Kori's Chronicles

 

We called him Kori but his real name was Vinod. His mother was from our village and he came visiting his maternal granny’s house during school vacations.

Those were slow-paced times. We got our lessons in animal care and kindness through simple norms and traditions. When stray female dogs in the streets gave birth to puppies, we would prepare nice little kennels for them using paddy haylofts. As the canine lady in labor rested, in the evenings we set out on a sort of alms-asking sortie on behalf of her. The group of children would hold an earthen pot, bowl or basin, little fingers holding the rim from all sides and there we went yelling in front of closed doors, raising a ruckus. People would offer chapattis, subzi, curd, buttermilk, millet khichdi and other rustic attempts at cooking a supper. All of it would be dumped in the same container to make it a heady cocktail of a canine supper. It would acquire a unique flavor as layers of different items entered the recipe.

Kori was involved in one such sortie. He loved bajra khichdi and buttermilk to along with it. It was a winter night. Those were the days when the streets were dark after the sunset and electricity arrived just in name, so most of the houses had candles and kerosene lamps. Kori must have felt very hungry. On top of that, his favorite dish was in the pot. He was draped in a shawl and in the dark helped himself with plenty of handfuls of buttermilk laced bajra khichdi. In fact, he chucked it out clean. So this part of the collective food went missing.

Standing in front of a door from where the incharge boy tilted the basin to check whether the collection was sufficient. To his puzzlement, the khichdi part of the canine supper was missing. It was pretty spooky and left us wondering about some ghost taking it away. We had a scary discussion about ghosts stealing bajra khichdi. Kori played a lead role in spreading the spooky tales about certain djins and prets who loved this food as his grandfather had told him.  

A few days later, having nicely digested the khichdi, but unable to digest the secret, Kori told me, on promise of keeping it a secret of course, that he had availed himself with that part because he liked it and we were late for dinner that day. Commendably, he had managed it very smartly, even though it was dark, from a basin that was held by many fingers.

Once, during some other summertime school break, he arrived at his granny’s place. Driven by his curiosity about his anatomy, he had an injured hung. So he couldn’t use his pants. He wore a lungi. Moreover, his rubber slippers went sailing down the village canal during one of the fun-bathing episodes, leaving him the option of wearing his maternal uncle’s leather boots that were double his size. In a lungi and double-sized black boots, he looked the kingpin of local goons. This, and his injured hung, gave him the walk of a teasing swag, a kind of flirtatious swaying gait. An old woman next door took it to her heart. He turned an eyesore to her and she cracked jibes at him. ‘He hardly has any legs in his bum but look at his attitude,’ she would say loudly whenever Kori passed her house.

With an injured pride, and injured hung, Kori resolved to take a revenge. He started relieving himself—in both solid and fluvial sense—on their own roof. When his granny found the roof turned into an open toilet, Kori pointed out the enemy old woman, saying he had seen her scaling the low parapet dividing their roofs and performing the relieving rites. But his granny cackled with laughter. Much concerned, Kori asked, ‘Why, you don’t believe me? Then whom do you suspect?’ ‘I don’t just suspect but I have full knowledge that it’s you. It’s a boy’s poop of your age beta,’ she spoke wisely. So the attempt at taking revenge failed.