Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

12

‘Look,’ Pinky yelled one day soon after the visiting hours had been put into effect. ‘It is one and the same monkey who chased us in the bazaar.’

‘Look,’ chortled Sampath from his superior look-out position, ‘a whole band of them!’

‘That monkey is following me,’ Pinky shrieked. ‘Everywhere I go, it goes.’ She turned to glare at her brother. ‘Why are you so happy to see them?’

How could he not be happy? A whole cluster of interested silver-fringed black faces peered at him prettily from between the leaves of the neighbouring tree.

‘Haven’t I told you, Pinky, nobody is following you,’ said Mr Chawla yet one more time.

But what did he know of the nasty qualities of these monkeys?

‘Wait and see,’ said Ammaji, showing a warning flash of lurid yellow between her lips. ‘There will be trouble. You can see it in their faces.’

Kulfi slapped some wet clay on to a bird pierced with cloves and threw it into the open fire to cook. The air filled with smoke.

‘Wait and see,’ repeated Ammaji darkly.

And it was not long before the troupe from Shahkot, presided over by the Cinema Monkey, became regular visitors to the fields and forests surrounding the orchard. They rarely ventured out of town and people wondered why they’d made this trip up the hillside — had even the ape community obtained news of Sampath and organized a visit?

The monkeys, when they first arrived, looked upon Sampath, the strange sedentary member of another species they had spotted up in their usual domain, with some trepidation and maintained a wary distance, baring their grotesque and discoloured teeth, pulling faces, chattering in a scornful show of contempt and derision. Unbothered by their mocking, glad of yet another distraction, Sampath turned their dirty game right back on them and hooted and howled. ‘Hoo hoo,’ he cried, rolling his eyes, puffing out his cheeks in a way that seemed to cause mutual satisfaction, for these antics continued and soon the monkeys drew closer, extended their dirty wizened palms and nudged Sampath, at first gingerly, to see how he would react, and then with a great rude push once they decided he was not a threat. And how he could contort his face! A look of being very impressed showed across their monkey faces.

They looked even more impressed when they had spent long enough in the orchard to identify Sampath as the nucleus of this bountiful community they had come upon. Funnily enough, all the food in the orchard seemed clustered about this hooting boy who possessed qualities that, though not admired in them, seemed to be greatly appreciated in him. No doubt, the closer a human was to a monkey, the more presents he was given: the freshest fruit, the best nuts, were brought to Sampath’s feet. He was not merely accepted, then, but endowed with elevated status within the monkey hierarchy. Through him they could receive the tastiest titbits. Before he knew what was happening, he was sharing his string cot with the cinema bully himself. Propped up simian-style against each other’s backs, they awaited visitors in this their shared state of splendour, for no longer did the troupe spend its time scavenging in the market, stealing from the shopkeepers, terrorizing the likes of Miss Jyotsna and Pinky. Why would they do that, when they had realized soon enough that they could obtain their meals much more easily by sitting near Sampath and receiving the kind people who drove up for the express reason, it appeared, of bringing peanuts and bananas?

Fondly, the lady monkeys groomed Sampath as he sat, secretly pleased but shouting, ‘Ow, don’t pull my hair like that,’ and swatting them. But, with amused, sly faces that looked as if they understood he was playing a little game, they circled back after being chased away to continue their attendance upon his glossy and shining locks, which, to their credit, grew even shinier and glossier with their care. Sampath enjoyed this attention more and more as he became used to the occasional tug or scratch.

‘Look at that,’ said Miss Jyotsna, who, like Pinky, had let out a shriek when she first identified the ape who had humiliated her at the cinema. ‘Clearly he has charmed the monkeys.’

They sat grouped about Sampath like a silver-haired and graceful bodyguard, yawning and scratching at their beautiful selves. Almost all the ladies had a story, second-if not first-hand, of torn saris and petticoats, and they marvelled: ‘Look at that monkey. Gentle as anything! The Baba has subdued the beasts.’ A priest visiting from the church in Allahabad was reminded, he said, of St Francis of Assisi, who was always depicted so touchingly surrounded by creatures of the forest.

The behaviour of the monkeys was just another proclamation of Sampath’s authenticity. ‘Think of all those shams said Miss Jyotsna, ‘all those crooks posing in their saffron, those gurus who are as corrupt as politicians …’

Oh, they gloated, their Baba was not like that. He was an endless source of wonder. He had even cast his spell upon the wild beasts of the market.

