In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  Within an hour, revitalised by the first nourishment I had taken since leaving Dalba days before, I was able to stand and, with the support and humour of my accompanying French Samaritan, who insisted upon carrying my luggage in addition to his own, commence the tedious process of buying a ticket.

  Queue at Window 20 for application form. Move away to fill in same.

  Queue again at Window 20 to have form checked and scribbled on for no apparent reason.

  Queue at Window 12 to have form scribbled on again and price calculated.

  Queue at Window 18 to pay amount.

  Queue at Window 20 to collect tickets and have original form retained.

  Grasping my ticket in triumph was my last memory of New Delhi Station. The fever was such that I retained no recollection of boarding the train, or climbing into my berth. Nor do I remember any grateful “Saluts” to Patrice. I assume it was he who made my bed, undressed me, placed a wet flannel over my head, tucked a stock of bananas in my bath-bag, two bottles of water by my side and tied my rucksack securely to my leg.

  When I next awoke, it was half past five in the morning. The train was still and quiet. The air, cool and fresh. I cautiously pulled myself upright to discover that, as though by some miracle, the fever had lifted.

  The train had come to the end of the main line at Kalka, towards Kashmir in the north and Tibet in the east. It was here that I had to transfer to a squat, pre-war train on a narrow-gauge track, which was to take me high into the thickly forested mountains and hill stations of what had once been known as the Eastern Punjab. It was in these little, toy-like carriages that I was to ascend into mountains that had once been the home of Kipling’s Kitty Mannering, young Cubbon, the Cussack-Bremmils - and my father.

  Chapter Nine

  Bindra could not withhold her cry as the end of the leather-bound stick struck again between her shoulders.

  “Please, not my back, brother! Not my back!”

  The soldier mockingly imitated her cry. “Then get moving, jungle woman!” he shouted in Bengali. “This is army property! And you, khanki, are trespassing!”

  Bindra tried to pack her few provisions into the carrying cloth as quickly as she could. The soldier grew impatient and lashed out with his foot. The last two papayas, saved for their journey to Kakariguri and the Gad Sup Hat Ashram, span towards the undergrowth.

  He kicked again. His foot caught her arm and came down hard on the few remaining lengths of tapioca root. He purposely drew the sole of his boot across them.

  “And take your chinky-eyed monkeys with you!” he spat, forcing Jiwan towards her with a stab of his stick.

  Before Bindra could catch him, Jiwan fell onto the dry earth. Before Bindra could reach him, Jiwan had leapt straight back up and had turned to face the uniformed brute. He looked hard into the man’s face.

  “Jiwan!” Bindra called, as she clutched a painful, darkening forearm to her chest. “Come!”

  But Jiwan was motionless.

  “Jyothi,” Bindra turned to her eldest. “Bring your brother!” But Jyothi did not respond. He was watching Jiwan, who had dropped to a squat and was now drawing in the dust with a broad, confident sweep of his finger.

  Bindra started towards him, but was halted by a deep, resonating chant. She was astonished. It was coming from Jiwan. Even the soldier seemed transfixed.

  Jiwan stood up. He carefully stepped into the centre of the pattern of intersecting lines he had marked out on the ground. He placed his small hands into carefully positioned mudras, manual gestures used to focus latent forces in both body and mind.

  “Hshraing hshklring hsshrauh ...”

  The booming sounds coming from her little boy shook Bindra. She sensed a gathering commotion and looked up. The sky had filled with crows.

  “Kali Ma!” Bindra gasped. “Dark Mother! What child is this?” A swift flash of khaki and the guard struck Jiwan to the ground with a single blow. Bindra cried out in furious alarm and fought to reach her son.

  The Bengali spat at them, cutting through the carefully scored lines in the earth with the heel of his boot, and hastily marching back towards the safety of barbed wire, parade grounds and procedure. The guard hut door slammed shut.

  Bindra gathered Jiwan into her arms. His ear and cheek were bleeding.

  “What have you done?” she whispered. “What knowledge has the ban jhankri shared with you?”

  She turned to look for Jyothi. He was staring beyond the fence, towards the guard hut, onto which every silent crow was now alighting.

