What Am I Doing Here? (28 page)

In their own feuds nomads preserve something of this ‘archaic' notion of equivalence. The nomad world is racked with vendettas, but justice is personal, brisk and effective. All parties to a quarrel try to prevent it getting out of hand. The instability in their nomad society lacks the cohesion needed for conquest on a mass scale. The nomad armies were military machines co-ordinated by powerful autocrats. Their cohesion can only be explained in terms of the nomad's interaction with settled civilisation.

It used to suit evolution-minded social scientists to believe that pastoralism preceded agriculture. The hunter learned to tame wild animals. The nomad settled down to grow crops, and the farmer made the inventions on which the first cities depended. Yet nomadism was not a step towards civilisation, but a step away from it. Abraham left the city of Ur to become a nomad. The Central Asian Steppe, like the Great Plains of America, had been under cultivation till the horsemen swept the planters aside.

The great transformation from food-gathering to food-producing, known as the Neolithic Revolution in the Old World, first took place on the flanks of the Fertile Crescent, that great arc of mountains from Palestine to South Persia, where, after the recession of the ice-sheets, the wild ancestors of our sheep and goats browsed over stands of wild wheat and barley. The process by which grains and animals became domesticated was gradual and is not yet fully revealed. The important point to remember is this: at first, stock-breeding and agriculture were practised by the people of the same settlement.

The farmers eventually developed irrigation, and agriculture came down the mountainsides into the rich alluvial valleys with startling increases in yield. Meanwhile, the herdsmen withdrew to the wild places and developed a new order of their own. There they later domesticated the horse to give them greater range. Thus, nomad and farmer are linked to a common past and, to some extent, share common aspirations. If the nomad recovered the mobility of former times, he was also committed to an ideology of growth. The cleavage deprived the farmer of rich sources of animal protein and the nomad of essential grain. Nomad and farmer might hate each other, yet they needed each other. A nomad independent of settled agriculture has probably never existed. Ammianus Marcellinus, it is true, heard that the Hunnish cavalry survived on the blood of their horses and foraged roots alone, just as the Masai suck the blood of their cattle. Such were the iron rations of the campaign; but normally settler and nomad exchange grains and vegetables for hides, meat and dairy produce. An Iranian nomad cannot get through the winter without grain. The Sahara camel man cannot live without dates. In an ideal situation the two cultures live symbiotically side by side.

But the nomadic insurgent has tactical mobility and is expert in guerilla warfare, the art of ‘attack and withdrawal' which, according to Ibn Khaldūn, was the practice of the Bedouin nations. ‘Raids are our agriculture', goes a Bedouin proverb. The nomad does not take kindly to being ordered about. He looks down on farmers as sub-human rabble and does not feel obliged to treat them as equals. To quote Lattimore, ‘when nomad chiefs patronize agriculture it is a subject agriculture that they prefer, exploited under their military protection and practised by imported peasants, between whom and the dominant nomads there is an emphatic social difference.' A character in the
History
of Priscus said this of the Huns: ‘being themselves contemptuous of agriculture, they descended on the Gothic food supply and snatched it away like wolves. Eventually the Goths occupied the position of slaves and toiled for the sustenance of the Huns.'

A barbarous taste for ‘fire-bright gold' infected the pastoral world. Its incorruptible brilliance relieved the leaden monotony of waste places. ‘They had golden earrings because they were Ishmaelites', goes a line from the Book of Judges. The Huns ‘burned with an insatiable lust for gold' and their Scythian and Sarmatian predecessors had their goldsmiths perfect ornaments in the celebrated ‘Animal Style', an art of seething, snapping monsters where man is a stranger. From the frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains or that of the Hunnish ruler from Noin-Ula in Mongolia, archaeologists have unearthed precious silks and embroideries, pile carpets and lacquers. Byzantine ambassadors to the camp of Attila noticed that the Hunnish dictator himself ate from a wooden trencher. But his followers wore extravagant silks, garlanded themselves with pearls, and drank from golden bowls encrusted with garnets. Such were the effects of contact with the luxuries of settlement.

