In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  Thus every morning my waistline was scrutinised. And, as the days passed, the auntly tuts were gradually replaced by the cooing of increasingly satisfied approval.

  ***

  Bindra had grown accustomed to the frequent cramps of hunger. They had become as ordinary as the biting insects that tumbled in callous clouds from the forest canopy with cruel mouth-parts primed. As common as the kicks and curses when she ventured beyond the charitable compound. As frequent as the sling-shot stones when she scavenged discarded vegetables in back alleys of the old bazaar.

  The sparse monthly ration of flour, lentils, mustard oil, diluted milk and stale spices rarely lasted far beyond two weeks. But she was grateful. Still after all these years, it was a miracle to her that she should be given food without money or labour.

  For her part, all she had to do was to keep the pot of vermilion sidur hidden beneath her blanket. The benevolent Christians would take it if they knew she defied their rules and practised puja after dark.

  And yet, to be here, in the charity-funded colony for those disfigured and segregated by leprosy, was better than the years that she had toiled in the tarring gangs, in searing sun, devoid of shade. Better than the endless, open roads that cut their linear incisions across the harsh invariability of the Plains.

  To be here was better than the burning pitch on insensate hands and feet, for which her fellow “lepers” had been specifically employed. Better than the star-bright nights of stinking, savage men who had sealed her mouth and forced her open, in the indifferent darkness of their roadside camp.

  ***

  Fourteen winters with the jhankri at Lapu basti.

  Puja and sadhana, ritual and practice.

  Fourteen winters of the jhankri’s teaching, exploring beyond the limitations of the mind. Beyond the limitations of the ego.

  And then the last initiation.

  Liberty to enter the jhankri’s consecrated space, to circumambulate the hidden lingam. The drawing of the secret yantra, to represent the Goddess whose name is never spoken. The concluding covering of the head and the whispering of truths.

  And then: bestowal of the final mantra.

  “My teaching is done,” Kushal Magar had smiled, to my dismay. “Listen with open ears. Approach the world with an unfettered mind. I have imparted all my learning,” he revealed. “So go now. Learn wisdom.”

  ***

  Bindra’s smoke-filled hut sparkled with the voices of children. She fed one more green twig to the struggling flame and breathed onto it in optimistic encouragement.

  “Burn a little brighter,” she begged the listless fire. “Just enough to bring bubbles to the water.”

  “Mataji,” the eldest of the girls courteously addressed Bindra in Hindi, “Respected Mother, take Baby for your cooking. She’ll burn nicely.”

  Bindra chuckled. “Not today, my sweet Aarti. You can keep her until tomorrow,” she promised. “Now hold her carefully and don’t let her pretty dress fall.”

  Aarti hugged the stick doll back to her chest. Both Dipika and Poojita tried to help their elder sister wrap the rag a little tighter around its narrow, bark body.

  “Now, will Baby want to share our daal-chawal tonight?” Bindra asked, maintaining the game as she dropped a frugal fistful of lentils and rice into simmering scum.

  “She can have mine,” offered Poojita without concern. She had often seen Bindra give up her share of food to ensure that she and her sisters were assured nourishment before they slept.

  “You’re a good, kind girl,” Bindra smiled, shuffling along the dirt floor to rest against the mud-sealed walls. “But I think there’ll be enough for all of us today.”

  She winced as she leant back to watch the three girls play Mother to their single, shared, treasured length of twig. She shuffled and winced again, struggling to find any relief from the persistent discomfort in her spine and hips. Often, it kept her from hobbling further than the stinking riverbank. Often, it prevented her from knowing any depth of sleep.

  Bindra drew up her knees to rest her head forwards on her forearms. She closed her eyes for a moment and smiled for the sound of children in her home. She smiled for the memory of a bamboo hut on an abandoned burial ground. For a Shakti Tree, a sociable goat and an arid vegetable patch of sharp stones and dark bones. She smiled for a family whose names still stole her breath in their recollection.

  “Mataji,” Aarti interrupted, “if Baby sleeps, then she won’t be hungry for daal-chawal. So shall we sing for her?”

