B006NZAQXW EBOK (15 page)

‘Thank you,’ said the spy. ‘Once you open a bottle of soda water, you should drink it before it goes flat.’ But the blood rushed to the spy’s face. Without thinking, he was repeating things he had heard under the Baba’s tree. And now he was taking credit for it! He didn’t have the courage not to.

Later, he tossed and turned in bed.

What did he want in his life?

The emptiness that stretched like the black night about him made him all the more determined to expose Sampath as a fraud.

One afternoon, about a month after their first appearance in the orchard, the monkeys found five bottles of rum while rifling through the bag of a man who had stopped to see Sampath on his way to a wedding. They drank it all up and that afternoon, when they resurfaced in Sampath’s tree, where they were accustomed to joining him for a little siesta at 3.00, they felt unable to slip into the general state of stupor that overtook the orchard like a spell particular to this time of day.

Sampath stretched out drowsily upon his string cot. He held his hands up so their shadow fell upon the illuminated trunk in front of him and he watched his fingers move, creating a lotus blossom with petals curling and uncurling, a swimming fish, a lurching camel. He was amazed at the sophistication of the shapes he made. He let his fingers wriggle like a spider to scuttle across the impromptu stage of the sun-stamped tree. These scuttling insect legs caused a shiver to course down his spine and he shook his hands as if to get rid of a spider inside him. He remembered the way he had sometimes scared himself in their home in Shahkot, flicking his tongue in and out in front of the mirror – a snake’s tongue, not his own. He thought of human beings with bird-beak noses, people with swan necks, cow eyes, bird-heart terror or a dolphin’s love for the ocean. People with sea-water tears, with bark-coloured skin, with stem
waists and flower poise, with fuzzy-leaf ears and petal-soft mouths. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The Chawla family and various visitors, including the spy and Miss Jyotsna, lay scattered throughout the orchard. But the monkeys refused to settle down.

‘Do keep quiet,’ said Sampath sleepily. ‘You are making me nervous with all your jumping.’

But, pulling faces and hooting, they leapt about the tree and carpeted the ground below with twiggy flotsam.

‘Stop this,’ said the spy, who was hit with a little twig. He was trying to think through his thoughts and put them all in order, since they had become so jumbled lately.

‘Yes, keep quiet,’ shouted several other devotees. There was something truly wrong with these monkeys.

‘They are acting very strangely,’ said Mr Chawla.

‘Perhaps it is the full moon,’ said Ammaji.

But when Mr Chawla discovered the empty rum bottles near the outhouse, it became apparent that it was not the moon at all.

‘Oh, they are only monkeys.’ Sampath felt compelled to defend them. ‘What can they possibly know? When the rest of the household is sleeping, the child puffs on his father’s hookah.’

‘It is true,’ said some, while others, embarrassed that alcohol had been discovered on the compound, just giggled. ‘It is not the monkeys’ fault. Always men are the degenerate ones. It is very sad, but in a place like, this with so many visitors, you are bound to get the bad with the good. Isn’t that so, Babaji?’

‘First a chikoo is raw,’ said Sampath, ‘then, if you do not pick and eat it quickly, it will soon rot and turn to alcohol.’

What was he saying? That the time of perfection passes, that you should eat a chikoo at the right time only, that
everything is part of nature, that good becomes bad or that bad is not really bad because it is all part of the nature of a chikoo? Oh, sometimes he was hard to understand.

One thing, however, became clearer by the day: the monkeys had developed an unquenchable taste for liquor. Bam! How they loved it! In an immediate and explosive way that must surely have been made inevitable by the forces of destiny. Who knew if the scientific community has determined the addictive properties of alcohol on the langur or not? The truth was plain to see. They loved it in a crazy, passionate way; they began to forage with a new recklessness that made people wonder if they had not gone a little mad. Peanuts and bananas didn’t mean a thing to them now.

A few days after their first encounter with alcohol, they discovered a case of beer in a delivery van.

A week later, a bottle of whisky in a rickshaw.

Then more beer.

Then more rum.

