Dacoit!
I didn’t know what, but something woke me. Turning on the torch I kept beside me revealed a tin trunk which was my bedside table and a crouching man in tucked-up dhoti.
As he quickly lowered the squeaky lid, I shouted, "Hat!" in a voice gone hoarse and disastrously faint. "Hat! Hat!" The thing right on top of everything in the trunk was a foot-and-a-half long kukhri knife with a blade I used to test the edge of by shaving the calf of my leg.
Bandit more than thief, most typically peasant-gone-bad rather than organized crime; in any given family, tradition more than a caste; of the Sicilian Mano Nero cut rather than Robin Hood’s (throats rather than tailors); male more often than female, for all to the contrary of Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen. Dacoits never advertised, so a long commute to work was generally part of the job, not to soil their own nest. The dacoits of our area were known by name, not likely the one they kept for daily use, and they were believed to live across the Indian border. In a land that traveled by foot, a thief had to be able to out-pace pursuit. One famous dacoit was said to be able to walk 20 miles in a night. He would come from India during daylight hours, lay up near the village he intended to victimize, and be back across the border before cock-crow, where no one had authority to look for him. How this was known, no one could say
My visitor hopped quickly into an excavation that he and his helpers had made under the woven bamboo of my wall and up through the floor. While I was getting to my feet and trying to know what to do, the man was gone. I wondered whether it would be foolish to open the stout wooden door to pursue him, but I was not cold-blooded enough simply to go back to bed or follow the recommendation of the French philosopher, Pascal, to sit quietly alone in my room. Then I remembered– I had come awake in the dark earlier that night. A flash of the torch had almost made me think the bolted door to my room was shaking, before I had sensibly gotten my imagination under control, turned out the light and gone back to sleep. A quick check revealed that, thank goodness, the kukhri was still in the top of my trunk so, unsheathing it with the care necessary not to cut my fingers, I went out into the night.
A problem for dacoits was the packs of feral dogs which barked at any stranger, particularly in the dark. Fifteen dogs doing their best to wake the dead were hard to ignore. They were ignored, though, all the time. Anyone who jumped out of bed every time the paranoia of dogs overcame them, would eventually fade into just a pair of dark rings beneath two blood-shot eyes. One dog would never waken anyone. Twenty furious canines, very likely would bring several people out for a look and a few harsh words, maybe a thrown brick. But where to draw the line? Two dogs crazy with territoriality could be brushed away. But if twenty called for action, what about nineteen flea-bitten barkers? Eighteen with mange? Ten with worms? Where to draw the line and how to do it in your sleep and in the dark? Insomnia may be a communal survival trait, of sorts. Our village dogs had not detected my intruder, probably because I had been given a room on the edge of the village in the jamindar’s three-room seasonal house, which he only used this time of the year, when he came down from Kathmandu to supervise the harvest. My first, hoarse cries had not brought him out from his own room, but he did say in the morning that he had heard me and wondered. When the sun rose, he showed me how the sliding wooden bolt of a door could be shaken loose by someone outside the house. Ensconced on the other side of the room we used as kitchen and storage, he may have been the one intended for this nightly visit, rather than me. This sort of theft would necessarily rule out heavy loads. Whole fields of standing grain were known to disappear in a night, but that was thought to be more local in inspiration.
In Govindapur, women wore most of their family's scant valuables, mainly around their throats and pierced through their ears, so they were at most risk. A knowing dacoit would excavate the place beneath the fire in quick silence. Money nearly extracted itself from beneath mattresses and pillows. There is an unacknowledged consensus about hiding places that is fatal to secrecy. But dacoits specialized in slipping valuables from around a sleeper’s neck without waking her. Horseshoe bracelets would be winkled off wrists and elbows of hard-sleeping farm wives. A necklace could be cut, but the best way to get gold ear-jewelry was to put a knife to the throat of the sleeping woman and take it while she lay frozen in terror. If a householder woke suddenly during the robbery, the dacoit would often simply kill the person rather than let alarm be raised. The thought of that unattended kukhri was to stay with me.
Turning about before my door and feeling a bit foolish in the empty night air, I made no more noise. Down the side of the building the freshly dug hole gaped vacantly; in the bright moon-light, a few bits of meat-grinder lay abandoned in the scattered earth. I had purchased this cast-iron contraption on the advice of Peace Corps staff, back in California. It was a marvel, even to me, of twirling ingenuity, disassembling into a pile of components, with a bevy of interchangeable bits, for a variety of coarse and fine effects. The only use I or anyone in the village found for it was as an insoluble puzzle, the sum of its parts being greater than it’s assembled whole. As the fields were empty, I bolted myself back into my room with the tin trunk over the new hole in the floor.
