by Sara Banerji
Jaswant, who had felt so in charge, so capable, as long as Julia slept, now felt a bit off balance, and began to jabber, “I expect you are hungry or something after all that … Someone, get food, a drink for the Madam …”
Julia stood up and shook her head. She brushed at her dress with her hands, and quite a lot of leaves and twigs flew out, though it did not seem to make the garment look the least bit better. It was torn, stained with mud in a dozen places, and stuck all over with blackjacks and bits of tree. The sun was setting behind Julia’s back, and the red light shone through her hair that stood out in a great mass around her head. The effect was dramatic, and made even Jaswant feel a little alarmed. There was something quite blazing about Julia Clockhouse.
“What! Nothing?” babbled Jaswant. “Well, in that case, you know, I think we should be making tracks … don’t you …” He surveyed her, filled with a sudden indecision. He did not know at all what he wished to do next, whether to go on round the world with this seer, or whether to return her to her husband.
He never had to make any decision in the end. Julia threw her arms round his body, hugged him very tightly, making the watching tribals shrink back fearing perhaps that she was attacking him. She said, “Thank you, dear! You have been so kind,” as though she had not been unconscious at all, but had known exactly what had gone on during the past three days. Then she turned and began to climb down to the floor of the jungle.
“Wait, wait,” cried Jaswant, bending over. “Where are you going? What are you going to do next?”
“You can come with me if you like!” she called, and her words seemed to echo ringingly round the wet jungle, as though it was a lofty green cathedral.
“Oh, thanks, thanks for nothing,” muttered Jaswant, as he scuttled down the ladder in Julia’s wake.
She walked very fast as though still pervaded with some of the yogi’s lightness, so that Jaswant had quite a job keeping up with her. Several times he asked her, panting, “Where are we going?” At first she did not answer, but on about the third time she turned and told him, “Home!”
“Ah,” breathed Jaswant. “Then we aren’t going to be sanyasis after all …” But Julia added, “Though, of course, to a yogi, everywhere is home.”
“Oh yes,” said Jaswant. “I am going to tell you about all that. You see I read some books, and I know about you, and why you are like you are, and I think that if I tell you it will be very helpful to you …” He knew he was jabbering. His words seemed to be running downhill, as though he had become unable to stop them.
Julia Clockhouse stopped walking. She turned, and gently laid her hand across his mouth.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said. “I know it all. Kali told me.”
She removed her hand after a moment and Jaswant said, “What? What did he tell you? But just let me explain. There is so much to know, and I have read quite a lot of books on the subject!”
“There is only one thing to know!” said Julia. She threw out her arms as though she was hugging the universe and Jaswant heard a sort of crackling noise as though electricity was running through her.
He waited, while she stood there, with her wild hair crackling and the universe pouring through her body. He looked into her face and it seemed to Jaswant that her eyes had become transparent so that he could see infinity through them.
“What?” he breathed, and thought in that moment that he wished they had been going to be sanyasis together.
“I am!” she said.
She was silent for a long time then she said, “I used to think my soul was getting out. But there was a yogi, somewhere, in my mind, perhaps. Or perhaps he really stood there. When I began to fall with his mind he took mine to an area where everything begins.” Again that crackling sound from her body as she shook it slightly. “My soul never really got out,” she went on. “It couldn’t because it is the whole cosmos. My soul, like all other souls, fills everything, and is part of everything else. All the poor soul ever wanted to do was to expand …” She turned and looked at Jaswant reflectively, then said, “I am. I don’t have to read about it to know. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Jaswant a little dismally, knowing that he understood as well as he was ever going to. Which was not very well at all. “But there are some things you do not know. You cannot know …” he told her. “About your husband, for instance …”
“I know even that,” she said.
“How? How?” he demanded, feeling bewildered. “You can’t know that he has come home because you weren’t there...”
“I know!” she told him. “Didn’t I tell you that everything is part of everything else? It is only our minds that make the separations …”
“The bungalow?” asked Jaswant, humbly this time.
She nodded. “I know,” she said. And then she laughed suddenly, as though at some huge terribly funny joke. She became serious after a moment or two, and told Jaswant, “I am going to be free from now on. Wherever I am, whatever I do, wherever I go, I will be free. I have found out about love, you see.”
This time Jaswant did not even pretend to understand her.
Chapter 21
The Arnaivarlai bus was late that morning. Jaswant had heard it honking down in the plains, a tiny peeping sound, shrilled by distance, and had expected at every panting step to be overtaken by it. It did not come.
He said, “I’m completely puffed. I’m going to sit down. You can go climbing on up if you like. I don’t care how long the bus takes!”
Julia frowned and told him, “I’m not tired, so why should you be?”
“Ah,” scowled Jaswant and shrugged his shoulders. He sat down.
Julia gazed at him, her pale face very serious, and then said, “Because you are a man you are supposed not to show weakness. Especially not in front of a woman.”
Jaswant pulled back his shoulders proudly and told her, “That is only English men! I am very glad I am not one of those so don’t have to pretend all sorts of things!”
“Really?” Julia bent down and said in the sort of voice used to make formal conversation at cocktail parties, “Is that so? We have never had an Indian assistant before, you see.”
