The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  “Yes, yes,” replies the secretary, a tiny young man from the south. He wobbles his head as he speaks, as if he might really be saying, “No, no.” “I will call the director,” he says, and disappears into the dark house.

  Half an hour passes before the director arrives, the gold trimmings of her sari glistening in the dim hall. She is a short woman who holds her head high as she walks, chin lifted, never looking at the ground. “Mr. Blackwood? Thank you so much for coming,” she says, holding out her hand. “I am Mrs. Ghosh. Please. Follow me.”

  “I’d like to see my mother now if I could.”

  “Yes, sir. Just some paperwork first.”

  “If I could just—”

  Mrs. Ghosh stands at the open door of her office and holds out her arm, ushering him into the chair beside the desk.

  The place is rancid, the air thick with the smell of mold, cat piss, wet dog, and mice. Gray-green butterflies of mildew grace the windows and pattern the walls. The worst-affected areas have been covered up with white paint, but the shadow of mold remains visible beneath. “It is just the season,” explains the director. “You wait, in a couple of weeks it will all be gone, everything sunny and bright.” Henry nods as his eyes skirt the office. The walls are cracked and the paint flakes off onto the floor. Water seeps through at the bottom of the wall and makes a dirty puddle on the carpet. “In November,” continues the director, thumbing a pile of damp, wrinkled papers, “in November we have one of our best seasons. Sunny, cool. Just a few days now, you’ll see.”

  “November,” Henry says, “is almost two months away.”

  “Oh no, not so long,” she replies. “Ah, here it is,” she says, pulling out a string-bound folder. “Your mother’s records.” She licks her thumb and turns the pages. “Ah, yes,” she says, pushing her large black-framed glasses up to the bridge of her nose. Henry fidgets.

  “I know you are in a hurry, sir. But you must not be. She will not know if it is now or later, if it is you or not you. I must warn you, that is all. Your mother has suffered a multitude of small strokes,” she says, checking the paper in front of her. “That, combined with the dementia, well, it is not good. Not good, I am afraid. She hangs on, you know—I wish I had known her as a young woman, she must have been very strong, very willful. Perhaps she is waiting for you, I don’t know. It can’t be long now. I must say this. But I see from your face that I do not need to. Here, come with me, I’ll show you the way.”

  It is a terrible place, dark and cold, the walls wet and foul-smelling, the paint bubbling up where the damp comes through. He feels shame creep over him. Nobody in India leaves their parents to wither in a home. He should have made her move to England before it was too late and she was too ill to leave. It isn’t all his fault, he reasons: there were no other siblings, there’s no ­other family, and Henry has his own life. That, his mother must know, is what she prepared him for. And why here? At least she might have been better cared for down in the plains. The disrespect would be no different, but she might have been better cared for. At least in the cities there are more people who’ve been abandoned. And the sheer number gives them a certain fiscal ­value—something that his mother, cooped up in this tiny private establishment, has no chance of benefiting from. He’s heard the British still help to fund one of the homes in Delhi, and there is another place, west of Calcutta. But there has never been any arguing with his mother. The hills are the only place for her. They remind her, she says, of what India used to be. No, she told him when he tried to encourage her to come to England years ago. No, she could never leave. “There’s nothing worse than the life of a migrant,” she said. “You lose everything. Everything.” Now, the two of them, Henry and his mother, have become like each other in so many ways, alone in the world and forgotten by it. Or so it seems, so it feels.

  Beneath the sheet her body is just a few small bumps, her head sunk in a mound of pillows. A moldering wicker chair is placed beside the bed. Its feet scrape over the cold stone floor as Henry drops his weight into it. His mother’s hands are folded on her stomach. Henry reaches out and takes her right hand in his. Her eyeballs flicker behind their shut lids but her fingers do not move. The bed is pushed up beside a large window. There is a view of the mountain, wet and dripping and covered in green—the bright green of the ferns and the darker green of the deodar trees. He strokes the top of her hand while two yellow butterflies weave a path through the woodland. Her skin is thin and comes together in pleats like the cooled surface of warm milk. Henry leans forwards and rests his head on the bed, the covers damp to the touch. He can see, through the opening of the pillow slip, that the cushion behind her head is completely black with mold. He pulls away and feels the chill rising up through the thin soles of his shoes.

