The Shoe-Stealer

By Abhishek Velankar

Jagya had never brought a chappal in his life. He received all by God’s grace. It only required for him to feel a new one was needed and all he had to do was go to the temple. There God furnished him with all that would lift up his sole. He had received all kinds of gifts in this way from him, from house slippers to branded formal shoes of the kind he had only seen villains in films wear. Over time, he did not besiege God for footwear only when he had the need but started collecting them as a hobby. He became fascinated with the artistry that went behind the creation, the curves and napes that distinguished one piece of a shoe from another, the thickness and the heaviness of each Kolhapuri chappal. He built up a collection that did not discriminate between genders, which required its own room. It was all the more perplexing to outsiders because Jagya was not a particularly outgoing man.

It was true. Jagya was not wont to step outside of his village, an unremarkable hovel near the Karnataka border in the district of Kolhapur. He was lazy enough that he had forgotten what Jagya stood for. His sister was convinced it was Jagannath but he had the feeling that it was Jagdish. But he could not remember anyone calling him anything other than Jagya and so could not the whole village or even his father. This patriarch was so fed up with his slouchiness that he had ruled him out of his will, bestowing the whole of the property to his sister. He now lived with his sister and brother-in-law in a room-cum-flat attached to their residence but in this house too he was at risk of running afoul of the main man. Principal Shinde, as he was commonly known to the village being the founder and head of the only school in it, was content with letting his wife’s queer but quiet brother dwell in his house initially but was quickly growing tired of Jagya’s habits.

Jagya never went to the bathroom in the house, even though the master was proud of having built the first Western style one in the village. He got up early in the morning and travelled the two kilometers-or-so distance to the sugarcane fields of his father to do his business. He took the risk of meeting his father on the off-chance he was surveying the fields early in the morning but he would not defer from his childhood toilet. He had a fascination for shoes but not for clothes and the principal believed he would have walked naked had he the freedom. He didn’t help him run the school like his sister did and was a dull conversationee.

But the biggest objection the principal had was Jagya’s burgeoning shoe collection. For someone who cherished it so much, he never thought of cleaning it, keeping them in the same condition as he had received them from God. They took up half of the space allotted to him and smelled, covered the house with dust and flies. His wife had not the heart to ask Jagya to move out but the principal was on the verge of doing so, meaning to do it any day.

Jagya’s village being unremarkable was without a doubt but as one slight fascination it did have a temple. It was not something someone from the cities like Kolhapur, Belgaum or Sangli would come visit, but it sufficed for the neighbouring four to five villages. It was at this temple that Jagya received God’s gift. Even though the temple was of the goddess Laxmi, Jagya thought of it as God’s lending, and it was where his closest friend practiced his vocation. The priest dispensed away salivation with a dismissive authority, as he did one day when Jagya dropped in for another helping of God’s Prasad.

“There are two types of people in this world, those who believe there are two types of people in this world and those who don’t, it is written”, the priest was explaining to the gathered congregation. When Jagya asked him later where the maxim was written, the priest explained, “I wouldn’t know. But we have 33 crore gods, somebody somewhere must have said it.” On the present occasion, seeing the crowd confused the priest set them homework, “Go and reflect on the lines, ask God for their meaning.” Thus, he concluded his speech and got down to the business of preparing the puja. Jagya joined in to the praying throng though he was used to receiving God’s benevolence in a different way.

Political upheavals have a way of bringing remote parts of a region closer to the centre. When Jagya was walking with the priest back to his house, the latter noticed the shoes won by him. Even excusing the fact that Jagya had turned up to the temple wearing sneakers, they were a size too small for him. Nonetheless, the priest pressed on, “You know, Prashant is thinking of running for it.” They lived in one of those villages where the Sarpanch’s election was a formality for the past number of decades, the only thing changing being the political party of their de-facto head of state. But the chief had died in the past year and the natural successor, his son, was in England with no intention to continue his father’s legacy. Moreover, the chief had died after winning the past election party-less, leaving a power vacuum. The nagar palika head from Gadhinglaj for the first time stepped foot in the village and so did minnows from various political parties who likely had not even known of its existence prior.

