Bindra wrapped the little boy tightly in her shawl, whilst Kushal and Darpan Magar quietly prepared a fire and made him a tunic from a length of the woollen cloth they carried.
“Where are your clothes?” Jiwan shrugged.
“What did the ban jhankri feed you?” Jyothi persisted.
“Syauharu,” came the whispered reply. “Apples. He gave me cut apples on the backs of his hands.”
“Were you in his house?” Jyothi pressed.
Jiwan rocked his head from side to side. “In his cave.” “Was it dark?”
Jiwan rocked again. “Were you afraid?”
Jiwan looked up at his mother. “I cried for Ama.” Bindra pressed her face to his. “So he showed me Ama in the shadows. He said, ‘Here is your Ama’.”
Bindra was puzzled. “What else did he say?” she asked gently. “He asked if my tears were for Apa” he replied.
“Your father?” Bindra was surprised.
Kushal Magar drew close and sat with them as Jiwan continued. “So he showed me Apa in the shadows. He said, ‘Here is your Apa’.”
Tears welled in Bindra’s eyes.
“What else did the ban jhankri do?” Jyothi eagerly enquired.
“He taught me,” came the solemn reply.
“Were there crows, bhai?” Kushal Magar asked, looking intensely at the little boy.
Jiwan nodded and rested his head against his mother’s chest.
Kushal Magar remembered well the crows. Over thirty years before, a ban jhankri had taken him one morning as he had worked in the paddy with his parents, up near Turzum basti. The little red man had appeared at the dark tree line and had beckoned for him to come. It had been the ban jhankri who had taught him the mantras with which he now healed, comforted and initiated change in the many who came calling at his open door.
Yes, Kushal Magar remembered well the crows, the emissaries of Shiva and Kali, the Bringers of Knowledge. The ban jhankri had repeatedly tested his memory of the mantras imparted to him through their recitation under extreme duress. The young Kushal Magar had suddenly found himself being torn and cut by the beaks and talons of a mob of screeching birds. He had fought this way and that, but still in their cruel, black hundreds they had ripped into his tender flesh. He had screamed for help from the quietly observing ban jhankri.
“Phalaknu!” the little red man had repeatedly ordered. “Say the words!”
It had only been as he had fixed his memory on the newly imparted mantra that the crows had vanished. For, in truth, they had been but the shadow of crows.
***
I woke in the night, dripping with perspiration and shivering on my upper bunk. I had called out her name.
A baby was screaming below and a rank, biley smell filled the compartment. I laid the sandalwood soap from my bath-bag under my nose, then wrapped a vest around eyes and ears to dull the noise and the pulsating electric light, which the colicky child was switching on and off without restraint.
In the morning, I woke with a choking start, as though smelling salts had been discourteously rammed up my nostrils. The sun was only just breaking over the strangely pointed mountains and yet the air billowing through the windows was already scalding. I rolled over to discover the source of the sickening stench. The infant had been allowed to relieve itself all night directly onto the floor, which was now awash.
With bent knees lodged against the ceiling, I struggled to dress as quickly as I could. I swung myself from the top bunk, straight out of the compartment door and into the corridor, without once letting my feet touch the ground. It was an immense relief to realise that the shakiness of my fever had largely passed. I had regained command and clarity of thought. A positive indication, I believed, of an imminent recovery.
I braved the communal carriage toilet, to find it to be no more than a hole in the floor, through which I could see the dash of tracks below. Despite its gaping size, numerous previous occupants had managed to miss their target. The floor and walls crawled with busy insects, the air fluttered with a menagerie of winged beasts. I washed my face and torso as best I could with the hot trickle of brown water that oozed from the single tap, whereupon the flying insects stuck to my skin, sending me into a frenzy of futile flailing.
Twice I walked up and down the train corridor, passing my compartment. I no longer recognised it. In the twenty minutes I had spent peeling wings and legs off my chest, arms and face, the cramped cabin had filled with strangers. A family of six was sitting on my upper bunk, gleefully rifling through my rucksack. I stood at the door and gaped as they passed around my socks, sun-block and journal for the other passengers to examine.
