ALQUERIA, GOA
The road to Alqueria ran along the sea. It was a zigzag of a road. A road with a split personality. A slam of sunlit sea on one side, quiet palm and mango forests on the other. The forests sloped upwards to a red dust hill where the old Portuguese fort stared out across the water. Next to the fort was the church of Santa Ana (presided over by Father Rudy) with its whitewashed walls and blue curlicues.
Tiny seaside Alqueria: one of the world’s forgotten ancestors. Where the spirits were ancient and powerful.
Wayside shrines dotted the zigzag road. There was a white crucifix planted under a cashew bush with a marigold at its base. Next to Sharkey’s Hotel, under the big banyan tree, villagers lit clay lamps every evening. Under the rocky steps that led off the zigzag to the beach were scattered hibiscus petals and stalks of rice. In Alqueria, Father Rudy told his congregation, all kinds of gods pranced in the shadow of humans. When a smiling arc of palm leaf drifted to the ground, you knew it wasn’t just another leaf.
In the evenings, music from the church choir accompanied the fishermen to the taverna. Family homes with pillared patios, red-tiled roofs and icons on their walls came alive with lights and buntings. Bougainvillea, jackfruit trees and abolim flowers grew in the back gardens of the houses that lined the zigzag.
Sloping down from the zigzag was Capuchine Beach and its crescent of sand. On one of the bends of the zigzag was the popular Sharkey’s Hotel. Its whitewashed walls were painted with palm trees and beer bottles. Red paper lamps hung from the ceiling. The rooms on the first floor were comfortable enough though the sheets were faded and the floors were sandy. The best thing about Sharkey’s was its stunning location, with the bay in front and Alqueria stretching behind. Ad executives, chief financial officers and models with bandannas streaming from their hair and cellphones tucked into their sarongs, came to stay during the New Year holiday and arranged all-night parties. There were techno, rock ‘n’ roll and Bollywood remixes on offer and an a la carte of Goan sausages, fish curry and beer, as well as first-aid when the parties became violent or when the Goa police exploded in on their motorbikes on the suspicion that someone was selling drugs.
Indi, who owned Sharkey’s Hotel, lived in a white-painted house on the far side of Capuchine Beach. The house overlooked the rocky part of the beach and a clear lagoon set back from the sea by an undulating bank of sand.
In the evenings, when Indi sat in her veranda, her face towards the lagoon, all movement on the beach stopped. The financial consultants and models who tripped past in their Speedo suits came to a standstill. And the fishermen who pushed their motorized crafts into the water whispered that when Indi was nearby, the poor prawns and pomfrets in the sea seemed to stop swimming and give themselves up distractedly to the fishing nets.
Indi was brutally beautiful. Her beauty had always been as formidable as a conquering army. At five feet ten, she was the tallest Indian woman Alqueria had ever seen. Her skin was the colour of freshly churned butter and she had eyes that stretched from the bridge of her nose to her temples. Her eyes were unlike any other. They were the colour of the ocean in the monsoon, azure streaked with grey, eyes that thundered and stormed under black brows. The straight nose and cheekbones that angled out of her skin were chiselled to knife-edge sharpness but there was nothing pure about Indi. Everything about the voluptuous figure and defiant expression, was brazenly sensual. Her clothes seemed to want to constantly fall off her body, as if in apology for covering up what should be displayed to the world. Her grey-streaked black hair flew around her face and when she smiled she looked wickedly unpredictable. She was a master-craftsman’s gift to himself. A prima ballerina’s swan song.
She was blind. Her stormy ocean eyes were dead. She hadn’t been born blind. She had been born with retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable progressive degeneration of the retina. She had been night-blind as a teenager, lost her peripheral vision in her thirties, developed tubular vision in her fifties, until one afternoon, one hot afternoon, something snapped and her vision went completely.
All her seeing life she had felt two thick black arms crowding into her eyes from the sides in a deathly embrace. Indi called these two arms her prison bars. Prison bars that were marching in towards the centre of her eyes from the sides bringing the blackess of solitary confinement. For many years she had seen the world as a distant planet, a circle of existence framed by a galaxy of pure darkness. Perhaps this was the way god saw us, she thought – as a far-away aberrant circle in a surface of uniform black.
