The Jungly Girl

The first day out under the tall sal trees by the forest dak bungalow, Sunil spent most of his time at the back talking with the servants and helping when he could. He knew they told the best stories and in any case, Uncle Vish and Matt the Prof were busy with Mr. Dubey who had brought a mountain of files, maps, charts and graphs for them to study. Uncle Vish had vaguely told him not to wander too far out and to take care of himself, after which he had ignored him completely. Matt the Prof pulled a few faces, wiped his brow theatrically and was gone as well. Mr. Dubey ignored him completely and politely, so Sunil did the same.

Motu the cook was the friendliest. He had beamed at Sunil when he first went round to the back and asked him what he would like for lunch. Rotis, of course, potatoes with a spicy tomato curry, thick tur dal, some fried bhindis on the side, and the inevitable caramel custard pudding the way Motu knew how to make it, and as he had learnt to make it from his father who had learnt it from his, who had been taught by white memsahibs, no less. Sunil had tried to interest him in Amritsari chole, kulchas and methi parathas, but Motu was firm – this was Chhattisgarh, and other kinds of food from elsewhere could have unknown consequences here.

After a very satisfying lunch to which the sahibs had done little justice except to gulp it down, Motu and Sunil reclined on a charpoy in the shade of the sal trees and heard a little bird, the coppersmith, increase its tempo as the air stilled and the heat of the afternoon went up. It was the ideal time for a siesta and they were both drowsy when Sunil brought up what was uppermost in his mind.

‘Motu bhaiya, the Baigas must be very fierce warriors if they’re not afraid to live in the jungle, no?’

Motu chuckled. ‘What warriors? Just a miserable bunch of poor jungly people who know no better than to eat roots and leaves. And what jungle is there for anyone to be afraid of anymore? You may meet a rabbit, if you are lucky, in the depth of these jungles!’ Motu spat on the ground in emphasis.

‘My uncle sahib has come here to turn the tribals out and protect the tigers,’ ventured Sunil.

Motu spat again. ‘You have to be a very sacred person to see a tiger anymore. No. All gone, all gone. The sarkar wants to say there are plenty around, so all right, there are tigers. The sarkar gets money from Americans to say so and that is all right also – we all have to protect our stomachs. So all right, there are tigers.’

‘Then why drive the poor Baigas out?’ persisted Sunil.

Motu sat up and looked at him round-eyed. ‘Why not? What good are they anyway? Why have such miserable people around, uncultured, running around like animals? Who cares where they go?’ He lay back on the charpoy and tried to close his eyes.

‘The professor sahib says they have magic,’ began Sunil.

Motu turned round on his side to look at him. ‘Yes… so the old ones tell us,’ he said solemnly. ‘You stay away from the Baigas, all right, chota sahib? They are bad people. You don’t want them, and I don’t want them. That old white sahib, why, he can have them and take them all to England. That is the best solution.’ With that he turned his back on Sunil with finality and in a minute or two was snoring, the noise rising and falling rhythmically with his stomach.

Sunil was no longer sleepy, so getting up softly he went into the large drawing room of the dak bungalow that was mostly kept locked up. Matt the Prof had told him it had some rare old books about the Baigas, tiger hunting and elephant up-keep, and Sunil thought he might as well add to the knowledge imparted by Motu. He selected a small pile of books, and put them carefully on a teapoy, which is what Motu called the small side-table which had black-buck antlers for legs. Th en kicking off his shoes, he lay on a large smelly sofa by the large plate-glass window and started to read. Miss Dhar, more so than the other teachers, had taught him how to select books, how to refer to any particular theme, and how to make sense of different points of view. He had found a funny old dictionary named Hobson-Jobson, which told him the history of the strange words that the British had coined in India long ago, why a guest house was called a dak bungalow, why Motu called rasam ‘mulligatawny soup’. The shades of the old British sahibs still seemed to rule in distant places like the one he sat in. He read on, picking up book after book at random. Sometimes he would close the book he was reading and look out of the window dreamily. His daydreams gave life to what he had read and he understood the writer all the better.

