Kiran Desai - Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

And then, down in the bazaar, there was the Hungry Hop boy, who did not even know of the misery she was going through. ‘Baap re!’ she concluded, he certainly ought to know, for it was a very awful and upsetting way to feel. This was an unbearable state of affairs. Here she was, no longer her own strong self and without anything else that might be of some consolation. Suddenly angry, she began, once again, stormily, to cry. And while she was crying over the Hungry Hop boy, she was simultaneously horrified that her own mind could create such a terrible cage, and she longed for the freedom of her earlier life, wished she could catch hold of this dreadful boy, throw him down the hillside, stamp on him and hit him with a stick.

‘What should I do?’ she asked her brother, as he sat high above her clucking his tongue at her tears while also examining the green veins of his arm, the woodiness of his heel. ‘I am going crazy,’ said Pinky. ‘I feel like a firework that has been lit by a match.’

‘If a firecracker has been lit,’ said Sampath, ‘then it is going to explode, like it or not. Unless you throw it into a bucket of water. And then, what a waste of a firecracker.’ He looked at his arm, the mahogany of his skin. He watched the sun’s watermark upon his belly, its rise and fall through the leaves.

Pinky decided her brother was quite right. There was no reason for her to drown herself in a bucket of tears, and neither would she sit and suffer through feeling like some faulty firework, with all the sparks flying inside her instead of blazoning outwards in a display that would surely create some sort of effect, make some sort of an explosion. And an explosion, she knew, is never without a certain amount of satisfaction.

The next morning, filled with resolve, she changed her clothes, painted her face, waited for the time when her family was distracted by the commotion of Sampath’s daily bath and made her escape up the path that led from behind the shed. She had painted her eyes thickly and blackly about the upper and lower eyelids, and pinned a bunch of flowers to bloom like detonations over each ear. Like an actress ready for a performance, she was prepared. Her lips pressed tightly together, earrings swinging from her unusually small earlobes, she strode down the path towards the bus stop, breaking the branches that threatened to bar her way, kicking the stones from the path, despite her flimsy slippers and delicate, unprotected toes.

The spy, barred from Kulfi’s cooking pots by the new visiting hours, had been loitering about outside the orchard, trying to think up an excuse that would allow him in anyway, when he saw Pinky on her way to the bus stop. He decided to kill the time before he could be legally admitted into the orchard by following Pinky instead, just this once, just to make sure there was nothing more going on there than an ordinary trip to the bazaar …

Here and there she caught a glimpse of him ducking, always just a little too late, behind bushes and tree trunks. But for once she was not bothered, although she noted with satisfaction that her father was certainly wrong: men were following her. On she strode. She climbed on to the bus and, when he did as well, she speared around her ruthlessly with her hairpin, giving the spy such a jab he was forced to rush straight to Dr Banerjee for a tetanus shot when they reached the bazaar.

It was still early. The smoke from the fires that were being started in the tea stalls obscured the pale winter sun. The Hungry Hop boy stood in the grey bazaar with all the shopkeepers, who were only just getting ready to open their stores, yawning and scratching at their bellies meanwhile.

By any standards this boy was rather slow. He had some humour, it was true, and was well-meaning and good-tempered for the most part, but he was not very conscious of what was happening in the world about him. Until the Cinema Monkey had begun to forage elsewhere, he had considered it part of his daily duties to chase him away. Thus he had not thought twice about his rescue of Ammaji’s dentures, and neither had he realized that now Pinky’s ice-cream buying was a significant ice-cream buying as opposed to an insignificant ice-cream buying. The various times she had endeavoured to bump into him in the street had not affected him in the least, for again he often bumped into her in the street. As impervious to Pinky’s charms as always, he had continued upon his way, his life rock-solid and unbothered by love. When the right time came, the right girl would be found for him without the disruption of romance. In the meantime, he enjoyed himself singing along to love songs on the radio and pinching and poking the odd girl on the bus who happened to catch his eye.

Thus it came as quite a surprise when Pinky changed her oblique strategies in a direct demand for recognition. He looked at her amazed as she bore down upon him dressed in the colours of battle, dark with kohl, mouth like a stab wound, storming through the bazaar as if at the head of the conquering army. ‘Enough,’ she muttered, ‘quite enough.’

She walked up to the Hungry Hop boy, who was removing the bit of corrugated metal propped against the opening of the van.

‘What, you want to eat ice cream this early in the morning? Clearly living in the mountains is getting to your brain,’ he said, smiling.

Seeing him she was filled with a rush of elation and rage. How placid and smiling he was! For a minute she thought she might kiss him, but the vein of aggression pounded powerfully within her and she bit him instead. She bit his ear so hard that the Hungry Hop boy shouted out and his voice boomeranged about the town.

He was being hurt. He was being murdered. ‘Ai. Yai. Yai.’ The black and white polka-dots of her sari swam alarmingly before his eyes.

People came running from every direction. ‘What happened? What happened?’

A piece of his ear lay upon the ground.

Women who were preparing lunch boxes and getting the children ready for school opened the windows and leaned out. Forced to leave his breakfast because of all the ruckus, the Superintendent of Police, who had been sitting at the tea stall, arrived. ‘Arre! What is happening here?’

The Hungry Hop boy held on to his maimed ear and yelled, ‘She attacked me, sir, she attacked me.’

Pinky was marched, trembling, glowering, to the police station. She had drawn blood before, in the school playground. She spat out the salt taste of it. The pour of red from Hungry Hop was like the spill of passion and pain. She trembled, but if there was any fear in her she refused to show it or to let it get the upper hand. Or even to admit it to herself. Her courage rising, she walked dignified, behind the superintendent. Meanwhile, the Hungry Hop boy, trembling more violently than her by far, his courage ebbing with each passing moment, was taken to the family clinic, his ear packed in a tub of vanilla ice cream that had been handily obtained from the van to keep it frozen so that Dr Banerjee might sew it back on.

‘Human bites,’ said Dr Banerjee, relaxing at the door to his clinic, talking to the local newspaper representative after seeing off both the spy and the Hungry Hop boy, ‘are most common in the summer and winter season, but can occur all year round. They are more common in the morning than in the afternoon. Indeed, although people concern themselves more with animal bites, human bites should be given close attention, for human mouths contain up to forty-two species of bacteria. Thus they can be more dangerous even than spiders or dogs.’

‘Since when do ladies in the town bite gentlemen?’ the policeman asked of Pinky, fierce and seemingly unrepentant, smouldering upon a bench back at the police station. ‘You will end up in the mental home if you persist in demonstrating that that is where you belong.’