With teeth tightly clenched, I dredged through the foul swillings on the floor to gather my belongings and repack my bag. The father of the newly arrived family unashamedly refused me space on my bunk. Instead, his wife offered me one of my own bruised bananas. I still could not face the thought of food. Nor did the idea appeal of an unattractive verbal battle in incompatible languages to win back my seat in such a reeking and confined space.
I spent the remainder of the journey crouched on my heels in the corridor. Hugging my ravished backpack. Muttering indecorously.
***
Bindra relished the warmth of the fire as she watched her boys sleeping. Kushal Magar offered from his bag more chiura, the beaten rice commonly eaten in the hills that swells in the stomach and quickly eases hunger. She smiled in gratitude and tendered a bandaged palm, onto which he carefully piled a portion of the dry, cream-coloured flakes.
“So what does it mean, dajoo?” Bindra asked, as she began an arduous chew.
“Your Jiwan has been chosen as a bhui putta jhankri,” Kushal Magar explained. “One who has ‘broken through the ground’. One who is ‘self-born’. For he has had no mortal guru.”
Bindra continued chewing.
“None in the Himalaya can match their skill or knowledge of mantra, the Words of Power. None are more able to help others find the means by which to heal themselves,” the kindly jhankri impressed. “It is a great and difficult gift. We can only wait and see what he chooses to become.”
Kushal Magar threw a little more chiura into his mouth. He knew well the challenge of such a call, although he never spoke of it. He knew he would never marry. He knew he would never have children. It was the price he paid, for the bhui putta jhankri had no selfish desires.
Kushal Magar was no longer a man.
He was Knowledge.
***
It was almost dusk as the train finally approached Delhi.
For forty minutes, in furnace heat, we crawled through an interminable landscape of wretched hovels, in which every tree had been sacrificed for fuel, every plant and every root consumed. Macilent figures swarmed like frenetic ants through a rotting carcass of rancid warrens and foetid dens. Scraggy cows and scrawny buffalo clogged the alleyways separating miserable shacks, amongst which they produced paltry quantities of germ-infected milk and runnels of liquid sewage.
The stagnant ocean of tin and plastic, rag and dung opened around a feculent pool that hummed in a haze of flies. Inhabitants squatted to relieve their bowels on the banks of these nefarious black waters, as others waded in to wash themselves with clay and ash, and raise cupped palms to parched lips.
I found myself unable to accept the loathsome scenes of abominable human misery, repeated mile after mile, along the railway tracks that pierced the nation’s congested capital city. This was not the India of my father that I had come to find, surely. Not the India of bedtime elephant and Maharaja. Not the India of Grandmother’s Uncle Oscar, Theo and Tagore.
Again, I found myself disorientated, angry, hurt.
At New Delhi Station, I climbed down from the train and pressed my back against a wall. I beckoned to an exquisite little girl who was bleating “Aam!” a
nd placed a coin on her dirty palm, in return for a rotund mango. Her one dark eye looked at me and blinked. The other was scarred and shrivelled in its socket. I smiled at her. She blushed and scurried away.
As I watched the child vanish into the surging throng, an inexplicable alarm began to pierce my chest. An engulfing sense of vulnerability and isolation. A new and frightening fragility.
I no longer knew where I was trying to go, or for what purpose. Wherever I went, I would not find Priya.
I was suddenly overcome by a pressing need to remember the last words she had spoken to me. A pressing need to assure myself that our ultimate interaction had been meaningful. The declaration of a love that could not be dimmed by distance, unalterable even in eternal separation.
But what if those parting words had had no significance? The booking of a hair appointment? Her sister’s choice of college? What if that last exchange had merely been a reference to the ordinary triviality from which a comfortable life is constructed?
I now struggled to excavate any memory of Priya from the compressed layers beneath which, in an instinctive effort of selfpreservation, I had buried her. I now fought to find the least echo of her words, the least shadow of her face. But the abrupt violence of her senseless deletion from my life had silenced all recollection.
