Little tufts of hair grew out of his ears and nose. As the old man played with his beard, he said, ‘You have come to the best man.’

Mumbles enquired, ‘I want to send a letter to the Golden Temple. How much will it cost me?’

‘Sorry, who is this Golden Temple?’

‘To Bhindranwale, you know Bhindranwale?’ Govinda demanded hastily.

‘Oh yes, of course,’ the old scribe said. ‘For that I have the best reputation. All my petitions are received as soon as possible. You have come to the best man. I have the highest success rate.’

‘Hurry up, then,’ Mumbles urged. ‘It is a matter of importance.’

The lane was as crowded and noisy and smelly as ever. Nearby a wireless played ye Akashvani hai, the sound of All India Radio. It ran the same news it always seemed to run. There had been more fighting in the Punjab and now the militants, led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, were accused of amassing weapons in the Sikh temple, which was being used as a fort by a large number of militants. Govinda could hear bits and pieces from the radio.

‘Sikh Separatists…armed uprising…widely contested…Sikh scholar.’ He tried to listen carefully but it became increasingly confusing.

Govinda wondered what Mumbles meant as he spoke to the scribe about human rights and why foreign media were being banned in the Punjab. The scribe wrote as Mumbles spoke.

Mumbles said, ‘The fact is there are armed troops outside the temple. The Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, is trying to provoke Sikhs and present herself as a great hero in order to win the elections. There will be a disaster if the army is called in.’

Govinda thought he heard the man on the wireless say that people would be killed. His stomach felt tight. His mouth suddenly seemed full of saliva. There were other recurrent items – fighting in Lebanon, famine in Ethiopia, sectarian skirmishes in Kashmir, a Ghurkha uprising in West Bengal. But mostly it was about the arming of the Golden Temple and how the Prime Minister and the rest of the community would react. Somehow Govinda learned from the welter of information thrown at him that there were horrors to come. Floating corpses, tanks, flesh raked with gunfire, burning buildings. He knew how the world worked. There was violence and there was evil, people wanting to hurt each other, they were hurting each other at that very moment. He knew the world was not as he had once believed. People did bad things to other people.

Under the sun, the stench of fish was overwhelming. Mumbles and Govinda walked back on the road as there were too many people and large potholes on the footpath that no one appeared willing to repair. Walking absent-mindedly in the lane had many hazards. You could slip on rotting fruit, or go skidding on a pile of dog shit. You might walk into a wayward cow.

The Miraculous Calf

The Miraculous Calf