“Yes, well, now I have explained the matter will you please sit here until I have got my breath back.”
The hills that still had to be so exhaustingly climbed unless the bus came soon were crowned in a single heavy purple cloud. The cloud must, Jaswant supposed, be ten miles wide, for it appeared to cap the whole of Arnaivarlai. The very edge of this great rain blanket stopped precisely on the lip of the hill above them. From the cloud to the top of the hill stood a single shaft of illuminated water. Some strange quirk of the light had caused just this rod of rain to catch the sun, so that it looked like an arrow of light drawing the eye to a place on the hill where a great chunk had been torn away. From here, a mile below, it was as if the chunk had been torn off by enormous teeth, thought Jaswant, and without knowing quite why, shuddered at this fanciful notion.
Julia Clockhouse followed his gaze, and he heard her sigh. She raised her hand towards the gleaming rod standing on the hill above them. Jaswant could not tell if it had been his imagination, or if the shining column gave a little quiver in response to Julia’s gesture.
She turned and smiled at him, and said simply, “That’s where the goose fell, you know. It has several names. But they all mean ‘Goose Gap’.”
“Oh, the goose,” laughed Jaswant. The servant, Jesudasu, had told him about Julia’s goose.
“Of course it was really not a goose,” said Jesudasu. “For if it had been would it have been rescued alive from the jaws of a jackal? No, no, sir. This creature was a human soul flying about the earth. Which is a very bad thing to happen. Especially for a Catholic.”
“I can’t see why it should have been worse for a Catholic than for a Hindu,” Jaswant had said stiffly, annoyed at being supposed to have less sensitivity because of his religion.
Now Jaswant sa
id to Julia, “We call the goose ‘Hamsa’.”
She looked startled for a moment, opening her eyes wide, bending over him as though his next words were going to be of great importance. He shrugged. “Well, you just say it backwards and it makes ‘Saham’. That means ‘I am that’,” he finished a bit lamely.
She nodded. “Kali told me,” she said briefly.
“Did you know,” he told her, “that the goose represents the human soul not only because of its name, but also because, like the soul, it is at home in all the elements. It is, so to speak, free from the restraint of any single element. It swims on water, walks on land, and flies in air.”
“What about fire?” said Julia, sounding as though she was about to win a point in a guessing game.
Jaswant frowned. “I can’t remember. I think fire is the same as energy. Energy is life. So that fire is present in the goose simply because it is alive. It is, like us, made of fire.”
The bus came at last.
Jaswant had one bad moment when Julia seemed as though she was going to refuse to get on, and he had to put on a little faint, a dizzy attack, and appeal to her mercy. She even held his arm as they climbed up the steps.
Among the other passengers who crowded the bus there came a gasp of shock as they recognised Julia Clockhouse, senior lady of Arnaivarlai Tea Estates.
She got on apparently unaware of the alarm she was causing. Several passengers got off, preferring the mile climb up to the top. Others scrambled to the farthest end of the bus from her. Mothers surreptitiously covered the eyes of their children with their palms, and fathers put their hands over the fontanels of the boy babies in case the Madam got in. Jaswant was quite pleased with the situation, and decided that if you had to travel on one of these awful buses, then do it with Julia Clockhouse. They had plenty of space, for every one had moved away from them. And no one, thought Jaswant, would dare to vomit with Julia nearby!
As the bus chugged up into the valley it passed a bungalow where the two old bachelors were sitting on the verandah, enjoying their before-luncheon gins.
They gazed into the unwindowed bus, and neither said to the other that they thought they had seen Mrs Clockhouse sitting inside. But both vowed to be examined by Kuts Chatterjee in the afternoon. Such hallucinations, each thought, spelled danger.
Nana Sallinger saw Julia going past as well. She was sitting out on her lawn, drinking morning coffee. Doris, who was visiting, had gone inside for a moment.
“I’m absolutely certain it was her,” said Nana furiously when Doris returned. Nana had expected Ben Clockhouse, who was taking the disappearance of his wife surprisingly badly, and had been in a very depressed state ever since she had vanished, to leave the job at any moment and be flown home.
“Only a matter of days I should say,” she had told Dick with delight. Dick was the certain choice for the next SM once Ben Clockhouse had been eliminated.
Doris said, “So the poor dear isn’t dead after all! I’m so glad.”
“Glad!” shuddered Nana. Then said “Glad” again, hastily, in quite another, relieved sort of voice. “But sitting on the labourers’ bus, Doris. And looking such a mess!”
“That’s Julia for you!” Doris laughed. “But won’t Ben be happy, poor soul!”
By the time the bus reached Goose Gap everyone in the valley, except Ben Clockhouse and a handful of stone-deaf grandpas, knew that Julia had come back to Arnaivarlai. People getting off the bus told their friends or shouted to passers-by, servants told their employers, labourers told the managers, children told their parents. Only Ben Clockhouse, alone in the shattered bungalow, cared for by Babuchi who was stunned by the loss of his friend, did not hear that Madam had come back to the valley.
