Nobody
was quite sure afterwards when the dead man first turned up in Chamathunagar.
Not even Pillu, who got to know him best, could be certain of the date. But
once they noticed him, they all agreed that he’d been around a while but they
simply hadn’t brought him to mind.
Of course they didn’t know at the time that
he was dead. He didn’t look dead. He
just looked like any other pavement stall owner selling cheap salwar kameez and
T shirts near the bus stop, mostly to people who came in from the villages
around, and occasionally even to somebody from Kuttagarh too silly to figure
out that anything being sold on the footpaths of Chamathunagar had to have been
bought in Kuttagarh, and so would be cheaper there. There were plenty of such
stall owners.
The first one to have an inkling that
something might be wrong was Jaggu Ram, who was ambling around town one market
day collecting his usual hafta from
the stalls. Pockets stuffed with cash, he was turning away to go for tea and
samosas at Vijay’s when he noticed that there was one stall he didn’t recall
seeing before. And if he hadn’t seen it before he hadn’t got hafta from it, and that would never do.
So Jaggu Ram walked heavily up the pavement
towards the stall, which was in an angle of the wall of the bus station, a
prime location which for some reason no other street hawker had ever claimed
before. Maybe it was such a prime location everyone assumed it had already been
taken over by someone else. The stall keeper, a medium sized man with a medium
sized moustache, watched him come with no reaction at all. This, Jaggu
realised, was also fairly strange, because people he visited on market days
either looked scared or eager to please.
Still, strange or not, the man was selling
on his turf, and owed Jaggu Ram hafta.
“New here to the market, are you?” Jaggu
Ram asked, tapping his stick on the pavement.
The man nodded, only a little, without
saying anything.
“So I suppose you don’t know the rules
around here. Got a licence?”
“Licence?” the man asked, as though he’d
never heard the term before. “What licence?”
Jaggu Ram heaved a sigh. “Licence for your
stall of course. What licence do you think I’m talking about?”
“Licence?” The man looked at the other
stalls. “Do they all have licences too?”
“Never you mind about that,” Jaggu Ram
said. “Answer my question. Do you have a licence?”
The man shook his head. “No,” he said. “I
don’t have a licence.”
“Then you can’t sell here,” Jaggu Ram told
him. “Of course, you could always get a licence from me.”
The man watched a prospective customer
approach, catch sight of Jaggu Ram, and move away in the opposite direction at
some speed. “From you?” he asked. “And how do I get a licence from you?”
“There’s a weekly fee.” Jaggu Ram stroked
his moustache. “It’s...let’s say...” He eyed the stall, its position and
calculated quickly. “...a thousand rupees a week.”
“A thousand,” the man replied, with no
inflection in his voice. “That seems rather a lot, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I like your face,” Jaggu Ram said.
“Maybe, shall we say, eight hundred?”
“Eight hundred.” The man stared at Jaggu
Ram. “I don’t think so.”
“Or even five,” Jaggu Ram said, cursing
himself inwardly for his benevolence. “”But five hundred, that’s the minimum
licence fee.”
“You misunderstand me,” the man said
kindly. “I am not going to pay anything at all.”
Jaggu Ram frowned. This statement was so
unexpected that it took a long time to filter through to his brain, and he had
to convince himself that someone had actually refused. “You aren’t going to pay?” he asked, just to
confirm.
“That’s right,” the man said cheerfully.
“I’m not going to pay.”
“In that case,” Jaggu Ram thundered,
drawing himself up to his full height, “you can’t sell anything here.”
“Oh, but I am going to.” The man nodded in
emphasis. “And you can’t do anything about it.”
“I can’t, you say? Come on,” Jaggu Ram pointed
a thick finger at the object of his wrath. “Come on to the police station with
me. I’m going to lock you up.”
“Most certainly I’ll come,” the man said.
“But I don’t think you’ll be able to arrest me. After all, you can only arrest
someone who’s actually there, right?”
Jaggu Ram tilted his head and studied this
madman. “And you aren’t here, is that it?”
“Of course I’m not. I’ve been cremated long
ago, and my ashes dumped in the river. You can’t arrest a handful of soggy
ashes, can you?”
“What are you telling me,” Jaggu Ram said,
resisting a strong urge to just walk away and sit down under a tree somewhere.
“That you’re dead?”
“Oh yes,” the man said, smiling. “I’m dead
and gone. Check out the registrar’s office if you don’t believe me.”
