The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  For the next day or two the Hemonys explored Malomba without the help of Mr Bundash, perhaps out of loyalty to Laki who meanwhile lost no opportunity to perform his discreet services. In such matters he showed imagination and tact, knowing that to display too much eagerness would work against him. To be obliging was one thing, but he had learned that Europeans in particular became suspicious of too much solicitude. He supposed this was a sad reflection on the state of affairs at home.

  Zealously he fumigated their rooms, going to some trouble in arranging to be doing it at the very moment his guests returned. He was seen leaving Tessa’s room with a carpenter’s rule and hammer. ‘To fixing window for missus,’ he said gravely, padding away up the corridor with a preoccupied air. Although she looked and found no evidence of repairs, she was touched that he had remembered, especially in a town whose predominating attitude was what she would have described as ‘laid back’.

  She and the children were doing a lot of walking. They bought a map and did the sights, visiting (it seemed to Jason) a hundred and seventy-three temples for each iced Mango Surprise consumed.

  ‘The map must be wrong,’ he said while waiting for one of these rare delicacies to be served. ‘Look, they say there are thirty-nine temples in Malomba. We’ve already been to more than that this morning.’

  ‘How silly you are,’ said Zoe.

  ‘And,’ persisted Jason, looking closely at the legend, ‘it says several of those are shut to visitors. The Vudusumin, for example. The Masonic Lodge – and this Lingasumin thing. I expect they’re the only interesting ones.’

  ‘You liked the Glass Minaret,’ said Tessa.

  ‘It was all right. It wasn’t made of glass, though, was it? Just covered with bits of mirror.’

  ‘And the stuffed man.’

  ‘Yes, the stuffed man was okay.’

  They had found him in the House of Rimmon, a circular building where all male visitors were required to remove their shirts. The entire floor was knee-deep in straw symbolising – according to the printed explanation – the threshing floor on which all human souls will one day be winnowed. Standing in the middle was a small brown man, stark naked and holding a flail in one upraised hand. Around his brow was a circlet of gold from which arose wavy jags like bent spearheads, alternately copper and gold. These were the tongues of fire with which the unrighteous chaff would be burned.

  Until the guide-book told her that the man with the flail was believed to be at least a thousand years old, Zoe had been embarrassed lest he caught her staring. Whatever preservation process he had undergone had resulted in an extraordinarily lifelike skin texture quite different from the dried-parchment look of mummification. He was supposed to be completely stuffed with emmer and barley, and at this very moment university departments in Europe and America were studying minute samples of skin reverently taken from the soles of his feet in order to date him. The Stockholm Institute of Forensic Science had also taken scrapings from under the toenails of one foot, and from their analysis of particles of mud, pollen and camel dung were able to confirm that they were consistent with an Eastern Mediterranean provenance. The Rimmonites of Malomba were already overjoyed and preparing for immense celebrations when the news arrived – as they never doubted it would – proving this figure to be the The God Himself, immeasurably older than anybody else’s, whose last corporeal manifestation happened to be that of a man who had fled Damascus before the spread of Islam.

  Tessa had tried, as she tried in every temple she visited, to be responsive to the vibrations, to the particular brand of the numinous which the place diffused. It was not easy with Jason giggling and shirtless, but the light did fall quite beautifully from a clerestory of unglazed slits around the shallow dome. Motes and spicules stirred up from the crackling straw danced in its beams. The whole place had the warm, immemorial smell of hay-lofts. Even though the figure of Rimmon was not perhaps quite as awesomely menacing as intended – having the stature of a modern eleven-year-old – there was something engrossing about his antiquity, his silence, his posture. Indeed, the more she looked at him and saw a man engaged in a timeless human activity, the more he seemed to transcend the role and emit a stealthy power. Altogether Tessa had been quite sorry to leave the House of Rimmon.

