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  ‘Wet hair leads to a cold in the head. A head massage with gingelly oil keeps the brain warm.’

  ‘Go to the Office of Public Transport tomorrow morning and apply for a position.’

  ‘Did you open your mouth in the fountain? That water is all recycled sewage water. You could have swallowed tiny worms.’

  ‘Think of interview strategies.’

  ‘If you go barefoot in dirty water all sorts of germs will enter your body through your toes. Put on some socks and shoes.’

  ‘You are an absolute good-for-nothing. Go to the Bureau of Statistics tomorrow afternoon and see if they have any openings. Go to the hospital, to the convent, to the agricultural centre, to the electricity office … To the Anu Dairy Farm, to the Utterly Butterly Delicious Butter Factory.’

  Mr Gupta and Miss Jyotsna came to offer their condolences.

  ‘Arre, Sampathji, how could you do that?’

  ‘Now you are really keema kebab.’

  ‘Now you’ll be on vacation for ever after …’

  How they all went on and on! How they all talked and shouted.

  Sampath felt as if they had conspired to build a net about him, what with all their yelling and screaming, to catch him and truss him up for ever. Their questions ate away at him. His head ached, and so did his heart. He felt dreadfully sorry for himself. ‘What did I do?’ he shouted. ‘I didn’t do a thing. Stop shouting at me. Stop talking. Keep quiet. Keep quiet. Keep quiet.’ He went out on to the balcony and slammed the door behind him. But they continued. Even now he could hear them through the door. He climbed up on to the roof.

  How he hated his life. It was a never-ending flow of misery. It was a prison he had been born into. The one time he had a little bit of fun, he was curtailed and punished. He was born unlucky, that’s what it was. All about him the neighbourhood houses seemed to rise like a trap, a maze of staircases and walls with windows that opened only to look into one another.

  He felt bitter at heart. Surely, he thought, his surroundings were detrimental to his mental health. The sky was a series of squares and rectangles between clothes lines and television aerials, balconies, flowerpots and water tanks. It looked like pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.

  How would you approach this problem?

  Strangely, for some odd reason, from way off in the distance, he remembered the taunting voice of Father Matthew Mathematics at the classroom board at the Mission School.

  Show all steps leading to the end result for full marks.

  In his mind the days, his work, his life and even his thoughts all whirled. The same days. The same place. The one road –

  The post office at the end of his journey like a full stop.

  He did not want another job.

  He wanted open spaces.

  And he wanted them in large swathes, in days that were clear stretches he could fill with as little as he wished. Here a person’s experience of silence and space squeezed and warped into underground forms that were forced to hide, found in only a few places that Sampath could discover. In his small lapses from duty; between the eye and the print of a newspaper held by someone who never turned a page; in a woman who stared into the distance and past the blur of knitting needles in her fingers; behind muttered prayers; once in a long while in eyes that could look past everything to discover open spaces. But no, Sampath was to be allowed no peace whatsoever. He was found out and turned away from every refuge he sought.

  ‘Hai, hai, what will become of that boy?’

  ‘And it took a whole year to find that post-office job …’

  Around him large pigeon families cooed and fussed in the flowerpots in an effort, it seemed, to enclose themselves in a world of woolly comfort. Sampath, suddenly angry, stamped his foot to scare them. They rose, only to settle again. Coo, fuss, coo, fuss.

  From a window below, his mother’s head appeared, sticking out. Apparently she too was in need of a little quiet after all the noise in the house. He watched as she leaned out, craning her neck to look into the shopping bag of someone returning from the bazaar. ‘Jackfruit,’ he heard her say excitedly to herself. And then, even more excited, so the word came out wrong: ‘Cakfurit. But it will give the whole family heart palpitations!’

  He could see the old Bengali teacher too, sitting on his string cot by the gate with his typewriter. He typed loudly and when the little bell went off at the end of each line, he paused and read it aloud.

  Mr and Mrs Raipur, who lived in the little room at the edge of the big, crumbling Raipur family home, emerged to walk their baby up and down among the canna lilies in their garden.

