“Well, same here. I’m glad it worked out.”
Actually, I hadn’t been bothered by the sudden railway strike that had grounded all the trains at Salem’s famous junction. Perhaps it’s always the natives who are thrown by sudden local events; the stranger has fewer illusions. I’d expected to reach Namakkal by four in the morning, relax, get some breakfast, maybe even check out its famous rock temple, where the mathematical genius Ramanujan had supposedly communed with the Goddess Namagiri. I’d wanted to check out this Goddess who was into elliptic integrals and partition functions. I’d planned to hire a taxi to Dindigul later in the morning. When I heard about the strike, I’d figured, no big deal, find a local hotel, get a drink, hunker down for the night, travel onwards the next day.
“Oh, I knew it would work out,” said Mrs D’Mello, smiling. “The Good Lord helps those in need. He sent you to us, Gabriel.”
“Oh, it’s not God,” said Francesca, in that knowing, notes-to-self tone she used. She tapped her nose. Twice.
Poor girl. I was beginning to see why Mrs D’Mello might have become religious. Still, the God bit made me uncomfortable. I was an evangelical atheist, compelled by my faith to spread disbelief.
Besides, Francesca was right. God had nothing to do with it. Mrs D’Mello had looked totally lost at Salem railway station. Francesca was a pretty twenty-year-old, but a pretty twenty-year-old who clearly had something wrong with her, and there’d been something predatory in the way the just-standing-here types were looking at her. The panic on Mrs D’Mello’s face had been impossible to ignore. But as I approached, Francesca folded her arms and turned her back to me. It had almost made me change my mind, walk past them.
However, Mrs D’Mello had been approachable. Perhaps over-approachable. Mrs D’Mello seemed to lack the blanket of suspicion with which most Indian women, quite understandably, seemed to wrap themselves.
“Have you made arrangements to stay once you get to the temple?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. There’s a small guest house. My sister’s husband knows the local collector. Arrangements have been made. What about you, Gabriel?”
Mrs D’Mello obviously liked saying my name. I already knew quite a bit about her. The D’Mellos now lived in Mumbai, but had migrated from Nevalim in Goa. They had family all over the place. She was proud of her heritage, and far from resenting Portuguese colonialism, she seemed to instinctively understand it had given her the gift, perhaps accidentally, of setting her apart in a country where standing apart was how one belonged to the main.
“Info dump,” Francesca had muttered, as her mother outlined a wonderfully complex story of relatives, migrations, family ups and downs.
Francesca was a tall slim girl with a pale face that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Victorian sanatorium or in some ruined white mansion overgrown with weeds. She had inherited her mother’s hazel eyes, a light green with an admixture of brown. She seemed out of it all, sometimes jerking her head, sharply, once, twice, and at other times standing distracted, head tilted, as if listening.
“I’ll be staying with the temple manager,” I said. “One of the descendants of the original Muthuswamy. My friend Venkat–”
“You know the manager of the temple!” Mrs D’Mello’s hazel eyes gleamed in the car’s dimly lit interior. “Gabriel, can you do us one more huge favor and introduce us? It’ll mean so much to me and Francesca. There’ll probably be lots of people, and I am very worried about not getting enough time at the temple. Oh, dear goodness, you truly are a godsend.”
“Sure, I’ll do what I can. Not a problem. Must warn you though. It’s my friend Doctor Venkateswaran who knows him personally, not me. So I’m not sure how much I can help. How long do you plan to stay there?”
“Two weeks.”
“Only?” I was a bit surprised.
Most people stayed for six weeks. Venkat’s paper had mentioned some stayed for as long as a year or more. Legend had it that towards the end of his life, Muthuswamy, more or less a nobody in the village, had been able to cure the mentally ill merely through his touch. True or false? It didn’t matter. Muthuswamy had died, a temple had been built over his grave, and the legend had become fact.
“We first want to see the conditions,” said Mrs D’Mello, and though she smiled, her darting eyes revealed her anxiety. “Who knows? Francesca also has to like the temple.”
“There is no Francesca,” said Francesca.
Mrs D’Mello smiled, shifted her head slightly to block her daughter’s face.
