Dahanu Road: A novel (29 page)

In exchange for a plot of land the size of a fingernail, the Warli had to till the landlord’s land, and the Warli was given a scoop of paddy, which he would convert to rice, then to rage, to sorrow, to pity, to hopelessness. Each morning at the sound of a bell, the Warli had to toil in the landlord’s fields, his dark tribal back releasing sweat as though it were some dreaded sickness.
At the end of the day only a handful of rice awaited him, and, if he was lucky, a lump of salt.

“Do not cry,” Vithal said to his people. “No tears. Our ancestors had fought for salt. It would be wrong of us to waste salt.”

His lips were wet with the palm wine he was drinking and the fire played with his face, made it darker, redder, more alive.

“Their long white claws yearned for us all,” he said. “So laws were passed. But they were not laws. They were our death sentences. Overnight, they turned the Kings of the Jungle into peasants. How is that possible? Can a tiger be called a goat? Can a lion be called a mouse?”

“No,” the villagers replied.

Since the Warlis were peasants, they were forced to buy seeds from the white demon, seeds they could not afford, and Warli land did not like those seeds, it spat them out. Little did the land understand that the Warlis still had to pay taxes. So they had to go to moneylenders, and the taxes went on rising, their loans kept on building, but the land remained silent. And when the land remained silent, the Warlis turned to liquor, but that too had been taken. Their mahua was now made illegal, so even for liquor they turned to the moneylenders, whose rates were high as pine trees.

And in all this, a young liquor store owner named Shapur Irani made a well of liquor available to Vithal on credit, and when Vithal could not pay up, a thumb impression was taken.

Vithal had lost his land.

He had lost his land so he decided to lose his thumb.

He went home drunk, angry, crying like a beaten woman. He hated his thumb. He hated the sight of his thumb’s
impression on stamp paper, so he used the sickle that hung on the wall of his hut.

A few years after he lost his thumb, he lost his wife as well. She left him for another man, a man who could provide for her. But not once did his father’s voice betray any bitterness or longing, so both Ganpat and Rami decided to be the same way. “Our mother has chosen to live somewhere else” is what they told themselves. They made it a matter of geography, not a matter of the heart.

KUSUM LAY ON THE FLOOR
of Zairos’ living room and stared at the burning candle. Above her, the ceiling fan was motionless, the victim of a power cut.

No matter how hard Zairos tried to bring Kusum to the sofa, she refused.

Zairos wanted to touch her, but all he could think of was Vithal’s thumb.

He stared at his own thumb, at the concentric circles in the skin, like the lines made by a plough in the soil. To him, it was just a thumb. But to Vithal, it was something that had brought shame, a leprous trickster. And when it was cut off, what remained? A stub as barren as Vithal’s remaining days on earth.

Twice Zairos nearly placed his hand on Kusum’s naked stomach, but then withdrew. If he was going to touch her, tonight would be different.

So he used only the tips of his fingers, very lightly, on hers.
So light it might as well be imaginary. He did not look at her face, did not check if her eyes opened or not.

Then he let his palm rest on hers, his thumb the last to make contact.

He could now feel their fingers generating a current, a transmission of all their fears, loves, and desires. Even if an Irani man had touched the hands of a Warli woman in this manner before, none of those touches could have exchanged so much, of that he was sure.

The candlelight searched the walls, the photographs of Irani faces lit by the flames. It reminded Zairos that people acquired meaning only if someone shone a light on them. If he blew the candle out, the faces on the wall would disappear.

There was a loud thump against the main door.

The candle almost fell off the table. Kusum sprang up and looked at Zairos. For a few seconds, nothing. Then another thump, even louder, the sound of a body ramming itself into the main door. It could be an animal, but Zairos did not want to take a chance. He took Kusum by the hand and went upstairs. He slowly opened the door to the upstairs porch. He stayed low and peered through the railings. It was no animal. It was a man, a Warli in shorts and vest. Zairos looked around but saw no one else. This man was too conspicuous to be a robber.

Then, in a long drunken yell, the man called out Kusum’s name.

It was Laxman.

Chambal the dacoit’s words rushed into Zairos’ mind,
A wounded man is a dangerous man.
Laxman walked away from the door, then spun around and ran straight into it. He did it again and called out her name. Laxman was shattering bone
in the darkness on purpose. He held his face in an attempt to stop the blood. Then he walked a few steps and fell down on the lawn. Then he got up again and ran into a tree. It did not matter if he had mistaken the tree for the main door. He was here to hurt himself, to wake the gods up from their slumber, to leave a trail of Warli blood on the lawn.

His goddess was next to Zairos. She was his now, and Laxman knew it.

By morning, the blood had dried up. Some of it was on the door, and when Kusum saw it, she used her hands to rub it off with the hurry of the shamed. Zairos had to hold her to make her stop.

Kusum said that Laxman’s appearance meant Rami had told him where she was. Rami was loyal to tribe, not soul. Zairos, however, looked at Laxman’s arrival differently. By attacking Aspi Villa, Laxman had made his own case weaker. Havovi the Benevolent would have a hard time finding sympathy for Laxman after this. A misdemeanour like this one gave flavour to the bribe, made it more moral.

Zairos went indoors and made tea for Kusum. It was Lakhu’s tea, the ginger-cardamom combination. She sat on the floor, amused that a seth was making her chai. He gave her toast, which she hated, but there was a look of delight on her face when she tasted ginger marmalade.

