9

Nearly three years have passed.

In these three years, I have changed a great deal. The wild nature of Labtulia and Azamabad has daubed some magic kohl on my eyes—I have all but forgotten the city. The spell of solitude, the spell of the vast, star-filled sky has so possessed me that once, when I went to Patna for a few days, I grew restless, wondering when I would escape the confines of tarmac-paved roads and go back to the Labtulia wilderness—where, beneath a sky like an upturned bowl, stretch field after field, forest after forest, where there are no ready-made highways, no brick houses, no sound of motor horns, where the only thing that breaks the dense sleep is the hour-call of a pack of jackals in the distant dark woods, or the collective footfalls of a herd of stampeding nilgai, or the grave bellow of a wild buffalo.

My superiors are constantly writing to me, demanding to know why I am not settling tenants on the land here. I know that this is indeed one of my main duties, but my heart is not in it, not if it means destroying such a secluded bower of nature. Those who lease the land will not buy it to preserve its trees, plants and bushes—no, as soon as they buy it, they will clear it, plant crops, build houses, and begin to live there. This solitary, beautiful, wild expanse, this forest, these pools, these hills will be transformed into a populated area; the sylvan goddesses, frightened by the crowds, will flee at a breathless pace—man will enter and dispel the magic of this enchanted wood, and efface its beauty as well.

I can see that populated area clearly in my mind’s eye.

Such habitations are everywhere in this country, on the way to Patna, Purnea or Munger. Ugly, misshapen one- or two-storey mud houses crammed together, settlements packed roof to roof, clumps of cactus, cowsheds for cattle and buffaloes amidst piles of dung-heap refuse—water being drawn from a well with a rahat, crowds of men and women in dirty clothes, a flag flying from the temple of Hanuman-ji, naked children with silver hansulis around their necks playing in the dust on the road.

What will be gained in exchange for what?

Such a vast, unbroken, unbounded, fiercely beautiful stretch of forest is a great national asset—any other country would have passed a law to preserve it as a national park. Work-weary city-dwellers could have come here from time to time to refresh their exhausted minds in the companionship of nature. But that is not to be; why should the owner of the land let it lie fallow instead of settling tenants?

I came here charged with settling tenants—I came to destroy this sylvan nature, and instead I have fallen in love with this exquisitely beautiful, wild heroine. Now I keep postponing the day—when I ride out alone on horseback in the shadow-deep afternoons or on moon-white, luminous nights, I look around and think to myself, it will be destroyed at my own hands, this wild, desolate, stone-strewn plain, lost in itself, ecstatic in the moonlight! How this cunning beauty has beguiled my mind!

But since I came to do a job, I must do it. At the end of Magh, a Rajput named Chhatu Singh came from Patna and submitted an application to lease a thousand bighas of land, and I found myself in a terrible predicament—if I gave him a thousand bighas, a great deal of land would be destroyed—how many beautiful thickets and vine-covered bowers would be mercilessly cut down!

Chhatu Singh kept hovering around—I forwarded his application to the head office, trying to delay the act of destruction a little longer.

One day, after midday, I was coming through the open plains of the Nara Baihar, to the north of the Labtulia forest, when I saw someone sitting on a stone by the side of the path.

I stopped my horse when I reached him. The man was no less than sixty, dressed in dirty clothes, with a torn shawl over his shoulders.

What was this man doing, sitting all alone in this desolate plain?

He said, ‘Who are you, babu?’

I said, ‘I am an employee of the estate office here.’

‘Are you the manager-babu?’

‘Why do you ask? Do you need something? Yes, I am the manager.’

The man stood up and raised his hand towards me in a gesture of blessing. He said, ‘Huzoor, my name is Matuknath Pande, a Brahmin. I was on my way to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘Huzoor, I am a very poor man. I have walked a long way, having heard your name. I have been walking for three days. If you could arrange some means of sustenance for me—’

My curiosity was piqued. I asked, ‘What have you been eating these last few days on this jungle path?’

