‘Let’s see…’ He stood up and walked around the semal, like a soothsayer on the verge of a prophecy. ‘There’s something ugly about this tree, don’t you think?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Ugly? This tree? The semal? No, it’s a beautiful tree. It’s Vik’s favourite tree. Someone used to leave letters in its hollows for him when he was a kid.’
‘It’s haunted.’
‘Haunted?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can feel it.’
‘But Vik loves this tree. There are hollows in it. As I told you, somebody used to leave letters in this tree. He thinks it was someone pretending to be his dad.’
They stared up at the tree.
‘Semal or silk cotton is called the devil tree in parts of Africa,’ said Karna. ‘Devil tree. They believe the spirits of the dead live in it.’
They walked around the tree. She pointed to the inscriptions in the smooth bark. RAM for Vikram. And PM, Vik’s aunt, Pom.
‘What’s this?’ Karna asked suddenly. ‘There’s something here.’
In one of the hollows of the tree was a bunch of crumpled papers. The sheets were old and damp with small dead cockroaches in their crevices.
‘What is it?’ Mia asked.
Between the damp sheets of crumpled paper was a photograph. A photograph that looked new, which had been folded several times but had still survived.
‘My god,’ Karna whispered. ‘My god.’
‘What?’ Mia asked.
‘Look at this photograph.’
Mia recognized Vik’s mother’s face. It was unmistakably Indi. The cyclonic dead eyes and the mass of grey-streaked black hair. But what had happened to her? She was bound and strapped to a bed. There were bright red circles on her cheeks. There were two hibiscus flowers behind her ears. Long black lines under her eyes. And her nightdress was torn. She looked as if she was in awful pain, her mouth open in a terrified scream.
‘Jesus,’ gasped Mia.
‘Who is this lady?’
‘It’s Vik’s mother.’
‘The fat pig’s mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is this photo doing here?’
‘I have no idea. Vik told me that he didn’t keep any photos of his mother in the house. There are no photos of anyone. Only paintings. I don’t know what this photo…this…oh god…it looks as if she’s been attacked…’
‘Attacked?’
‘This photograph…could it be? Doesn’t it look like she’s been beaten or something? My god, how could it have come here?’
‘What an obscenity!’ Karna exclaimed. ‘Let’s destroy the photograph and the tree. You tear up the photo. I’ll destroy this immoral tree.’
‘What? Destroy the tree?’
‘Yes, let’s get rid of this tree.’
‘Destroy the tree? Are you crazy, Karna? What’s the tree got to do with it? No, Karna, wait, I have to think about this a little. How did this photo get here? I just can’t think straight any more…’
‘No thinking!’ he shouted. ‘Action! Your husband is a fiend! He lives in this huge house and keeps pictures of his mother inside a tree. I’m surprised you haven’t escaped this place. I’m surprised you haven’t run away!’
Mia shut her eyes. How had this photograph of Indi appeared here? How could it have? She must call Vik and ask.
‘The semal is a lovely tree, Karna,’ she said in a haze of conflicting images, babbling like a baby. ‘Its branches are arranged in whorls around the trunk. The red flowers will appear soon, it’ll bloom in a couple of months. We can’t just chop it down. What’ll Vik say? What’ll he think? No, this is his tree. It’s very old. That’s why its bark is so smooth. Vik told me. He said when it was young, its bark was covered in thorns, but as it got older it became smooth. He knows the tree so well.’
‘It’s ugly,’ Karna’s voice was distant. ‘You said he doesn’t like ugly things. Stupid, dumb tree. The spindly stupidity of it. It can do nothing but be a receptacle. It can’t act. It has no agency. Its muteness is grotesque. All it is, all it can be, is simply outrageously beautiful. But tell me, Maya, what good is beauty, if it can’t shield, if it can’t nurture? The flowers of the semal are useless, good for nothing. It’s unhelpful, oblivious to everything around it. Just a tall beautiful thing which doesn’t help anyone.’ His voice grew agitated. ‘It never does anything. It just stands. It just watches. It can’t do anything. It can’t help. Can’t help those who are in need. Beauty! What good is beauty? Why do poets say that beauty is a force of good? Beauty is a force of evil, constructed by malevolence, beauty aims to destroy goodness. Look at this tree. It’s beautiful but it can’t act.’
