A Suitable Boy, Page 87

  ‘Aren’t wolves normally scared of the villagers?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what I thought too,’ said Sandeep. ‘We don’t have so many wolves left anyway, and people don’t have permission to go around shooting them unless they become a menace. But I’ve seen children who’ve been mauled by wolves, and even the remains of children killed and eaten by wolves. It’s really terrible. The people of these villages are absolutely terrified. I suppose they are inclined to exaggerate, but the forest officers have confirmed from pug-marks and so on that it’s wolves we’re talking about, not leopards or hyenas or anything else.’

  They were now driving through an area of undulating ground covered with scrub and rocky outcrops. It was getting warmer. The occasional village looked even more barren and destitute than those closer to the town. At one point they stopped and asked the villagers if they had seen the others in their party go past.

  ‘Yes, Sahib,’ said one villager, a middle-aged man with white hair, who was awestruck by the fact that the SDO had appeared in their midst. He told them that a jeep and a car had gone past earlier.

  ‘Has there been any problem with wolves in this village?’ asked Sandeep.

  The villager shook his head from left to right. ‘Yes, indeed, Sahib,’ he said, his face taut with the memory. ‘Bacchan Singh’s son was sleeping outside with his mother and a wolf grabbed him and took him off. We chased him with lanterns and sticks, but it was too late. We found the boy’s body the next day in a field. It was partly eaten. Sahib, please save us from this menace, you are our mother and father. These days we can neither sleep indoors for the heat nor outside for fear.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ asked the SDO sympathetically.

  ‘Last month, Sahib, at the new moon.’

  ‘One day after the new moon,’ corrected another villager.

  When they got back into the car, Sandeep said nothing more than: ‘Very sad, very sad. Sad for the villagers, sad for the wolves.’

  ‘Sad for the wolves?’ said Maan, startled.

  ‘Well, you know,’ said Sandeep, taking off his sola topi and mopping his forehead, ‘though this area looks very bare now, there used to be a lot of forest cover once—sal, mahua and so on—and it supported a lot of small wildlife that the wolves preyed on. But there has been so much logging, first in the War because it was needed, and then, illegally, after the War—often, I’m afraid, with the connivance of the forest officers themselves—and also of the villagers, who want more land for their fields. Anyway, the wolves have been crowded into smaller and smaller areas and have become more and more desperate. The summer’s the worst time because everything is dry and there’s nothing to eat—hardly any land-crabs or frogs or other small animals. That’s when they are driven by hunger to attack the villagers’ goats—and when they can’t get at the goats, they attack the villagers’ children.’

  ‘Can you reafforest any areas?’

  ‘Well, they would have to be areas that aren’t used for cultivation. Politically and, well, humanly, anything else isn’t possible. I can imagine being flayed alive by the likes of Jha if I even suggested it. But anyway, that’s a long-term policy, and what the villagers need is that the terror stop now.’

  Suddenly he tapped his driver on the shoulder. The startled man turned his neck around and looked at the SDO questioningly, while continuing to drive full speed ahead.

  ‘Will you stop blaring that horn?’ said the SDO in Hindi. Then, after a pause, he took up his conversation with Maan:

  ‘The statistics, you know, are quite appalling. For the last seven years, each summer—from about February to June, when the monsoon breaks—there have been over a dozen kills and about the same number of mauls in an area of about thirty villages. For years officials have kept writing reports and referring and deferring and inferring and talking round and round in circles about what to do: paper solutions for the most part. Occasionally they’ve tied up a few goats outside the village of the latest victim in the hope that this will somehow solve things. But—’ He shrugged his shoulders, frowned and sighed. Maan thought that his weak chin made him look rather grumpy.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Sandeep, ‘I felt that this year something practical just had to be done about it. Luckily my DM agreed and helped rope in the police at the district level and so on. They have a couple of good shots, not just with pistols but with rifles. A week ago we learned that a pack of man-eaters was operating in this area and—ah, there they are!’ he said, pointing to a tree near an old and now deserted serai—a resting place for travellers—which stood by the side of the road a furlong or so ahead. A jeep and a car were parked underneath the tree, and a large number of people were moving around nearby, many of them local villagers. The SDO’s jeep roared up and screeched to a halt, enveloping everyone in a haze of dust.

