Seeing him rolling his head like a dumroo, and talking in a nonchalant manner, Melu felt enraged. Sitting on the edge of a bench, he asked again, ‘Why don’t you talk straight? Where have Chaunda and Laloo gone?’

  ‘They have gone to secure your friends’ release.’ Again, the cook spoke in riddles.

  ‘Which friends?’

  ‘Dulla and Dheeru.’

  ‘Why, what happened to them?’ Melu looked at him, surprised.

  ‘Nothing much.’ Turning his palms up, the cook spoke lightly, ‘They just had a minor scuffle here. There is nothing more to it.’

  ‘Oye, why don’t you talk straight, like a man? Why are you shooting your mouth off?’

  ‘You’ll be miserable if I tell you the real thing. And if I don’t, at least, you’ll have your roti in peace.’

  Rising to his feet, when Melu positioned himself next to the tandoor and rebuked him in a harsh tone, Maroo became serious and told him how Dulla and Dheeru had picked a fight with an auto-rickshaw driver outside the cinema hall. Things had really come to a head when five–six auto drivers, equipped with lathis, gathered with the intention of beating them up. Snatching a lathi from one of them, Dulla had lashed out at two of them, even broken the windscreen of one of the auto rickshaws. The police arrested Dheeru, Dulla and the two auto drivers. Chaunda had now gone to secure a negotiated settlement for both of them.

  Melu asked anxiously, ‘So, hasn’t Chaunda returned yet?’

  ‘He’s been gone for barely five minutes now. Chaunda said, just give roti to whosoever comes and then shoo them off. The policemen are really exasperated with all of you today.’ Looking at the plate piled high with dough, Maroo said, ‘Now, if you want to have roti, then sit down. Or you just disappear from here. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  This new complication had preoccupied Melu to such an extent that he had almost forgotten about his own roti. Instructing Maroo to make a couple of rotis, and settling down on the bench right opposite, he asked in a somewhat dispirited voice, ‘But how did the fight begin?’

  Tearing away a ball of dough from the kneaded flour, Maroo rolled it into a chapatti, and making a swishing sound, as he pushed it inside the tandoor, he said, ‘Do you think, while picking a fight or while thinning out lassi, people consult the horoscope of Beli Ram, the Brahman? There was some old animosity rattling deep inside. They were dead drunk, and so started abusing each other. Then things just went out of hand. What else?’

  It was as though Melu’s mind was in a logjam. He felt as if this entire matter had woven a strange web inside his head. Once or twice, he strained his brain to think as to what could possibly be done, but he couldn’t think of a solution—it was as though someone had lost his path on a pitch-dark, dust-laden night. After placing rotis in a steel plate, when Maroo called out to him, Melu was so distracted that he paid him no attention.

  ‘O yaar, have you gone deaf?’ When Maroo spoke in a somewhat brusque manner, jolting him out of his reverie, Melu picked up the plate and went off.

  While eating his roti, he kept staring at the soot-laden tin roof of the dhaba, the piles and piles of sacks and the wooden planks of the windows. The old table, on which he had kept his plate, would shake each time he tore a piece off his roti. His bench was also rickety and shaky. Everything, the utensils on the platform and the big vessels meant for cooking daal or vegetables, an aluminium basin, a bowl for grinding chutney, and the three–four-year-old calendars hanging on the yellowing wall behind Maroo’s back, appeared to have been smoked out. Everything seemed strange and dreadful to him. With each passing moment, he was getting more and more restless.

  Maroo was still talking incessantly. Each time he slapped the roti from one hand to the other, applying unusual force, his hair would fall over his face. The moment he jerked his neck back to throw the locks off his face, his bloodshot eyes would start smouldering, creating waves of fear in Melu’s heart. The straggly hair of his moustache and beard, unusually long and ugly nose, thick neck, long ears and cheeks as broad as a palm, all of this made him look somewhat strange. Even today, he was wearing the same old khaki kurta, soaked in grime, its left pocket was torn and hanging low, looking somewhat like the lolling tongue of a dog, and its arms, near the elbow, had big patches sutured on them. Earlier Melu had never paid much attention to his kurta, but today, he kept staring at its tattered collars, and Maroo’s bones peeping out of the broken buttons of his kurta near his chest, as though he was setting his eyes upon him for the first time. ‘What a grotesque body! What an ugly face!’