Dark faces full of determination, wild, liquid eyes, they ran with great leaping strides to meet each bus that arrived, each scooter rickshaw that drove up, searching for liquor of any sort, inspired, no doubt, by the memory of a certain race to the blood, a mysterious lift to the spirits. They grew bolder and bolder, rifling through the contents of bedrolls, grabbing hold of shopping bags and chasing away the owners, who ran off screaming in horror. It was as if all their old bazaar habits were resurfacing; as if, bored by plenty, they were doing their best to re-create the excitement of their former life of thievery and assault in the midst of public outcry.

When they were chased from their shameless attempt at plunder, they bared their teeth, so the travellers retreated for fear of being bitten. When the pilgrims shook their fists
at them, they shook their fists back and jeered loudly. As soon as they were clapped and shooed from one place, they appeared doing something worse in another. It was like warfare. They mimicked the pilgrims and lined up along with them by Sampath’s tree, smacking each other with glee as they waited for his blessing.

It soon became clear that the display of affection between Sampath and the monkeys would not extend to include everybody within its charmed circle; that their simian charms, so dear to him, would not endear them to anybody else. Peanut-laden film-lovers might be making their way to the cinema unmolested, but evidently the monkey problem had merely shifted focus.

Concern permeated the devotees’ happiness. Almost overnight, it seemed, they had a new problem on their hands.

‘If they were a nuisance before, it was more in the way children are naughty,’ said Miss Jyotsna sadly to the others as she watched the monkeys raid her bag of mail, scattering the letters in a frenzy of disappointment when they discovered no bottles in her possession.

‘Yes,’ agreed one gentleman. ‘In fact, they were endearing in their very naughtiness,’ and though he had gone too far, everyone sympathized, for generally speaking there was some truth to what he said.

One afternoon, a little while after the frequency of these unfortunate events had accelerated, Mr Chawla stood thinking under Sampath’s tree. The monkeys were getting more and more out of hand and he had an unsettling feeling that their hallowed days in the orchard might be under serious risk of disruption.

But the family bank account in the State Bank of India was growing by leaps and bounds and he was eager to buy shares in the VIP Hosiery Products company; they could do without a disturbance to upset this nice little venture he had set to sail. He looked to the right and left, surveyed their domain with its paths and a little arrow pointing in Sampath’s direction, with its advertisements that hung colourfully on the neighbouring trees: Dr Sood’s Dental Centre, Gentleman Tailors – ‘God made Man, we make Gentleman’ – for Campa Cola, Limca, Fanta and Goldspot, Ayurvedic Talcum Powder and Odomos Mosquito Repellent. All paid for by lavish donations, boxes of nuts and more sweetmeats, yellow, green, pink and white, than anybody knew what to do with. If it was not for Mr Chawla none of this would exist. None of it.

‘Sampath,’ said his father, ‘perhaps it is time to build you a proper hermitage. The problem of the monkeys is getting out of hand. If you lived inside a concrete structure, we could keep them out and control things. Anyway, we can’t
have you sitting in a tree for ever. What will happen when the monsoon comes? There are only a few months left now.’ He envisioned a whole complex with a temple and dormitory accommodation for travellers designed to suit modern tastes in comfort, a complex that would be a prize pilgrimage stop and an environment he could keep control of.

Sampath looked at his father. Could he be hearing correctly?

Seeing Sampath’s face, Mr Chawla was filled with irritation. What a ridiculous look of overdone incredulity! ‘And you had better start learning some philosophy and religion,’ he said. ‘People will soon get tired if you cannot converse on a deeper level. I will buy you a copy of the Vedas. You really cannot sit saying silly things for ever.’

The monkeys threw apples at Mr Chawla’s head for fun, though it looked as if they were attempting to protect Sampath. He gestured angrily at them, but they greeted his protest with a barrage of bananas. Mr Chawla lost his temper.

‘They are making a mockery of us,’ he said, his sense of dignity hurt. ‘It is getting too much. People will think you are a circus act. Sitting in the tree with drunken monkeys! We must put you in a proper building immediately.’

‘I am not going to live anywhere but in this tree,’ said Sampath. ‘And the monkeys are not drunk right now. They are only playing.’

