by Anuradha Roy
He went away one morning before I was awake. I did not hear him go. This, Dada explained later, was because he did not leave in a tonga or a car, he merely walked out of the gate with no more than a cloth bag containing a blanket, a metal bowl and tumbler, and a few clothes. He told Dada he planned to walk to the edge of our town and then down the road that led to the next village and onward to the next. He would beg for a little space on bullock carts or tongas, whatever was going in the northerly direction and where they stopped he would sleep the night in a verandah or temple or wayside teashop. He had not woken me because that might have weakened his resolve, he told me in a note he left for me along with a rupee to spend on anything I wanted. He would be back soon, he said in his note. I was not to worry.
13
ONCE MY FATHER went away on his journey to the center of his self, I took out my mother’s letters again: a second had come, and this one was several sheets, with illustrations all over. I hid them in a book and took them with me to Dada’s clinic. I made a nook for myself out of a cupboard and a rickety painted screen so that I could be shielded from waiting patients. Here, I lay on the floor and went over each word, each brushstroke.
My mother described villages, dances, medicine men, rain forests, mountains, strange flowers. “It is a storybook land,” the second letter said, “one day you will come here, and you will see. There are volcanoes and springs, rivers and seas and temples cut from stone. There are foxes that can fly.” She made postcard-sized paintings of her surroundings to show me what she meant. Thatched huts among circles of green fields. The fields painted in thin, emerald-green strokes and surrounded by tall trees. In the distance a blue, flat-topped mountain. Another page was black but for an orange-and-red fire in the middle of a clearing, around which were a group of men with cloth turbans on their heads. Their faces were the same orange-red as the fire. In the area behind them were shadows of leaves and trees, through which you could glimpse the dimly glowing yellow head of a tiger. Both the letters ended, “With so much love that the sky isn’t big enough for it.”
I slipped them under the cupboard when Lisa McNally came in through the back door, followed by the young man she used to call Boy. Boy was carrying a tray with cake cut into wedges, a glass of hot chocolate, and two cups of tea. Lisa had made a ritual of it after my mother left. She appeared at about the same time every day and before she had said a word, a scent announced her arrival—the blend of smoke, vanilla, coffee, old books, and perhaps camphor—that her guesthouse smelled of as well. I have only to catch a whiff of any one of these things even today and I am instantly back in Lisa McNally’s Home Away from Home.
Lisa seated herself opposite Dada and after a “Hello, young fellow” to me, she sighed. “What I thought to myself today was whether Nek had gone off with . . .” And here she said something to Dada in a whisper that I could not hear. I slunk away to my corner with my cake and hot chocolate.
“Oh, do be serious, Lisa, she is a nun,” Dada said. “Can’t you rein in your imagination? Mukti is still in Lucknow. Nek’s gone alone. On some nonsensical pilgrimage only he knows the meaning of. You come up with something of this kind every day.”
“Ah, but I can’t stop thinking about it, Batty!”
“You mustn’t think so much, Lisa,” I heard Dada say. “It’s bad for the digestion. It gives you wrinkles and headaches and spoils pretty faces.”
“Pretty faces puff no pastries.”
“But they do bake very good cakes.”
Laughter, and a moment later, the sound of a match striking, then cigarette smoke. Lisa’s contented exhalation went around the room like a sigh. As their voices rose and fell, a curious thing happened to me. I could no longer hear Dada or Lisa, I was no longer in the shop, I was looking at one of my mother’s paintings and there, in the one that she had drawn of the deck of a boat, I saw myself sitting on a deck chair. It was not as if I imagined myself on the chair. No, I had popped out of my body, as a pea from its pod, and rolled onto that deck, that chair. I could feel wind in my hair, damp, warm air, a rocking motion in my body. My mother sat on the deck refusing food, refusing to move, seasick. I sat with her. Stars glittered in the sky as far as our eyes could see and we felt the wind touching us, moving on, rushing past. As the night grew deeper, we drifted off to sleep in our chairs, my mother and I, lulled by the sound of water. In the morning we saw other boats and ships go by, we went past islands fringed with coconut trees. The water changed from blue to green to violet to gray. Mr. Spies played a tune on his harmonica—the one he had played that night with my grandfather out in the open under a full moon, “The Trout.” Rikki listened with her chin on my feet.
