With the gunfire the men in my logging crew dropped their tools and ran toward me. Yes! They had been there all along. “What is it?” they cried. “An elephant? A leopard.” I looked at them in disbelief. Hadn’t they seen it? The fog? The girl? They looked among one another. “Where did you go?” I shouted. “Where have you been?” They grew reticent. Their expressions were knowing and wary. “We’re here,” one said. “Where?” I replied. “We go no farther” came the answer. One of the other guards spoke up. “Let me see your gun,” he said. “It looks like it jammed.” With that the gun was snatched from my hands, and not a moment later I was being grabbed from all sides, pulled toward a tree, and lashed to its trunk by heavy rope. A gag was tied around my mouth. Another round my eyes. I couldn’t move, see, or scream. I could only hear the men marching away until the silence of the forest returned. I’m being sacrificed, I said in my mind. And then footsteps. Footsteps approached through the forest floor. Coming closer. Until they stopped before me and I heard steady breathing and hot breath, and I shivered as I heard my name emitted from the depths of a stranger’s chest.
“Sunil Rastogi,” it said. “So you’re the man who will not die.”
And his hands peeled back the rag that covered my eyes.
17.
That was the last thing I remembered. I woke up four days later, lying beside a canal among the beggars in a market town I didn’t know, dressed in tattered clothing, covered in my own filth, an empty liquor bottle in my hand. My feet were raw, my body bruised. It was the middle of the day, the sun beat down. The market was lively and I was ignored, taken for a drunk, a madman. A crone without legs howled at me. I staggered up and on in agony. As I hobbled, trying to remember what had brought me to this place, I stopped to examine my face in the mirror of a bike. I almost jumped out of my skin. My cheeks had been clawed, my lips had burned and blistered. I had aged, it seemed, many years. What I saw was the man you see now. I knew in that instant; something had been taken away from me. Something here, in my head. Here, in my heart. Even down here, in my balls. I tried so hard to recall how I ended up this way. All I could remember was my name. Sunil Rastogi. But I was not myself. I was not the man I used to be. I was penniless and haunted. Without luck. I tried to beg, and I was spat on. I tried so hard to beg, and I was beaten by the cops. Left to bleed. I crawled through ditches. I was bitten by stray dogs. Me! Me? No . . . there was no me. I had been hollowed out. I escaped at night and walked through fields. I slept in temples and old buildings. But I couldn’t bear to be around men. I took to sleeping in the wild. I hated sleeping at all. Sleep was full of monsters. Even when I was awake, I felt something watching me behind the lids of my eyes. But when I tried to understand what had happened, my brain fell into darkness. I could only see life out of the corner of my eye. I knew I had to flee.
18.
But flee where? The only place I could think was west, all the way back home, back where everything started. You have to understand, Sunny Wadia, I was desperate in that moment, desperate and afraid. The amnesia that haunted me was the worst of all. But what’s that you’re thinking? Wasn’t home just as unsafe? Weren’t they waiting to arrest me there? It was possible. But at the same time, I doubted it. The only one who knew me as a criminal was Madam-Sir. But to protect herself, she would never have uttered my name. Besides, it seemed to me that years had passed, that old sins had been forgotten. No, I would go back home, show humility, take my family land. Live a life of solitude and simple work. This thought sustained me as I begged and stole my way west. Several weeks later I arrived. Imagine my surprise, Sunny Wadia, when I reached Greater Noida and came to find all the farmland gone, whole villages erased, huge apartment complexes rising, and mansions for former farmers springing up from the soil. With some difficulty I located the place where I had been born, found the village house had been replaced by a compound with tall metal gates and video cameras on top. I called my uncle’s name; there was no reply. I pressed the buzzer on the gatepost and a voice buzzed back. Who was I? What did I want? If I didn’t leave they’d come out with the dogs. Even though I was no longer wearing rags, I looked a sorry state in that grand light. One part of me wanted to turn and leave. Another said no, this is your land. In my indecision, a door within the gate burst open, and one of my young cousins stepped out, dressed in a shiny suit, sunglasses, big watch, wielding a huge American gun. Ah, I said, so it runs in the family! What are you talking about, crazy man? I asked him if he didn’t recognize me. Especially since he was standing on the place of my birth. He told me to get lost or he’d shoot me. I managed to smile at that. I am your cousin, I said. “Sunil?” I heard a woman’s voice behind him. It was my brother’s widow. Plump and covered in jewelry and dressed in jeans! She had a queenlike manner, she was in charge of the home now . . . my loins burned on seeing her, my heart raged . . .