Kiran Desai - Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

But even so!

‘That crazy family!’ Mr Chawla had exclaimed. ‘Oh no. Absolutely not. I am not going to get married to their daughter. I am staying well away from that sort of thing, thank you very much.’

But Ammaji clucked her tongue. For some reason she had taken a liking to the girl, and who on earth would turn down a big sum of money like the one they had been offered? It would allow them to clear all their generation’s debts and buy a refrigerator. ‘Don’t be so unreasonable,’ she said. ‘She appears normal, even if she is a little bit shy.’

‘With these things, there is no knowing,’ said Mr Chawla. ‘In fact, it is the quiet ones you have to watch out for.’

But although he did not admit it out loud, he too had been smitten by Kulfi’s flower beauty, her slender frame, her impossible delicacy so different from the robustness of the neighbourhood girls with their loud laughter, their round hips, their sly nudging and winking. And in a few months’ time Kulfi moved from her ancestral home, which was big and rambling, even if the roofs leaked and the paint had peeled away, to the Chawlas’ tiny rooms in the tumbledown streets of Shahkot. And over time Mr Chawla had developed a sort of exasperated affection for his wife, even when it became apparent that she was not the normal daughter of a crazy family as Ammaji had conjectured, but the crazy daughter of a crazy family as he himself had surmised. He was almost always right. With a wife like this, and two children to look after and manage, Mr Chawla grew more and more firmly established in his role as head of the family, and as this fitted his own idea of the way he ought to live, it gave him secret satisfaction despite all his complaining.

He was the head of a family and he liked it that way.

But oh! What good was it to be the head of a family when you had a son who ran and sat in a tree? Who slipped from beneath your fingers and shamed you?

‘What am I do?’ he demanded of the devotees still milling about, to show them it was not for lack of effort and concern on his behalf that Sampath had ended up in such a pitiful state. He hit his forehead with the flat of his palm, for drama has a way of overriding the embarrassment of a situation that should be privately experienced.

The ladies and gentlemen from the bus felt a little sorry for him. ‘Yes, yes, how shameful,’ they muttered. ‘And coming from a decent family and all. Clearly the boy has been derailed.’

They focused on Sampath, watching to see how his father’s distress would affect him. Surely any son, even this one, would respond to such a moving show of emotion.

Sensitive to the atmosphere of expectation beneath him, Sampath looked into the upturned eyes of the devotees. He thought of his old school and the post office and entire roomfuls of people awaiting the answer to questions he had often not even heard. He wondered how it could be that he had never felt comfortable among people. Here he was alone, caught up in the enigmatic rituals of another species. ‘Go on with your own lives,’ he wanted to shout. ‘Go on, go on. Leave me to mine.’

But, of course, he could not say any such thing. In desperation he looked around him. Among the crowd of faces down below, he recognized that of Mr Singh, the brother-in-law of a neighbour in Shahkot. Mr Singh, whose letters he had sometimes read in idle moments in the post office. As if in a frantic plea for help, he shouted: ‘Mr Singhji.’

He remembered one particular letter sent by him to his father.

‘Is your jewellery still safely buried beneath the tulsi plant?’

Mr Singh turned pale. ‘How do you know about my circumstances?’ he asked.

Sampath then caught sight of Mrs Chopra. ‘How is that lump in your throat that travels up and down your windpipe, whispering threats and almost bursting right out of your chest?’

‘Hai,’ she gasped. ‘Who told you?’

Encouraged now by his success, Sampath’s face was brightening a little. He jabbed his finger at a bald-headed man in the crowd and said: ‘And you, sir, that secret oil you got from the doctor in Side Gully. Clearly it is not working. Try a good massage with mustard oil and your hair will sprout as thick and as plentiful as grass in the Cherrapunjee rain.’

Their eyes wide with what they had seen, important in the news they were carrying, the devotees drove back into Shahkot.

There was a man up in the guava tree, a remarkable man. He had known all sorts of things. The dacoits were blackmailing poor Mr Singh. An evil spirit had established itself in Mrs Chopra’s stomach. Ratan Sinha had been using a special hair oil to no effect.

Clearly, there was more to this post-office clerk than to ordinary mortals. In his eyes they had detected a rare spirit.

‘Post-office clerk climbs tree,’ Mr Chawla read to his astounded family a little later in the week when the story had reached even the local news bureau and been deemed worthy of attention. ‘Fleeing duties at the Shahkot post office, a clerk has been reported to have settled in a large guava tree. According to popular speculation, he is one of an unusual spiritual nature, his child-like ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom.’

There it was — a modest column introducing Sampath to the world, along with news of a scarcity of groundnuts, an epidemic of tree frogs and the rumour that Coca-Cola might soon be arriving in India.

It was at this point in time that Mr Chawla had a realization — all of a sudden, with a tumble and rush of understanding — a realization so quick and so incredible in nature that his heart began to pound. Sampath might make his family’s fortune. They could be rich! How many hermits were secretly wealthy? How many holy men were not at all the beggars they appeared to be? How many men of unfathomable wisdom possessed unfathomable bank accounts? What an opportunity had arisen out of nowhere! Already there was a change in the way people looked at Sampath: no longer did they snigger and smirk or make sympathetic noises with their tongues. He, Mr Chawla, must move as quickly as he could to claim these possibilities for his family, possibilities that stretched, he was sure, well beyond his sight’s furthest horizon. He dropped his plans to return to Shahkot as soon as possible, Sampath in tow, and began to think of the old watchman’s shed the family was camping in as a permanent residence. He kept his thoughts close to his chest, however, and didn’t say a word to anyone, but in a sudden turnabout of policy that both surprised and pleased his wife and mother, who were already settling into the orchard as if it were their own long-lost home, he stopped berating Sampath for having climbed up the tree, and turned his attention to other matters.

In his attempt to make Sampath more comfortable so that he might greet visitors in a style that matched his father’s vision of the future, Mr Chawla recruited the help of Pinky, Ammaji and Kulfi. They considered the problem with due seriousness and spent many hours discussing the practicalities of the matter while sipping endless glasses of milky tea. Would it be nice for him to have a hammock? A length of cloth strung between branches? No, that would not be grand enough. Besides, Sampath would be forever horizontal and, after all, he was young and healthy, so surely he should not be allowed such indulgences. How about a platform? ‘Perhaps later,’ said Mr Chawla, ‘when we can afford some wood and get a carpenter. Constructing a platform is beyond us.’ They could not construct a tree house either. Anyway: ‘Nothing doing,’ interjected Sampath at this point in their conversation. ‘I am not going to live in a house after all this effort to run away from houses.’ In the end they decided that for now they would settle for a string cot in the branches upon which Sampath might recline. They raised the cot up to where Sampath sat, Ammaji and Kulfi handing it up to Mr Chawla and Pinky, who climbed all about Sampath.