Ben Clockhouse remembered long ago saying something to Gwen Buxton like, “I will make Julia happy.”
They had been playing croquet on the lawn, and the sun had been setting in a frightfully picturesque sort of way. He had taken Gwen by the hand when he had made his promise to her.
Now he stood on the debris of what had once been his sitting room, looked out on to the same lawn and considered that he had broken his promise to Gwen. He had failed to make Julia happy, and now she would never be happy again.
Under his feet in several inches of mud stirred the carpet his mother had given him for a wedding present. He had always insisted that the servants kept this expensive object perfectly free from dust and dog-paw mud, but now the feel of it squelching under the mud made him, for some inexplicable reason, smile. The carpet represented some of his mother’s hostility toward him. He had never thought of it like that before, and the realisation, instead of disturbing him, comforted him. It was as though for the first time he accepted the possibility that his mother’s dislike of him was her problem and not his.
He had been about twelve when he had realised that she disliked him not because of what he did but because of what he was. During the school holidays he used to tiptoe round his mother’s house, trying, as far as was possible, not to attract her attention — and her anger.
He had learnt long ago, without understanding why, the reason for his mother’s dislike of him. It was because he did not look like his father.
His father’s photo, which stood in a silver frame on the mantelpiece in Ben’s mother’s home, showed a very tall dark-haired man with a large jaw. Ben, who was short, fair, and small-jawed, was, no one could deny, different.
Ben had been about five, and had been quietly playing with dominoes behind the sofa (for even at that age he always took care to avoid attracting attention), when the lady who cleaned for his mother picked up the silver-framed photo and said, “Amazing, Mrs Clockhouse! Is this really your husband? Your little boy is not at all like him! One can hardly believe that this is the kid’s father!”
Ben’s mother had taken the photo from the woman with cold hands. She had replaced it on the mantelpiece without comment, but Ben, crouching behind the sofa, had felt fear run through him. His hair had crackled with fear. When his mother was reminded of how unlike his father Ben was she did terrible things to him. Once she had locked him into a cupboard for two days.
Ben’s mother had given the cleaning lady the sack for not believing that the man in the photo was Ben’s father. The trouble was that he was not Ben’s father.
The only time Ben took Julia to meet his mother, she had bent her head, shaken a couple of pills from a medicine bottle into her palm, put them into her mouth then said to Ben, “Your father killed himself because of you. I loved him, and you caused him to die.”
Ben had said nothing. But after a brief pause Julia had cried out hotly, “How can you say such a cruel thing! How could a little baby have been responsible for his father’s death?”
Ben’s mother had said in a cold voice, “He will probably be responsible for your death too! Wait till you see what my son is really like!”
On their way home Ben had driven in silence. After a while Julia had said, “It was her fault for making love with the other man. Not yours for being born. It was she who did the wrong thing. It was your mother who killed your father, not you.” She had stared out of the window at the fleeing English countryside for a while, and then added, “Perhaps he didn’t kill himself because of you not being his child, anyway. Perhaps she was as horrible to him as she was to you, and that’s why he did it. I mean, you would think he would just go away and leave her if he was so furious with her. Why should he have killed himself for that?”
She had asked this question with such sincerity that it had seemed as though she required an answer, so he had said, “We love each other too much to have to even think of anything like that!”
“When I have your baby, Ben, I’ll be so kind to it,” Julia had said. “I’ll give it all the hugs and kisses that you didn’t get.”
Ben had laughed and told her, “That’s not fair. It would be getting my hugs and kisses then!” and he stopped the car to give her a chance to dispense justice.
It wa
s on that day that Ben had accepted that it was not because he was a hateful person that his mother had stuck cigarettes into his body. Julia had put her arms round him and covered him with kisses and Ben Clockhouse had realised that he had been transformed into someone loved.
Now that was over. He had, without even knowing how it had happened, done to Julia what his mother had done to his father. Because of that he saw that the world had nothing more to offer him. He viewed his situation bleakly, and accepted the fact that being Senior Manager of Arnaivarlai was not worth staying alive for. The only thing to be considered now was how it should be done. His father had killed himself by sitting in the car with the engine on in a closed garage. The Senior Manager’s garage had survived the falling of the tree, and the car still stood inside it. It seemed to Ben, who liked order and regularity, that this was the neatest and the most orderly way to finish the matter.
“Almost the hereditary way,” he told himself humorously. He gave the sinking carpet another spiteful poke with his toe, and said aloud to his mother (who would certainly have not been in the least interested), “Well, you win!” Then he went over to his desk, and began to get his papers in order. He would not like to be remembered for having left a mess behind him. As this thought came to him he looked around, and let out a short laugh because there was so little left of the bungalow that was not a mess.
He sat down at his desk which had somehow managed to avoid the branches, and tried to concentrate on his papers.
He wrote for a while, then became aware of a rustling of tissue paper coming from the bedroom. He thought it was Babuchi hovering, as usual. Since the death of Kali Babuchi always seemed to be hanging around Ben.
“Only you and me now, old chap,” Ben had said to him that morning. And had told him not to bother about lunch. “I’m not hungry. If I feel like a sandwich I’ll let you know,” he had said.