to keep those deer at home? What were you thinking? It’s not a pet dog or a goat, it’s a deer. Chauhan Sa’ab’s order: it’s going to the Nainital zoo.” Charu and Puran hardly waited for him to finish what he was saying. They panted their way up the slope they had just run down and then over the short cut to Mall Road where the police station was, with the forest guard’s voice in their ears: “Don’t go, he’ll put you in the zoo as well. They have zoos for mad people in Nainital!”
The police station was on a hillock above Mall Road, a yellow, two-roomed cottage with a red roof. It had no more than a rudimentary lock-up that was occupied only sometimes, usually by drunk people who needed to sleep off their fog. The constable in charge was a tall, sharp-featured woman from the plains who had a reputation for being tough with lawless motorcyclists and water-thieves. She had a tight bun, she carried a stout, polished stick to brandish at the unruly, and was never seen dressed in anything but her khaki uniform sari that she pinned up like a neatly folded napkin.
Charu and Puran reached the door of the station gathering the courage to reason with her, and found it empty save for the chowkidar peeling onions in the veranda. Through the main room they could see the bars of the lock-up and Puran ran in, despite the chowkidar yelling “O Puran”, and getting up hastily to stop him. Puran was on his haunches before the bars in a moment.
Rani was pacing around behind the bars of the lock-up. Twice, as they watched, her hooves slid on the polished floor, and she knocked her head against the wall on the other side. Puran held the bars and rocked back and forth. Something between a moan and a sob burst from him, then turned into rhythmic keening sounds.
“Let her out,” Charu begged the chowkidar. “Let her out, she will die.”
The chowkidar ticked them off in a loud, hectoring voice. “How dare you,” he said. “This is a police station, not your house that you come in and do as you please.” He yelled to whoever might be listening, “We are the police, what do you think, that we have all the time in the world for lunatic cowherds?”
Puran sat by the bars of the lock-up groaning and calling Rani’s name. He had some of her grain in his pockets and he scattered it on the floor of the lock-up, but Rani paid no attention to him. It was as if she had not noticed him at all. The skin on her back trembled and shuddered in spasms of fright; the whites of her eyes were flecked with red. In despair, Puran pulled at the lock on the grille, banging it against the iron rods to break it. The chowkidar grabbed his arm and pulled him aside shouting, “Saala, this is government property. What do you think you’re doing?”
Charu recognised that she was up against a force too powerful for her. Why would a police chowkidar – far less someone as elevated as the constable – pay attention to her? She thought of the only person she knew she could turn to. His words would count with the police. They would have to obey him. She ran to Puran to explain, then sped off, bounding over every available shortcut, her pink plastic slippers slipping and sliding on the monsoon-mossed rocks.
9
It was no use trying to finish reading the newspaper. Ama had arrived with the story of a certain Mangesh who worked for Missis Gracie long ago. He put her into one of those orphanages for old people, she said, and swindled her house away. And his wife, “That woman Asha, you’ve seen her, of course – tall and thin as a bamboo pole, with a voice that reaches the next valley even when she whispers, but she thinks she’s pretty – she has put a spell on my cow Ratna, she gives no milk at all any more.” Ama moved a ball of chewing tobacco from one of her cheeks to the other as she spoke and sat down with a groan on the staircase leading to Diwan Sahib’s veranda.
Diwan Sahib scowled at me and at Ama, and hauled himself out of his chair, retreating behind a line of dripping blue hydrangeas that separated his garden from the nettles below. I glimpsed his hands fumbling at his