The Elephant Chaser's Daughter Read online

  Appa explained that he preferred to go selling liquor after dark to avoid policemen who were on the lookout during the day. He walked through the forest at night to get to his customers in the nearby villages. ‘You had to remember all the turns and twists, or you wouldn’t make it out of here before dawn,’ he said, pointing to the dense foliage in all directions.

  The forest wasn’t as much a sanctuary for him as it sometimes appeared. After all, he had to look out for not just wild elephants but also forest guards. Police frequently came searching for illegal liquor-brewers like him. Yet, he preferred the quietness of the woods to the merciless moneylenders from the nearby town who were waiting to catch him and demand repayment of their loans. They would do anything to extract all they could.

  Appa knew his way through the woods even where there was no track. I was sure he was familiar with every tree in the forest. They were his most loyal friends, each standing at the same spot, awaiting his arrival. Every time he passed a eucalyptus tree, he pulled off a twig and chewed on it. The potent medicinal taste of the stem seemed to give him a little kick of exhilaration, helping him to relax.

  ‘This is the chakki,’ he said, halting abruptly before a tall, broad tree with unusually slender, thorny leaves. Running his hand over its thick bark, he said, ‘Of all the trees in the forest, the chakki is the most precious to us. Its bark is the main ingredient in sarayam.’

  ‘How do you use it?’ I asked.

  ‘We scrape the trunk with knives and boil the bark with jaggery in a steel barrel for a few hours,’ he answered. ‘The dark liquid you get is strong enough to intoxicate anyone.’ We spent the next hour sitting in the shade of a large tree as he shared his trade secrets, and we laughed at stories about his drunken customers, until it was time to go home for lunch.

  The next morning I set out again to learn more about his early life. He wasn’t sure why anyone would want to know about someone like him. But his eyes gleamed; I knew he was enjoying the attention.

  The thick forest suddenly opened into a small clearing. A middle-aged man sat cross-legged under a tree, filling a gunny sack with tamarind fruits that two young children were gathering from the ground. Tamarind found its way into every curry, and fetched a good price in the village market.

  Appa called out, ‘Ramanna, this is my daughter. English medium school. She has come home for the holiday.’ The man acknowledged my presence with a smile. I could see that Appa was proud of me.

  Appa kept walking until we reached a secluded area, dense with tall, thorny brush. He waded into what looked like impenetrable undergrowth and dragged out two rusty old barrels.

  ‘We used these for making liquor,’ Appa said, brushing off a layer of dark soil. He seemed to want me to know how he had spent his days working hard at his trade. He boiled jaggery in water with the bark of chakki in the barrels, and left them underground for eight days so the solution could ferment into liquor. On the ninth day, he dug out the barrel and drew the potent substance through a tube running from a hole on one side of the barrel to a large rubber sack. Once the liquid was completely transferred into the sack, he waited until sunset before heading to the neighboring village to sell it.

  Appa recalled marching through descending darkness along narrow mud paths with the rubber sack of sarayam on his back. In the forest he usually walked barefoot, wearing nothing but his underwear, as he couldn’t afford to get his clothes torn and dirty.

  As he went back to hide the barrels in the bushes, I went through the notes I had scribbled. ‘Why are you hiding those barrels when you don’t use them anymore?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an old practice. Nobody leaves his secrets in the open,’ he replied. I was fascinated by his answer, not having found any compelling need for his strange habit. I began scribbling again, eagerly recording everything my father said.

  Suddenly, Appa turned pensive. He looked down, staring at his own shadow as though he wanted to erase his past. ‘I have gone through a lot, my girl. Neither you nor your brother and sister should suffer as I did,’ he said, gazing into the distance, his voice soft.

  I didn’t know how to respond. He was my father but also a stranger. I could appreciate what he wished for Kavya, Francis, and me but I didn’t understand his past or how he really felt about us. I didn’t know how to comfort him.

