Kumbhpur Rising

by Mayur Didolkar

  Constable Patode slapped the stranger hard across his face, and prepared to beat the shit out of him, when the stranger suddenly hit him back, before he could realize what was happening the stranger had kneed him in the groin, and then had a vice like grip across his throat shoving his face in the earth. Head Constable Patode could feel the smell of his own urine a couple of foot from his face.

  “Listen to me once Saheb, I am dead, been so for eight years, and so are you. You were dead the day you first mounted your wife and realized you could not get hard, no matter how many slaps you administered her, and no matter how hard you squeezed her breasts. You had your heart attack, and now you are drinking again, your wife wants it too, she is tired of living with a hijra like you. Once you die, maybe she will take your insurance money, and go to a nice big city to live in. She is still attractive enough to get a good man for herself. A man who does not drink, who does not smoke and mostly who can get hard without beating her up. She has laid the trap for you, and you are walking right inside it. What are you going to do if you go home right now to find your Boss’s uniform hanging in the living room with the bedroom door closed? Hit her maybe? Kill her even? Go ahead; you will still fall in THEIR trap. They are waiting for you to fall right in.”

  Even as the stranger was speaking, Head Constable Patode saw light. The stranger was right, his wife wanted him to die and his Boss wanted his wife. Even Rajaji was a part of it. Constable Patode could imagine Inspector Kamble going to Rajaji’s bungalow afterwards and regaling Rajaji and a few other fellows with stories about the hot wife of Head Constable Patode.

  He could also imagine the next step from here. Inspector Kamble would accept that he was helping himself to his Head constable’s wife from time to time, and then he would dare his underling to stop him. What was a small town, semi literate, constable going to do if his Boss decided to screw his wife? He could not complain to the department, he would be laughed at and thrown out. He could not seek help from his town; the town had plenty of other things to worry about. Inspector Kamble knew it, and it was only a matter of time before Constable Patode was forced to become his own wife’s pimp. Constable Patode had lived a reasonably honorable life till this time. This affair would surely strip him of his dignity.

  And what about his sons? His elder son was in the 12th standard this year. Head Constable Patode wanted him to become a cop. What sort of a career could he expect his son to have; if everyone in the department knew that his own mother was the mistress of his father’s Boss?

  “Constable Saheb, there are going to be major changes in this town. All the little people have suffered enough for centuries, and now they are going to unite. Only this time there is going to be no strike, no petitions, and no marches. This time the rich and the powerful are going to be buried in this very earth, ending their reign of terror. You were their pawn all your life, and now they have turned against you, you can either choose to join us and help us overthrow them, the corrupt bosses, the vicious politicians, the killer Patils, or remain their pawn. Maybe your Boss will pay you some money every time he fucks your wife.”

  Head Constable Patode sat up, and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. He could hear a faint murmur in his chest. Surely another heart attack was not too far away. The question was - was he going to go down fighting?

  He made up his mind and by the time he reached home it was nearly three in the morning. His wife showed the usual fake concern for his health and even shed a tear or two, begging him to stop for his children’s sake. Constable Patode said nothing, and went to bed. The last thing he noticed before falling asleep was the large red welt on his wife’s right wrist, the kind that comes from squeezing it long and hard during passionate coupling. But that did not disturb him in the least; He had heard the stranger and he knew that the end was near.

  ***

  Sitting in her thatched hut, Kantabai Durande was trying to calm her bellowing four year old daughter, Sulochana. The baby was running high fever for the last four days, a result of playing in the rain, heedless of Kanta’s warning. Now Sulochana, as she was lying on the threadbare mattress in her house, was white and sweaty. She was crying loudly saying her head hurt and since yesterday morning she had thrown up everything her mother had tried to feed her.

  Sulochana was the eldest among two children that Kanta had borne in her young life. Both Kanta and her husband Damu were daily wages workers at Rajaji’s rice farm. Now at eight in the night, Damu was out boozing as usual and Kanta was deciding between waiting for him to turn up and taking her daughter to the civil hospital herself. She knew waiting was useless. Damu had headed towards the local desi bar with his friends after his day’s work was done and if five years of marriage was anything to go by, chances were that he would turn up well past midnight, punch drunk and looking for nothing but a little bit of sex and a lot of sleep. Waiting for him may only make matters worse.

  Sulochana again sat up in her bed, and weakly retched once, nothing but a little bit of thick spittle came up. Watching her child like that finally made up Kanta’s mind. She took her younger son in her arms and hauled Sulochana to her feet, walking out of her hut she called her neighbour, an elderly lady, whose husband was very likely getting drunk along with Damu. The lady promised Kanta to take care of her son till she came back from the hospital. Kanta picked her daughter’s scrawny body in her arms and set towards the civil hospital.

  When she walked into the single story building of civil hospital, it was a little after nine in the night. The front room was deserted.At this hour the orderlies were likely to be in the nearest watering hole, leaving the patients unattended. As it is, the only people who dared to take consultation from Dr. Thombre, the local quack, were poor penniless people like Kanta and who cared about them anyway?

