Sixty Lights

by Gail Jones

  Victor turned to Lucy, looking embarrassed.

  “Certainly not,” he said. “Colour is God’s business.”

  For Victor photography was purely fake – vain posturings; the stiff fictions of a happy marriage, placement in other, more remote and more comfortable worlds. For Lucy it was a shift in time itself, and a celebration of the lit-up gaze. The imposture of studio work did not really trouble her: she knew it was one mode among many of the concentrated image. There were still moments in time, moments arcane, seductive, trivial, breathtaking, that waited for the sidelong glance, the split-second of notice, the opening up of an irrefutable and auratic presence. She had always known this. She had always believed this to be so. She had always been, after all, a photographer.

  The holy man:

  At the door of a temple sat a holy man, a sadhu, with his foot tied to his neck. His forced-up leg was withered and odd-angled – it looked no longer human – and his body was thin and appeared like walnut wood. He had long hair and a matted beard and a single shred of rag around his waist. Lucy bent before the holy man and filled his bowl with money. The man smiled. His eyes shone. His eyes were the only part of him that seemed still to have the capacity to be fully flexible and alive. Lucy caught his gaze directly: Yes, she thought, just as my eyes make this man a spectacle, his return to me a refusal, and a claim of humanity.

  Arre! he called out.

  The elephant:

  It was in the Bombay Gazette: Mayhem at Chowpatty. An elephant had run amok, killing five people including his mahout, and trampling numerous small dwellings and market stalls. Members of the local constabulary had tracked and shot it, blasting the crazed elephant brains to spattered mush. After the initial sensational story, there were letters to the paper about the non-removal of the carcass: it stank, it was unsightly, it was publicly decaying. Lucy set off with Bashanti to see the dead elephant.

  Who could have thought so much flesh was contained in one being? The massive creature lay on its side, its head thrown back. The tusks had been hacked off, and so had the feet, so that there were bloody exposed areas swarming with insects. The stench was foul. A poor fellow in a ragged turban stood guard over the elephant; he scratched unselfconsciously at his genitals and exchanged a few words with Bashanti, clearly curious that she had brought her memsahib to this dreadful site. Lucy picked out the word farangi, foreigner, one of the few she knew well. Bashanti lowered her voice and turned away and Lucy tried to imagine what explanation she might be inventing.

  Lucy had come to witness bioluminescence. If there is light visible in posthumous flesh, she reasoned, then it will be visible on this scale, with this mountainous beast. She moved foward to the creature, holding her nose to suppress nausea, and saw all of a sudden the flesh disturbed, as though the animal still pulsed and was still, despite its disfiguring mutilation, alive. Lucy’s heart bucked and shuddered and she instinctively stepped back, then saw two rats leaving the carcass through one of the open legs. There was no shine but that of viscera; there was nothing lovely or bright. There was no redeeming conversion of death into luminescent surface. It was only a mass of putrescence, a butchered mess.

  That night Lucy dreamed that she set up a camera in front of the elephant. When she looked through the viewfinder she saw right into its body, right into the red heart, which still beat feebly and bore a glazed and delicate shine. As she took the photograph, the elephant rose on its bloody stumps and shuffled away. This was not a nightmare; it was the artful conversion Lucy had hoped in waking life to see.

  The pan-wallah:

  He sat cross-legged on the ground before a wood plank platform upon which rested, neatly stacked, his bundles of pan leaves bound around mixtures of tobacco, spices and herbs. For a few paise clients bought this unusual confection and headed off, chewing vigorously, filling their cheeks with complicated, explosive tastes. The pan-wallah advertised his wares by his own perpetual chewing. He favoured betel nut, and every minute or so spat a gob of bright crimson fluid onto the ground around him. It was a forest of peonies. Lucy noticed the floral composition of betel stains that circled the pan-wallah. He was at the centre of a kind of artwork. He was in a pattern of spat fluid.

  “Disgusting, isn’t it,” Isaac had whispered at her side.

  “Sometimes,” he added, ever the teacher, “there are special pan mixtures that include gold dust or silver paste. For the wealthy, you understand.

  Lucy loved this idea: chewing on gold and treating it as mere food or condiment. “I want to try some,” she whispered back to Isaac, and felt him immediately recoil.