Matuknath showed me about a quarter-seer of ground gram flour tied in a corner of his grimy shawl and said, ‘There was about a seer of sattu tied in this; I left home with it. That’s what I’ve been eating these past few days. I’m wandering in search of a livelihood, huzoor—today the sattu has run out; God will provide again.’

I could not understand what kind of livelihood this man expected to find in this desolate forest of Azamabad and Nara Baihar, with only some sattu tied in the corner of his wrap. I said, ‘Why did you leave the big cities of Bhagalpur, Purnea, Patna, and Munger to come into this jungle, Pande-ji? What will you find here? Where are the people? Who will give you anything?’

Matuknath looked at my face with a despairing expression and said, ‘Won’t I earn anything here, babu? Then where shall I go? I don’t know anyone in those big cities, I don’t know the roads, I’m afraid. That’s why I was coming here—’

The man seemed very helpless, pitiable, and good-natured. I brought him with me to the estate office.

Several days passed. I could not find any work for Matuknath—I saw that he knew no trade—but he had studied Sanskrit and could do the work of a Brahmin pandit. He used to teach students in a tol, a traditional school, and sitting with me at odd hours, he would recite outlandish shlokas, probably trying to amuse me in my leisure.

One day he said to me, ‘Give me a little piece of land next to the estate office and let me open a tol.’

I said, ‘Who will study in your tol, Pandit-ji? Will the herds of wild buffalo and nilgai understand Bhatti or Raghuvamsa?’

Matuknath was an utterly simple man—he had probably proposed opening a tol without thinking it through. I thought that perhaps this would deter him. But after being quiet for a few days, he brought up the subject again.

He said, ‘Please be kind and let me open a tol. Let me try and see what happens. Otherwise, where else will I go, huzoor?’

I was in a fine mess. Was the man mad? One felt pity just looking at his face; he didn’t understand the complexities of the world, an utterly simple, foolish sort of man—and yet he had come with such a great deal of trust and hope—on whom, who knew?

I tried my best to reason with him. I was willing to give him land, let him farm it, just as Raju Pande was doing. Matuknath pleaded, saying that his family had been Brahmin pandits by trade for generations; he knew nothing of farming, what would he do with land?

I could have told him that if he was a pandit by trade, why had he come here to die, but my heart did not permit me to say anything harsh. I had taken a great liking to the man. Finally, at his persistent urging, I had a hut built for him and said, ‘This is your tol. Now see if you can find any students.’

Matuktoath established his tol with a puja and a feast for two or three Brahmins. Nothing is available in this jungle; he himself fried thick puris of maize flour and made a curry of wild gourds. He had brought buffalo milk from a bathan and set it to make curd. I, of course, was among the invited.

After opening the tol, Matuknath seemed to be having a wonderful time for a while.

To think that such people exist in the world!

In the morning, after his bath and daily rituals, he would go to the tol-hut, sit on a mat woven from wild date-palm leaves, and, with the Mugdhabodha open before him, recite grammatical rules, just as if he were teaching someone. He read so loudly that I could hear him while working in my office.

The tehsildar, Sajjan Singh, would say, ‘That Pandit-ji is stark mad! Look what he’s doing, huzoor!’

Two months passed in this way. Matuknath continued to run his tol in the empty hut with undiminished enthusiasm. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. In the meantime, Saraswati Puja arrived. Every year at the estate office, the Goddess of Learning is worshipped through a ceremony for inkpots; where would an idol be made in this jungle? I heard that Matuknath would hold a separate puja in his tol, and that he would make the idol himself.

What hope, what enthusiasm in a sixty-year-old man!

Matuknath made a small idol with his own hands. A separate puja was held at the tol.

The old man said with a smile, ‘Babuji, this is our ancestral puja. My father always had an idol made for his tol and performed the puja; I saw it as a child. Now, again in my tol—’

But where was the tol?

Of course, I did not say this to Matuknath.

Ten or twelve days after Saraswati Puja, Matuknath Pandit came to inform me that a student had enrolled in his tol. He had apparently arrived from somewhere just today. Matuknath brought the student before me. A dark, gaunt boy of fourteen or fifteen, a Maithil Brahmin, utterly poor, with not even a second piece of cloth to his name besides the one he was wearing.

