He said, “A few drunks go berserk and you report it as if the end of the world has come. They must have been college boys, looking for a lonely place to go wild in … and the bazaar booze shop is down the road from that graveyard.”
“It is not down the road from the booze shop, the bazaar is two kilometres away.”
“What is two kilometres these days? Boys have motorbikes.”
“It’s not a few drunks,” I said. “Don’t you read the papers? Haven’t you noticed how missionaries are being threatened and beaten up? I told you how those election workers threatened me and Miss Wilson. The poor woman was terrified.”
“The poor woman! You’re constantly complaining, ‘Agnes-this, Agnes-that, Agnes needs her vocal cords changed, no wonder Jesus didn’t want Agnes Wilson for His bride’.” Diwan Sahib spoke in high-voiced imitation of my own. “So why is your heart bleeding for her now?”
“That’s different. This is serious, I’m sure this is another way of giving the Church a message.” I was stumbling over my words in my anger and tried to slow down. “I’ve noticed things going wrong there over the last few months. Most of the old gravestones have chunks missing. Some of the writing on them is wiped off. That beautiful angel on little Charlie Darling’s grave is headless.”
“Why have graves, is what I say. The man’s dead and you hold onto his bones. It’s all molecules.” Diwan Sahib looked sullen and obstinate. “Throw the ashes into a fast-flowing river. Or scatter them in the air. Much more poetic.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” I said in as sharp a voice as I dared. “That graveyard is sacred to some people.”
Diwan Sahib refused to take me seriously. He poured himself another drink, topped it carefully with an equal amount of water, and flung himself back into his chair. “Chandan and Puran and Joshi and Tiwari,” he said. “I suppose they’re all hiding country bombs in their haystacks and shops and cowsheds to go and attack your precious school and church and jam factory, one of these days. And your chaiwallah at the temple, who spots a leopard for every cup of tea he sells? He may be manufacturing gunpowder boiled in leopard blood as we speak. Look for another job, Maya, while there is time. And go back to your maiden name.”
15
By the end of April the peaks were hidden behind a dust haze that rose from the plains, and on the rare early mornings when they became visible we could see bald grey stone on ridges where snow should have been. Down in the plains, we heard, the hot winds had begun to blow. Here it was cool in the evening, but the grass was yellow, the earth dusty far too early in the summer, and sun was so intense that it tore through layers of clothing like fire. Water ran dry in the pipes, garden plants wilted. If the sky showed signs of clouding up, Ama cautioned Charu not to bring in the washed clothes from the line or the red chillies that were drying in the sun. Her notion of rain was that it was a sentient creature that enjoyed wetting things put out to dry. It would lose interest and saunter off if the clothes and the chillies were moved to a sheltered place.
Charu and Puran began to go further and further afield with the cows, having exhausted all the grass closer to home. Despite the heat, Puran neither bathed nor changed out of his sweater and cap. When he passed, the air around him hung with a sour unbreathable smell that was a putrid compound of sweat, hay, milk, and cattle. These days I moved away if I saw him approach.
Charu and Puran would leave the house early and come back late in a flurry of cowbells and dog barks. Bijli was still an overgrown puppy more inclined to play than shepherd. He leaped before the goats, his front paws slapping the ground, tail furiously wagging. If the goats approached to butt him in response, he took it as encouragement and raced around them barking, sending them up slopes in bleating disarray. Charu’s grandmother said, “This is not a dog, it’s an ass. How will it ever look after the cattle? Even the leopard thinks it’s not worth eating.”
I had heard leopards calling the night before, a hoarse sound much like the sawing of wood. It was very close to the house — I smelled its scent, like that of burned hair and buried myself deeper in my pillow. I wished I had never read Corbett. The leopards in Corbett’s stories were all natives of our hills, and short of opening locks on doors were able to enter almost any house at will, with the kind of intelligence and stealth that nobody imagined animals possessed. Had I remembered to lock the doors downstairs? Were the windows properly bolted? After tossing and turning I got up and checked and then tried to return to sleep again. The next day I heard that the General had almost lost Bozo to the leopard; miraculously, the dog had escaped with a gash on its shoulder.
The day after that I heard Charu’s call for Gouri coming and going, growing louder, then fainter, louder again, hopeful, questioning, despairing, as afternoon purpled into dusk. She wandered up and down every slope that I could see from my windows. The brass bells on the other cows tinkled as they came homeward from the valleys, but Gouri did not appear.
By dusk, a knot of people had gathered outside and the clerk shook his head and pulled on a beedi saying, “Call the girl back, it’s no use.” He bent over the fire outside his house and poked at it. “Take every care you can, but when the leopard wants something he gets it.”
“What do you expect?” Ama said. “We live in the middle of a forest.”
“The other day,” the taxi driver said, “we were standing by the road — at just this time — four of us. And Lachman’s dog was sniffing about right there, two feet from us. Before we knew it, a leopard had come out of the bushes and snatched it away. We chased it with sticks, we shouted and screamed, but it was too quick.”
“And?”
“And, what do you know? It dropped the dog! But by then the dog had died — maybe of fright — but it had a deep wound, dripping so much blood, the road went red. Half its fur and skin was torn off, you could see right down to its bones near the head.”
“That Lachman had paid five hundred rupees for it. And he’d been feeding it a boiled egg every day for the past year. Said it was a valuable guard dog.”
The other man smirked. “The bastard didn’t have money for his wife and children, but he made sure the dog got a boiled egg each day!”
“Boiled!” they said again and held each other, shaking with laughter. “Not even raw, boiled!”
Ama snarled, “Why don’t you get out and help the girl hunt for her cow instead of sitting here telling silly stories?” She hitched up her sari and creaked down the slope with a long stick in her hand, shaking her head at them and muttering.
Charu found Gouri at dawn the next day, in a deep gully. The cow had fallen in awkwardly. Two of its legs jutted at such an odd angle they were certainly broken, and it had a deep wound near its neck. It was alive, but it lay with a still, glazed look, not making a sound. The bell at its neck was red with blood as were the white patches on its mostly dark body.
Everyone gathered around the cow. Charu held out torn pieces of roti to it, eyes streaming tears, saying, “Gouri Joshi, eat something.” She tried to stem the flow of blood from the wound on its neck by stuffing her dupatta against it, but the cloth was soaked in a moment.
“We should call the vet,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“That animal doctor will be no good now; it’s too late,” the clerk said. There was a general murmur of assent.