Gainda was wrong. Six weeks after Vishal’s arrival, Gwalabhai summoned him and said, ‘The sub-inspector came by, son. It seems the
police have some idea of your whereabouts. It’s time for you to move out of here.’
A man waited outside on a red Yamaha motorcycle with two big rear-view mirrors, like an insect’s antennae, on its steering handle. Gainda gave the boy a farewell hug and said, ‘If you see him, tell him you can punch out thirty-two teeth in one blow, and can suck the blood of a man like Coca-Cola!’ Then he laughed aloud—the veins in his thick neck jumping—and said, ‘And don’t fall at the feet of any old man wearing PT shoes!’
The man driving the motorcycle was not young. His crew-cut was grey. He wore a white dhoti and a blue shirt and his sock-less feet were encased in rough leather juttis. He said, ‘Hold on tight,’ and then sheathing his mouth and nose in a white bandanna, roared off in high gear, zigzagging through the busy streets, blaring a power horn worthy of a big truck. Soon they were out of the town and on a narrow country road, shooting past small villages. The man drove them deeper and deeper into the country, rattling and scudding over semi-tarred lanes, fields and throbbing tube wells on either side, meeting only, as the evening waned, the odd ploughman, lines of shuffling cattle, or a struggling bicycle. Soon the last tarred road was behind them. The dust was now a moving cloud, choking Vishal’s eyes and mouth and nostrils. He shut his eyelids tight and held on, feeling the machine’s heart move through his muscles, aware of the man’s holster digging into his wrist.
He was jolted out of his rhythmic trance when he realized the bike had come to a halt and the engine had died. He first heard the barking of dogs, in several registers; followed by the clucking of hens. In the supernatural light of dusk he saw that the farmhouse in front of him was made of naked brick and mud and dung. There were two ageing trees to one side, a shisham and a neem, both with spare branches and fraying leaves. Unusually the house was two-storeyed, and the small open windows were like watching eyes. On the flat roof, like a single hair, stood a television antenna.
All around the house, for several acres, were open fields, clear of
all vegetation. Beyond that, to one side, green blocks of sugarcane rustled. On the other side, much further away, the tree-line of the jungles was visible. It was not possible to sneak up to the house without being seen; at the same time, it was possible to make a run for the cover of the cane and the forest if the need arose.
There were five dogs, and they were all around the visitors, sniffing and assessing. The motorcycle driver gave the snuffling-growling canines a hard push away from himself, but Vishal found himself running his hands over their graceful brows and napes, feeling their rough warm tongues lick his skin. The tall old man who had emerged from the house in a white dhoti, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a turban around his head, holding a short stick, said, ‘The love of the beast! If they don’t love you, they won’t let you survive, and if they love you, they won’t leave you alone! My friend, you are in trouble!’
The motorcycle driver said, ‘Shall I leave?’
The old man said, ‘Unless you want a cup of tea.’
The driver wrapped his scarf around his face and said, ‘Old man, there is much better company in the world than yours! Keep him alive till some use is found of him!’
Vishal Tyagi was given a charpoy and bedding in a room on the first floor. There were nails on the wall for clothes to be hung. There were two other charpoys in the room, but they were propped on their side—this was clearly a transit space. In one corner stood a few sacks of grain, one of unshelled peanuts, and one of black-brown gur. On the wall next to the door was a big smudged mirror, which caught and reflected the sunlight blindingly during the day. On the other wall was a calendar with an image of a smiling Shiva, sitting on a tiger skin, hand resting on his trident, the Ganga flowing out of his matted hair. The calendar was four years old.
Placing the long-stemmed hammer under his pillow—for no
reason other than a vague sense of security—he looked out the window. The boy could see the forest-line. At night he heard the baying of wolves and jackals fill the air. From that day on, on nights that the moon was high, he would sit by the window for hours and imagine the animals moving in the thick forest cover. The old man said there was a time when tigers routinely wandered through, but now that men were mice, tigers too had become jackals.
As far as the boy could tell the only permanent inhabitant of the house was the old man. He cooked in a makeshift outdoor kitchen, much like his mother did, to keep the woodsmoke from filling the house. Each day, early in the morning, he put a dal to simmer in a burnt pot, and they all ate it, with raw onions and mango pickle, with parathas for breakfast, rice for lunch, and rotis for dinner.