  On the wall above her bed is a framed picture of the Queen. It is a poor black-and-white reproduction that looks like it has been cut from the newspaper and is now yellowing under the glass. Other objects of reverence are placed about the room. On a shelf by the window stands a set of silver teaspoons with English place-names and some funny little pictures decorating their handles, all displayed in a velvet case. Beside this are two porcelain animal figurines—a robin and a Staffordshire puppy. And next to the bed stands a plastic figure of Jesus, the details of his face worn clean away by his mother’s devotions, her thumb working sandalwood over his brow, day after day after day. Henry has seen little brass figurines in shrines that have been rendered featureless out of love, their faces smoothed to a shine—the Seven Wives, and Krishna—but never before Jesus. The plastic statuette looks defaced rather than worshipped, and the ghostly image startles him even though it should not—after all, he had seen her do this over and over again when he was a child: put her hands together in prayer, then touch the figurine’s tiny white forehead.

  * * *

  He doesn’t know for how many hours he sits there. By the time he leaves for his hotel the rain has begun. It falls fast and heavy, the warm bullets of water breaking down through the trees. The valley is white with cloud and the steep road quickly turns into a brown river. Henry’s small blue umbrella bobs through the gray haze as he picks his way among the rocks and dirt and rubbish that litter the edge of the tarmac. His feet squelch in wet shoes. Others pass him on their way up, men and women in sandals with their trousers rolled to the knee. Their eyes meet his briefly, then slide away.

  Back in his room Henry cannot sleep. For the first few hours of the night, car horns echo through the valley. Later it is filled with the sound of barking dogs. So many dogs, all yapping and howling at the same time, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. They follow each other around the lower edge of the valley, they gather at the top of the hills. His mother must hear them too. If not tonight then other nights. The wild dogs barking in the valley below and the wild dogs barking higher up, in the woodland near her window. On and on throughout the night. The last thing he hears is the horn of the train as it pulls into the station at dawn. He sleeps then, and when he finally opens the long red curtains the day is white with fog.

  * * *

  Henry has been gone just over a week now. Every morning Charlotte stands by the living room window and waits for the post. She waits and waits and nothing comes. Then one day the postman lifts his hand and waves to her. After this she is careful to hide behind the curtains and look through the lace. Bills come, and the Times Literary Supplement, but nothing from Henry. She stacks the envelopes neatly on his desk and closes the door.

  At lunchtime she takes the children to the river for a picnic. She makes sandwiches and they eat them in the sun. Ham and white bread. Strawberry jam. Cordial from one drink bottle. Milk from another. They pinch off the crusts of the sandwiches and throw them to the seagulls, the birds red-eyed, squawking. Arching and flapping their wings. Later the children nap in the pram, under the shade of the river trees. Charlotte sleeps on the blanket beside them. When they wake, the children play; there is a yel
low ball, shells from the river, a bucket and spade.

  Charlotte stands, brushes off her dress, and walks towards the bushland that borders the water. “I’ll be back soon,” she says, then ducks under a low-hanging tree and onto a narrow path. A few steps in and there is no sight of the clearing behind. She follows what looks like an animal track, the leaves on the ground smoothed, beaten down by passing creatures going to and from the water. She has never been here before. In all these months. She thinks of Henry, far away. Up ahead is the sound of water, high tide slapping on rocks, but there is no sight of it. She bends down to pass beneath branches. Perhaps his letters have gone missing—overseas mail is often slow and wayward.

  “Mummy!” May cries; the girls are somewhere behind her, in the clearing. “Mummy!” The child’s fine, high voice drifts through the trees. A twig snaps beneath Charlotte’s foot.

