by Kiran Desai
The littlest sister had been joined by several older ones. Finally, they managed to open the door, by breaking the thin hook that held it closed, and discovered their brother still crouched down against the mildewed wall, but, though they searched and searched, the hair-oil bottle was nowhere to be found.
‘What have you done with the hair-oil bottle?’ they asked Hungry Hop, whose beautifully oiled and perfumed curls betrayed him as the last user of the product. They were terribly angry. The sight of the swelling on his jaw made them somehow even angrier. No doubt he had slipped while taking a bath and hurt himself. Their pathetic brother who had lost the hair oil, who was constantly getting injured or injuring himself. At first they had been patient and sympathetic, but there was a limit to these things after all, and his constant attempts to incite their pity were getting tiresome!
‘Ooh, now you are really getting on our nerves,’ they said in a quick about-turn of feeling.
‘It is time to snap out of things,’ said his mother. ‘Find your backbone and pull yourself together.’
But, amazed by love, Hungry Hop looked right through their exasperated faces. Redolent with oil, he was still thinking about Pinky Chawla, who was likewise indulging herself in thoughts of him as she took a whiff from the bottle she had caught beneath his window.
The very next day she arrived in the back alleyway at exactly the same time and, catching sight of Hungry Hop again – for it was his regularly assigned bath hour – she threw him a rose. This time, Hungry Hop, his heart aflutter, succumbed to the mysterious compulsion welling up inside him and responded with his mother’s hairnet. This incident marked an important change in their relationship: the beginning of a mutual involvement, a series of feverish exchanges that took place almost daily, with Pinky hovering about his house with some token of affection in her pocket and Hungry Hop waiting by the bathroom window. As the days went by, they managed to exchange all manner of bottles, toffees, sweetmeats, handkerchiefs and nightclothes. Also a comb, a toothbrush, an ear pick, a bar of soap, a pomegranate, some photographs and a towel.
Hungry Hop’s sisters and aunts, now forced to hammer regularly at the bathroom door, shouting: ‘What are you doing in there?’ realized quickly enough that something had gone very wrong. The bathroom was being emptied of supplies. Was Hungry Hop so depressed and troubled that he was spending hours flushing things down the toilet? But the toilet drain would not be able to take such a surfeit of offerings, and where was his jungle-print shirt that nobody could find?
When the truth came to light after a sister had spotted Hungry Hop throwing his mother’s petticoat out of the window to his previous attacker, the family became crazy with worry. Clearly he had lost his stability. As if under a dangerous spell, his fear of Pinky Chawla had somehow been perverted into an unsavoury affection.
‘Be careful,’ they warned him. ‘We will send you to your uncle in Dubai if this behaviour persists. We will marry you off immediately.’
It would be the end of their good name to be associated with Pinky. They had made some discreet inquiries and discovered what had happened to the family of Pinky’s maternal grandfather when he fell under the spell of Kulfi’s mother. That was the downfall of a fine family. And they were told it had all started in much the same manner. They began to make immediate inquiries about girls from normal, matter-of-fact, ordinary families. Who cared about dancing and cooking and high IQs? All they wanted was some sane steady girl. They whispered to the people who were on the look-out that they were willing to negotiate even in the matter of the dowry. This is how worried they were.
And they sent a message to Mr Chawla: ‘Please keep your daughter from bothering our son.’
Mr Chawla confronted Pinky: ‘What is this all about? You are always complaining that people are following you and now the truth comes out – you yourself are doing the following. That is that,’ he said. ‘You are not to associate with ice-cream vendors. A shopkeeper type! In fact, not even a shopkeeper type! An ice-cream-cart type. Our family name will be destroyed. You should set your sights higher than yourself, not lower.’ How dismayed he would have been to find the ice-cream family making similar remarks about his family. He ordered Ammaji to accompany Pinky on her trips to town. He was far too busy with other matters to keep an eye on her himself.
Ammaji, however, did not much like this role of chaperon. At first, she did her best to run after Pinky and even donned special gym shoes for this event. Still, despite such arrangements, Pinky strode on far ahead.
