Amita Basu

From On High

I ride down the winding trail, muddy from spring melts, hugging the curves of the lake. Weeks into my gig at Nature Conservation Foundation, Spiti’s landscape still surprises me. Snowcapped mountains, jewel-blue sky, algae-green water reflecting the sky stained green-gold – everything’s colourful here. Only the earth is colourless, still barren in April. Was it always so, or is this climate change? 

I spot the cottage, park my old black-and-orange Hero Pulse, and clamber up the slope. On the rim, pausing for breath, I gasp. The meadow is lush and speckled with daisies and poppies. 

But empty. No sheep in sight.

Taapas awaits me outside his cottage. It’s immaculately whitewashed, the roof piled with hay – he must’ve stocked extra hay this winter. Inside, a single spotless room. 

Taapas is short and wiry. Sun-narrowed eyes glimmer in his deeply tanned face. He offers me tea and clears his plywood table for my sheaf of papers.

“I lost both my sheepdogs last week.” He’s standing, deferentially declining to sit down with a big-city person. “If it was distemper, it was lightning-fast.” His hands are clasped before his groin. His pahaadi Hindi is languid and rolling. “That’s how the beast got into the barn.”

“Terrible luck,” I murmur.

Snow leopards are threatened: only 700 left in India. Deforestation, poaching of their prey, and the retreating snowline are driving them down into the pastures. It’s not their fault. We know that. We build relationships to prevent escalation of human-wildlife conflict.

“The government compensation is paltry,” I say, “and often delayed. But we’ll do our best to get you any available help.” 

Taapas stands motionless, blank-faced. In the mountain silence, my ears strain for lambs bleating, sheep teeth tearing juicy grass. Nothing. 

“How many sheep did you lose?” The community coordinator only told me Taapas had lost ‘some.’

“Will you come see?” says Taapas. “You should see the evidence, no?” Shyness notwithstanding, he speaks with the conviction of a man who, in his own sphere, knows what’s what.

I rise. I follow him out along the rim of the saucer-shaped cavity containing the flower-strewn meadow. We approach the barn. I catch the first metallic whiff in the air. 

He pushes open the heavy barn door. Like a demon crouched, the stench springs out. It jumps into my gasping mouth, taints my tongue, and forces its way into my lungs. If the demon were holding my head down in a boiling sea of blood, the stench could not be stronger.

The barn is concrete. Narrow windows, iron-barred, run horizontally fifteen feet above the ground. Hay stands piled in the corners and mattresses the floor, thick and cosy. And on the hay, sheep lie staring, their golden eyes wide. They lie on their sides with their heads far askew, on their backs with their stomachs open, guts spilling out, the intestines looking, to me, as I scramble to make sense of this, too narrow. I’d thought intestines would be thicker. Substantial.

My knees buckle. I clutch at the wall. Round and round spins the world. 

Taapas’s eyes spin past me. Steady eyes. I hold onto them. Slowly the world stops spinning.

Back indoors, Taapas pours me more tea. He doesn’t apologise. Why should he?

The effort of getting Taapas’s story down bolsters me. His voice deliberate, his face impassive, his words well-sequenced, he tells me he’d been away at a wedding on Tuesday. Returning early on Wednesday, he sensed something was off. “I approached the barn. The silence was complete. I opened the door. He sat there, in the centre, covered in blood. He had eaten only two lambs, incompletely. But he had killed them all. Killed my whole flock.”

Henhouse killing, we call it, or surplus killing: when a predator, surrounded by prey, kills far more than he can possibly eat. Who knows why they do it?

“He sat panting, motionless, staring,” Taapas continues. “After his bloodfury, he was too exhausted to budge.”

“How’d you know it was male?” I ready my pen. Our tracking team must find the leopard and relocate him safely.

Taapas turns away to fetch a fresh kettle. “I discovered, afterwards… From the size, I mean.”

Afterwards? After what? A chill runs up my spine. 

“Have you got any other income?” It’s too early, I know, for this question. But I’m eager to shrug off the truth I’ve just half-glimpsed.

Eyes on teacup, stirring in sugar, Taapas shakes his head. 

“Or any other skills? Is there anything else you can do?” 

Taapas shakes his head, strangely calm.

“I’m so sorry.”

He shrugs. “Everything is God’s pleasure.”

I peer into his eyes. They’re gray-blue and opaque. I picture the snow leopard, exhausted after his hike down from his home above the treeline, and then from his bloodfury: sitting there, jaws drenched in blood, golden spring coat pooling around him: a fat-looking puddle of fur, hateful, helpless, and unnaturally calm. 

