A Victor of Circumstance

A Victor of Circumstance

Frank D’Souza

Notion Press

5 Muthu Kalathy Street, Triplicane,

Chennai - 600 005

First Published by Notion Press 2014

Copyright © Frank D’Souza 2014

All Right Reserved.

ISBN: 978-93-83808-97-7

This book has been published in good faith that the work of the author is original. All efforts have been taken to make the material error-free. However, the author and the publisher disclaim the responsibility.

No part of this book may be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is dedicated to the Author’s grandsons:

Aevon Franklin Pereira

And

Aarin Mark Rakesh

May they grow to be pillars of strength that their parents and society can lean on.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Author of this book categorically and emphatically states that the events and conversations found within this book are purely the product of the Author’s imagination, and apart from Historically documented figures, the characters, events and conversations are also fictional, and any resemblance to any person living or dead would be purely coincidental.

It is a documented fact that during the latter part of the eighteenth century, the Christian Catholics of Mangalore and surrounding areas of South Canara were indeed rounded up by the armies of Tippu Sultan of Mysore, and forced to march to Srirangapatna, the Capital of the Mysore Kingdom, through unimaginably dense forests, traverse steep and treacherously adverse valleys and mountains of the Western Ghats, the environs of which were extremely harsh, hostile and intimidating to the thousands of people, who until then had been wealthy land-owners, traders, merchants and such, used to comfortable life-styles and unaccustomed to any type of hardship, and the passage through these daunting areas took a heavy toll on the captives forced to march through it. The entire trek took six weeks to cover from Mangalore to Srirangapatna, as the armies of Mysore had to circumvent the intermediate territory of Kodugu or Coorg, which lay in the path of a direct route from Mangalore to Srirangapatna, and the denizens of which were not friendly to the Mysoreans.

Care has been taken to research historical facts. The Author has also tried to be as exact as possible in representing the local languages as phonetically close to the original colloquial words.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Author wishes to acknowledge his wife, Flossy’s, unfailing and infinite patience and unstinting support, without which, this work of fiction might not have been done.

The Author also acknowledges the immense help rendered by Aurelia (Awrie) Pinto for taking time off her busy schedule to edit the manuscript of this book.

Contents

TITLE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER ONE

When Pittoo Fernandes awoke, it was dusk with the light of day fading, and the chill of the coming night setting in. He sat up from where he had slept, rubbing his eyes, aware of the acute hunger pangs he was feeling. He had not eaten anything in three days, since his escape from Srirangapatna, the Capital of the Mysore Kingdom, and where the king, Tippu Sultan had imprisoned him together with about surviving fifty thousand other Christians from the areas surrounding Mangalore, the area called South Canara.

It was towards the end of the month of May, 1791, and he was on the plains of the Deccan Plateau, where the weather was very hot in the daytime during the dry season, very much unlike the weather in his native Coastal region, where though the temperatures were high during this time of the year, it was extremely humid too, encouraging the body to sweat and cool itself naturally. On the other hand on the plains, there was very dry heat and low humidity, which resulted in very little sweating, which gave a person the feeling that the body was baking in the inside, and that feeling added to a draining of physical strength.

He was of medium height about five feet seven inches tall, but he was a little more than stretched skin on bone, the result of malnutrition and near starvation during his over six years of being in captivity. His eyes were prominently deep in his skull, and his hollow, sunken cheeks and jaw were covered with a sparse growth of a beard.

His only piece of clothing was a very dirty and blood-stained lungi, or a piece of cotton cloth about two yards long and a yard and a half wide, which was worn wound around and tucked at the waist, and which draped up to his ankles. The lungi he wore was not just blood stained, but was caked with dry blood, which still oozed from the foreskin of his penis. He had been forcibly circumcised on the orders of the King, by being held down on the ground by soldiers, and his foreskin roughly sheared off by a cobbler, or sandal-maker, who used a crude cutting tool, otherwise used in cutting and shaping leather, to make footwear.