I crumpled forwards, winded by a new and fierce guilt. A realisation that, just as she had been ripped out of the future we had determined to forge together, her hand wrenched forever from my own, I too had been complicit in her eradication by silencing her voice within me, erasing her image, attempting to extinguish her memory.
“Priya!” I heard myself gasping at the surge of faces that pushed past me.
“Priya!” as the world began to blur and slide.
***
Bindra woke just before dawn. She automatically put out her bound hand to find her two sons.
No Jiwan.
Bindra struggled to sit upright.
In the twilight, she could see him sitting around a new fire with Kushal Magar. He was now wearing oversized clothes the kindly brothers had been taking as gifts for nephews at their family home. They were talking in low voices. She tried to listen, but could not hear. It sounded as though they were chanting together.
Today, they had to continue their slow journey to the Plains. They must gather more iskusko jara and tarulko jara. They must collect more ripe papaya and clean water from the tumbling stream.
She looked back to the firelight. Kushal Magar was now on his feet and circling Jiwan in respectful blessing. Bindra looked on in puzzlement. She wondered what had happened to her son in the ban jhankri’s cave. She wondered what he had become.
Bindra looked to her feet, which were to carry her far today. She had no pain in her curled toes. Even the open blisters and deeply embedded stones did not hurt. Only her swollen knees, hips and lower back ached. But she had her boys. She shared their laughter and their songs.
Bindra had neglected the bandages on her hands since leaving the Tibetan doctor and his cheerful wife. They were loose and filthy. She began to gingerly unwrap her senseless fingers with her teeth, but as the cloth fell away she wrinkled her nose at the smell and gasped at the swelling. Bindra was astonished to find that the left hand was now unresponsive and entirely closed. She sat and stared, unable to accept that the stinking mess of flesh she had exposed belonged to her.
“Bahini,” Kushal Magar said by Bindra’s side, “you will get bad fever. We must give you pisaiko hardi, good turmeric paste, to heal your fingers. And neem leaves to ward off delirium. They’ll be more palatable if you add a little sugar and black pepper, when next you can.”
Jiwan helped the kindly jhankri to rummage in one of his bags until he drew out a small clay pot, bound in cloth. He gently applied its rich yellow contents to the deep wounds where fingertips had once been. Not once did Bindra flinch.
“I asked Kali Ma for knowledge - and burnt my fingers!” she chuckled awkwardly at herself. “Now I must take from her tree, Neemari Devi, to protect me from a fever my own inattention may bring!”
“The knowledge you are seeking you already have,” the gentle jhankri replied, as he tore strips from a cloth for clean bandages. “All true knowledge is within. You need only to recognise it in yourself.”
Bindra nodded her head from side to side. She knew this to be true.
“You know, bahini,” he continued, “we make real the things for which we most yearn. There is no destiny, sister. Every choice you have ever made has determined your present path.”
Bindra smiled. This was their way, in the Hills. Not the predestined fate taught by the Brahmins. Not the unchanging Karma and Samsara of the orthodox Bahun priests and Buddhist lamas. Not a life borne passively to pay off the “spiritual debts” of some previous life. Bindra knew that any loss of harmony was not the reaction of a watchful, chastising god. It was the product of her own thoughts and actions. A consequence of the way in which she chose to respond to whatever the natural ebbs and flows of life may bring.
Jyothi stirred and sat up. He was shivering in the cold morning air.
“Ama, can we go home today?” he yawned.
“Not today,” she sighed, with a smile. “We have Ancestors with foreigners’ medicine to find. And a whole new world to see!”
***
For five hours I stayed where my knees had buckled and I had slumped to the floor, against a spittle-splattered wall in New Delhi Station. In some self-castigating reaction, my fever had returned with a vengeance and I had been rendered barely capable of movement or speech. For five hours I watched through eyes made keen by searing temperature, as an entire sub-continent seemed to hurry past.
