Child Bites Snake; Snake Dies

Champaran Diary/चम्पारण डायरी

On Monday night, my uncle died in Bettiah.

This uncle, whom I called Balram Chacha, was my father’s youngest brother. He had eaten his dinner and and gone to bed but woke up feeling restless. He was having trouble breathing. His wife, my Chachi, called my sister, a doctor. In Patna, I was in the car with my sister when the call came. She said that Chacha was to be rushed to the hospital. We got another call some time later giving us the sad news.

The next day, we carried the bier with Chacha’s body to the field in our ancestral village where in the years past my grandparents had been cremated. The sky was slightly overcast and that gave us shelter from the sun; there was also a fine breeze and it was only when the pyre began to blaze that I became conscious once again that it was July. The flames from the funeral pyre rose high and waved in the heat, shriveling the leaves of the nearby mango tree. The mango trees had been planted by my father, about a dozen trees, and on one of them, I noted distractedly that the fruit hung heavily from the branches. All the other trees were oddly without fruit.

During my childhood, Balram Chacha had lived with us. One of my memories is of my father berating him for reading pulp novels. Chacha was a college student at that time. I used to share the bed with him. I must have been four or five years old then. Like my hero George Orwell, I was a bed-wetter. Chacha was my protector, attempting to shield me from my mother’s wrath; he failed, of course, and failed also to protect me from my own shame. He failed at other things too, and became an object of interest to me when I became a writer. My uncle had meant so much to me in my childhood; he had taken me to the cinema but I had become scared of the tragedy depicted on the screen and asked him to bring me back home; so often he had climbed trees for me and my sisters, and brought down fruit for us; it felt fate had played a part in my being present for his funeral even though I had gone home only for a day. My Chachi said as much when I arrived in the village and she was weeping in my arms.

My uncle’s wasn’t the only recent death in Bettiah. The previous day the papers had carried a report from there that a two-year-old child had bitten a cobra. The snake died and the child survived. When I read the news I thought of the account that V.S. Naipaul offers of his father’s career as a journalist at the Trinidad Guardian. The elder Naipaul would bring back sensationalist stories from the rural Trinidadian-Indian community: a story, for instance, of “a goat born with two heads.” In A House for Mr. Biswas, our hero does the same with the editor’s encouragement. (“Amazing scenes were witnessed….”) This explains the title I have given this post.

Naipaul had been on my mind the day my uncle died. This was because I was thinking of the opening of his early book Miguel Street. The line I had in mind is this one: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’” Miguel Street was the first publishable book that Naipaul had written. The character Bogart was based on a distant relative of the author’s; I think it was in Finding the Center that I had read Naipaul’s narrative of going, later in life, in search of this relative. Naipaul had preserved a fanciful idea of Bogart; in real life, so many years later, he was both disappointed and surprised.

When my sister got the phone call in the car, we were on our way to a hospital to see a cousin of ours. He wife was dying of cancer. This cousin of mine had been my own Bogart. During our childhood he had been a petty criminal; later, it was said that he had done something more evil. Then, his life had taken a turn. He had become a holy man in a town in central India. People in our village said that my cousin had a large following. For many years I had thought of writing about him, of finding out who he really was.

Then, that night in Patna, between the two calls we received from Bettiah, I got the chance to see my cousin. His wife was lying on a bed in the general ward of the cancer hospital. She was a dark figure, her mouth collapsed, two pipes running from her body. My cousin still retained a bit of the boyish grin I remembered from his childhood but he was an old man, poor and powerless. He spoke incomprehensible gibberish about his proximity to various politicians. He reminded me unpleasantly of his father who was a drunk. Toward the end of his tedious monologues, my cousin advised me to sit down soon with Obama whom he said he knew to be a simple and straightforward man. Obama had visited him in central India, he said. Minutes into our conversation, I began to think how stupid I had been in my plan to make a journey to some distant town to interview this bogus Bogart. I let my sister offer medical advice to my cousin and his wife—my sister told them that it didn’t seem much could be done, the cancer had spread, and they should return to our village.

When my sister and I came out of the cancer ward, we received the second call from Bettiah. Balram Chacha was dead. And then, a few hours later, it was we rather than our cousin and his wife who were on the way to the village.