Her son had chosen death as his ultimate weapon against her – against she who had given him life.
She had resented him for feeding off her body. She wished she could have devised some way by which foetuses were able to be self-sufficient, living off some science-created uterus she would have had to have nothing to do with. And after he was born, he had demanded things from her that she simply could not – would not – give, because she had instead demanded the freedom not to be his mother.
She had always envied him his energy; she imagined his limbs as skinny, whiplash, so unlike her own soft curves. After he was born, she felt her breasts become ungainly rocks that dragged her chest down to her navel.
She had tried to outdo her son in lightness. He whistled past her in the garden, sturdy and alert, while she lumbered tiredly behind him, imagining the smelly fluids of childbirth still trickling from her vagina. He seemed to her to be as fresh and as energetic as the incoming tide, always dashing back for a new charge at the beach. After his birth, Indi had starved herself to malnourished thinness and tried to run as fast as him. When he beat her effortlessly in the races they had in the Victoria Villa garden she would go back to her room and stare at the stretch lines around her stomach. The terrible fear of being outdone had created sharp lines around her mouth. Her silky hair coarsened with anxiety.
In the curve of his adolescent cheek, Indi had sensed a frightening resoluteness. She hated his falsetto baby voice and told him so. She hated his thin wrists and told him to cover them up. As he grew into a young boy she told him terrifying ghost stories. His grandmother’s ghost still haunted the garden, she told him, so he must never go out to play at night. Some afternoons, he would lie in bed listening to the call of his dead grandmother. One afternoon, he thought he heard a voice that sounded exactly like Indi’s throaty tone. ‘Come,’ the voice called, ‘my little son, come.’ He had shut his ears. If he answered, he feared she would eat him up.
She detested his diabetes and dealt with it contemptuously, demanding instead that he attend to her own, much more serious, handicap. She would leave bottles of jam open on the table to tempt him into sugar, but he would close the lids tightly and arrange them away neatly. She forced him into adult companionship, laughing and joking about things he didn’t understand. She brushed off his wounds which healed only after many weeks, mocking his babyish tones and insisting that he stop being a child.
He grew used to hearing her lovers’ light footsteps. Used to hearing soft steps climb up the iron ladder to the roof in the dead of night. And the shadows that slunk out later. Sometimes, before he went to sleep, Indi would sing, ‘Sleep my little baby one’ but if he tried to snuggle closer, she would brush him off and quickly switch from lullaby to a thumping film song, impatient with his desire for love.
She would walk under the semal tree, thinking of the tasks she would have to accomplish the next day. She wouldn’t be able to see that he was lying in bed and gazing at the blue night light watching it turn into the eye of a serpent.
She ran about with him under the shadows of the trees. She played with him on a see-saw. She took photos of him, telling him he was all she had. She pranced about and sang out loud but he terrified her. He reminded her of burnt palms and dead husbands. Of widows who didn’t get invited to their sisters’ weddings. Of fathers who never forgave their daughters even on their deathbed. Every time he smiled she became determined to defeat him.
Perhaps all mothers are secretly jealous of their sons. Jealous that they are like waves that break on the shore and then dash around again for another charge at the beach. Sons were luckier, superior beings. No suspicion and hostility greeted his skip and jump on the street. No one would look askance if he flung his head in the air and laughed. Everybody would smile along, happy to be caught up in his joy. Sons were lithe jaguars; mothers were blind and slow, they were cow elephants.
They had both sprung from the same Four-Armed-One. Between mother and son, there had always been an equally matched war. She would always come flying at her adversary with her impure heart to defend herself and her chosen task, her own work and the path she believed was good true and moral, the nation-building tasks, the law and order tasks, however lowly or dirty he may call her, however loudly he may call her a whore, she would press ahead.
No Purification Journey would ever defeat Indi.
His resolve had been as strong as hers, although it was directed in the opposite direction. Indi had fought for life, Vik had chosen death as the only achievement that would match his mother. His death would haunt her, would drive Justin to his own, his death would take away her beauty and send Justin weeping to his grave.
