Snakes of light fell on the floor. The tamarind tree outside had maps of morning glow on it. India, Australia, China, America… The birds were awake and busy flitting from one country to another. I walked to the window; I saw the ladder resting against the wall. Had Amma climbed down and run away? Suddenly it struck me how closely Snakes and Ladders represented life: ladders to climb up, only to slither down snakes, for every square of joy, a circle of misery: the Golden Ratio. Amma had been swallowed by the Amma snake and landed at the bottom square. There were ladders all around her but she couldn’t see them. I now knew why Amma blamed me. It was as simple as the Snakes and Ladders game: snakes, you hate. Ladders, you love. Tara was the ladder. I was the snake. Amma had no ladder left.
***
I returned to my room with the album. I hid it in my cupboard under a pile of old clothes in the bottom shelf where I had hidden Georgie’s old ledger wrapped in an old towel. I had forgotten about it. Did Elizabeth come back to Georgie and her son? This would answer the more important question: would Amma return? I took the ledger out, lay in bed and started to read from the page where I had stopped:
It was not, of course, to be expected that Elizabeth’s departure was the only matter that disturbed the peace of Victoria Villa. My child wouldn’t stop crying. It was late in the night and the ayah had gone home hours ago. It was the weekend and she didn’t stay overnight. I rocked the cradle and sang the only rhyme that came to my mind:
Goose-a goose-a gander,
Where shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs,
In my lady’s chamber;
There you’ll find a cup of sack
And a race of ginger…
But my child wouldn’t stop bawling. I was exasperated and worn-out. How was I to look after a child who needed its mother above all things? And then a thought struck me. I opened my cupboard and took out the leftover yardage of brown silk. I wrapped it around me and then went to the cradle and picked up my bawling child. The baby nestled its face in the folds of silk and let forth a series of gurgles. Holding the child in the crook of my arm I rushed down to the kitchen, where I pulped a piece of ripe papaya in a small bowl with my free hand.
I continued singing as I fed my child:
Old father Long-Legs
Can’t say his prayers:
Take him by the left leg
And throw him downstairs
***
A flock of brilliantly feathered birds descended from the sky to settle around the pond and under the trees. I was in the garden making a bird out of wood and metal wires. I had shaped the wings, a pointed beak and the claws. I measured each part. Perfect proportions: I was pleased. A gleam of silk caught my attention. The ayah had come to me with the baby in her arms. ‘Good heavens! Why have you dressed him in that?’
‘Lis-bet Memsab stitched it for her,’ the ayah said.
I eyed her closely for some moments, deep in thought. Elizabeth had reached London some months ago. My mother had written to me that Elizabeth had gone completely insane. Poor girl. Then she had run away from home.
The ayah noticed me staring at her and drew her saree over her head and face. Then, as I reassembled my thoughts, my eyes moved to the child in her arms, slowly absorbing what I saw: my son, my daughter: a hermaphrodite – the offspring of two lonely, bored English people. The startling news about the abnormal child had spread all over the town.
The gates clattered and my eyes turned toward the sound. I saw a group of eunuchs clapping their hands and shouting. They had come before; they came every day. They had warned that they would come every day.
‘Give us your child,’ they now shouted from the gates, ‘she belongs to us.’
I put down my tools and the hen I had partly made and stood up tall. I clutched the ayah’s arm and dragged her into the house. Minutes later, I rushed out of house with a rifle in my hands. I aimed my weapon at the eunuchs. ‘Go away. Leave my child alone,’ I shouted, ‘or I’ll shoot every one of you.’ I shot into the air.
‘Why shoot us?’ one of the eunuchs screamed at me. ‘We are not to blame.’ The other eunuchs smacked their hands together and ululated. ‘It’s your fault,’ one of them said. ‘We know Elisbet is your sister. And this is what happens if you do it to your sister.’
