Norbhu Dzasa described for Christopher the dress of a Sak-yapa lama:
the low, conical hat with ear-flaps, the red robes, the broad-sleeved over-mantle for travelling, the distinctive girdle.
“Yes,” said Christopher, ‘he was dressed very like that.” But he wanted to move on, to narrow the field even more.
“Did you find anything,” he continued, ‘that might have told you where he came from? The name of his monastery, perhaps?”
Norbhu could see what the Englishman was trying to do. Why was he playing such games with him? Did he take him for a fool?
“Where your friend come from?” he asked.
Christopher hesitated.
“He didn’t say. Do you know where the dead man came from?”
The tsong-chi smiled.
“Not every mountain has a god,” he said.
“Not every monastery has a name.” If the Englishman expected him to play the part of the wily and enigmatic Oriental in this masquerade, he would at least put on a virtuoso performance.
Christopher recognized the shift in mood. He would have to change tack.
“Did you see this man Tsewong before he died? This house is on the road he must have taken to reach Kalimpong. Perhaps he called here. Perhaps you saw him. You or one of your staff?”
Norbhu Dzasa shook his head.
“Not see. No-one see.” There was a pause. The tsong-chi looked at Christopher intently.
“What you really look for, Wylam-la? What thing you look for? What person?”
Christopher hesitated again before answering. Did the little Tibetan know? Was he teasing him with this questioning?
“My son,” he said.
“I’m looking for my son.”
The tsong-chi sipped tea from his cup and set it down elegantly.
“Not find him here. Understanding, perhaps. Wisdom, perhaps.
Or things you not wish to find. But no son. Please, Wylam-la, I advise you. Go home. Back to own country. The mountains here very treacherous. Very high. Very cold.”
The two men eyed each other closely, like fencers with raised foils. In the silence, the mantra sounded clearer than before.
“Tell me,” Norbhu Dzasa said abruptly.
“Is Wylam a common name?”
Christopher shook his head. Not common. Not not common, he wanted to say. But he didn’t.
“No. There aren’t many Wylams. Lots of Christophers but not many Wylams.”
Norbhu Dzasa smiled again. There was something about his smile that unsettled Christopher. A lamp on the altar spluttered briefly and went out.
“I knew man called Wylam,” the tsong-chi said.
“Many years ago.
In India. Look very much like you. Father perhaps?”
Had Norbhu Dzasa suspected all along? Christopher wondered.
“Perhaps,” he said.
“My father was a political agent. He died many years ago.”
Norbhu Dzasa looked hard at Christopher.
“Your tea getting cold,” he said.
Christopher lifted his cup and drank quickly. The thick, lukewarm liquid clung to his palate and his throat.
“I’ve taken enough of your time, Mr. Dzasa,” he said.
“I’m sorry to have wasted it on a wild-goose chase.”
“No matter,” answered the little man.
“There are other geese.”
He rose and clapped his hands twice. The sound of the hand-claps rang out dully in the shimmering room.
The door opened and the servant came to show Christopher out.
“Goodbye, Wylam-la,” Norbhu Dzasa said.
“I am sorry not more help.”
“I’m sorry too,” said Christopher. The heavy tea was making him feel slightly nauseous. He wanted to get out of the stuffy room.
Norbhu Dzasa bowed and Christopher left, escorted by the servant. The tsong-chi sighed audibly. He missed his wife and children. They had gone to Lhasa for the New Year celebrations at the end of January and the three-week Monlam Festival that would follow. It might be months before they returned. His new wife was young and pretty, and he felt almost youthful when he was with her. But here, without her, he felt age lie upon him like a covering of hard snow that will not lift. On the walls around him, gods and demons danced and copulated in solemn gradations of ecstasy and pain. So little ecstasy, he thought; and so much pain.
Curtains parted in the wall to his left. A man dressed in the robes of a monk stepped into the room. His thin, sallow face was covered with the scars of smallpox.
“Well?” asked Norbhu Dzasa.
“Did you hear?”
The monk nodded.
“Wylam,” Norbhu Dzasa went on.
“Looking for his son.”
“Yes,” said the monk.
“I heard.” He ran a thin hand over his shaven scalp. Light from the lamps flickered on his mottled skin, making small shadows, like ants crawling.
“The gods are coming out to play,” he said.
“We must be ready when the game begins.”
As Christopher returned to the outskirts of Kalimpong, the sun sank steeply in the west. The light was snatched away with fierce rapidity. Night invaded the world, precipitately and without resistance, save for a few pockets of illumination in the bazaar and one light burning faintly in St. Andrew’s church, just visible from where he stood.
He walked back through the bazaar, filled with flaring lights and the deep, intoxicating scents of herbs and spices. At one stall, an old man sold thick dhal in rough pots; at another, a woman in a tattered said offered a selection of peppers, chillies, and wild pomegranate seeds. On small brass scales, in pinches and handfuls, the whole of India was being parcelled out and weighed. The old kaleidoscope had started to turn again for Christopher. But now, for the first time, he sensed behind its dazzling patterns an air of cold menace.
He found the Mission Hospital at the other side of town from the orphanage. The British cemetery lay symbolically between.
