I could do no more than mumble ‘Yes,’ to his questionstatements. I thought he had an uncanny gift of reading one’s mind. Were he to tell me that I had fathered two children and had come from Delhi, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But he did not speak another word. His attention was rivetted to the tea in his hands.
‘Where are you coming from?’ I ventured to ask him later.
He set his empty glass on the bench and wiped his flowing beard on the crook of his elbow.
‘Ask me where I am going. I am here only for a few days.’ His red-streaked eyes reflected a carefree unconcern.
‘Where have you set up camp, baba?’
For a moment I thought his little finger was raised heavenwards but, mercifully, it came to rest short of the heavens and pointed to a summit beginning to emerge from the shimmering morning mist.
‘Isn’t that where the Shiva temple is?’ I could not repress the flutter of excitement and curiosity that the temple aroused in me. ‘Don’t you call it Shiva temple! Call it Mahakal temple.’ He threw me a glance of derision and reproach. ‘Haven’t you been here before?’
‘This is my first visit.’
‘The first? Are you sure?’ He laughed aloud. ‘How can you be so sure you haven’t seen all this before somewhere? No, no! There is no first time.’
‘I’m also seeing you for the first time.’
‘Really?’ he said, his sly eyes on me. ‘And that thing over there?’ He pointed to a swaying pine tree that climbed straight up from a ditch across the road.
‘Why, that’s a tree.’ I was intrigued. ‘What’s there in it?’
‘And what’s there in me?’ He pulled a beedi out from under his skimpy cloth and lit it on a live coal from a burning log in the mud and stone oven. ‘What do you see in me?’
Acrid smoke curled lazily upwards from the glowing end of his beedi.
I ran my eyes over his naked body. All his bones stood out, gleaming in the bleached winter sun: a skeleton bound in coarse brown skin which withstood the cold without a shiver or gooseflesh but provided warmth to what it held together . . . No, I had never seen this man before, but seeing him, I was reminded of the bundle of bones and ashes of my father I’d carried for immersion from Delhi to Kankhal. Had the jostling, rumbling train coach somehow put the bones together, the reconstituted form could well have resembled the live skeleton before me . . . and then it struck me that even if one had not seen a certain man before, the latter could still bring back to life another who was once alive and was now dead. What I was seeing in him was not the man who sat so placidly beside me on the bench but a reflection of another long since dead.
‘Are you on a sight-seeing trip?’ His watery eyes held me. I kept silent.
He moved closer to me. ‘You must have come for a darshan of the baba. Am I right?’
‘Well,’ I stared at him.
‘Do you know the way?’ He spoke very softly. ‘He lives on the way to the temple. Go up the rock steps until you come to a track. Turn and follow it; it will lead you straight to him.’
‘Will it be possible to see him now?’
‘You can try. It should be no problem unless he has retired to his cell. If he is inside, don’t disturb him. He is not keeping well.’
‘Is he ill?’
There must have been something in my voice which irked him. ‘Illness is all a part of life. The body is vulnerable.’
What he said gave me no cause for worry. I was a little surprised that he had not written a word about the illness in his letter to me. Was he afraid I would have brought our mother along? I laughed to myself at his fear. How could mother, who could not even climb the stairs in our house, have withstood the rigours of a day-long bus journey to a height of 2,100 metres?
I rose to my feet without a word. The aghori baba looked up. ‘What, leaving already!’
‘How long will it take to reach there?’
‘It will take a lifetime,’ he smiled. ‘But if you don’t lose the way, you might make it in half-an-hour.’
I filled my thermos with drinking water from the tea-shop. As I took out my wallet to pay for the two glassfuls of tea, the baba said, ‘Make it for three. I’ll take another.’ I did not even turn round but paid up and took the road uphill.
The mountainside inclined steeply upwards like a raised palm. There were trees all around but none beside the track to give shade. Before long, sweat ran down my body like a mountain stream. In addition to my fear of high blood pressure, the loud pounding of my heart rattled my ribs.
