“Oh, it’s nothing!” Johnny Toppo’s tone of practised cordiality had come back. “Just a folksong. That’s all I brought with me when I came here to Jarmuli. A few songs and the clothes on my back.” He began to sing again.
Nomi sat on the sand a short distance away, listening. It was a voice from long ago, a voice that contained grains of sand, winds from the sea. Why hadn’t she heard it as clearly before?
The tourists sat on the tea-bench. One of them said to the other, “Did I bring you to the right place or not? Have you ever heard anything so beautiful?” The man turned to Johnny Toppo. “Bhai, I want to record you. I’ll record you, I’ll sell your songs, I’ll make you a star. And I’ll make me some money.”
Johnny Toppo stirred his pot.“People like me, our dreams were beaten out of us long ago. I have no time for stars, I just want a patch of ground to sleep on, a bit of cloth to wear and my next meal.”
The man paid up, saying, “We can do something – folk songs are in fashion now!” As they walked away he smiled and slapped his friend’s shoulder. “You’ll buy his songs or not?”
Johnny Toppo had heard many such conversations. He turned his back to them and scraped his saucepan clean, swilled it out with water from the iron bucket at hand. Nomi sat watching, and before she fully understood what she was saying, the words were out of her mouth and once they had started she could not stop them.
“Once there was a woman called Shabari and she ran away from home on her wedding day. She lived in deep forest after that, in a hermit’s ashram, serving the hermit.”
Johnny Toppo’s head jerked violently and the saucepan fell to the sand. A shudder seemed to go through him. When he bent to pick the pan up he looked old and creaky. “Do you want more tea? I’ve work to do,” he said. He pulled the cloth tight around his neck. He picked up a packet of beeris. He looked for his matches. His hands were trembling when he lit up.
“When the hermit was on his deathbed, he said in a sad voice to Shabari that he had spent all his life serving God, yet was leaving life without a glimpse of Him. But that would not be her fate, he said. One day God would appear before her, so she must be ready. After this, the hermit died.”
Johnny Toppo said, “So what’s the moral, eh? Do I look like a child who needs fairy tales?”
Nomi carried on, talking softly, as if to herself. “Shabari understood his last words to mean that she would have to be prepared. She would have to wait for God in the very same place, otherwise how would He find her? Shabari was a simple-minded woman. She waited and she waited, all her life.”
Johnny Toppo stormed out from behind the tea stall towards Nomi. “I thought you only looked crazy, with all these beads and rings and that madwoman hair.” He let out a jet of spittle that shone on the sand like a blob of jelly. “That screw-loose gardener there, see? He’s the one you’re looking for! Ask him if he remembers anything.”
He went back to his stall and turned off his stove. He had a trunk below the barrow into which he locked everything each evening and began to stack his pots and pans and cups and jars, pell mell, cursing as a few of the terracotta cups broke inside the trunk. He muttered furiously to himself as he packed up. “All words and no money: some days start bad and get worse.”
*
Nomi sat alone in a car, watching the suburbs of Jarmuli go by. She stared out as if she could not afford to miss the landscape for a minute, even though the suburbs of Jarmuli looked much like those of any other town. Boxy houses on either side of the road, their verandahs curtained by wet clothes on lines. The few trees covered in dust. Ragged oleander hedges with drooping pink flowers. Grocery stalls garlanded with foil packs of chips at street corners. Here she was far away from the sea, the temples, the tourists, the radiant, suspended disbelief of the beach.
Johnny Toppo had not wanted to help her. She had been overtaken by a staggering sense of recognition, of joy – he was not dead after all, he was alive and she had found him! But he had spat at her and turned away. She could handle that, she would feel nothing, she was used to having doors slammed in her face. And I might be wrong, she told herself, many men have scars on their necks and everyone asks for morals of stories. What makes me so sure it was him? A memory she thought she had lost came back to her, its every feature sharp: Jugnu unloading the manure truck at the ashram. First he would spade the manure into a big metal basin. Then he would lift it to his head. He would walk with it on his head to the manure pile near the shed. Tip it out, come back with the empty basin, start the whole process again. He was bent under the stinking manure. His thin, bare body was lean and hard as wood. He spoke to nobody. The remote look he had then was on Johnny Toppo’s face today. Neither of them wanted to have anything to do with other people. Who was she to try and make a man remember what he wanted to forget?