And that is how people found out that the
dead man had come to Chamathunagar.
**************************************
Of course
he wasn’t really dead. That was
obvious to everybody. Dead people don’t get up and walk around, and nobody ever
saw a ghost sell things in the marketplace in the middle of the day. And, as
Vijay said, no ghost ever stopped by his stall for tea and bread pakoras, and
paid for them with quite genuine money.
But he was dead for all that.
Jaggu Ram had made certain of that the very
first day, after dragging off the dead man to the police station. He’d pulled
out a form and a ball point pen whose refill, hopefully, still had some ink left.
The refill had responded to some vigorous scribbling on an old newspaper, and
now Jaggu wanted the details.
“Your name?” he’d asked, squinting at the
dead man.
“Lal Bahadur,” the dead man had responded
readily. “I’m generally called the late Lal Bahadur, or Lal Bahadur the Dead, whichever you prefer.”
Jaggu Ram had ignored that part of it.
“Father’s name?”
“Satya Veer,” Lal Bahadur had said. “He’s
dead too, so you can put down the late Satya Veer.”
“Don’t get cheeky with me. Address?”
“I live...I mean, I stay in Churail Chauraha.” It was a village not far from
Chamathunagar. “But I’m not really there, because I’m dead, you know.”
Jaggu Ram had put down his ball point and
stared at the dead man. “Just what the hell is this dead talk?” he’d asked.
“Don’t try my patience too much, or I’ll find some additional charges to slap
on you.”
The dead man had shrugged. “Please call the
registrar’s office,” he’d said. “The registrar of land records. This is the
address.” Taking Jaggu Ram’s pen, he’d scrawled away on the back of the form.
“You’ll find out.”
Jaggu Ram had frowned at him for a moment
and then the explanation had come to him. The man was trying to blow him off,
trying to confuse him so that he’d let him go. Well, he’d thought grimly, that was not going to happen. Nobody
ever made a fool of Jaggu Ram.
Already rehearsing the triumphant tones in
which he would bring down the weight of the law on the man on the other side of
the desk, he’d reached for the telephone directory, and, a minute later, for
the old black dial telephone.
The dead man had sat opposite him, smiling.
It was, Jaggu Ram had thought bitterly as
he’d hung up the telephone a few minutes afterwards, as though he was enjoying it all.
“You can go,” Jaggu had said, and buried
his head in his hands.
And it was all just the beginning.
**********************************
The
realisation that he was a dead man meant that Lal Bahadur’s business improved
no end. People came to him to gawk, and stayed to buy. His wares weren’t bad
and he didn’t charge too much, and anyway, it was something they could talk
about afterwards.
“I bought this T shirt from a dead man!”
they’d say. And of course whoever heard the story would come to have a look.
But nobody knew just why he was dead. They
talked about it with each other, and thought up all kinds of fancy
explanations, but nobody knew anything for certain. All they knew was that he
was in the market every day, in the corner by the bus station, and he paid
Jaggu Ram nothing.
This quickly got on the nerves of the other
stall owners. “Hey, Jaggu,” they said, “if you aren’t going to make him pay,
then why should we?”
“Because I’ll lock you up otherwise for
business without a licence,” Jaggu Ram replied, jutting out his belly.
“Oh, that’s
a threat,” they jeered. “Not only is he not paying, he’s got the best place
on the whole pavement. And he’s selling more than the rest of us put together.”
“He’s dead, and you aren’t,” Jaggu Ram
pointed out.
“We’ll see who’s dead,” Anwar, a brawny
seller of fake jewellery and trinkets, snapped. “We’ll go right now and throw
him and his stock into the river.”
“No,” Sushant, who peddled combs and
mirrors, scissors and nail clippers, replied. “We’ll keep his stock as compensation for our losses.”
“None of you will do any such thing,” Jaggu
Ram bellowed, “or I’ll see you all in jail. I’ll have no fighting in my town.”
“Well, in that case, Jaggu,” Mukesh, the
street barber, told him. “Either get him out of there or get him to pay. Or
stop taking money from us.”
“How do I get him out of there?” Jaggu Ram
asked.
“How the hell do we know? You’re the cop,
not us.”
And there it might have rested
indefinitely, but for the rising tide of resentment in the market, of which Lal
Bahadur can’t have been unaware. But he carried on serenely, and people
continued to buy his goods, and still nobody knew just how he came to be dead
or what to do about it.
