In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  I understood that although the facts remained immovable, the past was done. My future did not need to be forever a reaction to it. A new and different life was waiting to be lived. All I had to do was make a choice. All I had to do was choose it well.

  We reached the road to find the jeep already waiting to return me to the Plains and to an aeroplane bound for that other, distant life beyond the setting sun. As my rucksack was strapped to the roof, we held each other one last time.

  I climbed in as the engine struggled to life, when Samuel suddenly lunged through the glassless window to press a kiss against my cheek.

  “David-dajoo,” he choked. “Dear dajoo ...”

  A grating of worn brakes, a grinding of ragged gears and he was gone.

  Sobbing.

  Running into the rain.

  ***

  Bindra washed her mouth, her damaged hands and feet.

  She sat facing north, in defiance of the orthodoxy of the Plains that declared such a direction “unclean”, worthy only of defecation. For those of the old tradition, of the mountain Tantras and the jhankri, it was northwards that the fecund goddess sat as she mounted the eternally erect lingam of Shiva. For Bindra, north was the direction of wisdom.

  Bindra lit the single wick she had made from a tag of cotton torn from her hem and dipped in mustard oil. She did her best to draw a simple pattern of interlocked triangles in the dust before her, a pattern her bojudeuta grandmother had tattooed on Bindra’s body when she had been a child. Bindra had been taught to see in these intersecting lines a representation of the underlying reality of union in the universe. She now methodically stained these contours with the vermilion sidur she still carried in her cloth.

  Bindra chanted the mantra of Ganesha as the kindly and benevolent Vighneshvara, elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles. Bindra reminded herself to release all her self-imposed restrictions, her doubts and fears. To find the truth within herself, within all life.

  Bindra breathed out kalapran, the image of “black air” helping her choose to disengage from all anger and ignorance, possessiveness and hatred, vengefulness and greed.

  Bindra honoured her teachers: her mother and her grandmother, her children and her lineage, the jhankris and crows.

  She placed eight grains of rice in the centre of the yantra she had drawn, one for each of the qualities for which she strove: tolerance and self-discipline, generosity and patience, contemplation and honesty, dedicated intention and knowledge.

  Bindra honoured Kubera, eight-toothed mountain Lord of Abundance, by adding the small, round lemon she had been given: symbol of her desire to dispel all fear of death, and thus all fear of life.

  Bindra formed her hands into a fingerless mudra and touched head, mouth, heart, belly, pubis, knees and feet, reminding herself to identify not with the limited and individual, but with the limitless and universal.

  She closed her eyes to repeat the mulamantra of Kali one hundred and eight times, until her body and mind reverberated with the activating syllables of action, discernment, and transformation.

  Then, Bindra sat in stillness.

  She slowly moved to touch her feet, knees, pubis, belly, heart, mouth and head. She extinguished the single flame and brushed the interlocking triangles back to dust. She offered the eight grains of rice to the solitary crow that waited at her door.

  Bindra was ready.

  ***

  As the rains eased, the smudged stamp in my passport was suspiciously scrutinised by the same man who had originally made it. I looked out of the office door to watch the locals venture into puddles and through the torrential gutters of Teesta Bazaar. The narrow street began to ring again with the laughter of children. The melody of Nepali, Lepcha and Tibetan. The loquacious descant of unseen mountain birds.

  When the jeep’s engine refused to restart, I sat at a dripping teastall and waited. I waited until the sun began to dip away to waken Europe and the first stars began to brave benighting skies. I waited until viscous mists crept in, clinging to the ant-hollowed heaps of the little market town, lingering on its sopping shopfronts, skulking on its slippery wooden stairs. Transforming its damp inhabitants into phantasmic ghosts and incorporeal shadows.

  I could barely conceive that my journey across India was over.

  I had come in search of a house in the Hills, and discovered my father. I had determined to prove Grandmother right, and learned an unimagined truth. I had hoped for a mountain grave, and found a family. I had come to fulfil a duty, and found a way to say goodbye.