  ‘Oye, do you ever have a bath?’ While eating his food, Melu suddenly popped this question.

  Maroo gave him a strange look, and then baring his broad teeth, he grinned and said, ‘Why should I? Do I have to give away cows in charity? To tell you honestly, the first time, it was the midwife who gave me a bath, and now four brothers like you shall bathe me when I go. Bathing twice is more than enough for a man in his entire lifetime. No? Can we lie soaking in water all the time, like buffaloes?’ Then after a pause, he spoke solemnly, ‘Bhai Singha, you talk big and know how to make stories. I sleep when I want to, and get up when I wish to. You people have a bath and wear clean clothes so that you can attract the attention of women passengers. And when you have nothing much to do, then you take out a procession and frighten people. If you have to get up in the morning at four and light this chulha with wet coals, or face the living hell of having to sit next to it, right up to twelve at night or even beyond, and, on top of that, if you have to constantly suffer the indignities of a man like Chaunda, then I’ll ask you if you can ever think of having a bath even in your dreams. Then you’d forget all these things that you’re talking about right now, with such gusto. I swear, you’d forget all of this in less than four days.’

  Maroo had been working for Chaunda for as many as four years and so Melu had, on many occasions watched Maroo bake rotis, even when he was running a high temperature. Yet strangely he knew virtually nothing either about Maroo or his family. It was the first time ever that he was hearing such things from him, which, though common, were yet so strange. He had always believed—wrongly—that Maroo had a comfortable life. He was becoming a soft pea, as he was feeding himself liberally on meat and masala. But now he wanted to ask him so many questions; about his salary, his wife and children, brothers and sisters, relatives, where his home was, and so on. But he hadn’t been able to gather enough courage to ask him even a single question.

  After finishing his meal and washing his hands, he asked, ‘I’ll pay for everything, next month.’

  ‘Next month your “wife” will be back. Then we’ll get to see you after six months or so, when she will again go off to her parents’ house. And all this while, Chaunda will get after my life. Oye, brother of mine, please pay in a day or two, or he’ll deduct it from my salary.’

  Melu’s pocket was empty. So without a word, he simply left by the back door. Sitting by himself, Maroo continued to mutter something indecipherable, for a long time.

  ‘Oye, I forgot to tell you one thing. Just listen to this carefully before you go,’ he shouted to Melu as he was leaving. When Melu came back, he tried to advise him in the manner of a wise old man, saying, ‘Now, you’d better go to the police station and make enquiries. Kalu, the constable, is from your village. Just seek his intervention and get this matter involving your friends sorted out. Do it right away. If it drags on too long, it’ll only get more complicated. Just like me, Dulla, too, is from a very poor family—what if he loses his head, and they decide to give him a good thrashing! Moreover, these auto wallahs are like scorpions; they go around feeling so important, their foot-long tails up, stiff. They think no end of themselves—so you shouldn’t regret it later. The other day, one of them landed up here and spoke in Hindi, “I’ll have roasted chicken”. Bloody roasted chicken! It’s with great difficulty that we get pumpkin here, and he is looking for the roasted legs of a chicken.’

  Melu left, once again, without answering. He had barely turned the rickshaw in the opposite direction when the lights went off. He tried very hard to peer through the dark street, but nothing was visible. Guided by his instincts, he kept dragging the rickshaw along the uneven path, close to the wall of the iron foundry, and only when he had turned the corner of the narrow street leading to the cinema hall did he spot some light there. All around, it was still pitch dark. Two or three trucks, and some handcarts and tongas that were parked on the stretch behind the cinema hall had blocked the entire road. He didn’t ride the rickshaw, but kept pulling it along.

  On reaching the crossroads near the school, he wondered which way to turn. So deep a quandary was it that for a long time, Melu just stood at the crossroads, looking from one side to the other. Suddenly, he felt as though someone had pushed him from behind. Trembling, he turned back, but he couldn’t see anyone, as the road was completely deserted. The night was slowly wearing off. He felt the bitter cold was wearing away his ankles. Turning the rickshaw left, he set off in the direction of the street opposite the mill-basti.