Motu bustled into the drawing room at four-thirty in the afternoon, as the shadows were lengthening under the sals, carrying with him a most welcome silver tray loaded with thick buttered toast and a large old-fashioned silver teapot, which was taken out ceremoniously only when burra sahibs visited the dak bungalow.

‘This silver tea set, chota sahib, is older than me, older than my grandfather, left here by Ranley Memsahib,’ he said, setting it down on a nearby table. ‘Those books will tell you about her. Oh! She was a great lady, afraid of nothing. Tigers, elephants in musht, nothing! I have seen her ghost ride by on moonless nights! Once, her horse dashed past, throwing me into a ditch. Now eat your toast and drink some tea and call me if you want anything else. I have to make chicken for the Ranger sahibs tonight.’

Sunil really didn’t believe Motu but the room felt cold and dark all of a sudden so he took a plate of toast and a cup of tea and wandered out into the sun. Maybe there really was a Miss Ranley or someone called something like that – he would ask Matt the Prof over dinner. But the books in that long-forgotten library had told him a lot about the Baigas, who would soon be forgotten just like the books about them. They had been great medicine people, curing even the English of dreadful diseases with their secret remedies. They had been brave, single-handedly facing man-eating tigers, armed only with an axe or sickle. They had looked after the forests very well, and though later government servants had criticized their system of slash and burn agriculture, the older conservationists had praised the ‘bewar system’ that fertilized the soil and gave bumper crops. The Baigas had respected the earth as their mother and they knew they were the lords of the land, sprung from an ancient royal race lost in antiquity. Sunil no longer saw the shaved hill slopes around him, with the blue-green line of forest far off , he was in the middle of that ancient land of tall trees, the noisy forest denizens telling their Baiga masters all the news of the jungle. And beside him was a little dark girl in a red sari worn high over her knees. She smiled at him with her big bright eyes and waved to him with her sickle.

The roar of the jeep struggling up the hill brought him out of his reverie.

‘Come, Sunil, come,’ Uncle Vish was shouting, his face relaxed at long last. ‘Come let us drive through the jungle as night falls. If we are lucky we may see some animals.’

He jumped into the jeep as it came up and Chamanlal Singh, the fat Forest Ranger with the big black moustache, made room for him at the back over the left -side rear wheel and soon they were off bounding over a forest track into the jungle. They drove for three hours over winding grassy tracks, splashing through rivulets and bouncing in and out of gullies but they saw only small herds of spotted deer, which were all over the place, sometimes even coming up to the kitchen to beg for scraps of food. They also came across a troop of langurs casually moving across the road. But there was nothing much wilder than that. Once Chamanlal Singh stopped the jeep and whispered that boars were rooting in the valley to the left but they soon realized that the animals were only the pigs that the Baigas reared in their villages. The only tribal they discerned in the distance was a small dark figure hurrying home with a load of firewood and none but Sunil took any interest in the figure retreating in the dusk.

Dinner on the verandah served by Motu the cook was almost always the same, with rotis, potatoes in tomato curry, tur dal and thick curds, followed inevitably by caramel custard pudding. But no one minded, least of all Sunil, who besides being very hungry found Motu’s cooking far superior to any he had in school. The sahibs as usual retired to their armchairs under the stars for a smoke, a drink and a chat. As Sunil was going in through the mesh swing-doors, Matt the Prof came ambling up.

‘Vish is being very stubborn,’ he whispered. ‘The government has already taken a decision and nothing can change it unless we can do something. You can help, Sunil! Think what we should do, and let me know tomorrow morning.’ Saying this, the professor ambled back to join the others.

Sunil lay awake in his bed for quite some time thinking about all that he had read, and what the professor had whispered to him. He knew his Uncle Vish to be a determined man of action, not one he could easily convince to let go of a project. His uncle knew charts and figures better than anyone and every paper put up to government was as familiar to him as the morning newspaper. But Uncle Vish knew nothing about people, Sunil sensed this even at his age, for his Uncle Vish reminded him a bit of a math teacher who had been so lost in his own world that all the boys had been relieved when he left to take up a post in the university. So Sunil knew that it was only by bringing people right up under Uncle Vish’s nose and startling him that Matt the Prof had any chance of getting him to change his mind. With thoughts like this swirling around his head, Sunil had a disturbed night. When he woke up next morning he could remember nothing of all that he had dreamt.

