Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

by Kiran Desai

  ‘Oh, rubbish,’ said the spy, who was in an awful mood these days. ‘Of course the monkeys should be done away with. They are cluttering up everything.’

  People could not believe their ears. ‘Did you hear what he said?’ they asked each other. ‘Rubbish, done away with, cluttering up …’

  Miss Jyotsna turned around ferociously to face him. The two-faced hypocrite! Here he had been coming to the orchard every day, professing his affection for Monkey Baba, noting down everything he said, and now he was advocating something that could only bring Monkey Baba pain. In fact, if the monkeys were removed they would not even be able to call the Monkey Baba Monkey Baba any more, for there would be no more monkeys.

  ‘Traitor,’ she said, and, to everyone’s surprise, especially Sampath’s, pursing her small round mouth, gentle Miss Jyotsna swung at the spy with her handbag and hit him in the stomach so he was forced to leave immediately and catch a rickshaw home.

  ‘Oh,’ said Pinky and Ammaji admiringly. Perhaps this girl had something to her after all. This was quite a change from all that sentimental singing beneath the tree. But they were forced to side with Mr Chawla, who, to Miss Jyotsna’s distress, said much the same thing as the spy, reasoning that the Baba might end up hurt and with rabies. At this, Miss Jyotsna did not know what to say and dissolved into tears. There seemed to be no solution to the problem.

  Sampath was left worn out by these discussions, as if he himself had been caught hold of and pulled in various directions; as if he’d been stamped on and beaten black and blue. Yet, even though he was fatigued, every so often he was swept away on such a surge of anger, it was all he could do to keep from leaping up and throwing things, from yelling out loud or bursting into tears. Somewhere in the pit of his stomach a feeling of horrible anticipation had taken up permanent residence, and his head seemed possessed by an impenetrable fog. ‘Hsssh,’ he tried to calm himself. And: ‘Hssh,’ the breeze sounded about him. It seemed to Sampath that it shared his own concerns, that it was shushing him, soothing him. He tried to surrender himself to its gentleness, to its quiet, to the coolness that moved like a tender hand over his forehead, his cheek, his entire body.

  The devotees made their way back down into Shahkot only to continue their arguments there, the sounds of their raised voices buzzing over the valley, rising from tea stalls, balconies and street corners.

  In every neighbourhood, in every public venue, meetings and protest meetings were held. Meetings on the national level and the local level, in the religious interest and the civilian. A new Monkey Protection Society was formed with the support of the Cow Protection Society. A slew of members from the Atheist Society mingled unnoticed with the crowds. Every office, every family, seemed split over the matter. Business had come almost to a complete standstill as customers and shopkeepers refused to buy and sell from each other. ‘See if I patronize your shop, you donkey!’ ‘What makes you think I’d sell to you, you son of a pig?’ The police superintendent spent his days rushing about with his stick trying to break up the terrible fights that were taking place. There was no longer any peace in Shahkot.

  19

  In the meantime, in the midst of all this furore, Verma of the university had been working hard on his plan. After much thought and digging up of yellowing scientific documents, he finally drafted a proposal that involved a complicated procedure for the killing of the Cinema Monkey and a display of his carcass that would, Verma postulated, result in the disbanding of the entire troupe of monkeys. They would disband just like that and disappear quietly into the forest to join other faraway monkeys elsewhere. It was a beautiful plan and he delivered it personally to the house of the CMO, for ultimately he was in charge of all health matters in Shahkot. That, of course, included everything concerning carcasses and their display. Butcher shops, the burning ghats, laboratory work – all had to be met with his stamp of approval before anything else. Verma also sent photocopies of his plan to the District Collector still being awaited at his posting, to the Superintendent of Police and to other parties who would, he thought, be interested (for example, the Indian Scientific Journal, which had often published the articles of his colleagues).

  He did not, however, show this plan to his wife, and though she was full of scorn for his ideas, seeing him retaliate in this way made her doubly angry. She began to plot and plan a separation from him. After all, they were not living in the dark ages, she thought. In their own town there was a man whose wife had left him, another who had left his wife and even someone who lived with a mistress, though nobody could understand why, for she was very plain.

