He looked like a fantasy creature from Middle Earth.
He was the Maharajah of Travancore.
And then the gods themselves were among them, tolerant gods demanding ritual but not dignity, wobbling along on their flower-strewn palanquins, swaying precariously on the uneven shoulders of the bearers.
And all around, pervasive and close as the humid air, the noise. The sound of India. Brass bands and pipes and Vedic chanting and cheering and laughing and shrieking and car horns and lathi blows and screams. The tumult of the people of Vishnu, who began now to defy all attempts to separate spectators from participants, who surged in the wake of the palanquins to follow them to the sea.
And on the way the rains began and the umbrellas went up like a disturbance of bats. It poured. Sluicing down like a cataract, battering umbrellas and shoulders, coursing around the feet. Relentless, sullen.
On the beach everything was in milling disarray. Elephants and people swirled in a rain dance, crowds huddled under the snake boat awnings. The deities were lined up at the edge of the ocean where the Brahmin priests surrounded them in a dedicated choral block, chanting the Vedas in sonorous counterpoint to the drumming rain.
They could barely see the Maharajah, who must surely have been shivering with age and wet and cold. It was his personal religious responsibility to bathe the deities one by one in the sea. Their ablution, signalled by a Vedic crescendo and the trumpeting of an elephant, seemed unduly perfunctory. A frail little figure, his wet dhoti clinging to gnarled and skinny legs, ran up the sands to where an official car waited. A sword trailed from one of his hands leaving an erratic line in the sand.
37
Smoke wisped upwards from the mosquito coils. The fans were turning and all the soggy clothes were spread out below them. With its lights on the house glowed like a beacon through the dripping and rainy grove. But they kept the oil lamps burning because the power ebbed and flowed so fitfully. The lights would flicker and dim, the whirring fan blades would stutter and rattle and stagger to a stop.
David and Juliet would remain sitting quietly in the semidarkness travelling private paths. Without Annie’s restless pacing the house seemed strangely hushed. She had seen Prem at the arat procession and had gone off with him.
When the fans stopped they could hear the breathing of the children asleep in the bedroom. Then the fans would stir sluggishly again and the light bulbs would wink and tease and flutter. They would wait for the surge of energy, the blaze of light, the breeze from above. They would see the lizards skittering across the ceiling and walls, heading for shadowy corners.
Juliet watched David staring into his memories and remorse.
“Should we leave her alone tonight?” she asked.
“Prabhakaran is with her. And Shivaraman Nair gave his word. Nothing more is going to happen.”
It rained as though it would never stop.
The rains sloshed from the thatched eaves of the toddy shop near Shasta Junction. Around the oil lamps inside the men caroused and sang. It was a festival day and they were better fed than usual. Prasadam had been freely distributed to the poor at the temple. Besides, they had done well to inform Shivaraman Nair of the strange happenings on his estate. They had silver rupees to show for it. They had been assured that cosmic order would be restored. More toddy flowed. There was a general feeling of well-being and heightened revelry
Perhaps, the thought drunkenly grew, they themselves should attend to the vanquishing of the yakshi. Salvation would accrue to them. Also, with reference to this particular and present incarnation, Shivaraman Nair might be moved to greater largesse. Courage burned hot and heady in their veins.
Into the night and the rain they stumbled, a band of high purpose and noble intent.
Prabhakaran sat in the doorway of Yashoda’s house looking out through the twisting ropes of water that sluiced off the roof. He played his flute softly to himself. Inside Yashoda slept, a deep and exhausted sleep. The night star was beginning its long slow slide towards morning. Prabhakaran played to keep himself awake, on guard.
Muffled noises reached him through the rain and his own music. He paused to listen. Voices, shouts, noisy singing. He was instantly alert, running through the forest to the edge of the paddy.
A knot of men, stumbling and staggering, were crossing the terraces. They are drunk, he thought. They have lost their way. There will be trouble for them. At the houses they will not have been heard because of the rain and the lateness of the hour. Everyone is sleeping. But in the morning Shivaraman Nair will be very angry. The police with their lathis will be called. Bodies in drunken sleep will be found strewn about the levees. For everyone there will be more trouble.
The men weaved and wandered between the terraces, sometimes doubling back in confusion. It was difficult for them in their condition to negotiate the levees. Several fell into the water, thrashing and calling, spitting and coughing the paddy mud. Their comrades shouted encouragement but slipped and slid on towards the forest.
Prabhakaran began to be fearful. Surely they were only lost and drunk, surely they were not …? But they were coming towards him. They had a goal.
All his senses and nerve ends flared like the hood of a cobra, and with snake-like speed he returned through the forest. His heart was deafening in his ears. Yashoda seemed drugged, heavy, bemused with sleep. He was still dragging her, crying, pleading, when the handful of men, like a rabble of monkeys, came babbling out of the trees.
They seized that yakshi and her consort, who was also thin and slight as a spirit. They twisted and pounded and smashed out all that evil, purging the world.
David and Juliet found them in the morning.
Yashoda lay crumpled at the door of her house like a broken and discarded doll.
Prabhakaran was floating among the lilies, blue with death.
