Qasim Ali saw Johnny Cigar standing close to the hut, and pushed his way through the silent crowd to join him.
"What's happening?" he demanded.
"Joseph is drunk," Johnny replied sourly, spitting noisily in the direction of the hut. "The bahinchudh has been bashing his wife all morning."
"All morning? How long has this been going on?"
"Three hours, maybe longer. I just got here myself. The others told me about it. That's why I sent for you, Qasimbhai."
Qasim Ali drew his brows together in a fierce frown, and stared angrily into Johnny's eyes.
"This is not the first time that Joseph has beaten his wife. Why didn't you stop it?"
"I..." Johnny began, but he couldn't hold the stare, and he looked down at the stony ground at their feet. There was a kind of rage in him, and he looked close to tears. "I'm not afraid of him! I'm not afraid of any man here! You know that! But, they are ... they are... she is his wife..."
The slum-dwellers lived in a dense, crowded proximity. The most intimate sounds and movements of their lives entwined, constantly, each with every other. And like people everywhere, they were reluctant to interfere in what we usually call domestic disputes, even when those so-called disputes became violent.
Qasim Ali reached out and put a compassionate hand on Johnny's shoulder to calm him, and commanded that he stop Joseph's violence at once. Just then a new burst of shouting and blows came from the house, followed by a harrowing scream.
Several of us stepped forward, determined to put a stop to the beating. Suddenly, the flimsy door of the hut crashed open, and Joseph's wife fell through the doorway and fainted at our feet.
She was naked. Her long hair was wildly knotted and matted with blood. She'd been cruelly beaten with some kind of stick, and blue-red welts crossed and slashed her back, buttocks, and legs.
The crowd flinched and recoiled in horror. They were as affected by her nakedness, I knew, as they were by the terrible wounds on her body. I was affected by it myself. In those years, nakedness was like a secret religion in India. No-one but the insane or the sacred was ever publicly naked. Friends in the slum told me with unaffected honesty that they'd been married for years and had never seen their own wives naked. We were all stricken with pity for Joseph's wife, and shame passed among us, burning our eyes.
A shout came from the hut then, and Joseph stumbled through the doorway. His cotton pants were stained with urine, and his T-shirt was torn and filthy. Wild, stupid drunkenness twisted his features. His hair was dishevelled, and blood stained his face.
The bamboo stick he'd used to beat his wife was still in his hands. He squinted in the sunlight, and then his blurred gaze fell on his wife's body, lying face down between himself and the crowd. He cursed her, and took a step forward, raising the stick to strike her again.
The shock that had paralysed us escaped in a collective gasp, and we rushed forward to stop him. Surprisingly, little Prabaker was the first to reach Joseph, and he grappled with the much bigger man, pushing him backwards. The stick was wrenched from Joseph's hand, and he was held down on the ground. He thrashed and screamed, a string of violent curses spilling with the drool from his lips. A few women came forward, wailing as if in mourning.
They covered Joseph's wife with a yellow silk sari, lifted her, and carried her away.
The crowd might've become a lynch mob, then, but Qasim Ali took charge of the scene immediately. He ordered the people to disperse, or stand back, and he told the men who were holding Joseph to keep him pinned on the ground. His next command astonished me. I thought he might call for the police, or have Joseph taken away. Instead, he asked what alcohol Joseph had been drinking, and demanded that two bottles of it be brought to him.
He also called for charras and a chillum, and told Johnny Cigar to prepare a smoke. When the rough, home-brewed alcohol, known as daru, was produced, he instructed Prabaker and Jeetendra to force Joseph to drink.
They sat Joseph in a circle of strong, young men, and offered him one of the bottles. He glared at them suspiciously for a few moments, but then snatched the bottle and took a long, greedy swig. The young men around him patted him on the back, encouraging him to drink more. He gulped down more of the extremely powerful daru and then tried to push it away, saying that he'd had enough. The young men became forceful in their coaxing. They laughed and joked with him, holding the bottle to his lips and driving it between his teeth. Johnny Cigar lit the chillum, and passed it to Joseph. He smoked and drank and smoked again. Then, some twenty minutes after he'd first stumbled from the hut with the bloody stick in his hand, Joseph dipped his head and passed out cold on the rubble-strewn path.
