not.”

  Halfway down the mountain they stop for a rest. “Animal, are you hungry?” asks Bhoora. “We have food.” From a bag he produces a small tiffin of rice, daal soup, pickle.

  “Did Ma send it? Where is she? I thought she’d be with you.”

  A look passes between them. “Eat sparingly,” says Zafar. “First take a little soup. We learned this following our own fast.”

  Zafar says that when news of the factory riot reached him and Farouq they decided to stop their fast. “Police came, they took us to a private clinic where the CM was waiting. He told us that rumours were flying round that we had died, he asked us to help stop the trouble.” Zafar and Farouq agreed to the CM’s request on condition that the CM swore by his temple gods to listen to what they had to say, and not to do anything or make any deal without their consent. This the CM promised. They were taken by a jeep to the places where the trouble was worst, to show themselves, that they were not dead, they calmed the people and sent them back to their homes.

  “What about Nisha?” says I, beginning at last to doubt. “She knew you were dead.”

  “The first place we went was the Chicken Claw, to show ourselves to Nisha and Somraj-ji. That’s when we heard you had run off. Nisha begged us to find you.”

  “Now I know you’re lying. Nisha hates me.”

  “She does not, she likes you more than me I think for she told me, ‘Zafar, you bring him back or don’t come back yourself.’”

  “She really said that?”

  “Yes, plus she told me when we found you to give you this.”

  My heart fails. He hands me a cap embroidered in blue and scarlet silks.

  By this gift, I lost my immortality, I knew then that Zafar really was alive and so was I. Life dropped like a heavy mantle about my shoulders and I began to weep for pity that I was to return to the city of sorrows.

  When it’s time to move on, they go to lift me up again.

  “Don’t carry me. On my own feet I’ll come.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” says Farouq. “Why did you run away and come all the way up here?” But this I don’t wish to tell.

  With the dog jumping round all, we move slowly down through the forest where I’d done my dying, by daylight in company of friends it seems harmless. The animals that were absent before now choose to show themselves. Farouq exclaims when he sees branches dipping beneath a troop of monkeys. Birds we see, deer in the distance, something like a giant squirrel’s tail hanging out of a tree. Soft clouds of rain come drifting between the trees, by a place where water is running’s laid a long white snake skin, perfect from nostrils to tip of tail. Says Zafar softly, “hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.”

  Down by the road’s waiting Bhoora’s auto, he lifts me in. “Come,” says he. “Now we’ll go home.”

  Zafar and Farouq squeeze in either side of me.

  “Wait! What about Jara?”

  “The dog is okay,” says Farouq with a grin. “Just look behind to see what a popular bugger you are.”

  Right behind us is a bhutt-bhutt-pig full of people plus, I guess, Jara too.

  “Bhoora brother,” says Zafar. “Let’s go. Back to my place.”

  “No, no,” says I. “Just take me back home. Ma must be worrying.”

  There’s a silence, then Zafar says, “You need a doctor, and Elli has gone back to Amrika. We’ll go to my place.”

  Eyes, someone had mentioned Elli leaving, but not until now do I know that she has gone back home. “She’s not returning then.” Eyes, I’m not even thinking of my back, just sad it’s that things had to end this way. “I would have liked to say goodbye.”

  “No need.” It’s Zafar. Something not right about the way he says this.

  “Why are you smiling, you bastard?”

  “They’re repairing Elli’s clinic. Your mate Dayanand is there, the blue-lungi foreman’s there chain-smoking beedis. It will be ready by the time she returns.”

  “She’s coming back?”

  “See, we bring good news.”

  “Zafar brother, what does this glee mean?”

  Says Farouq, “Elli went back to Amrika, but she took Pandit-ji and Nisha with her.”

  “But,” says I, “she promised her husband, the lawyer, that she would go back to him. She told me this herself.”

  Says Zafar, “She promised to go back to Amrika. She did not promise to go back to him. What it means…”

  But I know what it means. It means the music of Elli’s promise will be heard loud and joyful at her wedding. So then I’m clapping.

