5

A brilliant moon, and a bone-chilling cold. It was the end of the month of Poush. I had gone from the head office to inspect the dihi kachari at Labtulia. At the Labtulia kachari, by the time the cooking was done and everyone had eaten, it would be eleven at night. One day, after finishing my meal and stepping out of the kitchen, I saw a girl standing at the edge of the kachari compound, out in that stark moonlight, under the frost-shedding sky, even at that late hour. I asked the patwari, ‘Who is that standing over there?’

The patwari said, ‘Oh, that’s Kunta. She heard you were coming, so yesterday she told me, “The Manager Babu is coming. I’ll go and fetch the rice from his plate. My children are suffering terribly.” So I told her, “Go on, then.”’

Even as we were speaking, Baloa, the kachari’s watchman, took the dal-mixed rice from my plate, the broken pieces of fish, the bits of vegetable and rice left at the side, the milky rice remaining in the dregs of the milk bowl—everything—and poured it all onto a high-rimmed brass thala the girl had brought. The girl then left.

I was at the Labtulia kachari for eight or ten days on that occasion, and every night I would see the same girl standing by the well, waiting for the rice from my plate in the dead of night and that terrible cold, with only her anchal pulled around her. Seeing this day after day, my curiosity got the better of me, and I asked the patwari, ‘This Kunta who comes for the rice every day—who is she? And where does she live in this jungle? I never see her during the daytime.’

‘I will tell you, Huzoor,’ the patwari said.

Inside the room, a log fire had been burning brightly since evening, and I had been sitting beside it for a long while on a chair, reconciling the accounts for the rent installment. Having finished my meal and come back in, I felt I had done quite enough work for one day. I rolled up my papers and prepared to listen to the patwari’s story.

‘Listen, Huzoor. About ten years ago, a Rajput named Debi Singh held great sway in this region. All the Gangota tenants and the farmers of the chari lands lived in terror of him. Debi Singh’s business was lending money to these people at exorbitant interest, and then collecting the principal and interest by force of the lathi. He had eight or nine lathial-wielding footmen in his employ. Just as Rasbihari Singh Rajput is the moneylender of this region now, Debi Singh was then.

Debi Singh came from Jaunpur district and settled in Purnea. Some years after his arrival, he went to Kashi, and while there, listening to songs at the house of a baiji, he became very close to her fourteen- or fifteen-year-old daughter. He then ran away with her and came here. Debi Singh would have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time. Here, Debi Singh married her. But when everyone found out she was a baiji’s daughter, his own Rajput caste-brothers stopped eating with him and ostracized him. On the strength of his money, Debi Singh paid them no mind. But then, through a lavish lifestyle, needless extravagance, and fighting a lawsuit against this very Rasbihari Singh, Debi Singh was ruined. He died about four years ago.

That Kunta is the widow of Debi Singh Rajput. There was a time when she would travel in a palanquin fringed with kinkhab brocade to bathe at the confluence of the Kushi and Kalbalia rivers, a time when she would eat Bikaneri rock-candy before drinking water—and today, this is her plight! What makes it harder is that, since everyone knows she is a baiji’s daughter, she has no caste here—not among her husband’s Rajput relatives and friends, nor among the local Gangotas. After the wheat is harvested, she goes from field to field with a basket, gleaning the fallen ears of grain, and with that she manages to feed her small children half-full bellies for a month or two out of the year. But I have never seen her hold out her hand to beg, Huzoor. You have come as the zamindar’s manager, you are like a king; for her to receive prasad from you is no dishonor.

I asked, ‘Her mother, the baiji—did she never come looking for her after that?’

The patwari replied, ‘I have never seen her, Huzoor. And Kunta has never gone looking for her mother. She slaves away in sorrow to feed her children. What you see now is nothing; the beauty she once had was unlike anything anyone in this region had ever seen. Now she has aged, and after being widowed, what with sorrow and hardship, nothing of that appearance remains. Kunta is a very good and gentle girl. But no one in these parts can stand her; they all turn their noses up at her, look down on her, I suppose because she’s a baiji’s daughter.’

‘That I understand,’ I said, ‘but she goes back alone at twelve o’clock at night, through this dense jungle, to the Labtulia settlement? That’s nearly three-quarters of a mile from here!’