There was a raucous peacock that kept hanging about outside the kitchen begging people to feed him and Sunil spent the better part of the morning playing with him. Th en Motu called him over to decide what curry he would like for lunch, all the sahibs having gone away as usual. After serious consultation, it was decided a lovely curry of sweet potatoes would be made and Sunil, always a hearty eater, decided he would stay close to the action. Sitting in front of Motu and facing the dark swath of trees that

ringed the kitchen garden, he started to scrape the tubers for he didn’t like the skin of the sweet potatoes even when they were well cooked.

‘What do you think you are doing here?’ asked the girl irritably, her eyes glowing sternly. The vision was gone in a flash and Sunil remembered with a start that she had said that and much more in the dream the previous night. The rest of it was also quite important but he couldn’t remember another word.

He finished a thoughtful lunch, answering Motu in monosyllables till the cook got tired and went off for his siesta. The afternoon was hot like the previous day, however Sunil decided he would take a walk down the road right up to that distant curve where they had glimpsed the little figure with a head-load of firewood hurrying off into the gloaming the night before. He hooked the strap of a water-bottle into his belt and set off .

As he walked down the long road towards the lonely spot he went slower and slower. It wasn’t that he was scared of anything there. The trees had all been cut down on either side, the short grass was devoid of any form of life and he had only seen a few deer and the occasional langur last evening, not even a sign of pesky rhesus macaques, so no, he was not afraid but he felt just a little silly. Why was he walking down the road in the first place? Because he dreamt of a girl? Gosh! If he ever told the guys back at school, they would never let him hear the last of it. And that small figure they saw last evening carrying firewood was most probably a man, a small man. They all seemed to be small people around there, anyway. Sure enough, when he reached the spot, there was nobody around. He was a little tired and the afternoon was hot so he sat on a big black boulder and took a thoughtful sip of water. Two squirrels chirped as they sped past down a winding footpath leading to the valley below where, right at the bottom, he glimpsed a silvery stream making its lazy way towards the dark and distant jungle. On an impulse, he started down the path just to have more of a real adventure than simply walking up and down that dusty road.

Within a few minutes he was very glad he had taken the steep path to the valley for it was a lot cooler than the road and bushes sprang up on all sides. Soon he was in a little clearing with wild ber and mango trees in scented flower, with long-tailed flycatchers and bulbuls weaving in and out of their branches. The path after the clearing dropped quite steeply but he clambered down happily on his hands and knees, getting his shorts dirty. He didn’t care. He wanted to reach the stream in which he could see egrets flapping about looking for insects to catch. When he got there, he took off his shoes and socks and paddled in the cool water before sitting down on a fallen tree to look around and take another drink of water. It was a quiet, beautiful spot and he decided to rest there a bit before turning back up the steep path to the road and the dak bungalow.

‘Ey! Nimme vagatal vati?’ said a voice behind his ear and turning, he saw with a leap of his heart that it was the girl. That girl! She looked exactly as he had dreamt, short and dark, wearing a faded red sari high above her knees with a sickle tucked in at her waist. She carried a huge head-load of all kinds of plants, roots, and leaves. She was not pretty, he could see that right away. She had wide nostrils, not a sharp high nose like Miss Dhar, but surprisingly for a jungly girl, she wore no studs on her nose.

‘Hello! You startled me, you know,’ said Sunil unthinkingly in English.

‘Nak kare maymaki,’ said the girl looking straight at him with her big black eyes. ‘Na sanga gondi vadka.’

‘I cannot understand what you are saying,’ said Sunil carefully in Hindustani.

The girl sighed, set her load down and sat on the tree trunk beside him. ‘I didn’t understand you either,’ she said casually, also in Hindustani. ‘Mi babal sarkari – I mean is your father in the government?’

