Fiction by Upamanyu Chatterjee: A hungry man, deranged by the smell of meat, kills a family of six

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23-04-2025

To the police, Basant Kumar maintained that the evening of September 29, 1949 had passed quite typically in the Dalvi household. The parents and the daughter had been discussing her engagement, the son had been trying to do his homework while listening to the radio, the sister-in-law and her daughter had been busy in the kitchen while he, Basant Kumar had been occupied with his routine chores, ferrying in water and wood and coal, washing up, rushing to the bazaar to buy sugar and eggs, tending to the cows, clearing the clothesline, going off to get the boy's school uniform ironed, the usual. Never a moment's rest for him.
'Well, go on.'
Well, the family had had dinner at 9.30-10, as they did every day. Gosht of goat, dal, tamatar-paneer. They always ate well. Then the sister-in-law and her daughter ate in the kitchen, whatever was left over. He waited. They called him. He went and washed up the thalis, pots and pans and then, after they had all gone to bed, he had his dinner in the shed, whatever was left over for him by the sister-in-law and her daughter from whatever had been left over for them.
'So you never had enough to eat in that household, is that what you're saying?'
Basant Kumar protested. He said that he was not one to complain, for God had been most kind to him. But if one wants service from one's donkey, if one needs a beast to slave day in and day out, one must at least feed him adequately. The subject animated him. The Dalvis liked to eat, he stated. And they liked the others under their roof to feel want. His voice rose. 'They had non-vegetarian almost every day, sir, goat or chicken or fish or egg. They ate like rakshasas themselves and always left only two pieces of meat in the pot, one each for the sister-in-law and her daughter.' His inhalations became audible, spasmodic. 'I got the scrapings of the pot, some gobs of curry, some grains of rice and a couple of chapatis. Then I'd have to filch two green chillis and one raw onion to complete my meal.'
'Where is the servant now?' asked Sen of the Assistant Superintendent. 'And the cows? You have of course spoken to all the neighbours? And the next of kin? I remember Dalvi telling me once of a younger brother who is an engineer at the Water Works on Indore Road.'
The policeman nodded. They stood in the rear courtyard just outside the kitchen. 'The brother was here this morning, completely shattered, sir, naturally. His man took the cows away.' He half-lifted his hand towards the outhouse before which stood, at attention, the constable who had left the kitchen on the orders of the Assistant Superintendent. 'Basant Kumar is here in bed, sir. He is not going anywhere.'
The policeman made little effort to hide his grim amusement. 'He injured his ankle last night. Rather badly. A good sprain if not a fracture. And we'll be guarding this place for a while.' His voice dropped as he repeated, half to himself, 'No, he is not going anywhere.' Basant Kumar was small, dark and moustached, with bulbous eyes that to Sen suggested an unstable temperament. In the gloom of the shed, lit inadequately by a kerosene lantern that cast fearsome shadows on the woodpile and the sacks of coal, he lay on his mattress and stared defensively at the law. 'He says that the pain in the ankle makes it impossible for him to stand, sir,' reported the constable in a soft bark that also suggested that he only awaited orders to raise the supine form upright with a couple of curses and a good kick.
The sharp smell of the kerosene remained distinct above the gentle stink of dung and animal urine that, permeating the planks of wood that separated the outhouse from the cowshed, diffused through Basant Kumar's living quarters like a blessing. A rexine bag atop the woodpile contained his clothes; on a nail hammered into the door – a plank, really – hung a rag of a towel and a half-shirt. Sen sniffed the stuffy air. Between the kerosene and the dung, he seemed to sense something else, raw onion, firstly, from the servant's exhalations, and yet another aroma, faint but heavy, suggesting meat fried and curried and cooked for an age in a hundred spices, as though for a rich marriage feast.
Basant Kumar looked exhausted, in pain, frightened and wary as he stared at all those uniforms crowding his space. Sen stood over him and smiled disarmingly. 'No, no, please don't get up,' he exclaimed even though the servant had made no move to do so. Turning to the Assistant Superintendent, Sen asked, 'Has he seen a doctor?'
Silently, with a wriggle of his eyebrows, the policeman asked the same question of the nearest constable. In response, the constable snapped to attention and began to glare without blinking at the wooden pole from which dangled the lantern. 'You'll get well soon,' Sen assured Basant Kumar with another smile and turning, led the way out. On the way to his jeep, the group paused once to gather around the blackened mango tree to allow Sen to finish tut-tutting over the extent of the devastation.
At the jeep, observing the group poised, as it were, on its toes, so eager was it for him to depart, he addressed it once again. 'I shall dispatch a report to the Collector immediately. And meet poor Dalvi's brother to see what else needs to be done' – and then specifically to the Assistant Superintendent – 'Could someone take that poor fellow to the Trust dispensary? He might not be faking that ankle, you know.'
After disposing of the day's work, Sen reached home, as was his habit, closer to eight in the evening than seven. The Magistrate's residence, a rather charming late-19th century bungalow on Temple Road in the Civil Lines area, was a mere couple of kilometres away from his court and Sen often preferred, despite the bother of a peon preceding – and a second following – him to shoo the citizenry of Batia away from the royal path, to walk the distance. In any case, at the junction of Durga Tank Crossing and Temple Road, he invariably descended from the jeep to stroll the remaining few hundred metres, never failing to warn Manjhi to crawl in first gear and retain his thumb on the horn because, as he explained to the grinning driver, he didn't want to be sitting in the jeep when it ran over one of the dozens of devotees who used the route as a short cut to the temple.
The Civil Lines area of Batia, dating from the time of the creation of the sub-division, was some seventy years old; the Dayasagar Adinath temple, at the summit of the knoll behind it, a little over a thousand. Circa 900 AD the man in charge of the local archaeological office said, attributable to one of the last Yadava kings. 'Architecturally not very significant, though it does attract sir, as you will see, thousands of pilgrims every year.'
Almost all of whom, from the railway station and the bus depot, found it most convenient to trudge up to the hospices on the hillock by way of Temple Road. In the past, though, the blessing of this facility had been available to them only sporadically. Before 1947, every now and then, some irate Sub-Divisional Magistrate (with the approval of his District Collector, of course), fed up with the trickle, throughout the day and throughout the year, of the faithful outside his bungalow – and moreover, one that swelled to a stream every April and October – would put up a board at the mouth of the road that read (in English), No Thoroughfare, and post a sentry in a tent alongside the notice, round the clock, whose duty it would be to encourage the devotees to trudge further down Durga Tank Crossing, past Subzi Mandi, and turn right at Chhindwara Gate to take Company Bagh Road to the temple hillock. A mere five kilometres more – not even – nothing, a trifle, if gauged as an expression of the depth of their faith.