  Although the SDO was the least expert among the gathered officials and the least capable of organizing the task at hand, Maan noticed that everyone insisted on deferring to him, and sought his opinion even when he had none to give. Eventually, in polite exasperation, Sandeep said:

  ‘I do not want to waste any more time in talk. The beaters and hired marksmen, you say, are at the site itself—near the ravine. That’s good. However, you’—he indicated the two Forest Department officials, their five helpers, the Inspector, the two crack police shots and the policemen—‘have been here for an hour, waiting, and we have been here for half an hour, talking. We should have coordinated our arrival better, but never mind. Let us not waste further time. It is getting hotter by the minute. Mr Prashant, you say you have drawn up the plans with great care after examining the site for the beat three days ago. Well, please do not reiterate them and ask for my approval of every detail. I accept your plan. Now you tell us where to go, and we will obey you. Imagine that you are the DM himself.’

  Mr Prashant, the Forest Officer, looked appalled at the thought, as if Sandeep had made a tasteless joke about God. ‘Now, let’s go ahead—and kill the killers,’ continued Sandeep, almost managing to look fierce.

  10.5

  The jeeps and car turned off the main road on to a dirt track, leaving the villagers behind. Another village went by, and then there was open countryside: the same scrub and outcrops as before, interspersed with pieces of arable land and the occasional large tree—a flame-of-the-forest, a mahua, or a banyan. The rocks had stored heat over the months, and the landscape began to shimmer in the morning sun. It was about eight thirty and it was already hot. Maan yawned and stretched as the jeep bounced on. He was happy.

  The vehicles stopped near a great banyan tree on the bank of a dried stream. There the beaters, armed with lathis and spears, two of them with rudimentary drums strapped across their bodies, sat and chewed tobacco, sang tunelessly, laughed, talked about the two rupees that they would be getting for their morning’s work, and asked several times for a re-explanation of Mr Prashant’s instructions. They were a mixed bunch in both shape and age, but all of them were eager to be of use and hopeful that they would flush out a man-eating wolf or two. Over the last week the suspected wolves had been sighted on a number of occasions—once as many as four of them together—and had sought escape in the long ravine into which the dry creek ran. This was where they would most likely be hiding. The beaters finally set out across the fields and ridges in the direction of the lower end of the ravine and disappeared into the distance as they trudged along. They would later move forward through the ravine and try to flush the quarry out at the other end.

  The jeeps now headed dustily towards the upper end of the ravine. Yet at this upper end—as at the lower end—there were a number of outlets other than the main one, and each exit had to be guarded. The marksmen were distributed at these various exits. Beyond the exits lay rough open land for a couple of hundred yards, and beyond that a patchwork of dry fields and areas of woodland.

  Mr Prashant tried to obey Sandeep Lahiri’s order that he should forget that he was in the superior, heaven-blessed, twice-
born presence of an IAS officer. He donned his cloth cap, nervously twisted it around, and finally mustered the courage to tell people where they should sit and what they should do. Sandeep and Maan were asked to sit at one of the smaller and steeper exits, which a wolf, Mr Prashant thought, would be unlikely to choose because it would too greatly reduce his speed. The police marksmen and hired professional hunters were assigned to different areas, where they sat in the skimpy and sweltering shade of a number of small trees. The long wait for the beat began. There was no stir in the air to provide the least relief.

