‘Yes I can! I’ve slept on a lot worse.’ She stood with her back to his closed bedroom door, arms folded across her chest.
‘So have I, beti, but is no need when a comfortable bed is there.’ And he reached round her to take hold of the handle, his breath smelling of cloves. She blocked his arm.
‘I will not put you out of your bedroom.’
‘Come,’ he appealed. ‘I have scrubbed my hands to the bone for you. Do me this kindness.’
She looked from his soft hands to his eyes, brown and warm. They reminded her of that dark sugar syrup she used to pour on pancakes. What was it called? Gur. Yes! A word of Hindi, at last. She felt it hum in her head as she met his gaze: dark and sweet, a lure for flies. Then she sighed and let him pass. Iqbal flashed an enormous smile and flung open the door like a ring master.
She stared. Iqbal set down her pack and bowed deeply.
‘I am trusting your happy comfort here,’ he said and stood erect, gazing about him with satisfaction. The walls were a crowded scrapbook of pictures, posters, calendars and photos, the floor an archipelago of rag-rugs, the bed teetering with cushions. Every surface was bedecked with lace and shiny fabrics, and on top of these, Iqbal had martialled a mind-boggling array of ornaments: Chinese fans, bowls of marbles, cuddly toys, fake flowers, shell sculptures, wooden trinkets and a plastic Scotsman with bagpipes. On the desk, a set of lacquered Kashmiri boxes bristled with pens and assorted stationery and beside them stood a vase of marigolds, their sharp smell fighting with the clamorous notes of a cheap deodorant. A large window above the desk looked south to the plains, though by now it was dark and raining and merely bounced back Ruth’s reflection. She looked lost and shabby next to this radiant man in his florid world. He grinned and waved. She forced a smile and yanked the curtains shut.
‘You will be performing your toilet,’ he said, gave a little bow and swept out of the room. If smelling Iqbal’s food had caught her in the seductions of memory, eating it was surrender to the moment. The meal was a gift: fluffy rice topped by a golden river of daal; a mound of sag with buttery chunks of paneer; a ladle-full of steaming mutton curry and a hot chapatti, fresh from the tawa. Iqbal served them with small flourishes and fragments of song, and Ruth found herself laughing and caught a glow in her father’s hawk eyes.
Throughout the meal, Iqbal beamed at her like she was his own child, plying her with extra helpings and questions.
‘Did you manage to eat that rubbish they gave you on the plane?’
‘Oh yes. I always eat it. Every last cracker.’
‘You must have been so, so hungry! Here, have some more gosht.’ And he dolloped the mutton on her plate as if trying to compensate for years of inadequate rations.
‘Oh thanks. No, I wasn’t that hungry. Just the habit of a life time. I can’t leave food.’
‘Never allowed to,’ James said.
‘Say that again. If you didn’t eat something on the plane, Mom would wrap it in a napkin and you’d get it for your next meal.’
‘Waste not want not!’ chimed Iqbal, lifting a finger.
Ruth tore her chapatti in half and scooped up a piece of slippery mutton. She shot a look at James.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, dragging her words. ‘We never wasted anything.’
Pencils had been used till they were stumps and pages from old notebooks folded into medicine packets for the pharmacy. Clothes were patched and repaired, old sweaters re-knitted as socks. Food was never thrown out, not even a grain of rice. And as for time, it was most sacred of all and never to be wasted on idle pleasures.
But the wanting? That never ceased. Ruth had felt it like an ache in the air around them. Her mother’s eyes drawn to shop windows, fingers stroking a bolt of silk. Hannah straining for approval, and gaining approval, yet straining still. Ruth’s own miserable longing to be at the centre of their hearts, for once. But more than all of them, James. Wanting only to serve God, he always claimed, to take up his cross. And yet no matter how hard he served and how far he dragged that damn thing – dragging them behind – it never seemed enough. Always that hunger in his eyes, that bent back, the troubled hands. Always the wanting, and never getting.
Like me, Ruth thought. She was not what he had wanted, right from birth – she was convinced of it – because after big sister Hannah, she should have been a boy. They’d even received A Word when Ellen became pregnant. The Lord to Abraham: ‘Your wife will have a son.’ Perfect. But when a girl emerged, red-faced and howling, it was clear their appropriation of prophecy had rather let them down. Or Ruth had. One way or the other, it set the precedent.
