‘You’re shivering,’ she said. ‘You must be sickening for something. Come along. Off to bed with you.’
I was told later that it was flu of some sort and quite serious, but I remember virtually nothing about the next few days. Fortunately none of the others in the house caught my influenza and Aunt Harriet went home early to avoid infection. When I had recovered some sort of consciousness and was beginning to convalesce I asked for some books to read. I noticed that the ones provided did not include A Child’s Treasury of Instructive and Improving Verse. I asked after it but was told by my mother that she had burned it in the garden. In the delirium of my fever I had talked about it endlessly, and with apparent terror. ‘And when I looked in it, I could see why. There were the most beastly illustrations in it. Beautifully done, but beastly.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I don’t know . . . hobgoblins and demons, and . . . all sorts of horrid things.’
‘But why did you have to burn it?’
‘Oh, I had a book like that when I was a girl. It caused no end of trouble,’ she said, and that was all she would say.
Some weeks later news reached us that Aunt Harriet had died. She had been crossing a busy road near her flat in Victoria late at night and a car had hit her and she had had some sort of heart seizure from which she never recovered. The details are vague in my mind and I have never sought clarity by looking at her death certificate. It is enough to say that in death she was as much trouble as she was in life. It transpired that shortly before that Christmas when she last came to us she had been dismissed from her job in the library service. There were allegations about missing books which were never fully resolved and my parents had to satisfy the authorities that we did not have any stolen books in our possession, nor had we profited from their illegal sale.
With the exception of a small bequest to an obscure animal charity Aunt Harriet had left everything of which she died possessed to my father. There came a time when both my parents had to go up for a few days to deal with the sale of my Aunt’s flat and its contents. I begged to be allowed to come with them and help but they firmly refused, so Louise and I were left at home in the care of a neighbour. On their return my parents looked exhausted and somehow haunted. It was only a few months later that my father began to show signs of the illness that later took his life.
Deprived of a sight of it myself I begged my father and mother for details of what they had found in Aunt Harriet’s flat, but they were not forthcoming. My father simply would not discuss it, and all my mother said was:
‘You wouldn’t have liked it. It’s a horrible place. There were cobwebs everywhere.’
MISTAKE AT THE MONSOON PALACE
Christopher Fowler
‘Iska kyadaam hal?’
‘How much does this cost?’
Marion Wilson gave up trying to memorise the phrases. She looked up from her guidebook, switching her attention to the driver. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘I said my cousin owns the best pashmina shop in Jaipur,’ Shere told her. ‘He will be honoured to make you a special deal because you are my valued client.’
Sure, she thought, this guy is your cousin, your brother, your uncle, anyone other than some creep you cut deals with to rob rich, gullible Americans. She impatiently tapped the guidebook with her forefinger, recalling the page about touts and conmen.
‘I assure you, you will not find finer materials in all of India.’
‘Forget it, Shere, it’s not going to happen,’ she told him. ‘Trust me, I bought enough stuff yesterday to fill an extra suitcase.’ In the three days that Shere had been appointed as her driver, they had visited jewellery stores selling silver bracelets that broke in half the first time you wore them, ‘hand-woven’ scarves produced by children in a Mumbai sweatshop and wooden statues of Ganesh that looked like they’d been speed-carved in the dark. ‘Let’s get on, it’s already ten.’
‘But Madam, this shop is of highest quality, government approved, everyone goes there, Richard Gere, everyone.’ The driver was wobbling his head amiably. ‘We stop for five minutes, no longer, and you do not have to buy if you do not wish.’
‘Well, I do not wish.’ She pulled a small plastic bottle of antiseptic wash from her trousers and poured a little of the blue liquid into her hands. She had been touching rupees so soft and brown that they looked as if they’d been used for—she dreaded to think what. She silently repeated the hygiene rule; right hand for taking money and greeting, because here the left hand was used as a substitute for toilet paper. Not that she was as pernickety as some. Iris, her companion from Ohio, had arrived in Delhi with an entire suitcase full of bottled water, which was taking things a little too far.
