A HOUSE
CALLED
ASKIVAL
A HOUSE
CALLED
ASKIVAL
MERRYN GLOVER
First published May 2014
Freight Books
49-53 Virginia Street
Glasgow, G1 1TS
www.freightbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Merryn Glover 2014
The writer acknowledges support from Creative Scotland (formerly Scottish Arts Council) towards the writing of this title.
The lines quoted in chapter 44 are from Emily Brontë’s poem Often rebuked, yet always back returning.
The moral right of Merryn Glover to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-908754-59-2
eISBN 978-1-908754-60-8
Typeset by Freight in Garamond Premier Pro
Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow
Merryn Glover was born in a former palace in Kathmandu and brought up in South Asia. She went to university in Australia to train in education. Her writing has won awards and been published in anthologies, magazines and newspapers. Also a playwright, her fiction and drama have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4. A House Called Askival is her first novel. Having returned to live and work in Nepal for four years she now lives in the Highlands of Scotland.
for Alistair, for always believing
Tear down the temple,
Tear down the mosque,
Tear down whatever you can,
But do not tear down the heart
For that is where God lives.
Bulleh Shah
Sufi Poet
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Acknowledgements
ONE
When Ruth finally returned to Mussoorie, it was late August, late monsoon, late in the day. Mist was rolling up from the valley like a brooding spirit, seeping into the hollows between hills, crawling over boulders, drowning trees. From her open window on the bus she felt it slip over her arm, smelling of damp earth and woodsmoke and dread.
Above, the town lay splattered across the ridge like the contents of an upended rubbish bin. It was bigger than before and even more crowded. Buildings shouldered each other along the steep slivers of road – restaurants and trinket shops, grey hovels and multi-storey concrete blocks – all bound together by a tangle of wires, washing lines and battered signs. Below them, on the forested slopes, the colonial bungalows hunkered under their rusting roofs as if trying to shut out the coarseness of the modern age, while Victorian relics, like the bank and the Masonic Lodge, sat forlorn and streaked with damp. Even the newer hotels, with their giant billboards and balcony rooms, seemed tired from the holiday makers and the relentless rain.
She got off the bus at Paramount Picture House, with its sodden film posters peeling off the walls and its broken ticket window. So unchanged, it could have been preserved in formaldehyde, like the specimens in the Bio lab at school squeezed into their watery yellow graves: a shrew, a cobra, a heart. They’d made her skin crawl, as had the cases of beetles stabbed into place, and the stuffed pheasant, gathering dust and losing feathers.
An old coolie approached her with a gnarled hand and an uncertain smile, revealing one brown tooth. At her nod, he stuffed her backpack into his basket and followed her silently up the narrow road through the bazaar. She felt like a fugitive, an exorcised spirit crawling back.
It was unsettling how the place had gone on without her, lending a feeling of callous indifference, betrayal even. So much was just as before: the row of shawl shops, the Tibetan stalls, the Hotel Hill Queen with its five floors built into the cliff. Even the tin shacks at the side of the road were still perched on their stilts like a row of rusting herons that had lost the will to migrate.
But some things were different. The hole-in-the wall booths that used to offer long distance calls now included internet access and mobile top-up; alongside the garish postcards of gods and Bollywood film stars a new pantheon of American celebrities jostled for space; and the old racks of walking-sticks and macramé pot-hangers were replaced with microwaves, televisions and cappuccino machines. Ruth wasn’t sure which felt worse: the things that were exactly as she had left them or the ones that had changed.
Godiwala Plastics, half way up the bazaar, was still bristling with the same array of buckets and brooms and soap dishes, but it was the blue basin on the front step that halted her. It was exactly like the one from the foot-washing scene in The Gospel of Jyoti, the musical in her last year at school that had begun with such promise but ended in ruin.
On the curve past the Hindu temple the monkeys were ravaging the offerings on the front steps. They squabbled and cuffed each other, shrieked, scampered up the electricity poles and over window frames, leaving rice and flowers spilled across the road and into the gutters. The streets smelled dank. For two months the rain had soaked into the rubbish and dung, the blackened fruit, the roadside mud. The place was swollen with it. Shops sagged, their signboards curling, doors jamming, breathing out mould. Here and there, the damp had loosened a building’s grip on the mountainside and swept it right away, leaving a jagged wound and a pile of rubble below. This was the spirit of August, the month when she’d returned to boarding each year after the summer vacation.