38
The little procession wound through narrow streets towards the banks of the backwater that meandered sluggishly through coconut groves to the Indian Ocean. Water dripped from the thatched roofs with soft gurgling sounds but the rain had stopped an hour ago.
Both the small bier and the larger one, rocking gently on the shoulders of the bearers, were massed with jasmine and lotus flowers. David and Juliet and the children had gathered them from the forest and the pond.
At the cremation grounds beside the backwater scattered fires smoked and smouldered. Keening figures sat hunched beside some of them, their heads cowled, watching. Others sifted through cold embers gathering bones and ashes in bronze vessels for scattering in sacred places. The air smelled acrid with death.
At an oval depression lined with coconut husks the bearers carefully lowered their burdens. Through the strands of flowers, the silk funeral bindings could be seen.
Shivaraman Nair sprinkled the shrouds with sacred water from the Ganges itself. For this much gold had been given to the temple priests. Shivaraman Nair had spared no expense for this funeral. The shrouds were of pure silk with a border of embroidered gold thread. He sought to bleach the dreadful stain of murder from his life. When he had seen the drowned blue face among the lilies, and the broken flute caught in the pond reeds, he had become secretly afraid that Vishnu had appeared to him in the form of the child Krishna, and he had failed to recognize the Lord of the Universe. He sought expiation. He had ensured that the culprits, violent fools, were all arrested. The sacred water, costly and redemptive, fell from his hands.
An old Kerala proverb came to his mind: Though the bitter gourd be washed in the Ganges, it will not become sweet. He trembled. I have caused this, he thought. Even my son turns from me. I have been guilty of wrong actions.
Yet he could not tell where his wrong actions had begun. It was surely unfair that he should find himself unexpectedly guilty of murder. He felt that events and intrusions had mysteriously conspired against him. He had been unwise to allow an unchaperoned widow to live on his estate, yet he had simply been responding with generosity to the request of his kinsman
by marriage, her father. How could he be held accountable for her waywardness, for the interference of the Westerners? Should he have acted more harshly earlier? He envied his Palghat kinsmen their certainties.
And the woman herself — she was surely guilty. How could he forgive her when he had so cherished her beauty and purity, when he had been so moved by it, had known so well how it would tempt men to lust that he had sought only to preserve and protect her from being sullied. Even now when he looked at that man, at that Matthew Thomas whose very presence here angered him, he could taste the bitterness of his outrage, stinging as bile.
Yet he had not, certainly he had not, intended her death.
And still he was responsible.
More coconut husks had to be piled over the flowers, over the bodies. The men moved quietly, carrying, placing. It was sad work. Jonathan and Miranda were trembling, shivering as though it were cold. Their eyes were red and swollen.
Think of his smile, Juliet whispered to them. Think of his flute. She held their hands tightly.
The fibrous husks were piled in a low mound. The bodies and the flowers were no longer visible. Everything of the biers was hidden.
They all stood silently waiting for Shivaraman Nair to light the sandalwood flares.
Matthew Thomas swayed dizzily and leaned for support against Prem who stood beside him. I have caused terrible destruction, he thought. I have sinned against God and my family. I have caused even an innocent child to die. Yet I did not know what to do. Things happened so suddenly. I was not ready for so many changes. I am glad I will die before I can no longer recognize the world. Already it is difficult for me to recognize it. I am always bewildered.
Prem steadied the old man, supporting his arm. He knew now that there were other wrongs and other griefs besides hunger and poverty. He had not understood that a rich widow could be a victim too. And now Annie was going to leave him. So lightly. She would write, she said. Nothing seemed to fit within his scheme of things. His philosophy was not used to accommodating a private pain unrelated to land and class. He felt disoriented, alone, between all worlds.
I have to fly home, Annie thought urgently, marooned in remorse. I have to atone where I can atone, where I won’t blunder into destruction when I’m trying to help.
By an effort of will, David kept his mind off the treadmill of unanswerable questions. He held his consciousness steadily on the image of Yashoda’s face in the lamplight, on Prabhakaran arriving with milk, playing his flute. You failed to save them, the waiting funeral pyres accused him. You failed, you failed.
We are implicated, Juliet thought, hearing again the first haunting notes Prabhakaran had offered her as a gift long ago when the coconut grove was Eden to them, when the world was young and innocent, when good and evil were distinguishable, never as sharply as day from night, but discernible as twilight is from darkness. We are not innocent of these deaths. We are implicated.
If she could only formulate the indictment. The questions (Had they interfered too much or too little? Were they culturally arrogant or excessively hesitant?) were already settling into a litany, an end in themselves. As though she had been granted a moratorium on answers. Even partial answers. But the basic dilemma still needled her.
Where had indictable actions begun?
Yashoda had looked to them for help; how could they not have responded?
Prabhakaran was lovable; they had been unable to treat him as a peon.
That was the given impasse: intractable.
That could never have been otherwise.
She would start there.
Her hands that had become callused, that were forgetting the motions of Canada (the wiping of frost from a windowpane, the closing of an oven door, the small precise movements across typewriter keys) were impatient for the heavy comfort of her stone pestle. She would sit on the floor of her kitchen, the granite mortar full of rice between her knees.
