No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  As I hid under the trailing dreadlocks of a banyan, I was chilled by a premonition that something was watching me. Was it Death’s raptor eye measuring the distance for its swoop? I could not shake the awareness of that presence.

  In the stillness of early night, as the crickets were beginning their chorus, I was startled by a howl of lamentation which turned into a wail, a long sob, making my hair stand on end.

  Pistol in hand, I slipped through the open door that stood ajar and found myself standing in a long hallway with a chessboard pattern of black and white marble, facing two louvered doors of wood encrusted with dust, no footmarks on the dusty floor, or clean patches on the grimy knobs to indicate that they had been in recent use.

  A kerosene lamp shed smudged light on a flat platform at the end of the hall, upon which lay the rigid figure of a man, draped to his waist in a length of marmoreal cotton. Creeping closer, even in this dimness I instantly recognized the high cheekbones, pointed jaw, and arched eyebrows of the fugitive.

  Aiming my gun at the centre of his chest, I tried to shake him awake with my other hand. I noticed his eyes were half open, the pupils dull. He was stone cold.

  A terrible cry rose in the desolate room, and so startled was I—who had thought myself surprised already—that I hit my hand hard against the edge of a table as I whirled around, dropping the gun, which clattered on the dirty marble and slid across a couple of black and white squares.

  From where I stood, I spied an old man kneeling in a far corner, his frail shoulders shaking. Struggling to get up, his skeletal arms stretching, twig-like fingers scraping the wall, he paid no attention to me. I could hear his laboured breath, and coming close, smelt the peculiar odour of age and misery. His frail rib cage and thin shanks confirmed that I had nothing to fear from such unarmed decrepitude. He looked at me, taking in my North Indian dress, and said in halting Urdu, “There is nothing to rob here.” He said it without ire or disgust, as if commenting that there was dust on the floor, or that it was night.

  “I came for him,” I replied in Bengali, pointing at the draped figure.

  “My grandson has been taken,” said the old man, “already.”

  His thin face, though lined and very aged, was intelligent and his eyes calmly studied me. His simple dhoti, wrapped in the rural Bengali style, grazed his bony ankles as he moved slowly to the taktaposh, just a plank on four legs, and knelt beside the dead young man, caressing him.

  “They grow up so fast,” he said to himself ruminatively. “He was to join the provincial judiciary. Such dreams in a country without independence.”

  I let him ramble on, wondering if I had come all this way for nothing and whether I should walk back now to the boat dock, or stay in this broken mansion until dawn.

  “Will you light the other lamp for me?” asked the old man.

  I fished matches from my pocket and lit the lamp, rotating the knob to raise the wick. Sitting cross-legged on the floor by its glow, I lit a Woodbine and, taking a long drag, choked. Staring in disbelief, I saw Santimoy Mitra pointing my gun straight at my chest. I might have pounced upon him, but seeing his finger fidgeting on the trigger, I stayed still.

  “I . . . I . . .” stammered Santimoy, “I had . . . n-nothing to . . . to d-do with . . . with th-the shooting. . . .” His voice quivered with the effort to finish his sentence. What kind of terrorist was this? The gun jerked up in his hand, and then tilted down uncertainly. “I . . . am-m innocent, Mr. T-Tegart,” he sounded frantic, “b-believe me.”

  I looked sharply at him. How could a Bengali terrorist not know his quarry? Nonetheless, here we were in a remote East Bengal village. All he had to do was aim true, and I was done for. Then he could simply fling my body in the river, and it would disappear, tugged by the powerful current to the sea.

  The old man was still on the edge of the taktaposh, paying no heed to either of us, tending to the identical body.

  What mystery is this? I thought, but I dared not move yet. The hands of the dead man lay by his side, unscarred, skin unbroken. I looked back at the figure holding the pistol.

  “I was p-passing the m-museum a-and was t-turning b-back,” he said, trying to master his stutter, “and s-sorry . . . I was u-urinating in the corner. Then I heard the pistols f-firing. I r-ran into the s-sidestreet, and then I saw y-you had a g-gun and were ch-chasing me. I j-just ran. What c-could I do?”

