Dark World

by Timothy Parker Russell et al.

  In fact, the formalities took three days and involved one boy and five men from two villages. Part of the problem was that the arrangement had to be kept away from the knowledge of the local police constabulary in order to avoid an unacceptable level of commission being deducted from the sale. At the conclusion of the deal much money was assembled, assurances were written out, whisky and masala tea was poured, everyone involved was sworn to silence, and Karan rode the train to Bangalore, to begin a new life.

  Shere Banjara, the driver for Jacaranda Tours, fifty two years old and married with five children, was severely reprimanded and fined for the loss of his charge. The paperwork involved took over a year to sort out. Finally he was moved from his base in Delhi to Kolkotta, where he quickly learned that the new circuit could reap him unexpected rewards from a fresh generation of middle-class businessmen looking to buy carpets and tapestries for their second homes.

  As the years passed, the dry and rainy seasons replaced each other like cards falling upon a gaming table. The monsoon palace was denied World Heritage status due to a dispute over the ownership of its land, and remained overgrown and forgotten by all except the monkeys, doves and peacocks, who lived within its evening shadows. Parjanya sat in the dusty shadows and bided his time.

  Then, one overheated day, just before the arrival of the monsoon, when the air was so scorched that it felt like you might carve a hole in it to breathe, some workers angrily threw their pickaxes and shovels down onto the hard dry soil and started shouting at one another.

  ‘What the bloody hell is going on here?’ asked the project foreman, striding over. Work had fallen behind, and it was starting to look as if they would not be finished before the rains came, which would be disastrous because the road had not yet been sealed and they needed to take the shack down now.

  ‘The villagers tell us we cannot remove Maran or we will bring bad luck to the area,’ said one of the workmen. ‘We need to dismantle any obstacle today.’

  ‘Wait, you are talking about this? This?’ The foreman pointed to the chaotic arrangement of tin huts that stood in their path and began to laugh. ‘Bulldoze it flat. Pass me a pickaxe and I’ll do it myself.’ He spat paan on the ground dismissively.

  ‘You don’t understand. A promise was made that Maran would never be moved.’

  ‘Who was this promise made to?’

  ‘An old man called Javed who lived in the village.’

  ‘Javed? That scoundrel? He has been dead for over five years! The past is the past. Knock it down.’

  The workmen reluctantly moved toward their tools, but before they could continue their work, a horn sounded and they were forced to move to the sides of the road to allow for the arrival of a white Mercedes. Everyone agreed that the man who emerged from the rear seat looked like a younger version of Shahrukh Kahn, the Bollywood superstar. He walked over to the tin huts, examined them and beckoned the foreman.

  ‘How far over the boundary line?’

  The foreman looked at the ground and thought. ‘Twenty feet, at least.’

  ‘You know how long Maran has lived here?’

  ‘The men tell me fifteen years.’

  ‘Sixteen. You know why?’

  ‘Something to do with guarding the palace and keeping it in good repair, but there’s no paperwork—’

  ‘You don’t need paperwork for everything. Let me deal with this.’ As he approached the huts, a pair of green parrots screamed and rocked the ornate wire cage that hung from the lintel above the front door. He tapped respectfully and stepped back, waiting.

  The grey-haired woman who appeared in the doorway studied her visitor and smiled. ‘Come inside,’ she instructed. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would get here in time. The chai is almost ready. I’ve learned to like it sweet. I never took sugar at home. Have that chair in the corner, but be careful, the leg is broken.’

  The interior of the hut was crowded with decorative ornaments that had been presented to her by the villagers over the years, mostly Hindu gods. ‘Let me look at you.’

  Karan adjusted his collar and slicked back his hair, ready for inspection. ‘I did not believe you would stay, Maran.’

  ‘Marion,’ she corrected. ‘Oh, I come from a long line of very determined women. Besides, if I deserted my palace, who else would do the job? You people are losing respect for your past, all this rushing toward the future.’