  ***

  The fifty-five-mile journey from Kalka to Shimla took six hours. The view from the train had quickly transformed from Kali-armed cacti on stony hills to the dark malachite of mountain pine. Along the way, passengers and post were collected at Victorian village station stops. The further we climbed, so the faces of the new passengers changed from the sun-scorched Caucasians of the Plains to the Mongoloid features of the mountains, each broad cheekbone and almond eye hinting at our proximity to Nepal and Tibet.

  The temperature dropped by the hour, as the century-old engine strained its weary way skyward. The clean, bracing air soon soothed all sense of fever. The chatter of silver monkeys, the glistening song of koel cuckoo and the rainbow blaze of parrots squabbling amongst the trees brightened my heart. My body had begun to regain its stability. My mind had begun to reclaim its calm.

  Until just forty years before, my father had lived in these forested hills. I thought of him as a child, as chota sahib, full of hope and life, scaring the servants with his plasticine scorpions and proudly saluting the passing cavalry with his home-made sword. Saving annas to tip the snake charmers and mourning his dogs that died of rabies. Running from the monkeys on his way to school and hiding from the dilated gaze of ash-strewn sadhus as they wandered past the garden gate.

  At that moment, the snow-capped heights of what my father had known as the Punjab Himalaya came into view above the treetops. I gasped in astonishment at my first sight of the very cloud-borne ridges I had spent years examining in the faded sepia of my grandfather’s books. I pressed my nose to the cold glass in wonder at the ranges so loved by my father, as the mountain peaks to which he still longed to return, the pines and sapphire skies of which I felt I too was a part, merged into a single, kaleidoscopic blur.

  A jovial Punjabi left two female companions sitting on the compartment floor and squeezed next to me on the single wooden seat. He put his arm around my shoulders and waited. He said nothing until I had wiped wet eyes and reinstated the well-trained reserve of my imperial roots.

  Kamlesh was travelling with his young wife and her sister for a week’s holiday in the Hills. He had come to say that they all thought I looked “a very nice young man indeedly - all handsome and loving.”

  For the last two hours of the journey, Kamlesh and I maintained a comfortably superficial discussion of our contrasting lives and “Ooohed” at the view. The two women would not join in. They stayed on the floor, where they giggled and fluttered their eyelashes at me, blushing as though too chaste to interact with any foreign man and quite innocent of their game.

  ***

  Kakariguri town was dirty and crowded.

  Nobody noticed the two children walking beside a woman in a torn chaubandi cholo blouse, tatty pharia sari around her waist, majetro shawl bound about her head and shoulders. It was common to see impoverished mountain women wandering down here, lost, in search of work.

  Bindra felt heavy and flat in the hot, still air. She had never been to this low altitude before. She had never felt this weight in her lungs, this density in her head. She led Jyothi and Jiwan to the shade of a large tree. They sat together to share the little remaining mountain water in the bottom of their canister. Nothing would ever taste as clean again.

  A passing convoy of garishly painted lorries spewed
yet more dust into the already congested air. Bindra clutched a corner of her shawl to her mouth and clung to her boys, as though they might be blown away by the black, choking exhaust fumes. She shuffled them around to the back of the tree, away from the traffic, and made an effort to brush down their grimy features.

  “Is this our new home, Ama?” Jyothi spluttered, spitting on the ground to rid his mouth of diesel-coated grit. He looked up at her, baring his crunchy teeth in a grimace.

  “We’re not at the Tune-Snake-Hand Ashram yet,” she began, struggling to quell the anxiety that threatened to consume her.

  “Well, I don’t like this place,” Jyothi stated emphatically. “There’s no forest here for food. It’s too hot. And the air is grey!”

  “But your big sister lives here!” Bindra offered in compensation, as much for herself as for her sons. “We’ll see where Jayashri-didi lives and she’ll give us hot chiya and aloo dum. We’ll share the love we have for her in our hearts. Then the dust will seem like a friendly greeting, and the heat like the warmth of a kindly welcome. You’ll see!”