  The Mango Surprises arrived, macédoines of mango and soursop with a dusting of mauve hundreds-and-thousands. Thus fortified – and in Jason’s case appeased – they made their way to the Wednesday Market next to the bus station. The alleys were thronged with people who carried the Hemonys along as if they had plans for them before dumping them at a street corner piled with the spare parts of car engines. Gamely they rejoined the crowd and were borne off again in a different direction, past heaps of trussed chickens with their beaks agape. There were boys with cloth wrapped around their heads seated behind pyramids of green mangoes. For those stopping to refresh themselves, the boys also dispensed salt to sprinkle on the unripe fruit. A few steps further and they came upon live fish sliced lengthwise to the spine and laid out with ice on draining slabs so that the monger could demonstrate the freshness of his wares. Their hearts twitched, their lifeblood streamed, their flotation sacs pumped and inflated hopelessly. Black silk Chinese caps in conference over the fish; long robes, yellow monkish robes. Priestly robes and cotton pantaloons delicately hitched to pass over improvised duckboards and broken packing-cases which might afford unspattered passage across pools of ordure. And suddenly, with the abruptness of silence unaccountably falling, the family were out on the other side. They found themselves beached at the end of a boulevard lined with balsam oaks whose perfume-drenched candles tottered away down the perspective towards the outer suburbs. Immediately before them stood a tall man dressed in purple, holding a slender leather pouch.

  ‘Nasal hygiene?’ he enquired in English. When nobody responded he said to Tessa, ‘I am picking your nose please, madam.’ He withdrew from the case what looked like a pair of slender chopsticks but which on closer inspection proved to be freshly peeled twigs with sharpened points.

  ‘No,’ said Tessa. ‘Thank you all the same.’

  ‘You mean,’ Jason wanted to know, ‘you’re a professional nose-picker?’

  ‘I am, young sir,’ said the man with a bow. ‘Very noble profession. In your country I am not knowing the custom. Here in Malomba it very bad to putting finger in nose outside house. Maybe go blind. But wooden piece is okay. So we are doing.’

  Looking round, Jason noticed another man in purple standing a few yards off. This one had a customer whose chin he held in one hand, tilting the head back to face the sun while with the other he delicately manipulated the twigs. Then he withdrew them and having flicked them towards the kerb wiped them on a strip of cloth. Tessa had already been upset by the fish, and now another fragment of her former private-school self bobbed up.

  ‘Most quaint,’ she said. ‘Come along.’

  Turning, they entered the crowd once more and were milled about amid hubbub and confusion before being spat from beneath the Chinatown arch. ‘Oh, I wish it was next Thursday,’ said Zoe. ‘Can’t we go and see this healer before then?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Zo. It was difficult enough getting any appointment at all. Hadlam Tapranne is probably the most sought-after healer in Asia. Of course, the Teacher engineered it all.’ This, to be sure, was Swami Bopi Gul. ‘How that divine man surrounds us with light. How lucky we are!’

  ‘But that’s at least another week,’ Jason objected.

  ‘I know it is, Jay. But we’ll find lovely things to do, happy things. You’ll see. Look at it,’ she threw a hand largely at the sky in a gesture which took in the dazzling blue, the green-tiled arch with its gold lions, the variegated tumult through which they had just passed. It also took in the First Tantric Temple of the Left-Handed Shaktas, Malomban Rite, crouching among its vines over the road.

  Zoe heard her catch her breath. ‘Is your back bad, Mum?’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ said Tessa. ‘Or nearly. All the same
, though, I’d rather like to spend this afternoon in the Botanical Gardens. The book says they’re spectacularly beautiful. There’s a Buddha and a butterfly house and a meditation grove. That sounds restful after this morning.’

  ‘I don’t want to come,’ said Jason.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to,’ his sister told him.

  They had a conciliatory lunch in a Chinese restaurant.

  ‘Then what would you like to do instead?’

  ‘We could go on the train.’ This was a miniature railway which was apparently laid out around the boundary of the Botanical Gardens. ‘Then you could go and look at your butterflies and meditate and things.’

  ‘He’s so spiritual,’ Zoe said.

  ‘The spirit affects us in different ways at different ages,’ her mother observed, expertly picking a raisin from a pile of rice with her chopsticks. ‘And you’d go back to the hotel?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Jason.