  ‘Such a beautiful baby,’ said Mr Raipur. ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby. Look, it has a face just like mine.’

  ‘Not at all like yours,’ said Mrs Raipur. And she sang: ‘Small nose.’ She sang: ‘Small nose, pretty rose, tiny mung bean, little little queen.’

  Far away, a generator began to roar.

  xy = 0 and x ≠ 0, then y = 0. If there is x and y and the result is zero. If x is not zero, y is.

  Sampath remembered how he had not at any time ever managed to solve a problem put to him by Father Matthew Mathematics, never managed to rake and weed those forests of numbers and letters upon the board into tidy rows following an orderly progression of arrows to a solution that matched the one in the list of answers at the back of the textbook.

  Eating jackfruit in the summer causes anxiety and, in some individuals, ill-temper.

  ‘Little star,’ sang Mrs Raipur, ‘pretty flower. Rose and jasmine and moonflower.’

  ‘And cauliflower,’ said Mr Raipur.

  ‘Radishes. Are those radishes? No, potatoes. Potatoes? No, radishes.’

  Somewhere a pressure cooker hissed. Kulfi Chawla climbed the stairs that led from the balcony to the rooftop with a guava. Sorry for her son, she crept up behind him. ‘Would you like a guava?’ she asked. She had been unable to resist buying it, even though it was the first of the season and still a little hard. She pulled his ear affectionately.

  He thought of the post office.

  ‘No,’ he wanted to shout. ‘No, I do not want any guava,’ he wanted to say. But his stomach growled and he took the fruit into his hands. He was cross and grumpy. The guava was cool and green and calm-looking.

  The post office. The post office. The post office. It made him want to throw up. He decided not to think of it again.

  Guavas are tasty and refreshing and should be eaten whenever possible.

  He stared at the fruit, wished he could absorb all its coolness, all its quiet and stillness into him.

  ‘Oh, what should I do?’ he asked out loud, all of a sudden. ‘What, what, what?’ He stared at the guava intently, ferociously, with a fevered gaze, and gave it a shake. He felt it expand in response, rising under his fingertips.

  ‘What should I do?’ he said, giving it another desperate shake. ‘I do not want a job. I do not like to live like this,’ he wailed … And suddenly, before his amazed eyes, the surface of the guava rose even more … and exploded in a vast Boom! creamy flesh flying, droplets showering high into the sky, seeds scattering and hitting people on the balconies and rooftops, and down on the street.

  ‘Ho!’ shouted Lakshmiji, who had been hit in the eye. ‘What is going on there? All kinds of bizarre happenings in that household always.’

  But she received no answer. Up on the rooftop, Sampath felt his body fill with a cool greenness, his heart swell with a mysterious wild sweetness. He felt an awake clear sap flowing through him, something quite unlike human blood. How do such things happen? He could have sworn a strange force had entered him, that something new was circulating within him. He shuddered in a peculiar manner and then he began to smile.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Kulfi. ‘I will complain to the fruit seller, Sampath, beta. Would you like an egg instead?’

  Sampath’s bare feet were cold against the floor. A breeze lifted the hair off his forehead. Goose bumps covered his arms. He thought of Public Transport, of the
Bureau of Statistics, of head massages, of socks and shoes, of interview strategies. Of never ever being left alone, of being unable to sleep and of his father talking and lecturing in the room below.

  ‘No,’ Sampath answered. His heart was big inside his chest. ‘No, I do not want an egg,’ he said. ‘I want my freedom.’

  6

  The afternoon of the next day, the family departed to attend another wedding (for it was the wedding season, you remember), but they left Sampath at home so as to be sure he would not pull down his pants at yet another important event. As soon as they had rounded the corner of the lane on which they lived, Sampath let himself out of the house. Propelled by a great buoyancy of feeling, he made his way down to the bazaar. Here, he caught the first bus he saw.