  Kanta stood undecided for a few minutes and then set her daughter on a plastic chair in the waiting area. Timidly she walked to the room marked “Dr. Thombre-Civil Surgeon” and knocked on it lightly. After a minute, she pushed the door open and walked in.

  Dr. Thombre, a quack if there ever was one, was sprawled in the chair, his feet on the table, and a glass of whisky by his hand. He saw a woman of about twenty five coming in and raised his eyebrows lazily. A look at her clothes was enough to tell him that she was a nobody.

  Kanta saluted him and said,” My daughter doctor, she is very sick.”

  Dr. Thombre took a good look at his visitor through smoke clouded eyes. Young, dark black color but overall good figure, high and firm breasts poking through a worn out blouse and a good tone to her thighs visible through her nine yard sari. The doctor had been a divorcee for about fifteen years and molesting poor female patients was about the only action he ever got here. He stood up and walked to her on unsteady feet. Up close he liked the sharp jute of her breasts even better.

  “Take her to the private hospital in Sindhudurg” he opened with his favorite pick up line with all the poor bitches.

  Kanta was in tears as he expected. She explained that she was a daily wages worker and could not afford a private hospital. She was ready to touch his feet, if that was what it took.

  Doctor Thombre casually walked around Kanta and latched the door shut. From behind, the view of his visitor’s behind was agreeable too. He became bold and gave it a little hard squeeze.

  But before the doctor could put his plans of raping Kanta, there were voices from outside.

  Doctor Thombre moved away from her in a hurry and walked out. Kanta’s bosom was heaving and her whole body was shaking like a leaf in the wind. Thombre went out to attend to the intruder without sparing her a glance.

  The intruder turned out to be the local MSEB engineer who had a sore throat. Doctor Thombre attended to him while making small talk about the weather and the upcoming local municipal election. By the time the engineer was gone, another couple of locals dropped in. Thombre, knowing his chance was gone, made those people wait and attended to Sulochana. He was mad as hell at the way fate had taken the chance of ha
ving this attractive villager anyway he liked and that affected his judgment about the diagnosis. While Dr. Thombre would never be called upon to do an open heart surgery on the chief minister, he was a reasonably good doctor, but three hours of drinking whisky and prickled vanity had finally sent him over the edge. He gave Sulochana a penicillin injection without checking whether the child was allergic to it.

  Before leaving, Kanta touched the Doctor’s feet. Doctor Thombre felt all was not lost yet and gave her the pain killer tablets from his dispensary. Before Kanta left he gave her backside a good double handed squeeze.

  What both of them did not know at that time was that Sulochana was severely allergic to penicillin and when they meet next it would be in unimaginably different circumstances.

  Kumbhpur had three schools, two municipal run, and one private, run by an educational foundation based in Satara. The only difference between the municipal schools and the private one was that the students here wore blue shorts instead of khaki like the municipals.

  Amar Sonawane was a teacher in the municipal school no.1 for some twelve years. A true son of Kumbhpur, he had bought his tenure with a bribe and now spent all his salary on booze and occasionally on hookers in Pune. At thirty-five years of age, he was divorced for the last five. Most of the people, who knew Sonawane, were surprised that his wife lasted as long as she did before she got tired of the beatings and the demands for money.

  Now without his wife even for a token bit of nagging, Amar had taken up drinking as a profession. What probably saved him from getting fired was the fact that the headmaster of the school was his drinking partner. Amar was a terrible teacher, ignorant of his subject which was History and cruel to his students. The students studying there belonged to the poorest of poor families, where a couple of lashes from a cane were nothing to care about. Amar knew that, and he hated those poor people who thought that their snotnosed, dirty, smelly kids were all going to become doctors and collectors by studying in this shitty little school at the Government’s expense. He spared no opportunity to discipline his students. Discipline was a euphemism for physical torture, in the drunken teacher’s mind.

  It must, however, be noted that Sonawane did not approach the physical abuse in the same crude ignorant way in which he approached his drinking. His tortures had a method and over twelve years of unchecked freedom, he had developed several tricks in his bag. He was the most dreaded teacher in the whole school.

  Far earlier, Sonawane realized that most of his students belonged to families where beatings were as common as meals. The children were hardened to a stage where a couple of lashes of the cane on the backside, or on the flat palm meant nothing to most of them. To a sadist, this fact has the same effect a painter would have upon discovering that all his patrons had suddenly gone blind.

  Sonawane however, showed ingenuity (something he never showed either in his family life or in his teaching methods) in understanding the fact that these kids were still vulnerable, if hit in the right place and followed by the right amount of insulting words.

  His most common method of punishment was to make his students (especially girls) stand with their fingers touching their toes with the back to their class. Knowing that their skirts were riding far up enough to show their dirty tattered knickers would be enough humiliation for most of them. But just to make sure, Amar would ask them if they ever washed their underclothes, all the while trying to control the erection he always got, seeing ten year-old bottoms in such prone positions. This would be followed by a succession of open handed slaps on the backside, all the while his hands feeling for the roundness in buttocks that simply was not there on the malnourished bodies.