  Just as swiftly his mood changed again and answer followed answer. ‘At the age of seven, I joined your Arpuda Ajji in the landlords’ fields pulling weeds. We were paid two to three rupees at day’s end, depending on how much we had weeded out,’ he said. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could do this job from morning till evening, day after day.

  The next job was even worse. ‘A couple of years later, I started working at a Gunna’s home as a servant, cleaning sheds, grazing his cattle, and doing whatever I was told,’ Appa said. But it was not a job that paid anything. Grandfather had failed to repay the loan he had taken from the landlord for Aunt Teresa’s wedding so he sent Appa to the landlord as a bonded laborer. Appa was happy to help out his family. It made him feel like a hero. Despite the grueling dawn-to-dusk work, he was satisfied with an occasional good meal with rice and curry when his mother could manage to make it for him, or free time on Sundays to go fishing in the lake with friends. He was young and strong, but no one can work like that forever.

  ‘Not too long afterward, I learnt from my father how to brew sarayam. As the eldest son, I was the first to join your grandfather in the family business. At fifteen, I became his full-time partner.’

  Appa went on to talk about how he and the other liquor brewers avoided being caught by police. Because he was involved in an illegal activity some might call him a criminal, but, to me, he was simply making a living in the only profession he could find. ‘I didn’t have any other choice. There were hardly any other jobs here,’ he said.

  Families like mine couldn’t be faulted for brewing and selling liquor. The land offered nothing to the poor, for they owned hardly any that was cultivable. For women like my mother and grandmother, their meager wages from weeding the landlords’ fields contributed very little.

  The police sought to catch people like Appa only to extort bribes before letting them go free. Appa told me that usually he carried with him some money to give to policemen, but some of them were too greedy to satisfy; he had to come back with more the next day or risk being imprisoned for a week.

  No one in the village was safe from theft or violence. Despite its putatively Christian culture, Thattaguppe still harbored plenty of crime.

  ‘It wasn’t hard to find rowdies in the villages willing to do anything,’ Appa said.

  Generally, a few hundred rupees and a good meal of chicken curry with ragi balls were all that was needed to get a man to eliminate anyone. Even the lane on which Joseph Thatha lived was ruled by a family of criminals—four brothers who disposed of those who displeased them as casually as they discarded cigarette butts. When one brewer refused to sell liquor to them for a lower price, they twisted his arms until they broke. A man suspected of flirting with their sister was beaten to death and left hanging from a tree in front of the church. These thugs controlled everyone, including the police whom they bribed.

  ‘The price of liquor was more than the price of life,’ Appa said.

  ‘One afternoon in the forest, as I was emptying jaggery into a steel barrel filled with boiling water, I heard an unfamiliar voice behind me. Before I could react, a policeman lunged forward and pinned me to the ground.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘When I tried to free myself, he struck me hard against my face with his fist.’ The force of the punch left him dizzy.

  The police didn’t need courts or judges to enforce liquor laws. They pushed Appa into a jeep and quickly drove off, not stopping until they reached a clearing in the woods where other policemen were waiting. That was where they usually stopped to give criminals like him a good thrashing. Appa finally produced for them his week’s earnings to avoid going to jail. They let him go, but not
without a stern warning, as though they were genuinely concerned about enforcing the law. As Appa walked home, he comforted himself with the thought that they hadn’t taken everything from him; he had hidden some of his week’s earnings in his underwear.

  As Appa told me this story, I could see from his grin he was proud of the way he handled the police. He knew what they were looking for—not sarayam, but money.

  Appa told me how difficult it was for him and his siblings to live in the narrow space of a single-room hut. He described the kitchen as three stones arranged in a triangle at the corner of the hut where meals could simmer above the fire. The walls of the room were covered in so much soot that Appa couldn’t remember any color other than the blackness that hugged the walls.