One day Pillu was coming up the street with Raja, bowed under a load of old tin cans he’d collected. It was a heavy, awkward load, and he paused by the dead man’s stall to wipe the sweat from his brow. Lal Bahadur watched him rub at his face with his hands.
“Here,” he said, holding out a hand towel
from his stock. “Take this.”
Pillu looked at him, surprised. “I don’t
have money,” he said at last, with some embarrassment.
“Forget the money. It’s a gift – from one
working man to another.”
Pillu took the proffered towel. It was
brown, with a black dog on one corner, not unlike Raja. “Thanks,” he said
awkwardly. “Thank you very much.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ve been watching you.
You work very hard, and you deserve something nice once in a while.”
Pillu grinned. “That’s the first time in
ages anyone said anything like that to me.”
“You’re Pillu, right? I’m Lal Bahadur.”
“Lal Bahadur the dead man. I know.” Pillu
looked him over curiously. “If you don’t mind my saying, you look fairly alive
to me.”
“But I’m not. You can check the government
records if you want, just like the fat cop did. I died three years ago. I’m
very dead now.”
Pillu scratched his head. “Suppose you tell
me about it,” he said at last.
“I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me to
do that,” Lal Bahadur smiled. “Come and sit down here, and here’s a samosa for
your dog.”
As Raja scoffed down the samosa in a bite
and a half, Pillu sat and listened as the dead man told his story.
“I’m from Churail Chauraha,” he began. “My
father was a farmer there, and he had a fairly large farm where we grew mustard
and wheat.” He paused to see if Pillu understood all this. “Since I was his
only child, when he died I inherited the entire place. I thought I was quite
lucky at that, since most farms split up among the children when the owner
died.
“Now my father had a brother, Raghu Veer.
They owned adjoining farms, which had been one big farm once, when their father had been alive. Raghu Veer
died before my father, and passed on his farm to his two sons – my cousins, Ram
Prasad and Sita Ram – who divided it among themselves. So each of them had
about half the land I did, and let me tell you they weren’t happy about that at
all, at all.
“But I wasn’t unhappy. The land was good, I
liked farming, I had no debts, and I was saving up to get married. Things
seemed to be going fine. I had no quarrels with the two cousins, and if they
were jealous, well, there was nothing I could do about that.
“Then one day I went to work on my fields,
and suddenly there were Ram Prasad and Sita Ram coming towards me with a bunch
of men. ‘Who are you?’ Ram Prasad yelled at me. ‘Lal Bahadur is dead, so who
are you who are working on his farm?’
“I was astonished. I’d never known either
Ram Prasad or Sita Ram to have the slightest trace of a sense of humour, or I
might’ve thought this was a joke of some kind. .‘You know who I am,’ I said.
‘I’m Lal Bahadur.’
“ ‘Lal Bahadur is dead,’ he snapped, and
held out a piece of paper. ‘Look, here is his death certificate. So who are you
who are pretending to be him?’
“ ‘Get out of here at once!’ Sita Ram
yelled. ‘You usurper, you thief of our dead brother’s land.’
“ ‘I’m Lal Bahadur,’ I protested. ‘And I
can prove it. I...’ But it did no good. They ordered their men to throw me out,
and they did, after beating me black and blue with their sticks. When I’d
recovered a little I went to the village police station and complained, but the
policeman wouldn’t even look at me. ‘There is no Lal Bahadur,’ he said, this
cop who had seen me maybe five hundred times. ‘Lal Bahadur is dead. Get out of
here or I’ll lock you up for creating a disturbance.’
“And that’s my story,” Lal Bahadur
continued. “They bribed people to make certificates proving I’m dead, of
course, so they could take my land. But there’s no way I can prove it.”
“Did you try?” Pillu asked.
“To prove I’m alive, you mean? I’ve done
everything I could think of. I sat in front of the local politician’s office on
a hunger strike, but nobody took any notice of me. I went to the land records
office, but they said I was dead and they had records to show it. And now Sita
Ram and Ram Prasad till my farm and grow fat on the produce, while I sell T
shirts so I can eat and feed my old mother.” He grinned. “But forget that.
Look, I just found another samosa for your dog. Here, boy.”
Raja jumped up happily.
*******************************************
“Something has to be done about this dead man problem,” Jaggu Ram
said. “Or I am going to have a riot on my hands.”
Karim Bhai, the lawyer, looked up from his
cup of tea. “What dead man problem? What are you going on about?”