‘Hmph,’ snorted the spy, who was, to tell the truth, a little unsettled by this new occurrence. ‘No doubt it is just well-developed human — monkey interaction,’ he said.

‘Human — monkey interaction,’ said Miss Jyotsna, highly offended by this disrespect being paid to her old colleague. ‘Go ahead, brother, you try your hand at human-monkey interaction and get sent to hospital covered with monkey bites.’

But though some of the visitors were happier about the monkeys’ arrival, seeing Sampath’s effect upon them, Mr Chawla thought his mother’s instinct had been accurate right from the start and he mourned his clever trick of selling and reselling the offerings provided by the visitors. Those greedy monkeys ate everything they could grab and run away with.

Kulfi grew worried about her kitchen and began to store her things away more carefully.

And Pinky, too, unelated by this onslaught of apes, was reminded of the insuperable Kwality Hungry Hop boy every time she saw them and consequently, several times a day, she burst into hysterical tears.

Ever since her encounter with the Hungry Hop boy over the denture affair in the bazaar, Pinky had gained a new feeling of compassion for her brother. This was not a feeling she had ever had before; it was different from the exasperation or amusement she had usually experienced in relation to him. But one morning she had looked up at his feet dangling from the cot and realized that they must surely have hit upon a similar vein in the state of things. No doubt, weighed by the same concern with fragility, inevitability and doom, Sampath had been driven up into the branches, away from this painful world. She remembered his face as he was going to school, how he would always try to climb up on to the roof to be alone when he came home, and she felt terrible about how she had harangued him, shouting up the stairs … Now, she felt, she too understood the dreadfulness of life, recognized the need to be by herself with sadness, and from this moment of realization onwards, she spent hours sitting under Sampath’s tree, in a private cocoon within which she indulged her every thought, wrapping herself in endless imaginings, endless ruminations, snapping in quite an uncharacteristic way if she was interrupted.

And then, down in the bazaar, there was the Hungry Hop boy, who did not even know of the misery she was going through. ‘Baap re!’ she concluded, he certainly ought to know, for it was a very awful and upsetting way to feel. This was an unbearable state of affairs. Here she was, no longer her own strong self and without anything else that might be of some consolation. Suddenly angry, she began, once again, stormily, to cry. And while she was crying over the Hungry Hop boy, she was simultaneously horrified that her own mind could create such a terrible cage, and she longed for the freedom of her earlier life, wished she could catch hold of this dreadful boy, throw him down the hillside, stamp on him and hit him with a stick.

‘What should I do?’ she asked her brother, as he sat high above her clucking his tongue at her tears while also examining the green veins of his arm, the woodiness of his heel. ‘I am going crazy,’ said Pinky. ‘I feel like a firework that has been lit by a match.’

‘If a firecracker has been lit,’ said Sampath, ‘then it is going to explode, like it or not. Unless you throw it into a bucket of water. And then, what a waste of a firecracker.’ He looked at his arm, the mahogany of his skin. He watched the sun’s watermark upon his belly, its rise and fall through the leaves.

Pinky decided her brother was quite right. There was no reason for her to drown herself in a bucket of tears, and neither would she sit and suffer through feeling like some faulty firework, with all the sparks flying inside her instead of blazoning outwards in a display that would surely create some sort of effect, make some sort of an explosion. And an explosion, she knew, is never without a certain amount of satisfaction.

The next morning, filled with resolve, she changed her clothes, painted her face, waited for the time when her family was distracted by the commotion of Sampath’s daily bath and made her escape up the path that led from behind the shed. She had painted her eyes thickly and blackly about the upper and lower eyelids, and pinned a bunch of flowers to bloom like detonations over each ear. Like an actress ready for a performance, she was prepared. Her lips pressed tightly together, earrings swinging from her unusually small earlobes, she strode down the path towards the bus stop, breaking the branches that threatened to bar her way, kicking the stones from the path, despite her flimsy slippers and delicate, unprotected toes.

The spy, barred from Kulfi’s cooking pots by the new visiting hours, had been loitering about outside the orchard, trying to think up an excuse that would allow him in anyway, when he saw Pinky on her way to the bus stop. He decided to kill the time before he could be legally admitted into the orchard by following Pinky instead, just this once, just to make sure there was nothing more going on there than an ordinary trip to the bazaar …

Here and there she caught a glimpse of him ducking, always just a little too late, behind bushes and tree trunks. But for once she was not bothered, although she noted with satisfaction that her father was certainly wrong: men were following her. On she strode. She climbed on to the bus and, when he did as well, she speared around her ruthlessly with her hairpin, giving the spy such a jab he was forced to rush straight to Dr Banerjee for a tetanus shot when they reached the bazaar.