“Venkat told me the place has helped a lot of people over the years.” It was awkward to pretend Francesca wasn’t there. “But there shouldn’t be much of a crowd at the temple. In three months, he observed about thirty visitors. It’s not like the Mehandipur Balaji Temple in Rajasthan.”
“Oh, we went there.” Mrs D’Mello shuddered. “The place is a disgusting shame. Gutters overflowing, people treated like cattle, full of crazy people. I told Francesca, forget it, let’s go back to the hotel, this is not for us. I was so upset. Now I see why it didn’t work out. We were meant to meet you.”
“I don’t know about that. But I’m glad we met.” I once again marveled at the ecumenical nature of Indian belief. Mrs D’Mello saw nothing paradoxical about relying on a Hindu temple to cure her mentally-disturbed daughter. “It’s a nice coincidence.”
“Nothing nice about it,” muttered Francesca. “Stay tuned, buddy boy.”
As Mrs D’Mello put a warning hand on her daughter’s arm, Mani suddenly pulled over to the side of the road.
“What’s the matter, Mani?” I asked, in Tamil. Then noticing Francesca’s inexplicable terror, I added, “Such sudden stops, please consider there are ladies in the car.”
Mani didn’t bother to reply. He got out, went around the front of the car, opened the passenger seat. Tug, check, adjust padding, close door. There was something obsessive, even crazed, about the way he worried about the TV. When he’d agreed to take us to Dindigul, he’d been really taking the damn TV to Dindigul.
Mani got back in and started the engine.
“Mani, I don’t think you take such good care of your child even,” I joked, again in Tamil.
Mani half-turned his head, and I caught the gleam of a gap-toothed smile. “Sir, all this is to take care of my child only. From where did you learn such pure Tamil?”
From Kusum. But I didn’t want to discuss my wife. It would merely reinforce the fact I wouldn’t get to see her for another three, maybe four, months.
“A previous life, from where else, Mani? Now tell me, why this comedy with the wretched TV?”
“Aiyyo, not a comedy sir, a complete tragedy. My whole life is a tragedy.” Mani launched into a Father India saga, complete with floods, bandits, item numbers, countless taxi rides, two deeply cherished daughters. The younger daughter had fallen ill, the older daughter’s in-laws had paid for her care, she’d died nonetheless, and now the in-laws wanted their money back. Or a large Samsung LED TV. They’d sent the older sister back to demonstrate their seriousness. Seven months had passed, she had to be sent back, Mani was desperate to send his daughter back before things really spun out of control.
Once, such a story would have made me furious. But after twenty years as an economist, after twelve years with Kusum, I had become a little smarter. Mani’s actual life probably didn’t bear much resemblance to the story. Indians used stories to hide themselves. Every living inch of this world was barnacled with stories. The stories said one thing, meant another.
The legend of the Goddess Namagiri was a case in point. The mathematician Ramanujan may have credited her for his brilliant intuitive leaps, but in myth, she was wedded to Vishnu’s fourth incarnation, Narasimha, the Lion That Devours All Categories, also Indian logic’s traditional term for extreme skepticism.
At one point, as Mani described his daughter’s death, Francesca shook with silent laughter. It was unlikely she was understanding a word of Mani’s Tamil, so it had to be t
he driver’s dramatic inflections and gestures. I decided to ignore it. But Mrs D’Mello didn’t. With an almost absent-minded motion, she drew her daughter’s head downwards to rest against her shoulder. Francesca quietly acquiesced. The Madonna pose did something funny to my heart.
I wished I had recorded Mani’s story. My aching body, the Indica’s cramped interior, the alert hazel eyes of the anxious woman next to me, the pale repose of her troubled daughter, the unexpectedly smooth road, the indifferent darkness streaming by our mobile campfire of a billion years: the only witness of this moment would be my unreliable memory.
“Liar,” whispered Francesca, her eyes still closed.
“What is the driver saying?” asked Mrs D’Mello, anxiously. “Does he want more money? Is there a problem?”
“No, no. He was telling me about his daughter.” I gave in and sank back into my seat. My thigh pressed solidly, indecently, against Mrs De’Mello’s thigh, but I simply couldn’t care anymore. “Sorry, Mrs D’Mello.”
