Shining Hero (11 page)

Meena did her best to be polite, inviting Bhima to help himself to yet another misti from the salver when Laxshmi returned and then sending the maid to make cold nimbu pani, ‘For I am sure, Mr Bhima, that you must be very hot after that dreadful journey from Calcutta.’ But she told her husband later, ‘I am really worried now. It will be worse if Shivarani marries this fellow than if she never gets married at all.’

‘She has never even suggested marrying him,’ protested the husband. ‘I expect he is merely a college friend or fellow politician. She talks to him quite coldly, as though she does not even like him.’

‘Are you blind, Ogo? She cannot keep her eyes from the fellow and when she looks at him it is as though there is not another person in the world. Of course she is thinking of marrying him.’

‘I can’t see there’s all that much wrong with him,’ the husband said. ‘His face is rather scarred but Shivarani said he got the wound because he was saving her life in Naxalbari.’

‘It’s not the scar,’ snapped Meena impatiently. ‘That is not the problem though it is certainly unsightly.’

‘I agree he’s a big young fellow, but that’s OK too, I should have thought. Till now the men have always been too short.’

‘He’s a dalit, Ogo. How is it possible that you could not see? He may be well-spoken and educated, but anyone can see from the blackness of his skin that he is an outcaste.’

The zamindar gave a farewell party for his departing manager during which he told Shivarani, ‘Pandu will be managing the estate from now on and I will not be employing anyone so the bungalow will be empty. You are welcome to take it over as your home if you wish.’

Shivarani was touched. When her parents told her that they were leaving the country she had felt worried for she did not have enough money to rent a place in Calcutta. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That really takes a big weight from my mind.’

Pandu was so busy with his cows these days that he hardly noticed the matter of Shivarani’s friend or even the departure to Canada of his parents-in-law. His Jersey herd were causing great excitement in Hatipur. The local cows were sharply horned and half the size. Daily crowds gathered at the byre to look at the new cows, asking each other, ‘Are they buffaloes?’ Bending to peer at the Jersey udders, which were four times bigger at least than those of the local cows, they would emit gasps of wordless wonder. They stared, stunned with awe, as the mighty steaming buckets of yellow milk given by these Billaty cows were carried from stall to dairy. They had never seen anything like it. ‘We are lucky to get three cups a day from one of ours. These creatures are not of this world, but are provided by the gods,’ came the eventual village pronouncement. Pindu feared that these compliments were bringing down curses from an envious deity for each month there came a new bovine disaster, sending Pandu dashing to the gwala for advice. But these foreign cows did not react to the local medicines of turmeric, tamarind, and mustard oil. They developed sicknesses that the gwala had never seen. Three cows died of redwater. The cowman passed cow pox from teat to teat till all were too sore and lumpy to be milked. The heaviest yielder got mastitis and was treated with antibiotics squeezed up into her teats
from a tube after which her milk was undrinkable for two weeks. Three quarters of the calves were male and were distributed among local farmers to be used as plough-pullers, till no more were needed and still more male calves were born.

‘In the West these surplus animals would be used for meat,’ sighed Pandu, ‘but here in our Hindu land I cannot think of an answer. There seems no end to the problems.’

At first it was difficult to sell the milk. The people of Bengal were used to pure white buffalo milk and looked on the golden cream of Jersey milk with suspicion. Eventually Arjuna’s father found a dairy in Calcutta which catered to a sophisticated sort of Memsahib. But after only a month of the arrangement there was a blockade. The Naxalites closed the road for a week in protest at one of theirs being murdered. The blockade was lifted. Pandu tried to get the milk into town again but on the following day the group who had committed the murder closed the roads in retaliation for the retaliation.

Pandu lost the market in Calcutta.

Before he bought the cows, Pandu had gone to see his friend, the minister for dairy development.

‘A government chilling tanker will collect your milk once it reaches a hundred litres,’ he was told.

Day after day, as the quantity rose, the hope of government salvation drew closer. At last the day came. A hundred litres was in the tank. Pandu contacted his friend, the minister.