I stopped at this point. I turned the page back and read it once more. Elizabeth was Georgie’s sister? John was Jane? What happened to John? I turned the page and read the account dated October 1860:
John was six. His skin was as soft and pink as an English rose, and his smile so sweet. Even though he was dressed in boy’s clothes people mistook him for a girl. I had allowed myself to accept the oddness in my son, though I ceased to understand much of his speech and many of his actions. He seemed to possess clairvoyant powers: he remembered things that had happened a long time ago or knew what would happen in the future. I didn’t believe him but I was afraid to question him for fear I would lose his love. And I loved him so.
On a rainy day he asked me: ‘What is rain?’
‘Water.’
‘What is lake?’
‘Still water.’
‘What is river?’
‘Running water.’
‘What is sea?’
‘Tides in water.’
‘What is ocean?’
‘Biggest water with the sea in it.’
I never left John alone at home with the ayah. He was a wanderer and he frequently stole out of the compound. He returned with a collection of stones, smooth round pebbles. Once he had walked alone for hours on end, until a neighbour had found him at the edge of the sea, crying his heart out.
‘I look the sea in the ocean,’ John told me that night. ‘The sea a bad monster.’
‘Why?’
‘It swallow me. It swallow daddy.’
After that I took John to the Victoria Dyes factory each day. In the skylit room John noted down what he knew in a notebook I had given him. Sometimes he was in the backyard chasing butterflies.
One evening I was at the factory until late. I had to check the consignment of cloth to be shipped. Out of the corner of my eye I saw John playing with the yards of silk on the floor. He had coiled the cloth around him. A ruckus could be heard from the gates so I stepped out into the porch to see what the problem was. A group of eunuchs stood there, clapping their hands. For six long years they had harassed me.
On seeing me they shouted, ‘Give us your son, she belongs to us.’ In a mass, they produced a rumbling, menacing sound, like bees in a swarm.
I shouted at them, my voice gravelly and tired, and then yelled out a command to my workers. With sticks raised in their hands they rushed towards the eunuchs. The eunuchs held up their arms in protest.
‘Our curse is worse than a snakebite,’ one of them said. Then smacking their hands the eunuchs went away.
I stood in the porch watching them until they appeared as two dots at the end of the road. I looked up at the white radiance of an obese moon. Doubts and indecisions swayed me: the John I knew might be my private illusion. The Jane seen by the world might be the real thing. I returned to the dyeing room. My son had disappeared.
I looked for him everywhere in the factory. I looked in the dyeing room, in the storeroom, in the yard at the back. I studied the ledger where I had made entries of the consignment to be shipped that night. I searched in every roll of cloth but I couldn’t find my son. Those bloody eunuchs had taken my son. With Chotoo, a few workers and my rifle I marched to the eunuchs’ settlement near the sea. It was well past nine by then, pitch dark, and the wind wailed from the west. The ground was uneven and slippery with rubbish, and glittered with a coating of rain. I turned towards the huddle of mud houses. Scanty fires burned inside most of them. I smelled meat and fowl roasting, and felt acute hunger.
I shot a round of ammunition into
the night air, which brought the eunuchs scurrying out of their huts. ‘Give me back my son or I’ll shoot each one of you,’ I shouted, and fired more bullets into the air.
‘We don’t have your son,’ the eunuchs shouted back. They looked deep into my eyes; I sensed the honesty in theirs.
Broken and tired, I walked away toward the sea. I stood on the warped planks of the old jetty. The air smelled of fish and salt. I could hear the tides slap and splash, swell and recede, and call out to me. The wind made its sound behind and around me. Like a hound on a trace, I focused all my senses, looked far into the water. My eyes bore me onward, further and further into the sea, because there was nothing else I could do.
***
It was only February and the Northeast trade winds brought, along with early dark clouds, bad news. Fires had broken out near Calcutta. They were believed to be the result of arson. The Hindus and Muslims were fighting again.