When his father had gone he realized his heart was thumping. He could not get the horrible thought out of his mind. Leave his tree? Never. Never ever, he thought, his body trembling with indignation. Fiercely, he studied the branch in front of him. He and his father were as different as black from white, as chickens from potatoes, as peas from buckets. What did he think? Did he think he would
just climb down and return to his old existence like some old fool? He had left Shahkot in order to be alone. And what had they all done? They had followed him.

He spotted a beetle crawling out of an aberration in the bark right beneath his very nose. Covered in brilliant green armour, antlers sprouting from its head, wisps of wings like transparent petticoats peeping ridiculously from beneath its hard-shelled exterior; it seemed a visual proof of the silliness of his father’s proposition. Gradually, he calmed down. How beautiful these insects around him were, how incredibly beautiful: huge, generous flowery butterflies, bees with tongues that he could see hanging thin and long from their mouths, finely powdered beetles with kohl-rimmed eyes and clown-faced caterpillars with round noses, false beards and foolish feet; creatures made from leaves and sepals, petals and pollen dust. He watched an endless parade of them, wriggling, hopping, flying by, emerging as if from the bubbling pots of a magician, with the flicker and jewelled shine of … of what? Of the essence of wind and grass? Of sunlight and water?

When his mother brought his dinner to load on to the pulley system, Sampath peered down at her. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘they are planning to build a hermitage, but I will not leave this tree.’

Kulfi looked up at him. Of course he could not leave. ‘We could always poison them, you know,’ she said, trying to comfort him.

And he smiled, despite himself, to think of the time he had been rushed, vomiting and blue, into the emergency room at the Government Medical Institute after eating a meal she had cooked. Joyfully, he had missed a whole week of school. Looking at her he felt a pang of tenderness. His mother, the monkeys and himself, he thought, they were a band together.

‘You had better change your ways,’ he warned the monkeys. ‘There will be trouble for all of us if you don’t behave better.’

But the monkeys did not behave better. In fact, they behaved a good deal worse.

About a month after their first encounter with alcohol, apparently disgusted by their meagre success in the orchard, the langurs made a trip to the bazaar, where they overpowered the old woman who sold illicit liquor from a cart. They devoured her entire supply and, drunk as could be, drunker than ever before, they returned to the Chawla compound.

‘Keep away,’ Sampath shouted at them when he saw them approaching. ‘Keep away until you’re sober.’

He knew there would be trouble. But they did not heed his warning. Exuding the rough, raw scent of local brew, they arrived like hooligans and, in true hooligan style, proceeded to turn everything they could upside-down.

Sampath had seen drunks every now and then, of course, but only once had he had a direct experience with one, when he had found himself in conversation with the neighbourhood drunkard outside the tea stall. Tottering about, crashing into the tables, the drunk had embraced Sampath, who was the only person there. ‘Say you are my best friend,’ he had pleaded, clutching hold of Sampath. ‘Are you my best friend?’

Sampath had been scared to death. ‘Yes,’ he had said.

And the man had embraced him. ‘Everything I have is yours.’

But I want nothing that is yours, Sampath had silently pleaded. The man had smelt of a sewer filth that had turned Sampath’s stomach. His eyes had been red, his breath powerful
and he had held Sampath as if he would never ever let him go. Finally the man was chased away by the tea-stall owner, who came outside to pelt him with stones. Sampath had cycled far away and stood in middle of a field to recover. Still as the plants about him, gulping in the quiet and greenery.

Oh, but the monkeys were different, he thought, despite himself, as he watched them raid his mother’s kitchen, overturning pots and pans, sending buckets rolling through the orchard, the discordant clatter of metal filling the air. They were so beautiful, so full of graceful strength. Tails held high above their heads, they knocked over the milk can so the milk disappeared into the grass. They tore open the sacks of supplies that were piled under the porch, and the rice and lentils spilled into rivers of gold and green, black and white. They ate quantities of raisins and nuts, almonds, cashews and tiny, precious pine kernels whose theft caused Kulfi to chase after them with her broom. But they avoided her easily, as they did all the intrepid devotees who had formed a whole pebble-slinging army under Ammaji’s jurisdiction – bravely, they sent their stone artillery flying from slingshots, running back and forth through the trees, feeling rather drunk themselves on the excitement of it all.