There was also milk to be drunk, but it was cow’s milk and Vishal didn’t like it. He was used to Shanti’s thicker buffalo fare. It made even the tea taste wrong, and it took many days before he could adapt his palate to it. The old man told him he had it wrong: ‘Buffalo milk gives you flab, cow milk builds your muscle and bone.’ Then he looked at the boy’s huge shoulders and rolling biceps, and said, ‘Twice as big. You would have been twice as big, if you’d been drinking cow’s milk.’
Leave alone the milk, Vishal found the cow no solace either. He tried to get it to lick his head—kneeling in the dust and offering up his scalp—but the beast had no gift of empathy at all.
Instead, the boy found friendship with the dogs. He stroked their throats and caressed their flanks till they fell asleep; he fed them rotis soaked in dal with his own hands; and occasionally, when the old man was not looking, poured them some milk to drink. Soon they were licking his hands and face, and trailing him wherever he went. Then they began to clamber on to his charpoy in the night and array themselves around him in various ways. The boy loved it. Their warm bodies, their steady breathing, the sudden shake of their head and the whisk of their tails, bred in him the same sense of calm
that Shanti’s tongue baths once had. One morning, as he walked down the stairs covered in dog hair, the old man said in disgust, ‘It’s only a matter of time before you open your mouth to talk and begin to bark! Bowwwww!’
The days turned to weeks, and the occasional visitor transited through. The dogs would begin to bark and sprint as soon as anyone set foot in the penumbra of the open fields—on foot, or cycle, or motorbike. The old man would welcome him after his acerbic fashion. The stacked charpoy in Vishal’s room would be dropped on its feet and a heap of bedding unrolled. The protocol was to keep conversation down to the minimum. To the weather, the dogs, the food. Always, the transiting men carried firearms, but they remained unremarked, like routine articles of clothing.
One evening the dogs barked wildly as the motorcycle man with the white bandanna arrived. Gruffly, he said, ‘Gwalabhai wants to know if the boy is okay.’
The old man cackled and said, ‘Tell him he is doing very well, and is growing bigger and tougher on cow’s milk and dog hair! Next time he will crack open six skulls with his hammer!’
The motorcycle man ignored him and continued, ‘Gwalabhai says the police has put a sum of twenty-five thousand rupees on his head. His uncle is baying for revenge and is trying to target Rajbir.’
Vishal said, ‘So what should I do?’
‘Do?’ snorted the motorcycle rider. ‘Do nothing! Plunder the old man’s dal, and pull at your small willy! You don’t need any help with that, do you?’
Later, the old man said, ‘He puts on arrogance because he is actually Guruji’s uncle—his mother’s brother. But in reality he’s like the rest of us, only a disciple.’
Vishal said, ‘Have you ever met Guruji?’
The old man laughed. ‘What do I look to you? A chick hatched yesterday? I knew him before he was Guruji, and I knew him before he was Donullia! His father was my cousin. I knew him before he had learnt to stand up and piss!’
As he saw the boy assessing the information, he quickly added, ‘But now I am like all of you—merely a disciple. Just because you knew the foal before he could walk doesn’t mean that you will still outrun it when it’s a horse! Today he’s my Guruji too, and we all live on his generosity and mercy.’
Vishal said, ‘When did you last see him?’
The old man said, ‘Just the night before you arrived.’
Vishal looked at him sceptically. He was at peace in this lonely farmhouse—especially with the dogs—but his arms had begun to ache with inaction. Near the tube well he had found a smooth, heavy rock to use as a shot and spent long hours twirling and hurling it, but he found himself missing that moment of high when his hammer had smashed through the skulls of those three bastards. Never in his life had he felt more pure, more powerful, as he had then. Even as he was fleeing to Donullia Gujjar’s realm, his head was bursting not with the prospect of escape but with the excitement of meeting the famed brigand and being commissioned into action.
But the weeks had rolled into months and all he had done was strain different charpoys, eat heaps of dal, sleep with the dogs, take long excursions into the cane fields, and hear endless accounts of the man who had a thousand faces. Maybe Gainda was right: maybe there was no Donullia Gujjar any more. He was merely kept alive by those who needed his protective shield.
