My train got to Sultanpur in the late afternoon. By a lucky coincidence, only a few hours earlier the Sisters had received a visit from the man who originally ‘rescued’ the boy in the forest. His name was Narsing Bahadur Singh and he was the thakur, or headman, of the village of Narangpur, about three miles outside the town.
The thakur owned a food-stall near the railway repair-yards and would often take along his wolf-boy, whom he called Shamdev. He said that Shamdev was always getting lost, or running after pariah-dogs, but usually had the knack of finding his way home. When Sister Clarice taxed him with a rumour she had heard: that he used to exhibit the boy in a booth, for money – he was extremely indignant and went away.
In the evening she and I took a rickshaw to Narangpur. The thakur was still at market, so we sat in his courtyard while a crowd of villagers entertained us with imitations of Shamdev’s antics, growling and baring their teeth. Narsing Bahadur Singh, when he did appear, was an erect, mild-mannered man in his fifties, dressed in white hand-woven khaki cloth, and with a striped towel draped over his shoulders. He owned six acres of land, planted corn, dal and rice, and was accounted rich. He had, it turned out, a history of adopting stray children. Besides his own two sons, he had brought up four other boys found abandoned in the wild. One of these, a gawky adolescent called Ramdev, was bundling straw into a loft. The thakur was insistent on one point: Ramdev was a mad boy; Shamdev was not mad, he was a ‘wolf-boy’.
With the help of Sister Clarice’s translation, I pieced together an outline of the story: It had happened early one morning about five years ago. It was the dry season but he couldn’t be sure what month. He had bicycled to see his cousin, who lived in a village on the far side of Musafirkhana forest, about twenty miles from Sultanpur. On his way back to the main trunk road, the track cut through thickets of bamboo and thornbushes and, behind one of these, he heard the noise of squealing. He crept up and saw the boy at play with four or five wolf-cubs. He was most emphatic that they were not dogs or jackals, but wolves.
The boy had very dark skin, fingernails grown into claws, a tangle of matted hair and callouses on his palms, his elbows and knees. Some of his teeth were broken to sharp points. He ran rapidly on all fours, yet couldn’t keep up with the cubs as they bolted for cover. The mother wolf was not in sight. The thakur caught up with the boy, and was bitten on the hand. He did, however, succeed in trussing him up in his towel, lashed him to the pillion of his bicycle, and rode home.
At first Shamdev cowered from people and would only play with dogs. He hated the sun and liked to curl up in shadowy places. After dark, he grew restless and they had to tie him up to stop him following the jackals that howled around the village at night. If anyone cut themselves, he immediately smelled the scent of blood, and would scamper towards it. He caught chickens and ate them alive, including the entrails. Later, when he had evolved a sign language of his own, he would cross his thumbs and flap his hands: this meant ‘chicken’ or ‘food’.
Eventually the thakur decided to wean him off red meat. He force-fed him with rice, dal and chapaties, but these made him sick. He took to eating earth, his chest swelled up and they began to fear for his life. Only gradually did he get used to the new diet. After five months he began to stand: two years later he was doing odd jobs, like taking straw to the cows.
‘He’s mine,’ said Narsing Bahadur Singh, angrily. ‘I want him back. I will go to Lucknow to fetch him.’
‘I’ll take you,’ I said.
At six the next morning he was waiting for the taxi, all dressed up in spotless whites. As the taxi passed through the forest at Musafirkhana he pointed to the track, but we couldn’t go and see the place because the driver was in a hurry and threatened to dump us and return to Sultanpur.
There were at least a hundred mentally defective children at the Mother Teresa Mission. We were greeted there by an elderly man, Ananda Ralla Ram, who had been a barrister before devoting himself to charity. He turned his legal mind onto the subject of Shamdev and gave the thakur quite a grilling. We tried to explore the story from every angle, in an effort to find a flaw or contradiction. The thakur’s answers were always consistent.
When the Sisters brought in the boy, he stood tottering in the doorway, screwing up his eyes to see who it was. Then, recognising his old friend, he jumped into the air, flung himself around his neck, and grinned.