The diagnosis was delivered to her parents when, as a fourteen-year-old, she began bumping into too many doorways at night. There was no known cure for retinitis pigmentosa. The retina could not be rescued. She must start learning Braille, the ophthalmologist suggested, to equip herself mentally and try and enjoy her life as much as she could, because inevitable darkness awaited her in old age.
She had tried not to notice the prison bars when she was younger because they started as faint threads. But as she grew older they began to thicken, getting broader and fatter until finally, one hot afternoon, when a dry wind came beating against the windows, they swelled and blocked out the sun forever.
Indi had learnt to feel her way along walls. She could tell if a wall had been recently touched by sunlight and if it led into a doorfront, or if a wall was damp and smelt of a bedroom. Bedrooms smelt of underwear, living rooms of shoes, cigarettes and farts. Footsteps were eloquent on character: angrily stomping or shuffling or suspicious. She felt the sun on different parts of the body like the touch of a friend or the push of an uncaring bystander. She could smell the starch on a napkin and judge whether it had been recently washed or not. She had never been able to properly distinguish colours, and sometimes dressed in wildly clashing clothes. She had never properly been able to see the power of her own beauty, but sensed it in the startled intake of breath she heard when someone saw her for the first time.
Sometimes she would smell and count her way to the lagoon and turn her face to the sky and bend her head this way and that to ease some sliver of sunlight into any remaining crack in the undulating dark.
But all she came away with was the mossy smell of the lagoon and remembered souvenirs of the sun on her skin.
She was extremely difficult to deal with. Frightening Indi – with the fresh-butter complexion who shouted at the top of her voice. Night-blind by her early teens, the family shuddered everytime they heard the thud of Indi against a bathroom door or an unladylike grunt when she stubbed her toe. During the day, although she was losing her ability to cross roads, her frontal vision was still strong and she would run out of the house, in taxis or in the family Ambassador, manically filling her days with a panorama of sights and feverish reading; committing it all to memory, building a restless visual bank for her future poverty. She was always impatient, her mind fixed on the coming apocalypse, always enraged that all those millions of rod and cone cells were giving up on her, noisily enclosed in a self-centred world of her relationship with the sometimes steady, sometimes wavering prison bars.
‘Don’t you get tired,’ Indi blinked scornfully at her mother, ‘of using only small small words? Why don’t you ever use a really big word?’
Shiela Devi had been confused by this question and had run off to Indi’s father, Ashish Kumar, quivering in fear. They had tried to dress her up in the conventional way. In fresh pink saris and white linen blouses, with ribbons in her hair. But however pretty and sweet they tried to make her, however kind and gentle they convinced each other she could become if they tried hard enough, they knew that, at any moment, Indi could throw off her pink clothes and emerge hissing and sensual, her speech as arch as her body, as boastful and as blind as only she could be.
The family lived in a house called Victoria Villa, in the Civil Lines area of Delhi, the genteel enclave where Indian collaborators with empires had been allotted spacious bungalows for their loyalty. Victoria Villa was a single-storeyed house built in the British
style and named after the Queen Empress. A wide veranda ran around it, leading through triangular arches into a flat lawn. In the lawn were two splendid old trees. A jamun with its leaves hanging shyly to the ground. And a tall semal covered in the early part of the year with brash red blossom.
Victoria Villa was the property of the Ray family, who had owned it after the British left. The Rays were one of India’s most energetic clans, successful soldiers, businessmen and doctors, but fatally cursed. Cursed, it was said, by the the Four-Armed-One.
A century ago, the patriarch of the Ray clan had been a poor fisherman in West Bengal. One morning, out on a catch, his boat sprung a leak and began to sink rapidly into the sea. But, suddenly, miraculously, a beautiful woman with eyes the colour of the ocean came rising up from the deep, black hair streaming behind her, fitted – so the legend went – with four arms. The Four-Armed-One was as strong as she was beautiful and quickly ferried the patriarch and his boat to safety. He immediately fell in love with his supernatural lifeguard and together they founded a huge family.