I don’t know how long I remained on the deck of that ship. When I did move from my corner I saw that Lisa had gone, the table was clear of tray and cake and tea, and Dada was examining a patient behind the swing doors while two more waited in front of the clinic. My hot chocolate stood untouched in my corner. It had a thick, leathery layer of skin on its cold surface.
All night, all of the next day, and for the next several days, I had nothing in my ears but the notes from the harmonica. The sea breeze was in my hair when I cycled to school and back, the neem and tamarind on the roadsides turned into coconut palms, the river behind my house became the stream in Tjampuhan by which my mother sat all afternoon, drawing. If I sat by our river and focused on the temple on the other side, willing myself not to blink till I had counted to fifty-five, I could see her there, head bent over her work. As soon as I blinked she disappeared.
At odd times, especially in the first few months when I woke up and did not find my mother, or came back from school to a house without her, the emptiness was a shock, like waking from one of those dreams where you are falling from the sky—falling forever with nothing below. Only this was not a dream. My childhood nightmare—what if everyone died and I was left alone?—had taken a shape I could never have anticipated. Our overstuffed rooms echoed now. My grandfather and I sat down to dinner at the same table and we stuck to our usual places, leaving my parents’ chairs where they belonged. If I banged my feet against my chair, as was my habit, it was Dada who placed a calming hand on my knee. It was he who took me to the library, waiting while I dithered over which two books, it was he who said goodbye on the verandah when I left for school. He set aside time in the mornings to go through the kitchen stores and give Banno Didi the daily shopping money as my mother had done for years. “Never too late to learn, eh, Myshkin?” he said. “Here I am, white-haired and dentured, learning how to run a kitchen. Next they’ll tell me to stitch a shirt.” Every Sunday he took me to the brimming street markets of the old city and we came back with laden baskets of exotic vegetables and fish nobody knew what to do with. He would then charge me with finding where, in her fat old diary, my mother had written down her recipes for Golden Lotus Stem or Banana Flowers with Coconut and I had to translate them into Hindi for Golak to follow.
I am my grandfather’s age now—I mean the age he will always be for me, a grandfatherly age. I am not like him. I could not have taken such tender care of a child left adrift. I know they call me a surly old bastard. I deserve it. I rage against things beyond my control, I fulminate at the disintegration of my world. A few years ago, when the municipality decided to build a new flyover across what used to be called Atkinson Avenue, they sentenced to death forty-four neem trees along both sides of the road. I had planted them decades before, when I came back from Delhi to head the horticultural department here. It was not easy at the time to protect saplings from passing cows and goats. They needed tree guards, but bricks were too expensive after the war and iron tree guards were hard to come by—steel was in short supply. Chance sent us old bricks from a demolished house and that house, in its broken-down form, protected those saplings.
From the moment I came to know my forty-four neem trees were to be cut down, I tried everything to stop it: letters to ministers and so on. The ravings of a barking-mad fool. I went from door to
door, sweating and pale, holding out a typewritten appeal for the people of the neighborhood to sign. My letter urged the government not to destroy my trees. They are fifty feet tall, I said, they give shade, their leaves chase away insects, oil is made from their fruit, the oil kills head lice, it makes skin beautiful and clear. For good measure I added a paragraph about the sacredness of neem trees—the abode of Goddess This and Goddess That, worshipped for centuries. Nothing works better in this country than ignorant religious faith or superstition.
