6

Various parts of the jungle were being surveyed. In the forest of Bomairburu, three krosh from the kachari, one of our amins, Ramchandra Singh, had been stationed for some time on this account. That morning, word came that Ramchandra Singh had, two or three days ago, suddenly gone mad.

On hearing the news, I immediately took some men and went there. The forest of Bomairburu was not especially dense; it was a wide, undulating plain dotted here and there with close-packed thickets. Now and then one came upon great trees, from whose branches thin, rope-like vines dangled, as though they were rigging tied to the high masts of a ship. The Bomairburu forest was completely devoid of human habitation.

Away from the dense growth of trees, in the middle of an open field, stood two small huts thatched with kash grass. One was slightly larger; this was where Ramchandra the amin stayed. In the smaller one beside it lived his peon, Asrafi Tindel. Ramchandra was lying on his wooden cot, his eyes shut. Seeing us, he sat up with a start. I asked, ‘What is it, Ramchandra? How are you?’

Ramchandra brought his palms together in a namaskar and remained silent.

But it was Asrafi Tindel who answered my question. He said, ‘Babu, it’s a most astonishing thing. You won’t believe it when you hear it. I would have gone to the kachari myself to report it, but how could I leave Amin-babu behind? This is what happened. For the last few days, Amin-babu has been saying that a dog has been coming at night and disturbing him terribly. I sleep in this small hut, and Amin-babu sleeps in this one here. This went on for two or three days. Every day he would say, “Where does this white dog come from at night? I spread my bedding on the cot to sleep, and the dog comes and whimpers and whimpers underneath it. It tries to brush up against me.” I’d hear him, but I didn’t pay it much mind. Then, four days ago, late in the night, he said, “Asrafi, come out quickly, the dog is here. I’ve grabbed it by the tail. Bring a stick!”

‘I woke up, grabbed a stick and a lamp, and as I was rushing over—you won’t believe this, Huzoor, but I wouldn’t dare tell you a lie—I saw a girl emerge from the hut and walk off towards the jungle. At first I was completely taken aback. Then I went inside and found Amin-babu fumbling around on his bedding, searching for the matches. He said, “Did you see the dog?”

‘I said, “What dog, Babu? It was a girl who just went out!”

‘He said, “You fool, are you being impudent with me? Who would come into this jungle in the middle of the night? It was a dog! I had a firm grip on its tail, I even felt its long ears brush against my skin. It had crawled under the cot and was whimpering. Have you taken to drink, have you? I’ll report you to headquarters!”

‘The following night I made sure to stay awake until very late. Just as I had drifted off for a moment, Amin-babu called out. I quickly ran out and got as far as the door of my own hut when I saw a girl walking along the northern wall of his hut, heading for the jungle. That very instant, Huzoor, I plunged into the jungle myself. In such a short time, where could she hide? How far could she have gone? Especially since we survey this jungle—we know its every nook and cranny. I searched and searched, Babu, but there was no trace of her anywhere. Finally, I started to feel suspicious. I held my lamp to the ground and saw that there were no footprints at all, save for the marks of my own nagra shoes.’

‘I didn’t mention any of this to Amin-babu that day. We are but two souls alone in this fearsome jungle, Huzoor. A shiver of fear ran down my spine. And besides, I had heard that the Bomairburu jungle had something of a bad reputation. I’d heard from my grandfather that on the hill of Bomairburu—you can see that banyan tree in the distance—he was once returning from Purnia on horseback on a moonlit night with the money from a sale of black lentils. When he reached the foot of that banyan, he saw a group of beautiful young girls dancing in the moonlight, holding hands. Around here they call them “damabanu”—a kind of jinn or fairy that lives in lonely forests. If they catch a man unawares, they will kill him.

‘Huzoor, the very next night, I myself stayed in Amin-babu’s tent and kept watch all night. I stayed awake doing the calculations for the survey plots. Perhaps a drowsiness had come over me in the last watch of the night when I suddenly heard a sound nearby and lifted my head to look. I saw Amin-sahib sleeping on his cot, and something had crawled underneath it. As I raised my head to see what was under the cot, I gave a start. In the half-light and shadow, my first thought was that a girl was huddled under the cot, looking at me with a smile on her face. I saw it clearly, Huzoor, I can swear it on your feet. I even distinctly saw the thick mass of black hair on her head. The lantern was where I had been sitting doing my accounts, six or seven cubits away. Just as I reached for the lantern to get a better look, some creature shot out from under the cot and fled. The light from the lantern fell at an angle near the door, and in that light I saw a large dog—but it was white from head to tail, Huzoor, not a speck of black on its body.