‘Act?’ her voice was faint, the voice of a heart patient, of a dehydrated child. ‘But why should a tree act? A tree should be beautiful. No, no, it’s a beautiful tree. Vik loves the semal. He says it is his childhood friend. He says it was where he used to keep letters for his father. He said his mother and he used to have a relay race between the semal and the jamun.’
And now there was a photograph in the semal which had scrunched together a whole lot of memories and became a crumpled technicolour clown-face, mocking her ability to understand anything at all.
She felt herself start to cry. Cry, because the bark of the semal was pitch dark inside, yet it was a tunnel of all kinds of life. There were glow-worms inside the tree. There were illuminated dragon masks with tongues flicking in and out. There were fathers and mothers and sons and daughters inside the tree. There was a goddess in the tree; a goddess impelling those who saw her to run to the horizons of sanity. The goddess was Indi. Indi was an evil goddess who lived in the semal tree. Heavens, she was going around the bend.
Her sobbing trailed off. Through a curtain of tears, Mia saw Karna rush around until he found the garden shed and return with a drill and chainsaw. She saw him push his glasses back and work furiously with the drill, until the semal began to shudder. It’s easy to kill a tree. The sap drips like bits of human flesh, the roots are upturned like human muscle.
He tied his robes around his waist. Sweat dripped off his forehead. By sunset, the tree began to creak.
Karna shouted: ‘Run!’
They ran towards the house and with a shrill, swishing sound, the semal lay face down on the lawn. The semal spread its branches as if in its death throes and Mia thought she heard it shriek. She tore up Indi’s photograph and then ripped through the shreds again. The dead tree gave off one last sigh, which trailed off into a grating laugh. They killed me, Vik, she heard it complain. Your wife and her lover killed me. In the emptiness of the murdered tree, Mia sat with her lover in a depleted garden.
Karna stood staring down at her as she slumped on the grass. She couldn’t see his eyes, only the reflection of Victoria Villa in his spectacles. The rich and sheltered, he said, need to feel the misery of the poor and unloved. Your husband needs to know what else is going on in the world beside his parties and his money, outside his glass cocoon. He, Karna, was here to destroy these abominations. The world is like this tree; this world in which people rush around trying to become bankers and doctors and accountants and fund managers so that the rich can become richer and find new ways of killing each other.
The best way is to uproot the tree and destroy it by its roots, he cried. That’s the only way.
Mia sat up all night, staring at Anand’s painting, rigid with expectation. She was hurtling, like Alice in Wonderland, down a chute, into fantasia. Something was about to happen. An upheaval awaited her. She made up a story about the tree for Vik. It had been chopped down by the municipality because it was blocking electrical wires for a new building complex. Certain trees in the neighbourhood had been earmarked and it had been one of them. Mr Krishnaswamy stared askance at her the next morning and shook his head in disbelief when she told him the same story.
Vik called that afternoon from London saying he was cutting short his trip. He arrived in Victoria V
illa the next day. He came back with his suitcase crammed with gifts. Chocolates, Body Shop soaps, blouses from Warehouse, Lavagulin whisky, liquorice sticks; he had called Mithu in New York to make sure she was fine and had made arrangements for the oil-paint-and-turpentine flat to be cleaned every weekend. The owner of the Eagle and Flag had promised to dispatch his cleaning lady every Saturday and had sent Mia his love. Poor girl, had she recovered yet from her father’s death? Mithu and Tiger were fine in New York. And the cherry tree was fine too, bare of leaves, but alive.
As he talked, she noticed he looked preoccupied. He slumped on the bed and said he had had some bad news just as he was going in for a meeting and hadn’t been able to concentrate. He had caught the next available flight back. He couldn’t stay very long in Victoria Villa either. It was time for them to go to Goa. Christmas was around the corner. Illuminated paper stars would be hung up all through Alqueria and coconut trees would be wound with strands of light. It was time to go, for her to meet Indi and for him, for the final confrontation with the ruffian.