There was no attempt at cleaning the cutting tool or at sterilising or disinfecting it, and it was used in fast succession on a large number of young Christian male prisoners. The bleeding wound was then plastered with burning charcoal embers and hot wood ash in an attempt to cauterize it. In Pittoo’s case, the purpose with which the hot wood ash was used had not quite worked, and as in many other cases, the wound continued to bleed, and worse, it was now infected and inflamed. He desperately needed something to stop the infection and inflammation, and to stop the bleeding. He also needed food, as he could feel his strength diminishing with the lack of food and loss of blood.

All he had had for the past three days since leaving Srirangapatna was water from streams or ponds he had come across while he was fleeing. Fortunately for him, there had been very good rains throughout the area for the previous three weeks, when the pre-monsoon showers had been particularly heavy, filling ponds and regenerating the streams. He could locate the water bodies in the dark by the din of croaking of thousands of frogs, the sound of which was amplified in the quiet and the stillness of the night.

He knew that he also reeked of elephant dung, as he had hidden under the dung piles on the bed of a bullock cart in order to escape, and had been under the dung for the better part of an hour before the cart was upended to dump the contents of the cart in an area away from the fort where collected dung was disposed of.

He had contemplated washing the lungi at one of the streams, but that was not possible as he hid during the daylight hours, away from eyes of travellers or village people, and he could not wash it at night, as, after the cold of the night set in, he needed it to cover his upper body, in order to insulate himself from the cold, and if he did wash it at night, he would have not survived the cold, with the damp cloth wrapped around him.

He rose painfully from the ground he had slept on with a groan, but careful to stifle the groan, in case there was someone within earshot. He had come quite a long way from Srirangapatna. He had to avoid a number of settlements, habitats and villages on the way, and also avoid travellers on the road. He could not take the route that he had been brought by to captivity from the coast, as it was all now territory controlled by Tippu Sultan. He had made up his mind that he would take the western direction towards the neighbouring Kingdom of Kodagu or Coorg, as it was called by the English, as that was one Kingdom that Tippu Sultan was not able to conquer totally, and the people of Coorg, the Kodavas, being enemies of Tippu Sultan, would give him shelter. But he was still a long way away, and his first concern was food.

He slowly made his way from concealment in the brush, about a hundred yards away from the road that he was to take. The land around him was mostly flat, with very low hills. There was little tree cover, but there was a lot of thickly grown brush, which would offer him cover in case he needed it. He had walked for about an hour had gone about a mile, when he suddenly smelt wood smoke!

Wood smoke could only mean one thing, that there were people ahead of him, as forest or uncontrolled fires would not have been possible with the dampness that existed resulting from timely and heavy rains the area had received in the preceding few days. He crept the next few yards, making the most of the cover the brush on the side of the road afforded him, until he came to a bend on the road, and the smell of the smoke was stronger.

Pittoo Fernandes, who had been Christened Peter Boniface Fernandes, his name shortened as was traditionally done in the coastal areas to Pittoo, crept silently further until he was able to see the fire. There were two men, one was evidently a soldier, and a Mussulman or Mohammedan, who wore a yellow shirt with black stripes, which was the uniform of Tippu Sultan’s army, and he had a sword belted on his left side and the hilt of a knife showed at his waist on the right side. He was of medium height, and like men that had a lot of physical exercise, was of an athletic build. He was sporting a patchy beard on his face which indicated that he was about nineteen or twenty years of age. A musket was stood upright against a large bush.

Pittoo Fernandes felt a wave of terror go through him, leaving him trembling in fright at the sight of the man in uniform. Was this when he would be caught by the soldier and taken back to be punished with amputation for trying to escape? NO!

He forced himself to calm down and told himself that there was no way that he would be taken back to the prison in Srirangapatna.

The other man was recognizable by his attire of a white dhoti, (a strip of white cloth worn wound around the waist). Another piece of white cloth draped over the shoulders, and the sacred thread, that hung from the left shoulder across his torso to the right hip, as a Hindu Brahmin, the highest in caste among the Hindus. His head and face were clean-shaven except for a tuft of hair about nine inches long, and tied in a knot, protruding from the back of his head. This man was about thirty years of age.