  Arpuda Ajji prepared the same meal every day. No one ever complained. Food was a means of survival, not a source of enjoyment. Even so, if Appa so much as uttered the word ‘hungry,’ Joseph Thatha would smack him with a sturdy stick. If he asked for another ittu, his father would growl, ‘What are you grumbling about, you fool? Didn’t I just see you eating a man’s share?’ He was usually too drunk to notice his children’s cries for more, and when he did, it infuriated him. Ajji would always try to comfort them with the promise of a good meal the next day, though she could never keep her promise.

  Appa told me he was fairly good-looking in his younger days, and his friends referred to him as ‘Handsome Anthu’. I was sure this had something to do with how women saw him. Most adults in the village carried a nickname that bore particular significance to their looks, their occupation, or something unusual about them. A notorious liquor supplier who is said to have murdered seven people was known as Murder Nagaraj. My maternal grandfather was Somersault Udayaraj. He was almost killed when his bullock cart rolled over and skidded down a steep hill. Rumor had it that his loud cries of ‘Amen’ convinced God to save him from falling into the gushing river below.

  I learnt that Joseph Thatha was also quite good-looking in his youth, unusually tall for a village man. He always wore a serious expression and seldom showed any affection or happiness as he went about his work from morning till late at night. Tedious hours of laboring in the heat, hacking trees for wood and brewing liquor in the forest, left him hardened like a brick baked in the sun. His drinking habit had turned him into an unpredictable man by the time he married my grandmother, Arpuda.

  Arpuda Ajji was given to Joseph in marriage before she turned fifteen. Even at that young age she had large, round breasts and wide hips that drew the attention of many men in the village. Her parents raised buffalos for a living and were looking out for a man who wouldn’t ask for a big dowry. They found their affordable match in Joseph, a twenty-four-year-old coolie whose parents didn’t demand any dowry because of his bad reputation as a drunkard. Like everyone else in the family, he had not attended school.

  In those days Arpuda Ajji carried herself with grace. Her husband’s ill-treatment of her did not diminish her determination to carry out her family duties. Even in her forties, my grandmother was a beautiful woman. But wear and tear from years of hard work in the field could be seen on her face. Yet, her eyes displayed strength wrought out of enduring hardship and indignity. She covered up her fears and disappointments with a look of contentment that served as a mask.

  Arpuda Ajji, Appa said, never questioned being a so-called ‘low caste’ woman. She saw no chance for change in her status and didn’t think there was any necessity for it. It was her way of recognizing life for what it was and accepting it unconditionally. She believed the prevailing social order was designed by God and it was her duty to live within it. ‘One doesn’t get to choose one’s parents,’ she would often say with resignation. As she saw it, sorrow and suffering connected heaven and earth, and there was very little of anything joyful in between. She viewed herself as a prisoner of fate and her goal was the survival of her family--mere survival, nothing more.

  Arpuda Ajji was well aware of what her society expected of women. In her world the purpose of her existence was to meet the needs of her husband, to serve his parents, and bring up their children. Her personal desires were of little concern to anyone, so she seldom complained about what she did not have. There was no sympathy for her from her husband or in-laws. Her inner longings for love and companionship as a young woman were suppressed by her daily chores and the demands placed on her by the family.

  Neither Arpuda Ajji nor Joseph Thatha truly recognized the importance of educating their children. Now that I had grown up with proper schooling, it bothered me that my father couldn’t read or write in any language. When I mustered the courage to ask him why he hadn’t studied, he told me simply that his father tried briefly to get him to go to school but he had no interest. As a child, Appa didn’t understand why he was sent to school; he couldn’t see how getting an education could save him from being a coolie. No one was there to guide or encourage him, and with all the financial pressures at home, he couldn’t have remained in school for long, even if he had wanted to.

  We had been talking in the little clearing for a long time. Now Appa wanted to know something about me. ‘When will you finish your studies?’ he asked, looking straight into my eyes.

  I didn’t want to tell him but after a moment I replied, ‘I have six to seven years left, Appa.’

  ‘My God!’ He struggled with disappointment. ‘When will you start working and making money?’

  ‘When I am ready,’ I said, irritated.