  Bindra chuckled again. It was this playful make-believe that had illuminated an impenetrable darkness. It was these innocent smiles that had delivered her from a dim twilight of confused thought and action from which she had once thought she would never be able to return.

  There had been so many long years before these new games and new laughter. There had been so many long years out on the scorched roadways and in the tarring camps, when only the gift of hand-rolled balls of cremation ash mixed with buffalo ghiu, given by the jhankri all those years before at Lapu basti, had saved her.

  “Throw one ball into fire for every bija, every seed of sound, of the mantra,” Kushal Magar had instructed long ago, in the shadow of the Kanchenjunga. “Throw one ball into fire when you believe you have no more choices,” he had directed, in that other place, that other life.

  Bindra had often clutched at the greasy little bag when despair had threatened to steal away her heart and mind. Yet still the bag remained tied closed, for even when reason had seemed to have been snatched from her, Bindra had found she always had choices. Choices even when Jyothi had returned to fire and earth, plant and water, air and sky.

  The jhankri’s gift had taught her that however isolated, however lost within herself, she alone was responsible for the ways in which she chose to respond to the natural ebb and flow of her life. She alone was the source of either her dark introversion and distress, or her bright clarity and peace.

  Of course the jhankri had known it when he had given her the little bag of hand-rolled balls. This had been the very wisdom he had intended her to learn.

  “So jao. Go to sleep,” Aarti cooed, rocking the stick doll tenderly in her arms.

  Bindra closed her eyes again and leant a heavy head against the soft, mud wall. She smiled as the biting insects, the burning spine and even the aching memories began to sweeten, as Aarti, Poojita and Dipika sang to their communal Baby the one song that Bindra had taught them in her own, long-silenced, mountain tongue:

  “Resam phiriri, resam phiriri udera jauki darama bhanjyang, resam phiriri . . .”

  ***

  Clad in thermals, enrobed in woven shawls and topped with woollen topis we may have been, yet still Ben and I shivered in the deep darkness of Kalimpong’s persistent power cuts. Still we shuddered at the murdered-infant howling of approaching jackals, and tried to ignore the spreading numbness in our toes.

  And yet, now that we had once again to say goodbye, I knew that I would miss the arrival of the milk every morning, carried warm in its churn by the gharwalni milk-woman, who glimmered with ear discs, coin necklace and nose-ring. The family dhurzi tailor, who, before lunch, could whip up a shirt with cut-away collar and double-cuff sleeves. The misteri carpenter, who sat on the lawn to craft a new bedstead with nothing more than handmade tools and a handsome apprentice. The naw-malissgarney barber-masseur, who would squat on the verandah to whisk off fresh whiskers with cutthroat blade, and unknot tired shoulders with talented thumbs. The Bengali dhunia who thrummed cotton on his dhanu bow to re-plump old mattresses and winter quilts, whilst covering the garden in a fine, sneeze-inducing snow.

  I would miss the group treading of clothes on washing day, accompanied by song, as though the task were a joyful, communal dance. And then the subsequent watching of the ants as they swarmed over wet garments to eat the remaining so
ap, which left them so intoxicated that they would curl up to thrill at who knows what sud-induced dreams.

  I would miss the blissful hours spent pottering in the garden and bamboo thickets, playing games with the children and teaching the Tibetan guard dogs to fetch us sticks. I would miss my cousin-uncles’ patient daily lessons in Nepali irregular verbs and Bengali basics, and my cousin-aunts’ instructions in the infinite medicinal uses of local flora, soil and sap.

  But perhaps most of all, I would miss the many hours of chat and tales at the kitchen table. The laughter and unspoken understandings in every interaction.

  It was never easy to say goodbye.

  However, this year, we were not returning to the blossoming of an English spring. Instead, Ben and I were travelling westwards, across the Plains, to a charitable compound in a distant slum, into which those affected by leprosy had been gathered from the district’s streets. I had read of the place ten years before in a Delhi newspaper. Its name had caught my eye as it stood outside the town to which, many years before, Priya had been sent for schooling. Even before I had reached the end of the article, I had vowed that, one day, I would offer myself to these people who had been rejected, ostracised and abandoned for no other reason than the stigma of a disease. People whose desperate and unrelenting plight had affected me more than any other in all my contact with India. This new journey was the consummation of a decade of determination.