After supper, Iqbal refused Ruth’s help in clearing up and they argued again, good-naturedly, while James’ mouth curled into a half smile and he muttered something about an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Iqbal won, again. All grinning and gur eyes, damn him. But Ruth extracted a promise that she could help from the next day.
‘Accha, accha.’ He tilted his head from side to side and sent her off with a mug of chai, its spiced smell rising like a genie. She put it on the coffee table and got out her cigarettes, glancing at James on the sofa, gangly legs crossed at the ankles, hands tucked in his armpits, eyes closed. He looked asleep but she felt his alertness, the tuning of his ears, the waiting. At the sink, Iqbal hummed as he washed the dishes, his tune light and folksy and vaguely familiar. She stepped out the door and huddled under the narrow eaves, the rain against her legs.
I don’t get it, she thought, as the lighter flared. Who the hell is this guy and what’s he doing here? When she’d tried a few casual questions over dinner, Iqbal had been evasive.
‘Oh, I’m just the fat fellow in the films,’ he’d said. ‘How do you say—? Comic belief?’
‘Relief,’ said James.
‘Ah yes!’ He laughed. ‘I’m that one. Wheeled on when the story gets too sad.’ And he winked at James. Ruth followed his gaze but her father gave nothing away.
‘But,’ she probed, slicing into her sticky gulab jamun. ‘Do you work?’
‘Not so well,’ he said, rubbing his hip and grinning. ‘Rusting a bit, you know, and losing some marbles.’
She sighed. ‘Are you retired?’
‘Oh no! Doctor-ji is retired, Ruthie, and he goes to meetings every day, writes reports, plants trees, clears rubbish and visits the villages. Is very hard work and I am avoiding for long as possible, Inshallah.’
‘But—!’ Ruth huffed with an exasperated half-laugh.
James wiped his mouth on a napkin and spoke. ‘Iqbal was down at Oaklands three days a week teaching Indian Music and a cookery class.’
‘Really—?’
‘What he doesn’t want to tell you is that he has taken leave so he can look after me. It is against my wishes.’
‘Oh,’ said Ruth, and swallowed a lump of gulab jamun.
Iqbal tilted his head and eyebrows, a helpless little shrug, a diminished smile. Rain shattered on the stone terrace outside.
‘I’m… here,’ she offered, slowly. James turned his gaze on her, a pale blue searchlight; it made her tighten.
Iqbal jumped up and started gathering dishes. ‘But you are not here to be house-maid,’ he said, voice bouncy as a ball.
No.
Cigarette finished, she took up the cane chair opposite her father and pulled a kashmiri shawl round her shoulders. Iqbal’s tune was slower now, sadder. A friend, James had said. Yet he waited on them hand and foot, second-guessing their needs, fussing and spoiling, just like a devoted servant, or a doting mother. Though Ellen, she thought bitterly, had not been allowed the spoiling.
Warming her hands on the mug, Ruth sipped her chai and looked around the room, struggling to remember the old servants’ quarters it once was. Grey concrete, streaked with damp and hung with ragged washing. Scabby children in the dirt at the front, chickens pecking, a broken chair. James had said the servants were moved to a smart, new block about five years ago and this would have been pulled down, had he not bought i
t. He’d hired unemployed Garhwali labourers to re-build it with strong stone walls and a tiled roof. Inside was all white and wood and glass. Ruth was surprised by its beauty. James had scorned beauty in all things but nature; only God could create beauty. Man’s efforts were vain, illusory and decadent.
Yet on the wall behind James there was a painting: a bluish shape against a background like sun-burned rock. Gradually she recognised the shape was a woman with her eyes closed and face lifted, as if for a kiss. The more Ruth looked at it, the more it gave.
Her gaze dropped to James, his head resting against the wall, fine white hair falling over his forehead and down to the caterpillar eyebrows. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his face and there was a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders of his sweater, a brown thing with patched elbows and sagging sides that hung on him like a dust sheet. He’d always been lean, but when she’d held him so briefly at their greeting on the road, the jutting of his ribs had shocked her.