The nomad ruler could only attract followers if he rewarded them well. An ungenerous lord was a dead lord. Once the supply of luxuries dwindled, he had a clear choice, blackmail or war. Ssu-Ma Ch‘ien records that the Hsiung-Nu appointed a Chinese renegade to handle their diplomatic exchanges with the Imperial authorities; he advised the ambassadors to make sure that their tribute of grain and silks was of fine quality and the right quantity; if not, ‘when the autumn harvest comes we will take our horses and trample your crops'. Once the settlers hardened their hearts and the subsidies dried up, the nomad ruler had no alternative but to risk deploying his ‘natura' military machine against the glittering metropolises of the plains.

 

L
ast Easter Saturday, Father Joseph de Souza put on a freshly-laundered soutane and took the bus from Sultanpur to Lucknow, to celebrate Mass in the Cathedral. With him went an eight- or nine-year-old boy whom he was taking to Mother Teresa's Mission of Charity. The boy was unable to speak. Instead, he would clench his fists against his neck, depressing his vocal chords to make a low muted noise halfway between a growl and a howl.

Along the road the bus passed through the forest of Musafirkhana, where, about four years earlier, the boy had been found at play with his foster-brothers – who, it was said, were wolf-cubs.

From Romulus and Remus to Mowgli in Kipling's
Jungle Book
, there have been stories of man-cubs being saved and suckled by wolves: as well as by pigs, sheep, leopards, bears and, recently in the Sahara, by gazelles. No single case has been proved beyond doubt. It is conceivable that Pascal – the name bestowed on the new arrival by the mission Sisters – will turn out to be the exception.

Pascal immediately befriended the orphanage dog – although, one day, he took its ear in his mouth and bit hard. During the first week, he would rip off his clothes, chuck away his food, and when he got hold of a pair of glasses, he clashed them together like cymbals. During the second week, he began to settle down. He learned to greet people with the Hindi salutation ‘
Namaste!
' He liked to travel round the garden sitting upright in the back of a bicycle rickshaw. The Sisters did have to watch him with other children: for sometimes, without warning, he would flick his fingers into their eyes.

One morning, a troupe of Rajasthani entertainers came down the street with monkeys jingling their bells, and a bear on a chain. Someone held up Pascal so he could get a better look – and he, as if suddenly seized with a fit, struggled and tried to throw himself into the bear's arms. A mission-worker, having watched this behaviour, decided to rename Pascal ‘Baloo' – like Baloo the Bear in
The Jungle Book —
and wrote a short article about him for one of the Lucknow papers.

The article was syndicated in the foreign press. I was in Benares when I heard of it: I took the train to Sultanpur and looked up Father Joseph, who teaches at a school run by the Sisters of the Little Flowers of Bethlehem. He is a small, wrinkled, optimistic South Indian who has spent forty of his sixty-nine years in the Hindi north. In the hot weather he sleeps alone on the roof of a barrack-like building, at the far end of the compound from the nuns. In the yard below there grew some leggy papayas. A kennel housed a ferocious Alsatian that yanked at its chain, howled, and bared its teeth as I passed. Father Joseph's colleague, Sister Clarice, then gave a tea-party in my honour at which she and two other nuns told their version of Pascal's story:

Early in Easter week a Muslim woman came to the school with news that an ‘animal-child' was roaming the western part of the town, scavenging for scraps. The Sisters found him on Good Friday, filthy and abandoned, crouching in a niche in the wall of a mudbrick house. The owners of the house said that a laundrywoman had come to claim him a few days earlier.

‘But she didn't want him back,' Father Joseph interrupted, ‘seeing he's come from the jungle and all. That's what it is. Once a baby's been touched by an animal, they abandon him and all.'

Father Joseph said that, in the course of his ministry, he had often heard stories of ‘wolf-children', but had never set eyes on one. He knew of one case where a mother had lost her child at nightfall, and returned to find a female wolf guarding it.

The Sisters succeeded in tying up the boy and taking him back to the school. When they bathed him, he bit them. He spat out some Cadbury's chocolate. They gave him dal and chapaties, but ‘he threw the plate and all'; and when he heard the Alsatian barking, he rushed towards the kennel and tried to get inside. The Alsatian suddenly went quiet. They then put the boy to bed and locked the room.

