Flame Tree Road (41 page)

He was determined to do it.

Without further thought, he struck out at the cobra, hitting it across the hood. It felt like slapping a strong, muscular arm. The snake whipped around with a raspy hiss and reared up to a full four feet. The hood flared open, and its jaw dropped to display a pair of curved pointed fangs. It emitted a low, throaty growl and Biren could feel its whooshing breath on the soles of his feet.

He kicked the snake again and then again. The snake swayed from side to side, dodging his foot. “Kill me! Kill me, you bastard!” Biren muttered through clenched teeth.

To his surprise the cobra froze and retracted its hood. Then with a swift sinuous motion it slid across the veranda floor, tumbled down the stairs in heavy folds and disappeared into the dark garden.

Biren drew his knees up to his chest, feeling oddly defeated. He had offered himself to Death and Death had turned him down. A primal rage seared through his body in fiery waves. It cindered every cell and burned every emotion down to silent ash. A vast stillness came over him. As he slowly became aware of his surroundings, he saw a piercing light—so sharp was its intensity he had to shield his eyes with the back of his hand. A new day was breaking across the river.

CHAPTER

61

Buri Kaki hobbled in with Biren’s morning tea, slopping it over the saucer as she set it down.

“Jamai-babu, you are up early
again
,” she cackled, clueless to the fact that Biren had not gone to bed at all. “Wait, wait, I will complain to
didi
when she gets home. Too much work, work, work.” She shook a long bony finger at him and clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

Biren had not told Buri Kaki about Maya’s death. What good would it do? She was too old for such sorrow. Buri Kaki lived in her own senile little world, and nothing she did or said made much sense anymore. Once or twice she had asked Biren with a childlike eagerness when Moni and Maya were coming home, to which Biren replied, “Not right now.” The answer to her was satisfactory. She muddled up the past with the present and talked as if dead people were still alive. She told Biren that Maya’s mother had just gone to market, and Jatin Nandi’s mother-in-law had made the fish curry. Biren just replied, “I see,” or, “Good, good,” to everything, and she was happy.

“Mia!”
A shout came from the front gate.

Kanai was running toward the house. He looked very agitated. Biren set aside his cup and rose hurriedly, the shawl slipping to the floor.

“You must come at once
,
” Kanai panted, wide-eyed with panic. “There has been a murder! Yosef is dead. They found his body in the estuary.”

“What?” Biren shook him by the shoulders. “What are you saying?”

“The villagers killed him. They took him by boat to the estuary. They tortured him and left him to die there.”

Biren felt nauseous with fear. “And Chaya?” he cried. “Where is Chaya?”

“They have taken her back to the village. I think they are going to kill her, too.”

Biren did not wait to hear more.

“Wait here,” he ordered Kanai as he charged back inside the house. “I have to get the police. You must take us to the weavers’ village,” he shouted over his shoulder.

* * *

Bit by bit he learned what had happened. Yosef and Chaya had escaped with the water gypsies. The gypsies were hard to trace. They moved like the silent undertow, carrying goods, people and currency from place to place.

Chaya’s father had gone from village to village looking for the couple. He’d warned the villagers against the water gypsies. They were charlatans, thieves and sorcerers. Vagrants with no morals, no roots. They had kidnapped his virtuous daughter and turned her into a prostitute to earn money for them. He had to find her at any cost.

He had been relentless. He’d hired thugs from out of town and bribed boatmen with opium. Nobody knew who had actually turned the couple in, but they had been found hundreds of miles away in tiger country in the big river delta. And there in the forest of flame trees they had been captured. As for the gruesome way Yosef had been tortured and killed, it was beyond horror. He was practically unidentifiable: mutilated, dismembered, his genitals cut; his blood mixed with the crimson petals of the flame tree spilled everywhere on the ground.

Biren had to identify Yosef from the pearl earring on the man’s left ear. Then he went to the police station and filed a detailed and comprehensive police report.

Securing the help of the police inspector, Biren set out with armed policemen in two boats to the weavers’ village. The village was deathly quiet. They approached in a single file, and Biren could sense they were being watched from behind closed doors. Armed police storming a village was not common. Someone must have warned the villagers of their approach, because the weaving sheds looked as if they had been abandoned in a hurry, the spindles lying helter-skelter on the floor. Young children who were always seen on the stoop of the mud houses playing with sticks and stones were nowhere in sight. Not even a single chicken pecked in the yard.

The emerald-green pond where women washed their clothes was deserted. So was the community well. It looked like people had left in haste, judging by the half-filled bucket of water and the two pitchers abandoned beside it.

They came to Chaya’s house. The doors and windows were shuttered. Biren walked up and rapped sharply on the door. When nobody answered, he rattled the windows and yelled, “Open! Police!”

There was a long silence. A curtain lifted, then dropped, and the front door unlatched. A thin woman in her midforties, her head covered with the end of her sari, peered through the crack with frightened eyes. Biren guessed she was Chaya’s mother from the striking resemblance in their features.

“I am here to see Chaya’s father,” said Biren.

“He is not home,” said the woman. “He has gone to town.”

From her shifty eyes, Biren could tell she was lying. “Tell him to come out,” he demanded grimly. “Otherwise, the police are going to enter and check this house.”

The woman looked over her shoulder. “He had to go to town,” she repeated in a monotone. “He is not here.”

“Where is Chaya?” said Biren. “Bring her out. I want to speak to her.”

The woman’s eyes dropped. She looked terrified. “I...I don’t know where she is,” she stuttered.