Mahavir Prasad, the other lawyer, and Rajat
Kapoor the accountant laughed. “You must be the only person in town not to have
heard of him,” the latter said. “He’s been parked out near the bus station for
weeks now. And Jaggu Ram isn’t happy about it at all.”
The fat policeman shot him a disgusted
glance. “It’s only the chance of violence I’m worried about,” he said.
“Of course, Jaggu,” Rajat Kapoor replied
soothingly. “We all know that you hate any kind of violence.”
“So tell me about this dead man,” Karim
Bhai said plaintively. “Or are you all just going to spend your time laughing
at me for not keeping up with bazaar gossip?”
Jaggu Ram told him what he knew. “And the
mood among the stall keepers is getting ugly,” he said.
“That’s right,” Vijay added, putting on
another kettle to boil for tea. “I’m hearing talk that they’ll lynch him one of
these days, Jaggu or not.”
Jaggu Ram nodded glumly. “If I can’t get
him to move I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep a lid on things.”
“And how are you going to do that?” Karim
Bhai asked. “I don’t see that you’ve got any legal means to...”
“Look.” Rajat Kapoor saw Pillu going by.
“I’ve seen him talking to Lal Bahadur, or whatever his name is, several times.
He may have an idea. Hey, Pillu, come here.”
Pillu walked over to Vijay’s Tea Stall
reluctantly, keeping a wary eye on the lawyers. “Yes?”
“You’ve been talking to that man, Lal
Bahadur,” Mahavir Prasad told him. “We need to ask you a few questions about
him.”
“It’s for his own good,” Rajat Kapoor put
in hastily, seeing Pillu opening his mouth, ready to deny he knew anything
about anything. “He’s going to be lynched any moment now.”
“I promise we aren’t going to harm him in
any way,” Karim Bhai said. “You have our word on that.”
Pillu nodded slowly. “It was like this...”
******************************************
It was
evening, and Lal Bahadur was packing up his stall ready to depart for the day
on the last bus, when he had visitors.
He eyed them curiously. They were obviously
not customers, and he noticed Pillu and the fat policeman, Jaggu Ram, lurking
behind the group. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked.
“Don’t be scared,” the tall thin man
leading the group said. “We don’t mean you any harm, but we do need to talk to
you. My name is Karim Durrani, and we’ve been talking about your situation...”
“And something has to be done about it,”
the short round man next to him said. “For one thing, you seem to have been the
victim of a really evil scheme. For another, unless you stop selling your wares
in this market, you’re going to provoke a riot and probably end up dead. I
mean, really dead.”
“Well, what can I do?” Lal Bahadur said plaintively. “I have to earn a living
somehow, and this is the only place I’ve found where I can sell enough to break
remotely even.”
“So you don’t really want to carry on this
business?” the third one of the group, the younger, smart-looking man, said.
“If you found another way to earn a living, you’d take it?”
“Are you joking?” Lal Bahadur bit his lip.
“All I want is my farm back. If I could get my farm back, I’d want nothing
else.”
“And that would only be justice,” the young
man said. “So we have to get your farm back.”
Lal Bahadur laughed. “That’s something that
might happen in a Bollywood film,” he said. “In real life, not a hope.”
The three men looked at each other.
“There’s always hope,” the short round man said. “Maybe we could move the
courts...”
The one called Karim Bhai shook his head. “The
burden of proof would be on us, Mahavir. We might win, of course, we probably
would in the end. And then they’d appeal and the whole thing would begin over
again.”
“You’re right,” the man called Mahavir
said. “In any case it would take years, at least. And we don’t have years.”
“We don’t even have days,” Jaggu Ram said from the back of the group. “I can’t sit here
with a stick all day to protect him, either.”
“Ram Prasad and Sita Ram are far too
greedy,” Lal Bahadur said gloomily. “They’d never give up the land, whatever
happened.”
Pillu had been sidling away, but stopped
suddenly when he heard that. “Wait, wait,” he said. “They’re greedy, you say.
Very greedy?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Lal Bahadur looked
at him. “Why else would they do this to me?”
“So greedy that they’d do even more if they
thought there was something in it for them?”
“I guess,” Lal Bahadur said. “What are you
thinking of?”
The young man with the smart clothes looked
from him to Pillu and back again. “I think I know what he’s getting at,” he
said slowly. “And I may just have got an idea...”
“This is going to take some planning,”
Karim Bhai said after he’d listened for a while. “Come back to my house and
we’ll talk. You too, Pillu.”