Jagya had to reposition and squirm his feet from time to time when he wore shoes for the first time. Up to that point he had at best worn flippers but when he first evidenced shoes he knew he had to ask God and take them. And yet about an hour into the exercise, with sweat forming by the gallon on his feet, he was on the verge of discarding them. But slowly, tediously, agonizingly, painstakingly he became enamoured of them. The same tightness that he had struggled with initially was like a new layer for his feet. He loved the way they enveloped his feet, the smooth insole brushing the underside with each step and the toe cap contracting on his toes, evoking out of him rhapsodic emotions. Shoes, especially tight sports ones, were now his favourite footwear, though God granted them scantily to him in his roughshod village. “He has a chance anyhow”, Jagya said to the priest. “My father is running too but he’s pretty old.” The priest had meant to work his way towards Jagya’s father but was glad to see the issue already raised. “Does he have the support and the finances all worked out then?” “Not sure”, Jagya replied. “But he was already close to the sarpanch and his inner circle. It will not be hard for him to get their backing.” Prashant was the priest’s brother and he had asked the godman to glean what information he could from Jagya. “At his age does he have the heart though?” “He is not a man who bothers about such things, he would run for the election even if he knew he would die the next day. He wants to take hold of things that he thinks belong rightly to him and being head of the village seems like it his for the taking, after assisting the sarpanch so long.” The priest could tell from Jagya’s tone, there was no use in even asking him to make his father reconsider.

Jagya was now not known to wander anywhere barefoot and to get the sensation of stifling comfort even more he had started to wear footwear one size smaller. It was hard work sometimes, especially with his favourite shoes where it took him up to 15 minutes to slip them on. His sister would be confused because he would emerge from his room already dripping with sweat. “Prashant is currently running the campaign on an anti-Karnataka angle, focusing on the Belgaum dispute, encouraging people to keep speaking Marathi even when crossing into Karnataka”, the priest was saying. “But it’s not going to work, at least not in exclusivity against your father’s backing. What he needs is finance and he doesn’t have that now.” Jagya was just now crossing the threshold from pain to pleasure, the effect of wearing the small-sized shoes. The priest looked up at Jagya as he spoke next,” I can’t provide him with much either.” The truth was that the priest was stealing a little from the donation boxes, but he had to be careful not to let the trustees of the temple have a sniff. He had to resort to stealing from the community free lunch provided by the temple, thinking the free-loaders would do without dal for a week, a chapatti less for a few days. Jagya was not in a state to heed the words of his friend just then but he had time to reflect that night.

Jagya was far from a selfless person but if he was to help anybody it was the priest. Not only because of the friendship but also because he was the head honcho of the institution from where Jagya received God’s grace. To help the priest was to go against his own father. But then again Jagya remembered his father had cut him out of his will. Would his helping of the priest be a measure of revenge against his father? Jagya was reluctant to think of it that way. He could perfectly see why anyone would a cut a child like him out off their will. He had thought of remonstrance to his father, to make the patriarch accept him back at his own house at least and then work his way towards altering the will. Jagya knew by helping the priest he could forget about any such hopes. But there was a personal reason for aiding the priest and perhaps what he had in mind was so tempting that he could not but help himself. Later, many would call what Jagya thought of right then as the only intelligent thing he ever did in his life. He came up with the concept for the Chappal Chori Laxmi (the shoe-stealing Laxmi).

Samant was a meek little field worker, employed by Jagya’s father in the sugarcane fields. He visited the temple everyday between hours spent in the field, had been coming to it since childhood, hardly missing a day. But for the first time in his life, he found after coming out of the temple that day that his chappal had been stolen. He went to the priest to complain but for a man who seldom appeared mystic despite being involved in the godly business, today the godman was cryptic and benign. “Remember, everything happens for a reason”, the priest said as a way of consolation. Samant was confused and irritated but he knew he had to get back to work. He was used to being barefoot and it did not necessarily hinder his work in the field but he was concerned anyway, not the least for having to buy another pair. His concerns did not trouble him much that day though as when he reached home, he found his wife was pregnant. The meek Samant was still smarting over the last time he had visited his parents and they had expressed their distaste he had not come with a grandson or granddaughter in tow. Overwhelmed with joy, the couple undertook the journey to the temple to offer their thanks to Laxmi. There they were met by the priest who was not long in interrogating Samant, “What else happened to you today?” Samant did not catch the gist and the priest had to finally tell him and the devotees at the temple, “Did not your chappals go missing earlier?” Samant confessed that they did. The priest then went to the front of the temple and taking an oratory tone dispensed, “I have suspected it for a while now and my dear friend Samant’s experience just proves it. People have been complaining about their chappals getting stolen quite often recently and yet no perpetrator has been found. It is because the thief is Laxmi herself.” This occasioned a gasp from the audience, which in addition to the devotees in the temple also now measured the lurking pedestrians on the street in front. “But she steals your footwear only to reward you in return. Samant’s chappal was stolen earlier today and he receives the news he is going to be a father. There was another instance just earlier this week when a man had his sandals stolen but then got the news that he had landed a job in Kolhapur. You could ask him about it but you will have to travel to Kolhapur for it. So follow the example of Samant and leave your footwear at the temple for the Devi.” And almost as if an afterthought he mentioned, “You illuminate the house and make it proper at evening time don’t you, because Laxmi comes in your home? So when you are offering up your footwear to her, make sure it is brand-new and clean. Samant’s case is different because he has been knocked down by life very hard so she took pity on him. Remember if you want Laxmi (money) in your life, you have to give the goddess something to work with.”