Climbing higher and higher up the steep road, she reached the top of the bazaar at Mullingar Hotel, where everyone always rested. The coolie lowered himself onto the steps of a corner store, grunting as he eased the basket strap from his head and tugged off a dirty cap. Ruth dug in her bum bag for her cigarettes and, lighting up, looked across at the Hotel. Why it was called that she didn’t know, for it was a slum and always had been. A labyrinth of shacks huddled around the main buil
dings, some of which now teetered four floors above the precipice. Make-shift stairs and banisters were hammered onto the sloping verandas and the roof was a patchwork of tin sheets fringed with broken guttering, the space above the courtyard webbed with Tibetan prayer flags and washing lines. There was no sign of the Lhasa Café, where she’d bought the joints all those years ago that had been the final proof, if any was needed, that she was to blame.
She looked along the routes that forked at Mullingar. To the west, the road continued up the ridge in a series of tight switch-backs to the chakkar, the circular road at the top of the hill. She’d made her way up it many times after a Saturday in the bazaar. To the east, the road levelled out and became Tehri Road, the long ribbon that traversed the Garhwal hills all the way to Tehri city and beyond. She walked along it to the spot where the view opened and she could see Oaklands School. It looked like a scene from a fairy-tale with the red roofs bright as apples in the forest and the neatly swept clearings. Twenty-four years since she’d last seen it.
Now she was forty-one and supposed to be grown up.
She pulled deep on her cigarette, a slight tremor in her hand, and breathed out, the smoke curling around her like cloud.
She’d been expelled.
Expelled.
It sounded like a swift and violent ridding of something venomous; a spitting out of the poison apple – which must have been how the school saw it. But for her, it had been far worse.
Eventually, it had become a self-imposed exile. She’d made no conscious decision to stay away, but as more time had passed and the wounds only deepened, the prospect of return had become impossible.
Until now. Till he was dying and she had to come back.
Ruth flicked her stub onto the muddy road and ground it with her shoe. In clipped sing-song English she gave the coolie directions to Shanti Niwas and pointed up a small path that climbed between the two roads.
‘Please take my bag there and tell to them I will come soon, yeh?’ she said, and kicked herself that her childhood Hindi lay sleeping like a dog. She wanted to kick it – the lazy cur! – hurl stones at it, beat it with sticks till it rose and did her bidding instead of leaving her shackled to this mute gesturing, this silly broken English. But she knew its dormancy was not sloth but neglect; she’d not fed the thing since she left.
Once the coolie had set off, his plastic shoes squeaking, Ruth turned in the opposite direction and took the west road to the top of the hill. She had to see the house, before she lost all courage.
TWO
Shanti Niwas was fragrant with spices. In the kitchen corner, Iqbal fried crushed cardamom pods, mustard seeds and cinnamon in a pan of ghee. His voice rose above the sizzling in the plaintive notes of an Urdu ghazal, soaring on the top notes like a great bird, before plunging back to the mellow depths.
What with the singing and the spices and everything else, James couldn’t concentrate. At the far end of the room, he sat stooped over a Bible and a print-out of his sermon, shaking his head and clicking his tongue. He rammed his half-moon glasses back up his nose and re-read the opening sentence: ‘Is it easier to make a cripple walk or to forgive his sins?’ Then he scratched it out, his knobbled fingers pinched red and stained with ink. Above it he scrawled, ‘Any idiot can tell when a cripple is healed, but how do we know if a man’s sins are forgiven?’
Iqbal hit an especially high note and James threw down his pen. He glared at his friend, but the man’s back was turned, the floral bow of his apron bouncing as he ground ginger and chillies on a stone. His whole body rocked with the rhythm, from his buttocks to the bobbing curls at his collar.
James cracked the knuckles of one hand in the palm of the other and swung his head to the door. His daughter’s backpack was propped against the frame, where the coolie had set it – he checked his watch – nearly two hours ago. But the little Miss-sahib herself had not come. It was getting dark.
‘I think I should go find her,’ he said, capping his pen.
‘Oh, don’t worry, Doctor-ji!’ Iqbal wiped the ground spices off the stone with his plump fingers and flicked them into the pan. ‘She’ll be here any minute now, I’m sure of it.’
He beamed and tipped his head, but James knew he spoke out of hope rather than conviction. Iqbal had been more nervous than him that day, adjusting the furniture, arranging flowers, checking and double-checking the household supplies. He’d even rushed out after lunch for a can of Jubli’s Lady Lush deodorant spray and fumigated the place, whipping up a haze of synthetic rose in the bathroom and drenching their shoes. It had sent James into a spasm of coughing and Iqbal into a fit of apology.
He was so, so sorry, he was just trying to make everything nice for her. Perhaps he should throw open all the windows? But then, maybe that would make the house too cold? Should he get the gas heater out of the godown? Or borrow the electric one from the neighbours?
