In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  The old man smiled.

  “He says you have an unfettered mind,” grinned Samuel. “He wishes you to take it as a gift, because you are my dajoo.”

  I was deeply touched, but insisted upon giving him money, as a “donation”. I bent to pass him the rupees with my right hand supported by my left, in an effort to show what I had learnt to be a traditional form of respect, when he took hold of my wrists and pulled me close. The man looked hard into my eyes.

  Samuel intervened and an intense conversation was exchanged between them.

  “David-dajoo,” Samuel said, his face rumpling in perplexity, “he tells me the words on this piece of wood are hidden knowledge, written in the ‘twilight’ language of the Tantras. You know, our mountain tradition. He says this inscription was concealed thirteen hundred years ago, for future generations to discover and interpret - but no one ever has . . .”

  Samuel raised a hand to silence the excited questions on my tongue.

  “But the strangest thing of all,” he continued, “is that he wants me to take you to a place in the mountains even I have never heard of. He says a man is waiting for you there.”

  I was astonished.

  “And what is this place?” I asked.

  “He calls it Lapu basti,” Samuel replied. “The village of Lapu.”

  ***

  It was a hovel. One of at least a hundred shacks built of dismantled packing cases, corrugated iron and plastic sheeting that skulked below the entire length of the railway embankment.

  Bindra shook her head, but the thin man just kept grinning his hematic slit. He pointed to a water pump, at which children were washing. He pointed to a reeking, communal toilet shack and partially buried sewage pipe.

  “Aacha ghar hai!” he exclaimed joyfully, impressing that this was a good place to make a home. He kicked away a crippled chicken and shouted out, “Kavindra!”

  An old woman, bent double and wheezing, peered around a length of sacking that hung across her empty doorframe. The man roughly pulled the woman into the light and smirked, “Dekhiye!” inviting Bindra to “Please look!” with disquieting courtesy.

  Bindra was embarrassed. She bowed to the woman and respectfully called her “grandmother”. She apologised in polite Nepali for the intrusion and asked her forgiveness. The old woman understood her meaning. She smiled kindly to Bindra and struggled to lift her skeletal arms in pranam. She had only one eye and no fingers.

  Jyothi was rummaging in the bag given to them by the Nepali novices at Varanasi. He offered two bananas to the old woman with both his hands, as a sign of deference to her.

  The thin man watched with swelling satisfaction. He lengthened one long finger to stroke the back of Jyothi’s neck.

  Bindra grasped hold of her son with her forearms in instinctive alarm and drew him tightly to her side. The thin man wagged his stiff digit in playful reprimand. He leaned in close with eager, heavy breath, wafting a sickly infusion of sweet spice, armpits and dental decay into Bindra’s face.

  She looked directly into his dry, bloodshot eyes, but held her breath. Bindra would not breathe in this man. She would not let him in to fan the full ferocity of her despair.

  One last bleedy grin and the bright-bleached kurta turned as though to leave.

  Suddenly, a bony arm extended towards Jyothi.

  Before Bindra could respond, callous fingertips twisted hard the boy’s unwary cheek, as the tall, thin man released from his lips a long, scarlet stream of muculent phlegm.

  ***

  It was early morning when Samuel and I mounted a borrowed motorbike, to make a difficult and bumpy ascent up Deolo Hill.

  We broke our journey to pay respects to many-armed goddesses, whose scarlet dresses drew us from the road and into the dappled shade of deep forest. We found tiger-riding Durgas enwrapped by tree roots. Purifying Parvatis standing in the shallows of woodland springs. Long-tongued Kalis marking the entrances to womb-like caves.

  We stopped at an army base that lay tucked into dense pine trees, to ask Sikh and Gurkha guards for directions to Lapu village. They pointed onwards, down into yet another distant valley.