  Where I had feared alienation, I had been deemed a brother and a son. Where I had anticipated exclusion, I had been embraced, kissed and inordinately loved.

  India had shown me life in all its terrible, glorious extremes. She had laid bare both the utter horror and inexpressible wonder of humanity. And through it all, she had revealed that the meaning of life is not found in affluence or poverty, health or sickness. Neither in fame or obscurity, science or politics. Nor in a belief in one, many or no gods. The true meaning of life is found simply in our relationships with one another.

  A sudden, violent spluttering and excited, oil-stained hands were waving at me in triumph. I climbed back into the front seat and listened to distant thunder and startled dogs defying each other across the valley. I listened to monkeys arguing with the stall-holders, and owlets pronouncing votive offerings to forest gods.

  As mud-encased wheels slowly turned and smiling, unknown faces wished me well, I wept for this most extraordinary of lands and its people who had changed me. I knew then that, until the day I flee this world, mighty India would forever invade my dreams. I knew that she had bound me to her with the very magic in which, as a child, I had believed. That she had captivated me, as I could never have imagined, with the enchantment beyond fairytales in search of which I had dared to come.

  ***

  Bindra had made no attempt to sleep. She had wandered in the night through an unfamiliar terrain.

  She had slipped and fallen. She had cut her arm and twisted her knee.

  Bindra had struggled to climb the embankment to the railway tracks, grimacing through her task at the stench of urine and faeces.

  She had called his name. She had called for Jyothi.

  Bindra had stopped many times to ease her swelling leg. She had sat and sung his song, his “Resam Phiriri”. She had held her breath to listen for his reply.

  She had listened long.

  “Kali Ma,” Bindra had whispered into unresponsive silence, “I know I do not own my children. I know that they are but expressions of this body and this mind, just as all life is an expression of the forces in the universe personified by you . . .”

  She looked towards the promise of daybreak on the horizon, towards the distant east from which she had come. She thought of home. Of hills and forest. A little house on an old burial ground. The loyal love of a man named Kailash. The laughter of sons and daughters.

  “But in my foolishness, I have mislaid them,” she confided to the coming dawn, “when neither my senses nor my breath are more precious to me. When all I long for is to smell their hair, to kiss their cheeks. To cook them daal-bhat, to watch them sleep . . .”

  Bindra slowly slumped to one side and laid her head in the dry dirt. She was panting and exhausted.

  “I have lost my children,” she gasped, mouth muddying with suspended dust. “I have lost my children . . .”

  Bindra closed her eyes and listened for a distant voice, a single footfall.

  She heard nothing but an incessant wheezing in her throat, a tremulous rhythm in her chest.

  When next she opened her eyes, a distant glow had begun to illuminate the haze. Bindra struggled to ease herself up and peered into the gloom.

  Again she called out to Jyothi. Again there was no reply.

 
A sudden fluttering. A solitary caw.

  Bindra looked towards the tracks, to the silhouette of a single crow perched upon the points lever.

  “Oh Kali Ma,” she choked. “What wisdom now?”

  Bindra pulled herself to her feet with difficulty and stood squinting at the bird.

  It sat still and staring.

  Bindra stepped over the first rail and paused. The new light touched the metallic lines that intersected at the junction. A tangle of parallel, silver streaks that led her eyes back to the solitary crow on the upright lever.

  “What, kaag?” she cried aloud towards the bird. “What do you know?”

  She stepped over the second rail and paused again to stare at the junction point. The sky was steadily reddening, illuminating a neat bundle of smooth cloth.

  The pounding of her heart silenced the blowing of an approaching whistle as she crossed the second track.

  Not cloth.

  Skin. Soft, young skin.

  As the crow began to rhythmically bob on the crest of the lever, Bindra began to scream.

  To cry.

  To run.

  To the naked body of a lifeless boy.

  Chapter Twenty

  I had kept my word. For fourteen winters I had returned to India.

