Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Mr Prashant, the Forest Officer, looked appalled at the thought, as if Sandeep had made a tasteless joke about God. ‘Now, let’s go ahead — and kill the killers,’ continued Sandeep, almost managing to look fierce.

The jeeps and car turned off the main road on to a dirt track, leaving the villagers behind. Another village went by, and then there was open countryside: the same scrub and outcrops as before, interspersed with pieces of arable land and the occasional large tree — a flame-of-the-forest, a mahua, or a banyan. The rocks had stored heat over the months, and the landscape began to shimmer in the morning sun. It was about eight thirty and it was already hot. Maan yawned and stretched as the jeep bounced on. He was happy.

The vehicles stopped near a great banyan tree on the bank of a dried stream. There the beaters, armed with lathis and spears, two of them with rudimentary drums strapped across their bodies, sat and chewed tobacco, sang tunelessly, laughed, talked about the two rupees that they would be getting for their morning’s work, and asked several times for a re-explanation of Mr Prashant’s instructions. They were a mixed bunch in both shape and age, but all of them were eager to be of use and hopeful that they would flush out a man-eating wolf or two. Over the last week the suspected wolves had been sighted on a number of occasions — once as many as four of them together — and had sought escape in the long ravine into which the dry creek ran. This was where they would most likely be hiding. The beaters finally set out across the fields and ridges in the direction of the lower end of the ravine and disappeared into the distance as they trudged along. They would later move forward through the ravine and try to flush the quarry out at the other end.

The jeeps now headed dustily towards the upper end of the ravine. Yet at this upper end — as at the lower end — there were a number of outlets other than the main one, and each exit had to be guarded. The marksmen were distributed at these various exits. Beyond the exits lay rough open land for a couple of hundred yards, and beyond that a patchwork of dry fields and areas of woodland.

Mr Prashant tried to obey Sandeep Lahiri’s order that he should forget that he was in the superior, heaven-blessed, twice-born presence of an IAS officer. He donned his cloth cap, nervously twisted it around, and finally mustered the courage to tell people where they should sit and what they should do. Sandeep and Maan were asked to sit at one of the smaller and steeper exits, which a wolf, Mr Prashant thought, would be unlikely to choose because it would too greatly reduce his speed. The police marksmen and hired professional hunters were assigned to different areas, where they sat in the skimpy and sweltering shade of a number of small trees. The long wait for the beat began. There was no stir in the air to provide the least relief.

Sandeep, who found the heat intolerably taxing, did not say much. Maan hummed a little; it was part of a ghazal that he had heard Saeeda Bai sing, but, oddly, it did not bring Saeeda Bai to his mind. He was not even conscious that he was humming. He was in a state of calm excitement, and from time to time he mopped his forehead or took a swig from his water bottle or checked his ammunition. Not that I’ll get more than half a dozen shots at most, he told himself. Then he moved his hand along the smooth wood of the rifle, and raised it to his shoulder a few times, aiming in anticipation at the bushes and thickets in the ravine from which a wolf would be most likely to emerge.

More than half an hour passed. The sweat dripped down their faces, and trickled down their bodies. But the air was dry, and it did evaporate; it did not torment them as it would have in the monsoon. A few flies buzzed around, occasionally settling on their faces or their bare arms and legs, and a cicada sitting on a small ber bush in a field chirped shrilly. The faint sound of the drums of the beaters, but not of their shouts, now came to their ears from the distance. Sandeep watched Maan with curiosity, curiosity not at his actions so much as at his expression. Maan had struck him as an easy-going, happy-go-lucky sort of man. But there was something intent and determined in his look now, something that seemed to say, with pleasurable anticipation: A wolf is going to come out there from that thicket, and I will follow it with my rifle until it gets to that spot along the path so that I can be sure of getting a good clear shot sideways on, and I will press the trigger, and the bullet will go true, and it will fall there — dead — and that will be that. A good morning’s work.

This was not a bad approximation of Maan’s actual thoughts. As for Sandeep’s own independent thoughts, the heat had thinned and blurred them. He did not anticipate with any relish the killing of the wolves, but felt that this was the only immediate solution. He only hoped that the menace to the villagers could somehow be diminished or removed. Just last week he had visited the district hospital to see a seven-year-old boy who had been badly mauled by a wolf. The boy was sleeping on a cot in a general ward, and Sandeep had not wanted him woken. But he could not forget the look in the eyes of the boy’s parents as they spoke to him — as if somehow he would be able to remove or ameliorate the tragedy that had struck their lives. Apart from severe injuries to his arms and upper body, the boy’s neck had been injured, and the doctor had said that he would not be able to walk again.

Sandeep felt restless. He got up to stretch himself and looked down towards the unluxuriant summer vegetation below him in the ravine and the even sparser scrub outside. They could now hear the faint cries and shouts of the beaters in the distance. Maan too appeared lost in his own thoughts.

Suddenly, and far earlier than expected, a wolf, an adult grey wolf, larger than an Alsatian and faster, broke through the main outlet of the gorge where many of the professional marksmen were stationed and bounded over the wasteland and dry fields. It rushed straight for the wood to its left, pursued by a few belated shots.

Maan and Sandeep were not in a position where they could see the wolf clearly, but the shouts and shots that followed it told them that something was going on. Maan caught a brief glimpse of it running across an unploughed, hard-baked field when it swung over to his side at a fair distance and disappeared among the trees, swift and desperate in the face of death.

It’s got away! he thought angrily. But the next one won’t.

There were shouts of dismay and recrimination for a minute or two, and then everything in the immediate area settled down to silence again. But a brainfever bird had taken up its obsessive triple-cry from somewhere in the wood, and the sound interlaced itself with the cries and drumbeats from the other direction: the beaters were coming swiftly up the ravine now, flushing out whatever was in it in the direction of the hunters. By now Maan could also hear the sounds they made as they whacked the bushes with their lathis and spears.

Suddenly another, smaller grey form bounded out in panic from the ravine, this time towards the steep outlet which Maan was guarding. With an instinctive reflex he swung his rifle towards it and was about to fire — earlier than he had planned to for a good sideways shot — when he muttered to himself, with a shock:

‘But it’s a fox!’

The fox, not knowing that it had just been spared, and out of its wits with fear, cut across the fields and streaked like lightning into the woods, its black-tipped grey tail stiff and horizontal to the ground. Maan laughed for a second.

But the laugh froze on his face. The beaters could not have been more than a hundred yards away when a huge wolf, grey and rugged, its ears drawn back, and with the hint of an irregularity in its swift bounds, broke cover and rushed up the slope towards the place where Maan and Sandeep were sitting. Maan swung the rifle around, but the wolf presented no large target. Rather, as it bounded towards them, its great grey face with its dark arched eyebrows seeming to stare at them with vengeful savagery, it was an object of gross terror.