Like that day in Tennessee when she was seventeen and had walked into his bedroom. It was just a few weeks after they’d left India and the morning of Hannah’s wedding. He was curled up on his side, back to her, in nothing but underpants. His ribs were convulsing like the poles of a wind-blown tent, and there was a sound she’d never heard before. A strange, almost silent hacking; the beating of breath; the rise and fall of sobs. In it she recognised a loss greater than her own, and a source deeper than she understood, and though she felt a tearing rush of love, she could not reach for him. She slipped out, frightened and alone.
Outside, the rain had softened into a dripping dark. From the bazaar a voice rose, like a song of lament. Iqbal laid a handful of cutlery on the counter and James’ eyes jerked open, roving from him to Ruth.
‘Time for prayer,’ James said.
She stared at him. That was the call from the mosque. Time for Muslim prayer. He waved his hand at her.
‘You’ve had a long journey, Ruthie. You get some rest.’ She hesitated, but he seemed impatient.
‘Ok,’ she murmured and with a slurping draught, downed the last of her chai and stood up, pulling the shawl around her.
‘Thank you, Iqbal. I’ve really missed good Indian khana.’ Another word! Hindi returning, of its own volition, as if some of the curry had slipped down to the old dog and revived it. Just two words so far – no more than whimpers, really – but Hindi, nevertheless. Tiny acts of salvage, of reclamation.
‘A happy day!’ Iqbal smiled, untying his apron. ‘Our Ruthie has come home. We have killed the fatted calf.’
‘This isn’t—!’
‘Home is where the family is!’ he interrupted, gesturing to James.
‘Of course,’ she murmured and turned to the stairs. ‘Night Dad.’ She leaned over the edge of the sofa and kissed him lightly on the top of the head. His arms flew up like a startled bird and grabbed her, but she pulled back. Then she wished she hadn’t seen his face: so briefly lit and then dark.
‘Night Ruth.’ His arms dropped and she felt an ache in her breastbone.
As she climbed the stairs she saw Iqbal unfolding a prayer mat and a white skull cap. She froze. He was Muslim? She looked at James, who was opening a scuffed, taped-together Bible, thick with papers.
In Iqbal’s room she stood behind the door and listened. The low murmur of James’ voice gave way to Iqbal singing, but this time a strange and haunting tune that stirred feelings she could not name. After a few minutes the song died, but the feelings remained, lifted and wheeling like a flock of birds.
She shook her head and turned to examine his pictures. Bollywood actresses shimmied beside Alpine meadows; gleaming cars parked themselves around a framed Arabic text; on a hospital fund-raising calendar, a man held up his leprosy-mutilated stumps, and everywhere, teddy bear and kitten greeting cards nuzzled amongst a vast array of snapshots. Many of the photos were of westerners, often standing with Iqbal, and mainly missionaries, judging by appearances. Several of them were women, grey-haired and determined. ‘Women outnumber men on the mission field thirteen to one,’ Grandma Leota used to say. ‘The men are just scared.’ Ruth was never sure if their fears centred on the mission field or the women.
In one picture, Iqbal was sitting on a stage beside a sitar and tabla with a group of people, all relaxed and laughing. They looked like musicians and dancers and one man was laughing so hard his eyes were hidden. Ruth was sure she knew the face but couldn’t place him.
Then she saw a picture of Hannah & Derek and her stomach clenched. There they were, in the back garden of their Tennessee home, arms bursting with their seven children, mostly red-heads like Derek, all clean-scrubbed and looking so happy and healthy and home-schooled that Ruth wanted to spit. And was at once ashamed. It was not their fault and, in truth, she loved them. And yet hated that smug Blessed-by-the-Lord! look stamped all over the picture, and the fact that not one of them was hers.
But when had Iqbal met them? She realised again how little she knew. How little she’d wanted to know. Or at least, that had been the message she’d given off, all these years, like a skunk’s fierce smell.
She searched for a picture of herself, but when she couldn’t find one, felt a pang of hurt and then scorn. Why would Iqbal have her picture? She’d never even acknowledged his existence. Hannah probably sent birthday cards and knitted socks.