  Uncles were horrified. Four months in slums? Four months so far away, with Plains-men? With Hindi-speakers? With leprosy?

  Aunts despaired. Where would we sleep? Who would wash our clothes? Who would understand our Hill Nepali? And, most troubling of all, who would cook our food?

  Fourteen winters spent in India, yet still they gave us lessons in survival. Do not drink the water. Do not take tea from roadside stalls. Beware bagala-mara pickpockets and dakait bandits. Avoid orthodox Bahun priests and bicho scorpions.

  “And sons, wherever you are, whatever you do,” they begged, “keep well away from policemen and politicians!”

  ***

  Stillness in the colony. An apprehensive anticipation, a fearful quiet.

  It was Friday. Doctor Dunduka was coming.

  Bindra swept the swathes of biting bugs from her doorway with a loose brush of dried grass, held clasped between her wrists. She paused to tensely arch her tormented back and called out in Hindi, “Jasoda-didi, aap thik ho aaj? You alright today?”

  A lethargic shuffle and a cloth-bound head peered out from the shadows of the opposite hut. Sunken eyes struggled briefly in the morning sunlight, then listlessly withdrew, back into the gloom.

  “Didi,” Bindra tried again, “you not well?”

  There was no reply.

  Bindra shuffled the few steps to Jasoda’s door. She eased herself down with effort and cautiously leant against the splintered doorframe.

  “I’m boiling tulsi leaves, sister,” she offered gently, brushing the biting bugs away from her bare feet with the hem of her shawl. “Good for your fever.”

  Jasoda gave a painful, choking cough in reply. She drew close to Bindra’s side, curving her twisted spine against the brightness of the day.

  “Not well today, bhabhi,” she wheezed in apology, mistakenly addressing Bindra as “sister-in-law” in her muddled mind. “My feet have brought such bukhar fever!”

  Bindra guided Jasoda to turn towards her, to lengthen her thin flaking shins, to brave the sunlight. The few toes she had retained were little more than shrivelled, oozing stumps. The ulcers on her deeply creviced soles, foul. The bone beneath, infected.

  “Oh sister!” Bindra grimaced, biting her extended tongue. “In the Hills, I could have done so much to help you. We have good plants there. We have putkako maha, treasured insect honey that cures all wounds.”

  She blew away the flies from Jasoda’s feet. She swept away the new flurry of biting bugs that had drifted from the saal trees.

  “We must protect your sores, sister,” she insisted. “We must keep them covered. But first, tulsi tea for the fever.”

  As Bindra struggled to stand again, a strident voice drew their attention down the alleyway.

  “Quick, sister!” Jasoda cried in whisper. “Doctor Dunduka has come! Do not let him see you help me! You know his temper! You know what he can do!”

  Bindra returned to her doorway. By the time she had swept away the bugs and eased herself back to the newly infested ground, he was there. Standing at a carefully judged, safe distance. Unblinking eyes monstrously magnified by heavy-rimmed spectacles.

  “Namaste Daktar-ji!” Jasoda muttered with required respect.

  Bindra touched hands to heart, but said nothing.

  “Your medicine!” he called out with contempt, tossing toward them two plastic bags heavy with a colourful mix of pills. Jasoda offered thanks, but wanted him to know that the fever was growing much worse, that the holes in her feet were growing ever deeper.

  “Then take a double dose, ungrateful hag!” he spat defensively. “A good handful might even silence your miserable complaining for good!”

  Bindra stayed silent. She took nothing given by Doctor Dunduka. She knew he despised them. She knew he improved on his government salary by dealing in black-market tablets. She had watched too many in the colony die quickly and violently after a measure of his illegal medicine.

  Every bag disdainfully thrown at her each week Bindra kept hidden in her bedding. And after dark, when the children buried them for her in the forest, she always paused to ask forgiveness of the Punyajana in the trees.

  Bindra was comforted that the Good People also knew Doctor Dunduka was distributing poison.