The market noises and the honking of buses carried up here sleepily. Then even these sounds were lost . . . and I found myself all alone—not a single man around, or animal, not even air. It struck me that even if I were to keep going up and up, the track would never come to an end—nor would I: I’d be struggling upwards forever, bathed in sweat, seeing nothing, my mind blank, my feet refusing to give a damn if I was exhausted.
Up ahead, the road forked into three prongs, like three outstretched fingers of an upraised hand. A sign mounted on a tree at the junction, pointing along the near right-hand path, bore an arrow in white chalk piercing through a four-word legend: To The Forest Rest-house. I remembered the finger of the aghori baba aimed skywards at the Mahakal temple. If the right-hand path went off to the rest-house, the middle one could only lead to the temple. I headed up the middle path.
Long ago there might have been some sort of rock steps here, but now, in this season, the stones fringed with blades of grass were slippery with moss. At each step my breath seemed laboured. As I hauled myself up, the burden of my years sat heavy on me. But far heavier than this was the other burden I was carrying—the legal documents and the messages from the family. I could not help asking myself why it was necessary for me to take these papers to him personally: I could have left them with the schoolteacher, and gone back by the late evening bus. But then, how would it have looked to have come this far and then go away without seeing him . . . go away empty-handed, as it were. After all, he had been living in this part of the world for ten years, and here I was, already despairing on the first day of my visit. He also must have climbed up these selfsame stones for the first fateful time ten years ago—but he was a young man then. I recalled his face from his latest photograph—in it he looked what they call ‘cheerful’ in English—in the newspapers over father’s message (he was alive then): Please Come Back . . . He not only didn’t come back, he didn’t even write to us. We went in search of him. The police took us on several rounds of the morgues where we went up and down the rows of the dead in search of the one who had walked out on us as a stranger overnight.
Trying to recover my breath, I wondered if I would be able to recognize him when I saw him.
Sweat dripped into my eyes, weaving a curtain behind which a green pine forest glistened tremulously. At long last in a clearing, the temple came into view—whitewashed, serene, cool. I sat down on a step, letting the breeze dry me. It was quiet all round, no devotees, no sanyasis who may have renounced the world . . . only a monkey which squatted on its haunches on a swinging branch of an ancient tree beside the temple. It regarded me with momentary curiosity, beating its metre-long tail before jumping onto the roof. A thud, a rustling of leaves—and nothing else; the silence returned. In the midst of a deep quietude, it seemed the monkey and I were the only two who sought refuge at the shrine of Mahakal, the Timeless One who presides over death. Sometimes the gods come to our rescue in the form of animals. So had the monkey, which had wiped out all my doubts with a swish of its tail, when I got up to go forward. I was light on my feet.
The temple was not far away. The ground had levelled off. A well-trodden path stretched ahead, cleaving the choppy green sea of pine. As the pine needles fell, a heavy scent diffused into the air. The aghori baba had been right: I had barely walked another hundred metres when I emerged into another clearing—like a patio, empty except for grass and rocks. A few steps onwards, a rock to my left caught my eyes. I stopp
ed in my tracks as I realized it was not a mere rock.
On a second glance, what looked like a rock resolved, like a puzzle picture, into a cell built of stones, wood and mud: a fluent coming together of the natural and the man-made. Its rear portion was flush with a cliff.
A rock which jutted out from the cliff before sloping down to the ground on either side, formed a roof above three white-washed stones, surmounted by a door.
I walked up the three door-stones. The chain-clasp on the door hung loosely, unhooked from its hasp. It was very quiet inside. I peered through a narrow opening in the door and at first saw nothing but blackness. A pale shaft of daylight entered from an invisible window, or perhaps from the opening in the door itself and penetrated the darkness. A grubby little patch of sunlight lay on the floor.
