People immediately began to gather at the Hanuman temple in the center of the village. When he pulled the trigger, the whole village heard the shot. Very slowly, Kullu continued, so as not to alert the tiger, my grandfather raised the shotgun. Kullu paused and I took advantage of that pause to drink a last, already cold sip of coffee. Yet, in the end, the Aztec priest decides not to say them.Īfter midnight, the clouds opened up and in the moonlight my grandfather caught a glimpse of a huge tiger eating the carcass of the cow. A magical sentence of fourteen words, writes Borges, that upon utterance would make the stone walls disappear and unleash the jaguar on his captors. One night, after waking from a feverish dream, the Aztec priest believes he sees in the jaguar’s fur a divine script. Listening to him tell me about his field work in the most inhospitable regions of India and Mongolia and Nepal and Kyrgyzstan, and about the prolonged solitude and many dangers (several of his colleagues had died of hypothermia up in the mountains), I thought of Jorge Luis Borges’s tale of an Aztec priest, who, locked in a stone prison by his Spanish captors, spends days observing and studying the rosette pattern on the fur of a jaguar locked in the neighboring cell.
.jpg "ranchero underpass")
His daughter and my son attended the same German lessons, and played together in the swanky garden out back.Ī renowned scientist in his field, Kullu had devoted the last fifteen years-his entire academic life-to work for the protection and conservation of the Himalayan snow leopard. Kullu and his family would invite mine to their apartment for typical Indian breakfasts of poha, sabudana, and chapati we would invite them to ours for typical Guatemalan breakfasts of black beans, huevos rancheros, and tortillas. We were living in the same building, Villa Walther (whose original owner, the architect Wilhelm Walther, in financial ruin after building such an elaborate palace in 1917, hanged himself inside the tower). We had both received writing fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg to spend a year among the forests and lakes of Grunewald. His name is Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, but everyone calls him Kullu. One was even decapitated, the frayed head lying beside it. Others had been mended with thread or tape. More than a few were missing a leg or an arm.
Ranchero underpass series#
As she prepared them, I noticed behind her a long shelf with a series of antique dolls, perhaps thirty or forty of them, sitting in a row, all old and dirty and in bad shape. Lacking German, I held up two fingers and asked in English for two coffees. I went inside and approached a tall, portly lady behind the counter. I’d love to, Eduardo, he said in his always soft-spoken, carefully measured way, as if he was never in a hurry to get to the end of his words.
I suggested we sit down for a few minutes to have a cup of coffee before we went up to the platform. At the entrance was a small café with four tables on the sidewalk. We stopped in front of the Grunewald train station. A single-barrel shotgun in his hands, he waited for the predator that had killed his cow earlier in the afternoon to return, as he knew it would. Through a hole in the wall, Jalambaba could see the silhouette of his dead cow on the grass.
When I was a child, said Kullu, my grandmother used to tell me that one night, in late 1964, Jalambaba hid inside his stable on the outskirts of Mukpat, our village, which is only a few kilometers from the Buddhist caves of Ajanta. He died before I was born.īadly parked on the street, in front of a beer tavern, gleamed a yolk-yellow Ferrari. We were walking in a Berlin neighborhood called Grunewald that is filled with mansions old and new, and borders a forest home to foxes and raccoons and wild boar and a series of lakes where Berliners, continuing a late-nineteenth-century German tradition known as Freikörperkultur, swim and sunbathe naked. At least that’s what I thought I heard Kullu say.
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