The Flying Rice, God’s Feast

After Dukhiram’s suicide, the first question that rose like smoke was whether he had failed to endure the larger society’s ridicule. Did the sharp scar of the party leader’s honor cut him so deep that he slit himself away? None of us had sensed, beforehand, that Dukhiram carried such a brittle prestige within him.
 
Some, whispering with folded lips, hinted that the women were at fault. Why did they bathe in the lake wearing those short saris, gamchas, blouses? First, it polluted the waters. Second, from tender boys to withered elders, every rib and belly turned into an audience, feasting upon breasts, hips, and backs. And in that feasting, character itself was accused, corrupted.
 
But the suicide theory did not hold for long. It crumbled like wet paper. The case crawled out from police burrows and scurried into the newsroom. Ah, the police—dying in spirit from their burden of morality! Meanwhile, the ghouls of reportage leapt into the field. Sexual suicide or sexual murder—both sold faster than fritters fried in street oil. Their investigation concluded: women flaunting body could not possibly be the cause of Dukhiram’s death. Reason one—this was the age of women’s liberation. The free display of breasts, bellies, and buttocks was healthy, beneficial to the body, not harmful. Reason two—they declared Dukhiram was sexually impotent. The public cried out, “Poor soul, he could not stand!” Such truth could only be unearthed by the magicians of journalism, not by mere mortals.
 
One idiot then discovered that on Saturday, precisely at two in the afternoon, by the western bank of the lake, near the pit-latrine of Slum No. 4 (where pollution too overflowed), a pair of Dukhiram’s sandals had been found. His wife, Holudmoni, however, explained in special interview: those sandals had been worn by him merely two days earlier when he went to work at a flat-building. Because the sandals carried cow-dung stains, the lady of the house had commanded him to leave them by the lift and enter barefoot. After finishing his chores, he emerged to find the sandals vanished into thin air.
 
Journalists pressed her: did Dukhiram himself, wearing those sandals, go to the pit-latrine’s edge? Or did he, in some act of purification, carry them to the public spout? Why did both husband and wife share one single pair? This sparked buzzing suspicion in the media-hive. Holudmoni, thinking long, replied that at that pit-latrine there was no water supply. The fastidious carried in their own buckets. The shameless, only dry paper. Her words set off an uproar. Headlines multiplied like locusts. Within a week, a dozen editorials were born, as though the entire city emptied its bowels together every dawn.
 
At last, media settled comfortably into its conviction: it was police bullets that had killed Dukhiram.
 
But the police remained stubborn, stone-faced, refusing to admit. Their muscle power—no mere pen could diminish. From sandals alone, they could not unlock the riddle of Dukhiram’s death. A high-ranking investigator raised the sandals to his nose before the media and pronounced: “This is no cow-dung, but dog-shit.” Over a mere suicide, such journalistic acrobatics—he declared with solemn indignation—were intolerable.
 
A few days later the post-mortem report surfaced. It revealed: Dukhiram’s death came from a sonic blast in the liver. A death by sound, not by blade, not by bullet. But even this truth was quickly smothered under blankets by many hands from many “higher circles.” At last the judge thundered, “The truth must be revealed!” And so, tugging their loose trousers up over their waists with both hands, the police brass prepared themselves once again for a “fresh investigation.”
 
And precisely then, the case welcomed a new actor onto its stage: the celebrated eco-revolutionary, Shyamal Kar. He alone unveiled the secret clue. In his booming voice he revealed: while police were storming the slums with sticks and bullets, Dukhiram had fled, hurling stones in defiance, then scuttling toward the railway tracks. A down-train was thundering in. Dukhiram had taken cover near the pit-latrine, but suddenly—right at his neck—the train roared a horn, a dreadful “PON” that split the sky. Though signals forbade it, the train had wailed its cry anyway, and with contempt for the court of human decency it had bellowed at sixteen hundred decibels.
 
That was the true assassin, claimed Shyamal Kar: the horn’s shriek had torn Dukhiram’s heart apart, a sonic heart-attack.
 
He aimed his next arrow at the administration: “If pollution of the lake leads to demolition of slums, then why should not sound-pollution of trains lead to demolition of the trains themselves? If a peaceful suburb is to be maintained, shut down the railway!” His voice gathered thunder. He vowed first to file a Public Interest Litigation in the High Court. Then—he announced with righteous zeal—he would stage a hunger-sit at Metro Channel, bringing in Medha Patkar herself to fast unto death. Let the authorities quake. Let him be crowned, once more, as the supreme eco-savior, perhaps with the world’s most fragrant garland, the Magsaysay Award.
 
And thus the police, the municipality, and the high towers of administration breathed a sigh of relief. Shyamal Kar’s “explosive revelation” had fallen from the heavens like divine puffed rice. They chewed it gratefully, because digesting Dukhiram’s bullet-torn stomach was far more difficult than swallowing a court-order to “shift railway lines.” Now their energies turned toward fortifying security at protest-sites.
 
Meanwhile, in an exclusive interview with another paper, Holudmoni confessed that lately Dukhiram had not been sleeping. She thought at first he had developed a common insomnia. Was he depressed? She could not swear to it. Journalists asked: was he truly unhappy, or was his very name—Dukhiram, “Sorrow-Ram”—the prophecy? Or was he a rebel, a dissident, tied to anti-government movements? The woman explained, “Nowadays so many freight trains pass at night, how was I to know if my husband was sick? I only feared that one day my man would simply flee the house forever.”
 
What a headline that made! “In Striving to Live, Dukhiram Died.” The journalists danced, their notebooks fluttering like wings of ravens.
 
The public, intoxicated, lifted Shyamal Kar toward the skies, almost into sainthood. Only the local train commuters shivered in dread. If train services ceased, how would they reach their offices on time? But no reporter went to them. Their voices dissolved in silence. Instead, a few over-eager intellectuals demanded that Shyamal Kar be awarded the Padma Shri for his courage.
 
Thus the great masquerade reached its climax. Police, municipality, and ministers wiped their brows in relief. A sonic horn had become the executioner; the bullet could be erased. As the saying went: “The lump from the culprit’s back, laid neatly on the poor man’s neck.” The police’s crime had been shifted onto the train.
 
 
And then, when all the noise and spectacle had subsided—when the circus of police, press, courts, and eco-saints had exhausted its puffed rice and slogans—life returned to its habitual hush.
 
One hot noon, in a flat-bedroom, after all was “done and dusted,” Holudmoni was slipping into her blouse again. Beside her, the landlord’s brother-in-law, naked on the bed, stretched his limbs with the laziness of a satiated beast. He said, almost idly, almost playfully:
 
“Did Dukhi ever know, I wonder, that the child swelling in your belly was not his?”
 
Holudmoni’s face twisted with a half-smile, half-grimace. “Fool,” she replied. “Do you think such a belly can be hidden from the man of the house?”
 
Her words landed like stones in a pond. The middle-aged babu’s face darkened, clouded with a shame that was neither shame nor repentance, but some older, darker stain.