And Matuknath’s enthusiasm! He couldn’t feed himself, but at that very moment, he took upon himself the responsibility of providing for the student. This was his family custom; all the needs and wants of the students at their tol had always been met by the school. He could not turn away someone who had come in the hope of acquiring knowledge.

Within a couple of months, I saw that two or three more students had joined the tol. They ate one meal a day, and went without the other. The sepoys collected subscriptions to give them maize sattu, flour, and china millet, and I also helped a little from the estate office. The students would gather bathua greens from the jungle—they would often get by on a single meal of boiled greens. Matuknath’s condition was the same.

I would hear Matuknath teaching his students until ten or eleven at night under a haritaki tree in front of the tol-hut. In the dark or in the moonlight—because there was no oil to light a lamp. I had noticed one thing with astonishment. Apart from his request for land and a hut for the tol, Matuknath had never asked me for any financial help. He never once said, ‘I can’t manage, please do something.’ He didn’t tell anyone of his plight; the sepoys gave what they did of their own accord.

Between Baishakh and Bhadra, the number of students in Matuknath’s tol increased considerably. Ten or twelve poor boys, driven out by their fathers and chased away by their mothers, had gathered from various places, lured by the prospect of getting food for free with little effort. Because in these parts, news like this spreads on the crow’s beak. Looking at the students, I felt they had previously been buffalo-herders; not a single one showed the slightest spark of intelligence—and these boys were to study poetics and grammar? They had found a gentle soul in Matuknath and, on the pretext of studying, had come to sponge off him. But Matuknath paid no heed to these things; he was overjoyed to have students.

One day, I heard that the students of the tol, having nothing to eat, were fasting. And Matuknath along with them.

I summoned Matuknath and inquired about the matter.

It was true. The flour and sattu collected by the sepoys had run out. For a few days, they had been getting by on just boiled bathua greens at night, but today even that was not to be had. Besides, it had made many of them sick, so no one wanted to eat it.

‘So what will you do now, Pandit-ji?’

‘I can’t think of anything, huzoor. The little boys will go hungry—’

I arranged to provide rations for all of them. Enough rice, lentils, ghee, and flour for two or three days. I said, ‘How will you run the tol, Pandit-ji? Shut it down. What will you eat, what will you feed them?’

I saw that he was hurt by my words. He said, ‘How can that be, huzoor? Can I abandon an established tol? That is my ancestral profession.’

Matuknath was a cheerful soul. There was no point in trying to make him understand such things. I saw that he was quite happy with his few students.

Thanks to Matuknath, a corner of my forest domain had become like an ashram of the rishis of old. The students of the tol chattered as they studied, reciting the aphorisms of the Mugdhabodha, stealing gourds and pumpkins from the estate’s trellises, breaking branches and leaves from the flowering plants to take flowers, and sometimes even things belonging to the estate staff began to be stolen—the sepoys would whisper among themselves that it was the work of the tol students.

One day, the naib’s cash box was found lying open in his room. Someone had stolen a few rupees from it and the naib’s ring of burnished, low-grade gold. The sepoys raised a great hue and cry about it. A few days later, the ring was found on one of Matuknath’s students. He had tied it to his waistband cord; someone saw it and reported it to the estate office. The student was caught red-handed.

I sent for Matuknath. He was truly a simple man, and the rowdy students were taking advantage of his good nature. There was no need to close the tol, but at least a few students had to be expelled. For those who wanted to stay, I would give them land; let them earn their keep by the sweat of their brow, growing some maize, china grass, and vegetables on the land. What they produced would be enough for them to live on.

Matuknath made this proposal to the students. Eight of the twelve students ran away as soon as they heard it. Four remained, and even then, I think, not out of a love for learning, but because they had absolutely nowhere else to go. They used to herd buffaloes; now they would farm. Since then, Matuknath’s tol has been running not too badly.