The fire engines arrived. One of the firemen came panting through the smoke, hoisted Indi onto his shoulders and staggered back towards the beach. Water came bursting through the pipes. Greyness and transparency merged. Liquid pursued vapour. Father Rudy sat Indi down on the beach. Villagers, models, taichi instructors and druggies stood in a trembling semi-circle around Sharkey’s, now reduced to a smoking shell.
The firemen found the body and brought it to Indi. She heard Justin behind her, crying as if his heart was being wrenched from his body. She sat with her son’s body on the beach, upright, quite calm, as if she was a magistrate listening to public complaints. She ran her hands along what remained of his face. Of course it was him. Of course it was the boy who had once lived with her. She would recognize him anywhere, because she had been aware of him every day of her life. A frightening stranger? Not really. Nothing but that silly child, running around in a costume. He had become a menace, an antisocial element, a criminal the papers would have called him, and she had struck out, as she always had, for the good of the public, whom she had always held as her most important responsibility. He had not known how to cure himself and he would have harmed others if she had not stopped him. It had been her duty to stop him.
‘This is a terrible tragedy for us all,’ Indi told them in her clear, ringing voice. Her voice was devoid of all sorrow or remorse. Instead it was a voice which was confident, as if it had only been confirmed to her once again, how savage the world was and how lucky she was not to be able to see it. The villagers formed a circle around her and prayed and wept, as Indi announced, ‘The madness of the world infected him too much.’
‘God help us,’ sobbed Father Rudy.
‘All the families of the dead will receive whatever assistance possible,’ declared Indi in her civil-servant voice. ‘Our country is young and these are the pangs of growth. But he is gone and the threat is nullified, the danger is neutralized.’
She turned to Vik again and drew his charred body onto her lap. She kissed his face, his chest and his legs. She pressed his arms. The first time he wore a vest, I laughed and said he musn’t wear them because they made him look more puny. When the hair started to grow on his back and shoulders, it was so blond, like Justin’s, all the hair on his body was blond, then slowly it began to turn darker. Then he went off and did some exercises so his shoulders would become broader and his hips narrower just like Justin’s. And they did. My last vision of him was of a tall and handsome man. Don’t I know every part of him? Didn’t I carry him in my body for nine months?
Yes, I know every bit of him but I lost him along the way.
It’s funny between mothers and sons, isn’t it, sobbed the villagers. How they kiss and cuddle and whisper sweet nothings after death. Who knows why she had hated him so, why he had reminded her of her father, of all men, except the one who had wanted to save her. She was like Aditi, mother of the gods, who buried her son Martanda alive. But Martanda defeated her, he survived and emerged from the earth to taunt her.
The worst type of woman is the one defined by her children. It’s the easy way out. To pretend one’s achieved something just because one has popped a few pups.
What had she lived for?
She had lived, she realized, not for Justin, but for her country. She had always acted in the common interes
t. She had been imbued with dreams of the country, been touched by a prime minister whose name she bore, been moved by speeches she read about young civil servants who could change the way things were. As she raged and fumed at her blindness, her work had become her only sanity. Her work and Justin had saved her and kept her thinking always of the unfinished task, the larger purpose, the goal ahead. Even though her world had closed up after that hot afternoon in a hospital when she knew her son had already died, she had lived with the knowledge that, like Othello the moor of Venice, she had done the state some service.
She had existed, she had worked, she had poured herself into the public and her monuments would remain. At every forum to which she had ever been invited, at the Magsaysay Award ceremony, at the seminars she had attended, she had never tired of her plans for the people. She had spoken about the irrelevance of theory, the need only for action and more action, to serve, to build, to defend this country, to embrace its poorest citizen and live up to a dream of bringing welfare and voting rights to those whose lives were no better than dogs and cats. She had been called every name in the book: irascible, intolerant, scandalous. Her cigarettes, her illegitimate child, her shattered family. Yet her work had acquired an incandescence that few others had achieved. Her dedication had inspired; her stern backbone, her inflexible incorruptibility in a service riddled with money-takers, would be remembered. Yes, all this would be remembered, thought Indi, beyond the gory present, the blood and ash of my revenge on the world, beyond the destroyed hotel and the dead body, beyond all this, there would be that small service, my service that would be remembered.