  The palm he had held out in appeal bore deep gashes. This was the corpse’s double, his living twin! What mattered, I thought bitterly, if one Mitra is dead—if the other shot me to keep him company? Abruptly, a wave of nausea swept through me, a bilious taste filling my mouth. A shimmer of lightheadedness troubled my eyes. This black-and-white marbled floor is playing tricks with my sight, I thought desperately, as a cold sweat broke all over me.

  The old man stood up now. “Santimoy, tell me,” he asked sternly, “was everything you said the plain truth?”

  “Yes, all true,” Santimoy said rapidly in his East Bengali accent, without a trace of his stammer. “All true, I swear by Devi Annapurna’s name, in the name of sacred Shiva.”

  “I believe you,” said the old man, as if that was the end of the matter. Then a querulous tone came into his voice. “But you said that you squatted by the railing to urinate? In a public place, by the Indian Museum itself! Oh-ho, can you, can you imagine what people will say about us who are from Barisal District?”

  I did not know if I should lunge and wrest the gun away at this moment or laugh out loud at the complete absurdity of this exchange.

  While the two of them talked earnestly, I reached out and slapped the gun from Santimoy’s hand. Gasping, he fumbled after it. I pushed him hard, and as he stumbled to the floor, I lunged for the gun, retrieving it. Let me shoot the young man first, I decided.

  But an unearthly dizziness overwhelmed me, a spout of vomit erupted from within, and I realized that detritus and mucous were seeping down my quivering legs, which refused to support me. I felt the metal of the pistol at my temple. The old man held the gun. In spite of the bob and reel inside my head, I could tell his hand was steady.

  “Are you Tegart?” he asked me, as if he had all the time in this strange world.

  Some poison was curdling my life’s blood. Who am I? I thought helplessly. Amar naam Aherne, I mumbled thickly in Bengali, hanging by this one certain thread.

  “Aherne!” exclaimed the old man. “Did you say Aherne?”

  I nodded feebly on the floor.

  “Lie still. Do not move, Mr. Aherne,” he added, his East Bengali accent elongating my name.

  “Shoot me. Get it over with,” I groaned.

  “I shall do no such thing, Mr. Aherne. You have the cholera and will need your strength and my skill to live.”

  Drifting like a leaf down a monsoon of darkness, gasping and vomiting a rancid fluid, I felt my life beginning to drain out of me. My mind stirred, a blind manatee in a river of pain. As I struggled to keep conscious, my head reeled, and my eyelids trembled in spite of my effort to stay alert. The flame of the hurricane lamp inside the sooty curve of the glass cylinder seemed to whisper to me, then faded into black before the sheet over me turned into a current of radiance—rippling and rising—growing lucent into something green and fluid. I was afloat in pain.

  I lost sense of time, forgot what day meant, and what was night. Words drifted into my head. Talon: A curved word with a feathered leg that clawed my naked skull; Eyes: Two peepholes squinting on each side of a bulbous nose; Honour: A word with two charred holes, convoluted and curved into itself. I: A stick moving from place to place in a small streak of blood, a painting-brush jabbed unspeakably deep within an eye-socket.

  What strange visions I had! My grandfather, whose features I knew well, leant whispering over me. Sensing a tender palm on my brow, I called out for my mother. I dreamt repeatedly of a woman with flaming red hair, who kept pointing directly at me, as if I needed to regard myself for some lost message.

  Each time I cam
e to the brink of waking, crack-lipped and hoarse, the old man gave me a small drink which tasted of crushed basil and some other herbs I cannot name, but would know instantly by the merest whiff for the rest of my life. In my confusion, I kept looking for my pistol, but found that I could barely move my finger on the pillow.

  The world smelt of wild lime and milkwort. A bumblebee strayed into the room and hovered, buzzing and suspended, punctuating its flight, revising it in a mindful way. A trio of jackdaws stopped between a broken windowpane and a peeling scarlet pillar to peck at something they found on the patterned floor. Above the sheet, I was startled to find my hands pale and thin, my nails translucent, not bitten to the quick as they usually were. I was emerging pulp-like, embryonic, from a chrysalis.

