Qasim Ali stood, and approached the circle. It was the moment he’d waited for, and he nodded to Veejay, who brought a dish of warm water, soap, and two towels from a nearby hut. The same men who’d been beating Joseph cradled him in their arms, then, and washed his face, neck, hands, and feet. They gave him water. They combed his hair. They soothed him with hugs and the first kind words he’d heard since the beginning of his chastisement. They told him that if he were genuinely sorry he would be forgiven, and given help. Many people were brought forward, myself included, and Joseph was made to touch our feet. They dressed him in a clean shirt, and propped him up, their arms and shoulders supporting him tenderly. Qasim Ali squatted close to him, and stared into his bloodshot eyes.
‘Your wife, Maria, is not dead,’ Qasim Ali said softly.
‘Not… not dead?’ he mumbled.
‘No, Joseph, she is not dead. She is very badly injured, but she is alive.’
‘Thank God, thank God.’
‘The women of your family, and Maria’s family, have decided what is to be done,’ Qasim said slowly, firmly. ‘Are you sorry-do you know what you have done to your wife, and are you sorry for it?’
‘Yes, Qasimbhai,’ Joseph wept. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry.’
‘The women have decided that you must not see Maria for two months. She is very ill. You almost killed her, and she must take two months to recover. In this time, you will work every day. You will work long hours and hard. You will save your money. You will not drink even one drop of daru or beer or anything but water. Do you understand? No chai or milk or anything but water. You must observe this fast, as part of your punishment.’
Joseph wagged his head feebly.
‘Yes, yes. I will.’
‘Maria may decide not to take you back. You must know this also. She may want to divorce you, even after the two months-and if she does, I will help her in this. But at the end of two months, if she wants to accept you again, you will use the money you have saved by this extra hard work, and you will take her on a holiday to the cool mountains. During retreat in that place, with your wife, you will face this ugliness in yourself, and you will try to overcome it.
Qasim stood, turned, and walked away. Joseph’s friends helped him to his feet, and half-carried him to his hut. The hut had been cleaned, and all of Maria’s clothes and personal articles had been removed. Joseph was given rice and dhal. He ate a little of it, and then lay back on his thin mattress. Two friends sat near him, and fanned his unconscious body with green paper fans. A cord was tied around one end of the bloody stick, and Johnny Cigar suspended it from a post outside Joseph’s hut for all to see. It would remain there for the two months of Joseph’s further punishment.
Someone turned a radio on in a hut not far away, and a Hindi love song wailed through the lanes and gullies of the busy slum. A child was crying somewhere. Chickens scratched and pecked at the place where Joseph’s circle of torment had been. Somewhere else, a woman was laughing, children played, the bangle-seller sang out his enticement-call in Marathi.
As the pulse and push of normal life returned to the slum, I walked back to my hut, through the winding lanes. Fishermen and fisherwomen were coming home from Sassoon Dock, bringing baskets of sea-smell with them. In one of those balancing contrasts of slum life, it was also the hour chosen by the incense-sellers to move through the lanes, burning their samples of sandalwood, jasmine, rose, and patchouli.
I thought about what I’d seen that day, what the people did for themselves in their tiny city of twenty-five thousand souls, without policemen, judges, courts, and prisons. I thought about something Qasim Ali had said, weeks before, when the two boys, Faroukh and Raghuram, had presented themselves for punishment, having spent a day tied together in work at the latrine. After they’d scrubbed themselves clean with a hot bucket-bath, and dressed in new lungis and clean, white singlets, the two boys stood before an assembly of their families, friends, and neighbours. Lamplights fluttered in the breeze, passing the golden gleam from eye to eye, as shadows chased one another across the reed-mat walls of the huts. Qasim Ali pronounced the punishment that had been decided upon by a council of Hindu and Muslim friends and neighbours. Their punishment, for fighting about religion, was that each had to learn one complete prayer from the religious observances of the other.
