In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  The old lady rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, “It’s all so disappointing.” She shook her head slowly, causing the pendulous skin of her wizened neck to drift from side to side like a lazy punkah fan. “Simla was glorious, of course. Every summer the viceroy and his council travelled over one thousand miles from Calcutta. He’d bring hundreds of his own attendants and guards, in addition to envoys, representatives, tradespeople and the like. It was like watching Hannibal coming up the mountain - without his elephants!”

  Miss Holt had become animated with the commotion of her memories. She unconsciously began brushing down her worn clothes and straightening the unpressed Eton collar on her dress, as though she were about to be presented to Lords Willingdon or Curzon themselves. She raised an arthritic hand to sweep thin thrums of white hair from her face, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of a young woman looking out from her twinkling eyes. A bright, lively girl, still in awe of the grandeur and elegance of her youth.

  “And the Viceregal Lodge, you’ve seen it of course,” she continued, “five stories high, and all furnished by Maple’s of Tottenham Court Road. Oh, my dear, the social life was so . . . eventful. Grand balls, the likes of which you couldn’t possibly imagine. And eight hundred guests at a time!”

  Over her head, I could see the mali getting himself into a proper pickle. His hands were full of mud and broken geranium stems. He seemed unable to decide whether to first re-pot whichever plants looked redeemable, or to clean the mess extending up his arms and across the verandah floor, which was now covered in dirty footprints, or whether to sneak past the reminiscing memsahib and make good his escape. Whatever his decision, it would not have made the slightest difference to her now. She was too far away in her reveries to have noticed the domestic disaster unravelling around us.

  “My father owned Wildflower Hall, built on the site of Lord Kitchener’s residence. It was a vast mansion, surrounded by pines. Beautiful. But it’s all gone. Burnt to the ground. I refuse to go to Simla now. It’s changed beyond recognition into a shabby madhouse. Frightful. All gone. Finished . . .”

  She slumped, suddenly exhausted, and the twinkle went dark. “India, the Land of Regrets,” she mumbled, whiskery chin dropping onto her sunken chest. “Ruined. Ruined. Ruined . . .”

  The old lady turned away, back bent almost double with the burden of bitter disappointment. She waved a hand weakly as though in dismissal, then withdrew through sallowed curtains into cloth moth-stippled darkness.

  ***

  “Didi,” Bindra continued. “Can you tell me where Mrs Mukherjee lives?”

  The nun shrugged. “Which Mukherjee? It’s a common name here.”

  Bindra could not answer.

  “Well, what does her husband do?” the nun persisted.

  Bindra knew nothing of the woman to whom she had entrusted her daughter. Mrs Mukherjee had spoken so nicely when she had come to the door. She had worn such a smart sari. Expensive. She had given biscuits to the children, handed milk powder to Bindra. She had talked a lot. She had made fine promises.

  Bindra looked blankly at the stout woman in her strange blue dress with its matching lank cloth that hung around her thick, dark features.

  “Mrs Mukherjee came to us nearly a year ago, asking for my daughter. My eldest, Jayashri,” she began. “She told me good things. Jayashri would learn to read and write, and grow strong on good food. To be a maid is good work. Good training. I want that for my daughter. She is a good girl. She works hard. She is a kind and happy child . . .”

  The nun’s face had lost all spark of humour. She looked hard at Bindra. “Did this woman take other girls to work as maids?”

  “I don’t know,” Bindra shrugged, listlessly. “But she offered more money if she could take my Jyothi too . . .”

  A portentous alarm suddenly caused her heart to pound. “Where’s my Jayashri?” The violence in her chest was causing her to gasp for air. “Good food. Education. She promised!”

  The Keralan nun looked grave. “You hill people are so trusting,” she sighed, shaking her head, as though in tired despair. “You’re as innocent as your own children. If you could but believe in Christ, He would welcome you with open arms into His Kingdom. ‘Suffer them to come unto me,’ He said . . .”

  Bindra could make no sense of her. “My daughter,” she interrupted. “Where is my daughter?”

  The nun drew close and dropped her voice. Bindra could smell sour milk on her breath.

