B006NZAQXW EBOK (14 page)

Thus it came as quite a surprise when Pinky changed her oblique strategies in a direct demand for recognition. He looked at her amazed as she bore down upon him dressed in the colours of battle, dark with kohl, mouth like a stab wound, storming through the bazaar as if at the head of the conquering army. ‘Enough,’ she muttered, ‘quite enough.’

She walked up to the Hungry Hop boy, who was removing the bit of corrugated metal propped against the opening of the van.

‘What, you want to eat ice cream this early in the morning? Clearly living in the mountains is getting to your brain,’ he said, smiling.

Seeing him she was filled with a rush of elation and rage. How placid and smiling he was! For a minute she thought she might kiss him, but the vein of aggression pounded powerfully within her and she bit him instead. She bit his ear so hard that the Hungry Hop boy shouted out and his voice boomeranged about the town.

He was being hurt. He was being murdered. ‘Ai. Yai. Yai.’ The black and white polka-dots of her sari swam alarmingly before his eyes.

People came running from every direction. ‘What happened? What happened?’

A piece of his ear lay upon the ground.

Women who were preparing lunch boxes and getting the
children ready for school opened the windows and leaned out. Forced to leave his breakfast because of all the ruckus, the Superintendent of Police, who had been sitting at the tea stall, arrived. ‘Arre! What is happening here?’

The Hungry Hop boy held on to his maimed ear and yelled, ‘She attacked me, sir, she attacked me.’

Pinky was marched, trembling, glowering, to the police station. She had drawn blood before, in the school playground. She spat out the salt taste of it. The pour of red from Hungry Hop was like the spill of passion and pain. She trembled, but if there was any fear in her she refused to show it or to let it get the upper hand. Or even to admit it to herself. Her courage rising, she walked dignified, behind the superintendent. Meanwhile, the Hungry Hop boy, trembling more violently than her by far, his courage ebbing with each passing moment, was taken to the family clinic, his ear packed in a tub of vanilla ice cream that had been handily obtained from the van to keep it frozen so that Dr Banerjee might sew it back on.

‘Human bites,’ said Dr Banerjee, relaxing at the door to his clinic, talking to the local newspaper representative after seeing off both the spy and the Hungry Hop boy, ‘are most common in the summer and winter season, but can occur all year round. They are more common in the morning than in the afternoon. Indeed, although people concern themselves more with animal bites, human bites should be given close attention, for human mouths contain up to forty-two species of bacteria. Thus they can be more dangerous even than spiders or dogs.’

‘Since when do ladies in the town bite gentlemen?’ the policeman asked of Pinky, fierce and seemingly unrepentant, smouldering upon a bench back at the police station.
‘You will end up in the mental home if you persist in demonstrating that that is where you belong.’

But she looked at him unvanquished. She was not one to be frightened by such threats. After all, this very asylum had been brought up several times in relation to her mother and her brother and, losing its ominous quality, it had begun to sound like a rather familial sort of institution.

‘This is a serious matter,’ the police superintendent said, waving his baton up and down. ‘Really very serious.’ He was happy at having such an interesting thing to do for a change. ‘Yes, you have created quite a to-do here.’

At this moment one of the other policemen came and whispered something urgently to him.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Are you the sister of the man who sits up in the tree? The Baba is your brother?’

She nodded sulkily.

The superintendent went out of the room and then came back with several curious policemen. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We did not know your family name. Please come along with us. We will escort you back to your family.’ And he gave a sniggering policeman, overcome by the humour of the situation, an unpleasant shove from behind. Didn’t he know he should be careful? The police were not going to upset the family of one of the town’s most respected personages. ‘In Shahkot, we honour and respect our hermits,’ he said.

Still glowering, Pinky was driven back to the Chawla compound in the station jeep, accompanied by the superintendent and several other policemen. She was glad she had bitten Hungry Hop.

The policemen all climbed up the ladder to receive Sampath’s blessings. The superintendent placed his unpleasantly greasy head under Sampath’s toes and felt as though he were being bathed in pure holiness, as if he were being
washed gently and cleansed in sweet blessing; it reminded him of the feeling he had when he was given presents on festival days. ‘Can you tell me, Baba, when can I expect a son?’ he whispered.