  As he came closer to his own street, a strange sense of fear overwhelmed him, and he started padding across, almost like a thief stealing his way through. Everything from the broken bricks of the mud-soaked street to the odour of the old houses was the same, and yet everything appeared rather strange to him. In these small, kuccha-yellow houses, looking somewhat like nooks and crannies, lived families of eight or even ten members. Whosoever had entered this street had never been able to leave it. In front of the houses or behind them, towards the right or the left of the street, wherever people found a little space, they had created little ‘tenements’ out of whatever they could lay their hands on, old bricks, tin sheets or cylinders, jute sacks or the thin planks plucked out of the wooden boxes meant for storing tea or soap. He had never seen a bricklayer or a labourer enter this street; working through the night or day, the men and women had created everything on their own. The narrow corners, in which they otherwise did most of their cooking during the day, were where either a newly wedded couple or two–three children would huddle up and sleep at night. Despite his best efforts, he hadn’t been able to leave this sorrowful basti and go elsewhere.

  He felt that the light emerging from behind the torn gunny sacks wrapped around the ventilator of a kothri, just ahead of his own, was not only dim but also fearful, just like the expression in Maroo’s eyes. When he heard the sound of Prabhu, the old man, coughing inside, he stopped in his tracks. He also felt as though some nuts and bolts of his rickshaw had loosened, and were creating a strange, jarring sound. But when he started walking again, he heard no sound at all.

  It suddenly struck him how all the sons and daughters of the old man, Prabhu, had gone off to live in their own houses. Now Mai Dharmo and he were the only ones left. After having served in the mill all his life, he had retired only three years ago. Since that very day, he had been keeping indifferent health. His son, who was working somewhere in Delhi, had come thrice to take him along, but he had refused point-blank. Every time, he would say, ‘When all my life I have lived here, why would I go and waste away in a foreign land in my last few years?’ It was strange that he didn’t feel like stepping out of such a hellhole of a kothri.

  The moment this thought of a ‘hellhole of a kothri’ occurred to him, tremors ran through his body. The next house was his. He slowed to a crawl. Stopping, he appraised the situation. No sound from inside. The tin-pot door frame, which overlooked the verandah and was fitted into a barely three- or four-foot-high outer wall, looked somewhat like Prabhu’s lower jaw, as it hung loose, towards one side. Pushing it hard, Melu threw it open; still there was no sign of anyone stirring, indoors. Without making any noise, he brought the rickshaw in, parked it under a roofed-in space near the kitchen, locked it up and yet no sound was heard from inside the kothri.

  Melu’s heart was beating very fast now. The buzzing sound inside his ears had become louder. His legs seemed to be caving in. First, he kept staring at the dark wooden planks of the doors in front of him, and then he turned away towards the main door. Walking back into the street, he closed the door quietly. As he glanced at the kothri, once again, from its threshold right up to the ledge of the wall, peering hard at several serpentine rows of closely laid bricks, he felt as though some animal was sitting on the edge of the wall. When he looked carefully, he realized that when this wall was being built, some amateur bricklayer had put five or six extra bricks on top of the ledge, something that he had been seeing for the past seven years now. But on earlier occasions, somehow these bricks had never assumed the shape of an animal, the way they had done now.

  Tiptoeing, he came right up to the corner of the street. Standing at the corner, when he looked towards the right, he saw no habitation, only large tracts of barren space spread out as far as the eye could see. Walking towards the main road, with his hands buried in his armpits, when he turned around to look in the direction of his basti, once again, a long, deep sigh escaped his lips, involuntarily.

  Short of the main road, he stopped near a high mound. This time, when he turned around, he felt as if he was watching a dream. Enveloped in the inky darkness, spread over several miles, and hovering far above the high and low buildings of the town, including the little nooks and crannies they called their home, the old fort appeared like a dark monster from the sky, with its sharp teeth sunk deep into the earth’s surface, running amuck, razing to the ground all the bastis that fell in its way, and it was now chasing him, screaming and hollering.