  Later, when in secret Lucy had persuaded Bashanti to bring her a sample of pan, she sat chewing the tough leaves and attending to the pan-effects. Her mouth burnt, tingled, was becoming numb, and began to fill up with curious liquids. She spat onto the floor and saw before her a small mound of gleaming brownish muck.

  The widows:

  A sanitary detachment from the army was spraying tenements with limewash to protect against bubonic plague. The air was filled with caustic stink and people rushed past, and ducked into doorways, complaining. Lucy saw a group of widows, four women – only one grey-haired – hurry past the sanitary operation in their white mourning saris, and she decided, since Bashanti was buying cloth, to slip away and follow. The four women turned into a side street and visited a stall that sold puja items, items for worship, then moved in single file into a hidden-away temple.

  The temple space was dim and filled with incense. It took a minute or so for Lucy’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, but there they were, the four women, just a few steps in front of her. Each sounded a hanging bell as they entered the temple and moved forward without speaking. They placed their items – a few old apples, rice, jasmine and bilwa flowers – at the foot of a statue of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god. Ganesha was luridly plump and jolly, with a sweetmeat in his hand and a single rat beneath his foot: he appeared to be dancing. Saffron powder and sandal paste smeared his face and he bore supernumerous garlands of bright yellow marigolds. The women prayed, waving smoke over their faces with slow fluent gestures. Lucy felt again oversized in her stiff-domed skirt, which caught and snagged against the rough stone walls of the temple. Her pregnant body was too full for these narrow spaces. There was chanting, more prayers, and more dense threads of incense. A holy man in a corner saw Lucy and gestured, but she had no idea what he was communicating. She was not sure why she had come, or if her presence was sacrilegious. She watched the widows – who throughout their ceremony had not noticed her at all – they appeared as lineaments of female shape in the claustrophobic dark. The single woman with grey hair seemed to be the only completed stripe: Lucy was tethered to her image. She was a completed pillar of white in the dark, dark temple.

  “I’ve been thinking”, said Lucy, “about Victor Browne’s photograph.”

  Isaac looked up from the book he was reading.

  “The shadows,” she continued. “I think it would have been more interesting with the blossom-looking shadows.”

  Isaac now enjoyed their quirky conversations.

  “You want the maculate, not the immaculate,” he responded. “Maculare: spotted, stained, blemished. Not immaculate, like the holy virgin.”

  “Yes,” said Lucy. “The world is like this, don’t you think? Marked, and shadowed, and flecked with time.”

  Isaac sat back in his chair. Flecked with time. He still could see only a slight indication of Lucy’s pregnancy and wondered vaguely if she was mistaken, if they could start again. She reminded him in some ways of her uncle, Neville Brady. Families contain peculiar routes of similitude and dissimilitude. He remembered Neville in Calcutta, all those years ago, stuffing his mouth with sugared fennel seeds then leaning forward – with a most alarming presumption and intimacy – so that Isaac could smell the crushed seeds and his sweet aniseed breath. Isaac had looked into the mouth of Neville Brady and glimpsed there a rare physical confidence that he thought at the time was specifi
cally Australian. And he had experienced at that moment a sexual shudder.

  “Flecked,” he repeated. “That is it, exactly. Nothing in my cabinet of curiosities is without fleck.”

  It was some time later, when Lucy had become a photographer herself, that she considered again, and more critically, the spectacle of the dead elephant and her own credulity. Vision included these ghastly moments and fearful contaminations. In India she had seen things she wished instantly to forget, things that rose up to the eyes with unmediated power. Violations. Deaths. Sufferings exceeding any image. She was ashamed at the vulgarity of her wish to beautify. How, she wondered silently, to attest it all? All the lights, all the darks, all the blotted cloudings in between.

  37

  Dearest Lucy,

  It seems such a long time since you left and Neville and I both miss you terribly. We received your news with some dismay, but are pleased that Mr Newton has made sensible arrangements after the confinement for your return to England. You draw a veil over the details – perhaps it is shame or distress that quietens your pen – but if you should decide to tell of the events on that disastrous ship, and if you should ever wish to identify the fellow who robbed you of your innocence, I shall listen with loving compassion and take action as appropriate or necessary. I can never forgive myself for not accompanying you on the passage to India, and ask you, dear sister, to one day pardon my mistake. Enough said, for the moment, on this difficult topic, but know that both I and Neville are concerned fundamentally for your precious well-being, and long to have you returned to us safely and in good health.