The little white taxi nosed its way back out of the crowded market square toward the main road, a dusty two-lane highway filled with overladen trucks, hay carts and sleeping cows. It was the end of the first week in July, and the monsoon season had yet to start, but the sky was dark with sinister cumulus. The ever-present pink mists that softened the views in every town they had visited had gone now, to be replaced by hot clear stillness. Marion wanted to open the window, to breathe something other than filtered freezing air, but could see black clouds of mosquitoes rising from ditches of dead water as the car passed.
Her attention drifted back to the guide book, which had fallen open on a list of Indian gods. The text was accompanied by tiny pastel drawings which made them all look the same. Bhairav. Ganesha. Hanuman. Rama. Shiva. Surya. Vishnu. Arrayed in lilac and yellow, blue and pink they rode birds, bore swords, cups, fire, tridents and bows, a vast network of deities who still seemed to hold some kind of power over the lives of ordinary people . . . she felt her eyes closing as the car swayed, and saw for a moment a bejewelled god lit by a curved prism of rubies and sapphires, spangling and spinning from his head. Feeling faint, she blinked the colours away.
She glanced up to the scenes rolling beyond the glass. Azure, crimson and sunflower bolts of cloth were stacked on the dirty pavement like a disassembled rainbow. The traffic was detouring around a buffalo that stood in the middle of the road, patiently chewing a plastic bag. It wore a gold-trimmed dress, its horns painted blue, its pierced ears laced with bells.
An ancient, bony man in a pink turban was squatting on the hard shoulder, cooking a chicken over an upright burning tyre.
A motorised rickshaw overtook them with two children and a piebald goat wedged inside it.
An elephant driver was asleep in a faded red houdah, waiting for tourist coaches that would not arrive—the latest wave of terrorist bombings had seen to that. A wedding band in yellow and silver uniforms were wearily donning the jackets they had dried on a row of thorn bushes.
A quartet of girls in identical yellow saris walked by, all listening to the same song on their mobile phones.
What do they think when they see me? Marion thought. Do they even see me? Am I as invisible to them as they are in my country?
What she first thought was a sparkling blue lake turned out to be a great ditch filled with empty plastic bottles.
‘Where you want to go now?’ the driver asked. Marion looked down at the guidebook in her lap and squinted at endless pages of forts and markets. Despite the low temperature in the vehicle, she felt overheated and fractious. She was still angry with Iris for deserting her five days into the trip. A few bouts of diarrhoea and she was calling her husband, making arrangements to return home. The secret was to keep tackling the spicy food until your stomach adjusted, Marion had been told. You’ve an iron constitution, her father had always said, you’re made of stronger stuff than your mother. You just have too much imagination.
The driver had pulled the car over to the side of the road, and was talking to two young men with old faces, nondescript Indians of the type you saw everywhere, skinny and serious to the point of appearing mournful, with side partings and brown sweaters and baggy suit trousers hiding thin legs. Most of the men seemed to do nothing but s
it around drinking chai while the women wielded pick-axes in rubble-filled vacant lots.
She tried to listen in on the conversation but realised they were speaking Hindi. ‘Who are these people?’ she asked, leaning forward between the headrests.
‘My brothers. They would like to get a lift. It is not far to their town.’
‘I met your brothers three days ago, Shere, and these are not the same guys. You think everyone looks the same to foreigners? They don’t, not anymore. Those days are over. These guys are not your brothers and cannot come in the car, it’s out of the question. Besides, I thought we had to get to Jodhpur?’
‘That is tomorrow. Today you may choose where you would like to go.’
To be honest, she was not entirely sure where they were going next. Everything on the itinerary sounded the same. She had picked it from four others on her travel agent’s website. According to the schedule, she was staying in an old Maharajah’s palace, a vast amber fortress that looked like a child’s sandcastle in the photograph, now converted into a luxury hotel. She was tired of eating in ornate, deserted dining rooms. The only other tourists she had seen on the entire trip were a pair of elderly British ladies who seemed to be duplicating her trip town by town. Their reasons for coming to India mystified her, because she often overheard them sharply asking the waiters for poached eggs or sausages and toast, anything but Indian food.
