Rasheed got up from the charpoy the instant he saw him. Then he said to Maan – the others were still out of earshot – ‘The big man is my Mamu. The round one is known as the “guppi” in my mother’s village – he blathers on and on and tells ridiculous stories. We’re stuck.’
By now the visitors had reached the cattle-shed.
‘Ah, Mamu, I didn’t know you were coming. How are you?’ said Rasheed in warm welcome. And he nodded at the guppi civilly.
‘Ah,’ said the Bear, and sat down heavily on the charpoy. He was a man of few words.
The man of many words, his friend and travelling companion, also sat down and asked for a glass of water. Rasheed promptly went inside and got some sherbet.
The guppi asked Maan a number of questions and ascertained quickly who, why, what and how he was. He then described to Maan a number of incidents that had occurred on their ten-mile journey. They had seen a snake, ‘as thick as my arm’ (Rasheed’s Mamu frowned in concentration, but did not contradict him); they had almost been blown off their feet by a sudden whirlwind; and the police had shot at them three times at the check-post just outside Salimpur.
Rasheed’s Mamu merely mopped his brow and gasped gamely in the heat. Maan leaned forward, amazed by these unlikely adventures.
Rasheed returned, bearing glasses of sherbet. He told them that his father was sleeping. The Bear nodded benevolently.
The talkative one was asking Maan about his love-life, and Maan was attempting weakly to fend off the questions.
‘People’s love-lives are not very interesting,’ said Maan, sounding unconvincing even to himself.
‘How can you say that?’ said the guppi. ‘Every man’s love-life is interesting. If he doesn’t have one, that’s interesting. If he has one, that’s interesting. And if he has two, that’s twice as interesting.’ He laughed delightedly at his sally. Rasheed looked abashed. Baba had gone inside his house already.
Encouraged by the fact that he had not been immediately stifled, as he often was in his own village, the guppi went on: ‘But what would you know of love – of true love? You young men have not seen much. You may think that because you live in Brahmpur you have seen the world – or more of the world than we poor yokels see. But some of us yokels have also seen the world – and not just the world of Brahmpur, but of Bombay.’
He paused, impressed by his own words, especially the entrancing word ‘Bombay’, and looked at his audience with pleasure. Several children had appeared in the last couple of minutes, drawn by the guppi’s magic. Whenever the guppi appeared they could be sure of a good story, and probably one that their parents would not want them to hear – involving ghosts or deadly violence or passionate love.
A goat too had appeared, and was standing at the upper end of a cart, trying to graze on the leaves of a branch just overhead. With its crafty yellow eyes it stared at the leaves and strained its neck upwards.
‘When I was in Bombay,’ the round and reverberant guppi went on, ‘long before my fate changed and I had to return to this blessed countryside, I worked in a big shop, a very famous shop run by a mullah, and we would sell carpets to big people, all the very big people of Bombay. They would have so much money, they would take it in wads out of their bags and throw it down on the counter.’
His eyes lit up as if at the memory. The children sat enthralled – or most of them anyway. Mr Biscuit, the seven-year-old horror, was occupied with the goat. Whenever it got near its goal, the leafy branch, Mr Biscuit would tilt the cart downwards, and the poor goat would now try to clamber up to the other end. So far it had not succeeded in eating a single leaf.
‘It’s a love story, I’m warning you in advance, so if you don’t want to listen to it, you can tell me to stop now,’ said the guppi in a formulary way. ‘Because once I’ve begun, I can’t stop it any more than one can stop the act of love itself.’
Rasheed would have got up and left if he hadn’t been so conscious of his duty as a host. But Maan wanted to stay and hear the story.
‘Go on, go on,’ he said.
Rasheed looked at Maan, as if to say: ‘This man needs no encouragement. If you show any interest at all he’ll go on twice as long.’
Aloud he said to the guppi: ‘Of course, this is an eye-witness account as usual.’
The guppi shot him a glance, at first suspicious, then placatory. He had just been about to say that he had seen the events he was about to recount with his very own eyes.
‘I saw these events with my very own eyes,’ he said.
The goat started bleating piteously. The guppi shouted at the distracting Mr Biscuit: ‘Sit down, or I’ll feed you to that goat, your eyes first.’