Blind Faith

by Sagarika Ghose

  If you write to your father and leave the letters in the hollow of the semal tree, Justin had whispered to him, be sure he’ll write back.

  So he wrote a love letter to his imaginary father:

  Dear Daddy. How are you in heaven? I miss you. When it rains, you and I could huddle under a blanket. When it rains, you and I could go splashing in a puddle. Lots of love.

  He left it in the tree and found a reply a few days later.

  God looks after me well, little son. And you are an angel who has come along to remind me of the magnificence of this world! Lots of love, Daddy.

  He found the letter in the hollow of the semal.

  Indi would wake up in the morning and rush away to work. She was in charge of army widows. She marched with them from door to door, from minister to minister, from official committee to official committee. Women came to her in great numbers for help. Some with bawling babies in their arms. Some with their bones rotting from lack of calcium. She marched through the day and often late into the night, tapping with her cane into committees and parliamentary inquiries. She was tireless, sleepless, and she never gave up until every widow had received her due. Indi was awarded the Sarojini Naidu Award for Professional Excellence, the Commonwealth Prize for Leadership and the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for Social Achievement. The citations and awards crowded Ashish Kumar’s study but she never gave up her work.

  She led other women to prosperity. Women who needed small loans to set up businesses. Women who needed money so that they could leave their violent husbands. She moved ministries. She dispatched teams of administrators into the countryside to stop child marriage and dowry killings. She collected money for a hospice for homeless women and supervised its construction. She started a neighbourhood watch scheme where citizens were asked to keep an eye out and report the ill treatment of little girls. She wrote letters. So many letters.

  But she never saw the other letters that were written under a blue light in Victoria Villa. The child’s letters which were always titled ‘You and I.’ Under the semal tree, the letters came thick and fast:

  Dear Dad, what’s your favourite country? Lots of love.

  Little son, my favourite country is Antarctica. Imagine living in an igloo? Love, Dad.

  Over the years, she patchily tried to make amends. Once after he had come back from school with medals in maths and football, she bought him a computer and promised to take him out. She had been strictly forbidden to drive but in an urge to impress him, had tried to reverse the old Ambassador out of its musty garage, the same Ambassador in which she had first driven past Justin in Connaught Place. She didn’t see that Vik had run out from behind the car. When he screamed, she braked hard but it was too late. He had already fallen down with his leg twisted under the rear tyre. In hospital, she ran her hands along his leg strapped in a plaster cast and scorned him for his mere temporary injury. It would heal. It was a mere fracture. But nothing would heal her. She would never be cured. She left him to the nurses, refusing to stay with him in hospital.

  He heard the nurses say, ‘Hé bhagwan, what sort of mother is this who breaks her child’s leg and doesn’t even come to see him?’

  Anger when it comes, is not just a noisy tantrum. Anger focuses the mind, quietens the soul, sharpens the intelligence. Anger bides its time, anger is polite, anger is well-behaved because anger grows into a conviction, a belief and then it starts to find ways to express itself in the most efficient manner. Vik looked up at the high ceiling and saw the face of his dead grandfather smiling at him from the cobwebs. Ashish Kumar had become a spider and come to crawl around Victoria Villa, his antennae up for the same anger that Indi aroused in generations of men.

  By the time he was eighteen, his anger was not irrational. On the contrary, his anger was now becoming cool and deliberate as he worked out various plans in his head. His anger worked at great speed. Anger was a plan of action that had been incubated for a lifetime.

  He was a good-looking boy and made friends easily. The friends came to Victoria Villa, played football under the semal tree, drank beer and smoked cigarettes because there was no one ever around in his house except the servants. Sometimes they saw a tall, bespectacled woman drive up in a government car, get out escorted by helpers and assistants and tap her away to the semi-circular study where she remained while a silent line of assistants took in tea, lemon juice and an evening whisky. He ruled the rest of the house; his music, his books, his happy loud laugh. He had an imitation pistol. A wooden bow and arrow. And albums of family photos of his grandparents, his aunt and the woman in the study who he said was his mother. His birthday parties were most fun for his friends because they were always efficiently organized by a group of staff, who he said, worked for his mother. But his parents were never present, nor were there ever any relatives, and the boys could do whatever they liked, including smoke.

