Seeking pardon, the beast approached trustingly. Monkey-man got in a kick to his ribs before the others pulled him back. They raised the lantern and looked inside the shack.
The hissing light fell on the walls, then found the floor. They saw the monkeys’ corpses lying in a corner. Laila and Majnoo’s long brown tails, exuberant in life, seemed strangely shrunken. Like frayed old rope, the tails draggled on the earthen floor. One of the creatures had been partially eaten, the viscera hanging out, dark brown and stringy.
“Hai Ram,” said Ishvar, covering his mouth. “What a tragedy.”
“Let me look,” said someone trying to push through the crowd.
It was the old woman who had shared her water with Om on the first day, when the tap was dry. The harmonium player said she should be let through immediately, she could read entrails as fluently as a swami could read the Bhagavad Gita.
The crowd parted, and the old woman entered. She asked that the lantern be brought closer. With her foot she nudged the corpse till the entrails were better exposed. Bending, she stirred in them with a twig.
“The loss of two monkeys is not the worst loss he will suffer,” she pronounced. “The murder of the dog is not the worst murder he will commit.”
“But the dog,” started Rajaram, “we saved him, he is — ”
“The murder of the dog is not the worst murder he will commit,” she repeated with grim forcefulness, and left. Her audience shrugged, assuming that the old woman, despite her fierce demeanour, was a little disoriented and upset by the event.
“I’ll kill him!” Monkey-man began wailing again. “My babies are dead! I’ll kill that shameless dog!”
Someone led Tikka to safety while others tried to talk sense into Monkey-man. “The dog is a dumb animal. When animals get hungry, they want to eat. What’s the point of killing him? It’s your fault for locking them in together.”
“He played with them like brother and sister,” he wept. “All three were like my children. And now this. I’ll kill him.”
Ishvar and Rajaram led Monkey-man away from his shack. Comforting him would be easier if the gory little bodies were out of sight. They entered Rajaram’s shack, then quickly marched out again. The bundles of hair all over the place, like macabre hairy little corpses, were not something Monkey-man could tolerate in his present condition. So they went into the tailors’ shack, and gave him a drink of water. He sat with the glass in his hands, whimpering, shaking, muttering to himself.
Ishvar decided that dropping in on Dinabai now was out of the question, it was too late. “What a day it’s been,” he whispered to Om. “We’ll explain to her tomorrow.”
They stayed with Monkey-man past midnight, letting him grieve for as long as he liked. A burial was planned for Laila and Majnoo, and they convinced him to forgive the dog. The question of livelihood was raised by Rajaram: “How long will it take you to train new monkeys?”
“They were my friends — my children! I don’t want any talk of replacing them!”
He was silent for a while, then, oddly enough, broached the subject himself. “I have other talents, you know. Gymnastics, tightrope walking, juggling, balancing. A new act without monkeys is possible. I’ll think later about what to do. First, I must finish mourning.”
Dina displayed her displeasure when Maneck returned late from college. And this on his very first day, she thought. Nobody believed in punctuality anymore. Perhaps Mrs. Gupta was right, the Emergency wasn’t such a bad thing if it taught people to observe the time.
“Your tea was ready over an hour ago,” she said, pouring him a cup and buttering a slice of Britannia Bread. “What kept you?”
“Sorry, Aunty. Very long wait at the bus stop. I was late for class in the morning as well. Everybody is grumbling that the buses seem to have disappeared from the road.”
“People are always grumbling.”
“The tailors — they finished work already?”
“They didn’t come at all.”
“What happened?”
“If I knew, would I look so worried? Coming late is like a religion for them, but it’s the first time they’ve been absent for the whole day.”
Maneck bolted the tea and went to his room. Kicking off his shoes, he sniffed the socks — a slight smell — and put on his slippers. There were some boxes left to unpack. Might as well do it now. Clothes, towels, toothpaste, soap went into the cupboard. A nice odour came from the shelf. He breathed deeply: reminded of Dina Aunty, she was lovely — beautiful hair, kind face.
The unpacking finished, he was at a loss for things to do. The umbrella hanging from the cupboard caught his eye. He opened it, admired the pagoda shape, and pictured Dina Aunty walking down the street with it. Like the women at the racecourse in My Fair Lady. She looked much younger than Mummy, though Mummy had written they were the same age, forty-two this year. And that she had had a hard life, many misfortunes, her husband dying young, so Maneck was to be kind to her even if she was difficult to get along with.
That would explain Dina Aunty’s tone, he thought, the hard life. The way she talked, her voice sounding old, having endured a vast range of weather. Her words always sharp — the words of a tired, cynical person. He wished he could cheer her up, make her laugh once in a while.
The little room was getting on his nerves. What a bore this was, and the rest of the academic year was going to just drag on and on. He picked up a book, flipped through it, tossed it back on the desk. The chessmen. He arranged the board and made a few mechanical moves. For him, the joy had seeped out of the plastic shapes. He tumbled them back into the maroon box with its sliding top — from the prison of their squares into the prison of the coffin.
But he, at least, had escaped his prison, he thought, had seen the last of that bloody hostel. His only regret was not being able to say goodbye to Avinash, whose room remained locked and silent. Probably still hiding at his parents’ — it would be foolhardy to return while the Emergency regime governed the campus and people continued to disappear.
Maneck remembered the early days with him, when their friendship was new. Everything I do is chess, Avinash had once said. Now he was under a serious check. Had he castled in time, protected by three pawns and a rook? And Dina Aunty, playing against her tailors, making her moves between front room and back room. And Daddy, attempting to take on the soft-drink opponents who did not observe the rules of the game, who played draughts using chess pieces.
Evening deepened the shadows in the room, but Maneck did not bother with the light. His whimsical thoughts about chess suddenly acquired a dark, depressing hue in the dusk. Everything was under threat, and so complicated. The game was pitiless. The carnage upon the chessboard of life left wounded human beings in its wake. Avinash’s father with tuberculosis, his three sisters waiting for their dowries, Dina Aunty struggling to survive her misfortunes, Daddy crushed and brokenhearted while Mummy pretended he was going to be his strong, smiling self again, and their son would return after a year of college, start bottling Kohlah’s Cola in the cellar, and their lives would be full of hope and happiness once more, like the time before he was sent away to boarding school. But pretending only worked in the world of childhood, things would never be the same again. Life seemed so hopeless, with nothing but misery for everyone…
He slapped shut the folding chessboard: a puff of air kissed his face. Where his cheeks were wet with tears, the kiss felt cold. He dried his eyes and slapped the two sides together again, like bellows, then fanned himself with the board.