Hungry Hop’s sisters and aunts, now forced to hammer regularly at the bathroom door, shouting: ‘What are you doing in there?’ realized quickly enough that something had gone very wrong. The bathroom was being emptied of supplies. Was Hungry Hop so depressed and troubled that he was spending hours flushing things down the toilet? But the toilet drain would not be able to take such a surfeit of offerings, and where was his jungle-print shirt that nobody could find?
When the truth came to light after a sister had spotted Hungry Hop throwing his mother’s petticoat out of the window to his previous attacker, the family became crazy with worry. Clearly he had lost his stability. As if under a dangerous spell, his fear of Pinky Chawla had somehow been perverted into an unsavoury affection.
‘Be careful,’ they warned him. ‘We will send you to your uncle in Dubai if this behaviour persists. We will marry you off immediately.’
It would be the end of their good name to be associated with Pinky. They had made some discreet inquiries and discovered what had happened to the family of Pinky’s maternal grandfather when he fell under the spell of Kulfi’s mother. That was the downfall of a fine family. And they were told it had all started in much the same manner. They began to make immediate inquiries about girls from normal, matter-of-fact, ordinary families. Who cared about dancing and cooking and high IQs? All they wanted was some sane steady girl. They whispered to the people who were on the look-out that they were willing to negotiate even in the matter of the dowry. This is how worried they were.
And they sent a message to Mr Chawla: ‘Please keep your daughter from bothering our son.’
Mr Chawla confronted Pinky: ‘What is this all about? You are always complaining that people are following you and now the truth comes out — you yourself are doing the following. That is that,’ he said. ‘You are not to associate with ice-cream vendors. A shopkeeper type! In fact, not even a shopkeeper type! An ice-cream-cart type. Our family name will be destroyed. You should set your sights higher than yourself, not lower.’ How dismayed he would have been to find the ice-cream family making similar remarks about his family. He ordered Ammaji to accompany Pinky on her trips to town. He was far too busy with other matters to keep an eye on her himself.
Ammaji, however, did not much like this role of chaperon. At first, she did her best to run after Pinky and even donned special gym shoes for this event. Still, despite such arrangements, Pinky strode on far ahead.
‘Do not go so fast,’ Ammaji begged. ‘Are you trying to outrun a Maruti jeep? I am too old for this. Look at your brother sitting quietly. None of this running around,’ she panted. Finally, after three-quarters of an hour, she gave up and sat down to rest. To Pinky’s satisfaction, thereafter, she settled in front of the grain store on all their trips to town, to talk to the other old ladies coming and going, and waited for her granddaughter to return from doing whatever pleased her. Then, they caught the bus back together and presented a united front before Mr Chawla.
Thus the Hungry Hop women were forced to guard their Hungry Hop boy even more closely than they had done before, keeping a constant watch for Pinky, the stalker of their son, and they chased her with sticks, all twelve of them, the one time they caught sight of her. After all, they knew they could not go the police. Look at what had happened the day Pinky had bitten Hungry Hop. This girl was a sly and scheming witch. They kept a watch out of windows. They posted a permanent watchwoman in the back alleyway. All of the sisters and aunts were recruited to keep guard. It was lucky there were so many of them. It was always useful to have a large family, even if it was mostly girls …
Pinky was forced to retreat to an infuriatingly powerless position and she spent a few days in tears, until, that is, she hit upon the ancient idea of bribing the milkman to carry notes back and forth. In this wonderfully practical way, Hungry Hop and Pinky cultivated their romance and amazed their families by their good humour in the face of a situation that seemed, to others, to be not at all amusing.
17
Things had gone from bad to worse, and not many people in Shahkot were in the best of spirits these days. Sampath, shadowed by worry, attempted to write a poem.
He remembered, in his sadness, a singular day at the Mission School when a Brother John had taught them literature. Brother John had been dismissed after a week of teaching for pinching the bottom of the sweeper woman. But though he had departed in disgrace with a soiled reputation, Sampath remembered him as a being filled with beauty who had imparted to him his single inspired moment at school. While Sampath was indulging himself dipping his fingers one by one into the ink pot, his attention had suddenly been caught by the lines Brother John was reading aloud from a small volume in his hands. ‘Poetry,’ said Brother John, ‘is born of hardship and suffering, of pain and doubt.’ Then he proceeded to recite. ‘All morning they have been calling you in,’ he said, in such a way that Sampath was covered with goose bumps. ‘Ten relatives to cook for and you’re the girl. Their voices echo in jungle darkness, but no, don’t answer. Stay by this shore. For what do they know of fin’s fine gold rising to light in pale water?’
Sampath had felt very sorry for the girl with ten relatives. And: ‘What do they know of fin’s fine gold?’ he repeated, trembling all over. Never again during his days at that terrible establishment had he felt touched like this.
Now he tried to compose something as well.
‘But no, don’t answer,’ he said aloud. ‘Stay in this tree. For what do they know of … of …’ Of what? ‘What do they know of … of the sun? What do they know of my tree? Of the monkey problem?’ No … that didn’t sound right. ‘What do they know of … a grey donkey going to the market?’ No, that wasn’t a good line either. ‘What do they know of …’ Oh dear. He tried to think of some worthwhile thoughts to put in his poem. He thought of how the moon goes around the earth and the winter season comes after the monsoon. Of how years pass, leaving memories, and how the future is unknown, of how a man can speak while an animal cannot, and how people speak many languages and cannot understand each other. But try as he might, he could not break through to anything that seemed profound, or right to put in his poem. And what is more, these thoughts kept getting disrupted by the overwhelming concern of what was to happen to him and to his life in the orchard. ‘What do they know …’
‘What do you know?’ he put his head down to ask of a red ant. ‘What?’ He raised his hands to the parrots. ‘Will I be all right?’ he asked out loud into the indifferent air.
The ant scurried by and the birds ignored him. And what did he himself know? Oh, he felt petulant; he should not have even begun. ‘What do you know … What do you know …’ It was to clear his mind he had climbed into a tree, not to befuddle it. Here he was thwarting his own ambitions.
As it was, only those who managed to enclose themselves in their own worlds and disregard the battles going on managed to sleep at night. One of these fortunate few was Kulfi, mother of the Monkey Baba himself, who had managed to brush away the entire furore with the langurs as if it were nothing but a minor annoyance of keeping her supplies locked up inside instead of out in the open, of having occasionally to chase a monkey with her broom. Preoccupied by her own thoughts, into which nothing else ever seemed to really penetrate, she continued on the path along which her life led her.