tried to return to sleep again. The next day I heard that the General had almost lost Bozo to the leopard; miraculously, the dog had escaped with a gash on its shoulder.
The day after that I heard Charu’s call for Gouri coming and going, growing louder, then fainter, louder again, hopeful, questioning, despairing, as afternoon purpled into dusk. She wandered up and down every slope that I could see from my windows. The brass bells on the other cows tinkled as they came homeward from the valleys, but Gouri did not appear.
By dusk, a knot of people had gathered outside and the clerk shook his head and pulled on a beedi saying, “Call the girl back, it’s no use.” He bent over the fire outside his house and poked at it. “Take every care you can, but when the leopard wants something he gets it.”
“What do you expect?” Ama said. “We live in the middle of a forest.”
“The other day,” the taxi driver said, “we were standing by the road – at just this time – four of us. And Lachman’s dog was sniffing about right there, two feet from us. Before we knew it, a leopard had come out of the bushes and snatched it away. We chased it with sticks, we shouted and screamed, but it was too quick.”
“And?”
“And, what do you know? It dropped the dog! But by then the dog had died – maybe of fright – but it had a deep wound, dripping so much blood, the road went red. Half its fur and skin was torn off, you could see right down to its bones near the head.”
“That Lachman had paid five hundred rupees for it. And he’d been feeding it a boiled egg every day for the past year. Said it was a valuable guard dog.”
The other man smirked. “The bastard didn’t have money for his wife and children, but he made sure the dog got a boiled egg each day!”
“Boiled!” they said again and held each other, shaking with laughter. “Not even raw, boiled!”
Ama snarled, “Why don’t you get out and help the girl hunt for her cow instead of sitting here telling silly stories?” She hitched up her sari and creaked down the slope with a long stick in her hand, shaking her head at them and muttering.
Charu found Gouri at dawn the next day, in a deep gully. The cow had fallen in awkwardly. Two of its legs jutted at such an odd angle they were certainly broken, and it had a deep wound near its neck. It was alive, but it lay with a still, glazed look, not making a sound. The bell at its neck was red with blood as were the white patches on its mostly dark body.
Everyone gathered around the cow. Charu held out torn pieces of roti to it, eyes streaming tears, saying, “Gouri Joshi, eat something.” She tried to stem the flow of blood from the wound on its neck by stuffing her dupatta against it, but the cloth was soaked in a moment.
“We should call the vet,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“That animal doctor will be no good now; it’s too late,” the clerk said. There was a general murmur of assent.
“If anyone can get it out of there, it’s the Ohjha,” Ama said. “Send someone to call him. But will he come?”
Just three days before, Charu’s grandmother had been holding forth to me about how the Ohjha loathed the new vet. The new vet was a local man who spoke a Pahari dialect, and this had won people’s hearts – the earlier vets had all been strangers from the plains. The new man had cut into the Ohjha’s livelihood. Unlike the vet, the Ohjha was not employed by the hospital. Unlike the vet, the Ohjha had fulminated to Charu’s grandmother, there would be no food on his plate or drink in his glass if sick animals stopped being brought to him. The government paid the vet every month, regardless of how many animals he treated, but who paid the Ohjha? He had to make his way in the world by his own devices. “There he was, sitting in the middle of all the junk at the Kabariwallah’s,” said Ama, “shaking his trident and screaming into his glass of booze, ‘I’ll kick that crazy bastard, the vet, I’ll kick him in the balls!’ I told him, ‘Forget all that, old man, your bijniss is going to go thup, your days are numbered.’ I laughed