Shining Hero

In the evening Dolly would bathe Karna ferociously under the ruptured pipe till she had rubbed away every trace of stink and rot. To Karna’s mother the sight of her frail son, shining with water in a muddy puddle, was the best sight of her whole day. When he was clean she would seat him on the ground and serve him whatever food she had managed to scrounge, for he was, after all, the man of the house. Sometimes she would manage to get enough fuel together to brew up a tiny fire on the pavement and cook her little man a hot meal of rice and lentils and on very good days even give him a spoonful of achaar to go with it. She always waited till Karna had finished before eating anything herself and as his appetite increased there would be very little left over for her. Often nothing.

When he was two she looked round and could not see him. She ran wildly up and down the road screaming and found him at last tugging at passing people’s clothes, patting his stomach and lisping, ‘No Mama, No Papa, very hungry,’ copying a bigger beggar girl called Laika.

Dolly was furious. ‘How dare you. We are not beggars. We still have our dignity.’ But the moment her back was turned he was down in the street again, and the money he gave her was welcome. She could not deny that. But there came a day when she could not find Karna anywhere. She went to all the places where he might be, till someone told her he had seen Karna being carried away by a foreign lady.

‘Which way did she go?’ asked the weeping Dolly. ‘Where did she take him?’

People pointed this way and that. Someone told her, ‘The kid was screaming.’ Dolly ran even faster and felt despair. She asked everyone she met, ‘Have you seen my little boy? He’s got golden eyes and a foreign lady has taken him.’ Dolly kept running madly and shouting, ‘Karna, Karna, Karna.’ The idea even came to her as she ran that, though she longed for her child so dreadfully, he would be better off with this foreign lady who would be able to give him good food, nice clothes and a proper education. But all the same she could not stop hunting for Karna. Perhaps when she found the lady, she might agree to let her take Karna away.

She ran, sobbing, all up Park Street and along Free School Street. She raced, panting heavily by now, along New Market Street. She rushed along Chowringee, banging into porters with merchandise on their heads, ignoring the outraged cries of shopping memsahibs, crashing into sahibs with briefcases.

She found him outside the Grand Hotel. The foreign lady was looking discouraged.

‘He told me he was an orphan,’ she said to Dolly. ‘Otherwise I would never have carried him away. I was only hoping to help him.’

Dolly was afraid, after that. ‘Don’t beg from foreigners till you’re older,’ she warned. ‘Stick to people from Bharat for now.’ He, of course, did not listen to her but was more careful now.

Dolly, worried at her son’s lack of education, began to teach him to decipher the words on the enormous cinema posters. The first words Karna learnt to read were the names of film stars and the titles of films. He began to watch out for new advertisements on his own and would come home, thrilled, to tell his mother he had managed to read ‘Prem Pujari’ or ‘Johnny Mera Nam’, all by himself. Concerned that his education was so one-sided she looked for other teaching tools. She encouraged him to recognise the letters on car number plates. She began to collect bits of newspaper off the rubbish heaps and instead of selling them on, wiped them clean of filth and grease and used them to teach Karna a wider range of reading. She even had a newspaper that she had kept from the good days and would bring it out on special occasions reading him the story of a man who had climbed the Himalayas without proper clothes and had survived because he was a yogi. ‘If you are a yogi you can do anything,’ Dolly told him. ‘Yogis can make themselves hot or cold by willpower, and make their tummies full without eating any food.’ Karna liked to read about Bollywood most of all. ‘I am going to be a film star and then I will turn you into a Maharani,’ he told his mother proudly.

She was afraid of pride, though, feared angering the gods with it. ‘You must take care not get punished like Dhuriodhana,’ she warned him. ‘He was the eldest of the Kauravas. A powerful rishi warned him not to fight the Pandavas in the war of the Mahabharata, but Dhuriodhana was too proud to take advice and mocked the rishi by slapping his thighs in a show of strength. Later in the battle he was punished by having both his legs broken.’