Snorting, she started to undress, but felt suddenly exposed. She was an impostor in this man’s den, humming with his presence and the spirits of all he had gathered here. It made her skin shrivel, the missionaries, the actresses and the man with the leprous mitts all watching as she tugged her t-shirt off and unclipped her bra, craning to see her pull down her jeans. Hannah and Derek, of all people! She turned her back on the faces, only to see herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, naked now but for her underpants and her jewellery. She allowed herself a long, cruel stare. It was a map of loss. Her breasts hung tired and uneven on a torso that was too scrawny for the swell of hips and thighs. The once-taut stomach was slackened, having not pulled itself together after grief. She hadn’t shaved for weeks and the growth on shins and armpits was a ragged black. Everywhere the slight coarsening of texture, the tide marks of age, the scars.
She leaned close to read a card that was sticky-taped onto one corner of the mirror. It was handwritten in a curly script:
Just as fragrance is in the flower,
and reflection is in the mirror,
in just the same way,
God is within you.
– Sikh saying –
Manveer had been Sikh. Though when his poor parents had come for his body, there would have been little sign of it. She shivered, her skin risen in bumps, feet like ice, and yanked on a fresh t-shirt. Dumping the bed cushions onto the floor – satin, frilly, embroidered – she was determined that all this would have to change tomorrow. There was something unbearably intimate about sleeping here surrounded by every expression of Iqbal’s taste and affections, as if she was curling up in his mind. Tossing aside a small, ancient teddy bear, she peeled back the razai and saw the one thing that was not his.
Pink polka-dot sheets.
Did he know their heritage? How they’d gone with her into boarding, age six, and remained till she left. On that last day, her mother had ripped them off her bed, as if the sheets themselves had been the scene of desecration. They must have been left in India when their family stumbled back to America that bitter November of ‘84. Ellen had first bought those sheets from a Sears catalogue on furlough, persuading James that it wasn’t luxury but frugality to buy things that would last.
They had outlasted Ellen.
Might outlast us all at this rate, thought Ruth, as she crawled in. Turning in the cool sheets, she suspected the sofa would have been more comfortable; the bed had a thin mattress on a hard base and a pillow that did not give under her head. And the sheets smelled of mothballs.
It was the smell of boarding school. The smell of everything she owned at the beginning of ever
y semester, when she unpacked her things from the tin trunk that had been left in the attic at school. Crushed flannelette nighties, corduroys with patched knees, old sweaters and polka-dot sheets. In the early years, kneeling on the cold floor, she’d tried to fold her clothes properly but ended up with messy bundles and a rising panic. What if she was scolded and made to do it again and not given any cake at Tea?
The trunk she’d brought from Kanpur was always better. Things lifted from it still smelled of life, of home: clothes washed in Surf and dried in the sun, peanut butter cookies, Mom’s soft scent, Dad’s coffee. Ruth would press her face into the Kanpur things and inhale, the ache in her chest tightening like a metal band. But the home smells soon died under the weight of the naphthalene that invaded her cupboard like a bad spirit and lingered over it for weeks. It was also the smell of the boys’ toilets if you were walking past when a door swung open, and the smell that sunk like a rock in your stomach as you pulled on your missionary barrel clothes and the other girls snickered, and the smell of the night when you lay in bed and felt cracks forming inside you and the seeping of tears.
In her dream, the bell was ringing and Ruth was supposed to line up for school, but was far away on a narrow path of the hillside. Dad was in front, carrying her bag, and Mom was behind and they were all going to Kanpur. But then Ruth realised she was alone and knew she had done something wrong but didn’t know what and wanted to say sorry, but couldn’t go fast enough with her bumping, dragging bag. She had to get to the road before they got on the bus! The faster she ran, the more her things fell out and that was another wrong thing so she had to keep finding them – jeans, a teddy bear, baby clothes – but some tumbled down the khud and were out of reach and Iqbal came by singing. Then she was at school with everyone standing in line but she was naked and Hannah was the teacher and Ruth had forgotten her bag and forgotten Mom and Dad. So she ran again, and finally, she was on the chakkar walking to the house. The house at the end of the longest walk in the world, round so many twists and bends in the mountain that you thought you would never reach it. But it was always there, reeking with grief. And she knew Manveer was there and tried to run but her legs would not move at all, like the air had turned to gur, and she tried to call, but the sound would not come till she pushed so hard it was like a groan from the grave but it was too late. He had gone.
A House Called Askival Page 5