  As the years had passed, my months spent in England had steadily decreased, until they had become little more than a simple preparation for the next departure, a chance to earn a salary that would enable me to extend my stay by an extra month or two. I had chosen a professional life of self-employment, despite its insecurities, for it enabled me to return whenever the need to be back amongst loving cousins, mountain peaks and jhankris became too pressing.

  My mother and father had been astonished at the discoveries I had made in those distant Hills. In my enthusiasm for Himalayan adventure, and my teaching in both Europe and India of the arcane yogic tradition of the North Bengal mountains, they had bestowed on me the mantle of “Hindoo Uncle” in the family. There could have been no greater compliment to be paid.

  Indeed, my parents had been so struck by the changes my contact with India had wrought on me, and so delighted by the new intimacy that had flourished in our relationship, that it had awoken in them both the desire and confidence to retrace their own ancestral paths.

  So it was that my father had accompanied me, after half a century away. He had wept at the sight of dahlia beds planted by his mother in the garden of Ketunky. At the fire-scorched floors in the ruins of his servants’ go-downs. At the mimicry of mynahs on the school path to Sanawar. At the moistness of the mist on Monkey Point.

  My mother had accompanied me, to meet her secret family. She had wept at the site of the grave of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Isi, swept into the Teesta by another monsoon landslide. At the embraces of her cousin-sisters and pranams of her cousin-brothers. At “Sundariboju!” in the mouths of the children as they bowed to their “Beautiful Grandmother”.

  My fifteenth winter, and once again I made my way northeastwards, but not alone. Beside me was tall, strong, blue-eyed Ben, my constant companion.

  Ben had visited India in his early twenties, some years before we had met. Horrified by the filth and unwelcoming aggression offered by the country’s overcrowded capital, he had spent four days locked in his hotel room staring out at the dust-dense smog and the gaunt wraiths that scavenged drifts of refuse beyond its gates. As soon as tickets had been changed and his prompt escape from Delhi secured, Ben had slunk back to the airport in an air-conditioned car with darkened windows, vowing never again to set foot on the Subcontinent.

  And yet, when he had pressed to introduce me to his family on a sunny shore of New South Wales, I had agreed on the condition that he in turn meet mine in the jungled foothills of the Eastern Himalaya. He had consented to the adventure, and had discovered not only an entrancing, alien world, but a tribe of new relations eager to adopt him as their own. When it had come time for us to leave the loving arms of aunts and uncles, to commence our journey home, it had been Ben who had silently wept the length of our long descent back to the Plains, and had known that they had changed him.

  Through the years of annual returns, our Kalimpong family had observed us with affectionate knowing. They had seen our friendship deepen to a devotion that surpassed the boundaries of gender, that disregarded the limitations of social expectation. It was they who had encouraged Ben and me to become ritually bound to one another in the old mountain tradition of miteri. We were of one heart, they had said, of one mind. We shared our breath.

  It had been on an auspicious day in the month of Magh, under their attentive direction, that we had tied threads and shared food, knocked heads together and marked each other’s brows with vermilion sidur.

  “When my days are done, my leave-taking hushed in a final silence,” I had recited, “my voice will linger in the autumn light and rain-laden clouds with the message that we had met.”

  It had been Phupu who had suggested that we include Tagore.

  Ben and I had then embraced and exchanged gifts, made vows of lifelong loyalty and deference to each other’s family. As is the custom, we had promised that all support, generosity, kindness and affection would be reciprocated, even if it required the defiance of cultural convention. And finally, we had pledged that when one died the other would oversee the Ritual of Severance and mourn as though he had lost his own brother.

  “Look at our lovely boys!” Cecilia had cheered, as they had all gathered in excitement to place khada silk scarves and saipattrimala marigold-strings around our necks in celebration. “Forevermore, Ben is David’s mit-dajoo and David is Ben’s mit-bhai!” she announced. “Brothers by affection! Already more loving and devoted than a married couple - and now as close as underpants!”

  My own smiles on the day had been broadened yet further by the relief that the family held to the Nepali rather than the Lepcha miteri tradition, which would have required the public binding together of our upstanding manhoods.