‘Can she afford to be afraid, Huzoor? She has to return alone through this jungle all the time. Who else does she have? Who will provide for her?’

That was in the month of Poush; as soon as the collection for the Poush installment was done, I left. In the middle of Magh, I had occasion to go to Labtulia once more, this time to lease out a small chari mahal.

The cold had not lessened in the slightest; on the contrary, with a westerly wind blowing all day, the chill would double after sunset. One day, while strolling along the northern boundary of the estate, I wandered a long way from the kachari into a part that was, for a great distance, nothing but a jungle of kul trees. People of the Kalwar caste from Chapra and Muzaffarpur districts lease these jungles to cultivate lac, earning a great deal of money. I had nearly lost my way in the kul jungle when I suddenly heard a woman’s anguished cry, the shrieks and sobs of young children, and the harsh sound of men’s voices shouting abuse. Advancing a little farther, I saw a woman being dragged along by the hair by the servants of the lac-leaseholders. The woman’s clothes were torn and filthy, and with her were two or three small, weeping children; one of the two Chhatri servants was holding a small basket containing half a basketful of ripe kul. Seeing me, the two Chhatris, emboldened, explained that this Gangota woman was stealing and picking kul in their leased jungle, and so they were hauling her to the kachari for the patwari to pass judgment. It was a good thing Huzoor himself had arrived.

I first rebuked them sharply and freed the woman from their grasp. The woman, now huddled in fear and shame, went and stood behind a thicket of kul. Her miserable state pained me deeply.

But the leaseholders’ men were not about to let her go so easily. ‘My good men,’ I tried to reason with them, ‘if a poor woman picks half a basket of sour kul to feed her children, what great harm has that done to your lac cultivation? Let her go home.’

‘You don’t know her, Huzoor,’ one of them said. ‘Her name is Kunta, she lives right here in Labtulia, and she has a habit of stealing kul. We caught her red-handed last year, too—if we don’t teach her a lesson this time—’

I was startled. Kunta! I hadn’t recognized her! One reason was that I had never seen Kunta in the light of day, only at night. I immediately reprimanded the leaseholders’ men and set Kunta free. She practically melted into the ground with shame and went home with her children. As she left, she abandoned her kul basket and her long hooked pole right there, presumably out of fear and mortification. I told one of the men present to take the items to the kachari; they were very pleased, thinking that the basket and pole would surely be confiscated by the estate. Back at the kachari, I said to the patwari, ‘Why are the people of your country so cruel, Banowarilal?’ Banowari Patwari was greatly distressed. Banowari was a good man; compared to others in these parts, his heart truly held some kindness and compassion. He immediately had a footman take Kunta’s basket and pole to her house in Labtulia.

From that night on, presumably out of shame, Kunta no longer came to the kachari for rice.

Winter ended and spring arrived.

About seven or eight krosh from the south-eastern boundary of our jungle estate—that is, about fourteen or fifteen krosh from the head office—a famous village fair is held during Holi in the month of Falgun. This year I had decided I would go. I hadn’t seen a large gathering of people for a long time, and I was also curious to know what a fair in this region was like. But the staff at the kachari repeatedly forbade me, saying the path was treacherous and filled with hills and jungles; moreover, almost the entire route was fraught with the danger of tigers and wild buffalo. There were settlements along the way, to be sure, but they were very far apart and would be of little help in a crisis, and so on.

I had never had the opportunity to do a single courageous thing in my life. Whatever I could do now, while I was in these parts, I must. Once I returned to Bengal and Calcutta, where would I find jungles, where would I find tigers and wild buffalo? Imagining the faces of my future grandchildren and their eager young eyes as they listened to my tales, I dismissed all the objections of Muneshwar Mahato, the patwari, and Nabinkumar Muhuri, and set out on horseback very early on the morning of the fair. It took two hours just to cross the boundary of our own estate, for the jungle is thickest on the south-eastern side. There was no path to speak of; any vehicle other than a horse would have found it impossible to pass. Small and large boulders were strewn everywhere, there were sal jungles, forests of tall kash grass and wild casuarina; the entire path was uneven, with high sand dunes here and there, expanses of red earth, small hills, and dense thickets of thorn-trees on the hills. I let the horse go as it pleased, sometimes fast, sometimes slow; it wasn’t possible to keep it at a steady canter. On account of the bad road and the scattered boulders, its gait was constantly breaking—at times a gallop, at times a trot, and at others a slow walk, as if merely strolling.

