In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  My taxi spluttered to a wheezy halt.

  “Is this it?” I asked the head of dark, oiled hair in front of me. I turned from side to side, in search of any building that might suggest a railway terminus. In every direction lay the same postapocalyptic landscape. Nothing but goats, dogs, cows, rats and crows picking their way through infernal filth with hoof and claw.

  “No, sir!” the driver laughed. “Breakfast chai!”

  He left the door open and wandered towards a stall piled high with red clay cups.

  I squirmed uncomfortably in my gummy seat. Beyond the dusty windows, as early morning sun and heat and stench continued to rise from amongst the stifled dens around me, innumerable generations of sons, fathers and grandfathers stretched their chickeninstep limbs. They pulled away tatty loin cloths to expose heavy, dark appendages, then crouched naked on the roadside to release new stygian brooks from straining, emaciated bodies.

  The air was physically thick, soup-like to my nose and throat. I fought to hold my breath and swallowed hard to quell the forceful contractions of my stomach. I battled to contain my need for reaction, to repulse the inconceivable vision now coursing, unchecked, into my incredulous eyes and nostrils.

  Suddenly, he was back.

  “Good chai, sir!” my driver said with a broad grin. He was bearing a cup of murky, ash-strewn brew, which he pushed towards my lips. I declined. “No, please sir. My gift. Welcome to India!”

  I performed my very best sipping act, without once letting my neurotic mouth approach the greasy liquid. My pretence evidently pleased him. Not until he turned away was I able to toss it out of the side window.

  Where slum ended and cosmopolitan city started was not easy to determine. My Virgil at the wheel sped us well away from the main roads, in preference for wretched, labyrinthine lanes. It did not help my fragile belly that, whilst he was careful to avoid the longeared cows, which wandered untethered at their pleasure, he made no attempt to swerve for dogs or children in our path.

  We stopped again. Time to relieve his tea against a boundary wall. The efficiency of his kidneys was certainly impressive.

  I looked out across the road to another desolate inner-city wasteland that seemed to be home to many thousands. As the sun’s blast drove billowing storms of flies from evaporating cesspools and into shade, I observed its inhabitants step from sordid hovels dressed in laundered shirts and pristine saris, their hair immaculately groomed. I watched entranced as they began to mend and stitch, mould and saw, to massage, play, laugh and sing.

  And in that moment, sitting alone and bewildered in a filthy Bombay back street, I recognised in these vibrant smiles something of the magic of India in which, since childhood, I had believed. In this exuberant humanity in the most inhumane of realms, I had already discovered the enchantment beyond fairy tales in search of which I had come.

  ***

  “You can’t be here!” the matron spat. “Who let her in?” she glared accusingly at the Nepali nurse. “Get her out immediately!”

  An orderly was summoned, but as he bent to lift Bindra he caught sight of one bare foot. He stood bolt upright.

  “No, madam!” he stated defiantly. “Do not ask me to touch her!”

  The young nurse gave him a harsh stare. He had used a linguistic form of “her” that is normally applied only to animals. The man glanced once in apprehension at the matron, then bounded straight up the stairs.

  Enraged, the matron turned to the nurse, dropping her voice to a vicious hiss. “I don’t care how, you hear me, but just get rid of her before word spreads!”

  The nurse bent down. “Didi,” she asked softly, “can you walk?”

  Bindra did not know.

  “Didi, we cannot treat you here. You should not have come. You must apply to the medical officer for your district. There will be trouble. You must go with your sons. Please, sister, can you try?”

  Bindra turned her eyes to Jyothi and Jiwan.

  The sight of a woman on her hands and knees, draped in a blanket, crawling from the hospital, provoked stares and laughter. The nurse stayed close until they reached the gate. She crouched down and pressed a few crumpled rupee notes into Jyothi’s hand.

  “Bhai, take your ama straight to the Tibetans, near Mangal Dham mandir, you know, Guru Shri’s Krishna temple,” she hurriedly instructed. “Do you understand? Take your ama to Doctor Lobsang Dhondup.”

  ***

  Five long hours on a slow train, stuck to grime-coated bench seats.

