Blind Faith
Page 24
There is hope.
‘My poor fatherless Goldie!’ cried Mithu. ‘Newly married and now a widow! A child widow with a child.’ Mithu shook her head, ‘Who would have thought such a fine young man would turn out to be a horror? And all the while I thought he was a decent businessman from a very upper class family! Hé bhogoban…and that mother of his…the blind one, she sounds like a witch!’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mia shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Not a witch?’ Mithu frowned. ‘What then, haan, then what?’
There had been a sparrow’s nest in the cherry tree once when she was very young. But one night there was a terrible storm and the chicks had fallen out and died. The mother bird, whom Mia had seen every day, painstakingly building the nest and then brooding over the eggs for weeks, had suddenly disappeared. She never came back. Perhaps the mother bird had just not wanted to grieve. Mia had scooped up the little fuzzy bodies in newspaper and buried them next to the tree. Mia said, almost to herself, ‘I guess Indi just concentrated on a single thing at a time.’
‘I never heard of such goings-on in my day. Thank god all my family is far away from that horrible land! It’s obviously going to the dogs.’
Mithu sped into the kitchen and spent the next two days cooking a multi-course meal for the neighbours and told Tiger that although Mia had at last shed her father fixation, she hoped she wouldn’t give birth to the possessed child from The Exorcist.
A letter arrived by courier for Mia. It was from Sanatkumara. She realized the reason Sanatkumara hadn’t recognized the name Karna that day in London. He hadn’t recognized the name because instead of Karna she should have been asking for Vik.
Bless you Sister Mia,
We have learnt of this news and we are all shocked. Shocked beyond belief. Vikram was such a wonderful person. We met him about ten years ago in New Delhi. He came to our ashram and said he had heard of the Purification Journey and wanted to join us because he agreed with our cause, our cause of fighting the Inner War and of fighting to create the Pure Love of the Mother Woman.
He offered us a substantial sum of money and as a charity working for a better world, we thought no ill of accepting his generous offer. He said our aims suited him very well.
His involvement with us was top secret, he was never a formal part of our group. He performed his own actions. Kept going away for what he called his ‘mission’. Sister, we never asked any questions. To some extent we were silenced, I must confess, by the funds he made available to us.
Sister Mia, you must believe me when I say that we had no idea of his motives. We are basically a global philanthropic body, nor did we know anything about his family. We tried to ask about his life, but he evaded answers and we let be thinking we would give him time. But in many ways he was strange. Sometimes he threw such tantrums. At other times he was charming, so generous, as I mentioned saying, with money.
When he went away for the last time, saying he was on the last stages of his mission, we didn’t know what it was. None of us did. You must believe us. We had no idea of this mission, we thought he was talking about his business. We have wept about those innocent people killed in the fire at Sharkey’s Hotel, we have prayed for many nights for Vikram.
What we do know is that he really truly loved you. We met him in London. By then he had put on some funny false beard and hair and told us it was a game he was playing with you. We did not ask questions. But we realized he adored you. He told us that you were the love of his life, you were innocent and trusting, and that you should find a world that didn’t ever make you cynical. He fell in love with you the minute he saw your picture in London and when he heard of the sad loss of your father.
After he saw your father’s painting, he changed his dress. That is when he acquired that beard from somewhere. Of course, as you know we have our white uniform. But he said for some personal reason he wanted to disguise himself and wear the bow and arrow. He said he had a mission, he was on a path of spiritual awakening, and so we agreed. To some extent we were swayed also by the generosity of his donation, who wouldn’t be?
He later confessed that he had dressed himself up into a character from your father’s painting! He said you and he were meant to be together because of your dead fathers.
Dead fathers united you.
Sister Mia, how can I express my shock and sorrow? Our ways are totally non-violent and we cannot even conceive of something like this. Some of our Brothers are still in a state of shock.
Do come and visit us at the Pavitra Ashram whenever you want, Sister. You will be blessed by the way of Pure Love and a Pure Way Of Life. Come and help us in the coming war.
The Almighty Presence bless you, Sister, Sanatkumara.
On September 11, while the world watched television, Vivan was born. He had his mother’s penetrating gaze. He had his grandfather’s blond hair, his father’s athletic body and his grandmother’s wraparound, oceanic eyes.
‘What a beautiful baby boy!’ shouted Tiger. ‘And he’s a Virgo!’
‘Goldie!’ – Mithu’s smile next to Tiger’s – ‘Your little prince has come.’
