A House Called Askival

by Merryn Glover

  Verghese scrabbled out from under the bed, fluff stuck to his hair. ‘Quick,’ he hissed, under the hullaballoo. ‘We have to hide.’

  James looked frantically around him.

  ‘The window!’ cried Verghese, darting across the room and tugging at the metal latches. But the whole window was warped and rusting with the rains and nothing would give. And it was too late anyway.

  There were heavy footsteps in the hall and the door was yanked open.

  ‘James.’ Stanley’s voice was loaded as a cannon.

  Ignoring Verghese cowering by the window, he frog-marched his son to the dining room, pointed to the smashed bowl and the fruit on the floor and asked if James had anything to say to Aziz-ji. The khansamma was standing in the kitchen door wringing his hands and shaking his head, tears spilling off his cheeks.

  ‘Is no problem, no problem, sahib,’ Aziz pleaded. ‘Is nothing hurting.’ He bundled his right hand into his apron, but not before James caught sight of his thumb, bleeding and swollen. A crushed dumpy stag lay on the floor.

  ‘Maf gijiye,’ James whispered to him, his face burning. Forgive me.

  Stanley then took him to the office, closed the door and undid the buckle on his belt. James fumbled with the buttons on his shorts, eyes fixed on the jute matting at his feet, jaw already clenched so tight he knew it would ache for days, though it would be nothing compared to his legs. He lay bent across his father’s desk, head turned sideways, face jerking against a musty manila file with the force of the whipping. All through it he could hear Aziz crying in the kitchen. His mother, he knew, would be out the back and walking fast – he never knew where – returning later with lips pressed together and glassy eyes. Of Verghese, he could hear nothing.

  When he got back to his bedroom, shuffling slowly, he saw his friend squatting in the corner, arms lashed around his shins, eyes huge and terrified, running with tears. James lowered himself to the bed and lay on his stomach, face to the wall. He heard Verghese creep up beside him, heard his breathing and frantic whispering and felt him tugging on his sleeve. But James did not move or speak. Finally Verghese was called for supper and James lay in the quiet dark, his legs on fire.

  A little later there was a soft knock on the door and a seam of light.

  ‘Babu?’

  It was Aziz, his voice like a dove’s. He slipped in and knelt beside James, a plate and cup in his scratched hands. The thumb was bandaged.

  ‘Sorry, sorry babu,’ he murmured, putting the things down on the trunk that served as bedside table. ‘So sorry.’ He repeated the words in a continual hushing mantra, his head shaking, hand patting James on the shoulder. ‘Come, come, Aziz-ji is bringing supper for you, babu,’ he whispered. ‘Hamburger Soup by Betty Shirk with Cloverleaf Roll – Hilda Clutterbuck Roll, babu! She is baking queen. And I have put this-season extra-fresh guava jelly, by Aziz. Come, come.’

  FOUR

  Rounding the last bend of the chakkar, Ruth glimpsed Askival through the forest, alone on a promontory, attended by trees. Even from a distance she could see the weather-beaten walls, the bleached and rusting sheets of corrugated iron, the decay. She stopped at the gate and studied the house, so quiet and chill.

  A bird took off from a branch beside her, sending a strange call into the air and a shower of droplets over her head. The metal gate was locked, so with a quick look over her shoulder, she climbed it and walked up the path, her jeans wetting where they passed through clumps of fern. On either side, the oaks reached out bent limbs to her, shaggy with moss and dripping.

  Her last time here, was with Manveer, on the night he died. They stood on the south veranda looking down at the lights of Dehra Dun, a blaze of fallen stars on a black lake. She was cold and he pulled her into the folds of his down jacket, her back against his chest. He smelt of freshly ironed clothes and a grown-up aftershave, though he never shaved. His beard tickled as she rested her head into his neck.

  ‘Manveer,’ she whispered.

  ‘Mmm?’ He tightened his arms around her, lowering his face so his cheek brushed hers, the folded edge of his turban against her ear.

  ‘Show me your hair.’