Perhaps he was ill or asleep on his bed somewhere inside. It could be that he had not received my letter and was not expecting me. Or, he might have waited up for me yesterday evening and afterwards presumed that I had put off my visit . . . I reached out to rattle the chain but it swung open before I could touch it. I stepped backward to the lower stone, as if for a short moment I wanted to flee, even as he appeared in the doorway. It was possible that rather than fear, it was a nervous eagerness to see him better which made me want to fall back, as one does for a better view of a painting on a wall. Be that as it may, he reached out to grip me by my hand and pulled me up, and in the scramble my briefcase fell. It clattered down the stones and the property documents, letters, loose sheets—everything flew about and scattered. Mortified, I dropped to the ground to retrieve them. He knelt down beside me, carefully picking up the papers. I felt his hand on my trembling knee. I turned and saw his hand—not his face—for the first time in ten years.
I do not remember how long we sat hunched there. At last, when I raised my head I knew him instantly—his face, his watchful eyes—unmindful of the fact that I had never seen him in a beard. With his grizzled locks, he resembled a stranger halfway between a forgotten brother and a sanyasi.
Yet, in his hand on my knee was a warmth evocative of a distant household and a shared past preserved in frozen memory. The ice began to melt at his touch.
He leaned forward to pick up my briefcase. ‘Come, let’s go in.’
I followed him into his cell.
‘Please, sit down.’ With his hand on my shoulder he steered me to one of the two mats on the floor. He squatted opposite me on a rug, his back resting against the wall.
Time dragged by. I was sitting with him in his cell, yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe I’d reached the end of my journey.
‘Did you get my letter?’
‘Yes, I did. You were supposed to come yesterday.’
‘I came yesterday but the bus was late by three hours.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘At the schoolteacher’s. He took me home.’
I longed to ask him if he had sent the schoolteacher to meet my bus, but I didn’t. I was put off by his impassivity and aloofness. He seemed to have drawn a line around himself which I dared not overstep. The thaw that I imagined had set in when he touched me at the doorstep had merely licked the outer layers: it had not reached the core of our being.
‘Was it difficult to find your way here?’
‘No, not at all. I met an aghori baba at a tea-shop. He gave me the necessary directions.’
‘Did he? What else did he tell you?’ He was rather amused.
‘Nothing.’ I looked on at him for a moment. ‘Are you ill?’
‘He must have told you this. It is nothing very important. It is the old breathing trouble; it gets worse in this weather.’ He seemed to find talking about his ailment more distressing than the distress of living with it.
‘Could this high altitude have anything to do with it?’
He shook his head in dissent. ‘No, I don’t think so. You’ll recall I suffered from this trouble even when I was at home.’
At its mention, ‘home’ crept silently in and sat down on its heels between us. He closed his eyes. Even if a leaf were to fall outside, the sound of its falling would have broken the silence of the cell.
‘Is everything over there all right?’ he asked drily, his voice keeping its distance from home, yet hovering around it.
‘Yes, everything is all right.’
‘The ground floor must be unoccupied.’
‘Why should it be?’ I didn’t understand him immediately, ‘Mother lives down there.’
‘Alone, you mean?’ He looked hard at me, surprised.
‘Yes.’
‘Doesn’t she live with you upstairs?’
‘Well, she prefers to live on the ground floor.’
He stared at me as if he had no inkling of what had gone on at the house, although I’d written to him about everything I could think of. He had not seen it happen with his own eyes, and I who had seen it all saw it again from the outside—through his eyes—and began to understand why he was surprised: an outsider had reason to be surprised to see a woman with three grown up sons and a house spend her last days alone in a corner.
Outside, a tree branch creaked and rustled. Suddenly, there was a loud thud on the roof followed by a quick skittering away and loosening of dust from the ceiling. He went out. I heard his voice carry in the silence. I heard it rise towards the mountain peak and return, until echoing waves caught up with it and bore it gently away.
When he came back I asked him: ‘Who was there?’
‘A monkey,’ he smiled. ‘The monkeys come down from the temple to bask in the sun . . . Have you been to the temple yet?’