‘Amin-sahib woke up and said, “What? What is it?” I said, “Oh, it’s nothing. A jackal or a dog got into the hut.” Amin-sahib said, “A dog? What kind of dog?” I told him, “A white dog.” Amin-sahib said, in what seemed a tone of disappointment, “Are you sure you saw white? Not black?” I said, “No, it was white, Huzoor.”

‘I won’t deny I was a little surprised—I couldn’t understand what advantage it would be to Amin-babu if the dog had been black instead of white. He fell asleep, but I felt such a sense of fear and unease that I could not close my eyes for a second. Very early in the morning, I had the idea to properly search under the cot, and there I found a lock of black hair. I have kept it, Huzoor, here it is. It is the hair from a woman’s head! Where did this hair come from? Such beautifully soft, jet-black hair. A dog—especially a white dog—does not have hair so long, soft and black. That was last Sunday, three days ago. For these three days, Amin-sahib has been in a state of near madness. I’m afraid, Huzoor—now I can only wonder if it is my turn.’

The story was certainly of the fantastical sort. Examining the lock of hair he held out did not enlighten me further. That it was a woman’s hair, of this I too had no doubt. Asrafi Tindel was a young man, and everyone agreed unanimously that he did not indulge in drink or drugs.

In that desolate plain of scrub and forest, the amin’s was the only tent. The nearest human settlement was Labtulia, six miles away. From where could a woman have come, so late at night—especially when fear of tigers and wild boars kept people from travelling these lonely forest paths after dusk? If one were to accept Asrafi Tindel’s story as true, then the matter was deeply mysterious. Or perhaps, in this godforsaken country, in these uninhabited jungles and vast, empty plains, the twentieth century had not only failed to find a way in—it seemed the nineteenth had not either. These regions were still shrouded in the mysterious darkness of a past age. Here, anything was possible.

We struck the tent and brought Ramchandra the amin and Asrafi Tindel back to the main kachari. Ramchandra’s condition grew worse day by day, until he descended into sheer madness. He would scream all night, rave, and sing. I had a doctor brought in to see him, but nothing worked. Finally, one of his older brothers came and took him away.

There is an epilogue to this incident; and though it took place seven or eight months after the events I have just described, I shall relate it here.

Six months after this affair, around the month of Chaitra, two men came to see me at the kachari. One was an old man, no less than sixty or sixty-five, the other his son, aged twenty or twenty-two. They were from the district of Ballia and had come here to lease a chari-mahal—that is, they wished to pay a fee to graze their cattle and buffaloes in our jungles.

All the other grazing lands had already been leased out, but the Bomairburu jungle was still lying vacant; I arranged to lease it to them. One day the old man took his son and went to inspect the area. He returned very pleased. ‘Such tall grass, Huzoor,’ he said, ‘a very fine jungle. We would never have got such a forest were it not for your kindness.’

The story of Ramchandra and Asrafi Tindel was not in my mind then, and even if it had been, I probably would not have told the old man. For if he had taken fright and run off, it would have meant a loss for the estate. None of the local people would go near that jungle lease, not after what had happened to Ramchandra the amin.

About a month later, at the beginning of Baishakh, the old man appeared one day at the kachari. He was in a state of high fury, and behind him stood his son, looking utterly wretched.

‘What is the matter?’ I asked.

Trembling with rage, the old man said, ‘I’ve brought this monkey to your court, Huzoor. You must take off your shoe and give him twenty-five lashes so he learns his lesson.’

‘But what has happened?’

‘I am ashamed to say it in your presence, Huzoor. This monkey has been going to the bad ever since he came here. For the last seven or eight days I have been noticing—it shames me to say it, Huzoor—a woman frequently leaving his room. We have only one small hut, eight cubits long and thatched with grass, where he and I both sleep. It’s no easy thing to pull the wool over my eyes. When I’d seen it for two days, I questioned him, and he acted as if he’d just fallen out of a tree, Huzoor. He said, “What? I don’t know anything about it!” When I saw it for another two days, I gave him a sound thrashing. A son going bad right before my eyes? But even after that I saw it—just the night before last, Huzoor—and so I’ve brought him to your court. Huzoor, you must discipline him.’