The Four-Armed-One brought luck to the patriarch and he soon grew rich. But as it turned out, she was as evil as she was beautiful and one night when the children were asleep, she stole into his bed and devoured him. Hair, bones, tongue and all. Then she walked back to the ocean from where she had come, fell into it and never returned, leaving her children orphaned and confused about what exactly had happened to their folks overnight. However, since they were all of semi-divine (although slightly macabre) lineage, they all grew up well enough, developed vigorous brains and healthy appetites, escaped the village and became civil servants and businessmen in the city.
The Four-Armed-One left the family an enduring legacy. When any of the family were near death, wherever they might be, they always saw her standing stockstill at the foot of their bed with her four arms crossed.
Great-aunt Pola had had a heart attack when the spirit of her long dead cook (so she claimed) came flying out of the refrigerator, still apparently agitated about the cut in wages, and tried to suffocate her with a cauliflower. Great-aunt Pola never recovered from the attack and came to live in Victoria Villa where she uttered a dire premonition before she died: ‘Be warned,’ said Great-aunt Pola to Ashish Kumar as she lay on her deathbed. ‘One day a girl will come, who will be like her who now stands by my bed. She will devour all those close to her.’
‘It’s Indi,’ Shiela Devi whispered to Ashish Kumar after Great-aunt Pola died. ‘The Four-Armed-One has been reborn as Indi. I’m sure of it.’
Indi was sent to Holy Mary Convent School where the nuns tried to teach her not to shake her legs while sitting in a chair and to button up her shirt, which she always left a little undone. She worked little, read voraciously in spite of her eyes, and streaked effortlessly to the top of the class, much to the disbelief of her parents.
After an impressive career in college where, because she couldn’t play tennis or go to the cinema, she spent most of her time fiercely reading in the library, she began to prepare for the civil service exam, as her father had.
If she passed, she would become a civil servant, like her father.
Ashish Kumar, six feet two and dashing in his youth, was a man of immense personality. When he was in a rage, government clerks whispered that the fire in his eyes could ignite piles of files and send official notices up in smoke. He liked his yoghurt thick and perfectly set. During meals, he would turn the bowl of yoghurt upside down to see if it was runny. If it ran water even a little, he would hurl it across the table at Shiela Devi’s face.
One night, as Indi watched her mother stand on the frontlines of her father’s airborne yoghurt, she had a bad idea.
A few days later, Sister Cyril, principal of All Saints College for Women where the girls from Holy Mary Convent went, rang Ashish Kumar saying that she was sorry to hear of his son’s death in a car accident.
‘Death of my son?’ exclaimed Ashish Kumar. ‘But, Sister, I have no sons!’
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
‘That’s what I thought, Mr Ray. But your daughter told us that you also have an older boy. Or you had one.’
‘No, Sister, I am blessed with only two daughters. The elder has graduated recently, thank god, and is now studying to join the civil service. Indira. As you know. The other remains in your college.’
‘Yes, of course I know your daughters, Mr Ray,’ said Sister Cyril briskly. ‘Indira was one of our best, if not the best. How proud we were of her and what she achieved in spite of her suffering. Paromita, your younger, unfortunately has none of her gifts…In fact Indira was the one who told us about your son. She rang the college and told us. It was very kind of her. We’ve just had a memorial service for him. A fine young man by Indira’s account.’
‘A fine young man…’ said Ashish Kumar carefully.
‘We are so proud,’ said Sister Cyril.
‘Of who, Sister?’ inquired Ashish Kumar politely.
‘Your son, Mr Ray,’ said Sister Cyril after a pause. ‘Apparently he was a fighter pilot.’
‘Ah,’ mused Ashish Kumar. ‘My son. The fighter pilot.’
There was another silence. The rituals of sorrow are indeed extraordinary, Sister Cyril sighed. Perhaps bereaved parents cultivate a certain forgetfulness that shelters them against the empty days. ‘God bless you, Mr Ray.’
He thundered for her to present herself before him in his study. The study was a semi-circular room with casement windows set with dusty window seats. Outside the windows, swayed the jamun tree. Ashish Kumar often lay here on the white hospital bed, bought for dying Great-aunt Pola, reading The Last of the Mohicans.
