doorstep to be cured. Dogs with broken legs found their way to his cowshed. It was necessary that he be treated differently because he was incapable of understanding such things as wildlife laws.
Diwan Sahib’s baritone was interspersed with fits of coughing and he searched in his long-unused trousers for a handkerchief. I passed him a tissue. The constable tapped her pencil on the table. Then she spun a five-rupee coin on it again and again like a top and waited each time till it rattled to a halt.
Puran was not raising the deer with a view to eating it, Diwan Sahib continued patiently. He had rescued it from the forest. If he had not rescued it the lost deer would have been devoured by other animals.
“That is the law of the jungle,” the constable interrupted him to say. “And the deer is a wild animal.”
“Of course,” Diwan Sahib said, “and in every other instance you would be absolutely right. But Puran is a special case. Did you know that – ”
A note of ingratiation crept into his voice. I had never seen him bend over the way he was doing now. He smiled at her as if trying to please.
The constable interrupted again. Nothing was possible, she said. She began to shuffle her papers and files. She looked Diwan Sahib up and down with scarcely concealed disdain. She had been posted to Ranikhet only a few months before, and had no idea who he was. To her, he looked like any other rain-soaked, old, small-town man – educated, no question – but she had no time for such refinement and slow civilities. She had risen the hard way, she was tough, her tongue was sharp, and as a policewoman she had to be feared and respected, not loved. All this was written on her face. No doubt, too, she could smell the rum on Diwan Sahib’s breath. His big hands, even when resting on her table, shook with the tremor that we were familiar with but which she must have thought another symptom of his drunkenness. Her eyes went to his feet. He had managed a shirt, trousers, and jacket, but his feet had been too swollen for shoes and he had pushed them into purple bathroom slippers. She looked at the wet, mud-spattered slippers and back at his face. “The law is the law,” she stated. “I have work to do. It is illegal for people to keep wild animals at home whether as pets or as food. He is no different from anyone else in the eyes of the law.” She returned to her file and did not look up again.
Mr Chauhan had left instructions that if Puran came after the deer, he was to be locked up until the deer was safely in Nainital’s zoo, and for a few days after, to teach him a lesson. If anyone made a fuss, Mr Chauhan had ordered, tell them this is a non-bailable offence under the Wildlife Protection Act and Puran would have to serve a proper jail term for fattening a barking deer in order to kill and eat it. “And while you are at it,” he had instructed the constable, “I want those army clothes off him, and burned, this time to ashes.” Having issued his instructions, Mr Chauhan had left for Bhimtal.
* * *
Puran came home in someone else’s clothes after three days. He went into his ramshackle shed and would not emerge, not even to eat. We heard from a friend in Nainital that Rani was moping and pining in her new cage at the zoo, and had refused food and water. All day she stood virtually immobile in a corner of her cage, despite the persistence of the zoo’s vet. A week later, the vet advised a revolutionary step: he wanted Puran brought to Nainital. “That’s the only hope,” he said, “the deer might eat if he feeds it.”
Mr Chauhan’s permission was sought. He slammed the telephone down, fuming. “Here I am, the Ad-Min-is-Trator of this city,” he said, emphasising every syllable with a rap of his pen on the desk. “And they want me to give all my time to these foolish matters!” It would be the ultimate humiliation for him to have to send Puran to Nainital. He would not hear of it. He got into his jeep, its large pimple of a red beacon gleaming, and went off to inspect the site of a new amusement park, his flagship project, for