by Anuradha Roy
The magician held out a black sheet embroidered with silver stars. He shook it ostentatiously and bowed at my mother from the waist saying, “See for yourself, madam, this is empty. There is no monster hiding in it. The circus lion is not inside it, the dogs are not inside it, there is no snake or alligator. Am I right?”
My mother smiled. The magician said, “Your children are in the first row. There. What is that little boy’s name? Is that your son? The one with the spectacles? Give him to me for a week, I’ll spirit his bad eyes away and give him good ones. He is scared—what will this wicked magician do to my mother? he is thinking. Tell him. There is nothing in the cloth.”
My mother repeated his words. “There is nothing in the cloth.”
“I will even tell you, madam, that it is a clean cloth. It is a laundry-washed cloth. It smells of flowers. I can see you are from a noble family, madam, and I thank you for gracing my show. I would never use an old unwashed cloth for you. Not many ladies from noble families would appear in public this way.” At this another roll of drums and trumpets sounded and a red-nosed clown leaped up from nowhere, startling us all, screaming, “No, no, no!! Noblewomen would not do this! The circus is for jokers and clowns! It’s for trained asses and donkeys.” The clown tumbled about, whinnying like a horse. The magician waved his stick at the clown and said, “Disappear! Out, you foul-smelling lump of stupidity.” The clown left, yelping.
At this point I saw that my mother was becoming irritable. A look I knew so well—the one that preceded an explosion or a snapped-out, curt sentence. “I don’t have all day,” she would have said, if someone else were putting her through this. “Perhaps you do.”
With much fanfare the magician asked my mother to sit on a low stool beneath a cross made of four poles. He showed us the black cloth again with a flourish, and then draped the poles with it so that she was no longer visible. All I could see now was a tent-like shape made by the cloth. Ivan the Terrible’s eyes gleamed. Insects bumbled around the hot gaslights. The lights made the man’s skin shine with sweat. You could see the pomade stiff on his henna-red mustache. When he spoke, a shower of silvery spittle flew from his mouth.
The magician cried, “Where has the good lady gone? Has she gone to Persia? Or has she settled down in Ashkabad? Is she in Peshawar or Rawalpindi? Because . . .” and here came another drumroll as he swept away the starry black cloth to reveal an empty space. My mother was no longer where she had been sitting a few seconds before.
The lunch we had eaten—kababs and korma and roti from an eating shop by a mosque—rose in my throat as if it would pour out of me in a gushing heap. I cannot remember how she came back or when we went home. I remember that I screamed and cried and tried to run into the ring when I saw the empty space where she should have been, and that Tobu had to clamp a palm on my face and hiss at me, saying, “It’s just a trick, she’ll be back.”
She never did tell me what the trick was when she came back. In the next many weeks, every time I asked her to explain where she had gone and how she had returned, she smiled mysteriously and said, “There are some things in life you never find out, Myshkin. Sometimes things happen that nobody understands.” At first I was too angry to ask her anything. I pummeled and kicked her and yelled, “Go away! Stay with the magician. I’ll tell Papa.” She scolded me all the way back from the magic show. “Myshkin, you ruin everything. To shout like that. When will you grow up? Really, one cannot do anything anymore without a huge fuss. As if the sky’s broken and fallen down.”
When in Delhi with her family, she spoke a mix of Bengali and Hindi and English and I could not always follow what she was saying, but I could tell she was furious and I was the cause of it. I suppressed my sobs and began to kick a stone. My rule was that it must not roll away into a pothole or gutter, the same one had to be kicked all the way back to the house. I was not allowed to change stones if I lost this one. My toes hurt through my shoes, but still I kicked.
“And why wouldn’t he scream?” her brother said, planting himself in her way to make her stop walking on. “Can’t you understand what that kind of thing can do to a child?”
“Come, Myshkin,” my mother said, sidestepping him. “Stop that, you’ll stub your toe and ruin those shoes. I think it’s time to go home. Never a good idea to be in my loving parental home for long.”