  My work at the Childish Establishment continues to flourish. Mr Childe has kindly taken me under his wing, as they say, and taught me the trade of magic-lantern operator. I can set slides, work the lamps, and direct musicians and narrators. Recently we showed a series of scenes from Shakespeare, and I thought of you, dear sister, when the ghost scene from Hamlet arrived. Mr Childe had arranged for a puff of smoke and a cymbal clap to accompany the ghost’s appearance (the slide itself was a little disappointing – clearly a man enshrouded in a sheet), but a woman in the front row rose up, screamed, and then collapsed in a faint. This event caused a sensation. I could not help thinking: partickler when she see the ghost!

  My good fortune continues: I made the acquaintance of the faint young woman, who turns out to be exactly my age and employed in the City as a teacher of pianoforte. Her name is Violet Weller and I believe – though I have told no-one and can barely believe I am disclosing it to you – that we may, God-willing, have a future together. She is sweet and intelligent and shares my love of the phantasmagoria, to which she has often come (although, to be truthful, I had not noticed her presence before). Violet lives with her parents – whom I’ve yet to meet – somewhere in Kentish Town.

  Uncle Neville continues to search for our mother and has found a new medium, one he considers superior to Madame d’Esperance. The new woman, Madame Noir, is dark and possibly gypsy, and Neville believes that this alone recommends her and makes her more spiritually competent. So far our ectoplasmic mother has predicted your safe return with a healthy son, and Neville is much heartened by this news and mentions it frequently. He hopes, I cautiously add, the infant might be named for him.

  Neville has found some irregular work at an importers’ warehouse in the docklands where, luck of luck, he works with Indian products and is again immersed in the world of his beloved spices. He brings home samples for me to try, but I cannot abide the tastes. When you return, Neville says, he shall cook an Indian curry in celebration, and he will supply the proper ingredients in the proper proportions!

  Neville’s health, I must confess, is not the best. He looks old and ruddy and has a shortness of breath and pains in the chest, for which he takes a noxious-looking tincture, supplied by Madame Noir. It has yet to prove an efficient remedy, and I fear it represents another dimension of his too-trusting nature. He also calls out at night, and is troubled by bad dreams, but says that – thankfully – since I began working the lanterns my sleepwalking has ceased. My own health is robust – touch wood – I have none of those spasms of coughing you witnessed before you left. Violet told me I looked “in the pink” of health, which I took to be a compliment and evidence of her growing affection towards me.

  Neville says to send you his love and requests that you seek “native” advice for the time of birth. He claims the Indians have a secret system of healing over four thousand years old and that it is based on the body’s composition of energies of earth, fire and wind. The fire sign, he says, is connected to a kind of bodily light, which he claims must be regulated in the act of birth. (He also told me that my sleepwalking was a disorder of wind!) I have no notion of the veracity of this information or the soundness of the advice, but promised Uncle Neville I would pass it on.

  We await your return anxiously and with much loving eagerness. Travel safely, dear sister, and guard your own new light carefully.

  Your ever-loving brother,

  Thomas

  38

  IT WAS IN the fifth month of her pregnancy, when Lucy showed, even then, only a small mound of belly, that she travelled with Isaac to the island of Elephanta. In the Bombay Harbour, a few miles from the city, rested an immense temple complex, carved of rock, and dedicated to the three-faced god, Shiva. Isaac said it was one site he hoped they would visit together. On the ferry, they rode comfortably in each other’s company. Lucy felt exulted to be once again on the water. The world before her was like blown glass: some fluid shape expanding, sphere-wise and breathful, into a glistening new form, some sense of the weird plausibility of transmogrification. The wind was high and the broad boat rocked and tossed. Lucy saw Isaac seize the railing and vomit into the heaving ocean. She turned her face into full sunshine and full wind, held on to her bonnet, and smiled. Fishermen, kolis, squatted confidently on the prows of their small wooden craft, received and answered her waves, surprised, perhaps, at this foreigner’s bold and out-of-the-ordinary friendliness. She would have liked to call out a greeting in their language, but realised, with a shock of shame, that she knew no kind hallos and no grateful expressions. So she placed her hands in a temple shape and bowed in their direction.