  The Brigadier too had come up with a plan. Sitting in his bathroom, waiting fruitlessly for the elusive green pigeon, the idea had hit him: he would organize an operation that would bring him honour and teach his men the true meaning of being in the army. It was his duty to take charge of all unusual and dire threats to peace and security. He would think of this mess as an opportunity rather than a bother.

  ‘We could,’ he suggested in a written report, ‘organize a firing squad whereby fifty or a hundred men will be dispersed throughout the brush, discharging their rifles every twenty to forty minutes to scare the monkeys. If we persist, the monkeys will surely get the jitters and disappear from here, never to return.’ And he sent army personnel in army jeeps to deliver his plan to the District Collector, who was expected by his secretary at the railway station very soon – if not on the next express from Delhi, then on the one after it. Also, copies were sent to the Superintendent of Police and the Chief Medical Officer.

  The Chief Medical Officer did not receive this plan for he was sitting behind locked doors in a feverish state of advanced hypochondria. Drinking onion juice by the gallon, ignoring the persistent ring of the telephone, he was drafting, with a shaky hand, his own proposal for peace in Shahkot. You will be surprised, perhaps, to hear that a man so concerned with his own health could manage to drag his attention away long enough to think about the problem at hand, but he had his own interests at heart. If he was successful, he thought, with a leap of hope, surely he would be rewarded with a promotion. And promotion meant a transfer out of Shahkot. Oh, how he wished to be transferred out of this place of ill-health to one of peace and calm. Somewhere perhaps in the coastal regions of South India, for he had heard that in Kerala people were remarkably sophisticated and polite. And, no doubt, it would be restful to be near the ocean.

  In elegantly worded prose that was one of his greatest strengths, he put forward his plan, which involved revoking the liquor licences of all shops and restaurants and banning alcohol in Shahkot. What a marvellous plan! He had thought of it while lying awake at night, unable to sleep, cushions piled up beneath him. What could be better for public health? And what better way to put a stop to the problem? With one fell stroke he would accomplish two such laudatory acts. Quite possibly this move would also put a damper on the problem of wife-beating, which had been getting rather out of hand of late. In that case, he could claim three … yes, three … victories! And he himself had nothing to lose as he was a strict teetotaller.

  Carbon copies of his plan were delivered by government jeep to the railway station in preparation for the DC’s still-anticipated arrival.

  Only the Superintendent of Police, as you can see, had offered up no plan at all, for he didn’t think of furthering his career. No. He did not want to be promoted for precisely the reason that the Chief Medical Officer did: it would mean a transfer out of Shahkot and he liked Shahkot. He liked the bazaar and the tea stall, he liked his naughty-eyed wife and all of his friends. It occurred to him that he might, in fact, be demoted because of all of this … Now that would not be such a bad thing … It would mean even more time to wander about the bazaar chatting with his cronies, even more time to sit with his wife eating golguppas in the municipal gardens while tickling her with flowers picked from the flowerbeds that had signs reading: ‘Do not pick the flowers.’

  Thus the Superintendent of Police did not joi
n the others when they visited Sampath in order to seek his blessing for their plans. The CMO had been the first to decide to go. And as soon as the Brigadier heard of the proposed visit through a servant who had seen the officer driving to the orchard, he too leapt into his jeep. As he drove, he was spotted by Poncha and Sinha, Vermaji’s friends, who persuaded a groaning Vermaji to join the procession on his moped. And so they all reached Sampath’s tree within a half-hour of each other, each one of them accompanied by crowds of outraged citizens. There had been uproar, you see, when the plans just elaborated upon reached the ears of the population at large, leaked, as they were, by the drivers of the government and army jeeps and by Verma’s wife, who had snooped among his papers in a way that should have made her ashamed.