The land has been settled with Chhatu Singh and the other tenants. A total of about fifteen hundred bighas. Since the land in Nara Baihar is extremely fertile, they had to be given fifteen hundred bighas all in one block in that area. The forest on the edge of the plain there was exceptionally beautiful; how many times, riding my horse in the evening, have I looked at that forest and thought that this forest in Nara Baihar was a world-class beauty spot—gone is that beauty spot.

From a distance, I would see that they had set fire to the forest; without burning a part of it, it is impossible to clear the dense, impenetrable jungle. But it wasn’t all forest; there were dense woods along the edges of the vast plain, perhaps thickets in the middle of the plain, so many kinds of creepers, so many kinds of wild flowers…

With a crackling sound, the forest burns, I hear it from afar—how many beautiful vine-covered bowers have been destroyed, I sit and think. It pains me, so I don’t go that way. Such a great national asset, which could have forever brought peace and joy to the human mind—it had to be sacrificed for a handful of wheat.

At the beginning of Kartik, I went to see the place one day. The entire field had been sown with mustard—here and there people had built houses and were living there; they had already brought their cattle, buffaloes, wives, and children and established a village.

In the middle of winter, when the mustard fields were lit up with yellow flowers, the scene that unfolded before my eyes was beyond compare. A vast plain of fifteen hundred bighas, stretching to the distant horizon, was covered with a yellow carpet—unbroken, without interruption—above it the blue sky, as blue as a sapphire—and beneath it, the yellow—a yellow earth, as far as the eye could see. I thought, this in its own way is not bad.

One day I went to inspect the new villages. Except for Chhatu Singh, they were all poor tenants. I thought of setting up a night school for them—seeing many small children running and playing along the edges of the mustard fields, the idea of a night school came to my mind first.

But soon the new tenants created a terrible commotion. I saw that they were not at all peace-loving. One day, as I was sitting in the estate office, news came that the tenants of Nara Baihar had started a violent riot among themselves. The trouble had started because the boundaries of the plots were not clearly demarcated; a man with five bighas of land had tried to take possession of the crop from ten bighas. I also heard that some time before the mustard ripened, Chhatu Singh had secretly brought in many Rajput lathials and spearmen from his own region; his real intention was now clear. Apart from the harvest from his own three or four hundred bighas of cultivated land, he wanted to seize by force the crop from the entire fifteen hundred bighas (or as much as he could) of Nara Baihar.

The estate officials said, ‘This is the custom in these parts, huzoor. The crop belongs to him who wields the lathi.’

Those who had no lathis to wield came to me at the estate office and wept. They were simple Gangota tenants—they had cleared a few bighas of jungle and cultivated it, brought their wives and children and built houses right on the edge of their land—and now the fruit of a whole year’s labour and hope was about to be snatched away by the tyranny of the strong!

I had sent two sepoys from the estate office to the spot to see what was happening. They came running back, out of breath, and reported that a terrible riot had broken out on the northern border of Bhimdas Tola.

I immediately set off on horseback with Tehsildar Sajjan Singh and all the sepoys from the estate office. From a distance, a clamorous uproar reached my ears. A small mountain river flowed through the middle of Nara Baihar—the commotion seemed to be louder in that direction.

Reaching the riverbank, I saw that people had gathered on both sides—about sixty or seventy on this side, and thirty or forty on the other—two of them Chhatu Singh’s Rajput lathials. The people on the far bank wanted to cross to this side; the people on this side were standing to block them. In the meantime, two men had already been injured—they were from the group on this side. They had been wounded and had fallen into the river, at which point Chhatu Singh’s men had tried to cut off one man’s head with a battle-axe—the other side had snatched him away and pulled him out of the river. Of course, the water was barely ankle-deep; it was a mountain river, and on top of that, it was the end of winter.

On seeing my men from the kachari, both parties ceased their rioting and approached me. Each faction began to call themselves Yudhishthir and the other Duryodhan. It was impossible to determine right from wrong amid that clamorous din. I told both sides to come to the estate office. The two injured men had only suffered minor blows from the staves; their wounds were not at all severe. I had them brought to the kachari as well.