She studied the arguing men from the window. Perhaps they were really his brothers. Everything here was designed to confuse, and everyone, it seemed had the same first impressions; the colours, the mess, the filth, the lost grandeur, the blurred light, the beautiful children . . . part of her wanted to explore the narrow backstreets alone, but the touts and beggars were simply too exhausting, and Shere insisted on remaining by her side wherever she went. It was clearly considered too dangerous to let tourists explore for themselves. It seemed that they had to be brought in and unloaded, like boats being towed to docks.
But oh, the children. Tiny boys with withered feet or hands, dragging themselves along the central reservation of the road on little carts, kohl-eyed girls balancing crying babies on their hips, boys twirling coloured strings on their caps to attract attention or tapping with endless patience on the windows of idling cars, selling copies of Vogue, a grotesquely ironic choice of periodical to assign to a beggar. The country was a smashed mirror with some pieces reflecting the past, others the future. Between the tower blocks and tin-roofed slums a Dickensian tapestry was being endlessly unpicked and rewoven, a world where nothing could be achieved without carbon papers and rubber stamps, where ten did the work of one and one the work of ten.
Shere crunched the gears and pulled away from the men in some anger, swinging into the traffic without looking, so that trucks and rickshaws had to swerve from his path. ‘So where do you want to go?’ he asked, glancing at her in the mirror.
‘I hadn’t really—’
My relationship with this man has changed over the past week, she thought, holding onto the door strap. He’s so bored that he barely sees me. I thought I was in control, but now I wouldn’t be able to do anything without him, and the further we get away from tourist spots, the more I am forced to rely on his services. The drivers run everything here.
‘Could you turn the air conditioning down for a while?’ She flapped the guidebook at her breast.
He looked horrified by the idea, but did as she requested. She tried to study the book as they bounced through a convoy of trucks painted the shades of children’s toys. Phrases swam up at her. ‘Once known as the Land of Death’. ‘Funeral pyres at dusk’. ‘Nausea, cramps and exhaustion.’ The pictures of the forts and palaces all looked the same; crenellated battlements, archways, turrets and domes. She turned the page. Singh Pohl Monsoon Palace. An ochre pavilion, perfectly proportioned, overgrown, surrounded by sandstone walkways and set on a perfectly square lake, the green water so still that it mirrored the building, doubling its size. She raised the book and pointed. ‘I think I’d like to go here.’
He looked over his shoulder and studied the directions impassively. ‘Forty-five kilometres, maybe more. It is not on our route.’
She read from the guidebook. Vishnu, the most human of all gods, still haunts the forests around the Singh Pohl Palace. A flute, a peacock feather and the colour blue announce his presence. An earlier temple to the god Parjanya exists upon this site.
‘Yeah, that’s where I want to go.’ A decision had been made. She could sleep for a while. Ted never came with her on vacations. He said he wanted to travel, but the truth was that he hated leaving the US, and complained so much when he did that he destroyed any pleasure in the trip. Ted was never around these days.
Her mouth was dry. Shere had provided iced water and hand-towels for her, but she wanted something else. She had bought a bag of pedas and fruit candies studded with cardamom seeds in the market. They had the kind of sharply spiced flavours you would never find at home.
They passed a partially constructed motorway on which just two men were working, slowing raking gravel in a manner that spread it across each other’s paths, each undoing the other’s work. How does anything run at all? She wondered. Over a billion people here, half of them shopkeepers selling nothing.
Without the air conditioning she began to sweat. Her watch was gripping her wrist in a hot band, so she undid the clasp and dropped it in the bag at her feet. Pressing her head back into the rest, she studied the half-finished buildings of a small town slide by. Did no-one ever think to finish one house before starting another, or to plan the roads and pavements in such a way that prevented people from considering them interchangeable?