  Five long hours of eyes and mouth gritty with the thick dust and black flies that squalled through the windows. My illusions of the glamour of Indian train travel had been fast shattered.

  It was all so unlike the descriptions of passage across the Subcontinent by rail as promised in my guidebook. I flicked again through its finger-stained pages.

  I was tempted to read aloud the paragraph which stated with conviction that “the Indian railway coach is arranged to give all the comfort possible to the hot-weather traveller.”

  Where, then, was the “dressing room at the end of the compartment providing a cool comforting wash whenever desired”? What had happened to the “stained glass in all the windows to modify the glare”? And what of the “disk-shaped curtain of scented grass that can be revolved by means of a small handle and which at each revolution dips into a concealed basin of water, whereupon the air delightfully refreshes the interior of the coach”?

  I glanced resentfully at my fellow passengers at the printed assurance that “one is almost sure to have the coach to himself, so he may lounge as lazily as he pleases on the long, leather-cushioned seats, which, with the addition of pillow and rug, make excellent beds at night.” As for the guarantee that one “can obtain delicious tea and toast, or, by telegraphing ahead, a very good and substantial meal,” I openly scoffed.

  But then my Grandfather’s guidebook had been printed in London. In 1916.

  I squirmed on the hard seat and wandered in and out of an awkward half-sleep - until I inhaled a plump currant of a blowfly. I woke in convulsions to find the compartment for six persons now snugly accommodating a perspiring and attentive audience of seventeen.

  The train had strained and ground its heavy way northwards, through the fertile plains of Gujarat, to the little market town of Valsad. I had in my pocket the name of Priya’s grandfather, the name of his village and the nearest railway station, at which I had now alighted.

  I squinted in the scorching noonday brilliance and stared at the sea of faces that swelled before me. Westerners were rarely, if ever, seen in these parts. They blinked in hushed amazement at the sight of a doughy-faced stranger, cheeks scarlet after hours of near asphyxiation amongst the scrum of bodies piled into the train. They blinked as I stood wilting, dwarfed by the excessively-pocketed luggage rising high above my shoulders, bottle of warm water in one hand, address on a greasy scrap of paper clutched optimistically in the other.

  I, in turn, blinked back at them. Tired and dazed. Nervously expectant.

  With a simultaneous roar, the crowd burst into raucous laughter, clutching each other as they squealed and hooted. I had clearly under-estimated the comedic potential of my travel wardrobe. All dubiety was dispelled and in one great surge, they ran at me.

  “Halloo!” they cried through their communal hysteria. “How a’you fine?” and “Wilcum kind chup!” they hooted with unrestrained enthusiasm.

  Now at close quarters, they scrutinised my clothes and studied the address scrawled on my paper. A highly animated discussion ensued, whereupon they triumphantly led me to one of the awaiting rickshaws, where innumerable friendly hands helped me with the rucksack, guided me onto the seat, secured my luggage and vigorously patted me on the back.

  The chuckling mob crowded around, whilst some amongst them lifted their arms and bent their elbows, indicating to me
that they wanted to see my biceps. I obliged, whereupon delighted cheers shook the banyan trees. Thin hands extended to stroke my skin and squeeze my thews, whilst wide eyes peered down my shirt front and up my shorts. Never had I thought myself physically broad or particularly tall, but amongst these slender Gujaratis, I was veritably strapping.

  The only exchange of words between myself and the locals, which did not involve an awful lot of clumsy hand-waving and uninformed guesses as to an approximate interpretation, was with a young lad who pushed up beside me and asked, “A British sir?”

  I affirmed that I most certainly was.

  “Lovely marvellous!” he grinned, brown eyes sparkling. “My uncle, he living in Leicester! My next-year wife in Parsons Green!”

  Before further familial details could be gleaned, the motorised rickshaw spluttered into action and, like a wild boar unleashed, immediately plunged at full speed towards the profusion of potholes that passed as a road. With hearty reiterations of “How a’you fine?” and “Wilcum kind chup!” now adopted as a farewell by the waving crowd, I quickly left the bustle of Valsad far behind, with its jolly population which had found me such a wag.