But from the moment I had left the kachari, I had been immersed in joy. The vast, open plains and forests of this country were gradually making me forget my homeland, making me forget the hundred comforts and habits of the civilized world, even threatening to make me forget my friends. What did it matter if the horse went slowly or quickly, when a festival of red palash flowers bloomed on the hillsides with the first touch of spring; when everywhere, on hill and plain, below and above, the branches of the squat trees were bent low under clumps of dhatup flowers; when on the leafless, milk-white trunks of the golgoli trees, large yellow blossoms like sunflowers made the midday sun languid with their gentle fragrance—then who keeps an account of how much road has been traveled?

But an account of some kind had to be kept, otherwise there was every chance of losing my way and my sense of direction. I understood this truth well even before I had crossed the boundary of our jungle. I had been riding absent-mindedly for some time when I suddenly saw far in front of me the smoky-blue crest of a vast forest, stretching in a line from one end of the horizon to the other. Where had such a large forest come from? No one at the kachari had mentioned that there was such a massive forest anywhere near the Maishandi fair. A moment later, I realized I had lost my way; the forest line ahead could be none other than the Mohanpura Reserve Forest, which lay due north-east of our kachari. In these parts, there is no such thing as a fixed, established path; very few people walk these ways. On top of that, everything looks exactly the same—the same kind of upland, the same kind of hills, the same kind of golgoli and dhatup flower forests, accompanied by the shimmering heat-waves of the high sun. For an inexperienced person, it doesn’t take long to lose one’s bearings.

I turned the horse’s head around. Carefully determining the position of my destination, I chose a landmark in the distance as a guide. Guiding a ship on the right course across a shoreless sea, the work of a pilot in the infinite sky, and steering a horse to its destination across these unknown, immense, pathless forest plains—they are all matters of nearly the same order. Those with experience will not take long to understand the truth of this statement.

Again the sun-scorched, leafless shrubs, again the gentle, sweet scent of wild blossoms, again the ranges of rock that appeared like heaps of exposed stone, again the splendor of the blood-red palash. The sun had climbed high; it would be good to get some water to drink. I knew that, apart from the Karo river, there was no water on this path. I still had no idea how long it would take just to cross the boundary of our own jungle, and the Karo river was a long way off. With this thought, my thirst seemed to suddenly intensify.

I had told Mukundi Chakladar to plant acacia wood posts or something like Mahavir’s standards to mark the boundary of our estate. I had never been to this boundary before, and I could see that the Chakladar had not carried out the order. He must have thought, ‘As if the Calcutta Manager Babu is going to push through this jungle to inspect the boundary! You must be joking! Who’s going to kill himself working? Let it be.’

Some distance down the path, beyond our boundary, I saw smoke rising and went there. A group of people were burning wood in the jungle to make charcoal, which they would sell in the villages in winter. In the winter here, the poor ward off the cold with charcoal fires in earthenware bowls. Charcoal sells for four sers to the paisa, but many do not even have the paisa to buy it; and how the charcoal-makers even cover their labor by selling it at four sers to the paisa after all that hard work is beyond me. I have seen since my arrival that the paisa is not as cheap a commodity here as it is in Bengal.

In a small shelter of dry kash and sabai grass within a forest of kend and amla trees, they were all sitting down to eat boiled maize together from fresh sal leaves when I arrived. There was no seasoning other than salt. In large pits nearby, branches were burning; a young boy sat there, turning the branches in the fire with a long, green sal branch.

I asked, ‘What is that in the pits, what’s burning?’

Leaving their meal, they all stood up in unison and, staring at me with frightened eyes, stammered, ‘Wood charcoal, Huzoor.’

I realized the men had been frightened by the sight of me on horseback; they had taken me for someone from the Forest Department. The forests in this region belong to the government’s Khas Mahal, and cutting wood or burning charcoal without a permit is illegal.

I reassured them. I was not a Forest Department employee, they had nothing to fear, they could make as much charcoal as they wished. Could I get a little water here? Leaving his food, one of them ran and brought me clean water in a brightly polished bowl. I asked and learned that there was a spring in the forest nearby, and this was its water.