Did I really think my mother had died when the magician made her disappear? That she was gone forever, in a puff of magic smoke? Did I know of death then? Maybe I did. I was given to fits of melancholy as a child, and when I was perhaps only five or six years old and lying in the center of my parents’ bed in the middle of the evening, apparently asleep but actually quite awake, surrounded by people chatting and laughing, I would be in tears, agonized by the thought that my mother, my father, my grandfather, and Dinu were all going to die someday, leaving me alone. How the concept had entered my head I do not know, but ever since then I have wondered when it is that a child becomes aware of death. Is it at some precise moment? Does the idea enter our consciousness along with life itself, at the time of conception? Do we learn about it from watching ants and grasshoppers die? Or from losing someone close?
When my mother went away that monsoon day of 1937, I wondered for some time whether she had died while I was in school and I was not being told. But fairy tales were not for my father, who believed in honesty and accuracy. I think he told us she had gone away for a short trip because he truly believed that. It is the only thing that accounts for his impassive adherence to routine in the weeks that followed. He went for his walk at dawn, came back and drank his glass of hot water with honey and lemon, was ready as usual by eight, and cycled off in his year-long uniform of khadi kurta-pajama. He clipped up the pajamas to be able to pedal without muddying them and went to his college, where he lectured on ancient civilizations, the Mughal Empire, historic battles, and then went to the Society for Indian Patriots for two hours. He came back by six for his cup of Darjeeling with three drops of milk. After that he read, listened to music on his gramophone, and over dinner quizzed me about school and suffered my grandfather’s stories of patients at his clinic.
From time to time one of his students would come over to discuss a thesis or an essay, but the biggest change after my mother went away was that we had fewer visitors, to stay or to come for a meal. Now I know it must have been because everyone was scandalized by her flight and tackled the disgrace to the family by pretending we no longer existed, but at the time I thought it was because my mother was not there to plan out sufficiently exciting food. Instead, Banno Didi now came every morning to my grandfather and stood before him, sighing with weary fatalism.
“What will be cooked today?”
“Whatever will not kill us.”
Banno Didi was given to theatrical self-pity and considered herself much put upon, but she was domineering and monumental. She walked away, muttering loud enough for everyone to hear, “Not a word of help and if the food is not to their taste? Who will be blamed? Who but Banno. Poor Banno, who cares about her?”
She had begun working for our family long before my mother’s time, as a cleaner and washerwoman, and over the years had acquired authority and consequence, turning herself into a housekeeper and ayah. She ordered around everyone else who worked in the house in a hectoring voice that carried all the way to the cowsheds. She had leathery old skin, she colored her hair orange with henna, and chewed zarda-paan so that her cheeks bulged with its juice and lines of blood-colored spittle trickled down either side of her mouth. My grandfather, who enjoyed filling my head with what he termed useful ideas, had told me the best time to say something to her was when her mouth was so full that she could not open it to reply. I tried always to follow his advice.
3
MY GRANDFATHER WAS born in Dehradun and inherited from his father a furniture shop called Rozario & Sons. My great-grandfather, a businessman called Rai Chand, had married an Anglo-Indian woman, Lucille, and because he believed her surname, Ro
zario, would be thought more exalted than his own in a country ruled by the British, it was what Rai Chand called his shop. Why he chose a Portuguese-sounding name rather than a straightforwardly British one was a source of enduring puzzlement to my grandfather. “If we were called Woodburn or Carlyle or Wright,” Dada would say in a wistful tone, “we’d still have been timber magnates.”
At first it was only the shop that was known as Rozario, but by degrees the name took over the family. My grandfather’s unlikely name, Bhavani Chand Rozario, was shortened by his close friends to Batty Rozario; to me, he was Dada, and everyone else called him Dr. Rozario. My father, however, was Nek Chand. He had discarded the “Rozario” because it reeked of being colonized. Being a progressive man (he said), he would leave the final decision about my name to me, but urged me to follow in his patriotic footsteps and registered me in school as Abhay Chand. Abhay: Fearless. He had not picked a deity’s name as other people did. It was also short, easy to remember. But for some reason not even my teachers called me anything but Myshkin Rozario.