‘It’s only a story,’ said Karna. He began to bring back presents for her – shandesh, oranges, saffron, betel nut, little pots of warm dahi, a handful of lychees, telling her that he had earned the money carrying a lady’s bag or showing a foreigner the way. ‘You must be earning well, my son,’ said Dolly with pride. ‘But please don’t spend so much of it on these luxury items. We need rice and another cloth to wrap round us at night.’

He did not tell her that the gifts he brought were really stolen. She had funny, old-fashioned notions about morality and he did not know what her reaction might be if she found out.

Cricket became the craze all over Calcutta and the streets were filled with boys and young men bowling, fielding, batting. Lorries, their drivers pretending they had broken down, blocked the entrances to streets, increased the traffic blocks, so as to allow cricket matches to take place in peace and untroubled by passing vehicles. Karna and other little pavement boys got great bowling practice and improved their batting skills, using rotten oranges for balls and an old box for a wicket just outside the New Market till they were shooed away by porters. For a short while Karna wondered if he would like to be a cricketer instead of a film star.

Dolly felt sad because, in spite of all her son’s hopefulness, he would probably amount to nothing because of her. If he had gone to school, she thought, he would have been playing cricket with a proper ball instead of a bruised orange.

As Karna grew older he started to help Dolly pick through the Calcutta rubbish heaps for something saleable, hunting through the debris and competing with other ragged and emaciated men, women and children. And with crows, pye dogs and rats. He began to fight to claim some reusable item, even taking on adults and sometimes winning. Dolly thought he would have been killed ten times over if she was not always on the lookout, and ready to grab him and hold him back when he got into one of these one-sided tussles.

At the time of Koonty’s engagement to Pandu it had been decided that Koonty’s father would seek another job as Pandu would find it awkward to have his father-in-law working under him. Koonty’s father had in fact long had plans to work in Canada, and now the chance had come and Meena and her husband were to emigrate. Shivarani, who had been touring the countryside for months, wrote to say that she would be coming to see her parents before they left and that she was bringing a male friend.

Shivarani arrived by car in the afternoon, and Meena, who had gone through every emotion possible since she woke in the morning, felt quite dizzy as she watched the young man emerge from Shivarani’s car. Her joy was overtaken by fluster as Bhima fully revealed himself. She seemed hesitant and reluctant as she ushered the young man to take a seat on the verandah, and told her maid to bring sweets and tea.

Laxshmi, a stocky, sensible woman, who had been abandoned by her smuggler husband on giving birth to a fourth daughter, Bika, hurried off suppressing a smile and wondering how Mem was going to handle this.

Meena did her best to be polite, inviting Bhima to help himself to yet another misti from the salver when Laxshmi returned and then sending the maid to make cold nimbu pani, ‘For I am sure, Mr Bhima, that you must be very hot after that dreadful journey from Calcutta.’ But she told her husband later, ‘I am really worried now. It will be worse if Shivarani marries this fellow than if she never gets married at all.’

‘She has never even suggested marrying him,’ protested the husband. ‘I expect he is merely a college friend or fellow politician. She talks to him quite coldly, as though she does not even like him.’

‘Are you blind, Ogo? She cannot keep her eyes from the fellow and when she looks at him it is as though there is not another person in the world. Of course she is thinking of marrying him.’

‘I can’t see there’s all that much wrong with him,’ the husband said. ‘His face is rather scarred but Shivarani said he got the wound because he was saving her life in Naxalbari.’

‘It’s not the scar,’ snapped Meena impatiently. ‘That is not the problem though it is certainly unsightly.’

‘I agree he’s a big young fellow, but that’s OK too, I should have thought. Till now the men have always been too short.’

‘He’s a dalit, Ogo. How is it possible that you could not see? He may be well-spoken and educated, but anyone can see from the blackness of his skin that he is an outcaste.’