  We sped through a flat, lush landscape of crops ripening and steaming in the sun, passing ox-drawn, hay-high carts rumbling along on timber discs, as I clung tightly to the hood-struts to prevent myself from being flung out into the road. We caused alarm amongst young men strolling hand-in-hand. We frightened women compressed beneath water-filled urns and crop-packed baskets. I tried throwing myself from side to side in the futile belief that it might in some way assist the driver to avoid the craters and dustbowls in our path. The broken branches and the herds of goats. The nonchalant water buffalo and the whoops-was-that-a-chicken?

  “Dalba?” my driver asked herdsmen drinking from a wooden bowl at a well. They shrugged and shook their cloth-bound heads.

  “Dalba?” he asked a line of Advasi Tribals who had evidently come from the remote mofussil regions of the interior to work the harvest. They rimpled sun-scorched brows and stared at me, transfixed.

  I had begun to believe that I had taken down the name incorrectly, when a near-naked holy man repeated, “Dalba,” and rocked his head from side to side in recognition. He bowed to me and pointed with a heavily knuckled finger across the fields.

  If he did indeed know Dalba, then it was somewhere amongst the dark mango groves. A tiny village hidden deep within the leafy haunts of serpents and wild monkeys.

  Chapter Five

  Bindra could not determine how long she had slept. Hours, days or weeks? The air of the little room in which she lay was heavy with the scent of plant oils.

  “Kasto cha, bahini?” a broad-faced Tibetan woman smiled, asking how she was in perfect Nepali.

  “Better,” Bindra replied, surprising herself.

  “Timilai pira cha, bahini?” the woman gently asked. “Do you have pain, younger sister?”

  “Little,” Bindra replied, again in surprise at the change she felt in her body. “My boys!” she suddenly gasped.

  “Listen,” the woman grinned, emphatically cocking her head towards the open door.

  Bindra could hear Jyothi and Jiwan’s voices flooding into the room on the bright sunshine, with the pungency of fermented lentil phing noodles drying outside on bamboo poles. The boys were playing a boisterous game of cricket.

  “We said they could stay in the house and keep my Dawa and Pemba company,” the woman explained, rolling a string of coconut and carnelian dzi prayer-beads between thick, stained fingers. “But every night, they sleep here on the floor, to be near you. You have good sons, bahini.” She opened a large bottle, from which she removed two pungent balls. “Now’s time for more medicine,” she smiled, and popped them into Bindra’s mouth. They were chewy, gritty and slightly sweet.

  “Mithai cha?” she chuckled. “Taste good?” The Tibetan woman raised a broad hand to her dark-skinned face to conceal her amusement. “Last week, bahini, you were still spitting them out!”

  Bindra moistened her mouth and rasped, “I thought you were feeding me gobar goat dung!”

  As Detchen Dhondup’s broad shoulders began to rock with boomy chortles, Bindra’s smile returned.

  ***

  I wiped my face with a sodden handkerchief and squinted through the brilliance. Five kohl-eyed girls at Dalba’s single stone well released the bucket-rope. They left their water-pots and scurried on flat feet for the darkness of doorways.

  I stepped out of the rickshaw into the midst of a handful of cowdung houses, bleaching, splitting and crumbling in the summer’s blaze. Not until my eyes adjusted to the glare could I discern silent figures clustered together in the shade, scrutinising me with a contradiction of delight and alarm.

  “Salaam-alaikum,” I offered towards my umbral Hindu audience in uncertain and starkly inappropriate Muslim greeting. “Mehta ka ghar kaha hai?” I attempted, asking in self-conscious, “kitchen” Urdu where I might find the Mehtas’ house.

  There was no response.

  “Mehta?” I persisted, convinced that the clipped, Anglicised pronunciation I had inevitably inherited from my Raj-born forebears had rendered my limited vocabulary unintelligible. “Mehta ka ghar?”

  A sudden clamour of Gujarati made me start.

  Two grinning boys were escorting an elderly, near-toothless woman draped in mazarine silk. All three were talking at once, waving their arms at each other and at me as they approached. I put my hands together to greet them, at which the boys hid behind the woman, giggling.