  With a cold tremor running through his body, Melu looked towards the road, and he saw a truck trundle past him, screaming, and then turning in, it zipped down to the bus stand. Going past the high mound, he clambered on to the main road. Opening his chaddar, he wrapped it around himself, and then, with hurried steps, proceeded towards the canal.

  After having crossed the canal, rather than hit the road leading to his village, he turned towards the old, kuccha pathway. A straight road had now been carved out of that pathway, after the reallocation of land in the area. But the moment he hit that pathway, he felt as though he was still walking under the shade of rows upon rows of bers, keekars, bamboos, jujubes, and several other bushes and thorns growing by its side. Perhaps, this was the reason why his pace had slowed.

  Seven years ago, he and his bride had hit this very pathway to come to the town. Bapu had tried his best to dissuade him, saying, ‘It isn’t going to be easy for you to survive in the town.’ But it was his exasperation with being a siri that had made him say, ‘If I’m unable to, then I’ll return to the village after knocking around for a while… So what’s your problem?’ In an emotion-choked voice, bapu had told him, ‘Oye, simple one, if we can’t sense your problem, who will?’ But at that point in time, he hadn’t really grasped the meaning of his bapu’s words.

  After coming to the town, he had tried his hand at hundreds of odd jobs, but he had simply refused to return. He had no wish to go back and work as a siri for the likes of Partapa, who would easily go back on their initial promise of giving him food, somewhere in the middle of the season, and start saying things like, ‘Now, you’d better bring your roti cooked from home. Who can afford to feed you idlers? Who gives roti these days? Why don’t you settle for dry siri? Do your work and collect your wages, for this is the convention now.’

  ‘Oh!’ An involuntary sigh escaping him was in recognition of a sudden pain he had experienced. He had hit his foot against a huge stone.

  Right ahead was the railway track. After climbing the incline up to the track, he stopped once again. Just like the old fort, the chimneys of the thermal plant seemed to be hovering over the track. It was as though the track had been bathed in a galloping floodlight. But after crossing the railway line, when he looked around at the bristle-filled kuccha pathway, it lay steeped in darkness. Beyond that, far into the distance, the pathway was just as it had been since the days of his grandfathers and great grandfathers. The same briars and brambles, the same old potholes, and the same strange smell of the wild elephant grass, as if everything had been left completely untouched. He felt as if the pathway had been chopped into two parts, and the railway line had been spread out in the middle like a sword, mainly to keep its severed head and its torso at a certain distance from each other…

  ‘But if I return home, what will I say?’ Standing upon that sword-like railway line, and looking towards the dark pathway, when he spoke out aloud, as if to himself, he felt as though his legs, frozen with cold, were beginning to tremble. He sat down upon the track. For a minute, he was so completely dazzled that he lost sense of where he was.

  ‘No.’ It was as if his mind had suddenly arrived at a decision, and rising to his feet, he spoke, again to himself, ‘It’s much better to be home and be hungry than live in this hellhole. If I don’t get a siri’s job, then I’ll work as a daily wager, or eke out a living somehow. What else? We’ll see what happens.’

  He got up suddenly, and started walking towards the other side of the pathway. Barely a hundred yards down the incline, the pathway appeared to have been lost in the thick, wild overgrowth of the elephant grass. It had completely slipped his mind that ever since the new road had been built, no horse or handcart had crossed along this pathway. As a result, all kinds of wild bushes and briars, including the elephant grass, had mushroomed right in its middle. But he kept pressing on ahead, feeling his way through, somewhat intuitively.

  Then out of the dense cover of darkness, he felt as though he had heard the sound of his father coughing, and he stopped. On peering a little harder, he felt that his bapu was actually walking a few steps ahead of him. (On so many occasions in his childhood, Melu had accompanied his bapu to this town, along this very pathway. At that time, he would often hear the sound of his grandfather coughing as he neared these thickets. As this thought struck him, he felt a cold shudder run through his body.) Stopping in the middle of the pathway, he started looking in all possible directions, as if his bapu was somewhere around, fumbling his way through… But the place where, only a couple of hours ago, Melu’s bapu had come to leave his bahoo and his children, was miles and miles away from this place where Melu was standing right now. How could he have heard the sound of him coughing from this distance? Melu felt as though he was sinking deeper into the solid earth.