That our surname confused people about our religion did not matter because nobody in our house appeared to know for sure what we were. There was no shrine with Hindu gods, as at Dinu’s house, nor a crucifix flanked by assorted angels and saints as at Lisa McNally’s. My mother did not fast for the welfare of her family, nor did I ever see her pray. One of the few things she and my father appeared to agree on was their lack of faith in any kind of higher power. If things went wrong they blamed themselves and if anything good happened, they thanked their luck. As for Rai Chand, the only religion in his life, my grandfather said, was the making of money. If converting to Christianity or Jainism or Islam had improved his prospects, Rai Chand would have seen no reason not to do so.
My great-grandfather made his fortune in timber. At the time of the great war of 1857, when upper India became a slaughterhouse, his parents were both killed. Rai Chand escaped Sikandra in a bullock cart, hidden under hay. He was fifteen. I often asked Dada to repeat the story of the escape and marveled at the fact that Rai Chand was only a few years older than me then, all alone in the world, parentless, on the run—how I envied him. I thought of him as scrawny and bespectacled, as I was, but in my heart I knew he must have been different, he must have been like Dinu: the kind of boy who could run fast, swear hard, tell quick lies, bring down mangoes with a catapult. After each retelling of the story I wandered the garden with a lump of jaggery and some dry roti tucked into a waistband I fashioned for myself out of an old rag. That was all the food Rai Chand had taken with him when he escaped—so Dada said. I skulked behind bushes and lurked by the cattle shed where our two cows Lalli and Peeli chewed the cud and offloaded great gobs of dung. Despite the stink and the insistent flies I sheltered resolutely in the cowshed behind piles of old gunny bags, fighting off imagined British soldiers.
That day in 1857, Dada said, Rai Chand’s bullock cart went only as far as the next village. After that he walked, hitched rides, starved, and begged his way northward, and by stages went beyond Dehradun into Garhwal, then higher still, ending up on a Himalayan mountainside close to the source of the Ganges, in a place of fierce streams and precipices, where rain turned to ice and snow in winter and the steep sides of the mountains were covered by deodar trees. At night leopards sawed, antelopes honked, jackals howled. But these sounds of lurking savagery were less terrifying than mobs with bloodred eyes, and here, in Harsil, Rai Chand stumbled upon the remote outpost of an Englishman called Frederick Wilson who had made his way there several years before. Rai Chand joined Wilson’s wild band of hard-drinking loggers and hunters, living by hunting, fur and musk exports, and taxidermy, and by acting as guides to British mountain travelers. It was here that Rai Chand married Lucille, whom he met on one of the expeditions he assisted Wilson in guiding across the high passes.
When the British started building the railways and needed wood for sleepers, Wilson turned to logging. Deodars taller than hills had lived undisturbed across dense, secretive forests all around him. They took centuries to grow to their two hundred feet and the timber was oily, immune to time and termite, virtually imperishable. He felled them in their thousands and floated the logs downriver to Haridwar. In time, he became a local potentate who minted his own coins. Some said he was more powerful than the Raja of Garhwal.
One of Dada’s stories was of how once he found himself at night by the ruins of a rope bridge said to have been built by Wilson on the Jad Ganga river. Full moon, the leaves on the trees shining like mercury, not a soul around. Only the soft whooshing of the wind. The silence was broken by the clopping of hooves, coming closer and closer—at this stage I always buried my face in Dada’s bony, tobacco-smelling chest and his smiling voice whispered above me, “And do you know who it was, my little Myshkin? The ghost of a white man, all in white, on a white horse with white hooves. The ghost of Frederick Wilson searching for his bridge across the river. Then I heard the far-off tinkle of anklets and I was so frightened I ran for my life.”
I tried to visualize Dada running, but it was not easy. I had never seen him so much as hurry. He was satisfied that the world would wait for him—to finish a sentence, to spoon up the last mouthful from his plate, to get dressed and leave the house, to climb into a carriage. I have mulled over what set Dada apart, what made people deferential to him, and it was this. He was never in a hurry because he knew, even if subconsciously, that everyone wanted to hear what he was going to say, or see what he was going to do. Nothing rattled Dada. Once when a large red-bottomed monkey invaded our dining room at lunchtime, leaped onto the table, and sat peeling oranges one by one, Dada was the only one who remained in his place, fixing the monkey with an amused gaze, saying, “Sir, are the oranges to your taste? Perhaps you would prefer apples?”