  Malomba was not a large town and there was little which could not be reached on foot. Twenty minutes’ walking and they arrived at the park. Here was a blistering expanse of coarse tropical grass worn to the roots and dotted with trees which gave off a subtly depressed air of not yet having been felled as opposed to having been encouraged to grow. Packed densely in the shade between them Malomban couples were sitting. Across the wastes between these oases plodded ice-cream vendors, their aluminium boxes slung over one shoulder, and children selling newspaper screws of unshelled peanuts. A few hundred yards away a belt of forest trees marked the beginning of the Botanical Gardens, which seemed to merge with the coconuts and bamboos of the closer foothills.

  Directly in front of the Hemonys was a miniature railway station, bizarrely stylised to look like an English country halt – Adlestrop, perhaps – complete with raised platforms and white picket fencing. Waiting at it, exhaling gently, stood a little green steam-engine with a dour Malomban in a peaked cap hunched on its tender, a heap of firewood at his back. Coupled to it were three open carriages with tin benches and canvas awnings. Several families were sitting patiently with their children, sucking soft drinks from polystyrene cups whose straws poked through their lids.

  ‘And this is what you wanted to go on?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Jason. While Tessa bought the tickets he went to look at the engine and exchange a few words with the driver. ‘It’s Taiwanese,’ he informed them, climbing aboard.

  ‘I hope that makes you feel better.’

  ‘Don’t nag, Zo,’ her mother said gently.

  ‘But Mum, this is for children.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Jason told her. ‘It’s for people who don’t want to see butterflies and meditate.’

  A guard’s whistle sounded, a tiny signal fell, the engine driver unslumped and tooted a shrill blast which sped flatly across the park, and they were off. It was, even Zoe had to admit, agreeable and even quite restful in its own way. The engine chuffed, the wheels made a subdued iron clicking, they never went faster than a brisk trot. Now and then as the track wove around the trees small boys would detach themselves from the shade and race alongside, generally outpacing the train for a few yards before dropping behind and returning proudly to their families.

  As the breeze fanned a smell of hot oil, steam and smuts back over the passengers, Tessa thought it was almost certainly the first time either of her children had been on a steam train. She remembered her own childhood and how steam engines from Victoria Station had carried her off to school on the south coast of England. She had hated them then, but today this little model was bringing back all sorts of marginal nostalgias which emerged into the foreign sunshine like wisps of smoke from a tunnel’s mouth. Then the rueful censor chided. ‘No,’ she told herself, ‘no. That was nearly thirty years ago. That happened to someone else entirely. To hanker after the past is just another form of grasping. Let go. It only gets in the way, it can do you no good. It holds us back.’

  Among the trees inside the Botanical Gardens she glimpsed a flash of the thirty-foot-high Golden Buddha which had been brought overland from Thailand five centuries earlier by ox-cart and river ferry. She had read that wherever its haulers had rested for the night, a shrine had been built to commemorate its passing. Now it sat at the end of a lotus pool beneath a ficus religiosa which had been lovingly grown from a cutting of the very Bo-tree at Bodh Gaya in India under which Gautama had achieved enlightenment and become the Buddha. Her eyes watered a little at the thought. The beauty of the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment always had that effect on her, as did reflecting on the depth and subtlety of the Dhamma. It was utterly mysterious, yet not at all mystifying since there need be no deities to mess things up, no sacraments like the ghoulish rituals in which Christians indulged – just the power of the human mind to transcend this earth and find its own way to bliss. As Tessa had said to herself at the time of her conversion in Nepal the year Zoe was born, by their symbols shall ye know them. Who would not ally themselves with a philosophy represented by the still, rapt figure of a contemplative rather than with a religion whose sign was a gibbet? She recalled that at this very moment, back in the glooms of Europe, Easter was only a week away. Here, steeped in heat and scent and light, Malomba was ebulliently un-Lenten.