The zamindar gave a farewell party for his departing manager during which he told Shivarani, ‘Pandu will be managing the estate from now on and I will not be employing anyone so the bungalow will be empty. You are welcome to take it over as your home if you wish.’

Shivarani was touched. When her parents told her that they were leaving the country she had felt worried for she did not have enough money to rent a place in Calcutta. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That really takes a big weight from my mind.’

Pandu was so busy with his cows these days that he hardly noticed the matter of Shivarani’s friend or even the departure to Canada of his parents-in-law. His Jersey herd were causing great excitement in Hatipur. The local cows were sharply horned and half the size. Daily crowds gathered at the byre to look at the new cows, asking each other, ‘Are they buffaloes?’ Bending to peer at the Jersey udders, which were four times bigger at least than those of the local cows, they would emit gasps of wordless wonder. They stared, stunned with awe, as the mighty steaming buckets of yellow milk given by these Billaty cows were carried from stall to dairy. They had never seen anything like it. ‘We are lucky to get three cups a day from one of ours. These creatures are not of this world, but are provided by the gods,’ came the eventual village pronouncement. Pindu feared that these compliments were bringing down curses from an envious deity for each month there came a new bovine disaster, sending Pandu dashing to the gwala for advice. But these foreign cows did not react to the local medicines of turmeric, tamarind, and mustard oil. They developed sicknesses that the gwala had never seen. Three cows died of redwater. The cowman passed cow pox from teat to teat till all were too sore and lumpy to be milked. The heaviest yielder got mastitis and was treated with antibiotics squeezed up into her teats from a tube after which her milk was undrinkable for two weeks. Three quarters of the calves were male and were distributed among local farmers to be used as plough-pullers, till no more were needed and still more male calves were born.

‘In the West these surplus animals would be used for meat,’ sighed Pandu, ‘but here in our Hindu land I cannot think of an answer. There seems no end to the problems.’

At first it was difficult to sell the milk. The people of Bengal were used to pure white buffalo milk and looked on the golden cream of Jersey milk with suspicion. Eventually Arjuna’s father found a dairy in Calcutta which catered to a sophisticated sort of Memsahib. But after only a month of the arrangement there was a blockade. The Naxalites closed the road for a week in protest at one of theirs being murdered. The blockade was lifted. Pandu tried to get the milk into town again but on the following day the group who had committed the murder closed the roads in retaliation for the retaliation.

Pandu lost the market in Calcutta.

Before he bought the cows, Pandu had gone to see his friend, the minister for dairy development.

‘A government chilling tanker will collect your milk once it reaches a hundred litres,’ he was told.

Day after day, as the quantity rose, the hope of government salvation drew closer. At last the day came. A hundred litres was in the tank. Pandu contacted his friend, the minister.

It took a week of lost milk for Pandu to discover that the chilling tanker had been a figment of the minister’s hopeful imagination.

Pandu decided to deliver it to the chilling centre himself. This was at Barrackpur, on the outskirts of Calcutta, requiring the milk to be driven, unchilled, for four hours. They began milking the cows at three so as to get it to the centre before the sun rose and the weather grew hot.

At the end of the week Pandu went to collect his money. And found he had been fined for selling watered milk.

He protested, ‘I am with the milk from the moment it is taken from the cows to the moment I deliver it to you. There is no way water could have got in.’

‘Perhaps the cows are not of sufficient quality,’ suggested the manager.

‘These are Jersey cows. Their milk is the creamiest in Europe.’

‘Ah, Billaty cows, I have heard of this being a problem. Their milk is very low in butterfat.’

A government official was sent to test the milk at the moment of milking. He pronounced it well within the desired range. ‘Good for a Billaty cow,’ he said. ‘Though of course the milk of a desi cow is much higher in butterfat.’

Pandu returend to the chilling centre with his milk and once again was penalised.

This time the manager looked sympathetic. ‘You see, the system is that there are fellows putting water into their milk and taking credit from others.’

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