  The bus thundered along on the road leaving Shahkot, the roar of its dirty engine filling the air. Sampath thought of snakes that leave the withered rags of their old skins behind and disappear into grass, their presence unbetrayed by even a buckle in the foliage; of insects that crack pods and clay shells, that struggle from the warm blindness of silk and membrane to be lost in enormous skies. He thought of how he was leaving the world, a world that made its endless revolutions towards nothing. Now it did not matter any more. His heart was caught in a thrall of joy and fear. Somehow, somewhere, he had found a crack. Bus stations and people passed by in a blur.

  He had taken the bus that took the milk sellers home after they had brought their milk to be sold in town. Squashed between dozens of cold, empty canisters, he continued all the way to the outskirts of town, until the buildings began to thin and patches of scrub and bedraggled trees appeared. He rode until no buildings could be seen at all, until they climbed up into the undulations of the foothills, so Sampath could feel the air thin about him and the freshness of greenery bloom within his tired frame. They climbed higher and higher.

  An old crone moved to sit closer to him. She had so many canisters, he was forced to lean right out of the window and to hang on for dear life. What is more, she was one of those old women who despise a silence. Especially irritated by Sampath’s face in its cocoon-like veil, she used her voice like a needle to reach and poke. ‘Where do you come from and what is your family name? What does your father do and how much does your uncle earn? How many relatives do you have in your house and how many cupboards? And the way to really good health is to drink a litre of buffalo milk first thing in the morning before the sun rises.’

  Sampath felt the marvellous emotion that had overtaken him begin to sag. The bus groaned its way up the slope of the hill. For a brief moment, the engine hiccuped and the bus stopped. In this moment, before the driver changed gears and proceeded up the hillside, Sampath leapt from the window of the stalling bus, spurred by his annoyance at the old crone’s voice. Amazed passengers who happened to be looking out at the view as they continued their journey saw Sampath racing into the wilderness towards an old orchard visible far up the slope. He ran with a feeling of great urgency. Over bushes, through weeds. Before him he saw a tree, an ancient tree, silence held between its branches like a prayer. He reached its base and feverishly, without pausing, he began to climb. He clawed his way from branch to branch. Hoisting himself up, he disturbed dead leaves and insect carcasses and all the bits of dried-up debris that collect in a tree. It rained down about him as he clambered all the way to the top. When he settled among the leaves the very moment he did so – the burgeoning of spirits that had carried him so far away and so high up fell from him like a gust of wind that comes out of nowhere, rustles through the trees and melts into nothing like a ghost.

  The passengers who happened to be looking out of the window might have sworn they saw a monkey man leaping in the orchard, causing the leaves to jump and quiver. But they were tired from selling their milk all morning and rubbed their eyes before they looked again so as not to be deceived. By then the bus had left Sampath’s tree far behind and everything was its normal self again.

  The tree Sampath had climbed was a guava tree. A guava tree larger and more magnificent than any he had ever seen before. It grew in the orchard that had been owned by the old District Judge of Shahkot, before the government declared the land to be part of an area reserved for national forest.

  Concealed in the branches of the tree he had climbed, Sampath felt his breathing slow and a wave of peace and contentment overtook him. All about him the orchard was spangled with the sunshine of a November afternoon, webbed by the reflections of the shifting foliage and filled with a liquid intricacy of sun and shadow. The warmth nuzzled against his cheek like the muzzle of an animal and, as his heartbeat grew quiet, he could hear the soft popping and rustling of plants being warmed to their different scents all about him. How beautiful it was here, how exactly as it should be. This orchard matched something he had imagined all his life: myriad green-skinned globes growing sweet-sour and marvellous upon a hillside with enough trees to fill the eye and enough fruit to scent the air. The leaves of these trees were just a shade darker than the fruit and the bark was a peeling away of tan over a milky paleness so delicate and so smooth that his fingers thrilled to its touch. And these trees were not so big, or so thick with leaves, or so crowded together, as to obscure the sky, which showed clean through the branches. Before his eyes, flitting and darting all about him, was a flock of parrots, a vivid jewel-green, chattering and shrieking in the highest of spirits. This scene filled his whole mind and he wondered if he could ever get enough of it. This was the way of riches and this was a king’s life, he thought … and he ached to swallow it whole, in one glorious mouthful that could become part of him for ever. Oh, if he could exchange his life for this luxury of stillness, to be able to stay with his face held towards the afternoon like a sunflower and to learn all there was to know in this orchard: each small insect crawling by; the smell of the earth thick beneath the grass; the bristling of leaves; his way easy through the foliage; his tongue around every name. And then, as the afternoons grew quick and smoky and the fruit green-gold and ripe, he’d pick a guava … He’d hold it against his cheek and roll it in his palms so as to feel its knobbly surface with a star at its base, its scars that were rough and brown from wind and rain and the sharp beak of some careless bird. And when he finally tasted it, the fruit would not let him down; it would be the most wonderful, the most tasty guava he could ever have eaten …