‘I heard him growling in the night and all,' said the old priest – and the morning had found him hunched against the door.

My train got to Sultanpur in the late afternoon. By a lucky coincidence, only a few hours earlier the Sisters had received a visit from the man who originally ‘rescued' the boy in the forest. His name was Narsing Bahadur Singh and he was the thakur, or headman, of the village of Narangpur, about three miles outside the town.

The thakur owned a food-stall near the railway repair-yards and would often take along his wolf-boy, whom he called Shamdev. He said that Shamdev was always getting lost, or running after pariah-dogs, but usually had the knack of finding his way home. When Sister Clarice taxed him with a rumour she had heard: that he used to exhibit the boy in a booth, for money – he was extremely indignant and went away.

In the evening she and I took a rickshaw to Narangpur. The thakur was still at market, so we sat in his courtyard while a crowd of villagers entertained us with imitations of Shamdev's antics, growling and baring their teeth. Narsing Bahadur Singh, when he did appear, was an erect, mild-mannered man in his fifties, dressed in white hand-woven khaki cloth, and with a striped towel draped over his shoulders. He owned six acres of land, planted corn, dal and rice, and was accounted rich. He had, it turned out, a history of adopting stray children. Besides his own two sons, he had brought up four other boys found abandoned in the wild. One of these, a gawky adolescent called Ramdev, was bundling straw into a loft. The thakur was insistent on one point: Ramdev was a mad boy; Shamdev was
not
mad, he was a ‘wolf-boy'.

With the help of Sister Clarice's translation, I pieced together an outline of the story: It had happened early one morning about five years ago. It was the dry season but he couldn't be sure what month. He had bicycled to see his cousin, who lived in a village on the far side of Musafirkhana forest, about twenty miles from Sultanpur. On his way back to the main trunk road, the track cut through thickets of bamboo and thornbushes and, behind one of these, he heard the noise of squealing. He crept up and saw the boy at play with four or five wolf-cubs. He was most emphatic that they were not dogs or jackals, but wolves.

The boy had very dark skin, fingernails grown into claws, a tangle of matted hair and callouses on his palms, his elbows and knees. Some of his teeth were broken to sharp points. He ran rapidly on all fours, yet couldn't keep up with the cubs as they bolted for cover. The mother wolf was not in sight. The thakur caught up with the boy, and was bitten on the hand. He did, however, succeed in trussing him up in his towel, lashed him to the pillion of his bicycle, and rode home.

At first Shamdev cowered from people and would only play with dogs. He hated the sun and liked to curl up in shadowy places. After dark, he grew restless and they had to tie him up to stop him following the jackals that howled around the village at night. If anyone cut themselves, he immediately smelled the scent of blood, and would scamper towards it. He caught chickens and ate them alive, including the entrails. Later, when he had evolved a sign language of his own, he would cross his thumbs and flap his hands: this meant ‘chicken' or ‘food'.

Eventually the thakur decided to wean him off red meat. He force-fed him with rice, dal and chapaties, but these made him sick. He took to eating earth, his chest swelled up and they began to fear for his life. Only gradually did he get used to the new diet. After five months he began to stand: two years later he was doing odd jobs, like taking straw to the cows.

‘He's mine,' said Narsing Bahadur Singh, angrily. ‘I want him back. I will go to Lucknow to fetch him.'

‘I'll take you,' I said.

At six the next morning he was waiting for the taxi, all dressed up in spotless whites. As the taxi passed through the forest at Musafirkhana he pointed to the track, but we couldn't go and see the place because the driver was in a hurry and threatened to dump us and return to Sultanpur.

There were at least a hundred mentally defective children at the Mother Teresa Mission. We were greeted there by an elderly man, Ananda Ralla Ram, who had been a barrister before devoting himself to charity. He turned his legal mind onto the subject of Shamdev and gave the thakur quite a grilling. We tried to explore the story from every angle, in an effort to find a flaw or contradiction. The thakur's answers were always consistent.

When the Sisters brought in the boy, he stood tottering in the doorway, screwing up his eyes to see who it was. Then, recognising his old friend, he jumped into the air, flung himself around his neck, and grinned.