‘Are you all right?’ asked Savita.
‘Yes,’ said Lata. ‘Did it kick last night?’
‘I don’t think so. At least I didn’t wake up.’
‘Men should have to bear them,’ said Lata, apropos of nothing. ‘I’m going for a walk by the river.’ She assumed, correctly, that Savita was in no state to join her down the steep path that led from the campus to the sands.
She changed her slippers for sandals, which made walking easier. As she descended the clayey slope, almost a mud cliff, to the shore of the Ganga, she noticed a troupe of monkeys cavorting in a couple of banyan trees – two trees that had fused into one through the intertwining of their branches. A small orange-smeared statue of a god was jammed between the central trunks. The monkeys were usually pleased to see her – she brought them fruits and nuts whenever she remembered to. Today she had forgotten, and they made clear their displeasure. A couple of the smaller ones pulled at her elbow in request, while one of the larger ones, a fierce male, bared his teeth in annoyance – but from a distance.
She needed to be distracted. She suddenly felt very gentle towards the animal world – which seemed to her, probably incorrectly, to be a simpler place than the world of humans. Though she was halfway down the cliff, she walked back up again, went to the kitchen, and got a paper bag full of peanuts and another filled with three large musammis for the monkeys. She knew they did not like them as much as oranges, but in the summer only the thicker-skinned green sweet-limes were available.
They were, however, entirely delighted. Even before she said ‘Aa! Aa!’ – something she had once heard an old Sadhu say to entice them – the monkeys noticed the paper bags. They gathered around, grabbing, grasping, pleading, clambering up the trees and down the trees in excitement, even hanging down from the branches and suspended roots and stretching their arms. The little ones squeaked, the big ones growled. One brute, possibly the one who had bared his teeth at her earlier, stored some of the peanuts in his cheekpads while he tried to grab more. Lata scattered a few, but fed them mainly by hand. She even ate a couple of peanuts herself. The two smallest monkeys, as before, grabbed – and even stroked – her elbow for attention. When she kept her hands closed to tease them, they opened them quite gently, not with their teeth but with their fingers.
When she tried to peel the musammis, the biggest monkeys would have none of it. She usually succeeded in a democratic distribution, but this time all three musammis were grabbed by fairly large monkeys. One went a little farther down the slope, and sat on a large root to eat it: he half peeled it, then ate it from the inside. Another, less particular, ate his skin and all.
Lata, laughing, finally swung what was left of the bag of peanuts around her head, and it flew off into the tree; it was caught in a high branch, but then came free, fell a little more, and got caught on a branch again. A great red-bottomed monkey climbed towards it, turning around at intervals to threaten one or two others who were climbing up the other root-branches that hung down from the main body of the banyan tree. He grabbed the whole packet and climbed higher to enjoy his monopoly. But the mouth of the bag suddenly came open and the nuts scattered all around. Seeing this, a thin baby monkey leaped in its excitement from one branch to another, lost its hold, banged its head against the trunk, and dropped down to the ground. It ran off squeaking.
Instead of going down to the river as she had planned, Lata now sat down on the exposed root where the monkey had just been eating his musammi, and tried to address herself to the book in her hands. It did not succeed in diverting her thoughts. She got up, climbed the path up the slope again, then walked to the library.
She looked through the last season’s issues of the university magazine, reading through with intense interest what she had never so much as glanced at before: the cricket reports and the names beneath the team photographs. The writer of the reports, who signed himself ‘S.K.’, had a style of lively formality. He wrote, for example, not about Akhilesh and Kabir but about Mr Mittal and Mr Durrani and their excellent seventh wicket stand.
It appeared that Kabir was a good bowler and a fair batsman. Though he was usually placed low in the batting order, he had saved a number of matches by remaining unflappable in the face of considerable odds. And he must have been an incredibly swift runner, because he had sometimes run three runs, and on one occasion, had actually run four. In the words of S.K.:
This reporter has never seen anything like it. It is true that the outfield was not merely sluggish but torpid with the morning’s rain. It is undeniable that the mid-wicket boundary at our opponents’ field is more than ordinarily distant. It is irrefutable that there was confusion in the ranks of their fielders, and that one of them actually slipped and fell in pursuit of the ball. But what will be remembered are not these detracting circumstances. What will be remembered by Brahmpurians in time to come is the quicksilver crossing of two human bullets ricocheting from crease to crease and back again with a velocity appropriate more to the track than the pitch, and unusual even there. Mr Durrani and Mr Mittal ran four runs where no four was, on a ball that did not even cross the boundary; and that they were home and dry with more than a yard to spare attests to the fact that theirs was no flamboyant or unseasoned risk.