  For boys, Amar relied upon hitting them on the backsides till he knew they would be red and bleeding inside, and then making them sit on the hard benches knowing, what effect it would have on their bleeding backsides. He tried hitting a 5th standard student between his legs once. But this particular method proved counterproductive; the boy spent five days in the civil hospital fighting for his life due to an internal hemorrhage. Sonawane did not go to jail for one simple reason, the doctor was his drinking buddy too.

  So, Mr. Amar Sonawane of Kumbhpur was sitting sprawled in the chair that morning, when things finally started going out of hand.Two kilometers away a constable was getting ready to finally cross the line, but all that Amar was thinking right then, was how he could get Savita Tamboli alone in the teacher’s room for a while. Savita was the daughter of a farm worker; her father was in a jail at Pune for last five years. Unfortunately for her, she was well endowed for her eleven years. Amar noticed the small swells inside her blouse, and her backside was also rounder than most of her classmates. Savita had pimples all over her face; she was also as black as coal. Her hair always smelled of too much oil with too little water. For anyone else, she was not even worth a glance, but in Amar’s warped mind her backside had all the attraction that Aishwarya Rai’s face would hold for a teenager. He wanted a piece of her. He had not been to Pune for more than four months and as it was, the red-light area there was turning more and more dangerous, what with pimps carrying razors and every cunt carrying some STD or the other. The students here were safer, they did not demand money, they were clean (in terms of STD only of course, by any other standards they were filthier than a pig), and there was no chance of getting caught, no chance at all. The principal, a fifty year old man called Sunder Pendse, was helping himself to his young female teachers since time unknown. He took a cut of their salaries after feeling their young plump bodies at every opportunity. The circle of life, in a small-town school.

  Sonawane rubbed himself through his pants, an act that brought a fresh wave of pain in his abdomen. Sonawane thought of it as a result of too much drinking last night. Last night was a hard night even by his considerable standard. He and Pendse were sitting in his one room house, drinking till almost two in the night. Sonawane had gone to sleep without his dinner. Today his head hurt and his stomach heaved, but his mind was in overdrive, imagining various scenarios with Savita. He rubbed himself again.

  The bell rang signaling the start of his first period of the day. Amar Sonawane picked up his tattered copy of standard six history book and his favorite cane and walked towards the class. The students fell silent the moment he walked inside. Sonawane took a satisfying look at their cowed faces. His eyes rested upon Savita sitting in the third row. The girl met his eyes for a moment before lowering hers. In her face, there was that unmistakable pleading look, that Sonawane admired so much in his students.

  Boy, he felt hard again.

  Sudhakar Wadale never felt so little, so powerless, so tired in his life. He was walking back home alone, after managing to convince his son-in-law to take his daughter back. His son-in-law was asking a motorcycle for Diwali and Wadale, a middle-aged music teacher in the municipal school was simply incapable of meeting that demand. His angry son-in-law had sent his wife back to Sudhakar’s house with a body swollen and blue with beatings, with the message that either she came back with the money, or not come back at all. Wadale had two more daughters yet to be married, and a no-good son. His wife took to bed under the stress. Her blood pressure soared with the domestic troubles.

  Finally Wadale took his daughter back to her husband’s house, where they were made to sit on the steps outside for three hours. Wadale spent those hours begging his daughter’s in-laws to take her back. His daughter’s mother-in-law hinted at getting her son to remarry and upon hearing this threat, Wadale forgot all his dignity and fell at his son-in-law’s feet begging him not to do so. After further pleading and some interference from sympathetic neighbors Wadale’s son-in-law agreed to take his wife back for another month till Wadale could somehow raise the money. Wadale touched the feet of his son-in-law’s parents and left without drinking even a drop of water.

  Now as he was nearing the same place where constable Patode was to have his meeting with the stranger, exhaustion overcame him. He was fifty two and never a very
strong man physically. All his fellow teachers made fun of him, because he was among the few male teachers who did not so much as touch the drink. He was always a shy soft-spoken person, his skill at the harmonium his only specialty (a specialty for which a lot of his students fondly remembered him). Talking to his thuggish son-in-law and his brutal parents always made him feel tired. Tonight he had seen murder in their eyes. Yet he was powerless to save Shubhangi, his daughter. What could he do? There was no way in the world he was going to be able to raise the money .The substitute of taking his daughter back to his place was equally impractical. Radha, his second daughter, was due to be married, and her prospective in- laws would surely break off the engagement if they came to know that Radha’s elder sister was thrown out of her husband’s house. Wadale suddenly remembered his two daughters hugging each other and crying at Shubhangi’s wedding and then contrasted it with today afternoon at his own house. Shubhangi was pleading with all of them to let her stay in the house, she did not want to go back to that brute, she was saying this with tears in her eyes, while she had dropped her pallu to show them her blackened back. Radha’s reply was equally hysterical. She wanted her sister to go back where her husband was. If she stayed here, Radha’s marriage would surely break. The two sisters had nearly gone for each other’s throats.

  Suddenly Wadale found that he could walk no more, not another step till he sat and caught his breath. And maybe, cry a little. As he sat on the milestone and wiped his eyes with the end of his dhoti, his eyes rested upon the empty ground beyond the road. Had it not been for his utter despair and exhaustion Wadale would have never chosen this as a spot for a rest.