  Now, as she looked south from the veranda steps, a rising sea of mist swallowed the bazaar and was overcoming the ridge. Shivering in its cool breath, she turned to face the house. The veranda gaped, splintered beams jutting from the plaster like broken teeth, windows staring out at the gloom, empty of glass and blind. She put a foot on the bottom step, but her skin rose in bumps and she pulled back, heading round the outside instead. The walls were bloated and breaking, stone bricks fallen onto the veranda like burst stuffing, woodwork left to rot. Passing the old kitchen she saw a rat scuttle into a hole and from a door further along the stench was like a blow.

  That long-ago November night with Manveer, the house smelled of pine and they found a nest in the fireplace. Outside, an octave owl called and they counted the beats between the notes, joining in on the two hoots and laughing. Till the owl fell silent and there were footsteps on the veranda and a crashing door.

  She circled the house and now stopped outside a corner room whose windows had once looked east onto the front veranda and north to the snows.

  Her father’s old bedroom.

  Now the north wall had fallen away and the room lay bare to the wind. Ruth wrapped her arms around herself, a hard steel bracelet cutting into her ribs, and turned to the north. A shroud of grey hid the mountains and only a few firs were visible: dark, bedraggled apparitions, dripping cold.

  Still unable to go inside, she slipped away down a goat trail through the trees.

  FIVE

  The trail was the same one James had often used to escape the house when he spotted unwelcome visitors coming up the main path. These included his teachers who pressed him into playing Rummy or Scrabble, visiting preachers who quizzed him about his missionary goals, and Colonel Bunce, who hauled him up for inspection.

  On this night in early 1945, James hadn’t quite made it down the path before the Colonel spotted him.

  ‘Where are you off to, my lad?’ he barked, swinging his stick. ‘Come and announce me to your good mother, there’s a boy. She has invited the old goat to tea.’

  James was forced to usher him inside, hang up the Macintosh that indeed smelled like a goat and call for his mother. Worse, he had to wait in the living room, squirming under the Colonel’s gaze, when Leota retreated to check on supper. Stanley was not yet home from work, and Mrs Bunce on a visit to Delhi, so the agony of polite conversation fell to him, thirteen and thick-tongued as he was.

  The Colonel declined a seat and stood with legs akimbo, using his stick to prod the sagging ceiling of white-washed burlap.

  ‘Gone a bit soft, don’t you think?’

  James hung his head.

  ‘Used to be a splendid place, this.’ Bunce tucked the stick under his arm and looked around him. ‘You know that? When the dear old Rawleys were here. Persian carpets, lace curtains from Belgium and a grand piano just there.’ He swung the stick round and fired an invisible shot into the adjoining room where Stanley’s desk now stood, stacked with musty files. ‘Not to mention some bloody good furniture from home!’ And he hit the leg of a sagging armchair. James flinched. He wished his mother would return from her conference with Aziz in the kitchen.

  ‘One of the oldest houses on the hill,’ Bunce said, rubbing his fingers on the wall and sneering at the whitewash that came off on his skin. James tried to excuse himself but the Colonel was just warming up. Leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece, he directed James to a chair with a flick of his stick and went on. ‘Built in 1825 by the great Captain McBain – one of the chaps who fought in the Gurkha wars. Do they teach you that history here?’

  ‘A bit,’ James lied.

  ‘Too American, that school,’ the Colonel muttered, fishing in his jacket for a cigar. ‘And too many missionaries.’

  James winced.

  ‘Did you know,’ Bunce continued, lighting up, ‘that e
arly last century, this whole Garhwal area was snaffled by the Nepalis?’ He waved his cigar expansively. ‘Well, we wrestled it back. Fierce little beggars, though, those Gorkhalis, and it took thousands of our lot and a posse of cannons to squash them. Did it in the end, though.’ He sucked on the cigar, his eyes narrowing, then breathed out a long, curling tendril of smoke. ‘And then signed them up,’ he said, with a twisted smile. ‘Better to have that lot fighting for you than against, eh?’

  James nodded, the smell making him queasy.