“Where did he go?” I whisper.

“Here, there… What does it matter? What’s done is done.” Taapas sips his tea. His averted eyes are opaque as the lake, opaque as a snow leopard’s: the eyes of a killer. 

I drop my pen. I slacken in my chair, the one plastic chair in Taapas’s cottage.

I long to rebuke Taapas, challenge him, force the truth out. I stare at my papers. Forms for compensation, which will do Taapas little good, which will do the snow leopard no good. 

I’ve worked in conservation eight years. Lately, all I see everywhere is selfishness and death. Why did I expect any better from this illiterate little man? He must’ve already buried the corpse, maybe sold off the skin.

I must be better than Taapas: mustn’t let anger master me. I’ll get the forms signed and get away. To avoid being angry here and now, you must, I’ve realised, get far away. As I walk Taapas through the forms, my mind’s already far away.

***

I remember Amma, a WWF ecologist, coming home after midnight, after inspecting, perhaps, another hoard of confiscated ivory – which she’ll tell Abba about, tomorrow, when she thinks I can’t hear, tell Abba about greedy merchants and corrupt officials. I hear Amma dropping her handbag on the dining table, gliding past Abba’s closed bedroom door, to her own bedroom, and putting on, softly, on the recordplayer, Fateh Ali Khan, music brightly sorrowful, to lull her asleep. I sneak up to Amma’s bedroom. Amma lies on her side, facing away from me. I know she’s awake. She knows I’m here. I long for her to turn towards me. I wait, leaning against the door, growing petulant. It’ll be years before I’ll see that there’re some states of mind in which you refuse to face people, especially people you love.

I remember Sitara, the baby goat I rescued from the market before Id, white as cream, speckled with chocolate stars, fleeing from me across the garden, leaping over rocking chairs and brick piles, as I pursue, chappal in hand, screaming curses, tears streaming. Amma snatches me up and sits me down. She tells me Sitara didn’t mean to upset me. She had warned me, hadn’t she, about goats and flowers? I hadn’t listened. I’d thought my Sitara loved me too much to hurt my flowers. So Amma had let me learn for myself. Sitara was hungry, says Amma, so she ate your flowers. You’re angry, so you want to beat Sitara. But you mustn’t let your impulses master you. You’re not a goat, are you?

I remember Amma, sunken into the hospital bed, skin thinned to translucence, beckoning me, as I lurk in the doorway, racked with guilt for having stayed away, racked with fury. For it’s because of Amma that I’ve stayed away so long. The vein pulses gently, playfully on her cheek. Her hand reaches up towards me. Her eyes meet mine. Her hand gives up midway and falls back. So you still haven’t forgiven me, Meher, says Amma: you’re unhappy as a teacher. How are you, Amma, I say sullenly. Go then, Amma says. Go become a conservationist. I tried to save you from it. The work was hard enough then. It’s harder now. I thought you’d get used to a normal job. Maybe I was wrong. Whatever life you choose will have its hardships. But I don’t want you to look back, asking yourself What if, hating me till the end. So go! Follow your heart. And then, when you’ve reassured yourself that it’s not too late, come back to me with different eyes. I remember going away, fighting my own fight, and coming back to Amma, with love, this time, coming back too late.

***

“And here,” I recite, half-awakening from my reverie, “you certify that you’ve got no insurance money incoming.”

I keep my eyes on the dotted line. Taapas signs. I turn the page too quickly, giving myself a papercut.

“All done.” I restack my papers. My third cup of tea stands untasted, grown cold and filmy. “We’ll follow up with the Forest Department to get you whatever we can.”

I rise. Taapas stays seated. He doesn’t even gesture politely at rising.

“I know you want to help, madam. I will keep my faith.”

“Yes,” I say. “Well…”

Taapas blows meditatively on his fifth cup of tea. “Life is a series of tragedies, madam. It’s rare that anyone takes an interest and allows us to speak of our sorrows.”

“Oh?” I can barely contain my anger. It’s only fear that restrains me, fear that he’ll take his poaching fulltime.

“For we hesitate to burden our kin, who’ve got their own troubles, with ours.” He looks at me, almost appealingly, his eyes, finally, almost warm. “Outsiders, madam, come and go. You’ll forgive us if we take our time to open up.”

“Not at all,” I mumble.

“Do you like your work, madam?”