The truth was that Jagya had access to the medical records of all of his father’s workers and their families. His father kept them without the workers’ knowledge by making an agreement with the local doctor and Jagya only had to give him a premium brandy, paid for by selling a significant part of his shoe collection (which was saleable anyway), and the medical man agreed to let him see the records. Samant and his wife’s pregnancy provided the perfect opportunity; with the priest making sure the wife had not yet told the husband and fixing a suitable holy date for the disclosure of the news, the day on which his chappals would disappear at the temple. The plan had been executed flawlessly at the initial stage but the priest still had worries.

Even if the populace bought the story of the shoe stealing goddess hook, line, and sinker, the priest was nervous about how much revenue the scheme would actually generate. He had reservations as to how many of the temple’s visitors had access to high-end shoes and the volume of the stock that would be generated. There was also Jagya’s commission too, half of it to be paid in money and half in shoes. But if there is a beginner’s luck, there is also a bullshitter’s luck. Jagya and his accomplices had both. The legend of the shoe-stealing Laxmi spread and spread and the earlier visitors to the temple that had numbered only the people from the neighbouring villages began swelling up by throngs coming from Kolhapur, Belgaum, Sangli and Satara. With them they would bring shiny, unopened packages of footwear and due to the combined dual lucks, some majority of the devotees did start experiencing positive changes. There were murmurs of the experiment having no effect on many of their lives, but they were quickly squashed down, not least by the priest himself who positioned himself as the spiritual leader of the village. And who better to be the head of the village than his brother. Thus, Prashant received a boost not only from the propaganda of the priest but also from a financial perspective. The new footwear packages would be donated at a special designated area near the temple, accessible only to the priest after nightfall (and to Jagya unbeknownst to the village) then carted off by a truck in the middle of the night to either Mahadwar Road in Kolhapur or FC Road in Pune, to shops whose owners would not ask questions. Prashant ended up winning the election and Jagya also became rich on the fly.

Jagya was used to receiving God’s grace, but in the current scheme he had cut out the middle man, eliminated God from the transaction. By this time, both of Jagya’s big toes were ugly deformities, red and black and bruised. The nails on his toes were jagged peaks, crushed by the small size shoes he was in the habit of wearing. His ankles hurt and the skin was peeling off, with sudden cramps setting in as a result of him forcing his feet into smaller shoes. But still he persisted with his obsession no matter what his feet body went through. A somber monotony had set in the work, which had not set in while he was receiving God’s divinity singlehandedly. Earlier, it was only him and God, but now there was the priest and his brother and the truck owner and driver plus the garage where the shoes are stored. It had taken the intimacy out of the equation while increasing the profits. He had known while entering into the enterprise that he had the ability to blow the thing open if required and he was contemplating whether to do it.

There was another man in the house who was in his own deliberations. Usually when a man comes into money, he has to worry about his in-laws mooching money off of him, but Principal Shinde had no thoughts of that kind. He did not even care what the mysterious source of Jagya’s wealth was, and he only noticed when he didn’t come begging for money to his sister at night every three days, he just wanted one thing. Now that Jagya was financially independent, Principal Shinde hoped he would move out of his house. But Jagya continued to be naïve to his hints and thus the principal resolved again to inform Jagya of his non-acceptance into the house. His task was to be made much easier however.

Jagya’s father was more bewildered than disappointed that he had lost the election, though the latter feeling was present too. He had looked at it as some sort of formality, an inevitability and had not put much stock into Prakash’s candidacy and his anti-Karnataka rhetoric. But alarm bells had started ringing when the priest’s brother was setting conventions that were much bigger than his in the lead-up to voting day. Slowly Prashant had started leeching off the older man’s backers and while he ran without a party, Prashant had suddenly received the backing from the party of Gadhinglaj’s municipal head. He alighted at his son-in-law’s house some six months after the election result to look up on his daughter and maybe even his son. He was seated in the living room, over a cup of tea and biscuits in conversation with the principal and his daughter. “Is Jagya fine”, the father asked off-handedly, not knowing what to expect. “Oh, he is more than fine”, replied his daughter. The father was puzzled, “what do you mean?” His daughter explained the change in Jagya over the past year, though she did not reveal that he was walking with a limp now and his shoe obsession was more severe than ever. His son-in-law seemed less enthusiastic about the change in Jagya and the father noticed. “And what in God’s name has he done to effect such change”, asked the father. Here the daughter dropped her tone and submitted her ignorance. The father was tired of Jagya’s laziness yes, but he had also seen a glint in his eye, that he used to explain to his wife while she was still alive communicated to him, “He’d sell his whole family one day.” She had dismissed him but the suspicion lingered in his mind till the day he had banished his son.