‘Not yet. I hear it’s a very old temple.’
‘Not all that old, perhaps. But the Shiva idol is. It was found buried in the mountainside here. I’ll take you to the temple one of these days . . . Would you like to have some tea?’
‘Who will make it? You?’
‘Who else is there?’ he laughed. ‘It will be ready in no time.’
He walked across the cell to a curtain and gathered it to one side. It gave on to an underground recess which sloped backwards. There was a low wooden seat in a corner, and beside it stood an earthen pot and two clean brass tumblers. In the wall above it was an air-vent, which could pass for a window: it framed a gnarled branch of a tree, grey rocks, and a slice of the sky suspended in humming silence. Nothing moved but the wind. I thought to myself: he lives here, alone, day in and day out, in the cold of winter, the wet of rains, the heat of summer. It was a mere shadow of a thought, without substance, intangible, unconnected to the grim reality. When we see a dead man, we may think either of death or the man or of both and still fail to register the flesh-and-blood reality of the man meeting his death. Why was I thinking of death? He in whose cell I was sitting was very much alive, although I found it difficult to convince myself that he was the selfsame person whom I had come to see.
He returned with tea in two tumblers and salted shakarparas on a bronze tray.
‘Why don’t you move out of the draught?’ he asked, setting the tray down on a low slatted board between us.
I took my tumbler and shifted back against the wall. Huddled opposite each other in the narrow cell, we kept to ourselves, while the wind rattled the door now and then and shook the trees.
‘The tea smells of burning wood, doesn’t it?’ he observed.
‘Don’t you have a kerosene stove?’
‘Kerosene is not readily available here, but there is plenty of firewood. I can collect enough during my morning walk. It also helps in keeping the cold away . . . Come on, take some shakarparas. It used to be your favourite dish.’
I took some, grateful that he should still remember such a trivial thing, although I’d have expected him to know little about us, living as he did mostly on the ground floor with mother. He would rarely come upstairs. He only met my children when they went down to the courtyard to play.
We sipped our tea in silence. He asked no questions about home, which was surpri
sing. But perhaps it was all for the good, for what could he have possibly asked me about, or, at what point could I have picked up the narrative of the ten long years which separated us. It was enough that we had a few hours to ourselves. Already the afternoon was wearing on. The shadows had begun to descend from the peaks facing the cell.
A shadow reached out between us, dividing the room into two portions; half where he was sitting in fading yellow darkness and the other half where I sat opposite him, near the door. A thin strip of wan afternoon light sprawled over the threshold in a still moment.
‘How are the children?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Munni has started going to college.’
‘And the little one?’
‘She is grown up now.’ I grinned as I thought of her. ‘She also wanted to come along.’
‘Well?’
‘She has never been to the mountains. She said she wanted to see where tayaji lived.’
‘She was very small when . . .’ he trailed off.
When I left home . . . I was prompted to complete the sentence for him but I didn’t. I let it hang unfinished around the seed of pain in the heart of a deadened grief. Perhaps that is the way grief lasts a lifetime, buried deep down.
There was no further mention of the children. He picked up the tray with the leftovers and went into the recessed portion behind the curtain.
I sat alone in the dusky light of the cell. Outside, the shadows were thickening on the ground but the sun still lingered on the humped mountain. A flight of crows winged downward beyond the cell, shattering the placid atmosphere with their shrill cawing.
He came back in, a hurricane lamp in his hand. As he set it down on the squat board in the middle, he glanced up at me. In that brief moment it struck me that he had something important, something crucial on his mind with which he was struggling, which he wanted to tell me about. Hesitation got the better of him and he took his seat quietly.
He sat with his head bowed, the lamplight playing upon his thoughtful profile, the greying hair, the swell of his shoulders, the curve of his neck . . . It was as if I was seeing my father again, the way he looked in my childhood, concentrating on the arithmetic sums on a slate for me while my fascinated gaze would keep wandering to his neck.
The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories Page 27