She liked the markets, the running and fetching, the tumble and bustle and sheer connectedness of everything. No-one seemed to be entirely alone, no matter how poor they were. Everyone had some kind of support system. At home she and Ted barricaded themselves in their gated community unlocked with an electronic key fob, and only saw the neighbours departing or arriving at holiday seasons. If I needed help and couldn’t get to the phone, I’d have to lie there until Ted got home, she thought, even assuming he was in town.
The car screeched to a stop. In the road ahead, two half-starved dogs were fighting. One had buried its teeth in the other’s left haunch. Loops of blood and spittle flecked the sidewalk as they rolled over each other. She opened the window an inch and the oppressive heat leaked in. Shere could not understand why his passenger was refusing the comfort of refrigerated air. This place disgusts and frightens me, she thought, and yet I am drawn in. It makes me dream again.
She was touring with three large pieces of Louis Vitton luggage. The driver did not seem to think this unusual. He was probably used to the strange habits of westerners, who toured as though they were moving house. Shere knew a place where they could stop for something to eat. A wall of oven-heat touched her as she stepped stiffly from the car. Ahead was a low white block in a bare, dusty yard. The straight road passed it, but there was nothing to see in either direction.
An ancient fiddle player witnessed her arrival, stood up and began to play a painful dirge until she had passed. The restaurant looked shut, but Shere waved her ahead.
‘You don’t want to come eat with me?’ she asked.
‘I have my own lunch.’ Shere smiled and wobbled his head in apology. As she approached the restaurant doors she saw the lights flicker on in the dark interior. Waiters were scurrying to don their white coats. She ate Butter Chicken and Pashwari Nan alone beside a window with cracked panes of plastic that had been stuffed with toilet paper to keep out the dust. The food was sensational, the bathroom after, horrific. She sat in the car with a gurgling stomach as the roads grew dustier, browner, emptier. On the horizon, a line of wooded hills appeared. Finally, the road curved and climbed. It grew hotter and closer, until she felt as if she was suffocating.
‘The rains are coming,’ he said, reading her thoughts, ‘maybe tonight.’
‘How much further?’ she as
ked, but received no reply. I shouldn’t have picked this place, she admonished herself, too far away, and even the driver doesn’t seem to be sure of its whereabouts.
They reached a string of small villages where everything glistened with marble dust. Outside every house and shop stood large carved statues of Hindu gods. Men sat cross-legged on their forecourts, chipping away at great white blocks from which the gods were slowly breaking free. She could differentiate some now; Ganesha, Hanuman, Brahma, Shakti and Shiva, but the rest still looked the same. A guide had told her that there were over 330,000 to choose from. Who on earth bought these huge statues? They stood in rows like sentries on guard duty, ignored by children who probably found them as familiar as relatives.
A low brick wall—half finished, of course—ran around the edge of the town. She caught a glimpse of a sandstone building between the trees. ‘I think the palace is over there,’ said Shere. ‘My friend tells me the World Heritage people, they came to look, and were going to make it a site of special significance. Good for tourism. But they decided not to.’
‘Why?’
‘Politics. I don’t know.’
‘Any tourists here now?’
‘No, none. Not since the bombings. This is a ghost palace. Nobody comes here at night. Only the spirits live here now. You will want to walk in the palace?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘There is no guide for you.’
Good, she thought, I’ve had enough of standing in the heat listening to earnest men reeling off building statistics. ‘Do you have any more cold water I can take with me?’
‘We can stop.’ He pulled up beside a small shop and purchased a bottle of water for her. While she waited in the car, a handful of children ran to the window and started tapping on the glass with distracted insistence. When she’d first arrived in the country, she had given all her small change to these hollow-eyed creatures, but the driver had stopped her, explaining that they were forced to pay their earnings back to gang-runners in the slums. After a few days she realised that her generosity could change nothing and would do nobody good in the long run.
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