  Prime ministers came and went, all expressing their admiration for Indi in personal letters of appreciation. She outdid her father in her dedication, her incorruptibility, the long hours she was willing to spend at work and the frantic energy she developed as a compensation for her eyes. She conquered her drug addiction and began a course in homeopathy that slowed her disease and sharpened the circle of light. Her special assistants brought her as many Braille documents as the administration could manage. Her once scandalous reputation was forgotten in admiration for her work. The tap-tap of her cane around the office buildings acquired a moral ring. Madam Indira was a model officer, a blind woman of steel.

  In Victoria Villa, a blue light fell around a boy writing a letter. The light shone through a flowery glass shade. The shade was curly and painted with a sprig of lemon grass. The boy couldn’t sleep. He was an insomniac who ate chocolates through the night.

  He kept the night light on because sometimes he woke at night retching and trying to squeeze sticky vomit from his throat. If the vomit was sweet enough he would swallow it and write to his father. He never gave up writing to his father, as he had done when he was little. As he grew up, he sent him messages about The Who, Deep Purple, Sunil Gavaskar and Mohammad Ali. He watched the film 2001– A Space Odyssey half-a-dozen times and sent a detailed treatise. When he grew older, he said he’d like to go to America. His father replied that he certainly should.

  Dad, I wrote a poem, he wrote in a letter. Here it is:

  I dreamed there was a convent in the ocean. And the nuns robes were floating like underwater weeds.

  That’s a strange poem, kid. But keep it up, son. Love Dad.

  He grew convinced that it was her, the woman, who was the obstacle between him and his father. If his father was dead, then how come he was writing the letters? They were typed letters. Did dead people use typewriters? Then why did she say he was dead? She was obviously lying. She was a liar on top of everything else. He did have a father and his father wrote him letters. The letters were a secret between him and the semal tree and they drove him, unintentionally, into mania. A mania that he lived with alone, a secret which was so fantastic that it must be real.

  ‘There must have been someone,’ he nagged Indi.

  ‘I told you,’ she snapped, ‘there wasn’t.’

  ‘But it’s not possible. According to the laws of biology.’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘But what was his name?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ she shouted feeling for her torch so she could shine them on the files balanced on her knees. ‘What d’you mean, why? Don’t you think there’s enough I have to remember? What my father did to me? What my mother did to me? I knew their names but believe me, it would have been better if I hadn’t. I have a great deal on my mind. There’s a need to change mindsets. Not be imprisoned in an old way of thinking. To be independent, there’s a need to strike out towards the new, towards newer ways of seeing things. That’s how reform is created, that’s how change comes, that’s how new societies are built. This house is yours, every
thing I earn, all yours. Why do you keep asking about the past? Erase the hankering, look forward.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t matter!’ she roared. ‘It really doesn’t. What should it matter what his name was? Just do what you have to do and get on with it. Make a life for yourself. Go forward and make a life for yourself instead of fretting about names. There’s so much to be done. You must grow up and become a good citizen. Do your bit for the country that nurtures you. Progress may be tortuous but it must come. Progress won’t make you popular, but you must sacrifice yourself at its altar for the next generation. Try and think of others. Try and concentrate on the work you must leave behind. Not only yourself. Think of me. Don’t you have any idea what I’m living with?’

  ‘He sends me letters. I get letters from someone who says he’s my father.’

  ‘Oh rubbish!’ she peered at him through her glasses. ‘Must be one of my secretaries playing a trick on you. They all know what a dumb fellow you are.’

