2. Arrest
The path that led from the main road to our house was narrow and full of potholes and rocks sticking out of the ground. Donkeys were the best way to transport coffee, cardamom, oranges and whatever else down the mountainsides. And people too, though we usually had to go by foot. Or if you were lucky, you could get a ride on someone’s bull cart. Sometimes outsiders would come for an adventure on the jungle trail with their bicycles. I remember a group like that showing up by our house a few days in a row, promising me they’d bring a sweet potato biscuit from town the next time if I watch their bikes. They never did, so I slashed their tires to teach them a lesson.
[Listen to the audiobook podcast version here.]
A jeep could also drive on the path, as we saw one morning, but that was a very unusual sight. It was a police jeep, with three men inside, and they pulled up right at our bungalow where we were sitting outside. It was a Tuesday morning; Ayya had just been on one of his hikes up the mountain the night before. At the end of it, he had used up all his energy and slept very nicely, like a dead man.
The policeman sitting in the passenger seat gets out first and without a word, walks up to us and grabs my father by the arm. We’re all scared. “Why are you taking me?” my father tries to ask.
“Poh da,” he says, giving Ayya a rude order to get in the car. “You know what you’ve done.” Another officer steps out from the backseat. Both are tall and have broad shoulders, both are dressed in their khakis. They drag my father towards the jeep and give him a few punches to stop him from resisting. I’m crying, my mother is crying, begging them to let him go.
“What did I do?” my father cries. “What’s happening?” But they refuse to tell us anything, except that they are taking him away. “You were all in it together,” we hear one of them say. Ayya’s legs and feet are bad, it makes it hard for him to keep his balance. They shove him around, he stumbles and falls to the ground. Now I begin to scream. Such a scream has never come out of me before, and with it, every insult and curse I know.
“Give me my father back! You bastards! Lambadi payale! Palavatrai payale!” I shout. “You sons of bitches! You butter, you cunt hair son of a whore!” I run behind the police car, throwing rocks and sand at it, shouting, “Ayya! Ayya!” When the car disappears behind the bend, I fall down; I’m wailing at the top of my lungs, rolling in the dirt.
They left us there in a shock, shaking, unable to think. There were no telephones anywhere and we didn’t even know what police station the men were from, or where they were taking my father. But we did know how the police can treat people, especially poor people.
The only thing my mother could think of was to go to the new landowner’s place in town and ask him for help, but it was still long before the afternoon bus would come. There was one at eight o’clock in the morning, and two more the whole day; the next one was only at 1:30. After a few hours’ wait, we grabbed five or six coconuts and began the walk down towards the road. We had no money to pay for the fare, but we knew the people who run the bus since a long time ago. My mother was crying to the driver as she handed him the coconuts, I couldn’t even hear what she was saying.
When we arrived at Sakthivel’s place in Bodinayakanur town, only the women of the household were home. They were two sisters, both of them widows of the old owner. My mother spoke to them through the collapsible door, holding back tears and explaining what had happened. One of them, Sakthivel’s mother, I know has a good heart; the other one looked at us suspiciously.
Again, I spent a day starving outside Sakthivel’s house, but this time by my mother’s side, my father gone. It was hot and we tried to stay in the shade; there was no place we could go to get food or find shelter.
After a long wait, with still no sign of the owner, my mother called out to Sakthivel’s mother: “My daughter and I are very hungry — could you please help us?” It was now too late in the evening for rich womenfolk to come out of their houses. But what do they do? They send out some sambar and rice in a coconut shell: we are from the house of a leper and they don’t want us touching their plates, let alone touching them. Funny how it’s so fashionable these days, all these dishes and ice creams that are served in coconut shells. For us, that’s how you give food to an animal or low-caste person, never mind that we worked for them.
We kept waiting, sitting and lying down on the dirt road by their main entrance where someone had drawn a decorative rice flour pattern on the ground. It was already getting dark when Sakthivel returned.
“Anna, Anna, please help!” I cried. “The police took my father away and we don’t know why!”
He wouldn’t even look at me: he was still angry at me for talking back at him the last time. But the way Sakthivel looked at my mother, I could tell he likes her. But why would he behave like that — touch her, rub her shoulder? Can’t he see how scared she is?
“Don’t worry, Chidambaram will be back in just a couple of days…” he tells Amma. “We’ll talk to the police. Summa. Simple thing.”
I realize now that he must have been taking advantage of my mother many times before. Every now and then, he would come to our place up on the mountain, to see how the work was going, so he had many opportunities. For him, this was just another opportunity.
“No, I want to see Ayya now! You have to talk to the police now!”
“Can’t you take us to the station? Please tell me!” my mother begged. “Mayes needs to see her father.”
Sakthivel refused to go with us, but he did know the station where they kept him.