She patted my hand. “What are you doing here, Gabriel?”
“Info dump. Dimensionalize character.”
I’d become used to Francesca’s little outbursts. And I was dimly beginning to understand the pulsing, black, tentacled nightmare in which she lived.
“I’m here for a project. I do a lot of contract work for World Bank. I’m an economist. I’m looking at community-based palliative care. My wife, Kusum, she makes documentaries. Educational, inspirational stuff. Kind of a mix between TED talks for villagers and short movies. She was making a documentary and I got interested in the topic. I have a team in Bangalore, we’re studying palliative care, and we’re excited because we think it’s going to be at least as big as microfinancing. Mental health care” – I didn’t glance at Francesca – “doesn’t scale well, so it’s costly, at least in the US, and when I read Venkat’s paper on the Muthuswamy temple, I thought I’d come check it out and see if we should set up a data collection unit here. So that’s why I’m here.”
After I’d finished, a small silence filled the cab. It was one of the reasons I resisted explanations of what my wife and I did. Our project-driven lives offered little purchase for those with real careers. But even if Mrs D’Mello had nothing to say, Francesca did.
“Your wife,” she said, hesitantly, “Kusum, she’s a movie director?”
Mrs D’Mello’s face broke into a delighted smile. I took it to mean that by speaking to me directly, Francesca had just paid me a huge compliment.
“Kusum’s a lot of things. She works with small budgets, so she’s whatever she needs to be.” I laughed, remembering. “Once, she even roped me in to act.”
“She made you act?”
“Yes.”
“In a movie?”
“Well, an educational movie.” I couldn’t see what Francesca was getting at.
“It had a story?”
“Oh, yes.” I smiled. “I played an evil western capitalist. British, of course. She made me sport these ginormous sideburns and say things in a villainous Hindi. My Hindi is pretty good, actually.”
“Was there a Gabriel the Economist in that world?”
“Pardon?”
“In the story world, was there an economist dude called Gabriel who’s into saving brown people?”
“Francesca!” Mrs D’Mello managed to smile apologetically and bark at her daughter at the same time.
“No, it’s all right. It’s a good question. You’re asking about metafiction, aren’t you Francesca? I’m afraid it was just a straightforward morality play. And I wasn’t trying to save brown people. Quite the opposite. But my evil plans are foiled by plucky villagers led by a brave maiden who’d studied economics and played by none other than my lovely wife. Kusum made me gnash my teeth at the end. It’s harder than you’d think.”
“So there’s no Gabriel the economist?”
“Nope. It wasn’t relevant.”
“Oh, but it is. Your wife played an economist? If Gabriel the economist isn’t there, it means all the papers which cite your work aren’t there. Ditto for the economists who wrote those papers. Do you think Adam Smith would exist in that world? So how can your wife play an economist? The Butterfly Effect, have you seen it?”
I waggled my hand. “Interesting point. But not necessarily. In an alternate world–”
“Have you seen the movie?”
“Butterfly Effect? No. Ashton Kutcher is in it, right?”
“No. Some guy who looks just like Ashton Kutcher. Weird thing is, no one tells him, oh, my god, you look exactly like the famous actor Ashton Kutcher. There are no Ashton Kutcher fans in that movie. Or take the Silence of the Lambs. I watched it thrice. I think I watched it thrice. I am told to say I think I watched it thrice.” She jerked her head, twice, as if shaking off a restraining hand. Then she resumed. “No one tells Hannibal Lecter, man, you look just like the actor Anthony Hopkins. The FBI doesn’t think that’s relevant, for some reason. For that matter, no one’s bothered that the FBI agent looks like Jodie Foster. Nobody’s going, isn’t this bizarre, we have an FBI agent who looks just like Jodie Foster going to interview a master criminal who looks just like Anthony Hopkins.”
“Well, you got to suspend disbelief.”
“Or else what? The characters will realize they are just characters?”
“The Truman Show did tackle this topic.”
“No it didn’t! The movie is a joke. Truman doesn’t ask why he resembles Jim Carrey. It doesn’t occur to him even once. He pretends he’s living in a world without Jim Carrey.” She jerked her head. “He continues to pretend he’s not Jim Carrey even after he realizes his whole life is fake. Why does he do that?”