Sunil shook his head and then added rather proudly, ‘My uncle is a very important officer in Delhi. I have come here to the dak bungalow with him.’

‘Why?’ asked the girl.

‘To protect the jungle for tigers,’ said Sunil spreading his arms out a little grandly.

The girl looked at her feet. When she looked up, there was a wealth of sorrow behind her eyes. ‘We are being chased away from our homes. I will never see my mother again!’

‘Your mother! What are they doing to your mother?’ asked Sunil aghast.

‘Everything – tearing her breast open,’ said the girl with grave composure.

‘Tearing – tearing what – what do you mean?’ Sunil cried out.

‘Dharti Mata – my mother earth, look at her, they have cut off the trees, now they will plough her.’ Her voice quavered with tears, though none came to her black eyes .

‘Oh, that!’ Sunil gave a self-confident little laugh. ‘That’s called “development,”‘ he said in English. ‘Your people will be better off later, you will see.’

The girl shook her head with sad finality. ‘You don’t understand. Cokot sille.’

‘Don’t keep talking to me in a language I don’t understand,’ said Sunil shortly.

‘It’s Gondi.’

‘All right. What’s your name?’ Sunil felt very much in command.

‘Jungu,’ said the girl softly.

‘Jungu! Jungly Jungu!’ Sunil couldn’t help slipping that one out.

‘Jungu bai – it is a very great name – a name of power, but everyone still calls me Jungu,’ said the girl with asperity. ‘You would know all that if you lived anywhere here, but you don’t, do you?’

‘I live in Delhi, well, no, Dehra Dun most of the time,’ began Sunil.

‘So, you don’t even know where you live,’ said the girl sharply. ‘But you must know your own name at least. What is it?’

Sunil drew himself up. ‘Sunil Kalra,’ he said with some pride.

The girl got up suddenly and backed away a little, staring at him with a mixture of fear and wonder.

‘You are Her son?’ she whispered looking at him intently. Th en, she recovered her composure. ‘No, you are not! You are only a sahib’s boy, that’s all.’ She turned her face away dismissively.

Sunil felt hurt. “What do you mean? I am not – who?’

‘You said you were the son of Cholera, the Goddess, but that is a lie,’ said the girl.

‘Cholera? I said Kalra! You are a fool! And cholera is not a goddess, it is a disease but you jungly people know nothing, do you?’ Sunil was cross because he didn’t like the girl putting on superior airs.

The girl looked at him without anger and shook her head. ‘It is you who know nothing. Want to come to our village? You will learn something if you come. Ad bay lange sille – it’s not far.’

Sunil looked undecided. ‘No, I cannot come, certainly not today. I better get back now.’

The girl shrugged, and quietly picking up her bundle, turned to go.

‘Jungu – Jungu, you are very strong to be able to carry that load,’ said Sunil not wanting to part with her on a sour note. ‘What are all those leaves and where did you get them?’

The girl turned to him with a big smile that lit up her face.

‘From the jungle, where else?’ she said pointing towards the distant dark gloom of trees.

‘From all that far away?’ he asked wonderingly. ‘It could be dangerous for a little girl.’

The girl laughed, a low tinkly laugh. ‘What do I have to fear? No animal will harm me, I am protected by Gansam Dev. I have to go to the jungle. I have to get chirota leaves. My father’s tummy is not well and these roots are needed for my aunt who has given birth.’ The girl was moving her head this way and that, pointing out all that she was carrying.

The girl went a few steps and then stopped. ‘I go there again in the morning so that we may have some greens and roots to eat. You can come too, if you are not afraid.’

Sunil’s chest swelled at the challenge. ‘Of course I am not afraid,’ he said shortly. ‘I am not afraid of anything, little girl. I will meet you here tomorrow morning at – at 9.30, all right?’

The girl pointed to a spot in the sky above the trees. ‘I will be here when the sun is there.’

Sunil nodded. The girl walked away without another word and Sunil watched her disappear round a bend in the streambed. Then, he himself turned round and slowly walked up the steep path he had come.