  They disembarked on a small beach, at which an old woman in a brown sari sold lotus-seed rosaries, and had a long climb, up stone steps, to the Elephanta Cave. Isaac chattered like Baedeker: “This island was named by the Portuguese”, he declared, “for an elephant statue that resided here, at the beach. It was moved away in 1814. The Portuguese – vile desecrators – defaced many of the carvings, but what you will see is still remarkable . . . finished somewhere between 450 and 750 AD . . . carved directly into stone, a huge effort, incredibly significant . . .”

  He puffed as he spoke. Lucy surged up the steps towards the temple, hoping to leave him behind and to recover her own quiet thoughts; but then took pity on Isaac and waited, looking down on his hatted head, feeling unaccustomed affection, taking his trembly hand at the very top of the steps.

  Before her were massive stone columns at the main entrance to the temple, which was composed of shrines, aisles, courtyards and porticos.

  “It was designed in a great mandala,” Isaac said, “to accommodate a circumambulatory ritual that involved observance of images dedicated to the god Shiva. Energy”, he added enigmatically, “is the purpose of this shape.”

  Inside was chill, damp and mysterious. Lucy clutched Isaac’s hand and felt a squeeze of acknowledgement. They were friends, after all. They stood side by side in the sacred shadows.

  The most beautiful statue was the Trimurti, the triple-headed god, tall, calm and resting with eyes closed. Lucy had seen many representations of Shiva in Bombay, but this grey basalt figure, dignified and elaborate, seemed to her the most compelling. There were scenes too of Shiva myths – his wedding with Parvati, his impaling of the demon of darkness on a trident, his emerging from a mountain and holding back the waters of the Ganges; there was even
the remains of the dancing Shiva, the Nataraj, Isaac called it, with his extra arms and his leg raised, dancing in a halo of fire. At the centre of the temple was an abstract shape, long, pure, resting in a circular receptacle. It dripped water and was smeared with sandalwood paste. Flowers and bel leaves draped and adorned its borders.

  Lucy looked across at Isaac, silently questioning. He cleared his throat and nervously adjusted his cravat.

  “It’s the male organ,” Isaac said. “The Shiva lingam. Fertility. Another image, you might say, of the divinity of Shiva. There are also female organs that serve for worship.”

  Lucy paused. She felt perplexed, dumb, enshrined in her own cramped circle of questions. What did she know? She knew that there were images, things seen, imperative as desire; that there were stories in images and the theft of essences in photographs; that myths were remade in stained glass and cast in bronze and stone, and that in the midst of all these verifying representations, she was a creature of half-belief, or no-belief, for whom all these mysteries were garbled, or blank, or intractably mistranslated.

  Isaac looked wan and drawn. The short voyage and the climb up the stone stairs had exhausted him. But Lucy felt her own vigour converging as questions converged.

  “Like the crucifix, this simplicity?”

  “Well, yes,” Isaac hesitated, “except that this symbolism is of course sexual, not deathly.”

  “Sexual not deathly,” she repeated, to Isaac’s embarrassment.

  Isaac looked down at his English shoes.

  “There are many kinds of shrine, then?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “There are many, many kinds of shrine.”

  Is the camera a shrine?

  Later, as Lucy made her way, much too quickly, back down the stairs to the water, she thought, as she stepped, of the human eye – pupil, lens, crystalline humour. Then she thought of the camera, the extension of her eye, the black-magic box of secluded light, the black box of recorded and refracted information, of objects inverted, of death defeated. She thought too of the glass plates that held the envisioned world – in eight by ten inches – returned to itself, as an act – surely – as an act of devotion. Lucy halted on the steps to look back at Isaac, above and behind her. He was a thin struggling shape. He gave a feeble wave. Called out something. Hurried up. Reached for his hat. Again she stopped and waited, overcome with sympathetic affection, consenting, in her own way, to let him join her.