IT HAD BEEN four or five years since Indir Thakrun had passed away. This was the last month of winter, but temperatures were still quite low. A low fog hung over roads and fields. On the evening of Saraswati Puja, a few men from Contentment had undertaken the ceremonial search for the elusive blue jay. The search took them off the main roads, and deep into the narrow mud tracks that ran through the surrounding woodlands.

One of the group suddenly said, ‘Oh yes, Hori . . . I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you people really given your banana orchard over as surety? Against a loan from that milkman Bhushno?’

The man he addressed was impossible to reconcile with the Horihor from ten years ago. Gone was the lithe young man with the wind in his hair. This Horihor was a middle-aged family man, immersed completely in balancing income and expenses, and lustily battling shopkeepers over the going rate of gourds. His chief source of income these days was in being a travelling collector, going from village to village to cajole taxes out of people for the local landlord. He had also spent some years tracking down all the families that had once accepted his father as the family priest. He had convinced most of them to accept him as their new guru, and received tokens of respect from these families every now and then. Still, his income remained slender. The life of the maverick young wayfarer—one who had watched sunsets from the top of the wall at Chunar fort, spent nights in the bayleaf woods of Kedar, eaten sour oranges straight from the trees at the orchard next to the Shah Quasim Suleimani’s dargah, cooked his own meals beside the river at Dasaswamedh Ghat, and sat next to the molten silver of the ice-cold Alakananda river—now seemed like figments of a distant dream.

This deeply domesticated Horihor was about to turn his head and voice assent, when he was distracted by the absence of someone who should have been at his heels.

‘Where’d the boy go?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Did anyone see . . .? Khoka? KHOKA-A-A!’

Seconds later, a slender, beautiful boy of about six came running out of the fog towards his father.

‘Don’t keep falling behind,’ Horihor admonished. ‘Here, come this way . . . go on, walk ahead of us. And stay on the track!’

The child didn’t seem at all perturbed by the telling-off. He was entranced by the foggy mysteriousness of the winter woods. ‘What was that thing in the last bush, Baba?’ he asked. ‘The one with the large floppy ears?’

Horihor didn’t respond. He was busy making fishing plans with Nobin Palit.

‘O Baba,’ the child asked again, determined to know. ‘What was that thing that ran out of the bush? The thing with the large ears?’

‘I don’t know, son, do I?’ said Horihor, annoyed. ‘This is the trouble with bringing you along. It’s always “What is this?” and “What is that?” from the moment we step outside. Come now, don’t dawdle.’

Undeterred by the admonishment, the child happily kept pace with the adults.

‘Tell you what, Horihor,’ continued Nobin Palit. ‘If you’re serious, let’s go to Bainsha’s Lake one day. Eastside’s Nepal Parui is renting out boats. A forty to sixty kilo haul, easily. No fish below at least a kilo, so they say. And sometimes, you know, late at night? “Shnaa shnaaa!” from the middle of the lake. Just like a calf wailing for its mother . . . know what I mean?’

Several of the men gathered close. Fishing had just taken a juicy turn.

‘Bainsha is an ancient lake, you see,’ continued Nobin Palit. ‘Deep waters. Black like the middle of the night. Choking under a wilderness of lotuses. Now, that noise could have been an enormous catfish. Or, who knows, it could have been a yakshi. With these ancient lakes, you never know. Anyway, the people on the boat were stuck there all night, shivering in the cold, barely holding on till first light . . .’

At this fascinating juncture, Horihor’s little boy suddenly yelled, ‘There, Baba, there! There it goes again! Floppy ears!’ Then he promptly took off after the creature.

‘Come back! Come back!’ screamed a panicked Horihor. ‘There are thorns! You’ll get lost!’

When his son showed no sign of stopping, he plunged into the undergrowth after the child and brought him forcibly back to the path. However, none of his disapproval made a dent in the boy’s excitement.

‘What was that, Baba? Did you see? Such big floppy ears!’

‘Stay on the path!’ admonished his out-of-breath father. ‘Uff. This is why one shouldn’t bring children along! Tell you a hundred times to stay on the path and what do you do? Run straight off it as soon as some pig moves in a bush!’

‘Not a pig, Baba! It was ti-i-i-iny. Look, it was exactly this high . . .’ The child proceeded to squat on the path to show how high the elusive creature was.

‘No one wants to know how high,’ said his irritated father. ‘Keep to the middle of the path. No moving to the sides!’

‘It was a rabbit, Khoka,’ said one of the other men kindly. ‘They like living in the hay this time of the year.’

Khoka was stunned. A rabbit! A real, ear-twitching rabbit! He had only ever seen rabbits in the pages of his schoolbook. It had never occurred to him that they could also be seen in real life. The idea that mythical schoolbook creatures could be found in perfectly normal bushes, and that too in the familiar neighbourhood woods, took his breath away.

The group had progressed from the narrow wooden path to an open field. The remains of an old indigo boiling room lay in one corner of the field, right on the banks of the river. Back in the days of the indigo plantations, this field used