It was still early. The smoke from the fires that were being started in the tea stalls obscured the pale winter sun. The Hungry Hop boy stood in the grey bazaar with all the shopkeepers, who were only just getting ready to open their stores, yawning and scratching at their bellies meanwhile.

By any standards this boy was rather slow. He had some humour, it was true, and was well-meaning and good-tempered for the most part, but he was not very conscious of what was happening in the world about him. Until the Cinema Monkey had begun to forage elsewhere, he had considered it part of his daily duties to chase him away. Thus he had not thought twice about his rescue of Ammaji’s dentures, and neither had he realized that now Pinky’s ice-cream buying was a significant ice-cream buying as opposed to an insignificant ice-cream buying. The various times she had endeavoured to bump into him in the street had not affected him in the least, for again he often bumped into her in the street. As impervious to Pinky’s charms as always, he had continued upon his way, his life rock-solid and unbothered by love. When the right time came, the right girl would be found for him without the disruption of romance. In the meantime, he enjoyed himself singing along to love songs on the radio and pinching and poking the odd girl on the bus who happened to catch his eye.

Thus it came as quite a surprise when Pinky changed her oblique strategies in a direct demand for recognition. He looked at her amazed as she bore down upon him dressed in the colours of battle, dark with kohl, mouth like a stab wound, storming through the bazaar as if at the head of the conquering army. ‘Enough,’ she muttered, ‘quite enough.’

She walked up to the Hungry Hop boy, who was removing the bit of corrugated metal propped against the opening of the van.

‘What, you want to eat ice cream this early in the morning? Clearly living in the mountains is getting to your brain,’ he said, smiling.

Seeing him she was filled with a rush of elation and rage. How placid and smiling he was! For a minute she thought she might kiss him, but the vein of aggression pounded powerfully within her and she bit him instead. She bit his ear so hard that the Hungry Hop boy shouted out and his voice boomeranged about the town.

He was being hurt. He was being murdered. ‘Ai. Yai. Yai.’ The black and white polka-dots of her sari swam alarmingly before his eyes.

People came running from every direction. ‘What happened? What happened?’

A piece of his ear lay upon the ground.

Women who were preparing lunch boxes and getting the children ready for school opened the windows and leaned out. Forced to leave his breakfast because of all the ruckus, the Superintendent of Police, who had been sitting at the tea stall, arrived. ‘Arre! What is happening here?’

The Hungry Hop boy held on to his maimed ear and yelled, ‘She attacked me, sir, she attacked me.’

Pinky was marched, trembling, glowering, to the police station. She had drawn blood before, in the school playground. She spat out the salt taste of it. The pour of red from Hungry Hop was like the spill of passion and pain. She trembled, but if there was any fear in her she refused to show it or to let it get the upper hand. Or even to admit it to herself. Her courage rising, she walked dignified, behind the superintendent. Meanwhile, the Hungry Hop boy, trembling more violently than her by far, his courage ebbing with each passing moment, was taken to the family clinic, his ear packed in a tub of vanilla ice cream that had been handily obtained from the van to keep it frozen so that Dr Banerjee might sew it back on.

‘Human bites,’ said Dr Banerjee, relaxing at the door to his clinic, talking to the local newspaper representative after seeing off both the spy and the Hungry Hop boy, ‘are most common in the summer and winter season, but can occur all year round. They are more common in the morning than in the afternoon. Indeed, although people concern themselves more with animal bites, human bites should be given close attention, for human mouths contain up to forty-two species of bacteria. Thus they can be more dangerous even than spiders or dogs.’

‘Since when do ladies in the town bite gentlemen?’ the policeman asked of Pinky, fierce and seemingly unrepentant, smouldering upon a bench back at the police station. ‘You will end up in the mental home if you persist in demonstrating that that is where you belong.’

But she looked at him unvanquished. She was not one to be frightened by such threats. After all, this very asylum had been brought up several times in relation to her mother and her brother and, losing its ominous quality, it had begun to sound like a rather familial sort of institution.

‘This is a serious matter,’ the police superintendent said, waving his baton up and down. ‘Really very serious.’ He was happy at having such an interesting thing to do for a change. ‘Yes, you have created quite a to-do here.’

At this moment one of the other policemen came and whispered something urgently to him.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Are you the sister of the man who sits up in the tree? The Baba is your brother?’