  For some years, even before our mit launu ceremony, Ben and I had kept a house in Kalimpong, newly built amongst the old family bungalows on the hillside of Uncle Oscar’s Kalimpong estate. Weatherboard-clad and tin roof-topped, our very own “chummery” had been given as a gift by a loving aunt and uncle, in gratitude for supporting Samuel through university in Sussex, mere miles from where my Grandmother had once scolded Bird for his delinquency and cast her “hoodoos”. It had been the least I could have done. For fourteen years, I had been submerged in love and kindness.

  As Ben and I now passed through Kakariguri, the dry heat of the Plains quickly gave way to the peculiarly soft, sweet coolness that promises mountains. As our jeep skirted potholes on the forest road, the verdant wall again loomed before us. As we crossed the Teesta River, monkey-ravaged teashops began to advertise momos, masala chiya and puri aloo dum.

  As faces and statures swiftly changed from Bengali and Bihari, to Nepali, Lepcha and Tibetan, so the hillsides of towering poinsettia and datura rose ever steeper. Itinerant roti-wallah pastry-men appeared on the roadside with heavy metal trunks of tasty treats balanced on their heads. Khelaune-wallah toy-sellers wandered with vast bamboo lattices of gaudy playthings fanning out from narrow backs.

  And so my bones seemed to sigh with relief, for more than anywhere in all the world, it was here that felt like home.

  The welcome at Kalimpong was as warm and emotional as ever. They never seemed to tire of our annual arrival, nor we of the joyful embraces from cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters, the affectionate ahashis from cousin-uncles and cousin-aunts. Even Jethi-Auntie and Shiva-Uncle had travelled to greet us from their distant home at Patan, in the Kathmandu Valley, and had survived an attack on their bus by Maoist guerrillas.

  Only Phupu was no longer there.

  The last time I had sat beside her bed, she had tenderly recited her beloved
Tagore to me.

  “There is love in each speck of earth and joy in the spread of the sky,” she had sighed. “And now, I care not if I become dust ... for whatever I am I am blessed and blessed is this earth of dear dust...”

  I had never heard her speak again.

  Once our gift-stuffed luggage had ascended the stairs, artfully balanced on sturdy heads, we were brought up to date on all the household gossip. The trauma of Premlal-Uncle’s exploding boils, Cousin Othniel’s snakebite and Barli-Auntie’s dentures-in-the-daal dilemma. The shame of naughty servant Ashok, who had secreted the dainty separates of an unknown ladyfriend beneath his pillow. The tireless giggling of the Tibetan lama’s mistress in his meditation hut behind the chicken coop. The dismissal of gardener Tshering, who had been imprisoned in the lavatory by the cook when caught with muddy digits in the money drawer. And the four-legged pothi hen that had enjoyed a brief life of celebrity before being stolen by a mongoose.

  Whilst their greetings were augmented with the usual cries of “How do our two sons remain so evergreen?”, Ben alone was deemed to look in perfect health. I, as usual, was judged “far too thinny”. Aunts tutted and shook their heads. A concerted programme of fattening-up immediately commenced.

  Thereafter, our days began with breakfasts of steaming masala kolay spiced porridge and well-buttered, twice-cooked toast. Slabs of boiled cake and every aunt’s own style of rice flour sel roti or crumbly phinni. Bowls of fragrant rice-pudding khir, and chunks of gelatinous, chilli-hot pumbi. Papayas from the garden, eaten with lemon juice and ground pepper. Ghui kera butter bananas, skins pierced and soft, creamy flesh sucked straight out of the hole. And finally their finest ginger brew, boiled with fresh pepper and cardamom, or hill-style Ovaltine made with cream-thick milk direct from a local udder.

  All this, of course, was just a preparation for the morning tea, lunch, tiffin and dinner that followed, each a full-blown feast in its own right, for food, affection and respect were indivisible in these mountains. To decline, or not to leave a plate quite clean, remained the cause of great dismay, if not offence.