  The very old man and the thin youth had taken turns caring for me: Washing my body, swathing it in white dhotis, changing soiled sheets. I was no more capable of helping than of levitating. The old man fed me from a small curved silver vessel, tongue-shaped, called a jhinook, which villagers use to feed newborns.

  I was still too feeble to call out, unable to explain that my nostrils were full of phlegm, that I was forced to breathe largely through my mouth, leaving my tongue dry as a wooden spatula, unable to move my head if an obstinate fly perched on my lip, rubbing its insect forearms in some disgusting ablution, drinking with its hairy proboscis.

  But slowly my ease of breath was returning to me. I understood the simple fact that this old man had saved me—no less surely than if he had hauled me from the roiling river nearby. I had no idea why he had done so.

  “You have been abed for five days,” he said. “Will you eat a little rice today?”

  I sensed that I had turned slowly, a lost planet in the void, from night to the first glimmer of day.

  • • •

  THERE WERE BOOKS on the small table by my taktaposh. Margaret Noble’s book on her Indian experience, pamphlets of Annie Besant, speeches of Eamon de Valera. On the very top of this small heap was Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom. In the last two days, I had read some pamphlets and leafed through books as my mind grew lucid. Some were books I had been given by my father, and had then flipped through and laid aside with little care.

  Now, in my silent convalescence, I felt a willingness to hear those voices. As I lay there, I realized that all these books had been written by people from Ireland and marveled at the strangeness of this, in an obscure riverine village of East Bengal. Some of these books and papers would be enough to lodge the Indian owner in a British jail. Dan Breen’s book was considered downright seditious. All news about Irish antipathy to English domination of India was routinely, carefully, and ruthlessly censored. The Irish I knew—or knew of—here in India, did not seem like these Irish in Ireland. Dyer, O’Dwyer, and their like were feared and despised. The Irish whose words I had been reading were from a different, greener world.

  I believe it had been almost a week when finally I felt able to sit up in bed. Thinking I was alone, I made the effort to turn and felt my feet on the cool marble underfoot. As I did so, I heard the old man whisper my name, and realized he had been keeping a watchful eye on me, out of sight, at the head of the taktaposh.

  “Aherne,” he whispered, as if the days and nights of my illness and convalescence had been no more than a small interruption.

  “Yes, that’s my name,” I said, “Robert Padraig Aherne.” I paused for breath. “I don’t know yours.”

  “Did you know Padraig Aherne?”

  “Please tell me who you are,” I asked him humbly, for I needed to know the name of the man who had nursed me back to life.

  “Do we, any of us, truly know who we are, or become?” he replied. His sparse hair was white, his face the parchment of great age, but there was no vagueness in his sharp black pupils, no filaments of tired red in his eyes. “My parents named me Ramkumar Mitra,” he said, “ninety-two years ago.”

  “I came from the Calcutta Police, to apprehend Santimoy Mitra,” I confessed.

  “You came without escort, without informing the local police thana in Barisal? Why is it that when you lay ill, no one came to look for you?” he said evenly. “You are a Tegart man? Everyone in our wretched land knows about your Mr. Tegart.” I could not avert my eyes from his steady gaze.

  “We can speak plainly,” he said quietly. “You came here to kill Monimoy, did you not?”

  “What?” I said in confusion. “Who is Monimoy?”

  “My grandson Monimoy was my pride. He was the one who collected and read those books next to your bed. He came home to see me one last time, before going from Dacca to Calcutta on a mission, but died suddenly. That is how the cholera kills, sometimes within hours, too late for my skills. I had him cleaned for his funeral pyre, when you came. But you . . .” he said quietly, “I was able to save you.”

  “You can kill me now,” I echoed. I knew I was still as weak as a kitten.

  “Tegart must have found out,” whispered the old man to himself, “that Monimoy would visit me one last time.”

  “I know nothing about this Monimoy,” I said.

  The old man shook his head slowly. “Twins they were born, but Monimoy was air and fire, and Santimoy water and patient earth. All Monimoy thought about was our poor land and the humiliations of being subject.” He paused for breath. “Monimoy finished school and went to Dacca. He discovered books by Parnell and Dan Breen. Breen became his hero. Most of Ireland has now become free. Impatient and patriotic, Monimoy wanted the same for India.” We sat in momentary silence.