A spring? I was intrigued. Where was this spring? I had never heard of a spring here.

‘It’s not a spring, Huzoor, it’s an unui,’ they said. ‘Water collects drop by drop in a rock hollow. In an hour you get half a ser of water. It’s very clean, and very cold.’

I went to see the place. What a beautiful, cool forest glade! Perhaps fairies descend to this secluded spot to sport in the water on autumn and spring days, or in the dead of night. In a very dense part of the woods was a low-lying spot enclosed by the branches of large piyal and kend trees. The ground was black stone, a single great stone slab that seemed to have been worn down by time into the shape of a husking-pedal mortar—like a huge, natural stone bowl. Above it, a flowering piyal branch hung low, creating a dense shade. The fragrance of piyal and sal blossoms perfumed the forest shadows. Droplets of water were collecting in the stone bowl; they had just taken water from it, and not even half a chhatak had collected yet.

‘Not many people know about this spring, Huzoor,’ they said. ‘We roam the woods and jungles all the time, so we know.’

Another five miles or so brought me to the Karo river. The sand banks on both sides were very high; one had to descend a good way down a steep incline to reach the riverbed. At present there was very little water; the sandy banks stretched far and wide on both sides, shimmering emptily. It felt as if I were descending a mountain. As I crossed the water on horseback, the water came up to my horse’s saddle at one point; I had to draw up my legs, stirrups and all, and cross with great care. On the other side was a forest of blooming blood-red palash, high and low patches of reddish rock, and nothing but palash and palash, a festival of palash flowers everywhere. Once, in the distance, I saw a wild buffalo emerge from a forest of dhatup flowers. It stood on a rock and began to paw the ground. I reined in my horse and stopped dead. There was not a soul to be seen for miles. What if it lowered its horns and charged? But as luck would have it, it re-entered the woods by the side of the path and disappeared.

Beyond the river, after some distance, the view from the path was magnificent! And this was in the blazing high noon, with no afternoon shadows, no moonlight of the night—yet in that silent, fierce midday sun, there was to the left a long, forest-covered range of hills; and to the right, on the undulating land scattered with ironstone and pyrite, nothing but white-trunked golgoli flower trees and a jungle of red dhatup flowers. That place was truly fantastic; I had never in my life seen such a landscape—so rugged yet so beautiful, so strewn with flowers yet so untamed and intensely wild. And over it all, the stark, searing sun of high noon. How deep-blue the sky was overhead! There was not a single bird in the sky—it was empty. On the ground, in the heart of wild nature, not a single human or animal—it was silent, terribly desolate. Looking all around me, I became submerged in this lonely, sublime play of nature. I never knew such a place existed in India! It was like the Arizona or Navajo desert seen in films, or the Gila River basin described in a book by Hudson.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon by the time I reached the fair. It was a vast fair, set in the fields of a tiny village at the southernmost tip of the long mountain range that had been travelling alongside me on my left for about three kosh. It lay on a mountain slope, surrounded on all sides by a forest of shal and palash trees. People, mostly women, had come from various places, near and far, such as Mahishardi, Karari, Tingantha, Lachhmaniyatola, Bhimdastola, and Mahalikhaparah. Young girls of the forest had come with pial flowers or red dhatup flowers tucked into their hair; some had wooden combs fastened into their slanted hair-buns. The figures of many of these girls were well-formed, graceful, and full of loveliness—they were delightedly buying cheap strings of beads, inexpensive boxes of Japanese or German soap, flutes, mirrors, and the most worthless of essences. The men were buying ten Kali cigarettes for a pice, and the children were buying and eating tilua-reudi, ramdana laddus, and deep-fried khaja.

I was startled by the sudden sound of a woman’s anguished wail. On a high patch of hilly ground, a crowd of young men and women had been absorbed in cheerful conversation and affectionate greetings—and the wail came from their midst. What was the matter? Had someone suddenly met their end? I asked a man and learned that this was not the case; a young wife had simply met a girl from her paternal village. Apparently, the custom in these parts is that whenever village girls, or friends living far from home, or relatives meet after a long time, the two will embrace and set up a heart-rending wail. An uninitiated person might think someone in their family had died, but in truth, it is a part of their ritual of welcome and affection. Not to wail would invite censure. If a woman does not cry upon seeing someone from her father’s home, it proves that she is very happy in her husband’s house—which, for a woman, is supposedly a matter of great shame.