  Sampath had spent the morning looking at a collection of things he had made in an old tin can when he first arrived in the orchard. Still feeling a little uneasy in the head and stomach, he lay down like an invalid and tried to tempt himself with what had once been a great obsession. All sorts of things had gone into that tin: a red velvet-backed spider; a tall, thin seed case stacked with seeds like sheets of parchment; an orange bead of resin; a snakeskin; a bit of bone; feathers of various colours; soft silk cotton silk; the furry cape of a moth; a whorl of sepals; a leaf, diseased, freckled blue with fungus … Now, even though a lot of these things had grown faded or fallen to pieces, Sampath spread as much of his collection about him as he could, balancing the most precious items up and down his legs where they showed beautifully against his skin.

  After about a month in the orchard, he had come to the conclusion that collecting was only worthwhile if you lived away from what you were collecting, not if you existed amidst all the bounty of your desire, not if you lived right where all you loved grew or crawled constantly by you. Anyway, how could you gather anything if you were wishing all the while that it would gather you up instead? Still, he felt nostalgic looking into his tin.

  At this point he heard the noise of approaching protesters who accompanied the officials and Vermaji.

  ‘Babaji,’ shouted the CMO, the Brigadier and Vermaji, but it was impossible for any of them to speak, as there were so many disruptive people accompanying them. Bits and pieces of information at screaming pitch, garbled and incoherent, reached Sampath, whose bewildered mind would not have been able to make sense of it all even if they were straightforward in their speech. How he hated to be interrupted when he was intent upon something as interesting as the long-forgotten contents of his tin.

  ‘Alcohol’, ‘Cinema Monkey’, ‘guns’, ‘banning’, ‘scaring’, ‘never to return’, ‘safety for your honourable self’ … Spittle flew from mouths that were twisted into ugly expressions. The louder they were, the more hysterical they got. Sampath could see an unrecognizable look in their eyes. It came from no feeling he had ever seen in himself, and he had often run to the mirror so he could view how each of his emotions appeared upon his face. He did not think this method had worked entirely, for he was sure his face always altered in front of the mirror due to self-consciousness. But all the same, he was sure he could not have felt this emotion, which was stronger than the men who displayed it. What was it? It existed beyond a person and anything any person could be individually capable of. They shook with this gigantic force.

  Sampath realized that he himself could speak out in a crowd only if he were happy; sadness or fright made him quiet. And anyway, he couldn’t think of what to say … He couldn’t think, and how could he respond when he didn’t understand what they were saying? He couldn’t understand, he couldn’t … No … At one point he thought he heard one of his own lines being shouted back at him. Something about an elephant and a banana. ‘Run when the elephant wants your banana.’ Or: ‘Eat a bun when the elephant wants your banana.’ But no, surely not. These words were not like anything he would say. They sounded like gunfire, hit him like bullets. Like an accusation of guilt. But he was not guilty. No, no, he could not understand … All he knew was that this was nothing good for him, or for the monkeys, or the orchard, the birds and insects … or even the grass that was being so thoughtlessly trampled underfoot. Sampath rubbed a geranium petal against his lower lip, staining it red. He rolled a flower up and down his cheeks, colouring them to match his lip. He rattled a tamarind pod from his tin and ate a seed. He ate a bit of dried fern too, and in a nervous fit he swallowed the diseased leaf and began to chew on the bone. He felt fiery rage, yet he was also close to tears. Tremors ran through him. These people were trampling on him. They were invading him, claiming him, polluting the air about him. They were dirtying him with their dirty minds. How could they bring their horrible thoughts and ideas to him? And how dare they? They were using him for their own purposes. He felt sick.

  Turning sour, his stomach revolted and fired up in a terrible state of indigestion as if it contained a roiling mass of serpents, venomous and hissing in volcanic heat.

  Sampath leant over the edge of his cot and threw up. The vomit burnt him like acid, leaving his insides corroded and empty. Only the black hole of horrible anticipation he had felt for the past few weeks was left intact.

  When the visitors were finally made to leave by Mr Chawla, they retreated not quiet and ashamed-looking, but shouting even louder to claim that the Baba’s indigestion was the fault of whoever was arguing against them.