Chhotu Singh’s men said they would come to the kachari to see me after noon. I thought the matter was settled. But I had yet to learn the ways of the people of this land. Shortly after noon, news came again that a fierce riot had broken out in Naṛa Boihar. I rushed out again with my men. I dispatched a horseman to the Naogachhia police station, fifteen miles away. When I arrived, I found the situation was just as it had been that morning. This time, Chhotu Singh had gathered even more men. I heard that Rasbihari Singh Rajput and Nandalal Ojha, the grain merchant, were helping Chhotu Singh. Chhotu Singh himself was not at the scene; his brother Gadadhar Singh was mounted on a horse some distance away—he slipped away on seeing me approach. This time, I saw that two men in the Rajput group were carrying guns.

The Rajputs shouted from the other side of the river, “Huzoor, you get out of the way! Let us deal with these sons of slave-girls, these Gangotas, once and for all!”

At my command, my retinue went and stood between the two factions. I informed them that word had been sent to the Naogachhia police station, and the police must be halfway here by now. Whose names were those guns registered in? Firing a gun would mean certain jail time. The law was exceedingly strict.

The two men with the guns fell back a little.

I called to the Gangota tenants on our side of the bank and told them there was no need for them to fight. They should all return to their own places. I was here. All my clerks and guards were here. If the crops were looted, I would be responsible.

Relying on my word, the chief of the Gangota group withdrew his men to stand under a bakain tree some distance away. I said, “Not even there. Go straight home, all of you. The police are coming.”

The Rajputs, however, were not the sort to be so easily subdued. They stood on the far bank, consulting among themselves. I asked the tahsildar, “What’s going on, Sajjan Singh? Are they going to attack us?”

The tahsildar said, “Huzoor, it’s that Nandalal Ojha, the grain merchant, who has joined them—he’s the one to fear. That scoundrel is a veritable dacoit.”

“Then be ready. Don’t let anyone cross the river. Hold them off for a couple of hours; the police will arrive by then.”

I do not know what the Rajputs decided after their consultation, but a group of them advanced and said, “Huzoor, we are going to cross to the other side.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t we have land on that side?”

“You can tell that to the police. They’re almost here. I cannot allow you to cross to this side.”

“Did we pay a huge salami to the kachari and take settlement of the land only to lose our crops? This is an unjust tyranny on your part.”

“You can say that to the police as well.”

“You won’t let us cross to the other side?”

“No, not before the police arrive. I will not allow a riot in my mahal.”

In the meantime, more men had arrived from the kachari. Their arrival started a clamour that the police were coming. Chhotu Singh’s gang began to slip away, one or two at a time. The riot was stopped for the moment, but that was the start of a cycle of fighting, police trouble, murder, and injury that, far from diminishing, only continued to grow day by day. I saw that all the trouble had been created by the folly of leasing such a large tract of land to a brute like Chhotu Singh all at once. One day I summoned Chhotu Singh. He claimed he knew nothing about any of it. He spent most of his time in Chhapra. How could he be held responsible for what his men did or didn’t do?

I understood that the man was a seasoned rogue. Plain words were not likely to work here. If I wanted to bring him to heel, I would have to find another way.

From that day on, I stopped giving land to anyone other than Gangota tenants. But there was no remedy for the mistake that had already been made. The peace of Naṛa Boihar was lost for good.

In the northern part of our twelve-mile-long jungle mahal, tenants had now settled on about five or six hundred acres of land. At the end of the month of Poush, I had occasion to go in that direction—and I saw that they had changed the very face of the region.

Emerging suddenly from the jungle of Phulkiya, my eyes fell upon a horizon-spanning field of mustard in full bloom before me—as far as the eye could see, to the right, to the left, and ahead, it was as if someone had spread out a single, vast carpet embroidered with yellow flowers. It was unbroken, without a single gap, stretching from the edge of the jungle to merge into the lap of the blue hills on the distant horizon line. Above was the cloudless blue sky of winter. Dotted about this magnificent field of crops were the tenants’ khupri huts, made of kash reeds. How they managed to live in these huts, enclosed by nothing more than fences of kash stalks, out in this open expanse in the bitter cold with their wives and children!