A final confrontation with the ruffian, she frowned. What happened? She heard a story she already knew. An unspeakable and weird attack, an assault whose photograph she had already seen. There were no suspects yet. Francis Xavier had been murdered so this guy would stop at nothing. His mother hadn’t been able to see who it was but, obviously, it was the same guy or member of the group who had been harassing them. The police had no leads, nothing to go on except a hoarse voice.
She couldn’t tell him about the photograph. It was a secret between Karna and herself. It was a secret that was the key to everything that was going to happen. She was drunk with possibility, feverish with what awaited her. She was trapped in a neurosis in which a set of events was conspiring to push her over the edge. She knew what it was. It was Anand’s plan. He was the puppeteer who was controlling her destiny, bringing in this horror here and this threat there and shoving her towards the end. Her father was trying to kill her to bring her wherever he had gone. The photograph no longer existed, its physical presence was finished, it was eliminated. It had been put there to taunt her, to create a hall of mirrors in which everything was twisted out of shape. There were mysterious presences in Victoria Villa, presences waiting to trip her up, to push her into a trap. She didn’t know the history here. She knew nothing. The tree knew, and had died for it. Perhaps it was best not to know and not to ask and think only of the journey ahead. She, already a prime patient of The Drama of Depression, was being driven mad by India. An epidemic of madness was afoot in this country where the past was a shambles but the future had not yet dawned; light had dimmed but day had not yet broken. A penumbral area of change where schizophrenia had become the national option, a country at war with itself. Vik’s parties were, in fact, ceremonies of mourning; wakes held to mark the confusion, vigils to mark an endless night.
The small flutter of soul was elsewhere. It was on the banks of a faraway river among pilgrims of all faiths. It was on a pilgrimage to a spot that was millions of years old. But because it was not profitable, not dazzling enough, it was ignored and prevented from giving succour and purpose. A village fair on the banks of an old river was considered irrelevant and dirty, when, in fact, it was the key to renewal.
‘Why didn’t you call me, Vik?’ she asked in a small voice, ‘I would have gone down there. I mean with you so far away, I could have just jumped on a flight to Goa and…’
‘No, no,’ Vik exhaled. ‘You couldn’t have done anything. It’s all always down to me. It’s always me, the dutiful son. I’m the bugger who’s going to bail her out of this one. Get the police and track this prick down. Whoever he is.’
She had already abandoned the son of a blind mother. Him, with his insulin monitor and his plans to fight a prowler. She had kissed his soft chest, killed his favourite tree and wandered far away. She was a courtesan and her thoughts were turning to her jungle man. The emperor went on loving her, stroking her face gently, but the courtesan’s face was turned towards someone else waiting outside the window.
She felt an ache of love for Vik suddenly. All the gifts, the care he had always taken of her, the kindness of his regard, the constant kindness. He had made arrangements for her life, he had checked her flat, he had called her mother in America and now he was off to do his duty unknowing that she had left him months before, hating him for Moksha Herbals and for his parties. She had listened to him being abused, called a fat pig, a shallow tycoon. She felt a sob of love before she gave everything up and left him with Karna to walk the last and deadliest mile. She hadn’t meant to harm him, she needed to find out why Anand had died, she needed to understand why fate was pushing her to the Kumbh.
I’ve never thanked you for marrying me, Vik. Never thanked you for rescuing me from Mithu and Tiger and from the loneliness of Papa’s death. Never thanked you for the scores of presents and for bringing me to Karna.
‘Vik,’ she asked. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘How am I feeling?’
‘Yes. You travel so much. You must be exhausted. When’s your next appointment with the doctor?’
‘Hey, you know’ – he ducked under the bed to retrieve a shoe – ‘nobody ever asks me how I am. Because I,’ he grunted, ‘am always fine.’
‘I know that, Vik, that’s why I’m asking.’
She wanted to ask if he was scared. She wanted to hold his arm and pray for his well-being, as a soldier’s wife does before her husband goes off to fight. She wanted to confess to him that the apocalypse was coming, that they were tumbling headlong into an unknown axis where the world would turn upside down for a split second, but he had found his shoe and was no longer listening.