She nodded sulkily.

The superintendent went out of the room and then came back with several curious policemen. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We did not know your family name. Please come along with us. We will escort you back to your family.’ And he gave a sniggering policeman, overcome by the humour of the situation, an unpleasant shove from behind. Didn’t he know he should be careful? The police were not going to upset the family of one of the town’s most respected personages. ‘In Shahkot, we honour and respect our hermits,’ he said.

Still glowering, Pinky was driven back to the Chawla compound in the station jeep, accompanied by the superintendent and several other policemen. She was glad she had bitten Hungry Hop.

The policemen all climbed up the ladder to receive Sampath’s blessings. The superintendent placed his unpleasantly greasy head under Sampath’s toes and felt as though he were being bathed in pure holiness, as if he were being washed gently and cleansed in sweet blessing; it reminded him of the feeling he had when he was given presents on festival days. ‘Can you tell me, Baba, when can I expect a son?’ he whispered.

Sampath, not in the mood to answer, withdrew his foot and tucked it under him. He was a little afraid of policemen, who had more than once shouted at him as he ignored the traffic rules when bicycling to work at the post office.

‘No need to worry,’ said Mr Chawla hurriedly, not wishing to upset the police. ‘You can ask him another time. Sometimes it is hard to get him to pay attention to what is happening down below.’ Why did Sampath always behave badly just when important people came to visit?

But the policeman nodded amiably. ‘People like this are not of this world and so it is natural that sometimes they separate out.’

Sampath opened one eye like an owl so he could maintain his distance, while also joining in this interesting talk about separating out that had just come up: ‘If you keep muddy, churned-up water still, soon the dirt will settle to the bottom. If you churn up milk, the cream will rise to the top. Ponder the nature of what lies within you and behave accordingly’

‘Can we have a photograph, sir?’ the policemen asked, awed. ‘For the police station, sir.’

The monkeys entertained themselves by throwing peanuts at the policemen’s heads.

Mr Chawla had not even thought of photographs! What a market he was missing. He hitched a ride into Shahkot on one of the scooter rickshaws that were constantly coming and going, and brought the town photographer back with him. The photographer climbed up into the tree with several cameras and a painted piece of canvas depicting background scenes on both sides. On one side there was a scene of swans floating in a pond with many pink lotus flowers; on the other, a magenta sunset over the sea with a far boatman stalled at the horizon in a tiny boat.

‘Helloji,’ said Sampath, delighted at the photo opportunity. ‘Aren’t you the boy who sent secret love letters to that girl from the convent school?’

The poor photographer was so taken aback, he dropped his equipment bag.

‘Don’t pay any attention,’ said Mr Chawla soothingly. ‘Somehow he knows these things. But please don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.’

Still, despite Mr Chawla’s kind words, it took the photographer several minutes to recover himself and gather strength enough to climb back into the tree. Along with Mr Chawla, he positioned the canvas sheeting behind Sampath and, hanging treacherously from the branches, he did his best to find the ideal angle of Sampath’s face, first against the sinking sun and then amidst the lotus flowers.

When the monkeys, who were pulling the leaves off a neighbouring tree, spotted this invasion of their territory, just like that, in broad daylight if you please, they let out screams of outrage and bounded back into the tree to help Sampath defend their domain. Leaping from branch to branch in a state of red-gummed, brown-toothed indignation, they almost caused the already jittery photographer to fall down upon his head.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the poor young photographer, new to the job. ‘I cannot do this. My mother would not like me doing such dangerous work.’

‘No, no,’ soothed Mr Chawla. ‘It is perfectly safe. I myself will talk to your mother if you wish. Look, we will make it safer right away.’

Ammaji was stationed down below with a pile of stones and a slingshot made of a branched twig and a piece of black elastic. As she sent the pebbles flying, keeping the irate monkeys at bay, the photo shoot was completed according to the specifications of Mr Chawla. Sampath had wished to pose properly with a nice smile and perhaps an arm thrown casually around a branch. But his father had not allowed him to do any such thing. ‘Keep your hands folded in your lap. Keep a gentle smile upon your face,’ he instructed. ‘No showing of your teeth.’

‘No charge,’ said the rattled photographer, happy just to get out without having been bitten or hit with stones. ‘The Baba’s blessings are enough for me. It is for the honour of my family name to do this. And please, sir, do not tell anybody about those letters …’

The photographs of Sampath were printed in hundreds of sheets by the Kwick Photo Shop at no cost and were cut into little squares by their tea boy.