At most houses, they banged the door in my face taking me for a robber or a detergent salesman. At one house the woman who opened the door said, “You’ve crossed over to the land of the crazies.” But she made me sit under a fan and brought me a glass of water and signed my piece of paper. I collected thirty-eight signatures. I sent my appeal off to the Public Works Department, knowing perfectly well it would make no difference.
The day it became clear that the death of my trees was inescapable, I plucked all the roses and hibiscus in my garden. I went to each neem tree on Atkinson Avenue and placed a flower at its base. Three dusty boys started following me. “The old crock’s got a screw loose,” I heard them chant behind me.
I spent that night in the open, below one of my trees, watching the sky go from dirty blue to grubby orange to sickly black. In the canopy above, I saw tender young leaves, pale green against a new-washed sky. A few bulbuls hopped from branch to branch feeding on the clusters of seed pods. Their wings were black, the patch of red under each tail was bright. They perched and sang a melody every now and then. I turned and next to me was Dinu, propped on an elbow, eyes shut, shadows painting a pattern of serrated leaves on his face. Dinu had a caterpillar of hair above his lips. He was scratching a girl’s name into the sandy earth with a twig. Madhuri, Madhuri, Madhuri. Who was Madhuri? I didn’t know and he did not tell me. After that we both had guns in our hands and were shooting at a train.
When I went back home after my night below the trees, I saw Ila moving back and forth in her rocking chair in the front verandah, trying to look as if she were not waiting for me. She put down her book and started off the instant she saw me open the gate.
“Look at you. Dry leaves in your hair. Bird droppings on your shoulder.”
“I fell asleep under a tree,” I said. “I had a dream. I can’t remember all of it, but Dinu was in the dream. He was fourteen, I was ten. We were lying under a tree and a bulbul was singing.”
She raised an eyebrow and said, “A bulbul sang, did it? And did peacocks dance too?”
Her round face, very like her mother’s, was furrowed but she got up from her chair and brought me a mug of gingery tea and toast and sat down again. She picked up the book she had been reading. For a while her face was half-hidden behind it and I knew she was reading to stay calm. Under her breath she murmured two or three lines from the poem she was reading. “The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, there must be reasons why the leaves decay.” Then she fell silent. Her rocking chair creaked with each impatient push.
As explanation and apology, I said, “They are cutting down all the neem trees I planted on Atkinson Avenue. I had to be with them.”
Ila went on reading—I could not tell if she had heard me—and I turned to my food. All I could see beyond a blue-and-white cover was her frown. In minutes, she snapped the book shut and picked up her latest piece of cross-stitch work with a restless, tetchy air. She stretches a particular kind of cloth on a frame and embroiders cottages covered with roses and hollyhocks, scenes from European country idylls. Then she adds lines of poetry to match. “Twilight and evening bell,” “A host of golden daffodils,” and so on. These are framed and hung all over the house.
Ila jabbed her needle in and out of the cloth. “You’re so much trouble. All night, I’ve been up, wondering where you were. An old man who’s disappeared. Some of them never come back. Do you know how people ridicule you? And can’t you do up the buttons of your shirt? You are as ragged as an umbrella in a storm.”
14
I KNOW WHAT RIDICULE is. It does not bother me.
After my mother left in the monsoon of 1937, there were whispers and hisses at school that reached me, faintly at first, like some far-off indecipherable clamor. Then my father went away as well, and the sounds came closer. I passed through the school corridors escorted by sniggers and salacious questions. I listened to nobody, I spoke to nobody. Even so, I got into fights every now and then and was badly beaten up by the older boys. One hot, bone-dry day, after a murderous encounter that left me with a broken tooth and limbless spectacles, Dinu said, “You keep your head down, you ass. Let them say what they like.”
“It’s all lies! They’re telling lies.”
“So what if it’s lies?” We were cycling home and Dinu pedaled faster and wheeled an eight around me on the narrow road, then cycled ahead and yelled back towards me, “Anyway, it’s not lies! Everyone knows everything.” He sped ahead so I would not have a chance to reply.
