A Sensational Story – R. Sreejith Varma 

The man wearing a chequered blue shirt and grey lungi spoke to a gaggle of reporters, who thrust their microphones toward him as if offering folded umbrellas. He spoke in a timid, quiet voice, his eyes flitting from one reporter to another in a gesture of inexplicable apology. He appeared to be in his fifties, with broad shoulders and sturdy arms, with the absence of a paunch attesting to his physical strength. A boy of seven or eight, orbited around him, repeatedly sticking his tongue out from the background, hoping the man wouldn’t suddenly turn around and spank him on TV.

To the man’s right stood a petite reporter in her twenties, wearing torn blue jeans and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Russian Doll.’ She was careful not to accidentally touch him as she extended her left arm holding the microphone. She craned her neck, glaring fiercely at the boy and then turned to her cameraman to signal her annoyance. The cameraman, however, didn’t notice her. He was eyeing the young woman in a nightie walking towards the veranda carrying a steel plate with six cups of black coffee. She gave the cameraman a knowing smile, set the plate on a shaky wooden stool, and walked back inside with unhurried strides.

‘So you were asleep when this happened?’ the lady reporter asked, her voice carrying a hint of insult. Its whiny tone seemed to startle the man for a moment.

‘Yes, it was past midnight’, he said regaining his composure.

The lady reporter nodded and wondered what she should ask next.

‘Can you take us to the shed?’ the male reporter spotting a goatee asked. He scanned the faces of the others to see if they thought he sounded too excited.

‘Of course’, the man mumbled before sprinting to his right, where a run-down concrete construction stood with an asbestos roof. A Deccani mother goat and a frail baby goat stood at the far back, and they seemed petrified at the sudden presence of an audience. The twenty-inch gap between the top of the wall and the roof made the story plausible. The cameramen circled the shed to capture a full 360-degree shot. The boy let out a bleat mimicking the goats to get them going, but they stood motionless and gawked around in a bewildered, stupid manner.

‘Sumathy, the one that got killed, has been taken to the vet for an autopsy,’ the man said with pronounced grief.

‘So, is it a tiger or a leopard or a fox?’ the lady reporter asked again. The other male reporter, clean-shaven and carrying a blood-red cloth bag, turned to her with a look of conviction. ‘Come on, it must only be a fox,’ he seemed to be telling her.

‘We don’t know. We don’t have CCTV cameras installed. And as you know, the next house is a kilometre away,’ the man said exposing his both palms and not trying to hide the triumph in his voice.

‘OK, that’s it,’ the goatee-spotting reporter yelled, and everybody was convinced they were done for the day. The cameramen slipped their equipment into their bags as the reporters milled around quietly, having lost the purpose of their existence.

‘Please have some coffee,’ the man said tentatively and ushered them back to the veranda.

‘So, what are you expecting?’, the lady reporter asked him as she consumed tiny sips of coffee.

The man seemed startled again by her voice and stared at her incredulously.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, from the government. Didn’t you get any call?’

‘Oh, the government,’ the man repeated and paused to take a good swig from his cup.

‘The Panchayat President called, of course. The police and the forest guys came and collected the details’, he resumed, but the lady reporter interrupted. ‘No, I was asking about the compensation you must be getting. Did they tell you about it?’

The man scrutinized the faces looking back at him expectantly. These people, except for a cameraman whom he knew, are clearly city-slickers in Western outfits speaking a blend of Malayalam and English. This lady reporter must be working for an English news channel. If she isn’t, then she should as she belongs there. Do they think the government compensation for a dead baby goat is undeserved? Are they jealous?   

‘No, but I think I must be eligible for the market price’, he said.

‘Which is…?’ the reporter with the goatee dithered.

‘Six or seven thousand rupees,’ the man responded with annoyance.

‘I see,’ the clean-shaven one muttered, impulsively smacking the hand of the boy trying to unzip his cloth bag. He nervously glanced at the man to check if he noticed slapping the boy. He hadn’t.

‘OK, we’re leaving,’ said the lady reporter, her lips giving only a suggestion of a smile without warmth, and she started climbing down the steps. The cameraman’s eyes darted into the house for the nightie-clad girl, but she didn’t emerge. The men too left, their heads hanging down as if lost in pensive thoughts.

 

2

‘Look at me, your husband starting animal husbandry,’ he had laughed inordinately long at his own joke that evening, two years ago, as he trudged home pulling a mother goat and her two kids by a coir rope. His matronly wife stood staring from the house’s threshold, making a knot in the pallu of her cheap cotton sari, her expression unsmiling as ever. For the purpose of narration, let’s call the man ‘Sudhakaran’ though the story would also work if he remained nameless.