  Yes, he was in the right place at last. Tiredness rolled over him like a wave and, closing his eyes, he fell into a deep slumber, lodged in a fork in the guava tree.

  7

  The day their son moved into a tree, the Chawla family, worried and full of distress, took up residence outside the local police station. They sat on the bench beneath the station’s prize yellow rose creeper and waited for news of his whereabouts. That is, the three women sat on the bench while Mr Chawla walked around and around the building, making the policemen dizzy by shouting through every window he passed during his circuits. If he were the Superintendent of Police, he said, Sampath would, right this minute, be back in his usual vegetable-like stupor between them.

  The town made the most of the drama. Neighbours came by regularly for news and everyone shouted out their support on their way to and from the market. In some places there are people of quiet disposition and few words, but around Shahkot they were a very rare exception. People visited their friends a great deal, and when they visited their friends, they talked the whole time, and in this way a great deal of information was passed back and forth, from even the most remote and isolated of places.

  So although for one awful day it seemed as if Sampath had vanished for ever, the next afternoon the watchman of the university research forest bicycled into town to bring his married sister some curd. Along with the curd, he also brought the news that, in the old orchard outside Shahkot, someone had climbed a tree and had not yet come back down. Nobody could tell why. The man, he said, would answer no questions.

  ‘If someone in this country is crazy enough to climb up a tree,
you can be sure it is Sampath,’ said Mr Chawla. ‘There is no doubting the matter. Thank goodness the property no longer belongs to that judge or he would have Sampath clapped in jail for making a disturbance in his trees. We must just get him down without delay.’

  Holding hands, the family ran together to the bus stop, their rubber slippers slapping against their heels. They caught the same bus Sampath had taken on his journey out of Shahkot and got off close to where he had leapt from the window to run up the hillside, and here, far beyond the edge of the town, they made their way down the crisscross of little paths that led into an old orchard that had once borne enough fruit for it to be shipped to and sold in New Delhi. But it had been abandoned for many years now, the fruit acquiring the tang of the wilderness, the branches growing into each other, and these days was used only by an occasional goatherd grazing his flock. The orchard trees stretched almost all the way up the hillside, bordering, at its edge, the university research forest.

  With determination and purpose, the Chawla family clacked about, shouting up into the leaves. At last, at the far corner of the farthest guava grove, right near the crumbling wall that bordered the forest, they discovered Sampath sitting in his tree eating a guava, his legs dangling beneath him. He had been watching their efforts with some alarm.

  What on earth was he to say? He imagined himself declaring: ‘I am happy over here.’ Or asking in a surprised fashion: ‘But why have you come to visit me?’ He could answer their accusations with a defiant: ‘But for some people it is normal to sit in trees.’ Or, serene with new-found dignity, he could say: ‘I am adopting a simple way of life. From now on I have no relatives.’ However, he did not wish to hurt anyone’s feelings. Perhaps he could leave out the last line and add instead that everybody was his relative. He could hold on to the branches and shout: ‘Pull at me all you want, but you’ll have to break my arms before I’ll let go.’ He could scream: ‘Try to move a mountain before you try to move me.’