Outlaw in India (7 page)

“But what about the swelling?”

She smiled. She was so kind. “Your friend has been walking around on a sprained
ankle. That’s why it is swollen. Didn’t he complain?”

“No, he never complained.”

She touched his forehead affectionately. “He’s a tough little guy.”

“He is.” I swallowed hard. “Can you help me? I have to find my dog. Is there
any way I can leave my friend here while I go searching for him? Please?”

She touched my arm gently and looked into my eyes. “He can stay here. Go find
your dog. We’ll keep him safe and let him rest, and when he wakes we’ll find
something for him to eat.”

“Thank you so much.” I could barely get the words out of my mouth without
bursting into tears. I felt so grateful. Her kindness took me by surprise. The
doctor across the street would have let Radji die. But I couldn’t think about
that now. Hollie was lost in a dangerous place and I had to find him.

HOLLIE WAS AS CAUTIOUS
as a wise old man, he really was. He was
curious, of course, but didn’t take the kinds of risks that many dogs do. He had
been the runt of the litter and was thrown from a wharf with a rope around his
neck, tied to a stone. So, his start in life was pretty bleak. And yet he
carried a lucky star, too, because he had landed in a dory, not the sea, and
somehow that dory untethered and drifted free and I found it. Since then, he has
travelled around the world in relative comfort. Still, he doesn’t ask for
much.

I couldn’t figure out what had happened to him. Now that I knew that the snake
was not poisonous it must have been something else. Had he been spooked by
something? But
what? I hadn’t seen anything. He was with us
one minute, gone the next. I had been so preoccupied with Radji I didn’t even
notice. I ran back to where we had come out of the woods. I checked the ditch
all the way. The thought that he might have been struck by a car came to me but
I tried not to think that. Images of finding him lying on his side jumped into
my head and I had to push them out. When I reached the woods, I started calling
his name. I tried to follow exactly the same path but I wasn’t sure it was
right. I couldn’t remember well enough because we had come through in a panic. I
thought I would recognize the bush where the snake had bitten Radji but suddenly
there were so many of them. I yelled Hollie’s name all the way through the woods
but there was no sign of him. I felt discouraged. I was worried sick. I just
wanted him back. You could keep all the money in the world, I just wanted my dog
back.

Maybe I was going the wrong way. I wasn’t sure. I just kept going. Eventually I
reached the river. Then I discovered I had travelled too far upstream. I ran
down to where the sub was and entered the woods again. Now it looked familiar. I
found the woods where the snake had been. Then I recognized the bush. Then, I
saw the tool bag, and there, curled up inside the bag, was Hollie.

But there was something wrong with him. He didn’t bark. He wagged his tail but
he didn’t get up. “Hollie? Are you okay?” His face was a little swollen. I
examined him very closely. I think maybe he had been bitten by the snake too,
and it caused
his face to swell. The poor thing. I scooped him
up in my arms, threw the bag over my shoulder and headed back towards the
clinic. I was worried about him but I was so happy I found him.

Back at the clinic Radji was still sleeping. The doctor was so kind she even
examined Hollie for me. She said, yes, he had also been bitten, and being such a
small dog, a bite in the face by a large snake would cause swelling and take
awhile to heal. He would be sore and lethargic for a few days but would heal
just fine. She gave me some medication to put in his food that would make him
feel better. I held Hollie on my lap and stroked his fur and talked to him while
the doctor saw other patients. She even let us stay after the clinic closed
while she did her paperwork.

We talked. I asked her about Untouchables. She said things were changing slowly
for them, but it was still a very big problem. “Mahatma Gandhi, our first
leader, tried to make it better for them. He was a pacifist. He went on hunger
strikes for political change. He did so much for our country, but it is very
hard to go against so many centuries of tradition. At least Untouchables have
legal rights now that they never had before. But there is still violence and
discrimination against them. India is a complicated country with many peoples.
And we have not only Hindus here; we have Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians,
and many others too.”