The harvest was not far off. Already, bands of katuni labourers had begun to arrive from all directions. Theirs is a strange life—they come from Purnia, the Terai, the hills of Jayanti, and northern Bhagalpur with their wives and children when the crops are ripe, build little shacks to live in, and cut the harvest. For their wages, they receive a share of the crop. Once the harvest is over, they abandon their shacks and leave with their families, only to return again next year. There are various castes among them—mostly Gangotas, but one can even find Chhatris, Bhumihar Brahmins, and Maithil Brahmins.

The custom in this region is to collect the land revenue while the harvest is still in the fields—otherwise, the tenants are so poor that once the crops leave the fields, they can no longer pay their dues. In order to supervise the collection of revenue, it became necessary for me to stay for some days amidst the endless fields of crops in Phulkiya Boihar.

The tahsildar said, “Shall I have the small tent pitched for you there, then?”

“Can’t you build me a small khupri hut in a day?”

“Will you be able to stay in that in this cold, Huzoor?”

“Perfectly. You do that.”

And so it was done. Three or four small kash cottages side by side: one for my bedroom, one for a kitchen, and one for two guards and the patwari. This type of dwelling is called a ‘khupri’ in these parts. Instead of doors and windows, there are simply openings in the reed walls—with no way to close them. Icy winds gusted in at night. The huts were so low one had to crawl to get inside. The floor was covered with a thick layer of dry kash reeds and twigs of the bon-jhau tamarisk—over which a shatranji rug was laid, and on top of that, a mattress and sheet to make a farash. My khupri was seven hands long and three hands wide. It was impossible to stand up straight inside, as the ceiling was only three hands high.

But I loved this khupri. I had never found such comfort and joy even while living in a three- or four-storey house in Calcutta. Perhaps it was because I had been living here for so long that I was becoming wild; perhaps my tastes, my perspective, my sense of good and bad—all were being influenced to a greater or lesser degree by this free, wild nature. Who knows if that was the reason?

The first thing I liked upon entering the khupri was the fresh fragrance of the newly cut kash stalks from which the walls were woven. After that, I liked the view, visible through a square-hand-sized peephole right beside my head: from my half-reclining position, the vast, desolate expanse of yellow mustard flowers lay almost at eye level. This view was utterly novel; it was as if I were lying on a world-sized yellow carpet. The sharp, pungent scent of mustard flowers drifted on the gusting wind.

The cold, too, was as bitter as it could be. There was not a single day’s respite from the westerly wind; its biting force seemed to turn even the strong sunlight into cold water. Returning on horseback past the vast kul-jungle of the boihar, I would watch the winter sunset behind the low, blue mountain range of Tirashi-Chauka in the distance. The entire western sky, from the south-east to the south-west, would turn crimson, a sea of liquid fire, as the huge orb of the sun sank down like a great ball of flame—it felt as if I were witnessing the earth’s diurnal motion with my own eyes. The vast surface of the planet seemed to be spinning from west to east; if I stared for a long time, an optical illusion would occur, and it would truly seem as if the western horizon of the earth’s crust was rotating towards my point of observation.

The moment the sunlight faded, an intense cold would set in. And we, after a day of heavy exertion and dashing about here and there on horseback, would light a fire in front of my khupri every evening and sit around it.

At the same time, in the sky above the dark-shrouded edge of the forest, countless stars would appear before the eyes of men on earth, like envoys of light from distant cosmic realms. The constellations in the sky burned like brilliant electric lamps—I had never seen such a Krittika, such a Saptarshi Mandal, in Bengal. From seeing them again and again, I had come to know them intimately. Below, the dense, dark forest, the solitude, the mysterious night; above, my constant companions, the countless worlds of light. Some days, an unreal sliver of a moon would appear like the light from a distant lighthouse in a sea of darkness. And cutting straight through that deep black darkness with sharp arrows of fire, meteors would fall, here and there. To the south, to the north, to the north-east, to the south-west, to the east, to the west—in every direction. There’s one, there’s another, there go two, and here’s one again, minute after minute, second after second.