‘Do not go so fast,’ Ammaji begged. ‘Are you trying to outrun a Maruti jeep? I am too old for this. Look at your brother sitting quietly. None of this running around,’ she panted. Finally, after three-quarters of an hour, she gave up and sat down to rest. To Pinky’s satisfaction, thereafter, she settled in front of the grain store on all their trips to town, to talk to the other old ladies coming and going, and waited for her granddaughter to return from doing whatever pleased her. Then, they caught the bus back together and presented a united front before Mr Chawla.
Thus the Hungry Hop women were forced to guard their Hungry Hop boy even more closely than they had done before, keeping a constant watch for Pinky, the stalker of their son, and they chased her with sticks, all twelve of them, the one time they caught sight of her. After all, they knew they could not go the police. Look at what had happened the day Pinky had bitten Hungry Hop. This girl was a sly and scheming witch. They kept a watch out of windows. They posted a permanent watchwoman in the back alleyway. All of the sisters and aunts were recruited to keep guard. It was lucky there were so many of them. It was always useful to have a large family, even if it was mostly girls …
Pinky was forced to retreat to an infuriatingly powerless position and she spent a few days in tears, until, that is, she hit upon the ancient idea of bribing the milkman to carry notes back and forth. In this wonderfully practical way, Hungry Hop and Pinky cultivated their romance and amazed their families by their good humour in the face of a situation that seemed, to others, to be not at all amusing.
17
Things had gone from bad to worse, and not many people in Shahkot were in the best of spirits these days. Sampath, shadowed by worry, attempted to write a poem.
He remembered, in his sadness, a singular day at the Mission School when a Brother John had taught them literature. Brother John had been dismissed after a week of teaching for pinching the bottom of the sweeper woman. But though he had departed in disgrace with a soiled reputation, Sampath remembered him as a being filled with beauty who had imparted to him his single inspired moment at school. While Sampath was indulging himself dipping his fingers one by one into the ink pot, his attention had suddenly been caught by the lines Brother John was reading aloud from a small volume in his hands. ‘Poetry,’ said Brother John, ‘is born of hardship and suffering, of pain and doubt.’ Then he proceeded to recite. ‘All morning they have been calling you in,’ he said, in such a way that Sampath was covered with goose bumps. ‘Ten relatives to cook for and you’re the girl. Their voices echo in jungle darkness, but no, don’t answer. Stay by this shore. For what do they know of fin’s fine gold rising to light in pale water?’
Sampath had felt very sorry for the girl with ten relatives. And: ‘What do they know of fin’s fine gold?’ he repeated, trembling all over. Never again during his days at that terrible establishment had he felt touched like this.
Now he tried to compose something as well.
‘But no, don’t answer,’ he said aloud. ‘Stay in this tree. For what do they know of … of …’ Of what? ‘What do they know of … of the sun? What do they know of my tree? Of the monkey problem?’ No … that didn’t sound right. ‘What do they know of … a grey donkey going to the market?’ No, that wasn’t a good line either. ‘What do they know of …’ Oh dear. He tried to think of some worthwhile thoughts to put in his poem. He thought of how the moon goes around the earth and the winter season comes after the monsoon. Of how years pass, leaving me
mories, and how the future is unknown, of how a man can speak while an animal cannot, and how people speak many languages and cannot understand each other. But try as he might, he could not break through to anything that seemed profound, or right to put in his poem. And what is more, these thoughts kept getting disrupted by the overwhelming concern of what was to happen to him and to his life in the orchard. ‘What do they know …’
‘What do you know?’ he put his head down to ask of a red ant. ‘What?’ He raised his hands to the parrots. ‘Will I be all right?’ he asked out loud into the indifferent air.
The ant scurried by and the birds ignored him. And what did he himself know? Oh, he felt petulant; he should not have even begun. ‘What do you know … What do you know …’ It was to clear his mind he had climbed into a tree, not to befuddle it. Here he was thwarting his own ambitions.
