In elegantly worded prose that was one of his greatest strengths, he put forward his plan, which involved revoking the liquor licences of all shops and restaurants and banning alcohol in Shahkot. What a marvellous plan! He had thought of it while lying awake at night, unable to sleep, cushions piled up beneath him. What could be better for public health? And what better way to put a stop to the problem? With one fell stroke he would accomplish two such laudatory acts. Quite possibly this move would also put a damper on the problem of wife-beating, which had been getting rather out of hand of late. In that case, he could claim three … yes, three … victories! And he himself had nothing to lose as he was a strict teetotaller.
Carbon copies of his plan were delivered by government jeep to the railway station in preparation for the DC’s still-anticipated arrival.
Only the Superintendent of Police, as you can see, had offered up no plan at all, for he didn’t think of furthering his career. No. He did not want to be promoted for precisely the reason that the Chief Medical Officer did: it would mean a transfer out of Shahkot and he liked Shahkot. He liked the bazaar and the tea stall, he liked his naughty-eyed wife and all of his friends. It occurred to him that he might, in fact, be demoted because of all of this … Now that would not be such a bad thing … It would mean even more time to wander about the bazaar chatting with his cronies, even more time to sit with his wife eating golguppas in the municipal gardens while tickling her with flowers picked from the flowerbeds that had signs reading: ‘Do not pick the flowers.’
Thus the Superintendent of Police did not join the others when they visited Sampath in order to seek his blessing for their plans. The CMO had been the first to decide to go. And as soon as the Brigadier heard of the proposed visit through a servant who had seen the officer driving to the orchard, he too leapt into his jeep. As he drove, he was spotted by Poncha and Sinha, Vermaji’s friends, who persuaded a groaning Vermaji to join the procession on his moped. And so they all reached Sampath’s tree within a half-hour of each other, each one of them accompanied by crowds of outraged citizens. There had been uproar, you see, when the plans just elaborated upon reached the ears of the population at large, leaked, as they were, by the drivers of the government and army jeeps and by Verma’s wife, who had snooped among his papers in a way that should have made her ashamed.
Sampath had spent the morning looking at a collection of things he had made in an old tin can when he first arrived in the orchard. Still feeling a little uneasy in the head and stomach, he lay down like an invalid and tried to tempt himself with what had once been a great obsession. All sorts of things had gone into that tin: a red velvet-backed spider; a tall, thin seed case stacked with seeds like sheets of parchment; an orange bead of resin; a snakeskin; a bit of bone; feathers of various colours; soft silk cotton silk; the furry cape of a moth; a whorl of sepals; a leaf, diseased, freckled blue with fungus … Now, even though a lot of these things had grown faded or fallen to pieces, Sampath spread as much of his collection about him as he could, balancing the most precious items up and down his legs where they showed beautifully against his skin.
After about a month in the orchard, he had come to the conclusion that collecting was only worthwhile if you lived away from what you were collecting, not if you existed amidst all the bounty of your desire, not if you lived right where all you loved grew or crawled constantly by you. Anyway, how could you gather anything if you were wishing all the while that it would gather you up instead? Still, he felt nostalgic looking into his tin.
At this point he heard the noise of approaching protesters who accompanied the officials and Vermaji.
‘Babaji,’ shouted the CMO, the Brigadier and Vermaji, but it was impossible for any of them to speak, as there were so many disruptive people accompanying them. Bits and pieces of information at screaming pitch, garbled and incoherent, reached Sampath, whose bewildered mind would not have been able to make sense of it all even if they were straightforward in their speech. How he hated to be interrupted when he was intent upon something as interesting as the long-forgotten contents of his tin.
‘Alcohol’, ‘Cinema Monkey’, ‘guns’, ‘banning’, ‘scaring’, ‘never to return’, ‘safety for your honourable self’ … Spittle flew from mouths that were twisted into ugly expressions. The louder they were, the more hysterical they got. Sampath could see an unrecognizable look in their eyes. It came from no feeling he had ever seen in himself, and he had often run to the mirror so he could view how each of his emotions appeared upon his face. He did not think this method had worked entirely, for he was sure his face always altered in front of the mirror due to self-consciousness. But all the same, he was sure he could not have felt this emotion, which was stronger than the men who displayed it. What was it? It existed beyond a person and anything any person could be individually capable of. They shook with this gigantic force.
Sampath realized that he himself could speak out in a crowd only if he were happy; sadness or fright made him quiet. And anyway, he couldn’t think of what to say … He couldn’t think, and how could he respond when he didn’t understand what they were saying? He couldn’t understand, he couldn’t … No … At one point he thought he heard one of his own lines being shouted back at him. Something about an elephant and a banana. ‘Run when the elephant wants your banana.’ Or: ‘Eat a bun when the elephant wants your banana.’ But no, surely not. These words were not like anything he would say. They sounded like gunfire, hit him like bullets. Like an accusation of guilt. But he was not guilty. No, no, he could not understand … All he knew was that this was nothing good for him, or for the monkeys, or the orchard, the birds and insects … or even the grass that was being so thoughtlessly trampled underfoot. Sampath rubbed a geranium petal against his lower lip, staining it red. He rolled a flower up and down his cheeks, colouring them to match his lip. He rattled a tamarind pod from his tin and ate a seed. He ate a bit of dried fern too, and in a nervous fit he swallowed the diseased leaf and began to chew on the bone. He felt fiery rage, yet he was also close to tears. Tremors ran through him. These people were trampling on him. They were invading him, claiming him, polluting the air about him. They were dirtying him with their dirty minds. How could they bring their horrible thoughts and ideas to him? And how dare they? They were using him for their own purposes. He felt sick.
Turning sour, his stomach revolted and fired up in a terrible state of indigestion as if it contained a roiling mass of serpents, venomous and hissing in volcanic heat.
Sampath leant over the edge of his cot and threw up. The vomit burnt him like acid, leaving his insides corroded and empty. Only the black hole of horrible anticipation he had felt for the past few weeks was left intact.
When the visitors were finally made to leave by Mr Chawla, they retreated not quiet and ashamed-looking, but shouting even louder to claim that the Baba’s indigestion was the fault of whoever was arguing against them.
Sampath remembered his early rapture in the orchard. It had been a love affair: how he had bloomed and blossomed, how his joy, his playfulness had shone upon his face. He remembered, regarding the remains of his collection, how he had spent hours stringing necklaces of seed pods about himself. How he had put flowers behind his ears, sipped their nectar. He had unzipped pods with his teeth and prised open buds to uncover parasols of pink. The longer he spent in such activities, the more engrossed he had become. He had tickled his heel with the razor edge of wild grasses, rubbed his feet against a bit of bark to be overtaken by the same unbearable ecstasy that overtakes a cat rubbing itself against a tree trunk. He had squeezed the sticky gum from shrubs, cut into stems so the sap ran like milk and painted with the whiteness upon his legs. He had tapped anthers heavy with pollen so they spilled their rich yellow cargo on to his fingers and he had dusted this richness over his eyelids …