Sampath, not in the mood to answer, withdrew his foot and tucked it under him. He was a little afraid of policemen, who had more than once shouted at him as he ignored the traffic rules when bicycling to work at the post office.

‘No need to worry,’ said Mr Chawla hurriedly, not wishing to upset the police. ‘You can ask him another time. Sometimes it is hard to get him to pay attention to what is happening down below.’ Why did Sampath always behave badly just when important people came to visit?

But the policeman nodded amiably. ‘People like this are not of this world and so it is natural that sometimes they separate out.’

Sampath opened one eye like an owl so he could maintain his distance, while also joining in this interesting talk about separating out that had just come up: ‘If you keep muddy, churned-up water still, soon the dirt will settle to the bottom. If you churn up milk, the cream will rise to the top. Ponder the nature of what lies within you and behave accordingly’

‘Can we have a photograph, sir?’ the policemen asked, awed. ‘For the police station, sir.’

The monkeys entertained themselves by throwing peanuts at the policemen’s heads.

Mr Chawla had not even thought of photographs! What a market he was missing. He hitched a ride into Shahkot on one of the scooter rickshaws that were constantly coming and going, and brought the town photographer back with
him. The photographer climbed up into the tree with several cameras and a painted piece of canvas depicting background scenes on both sides. On one side there was a scene of swans floating in a pond with many pink lotus flowers; on the other, a magenta sunset over the sea with a far boatman stalled at the horizon in a tiny boat.

‘Helloji,’ said Sampath, delighted at the photo opportunity. ‘Aren’t you the boy who sent secret love letters to that girl from the convent school?’

The poor photographer was so taken aback, he dropped his equipment bag.

‘Don’t pay any attention,’ said Mr Chawla soothingly. ‘Somehow he knows these things. But please don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.’

Still, despite Mr Chawla’s kind words, it took the photographer several minutes to recover himself and gather strength enough to climb back into the tree. Along with Mr Chawla, he positioned the canvas sheeting behind Sampath and, hanging treacherously from the branches, he did his best to find the ideal angle of Sampath’s face, first against the sinking sun and then amidst the lotus flowers.

When the monkeys, who were pulling the leaves off a neighbouring tree, spotted this invasion of their territory, just like that, in broad daylight if you please, they let out screams of outrage and bounded back into the tree to help Sampath defend their domain. Leaping from branch to branch in a state of red-gummed, brown-toothed indignation, they almost caused the already jittery photographer to fall down upon his head.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the poor young photographer, new to the job. ‘I cannot do this. My mother would not like me doing such dangerous work.’

‘No, no,’ soothed Mr Chawla. ‘It is perfectly safe. I myself
will talk to your mother if you wish. Look, we will make it safer right away.’

Ammaji was stationed down below with a pile of stones and a slingshot made of a branched twig and a piece of black elastic. As she sent the pebbles flying, keeping the irate monkeys at bay, the photo shoot was completed according to the specifications of Mr Chawla. Sampath had wished to pose properly with a nice smile and perhaps an arm thrown casually around a branch. But his father had not allowed him to do any such thing. ‘Keep your hands folded in your lap. Keep a gentle smile upon your face,’ he instructed. ‘No showing of your teeth.’

‘No charge,’ said the rattled photographer, happy just to get out without having been bitten or hit with stones. ‘The Baba’s blessings are enough for me. It is for the honour of my family name to do this. And please, sir, do not tell anybody about those letters …’

The photographs of Sampath were printed in hundreds of sheets by the Kwick Photo Shop at no cost and were cut into little squares by their tea boy.

‘How handsome my grandson is,’ said Ammaji when she saw the photograph of Sampath sitting cross-legged amidst lotus blossoms, his umbrella askew, his cot at a slant, looking distracted because of all the commotion with the monkeys and pebbles and the photographer dangling before him with peculiar, militaristic and medical-looking gadgets.