I watched him for about two hours. Nothing much happened. He cuffed a child; he made his growling noises; he made the sign for ‘chicken’; sometimes he would point to the sky, circling his index finger as if describing the sun or moon. The callouses had gone, but you could see the scar tissue on his knees. He also had scars on the sides of his head: these, according to the thakur, had been made by the wolf-mother when she picked him up with her teeth.
The thakur left the Mission with me. He had been gearing himself for a scene; but the firm smiles of the Sisters unnerved him. He asked, meekly, if he could come again. He seemed very upset when it was time to say goodbye. So was Shamdev, and they hugged one another.
The discovery of an authentic wolf-child would be of immense importance to students of human and animal behaviour. But though I felt that Narsing Bahadur Singh was speaking the truth, it was a very different matter to prove it.
The best-documented account of Indian wolf-children is that of Kamala and Amala, who, in 1920, were dug out of a wolf lair in Orissa by the Reverend J.A.L. Singh. The younger girl, Amala, died — although her ‘sister’ lived on for nine years at the orphanage of Midnapore, during which time Singh kept a diary of her adjustment to human life.
Extracts from the diary have recently been republished in a book called The Wolf Children by Charles Maclean. On reading through it, I kept being struck by parallels between the girls and Shamdev: their sharpened teeth, their callouses, the craving for blood, the earth-eating, chicken-killing, the love of darkness and their friendship with dogs and jackals. Maclean, however, concluded that the Reverend Singh’s story is shot with inconsistencies – and that it does not hang together.
Another investigator, Professor Robert Zingg, collected in his Wolf Children and, Feral Man all the known texts relating to children reared by animals, as well as stories of The Wild Boy of Aveyron and the legendary Kaspar Hauser. As for Shamdev, by far the most interesting comparisons are to be made with the reports in Major-General Sir W.H. Skinner’s A Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh (1849 – 50): five of his six cases of wolf-children come from the region of Sultanpur. He writes: Zoolfikur Khan, a respectable landowner from Bankepoor in the estate of Hassanpoor, 10 miles from the Sultanpoor cantonments, mentions that about eight or nine years ago a trooper came to town with a lad of about 9 or 10 years of age whom he had rescued from wolves among the ravines of the road . . . that he walked on his legs like other people when he saw him, though there were evident signs on his knees and elbows of having gone very long on all fours . . . He could not talk or utter any very articulate sound . . . he understood signs and understood exceedingly well and would assist the cultivators in turning trespassing cattle out of their fields . . .
His story could be that of Shamdev.
During the nineteenth century, when such tales were commoner, the most famous ‘wolf-man’ in India was Dina Sanichar, who lived at the Sicandra Orphanage in Agra from 1867 till his death in 1895. He probably gave Kipling the model for Mowgli. He, too, had a craving for raw meat and, when forced to give it up, would sharpen his teeth on stones.
In zoological terms, there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of a female Indian wolf actually being able to rear a human baby. First, she would have to lose her own brood: to keep her milk, and to be on the lookout for a substitute cub. She would have to scent the baby but, instead of making a meal of it, allow its cries to stifle her hunger-drives and signal to her maternal instincts. Finally, since a wolf-cub’s period of dependence is so much shorter than a human infant’s, She might have three litters of her own before her adopted child
could fend for itself. She would also have to protect it and post ‘Keep off!’ signals to other wolves whose hunger might get the better of them.
One alternative explanation is that the wolf-boys or girls are autistic children, abandoned by their parents once they realise their condition; who somehow survive in the forest and, when rescued, seem to behave like wolves. Or could it be that the wolves around Sultanpur have a natural affiliation with man? There are no absolute conclusions to be drawn. But I came away convinced that Shamdev’s story was as convincing as any other. Someone should get to the bottom of it.
1978
THE VERY SAD STORY OF SALAH BOUGRINE
It was an early morning last August in Marseilles. A lonely Algerian was walking in the Quartier de la Porte d‘Aix, the quarter they call the ‘Kasbah’. The streets of the Kasbah are straight but narrow, and residents hang their washing from house to house. Balks of timber shore up the bulging walls of the houses. Black water runs along the gutters, and hungry dogs drive the rats from the rubbish dumps at dawn.