  “Salaam-ji,” I bowed. “Mrs Mehta-ji?”

  Priya’s grandmother nodded her head from side to side and began to chatter at me in excited Gujarati.

  “Kiy aap angrezi boltay hain?” I fumbled, in the hope she might speak at least some words in English. She shook her head. She scolded the boys who were staring at me with wide eyes from amongst the drapes of her sari, and shooed them off to fetch a bilingual relative.

  I rapidly dredged through the vague remains of courteous childhood phrases and found, “Aap se milkar khushi huye.” Accordingly, I declared that I was pleased to meet her.

  Mrs Mehta rocked her head in incomprehension and sucked her remaining teeth through an unconvincing smile.

  I decided it prudent to remain silent, leaving Mrs Mehta and me to stand blinking. Politely. At one another.

  To my great relief, the boys soon returned, escorting a cheerful young man who introduced himself as Mukund. His English was admirable. My arrival, he explained with embarrassment, was entirely unexpected. The letter sent had not arrived. The embarrassment, I insisted, was all mine.

  Back in England, where affluence abounds, an unexpected stranger could be most unwelcome. The arrival of an unplanned guest could inflict havoc upon schedules and diaries. Hands might be thrown up and excuses voiced of unprepared larders and lowstocked fridges, imperative Scout activities and Church meetings, insufficient bed linen and no clean towels.

  But here - where the people lived from hand to mouth, fighting against the seasons to feed their families when one bad crop could bring starvation - they offered me their all.

  I was led away from the low mud houses, across a rough dirt yard, to a building that stood beneath the welcome shade of tamarind and neem trees. Fronted by a finely carved, wooden verandah, this was by far the grandest house in the village. I was invited into the central hall and directed to an old, wicker-seated chair. The room was dark, lit only by shafts of spiralling dust that broke through the fine filigree of closed shutters. The house was ancient and, although much decayed, retained an exquisite beauty in its intricately carved doors and cupboards, its chequer-board floors of green slate and pale cream alabaster.

  Brusque orders were given.

  In moments, the tepid water from the bottle I had been carrying was offered to me in a metal beake
r, on a tray engraved with dancing deities. The clatter of pans, the hiss of oil and the ambrosia of cooking spices drifted from an unseen kitchen. Through open double doors I could see a broad wooden bed being stripped and hurriedly remade.

  Sad eyes lingered on me for a moment. Whispers were exchanged.

  I wondered whether they were saying that if I had arrived with Priya, they would have been scattering the sheets with flowers.

  I pressed hard against the sudden, waxing weight in my chest, as a steady stream of women, young men and children, some thirty in all, were presented to me. They bowed shyly, smiled and departed as quickly as they came. I gave up trying to remember their names, and hoped they did not notice the quaver in my pleasantries. In every pair of dark, bright eyes I had seen only hers.

  Mukund stayed by my side. He politely clarified that Namaste was the appropriate greeting in Hindu company and laughed out loud at my earlier blunder.

  “Please no need for apologising, Mr David,” he assured me. “No offences being felt. We are rather most tickled to be hearing our Muslim brothers’ salutation in our village for the first time in history,” he grinned, squeezing my shoulder as though to indicate a new affection.

  Mukund explained that he was visiting from Bombay, on study leave from college. He told me that the men of the house, Priya’s Uncle Piyush and her grandfather, were out giving offerings at the temple of Hanuman, the Monkey God, far across the fields, but that they would return before dark. He enquired after the health of English cricket and the Queen, Winston Churchill and Mrs Thatcher. He asked if his three cousins, who were standing against the wall and whispering, could feel my arms.

  “What do you eat, Mister David, to make you grow?” he translated for them.

  The second time in one day that I felt big and butch.

  ***

  “How am I?” Bindra asked.

  “Doing well, bahini,” Detchen smiled reassuringly. “Doctor Dhondup’s very pleased. You are healing. Your thick woollens stopped the burns from going too deep. The shawl you were wearing protected much of your head and face. Gu-Lang, our Protectress of Mothers and Children, was with you that night.”