  We eventually drew to a halt near a scattering of neatly painted, wooden kuti cottages. The air was sheer, the mountain peaks lucid. An elderly woman approached, followed closely by two nanny-goats and six uninterested chickens. She expressed no surprise at our sudden appearance, but bowed and confirmed that Lapu basti lay below us, on the lower hillside. She looked intently at me, then spoke quietly to Samuel. His forehead wrinkled.

  “I don’t know what you’ve started, dajoo, but this woman says the man who’s waiting for you lives down there!” he exclaimed, pointing to a narrow track that disappeared into thick jungle.

  The powdery path down the hillside was treacherous, but as we stepped out of the trees, the entire Kanchenjunga range was revealed before us.

  I held my breath.

  It was as though both heart and time were momentarily suspended.

  Ahead of us lay two small, wooden buildings. One a singleroomed hut, the second a simple temple. Both were surrounded by carefully tended flowers. Both were topped by quiet crows. The birds fixed their attention on us as we commenced our approach, only to come to an abrupt halt.

  The man had been so motionless, sitting in the shade of the temple canopy, that neither of us had seen him. He smiled and bowed.

  “Dayagari aunuhos. Ma asa gardaitye,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Please come. I have been expecting you.”

  Samuel turned to me with alarm in his eyes.

  “David-dajoo, I don’t understand why we’re here,” he whispered. “This man is a jhankri!”

  “A what?” I hissed.

  “The people here say the Goddess first formed man from earth and fire, wind and stone, leaf and water. But then she suffered to see the effects of all his self-inflicted afflictions - you know, like jealousy and anger.” Samuel dropped his voice yet further and leant towards me. “So she took a handful of purest snow from the mountain Pundim Chyu, and formed the first jhankri, to heal mankind and oversee his welfare.” He glanced back towards the man. “Well ... this is a jhankri! One of those very same hill shamans!”

  I was enthralled.

  “Look at the marensi mala around his neck!” Samuel exclaimed in an animated mutter. “Little skulls carved from old men’s bones as a necklace. And you see that flute pipe in his lap?” I did. “Do you know what that’s made from?”

  I peered at its long, brown, knobbly length partially bound in cloth. I shrugged and innocently suggested, “Bamboo?”

  “No, dajoo!” Samuel grimaced. “It’s also bone! Cut from a dead man’s forearm!”

  I looked back, into the face of the quiet figure on the temple steps. He smiled warmly and nodded for me to approach.

  “Be careful, dajoo,” Samuel hissed. “The jhankri have great power...”

  I stepped forwards alone and bowed in pranam.

  “Namaskar hajur! Ma David huñ,” I announced in introduction, courageously experimenting with my new Nepali.

  “Namaskar bhai,” he replied warmly, addressing me as “little brother”. “Ma Kushal Magar huñ.”

  ***

  Bindra blamed the heat.

  She had been unable to think. She had been unable to make a decision. Nobody had understood her questions about the mountains or the Aghori Babas. Nobody had seen Jiwan.

  Bindra had told the tall, thin man that she had no money to pay him for the temporary use of the shack, to which she seemed to have inadvertently agreed. He had grinned in understanding. He had shrugged nonchalantly. She had assumed that it had been in lieu of rent that he had taken four boxes of her medicine and the oil for her deeply creviced skin. In return, he had given Jyothi two brightly coloured boiled sweets.

 
The tall, thin man lingered outside the hut for much longer than Bindra felt comfortable. Only when he finally left did they break the candy into pieces with a stone and share them with Kavindra. The old woman talked endlessly to them in her sibilant Hindi, frequently shaking her head and tutting, shaking her head and tutting. Bindra understood a few of her spittle-wet words, but little more.

  As dusk fell and the biting flies began to rise, the sky was soon fluttering with paper kites. Jyothi was excited and ran up the steep railway embankment to watch them spiral and soar in daring dogfight. He clapped his hands and cheered as a small, green kite with glass-impregnated string cut free a bright blue opponent.

  “Stay close!” Bindra called, as she watched Jyothi run along the railway line, laughing, to see if he could catch it. “Stay close where I can see you!”

  The liberation of the chase sustained Jyothi’s legs in their flight far further than he had intended.