  ‘And “you people” have not done the same?’ asked Karan. ‘This is not your palace. It is not a cause you can simply adopt, like a child.’

  In the soft light Marion looked younger than her years, the way she had been when he first saw her. ‘You’re right, of course. I can’t explain what I feel. But I know you can’t take his land.’ She touched her bare tanned neck, remembering. ‘I wanted to look nice for you but the damned monkey took my necklace. He’s probably buried it out by the jharna.’

  ‘The gardens of the monsoon palace have never been accurately measured, you know. We could go beyond their walls right now, trim a hundred yards off and no-one would ever know.’

  ‘Shame on you, to even think of such a thing. He will know. Parjanya will know.’

  ‘I have no other choice. But you, do you really want to stay on here?’

  ‘I have no other choice either. I burned my bridges long ago.’

  ‘Where is your husband?’

  ‘Maybe he stayed with his mistress,’ she said carelessly. ‘I wrote him some letters. I don’t know if he got them.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be, I’m not. I’ll become like the old British ladies who still live on in Delhi, complaining about their landlords and going slowly crazy. Something about this place encourages the irrational. . . .’

  ‘I could move you back into the village. Javed’s children have offered you a home.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘I need to be within sight of the pavilion. I’ve seen the designs for your little housing project, Karan. A gated community? I stayed here to get away from such things. Don’t tell me it’s progress, because it’s nothing of the kind.’

  ‘It’s what people want.’ Karan smiled. ‘Didn’t you know, we’re all middle class now, even if our castes can never change.’

  ‘Well, it seems to me that we have to strike a deal, but I have no cards to play. Are you hungry? I could make you some paneer.’

  ‘No, I had a pizza.’

  ‘You could have me thrown off the site tonight, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I could, but you know I would never do it.’ He sipped his masala. ‘You make this better than my mother used to. So, this is what we’ll do. You stay here. I’ll shift the boundary back, everyone’s happy.’

  ‘Everyone except Parjanya.’

  ‘It is the only solution I can offer.’

  ‘It sounds like you already had that in mind. You can’t do it without changing the planning application, can you?’

  ‘I can change the application with a few handfuls of rupees. We need to reduce the size of the estate because the surveyors are arriving from Delhi next week.’

  ‘It’s a shame. I thought the monsoon palace would eventually be accepted as a World Heritage site. Now, more than ever, Parjanya needs a guardian here.’ Marion laughed softly to herself.

  ‘What is funny?’ Karan asked.

  ‘I was foolish enough to think that such an ancient, magnificent monument might be saved by a bag of sweets,’ she replied.

  ‘The palace will be protected, but the condition is the partial surrender of its grounds,’ said Karan.

  ‘He will not let you take his land,’ she said simply.

  ‘Listen, Marion, I have respect for you, but you cannot change what must be done.’ Enough. She exasperated him. Karan rose and took his leave. Outside, as he spoke to his foreman, she imagined the desiccated ground receiving fat drops of quenching rain.

  The men moved in. The yellow bulldozers and earthmovers backed away from the hut, but surged toward the low dry-stone walls
and pushed straight through them, gouging channels in the soft red earth. The workmen marched forward behind the vehicles, an advancing army clad in bright protective jackets.

  Marion stood in the doorway and watched, smiling to herself.

  They cannot steal the land you have protected for me, Parjanya hissed in her ear. They are arrogant enough to think that their machines will make a difference, but they forget I control the Heavens.

  Parjanya made the rains come. She looked up into the sky and saw it cloud over within a few seconds. The first bolt of lightning split the air and hit the cabin of the lead earthmover. A scream came from within. Men swarmed around the stalled vehicle as smoke billowed from its electrics.

  It was the heaviest monsoon squall she had ever witnessed. The rain increased until nothing could be discerned from the door of the hut. She heard the ominous rumble of wet earth as a torrent of mud poured over the broken walls, punching the workmen’s legs from under them, swallowing them in thick brown effluvium. The men were all choked and drowned, or were crushed and buried. Their machines were overturned on top of them, hammering them flat, bursting their soft shells into the bubbling cauldron of mud. The monkeys stared out from the shelter of the palace, hooting in triumph. Soon the mud would dry again and it would be as if the workmen were never here.