Suddenly, the affair of Ramchandra the amin came back to my mind. I asked, ‘At what time of night did you see this?’

‘It’s nearly always towards the end of the night, Huzoor. When there are only one or two gharis of night left.’

‘Are you sure you saw a woman?’

‘Huzoor, my eyes are not so weak yet. It was certainly a woman, and young too. Some days she wears a plain white sari, other days red, other days black. One day, as soon as the woman left, I followed her. She vanished somewhere in the kash jungle, I couldn’t find a trace. When I came back, my son was pretending to be deep in sleep, but when I called him he sat up with a start, as if he’d just woken up. I realised the only cure for this disease is the kachari, and so I have come to you, Huzoor—’

I took the boy aside and asked him, ‘What is all this I’m hearing about you?’

The boy fell and clasped my feet. ‘Please believe me, Huzoor. I know nothing about this, not a single word. I spend the whole day grazing buffaloes in the jungle—at night I sleep like the dead. I don’t wake up until morning. I wouldn’t even be aware if the hut caught fire.’

I said, ‘You’ve never seen anything enter the hut?’

‘No, Huzoor. When I’m asleep, I’m dead to the world.’

Nothing more was said on the matter. The old man was very pleased; he assumed that by taking his son aside I had given him a stern reprimand. About fifteen days later, the boy came to see me. He said, ‘Huzoor, there is something I must ask. That time when I came to the kachari with my father, why did you ask me if I had ever seen anything entering the hut?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Huzoor, I’ve become a very light sleeper lately—whether because of the way my father acts, or for some other reason, I have this fear in my mind. For the last few days, I’ve been noticing that a white dog comes at night from somewhere. It comes very late. Some nights I wake up and see it was somewhere near my bed—the moment I stir, it runs away. Some nights it flees the moment I wake up. Somehow, it knows the instant I am awake. I’ve seen this happen for several nights—but last night, Huzoor, something happened. Bapji doesn’t know—I’ve come to tell you in secret. I woke up late last night and saw that the dog—I hadn’t seen it enter—was quietly leaving the hut. There’s a gap the size of a window in the kash-grass wall on that side. After the dog went out—perhaps in the time it takes to blink—I looked out through the window in front of me and saw a woman walk past it and disappear into the jungle behind the hut. I ran outside at once, but there was nothing there. I haven’t told my father; the old man was sleeping. I don’t understand what is happening, Huzoor.’

I reassured him—it was nothing, a trick of the eyes. I told him that if they were afraid to stay there, they could come and sleep at the kachari. The boy, perhaps a little ashamed of his own lack of courage, went away. But my own unease did not subside. I decided that if I heard anything more, I would send two sepoys from the kachari to sleep there with them at night.

Even then, I did not understand how grave the matter was. The calamity struck with utter suddenness, and in a most unexpected way.

Three days later.

I had just risen from bed in the morning when I received the news that the old leaseholder’s son had died in the Bomairburu jungle the previous night. We set off at once on horseback. When we arrived, we saw that the boy’s body was still lying in the jungle of kash and bon-jhau behind the hut where they lived. His face was marked by a look of dreadful fear and terror—as if he had died from the shock of seeing some awful apparition. I heard from the old man that he had woken in the last watch of the night and, not finding his son in his bed, had immediately lit a lantern and begun to search—but he had not found the body until dawn. It seemed the boy had suddenly got out of bed and followed something into the forest, for a heavy stick and a lantern were found lying near the body. What he might have been following, alone in the forest at night, was hard to say. On the soft, sandy soil, there were no footprints other than the boy’s—neither of man nor of beast. There were no signs of injury on the body either. This mysterious affair of the Bomairburu jungle was never solved. The police came, and left, unable to do anything. The incident created such a terror in the hearts of the people that no one would go into that area long before evening fell. For some days it reached a point where, lying alone in my room at the kachari, I would look out at the dazzling white, shadowless, indifferent, and lonely moonlit night, and my heart would tremble with an unknown dread. I felt like fleeing to Calcutta; these places were not good. Their moon-drenched nightscape was like the ogress queen of a fairytale, who would lure you to your doom and kill you. It was as if these lands were not meant for human habitation at all, but were the kingdom of mysterious, unearthly beings who had lived there for ages and who did not take kindly to this sudden, unauthorised trespass into their secret domain. And given the chance, they would not fail to take their revenge.