  “I fear your little girl is now in Calcutta. Probably in Sonagachi district. Perhaps in Kalighat. These women come every year to search the Hills for healthy girls. And boys. Young girls. Pretty boys . . .”

  The weight in Bindra’s chest was crushing out the air.

  “My sisters tell me there are almost 70,000 doing such work in Calcutta,” the nun continued. “I’ve heard that 14,000 are brought in from Nepal alone, every year. Many are still children. How old is your Jayashri?”

  Bindra did not want to believe that she was understanding the words through the distortion of their dense, Malayali accent.

  “Jayashri has turned twelve. Perhaps soon thirteen . . .” Again the nun shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Ama,” Jyothi had taken hold of her arm. He was pointing towards the sky. “Look!”

  Bindra’s face turned up towards the blue. There were kites. Small paper kites, swooping and spinning.

  She closed her eyes. “Dark Mother, what have I done?”

  But the words were engulfed by the distant sound of her own voice, screaming.

  ***

  A figure in flip-flops struggled up the steep hill path towards me. Beneath a plain shawl, I could make out the face of a handsome young woman. She had a feisty billy-goat on a string in one hand and a chuckling child astride her hip supported by the other.

  I greeted her and asked, in Urdu, if she spoke English. She did not. “Ketunky?” I asked, as her son’s eyes widened in horror at my strange white face and threatened to flood with frightened tears. The young woman nodded vigorously to my question and pointed back down the hillside up which she had climbed.

  It all seemed strangely familiar. It was as though I had visited this place as a child. Perhaps it had been in that twilight region between wakefulness and sleep, my father’s bedtime stories enlivening my eager imagination.

  Was this not the path - stony and somewhat treacherous, wild forest to the left, British-built bungalows through the trees to my right - that I had seen in over twenty years of lucid dreams? Was this not the path down which I had vividly pictured my father being carried by two bearers on a wax-cloth and wicker dhoolie litter, his mother running behind shouting that they were trotting too fast and would drop him straight down the precipitous khud? Was this not the route along which I had imagined my father running to school, whilst scheming monkey hordes had bombarded him from above with a shower of fir cones, urine and worse?

  A narrow track led me to the garden gate of a deserted bungalow. Monsoon and snow had stripped the red paint from the corrugated roof. Summer sun had blistered the window frames. Forest scrub had consumed the garden.

  My heart was pounding, as though I were a young Pevensie finally ready to push his way to the back of the wardrobe.

  I forced open the rusting metal and walked to the front steps of the verandah. The view that lay before me was exactly as it had been described over many years of childhood bedtimes.

  I had found Ketunky.

  And yet, never once had I imagined myself stepping alone onto this overgrown circular lawn, with its open views across deep valleys and dark mountains. This was a discovery Priya had made me vow to undertake with her, so we might together reveal the veracity of all those childhood stories on which I had been raised. This was always going to be our adventure, to prove to both of us that for all the bright, breath
less intimacy that was our own, we also shared a deeper, cultural connection.

  I had planned to show Priya that it had been on this grass that my father had regularly had his hair cut by the dreaded napi barber, with shears so blunt their blades had not so much cut as plucked the hair from his scalp. I had intended to tell her that it had been around these borders that the family servants had placed little oil lamps every Diwali, their domestic Festival of Lights so enchanting my father as a child that the twinkling flames had continued to burn brightly in his memory for forty years.

  I had wanted to tell her that it had been amongst these same flowerbeds that my father’s pet dog had been mauled in the night by a leopard. He had found it before breakfast “without a face and with its head turned upside-down”, a much-repeated phrase that had haunted my own upbringing, just as the memory of the gruesome discovery had haunted his.

  I had anticipated making her grimace with the story that it had been from the verandah upon which I had expected us to sit together that my father’s mother had once found a servant, his dhoti cloth raised high to expose thin legs covered in seeping sores. She had knelt before him to clean the wounds and apply antiseptic ointment. These benevolent treatments had been repeated for three days, but when his condition had not improved she had sent the man off to the doctor with a letter and a one-rupee note. Within the hour, an urgent summons had arrived from the surgery. The entire family and all staff were to attend the hospital directly. The servant had been riddled with aggressive syphilis.