At one spot, a bookseller sat with his wares arranged on a jute sack—Hindi editions of Gulebakavali, Laila-Majnu, Betal Pachisi, Premsagar, and the like. A few elderly men were flipping through the pages, and I realised that the condition of the reader standing at a bookstall is the same in Anatole France’s Paris as it is here at the Holi fair in the wilds of Karari-Tingantha. If they can get away with reading a book for free while standing there, few people will actually buy one. The shopkeeper’s business sense, however, was quite sharp; he asked one engrossed reader, “Are you going to buy the book? If not, put it down and be on your way.” Some distance from the fair, in the shade of a shal forest, many people were cooking and eating. For their convenience, a market for vegetables and provisions had been set up in one part of the fair, where dried tiny shrimp and the eggs of red ants were being sold in funnels made of fresh shal leaves. Red ant eggs are a favourite delicacy here. Besides these, there were unripe papayas, dried jujubes, kend fruit, guavas, and wild beans.

Suddenly, a voice called out to me—“Manager-babu—”

I looked and saw Brahma Mahato, the brother of Labtulia’s patwari, pushing his way through the crowd towards me. “Huzoor, when did you arrive? Who is with you?”

I said, “Brahma, are you here to see the fair?”

“No, Huzoor, I am the leaseholder of the fair. Come, come, please come to my tent and honour it with your presence.”

The leaseholder’s tent was at one side of the fair. Brahma led me there with great deference and sat me down on an old bentwood chair. There I saw a man the likes of whom I shall probably never see again on this earth. I did not know who he was; he must have been one of Brahma Mahato’s employees. He was between fifty and sixty years old, bare-chested, with dark skin and salt-and-pepper hair. In his hand was a large bag full of coins, and under his arm was a ledger; he was likely collecting the fair’s taxes, which he would later account for to Brahma Mahato.

I was captivated by the look in his eyes and the extraordinary meekness and humility on his face. There seemed to be a hint of fear mixed into his gaze as well. Brahma Mahato was no king, no magistrate, no arbiter of life and death, but merely a prosperous tenant of the government’s Khas Mahal estate—so what if he had taken the lease of the fair? Why was this man so very meek before him? And then, when I went into the tent and the man saw Brahma Mahato himself treating me with such deference, he dared not look at me more than once or twice, and then only with a glance of extreme reverence, humility, and fear. I wondered why his gaze was so utterly meek and humble. Was he desperately poor? There was something in the man’s face that made me look at him again and again. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth—I had never before seen a face so truly meek and humble.

I asked Brahma Mahato about the man and learned that his home was in Karari-Tingantha, the same village as Brahma Mahato’s. His name was Giridharilal, of the Gangota caste. He had no one in the world but a young son. His circumstances were as I had guessed—he was extremely poor. Brahma had recently hired him as a collections clerk for the fair, at a daily wage of four annas, plus meals.

I was to meet Giridharilal again, but the circumstances of our final meeting were deeply tragic; I will speak of these things later. I have seen many kinds of men, but I have never seen a man as pure of heart as Giridharilal. So much time has passed, so many people I have forgotten, but Giridharilal is one of the very few whose memory is and will forever be etched in my mind.

The afternoon was drawing to a close. I needed to set off at once. I told Brahma Mahato as much and asked to take my leave. Brahma Mahato looked as though the sky had fallen on his head, and the others present in the tent gaped at my face. Impossible! To return along that thirty-mile road at this late hour! Huzoor was a man from Calcutta; he did not know the roads of this region, which was why he was saying such a thing. The sun would set before I had gone ten miles. Even if it was a moonlit night, the path ran through dense hills and jungle, with no people anywhere. A tiger might emerge, there were wild buffalo, and since this was the season for ripe kul berries, bears would certainly be out. Just the other day, a tiger had taken a bullock-cart driver in the Mahalikhaparah forest above the Karo river; the poor fellow had been driving his cart alone along the jungle path. Impossible, Huzoor. Stay the night here, have your dinner, since you have graced this poor man’s shelter with your presence. You can leave at your leisure tomorrow morning.