‘It is a terrible picture,’ said Pinky. ‘He has not even combed his hair. You can see the birthmark on his cheek. And he is wearing nothing but his undershorts. How can you say it is a good picture?’ A good picture was one where a man posed with perfectly oiled and coiffed hair, with a nice tight shirt and nice tight trousers, sitting on a moped.

But anyway, despite Pinky’s disapproval, these pictures
were sold from Mr Chawla’s cart and proved to be very popular. Soon they made their appearance everywhere, permeating the shops and houses of Shahkot and travelling much farther afield.

In February, this picture was even printed in the
Times of India,
together with the headline ‘The Baba of Shahkot in his Tree Abode’.
This peaceful orchard outside Shahkot,
it read,
has been transformed by a glut of visitors rushing to see the hermit of Shahkot, whose rare simplicity and profound wisdom are bringing solace and hope to many who are disheartened by these complicated and corrupt times. ‘There is a spiritual atmosphere here that I have not seen anywhere else in India,’ Miss Jyotsna, a postal worker, told this reporter. She professes herself a frequent visitor to this hermit, whom disciples affectionately call ‘Monkey Baba’ or ‘Tree Baba’ in reference to his fondness for animals and the simplicity of his dwelling place. While admitting all who come to see him, he limits the hours when he is available to protect his secluded lifestyle …

After the appearance of this article, letters by the thousand began to arrive for Sampath from all over the country. Mostly they bore no address, just the photograph of Sampath in his tree pasted trustfully upon the envelope. Inside were pleas for help and questions from ardent wisdom-seekers galore.

Delighted by this excuse to visit the orchard even during work hours, Miss Jyotsna from the post office took to making regular trips in a scooter rickshaw to deliver these enormous quantities of mail, while Mr Gupta sulked back in Shahkot, for he had decided he did not like it when he was not the centre of attention.

At the annual meeting of the Atheist Society in a neighbouring town, the spy addressed his colleagues. ‘Did you see the newspaper article about the Chawla case? It is completely
outrageous. Even the press in this country goes along with this rubbish. In fact, they are the ones who propagate it. They take a rumour and put it into official language and of course everybody who reads it promptly swallows it as the whole truth. This madman belongs in a lunatic asylum and just look at how everybody is running to him bringing him presents.’

He went on for so long and in such an impassioned way, it grew past dinner time for many people in the audience. One member leaned over and spoke into the ear of another: ‘He is going a bit overboard, don’t you think? Why is
he
so upset by all of this?’

But the spy now felt personally involved and personally outraged, and continued upon his tirade for yet another hour. It was precisely people like Sampath who obstructed the progress of this nation, keeping honest, educated people like him in the backwaters along with them. They ate away at these striving, intelligent souls, they ate away at progress and smothered anybody who tried to make a stand against the vast uneducated hordes, swelling and growing towards the biggest population of idiots in the world. Even minuscule little countries like Taiwan and the Philippines were forging ahead. If he had any sense, he would leave this blighted country and emigrate. But no, he had chosen to stay back and do his bit to change things, even though he had once been knifed in the arm with a metal hairpin by the sister of the Baba for this sacrifice. Who could tell what permanent effect this would have on him?

He began an additional elaboration upon his suspicions of what Sampath was being fed, how his food was so carefully guarded nobody was allowed near, how he might be drugged, his spirits raised or lowered to abnormal levels,
the spy was not sure which. He talked of how he was going about his research regarding this topic, of the book on hallucinatory substances he had procured …

The roars from the stomachs of the audience rose to a deafening level. Really, this man was too much. Talking of food when they should all be sitting down to their own nice hot dinners that very minute.

‘Did he say he was stuck in the arm with a hairpin?’ asked the member of the audience who had been restless an hour and a half ago. ‘Or was it in the head? He is quite right, though, it has had a severe effect on him.’ And this time the man did not talk in a whisper, but as loudly as he could. ‘Oh, sir,’ he shouted directly at the spy, ‘don’t you think your time is up?’

The spy was interrupted midstream. For a second he was thrown off balance. ‘Before the mosquitoes are killed the night is uncomfortable,’ he replied.

‘Well, that is certainly true,’ said some other individual.