As it was, only those who managed to enclose themselves in their own worlds and disregard the battles going on managed to sleep at night. One of these fortunate few was Kulfi, mother of the Monkey Baba himself, who had managed to brush away the entire furore with the langurs as if it were nothing but a minor annoyance of keeping her supplies locked up inside instead of out in the open, of having occasionally to chase a monkey with her broom. Preoccupied by her own thoughts, into which nothing else ever seemed to really penetrate, she continued on the path along which her life led her.
Doggedly, the spy followed. Thus far his research had led to nothing, and as if this lack of success were not enough, he was beginning to wonder if something in his constitution had been jiggled out of place. He was dismayed by how much space in his head had been taken up by Sampath’s teachings. Ever since his lapse in the Atheist Society’s meeting, he had been nervous about Sampath’s influence upon him, and the more nervous he was, the more of Sampath’s lines he discovered entangled inextricably with his thoughts. ‘Wrestle not the sweet vendor’s daughter.’ He could not help but have it occur to him on all sorts of odd occasions. ‘Spit not at the doctor’s son. Why think about futter when you have plenty of butter? Don’t say you like watermelon when someone gives you pumpkin. Don’t eat a fiffle to save a piffle. Every plum has its own beginning. Every pea its own end.’ With this sort of thing in his brain, he was finding it hard to follow his usual rational line of thought.
He was being seduced, he realized in a flash of terror. They were trying to brainwash him, using the equivalent of jingles and suave advertising. He had spent far too long in the orchard. In fact, to tell the truth, he had found he was enjoying his time there.
As soon as this thought occurred to him he was doubly terrified. He had better solve this case immediately and get out of the orchard as quickly as possible.
Keeping what he hoped was an unsuspicious distance, the spy tried not to lose sight of Kulfi as she sometimes ambled, sometimes darted up the hillside, showing no more concern for following a path than a bee.
Kulfi was beginning to feel a little tired of what she had been finding in the forest. She looked under a rock, by a tulip tree, along a stream. She needed a new ingredient, she thought, sniffing the air, something exciting and fresh to inspire her to an undiscovered dish, a new invention. She looked up into the sky.
Already she had cooked a pigeon and a sparrow, a woodpecker, a hoopoe, a magpie, a shrike, an oriole, a Himalayan nightingale, a parrot … She had cooked a squirrel, a porcupine, a mongoose, all the wildfowl that could be found in those parts, the small fish in the stream, the round-shelled snails that crisscrossed the leaves with silver, the grasshoppers that leapt and jumped, landing with loud raindrop-like plops upon the foliage.
Diligently, she searched for a new plant, a new berry, a new mushroom or lichen, fungus or flower, but everything about her looked familiar and dull. No new scents enlivened the air and she wandered farther and farther away. As she wandered, she began to daydream.
She was the royal cook of a great kingdom, she imagined. There, in some old port city, ruthless hunters, reckless adventurers, fleets of ships and whole armies lay at her beck and call, were alert to her every command, her every whim. And sitting in a vast kitchen before an enormous globe, imperiously she ordered her supplies, sent out for spices from many seas away, from mountain ranges and deserts that lay beyond the horizon, for spices that existed only in the fantastical tales of sailors and soothsayers. She sent out for these and for plants that grew on islands no bigger than specks in the ocean, or on mountain peaks devoid of human habitation. She sent out for kingdoms to be ruined, for storehouses and fields to be plundered and ransacked. She asked for tiger meat and bear, Siberian goose and black buck. For turtles, terrapins, puff adders and seals. For armadillos, antelopes, zebras and whales. She demanded elephants, hippopotamuses, yaks and cranes, macaques and … monkeys! Monkeys! Oh, to cook a monkey!
Into the bamboo, past the green and yellow banana grove, out through the nettles, up to the hilltop. Exhausted and bedraggled, the spy gave up trying to follow her and climbed a tree from where he hoped to be able to keep up his watch. But, of course, he promptly lost sight of her altogether as she vanished around the curve of some rocks.