The day I first met Raju Pande is still quite clear in my mind. I was sitting at the kachari, busy with my work, when a fair, handsome Brahmin stood before me with a namaskar. His age must have been fifty-five or fifty-six, but it would be a mistake to call him old, for many young men in Bengal did not possess a body as well-formed as his. He had a tilak on his forehead, a white chador over his shoulders, and a small bundle in his hand.

In answer to my questions, the man said he had come from very far away and wished to take a lease on some land here to cultivate. He was extremely poor and had no ability to pay the customary salami for the land; could I arrange to give him a small plot on a half-share basis with the estate?

There is a type of person who does not know how to say much about himself, but one look at his face and you feel that he is truly in great distress. Looking at Raju Pande, it seemed to me that he had come all this way from the Pargana of Dharampur with great hopes for land. If he did not get any, he would surely turn back without another word, but he would return utterly heartbroken and bereft of hope.

I arranged to give Raju two bighas of land in the dense jungle north of the Labtulia wilderness, practically for free. I told him he could clear the jungle and cultivate it; for the first two years nothing would be required, and from the third year he would have to pay a rent of four annas per bigha. Little did I know then what a strange sort of man I was settling on the estate!

Raju came in the month of Bhadra or Ashwin, and having received the land, he left. Amidst my many tasks, I forgot about him completely. The following year, towards the end of winter, I was returning from the Labtulia kachari when I suddenly saw someone sitting under a tree, reading a book. Seeing me, the man closed his book and quickly stood up. I recognised him: it was Raju Pande. But after I had given him the land last year, the man had not once shown his face at the kachari. What was the meaning of this? I said, ‘What, Raju Pande, you’re still here? I thought you had probably abandoned the land and left. Haven’t you been farming?’

I saw that Raju’s face had gone pale with fear. He stammered and said, ‘Yes, Huzoor—some farming—this year, Huzoor—’

I felt a surge of anger. These sorts of people had sweet tongues; they were adept at cheating you while winning you over with flattery. I said, ‘For the past year and a half, not a hair on your head has been seen! You’re happily cheating the estate and bringing in the harvest—I suppose you’ve forgotten the agreement to give the kachari its share?’

Raju now raised his large, astonished eyes to my face and said, ‘Harvest, Huzoor? But it never occurred to me that I had to share that—it’s only china-grass seed—’

I didn’t believe him. I said, ‘You’ve been eating china-grass seed for the last six months? No other crops? Why didn’t you plant maize?’

‘No, Huzoor, the jungle is full of gajar trees. I’m just one man, I couldn’t find the courage. I’ve prepared fifteen kathas of land with great difficulty. Please come, Huzoor, be so gracious as to honour my home with the dust of your feet.’

I followed Raju. The jungle was so dense in places that my horse had trouble getting through. After some distance, we came to a circular clearing in the forest, about a bigha in size. In the middle were two low, small huts made of wild grass. Raju lived in one; in the other, the harvest from his field was stored. There were no sacks or bags; piled up on the low, earthen floor was a mound of china-grass seed. I said, ‘Raju, I never knew you were so lazy and idle. In a year and a half, you couldn’t clear two bighas of jungle?’

Raju said timidly, ‘There’s so little time, Huzoor!’

‘Why? What do you do all day?’

Raju remained silent, a shy look on his face. The inside of his hut was all but bare of possessions. Apart from a single lota, no other vessel was to be seen. It was a large lota; in it he cooked his rice. Or rather, not rice, but the seeds of cheena grass. When one eats boiled cheena seeds served on fresh shal leaves, what need is there for utensils? For water, there was a kundi—a small pool—close by. What more could one want?

But in one corner of the hut, a small, black stone image of Radha-Krishna, smeared with vermilion, told me that Raju was a man of devotion. He had adorned a little stone altar with wildflowers from the forest, and beside it lay a couple of punthis and books. This, then, was what he meant by having no time—he must spend his whole day occupied with worship and rituals. When, I wondered, did he ever find the time to farm?

And so I began to understand Raju for the first time.