  A beatific smile crept over Marion’s face as she returned to make fresh tea.

  Karan unknotted his tie and fanned himself in the blast-furnace heat. He watched Marion slowly retreat into the shadows, lost inside her visions. One of the workmen jammed his shovel into the hard dry earth, leaned back and caught his eye, grinning knowingly. Pâgala aurata. Crazy lady.

  Karan wondered what was going through Marion’s head. It was a funny thing about those who came to stay; the ones who didn’t believe often ended up believing a little too much.

  Let her keep her dreams, he thought. I’ll only take eighty yards from the garden. No-one will notice. If they ask, I’ll tell them it was a mistake.

  Somewhere in the dense treetops behind him, the first cool breezes rose.

  THE SWINGER

  Rhys Hughes

  There was a haunted tree in the garden of the hotel. Everyone knew it was a haunted tree, though they treated it as a joke or a mascot, something that didn’t need to be taken seriously. Only Uncle Dylan had authentic respect for the old tales, the gnarled legends.

  It was the highest cedar among a dozen others and a curiously straight branch jabbed out near the very top, like the crossbeam of a gallows. The stories insisted that no bird dared perch there; but I saw several ravens in a line on it once, and I waved at them.

  One of my habits, waving at birds, an energy-efficient royal wave that must look absurd to anyone else. I have been doing it since I was a child, secretly, with much embarrassment, like those people who salute magpies by pretending to scratch their foreheads.

  This tree was part of my soul and my dreams.

  But I never looked at it properly.

  It was with amazement that I realised that the reason why it was higher than its neighbours was because it stood on the summit of a grassy mound, a bizarrely symmetrical cone of densely packed soil. The tree was actually fairly short, compacted, stunted.

  Uncle Dylan had hung lanterns in the limbs of the other cedars, paper spheres with little candles inside, so that they resembled gigantic oranges that had suddenly appeared where they shouldn’t; but the haunted tree he left undecorated in the evenings, a stark silhouette against the starry sky. I didn’t believe he had no spare lanterns.

  ‘It’s for the sake of the guests,’ he told me once.

  ‘I’m not fooled by that,’ I said.

  He sighed and shrugged, then turned to wipe clean the beer glasses. A fire of logs snapped and hissed in the grate; the click of cribbage pegs and the plucking of a harp; the creak of the rusty sign outside. These made the music of the place, a false re-enactment of a time that never truly existed, the merry days of yore, of pastoral life.

  Uncle Dylan was obsessed with his personal vision of what the ancient times must have been like. In vain I objected to his notions and explained in detail the brutality endured by our remote ancestors. The good yeomen waded in filth; they crouched in squalor; for the most part, they beat each other with sticks. But he wouldn’t listen.

  Matthew Loveday, a writer and historian, shared similar utopian ideals and mindlessly approved every one of Uncle Dylan’s prejudices, agreeing that the hotel had stood on the spot for eight hundred years at least, that a monastery had existed here before it, that primitive men had danced to an unknown god thousands of years earlier around standing stones that must have been carted away by a greedy king.

  Like most of our long-term guests, Loveday was from England and he had come here to sample a past long since covered by concrete in his own land. Uncle Dylan lived up to his expectations perfectly, even playing the old raconteur with greater than usual relish, lighting a pipe stuffed with a foul and oily smuggled tobacco and saying:

  ‘Oh yes! we have a ghost. A man of letters like yourself. I found him swinging one morning under the tree, dangling on the end of a long rope from the highest branch. And now his spirit wanders the garden wailing. A miserable sod. Does he rattle things? He ransacked the kitchen, looking for a knife with which to cut himself down.’

  ‘And did he find one?’ Loveday asked, gazing through the window at the haunted tree with a pensive expression.