Sudhakaran bought the goats from the Sunday market after spending a lifetime trying out a legion of jobs to fend for his family. He was once an insurance agent, an ice cream vendor on a bicycle, a door-to-door salesman of steel and aluminum kitchen utensils, and a salesman at a grocery store. Sudhakaran’s failures were never due to a lack of perseverance, grit, and positive thinking, as self-help books often insisted. He was one of those men whom other people would undeniably wish not to become. His job was always on the line – his insurance company would go bankrupt, parents would stop buying locally-made ice cream for their children from vendors on bicycles, and simple people would turn incredibly clever in haggling.

‘I’m the opposite of King Midas’, he insisted to his wife Komala. You could be the sincerest hard worker, but what if the world decided not to reward you? Being an atheist, he never called it ‘God’s will’ though his wife suspected it might be the case. ‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ Komala always responded with such truisms, but this specific one often left him feeling miffed.

Sudhakaran would wake up at 5: 30 AM to milk the mother goat. Although he had hoped his wife would take on this chore, she plainly refused. Before bedtime, he separated the kids from the mother to prevent them from emptying the udders at night. After collecting a tumbler full of milk, he quickly cleaned the shed, gathered the pellets, and left them at the base of the rose, chrysanthemum, and balsam plants in the front yard. By six o’clock he was ready for his bath after which he set out on his bicycle to distribute the milk in five or six houses within a six-kilometre radius.

After breakfast, he walked around his backyard where he grew pepper, plantains, bitter gourd, and other plants whose seeds he had obtained for free from the local agricultural office or friends. After lunch, he would curl up on his bed for a nap following which he would repeat the routine of milking the goat and then venture out with the milk bottles for distribution in the opposite direction of the road.

Days changed into uneventful nights until, one day, his neighbor, whose house was located one kilometer away on the right, told him about chickens disappearing from his farm every night. He didn’t ask, unlike the local reporters, ‘Are you sure you counted them correctly?’ because he knew a farm owner would never miscount. He stroked his stubble and thought for a minute as his neighbor added, covering his diminishing farm in a sweep of palm: ‘There’s no noise or commotion. It’s uncanny’.  Sudhakaran felt as if he had entered the world of a mystery novel, and it was exciting.

3

Anandita, the young woman in the nightie, was running after a calico cat that had strayed into the kitchen in search of milk or a piece of fried sardine when she heard her phone buzzing. She abandoned the chase and stepped into her bedroom. It was a text message containing just a smiley from S.M. She pondered it for a moment and typed, ‘Reached office?’ As she looked up, Anandita noticed the boy’s head popping through the door, making a face that hinted he knew what she was up to. ‘It’s your science teacher. She says you failed the test again,’ Anandita yelled. The boy immediately vamoosed, not wanting another slap that day.

‘On my way,’ S.M. wrote back, ‘Stopped by my house. Would have been rude, otherwise. Introduced my colleagues to my father & the farm, of course (:)).’

Anandita nodded as if S.M. was looking at her in expectation. ‘Do u think ur colleagues bought it?’ she asked.

‘They bought it big time (laughing face). It’ll be aired this evening under the title, “Leopard Unleashes Terror in Village”’.

The woman sent a thumbs-up and then sat on her bed, wondering if what they had done was stupid.

She recalled his phone call from an afternoon a month ago when S.M. sounded as if he was winded after a marathon. S.M. was Sethu Madhavan. She was afraid her father might check her phone and discover Sethu Madhavan’s number saved on it. ‘I think I’m screwed,’ he gasped.

‘What gives?’, she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

‘I just had a meeting with Vinod’, he began. Vinod was his boss. ‘You know, a few of us are on probation. The boss thinks we’re not bringing enough to the table. Apparently, our stories aren’t interesting enough. He says he may have to make some “tough decisions” if we don’t “crank it up a notch”’.

That was rough. ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be OK. Hopefully, you’ll get some interesting story soon,’ Anandita paused, and then added, ‘I’m going to the temple in the evening. I’ll pray for you.’ He went on for a bit longer, bitching about the saturation of the news channels with the surge of online news portals, before disconnecting.

For the next two weeks, S.M. and his team ran around covering stories of an old woman who was denied pension for months, a fire in a textile showroom, a theft in a jewelry store, and the arrest of a kidnapper. As it turned out, Vinod was hard to please. In a last-ditch attempt, S.M. turned to Anandita once again.

‘I was thinking,’ S.M. began haltingly as he met Anandita a week ago at the crowded K.S.R.T.C. bus stand, standing behind a chipped cement pillar to avoid drawing public attention.

‘What if I did a story about a wild animal, say a tiger or a leopard, straying into the village? Human-nature conflict is of consequence. I could provoke activists, NGOs, the government, and even Vinod.’ S.M.’s lips curled into a sardonic smile. Anandita had known him well enough to notice that he involuntarily used formal words when he was nervous.