The two of them were sitting in the front yard—on charpoys opposite each other, their feet tucked under them. Above, the sky was bursting with stars, and every few minutes one left its mooring and burnt a path through the dark. It was late September and the breeze had begun to sharpen its cold teeth. The moon was slow in rising, but the forest was beginning to howl and move.
The boy said, ‘So when did he die?’
A beedi in his mouth, the old man said, ‘Who?’
‘Guruji.’
The old man pulled the beedi out of his mouth and said, ‘You should stop sleeping with those dogs. You are beginning to bark. When you have lived long enough you will realize it is not a good idea to talk loosely about Donullia Gujjar! You will see him when he wants to see you, not when you want to see him! At this moment, of course, he is more alive than you and me! But remember, even when he is dead he will still be alive!’
W
ith his days so barren, Vishal Tyagi’s dreaming had acquired a kaleidoscopic fecundity. Every morning he woke with the residue of busy images floating in his head. Most days he liked the dreams. They were full of action—double-barrelled guns, flying hammers, galloping horses, baying dogs, running policemen, a moving shadow. Having woken, he would scrunch his eyes shut again, in a futile attempt at recapturing the storyline. Then he would pull out his slim-stemmed hammer from under the pillow, caress it, and know that his life fell in that unknown space between dreams and reality, and he did not have the tools to make any sense of it.
One night, as he lay buried in the depths of his quilt, amid the slumbering dogs, the dream became unusually vivid and menacing. He found himself suddenly surrounded in the dark by numberless shadows. The shadows had no faces but had lines of guns sticking out of them. There were two by the door, barring escape. And there were two flanking the window, which was now open with the moon shining through. In the middle of the room was a huge shadow whose head seemed to go through the ceiling, and who had shoulders that could have hurled the shot into the next country and beyond. Next to its thick legs was a lumpy one—as if it were sitting on a chair.
Soon the boy realized there were more shadows than he’d first thought—they were clinging to the walls and filling the corners. This was a dream unlike any he had ever had. More vivid, more sinister. Suddenly he began to hear mewling sounds. The dogs were burrowing into him, pushing themselves under the bedding, into his feet and thighs. This too was odd. He didn’t think his dreams had ever had a soundtrack.
Okay, he thought to himself, if this was going to be about battle, he’d better get on with it. He pulled his hand out of the warm quilt and reached under his pillow, and in that very instant he found both his wrists grabbed and held tight. In the last couple of years Vishal had not met anyone who could physically match him or contain him, but now no matter how much he flexed his arms, they were trapped in a stronger grip. It had something to do with the position. Someone very heavy was leaning his whole weight down onto his wrists, pinning them to the bed. It was a dream, after all—unlikely things were allowed.
The boy relaxed, letting the struggle drain out of him, and in the next moment his dream exploded in a flash of blinding light. Someone was shining a powerful torch into his eyes, and he suddenly knew he was not in a dream but awake, and he was in deep trouble because the police had found him, and all the shadows looming around the room had come to pick him up. With a loud roar he snapped his wrists free and banged the torch away from his face and jumped up from the bed, scattering the quilt and dogs, but before he had found his feet something slammed him hard on his chest and he was flung back onto the bed, the breath knocked clean out of him, the mad baying and whining of the dogs ringing all around.
When his head cleared the light was still on his face, and the whimpering of the dogs had gone into diminuendo. A low gravelly voice said, ‘So, boy, you are very strong, are you? And did you really hammer in the skulls of three men all by yourself?’ Vishal knew
that his uncle Joginder was most probably in the room too, and the police were going to bump him off once they had his confession. When he said nothing, the low voice asked, ‘Did Gwala say he had no tongue?’ The shadow in the middle of the room, with his head going through the roof, said with a chuckle, ‘Most tongues quickly slip down into the stomach in your presence, don’t they!’
Vishal exclaimed, ‘Guruji!’
The voice from the roof said, ‘He has a tongue, and it says the right things.’
The torchlight had dipped from his eyes a little and Vishal could once again see the shadow lines. Yes, there was someone sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, next to the huge silhouette. In a low gruff voice it said, ‘You want to work for the people? You want to fight for justice? You want to swing your hammer to help the poor?’