Raju Pande was well-versed in Hindi, and knew a little Sanskrit as well. He was always reading. Sometimes, in his leisure, he would sit beneath a tree with a Hindi book open before him—though most of the time he would simply sit in silence, gazing at the distant sky and hills. One day, I saw him sitting with a small notebook, writing something with a reed pen. What was this? Did Pande-ji write poetry, too? But he was such a shy, quiet, reserved man that it was exceedingly difficult to draw anything out of him. He was unwilling to say a single word about himself.

One day I asked him, “Pande-ji, who else is in your family at home?”

“They are all there, Huzoor. My three sons, two girls, my widowed sister.”

“How do they manage?”

Raju raised a hand towards the heavens. “Bhagwan is seeing them through. It’s to make sure they have a couple of meals to eat that I’ve come to take refuge with you, Huzoor, and taken this land. If I can just get the land ready—”

But could such a large family survive on the harvest of two bighas of land? And it wasn’t as if he was straining every nerve to do even that.

At first, Raju did not reply. Then he said, “Life is so very short, Huzoor. When I go to clear the jungle, so many thoughts come to me, and I sit and ponder. This forest you see—it is a blessed place. For ages untold, flowers have bloomed and birds have called, and mingling with the wind, the gods set foot on the earth here. Where there is greed for money, the business of debt and repayment, the very air grows poisoned. The gods do not dwell there. And so, the moment I take up my axe or sickle, the gods come and snatch it from my hands—they whisper things in my ear that turn my mind far away from worldly wealth.”

Raju, I saw, was a poet, and a philosopher, too.

“But Raju,” I said, “the gods don’t tell you not to send money home, to let your children starve. That’s just talk, Raju. Get to work. Or I shall take the land away.”

Several more months passed. I would visit Raju’s plot from time to time. I grew to like him a great deal. How he managed to live day after day, all alone in that small grass hut in the deep, silent jungle of Lobtulia’s grasslands, I could not imagine.

Raju was a man of truly sattvic nature. He had managed to grow no other crop besides the cheena grass. For seven or eight months, he had been living on its grains with a smile on his face. He saw no one, had no one to talk to, but this caused him no trouble at all; he was quite content. Whenever I passed by his land in the afternoon, I would see him working in the fields under the midday sun. In the evenings, I would often see him sitting quietly under the haritaki tree—sometimes with his notebook in hand, sometimes without.

One day I said to him, “Raju, I’m giving you some more land. Farm more, or your family at home will die of hunger!” Raju was a calm man; it never took much effort to make him understand something. He took the land, it is true, but in the next five or six months, he failed to clear it. He would wake in the morning and his prayers and Gita reading would take until ten o’clock, after which he would head out to work. After working for a couple of hours, he would cook and eat, then labour for the whole afternoon until five. Then he would sit alone under his tree, lost in his own thoughts. In the evening, there were prayers and rites to be performed again.

That year, Raju grew some maize. He didn’t eat any of it himself, but sent it all back to his village; his eldest son came to fetch it. The boy came to see me at the estate office, and I gave him a scolding. “Leaving your old father alone in this jungle while you live it up at home—aren’t you ashamed? Why don’t you try to earn a living for yourselves?”

That year, a terrible cholera epidemic broke out in the Shuormari Basti, and the news reached me at the estate office. Shuormari was not within our jurisdiction; it was eight or ten kosh away, on the banks of the Kushi and Kalbaliya rivers. So many people were dying each day that the waters of the Kushi were constantly carrying floating corpses; there were no arrangements for cremation. One day, I heard that Raju Pande had gone there to practise medicine. I had not known that Raju Pande was a physician. I had, however, dabbled in homoeopathic remedies for some time, and I thought I would see if I could be of some use in a place so devoid of doctors and kavirajes. Many others from the estate office went with me. When we reached the village, I met Raju Pande. With a small cloth bag of roots, barks, and herbs, he was going from house to house, seeing patients. He greeted me with a namaskar and said, “Huzoor, your mercy is great. Now that you have come, perhaps these people will be saved.” He made it seem as though I were the district’s Civil Surgeon, or Doctor Goodeve Chuckerbutty himself. He was the one who took me with him, guiding me from house to house to see the sick of the village.

Raju was giving out his medicines, as I saw, entirely on credit. The arrangement, apparently, was that they would pay him if they recovered. What a dreadful vision of poverty in hut after hut! They were all houses of tile or thatch, tiny rooms with no windows, where no light or air could enter. In almost every home there were one or two patients, lying on filthy bedding on the floor. No doctor, no medicine, no proper food for the sick. Raju, of course, was doing his best; he went to every patient, whether they had called for him or not, and administered his herbal remedies. I heard he had even stayed up the entire previous night, tending to a small sick boy at his bedside. But the plague showed no sign of abating; if anything, it was spreading.

