SAVE THE TIGER!
Mr. D’Mello stood behind the seated boys along with the other teachers. He wiped his face with relief. It looked like everything was going to be okay, after all. After leaving him alone in peace for a few minutes, young Mr. Bhatt then moved up to the assistant headmaster and tried to make small talk.
Ignoring young Mr. Bhatt, Mr. D’Mello kept his eyes to the screen. Photos of tiger cubs frolicking together flashed on the screen, and then a caption said, “If you don’t protect these cubs today, how can there be tigers tomorrow?”
He yawned. Stucco angels stared at him from the four corners of the auditorium, long peels of faded paint rising from their noses and ears, like heat blisters. He hardly went to films anymore. Too expensive; he had to get tickets for the wife and the two little screamers too. But as a boy, hadn’t films been his whole life? This very theater, Angel Talkies, had been one of his favorite haunts; he would cut class and come here and sit alone and watch movies and dream. Now look at it. Even in the darkness the deterioration was unmistakable. The walls were foul, with large moisture stains. The seats had holes in them. The simultaneous advance of decay and decadence: the story of this theater was the story of the entire country.
The screen went black. The audience tittered. “Silence!” Mr. D’Mello shouted.
The title shot of the “bonus reel” came on.
THE IMPORTANCE OF
PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN
Images of boys showering, bathing, running, and eating, each appropriately captioned, began flashing one by one. Mr. Bhatt came up to the assistant headmaster once again. This time he whispered deliberately:
“It’s your turn to go now, if you want.”
Mr. D’Mello understood the words, but not the hint of secrecy in the young man’s voice. At his own suggestion, the teachers were taking turns to patrol the black-clothed corri dor to make sure none of the overdeveloped boys slipped out to take a peek at the pornographic images. It had just been Gopalkrishna Bhatt’s turn to patrol the Murals of Sin. For a moment he was lost-then it all made sense. From the way the young man was grinning, Mr. D’Mello realized that he had taken a quick peek himself. He looked around: each of the teachers was suppressing a grin.
Mr. D’Mello walked out of the auditorium full of contempt for his colleagues.
He walked past the black-cloth-covered walls without feeling the slightest urge. How could Mr. Bhatt and Mr. Rogers have been so base to have done it? He walked past the whole length of the walls without the least temptation to lift up the black cloth.
A light flickered on and off in a stairwell that led to an upper gallery. The walls of this gallery too were covered with black cloth. Mr. D’Mello dropped his mouth open and squinted at the upper gallery. No, he was not dreaming. Up there, he could make out a boy, his face averted, walking on tiptoe toward the black cloth. Julian d’Essa, he thought. Naturally. But then the boy’s face came into view, just as he lifted up a corner of the black cloth and peered.
“Girish! What are you doing?”
At the sound of Mr. D’Mello’s voice the boy turned. He froze. Teacher and student stared at each other.
“I’m sorry, sir…I’m sorry…they…they…”
There was giggling behind him; and suddenly he vanished, as if someone had dragged him away.
Mr. D’Mello rushed up the stairs at once, to the upper gallery. He could climb only two steps. His chest burned. Stomach heaving and hands clutching the balustrade, he rested there for a moment. The naked bulb in the stairwell sputtered on and off, on and off. The assistant headmaster felt dizzy. In his chest the heartbeat felt fainter and fainter, a dissolving tablet. He tried to call to Girish for help, but the words would not come out. Reaching a hand for help, he caught a corner of the black cloth on the wall. It ripped and split open: hordes of copulating creatures frozen in postures of rapes, unlawful pleasures, and bestialities swarmed out and danced around his eyes in a taunting cavalcade, and a world of angelic delights that he had scorned until now flashed at him. He saw everything, and he understood everything, at last.
Young Mr. Bhatt found him like that, lying on the stairs.
DAY TWO (EVENING): MARKET AND MAIDAN
WITH HAIR LIKE that, and eyes like those, he could easily have passed himself off as a holy man, and earned a living sitting cross-legged on a saffron cloth near the temple. That was what the shopkeepers at the market said. Yet all this crazy fellow did, morning and evening, was crouch on the central railing of the Hyder Ali Road and stare at the passing buses and cars. In the sunset, his hair-a gorgon’s head of brown curls-shone like bronze, and his irises glowed. While the evening lasted, he was like a Sufi poet, full of mystic fire. Some of the shopkeepers could tell stories about him: one evening they had seen him on the back of a black bull, riding it down the main road, swinging his hands and shouting, as if the Lord Shiva himself were riding into town on his bull, Nandi.