Dinu used to be my protector, he would launch himself with the force of a bullet at anyone who bullied me. Yet a week or so before, when I had looked beyond the jeering crowd of older boys around me wishing he would turn up, I did see him—standing on the fringes. He had not joined in their chorus, but he was observing the scene with a grin. He turned away as soon as he felt my eyes on him. Later he said I didn’t know how to take a joke, the boys meant no harm, I ought to be a good sport. I had once found him in the corridor doing a high-pitched imitation of me asking the postman if he had a letter from my mother. He avoided being seen with me in school now, as if ashamed. At home, however, he demanded I play cricket and go fishing and horse around as usual. From being my friend, this altered, ever-changeable Dinu had become another element in the hostile forces ranged against me.
The day my teeth and glasses were broken by the older boys, I had seen him in the scorched playground, I was sure of that, and though he had not been a part of the mob, he had done nothing to stop them kicking me, pummeling me to the dust, flinging my spectacles far away so that I would not be able to see to fight back.
I did not go home that afternoon, I walked into my grandfather’s clinic, bloodied, my school shirt torn, my shorts dirty. I went straight through the swing doors. Dada was not in his consulting room. Why was he not at his desk when I needed him? Why was nobody ever there when I needed them? A red mist of anger made me want to destroy everything in sight. I picked up Dada’s spare stethoscope from his desk and twisted it around my fist. I flung it into a corner and it lay there limp, like a dead snake.
“He’s on a house call,” Jagat said, picking up the stethoscope. “What’s the matter with you? Got into a fight? Go and wash those cuts.” He shuffled off to a cupboard in the outer room saying, “I’ll find the purple medicine. It’ll sting.”
I opened the glass jar of sweets that Dada kept on his desk to bribe child patients. I helped myself to two boiled sweets. I put them into my mouth together and sucked on them without taking in their taste. In front of me were Dada’s medical books, his tall-backed chair, a medical chart showing a man in profile with red-and-beige organs inside him. My eye fell upon the preserved hand in a glass jar. It floated in its clear liquid, as pale as wax, its extra fingers dangling like a question. Before I knew it, I had dragged Dada’s chair to the shelf and picked up the jar. It was heavy. The hand moved about in it and the extra fingers moved separately, as if not quite attached to the whole. I was overcome with revulsion watching the hand touch the sides of the jar, then float away and knock against the other side. Once I had brought the jar down, I opened my school knapsack and shoved it in. The door swung behind me and I was gone, Jagat yelling, “Wait . . . the medicine!”
I cycled as swiftly as I could. The jar banged against my back each time I hit a bump on the road. What if the lid fell open? I tried not to think of the consequences. When I got to our road, I flung the bike aside at my gate and ran to Dinu’s house. On its left side was the oute
r wing where Arjun Chacha’s head clerk, Munshiji, sat. He peered through owlish glasses at sheaves of paper, picking his nose absently. Arjun Chacha was in an inner room talking to someone, I could hear his booming voice saying, “This country is going to the dogs, the Congress wants self-rule, but who will rule and how?” I took the jar out of my knapsack and before Munshiji could say a word, I had run to the inner door and flung the jar into the room with a crash so that it shattered. “Lambu sent you a gift from hell!” I shouted, then ran out of the room.
All day and all night after that I had Arjun Chacha’s roar of rage in my ears and the ghastly smell from the jar in my nose. I could see nothing but a limp, rubbery hand lying on the floor in a pool of liquid. One of the two extra fingers had fallen off and lay some distance away like a dead lizard without head or tail.
After that incident, I caught Dada looking at me every now and then as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. A few days on, he said he had too much to do now and he needed as much help as he could get. Could I be of use? What he especially needed, he said, was a boy to carry his case for him on house calls, since he was getting too old to carry it, and to see that he wasn’t forgetting anything on his way out, since he was too old to remember things.