Martin Cormac, the doctor who had tended the dying monk at the Knox Homes, was not available.
The nursing sister who saw Christopher was unhelpful. She said that Cormac had gone to make an urgent call at Peshok, a village between Kalimpong and Darjeeling. More than that, she said she knew nothing.
Christopher left a slip of paper bearing his name and the address of the rest-house where he had put up. The nurse took the paper between finger and thumb as if it bore embedded in its fibres all the diseases of the sub-continent and most of the plagues of Egypt.
She deposited it in a small, neglected pigeon-hole half-way down the hospital’s austere entrance hall and returned to the ward with a look that promised much wiping of fevered brows.
He returned to the rest-house, took a cat-nap, and fortified himself with another chota peg before shaving and donning some thing suitable for dinner with the Carpenters. The rest-house was quiet when he left. No-one saw him go.
He was met at the door of the Knox Homes by Carpenter himself, now dressed more formally than before, but not in evening attire. The missionary conducted him straight away to the orphanage proper, or rather, to what constituted the girls’ division.
There were more girls than boys in the Knox Homes: boys were economically viable offspring who might grow up to look after their aged parents: girls were burdens who would end up being married into someone else’s family. Girl babies were dumped quickly on someone else’s doorstep if they were lucky.
The girls’ orphanage was a scrubbed and spartan place, more a way-station than a home; its walls and floors and furniture were pervaded with the smells of carbolic, coal tar soap, and iodine, and its musty air seemed laden with the ghosts of other, less immediately recognizable smells the thin vomit of children, boiled cabbage, and that faint but unmistakable smell that is common to all institutions where adolescent girls are gathered in one place. A r sour, menstrual smell that lingers on all it touches.
In a dark-pa
nelled hall hung with the portraits of patrons and pious mottoes edged in funereal black, Christopher was introduced to the children. Rows of silent, impassive faces stared up at him as he stood, embarrassed and awkward, on a low platform at the end of the hall. The girls were of all ages, but all wore the same drab uniform and the same dull look of incomprehension and sullen endurance on their faces. Most appeared to be Indian, but there were Nepalese, Tibetans, and Lepchas among them. Christopher noticed a few of mixed parentage, Anglo-Indians, and two girls who seemed to be of European origin. There were rather over one hundred in all.
To Christopher, the most dreadful thing about the place was the temperature: it was neither uncomfortably cold nor was it comfortably warm. Old pipes brought a certain warmth up from an ancient boiler hidden in the bowels of the place, but not so much that one could feel relaxed nor so little that one could wrap up sensibly against the chill. And the children themselves, he noticed, looked neither well fed nor thin. He guessed that they did not go hungry but probably never felt that they had eaten quite enough.
It was a world of limbo, where these orphans, neither wholly abandoned nor yet wholly loved, lived an in-between existence that would forever determine the tenor and the inner structure of their lives.
“Mr. Wylam has come to us recently from the distant shores of England,” Carpenter began to intone in a pulpit voice.
“He came among us to seek tidings of his son, a child of tender years taken from him by dreadful circumstance. Which of us here has not prayed in the dark watches of the night for a loving father who might come searching after us, to carry us home? Which of us has not yearned for such a love as this man’s, that he comes willingly and alone across the globe for the sake of his only child, to return him to the loving bosom of his family?
“How well this brings to mind the words of our Lord, in that sweet parable of the father and his sons: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” Perhaps in Mr. Wylam’s journey there may be a parable for us here. For there is a father searching for us, longing for us to return to him, contrite and full of repentance. And he will travel the lengths of the earth to reach us.”
Carpenter paused for breath. It sounded as though he was just getting into his stride. The girls looked resigned. They did not cough or fidget or shuffle their feet as English children would have done. Clearly, they had long ago decided that being preached to was as normal a part of life as eating or sleeping. Christopher had to struggle to stop himself yawning.
“Mr. Wylam, our hearts go out to you in this, your hour of need, as yours, I doubt not, has in the past gone out to the widows and orphans of this godless and wasted land. These are the children of idolatry, Mr. Wylam, the children of sin. Their mothers and fathers were but heathen cannibals, but through the grace of our Lord, they have been brought out of the darkness and into the light. I ask you, then, to join with us in prayer, that our spirits may be united in the presence of our all-merciful and loving Saviour. Let us pray.”
Like mechanical dolls, the uncomplaining rows closed their eyes and bowed their heads. Their necks and eyelids seemed fashioned to the task.
“Merciful Father, Who know est our sins and our transgressions,
miserable sinners that we are, look down this night, we beseech
Thee, upon Thy servant Christopher .
And so the evening began.
The meal was a cabbagy affair with some sort of gristle-laden meat I . that had long ago given up its struggle to maintain any sense either of identity or taste. Moira Carpenter was less a hostess presiding , over her table than an undertaker directing the obsequies for whatever poor beast lay sliced and gravied on their plates. She kept up her end of a stilted conversation with miserable politeness. “My husband told me of your grief, Mr. Wylam,” she said, ladling boiled cabbage on to his plate.