At long last, after a lifetime’s struggle, Indi became thankful for her blindness. Her blindness was not a curse, it was a sacred place to which she had undertaken a lifelong pilgrimage. How peaceful was the darkness that blocked out the ugliness of this world. For the first time in her life, she felt relieved that she would never be able to see it anymore. She was relieved and thankful that she couldn’t see. She sank into blessed blackness like an exhausted marathon runner sinks into deep sleep.
There had been quite a few casualties in the fire. A handful of guests had been able to jump out of the window and save themselves. They laid the bodies on the beach. Indi sat among them staring expressionlessly into the sea. Justin, no longer able to stand on his feet, sobbed like a child in Father Rudy’s arms. Father Rudy said he would take all the ashes and immerse them at the Kumbh Mela so at least their souls would be at peace.
In the sky, as if in response to the shocking developments on earth, an aeroplane suddenly exploded. South Wind Airways flight SW 448 from Delhi to Goa, became the victim of a suicide bomber’s dress rehearsal. One of the passengers pulled a toggle strapped to his chest and the plane broke apart and crashed into the Alqueria bay.
That night Alqueria was surrounded by fire. In the water the crashed plane. On land Sharkey’s Hotel in flames. In Alqueria, of all places, where peace had lived for centuries. The rockers froze in mid-smoke. The bells in Santa Ana forgot to ring. And Father Rudy sank to his knees wondering where god was.
The divers from the navy who dived into the sea to search for the dead bodies, found all the dead passengers except one. All the bodies were recovered. Except one.
‘We are calling to tell you, Madam’ – South Wind Airways told Mia, after tracing her mobile number from the address on Vik’s ticket– ‘your husband’s name is in the passenger manifest, Madam, yes, his name is on the passenger list but we regret to tell you that we are still unable to find his body. It’s very puzzling, Madam. Because we’ve found all the other bodies. Your husband’s body is the only one that we are unable to trace. We are still searching. Our records tell us that no boarding card was issued to him, so it is possible he never boarded the plane. Perhaps he never boarded the plane after all?’ Of course Vik never boarded the plane. He had never intended to. He had bought a ticket and put his name on the passenger list only to prove that he hadn’t been in Alqueria when ‘Karna’ took his own life. To his business associates, his employees, his buyers and suppliers, Vik would just have gone missing; it would be Karna who would have completed his suicide attack on Sharkey’s Hotel.
Perhaps giving birth is indeed dealing out a certain kind of death, thought Father Rudy.
Perhaps the act of creation carries within it the act of destruction.
And only a mother knows this secret.
Deep underwater, the debris of the burnt plane drifted to the seabed. It looked like a convent in the ocean. With nuns floating like underwater weeds.
11
LONDON
The oil-paint-and-turpentine flat was tinged with dawn when Mia came back to London. She opened the door and windows to let in the sun. The cherry tree leant gently against her bedroom and she heard church bells far away.
Time slowed down. She projected herself on the wall where Anand’s painting used to be. Time took her backwards into herself. Time jumped up and dragged her forward, towards the next twenty years. She and her child bending together over a lily lake. She and her child thirty years later. She at his school. At his wedding. At the birth of his children.
‘Do you want to keep staying on here, Goldie?’ Mithu whispered. ‘Why back here to this awful place?
‘I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me, Ma.’
This flat is my festival and every street corner is a pilgrimage and every chance acquaintance on an elevator is a sage. I chased after a mystic and I found that he was none other than my businessman husband. I ran to the holy festival to see things, but the festival only sent me home, giving me the answers to my father’s death.
What airy-fairy castles we construct on this mundane earth.
I charged after a sadhu, who, I thought, encapsulated everything fantastic and mystical and found he was none other than a corporate executive in drag. I was like the English colonialists in India, like the orientalists from Edward Said. I indulged my fantasies, without bothering to unmask the single human being under the differences of costume. The ash-smeared, naked priest is an executive on his day off. The snake-charmer with the swaying cobra is simply a travelling salesman providing an ordinary service. The owner of an international business can easily double as a spiritualist.