  “Coming, sweetheart,” she calls back, but she walks onwards, towards the water, the path invisible behind her now. Part of her wishes to find Henry waiting when they arrive home. Then life would go on. Only, she is deep enough into it now to know that she does not really want this, the continuance. All about is the low, green-brown haze of shrub leaves, and spiky yellow flowers like gorse but which are not gorse. There are purple flowers like heather but which are not heather. Twists of black tree limbs rise up towards tufts of dangly eucalyptus foliage. Half a tree left after lightning. Contorted roots rise aboveground. Something rustles in the purple grasses beside her.

  “Mummy?”

  “Coming,” she calls again, as she walks on still further. What did he feel, she wonders, when he left them, when he flew away? Three minutes, four—she has not gone far, but already she can’t see her children. They have their sandwiches, she thinks. They are sitting on the blanket with their lunch and their toys. The bush thickens. The trees are taller here, the air shady and cool underneath, and all about is the smell of eucalyptus, damp earth, rock and salt and river weed. She stumbles across the remains of a fire—a ring of stones, cans left behind. Rocks kids have pulled up to sit on. She rests on one and looks to the sky; a pelican flies overhead followed by a flock of white-tailed black cockatoos. She thinks of the history of this place, thinks that she has something in common with them after all—with the people before her who tried to understand it as home, while feeling they belonged elsewhere. Did they, she wonders, ever succeed? She would like to know them. She tries to imagine them.

  “Mummy!” the two children call together.

  “I’m here—” she calls. But where is here? The bush soon gives way to water. Rocks slope down to the tide edge. The surface of the rocks is covered in greenish algae and oyster shells. Dense mangrove trees lean out over the rocks, making the air briny, cool, and dim. The only sound is the wind high in the trees and the water sloshing in and out of the small caves between the rocks. Shadows of leaf and tree branch tremble across the surface of the river. Beyond the shadows the water is bright.

  “Mummy!” the children call again, frightened now, and Charlotte turns back.

  Henry’s mother lingers for days. Nobody expects this. He sits at her bedside, reads to her, offers sweet food that she cannot eat. Time wears on. In a nearby room the staff chatter and drink tea. Beyond the window there is the forest. Henry comes and goes. He thought he’d be back in Delhi by now, making his way home. He misses the children. Soon he finds he no longer hurries to be at the nursing home before midday. He sleeps in, arrives late. Each day he takes his mother something—biscuits that sit untouched on a plate, a new book, an extra blanket for her bed. Today, he thinks, he will bring her flowers, remembering her bedroom graced with roses when he was a boy.

  It is afternoon by the time Henry has dressed and eaten and left the hotel in search of the flower stall. The concierge told him it could be found behind the post office and gave Henry directions. Henry turns left up the hill, then veers right at the bend. From somewhere up ahead comes the tune of a brass army band, the call of the trumpets rolling out across the valley. Whistles join the trumpets in a marching beat and a series of cheers erupts from the ridge. He walks towards the music, passing numerous tea carts, market stalls selling fake pashmina shawls, chemists, the old bakery, the Maria Brothers antique bookshop, the public library, the brass statue of Gandhi, and a small girl sitting on a square of cardboard who says to him as he passes, “Hello, ­Money. Hello, Money.” At the top of the mall stands a row of white ­horses available for hire. They are mottled with dust and mud and tethered to the fence. Many years ago one whole strip of the mall was kept for the horses. Children received an hour’s ride for a small fee and the horses were led all around the hills. Henry remembers this. He remembers his mother handing him a chewy yellow sweet spotted with green pistachios before a man lifted him into the saddle. There was the smell of hay and horse dung and the sight of his mother standing below, waving as he set off on his adventure.

  But no, it is not at all how it was before. Where is the cottage they lived in during the summer of ’38? He thought it was further up, in Lower Jakhu, but now, standing in the center of the mall, looking about, he can’t be sure. He’s lost his bearings. There had been a fireplace, and his mother had collected sticks from outside, and his father had spent the day chopping wood so that in the evening they could burn great logs of sweet-smelling pine. The memory of the smell is clear, fleeting. It comes from nothing.