  Sandeep, who found the heat intolerably taxing, did not say much. Maan hummed a little; it was part of a ghazal that he had heard Saeeda Bai sing, but, oddly, it did not bring Saeeda Bai to his mind. He was not even conscious that he was humming. He was in a state of calm excitement, and from time to time he mopped his forehead or took a swig from his water bottle or checked his ammunition. Not that I’ll get more than half a dozen shots at most, he told himself. Then he moved his hand along the smooth wood of the rifle, and raised it to his shoulder a few times, aiming in anticipation at the bushes and thickets in the ravine from which a wolf would be most likely to emerge.

  More than half an hour passed. The sweat dripped down their faces, and trickled down their bodies. But the air was dry, and it did evaporate; it did not torment them as it would have in the monsoon. A few flies buzzed around, occasionally settling on their faces or their bare arms and legs, and a cicada sitting on a small ber bush in a field chirped shrilly. The faint sound of the drums of the beaters, but not of their shouts, now came to their ears from the distance. Sandeep watched Maan with curiosity, curiosity not at his actions so much as at his expression. Maan had struck him as an easy-going, happy-go-lucky sort of man. But there was something intent and determined in his look now, something that seemed to say, with pleasurable anticipation: A wolf is going to come out there from that thicket, and I will follow it with my rifle until it gets to that spot along the path so that I can be sure of getting a good clear shot sideways on, and I will press the trigger, and the bullet will go true, and it will fall there—dead—and that will be that. A good morning’s work.

  This was not a bad approximation of Maan’s actual thoughts. As for Sandeep’s own independent thoughts, the heat had thinned and blurred them. He did not anticipate with any relish the killing of the wolves, but felt that this was the only immediate solution. He only hoped that the menace to the villagers could somehow be diminished or removed. Just last week he had visited the district hospital to see a seven-year-old boy who had been badly mauled by a wolf. The boy was sleeping on a cot in a general ward, and Sandeep had not wanted him woken. But he could not forget the look in the eyes of the boy’s parents as they spoke to him—as if somehow he would be able to remove or ameliorate the tragedy that had struck their lives. Apart from severe injuries to his arms and upper body, the boy’s neck had been injured, and the doctor had said that he would not be able to walk again.

  Sandeep felt restless. He got up to stretch himself and looked down towards the unluxuriant summer vegetation below him in the ravine and the even sparser scrub outside. They could now hear the faint cries and shouts of the beaters in the distance. Maan too appeared lost in his own thoughts.

  Suddenly, and far earlier than expected, a wolf, an adult grey wolf, larger than an Alsatian and faster, broke through the main outlet of the gorge where many of the professional marksmen were stationed and bounded over the wasteland and dry fields. It rushed straight for the wood to its left, pursued by a few belated shots.

  Maan and Sandeep were not in a position where they could see the wolf clearly, but the shouts and shots that followed it told them that something was going on. Maan caught a brief glimpse of it running across an unploughed, hard-baked field when it swung over to his side at a fair distance and disappeared among the trees, swift and desperate in the face of death.

  It’s got away! he thought angrily. But the next one won’t.

  There were shouts of dismay and recrimination for a minute or two, and then everything in the immediate area settled down to silence again. But a brainfever bird had taken up its obsessive triple-cry from somewhere in the wood, and the sound interlaced itself with the cries and drumbeats from the other direction: the beaters were coming swiftly up the ravine now, flushing out whatever was in it in the direction of the hunters. By now Maan could also hear the sounds they made as they whacked the bushes with their lathis and spears.

  Suddenly another, smaller grey form bounded out in panic from the ravine, this time towards the steep outlet which Maan was guarding. With an instinctive reflex he swung his rifle towards it and was about to fire—earlier than he had planned to for a good sideways shot—when he muttered to himself, with a shock:

  ‘But it’s a fox!’

  The fox, not knowing that it had just been spared, and out of its wits with fear, cut across the fields and streaked like lightning into the woods, its black-tipped grey tail stiff and horizontal to the ground. Maan laughed for a second.