  “To throw off police suspicion, Monimoy sat for the Civil Service examination for the minor judicial order which tries cases about stolen goats and cows, and petty bribery. Pathetic imitations of power for subject Indians. In time, he received the Imperial Letter of Appointment to join the judiciary branch of the Empire’s Civil Service, so the police left him alone.” The old man paused for breath. “Monimoy was expected to go to Dacca. Before that he planned to go to Calcutta and pay his respects to Tegart. There he would shoot him, my impetuous grandson told me on his deathbed, for Irish Dan Breen had taught him how to deal with turncoats. Tegart is a turncoat, he said. An Irishman serving the English.”

  “There are many Irishmen serving in India,” I demurred.

  “No one can resist the temptation to grind those under their power. That is human nature. And I doubt not, Robert Aherne, if ever we Indians were to have power over others, we too would do the same. Power is that heady drink.” He paused momentarily for breath. “Robert Aherne, who was Padraig Aherne to you?”

  “My grandfather,” I responded slowly. “He died when I was an infant.”

  “It was Padraig Aherne from Ireland who first spoke to me of all this. He was a remarkable man, Mr. Aherne.” Ramkumar sat quietly for a while, then handed me an object wrapped in a length of faded silk, a long envelope, yellow with age.

  “It belonged to my father,” he said.

  The name on it read Doorgadass Mitra, Esquire, addressed to a business house near Pathuriaghata in Calcutta, in the manner of penmanship common in the last century, dated October 25, 1848. A red wax seal once held the letter together.

  As I read the sender’s name, my breath stilled:

  Padraig Aherne, Merchant

  Old Courthouse Lane, Esplanade

  Calcutta, East India Company Territory of Bengal

  East Indies

  Padraig

  Calcutta, India

  1848

  To my Respected Mentor and Dear Friend,

  Doorgadass-Babu,

  I send my greetings to you, almost a year after my last letter bidding you goodbye. It was with great trepidation of mind that I left India, and you and yours, to find if a dreadful rumour about my family in Ireland was true. I found, contrary to my hope, that the direct appearance of disaster was harsher than my abstract dread of it. I had thought that I had seen and understood enough of life’s strange stratagems. Now those seemed mere caprices.

  Y
ou, sir, had stood between me and the East India Company’s soldiers, when I believed that my life hung by a thread. It is only now that we can smile, remembering how they had come to your palace to have me hanged. But you did tell them that I was not Alexander Blackburn, the escaped English clerk, but your employee Padraig Aherne, come by your private boat from Calcutta. Do you recall how that officer McMillan and I spoke on, he about County Down, while I expanded fluently on how I’d taken ship from Sligo Harbour to Liverpool, and thence to Calcutta to seek my fortune?

  “And do you like your job as clerk with this brown merchant?” the captain asked me with casual insolence.

  “Better than serving the English,” I had thought to myself, but Doorgadass-babu, I needed to save my skin, so I pretended nonchalance. Had he known the truth, he would have hoisted me on my petard—an expression my old schoolmaster favoured. McMillan could not think why an Indian merchant of Calcutta with a great country-house would risk a lie to the great East India Company itself. And I was finally rid of Alexander Blackburn.

  You, kind sir, believed that I rescued your only son, Ramkumar, from certain death. True it is that you were away when he took so sorely ill, but what strange custom of your religious kin to convey him in his last moments to the riverside! The end of life, its length, is a mystery to man, and it is troublesome for me to think of anyone aiding Fate. It needs no human help, I say. Fate it was that directed me, so I could succor Ramkumar, put him by my fire, and give him watchful comfort and the simple nourishment of coconut water. That alone revived him—and his fate—no skill of mine.

  You befriended me, became my generous mentor; more indeed, for you proved a father to me, I say without let or hindrance, for my father was dead before I was born.

  But in my own filial duty, I have been sore amiss, and in my common sense to boot. Therefore I must confess to you and relieve my torment.

  I do not expect anyone else to understand or condone my stupidity and arrogance. I can scarcely believe it myself. It is a damnable thing that I did not write home when I arrived in India. At first I thought I would earn enough, rapidly, for my passage back home—in about the same time it would take a letter to reach my family.