‘How handsome my grandson is,’ said Ammaji when she saw the photograph of Sampath sitting cross-legged amidst lotus blossoms, his umbrella askew, his cot at a slant, looking distracted because of all the commotion with the monkeys and pebbles and the photographer dangling before him with peculiar, militaristic and medical-looking gadgets.

‘It is a terrible picture,’ said Pinky. ‘He has not even combed his hair. You can see the birthmark on his cheek. And he is wearing nothing but his undershorts. How can you say it is a good picture?’ A good picture was one where a man posed with perfectly oiled and coiffed hair, with a nice tight shirt and nice tight trousers, sitting on a moped.

But anyway, despite Pinky’s disapproval, these pictures were sold from Mr Chawla’s cart and proved to be very popular. Soon they made their appearance everywhere, permeating the shops and houses of Shahkot and travelling much farther afield.

In February, this picture was even printed in the Times of India, together with the headline ‘The Baba of Shahkot in his Tree Abode’. This peaceful orchard outside Shahkot, it read, has been transformed by a glut of visitors rushing to see the hermit of Shahkot, whose rare simplicity and profound wisdom are bringing solace and hope to many who are disheartened by these complicated and corrupt times. ‘There is a spiritual atmosphere here that I have not seen anywhere else in India,’ Miss Jyotsna, a postal worker, told this reporter. She professes herself a frequent visitor to this hermit, whom disciples affectionately call ‘Monkey Baba’ or ‘Tree Baba’ in reference to his fondness for animals and the simplicity of his dwelling place. While admitting all who come to see him, he limits the hours when he is available to protect his secluded lifestyle …

After the appearance of this article, letters by the thousand began to arrive for Sampath from all over the country. Mostly they bore no address, just the photograph of Sampath in his tree pasted trustfully upon the envelope. Inside were pleas for help and questions from ardent wisdom-seekers galore.

Delighted by this excuse to visit the orchard even during work hours, Miss Jyotsna from the post office took to making regular trips in a scooter rickshaw to deliver these enormous quantities of mail, while Mr Gupta sulked back in Shahkot, for he had decided he did not like it when he was not the centre of attention.

At the annual meeting of the Atheist Society in a neighbouring town, the spy addressed his colleagues. ‘Did you see the newspaper article about the Chawla case? It is completely outrageous. Even the press in this country goes along with this rubbish. In fact, they are the ones who propagate it. They take a rumour and put it into official language and of course everybody who reads it promptly swallows it as the whole truth. This madman belongs in a lunatic asylum and just look at how everybody is running to him bringing him presents.’

He went on for so long and in such an impassioned way, it grew past dinner time for many people in the audience. One member leaned over and spoke into the ear of another: ‘He is going a bit overboard, don’t you think? Why is he so upset by all of this?’

But the spy now felt personally involved and personally outraged, and continued upon his tirade for yet another hour. It was precisely people like Sampath who obstructed the progress of this nation, keeping honest, educated people like him in the backwaters along with them. They ate away at these striving, intelligent souls, they ate away at progress and smothered anybody who tried to make a stand against the vast uneducated hordes, swelling and growing towards the biggest population of idiots in the world. Even minuscule little countries like Taiwan and the Philippines were forging ahead. If he had any sense, he would leave this blighted country and emigrate. But no, he had chosen to stay back and do his bit to change things, even though he had once been knifed in the arm with a metal hairpin by the sister of the Baba for this sacrifice. Who could tell what permanent effect this would have on him?

He began an additional elaboration upon his suspicions of what Sampath was being fed, how his food was so carefully guarded nobody was allowed near, how he might be drugged, his spirits raised or lowered to abnormal levels, the spy was not sure which. He talked of how he was going about his research regarding this topic, of the book on hallucinatory substances he had procured …

The roars from the stomachs of the audience rose to a deafening level. Really, this man was too much. Talking of food when they should all be sitting down to their own nice hot dinners that very minute.

‘Did he say he was stuck in the arm with a hairpin?’ asked the member of the audience who had been restless an hour and a half ago. ‘Or was it in the head? He is quite right, though, it has had a severe effect on him.’ And this time the man did not talk in a whisper, but as loudly as he could. ‘Oh, sir,’ he shouted directly at the spy, ‘don’t you think your time is up?’

The spy was interrupted midstream. For a second he was thrown off balance. ‘Before the mosquitoes are killed the night is uncomfortable,’ he replied.

‘Well, that is certainly true,’ said some other individual.

‘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.