They had a cooking pot on the fire, and were seated on the ground near the fire Pittoo surmised that they were cooking their evening meal, and were waiting for it to cook. He took a detour that took him away from the road towards the brush on the side, and settled down to wait with the fire and the two men now between him and the road. Normally when travellers cooked in the evening, they usually made enough for both the evening meal, and for breakfast the next morning. Pittoo made up his mind that he would wait for the men to have their meal and until they were asleep, then he would creep forwards and steal the pot.

Is that rice cooked as yet? the soldier asked the Brahmin.

The Brahmin took a ladle made of a coconut shell that had been dried and scraped of all the fibres that clung to it and was then fitted with a length of a piece of bamboo, which served as a handle and dipped it into the pot on the fire, bringing out some grains of rice and feeling them between his fingers to check if they were cooked. It has to cook just a little more, he said to the soldier.

But why does it take so long? The soldier asked, I have seen my wife cooking rice and it certainly does not take as long.

Rafiq-Sab, your wife must be cooking raw rice like all the people on the plateau, but in the Malnad or mountains and the coastal areas they prefer to cook and eat boiled rice. This rice is got from boiling the paddy and then de-husking it. It does take much longer than raw rice, but is definitely tastier and more nutritious than raw rice that is obtained from de-husking the paddy without boiling it. The Brahmin said.

Pittoo now knew that the soldier’s name was Rafiq.

Anyway I am hungry and waiting to eat a good meal after walking all day. Rafiq said.

The Brahmin waited for a few more minutes and tested the rice grains again, then declaring, The rice is now ready, Rafiq-Sab, you may serve yourself. Suffixing the word ‘Sab’ after the soldier’s name which meant ‘Sir’, to show respect to a person.

The two men then took up tin plates and ladled some of the cooked food into them and ate in silence, and when they had finished, they kept the plates beside the fire.

Half an hour after the men had eaten their meal, the soldier had lit a beedi - a little quantity of powdered dry tobacco leaf that was filled in a cylindrical shaped rolled tobacco leaf about four inches long - and smoked while the Brahmin had extracted a small cloth pouch from his waist band, taken out some beetle leaf, smeared it with chunna or lime or calcium carbonate, put it into his mouth with a piece of beetle nut, and bit off a piece of raw tobacco, which he chewed. He then returned the remainder of the unused tobacco and chunna to the pouch and stuck the pouch into his waistband.

Pittoo could hear their conversation, they were talking in the local Kannada language, a language that Pittoo was familiar with as it was also spoken on the coast, but as a slightly different dialect, and was called Canarese, as the Coast was named The Canara Coast.

The Brahmin was asking, Are you sure that the Sultan will reward us well?

The soldier answered, We have been entrusted with very important information for the Sultan. The Sultan is a very benevolent person, and I am certain that we will be rewarded suitably

We have travelled for four days to get here, how long it will take to reach Srirangapatna? asked the Brahmin.

Another day and a half, replied the soldier, We will be in Mysore by nightfall tomorrow, where we will have to spend the night, and Srirangapatna by noon the next day.

Pittoo was aghast at hearing that even after three days of travel he was still too close to the Capital. He should have been further away but apparently, he had misjudged his speed of travel, and he was extremely weak from lack of food and also from the loss of blood. He would have to put more distance between himself and the capital if he wanted to be safe from the clutches of the Sultan and his army.

Hunger gnawed at Pittoo. Being a devout Catholic, brought up in a well-to-do home, he was discouraged from even entertaining thoughts that might be sinful in any way, Pittoo would not normally even contemplate thieving. But his three day old empty stomach would not let his eyes move away from the cooking pot that was still standing over glowing embers.

The two men then unrolled their blankets and sheets on the ground, and while the Brahmin lay down on his bed, to Pittoo’s shock, the other man stood and walked towards the brush that Pittoo was hidden behind, went past Pittoo’s hiding place, and squatted down, after loosening his lungi, (which is different from a dhoti which was white and a lungi was a piece of printed cloth, as opposed to the plain white of a dhoti), apparently to relieve himself.

It would only be a few moments before the man had completed what he had come to do, rise and turn back, and then Pittoo would be spotted. Pittoo’s mind raced. He must not be caught! Pittoo knew of other prisoners who had tried to escape but were caught, that the punishment meted out to those that attempted escape and were captured was the cutting off of the nose and upper lip and amputation of both feet and one hand.