I was in my study when Matthew brought me my evening drink. He set the tray on the table and looked up at me. ‘It’s not being safe here, sar,’ Matthew said. ‘You must go back.’
I thought of the English countryside turned emerald by the rain, and yellow and blue flowers showing themselves in the thick grass. I thought of the English birds, throats full of music. I thought of English women’s breasts, full and white. I thought of dark fermented beer and the fragrant smell of apple pie with cloves in it. Surely then, I thought, it was time to leave this incomprehensible land where the Hindus disagreed with their fellow Muslims, and more, the English who ruled them.
Then I thought of my son. ‘I can’t go,’ I said. ‘For John’s sake, I can’t go now.’
Under this, scribbled in pencil, was a note, an afterthought:
(John, my son, I have written these notes for you so you will know exactly what transpired. Please don’t blame me. I was helpless. And if you ever return and if you read these notes you will know that I never left. I loved you so.)
I looked up at the picture of Georgie on the wall; his eyes stared back at me. A muscle twitched at the back of my neck and my stomach turned. Georgie had written these notes for John and I shouldn’t be reading them. Once more I wrapped the ledger in the old towel and put it away.
22
I started to feel nervous, strangely nervous. It wasn’t something I could understand clearly, it was as though my body was too small; I felt hemmed in. I felt my heart convulse: it seemed to have a life of its own that had nothing to do with me. It seemed to me that I had grown shorter. I had lost height and weight. I felt sharp pangs in my limbs, so acute that I could hardly walk or sometimes even stand. I did not know where the pain came from nor why. I was in the clutch of some mystifying thing. But now and then the aches became numb; I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. I felt Tara’s arms in my arms, her hands in my hands, her touch in my touch. My skin stretched and I filled up with her. Her blood felt warm inside me. Until now she had been one half of me and now it was as though I was she. Or she was me. Her feet walked me everywhere and through her eyes I saw everything. She talked to me; she told me what to think, what to do and how to do it; helplessly, I surrendered to her. Honestly therefore, I didn’t know if it was Tara who decided to talk to Appa or if it was me.
Appa returned home and went straight to his study. Patti was in the kitchen making coffee. Moments later, I found myself at the study door. Everything in the room appeared solid and foreboding. On the desk was a heap of books, leatherbound, all gloomy and dark. The room was dark too. Only one light behind Appa spread a steady glow that illuminated the slight bald patch on his head and a portion of the paper he was reading. An elliptical shadow cast by his head fell onto the rest of the paper. He looked old.
I pushed my head against the door and Tara wrapped her arms around my body. I shook with convulsions of fear, anger, loneliness and the frustration of not knowing what was wrong with me. Appa turned and looked at me. I walked to the chair and sank in it. I felt a curious tossing in my stomach. I stared gloomily at my feet. I rotated one foot round and round and then Tara rotated the other.
‘What’s wrong, Siva?’
‘I think I am Tara,’ I said.
A deep hurt showed on Appa’s face. His eyelids trembled with the sorry in his eyes. He walked around the desk, held my arms and lifted me from the chair and put both his arms around me. ‘You’re Siva, kanna.’ His hands trembled as he drew me closer to him.
‘I am Tara,’ Tara said, her voice shrill and sharp.
Appa was a man whose life had been filled with the small activities of mosquitoes. They were his world. He would not have known that everything around him could break down, that he himself would break down. He did.
Patti stepped into the room with a tumbler of coffee. ‘Why are you crying Raman?’ she asked and then she looked at me. ‘Is something wrong with Siva?’
Appa raised his hand to his eyes and closed them with his thumb and forefinger to stop his tears. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You usually know everything.’