‘What son? What car accident?’ he roared. ‘Are you mad or what?’
She hung her head, but he could see that beneath the lowered eyelashes she was barely listening to him. Naturally, he had been extremely disappointed when she was born. She had been such a big healthy baby that she could easily have been a male child. But she was not. As she grew older, he had begun to get even angrier because she seemed to succeed at everything in spite of being a disappointment…She grew unacceptably beautiful and embarrassingly curvaceous. She understood more mathematics than he ever could and on top of everything else, she was blind, blind to the horrors she was wreaking on those around her. She was freed by blindness, strengthened by blindness, made wanton by blindness. Blindness made her wild, a creature of the wilderness.
He was powerless to rein her in, helpless against her success, impotent against her unseeing dominance and powerless in the face of her scorn. Since she couldn’t see properly, he was easy for her to ignore. Easy for her to regard as negligible while he chafed and fretted about his own smallness, six feet two and still maddeningly small in his daughter’s disrespectfully absent eyes.
‘You told a lie? Why?’
‘Lie?’ she asked. ‘What lie?’
‘You told Sister Cyril that you have a brother. That he was killed in an accident. Why?’
‘I felt like saying it. I wish I had a brother. Instead of’– she jerked her head at the cowering Pom – ‘that idiot.’
‘Don’t you think it’s wrong to lie?’ His face was red with fury and triumph. ‘You’re not young. You’re going to become an officer in the civil service. And you act like a child.’
‘I felt sorry for you,’ said Indi calmly. ‘You don’t have a live son so you may as well have a dead one. A man without sons is not a man.’
‘Get out!’ shrieked Ashish Kumar. ‘Get out of my sight!’
‘Indira,’ Shiela Devi wept. ‘Was it you who sat in my poor womb for nine whole months?’
She sneaked out into the lawn that night, treading barefoot so she could recognize the path, to smoke her cigarettes which she stored in a test-tube buried under the semal. As she lit up and inhaled, Ashish Kumar came up behind her and whispered softly, ‘So, my dear. You are smoking?’
She started and exhaled hurriedly into his face. ‘Once,’ she h
eld up her head, ‘in a while.’
She ran her feet over the triangular edges of the bricks that lined the flowerbeds. Tiny upturned bricks formed a neat mountain range enclosing the nodding pansies.
He stepped in front of her and snatched her wrist in a hard grip. His mouth was twisted in a sneer but his eyes were frightened. ‘Your lie about my son was a shameful matter. A very serious, disgraceful matter.’
She struggled to free her hand, the cigarette still burning between her fingers. ‘I was teasing you,’ she said, trying to laugh.
‘You must not do all this.’ He looked at the cigarette, ‘Telling lies to your college principal. Lying to a nun. Asking them to hold a full scale mass for someone who doesn’t exist…Now you are smoking. What will you do next? Sell your body to anyone who wants it?’ All of a sudden her father shifted his grip to her fingers and twisted the burning cigarette into her palm. The heat burned into her skin. Tears sprang to her aching eyes but she didn’t make a sound.
They stood under the semal, the father crushing the lit cigarette into the daughter’s palm, smelling the singed skin and watching her hand thrash involuntarily like a wounded bird. Then the cigarette fell to the ground and Ashish Kumar turned away red-faced.
Indi hopped around in pain. ‘You gave me a third degree burn!’ she shouted. ‘You burnt me!’
‘Go into the house,’ Ashish Kumar hissed over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘Your mother will make you better.
‘You fraud!’ she screamed after him. ‘Pretending you don’t lust for a boy!’
Loud prayers from the shanties surrounding Victoria Villa ran up the trees.
Indi sank to her knees and cooled her palm on the wet grass.
J The world became her adversary. Her blind and blinding beauty brought out the worst in everyone around her and made it impossible for her to find love. All she met – even from her parents – was jealousy, suspicion and fear. She began to detest her over-the-top womanliness. She thought of herself as a grotesque creature who drove everybody away, a ravishing half-blind Amazon to whom nobody could bear to get close. She became convinced that no one, not even an infant, was capable of goodness towards her, that nobody would ever sympathize.
Blind Faith Page 3