Still talking earnestly, they went.
**********************************************
Sita Ram
had just got into the driver’s seat of his new tractor when he saw the men.
The tractor was Sita Ram’s pride and joy.
Bright red and shining black, with an engine that growled like a panther and
sent a thrill right through the seat, he couldn’t have enough of it. He’d even
stood up to Ram Prasad and insisted on buying it, though his elder brother had
grumbled at the expense.
Well, expense or not, it made the farming
much easier. And now that they had got rid of that absurd Lal Bahadur, they had
so much land that they really needed the tractor. Maybe someday his skinflint
of a brother would even agree that it had been money well spent.
His brother was really an idiot, Sita Ram
thought. The only good idea he’d ever had in his life was to have Lal Bahadur
declared dead so they could get his land. And it had been even easier than
they’d thought. Of course, they’d had to spend a fair amount in bribes and to
hire a party of goons, but they’d earned it all back. The extra harvest last
year alone...
He’d just reached out to turn on the
tractor’s engine when he saw the men standing in the middle of what used to be
Lal Bahadur’s field.
It was not a good thing to see strange men
standing in what used to be Lal Bahadur’s field. It was even worse when those
men looked very official and formal, and positively the worst when they were
accompanied by a very large, completely unknown, policeman.
Leaving the tractor with its engine
sullenly silent, Sita Ram hurried towards them. “What do you want?” he called,
as soon as they were in earshot.
One of the men, who had a clipboard and was
making notes on it, turned. “Ah,” he said, “you must be the owner of this
land.”
“Yes,” Sita Ram responded. “I’m the owner.
What do you want?”
“We’re from the government,” another of the
men, taller and thinner, said. He had plunged a stake into the ground and
looked up from a meter of some kind. “We need to talk to you.”
“Urgently,” the third man supplied. He was
younger and had on some kind of overalls with a yellow plastic hard hat. “We’ve
been testing the soil here.”
“And,” the man with the clipboard said,
“your farm here has the highest deposits of a rare mineral that we have ever
seen, anywhere.”
“Mineral?” Sita Ram repeated. “What
mineral?”
“What’s going on?” Ram Prasad demanded,
coming up. “Who are you lot and what are you doing here?”
“Government people,” Sita Ram told him.
“They say our farm has some mineral.”
“Is that so?” Ram Prasad’s little eyes
glittered with cupidity. “What is it, gold?”
“No, no.” The tall thin man flapped a hand
deprecatingly. “Nothing so common as gold. This is unobtainium.”
“Un..ot...ob...” Sita Ram struggled with
the word and gave up. “What is it?”
“Just a very rare metal, used for very
specific applications. You know how we send rockets up?” The tall man pointed
at the sky. “Satellites? Well, they can’t go up without unobtainium. The
government needs it.”
“There’s a terrible shortage worldwide,”
the man in the yellow hard hat put in. “So little to go around that it can’t be
had for love or money.”
“And that’s why the government wants your
farm,” the short round man tapped his clipboard. “We’ve got the papers right
here.”
“You want our farm?” Sita Ram blinked
nervously. “But...”
“Don’t worry, the government will give you
adequate compensation. We won’t just seize it.”
“Compensation?” Ram Prasad leaned forward.
“How much?”
“The standard rates would be the market
value of your land, but in this case it’s an emergency,” the tall man said. “So
it’s going to be a lot more.”
“Five times more,” the clipboard man said.
“The government will give you five times the value of the land.”
“Five
times?” Ram Prasad yelped.
“That’s right. Five times more than your
fields are worth. All we need is your signature and we’re done.”
“Five times,” Ram Prasad said to Sita Ram.
“With five times the value of this, we could move to the city. Buy a couple of
good houses.”
“Marry pretty city women,” Sita Ram
replied. “We could start a farm supply business. Get very rich.”
“You can do anything you like with the
money,” the tall man said. “I take it you’re willing to sell?”
Sita Ram had a moment of doubt. “What if we
don’t agree?”
The three men looked at each other. “Well,”
the clipboard bearer said, “we wouldn’t really recommend that. It’s a matter of
national need, and if you don’t hand over the land voluntarily –“
“The government will seize it
compulsorily,” the hard hat finished. “You won’t get anything more than the
standard compensation, and even that will take its own time coming through the
government channels.”
“By the time you get it, inflation will
probably have reduced its value by a third,” the tall man added helpfully. “Of
course, if you agree to sell it right away, that’s not going to be a problem.”