The Kumbh Mela is not about naked ascetics doing bizarre things with their bodies, but grandmothers and grandsons keeping family traditions alive. That’s all there is to it. I was naïve, no different from the others who had visited India in the last two centuries, and whose skin colour was many shades lighter than mine. Memsahibs who had been swept off their feet by enigmatic preachers and mystics, sahibs from London who had mistaken simple poverty for pagan ritual. The Dark Man from the east, playing Aziz to my Adele. My false assumption of two realities, of two Indias, Vik’s India and Karna’s, of the shallow life of parties and the deeper meaning of life revealed, Vik, the corporate guerilla and Karna – what had she called him – ‘touched by an extraordinary current of air’, all in the end, one.
I am the ever-shining unborn, one alone…non dual, that am I.
Oneness as an ideal, oneness at the heart of the variety of the Kumbh, all individuals, all opposites, denominations, all faiths, all sects of the world, yet arching over it: the great human canon, belonging to no civilization and belonging to all, the One Being standing alone in the wayside shrines manifested in innumerable folk saints across the globe, in tiny shared spaces of memories and rituals, in churches, in mosques, in synagogues in temples, all streams ending in the great one shared revelation.
I’m the pilgrim of the One. Orient versus Occident, West versus East, all petty wars ending in a final crowded march to the One. The opposition between believers and doubters is nonsense because each exists because of the other. The miracle is that we don’t have to choose, we are not compelled to choose, yet we believe we must make that choice between belief and rationality.
Between Papa’s way and mine.
Vik tried to keep my dreams alive, tried to give me a
reality I could believe in; he created something for my schoolgirl innocence. But he knew that somewhere his energy would give, he wouldn’t have the strength to keep it up for too long and faded away exhausted by the daily effort of stoking my romantic yearnings.
He had grown up alone, wandered here and there, becoming many different people. He had met mendicants, businessmen, officers and thugs. He had explored worldviews, learnt about the creation of personas, learnt the secrets of marriage and the techniques of make-up. The Purification Journey had taught him well. He had learnt to speak with genuine belief. Or perhaps he had actually believed in the words. The businessman/prophet with the perfect dialogue for each identity. Emperor Jehangir, always Akbar’s weaker son, the effete beautiful son, the luxury-loving cruel son of the great parent. An emperor weakened by sentimentality, shackled by need, while the parent soared like Everest because she had no need for anyone or anything but her own actions.
Furious that he could not pull himself back from the brink, that he slid into evil madness when he could easily have crawled out of the quicksand and been strong enough to forgive and grow taller than his memories. Why could he not have tamed himself? He, so successful, so at ease, his life so full, could he not have reined in his perversion? But, perhaps, he too was possessed of the same demon as Indi, the demon that urges destruction, a demon that lived in that silk cotton tree. The power, the indelible mark upon the memory, one’s continuation branded onto another’s; the final victory embedded in the act of taking one’s own life.
How my daughter has changed, thought Mithu. She seems to have become taller. Her hair has grown long, her shoulders are broader, her bosom is fuller, her eyes have lost their confusion.
Mia’s gaze had become direct and calm. The nervous, brittle girl was gone. In her place stood a woman who was confident about her choices. The Drama of Depression was put away in the bookshelf. She no longer talked of Anand’s death. She gave his Kumbh Mela painting to the Tate Modern to be stared at by students and tourists, for them to be taken where it had led her. The painting was a gateway, a riddle, a clue to opening a secret door. The Kumbh Mela was not just a celebration of nakedness or a hashish heaven. It was about failure. About learning to accept failure. The naked ascetic in all his rejection of politenesses, norms, correct paths forward through life. The naked sadhu is a monumental failure. A failure at life. He goes backwards instead of forwards. He is naked because he doesn’t fear being ridiculed. But there’s hope for a world that permits such failures to celebrate their existence.
Blind Faith Page 23