  His eyes were so fixed on the twisting, tumbling paper that he did not see the bright-bleached kurta until his face hit hard against the tall, thin, perspiring body to which it clung.

  ***

  “He says this is your time,” Samuel announced, “that you are ready.”

  “Ready for what?” I asked, in puzzlement. “I don’t even know why we’re here.”

  I had removed my shoes and was sitting on the cold stone, before the inner doors of the jhankri’s temple.

  “Well, dajoo, he’s saying you have come for diksha - initiation,” he insisted. “And these jhankri fellows are rarely wrong.”

  “Initiation into what?” I asked with a bemused chuckle.

  Kushal Magar smiled with me. “Thuture Veda,” he replied.

  “The Spoken Knowledge,” translated Samuel. “The Paramparaa - the Tradition.”

  I could not pretend to understand. But sitting there, beneath the fulgent heights of the Kanchenjunga, I knew that I instinctively trusted this quiet, gentle man.

  I did not need to think.

  I smiled and nodded, unperturbed by the fact that I had no knowledge as to what I had agreed.

  ***

  Bindra had collected sufficient twigs and dry leaves to bring to a boil the sandy hydrant water in her blackening canister. She scooped a little rice and lentils from the bag given by the temple novices back in Kashi and added it to the rolling foam.

  She called out for Jyothi to come for his food, then turned to invite Kavindra to share their evening meal of plain daal-bhat.

  Bindra stood quite still.

  Her arms fell limp to her sides.

  Sitting along the edge of the old woman’s hut was a single line of silent crows.

  ***

  The kindly jhankri placed his hands on my head in ahashis, then turned to prepare himself.

  I watched as he donned his white tunic before positioning a headdress stitched with feathers and shells. He reverently opened the red wooden doors of the little shrine, to the accompaniment of an unintelligible stream of rhythmical syllables.

  Kushal Magar turned to sit before me.

  He placed a palm-worn drum in his lap. He unwrapped from its cloth binding an elaborate dagger of ornate metalwork and carved rock-crystal. He drew a circle on the ground and repeated a distinctive, reverberating chant.

  Kushal Magar placed grains of rice upon my tongue and turned to face the altar. He burned handfuls of carefully selected mountain herbs in metal bowls. He lit pungent cones of incense in scorched, clay cups.

  “I’m sorry, dajoo,” Samuel muttered, “but the jhankri is asking that you remove your clothes. Yes, everything.”

  I inhaled a swell of scented smoke and found myself unhesitating. During these many weeks in India, I had learned that Westerners so often asked the wrong question. We asked ‘Why?’ Here they asked ‘Why not?’

  So it was that, in a moment, I sat again before the temple doors, oblivious to the chill of mountain air against my naked skin.

  As Kushal Magar’s palms began to voice the drum’s taut top, I felt the union of earth, sky, mountain, breath. As our eyes drifted closed, as the vibration of his mantras seemed to mingle with my marrow, both he and I began to tremble.

  All sense of time was slipping. All sense of self.

  Had I been sitting before the scarlet temple for hours, days or months? How many moons had waxed and waned? Had I arrived today or was this the place in which I had been born? Was I infant, adolescent or ancient? Was I man or woman? Tree or crow? Earth or sky?

  It was already darkening into dusk when the jhankri indicated for Samuel to lie me flat upon my back. Kushal Magar knelt to pour a viscous liquid into the pit of my throat, chest, belly and the hollows of my groin. He ran vermilion-stained fingertips in long lines across my skin as he mumbled unceasing, vibratory syllables.

  He doused in new chrism a sudden, inexplicable tumescence, then pressed into my forehead and pubis with his thumbs. He dripped into my nostrils a bracing, bitter oil that set alight my sinuses and swelled my tongue. It seemed to cause my face to melt, my head to bloat, my eyes to open wider than the beam of every star.

