A Black Christmas For A Black

Long before I got into the high-tech business when I got to visit foreign countries and video-conferenced with White clientèle, I still had contacts with foreigners - yes, blacks, in Nagpur - who stayed in the same lodge where I had taken shelter during my college days.
I had one particular friend called Roy Nyale, a Kenyan, who I am afraid was not a very bright guy (hope he forgives me if he is reading this), but jovial, witty and fun-loving that made up for it. I often went over to his room and he gladly prepared a cup of black coffee spiked with lime juice and occasionally shared his meal of boiled potatoes and cabbage which was usually was all that he had for meals.
He also had a tendency to lose his cool once he had one too many, and one for the road, which I am afraid was quite often.
One experience I can't brush off from my mind happened several decades ago on Christmas eve.
Roy had a very muscular build not unlike Ben Johnson, the guy who doped his way to the Olympics gold medal around that time.
One night, after having visited the bar, Roy returned fully sodden and very uncool. He had an ongoing spite with a couple of Bihari students who shared the same lodgings, which was run by a Nagpur settled Rajasthani Rajput called Tomar. Roy went to this Bihari group's room and demanded the keys to the bike which belonged to one in this group. When they refused, not without reason considering that he was drunk beyond coherence, he started lambasting them in English. They locked themselves in and shouted obscenties at him in Hindi, which only enraged him further.
Roy got into a rage, grabbed hold of a window frame and with his immense strength pulled the frame right out of its hinges. The verbal harangue continued for another half an hour, till the venerable but loose tempered, short, but heavy weight Tomar arrived from his business. He tooks stock of the situation and when he saw that the bulky Roy had damaged his property (one window lacked a frame), he went into battle mode. He awoke his older brother, who ran the other half of the lodge, and their children who were just past their teens but who were brawny all the same.
Together they tied Roy to a electric post with leather belts and proceeded to lash out at him with belts and an iron rod, till poor Roy was crying out in pain and begging for mercy.
But I guess mercy is not in the dictionary of an angry Rajput and the group of young and old Tomars hit him again and again the more Roy cried out. The landlord Tomar threatened Roy that he would throw Roy into the compound well with his hands and legs tried.
I watched all this with horrow and believed that Tomar would very well carry out his threat and that Roy would end up in the well.
An hour of beating later, Roy was released and he unsteadily stumbled off and we all onlookers returned to our rooms discussing that night's happenings with animosity.
I had a Manipuri friend at that time and we toyed with the idea of reporting the incident to the police station, but later gave it up considering that the Tomars were not too all in the wrong.
Next day we went to have a look at Roy in his room and he proudly showed off the red welts that had sprung all over his back from the beatings. He nursed a black eye as well and limped a litte. Anyway we were glad that at least he was alive after that horrific beating.
Roy, however learnt nothing; he went back to his old ways and was involved in a brawl at at bar where we went together not many days later on New Year's eve. But I will leave that for another post if I dare recall what happened that black day.