‘There’s potential there. But have you heard such a story recently?’, Anandita asked.

‘Nope. And that’s the problem’, S.M. said, ‘But, I’ve a plan.’

4

 Anandita had only one duty: once Sudhakaran had closed the goat shed and gone to sleep, she was to come outside and leave the door open again. However, she was shaking like a leaf and felt like she might drop down any minute, possibly dying drowning in her own sweat.

That night, Sudhakaran sat down for his dinner a little later than usual. After a meal of rice gruel, cooked green grams, and tapioca curry, he headed to the goat shed and knelt down for a quick inspection. The baby goats were cuddling with their mama, and he thought they looked cute. ‘Sumathy and Vasumathy, come here’, he yelled, although the baby goats didn’t move. He yanked at their rope collars and separated them from their mother. He had never felt good about the act. Scenes of separation from his childhood flashed before them every night when he separated the baby goats from their mother. Memories of the day he was asked to sleep in another room because ‘the mother was carrying again’, his first day at school when he was shocked to learn that his mother would join him again only at 4 PM, and the morning he found her in bed, not waking up at the usual 5 AM.

After tying the baby goats to a pole, Sudhakaran closed the wooden doors of the shed and went straight to his room to sleep. Anandita was in her room, sleeplessly waiting for midnight and receiving a missed call from S.M. She lay on her back in her old, inexpensive bed and thought about her meeting with S.M. and his father near his farm.

‘It’s indeed quite a little scam we’re doing,’ S.M.’s father told her, as he threw some chicken feed into a blue plastic container near the entrance of the aviary. Lines in his temple narrowed when he spoke as if he was just about to break into laughter. ‘I have never done anything like this, but Sethu can’t lose his job. He needs a sensational story’, S.M.’s father paused for a moment, chuckled, and then placed his left hand on Anandita’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, I know what’s going on between you two,’ he said quietly as though he didn’t want S.M. to hear it. She smiled nervously and shot a glance at S.M. He looked pensive, perhaps worried about the execution of his plan upon which his career depended. Anandita looked around and saw two workers carrying a plastic sack, probably containing fertilizers for the coconut trees, to the back of the house. It was the first time she was standing in S.M.’s front yard as an adult. The last time she was there was when S.M.’s mother died. Anandita had gone with her mother and sat on a wooden bench in their veranda. Back then, there was a rumor that S.M.’s father kicked his wife in the abdomen and killed her. As Anandita looked at the smiling old man staring into her eyes with affection, she wondered if the rumor was true.

S.M. informed them that he knew the local veterinarian who would take care of the autopsy. ‘OK, then. That’s it,’ S.M.’s father said as if that was a signal for Anandita to leave. Suddenly, Anandita’s phone came alive. A missed call from S.M. It meant he and his partner were waiting near the gate. The time was 12: 05. She stepped outside her room and unlocked the front door. She was literally walking on her toes to the gate as she opened it and let the men in. S.M.’s partner was a bearded man wearing a black polo shirt and a green lungi. She hadn’t seen him in the neighborhood before. He looked around the house shiftily which made Anandita more anxious.

‘The shed is on the side’, Anandita said, ushering them towards it. The night was moonless, and were it not for the S.M.’s phone torch, they would have bumped into things and woken up Sudhakaran. Anandita unbolted the shed’s door and found Sumathy and Vasumathy sleeping. The mother goat opened her eyes and appeared relieved it was only Anandita. She looked at the mother goat and mumbled a quick apology. She would have hugged her too, if time wasn’t at a premium. Anandita took Sumathy out and handed it to S.M. ‘Make it quick; she is a baby,’ Anandita said, her eyes moistening as she spoke. S.M. grunted a yes and passed the goat to his partner. Anandita quickly ran up the steps and bolted the front door as the men disappeared into the darkness behind the house, leading Sumathy and carrying something shiny in their hands.

R. Sreejith Varma is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2018. He writes in both English and Malayalam, his first language. His poems in English have previously been published in the journals New Writing (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, Postcolonial Text, Spill Words, and Kritya. His short story titled ‘The Girl Named Bhumi’ was published in The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment & Culture in Canada. His poems in Malayalam have been published in Kalakaumudi weekly, Pacha Malayalam magazine, True Copy webzine, Mathrubhumi Online, Manorama Online, We the People Live, Kalapoornna magazine and The Arteria. He won the Poorna-Uroob award for the best short story in Malayalam in 2007. Along with Swarnalatha Rangarajan, he is the translator of Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (2018), published by Orient Blackswan, which chronicles the life of Mayilamma, the tribal woman leader of the Plachimada anti-Coca-Cola campaign in Kerala, India