  But the laugh froze on his face. The beaters could not have been more than a hundred yards away when a huge wolf, grey and rugged, its ears drawn back, and with the hint of an irregularity in its swift bounds, broke cover and rushed up the slope towards the place where Maan and Sandeep were sitting. Maan swung the rifle around, but the wolf presented no large target. Rather, as it bounded towards them, its great grey face with its dark arched eyebrows seeming to stare at them with vengeful savagery, it was an object of gross terror.

  All at once it sensed their presence. It swung away from them and leapt down to the path in the ravine where Maan had imagined a wolf might emerge in the first place. Giving himself no chance to think of his own relief and paying not the least attention to the dazed Sandeep, he swung his rifle to follow the wolf to the point where he had earlier judged it would present the best target. It was now in his sights.

  But just as he was about to fire, he suddenly saw two marksmen who had not been there before and who had no business to be there, sitting on the low ridge at the far side of the path, directly opposite him, their rifles trained on the wolf, and clearly about to fire as well.

  This is mad! thought Maan.

  ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ he shouted.

  One of the marksmen shot anyway but missed. The bullet pinged against a rock on the slope two feet away from Maan and ricocheted away.

  ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! You crazy fools!’ yelled Maan.

  The great wolf, having changed its route once, did not do so again. With the same irregular heavy swiftness it charged out of the ravine and made for the woods, its paws raising a trail of dust until it disappeared for a second behind the low boundary of a rough-surfaced field. The moment they saw it in open countryside some of the marksmen positioned at other exits fired at its diminishing shape. But they had no real chance. The wolf, like the fox and his own earlier fellow, was in the woods in a matter of seconds, safe from this concerted human terror.

  The beaters had reached the exit of the ravine, and the beat was over. Not disappointment but a fit of violent anger seized Maan. He unloaded his rifle with trembling hands, then went over to where the errant marksmen were standing and grabbed one of them by his shirt.

  The man was taller and possibly stronger than Maan, but he looked apologetic and frightened. Maan released him, then stood before him, saying nothing, merely breathing swiftly and heavily with tension and aggression. Then he spoke. Instead of asking them whether they were hunting humans or wolves, as he had been about to do, he controlled himself somehow and simply said in a semi-feral growl:

  ‘You were placed to guard that route. You were not intended to come over the ridge and hunt in some other place that you decided was more promising. One of us might have been killed. It might have been you.’

  The man said nothing. He knew that what he and his companion had just done was inexcusable. He looked at his companion, who shrugged.

  Sudde
nly, Maan felt a wave of disappointment wash over him. He turned away with a shake of the head, and walked back to where his rifle and water bottle were standing. Sandeep and the others had gathered beneath a tree and were discussing the beat. Sandeep was using his sola topi to fan his face. He still looked shaken.

  ‘The real problem,’ said someone, ‘is that wood there. It’s too close to the exit. Otherwise we could get about ten more marksmen and spread them in a very wide arc—there—and there, say—’

  ‘Well, at any rate,’ said someone else, ‘they’ve had a bad shock. We’ll flush this ravine out again next week. Only two wolves—I’d hoped that there’d be more of them here today.’ He pulled a biscuit out of his pocket and munched it.

  ‘Oh, so you think they’ll be here next week awaiting your pleasure?’

  ‘We set out too late,’ said yet another. ‘Early morning’s the best time.’

  Maan stood apart from them, struggling with a rush of overwhelming feelings—unbearably tense and unbearably slack at the same time.

  He took a drink from his water bottle and looked at the rifle from which he had not fired a single shot. He felt exhausted, frustrated, and betrayed by events. He would not join in their pointless post-mortem. And indeed a post-mortem was—in a literal sense—unjustified.

  10.6

  But later that afternoon Maan heard some good news. One of Sandeep’s visitors mentioned that a reliable colleague of his had told him that the Nawab Sahib and his two sons had passed through Rudhia and gone to Baitar with the intention of staying at the Fort for a few days.