  I imagined that Priya walked beside me as I approached the house and rattled the doors. All were locked. It was as though my father’s mother were still inside, clutching her Flit-gun for fear of spiders, humming wholesome hymns for comfort and hiding from the loose-wallahs. Such local rogues had regularly attempted to slip into the house stark naked and so greased with oil that, had they been disturbed in their burglarious transgression, no part of their anatomy could have been grasped in capture.

  I shaded my eyes and peered through the small-paned windows, but all the rooms were derelict and dark. I looked into the sunless bawarchi-khana kitchen, where once my father’s mother had kept an attentive eye on the staff, horrified by rumours that the servants used socks to strain soup, held mutton rissoles between their toes, and shaped fish patties in their armpits. I winced at the echoes of my grandfather’s incensed splutters when a newly hired hand had attempted to impress by presenting a platter of mashed potato at dinner formed by his talented, though dirty, fingers into a menagerie of animals. The sight of a perky aloo elephant, smeary cobra and goggle-eyed monkey seated in a wallow of gravy beyond the braised pigeons and vegetable darioles had been too much for a seasoned sahib to tolerate. Angry voices had been raised, plates had been broken and at least one well-meaning domestic had been sent to bed in tears.

  I chuckled aloud, as though I were telling Priya of the Christmas my father’s mother had entrusted the icing of the cake to her Madrasi bawarchi. The cook had been proud of his spoken English and had emphatically stated that he needed no help whatsoever in its festive decoration. On the day, the cake had been carried into the dining room with great ceremony to be placed before the family and their guests, in the centre of the table. There had been a momentary silence before the entire company had burst into hysterics, to the bewilderment of the ever-obliging, but illiterate bearer. Inspired by a pretty, seasonal advertisement in the Times of India, he had pasted across the royal icing the confident cochineal legend: “Buy Littlewood’s Pools”.

  I moved on to gaze into the patchwork shadows of the conservatory that had once been my father’s playroom. Here, he had listened to the BBC’s regular appointments with the plucky “Front Line Family” on the wireless, and first learned of rationing, blackouts, parachute-silk blouses and doodlebugs in a distant, unknown Britain. The door curtains of this room had been my father’s theatre, his magic tricks and puppet shows deemed so amusing by an eager audience of servants that they had named him joker-sah’b. The geometric patterns of the Afghan rug that had once lain upon the playroom floor had been his giant game-board, across which my father’s lead soldiers had boldly marched in tidy regimental lines, and his treasured Hornby train set had puffed its tireless circle.

  I strolled to the side of the house and a row of derelict go-downs, the single-roomed huts in which the servants and their families had lived. There had been Burket, the well-liked bawarchi cook; Kondi Ram, the khansamah butler-bearer; Manu, the Pashtun chowkidhar watchman; Samir, the mali gardener; Harish, the bhishti water carrier; and Fakeru, the lowly bhangi sweeper, whose sole job it had been to deal with the “night soil” in his masters’ “thunder box”.

  Despite the customary practice of employing native nannies, my father’s mother had adamantly refused to hire an ayah for her children. She had believed the rumour that opium was commonly secreted beneath such women’s fingernails, on which their charges were expected to suckle at bedtime to secure for their nurse a night of unbroken slumber.

  I peered into the windowless, chimneyless rooms of these godowns, where my father had regularly sneaked to share meals with the servants’ children. It had been on these dirt floors, wreathed in wood smoke and tempering spices, that he had developed his taste for all manner of native delights, which I in turn had inherited.

  It had also been in these lowly quarters that, with no ayah in the household, the servants’ wives had unofficially adopted the role of communal nanny. Upon discovering my father’s insatiable appetite for sweetened condensed milk, these devoted and indulgent women had taken it in turns to proffer liberal spoons of the sticky, viscous pleasure until all his nascent teeth had been reduced to blackened matchsticks. The repetition of this chilling fact, with its unnerving image of carbonised incisors, had terrified me into an intimate relationship with my toothbrush from an early age, through which I had undoubtedly ingested an excess of baking soda and fluoride in my efforts to retain the pearly brightness of a youthful smile.