  ‘Will you become a doctor or a lawyer?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He didn’t ask what I did want to be. There was no chance that he would think, even for a moment, about achievement rather than money. But I also knew he took pride in me for being different from the other girls in the village—dressing in Western clothes, speaking fluent English, walking with confidence. With a broad smile, he would quietly watch me as I spoke to anyone he introduced me to. If he sees me as the one who might save him from misery in his old age, so be it. That is, after all, what I want, too.

  The next morning Appa insisted that we go to the forest again despite talk among villagers of elephants being spotted in the area the previous evening. ‘Don’t you know I am the king of the forest?’ he said with a grin. ‘Why are you worried when I am here to protect you?’ There was no doubt he knew the forest well and wasn’t afraid. I gave him a sarcastic look, but was secretly pleased he could protect me, and that he saw himself as a hero.

  I was eager to find out why he dropped out of school so early. He told me that when he was six, Joseph Thatha took him to the small school that Father Sigeon had built for the poor, after other relatives insisted that he do his fatherly duty to educate his son at least for a few years. The packed classrooms had no chairs or tables so all the children sat on the floor. On his first day, Sister Clara, the stern-faced, stubby, first-grade teacher, asked him to recite the Kannada alphabet. He would already have learnt it had he attended kindergarten, but he hadn’t; Joseph Thatha couldn’t afford to pay the fifteen rupees admission fee. Appa mumbled something incoherent, buckling with embarrassment. When he finished, the teacher ordered him to stand up, fold his arms, and try again. When he proceeded to stammer, the other students laughed at him.

  ‘Take a piece of chalk and start practicing the letters on your slate!’ the teacher scolded.

  He was lucky. Before the government had begun providing slates to schools, children sat outside practicing letters in the dirt until the afternoon sun made it unbearable.

  For the rest of the year he repeated alphabets, counted numbers, and sang rhymes. In the second grade he encountered problems with arithmetic. He seemed unable to learn numbers and was often caned for it, each blow cracking his small, tender palms.

  Appa would return home by early afternoon, smarting from pain and humiliation. The simple joy of a game of marbles in the evening sun or, better yet, a day off from school, made his childhood bearable. Appa had a way with marbles; he would take aim, squint, and lau
nch straight into a tiny hole in the hard ground. If only numbers had come so easily to him! I can see I am Appa’s daughter after all.

  But I knew from my own experience that with more patience and encouragement from his elders there was more he might have learnt. I was ashamed Appa couldn’t sign his name on official documents when the school authorities asked him to so I tried to teach him, one by one, each letter of his name. His fingers kept shaking and he could barely hold the pen. After the first try he gave up, dropping the pen in exasperation and flinging the piece of paper into my lap. ‘Don’t give up so easily, Appa,’ I said. I waited patiently as he tried again and again until finally he mastered the individual strokes that made up each letter.

  The first time he wrote his own name on a piece of paper, I leapt up, delighted. ‘Oh, good, Appa. Well done. No more using your thumbprint to sign!’ Impulsively, I gave him a quick hug.

  He looked up, surprised. I hadn’t done that in years. Turning away, he smoothed the paper with both hands.

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘You’ll still have to practice, you know.’

  He looked at me for a moment as if he wanted to say something, but in the end he just nodded.

  Joseph Thatha used to beat him and deprive him of dinner, but failed to motivate him to attend school. Eventually, he gave up on his son. ‘I thought when I die my son will sit by my head and read the Bible,’ Thatha said. ‘But this donkey doesn’t want to!’ Soon, Appa was put to work as a servant in a Gunna’s house.

  The next day, on our way back home from the forest, Appa told me what it was like to work for another Gunna. The master, a beefy looking man with a thick moustache and a pink scar on his lower lip, had employed Appa as a servant in exchange for one hundred rupees a month. ‘I was amazed to hear how much more I was worth than the two rupees a day I had been making by pulling weeds,’ Appa exclaimed.