  ‘No,’ said Uncle Dylan, abruptly and with a scowl.

  ‘So his ghost is unsatisfied?’

  ‘Yes, yes! And they say he seeks one like himself to give him aid; but I don’t know who “they” are to say such things, so I can’t be certain and I can’t even ask them to hold their tongues.’

  ‘Why should anyone wish to hold their tongue?’

  Uncle Dylan thrust out his own pink organ from between his thick lips and clutched it in both hands; that’s how large a tongue he had. For a full minute he held it, then let it go and it slithered back into his mouth like a chastised flatworm, and Uncle Dylan’s throat pulsated as if it wanted to slide down even deeper than was normal.

  ‘It’s not an unpleasant thing to do, that’s why.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it is,’ said Loveday.

  I smiled into my beer. The wind whistled around the house. Indeed it was getting quite eerie again. The fire in the hearth was dying; the embers glowed faintly in a gale howling down the chimney. As the mischievous Uncle Dylan spouted more of his nonsense, and as Loveday leaned closer to hear it, I couldn’t resist an interruption.

  ‘It won’t last,’ I said. ‘They’re all coming down, every last one of the cedars. The entire garden will be concreted over. Then a car park, electric lighting and satellite television aerial. . . .’

  Uncle Dylan scowled. It had taken me a year to persuade him that the hotel would be better off without the overgrown wilderness of a garden. Ecologically minded, he had objected to the felling of trees on principle, but yielded after I made him aware of a few facts concerning increased profits. The haunted tree he wanted to be made exempt, of course. Finally, I’d persuaded him that it would look so ungainly standing atop its mound all by itself, that we really had no choice.

  ‘Times do change,’ he admitted to himself. Loveday, however, didn’t seem at all disconcerted by this threat to his beloved past, this end of a heritage right under his very nose. He was in high good humour. His latest novel, he explained, had just been published. It was, he felt sure, his masterpiece, an effort that would finally secure his place in the pantheon of great moderns. He drained his glass.

  ‘Let’s drink to my success and to the next one!’

  He bought a round for the three of us. I felt uncomfortable sipping the ale of a man I eagerly wanted to disillusion, to drown in disappointment, to send back to England, his tales between his legs. I can’t explain why I felt this aversion to the man. An instinct.

  ‘There’s a legend about the man who hung himself,’ Un
cle Dylan said in a very small voice and I blinked at him.

  ‘Do you have to? I’ve heard them all many times.’

  ‘Not this one, you haven’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ in my sharpest tone.

  ‘I’ve kept it to myself all these years. I am allowed to have secrets that you don’t. There’s no law against that.’

  ‘Well, tell us the legend!’ gasped Loveday.

  He was desperate to know more, to gather every fact, every fiction and speck of rumour, every flake of hearsay about the case. Why it fascinated him so intensely, I couldn’t understand.

  ‘It is said that if a man manages to hang himself in that garden higher than the top of the haunted tree, he’ll earn the right to live in any period of history he desires. Myself, I would go right back to the Middle Ages, to the time of Llewellyn the Great; but though I believe the legend, I just can’t think of a way of fulfilling its terms.’

  Loveday was impressed by this. He drank his beer in slow gulps like a man drinking his own excellent destiny.

  ‘Time travel through hanging,’ he said at last.

  Uncle Dylan nodded. ‘Apparently.’

  ‘How can this be possible? You are talking nonsense!’ I interjected, a false but enormous grin on my face. ‘The man killed himself two decades ago; he’s not a legend yet, not a tradition.’

  Uncle Dylan swivelled his head like an owl, his eyes unmoving, facing me with an infinite weariness, and sighed. ‘Yes, the legend of the hanged man predates the reality of the event. Why should that be impossible? It’s an assumption that a legend follows the truth; it’s a distortion of the facts. After all, it’s time travel we are debating.’

  ‘We’re not debating anything,’ I snarled bitterly.