  Sampath remembered his early rapture in the orchard. It had been a love affair: how he had bloomed and blossomed, how his joy, his playfulness had shone upon his face. He remembered, regarding the remains of his collection, how he had spent hours stringing necklaces of seed pods about himself. How he had put flowers behind his ears, sipped their nectar. He had unzipped pods with his teeth and prised open buds to uncover parasols of pink. The longer he spent in such activities, the more engrossed he had become. He had tickled his heel with the razor edge of wild grasses, rubbed his feet against a bit of bark to be overtaken by the same unbearable ecstasy that overtakes a cat rubbing itself against a tree trunk. He had squeezed the sticky gum from shrubs, cut into stems so the sap ran like milk and painted with the whiteness upon his legs. He had tapped anthers heavy with pollen so they spilled their rich yellow cargo on to his fingers and he had dusted this richness over his eyelids …

  His mind returned to the afternoon’s events.

  20

  It was into this strained atmosphere that the new District Collector was delivered when, at long last, the awaited express from Delhi arrived. As soon as he descended from the train, he found himself rushed at and surrounded by several stern-faced messengers and a secretary; they bore all sorts of plans and proposals on a subject about which, who knows how, he had not been briefed before his arrival.

  ‘I am sorry, sir. I tried, sir,’ said his secretary, ‘but the phone lines are out and the postal and telegraph services are being run by my old boss, sir, who will not let me enter the premises, and we did not want to alert any of the big authorities for it would be better if we can deal with the situation ourselves … Or all the blame will be on our heads, sir, and it will go down as an immediate black mark on your record … Never mind, sir, in this way you will have had a nice peaceful journey instead of being worried … Am I right?’ He beamed and garlanded the bewildered official with the garland of marigolds he had brought along, even though the flowers were rather bedraggled from having been at the station so long.

  The newcomer was a quiet man and, though firm in his ideals, he was a very shy man, only just installed in government service, and very thin and weak-looking. He had been offered the town of Shahkot as his first posting precisely because it was not a very big responsibility, and so that he might find his feet gently, for, after all, his father was an influential officer in the Indian Administrative Service. How the family had rejoiced to have a new member in the government; after a short vacation to celebrate the news, he was sent on to his posting with thirty-five pickle jars containing pickles made personally by his mother, enough to last him two entire years in se
rvice! He had hoped to go home quietly with cook and driver, unpack, explore … and now … Black mark on records? What good is too much worry?

  Who do you think this secretary was, giving all this fine advice in a waterfall of words? It was Mr Gupta from post-office days! Lonely after being more or less completely deserted by Miss Jyotsna and miserable in the post office with nobody to talk to but a curt and silent man hired in Sampath’s place, he had applied for and obtained the post of secretary to the DC. At last, he felt, he was in the thick of things; more so, in fact, than at any other time in his life. His spirits rose. He would have been even happier if there had been a lady around to flirt with, of course, and he had been disappointed to learn the District Collector was a bachelor, but this job, he thought, might put him back in touch with Miss Jyotsna …

  ‘I will escort you to your new home, sir. I myself gave orders for dinner. The cook is left over from the Raj, sir, and wanted to make you cutlets with caramel custard. I said: “Nothing doing. What did we get rid of the British for? To continue eating cutlets and custard?” You will have to be very strict with him. He got into a very bad mood, but I gave him orders for vegetable pulao and mutton curry. That is why he refused to come to the station. I am sure he is still sitting on his stool sulking … Oh, and after you have eaten, sir, we had better visit the Monkey Baba. It must be done, sir, or it will look bad. It is expected.’

  In the meantime, swaying and jumping in the government jeep, the DC was trying hard to read the missives that had been delivered to him. He could not understand what was going on at all … and how his secretary could talk! He could not think, what with all the talking that man was doing. There, only a few days ago he had been on a blissful family vacation in Mussoorie and now here he was immersed in the worst governmental tragedy he could have dreamt of.