  Jyothi looked her directly in the eyes. “Ama, I want to go home!”

  Bindra stroked his face with her bandaged hands. “After we find Jayashri, I must ask for medicine from the Ancestors. Then we can go back to the Hills,” she smiled reassuringly. But even as she said the words, she could feel they were not true.

  They were sitting opposite a long line of low bamboo huts with palm-leaf roofs that lined the roadside. The front of each house was open to the billowing dust, yet busy with bands of carpenters, secondhand rubber merchants, coir dealers, poultry sellers, their apprentices and customers. Jyothi wandered over to look at the newly carved domestic shrines and tables, the towers of old lorry tyres, the mounds of coconut shells next to robust coils of rope and piles of neat matting. He peered through the slats of round baskets stuffed with sweltering hens that were pecking each other to baldness. He rubbed his foot on the ground in search of worms he might push through the gaps to distract the birds from their claustrophobic insanity. However hard he rubbed, he only found more dust.

  “Paani!” Bindra called after him. “Ask for water!”

  She watched Jyothi approach a group of young men smoking under the plastic canopy of a nearby tea-stall. One stood and filled a bucket from an irrigation ditch that ran behind them.

  Bindra gasped and struggled to rise to her swollen, ragenwrapped feet. She moved quickly, but could not reach Jyothi before he had been drenched in thick, brown liquid and the indolent crowd had exploded in a roar of amusement.

  As she hobbled towards them, the tea-stall quickly fell silent.

  “Bas! Bas! Aage ashbena!” a young man commanded in Bengali. “Stay away! Don’t you dare come any closer, khanki!”

  Bindra did not understand his words, but she understood his meaning. She had so quickly forgotten.

  “I just want my son, younger brother,” she announced, reaching out towards Jyothi, who was trying to wipe stinking mud from his eyes. “He didn’t mean to bother you. I just asked him to fetch us water. We’re strangers here, bhai, and did not mean . . .”

  She stopped still.

  “Jyothi, come straight to me! Now!” she ordered, with uncharacteristic urgency.

  The young man had bent to grasp a stone.

  ***

  Seven thousand feet above the sea, Shimla spread across a broad, crescent-shaped ridge. The cosy hill station had once been known as Simla, in the days when it had been the summer capital of British India, the “Abode of the Little Tin Gods” to which armies of administrators, their clerks, wives, mistresses and extensive households had trekked in order to escape the cruel incalescence of the Plains.

  I stared out across the red-roofed Victorian chalets of its suburbs. I scanned the tin-topped clutter of its bazaar that clung to the steep, south-facing slopes. I peered up towards its castle-like public buildings and the terraced shops that lined the broad, central boulevard of the Mall. I squinted towards the tower of its parish church rising to the east and looked for the High Raj splendour of Viceregal Lodge to the west, where my father’s parents had once enjoyed a “moonlight revel” of freaks, fortune tellers and baked potato stalls. Shimla was indeed an extraordinary sight.

  Bedtime stories had led me to believe that upon arrival at the train station, strong-legged jhampanis would be awaiting my custom. I had long been assured these merry, bantering men would have primed their double rickshaws, with two sturdy fellows to push and two to pull, eager to whisk me along the narrow, winding paths that ascended into the town. But there was none. A rusting jeep, with a surly young man at the wheel with an absurd price on his tongue, was the only transport on offer. I chose instead to make the precipitous climb by foot.

  I commenced my ascent with enthusiasm, but in far too few strides calf muscles began to protest at the relentless incline and lungs began to heave in the thin mountain air. It was, therefore, with slow deliberation that I trudged my passage through the crowded warrens of the bazaar. I hauled my way up flights of stairs and urine-sprayed passageways between buildings, in the hope that one might lead me to the Mall. I wheezed my way past grandsons and great-grandsons of the grocers, oil-sellers, curio-vendors, priests, pickpockets, and native employees of the government once known by Kipling and my grandfather.

  I paused to survey the pierced wooden screens and carved balconies of the eccentrically piled buildings amongst which my heart now palpated. Some were only supported in their semi-vertical positions by the haphazard addition of precarious, childlike constructions of bamboo scaffolding. I recalled my father telling me that it had been in these now dilapidated hovels that courtesans had once discussed the supposed secrets of Empire.