  As I circled the house for a second time, my thoughts of tarnished teeth, toy trains and trusty staff became a constellation of curling pictures taken in these very hills, all now preserved in ancestral albums. Tea parties and church bazaars, Scout parades and Sunday School picnics. Sola topee-topped sahibs with their cricket bats, polo mallets and pig-spears. Broad-brim-crowned mems with their parasols, gossip and tennis-coach lovers. Chota sahibs and missy babas with their chatty pet mynahs and dog-collared monkeys. Smiling, confident, pale-faced generations, who had believed themselves omnipotent, now reduced to fading faces pressed between glassine interleaves.

  Priya would have chided the mounting melancholy of my nostalgia.

  “Come on! I’ll race you to the church!” she would have laughed, delivering a pinch, then skipping ahead for me to catch her.

  I left the overgrown garden of Ketunky and wandered up towards a tired tower. The great, ornamental iron gates of the entrance were so rusted that they could barely open. I breathed myself thin and squeezed through.

  The building was near collapse.

  “Untouched since the British left,” a voice beside me apologised, “and only six Christians living here now.” It was the vicar’s wife, who indicated with an outstretched sweep of a thin, dark arm that I was welcome to explore at my leisure.

  I wandered between rows of dusty Victorian pews, where once my father had sung “Jerusalem” and felt proud of King and Empire. I squinted through psychedelic shafts of glass-stained light at timetainted paintings of Israelites and fishermen. I read every ornately inscribed brass plaque, in memory of Rutherfords and Driscolls, Eckersleys and Biggan-Smyths. All dead with disease and battle. Or too much tiger.

  I stood at the altar rail and thought of my grandparents’ enduring shame of having to attend a service in weekday dress, when rats had eaten all the fine bone buttons off their Sunday best. I turned to walk up the nave aisle, but it was scattered with hymn
books and church records that dated back to the 1830s.

  “Oh those scallywag monkeys!” the vicar’s wife growled. “Old Nick’s own terrors they are!” I helped her gather the torn pages, whilst trying to avoid the generous deposits the troublesome beasts had added to their mischief. “Come, I’ll show you where these infernal imps climb in,” she beckoned, directing me to ascend a precarious wooden staircase to a broad balcony.

  High above the nave, she pointed to two broken panes in a neo-Gothic window, but I was not looking. Perched on the balcony was an ancient organ, of which I had heard my father speak. I ran my fingers around the corroded pump-wheel, at which he had once furiously toiled to earn a treasured Boy Scout badge, and looked about me in astonishment. The long-silenced instrument, its decomposing heart now rustling with rodents, was surrounded by towering piles of Victorian chests and Edwardian portmanteaux.

  “Just old junk,” my parochial guide explained, having followed my gaze, “left behind by Britishers from the old days - you know, before your Miss Kendal and our Mr Kapoor came here to film their Shakespeare Wallah.”

  Disturbed by nothing but indefinable paw prints and snake slithers, decades of dust lay in thick swathes. Between great latched boxes and crumbling leather trunks tumbled libraries of wormmined books. Galleries of heavy-framed portraits of pukka sahibs and mems, faded sailor-suited sons and ringlet-draped daughters. I wondered who had stored them so safely there, intending to return. I tried to lift the cobwebbed lids, but all were firmly locked, their keys long lost.

  I turned to ask more of the vicar’s wife, but her slender arm now extended not a welcome, but a donations book and ready pen. I forced the joyless smile of a martyred saint and scrounged my pockets for token change. Grandmother’s response would have been far more honest: the recitation of another of her rude rhymes about the clergy involving pigs and potato peelings, and a concluding “Amen!” in a pointed, plagal cadence.

  As I pushed my way back through the gap in the gate, an old shop-board opposite caught my eye. It was Mullick’s Haberdashery, a store that had also played its part in my bedtime stories. I crossed its well-swept threshold and entered a fusty interior, dimly lit and densely packed with old glass cabinets and shelves of faded boxes. I stood still and breathed in a giddy mix of naphthalene and camphor, stale incense and stewing tea.