It took a week of lost milk for Pandu to discover that the chilling tanker had been a figment of the minister’s hopeful imagination.

Pandu decided to deliver it to the chilling centre himself. This was at Barrackpur, on the outskirts of Calcutta, requiring the milk to be driven, unchilled, for four hours. They began milking the cows at three so as to get it to the centre before the sun rose and the weather grew hot.

At the end of the week Pandu went to collect his money. And found he had been fined for selling watered milk.

He protested, ‘I am with the milk from the moment it is taken
from the cows to the moment I deliver it to you. There is no way water could have got in.’

‘Perhaps the cows are not of sufficient quality,’ suggested the manager.

‘These are Jersey cows. Their milk is the creamiest in Europe.’

‘Ah, Billaty cows, I have heard of this being a problem. Their milk is very low in butterfat.’

A government official was sent to test the milk at the moment of milking. He pronounced it well within the desired range. ‘Good for a Billaty cow,’ he said. ‘Though of course the milk of a desi cow is much higher in butterfat.’

Pandu returend to the chilling centre with his milk and once again was penalised.

This time the manager looked sympathetic. ‘You see, the system is that there are fellows putting water into their milk and taking credit from others.’

‘But I thought you had people overseeing,’ protested Pandu.

The manager shrugged. ‘But who is to oversee the overseer? These fellows are being bribed by those who are watering. This is our problem. So long as the bulk turns out sufficient butterfat content then this is OK. Your milk is taking the burden of many double-dealers.’

Pandu arrived next morning and approached the overseer. ‘This is for you,’ he said, pressing a bundle of notes into the man’s hand. ‘And from now on I hope my milk will be acceptable.’ He did not like the idea of bribery but when it is a question of survival it must be done.

The man paused for a moment, surveyed the money bundle, then thrust it back into Pandu’s hand. ‘We do not take bribes from people like yourself, Sahib.’

‘What is wrong with me?’

‘You have a friendship with the dairy minister and know officers of the police. We take money only from the poor humble man, who stands in the corner wrapped in his blanket. It is dangerous to take bribes from people with such friends as yourself.’

Pandu returned to Hatibari, defeated. ‘We will have to get rid of these cows,’ he told Koonty sadly. ‘I love them but we cannot afford to keep them if we can’t sell the milk.’

‘We should go in for cheese – it doesn’t need to be sold so fast,’ said Koonty. A few days later, Gadhari found her sister-in-law, her sari hitched up, pummelling curd in the dairy. ‘You are letting down the dignity of this family,’ she cried. ‘Leave this kind of thing to the servants and other lower castes.’

The remaining cows began to acclimatise. The cheese was a success. Koonty took several large rounds of it in the jeep to Calcutta where the first shop she showed it to snapped it up. The Calcutta Club put in a big order. Tolley followed suit. Even when there was a blockade, things were not lost as the cheeses could wait till the roads re-opened.

The yields of the eleven remaining cows improved. Their daughters matured and though giving less milk, were proving hardier, less prone to disease. Things went well. They took on a head cowman. Planted more roses. Bought a new chandelier. Began work on building a bank to keep the flooding out. They put Arjuna’s name down for Doon school, where his cousins already went but for now he went to the local school where, almost at once, he fell in love. ‘She is Laxshmi’s daughter, Bika, and she’s bigger than me, and she’s the most beautiful girl in the world.’

Boodi Ayah was shocked. ‘It is not suitable for a child of his age to talk of love.’

The misti wallah’s sons, Ravi and Rahul, joined a gang of young Marxists, among whose members were the two young men who had returned from college and never found jobs. The gang, wearing tight white trousers and dark glasses, would swagger around the village, snatching up a fruit from this stall, a sweet from that one, the shopkeepers making no protest, because these boys were trouble and had power. The one-eyed Communist leader, Nitai Mandel, began to worry about the excesses of the boys which
he felt were giving Communism a bad name and turning people against them.