  I panted onwards, lugging my rucksack along the verandah-like “side walks” and alleyways of the “native quarter”, until, at last, I reached the town’s main street. In my father’s day, all vehicles except the Viceroy’s had been banned on the clean and quiet Mall. So had all dogs. And natives.

  I peeped through the darkened windows of the Gaiety Theatre, where once audiences had disrespectfully roared at the strictly maleonly productions of Shakespearean tragedies. I walked around the bandstand, where once patriotic anthems had sounded on Regent Street brass. I passed Scout huts, General Post Office, tea rooms, second-hand bookshops, clock tower and Town Hall. It seemed to me that I had walked into a much-decayed Epsom or Dorking, a Surrey market town on Bank Holiday, in which the entire population was tanned, beshawled and smiling.

  I sat on a garden wall and watched children in prep school uniforms riding home on ponies, led by devoted servants. I leant against the Tudor Porch of Christ Church tower and watched little boys play cricket, where once the Protestant ruling classes had exchanged banalities in their Sunday best.

  I scanned the hillsides, dotted with cottages and bungalows, their original weather-worn names of Chertsey and Cheltenham, Harrow and Hutton Henry still decipherable above honeysuckled porches and wild-rosed gates. The temperate climate had allowed for the laying of lawns and the planting of fruit trees around the summer residences of the town’s British founders. However, as I was discovering to be the way of much of modern India, all had been left to decay and rot. Many of the old houses and hotels were fast collapsing. The gardens lay overgrown and desolate, the orchards diseased and barren. Herbaceous borders had turned woody and prize blooms had long gone to seed.

  A young, short-bearded Kashmiri porter approached me and asked if he could suggest a hotel. Wary and mistrustful after my experiences in Bombay and Udaipur, I declined. I had decided to stay in the YMCA, which I anticipated to be cheap and clean. He emphatically insisted that I had made a bad choice and that he would accompany me to prove it.

  The building we approached must have formerly been a grand mansion that had stood in extensive grounds. The rotten mahogany doors, the grimy decorate
d floors and collapsing central staircase gave mere glimpses of what this house must have once been. My Kashmiri companion collected a key from the front desk and took me to a room on the upper floor.

  It was the fine cornices that first caught my attention as I stepped through the door and tripped over one of many shattered clumps of ornamental plaster, which lay scattered across the wooden boards. As I brushed off my hands, my earnest escort insisted upon brushing off my knees. This intimate moment evidently broke our mutual reserve, as he took it as a sign that he could now hold my hand. He only let go when I laughed out loud, in sheer delight, as he told me his name was Dilruba, “which, sir, has for its most finely meaning ‘Heart Throb’.”

  Returning my gaze to the room, I stared in puzzlement at the ceiling rose that dangled precariously on taut tufts of horsehair. I sighed in despair at the elaborate marble fireplace, piled high with soot, rubble and empty Coke bottles, the yellow-stained sheets and the all-pervading stench of blocked lavatories. I needed no more convincing. My new-found chum had been entirely honest in his judgement. I conceded. He could now guide me instead to the one hotel in the town he had strongly recommended. “Heart Throb” was thrilled and immediately restored his hand to mine.

  The Municipal View was an ugly, concrete shoebox that stood high above the town. However, my room was large, the bedding acceptable and the price within my limited daily budget. Even the bathroom was clean and promised hot water for an hour every morning. Although I was the only guest and the eighteen-year-old proprietor just happened to be my Kashmiri’s cousin, I agreed to take the room. The young manager was thrilled at my custom. As he left me to unpack and wash, he advised that I “be keeping windows well indeed closed shutly, sir, for rascal monkeys cause much havocs and guest displeasures.”

  I expressed my thanks for his warning, turned the key behind him, and immediately opened the door onto the balcony. I stepped out and inhaled the crisp, enlivening air with a forceful gasp. Before me spread an astonishing view of the Elysium and Summer Hills.