Nanju's bete noire

On this day a couple of years ago, when I met Ananda, my friend and occasional philosopher-cum-guide, he was all excited. ‘Sir, you remember Nanjundappa?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I remember him,’I said; he has worked occasionally at Random Rubble and is one of those silent sorts with wide open sparsely populated spaces between his ears.

‘Sir, a leopard bit him!’ he said and sat back with satisfaction at seeing the shock on my face.
It turns out that on an earlier day, the leopard had picked up one of Nanjundappa’s lambs and returned this day for another. The man heard the commotion in the pen, rushed out and charged at the leopard. In the ensuing melee, the leopard dropped a lamb and bit Nanju on his palm and then bolted away.

It was a nasty bite, deep and bloody. Now, the thing you expect to read next is that Nanju was rushed to the hospital but then he, as with many others in Doddi, his hamlet, has never visited one in his life and wasn’t about to grace the premises of an Emergency ward with his Divine Presence now and the only thing more daunting than a leopard that bites is a doctor who injects (old jungle saying). So he tore out some old cloth and wrapped it around a heavily bleeding palm and then wondered how he’d manage the excruciating pain.
And then an idea struck him.

So Nanju and his friend then headed out to the local bar about four km away and tucked in a robust round of pegs of potent intestine-churning stuff like PowerBolt, Napolean 65 and BigBang 10000, which meant that in about half an hour, he was pain-free, sozzled to his gills, seeing two bottles where there were none and leopards behind the grill on the counter. He was, to use Ananda’s immortal words, ‘Full tightu, saar.’

Which is the condition in which Ananda and a couple of forest guards, who had been informed, found him. They took a most reluctant Nanju in the jeep to a clinic but the doctor – quite rightly – refused to inject a pain-killer into a guy who was seeing two leopards where one doctor stood, and asked them to go to the Government hospital. At which point, Nanju did what these strong, silent types do when they are plastered to their pinkies: he gave everyone present and voting a piece of his mind - that tiny piece that was still left inside the cranium. In most colourful language, he cast grave doubts on everyone’s ancestry and their parents’ marital status, and continued the performance in the hospital until the effects of PowerBolt + Nap 65 + BB 10000 had worn off.

All in all, he lost about two litres of blood (after we deduct the sales tax in the narration). He was then sent back to Doddi and was taken everyday for an injection and told that, if he so much as breathed BigBang 10000 in, he would be locked up in hospital with a leopard or two for company and, if leopards couldn’t be found, doctors - the kind who carry sutures and thread and sing praises of the devil - would substitute.

I met him the other day in front of his ragi field; the stalks were tall and handsome and richly productive and he proudly told me that he guarded it all night from the machan on top of a nearby tree from elephants and wild boar and the odd nocturnal writer, the keen scrutiny no doubt aided by a generous helping of Napolean 65.

His hand has healed well and the leopard, having learnt that you do not mess with some, has moved to greener pastures (which, you will - one hopes - understand, is an idiom and not a suggestion of a cathartic change in diet).

Now, if this story does not have the happy ending you often dream for, which one does?