  ***

  Dawn was dissipating dense fog.

  I peered through the grimy carriage window at vast sugar-cane plantations and enticing jungle, wild with boar, shimmering with peacock. I peered at children bursting from thatched huts to dance at the boisterous rhythm of the passing clickety-clack.

  I had never tired of rail travel in India, even though for eight hours I had lain wide awake as the men in the lower bunks had snored like congested trufflers. One had repeatedly shaken the entire carriage with his sudden, chilling screams, until I had given up all hope of slumber. Instead, I had counted the cockroaches scuttling through the empty rivet holes on the rusting ceiling, and wondered at the demons by which my companion’s dreams were haunted.

  The last station at which we were to change trains already heaved with life, even at four o’clock in the morning.

  Amongst cows, dogs, rats and crows, vociferous chai-and chatwallahs competed for custom with many busy book and fruit stalls balanced on buckled wheels. Scarlet-clad porters strained beneath battered trunks and over-stuffed portmanteaux, between heavyhipped matajis, who force-fed their sleepy broods with dum aloo and buttery paranthas from burnished towers of tiffin tins. Dignified tribals, with arms encased in dowry gold, nervously eyed mighty Pashtuns swathed in mountain wool. Enrobed Punjabi sadars, each with pagri turban, elaborate whiskers and splendid nose, swilled teeth at taps with old-time Congress-wallahs bearing Gandhi topi caps, unbleached “homespun” and defiant chins.

  And between them all, steely-eyed urchins with Struwwelpeter hair and scabby, sidur-reddened cheeks cartwheeled and back-flipped in hope of alms from the indifferent throngs.

  For two days we had travelled from Kalimpong to reach our final destination, which lay embedded in an overbuilt valley beneath dry and rocky hills, hard up against the border with Nepal. The nearest town proved a filthy, dreary place with virtually all remnants of its history eradicated. A crumbling colonial bungalow in abandoned, squatter-ravaged gardens. An exuberant Mughal façade, now disintegrating and defaced, in a back street of the bazaar. A refined and elegant past reduced to little more than mere hints of long-lost wonder.

  I was astonished t
o think that Priya had once been here, walking through this dust in pleated grey and navy blue. Satchel full of Shakespeare, Sassoon and Sukanta Bhattacharya.

  “I threw away my heart in the world; you took it up,” I smiled at her memory. “I sought for joy and gathered sorrow, you gave me sorrow and I found joy,” I recited in gratitude for the way of loving that she had taught me.

  The charitable colony for leprosy sufferers in which we were to work lay far to the north of the town, hard up against the remaining forest’s darkness. It had once been entirely isolated within dense saal trees, but over the years many hundreds affected by disfiguring disease had gathered outside the official boundary. All waited in hope of a place within, for a convenient demise.

  Over the years, these invading squatters had systematically cleared the once fertile land. Where there had been thorny dhaak, tesu and babool, stealthy leopard and shy musk deer, a noisy rabble of squalid homes now engulfed the arid ground. Where a fish-filled mountain river had gushed, a choked and viscous public drain now stagnated.

  The official colony was a cluster of decades-old block buildings and wooden huts, which lay wedged between slum and hillside trees. The quarters in which Ben and I were to spend four months stood at the perimeter of the community. The two rooms were mouldering, dirty and infested. Upon arrival, we spent our first hours scrubbing and cleaning.

  “You’re sure we won’t catch anything too nasty?” Ben coughed through mite-dense dust that now billowed from the open door.

  “Don’t worry!” I assured him, as we coaxed dark, mucus-like growths from concrete floors, knowing exactly to what he referred. “Most of us are born with a resistance to the leprosy bacillus. And even if we did catch it - which would be highly unlikely as our immune systems are in such good nick - we could be easily cured before it did us any lasting damage.”

  Ben nodded and chuckled at his enduring disquiet. He seemed content with my reply, as we swept crab-pincered spiders from hidden lairs. Yet still I wondered whether I had done a selfish thing to ask of him this sacrifice of precious savings, time and all the comforts to which we were so casually accustomed.