“What do mean, you don’t know?” Biren shouted. “She’s your daughter, isn’t she? Where is she? She was brought back to the village. Your husband and some men dragged her home by her hair. They murdered Yosef. We know everything. Now go bring her out!”

“She is not here,” repeated the woman. Her lips trembled as she blinked back frightened tears. “I don’t know where she is. They took her away.” Her voice was cracked from dryness.

“Who took her away?”

The woman began to weep. “They threw acid on her face and they took her away.” She fell to the ground with a shriek.

Biren turned to the police. “Two of you search this house,” he said. “The rest of you go and bang on every door in the village. I want every villager rounded up and assembled in this compound in five minutes. Hurry!”

The woman wailed inconsolably.

“You saw them do it?” Biren asked in a shaky voice. “You saw them throw acid on Chaya’s face?”

“Yes,” the woman sobbed. “They called her a
maagi
—a Muslim’s whore. They kicked her and told her she can now go and screw for her living. Then they dragged her away.”

Biren felt nauseated. “Didn’t anybody try to stop them? You are her mother!”

“What can I do?” the woman cried. “They would kill me, too, if I tried to stop them. The whole village watched them kick her. It happened right outside this house. I just cleaned up all the blood. Her father wanted to finish her off but the men said she should be allowed to live as a lesson to others.”

“Who were the other men? Are they people from this village?”

“They were local
goondas
from town. Her father paid them to find and kill Yosef.”

“Sir?”

Biren turned around. It was the policeman.

“The villagers are all here, sir.”

About thirty people were gathered outside. Not a single person looked him in the eye as he stepped forward to address them.

“All of you stood and watched today as a young girl was beaten by
goondas
. You watched her own father throw acid on her face to disfigure her. You watched the men drag her away by her hair. And not one of you did anything.” He looked the people standing before him. They were all looking down.

“This girl could have been your own wife or daughter,” Biren said slowly. “Someday, if this should happen to them, they will all stand around and watch like you did. This is not a matter of religion or morality. This is a matter of humanity. If there is no fairness and justice for this girl, there will be no fairness and justice for you. You will always be puppets in the hands of a bully, power won by corruption, by money.

“Your
didi
,” he continued, and paused, choking with emotion, “my wife, Maya, tried to help you, did she not? She encouraged you to be self-reliant. She wanted you to be free. Free to make your own choice. And now...and now your
didi
and my wife is gone. She’s dead.”

Some of the women started crying.

“Some of you have daughters like I have a daughter. What happened to Chaya must never happen to them. I know you have been told I am a traitor because I work for the British. But remember the mighty power of the British rule can be used for our good, as well. I am an insider and I represent you. I was born in a small riverside village like you. I fished in ponds. I walked barefoot to school. I did not even own a pencil to write with. Just because I wear trousers and ride a horse does not make me a
belayti
.”

He looked at the faces around him, and as he did so, he had a flash of being back in the Cambridge union debate presenting his argument. Only this was real life.

“I have taken a vow,” he said, “for my mother, my dead wife, my young daughter and for all Indian women that they will never again be without a voice. I will be their voice and I will use the laws of our foreign rulers to bring about change. These changes cannot happen from the outside, by force or by anarchy. The machinery has to be manipulated from within the administration, which is why I work for the government. This is why I am a lawyer. Please understand I am not going against their policy. I am making their policy work for you. There is something much greater beneath appearances—beneath the garb of religion, politics and social status. And that is our common humanity and it unites us all. Today I want to remind you of that. Today I need you to help me.”

Exhausted, he leaned against the wall of the house, crossed his arms and studied the faces before him. A small child crawled toward Biren and touched his shoe.

He picked her up and handed her to the young woman who came forward. His heart filled with grief when he thought of Moni. “Some of you have seen my little daughter, Moni—yes?” he said softly, choking with emotion. “Perhaps during the Durga Puja, or by the river where I sometimes used to take her. I am doing this for her and for all our daughters. I will not rest until all the men who have been involved in this atrocity are brought to justice. They will all go to jail. You may criticize our foreign rulers, but I can attest to one thing. They have established one of the finest judicial systems in the world, where all men rich or poor can be brought to trial. Did you know there are cases where even Englishmen have been tried and sentenced in this country? That is what I mean by justice. All of you have access to the same rights as anyone in this land. But I will need your help to identify the men. I will need to get signed statements from you as witnesses. In return you will be given full police protection. Our most critical need at this moment is to find Chaya. We don’t know if she is dead or alive. How can you forget her? She is one of your own. She was born here. So many of you have seen her grow up from a little girl. What a fine young woman she turned out to be. You must help me to find her. I cannot do this without your help. Please.”

One of the men cleared his throat and shuffled to his feet. He spoke to the others in a low voice. His back was turned and Biren saw him gesture, pointing this way and that, then the men dispersed in different directions.

“We will find her,
dada
,” the man said, turning back to Biren.

Dada.
Brother. He had addressed Biren as one of their own.

* * *

She was discovered the following day, barely alive outside a temple, ten miles away in another village. A bullock-cart man had brought her there after he had found her abandoned by the side of the road. At first he had thought she was a pile of dirty rags until she’d moved. He’d taken her to the next village where nobody knew who she was.

Biren brought her back to Silchar by boat. With Reginald Thomson’s help, he admitted Chaya to the military hospital, where she lingered between life and death for eleven days. Chaya was four months pregnant and had suffered a miscarriage, the doctor said. She would live, although the acid burn would forever disfigure her face.