Very close to where Pittoo crouched, there was a round rock, the size of a small pumpkin. Pittoo started rising from the crouching position he was in, picking up the rock in the process, and very silently made his way to where the man was squatting. A quick look behind was enough to convince Pittoo that he was out of visual range of the sleeping man, the brush between giving him adequate cover.

He now stood behind the squatting man, who had by then lit another beedi, and was smoking it. He lifted the rock as high as he could and brought it down sharply onto the crown of the man’s head, and the bones of the skull gave way under the impact with a crunch that was audible to Pittoo. The man grunted, and toppled over on his side to lay still. Pittoo could see that the rock had smashed open the top and back of the man’s head, and he was bleeding profusely. He must have been dead even before he hit the ground.

Shaking with fear, his heart beating furiously in his chest, Pittoo took a minute to gather his senses, and then in the dark, he felt about the middle of the body and found the sheathed knife, which he pulled out.

He now had a weapon in hand. He took a few steps away from the fallen man and sat on his haunches, his heart still beating feverishly. He was sure if he was to take even two steps more, the sleeping man would hear his pounding, beating heart, which seemed extremely loud in his own ears. It took a few minutes to subside and then return to almost normal.

He rose again and in a crouch, crept towards the sleeping man. To his good fortune, the man had turned his face away from Pittoo’s position, facing the other way. In what looked like a very long time, Pittoo came up behind the sleeping figure. The blanket covered the body, while the neck and the head were exposed. Without waiting to think, Pittoo raised the knife and plunged it into the sleeping men’s neck, pulling it out and plunging it down again and again, until the threshing legs of the man were still.

He then dropped the knife, went over to where the cooking pot was, lifted it from the embers, put it to one side, and covered the embers with loose mud, until there was no evidence of glowing embers left, as he wanted to be sure that no other traveller passing by would smell the smoke and come to investigate. All the time he was saying under his breath, "Deva, maka boag-shi, Jesu maka boag-shi, God, forgive me, Jesus, forgive me,"

He took the pot a little further away from the dead men, sat down on the ground, and putting his hand into the pot, realised that the men had cooked rice kungee for themselves. But it was still too hot to touch. His hands trembled uncontrollably, his hunger making him impatient. He had to wait a while for the pot of cooked kungee to cool a bit. Then he remembered the ladle and tin plates and went back and got them, and ladled the hot kungee into one of the plates.

It had been about six years that Pittoo hadn’t eaten rice in any form, though it was the staple diet of those who lived on the coast. They had been issued with raw ragi millet grain as food throughout their term of imprisonment.

While the coastal areas of the kingdom received very heavy rainfall during the monsoon months, rice was widely grown, as water for irrigation of the crop was available in plenty. Rice paddy required a great quantity of water to grow until it matured. However, on the plains of the Deccan Plateau, water was harder to come by in quantities required for a crop like rice, and millets were grown instead, as these grain crops did not require water in excess of the rain the areas received.

He scooped a handful of the kungee from the plate into his mouth. He tasted food that was seasoned with salt for the first time in six years!

But he could swallow only a little of the first handful, and with great difficulty, the second. He was indeed very, very hungry, but his stomach had shrunk with the hunger, and he had to wait a while before the first traces of hot food loosened the muscles of his stomach, and the stomach gases expanded sufficiently for him to burp a couple of times, to enable him to swallow some more. In a while, between burps and belches, and even though he had fully intended to save at least half the amount in the pot for the following morning, he finished the kungee and drank the water.

His stomach, now stuffed with all the rice he had gorged on, he was sorely tempted to lay down and rest, but Pittoo then went over to where the Brahmin lay and uncovered the blanket which covered the man. He saw that the cloth covering the torso was soaked with blood, but the dhoti was comparatively clean, and he took it off the man. He also took the sacred thread from the man’s body. He then dragged the body away from the side of the road, through the bushes, past the body of the Muslim soldier, and dumped it in a hollow he found about a hundred yards from where the soldier lay. He returned and took the belt and a pouch that was at the soldier’s waist, the lungi, stripped him of the army uniform shirt, and finding that the man wore an undershirt, took it. He then dragged the body to where the Brahmin’s body lay.