  These reflections were interrupted by a series of piercing whistles from the engine and a shuddering of brakes which sent hands out automatically for support. A screaming yelp sounded nearby and a mongrel dog appeared running at a hobble diagonally away from the train. One of its forelegs ended midway and it was an instant before Tessa took in that the accident was happening now, that the screaming dog was trailing behind it a bright scatter of crimson blood across the tawny grass, that even at this moment they were trundling over its severed paw. From up front the driver was looking back at his passengers with a grin, shaking his head at the hopelessness of dogs which lay dozing with their legs on railway lines. By now he had released the brakes and the animal was eighty yards away, stopping momentarily to bite at its stump. It went on again but more lethargically and soon halted once more, head to leg. The puffing of the engine turned hollow; the train was passing into a tunnel made of green-painted tin with a brick portal. The last glimpse Tessa had was of the dog crumbling, melting downwards, a lone lump on the baked width of park.

  Jason made his own way back to the hotel, leaving his mother and sister to recover among the diverse balms offered by the Botanical Gardens. The streets were hot and drowsy. At times he was sure he fell asleep as he walked; whenever he tripped over a pothole it was as if he woke up to recover his balance. Some way off the Glass Minaret winked and blazed above the slums and boulevards, a celestial conductor down which a tithe of the abounding light and energy of the solar system might pucker and pass to this dark earth. On it Jason fixed his lethargic eye and navigated in a trance.

  The air of Malomba was saturated with odours. Fragrances of fruit rotting in the Wednesday Market mingled with those of a thousand balsam oaks, orchid sapodillas, belfry palms. From the clustered violet bells of these last trees tolled heavy notes of scent, rolling out of merchants’ gardens and temple grounds. To Jason, reeling with perfumes, there was one single smell behind all the others which in a few short days had become for him that of Malomba itself. He had no idea what it was.

  He entered Chinatown. In stenching alleys behind the restaurants dogs were fighting over the lunchtime crop of puppy bones and fish heads. Gradually he became aware of a voice calling him, together with a hollow grinding noise. Looking down he found himself addressed by the torso of a boy mounted on castors. Of much the same age, this young fellow had a pair of muscular arms and hands wrapped in filthy cloths with which he rowed himself along. To each corner of his wood pallet were nailed steel bearings, worn ball-races discarded by mechanical workshops. In stopping he had slewed himself with a burst of sparks and blocked the path so Jason somehow lacked the energy to walk round him. Then in a high voice the boy-torso began to sing.

  Thought flew out of Jason’s head,
his feet would not stir. He watched the white, glittering teeth, the two grubby lumps of hand held out towards him, was fixed by the eyes which never left his face. The song climbed the hot walls of the alley and floated towards the pigeons slicing the blue air overhead. There was in it none of the shocking nakedness which singing on a street ordinarily had when upraised against the din of traffic, the indifference of passers-by. On the contrary, the boy’s voice blotted out all background noise so that he became cocooned in its sweetness.

  How hot it was! It seemed there was nothing but this immense heat and the singing, interdependent in some way. Sima. The knot of mongrels foraging and brawling at the alley’s end were balletic in their movements. Sima. Not a sound came from them, only their feet raised whirlpools of dust, their fangs gleamed mutely. Sima sima sima.

  Jason found the singing had stopped and the boy was addressing him.

  ‘Sima?’ The wrapped hands were still extended and now he saw they held several small brown lumps.

  ‘I don’t speak … I don’t know …’ he stumbled and suddenly his feet were free and he could walk away. A last sima behind him and then silence in which he heard only his own footsteps. At the mouth of the alley he looked back and the boy-torso had not moved. Then with an abrupt thrust of his knuckles he spun on his trolley with a screech of steel and rowed away at a great pace, dusty thatch of hair flapping, the sound of his wheels fading into the snarling of dogs.

  Laki had been alternately dozing and plotting beneath the vine’s shade on the very edge of the roof. Fresh bread, fumigations and repairs were a good start, but minor services needed to become favours, obligation turn into intimacy. How did one insinuate oneself into the closed circle of a family’s affections? It was precisely this delicate insertion he had been pondering when suddenly he caught sight of the son down below in the street. Thoughtfully he watched the boy enter the hotel alone.