Sometimes he behaved like a rational man, crossing the road carefully, or sitting patiently outside the Kittamma Devi Temple with the other homeless, as they waited for the leftovers of meals from weddings or thread ceremonies to be scraped into their clustered hands. At other times he would be seen picking through piles of dog shit.
No one knew his name, religion, or caste, so no one made any attempt to talk to him. Only one man, a cripple with a wooden leg who came to the temple in the evenings once or twice a month, would stop to give him food.
“Why do you pretend not to know this fellow?” the cripple would shout, pointing one of his crutches at the fellow with the brown curls. “You’ve seen him so many times before! He used to be the king of the number five bus!”
For a moment the attention of the market would turn to the wild man; but he would only squat and stare at a wall, his back to them and the city.
Two years ago, he had come to Kittur with a name, a caste, and a brother.
“I am Keshava, son of Lakshminarayana, the barber of Gurupura Village,” he had said at least six times on his way to Kittur, to bus conductors, toll gatherers, and strangers who asked. This formula, a bag of bedding tucked beneath his arm, and the light pressure of his brother’s fingers at his elbow whenever they were in a crowd were all he had brought with him.
His brother had ten rupees, a bag of bedding that he too tucked under his right arm, and the address of a relative written on a paper chit that he kept crushed in his left hand.
The two brothers had arrived in Kittur on the five p.m. bus. They got off at the bus station; it was their first visit to a town. Right in the middle of the Hyder Ali Road, in the center of the biggest road in all of Kittur, the conductor had told them that their six rupees and twenty paise would take them no farther. Buses charged around them, with men in khaki uniforms hanging from their doors, whistles in their mouths that they blew on screechingly, shouting at the passengers, “Stop gaping at the girls, you sons of bitches! We’re running late!”
Keshava held on to the hem of his brother’s shirt. Two cycles swerved around him, nearly running over his feet; in every direction, cycles, autorickshaws, and cars threatened to crush his toes. It was as if he were at the beach, with the road shifting beneath him like sand beneath the waves.
After a while, they summoned up the courage to approach a bystander, a man whose lips were discolored by vitiligo.
“Where is Central Market, uncle?”
“Oh, that…It’s down by the Bunder.”
“How far is the Bunder from here?”
The stranger directed them to an autorickshaw driver, who was massaging his gums with a finger.
“We need to go to the market,” Vittal said.
The driver stared at them, his finger still in his mouth, revealing his long gums. He examined the moist tip of his finger. “Lakshmi Market or Central Market?”
“Central Market.”
“How many of you?”
And then: “How many bags?”
And then: “Where are you from?”
Keshava assumed that these questions were standard in a big city like Kittur, that an autorickshaw driver was entitled to such inquiries.
“Is it a long distance away?” Vittal asked desperately.
The auto driver spat right at their feet. “Of course. This isn’t a village, it’s a city. Everything’s a long distance from everything else.”
He took a deep breath and sketched a series of loops with his damp finger in the air, showing them the circuitous path that they would have to take. Then he sighed, giving the impression that the market was incalculably far away. Keshava’s heart sank; they had been swindled by the bus driver. He had promised to drop them off within walking distance of Central Market.
“How much, uncle, to take us there?”
The driver looked at them from head to toe, and then from toe to head, as if gauging their height, weight, and moral worth: “Eight rupees.”
“Uncle, it’s too much! Take four!”
The autorickshaw driver said, “Seven twenty-five,” and motioned for them to get in. But then he kept them waiting in the rickshaw, their bundles on their laps, without any explanation. Two other passengers negotiated a destination and a fare and crammed in; one of them sat on Keshava’s lap without any warning. Still the rickshaw did not move. Only after another passenger joined them, sitting in the front beside the driver, and with six people crammed into the tiny vehicle that had space for three, did the driver start kicking on his engine’s pedal.
Keshava could barely see where they were going, and thus his first impressions of Kittur were of the man who was sitting on his lap: of the scent of the castor oil that had been used to grease his hair and the hint of shit that he produced when he squirmed. After dropping off the rider in the front seat, and then the two men at the back, the autorickshaw meandered for some time through a quiet, dark area of town, before turning into another cacophonous street, lit by the glaring white light of powerful paraffin lamps.