‘Everybody wants Mia,’ he said. ‘Everybody wants my English wildflower wife. My love-in-a-mist.’
‘Really?’ she blinked, unnerved by how he had seemed to deduce her thoughts.
‘Are you happy here?’
‘Yes. Vik?’
‘Yah?’
‘Do you ever miss your father? Do you miss him the way I miss mine?
‘My father?’ He said it like a toddler at school reciting a poem entitled ‘My Father’.
‘Yes, d’you miss him?’
‘You know,’ he murmured, ‘I’m glad my father died young.’
‘Glad?’
There was a pause, and then Vik laughed and shrugged. ‘Parents who die young do their children a favour by sparing them the humiliation of their own unravelling,’ he replied. ‘The glucose drip, the bedpan, better to go with all guns blazing.’
When his voice changed everytime he spoke of his father– changed from loud and hearty to a shy lisp– she had at first thought that this was the Indian way of showing respect to the dead. Or perhaps imitating the way his father had talked to him. But hearing it now, she realized that it was a pantomime act, an actor playing the part of a child, an actor performing a role about which he had no idea and it coming out all wrong on stage. He acted out the part of his father’s son, as if to convince himself that he was. He was a manufactured personality. His life was a series of dramatic tableaux. He was the perfect actor. The successful businessman, the party trickster, the loving husband, all of it underwritten by a private battle with diabetes, a war with an injured acrobat.
‘Am I disappointing to you?’
‘Disappointing? No, why disappointing?’
‘You know why,’ he chuckled. ‘You know very well why. You don’t think I’ll win, right? You don’t think that I’ll be able to get the better of him. You think I’ll be defeated by this terrorist or this hoodlum, right? You don’t think I have the strength.’
‘I’m worried for you, Vik. The way you talk sometimes is frightening. You talk of killing him. But why talk of killing him? That’s a joke, right?’
‘Why, don’t you want me to kill him?’
‘Of course not! You can’t.’
‘I can do anything.’ He held up his hand. In it was a revolver. ‘Look.’
&nb
sp; ‘Vik!’
‘Oh, sorry,’ he laughed. ‘I scared you. This is just my new present to myself. I bought it from my friend before I went to London. If all else fails. If the Goan police are unable to manage it. If Justin can’t manage it. If the hired hands can’t manage. Then who else will it be but me? Just for self defence. Only if he attacks me. Come on,’ he grabbed her arm, ‘let’s have some fun before we meet the criminal. I must bury this criminal forever, Mia. Otherwise, there’s no knowing what he might do next. He must be destroyed. The final’ – he sang – ‘countdown.’ He tucked the revolver away under his clothes and went in for a shower.
Mia changed into the black dress he had bought her, and sat down to wait for his welcome home party to start. She didn’t care about him any more. She was on her way to a celebration of bedraggled mystics and Vik was nothing but a laughing boy, constantly hopeful of her happiness. He had been hospitable, generous. But how could he possibly comprehend Karna? He would be bewildered by him, he would wonder how the dirty drop-out could be more alluring to her, to anyone.
For this party, the guests came in masks. The runner-up came in a Catwoman mask, the wordless beauty came with a mermaid’s head and the politician wore a dinosaur disguise. Mia stared at Vik in his clown mask. Perhaps he was the Henry Ford or John D Rockefeller of India. The country relied on people like him. The nation relied on him to flesh out its evolving corners.
In the midst of the party, with the curtains twitching with stolen kisses and tears of betrayal falling into the swimming pool, Karna stared out at her from the trees. He had said she was not meant to be imprisoned here. She wasn’t.
That night, as she lay next to him, exhausted, wondering why he didn’t have any jet lag and how he had had the energy to leap off the plane and organize another party, Vik asked, ‘What will you do, my dear, if I die?’
‘Die?’ she whispered. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘What if the thug kills me?’
‘Of course not,’ she said firmly. ‘It won’t happen. You’ll have the police with you.’
Blind Faith Page 19