  He frowned at her. She told him to think about others but all she ever did was think about herself. She told him not to think of his father, but all she did was think of her own father. He hated the way she filled the house, her blind presence looming into every room like an ogre. She was a giantess, a demoness, a chudail, one of those women with her feet turned back to front. In a huge house, she left him no space to move with her harangues about creating a new country and a new way of thinking.

  ‘Tell me,’ he whispered to her, showing only the whites of his eyes and standing under the semal tree, possessed with a menacing spirit which only the tree could see. ‘What’s your name?’

  Revenge need not be impetuous. Revenge can become fanciful and imaginative, reflecting the twists and turns of the growing up years. Revenge is not just a silly bout of crying; revenge plots silently and becomes a reason for survival.

  He leapt across the line of normalcy. If she had reached out for his help, he might have been moved to sympathy, he might have read up on retinitis pigmentosa, might have assisted Justin in his care of her. But she assaulted him, pushed him against a precipice and held her cane to his chest as if she would quite happily ease him over the cliff with her hatred of him clearly visible in her eyes. She hated him for his existence. Hated him for his eyes. Hated him almost as much as much as she had hated Ashish Kumar. Her father and son fused, in her blindness, into a malevolent single entity whom she must subdue.

  He read a book entitled Inside the Mind of a Terrorist based on the author’s experiences of travels with young Sikhs who joined the Khalistan movement for an independent homeland. He read: Most of the militants are young men, battling a powerful sense of victimhood. The feeling is that life on earth is nothing compared to the paradise available for all eternity if one sacrifices one’s life for a greater cause…Death is a reassertion of glorious manhood, of heroic glory.

  He realized the definition described him.

  8

  ALQUERIA, GOA

  The man swam between sky and sea in a place where one could be the other. He had been swimming for about half an hour and his calves and shoulders ached. On the shore he could see smoke curling up from Sharkey’s Hotel. What a time it was here in the sea. A peaceful stretch of twilight after an afternoon nap. The water against his chest was cool.

  Sharkey’s Hotel was filling up with the usual finance consultants and fashion models. Lights glimmered on and off and music began to pump out over the sand. If he was god – a giant reclining god in the ocean – he would simply lift his heel and an avalanche of water would rush from his toes and flood out all those filthy little pleasure spots. The cretins gyrating obscenely to their music would be washed away. Seekers of sex. Sex to the power of infinity. Menstruating, constantly pregnant. Using the pure ocean for their mucky activities.

  If he could, he would wring their dirty necks one by one.

  He had been angry all his life.

  He swam towards the beach, dried himself, and lay on his back on a rock.

  Mia was different. She loved her dead father in the old-fashioned way. She had been abandoned by her mother and read psychology books to cure her depression because there was no one to help her. He would keep her safe. The minute he’d seen her in London he had known that he had to preserve her. Preserve her vulnerability and her ability to believe in things. Her intelligence was eccentric, idealistic, innocent. She was just like himself. Seeing her again had reminded him of how much he loved her. One minute he had been lying on the road gazing at the underbelly of the truck, the next her face was hovering above his. She had agreed to walk with him down the deadliest mile. He would vault over her marriage as a jumper pole-vaults the highest heights. He would crush the jellyfish she had married; in whose rich villa she was a prisoner. One day he would confront her husband face to face, and snatch Mia away. What would their confrontation be like? What would the jellyfish bring against him? A machine gun against his bow and arrow?

  He lifted his head to the trees and screamed a shrill scream. Where are you, Mia? He threw himself back on the rock. He ran his hands over his chest and neck. He ached for her. He screamed her name again, feeling the rock’s sharp grain pierce his skin. When he rose to go, his back was dotted with blood.

  He crept along the zigzag and up the red dust hill to the small abandoned outhouse in the courtyard of Santa Ana. He used the outhouse as his hidden home whenever he came to this village, which was pretty often these days. He had been making his plans for a long time. His mission to destroy Sharkey’s Hotel was meticulously planned. The outhouse had been a good place to hide. He gathered his things…a can of paint, a brush, some palm leaves, a fruit cake, rope, screwdriver, torch, some make-up, a bunch of hibiscus flowers and a Canon instamatic.