The doctors confessed that they had been worried. For a few seconds during the Caearean section, Mia’s blood pressure had plummeted and she had almost stopped breathing. But, miraculously, her life had returned as suddenly as it had ebbed. As she felt herself being pulled upwards towards the surface of consciousness, Mia knew that it was Vik whom she had seen in the darkness below when her breath had almost given out. Vik had been standing very still wearing Karna’s white clothes and hair, looking at her with serious eyes. I could not understand myself, his eyes seemed to say, as if in answer to her question. I hated Karna and I hated Vik. Why was I, the practitioner of Pure Love, incapable of compassion? I had the words, the speeches, the beliefs; everything except the feeling. Why could I not care for and sympathize with a blind woman, a handicapped victim who needed nothing but my protection and support? Instead, her blindness was her power, her weapon against me, her war with the world. I had to obliterate the demon that would have done her more harm. Can you and my son still love me, he seemed to plead. Me, the sinful murderer, me, dead on arrival, with my brochure of purity, yet too timid, too fearful, to love?
I can never forgive you for what you did, she answered him, but I can love you for giving me my vision.
In the tumult over the next year, the wars and lost lives, Mia took over the reins of Moksha Herbals. On the long lonely evenings she spent mastering the business, feeling a control and calm she had not felt before, her thoughts would often turn to Indi. They had never met and were completely unalike – she compliant and fearful, Indi defiant and fearsome – yet, how deeply their actions had resonated in each other’s lives. Like Karna to Vik, Indi was her polar opposite, her dark self: all pervasive, non-dual. That am I, thought Mia, and I am forever released.
After a long correspondence with Indi, Mia decided to sell Victoria Villa and use the money to rebuild Sharkey’s.
Mia would stay somewhere else during her trips to India, and was glad for the opportunity to travel up and down at least twice a year.
She repaired the oil-paint-and-turpentine flat; papering the walls so that the damp faces disappeared. She spread out bright cushions on the floor and rang up all her old friends, including Sudden. In place of her father’s painting, Mia put up a photograph of Vik, neat and normal in his ironed shirt and bright tie, so Vivan would see his father as he would want to be seen.
The city became hers again. People cheered when she went back to the Eagle And Flag and her friends held a welcome home party for her.
The city was hers, even though she had tried to run away. Hyde Park was reassuringly familiar and the tourists in Speaker’s Corner she could see were clustering around another group of fervent speakers – only now they were ringed around with police. The city had called her back and pleaded with her to discover its flawed love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sagarika Ghose went to St Stephen’s College in New Delhi before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University where she gained an MA and M Phil degree in History. She has been a journalist for fourteen years, reporting extensively on Indian elections, politics and society as well as travelling and reporting in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Her first novel The Gin Drinkers was published to critical acclaim in 2000.
She is currently senior editor and prime-time news anchor on the news channel CNN IBN. She lives in New Delhi.
2002
ALQUERIA, GOA
The sun began to set in Alqueria. Set to the tune of a thousand emails darting across the world. The emails had been going around thick and fast. What times we are living through. First the horrible attack on America. Then the equally horrible attack on Afghanistan and now god knows which other country they’ll attack next. The events in Alqueria had been equally frightening, said the Sydney Alquerians, who still talked about the Sharkey’s Hotel fire and the plane crash.
The Californian Alquerians all sent messages to Indi about Justin and expressed their gratification that Justin was buried in Alqueria.
Justin had not survived the sight of his son’s death. Speechless and trembling, he had gone without food and water for days; had defied even Indi when she sat pleading by his bed. He died within a month, carried away to Orion, still holding Indi’s hand as he fell back on his pillow vowing he would watch over her from wherever he was. On his gravestone, at Indi’s wish, they had chiselled a prancing horse.
Father Rudy whispered a story to his congregation. On nights of the full moon, the ghost of Dom Fernando, a Portuguese nobleman in the fifteenth century, comes to sit by Justin’s grave in sympathy, to compare Justin’s plight with his own lovesickness for a local beauty named Mogarem. Dom Fernando tells Justin that great empires remain strong because in their interstices exist small relationships of transcendent love.
Indi was unrecognizable. She was scrawny, bent almost double, and her hair had turned completely grey. The aquiline nose and arched eyebrows were smudged with blotches of veins. Her body had shrunk to a raisin-like miniature and her face was furrowed with deep lines. Dressed in a plain grey sari, only a breath of beauty remained in the occasional flash of her sea-squall eyes. She lived in Justin’s rooms in St Theresa’s Hospital and a day and night nurse took care of her.