“It’s just a movie,” I said, helplessly. “Kusum is the literary one. She’s hip to these postmodern twizzlers. I’ll intro you two once I get back to Chennai.”
“She doesn’t even exist, you poor fool.”
“Oh, Francesca,” said Mrs D’Mello, sounding exhausted, “please don’t start. Don’t bother Gabriel. Go to sleep, be a good girl now.”
Francesca’s face underwent an extraordinary range of expressions. It was strangely inhuman to watch someone shift from rage to fright to humor to doubt to sorrow. My heart went out to the girl.
“I’m the only sane person in this car. But nothing is mine, not even silence.” Francesca’s voice trailed away and she once again rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.
Mrs D’Mello turned to me. “You can’t win arguing with her, you’ll only go mad. I’ve tried everything. She’s tried everything, poor baby. So many doctors, they just reduce her to a vegetable, that’s all. I’m praying the temple will help. God doesn’t care about religion. Didn’t Jesus help the Canaanite woman? People get cured in the temple, don’t they, at the temple? What do you believe, Gabriel?”
What could I say? I nodded. I tried to imagine Francesca’s life and failed. She was being consumed by the Lion That Devoured All Categories. It wasn’t wise to approach the beast.
I felt the car hit a stone, shudder. I instinctively grabbed for something, felt living hands grasp my own. The LED TV lurched, threatened to slip free; it was safe enough, but Mani extended his left hand to stabilize it. The car turned savagely to the right, again hit something, a grinding metallic sound, hung suspended for a terrible second, started to fall, over the side of the hill, gently, such a long hopeless fall, the fall of all doubts, all hopes, all sins, all plans, until only one crystal clarity remained: it was over. Yet my mind wouldn’t let go. I sensed my mind cry out for Kusum. Kusum, Kusum, beloved wife, my Kusum. I began to weep. Francesca’s hazel eyes, luminous in the forest of screams. She was cradling her mother, smiling.
“Don’t worry, Gabriel,” I heard Francesca say. Or was it another? And we fell.
THROUGH WYLMERE WOODS
SOPHIA MCDOUGALL
Readers familiar with Sophia McDougall’s story, ‘Mailer Daemon’, in Magic (Solaris, 2012) will be delighted to encounter two old friends
here, though both stories also stand alone. This is both a prequel and an origins story, an exploration of Morgane and Levanter-Sleet’s complex relationship. The road here acts as a conduit for power and a path into the unknown. McDougall writes brilliantly about empowerment and identity, making ‘Through Wylmere Woods’ an extraordinarily heartfelt story about a journey into self-discovery.
CHAINSAWS ARE SHRIEKING against the sky as she runs into the woods. It sounds as though the road crew are somehow suspended in mid-air, their blades carving out blocks of cloud, rather than down here biting into oak. Even when she’s stopped sobbing, curled up and hidden at the base of a tree, the roar almost drowns the usual sounds of Wylmere Woods. The birdsong, the noise of the stream, and the woman’s voice she sometimes hears chattering and yelling in the water, the whispering among the leaves.
This isn’t the first attempt at escape, but it is the most premeditated. This time she has supplies: inside her school backpack there is a change of jeans and underwear, Tales of the Round Table, her sewing kit, embroidery silks and some stolen swatches of velvet, an art-deco hair slide, a packet of fig rolls, and a twenty pound note from her mother’s purse, which she hopes should pay for the bus fare to London.
Her seeing stone is clutched in her hand in case she needs it, but for the time being it seems safest not to use it. It’s always a difficult balance: the things are blurry and indistinct when she doesn’t use it; she can’t always see what they’re up to, but it’s also easier to pretend she hasn’t noticed them. A lot of things know when they’re being looked at and get much more interestedin her, and much more dangerous when she puts the hole in the stone to her eye.
She uncurls, cautiously, but carefully avoids looking up, or forward, or at anything. Around her, shadows leap and rattle. Rust-coloured wings twitch overhead. Eyes blink at her in the dark places between roots. But there will be things in London too. Perhaps the things here would get used to her in time, and she could live among them here, eating berries and mushrooms, like people in stories.
The Future of Horror Page 81