  “Congratulations, Farouq brother. Zafar brother, to you double congrats!”

  “Why double?” Grinning like he knows the answer.

  “Because there’ll be not one wedding but two. You will marry Nisha and I’ll be there cheering. I love the pair of you. I swear, my brother, may god in whom you don’t believe, be my witness.” With these words, which I had no idea would fly out of my mouth, a great peace enters my heart. “Zafar brother, this gift which you gave me, please wear it at your wedding.”

  I’ve given him back the precious embroidered cap.

  “So after all, we won. The power of nothing rose up and destroyed our enemies.”

  Says Zafar, “When is anything ever as simple as that?”

  The auto’s bumping along the road that leads south to Khaufpur, behind us the hills are dwindling. The countryside is green from recent rain.

  After some time Farouq asks again why I’d run away. The way he asks this, it’s like there is another question hidden behind the first.

  “After the factory went up, poison smoke came. Ma said it would be like that night all over again.”

  “It was not,” replies Farouq. “This time people knew what to do, they got out. Even so, three died.”

  “Three? I thought it must be thousands. That fire was hell itself. It was burning my back as I ran away from the factory.”

  “Three is three too many,” says Zafar. “So you were in the factory. We thought as much.” They share a silence whose meaning I can’t fathom.

  As we rattle along, Zafar and Farouq tell the story of what happened in the days following the fire.

  Seems that after they had extracted their promise from the CM the city returned to a peaceful state. Right away the politicians got it into their heads that since things were back to normal they should after all quietly proceed with the deal. It would have to be done in secret. They reckoned that if they did the double-cross quietly plus delayed announcing it, it would
be too late to stop. Zafar and Farouq were no longer in danger of dying, it would be difficult to make another demo, plus this time police and army were ready. So a meeting was set up, it would take place not in a government building, where all kinds of eyes would see, but right in the place where the Amrikan lawyers were, in other words, Jehannum.

  The morning of the meeting came. Up and down the road from the old city to the hill above the lake, police were out in numbers. Jeeps were going back and forth. Unless they were guests, people were being turned away from Jehannum. The police would stop them at the gate. Nobody could get in. If people asked why this was happening, they were told it was because there’d been threats to the Amrikans. “We are taking no chances,” the police said.

  Early on that morning, a woman was seen making her way up the hill. A poor woman she was, clad from head to toe in a black burqa. No one could see her face, she must have been young, for she was tall and stepped swiftly. In her hand she carried a jhadoo, a simple broom, used for sweeping floors. When challenged at the gate, she said she was going to her work as a cleaner. Little mind they gave her because soon messages were coming to prepare for the reception of some big shots, who’d be arriving shortly at Jehannum. Sure enough, the cars soon showed up. Not government cars, mark you, the CM, Zahreel Khan and others, they all came in plain white Ambassadors, one by one they disappeared inside.

  What all happened next, the world learned from these folk themselves. The shameful meeting began in a room with a big table, the four Amrikans were on one side, the politicians on the other. They had begun their arguing and haggling when without warning their eyes began to sting. An evil burning sensation began in their noses and throats, a little like the smoke of burning chillies, it caught nastily in the throat, it seared the lungs, they were coughing, but coughing made it ten times worse. Something was in the room, something uninvited, an invisible fire, by the time they had realised this it was already too late. These big shot politicians and lawyers, they got up in a panic, they reeled around, retching, everything they did just made the pain and burning worse. Tears streamed from their eyes, hardly could they see. One of the lawyers was trying to vomit, the rest of them ran in panic. They rushed from the room, jostling in the doorway each man for himself, the buffalo it seems being too bulky to rush, was left behind while the others scrambled to save their skins. These Kampani heroes, these politicians, they were shitting themselves, they thought they were dying, they thought they’d been attacked with the same gas that leaked on that night, and every man there knew exactly how horrible were the deaths of those who breathed the Kampani’s poisons.