  ‘Be a sport and get me an ashtray, will you?’ James couldn’t think where one might be, so passed him a used mug. The Colonel raised his brows at the sight of the coffee dregs, sniffed and tapped his cigar. ‘Anyway, all the top British officers from the conflict got land up here as rewards and built hunting lodges. The place was wild with game back then, you know! So more and more chaps came and then of course the box-wallas and merchants and before you can say hobson-jobson, you’ve got a hill station. Very jolly place it was, too. Of course, that was all over on the Mussoorie side.’ He stabbed his cigar towards the western ridges. ‘This end was very different. Cardiff fellow, Dr Barnabas Jones, set up an army sanatorium here and saddled the place with a Welsh name.’ Bunce screwed up his face and dragged out the word. ‘Llanddowor. Good god! No-one could say it without spitting, so it soon became Landour and remains to this day. Then the whole ridge was declared a military cantonment and got rather straight-laced. Mussoorie, on the other hand, was having a gay old time. Hotels and clubs popping up like mushrooms and endless dinner parties and balls. Rather a lot of hi-jinks, too, I gather.’ James watched the smirk tugging at the corner of his yellowing moustache. ‘You see, Simla was where the Viceroy moved his government for the summer, so one had to behave up there, but in Mussoorie one could let one’s hair down. And let it down one certainly did.’ He chuckled, gazing out the window. ‘It was all rather naughty.’

  Then, as if suddenly remembering James was in the room, he blinked at him, tapped his cigar briskly on the mug and set it on the mantel. With a sharp turn, he applied his stick to a tiger skin on the floor and poked some bare patches on the beast’s head.

  ‘Your old man?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Any shikar yourself?’

  ‘Just birds.’ James felt his cheeks warming. He hoped the Colonel wouldn’t poke his silver-black kalij pheasant stuffed in mid-strut on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Birds are for babies, my boy!’ the man barked, poking the pheasant. ‘You should have seen old Captain Rawley’s trophies. The place was bristling with them. Bears, leopards, tigers, ghoral, kakar. Heads and skins everywhere!’

  James slid his hand into his armpit.

  ‘Something to aim for, eh?’

  The boy nodded, gave a watery smile and dug his nails into his skin. There had been a deer. A delicate thing with velvet fur and huge eyes. But James had only wounded her leg before she ripped off into the forest. Crying, broken.

  SIX

  ‘Lai, lai, la-iiii.’ Iqbal’s voice filled the open-plan living room at Shanti Niwas. James looked across from his post at the door as Iqbal threw open a tablecloth, smoothed it with his dimpled hands and set a jug of daisies in the middle. ‘La, la, la, la, la, la!’ Then he started folding sky-blue napkins into fan shapes. James had forbidden all that frippery at first, when Iqbal had found him, seven years before, clinging to grief and his bare table. But the man was wily. He had started with flowers here and there, dusting off some old vases from the back of a cupboard, and James could not argue. Even Ellen had been allowed flowers. But never had he imagined it would come to this.

  He checked his watch again.

  ‘I’d better go find her,’ he said, taking down his jacket from the rack in the corner.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Iqbal asked, pausing his folding. ‘Then I’ll come, too, na.’

  ‘No.’ James held up a hand.

  ‘Ok,’ his friend sighed and made an effort at an encouraging smile. ‘Take care now, hah ji?’

  Outside the rain had started. James shook open his umbrella – black cotton with CONNOR painted in large white letters on the panels – and shone his torch onto the wet path.

  Once on the chakkar, he walked quickly, the rain drumming on the umbrella and flattening his trousers to his legs; it was colder than he’d expected and his jacket felt thin. Squinting down the dark twists of the road, he prayed for Ruth. It was all he had left, though even that was disappearing. In Bible Studies and meetings he rarely prayed aloud anymore and when he did, the words sounded hollow. Alone at the desk in his room, head sunk in his hands, he felt prayers crumble to ash like the burnt end of a mosquito coil.

  There had been many times in his life when he had sensed God, felt the Presence like breath, known a quiet leading.

  But not now.

  Now it was like throwing himself into emptiness; falling, calling, wearing his voice hoarse, but hearing nothing. Even walking the mountain paths, where his spirit was most free, he found himself pleading in vain. There was birdsong and crickets and the sighing of wind through trees, but no God.

  This absence had pushed him to Iqbal’s side on Friday nights, when his friend touched his nose to the floor and poured song into the void and somehow filled it.

  Approaching Morrison Church, where the road divides, James saw her: the small frame in jeans and jacket, hood over her head; the quick stride she’d inherited from Ellen; the hands rammed in pockets.