  Kushal Magar withdrew both hands to touch his heart, then plunged into my abdomen with tightened fists. He threw back his head to pronounce a chant that resounded through my cells. A chant that caused my limbs to shake without restraint.

  My chest began to freeze, as though to mountain ice. My navel to ignite, as though some hidden, residual dock of my infantine umbilicus were now fiercely on fire.

  I stretched down to grasp his wrists.

  I tried to cry out, to restrain him in his rite.

  But my entire body and mind were violently, rhythmically convulsing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was Kavindra who called for the neighbours.

  Word spread quickly. The newly arrived Nepali boy was lost.

  It was already dark when some of the men agreed to search amongst the haphazard rabble of shacks that squatted between the railway embankment and the stinking irrigation gully.

  They soon tired. They would wait until morning. No point now. He would find his way back when he was hungry.

  The women gathered to chatter and stare at the quiet outsider in their midst. One woman gave Bindra an onion; another, a paper twist of turmeric. One woman spared a green chilli; another, a measure of mustard oil and a small, round lemon.

  Bindra was grateful. Really she was.

  But all that she could do was to look beyond the sympathetic shaking of their heads and stare out into the darkness.

  ***

  It had been a full five days before I had stopped trembling.

  My new aunts had scolded Samuel for taking me to a jhankri, “of all people!” These men had great knowledge, they had been unable to deny. However, they considered that any close contact with mountain shamans was always best avoided.

  Samuel had said nothing in his defence. Neither of us spoke of what we had witnessed in the wooden temple at Lapu basti. There was no need. I had experienced something that defied my understanding. All I knew was that a profound and lasting change had been wrought, for which I had no words. An inner freedom for which I would have to wait many years to begin to comprehend.

  Then, suddenly, it was time to leave. My permitted fifteen days in the militarily sensitive district were already spent.

  The family was fearful at my departure. Kalimpong was in monsoon six weeks early. Shutters were closed and market stalls tarpaulined. Every street was a river of sludge and refuse. Trees had fallen, hillsides had slid. The few jeeps and buses that managed to reach the town were hailed as heroes, having slipped and veered their ascent through the watery mists of mountain jungle.

  We all stood outside Uncle Oscar’s house and hugged in the pouring rain. We all gave and received blessings. We all cried and kissed.<
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  “The morning light aches with the pain of parting,” Phupu smiled forlornly, as she placed her hands on my head in ahashis, again quoting her beloved Tagore. She asked me to bear her love to her relatives in England, the family she would never meet. She begged me not to forget my new cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters, my new cousin-aunts and cousin-uncles. She implored me to return quickly, back to their eager arms.

  “We shall never forget you,” Phupu promised. “Please, do not forget us. We shall be waiting.”

  Cecilia stepped forwards and pressed her lips to mine. Through her tears, she said they had all grown to know and love me. That they would not be able to bear my leaving.

  “I will return,” I vowed.

  “I know,” she smiled, looking deeply into my moistening eyes. “And one day, David-bhai, you will write a book that describes this moment. Remember my words. You’ll see . . .”

  Samuel held my hand tightly as we walked up to the road through the sodden bamboo grove. I looked down at the dark fingers he had slipped between mine and caught my breath.

  For a moment, it was Priya.

  I stopped still.

  “It’s too hard to say goodbye,” I mumbled, my hand purposely letting his slip free. I turned away to calm the savage surge that threatened to tear apart my chest and stared hard into the immensity of cloud that plunged before us.

  “There are no goodbyes, dajoo,” Samuel said gently by my side, insistently taking hold of my hand again. “Only gaps between hellos.”

  “Get that from a greeting card?” I winced.

  “Oh no!” he assured me, squeezing my fingers hard. “June page of the Shanti Press calendar!”

  As the breadth of his grin reached my heart, I caught a sudden glimpse of livid mountain peaks. They bobbed by, borne on a swelling silver sea, only to souse straight back into the torrent.

  And in that moment, I understood that life is change. Breath in, breath out. Ebb and flow. Joy and sorrow. And ever the promise of joy again.