This particular morning, 25 August, at eight o‘clock, Algerian traders were beginning their day, stacking heaps of plastic suitcases and tin trunks, laying out leather jackets on old camp-beds, or hanging up the tinsel dresses that are loved by Berber ladies. In the Rue des Chapeliers a street-vendor was arranging his tray of razor-blades, soap and key-chains with medallions of Napoleon III. In the Rue des Présentines a barber opened his plyboard booth, papered inside with pin-ups and prints of the Ka’aba. A butcher in the Rue Puvis de Chavannes hung sheep-carcasses from steel hooks outside his shop, which was painted blood red and protected by a plastic hand of Fatima.
The hotels – Hotel de l’Armistice, Hotel des Phocéens and hotels without name – were emptying their sleepy occupants onto the street. In the Quartier des Carmes nearby one set of Algerian sleepers quit their damp mattresses to allow a few hours’ sleep to friends who had no bed that night. And in the Rue de Baignoir the bain turc opened the door to its palms, plaster statues of Health and Hygiene, and not-so-healthy goings-on behind.
Mothers of Africa lolloped down the street in multicoloured cottons, smiling. The ladies of Algeria preferred not to be seen: Kabyles with tattooed faces, veiled Arabs with pale foreheads and wide dark eyes. A few exhausted whores were out among the flower-sellers hoping to catch their share of the morning trade: their mahogany-coloured coiffures were clustered round the Hotel de Verdun, once a fine town house with a wrought-iron stair-rail sweeping up to its now squalid rooms. Over the door a stucco nymph of the Belle Epoque had been transformed into a Mussulman houri, with jet hair, mascara and moles. Across the street a few elderly Frenchwomen crept into the crumbling church of St Théodore to pray. The raking sunlight along the Rue des Dominicaines threw into sharp relief its statue of the Virgin, and played over Arab and anti-racist graffiti.
In the Black’s Paradise Bar Senegalese dandies with soulful fingers were dipping their brioches into bowls of café-au-lait, while in the Arab cafés they had tuned into Radio Cairo. In one café two Algerian migrants were sipping mint tea and clacking dominoes onto the table. They were working in France as labourers on an industrial site at Etang-de-Berre. The lonely man who came in and ordered himself a coffee they instantly recognised as their cousin Salah Bougrine. They had all three been born on the same slab of mountain, at Maida, near Sedrata in the east of the country.
Now when an Algerian in France sees a relative, he shouts for joy, pumps his hand, kisses him four times, blesses him in the name of Allah, and asks for family news. But Salah Bougrine greeted his cousins with a blank, uncomprehending stare. He sat beside them. He didn’t speak. He drank his coffee, stared into the middle distance, and left without a nod. Poor Salah, they thought, he must be mad!
At two-thirty that same afternoon, the trolley-bus, Number 72, driven by Monsieur Désiré-Emile Gerlache, was carrying a load of Marseillais to the beach. It halted at a stop north of the Zoological Gardens to take on a new passenger, Salah Bougrine. The driver, who also sold the tickets, asked the Algerian for his money – and received the same negative stare. What M. Gerlache said next is unknown or ill-reported, and the man is dead. He may have said nothing very offensive; but he may also have said ‘raton’, or ‘sale melon’ or ‘putain de bougnoul’ or any other French term of abuse for Arabs. For M. Gerlache the matter was simple: ‘Here is an Arab who will not pay. Either he pays or he gets off’ – and he started shouting abuse.
Bougrine’s immediate reaction was to find the money in his pocket, put his ticket in the automatic punching-machine, and sit in the seat behind the driver. As the bus started, however, he pulled a knife from his other pocket and expertly inserted the point under M. Gerlache’s left shoulder-blade, where it found the heart. Before the victim had time to fall, the killer withdrew the knife, hooked one arm around the driver’s partition, and cut his throat. The bus zigzagged across the Boulevard Françoise Duparc and came to a halt for lack of power, the passengers shrieking ‘À l’assassin! À l’assassin!’ Bougrine wounded five of them.