“Of course we’ll sell,” Ram Prasad said.
“Don’t worry about my brother here, he’s just not so quick to see where his
real interests lie.”
“Excellent,” the clipboard said. “Now,
which of you gentlemen is Lal Bahadur?”
“Lal...” Sita Ram’s mouth fell open. “Lal
Bahadur’s dead.”
“Dead?”
The man turned over a couple of pages on his clipboard. “When did he die?”
“Three years ago. Why, we’ve been the
owners of the land since then.”
“Three years? How can that be? Look here,
according to our records he’s the owner of the land.”
The brothers looked. They couldn’t read the
English, of course, but they could make out Lal Bahadur’s photograph and
signature well enough. And it was a very official looking document, as well it
might be, with all the effort Rajat Kapoor and the lawyers had put into forging
it.
“Look at the date there,” Mahavir Prasad
said, pointing with one neatly manicured finger. “This is only a month old.”
“How can he have died three years ago if
the document is only a month old?” Karim Bhai pressed, leaning over their
shoulders. “There must be a mistake.”
Ram Prasad began to say something and
thought better of it.
“The government records...” Sita Ram began.
“The district office...”
“This is a central government document,” Rajat Kapoor said portentously. “It’s
the Delhi government. What the local
records say doesn’t matter.”
“You’d better find Lal Bahadur, wherever he
is,” Karim Bhai said. “If you can’t, well...”
All three of them glanced at the big
policeman, who was standing to one side, stolidly watching. For all his fat, he
was a very big policeman, and just
looking at him made Sita Ram begin to sweat.
“Wait, please,” Ram Prasad said. “I can
show you documents for the other half of the land, we own the other half as
well, the government can buy the other half, can’t it?”
“Uh huh.” Karim Bhai shook his head. “The
government wants the whole farm, actually. It’s all or nothing.”
“So you’d better find this Lal Bahadur,”
Mahavir Prasad advised. “Oh, I’m sorry, you said he’s dead, right? So I assume
you can’t find him.”
Sita Ram and Ram Prasad looked at each
other. “Er, um,” the latter said. “It might just have been a mistake that
someone said he was dead. In fact, uh...I think he might be still alive.”
“We could find him for you,” Sita Ram said.
“If we find him for you, the sale’s on, isn’t it?”
“You mean he isn’t dead? You’re sure?”
“Yes, sure, we’re sure,” Sita Ram and Ram
Prasad said together. “He isn’t dead, we’ll find him for you.”
“You’ll find him?” Karim Bhai asked gently.
“I think that won’t be necessary.”
“In fact,” Mahavir Prasad said, pointing
over the fields, “if I’m not mistaken, here he comes now.”
There was a long silence as the brothers
watched the distant figure trudge towards them.
The policeman cleared his throat and spoke
for the first time.
“Remember you said he wasn’t dead, won’t you?”
******************************************
“Five hundred rupees?” Anwar
squalled. “It was only four hundred and fifty!”
“Prices are going up,” Jaggu Ram said serenely.
“Besides, you don’t have competition from the dead man any longer, so you’re
going to make more money again. And,” he added, “remember I kept you all out of
having to go to jail, so that’s an extra little something you owe me.”
Rajat Kapoor and the lawyers watched him
from Vijay’s Tea Stall. “There goes a happy man,” the accountant said.
“Not as happy as Lal Bahadur,” Karim Bhai
replied. “You know, I’d never really thought those two crooks would collapse so
completely.”
“Well, their greed got the better of them, and
by the time they realised the trap they’d entered, it was too late to back out.”
Rajat Kapoor reached for his tea. “Though I must congratulate you, Mahavir. I’d
never have thought about demanding they compensate Lal Bahadur by giving him the
tractor as well.”
Mahavir Prasad laughed. “I thought the
younger brother was going to cry. And when they went back to their old farm,
they looked ready to come to blows. I’ll bet there was one hell of a quarrel.”
“As long as the good guys are happy.” Rajat
Kapoor frowned. “Here’s someone who doesn’t look so happy. What’s wrong, Pillu?”
“Raja wants samosas,” Pillu said gloomily. “Lal
Bahadur used to feed him samosas everyday, and now he wants samosas and gets
angry if I don’t give him any.”
Rajat Kapoor reached for his wallet. “Vijay,”
he sighed. “A samosa for our friend with the wagging tail, please.”
Copyright
B
Purkayastha 2015
