There was a tea shop on one side of the dirt road that led to my home from the tarred main street in Janakpur. It was owned by a man everyone called Kachuwa. He was a small man, always wearing a dirty T-shirt or a ganji and lungi, and always smiling. Across the road was a small furniture factory with lots of planks, bamboo poles, and sawdust.
I was often asked to run to Kachuwa’s shop to get milk for tea when guests arrived unexpectedly, or to get a small amount of curd to use as culture for making more at home. Kachuwa was always nice to me and never charged for the small amounts of curd, though he knew that if we did not make at curd at home, we would have to buy it from him.
One morning, I must have been about twelve or thirteen, I saw that Kachuwa’s shop had been vandalized. The table where he displayed his wares – milk, curd, some cheap sweets, homemade biscuits – was overturned and the floor was splashed white from the spilled liquid. The large aluminum bowls with sweets had been toppled, along with the glass jars with the biscuits. The few benches in the shop were in disarray, some flipped over.
I was going out with my father to the market, and we stopped to inquire about what had happened. Kachuwa murmured something about an incident the night before. But he did not seem to be in a hurry to bring his house to order. He seemed oddly calm, but I could feel something was really not Kachuwa-like about his behaviour. My father said he would talk to him later about what had happened.
About two hours later, on our way home in a rickshaw, we made out a small crowd gathered in front of the shop. There is something about a mob that one immediately recognizes, be it in the streets of Kathmandu when “respectable” people get hold of a pickpocket kid or a small group of amused people stopping a motorcycle for having hit a kid (from the goat family). As we approached, we asked the rickshaw to stop and got off.
There was a young man tied to an electricity pole right by Kachuwa’s shop. A few men were holding planks from the furniture factory. One man had a long bamboo pole with which he was holding the semi-conscious young man upright. There was blood on the man’s face and he was drooling, but I could make out that he was a neighbour. I could tell that he had been beaten by the planks. Every once in a while, someone would again take a shot at the poor young man.
My father tried to intervene. The poor bidyarthi is already half dead, he said. What are you guys doing this for?
There was a commotion and I could make out some angry words. They were accusing my father of protecting a fellow upper-caste. I searched for Kachuwa in the crowd; he would surely confirm that we were closer to him than to the man tied to the electricity pole. But Kachuwa was squatting outside the circle of the crowd, seemingly aloof from the mob justice playing out there.
Some people in the crowd knew my father and stopped the anger that was starting to be directed towards him. This guy came drunk last night and thrashed Kachuwa and vandalized his store, one of them said. What else can we do?
My father suggested calling the police. They said they already had, after giving the young man the beating he deserved to make sure he never did anything similar again. The police would just take him to the station and release him without punishment, they said. It was essential that he be punished.
This was, in a way, justice meted out by the lower-caste labourers against an upper-caste hooligan. I felt strangely good because I knew the man tied to the electricity pole was a neighbourhood rival of an elder cousin. I disliked the man; he was one of those contemptible young thugs who pretended to rule our neighbourhood. But I would miss Kachuwa who, a few months after the incident, closed shop.