Once "Chhor!"–thief, was cried out an entire able-bodied population would snatch up whatever was near to hand and boil into the streets like a pugnacious colony of the local bees, which hung their combs of honey in the open and dared anyone to try. Though there was said to be a single forest ranger, several villages over, police did not exist at all. If the villagers found a group of dacoits, they would mob them, hurling bricks, swinging bamboo lathis, chopping with sickles and hoes, lashing out with anything hard or sharp or throwable until the bodies stopped twitching. Then, if police should appear, not very likely, they would be free to arrest what remained.
Beyond wrestling, these were not a military sort of people and fighting Robin Hood-versus-Little John-style with long bamboo lathis was the one martial art ever described. No one knew anyone who knew how to practice it, beyond a few self-damaging twirls, but the tale went that there was one dacoit who was such a master of the art, that when discovered by an angry village, he was able to keep his staff twirling so fast and continuously, that not even a stone the size of a pea could penetrate the defense and thrown bricks were deflected by its momentum. Behind his shielding propeller, a marching band of dacoits was making its retreat out into the fields of the night and safety, when their champion stepped backwards into a ditch and fell. The crowd was on them in a flash. A happy ending. I was given to understand.
"Sah’b," Mohan cried, "can I have your torch?" He was agitated and the sounds of running feet and raised voices raised my own alarm.
What is it?" I called after, as he disappeared with my flash-light into the deepening dusk. "What’s happening," I asked, turning to Kumar Prasad, with whom I had been sitting.
"Chhor, someone has seen a thief," he told me. "I’ll go look, too."
I stayed behind, as instructed, neither likely nor eager to witness the worst that might happen. For a few minutes the village, which was normally a quiet place, rang with shouts and pelting feet. My experience with bolting cattle had taught me that sometimes–often–the best help I could offer was to stay out of the way. After a quarter hour, the bustle died away and finally Mohan and Kumar Prasad returned with my torch talking between themselves too rapidly for me to catch.
"What happened? Did they catch him?"
Kumar shook his head, laughing a bit, "No, it wasn’t a chhor. Some little boy coming home with the cows thought he saw a leopard and called out, chhitwa." Chhor: chhitwa, there was a certain resemblance. Nor was it an impossible thing for a leopard to have drifted down from the hills to the patch of jungle which remained adjacent to the village. The streets were dead empty and everyone with a door had it shut. No one wanted to be the first to find a leopard.
"Every boy is a thief," Kumar Prasad told me once, to further my education. The words chora and chhor, boy and thief, were strikingly similar, and made for a ringing aphorism. Though I was surrounded by little boys and girls from dawn to dusk, sometimes after, little if anything was stolen from me at home. I was advised to take extreme care when traveling, however. This from people who regarded a couple hours’ walk as a visit to a foreign land. Thieves clustered in distant places and particularly along railroads, which were the means of so much travel. A thief might spot a prosperous-looking sah’b in the station, before he boarded a train and board after him, to rob him along the way. If the trip were long and opportunity did not arise before the thief would find himself too far from home, he would pass his mark on to another thief at some spot along the way. In this manner, a victim could be followed the length of India, while a moment of carelessness was awaited. Tales of maggar’s– assassins of the Kali cult, with their silken strangling scarves– fit right in. Heavy chains with shiny pad-locks were sold to secure luggage while one slept. The chains were vastly more substantial than any luggage I ever owned or saw, though. And the crowded conditions of a cheek-by-jowl third class railroad car would have been an impossible setting for all but the most deft transfer of luggage. First or second class was a more likely setting and, despite locked compartments, doors or windows were jiggered open and purses taken from beneath the heads of sleeping memsah’b ladies.
On the narrow-gage line to Jaleswar I got talking with a man, who asked if I were Russian. Our side achieved a foreign policy coups of substantial proportions by the happy circumstance that America was difficult to pronounce, while Russ was much easier and familiar, the Russians having constructed a cigarette factory in the area and departed some years before. No, I said, I was not Russ, but American. Ha, the man laughed, had I heard the story of the foolish Russ sah’b who had been robbed of his chhatha, umbrella, while walking through Roganathpur bajaar? No, I had not. What had happened to the poor, foolish chap? Why, he was walking through the crowded market with his chhatha hooked over his shoulder to hang down his back, trying to look sophisticated, when someone came up behind him in the crowd and lifted the umbrella off his shoulder. Like so! What a fool, I agreed. Though a Russ might look much like an American, myself, I did not carry an umbrella, as could easily be seen. I neglected to mention that I had lost mine in the Roganathpur bajaar the week before. Perhaps there was no need to say.
For several weeks after my burglary, I kept meeting men who looked like my night visitor–a stranger, average height, slender build, moustache, a certain lift of his lip..., but the sum of the parts was never equal to the whole. Sometimes I would ask Sri Kissun or Kumar Prasad if this or that could be the man. For several years, even after leaving the country, I slept uneasily . Dreams were full of the man in vague outline. My only comfort lay in imagining him and his helpers back in the safety of their home territory, after a strenuous hike of more than fifty miles over at least two days, trying to put together twelve pounds of cast iron parts to make a ten-pound meat grinder.