  And his other favourite toy. His revolver – a Smith & Wesson Model 640–1.

  Tonight, he had tryst with the repulsive old woman who lived by the sea and ran the sleazy hotel. The one with the barely covered breasts. The one who was the opposite of the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. The one who looked as if her hands had travelled to unimaginable places; as if there was a treacherous cavity between her legs that would lead to the ruination of all men. If there was any example in the world of a woman with a big ego, it was her. She ordered people around in an imperious way. She was an enemy of society, an instrument of squalor. She was the reason why the world was becoming dirty. She was a putrid rotting piece of meat who thought far too much of herself.

  He waited until the moon sailed out and then began its descent into the sea. It was raining. Slinging a canvas bag on his shoulder, he slipped out of the outhouse and ran down the red dust hill, across the zigzag, to the sea front. He ran past the lagoon to Indi’s house. Francis Xavier, dozing outside and reeking of rum and tobacco, was easy to kill. All he had to do was aim his revolver, watch Francis Xavier surface from sleep as slowly as the seaside afternoon lengthens into twilight, and then fire a single shot into his head.

  The sound of the sea and rain camouflaged the sound and Francis Xavier fell forward.

  He ran up the wooden steps leading to her veranda. Inside, the rooms were pitch dark and she was asleep. He pushed lightly at the front door. It was locked. He pushed it again. Noise didn’t matter, she’d never be able to see him. Using his screwdriver and torch, he unscrewed the hinges which were large and easy to take apart. The door came loose. He propped it up on one side and stepped in with the rain and wind streaming in behind him. He switched on a lamp. She was asleep, lying stretched out on her bed. He dumped his bag near the door went through the bedroom into the hall, through it to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and found three bottles of wine. He unscrewed them and dunked the wine in the sink. Then he carried them back and arranged them in a neat line at the foot of the bed. In front of the wine bottles he placed pieces of fruitcake. He had brought armfuls of palm leaves. He arranged them in the corners of her room, propping them up against the wall.

  Indi woke up.

/>   He heard her fumble in bed, then saw her sit up with her hair down her back.

  ‘Justin?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered back. ‘It’s Justin.’

  There was a long pause. She snatched up her cane which rested against her pillow and held it in front of her like a spear. He laughed to himself. The Purification Journey Brothers couldn’t have given him a softer target. An old blind woman as his chosen enemy. What a joke! He walked towards her and pushed her against the head rail of the bed.

  ‘Who are you?’ she screamed. ‘What do you want? Why have you been following me for so long?’

  ‘Relax,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Justin. It’s the man you want.’

  Again, the same smell. A wan, woebegone smell, something chemical, something doomed. Hair dye, or foundation or was it some sort of hair lacquer? If only she could get to touch his face, she would know for sure who the Phantom Listener was.

  ‘No, nooo!’ She started to get up. He pushed her down again. He held her pinned against the headrail, twisted her hands behind her and tied them against the bedpost.

  ‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘Francis Xavier!’

  ‘Francis Xavier is dead,’ he whispered. ‘Why do you want Justin so badly? Won’t I do instead?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she shouted back, struggling hard. ‘What are you doing? Do you want money? Is it money? Bring the key, haan? I’ll give you money. I have money. I’ll give it to you. What do you want in Sharkey’s Hotel? You can come and see, you can see what we do, you can see that it doesn’t offend anyone. You’ – she tried to negotiate as she had with the violent trade-unionists of a sick company – ‘need to tell us what you’re after. What cause you believe you’re fighting for. What you hope to achieve. Your objectives, as far as I can make out, are too short term. An attack on me won’t get you anywhere, won’t help you to gain your freedom or help you escape from your sense of being the target of injustice. Tell me, tell me what you are looking for.’