I have sunk, pleasantly, into the nastiness of old age. The body and mind decay and become selfish, leaving me to care only about small comforts, so that death, when it comes, will be a release from my perpetually shrinking universe. She read about the World Trade Center attacks, then the tragedies in Afghanistan. Young men pushed towards all manner of unimaginable acts. She read about the leader of the group of suicide terrorists. She would like to meet his mother; they could compare notes on their sons.
She fancifully thought of herself as an Empire in which Vik had been a freedom fighter, a fighter for his liberty against a blind, brutally beautiful Empire that had pushed a young man to his death. She was an unbearably successful force, an excluding, dazzling, cruel and pulverizing presence bearing down on him, creating in him an urge to grow bigger, to tower over her somehow or the other, to protect his honour and his manhood as an escape from her prodigious force.
Alqueria saved Indi from bitterness. Whenever she felt tributaries of tears race down her cheeks, the sea breeze dried them and carried them off to the distant steamers. The air filled with song. Songs from the fisherwomen who sat with their prawns and mussels by the roadside. Music from the mandolin players on the beach. And music from the choir of Santa Ana.
Alqueria was not rich. The houses were mossy. The wooden carvings on the verandas were termite-ridden and the zigzag was marked with pot-holes. But during feast days when the village homes were en fete and the face of Santa Ana was reflected in the sea, Alqueria became the pinnacle of the world.
At last she accepted her blindness; her lifelong pilgrimage to darkness had been completed. The pilgrimage had been a bloody one but had brought her unfailingly to the doorstep of her destined shrine. People make too much of a fuss about seeing. See this. See that. See this painting. Take a photograph. Make a video. Vision is a highly overrated virtue and much of this world’s ugliness is best left unseen. In her dark temple, Indi found the gods of Alqueria. The fisherfolk looked nondescript but they weren’t. The cosmos slowed down around them. If they wanted to, they could have pulled the moon down and dragged it up in their fishing nets. They could have reached up and pushed away a rogue cloud left over from the monsoon. All existence ran through the people of Alqueria because they lived so close to the sea.
When the creature was taken out, she whispered to the lagoon, taken out of my body, spattered with my blood, spattered with my peaceful singing companionship, it was out and gone. I tried to build bridges but by nightfall the constructions between me and the child disappeared because he held his nose every time he saw me. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was holding his nose, as if I was the source of some polluted smell. When the mother mountain produces a herb, the fisherwomen sang, she lets it go away from her to far-off lands to heal the sick. When the mother ocean produces a pearl, she has no idea whose neck it will eventually adorn. When a mother gives birth, she doesn’t know into which undiscovered country her child will lead her.
Indi sat by the lagoon, with her face turned towards the sun, the smell of the ash from Sharkey’s still wafting in the overhanging palms.
Off the Panjim bus, came two figures, lit by sunlight. A young woman with a little boy in her arms, the sea reflected in the woman’s eyes. Indi had no idea they were there but she sensed their footfalls.
A straight-backed woman with a rucksack on her shoulders, a mop of curls framing her face, held the boy close to her and came towards Indi down the zigzag.
A woman and her son.
Indi and Vik.
‘ Indi,’ Father Rudy’s voice shouted down the red dust hill from the courtyard of Santa Ana, ‘I’m sending one of the nurses down. Hold her hand and come up slowly to the road, dear. Careful, now, careful.’
The bells of Santa Ana began to ring. From the bay came the friendly honk of a barge.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Bhaskar Ghose and Ranjana Sengupta, stern critics and tireless readers of every draft. Also to Leela Gandhi and Radha Mohan. And to Ravi Singh at Penguin. GS Ghurye’s Indian Sadhus remains a comprehensive account of the Hindu religious orders.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s The Principal Upanisads was invaluable. Thanks to Dilip and Nandini Sardesai for introducing me to Goa; Maria and Alban Couto for giving me the benefit of their insight and wisdom.
Sanjay Hazarika (St Stephen’s 1983–1986) wrote a poem that has stayed with me and which I have taken the liberty of quoting. And thanks most of all to Nandita Aggarwal for being friend and editor.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © Sagarika Ghose 2006
Sagarika Ghose asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
ePub Edition June 2008 ISBN-9780007283675
First published in 2006
Third impression 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auc
kland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com