  But he’s walked too far. Henry turns and retraces his steps, the valley far below him and full of cloud. The blue peaks of the lower Himalayas stretch out into the distance, each rise paler than the last, a series of indigo shadows resting one behind another. At the back of the post office, two paths lead in opposite directions. On a whim he heads right, passing a line of coolies who carry impossible items upon their backs—a tank of gas, a wooden trunk, vast sacks of grain. There is a tiny porter balancing two enormous suitcases on his head, his arms hardly able to reach the top of them. Henry follows a stairway down and down but there are no flowers. There is the smell of shit and sweat and rotting bananas. A green-and-blue sari, the colors of a peacock tail, has been pegged out to dry on a length of wire. The path flattens and narrows. Lopsided wooden houses built by the British more than a century before hang over him, darkening his way. A rabid dog runs out and barks; Henry startles. Water drips onto his head from the buildings above. He has taken a wrong turn. He should have gone along the other path. No one told him. He is hot and sweaty and the hems of his trousers are wet with mud. Or is it sewage? There is a raw stink in the air. A man dressed all in white sits on his haunches in the alcove of a door. “Flowers?” Henry asks, pointing down the dark path and imitating, with opening hands, the unfolding of a blossom. “Flowers?” The man grunts and points the other way.

  In the lower markets he finds what he is looking for—a tiny stall set up in the dirt beneath the veranda of a tall house. A ­wooden bench displays the vendor’s wares: a yellow bucket holding carnations and red roses; another bucket with lilies, the bees dancing in and out of the brown and curling petals. A thin, short man steps out of the shadows, addressing him in Hindi, and ­Henry apologizes, explaining that he does not know the language. The stallholder backs away in confusion, then returns when Henry nods his head and points, holding up his fingers to show he wants two bunches of carnations—one pink, one white—and at the last minute adds a small posy of roses.

  He knows he’s already taken too long. He must leave the nursing home by dusk, before the monkeys come down from the trees, and at this rate he won’t get there until three. He holds out money for the flowers but the man does not take it. Instead he places the flowers carefully on the bench, picks up a single carnation, and flicks open the petals as if dusting a tiny ornament. Henry expected to be handed the bouquets and then be off. But every flower is carefully tended to. The carnations are laid out in a row, then the roses flicked at and checked, one after another and another. The man gathers up the carnations and tapes their stems tog
ether. Then he disappears and comes back with a handful of greenery that he cuts and arranges and tapes to the carnations. The roses are pushed into the bunch, then they too are taped. Each time Henry thinks the production over, something else is introduced. Gold ribbons, silver glitter. More Sellotape. Plastic wrapping, then a wrapping of old newspaper; a first, then a second spray of water. Passersby stop to look. A woman asks the price of the roses, stands watching awhile, then walks on. After an interminable period of time—what has it been, ten minutes, twenty, half an hour?—Henry hands the man a bundle of notes, takes the flowers, and walks up out of the markets towards the nursing home on the hill.

  * * *

  It is almost four when Henry arrives. He knocks, enters, and takes his place in the wicker chair beside his mother’s bed. He leans forwards and rests his hands over hers. She does not appear to have moved since he saw her the day before. Perhaps they’ve rolled her over and rolled her back again. She does not open her eyes to see the flowers. A nurse comes and tends to her hip bone where a bedsore festers. Henry suspects this is done for his benefit—­evidence of care in the face of obvious neglect. But they all know he is the one who left her here.

  He knows he should speak to her, he knows she believes that the dead can hear everything said by the living. Of course she is not dead, but nor can he say that she is alive. He does not know what is keeping her. There is nothing here for her now. There is nothing to hold on to. “It’s me, Mother. I’m here. It’s Henry.” The son who was named after a king of England. This was the plan: a line of boys all named after royalty. He squeezes her hand and for a moment thinks he feels a small movement in her fingers. “It’s Henry,” he says again. He pulls the chair closer and strokes her arm. There is the shush shush of rain on the roof and the distant racket of car horns in the valley. Her breathing has been quiet but now it begins to change. Air rasps and drags at the back of her throat. In and out, out and in. The chair screeches on the floor as he pushes it back and stands and calls out for the nurse. At the same time he knows that it does not matter if something is wrong. Of course there is something wrong. She needs to die, he knows that, that’s why he’s come.