When Ravi was fifteen and Rahul sixteen, their sister became pregnant and the outraged brothers joined her parents in giving her a beating, but through her sobs she said that a wealthy local man had raped her. Raging with fury, the brothers ran to Nitai Mandel. ‘You must send people to execute the rapist. It is your duty as the leader of our local Communists.’

Nitai Mandel sighed. ‘How many times have I told you we must not fritter away our political advantages with acts of revenge. And also too much violence turns people from the cause.’

‘But this is a question of justice,’ raged Ravi.

Nitai would not give in. ‘I forbid it,’ he said. ‘This is a matter for the law and the police and it will give our party a bad name. You must go and demand that the police take action in this matter.’

Even when Ravi said, ‘They refuse to take action – they are saying that my sister has invented the charge out of shame,’ Nitai would not give in.

‘I have always told you he is a dinosaur,’ said Ravi. ‘He is in the pay of the zamindars and what can you expect? The responsibility is ours now.’ Next day five young Marxists walked onto Hatipur railway station, where the accused rapist stood waiting for the Calcutta train. As the man tried to explain that the girl had come to him willingly and had said she was in love with him, Ravi stabbed him in the stomach. Then they hacked off their victim’s head which was later found stuck on a pole in the village with a note saying, ‘This is what happens to the rich men when they rape our women.’ Although four hundred people were waiting on the station, no one admitted to witnessing the murder. When Ravi was questioned by the police, he had ten young men to swear he had been playing cards with them. After the episode, Ravi became hero-worshipped by the young Marxists who began following him instead of listening to Nitai Mandel. When Ravi said that something must be done about the price of rice, older boys including his brother, Rahul, eagerly went with him to the mill. The miller refused to lower the price and that night a
home-made bomb was thrown into his house, killing the mill owner and his two-year-old daughter. Once again the police never found the killers. The gang became increasingly influentual. If a Marxist was arrested in Calcutta or beaten up in Haringhata by members of another political party they would ignore Nitai Mandel’s objections and shut down the village in protest, then smash up any shop that opened, beat anyone seen going to work or set fire to traffic that inadvertently blundered into their blockade. None of the boys had a job. Their income came from protection money from the Hatipur shops and businesses and when they needed anything, from a pair of shoes to a sack of rice, they simply took it. The owners never protested. It was not worth it. You could have your mill burnt to the ground and your legs broken if you stood up to the young Marxists. The fathers of these boys were shocked at this appropriation of other people’s goods and accused their sons of stealing even when the boys maintained that they were merely taking payment for their work in providing the village with security and justice.

So when Ravi arrived with his gang at the Hatibari elephant gates, the two durwans only hesitated a moment before letting them in. The durwans lived in the village, had wives and children, and knew all about the ruthless Ravi, son of the misti wallah. Ravi and his followers shouted Communist slogans as they marched up the drive towards the Hatibari house.

‘Oi, Dadoo,’ they called when they reached the marble steps.

Kuru Dadoo came out of the house and greeted the young men with a courteous namaste. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. He recognised them. He recognised Ravi, son of his friend, the misti wallah, who had been a guest at Pandu’s wedding.

‘We have come to take the cows,’ Ravi said. ‘They are being requisitioned. Call your son. Tell him to give up his cattle for the cause.’

‘My son is not here at the moment,’ said Kuru Dadoo. ‘But what you are doing is not right. I know all of you. You are like my family. I know your fathers. What will they say? This is theft, not requisition.’

‘The day of the zamindar is over,’ shouted Ravi. And to his followers, ‘Go, take the cows since the old man will not give them up.’

But the other young men began to feel flustered. Kuru Dadoo was not the mill owner or some newcomer to the village. He was the heart of the village. Almost every one of them had benefited from him in some way. Kuru Dadoo had given dowries, had paid for weddings, had financed hospital bills. Kuru Dadoo was everybody’s grandfather and however strongly these young men felt about their cause, they still felt respect for their elders. Gradually it became the voice of the zamindar which sounded the loudest and the longest while the voices of the rowdy Communists grew quieter and, eventually, silent.