“Pardon?” Nobody’s ever asked me this. Not since Amma died. Not my colleagues, who’re underpaid, dismissed by government officials, distrusted by locals, written off by old schoolmates with cushy jobs. Not our community members, who’re caught between industrial lobbies and freefalling agricultural prices. Not Abba, who’s ensconced in his second family. “Yes. I do.” Taapas is watching me. Amma’s words tumble out my lips. “To ask and to listen – it’s such a little thing, that makes so much relief. Like a shower in midsummer.”

“You understand me, madam,” says Taapas. 

I sit back down. For Amma was right: I’m not a goat. I mustn’t let my anger master me. I brace myself to hear a veiled confession of guilt, which can, perhaps, keep Taapas from further misdeeds. I twist my face into a sympathetic smile. My heart thuds. 

“But you’re wrong.” Taapas cradles his teacup, head bent, eyes searching the tea for the right words. “To listen is no little thing. Today everybody is in a hurry to get places. Even the conifers are packing up and moving north.” He puts down his cup. He flexes his hands, scrutinising their knobby joints and callused fingers. “I was so angry, madam. So angry.” 

My heart roars, deafening me, protecting me from the truth. It’s become a habit of mine: dissociating, or retreating into memory, at the first hint of unpleasantness. What’s done is done. Taapas said so himself. What good is the truth now?

Taapas bends towards me across his table. His hands clench and unclench. “I locked the beast in the barn. I came in here to fetch my axe.” He nods towards the far corner. I spot the axe, big, heavy-looking, gleaming. “I’d sharpened it last week, to chop wood, to build my lambs a new house, a wooden house. For my ewes lambed prolifically this year. But I cannot afford another cement house. Not yet. I thought, perhaps, two years from now, I could… I reentered the barn. I locked us in. Either he would live, or I would.” 

My blood waterfalls against my eardrums. The pressure builds. Taapas’s voice grows faint. The whitewashed room spins, darkens, and vanishes, leaving only Taapas’s face. 

“I grasped my axe. I prepared to raise it over my head. Then I looked at the beast. The hell-demon sat gazing at me. Like a sleepy housecat.” Taapas’s eyes, narrowed from three decades of squinting in the sun, narrow further. They’re almost closed, now, meditating. But his voice rises and grows. “I could’ve killed him and he wouldn’t have moved.”

“What?” 

“If he had flinched – if I had raised my axe before I looked him in the eye, surely then he would’ve flinched. That little motion of his would’ve erased my last scruple. I would have done it. And would you have blamed me?” His voice is almost roaring now. “Everybody stands by, clucking their tongues, looking sheepish. The educated people, who’ve turned their cities into deserts, into gold to fill their own pockets with, come and tell us that conservation is our job.” My cheeks burn. “If the beast had made one move, by God, I would’ve brought the axe down and split his skull.”

“I don’t understand,” I stammer. “I thought you did –”

Transformed by the relief of speaking, eyes big and burning fixed on the wall behind me, Taapas speaks over me. “But he didn’t flinch. He sat staring, looking done for. I could’ve petted him, like a housecat, had I been so minded… The axe slipped from my hands. It was just sweat. I could’ve stooped to pick it up. I didn’t.” 

Briefly he meets my gaze. 

“To kill in rage is one thing. But that beast might as well have been asleep. Asleep, as my flock probably was when he came… But now he looked so innocent, not guilty at all, just done for… So I swore. I swore the beast would not make me like himself, like all the people who stand by clucking.” He laughs a short, bitter laugh. “Arrogance, madam! It was arrogance stayed my hand… I left the barndoor open. Next morning he was gone.” 

He’s still staring at the wall. The fire in his eyes glows then dies. I stare at this illiterate little man slumped in his cottage. 

“I’ve spent,” he says, “these two days in darkest thoughts, wishing my fate upon all… Enough of that. You must warn my neighbours. And catch the beast, and send him elsewhere. You cannot mistake him. He’s got one golden eye, one blue. Never have I seen such a one.” 

Eventually I emerge from Taapas’s cottage. The late afternoon sun gilds the barren dun-coloured slopes to bronze. My heart peeks over the horizon. I scramble downhill to my Hero Pulse. 

I ride a long way before looking back. He’s still standing there, seeing me off. 

I’m going to get Taapas his compensation, however paltry, hook him up with retraining programmes, and do for him whatever else I can. Not for his sake. For my own. For I keep forgetting that, even in this world, there’s still always hope.