“You will come with me to the police station,” said Zairos. “If you speak to Mhatre personally about Laxman, it will help.”

At the mention of the police, Kusum stopped eating.

“You will not come to the police?” Zairos asked. “Are you scared?”

“Yes,” she said. “You would be too if you were named like my people.”

“Named?”

“We are named so badly. We are named Patlya and Barkya, we are named Manglya … Of what use are such names?”

Patlya and Barkya. Thinny and Smally.

Zairos understood. Names were based mainly on appearance. And what appearance did anyone expect when malnutrition was rampant, when malaria shook mothers during their pregnancy as though they were in the grip of a malevolent storm? And Manglya, the boy born on a Tuesday. It was pathetic. When others named their children Shiva or Vishnu, when others had the names of gods, the Warlis had names even the dogs would refuse.

“Even our folk tales,” she said. “A great Warli king is fooled by a Brahmin into giving up all his cattle and kingdom. Why is a child told such a story? So that we realize from birth that we are stupid, that we lost our land.”

“I will take you home,” he said. “I want to speak with Rami.”

The roads were still wet even though the rain had stopped. Everything was fresh, the boulders, the soil, the roofs of temples and huts, the leaves of coconut trees, all had a sheen, a rebirth. Except for Kusum. Zairos thought of her as cobwebbed in her past. As soon as one web broke, another formed, stronger and stickier.

“Seth, you will never know what it’s like. First, I am a woman. That is one leg cut off. Then I am a tribal. Now both legs gone.”

“I am with you because you are a woman,” he said. “I don’t
think I could play with Laxman’s hair or listen to him talking about folk tales.”

“Seth …” Her smile waned before it could reach full bloom.

Kusum’s hut was still recovering from the heavy rain. Even though the hut was made of reeds that were meant to make the water slide off, the rains had been too formidable an opponent. So was Rami. He could tell from the way her lips crushed the beedi she was smoking.

“I came here to tell you that Kusum will stay at home with me,” said Zairos.

He could tell that there were many things she wanted to say to him, but years of subjugation were stopping her, and the beedi bore the brunt.

“She is safe with me,” he said. “If she is here, Laxman will harm her. Do you want that?”

“No,” said Rami.

“Just for a few days. I will bring her back.”

“What exactly will you do with her for a few days?”

“I will look after her.”

“Seth, I am a woman. I may live in a hut, but I am a woman.”

Kusum was enjoying this. In some small way, her man was fighting for her, and for that reason, she stepped in. She bent down and placed her hand on Rami’s head, a simple gesture that meant she was going, but not leaving. When she did that the skin on Rami’s forearms sagged even lower.

“I need her help this afternoon,” said Rami. “You can collect her in the night.”

Kusum had to tell Rami the truth about Zairos. She saw him as a way out, perhaps more than just a chariot on which she could leave, even if it was only temporarily.

But when Rami said, “There is something I need to tell you,” Kusum knew that Rami was trying to bash sense into her young brain.

“There is something you must know before you go with this man who will spit you out one day,” said Rami. “You say he is not like the others. There is a way to find out.”

“How?”

“Tell him a story. A story your father told.”

But Ganpat was a dry well, a famine. The moment he was asked to tell a story, his heart thundered out of fear, his shoulders drooped, and he rasped for mercy like a lamb being skinned.

“It was the only story Ganpat ever told in his life, and he discovered its meaning on the morning of his death,” said Rami. “But your father took that meaning with him the moment his neck snapped.”

“I am willing to listen,” said Kusum.

She was also willing to take a chance on Zairos, even if it meant she was exactly like all the stupid peacocks, partridges, and quail that had mistaken that same look in their hunters’ eyes for something else.

At night, as Zairos and Kusum lay on the floor, his head on her bosom, she told him what Rami had revealed to her.

“It started seven days before my father’s death,” said Kusum, “when Laxman had given me one of his worst beatings ever. My father was full of tears.”

Ganpat looked to the skies, begged the gods for help, but realized that the gods were just as old and tired as he was. Even their
backs were bent. Even their bodies were in pain. So much that they stuffed clouds in their mouths to muffle their moans, to prevent the Warlis from hearing their screams and losing faith.

It was too late. He had lost faith already. Just as his father Vithal had when he lost his land and his thumb.

His father had lost faith in the gods, but not in stories. Ganpat heard his father’s voice come to him in a torrent. “Whenever there is pain, it is time to start telling stories.”

But Ganpat was not a mountain of a man like his father, who had the courage to sing of the beatings, to sing of the torture, to sing of the malnutrition. Everything that had been lost by the Warlis could be found in Vithal’s voice again.

“I feel like all the wild animals of the forest are in my stomach,” he said to Rami. “There is this great rumbling, they are all running down a hill, bringing rocks and stones with them, trees and snakes and who knows what, all are coming down the hill, and this is all happening in my stomach.”

“You are speaking like our father today,” said Rami. “Maybe our father is speaking through you.”

If only Ganpat could get enough money to free his daughter.

He needed to go in search of the black moha. The witch doctors swore that whoever found this plant would attract money beyond his dreams. But no one Ganpat knew had ever found the black moha. The black moha was nothing more than a black phantom.