“I have spent most of today in prayer, asking for your son to be restored to you. And his poor mother at home: she must be stricken.”
“My wife is dead, Mrs. Carpenter. She died a little over a year ago.”
“I am so sorry. So very sorry.” She dropped a slab of something off-white beside the cabbage.
“Was she carried away by illness?”
“Consumption, Mrs. Carpenter. She died of consumption. She was thirty-one.”
For the first time, Moira Carpenter’s eyes seemed to light up.
Sickness enlivened her much as idolatry enlivened her spouse.
“It is a scourge, Mr. Wylam, a dreadful scourge. We are blessed to live here where the mountain air drives it away. But, of course, we have our own afflictions to bear. You can have no conception how these poor people are ravaged. They pay the price of a depraved system. Syphilis, Mr. Wylam, is endemic .. . please, do eat your dinner .. . and gonorrhoea takes a terrible toll.”
It was not long before Christopher realized that his hostess was the worst possible dinner companion anyone could have: a hypochondriac who finds interest in nothing else but illness. As she picked at her food, she regaled Christopher with tales of her own illnesses, her husband’s illnesses, the illnesses that daily afflicted the unfortunate orphans of Kalimpong, the illnesses of the entire sub-continent.
It was all Christopher could do to force down his sweet a vile yellow custard with indecipherable pieces embedded loosely in it while she expatiated on a recent case of cancer of the nose she had visited in the hospital.
“This is all very well, my dear,” her husband interrupted at last.
“But we should not allow our guest to think that our care is chiefly for the physical ailments of these unfortunates. We leave that to those whose inclinations lie in that direction. But I assure you, Christopher I may call you Christopher, may I not? that, however terrible the ills that ravage the flesh of India, they are nothing to the spiritual sicknesses that torment its spirit. The Dark One is at work in this land, dragging this wretched people down to hell, generation after generation. We do what little we can, but it is an uphill struggle.”
And so he went on, detailing what were for him the principal horrors of India and its idolatrous faith. The Hindus were condemned for worshipping a multiplicity of gods, the Muslims for praying to the wrong one. Yogis were charlatans and Sufis fakes, for by definition no sort of spirituality could be found without the presence of God and God to John Carpenter was white-skinned and Presbyterian. Christopher decided there was no point in arguing. He was little enough of a believer himself to go defending other men’s faiths.
It was only towards the end of the evening that Christopher began to see that the man was playing an elaborate game with him. He was not a fool with antiquated and bizarre beliefs about religious practices on his doorstep, nor yet a simple-minded bigot rabbi ting on about his personal obsessions, but a clever man playing a role.
Christopher remembered the moment earlier that day when Carpenter had removed his glasses and shown himself to him briefly. Now, as the missionary or his wife rambled on about disease or moral corruption, he caught from time to time a sneaking look on Carpenter’s face whether ironic, derisory, or merely mischievous he could not tell.
“Tell me, Christopher,” he said while they drank weak tea after the meal, ‘how often have you been in Kalimpong before?”
“I came here frequently as a child. My father worked near here.”
“He was a businessman like you, was he?”
“Yes, he ... was a tea trader.”
The missionary looked across his teacup at Christopher.
“And you? What do you trade in?”
“Most things. I’ve dealt in most things in my time.”
“But you seem to me like an educated man. More like the sort of man who might make a career in the Civil Service or the Political Service. Not a small trader, really. Please don’t take any offence.”
“That’s all right. I chose to go into business. But perhaps another career would have suited me better. Things haven’t gone too well lately.”
&nbs
p; “And you live in England now, is that correct?”
Carpenter was interrogating him, discreetly but carefully.
“Yes. My wife and son went there when war broke out. I returned last year to rejoin them, but Elizabeth died soon afterwards. I decided to stay on with William.”
“I see. What did you do during the war? You stayed in India, take it.”
“I was a supplier to the army. Grain, fodder, rice: all the staples.
I made a little money for once. But not enough.”
“And who hates you enough to steal your child? Whom do you suspect?
Why did you come to India to look for him? To
Kalimpong?”
Christopher sensed more than mere curiosity in Carpenter’s questioning.
The missionary was worried about something. He did not believe
Christopher’s cover-story. But there was more than that: he knew
something and he wanted to know just what
Christopher knew.
“I’ve been advised not to talk about that,” Christopher said.
“Who advised you? The police?”
“Yes. The police.”
“Did they fly you here? Forgive me for seeming inquisitive. But it puzzles me that a man like yourself should have enough influence to be flown to India. Just to look for a child, however precious he may be to you. The authorities are not normally so obliging.”
Christopher decided it was time to go.
“Dr. Carpenter, I’m grateful to you and your wife for such a delightful evening. I’ve enjoyed your food and conversation immensely.” He turned to Carpenter’s wife.
“Mrs. Carpenter, please accept my thanks. You have been a most considerate hostess. But now, I fear, I must take my leave. I am still tired after my journey, and I fear I may become boring company if I stay any longer. And you must have your duties to go to.”
“Of course, of course. How thoughtless of us to keep you talking.”
Moira Carpenter got to her feet. Her husband followed suit.
The Ninth Buddha Page 7