  ‘Ruth!’ he called out. ‘Is that you?’

  She stopped. Her face was hidden.

  He moved into a wavering funnel of light under a lamp, and tilted back his umbrella.

  ‘It’s Dad.’ Rain blew on his face. ‘Came to find you.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘I wasn’t lost.’ Her voice was low, rough, the dragging of stone on stone. She lifted her face and his stomach tightened. Her mother’s fine bones and nose, the full mouth, yet all battened down and hard as steel. Not a flicker in those lovely eyes.

  ‘Ruthie,’ he said, her name hurting his throat. He lifted a hand towards her, knobbled and white and getting wet as it hung there. He reached further and touched her arm.

  ‘Good to see you, Piyari.’

  She stepped closer, yanked her hands out of her pockets and slipped them round him.

  ‘You too,’ she said and gave him a quick pat. He had just enough time to fumble his arm round her shoulders, accidentally pulling her hood off and bumping the umbrella spine against her forehead. His face brushed her hair, a tangle of curls smelling of exhaust fumes and cigarettes. She stepped back.

  His hand ran over his mouth and fumbled across his chest.

  ‘Journey ok?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said and pulled the hood back up. The rain spattered on it, droplets coursing down her shoulders. ‘You shouldn’t have come out in this.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said James. ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘Well don’t be. I’m fine.’

  ‘Good then. We’re all fine. Chalo!’

  He held the umbrella out to offer her shelter but she ignored it and they moved off, silent except for the squish of her sneakers and the clump of his boots. The rain fell harder, pelting the trees, the umbrella, her back.

  Rounding the bend above Shanti Niwas, James pointed at the house.

  ‘That’s us,’ he said. It shone like a lamp on the dark mountain, light spilling from its windows, blurring in the wet. As they neared the door, the sound of singing rose to them above the rain.

  SEVEN

  He always sang when he worked, as if the song were an essential ingredient without which the meal would fail, as vital as yeast for the bread or flame for the pot. It was a spell stirred into the food, a prayer for the health and happiness of the diners, a blessing. But on this cold day in 1945, Aziz’ voice was a little cracked and jerky. It was not easy to sing whilst butchering a goat.

  They had set off from Askival the day before, with their army-
surplus rucksacks and tin canteens. James and Stanley had guns in their packs, broken down and wrapped in sleeping bags, while Aziz’ bag clattered with primus stove, cooking pots and tins of spice. They took the path straight down the north side of the hill below Askival, a precipitous track that zig-zagged down through rhododendrons and deodars to the Aglar river at the bottom. The forest was deeply quiet but for the crunch of their leather boots and the occasional cry of a barbet, and the three did not break the hush with speech.

  When they came out of the trees into a clearing it was dusk and the late November air was chill. Ahead was a cluster of chaans, temporary huts for cattle and their keepers in the winter months. Made of rough stone and earth with thatched roofs, they rose from the ground like they had grown there, as much a part of the landscape as the rocks and the scrub. Cracks of light glowed at the doorways and smoke rose in tendrils through the thatch. The people here were well known to the Connors as they were their dudh-wallas, the dairymen who delivered buffalo milk each day to Askival and the other houses a thousand feet up on the ridge. They lived constantly on the brink of ruin and were thus top priority in Stanley’s agricultural programme. In Hindu classification, they were bottom. Untouchables. Or Harijans, as Gandhi had named them. The children of God.

  At Stanley’s call, the father of the house, Bim, cried out, pulled open the wooden door and drew them in. James was hit by the smells of dung and wet straw and a bitter smoke that stung his eyes. Half of the hut was for the cattle, with just a crumbling wall and a window dividing the space. A buffalo and a cow shuffled and chewed and snorted at the opening, liquid brown eyes surveying James as their hairy ears twitched and long streams of piss gushed onto the straw. Children jumped up and pulled him to the floor, one little boy scrambling into his lap as the others pressed to his sides, giggling and fishing through his pockets for loot. The firelight danced on their faces: chapped cheeks, runnels of snot coursing up and down with their sniffs, hair dry and matted as thorn bushes. None had shoes and the boy wore only a shirt.