leeches. Puran was in too much of a panic to bother about any of this. His cows and goats followed him down the valley, precisely into the area Mr Chauhan had marked out of bounds. Their hooves flattened several new saplings Mr Chauhan’s workforce had planted there the week before.
Later, soaked and irritable, Mr Chauhan walked into his house, and when Mrs Chauhan said in a voice full of concern, “How did you get so wet?” he shouted, “In the line of duty! I got wet in the line of duty!” He had forgotten to take off his muddy shoes at the door. They left a trail over a new carpet as Mr Chauhan went towards the bedroom, yanking his sopping shirt from the tight waistband of his trousers. Mrs Chauhan gave the carpet a look and slapped her forehead in exasperation. “Offo! What did I say? It’s become impossible to talk in this house, even a simple question.” She telephoned her sister in Lucknow for solace. “This job’s stress is really getting him down. Day and night, he’s never relaxed, not for one minute. And now I’ll have to send this carpet to you to be dry-cleaned. No dry-cleaner’s even seen a real Kashmiri carpet in this place or even in Haldwani.”
Mr Chauhan overheard her from the bedroom. He sat on the bed with his head in his hands. A damp patch grew around him as water seeped out from his wet clothes. He pressed his fingers on his Australia-shaped birthmark, which throbbed to the beat of his agitated pulse. He unearthed a hidden packet, lit a cigarette with a match that shook, and resolved that this time he would teach Puran a lesson he would never forget.
* * *
Burdened with her new preoccupations, Charu no longer remembered to steal grain from Ama’s store for Puran’s deer. He had to wait every morning for his mother to leave their rooms for the few moments that it took him to steal some of the hen’s grain from her storage tin, just a little bit every day so that she would not notice. This, combined with the freshest of the rotting fruits and vegetables that Charu brought back from the bazaar for her cows, supplied the food for his baby barking deer, which had grown steadily over the past five months, and was now more body, less leg. When he took the food to the shed and whispered, Rani, Rani, he saw her large, dimly-glowing eyes turn in his direction, but she did not get up until he had set the grain and fruit in the usual place and withdrawn some distance away.
One afternoon that August, when he called to Rani on returning from grazing the goats, he saw there was empty space in the place in the shed where her eyes should have been. The shed was tiny. Even so, he scrambled around as if the deer might be hiding under the heaps of hay and sacking strewn on the floor. She had wandered off twice in the past, and both times he had rushed about the hills like a man possessed, only calming down when he had found her and shepherded her back to the shed, all the while making mewling noises of relief. When he did not find her in the shed that afternoon, he ran down to the slope where he usually took her to graze and survey the world of commoners. She must have gone off without him again, he thought. He felt his heart turn into a cold, heavy stone at the thought of leopards, jackals, foxes, dogs – all waiting to savage her.
Puran walked the slopes calling for Rani in his loud, hoarse, hollow voice, until Charu heard his calls and came to see what the matter was. She searched the slopes with him: they went in different directions, came back, met, and asked each other, “Did you see her?” and separated again. They went deeper into the valley that led to the Dhobi Ghat; they walked every path through the pine forests to the north, the oak forests to the east, and then started searching the path through the woods to the bazaar. They clambered over the boulders near the stream that cut across the shortcut to the bazaar and at the narrow bridge over the stream they encountered Joshi, the forest guard. “Your deer is at the police station,” the guard told them. “You crazy fool, Puran, don’t you know it’s illegal