Raju called me over and led me to a house. It was a single thatched room. On the floor, a patient lay on a mat of palm leaves; he was no younger than fifty. A girl of seventeen or eighteen sat in the doorway, weeping her heart out. Raju tried to comfort her. “Don’t cry, child. The Huzoor is here. There’s nothing to fear now, he will be cured.”

I was deeply embarrassed, remembering my own powerlessness. I asked if the girl was the patient’s daughter.

“No, Huzoor, she is his wife. The girl has no one else in the world. Her widowed mother died after marrying her off. You must save him, Huzoor, or the girl will be left destitute.”

I was about to reply to Raju when my eyes fell on a wooden shelf on the wall at the head of the patient’s bed, about three hands up from the floor. On the shelf sat an uncovered stone bowl containing two portions of panta-bhat. A dozen or so flies were sitting on the rice. What a disaster! Here was a patient with the dreaded Asiatic cholera, and less than three arm’s-lengths away from him was a bowl of rice, left uncovered!

After a whole day of nursing the patient, the poor, hungry girl would likely take down the stone bowl and sit down to eagerly eat her fermented rice with salt and chillies! Poisoned food, with the seed of a cruel death in every mouthful. Looking at the girl’s simple, tear-filled eyes, I shuddered. I told Raju, “Tell her to throw that rice away. Who keeps food in this room!”

At the suggestion that she throw away the rice, the girl looked up at our faces in bewilderment. Why would she throw away rice? What would she eat, then? The family at the ojha’s house had given her those two portions to eat last night!

I remembered that in this region rice was considered a delicacy, the way we in our country might think of luchi or pulao. But I spoke in a rather stern tone. “Get up right now and throw that rice away first!”

Frightened, the girl got up and threw the rice from the bowl away.

Her husband could not be saved. Shortly after evening fell, the old man breathed his last. The girl’s weeping was inconsolable. And Raju, alongside her, cried his heart out.

Raju took me to another house. It belonged to a distant brother-in-law of his. When Raju had first arrived, this was the house he had stayed in. He had eaten his meals here. Now, a mother and her son both had cholera. They were in adjacent rooms, the one frantic to see the other, and the other just as frantic to see the one. The boy was a small child of seven or eight.

The boy died first. The mother was not told. With my homoeopathic medicine, her condition began to improve steadily. But she kept asking for news of her son. Why couldn’t she hear a sound from his room? How was he?

We told her, “He has been given a sleeping draught. He’s sleeping.”

Secretly, the boy’s body was removed from the room.

The people of the village knew nothing at all about the rules of health. There was a single pond, and in that same pond they washed their clothes and bathed. I could not make them understand that bathing in the water was the same as drinking it. So many people had abandoned so many others and fled. In one house I saw a patient who had no one left to care for him. The sick man was a ghar-jamai, a son-in-law living in his wife’s family home; his wife had died the year before. And yet, whether because his condition was so bad or for some other reason, his in-laws had deserted him. Raju began to nurse him day and night. I arranged for his medicines. In the end, the man survived. He had, I understood, much sorrow yet to endure as a dependent in his wife’s family home.

Seeing Raju take out his pouch and count his total earnings from his medical practice, I asked, “How much did you make, Raju?”

He counted it all up and said, “One rupee and three annas.”

And he was quite pleased with this. The people of this region do not easily see the face of a single paisa; a earning of one rupee and three annas is not to be scoffed at here! And for the last fifteen or sixteen days, what labours had Raju undertaken—he had been the doctor, he had been the nurse.

Late that night, the sound of weeping arose from the village. Another one had died. There was no sleep that night. Many of the villagers were not sleeping either; they had lit large fires of wood before their homes, and were burning sulphur and sitting huddled in circles, talking. There was no other topic on their lips but stories of the sickness, news of death—on every face, the signs of fear and terror were manifest. Whose turn would be next?

