An excerpt from a story
The Cattle Thief
Kolakaluri Enoch
AT the slightest noise, Nagadu would shout, “Who is it?” and then rush out like a dry leaf in the wind. He came out often and looked around, even at the stirring of an ant.
He did not sleep a wink. He sat on with great determination. It was as though he had lit wicks in his eyes. A small kerosene lamp burned inside. A faint light within and pitch darkness outside—he couldn’t see a thing even if he kept his eyes wide open.
It was past midnight. The sun had gone down three watches ago. The village had long gone to sleep. One more watch remained before daybreak. Nagadu vowed not to sleep. He set up vigil like a graveyard keeper, sitting cross-legged on the ground.
It was his house. Just a shack built around a single post. A place ghosts could haunt. No one to answer you if you yelled. No one to rush to your help even if you were beaten to death.
He himself was a ghoul. None dared to meddle with him. If anyone did, it meant the attacker’s death. No one ever talked about him. If he ever opened his mouth, it was to swear. That stinking mouth. No one dared to pick up even small talk with him. Stink all the way. Not a little man was he. Mother’s husband was he.
He came tearing out of the house, this Nagadu. He climbed the narrow mud bank dividing the rice fields. Leaped across a sluice. Climbed the bank of the canal.
He scanned the surroundings but couldn’t see anything. No one came that way. He crouched for a while on the bank in the path made by bullock carts. A banyan tree beside the bank of the canal. A cleared space underneath the tree. Next to it a post to tie cattle. A calf on a heap of dry grass.
He must butcher it at daybreak. Heap the flesh and bone in piles at different prices and sell it. That is his work. His living. He hacks a male calf every other day. That fills his belly. A male calf is much in demand. By ripping open its belly, he can fill his.
The fellow had fiery and red protruding eyes, like Pothuraju’s. If you see him in the day, he could appear in your nightmares. If children catch sight of him, they get terrified and develop a fever. If he beats it, the mountain of Golconda would cry out in pain. Such is the fellow. You know how tall he is. That tall! So tall that you have to measure him with an outstretched arm above your head.
In those days he had lived in the village as a cobbler. If anyone wanted creaking-chappals, he used to come searching for Nagadu. None to beat him in his workmanship.
If the farmers of high lands needed a mota, they came looking for him from faraway places, however great they were. He could do it in no time.
When the moneyed wretches started Tatas, Ballas, Botas and Batas, stitched and sold chappals, he told himself in contempt, “Let the wretches live!” He bundled his bag of tools along with the stone he worked on and shoved them into the attic. He hardly gets them out these days.
When he had bound the legs of a buffalo together, wrung its neck and hacked it, his little son had one glimpse at it, pissed in his clothes, and took to bed in a fever. He babbled all night in fright, and reached the graveyard straightaway without ever rising from the bed. The little fellow’s mother had showered a volley of abuse on him, left for her mother’s place and never came back again (as if it would cause the stars in the sky to fall on the earth!) She never came though. He never went to her. Never called her back.
That was all. No one knows whether she left him or he left her. The woman was never widowed nor did he break his waist-string. The wretch never got himself a woman again nor was he ever deserted again.
When they commented that children were frightened to death seeing him hack the cattle, he was disgusted with the children, with their parents and with the whole village. Leaving everything to fate, he had built a shack in the fields and was getting by.
Translated from the Telugu by C.L.L. Jayaprada
Chandrabhaga-4