By chance, the motorist who swerved to miss the careering bus was the retired light-heavyweight boxing champion, Gracieux Lamperti. By another chance, he happened to have a short iron crowbar in the car. He prised the bus-door open, thumped the bar onto Bougrine’s skull, and laid him out cold. He then left the ladies and gentlemen of the bus to continue the good work – and particularly the ladies, who went at the skull with high heels. They would have carried the work to conclusion had not a company of the Deuxième Corps Cycliste restrained them. The Algerian came out of his coma on 15 September and cannot remember one detail of the events of 25 August, expressing surprise and anguish to the psychiatrists who examined him.
On the surface the Marseillais rose to the occasion. They celebrated the funeral of Désiré-Emile Gerlache in magnificent southern style, with black crepe, crowds in tears and the chant of De Profundis. His fellow-drivers led a blue-uniformed guard alongside the hearse, and announced beforehand they ‘would not tolerate any racist demonstration to mark the obsequies of our comrade’. These had, in any case, been forbidden by the police. ‘It would be regrettable,’ said Monsieur René Heckenroth, the Prefect, ‘if following so grave an incident, the public, in an excess of legitimate anger, lapsed into acts unworthy of its history.’
But the killing of Monsieur Gerlache had come at the end of a summer of hate. In fact, both the North African and French communities had been sharpening their teeth for some time. Earlier in the year, politicians in the Midi discovered that anti-Arab policies could capture a valuable slice of the electorate. ‘Toulon must remain Toulon,’ said the Mayor of Toulon. ‘Keep Grasse for the Grassois,’ said the Mayor of Grasse, a young man called Hervé de Fontmichel, who found the presence of North African demonstrators offensive to his town’s scent-manufacturing image, and illegally turned the fire-hoses on them. About this time, I was told, a Tunisian was given up for dead after his arrest and questioning by the Grasse police, but woke up on the municipal garbage tip. At Ollioules, near Toulon, the racists talked of relighting the gas-ovens - but that was only a joke.
It was no joke when they machine-gunned Arab cafés, or threw Molotov cocktails into Arab lodgings. The graffiti campaign was no joke either, if you were an Arab and could read ‘Cochonnerie Arabe’, ‘Merde aux Arabes’, ‘Our city is polluted by Arabs’, ‘Our mothers, wives and children are menaced by Arabs’. Nor was it a joke to the Algerian who strolled into the Quartier du Panier: the residents strung him up by the feet and pelted him with filth – which was odd in a quarter patrolled by so many policemen.
The revenge killings began the night of Monsieur Gerlache’s death: within a week there were seven dead in Marseilles. There was the case of Ladj Lounès, a thin sixteen-year-old boy with a shock of hair and a cheeky smile. He had been playing football with friends and had gone into a tobacconist’s on the Boulevard Madrague-Ville. A dark red Peugeot was waiting for him when he came out. The driver asked him som
e directions, and he was giving them when the passenger shot him through the head. They put two more bullets in his back as they drove off. The police said Lounès was a car thief and street-trafficker in barbiturates – and that explained everything.
Or there was the case of Mebarki Hamou, workman, forty years old, father of five, who died in the Hospital of the Conception in Marseilles on 29 August. His employer came with gendarmes to his lodging, and took him away for questioning. There was some row over wages. He left the gendarmerie a free man, but was found dying outside on the pavement thirty minutes later.
There have been no arrests. The Government did not even express its regret: although the President of the Republic did say some words about racism (‘Non . . . non . . . et NON!’) and the Ministry of the Interior published a graph to show that the number of North African deaths was nothing unusual for the time of year.
The police report on Salah Bougrine should have calmed things down. His papers showed that he was working in regular employment, in the sewage department in Nice. And the 2,500 francs in his pocket should also have suggested that he was in town to take the boat to Algiers.
This would not do for most Marseillais. To their minds an Algerian with 2,500 francs was up to no good. Was he, perhaps, a hired killer? Or a heroin-pusher? It was always convenient, in Heroin Capital Number One, to pin that business onto Arabs. But Bougrine had no police record. Instead, he had a clinical record. In 1969 he had been attacked in Nice by two Europeans and a French Muslim, who had robbed him of all his savings and split his head open with an axe. The blow had removed an area of his skull ‘the size of a galette’, and the damage to his brain was ‘severe’. He remained in a Nice hospital for over a year. He had been in and out of mental institutions. The facts of his condition speak for themselves.