What happened a few days after the party later became a frightening haze in Puran’s head. It was around midday. He had been sitting at the edge of the slope next to his cows. He had tied Gangu, the skittish young one, to a tree, spoken some sense into the wobbly, large-eyed new calf that was unable to draw enough milk from its mother, and then sat back on his haunches, smoking grass. Charu was at some distance, high up in a tall oak tree, cutting fodder with her sickle. She saw the four men approach Puran but returned to cutting oak leaves, not for a moment imagining what they were going to do.
Without warning Puran felt rough hands on his shoulders, harsh voices in his ear, giving him instructions: he could not tell what. He saw nothing but a blur of laughing faces. They thrust him into a jeep. He responded with keening, terrified, animal sounds to its unfamiliar rolling motion as it charged off, taking bends and slopes at high speed. The men slapped him around the ears and shouted, “Arre yaar, shut up! Chootiya! Donkey!” Then they stopped the vehicle, pushed him out, stripped him down to his threadbare underpants and thrust him under a roadside tap. The icy water clawed at him. They threw a bar of bright green soap towards him. He shivered at the unexpected feel of open air on his near-naked body. It made him ache with the cold. He clutched the soap not knowing what he was expected to do with it.
One of the men who was kinder than the others tried telling him something, then, getting no response, rolled up his sleeves, took the soap from his hand and lathered him all over while the other men screamed with laughter and slapped their thighs, shouting, “Mammi, Mammi, give him a good wash!” Puran’s knees knocked and he clasped his hands over his crotch. A small knot of people had gathered by this time, some of them waiting with empty canisters and buckets for their turn at the tap. Nobody dared raising a protest against the men, among whom they recognised Mr Chauhan’s guard, driver, and chowkidar. Some of the gathered people thought it was a joke. Some said, “Good thing, that crazy Puran really needed a bath.”
After it was over, Puran found himself in an unfamiliar yellow shirt, red pullover, and overlarge blue trousers. He babbled in his hollow-sounding voice and darted for his own clothes, which had been flung to the verge in an untidy heap. Before he could reach them, one of the men picked up the clothes on the end of a stick and tossed them into a heap of twigs and leaves and pine cones he had set fire to at the road’s edge. The shoes followed. The flames leaped and crackled; the fumes from the burning rubber made people draw back with choking coughs.
Puran let out a strangled yelp. He thrust his hand into the flames to rescue his clothes. The man who had scrubbed him with the soap tried pulling him away, but Puran’s small frame was possessed with a new demonic strength. Charu, who had clambered down from her tree and cut across the valley to catch up with the jeep, saw him put his hands into the fire and screamed, “Chacha, Puran Chacha!” and tugged at his new yellow shirt, but she was not strong enough to stop him.
His hands were as charred as the clothes by the time he had retrieved them, but he tore off the yellow shirt and replaced it with his tattered and still smoking old uniform. Some of it came apart in his hands, but he managed to get it on, though one of its arms and a part of the collar had burned away.
Ama gave me a theatrical account of what had happened, but I did not see Puran for several days after the incident. He took to hiding in the cowshed and whimpering in a corner there, refusing to graze the animals. He slept huddled in the straw, holding a goat kid for warmth. Charu took him food and water and wheedled him into eating, then left to graze the cows and goats alone. Puran only dashed into the forest at dawn to shit when everyone was still asleep. One such morning, he came back, holding an animal in his arms.
He set it down in the courtyard. It stood there, only a little higher than the very tall black rooster that waggled its head at the intruder and circled it, pecking at the ground around its hooves. It was a fawn, exquisite in its delicate beauty, its long eyelashes fencing in pools of brown that took up most of its pointed face and big moist nose. Puran knelt next to it, and groaned and cooed and slapped the sides of his thighs in delight. The fawn would not let anyone else come close. If they did, it moved away with careful dignity. But when Puran cooed, it turned its head in his direction, took a step towards him and even allowed him to touch it, which he did with infinite tenderness. He gathered the creature in his arms after we had inspected it, and disappeared behind the stand of bamboo that blocked the cow stalls from our view. He made the fawn a soft, cushioned bed with piled pine needles and dry grass. He named her Rani, because she was queenly in her disdain and because she was a deer from Ranikhet.
Over the next weeks, we grew accustomed to seeing Puran carrying the fawn like a baby when he went to the forest, her legs poking quilllike out from beneath his arms. He fed her milk in an aluminium bowl and muttered to her day and night. She listened to him with the distant patience of a diva before an acolyte. After a while, having had enough of his adoration, Rani would get up and walk away to nibble at grass. The clerk said, “Puran has a lover at last, a princess no less, and she’s playing as hard to get as any pretty woman.” Everyone laughed, and shouted, “O Sanki, shall we arrange a wedding?”
I thought it a rare thing, almost other-wordlly, that this barking deer’s fawn had come to live among us. I waited every morning to catch a glimpse of her when Puran carried her down the hill for a constitutional before he left with the cattle, which he was now grazing again. It made me late for school some days, I said to Diwan Sahib, but I felt as if my day had not begun until I caught a glimpse of Rani’s liquid eyes and languid legs.
“Do you know what drew me to Corbett?” he said to Veer and me after he had heard me out. “That is, apart from the fact that he habitually described springs with ‘gin-clear’ water? — there’s a man after my own heart. Imagine mountain springs gushing gin!” Diwan Sahib poured himself a hefty measure of Bombay Sapphire.
“His tall tales?” Veer said in a tone so caustic that Diwan Sahib looked at him in surprise.
“Oh, come on,” Veer said. “That story where he kills a man-eater in a gorge with a gun in one hand and two nightjar eggs in the other? A tiger that munched dozens of people for dinner is killed with one shot, and the eggs survive!”
“You’re losing the wood for the trees, Veer,” Diwan Sahib said, sounding stricken. “Every adventure story has its exaggerations and embroidery. That doesn’t mean all of it is untrue. Look at Corbett’s jungle craft, his love of nature.”
“If I want fiction, I’ll read novels,” Veer said, and left the veranda for his room. We heard him banging and thumping inside, then a bellow. “Where the hell does that fool put my laptop charger? Himmat Singh! Himmat! A different place every day. It’s just not possible to run an office in this madhouse.”
Himmat Singh scuttled past us towards Veer’s room as fast as his creaking legs could manage. Silence for a moment or two, and then Veer snapped, “Behind that curtain? Which hiding place will you think of next?”