The spot was a good hundred and fifty yards away from the road, and the chances of them being found in the next two days were slim.

He returned to where the two men had eaten their meal, and put together all the other belongings of the two men that he could find. These included the musket, a bundle tied in a cloth that belonged to the Brahmin, and a large bag that must have been carried by the soldier. The sword and the musket he flung away, as far as he could, while retaining the knife. Though his father had a muzzle-loading gun and liked to go hunting, Pittoo himself had never showed any interest in firearms, nor in hunting.

He then used the soldier’s lungi to make a large bundle of all the things he had gathered, including the knife he had used on the Brahmin, and tied the four ends of the cloth, which he slung over his shoulder. Just before leaving the place, he saw the leather sandals that the soldier had used, were beside the doused fire, and trying them on his feet, was very glad that they fitted him perfectly. He had been without footwear of any kind for almost six years, the last pair that he wore had served him for a longer period of time than it was deemed to serve, simply because he had used them until the soles just disintegrated for wear, and there was no way of getting himself a new pair while he was in captivity.

Pittoo Fernandes, stomach full and feet now encased in sandals that protected his feet from the sharp stones on the road, strode briskly from the spot, as he had decided that the further away he was from the place by morning, the safer he would be.

There was a quarter-moon in the sky, and by the light of the moon Pittoo walked on the dusty road, pushing himself to put as much distance as he could from the danger of being recaptured and returned to Srirangapatna as a prisoner again. He passed sleeping hamlets and small villages, where the local dogs barked at his passing, and crossed streams whenever he came across them. Just before dawn, he left the road and angled his way towards a hillock that was barely visible to him in the fading moonlight, and which was situated about half a mile from the road. As he approached the hillock he was glad to see that the area was covered with lantana shrubs and bushes. These prickly bushes were dense in places and would offer him good cover from passers-by on the road. He laid down the bundle and cleared a small space for himself to rest. He was tired, and slept.

But sleep was rather fitful, as every time he moved in his sleep, he would wake up in pain. He then had to wait for the pain to subside before he could fall asleep again. As dawn broke, he sat up and looked around. He saw that apart from the lantana bushes, there was a sizable pond of water between where he sat and the hillock, not more than fifty yards away. This pond was also surrounded by thick lantana bushes that hid it from people traveling on the road. The lantana bushes reached up to about twenty-five feet from the edge of the pond. Pittoo decided it was time he cleaned himself.

He tried to rise from the ground, but the spasm of pain was almost intolerable, and he had to rest for a while before he finally stood up. He undid the lungi from around his waist. His foreskin was inflamed and infected. He desperately needed to get some medicine for the infection. He then went into the pond to a point where the water came up to the calves of his legs and bathed, scrubbing himself as best as he could to get the smell of the dung off himself.

He looked around him, but apart from the hillock and lantana bushes and a tree here or there, there was nothing else.

When he was a young boy, he used to spend plenty of his spare time watching his neighbour, Piyad Menezes, an ayruvedhic pundit, who worked with herbs, treat people with a variety of ailments, and many of these included cuts and wounds that were infected. The pundit had used the tender leaves of the peepul tree, (Ficus Religiosa) which when just sprouted were red in colour, as opposed to the dark green mature leaves, grind these leaves with turmeric into a paste and have the injured person apply this paste to the wounds five to six times a day, for about three to four days. The pundit had said that peepul leaves and turmeric had healing properties and was also good for killing germs that infected a wound.

But Pittoo Fernandes knew that to find a peepul tree would mean to find a Hindu shrine next to it, as the tree was revered by Hindus. It was said that the tree which lived for thousands of years and bore leaves in the shape of the human heart, was sacred, and under such a tree, the God Vishnu, one of the three Gods of the Hindu Trinity, was born. It was also the tree under which the Prince Siddhartha later called The Buddha, meditated and attained enlightenment. Thus the peepul tree was held in reverence by both Hindus and Buddhists.

Pittoo was also aware of the healing properties of medicinal herbs like turmeric, tobacco, lime or calcium carbonate, honey and coconut oil. But he had none of these around