No, no, no. James had put his foot down and an end to Iqbal’s feverish preparations. He had already forbidden the tinsel streamers and the banner reading, ‘Welcome Home Beauteous Ruth!’
‘She would hate all that,’ he’d snapped. ‘She’d walk straight back out the door and into a hotel.’ Iqbal’s face had fallen, but he’d agreed to invest his energies in the cooking. It was his forte, his father’s legacy, his fate. And, mercifully, its aromas were now vanquishing the last whisps of Lady Lush.
James raked his sermon pages together and stuck them into the Bible. He knew that Iqbal understood his unspoken longing and had made it his own; that he saw both the hope and the helplessness of what lay ahead. He closed the Bible with a thwack, set his reading glasses on top and pushed hard on the armrests of his chair to stand. Iqbal glanced across.
‘She’s a tough girl, your Ruthie,’ he said. ‘She’ll be just fine, Inshallah. Here, why don’t you have a drink or something? Can I get you a juice? Ginger ale? Chai?’
‘No, nothing,’ said James, and pressed his hands into the small of his back, pushing his hips forward till his spine cracked. ‘Most of the time, Ruth is not just fine. But by the grace of God, she is still alive.’
‘May his Holy Name be praised!’ breathed Iqbal.
James grunted and moved to the glass door, rubbing his back. There was a biting between his shoulder blades and his neck was sore. Too long at the desk, bent over his Bible, struggling with words. Why take a man who could barely speak and ask him to preach?
He looked down towards the bazaar where the lights had become smudged halos in the blackening sky. He wished again she had agreed to be met at the bus stop. Or to get a taxi up instead of walking. She’d not been in Mussoorie for such a long time, she might not remember it so well, might not find the house. It used to be a crumbling servants’ quarters, ugly as sin. Now it was Shanti Niwas – House of Peace – restored, with shining wood and a Garhwali slate roof, the southern wall a sheet of glass.
But Ruth did not agree to anything, he thought, sliding his hand round to his chest and rubbing the hollow beneath the yoke of his shoulders. She had always been thus. If the family had set out walking, she wanted to go the other way. If they were eating, she wasn’t hungry; if sleeping, wide awake. Her mother, had called it “spirit”. A Spirit of Rebellion, he’d called it and tried to crush it.
He opened the door, straining his eyes in the gloom. It was nearly three years since he’d seen her last – at her sister Hannah’s in Tennessee – but so many people and so much bustle, there was no chance to talk. And was there any use? She would not talk anyway, would not open up, would not let him in.
But it was not just her, he knew that. Even when there was an inkling of an opportunity, a moment alone, he never could say anything. He had hoped her mother’s death might open a space, but it had not. If anything, Ruth had become more remote, the meetings fewer and further between, her communications shorter, rarer, colder. Most of the time he didn’t even know where she was.
Till now. Till he was dying and there was a phone call. Ruth never phoned, but t
here she was, clear as next door all the way from Glasgow.
‘I’m coming.’
‘Oh. Good.’
‘And I’ll stay’.
‘No need. Iqbal is here.’
‘I’ll stay till… whatever.’
‘Accha.’
And her email had arrived the next day with her travel details: she would be with them on Friday. Iqbal had cheered. James had felt something turn over inside.
As he stood at the open door, the cool night smelling of rain, he felt it again. That deep, unknown, thing, that could be hope or dread.
He knew why she was not here.
He knew where she was.
THREE
Askival had once been his home. That was back in the ‘40s, when his parents Stanley and Leota Connor had divided their work between the Bareilly Agricultural college in the plains and farming projects in the hills around Mussoorie. When south, they left James in boarding at Oaklands, and when on the hillside, brought him out to stay with them at Askival. During these stretches, he ran the thirty minutes down the steep hill to school each morning, bounding like a mountain deer, and each afternoon plodded the hour back up, a slow mule with his sack of books. But on arrival, his efforts were always rewarded by a hug from the cook and a plate of home baking.
Aziz was the only servant the Connors brought with them from the plains, leaving the rest behind to keep the Bareilly house. For this couple from Iowan farming stock, who had done chores since they could walk and come to India to serve, the very idea of keeping servants was anathema. But India had other ideas. People wanted work and the missionaries must provide it. And so they were compelled to hire a chowdikar to patrol the mission compound at night, a chaprassi to do odd jobs and deliver chits, a jamadar to empty the commodes and clean the bathrooms, an ayah to care for the infant James, a chokra to operate the punkah fan in the hot season, a mali to tend the garden and pump water from the well, a khansamma to shop and cook, and a bearer to serve the meals, wash up and do the housework.
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