18
Far from being deterred by the public disapproval that had been expressed after their drunken orgy, the monkeys kept busy demonstrating how this was no isolated incident to be easily dismissed but, on the contrary, a whole new way of life for them.
Ammaji chased them from dawn till dark, assisted by her battalion that was sprinkled about the orchard, each person being allotted a daily ration of pebbles and a slingshot made by herself out of sticks and lengths of inner tubing she had rescued from old tyres. Everywhere you looked there was someone running through the trees as if involved in an archaic exercise in weaponry, letting the pellets fly. But nowadays the monkeys merely shrugged them off, realizing they did not really hurt, and instead the devotees themselves suffered many injuries, what with stones flying backwards instead of forwards and hitting them in the face.
When the monkeys were not in the orchard or the bazaar, they took to waiting in the trees growing by the market road and accosting people on their way home from the bazaar in the hopes of finding a bottle of toddy or even rum. Leaving their victims in a mess of apples, ladyfingers, Postman oil and who knows what other supplies, they bounded away unconcerned about the damage they had caused, contented if they had been successful, but still on the look-out for other victims if they came away empty-handed. It became dangerous to walk through the area alone, and people who lived there organized special groups to go shopping together. They kept their windows and doors closed, saying their prayers as the monkeys bounded over their tin rooftops with a vast crashing sound of thunder. They tried never to be by themselves in any exposed location. Despite these precautions, in a sad event that took place in a private garden, two young men drinking to their success in the university examinations were bitten and taken to the local hospital with monkey-teeth marks upon their arms.
A monkey bite can prove to be as dangerous as a cobra bite in that monkeys often carry rabies, which can, of course, be as deadly as snake venom. Rabies is one of the worst illnesses a lady or gentleman can contract. It is more common in the summer than in the rainy season … With his usual dramatic flair, Dr Banerjee published a whole-page article in the next day’s paper on the subject of monkey bites.
Immediately there was an uproar. Moaning in fear for his own safety, the Chief Medical Officer tried to do his duty and issued his own statement saying that as yet there was no problem with rabies, and under no circumstances should anybody succumb to panic-mongers and antisocial elements. They would persevere towards a working solution to this delicate problem.
Then, as if to undo any sense of calm that might result at this assurance, the Hanuman Temple took this opportunity to compose its own combative statement, officially joining the furore and expressing outrage at the indecent treatment of these monkeys. Clearly, forces bent on corrupting great Hindu traditions were at play, they said. They would sacri
fice themselves for the religion’s good name, if necessary.
Reading this, the Superintendent of Police, the Brigadier and every politician for miles around shook with renewed terror, realizing that they were in for a severe law-and-order problem of the worst religious degree.
‘Some fruit must be eaten with the skin,’ said Sampath.
‘If you cannot find a car, you must do without.’
‘If you do not find a bottle of rum, you will not drink a bottle of rum.’
‘If your Auntyji finds a lump of silver, she might very well keep the lump of silver.’
‘If your two-year-old son behaves badly, you will not think to exchange him for another. No, instead you will wait until he behaves better …’
But, he realized, he was losing the heart to carry on, and nobody was paying any real attention to what he said any more.
Below his tree, two fervent camps of devotees had been formed: one was adamant that the monkeys be removed so as to save the Monkey Baba and the holy atmosphere of his hermitage; the other was furious that these sacred animals were to be thus humiliated and turned from their rightful home. The battle lines had been drawn and everybody even remotely associated with the dispute felt compelled to involve themselves and make their voices heard. Sampath himself was forgotten in the fray, although his name was bounced back and forth between the warring factions like a ping-pong ball. Fairly spitting at each other, barely able to contain their wrath, their indignation and alarm, they fought from the minute they were allowed beneath Sampath’s tree to the minute his visiting hours were over.
‘How can you ask the monkeys to leave?’ said Miss Jyotsna to everyone she met, supporting Sampath’s point of view with loyalty.
‘No one will be asking them, madamji. They will be kicking them out without asking them anything at all,’ said one vulgar man.
But scores of people rushed to Miss Jyotsna’s rescue. ‘How can you say that? You have no shame.’