Things had gone from bad to worse, and not many people in Shahkot were in the best of spirits these days. Sampath, shadowed by worry, attempted to write a poem.
He remembered, in his sadness, a singular day at the Mission School when a Brother John had taught them literature. Brother John had been dismissed after a week of teaching for pinching the bottom of the sweeper woman. But though he had departed in disgrace with a soiled reputation, Sampath remembered him as a being filled with beauty who had imparted to him his single inspired moment at school. While Sampath was indulging himself dipping his fingers one by one into the ink pot, his attention had suddenly been caught by the lines Brother John was reading aloud from a small volume in his hands. ‘Poetry,’ said Brother John, ‘is born of hardship and suffering, of pain and doubt.’ Then he proceeded to recite. ‘All morning they have been calling you in,’ he said, in such a way that Sampath was covered with goose bumps. ‘Ten relatives to cook for and you’re the girl. Their voices echo in jungle darkness, but no, don’t answer. Stay by this shore. For what do they know of fin’s fine gold rising to light in pale water?’
Sampath had felt very sorry for the girl with ten relatives. And: ‘What do they know of fin’s fine gold?’ he repeated, trembling all over. Never again during his days at that terrible establishment had he felt touched like this.
Now he tried to compose something as well.
‘But no, don’t answer,’ he said aloud. ‘Stay in this tree. For what do they know of … of …’ Of what? ‘What do they know of … of the sun? What do they know of my tree? Of the monkey problem?’ No … that didn’t sound right. ‘What do they know of … a grey donkey going to the market?’ No, that wasn’t a good line either. ‘What do they know of …’ Oh dear. He tried to think of some worthwhile thoughts to put in his poem. He thought of how the moon goes around the earth and the winter season comes after the monsoon. Of how years pass, leaving memories, and how the future is unknown, of how a man can speak while an animal cannot, and how people speak many languages and cannot understand each other. But try as he might, he could not break through to anything that seemed profound, or right to put in his poem. And what is more, these thoughts kept getting disrupted by the overwhelming concern of what was to happen to him and to his life in the orchard. ‘What do they know …’
‘What do you know?’ he put his head down to ask of a red ant. ‘What?’ He raised his hands to the parrots. ‘Will I be all right?’ he asked out loud into the indifferent air.
The ant scurried by and the birds ignored him. And what did he himself know? Oh, he felt petulant; he should not have even begun. ‘What do you know … What do you know …’ It was to clear his mind he had climbed into a tree, not to befuddle it. Here he was thwarting his own ambitions.
As it was, only those who managed to enclose themselves in their own worlds and disregard the battles going on managed to sleep at night. One of these fortunate few was Kulfi, mother of the Monkey Baba himself, who had managed to brush away the entire furore with the langurs as if it were nothing but a minor annoyance of keeping her supplies locked up inside instead of out in the open, of having occasionally to chase a monkey with her broom. Preoccupied by her own thoughts, into which nothing else ever seemed to really penetrate, she continued on the path along which her life led her.
Doggedly, the spy followed. Thus far his research had led to nothing, and as if this lack of success were not enough, he was beginning to wonder if something in his constitution had been jiggled out of place. He was dismayed by how much space in his head had been taken up by Sampath’s teachings. Ever since his lapse in the Atheist Society’s meeting, he had been nervous about Sampath’s influence upon him, and the more nervous he was, the more of Sampath’s lines he discovered entangled inextricably with his thoughts. ‘Wrestle not the sweet vendor’s daughter.’ He could not help but have it occur to him on all sorts of odd occasions. ‘Spit not at the doctor’s son. Why think about futter when you have plenty of butter? Don’t say you like watermelon when someone gives you pumpkin. Don’t eat a fiffle to save a piffle. Every plum has its own beginning. Every pea its own end.’ With this sort of thing in his brain, he was finding it hard to follow his usual rational line of thought.
He was being seduced, he realized in a flash of terror. They were trying to brainwash him, using the equivalent of jingles and suave advertising. He had spent far too long in the orchard. In fact, to tell the truth, he had found he was enjoying his time there.
As soon as this thought occurred to him he was doubly terrified. He had better solve this case immediately and get out of the orchard as quickly as possible.
Keeping what he hoped was an unsuspicious distance, the spy tried not to lose sight of Kulfi as she sometimes ambled, sometimes darted up the hillside, showing no more concern for following a path than a bee.
Kulfi was beginning to feel a little tired of what she had been finding in the forest. She looked under a rock, by a tulip tree, along a stream. She needed a new ingredient, she thought, sniffing the air, something exciting and fresh to inspire her to an undiscovered dish, a new invention. She looked up into the sky.
Already she had cooked a pigeon and a sparrow, a woodpecker, a hoopoe, a magpie, a shrike, an oriole, a Himalayan nightingale, a parrot … She had cooked a squirrel, a porcupine, a mongoose, all the wildfowl that could be found in those parts, the small fish in the stream, the round-shelled snails that crisscrossed the leaves with silver, the grasshoppers that leapt and jumped, landing with loud raindrop-like plops upon the foliage.
Diligently, she searched for a new plant, a new berry, a new mushroom or lichen, fungus or flower, but everything about her looked familiar and dull. No new scents enlivened the air and she wandered farther and farther away. As she wandered, she began to daydream.
She was the royal cook of a great kingdom, she imagined. There, in some old port city, ruthless hunters, reckless adventurers, fleets of ships and whole armies lay at her beck and call, were alert to her every command, her every whim. And sitting in a vast kitchen before an enormous globe, imperiously she ordered her supplies, sent out for spices from many seas away, from mountain ranges and deserts that lay beyond the horizon, for spices that existed only in the fantastical tales of sailors and soothsayers. She sent out for these and for plants that grew on islands no bigger than specks in the ocean, or on mountain peaks devoid of human habitation. She sent out for kingdoms to be ruined, for storehouses and fields to be plundered and ransacked. She asked for tiger meat and bear, Siberian goose and black buck. For turtles, terrapins, puff adders and seals. For armadillos, antelopes, zebras and whales. She demanded elephants, hippopotamuses, yaks and cranes, macaques and … monkeys! Monkeys! Oh, to cook a monkey!
Into the bamboo, past the green and yellow banana grove, out through the nettles, up to the hilltop. Exhausted and bedraggled, the spy gave up trying to follow her and climbed a tree from where he hoped to be able to keep up his watch. But, of course, he promptly lost sight of her altogether as she vanished around the curve of some rocks.