* * *
It was a men’s police station and the officer standing outside was not expecting a young woman and a little girl to show up at this time of the day. “Why did you come here? What do you want?” he demanded. They are not supposed to let women in after six in the evening. There was a separate female police station further away — but why would we go there? We knew this was where they had taken my ayya. Finally, the policeman said he would have a word with the inspector and went inside. Then we didn’t see him for another two hours.
When we were told we could see my father, but just for five or ten minutes, I grabbed my mother’s hand and held it tight. Inside, khaki-clad men with mustaches looked at us suspiciously. As we walked towards where they kept Ayya, we passed by an open door to a room where I saw — just for a second or two — a man hanging from the ceiling by his feet. I had been afraid already, now I was filled with terror. My mother squeezed my hand harder and we kept walking.
They had put my father in the furthest corner of the building, maybe because of his leprosy, I’m not sure. I don’t think they were afraid of getting the disease if they hit him, though; they only use their sticks to hit people. Hitting someone with your fist could be painful for the policeman. Ayya was sitting on the floor, hugging his legs, only a dhoti wrapped around his waist. They didn’t allow him to hold me, and they didn’t even give us more than two minutes. But it was enough for him to explain what had happened.
Some men had entered a neighboring estate at night and cut down teak and sandalwood trees. Those are valuable, you can get up to one lakh rupees for a single log. It was the neighbor’s watchman who was being tortured in the other room: his boss was sure that Ayya and him had together allowed the thieves in, and that both of them were getting a share.
“They’ll release me, I know it,” Ayya kept comforting my mother. That anyone could even suspect him of helping thieves enter the estate was impossible for him to imagine. He took his job very seriously and liked to think of himself as the Guardian of the Mountain. “Just take care of Mayes until I come back, and don’t worry.”
Now a constable shouts at my mother: “Eh! Inge va!”
I’m boiling inside. That’s how you’d say “come here” to a dog. The constable is standing outside the inspector’s office, next to another man sitting in a small chair behind a small table. He’s the guy you call “the writer”, an officer whose job it is to write down the complaints of illiterate poor people.
“You go back and talk to your husband now,” says the writer, “and advise him to confess to aiding the theft.”
“Please, Sir,” my mother says, “we don’t know anything about any trees.”
“Shut your mouth and get out of here then.”
“Sir, don’t think of my husband like this, he’s an honest man.”
“Then you tell him to accept the charges. Or he will get the same treatment tonight as his friend, okay?”
“You can do what you like, you can kill him,” says my mother, in tears, “but he’s not going to lie.”
When I hear all this, I can’t take it. I begin to scream at them: “You are bastards! You are all bastards!” Now the inspector comes out of his office in a huff.
“Who is this? Why did you allow this girl in here? Get rid of them. Out, now! Poh poh da!”
Still, my mother is begging him: begging that the inspector believe my father, that he show us mercy. Her voice stays quiet and meek, mine keeps getting louder and higher as I scold them with every name I can think of. Even after we’re thrown out, I can’t stop; I wail and curse and spit and swear, I throw a pebble at the police station.
“Don’t do that or they might hurt your father,” my mother tells me. Only then I close my mouth, startled and terrified I might make everything even worse. “He didn’t do anything bad, of course they’ll let him go,” she comforts me, but I can see that her eyes are wet and her face still full of fear. “He’ll come home tomorrow and bring you sweets, you’ll see.”
* * *
Again, we returned to Sakthivel’s house; there was nowhere else for us to go in Bodi. My mother held up her wedding thali, a simple yellow thread she wore around her neck — they couldn’t afford a real necklace for their marriage ceremony — and pleaded to him: “Get my husband back to me, please! They say they’ll hang him upside down, maybe they will kill him…”
He stays cool and offhand. “Go home and wait,” he tells her. “You need to take over the watchman’s duties now anyway. So just head back mountainside and give it a couple of days, okay?”
But the last bus was long gone by now. We tried to sleep on the side street, under a tarpaulin that Sakthivel’s mother gave us. But the whole night we cried, and at four in the morning, we had to get up to catch the seven o’clock bus back home. Now my mother had the responsibility to guard the estate, but she could only stay inside, sitting and crying, trying to eat, just waiting for my father. Night came, then morning, but no sign of him all day.
We waited and waited — until we had to sleep again.
* * *
On the third day, in the late morning, he returned to us.
I ran to him and hugged him, I held him, pressed my face against his, ran around him like a little dog, jumping, wanting to keep giving my father kisses like I was eating him alive. And it was the first time I ever saw my father hug my mother.
The other watchman had confessed, we found out later. He had told the police where the trees are and said, “Chidambaram doesn’t know anything.” Sometime later, the neighbor hired a new guy. We never saw the former watchman again and I don’t know what happened to him.
“Did the policeman hit you, Ayya? Scold you badly, Ayya?” I asked.
“No no,” my father said to me, but I knew he was hiding something. And then he laughed. “But one policeman told me: ‘Next time you come, bring me two big jackfruits! I like those!’ he says!”
“Let’s give him his jackfruits, Ayya,” I said, “but I’ll pee on them first.”