Then I asked her about the save-the-girl-child poster. She made a sad face.
“It’s a program to stop the euthanasia, the killing of baby girls, before and
after they are born.”

“But why would anyone kill their babies? That doesn’t make
any sense.”

“Girls are more expensive to have in India than boys.”

“Why?”

“Because families have to provide a dowry for them when they marry, and that’s
expensive. And the other thing is that parents expect to be looked after by
their sons in their old age. So, if a family has only girls, they have to pay
money for them when they are married, and, when they leave, there’s no one to
look after the parents. So, they get it coming and going. Our traditions make it
rather difficult for many families to celebrate the birth of girls. There are
lots of illegal clinics where people go to find out what sex their baby is
before it is born. If it is a girl, they abort it.

“For some who cannot afford such a clinic, they might take matters into their
own hands after the child is born. It’s terrible of course, and we are trying
hard to stop it. Like the attitudes you see towards your friend, this sort of
thing goes very far back in India’s history. To understand any person in India
today, such as the doctor across the street, you have to imagine all the people
standing in front of him—his ancestors— and the centuries of tradition and
thousands of years of history. It’s not simple at all.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No. It doesn’t make it right. But it explains where it comes from. To make it
right is going to take a long time.”

When the doctor was ready to go home, we woke Radji.
Then she
kindly offered us a drive. It was a little tricky explaining where to drop us
without telling her about the sub, which I didn’t want to do if I didn’t have
to. I said we were staying on a boat on the river, which was true, mostly, and I
convinced her to let us out on the road and not come to the boat, and she
accepted that, although I think she was curious. I was glad to get everyone
inside the sub safe and sound, including Seaweed, who dropped out of the sky
when he saw us come to the river. I fed everyone and we settled down to
sleep.

I should have fallen right to sleep, too, because I was so tired. But I
couldn’t. Something was bugging me. I kept remembering the look on the face of
the other doctor when he refused to treat Radji. I thought it was a look of
hatred. It was so ugly. Now, I felt that I hated
him
. But I didn’t like
that feeling. It was so complicated! I just couldn’t get over the fact that, had
the snake been poisonous, he would have let Radji die. Didn’t that go against
human nature? I lay on my cot and tried to fall asleep but I couldn’t. I needed
to get out and walk. And so, while everyone was sleeping, I slipped out of bed,
climbed out of the portal, shut the hatch behind me and climbed up the
bank.

I walked along the road that followed the river. The moon was out and I saw it
reflect off the tops of the trees. I walked, lost in thought, until I realized I
was standing in front of the doctor’s house. The big iron fence went all around
his property except for the side open to the river. I peeked through the fence
and saw his fancy car and boat, and behind that, a
statue of
a woman holding an urn. It looked like a Greek statue. Staring at his house and
property in the middle of the night, I felt that what was most important to him
was money. I thought of the other doctor, and I knew that what was most
important to her was people. They were so different. She had told me to try to
think of all the generations of people standing in front of this doctor, but all
I could see was money.

I went through some bushes beside his property and found my way to the river.
To the right I saw an old barge, tucked in underneath some overhanging trees,
just the way the sub was hidden. It looked to me as though the barge hadn’t been
moved in decades. It was rusted and banged up and looked a hundred years old. So
much of the machinery in India was ancient. I liked that. Ziegfried would have
liked that too.

I was so restless. Looking to see that no one was around, I climbed onto the
old barge. There was a cable rolled around a spindle on the stern, and a crank
for winding it manually. Curious, I pulled the cable out to see how far it would
reach. It came out surprisingly easy considering everything was so old and
rusted. I jumped down and walked backwards pulling the cable with a hook on the
end of it. There must have been two hundred feet wound around that spindle. I
couldn’t believe it. I wondered what they used it for. Now that I was standing
at the bottom of the doctor’s property, a crazy idea jumped into my head. I
thought how much I would love to teach that doctor a lesson by tying the cable
to the bumper of his fancy car so that when he tried to leave in the morning,
the cable would hold his car back and he’d have to get out
and unhook it. He’d wonder who had done that and maybe he would remember us and
think about what he had done. I knew it wasn’t right and that I shouldn’t do it,
but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I just couldn’t leave without doing
something
. But I did not foresee what would actually happen. I
suppose I should have. But I didn’t.