She would not leave the questions alone. She would pound away at them until she had ground out answers.
Shivaraman Nair put his torch to the pyre.
39
Somewhere all the world’s waters met.
Juliet sat low in the catamaran dipping the bamboo paddle from side to side, alone in the Indian Ocean. (The fisherman had demurred but when she paid him well he had allowed his scruples to subside. What could be done, after all, about the peculiar impulses of western women?)
Seething in between the lashed and buoyant balsam logs, the blood-warm waves lapped her thighs like birth fluid. And then, she thought, watching them foam and gurgle back out of the boat, they will curl themselves into the womb of earth again. They will whisper and return, exploring by trial and error, advancing and retreating. Somewhere, some time, yearning after the moon, they will slip below southern landfalls and sidle up to the great Atlantic currents. They will shiver and head north and foam around Nova Scotia and mingle with waters that have flowed past Montreal.
And some time soon, she thought, I’ll follow them. After the rituals of grief and atonement seem complete.
She felt she would know when it was time.
Just as Annie had known, by the private clock of her emotions, when it was time for her to leave. Which had been immediately, of course.
“I think,” she had said to Juliet, “that I might possibly be cured of rash impulse. All these years I have started and ended relationships at whim, I have dallied with other people’s happiness, I have begun and then abandoned courses, I have backpacked around the world, stayed on the move, dropped in and out of my life. Now I’m making my bid for responsibility and permanence.”
“And you’ll start,” Juliet had been gentle but sardonic, “by leaving India on instant rash impulse.”
“You’re not taking me seriously. I’m going to stop bitching about the mysterious lack of stability in my life and I’m going to work at creating it. I’m going back to finish law school. I’m going to call the man I walked out on in Toronto and ask him if he will let me back in the door.”
“You’ll call him from the airport.”
“Why not? This time I’m making a committed effort.”
How oddly, Juliet had thought, embracing her sister in farewell, how oddly we diagnose our own flaws, how predictably we prescribe for ourselves. How wistfully well-intentioned is the pendulum-path of our resolve.
As Annie’s plane had disappeared beyond the last green quaver of coconut palms, Juliet had seen in its sky-trail the long arc of a swing that would never be still. We both want to be both of us, she thought.
And here I am still — the Indian Ocean was caressing her thighs like a lover she could not leave — here I float in the juice of earth, my body seeping into the elements, my blood flowing slow as the ocean’s pulse — and a small part of me, cerebral and perverse, skitters enviously along the trajectory of Annie’s life. (What is happening in the cities that will receive her en route to her future and past, what is happening in London and New York and Toronto?)
Jonathan and Miranda waved from the sand and she paddled shorewards. The other child, the missing one, was part of the element surrounding her. His ashes had been scattered in the ocean to return to those beginnings from which he would be reborn.
She was not ready to leave him yet.
Each day she sat on her stone floor and hugged the mortar with her knees. The dull thud of the pestle, the soft, resonant throb of granite against granite, sounded oddly Gregorian. Low in her throat she hummed a lament to its accompaniment, her requiem for a lost child. Let light perpetual shine upon him … Even there, where he flows in the veins of Vishnu.
In the still evenings she found herself listening for the sound of a flute.
But at dawn, and sometimes during the day, the alluring hum of Montreal began to disturb her trance. A jazz beat, seductive.
From Yashoda’s desecration and death, her mind still shied away.
David left the grove early each day and sat for hours in the university library staring
unseeing at ancient texts.
He turned the frail pages of illuminated manuscripts where Radha, in gold leaf and lapis lazuli, moved languidly on her ivory swing, trailing beauty through the air. Yashoda, reproachfully, gazed at him from those almond eyes.
I am everywhere, she said. I am the idea of perfection and of flawed endeavour. I am unattainable beauty. I am the moment of opportunity forever lost.
She came to him ceaselessly in image, in poetry, in idea. He found he could not recall the actual feel of her hair, the silk of her skin. He found he had difficulty sustaining a belief in her death. Her ashes were part of the air around him, he could smell rebirth in the forest’s decay. He was hemmed in by five hundred million people for whom dying was a brief journey between lives.
But something ugly had happened, he reminded himself. A dread and final thing for which he was partly responsible. By a sin of omission at the very least. Yet when he placed the grotesque event penitentially before his consciousness, when he tried to hold it there like a memento mori, like the maggoty skull with which Saint Jerome kept his morbid sense of mortality kindled, then its jagged and horrid edges became fluid and wonderful to look at. Something transfigured and transcendent emerged, a thing of art.
There is something monstrous about me, he decided. There is something defective about me. I cannot take tragedy or unhappiness or death seriously. I see them as occasions for art, for transformation, for the enduring triumph of the human spirit. I do not feel the mother’s anguish, I see the Pièta.
You only keep one kind of evidence. It was something Juliet had said often enough — with affection, he had thought; with despair, he saw now. And what had he done to her, wilfully blind all these years to her distress? Like the emperor with his nightingale, he had kept her in the jewelled cage of his version of their life together, in the prison of a small stultifying town. She could no longer sing.
The Ivory Swing Page 22