In the depths of the night, we received news that the newly-widowed girl from earlier in the day had contracted cholera. I went and found her lying in the cowshed of a house next to her husband’s. She had been too afraid to come and lie in her own home, yet no one had given her shelter because she had touched a cholera patient. In one corner of the cowshed, an old gunny-sack had been spread over a few bundles of wheat straw, and on this the girl lay, writhing. Raju and I tried desperately to save the unfortunate soul. But a lantern, a little water—these could not be found anywhere. No one would even peep in to look at her. Such a terror had been created that if anyone got cholera, people would not go within a mile of them.

The night brightened into day.

Raju had a fine sense of the pulse. He felt her wrist and said, “Huzoor, the signs are not good.”

What more could I do? I was no doctor. If she could have been given a saline drip it might have helped, but there was no such doctor anywhere in this region.

At nine in the morning, the girl died.

Had we not been there, it is doubtful anyone would have come to carry her body out. After much persuasion and pleading on our part, two Ahir peasants brought a bamboo pole and, with its help, pushed and prodded the body towards the river.

Raju said, “She has been delivered, Huzoor. A widow, so young—what would she have eaten? Who would have looked after her?”

“Your land is very cruel, Raju,” I said.

A sorrow remained in my heart: that I had not let her eat her two portions of rice, which she had desired so much.

In the silent afternoons, the distant hills and forests of Mahalikh-harup looked mysterious and full of wonder. How many times had I thought of going and exploring the hills, but I had never found the time. I had heard that the Mahalikh-harup hills were impenetrable and densely forested, a haunt of king cobras, filled with junglefowl, rare wild chrysanthemums, and great bear-thickets. Because there was no water on the heights and, especially, because of the dread king cobras, even the woodcutters of the region never went there.

Visible on the horizon like a long blue line, these hills and forests brought so many dreams to mind—in the afternoons, in the evenings. For some time now, this whole region had begun to seem to me like a fairyland. Its moonlight, its woodlands, its solitude, its silent mystery, its beauty, its people, the calls of its birds, the splendour of its wild flowers—all of it seemed wondrous, bringing a deep peace and joy to my heart that I had never found anywhere else in my life. And above all this, what seemed most wondrous was that range of hills, Mahalikh-harup, and the border of the Mohanpura Reserve Forest. What a world of beauty they conjured up at noon, in the late afternoon, on a moonlit night! What pensive, melancholy thoughts they stirred in the soul—

One day I set out, determined to see the hills. After nine miles on horseback, I took the path that ran between two ranges of hills. The slopes on both sides were covered in forest. The path wound its way through dense, varied thickets and copses, rising and falling, with small mountain streams here and there flowing over beds of stone. I did not see any wild chrysanthemums in bloom, for it was autumn, not their season, but what a profusion of wild shephali trees everywhere in the woods, their blossoms scattered like popped rice beneath the trees, on the boulders, on the stony banks of the streams. And so many other kinds of wildflowers had bloomed at the end of the rains: flowering saptaparni groves, arjun and pial trees, flowers of all kinds of creepers and orchids—the perfumes of many flowers mingled together, intoxicating a man with their scent, as they did the bees.

I had been here for so long, and yet this land of beauty had remained unknown to me. I had regarded the forests and hills of Mahalikh-harup with fear from a distance—there were tigers, there were snakes, the number of bears was said to be beyond counting. And yet, I had not seen a single bear-thicket so far! People do exaggerate.

Gradually, the forest on either side of the path grew denser, as if pressing in from both sides. The branches of great trees created a canopy over the path. The trunks of the trees were dark and tightly packed, and beneath them grew only ferns of various kinds, and here and there, the saplings of larger trees. Looking ahead, I saw the path climbing steeply upwards, the forest growing ever darker. Ahead was a soaring peak, and the wild trees just below its bare summit looked from this distance like small clumps of sheora bushes. The beauty of this place was sublime, grave. I climbed a good way up the mountain along the path, then it dipped down again. After descending some way, I tied my horse under a pial tree and sat down on a slab of rock—my aim was to give my weary horse a short rest.

That towering peak had suddenly moved to my left; I had noticed this amusing feature of mountain regions many times. You never knew how a turn would, in the space of half a string’s length of road, create two completely different vistas; something I had thought was due north, I would suddenly see had swung around to the west before I had gone very far.