Some days, Gonori Tewari and many others would gather at the camp. There would be all sorts of stories. It was here one day that I heard a strange tale. The conversation had turned to hunting. The wild buffalo of the Mohanpura forest came up. A Rajput named Dashrath Singh Jhandawala happened to be at the Labtuliya kachari that day to bid for a char-land lease. The man had once roamed the forests and jungles extensively and had a name for being a formidable hunter. Dashrath Jhandawala said, “Huzoor, I once saw the Tandbaro in that very Mohanpura forest while hunting wild buffalo.”

I remembered that Ganu Mahato had once mentioned this Tandbaro. “What is that?” I asked.

“Huzoor, it was a long time ago. The bridge over the Kushi river hadn’t been built yet. There was a double ferry at Kataria; passengers and goods from the carts would cross on it. Back then, we were mad about horse-dancing—me and Chhotu Singh of Chhapra. Chhotu Singh would bring horses from the Harihar Kshetra mela, and the two of us would teach them to dance, then sell them for a high price. There are two kinds of horse-dancing, jamaiti and phanaiti. Horses with more training in jamaiti sell for a higher price. Chhotu Singh was an ustad at teaching the jamaiti dance. In three or four years, the two of us made a lot of money.

“Once, Chhotu Singh suggested we get a license for the Dholbajya jungle and start a business catching wild buffalo. Everything was arranged. Dholbajya is the Darbhanga Maharaj’s reserve forest. We bribed the forest officials and got a permit. Then for days on end, we roamed the dense jungle searching for the tracks of wild buffalo. Such a huge forest, Huzoor, but not a single wild buffalo to be seen! In the end, we hired a wild Santal. He showed us the base of a bamboo grove and said that in the dead of night, the jera (herd) of wild buffalo would pass this way to drink water. We dug a deep pit on that path and made a trap by covering it with bamboo and earth. At night, when the buffalo herd passed, they would fall into the pit.

“The Santal looked it all over and said, ‘You’re doing all this, but there’s one thing—you won’t be able to kill the wild buffalo of Dholbajya jungle. The Tandbaro is here.’

“We were astonished! What was a Tandbaro?

“The old Santal said, ‘The Tandbaro is the god of the wild buffalo herds. He won’t let you harm a single one.’

“Chhotu Singh said, ‘That’s all lies. We don’t believe in that. We’re Rajputs, not Santals.’

“You’ll be amazed to hear what happened next, Huzoor. Even now, the memory makes my hair stand on end. In the deep of night, we were standing silently in the darkness, hidden behind a nearby bamboo thicket. We heard the sound of the buffalo herd’s hooves; they were coming our way. Soon they were very close, within fifty hands of the pit. Suddenly, we saw, by the edge of the pit, about ten hands away, a tall, dark figure of a man standing silently with his hand raised. The figure was so tall, it seemed to touch the tops of the bamboo grove. On seeing him, the herd of wild buffalo froze, then scattered in every direction, running away. Not a single one came within a hundred miles of the trap. Believe it or not, I saw it with my own eyes.

“After that, I asked a couple of other hunters about it. They told us, ‘Give up hope of catching wild buffalo in that jungle. The Tandbaro won’t let you kill or catch a single one.’ Our money for the permit was wasted; not one wild buffalo fell into our trap that time.”

When Dashrath Jhandawala’s story was finished, the patwari of Labtuliya also said, “We too have heard stories of the Tandbaro since we were children. The Tandbaro is the god of the wild buffalo—he is ever watchful to see that the herds do not fall into peril and lose their lives.”

Whether the story was true or false was not for me to judge. As I listened, I would gaze at Orion, the celestial swordsman with his luminous blade, in the dark sky. The silent, dense forest was overhung by the dark heavens; somewhere far away in the woods, a wild fowl called out. The dark and silent sky, the dark and silent earth, seemed to draw near to one another on a winter’s night and whisper secrets. Gazing towards the black silhouette of the Mohanpura forest in the distance, the thought of this unheard-of forest god would send a shiver through my body. These stories are best heard just so: in the heart of a lonely forest, on a bitterly cold night, seated by the edge of just such a fire.