Left, right. Left, right. Stand at ease.
What hope was there for the army? When the telephone system did not work and, he remembered the newspaper reports, when monkeys developed a taste for alcohol and went on the rampage?
He leaned out of the window, still on the toilet seat, with a megaphone, to shout: ‘Double march. Jump to it.’
The soldiers, realizing they were being mysteriously observed from farther up the hillside, leapt like frogs and, in their confusion, scattered in all the wrong directions.
Somewhat mollified and feeling better about the day after having shouted at his men, the Brigadier retired for his bath. He looked up the schedule that was mounted behind plastic on the wall by the water taps. ‘Monday,’ it read, ‘back of the neck and ears. Tuesday, between the toes. Wednesday, the back,’ and so on. Ah, it was his day of the week for washing behind his ears and neck. Each morning he paid attention to a different tricky part of the body. In this way, in seven days, every crease and crevice and difficult-to-remember spot was given a good scrub, despite water rationing. Of course, he washed his face every day.
But just as he was working up a good lather to apply to himself, he remembered the army mess, with its well-stocked bar, where he enjoyed a whisky soda almost every night. The monkeys must, at all costs, be kept away!
Rushing out of the bathroom in a way he knew he would later regret, he replugged his telephone and attempted to call the police superintendent, whose assistant answered and snapped: ‘He has already gone on investigation,’ which was untrue. The police superintendent could not be disturbed because he was at that moment getting his shoes shined at the shoe stand behind the station.
Aware that there was no point in calling the District Collector, for the new DC had not yet arrived at his posting, the Brigadier then tried to call the Public Health Department, but got instead a film star vacationing in the mountains, the Malabar Sweet Shop, the D’Souza household and the Patedar Shoe Store.
In frustration, the Brigadier took up his cane and, feeling grubby behind the ears, got into his jeep to visit the CMO. The CMO, despite a distinct pain in his side, had donned his Gandhi cap and set off along with Mr Chawla to see Verma of the university, albeit by a roundabout route that gave them the benefit of a good view of the mountains. Verma himself had left his house for his customary walk to the university through the Badshah Gardens with his friends Poncha of Epidemiology and Sinha of Virology.
Thus they all missed each other and that morning, anyway, the monkey menace was not discussed by the authorities.
‘Oh, just look at how bad you’ve been,’ said Sampath, when the monkeys reappeared in the orchard later that day.
Their dark faces peered from the battered foliage of the tree, looking contrite. Holding their heads, the distillation of pain and hardship in their expressions, they sat limply propped against whatever branches had not been wrecked and left to hang like the useless limbs of the war-wounded.
‘Yes, you are very bad,’ said Sampath. But he could not help but be charmed by them anew each time he saw them and he sounded like a fond parent trying hard to be disapproving. ‘Of course you feel sick after all that. In fact, I myself feel a bit sick.’ He forgave them completely. He could not blame his lovely monkeys. This was not their fault. It was the fault of those who brewed the liquor that had turned the langurs into alcoholics.
With grunts and burps, the monkeys suffered through what was probably a combination of indigestion and bad headaches.
16
In a room in his family’s house in the bazaar, Hungry Hop sat nursing his ear, no longer throbbing and painful but adorned with small stitches to remind him of that very strange day in his life when he had been bitten by Pinky Chawla for no apparent reason. Since then, he had developed such a constant pounding in his heart, he had not yet mustered the courage to venture outside.
‘Poor boy,’ said his family, twelve women and three men, clucking their tongues beneath his room, looking upwards where, through the ceiling right above them, Hungry Hop sat by the window, fingering his ear for hour upon hour. ‘He has really been given a scare. That crazy girl,’ they said. ‘It is best he stay inside and rest for a while longer. He never was a very strong boy’.
The days had gone by. The thought of Pinky went round and round Hungry Hop’s head like a fish in a bowl; he could not get her out of his mind. He remembered those black eyes, that red determined mouth floating in the midst of billowing waves of polka-dots … the determination of that face! How terrifying!
Clearly, he had not taken his first brush with out-and-out danger in this world with very much spirit. And, as it transpired, his instincts in this matter were sadly to be trusted, for as he sat tearfully house-bound, his aggressor of old was plotting and planning yet another assault upon him.
‘Once the rain has filled up all the holes in the earth,’ Sampath said to Pinky as she sat morosely beneath the tree, ‘amworm has no option but to emerge.’
He did his best to say something to his sister that would be helpful as well as acceptable to her, although he himself was fraught with worry over the fate of the langurs and, for that matter, his own fate. Already, of course, he had heard the first mumblings about modern hermitages and monsoon rains, and he could see exactly where it was all heading. And now that the monkeys had behaved so badly, he had no idea what was in store for him. Concrete hermitages! Phoof! A true hermit lived in a tree or on a rock, in a cave or a hole.
He looked down at the reflection cast by the morning sun upon the grass below: his own figure in its crazy contraption of tilted string cot and raggedy, monkey-battered umbrella, and the shadows of the monkeys grouped about him, their long tails hanging. Peaceful for once, full-bellied and quiet, they were in one of their most endearing moods; lazily, in perfect placid companionship, they regarded him and yawned. He thought that he would never be able to do without them. All the fun would disappear from his life: the teasing, the games, their naughty behaviour — their shamelessness and outrageous charm …
He looked at the tree that was such a good home. Its smooth, spacious branches of silvery tan that stretched wide and far-reaching in knotted, twisted curves and delicate bunches of spreading leaves. How important this had become to him. Here, sitting not too high and not too low, he had seen the world in absolute clarity for the first time, the days emerging as if purified from nights of a clean and brilliant blackness. The sunlight coming in through the leaves at daybreak, shifting and flickering, breathing its fire-breath upon the bark, falling now and then upon Sampath, whom it treated as if he were not the solid being that he was, scattering him like water … He felt weightless here, rocked by this lambent light, lapped by the swell of flower and grass, of leaves as rich as fruit, being warmed to their different scents. All about him the hills rose darkly up into a sky that stretched like a sea, white-stippled and warm, to the very rim of his eye.
How strangely it made him feel, Sampath thought, how strangely he thought of beauty. He was greedy for it, insatiably greedy. He could watch it constantly and never could he do it justice … At first, he had stared intently, watched everything about him with a fierce urge to take it all and imprint it within himself, every detail, every sweep. He had stared so that tremors ran over him, until this encounter with something that he could not believe, lying there right before his eyes, had him in its thrall. He had closed his eyes to check if it had indeed entered him, as he hoped it would — to see if the landscape before him could be conjured up inside him, at will.