Chapter 1: The Boy on the Farm

Jagat — 1994, Age 10

The walk home from school followed the same dirt road every day—two kilometres of packed earth and loose gravel that wound from the government school in Waknaghat through the pine forest and past the apple orchards before arriving at the Thakur farmhouse, which sat at the end of the road like a sentence that had been started by his great-grandfather and never properly finished.

The house was large—built in the colonial hill-station style that the British had introduced to Himachal Pradesh and that the Thakur family had adopted with modifications: a two-storey timber-and-stone structure with a sloped tin roof that sang in the monsoon, a wooden verandah that wrapped around three sides like an embrace, and the particular blend of grandeur and decay that characterised buildings built for large families and inherited by small ones. His great-grandparents had built it hoping for many grandchildren. They had produced one son, who had produced one son, who had produced Jagat.

The road was Jagat's territory. He knew it the way a mapmaker knows a coastline—every contour, every deviation, every feature catalogued and committed to the specific memory that solitary children develop when they walk the same path every day with no one to talk to. The ditch on the left, where the monsoon runoff collected in July and bred mosquitoes the size of small aircraft. The rabbit burrows on the right, concealed beneath the wild grass, visible only if you knew where to look and stepped carefully. The wildflowers on the left side—marigold, chamomile, the blue flax that his mother used for poultices—and on the right, the other flowers. The ones his mother had shown him in her books and told him never to touch.

Dhatura, with its white trumpet flowers and spiny seed pods. Kaner—oleander—pink and sweet-smelling and capable, according to Maa's book, of stopping a human heart with a single leaf boiled in chai. Aconite—the purple-hooded flower that grew in the higher elevations and that Maa called meetha zeher, sweet poison, because its roots tasted sweet and killed in hours. These flowers grew on the right side of the road in what appeared to be random clusters but which Jagat would later understand were planted rows—someone, perhaps his great-grandfather, had cultivated them with the deliberate attention of a man who understood that the line between medicine and murder was a question of dosage.

But that understanding was later. Today, Jagat was ten years old, and the thing that occupied his mind was not flowers but Dhruv Rawat.

Dhruv Rawat was twelve, two years older than Jagat and approximately a lifetime ahead in the developmental currency that mattered at the government school in Waknaghat: height, weight, the ability to intimidate. He was the son of the Block Development Officer—a position that in Himachali small towns conferred the specific authority of a man who controlled government contracts and was therefore feared by everyone who wanted a road repaired, a ration card issued, or a land dispute resolved in their favour. Dhruv had inherited his father's understanding of power—that it existed to be exercised, and that the exercise of power over someone weaker was not cruelty but practice.

The bullying had started in Class 3, when Jagat was seven. It had begun with words—chooha (mouse), ladki (girl), kamzor (weakling)—and progressed, with the systematic escalation that characterised sustained campaigns, to physical acts: the shoulder shove in the corridor, the kicked schoolbag, the hair pull behind the water tank where the teachers couldn't see, the spit on the back of the neck during assembly that Jagat had wiped away with his hand and that had felt, on his skin, not like saliva but like a brand.

Jagat told no one. Not because he lacked the language—he was, despite everything, an articulate child, the kind who read his mother's books and spoke Hindi with the precise grammar that his father insisted upon at the dinner table. He told no one because telling required an audience that would act, and the adults in Waknaghat did not act against the BDO's son. His father—Mahendra Thakur, apple farmer, a man whose silence was not stoicism but exhaustion, whose days began at 4 AM in the orchard and ended at 9 PM with the accounts book and the specific worry of a man whose livelihood depended on weather and wholesale prices and neither was reliable—had said, when Jagat once mentioned that a boy at school was mean: "Stay away from him. Keep your head down. We don't make enemies."

His mother—Suman Thakur, the woman who knew flowers, who kept a kitchen garden of herbs and a shelf of Ayurvedic texts and who treated the village's minor ailments with tulsi and ashwagandha and the calm competence of a woman who had been a nurse before she married a farmer—had said: "Some boys are like that. They grow out of it. Be patient."

Be patient. The instruction of adults who had never been ten years old and cornered behind a water tank by a twelve-year-old who called you chooha and spat on the back of your neck.

Kavya Sharma arrived in Waknaghat in October, when the apple harvest was at its peak and the hillside orchards were the specific red-and-green of a landscape that appeared on the tourism department's posters and that the residents of Waknaghat experienced not as beauty but as work—crates to be packed, trucks to be loaded, wholesale agents to be negotiated with, the annual economic cycle that determined whether the year would end in modest comfort or modest debt.

She was in Jagat's class—a new admission, which was unusual in a school where most students had been enrolled since nursery and where a new face was an event that disrupted the social ecosystem with the force of a stone dropped into a still pond. She was from Shimla—her father, a forest officer, had been transferred to the Waknaghat range—and she carried the specific confidence of a city girl who had been transplanted to a small town and was not yet aware that the transplanting would be permanent.

"I'm Kavya," she said on her first day, sitting down beside Jagat with the unself-conscious directness of a child who had not yet learned that the seat beside the boy Dhruv called chooha was social exile. "What's your name?"

"Jagat."

"Jagat. Like jagat—the world?"

"My grandfather named me. He said the world was bigger than this road."

She smiled. The smile was genuine—not the practised, social smile of a child performing for adults, but the involuntary smile of a person who had heard something unexpected and liked it. "I like that. My name means poetry. My mother is a Hindi teacher."

They became friends—quickly, the way children become friends when the alternative is loneliness and the friendship is built on the simple, uncomplicated foundation of proximity and mutual need. Kavya needed an ally in an unfamiliar school. Jagat needed a person who did not see him through the lens of three years of Dhruv's campaign. Together, they occupied the front bench (Dhruv and his associates occupied the back), shared tiffins at lunch (her mother's aloo paratha against his mother's siddu, the steamed bread of Himachal that Jagat ate with ghee and green chutney), and walked the two kilometres home together because Kavya's house was on the same road, a kilometre before the Thakur farmhouse.

The friendship changed the arithmetic of Jagat's days. The walk home, which had been a solo passage through territory that was familiar but exposed—Dhruv had never followed him past the school, but the possibility lived in Jagat's body the way an undetonated mine lives in a field—became a shared journey. Kavya talked. Jagat listened. She talked about Shimla (the Mall Road, the ice cream at Baljee's, the monkey that stole her mother's spectacles near Christ Church), and he talked about the farm (the apple varieties, the woodworking shop where his father made chairs in winter, the flowers on both sides of the road that his mother had taught him to identify and that he could now name with the confidence of a boy who had been given knowledge and found in the knowledge a form of power).

"Which ones are poisonous?" Kavya asked one afternoon, looking at the flowers on the right side of the road with the specific curiosity of a child who had been told something dangerous and was interested rather than frightened.

"All of these." Jagat pointed. "Dhatura—the white one—causes hallucinations. Kaner stops the heart. Aconite—that purple one up the hill—is the worst. It kills in hours and there's no antidote."

"How do you know all this?"

"Maa's books. She's a nurse. She says knowing what's dangerous is the first step to being safe."

"Or the first step to being dangerous," Kavya said, and laughed, and Jagat laughed with her, and the laughter carried through the pine-scented afternoon air of the Waknaghat road and dissipated among the trees, and neither of them understood—because they were ten, and ten-year-olds do not understand foreshadowing—that the joke was not a joke.