***
The waiting room of Dr Kuruvilla’s clinic was crowded and it was not any different from the railway platform. Entire families had accompanied their sick ones and they talked incessantly. The older men talked about politics and the problems of the country; each had different solutions. Middleaged men discussed the prices of land and petrol, and cures for balding. Old women talked about arthritis, and the cost of green chillies and onions – the poor man’s staple food, and how cheap they were in their younger days. Young girls giggled over gossip of their favourite film stars. Some stood around the water cooler, filling small steel tumblers with cold water and drinking it with unexpected thirst. The water was free. My throat was dry and my lips stuck together.
The two tubelights on the wall flickered; clockticking, they flickered like the eyes of those people who waited: uncles, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, perhaps a postman or bankclerk, a businessman. A priest, a lame man, a man with a golden tooth, an old man with an old heart, a woman with a baby in her womb. I turned my head with a jerk, sourness in my mouth, and a dull pain in my chest. I felt empty, like a carcass into which I would crawl again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after. I waited.
Nearly an hour later Appa and I walked into the consulting room and sat down in front of the doctor. Black hair bristled up on one side of his head, which was otherwise full of grey. ‘So who is the patient?’ the doctor asked smiling. The doctor studied me. ‘He’s half his size.’ He tilted his head and returned Appa’s stare. ‘What’s the problem with him?’
‘His mother disappeared three months ago.’
‘I heard about it. I am sorry. It’s wholly understandable your son feels terrible about this.’
‘This is not all.’ Appa looked at the doctor with a pitiful desperation. ‘He thinks he is Tara, his twin sister who died at birth.’
The doctor leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands in front of him. He shook his head to and fro. ‘Wholly understandable.’ His eyes softened a little as he surveyed me. He leaned towards Appa. ‘I would like to talk to your son alone,’ he said. ‘Please wait outside Mr Iyer.’
‘Don’t be afraid, son. Talk to me,’ the doctor said when Appa had left the room. ‘Tell me everything. Tell me your thoughts, your memories, your dreams, everything.’
My whole world shrivelled into a bookroom of memories. Thoughts moved in my brain, round and round, deep in all the shelves. When I spoke I couldn’t stop; words, memories, voices spewed out of my mouth. I babbled on and on incoherently. The doctor’s eyes grew small and intense as he listened to me.
‘Wholly incredible.’ The doctor stood up and pulled at the waistband of his trousers. He removed his spectacles, blew on the lenses, wiped them with a handkerchief, and then put them on. He walked to the door; opening it slightly he asked Appa to step
in. The doctor went back to his chair and Appa sat down in the chair he had recently vacated. I stared out of the window. The stars had come out in the sky. Then I saw one fall. Appa had told me that the falling star was not a star falling but tiny bits of dust and rocks that left a streak of light across the sky. But Patti had told me that it was a sign. When a person saw a falling star it meant he had reached his ultimate destiny.
Appa rested his hands on the table and leaned towards the doctor. ‘What’s wrong with my son?’
The doctor coughed into his fist and I turned to him. He attempted to smile but only one half of his mouth curved into an arc. There was a glint of triumph in his eyes.
‘It’s the perfect case of the Twinless Twin,’ the doctor said, a frown coming to his face. ‘Let me explain. When two embryos develop together in the womb, they have a vague sense of one another, even in the earliest weeks of pregnancy. When a twin dies its imprint lies somewhere in the surviving twin’s memory and it expresses itself in a coded message that the twins once shared in the womb. So the surviving twin develops dual personalities: one that he has inherited, and the other, his own. Some surviving twins feel guilt that they have survived and feel the need to live for two and do the things their dead twin cannot.’ The doctor’s eyes rested on me. The doctor fiddled with the oversized ring on his finger. It had a ruby the size of a one–rupee coin, the kind that is worn to ward off evil. ‘It is wholly possible that Siva feels displaced,’ the doctor said. ‘He may also feel he is less than and not as important or special as his dead twin. And this leads to a lot of psychological problems. It is wholly understandable. But what I can’t understand is the matter about George Gibbs. Siva talks of him as though he is his intimate friend. He seems to know a lot about him and his sister Elizabeth.’
IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE Page 21