The sky was turning blue. Morning was coming. I snuck up behind the car, hooked
the cable around the bumper and went back into the bushes. When I reached the
road and started to leave, I saw two men and a boy turn down towards the river.
They didn’t see me. I would have just kept going except they seemed to be
heading towards the old barge. That surprised me so I stopped and waited. The
next thing I knew, I heard the motor of that old barge cough and spit as it
started up. It sounded terrible. A small cloud of blue smoke drifted through the
bushes. That engine needed a cleaning badly. Surely they weren’t planning to
take such an old barge out on the river?

Too curious to leave yet, I snuck back into the bushes and waited to see what
they would do. Sure enough, the engine coughed, wheezed, and roared into life,
and they steered the barge onto the river. Oh no, I thought, they will get
frustrated when the barge won’t go and they’ll discover the cable attached to
the car and will realize that someone was playing a prank on them. Then I felt
badly because I never meant to play a prank on those guys, and I wondered if I
could reach the car
and unhook the cable before it grew taut.
No, it was too late. There was nothing I could do about it now.

The barge didn’t go upstream, it went down. And it very quickly picked up
momentum in the current. The cable went taut and began to drag the doctor’s car
across his property and into the river, and I suddenly felt sick in my stomach.
As the barge went down the river, the cable went sideways across the yard,
wrapped itself across the statue, knocked it over and smashed its head before
the cable finally snapped. I saw the doctor come running out of his house,
screaming. All he could see was his car disappearing into the river. He ran
after it, yelling, but the men on the barge couldn’t hear him, and he couldn’t
see anything but a normal looking barge going downstream.

I crept back onto the road and got out of there as fast as I could. I ran all
the way back to the sub, where I saw the barge pass with the men on it, who
still didn’t know anything had happened because the cable had snapped and they
were looking downstream the whole time. I climbed inside the sub, shut the hatch
and went back to bed.

My heart was racing. The butterflies in my stomach took a long time to settle,
but eventually they did. I wondered if the doctor would be able to rescue his
car. Maybe. I felt badly. It wasn’t what I had planned to happen. I should have
minded my own business. I wondered what Ziegfried would have done in my shoes.
Well, the doctor wouldn’t have refused Ziegfried; he would have been too afraid
of him. And Sheba, my
mystical and loving friend, who loved
everyone and everything? Hmmm. I think she would have won him over with the
sweetness of her heart. And if she hadn’t, and he had behaved the way he did to
us, what would she have done? Would she have pulled his car into the river? No.
Not a chance. She would probably have visited him again and brought him flowers
and won him over in the end. And he would have felt really badly and tried hard
to make it up. Sheba was a messenger of love, or something like that.

Then I wondered what Mahatma Gandhi would have done. He was the first leader of
India as an independent country and he was a pacifist. I’m sure he wouldn’t have
pulled the doctor’s car into the river either. Maybe he would have gone on a
hunger strike until the doctor gave in and saw Radji. The nice doctor told me
that Gandhi had tried to help the Untouchables of India when he was the leader.
And he fasted to get his way sometimes. Well, I wasn’t Gandhi, or Sheba, or
Ziegfried. And I did cause the cable to pull the car into the river and break
the statue. And I knew it was wrong and I felt sorry for it. On the other hand,
he was obviously rich and could probably just buy another car and another
statue. It wasn’t as though he had been injured or wounded or anything. And it
wasn’t as if he was going to die.