But the temptation to ride alone on horseback through the desolate hills and jungle on this night of the full Basanti Purnima moon became irresistible to me. This would never happen again in my life; this might be the last time. And the magnificent scenery of forests and mountains I had seen on the way! If I did not see what they looked like in the moonlight—especially the light of the full moon—then what was the point of having come all this way with so much trouble?

Brushing aside everyone’s earnest pleas, I set off. Brahma Mahato had been right. A little before I reached the Karo river, the enormous, fiery-red sun sank behind a low mountain range on the western horizon. I had just ridden my horse up onto the sandbanks of the Karo, from where I would descend the sandy slope into the riverbed—when the sight of that sunset, and at the same time, in the opposite direction, far in the distance, the sight of the newly risen full moon above the Mohanpura Reserve Forest, which appeared as a dark black line—this simultaneous vision of setting and rising made me stop and rein in my horse. On that deserted, unfamiliar riverbank, everything seemed like an unreal affair—

All along the way, the path was flanked by scattered jungle on the mountain slopes and uplands, at times pressing in on the narrow track from both sides, at others receding into the distance. How terribly desolate it was all around! It had been one thing in the daytime, but after the moonrise, I felt as if I were passing through a world of unfamiliar and wondrous beauty, a realm of fairies. With this came the fear of tigers. I remembered how at the fair, Brahma Mahato, and at the kachari, almost everyone had repeatedly forbidden me from travelling this path alone at night. I recalled how, two or three months ago, one of our herdsman-tenants named Nandakishore Gosain had sat in the kachari and told the story of someone being eaten by a tiger in this very Mahalikhaparah forest. Here and there in the jungle, the branches of large kul trees were bent low with ripe fruit, the ground beneath them strewn with dried and ripe berries—so the possibility of bears emerging was also very high. Even if there were no wild buffalo in this forest, it would not take long for one or two to stray from the Mohanpura jungle, just as they had earlier in the day. There were still fifteen miles of desolate forest and field ahead of me.

The fear seemed only to heighten the beauty all around. At certain points, the path twisted sharply from south to north, and from north to east. Very close to the path, on the left, ran a continuous chain of low hills, their slopes covered in a jungle of golgoli and palash, with shal trees and tall grasses higher up. The moonlight was now brilliant, the shadows of the trees at their shortest. The moon-white plains were filled with the scent of some wild flower. Far away on the hills, the Santals had lit fires for their jhum cultivation. What a novel sight that was! It seemed as if someone had strung garlands of light from hill to hill!

If I had never come to these parts, I would not have believed anyone who told me that so close to Bengal there existed such completely uninhabited wildernesses of forest and chains of hills, which were in no way less beautiful than the stony deserts of Arizona or the bushvelds of Rhodesia. And from the point of view of danger, these regions could hardly be called tame, where people did not dare to walk the paths after dusk for fear of tigers and bears.

Riding through this open, moon-white wilderness, I thought to myself: this is a different kind of life. For those who do not love to be confined within the four walls of a house, for those in whose blood it is not to build a home and family—for such wayward, unconventional souls, a life like this is surely the one to be desired. When I first came from Calcutta, how unbearable I had found the terrible solitude and completely wild existence here. But now, I feel this is better. This savage, rugged, wild nature has initiated me into its mantra of freedom and liberation. Will I ever again be able to sit on a perch inside the cage of the city? I would not exchange the joy of galloping my horse under this open sky, through this pathless wilderness of rock and shal-palash forest, in this glorious moonlight, for any treasure in the world.

The moonlight had grown even brighter. The host of stars was almost invisible in its glow. Looking around, it seemed this was not the earth I had known for so long; this was a land of dreams. In this horizon-spanning moonlight, unearthly beings descended here in the dead of night—beings who are the objects of ascetic devotion, of imagination and dreams. This world never reveals itself to those who do not love the flowers of the forest, who do not recognise beauty, who have never been beckoned by the line of the horizon.

About four miles after the end of the Mahalikhaparah forest, our estate’s boundary began. I reached the kachari at around nine o’clock at night.

Hearing the sound of a drum from the kachari, I looked outside and saw that a group of people had come from somewhere into the compound and were beating a drum. At the sound of the drum, the kachari’s sepoys and clerks came and gathered around them. I was thinking of calling someone to ask what was going on when the head guard, Muktinath Singh, came to the door, saluted, and said, “Would you be so kind as to step outside?”

