Govardhan lay on the ground, twisting and turning in excruciating pain. Two lumps of soil and blood had formed at the spots where his ears had been. To some extent, they helped staunch the steady flow of blood. The numbness creeping down the sides of his head lessened the intensity of the pain somewhat. Once he realized that every little movement would aggravate the pain and bleeding, he tried to lie still.
The police had brought him in a vehicle as far as the gates of the city. The driver stopped the vehicle there and the policemen carried him down and sat him in a field on the side of the road. They tied his hands together at the back and his legs in front. A man climbed onto his knees and gripped his head tightly so that it would not move. Two persons stood behind him and, using long scissors of the kind gardeners use to trim plants, sliced off both his ears at the same time so that the torture would not be prolonged. The word ‘criminal’ had already been indelibly tattooed on his forehead.
His severed ears moved and throbbed on the ground for a few minutes like fallen lizards’ tails and then became still. Govardhan felt affection for them and detested them by turns. Tears coursed down his bloodstained cheeks.
His mind knocked at Salma’s door, then at Mannu’s. Neither opened. He had known they would not. So he tried another door—Mariam’s. It stood open. Govardhan watched as someone dragged her away through it. She would never come back; she would go from market to market and eachwould take her farther away from him.
Govardhan was alone once more.
When he had been sentenced to death by hanging, there had been someone to smuggle him out of prison. The feeling that there was still hope had given him the courage to ask questions. As he moved from the great scholar Ramchander, who had been writing quietly at his table at midnight by the light of an oil lamp, to the uncouth Mariam who had been led in the fierce glow of burning torches to the sacrificial lock to the accompaniment of drumbeats, the questions had gradually fizzled out. But a certain happiness had come to him, that he could give refuge to someone even though none could give it to him. But now, Mariam too had ended as a closed door.
The belief that his unjustified punishment was an aberration of justice had encouraged him to knock at many doors. However, the court had now made it clear to him that he, Govardhan, stood outside the enclosures of kings, revolutionaries, scientists and artists alike, and that he had been condemned to eternal punishment for no reason. That if not the courts of kings, there were many other courts lying in wait for him on the way with elegant buildings and lawyers and policemen. That the only freedom he had was to choose which crime he was to be charged with and at which court he was to present himself. Salma, Mannu and Mariam had been small profits he had earned between the courts and the losses he had incurred in each of them.
Govardhan’s tears dried up. He shivered with a fever, in spite of the sun which was turning the fields silver. He longed with all his heart for someone near him, but only empty fields stretched around him into infinity.
Two dogs appeared from somewhere. They hovered around him for a while, looking at him and his severed ears lying on the ground in turn. Realizing what they wanted, Govardhan stretched out his hand to pick up a stone, then withdrew it. Emboldened, the dogs slowly advanced. Each picked up an ear in its mouth and ran away.