Black-skinned peasants from the south, curly-haired, broadnosed, bewildered. Bhil people dressed in mirrored clothes of scarlet cotton, far from their lake island villages in search of work. Tired, determined parents bearing all they owned in loose bundles, shepherding children who carried still smaller siblings in their arms. Ancient porters in tatty red jackets, official brass badges bound to gangling arms that strained to drag cumbersome carts piled with post and luggage. Workmen, stripped naked to soap sinewy limbs at hydrant taps that spewed brightly between stationary trains.
Slum scavengers, beneath sacks on hunched and bony backs, combing the tracks for fuel to burn, rubbish to sell, morsels to eat. Tin trunks atop tall soldiers, wooden rifles across shoulders, hand in hand, cuddling in corners like lovers. Pilgrims with saffron beads and bowls, vermilion handprints pressed between sharp shoulder blades. Wandering holy men, uncut hair drawn back to reveal brows painted with the sign of their sadhu sects, narrow necks garlanded by flowers, long staffs clasped in torous fingers.
Of all these storybook people, it was the hijra who most puzzled my fever-fired mind. Devotees of the cockerel-riding goddess Bahucharji Mata, these ritually castrated men were dressed in gaudy saris, their henna-tinted tresses tumbling across broad shoulders. Eyes boldly daubed with shadow and kohl, pert pouts brazenly scarlet-stained. A cache of tawdry necklaces languishing across breastless chests, downy forearms jingling with iridescent bangles.
A little slum boy was the first to notice the feverish, fallen foreigner. He peered at me from between the mountains of clothbound freight, wincing in his curiosity. The serious-faced child drew close enough for me to stretch out a clammy hand and offer him the mango. He cautiously gathered shuffle-speed and confidence, and eventually grasped the fruit with a look of triumph on his face.
For hours little Jai and I sat together on the floor, as the jostling mobs hurried by, oblivious. Nobody noticed the defeated traveller sitting slumped and shaking, or the dirty urchin grinning at him and clinging to his fingers, as though they were old chums who shared a secret.
***
Bindra had never before stood so far from home.
The air was hot and he
avy, the view before her disorientating. From left to right, as far as she could see, there were no forested hills, no mountains. Only flatness.
“What is this place, Ama?” Jyothi asked.
“It is what they call the Madesh,” she muttered in reply. “The Plains that lie where our Hills end.”
“Well, I don’t like it!” Jyothi stated categorically. “It looks like the edge of the world!”
Jiwan, whose hand he held, said nothing.
Bindra had regretted having to say goodbye to the Magar brothers amongst the cold, damp trees. They had shown such generosity and understanding. She would never forget. They had taught her in their kindness.
But that had been long days ago, amongst people she knew, in a place she loved. Now Bindra stood on the brink of a different world, of which she knew nothing. A world into which she, with her brave little boys, now felt compelled to step.
***
When next I awoke, Jai had vanished back into the swarming hordes. He had left the gift of an empty, well-chewed biro in my hand.
I tried to move, but found I could neither stand nor lift my backpack. My joints were ablaze and bubbling. My head a vault of molten magma.
I fought to focus fast-liquefying eyes on the station clock. My train to the heat-relieving north was due to leave in just two hours and I still had no ticket. I tried to stand again, but the world blurred into a vacillating smear and my face struck the filthy floor.
I lay still, panting heavily, unable to pull my arms from the tight rucksack straps. My fevered mind drifted back into heat-born visions and my sweat-wet eyelids closed. I had begun to believe that I was going to die on the concourse of New Delhi Station. And no one would notice.
Suddenly, a cool hand rested on my forehead. I looked up, startled.
“L’Inde, c’est de la merde!” a pale young man muttered, as he knelt in front of me.
Patrice from Strasbourg freed me from the shackle of my rucksack, propped me against it, then disappeared without a word. He returned with bottled water, an oily bag of vegetable pakoras and a clutch of bananas. I insisted that I could not possibly eat. He ignored my protestations and insistently force-fed me, unperturbed by my constant heaving.
In the Shadow of Crows Page 11