It was profitable to be Wilson’s friend and Rai Chand was for several years a kind of manager, recruiting loggers from Kangra and sawyers from Punjab, supervising the timber depot in Haridwar. The pickings were good and when his fortune became substantial he started a carpentry workshop. After some years he had shops in Dehradun, Karachi, and Muntazir, as well as in Nainital, where he built a summer home. Rozario & Sons was known all over the hill stations of Kumaon and Garhwal as furniture makers to the sahibs.
The success did not last. Both Rai Chand and Lucille died of cholera within a week of each other when my grandfather was sixteen. He and his several siblings did the rest of their growing up in the homes of Lucille’s relatives. Despite these upheavals, Dada had salvaged some remnants of the Rai Chand days, which were displayed in his bedroom. One corner had a tiger skin draped over a settee. Its head was upright, resting on its chin and its eyes of amber followed you around. The taxidermist had left its mouth permanently open, its long, yellow fangs ready for combat. The paws drooped down the settee’s side. A moth-eaten, ever-watchful Monal pheasant said to have been snared and stuffed by Frederick Wilson himself presided over another corner of the room and by the doorway to Dada’s dressing room was a sola hat perched on an ancient rifle. When I was little, it was a ritual for me to tiptoe in on Sunday afternoons and for him to exclaim, “There you are, my man! Not a minute to lose! Time to bag that tiger!” He would clamp the hat on my head and his pipe in his mouth. He would balance the rifle on his shoulder and we would prowl around his room circling the tiger-draped settee. He kept some whisky hidden in his wardrobe to sip in peace, away from my father’s abstemious eyes, and he would take it out on those afternoons. “Some Dutch courage, Myshkin,” he would declare, “before we go hunting for that fiendish man-eater. It’s going to be a long, hard day in the Burmese rain forest. Here, you have one too.” He would hand me an empty glass and I would knock back the imagined whisky.
I do not know whether losing his father early in life is what made Dada a physician instead of a furniture seller or if it was merely that he had not inherited his father’s head for commerce. None of his brothers had either, although one of them held on to the vestiges of the b
usiness in Karachi and lived a life of genteel decay on money borrowed from my grandfather. There was still a big barn of a shop in our town, the only substantial part of his father’s possessions that my grandfather formally inherited, with the words Rozario & Sons, Since 1857 embossed in green and gold on a wooden signboard that went all the way across the front above the door. A small sign below it, barely bigger than a child’s slate, announced Dr. Bhavani Chand Rozario, General Physician, plain white on black. His nameplate was not crowded with a string of acronyms, as with other doctors, and few outsiders knew the genealogy of my grandfather’s medical degree, which started in India and ended in England, where he was when my grandmother fell ill. He was not able to come back in time to save her life. It was local lore that his wife’s death so devastated Dr. Rozario that he swore he would never leave to find money or fame in a big city, he would be the doctor for the people in his own medically ill-equipped town.
My grandfather presided over his junk-store clinic with as much assurance as a white-coated surgeon in a shiny hospital. His consulting room was in a sectioned-off part of the old shop. All kinds of things still turned up there, from chipped tea sets and chairs to crystal wineglasses, which people brought in to be sold off secondhand. If a table or tea set caught anyone’s eye, Dada sold it and gave the owners the money. If not, until they were claimed again, they remained as furniture in his clinic.
It was here that Walter Spies appeared one day in 1937.
I first met Walter Spies on a summer afternoon, one of those dull, interminable parts of the day when the house felt as if it were struck by a spell, everyone dazed with the heat. Blinds striped the front verandah with swaying lines of light and dark. The fans whirred, the blinds rustled, the sawdust-covered ice block that was delivered every other day melted into an expanding puddle. This was all that happened in the house every summer afternoon.