I sat in silence for a long time. Nearby, somewhere in the woods, the murmur of a stream only deepened the profound stillness of the forest encircled by those peaks. All around me were high mountain summits, and above them, the blue sky of autumn. For how many ages had this forest, these hills, been just like this. When the ancient Aryans, crossing the Khyber Pass, first entered the land of the five rivers, this forest was just as it is now. On the night that the Buddha, leaving behind his newly-wed young wife, secretly renounced his home, these mountain peaks would have smiled in the deep moonlight just as they do today. On the day the poet Valmiki, in his leaf hut on the banks of the Tamasa, intent on writing the Ramayana, was startled from his work to see the sun resting on the crest of the western peaks, the shadows of crimson clouds falling on the dark waters of the river, the ashram’s deer returning to the hermitage—on that day, too, the peaks of Mahalikh-harup had been anointed with the last crimson light of the western horizon, just as they were slowly becoming before my eyes now. All those ages ago, on the day Chandragupta first ascended the throne; when the Greek king Heliodorus erected his Garuda-pillar; on the day the princess Sanyukta placed the garland around the statue of Prithviraj in the swayamvar hall; on the night the luckless Dara, defeated in the Battle of Samugarh, fled secretly from Agra to Delhi; on the day Chaitanya held his sankirtan in the house of Srivas; on the day the Battle of Plassey was fought—that peak of Mahalikh-harup, this forest, were all exactly like this. Who lived in these jungles then? In a village not far from the forest, I had seen just a few thatched huts, a contraption like a husking-pedal made of two wooden blocks for crushing mahua seeds to extract oil, and I had seen an old woman, she must have been eighty or ninety, her hair like twists of jute fibre, her skin flaking like chalk, sitting in the sun, perhaps picking lice from her hair—like Bharatchandra’s Annapurna in the guise of an old woman. Sitting here, I thought of that old woman—she was the symbol of the wild civilization of this region. Her ancestors had been living in these jungles for many thousands of years. On the day Jesus Christ was crucified, they were crushing mahua seeds to extract oil just as they had done this morning. Thousands of years have vanished into the dense fog of the past, yet they still hunt birds with blowpipes and sticky birdlime, just as they always have. Their thoughts about God, about the world, have not advanced one bit. I would give a full year’s earnings to know what thoughts passed through that old woman’s head each day.

I cannot fathom what seed of civilization lies hidden within certain peoples, compelling them to progress as time goes by—while other peoples, for thousands of years, remain rooted to the same spot, motionless as pillars. The once-barbaric Aryan peoples, in the space of four or five thousand years, composed the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and great epics; they developed astronomy, geometry, the medical sciences of Charaka and Sushruta; they conquered lands and founded empires; they sculpted the Venus de Milo and built the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, and Cologne Cathedral; they created the raga Darbari Kanada and the Fifth Symphony; they invented the aeroplane, the ship, the railway, the radio, and electricity—and yet, why have the Papuans, the aboriginals of New Guinea and Australia, and in our own country, the Munda, Kol, Naga, and Kuki peoples—why have they remained exactly where they were for these five thousand years?

In an age long past, this very spot where I am sitting now was a vast ocean—the waves of that ancient sea would come crashing down upon this sandy shore of the Cambrian era, a shore that has now been transformed into a colossal mountain. Sitting here amidst the dense forest wilderness, I dreamt of that blue sea of a bygone age.

What was once a river’s flowing stream is now a sandy shore.

Upon the peak of this sandstone mountain, that great ocean of a forgotten past has left the marks of its turbulent waves—marks so clear they are plain to a geologist’s eye. Man did not exist then, nor did vegetation of this kind. The plants and creatures that did exist have left their imprints on the heart of the stone, as one can see in any museum.

The afternoon sun had reddened on the peak of Mahalikharup Hill. In the air, fragrant with the scent of shephali groves, was a faint hint of Hemanta’s chill. It would not be wise to linger here any longer. Ahead lay the dark night of the Krishna Ekadashi, and somewhere in the heart of the forest, a pack of jackals cried out. What if a bear, or a tiger, were to block the path!

On the way back, for the first time, I saw a wild peacock, perched on a boulder at the edge of the forest. There was a pair of them; startled at the sight of my horse, the cock flew away, but his companion did not stir. In my fear of tigers, I had no leisure to watch, and yet I halted for a moment before it. I had never seen a wild peacock before; people used to say there were peacocks in this region, but I had never believed them. I did not dare to delay for long, however. Who knew—what if the rumour of the Mahalikharup tiger also turned out to be true?