“What is it, Jamadar? What’s the matter?”

“Huzoor, the paddy crop has died in the southern country this year, leading to a famine. People are unable to manage, so they have set out with dance troupes, travelling from place to place. They have come to the kachari to dance before Huzoor. If you give the order, they will perform.”

The dance troupe came and stood before my office-room.

Muktinath Singh asked them what dances they could perform. An old man of sixty or sixty-two in the group saluted and said humbly, “Huzoor, the Ho Ho dance and the Chhakkarbaji dance.”

Looking at the troupe, it seemed that whether they knew anything about dancing or not, people of all types and ages had joined it in the hope of getting a couple of meals. They danced and sang for a long time. They had arrived as the day was ending; gradually the moon brightened the sky, and still they were dancing, holding hands and turning in circles, and singing. The dance was of a strange kind, the songs of a completely unfamiliar melody. In this vast expanse of open nature, in this secluded, wild setting so far from the civilised world, under this horizon-flooding, shadowless moonlight, this song and dance seemed a perfect fit. The meaning of one song was something like this:

“I was happy in my childhood. The hill behind our village was crowned with a forest of kend; in that forest I would gather ripe fruit, and string garlands of pial flowers. The days passed in great happiness; I did not know then what love was.

That day, by the five-stream waterfall, I had gone to hunt the karra bird. In my hand were my bamboo tube and lime-twigs. You came to fetch water, wearing a sari printed in the colour of saffron-flowers. Seeing me, you said—‘For shame! Does a man hunt birds of the forest with a seven-barrelled blowpipe?’ In my shame I threw down the bamboo tube, I threw down the bundle of lime-twigs.

The bird of the forest flew away, but the bird of my heart was caught forever in the trap of your love! By telling me not to hunt birds with a seven-barrelled blowpipe, what have you done to me! Was it right of you, my friend?”

Some of their language I understood, some I did not. For that very reason, perhaps, the songs seemed all the more strange to me. Their songs are set to the music of these hills and pial forests; they will sound good only here.

Their fee was a mere four annas. The kachari clerks said in one voice, “Huzoor, in many places they don’t even get that. Don’t raise their expectations by giving them more; besides, it will spoil the market. If you give more than the going rate, poor householders won’t be able to have them dance at their own homes, Huzoor.”

I was astonished. They had laboured with all their might for two or three hours, at least seventeen or eighteen people—at four annas, that wouldn’t even come to one pice per person. They had come all this way, crossing this uninhabited plain and forest, to dance at our kachari. This was their entire earning for the day. There were no other villages nearby where they could dance tonight.

I arranged for them to eat and stay at the kachari for the night. In the morning, I had their leader summoned and gave him two rupees. The man stared at my face in astonishment. No one ever gave them food after watching them dance, and on top of that, a fee of two rupees!

There was a boy of twelve or thirteen in their troupe whose face was like that of Krishna in a jatra play. He had a head of thick, curly hair, and his eyes and face were exceedingly serene and beautiful against his jet-black skin. He would stand at the front of the troupe, lead the singing, and when he danced with bells tied to his ankles, a smile would linger at the corners of his lips. Waving his hands in a lovely gesture, he would sing in a sweet voice:

Raja lijiye salaam, main paradesiya. (O King, accept my salute, I am a stranger from a foreign land.)

The boy was travelling with the troupe merely for two meals a day. He rarely got a share of the money. And what meals they were! Millet grains and salt. At most, a little vegetable curry on the side—not potatoes and pointed gourd, but fried wild gurmi fruit, or boiled bathua greens, or fried ridged gourd. On this diet, a smile was perpetually on his face. He was in splendid health, his whole body suffused with a rare grace.

I said to the troupe leader, “Leave Dhaturia here. He can work at the kachari, and he’ll have a place to stay and food to eat.”

The leader was that bearded old man, and he too was a strange sort of person. Even at sixty-two, he was just like a boy.

He said, “He won’t be able to stay, Huzoor. He is with all the people from his village, and that is why he is well. If he stays alone, his heart will feel strange. He’s just a child, how can he stay? I will bring him before you again, Huzoor.”