The father’s suspicions found common agreement with his son-in-law. When they were alone, the son-in-law confessed he had suspicions too. The now-Sarpanch Prashant had visited the principal at his school the day before, some odious business about “teaching the kids about how Belgaum was stolen by those Kannadi people” and how it will always belong to Maharashtra still. What most intrigued the principal though was the parting shot from Prashant, asking if everything was alright with Jagya. The principal had not known before that these two even knew each other. “Oh, it is only because of my brother”, assured the chief but the principal did find it curious. When the father had given vent to his befuddlement at Prashant’s victory and sudden rise in the type of backers he was managing to woo, the principal had hit upon the realisation that the rise in wealth of both had happened over the past year. He confided in his father-in-law and they both decided to Jagya.

Now, if Jagya’s room was unapproachable before, it had become almost forbidden now, in the principal’s own house. Jagya’s sister watched with trepidation as they were about to enter his room, for she knew the state, being the only other person still making visits there once in a while. When the duo entered, they found the room musky and filled with dust, Jagya keeled over against one rack of shoes, probably asleep. The father decided to wake him up but Jagya was not asleep, merely doubled over in agony and that’s when his father saw he was trying to squeeze his feet, his bloody, swollen feet that were an anguish to even look upon, into clearly too small sized shoes. His father straightened him up and tried to talk to him. At first, Jagya was not sure who was talking to him but he generally made out the face of his father. “What have you done, what have you done”, implored the father. Getting no reply, the father grabbed him by the towel hanging off his waist (Jagya continued to dress skimpily still) but here the principal stepped in. After calming the father down, he said to Jagya, “I am calling the ambulance but we want to know what you have done, not only this but what you have done to get all this money.” Jagya was sensing a revelation, a fork in the road, he was feeling like he was the one giving back to God now, the fact that there were people other than him in the room was escaping his brain until his father slapped him hard. He came back to the present but hardly appeared capable of speaking. He managed to croak out however that there is a letter present in one of the shoes, hidden away on a particularly dirty rack which would be all explanation. The principal took note but he was attuned more to the danger now, “listen I am going to call an ambulance and you stay with your father here ok?” Jagya burst out, “The old man is here?” The principal left the father-son duo, with the father actually sobbing.

Over the next few days the scheme was unraveled, with the priest and his brother ousted. Jagya had not left any leaf unturned, who aside from detailing the scheme to win the election, also revealed the stealing of petty sums by the priest. Perhaps the case would not have blown open with such rapidity had Jagya not had the father that he had, but the patriarch ensured the swift removal of Prashant and his brother, as much for revenge as for deceiving the people. He joined Prashant’s former party and finally got his wish to be the sarpanch. For Jagya’s part, his father ensured he stayed out of prison, hiring lawyers that argued successfully of the deteriorating mental and physical state of his body, as well as his willingness to confess.

Jagya’s feet were restored as much as they could be and he was extensively cared for in a mental hospital. The doctors advised his family to take care and not tempt him with footwear, to make him walk barefoot and themselves do so as much as possible when with him. If Jagya did not go out much before, he was a recluse now. He was kept confined to his room, with his feet being tied up in the day.

Jagya suffered through it all and showed outward signs of progress but he was still clinging to the notion of having the chance to deck out his feet in small-sized footwear again. His family started to tentatively let him out of the house, only small distances because he was not allowed to use any covering on his foot. However, they slowly started to allow him more freedom and even let him start using comfy footwear, slippers to head on errands and even visit his father’s fields. What they did not know was that Jagya had a reserve stock stored in one of his fields and he would get his fill of smothering his feet while out. Jagya knew at first there would not be many signs but over time again his feet would start to resemble their earlier state. But he resolved to keep it going until he thought of something. He didn’t need to.

One evening, Jagya had not come home from his excursions and a search party was launched. That he had gone into his father’s fields was seen so that was where it was concentrated. There, in a part where the fields bordered a small jungle, they found Jagya, lifeless. He had tried to push his feet into shoes that were at least two sizes smaller and in the process he had cut off parts of both of his ankles and the upper part of his two biggest toes on each foot. The blood had congealed all over his foot and internally a blood clot had been formed. But he had died having received God’s gift for the one last time and in his final moments he felt sure he was ascending up to heaven as a gift to God himself.

By Abhishek Velankar