A sudden exhaustion permeated every bone, muscle, and tissue in her body. It was futile. She should never have come. The roads through the town grew narrower and bumpier. Here, only a short distance away from the broad promenade along the sea, trucks bore down on them from the opposite side, and dented, rattling tempos scraped past the car. She could no longer smell the salt and fish. Exhaust fumes made her eyes sting. She asked the driver to switch on the air-conditioning and soon her window was coated with a film of grey dust. She stared at the houses and street markets they were passing, hoping, as she had on the first drive from Jarmuli station, for a moment of recognition.
After a while, the distance between the houses grew until there were no houses at all. Beside her on the seat she had a map, but like most maps it seemed to bear no relation to what she saw. The driver made a sharp turn towards the highway. Here, the road outside corresponded with the map in one detail at least – as they drove, she caught glimpses of the sea across the road, beyond a stretch of scrub and trees. She did not know for sure if they were going in the right direction, but she leaned over and said to the driver, “Take a left at the crossroads.”
She picked up the map again. It was wrinkled now, frayed at the folds. She had scribbled on it, drawn arrows. There was nothing to connect the represented with the real or the present with the past, not if you went by the road names. But she knew from her research that the place she was looking for was somewhere on the Kanakot–Jarmuli highway.
The sun hung orange between branches and leaves by the time her driver stopped the car two hours later. She had left Jarmuli too late, she realised, not knowing the drive would take so long. Long shadows of trees already barcoded the road, nightfall came swiftly here. She felt a prickle of fear at her neck, wanted to lock the doors of the car, turn back without getting out. They were at a pair of metal gates. The driver looked over his shoulder, despite herself she nodded, and he turned the engine off.
The silence was sudden. Nothing seemed to move, the air humid and heavy. The driver felt as if he was having to push the heat outward to make room for the door when he opened it. He got out, stretched and looked into the car. The girl was still sitting there, making no move.
He went to her window. “What, madam? This place is shut. Nobody here. Is it the right place?” He wiped the nape of his neck, making a face. Only moments away from the air-conditioning of the car and his shirt was damp.
She sat without moving. Like water’s flooded her limbs, he thought. Or did she expect him to hold open the door for her? She was looking towards the gates, scabby with rust. One of them hung askew, as if it had broken a bone. A sign on it said: SITE FOR PEACOCK AYURVEDIC SPA. He said, “This place has been a ruin for years. If you had told me before where you wanted to go, I would have told you. Even the builders abandoned it. It’s a godforsaken place. They say bad things happened here long ago.”
His words seemed to bring the girl to a decision. She got out of the car, saying only, “Wait here.” The earthen pathway leading from the gate to the grounds inside was covered with dry leaves. The driver watched her trudge forward as if she were ill. When she reached the gates she peeped through them as a ch
ild might, frightened of encountering ghosts.
He locked the car and followed her. It wasn’t safe out here on the empty highway, wandering in a derelict estate. What would he do if she disappeared in there?
He walked a short distance in, his feet crunching the dry leaves. She had stopped at a shed-like house beside the path. A pelt of moss covered its walls. The windows she was looking into were broken, the door missing. Inside, it was a brutal concrete cube. There were platforms shaped like beds along the wall and tiny cell-like windows with bars on them. When they walked further in they found more ruined cottages of the same kind, surrounded by warped iron railings, fallen masonry and broken tiles. A few of the cottages had been demolished and turned into piles of bricks, hairy now with grass and weeds. A grey old tree trunk lay on the ground in a ruffled skirt of frilly toadstools.
They walked through groves of old trees, twisted, chopped, vandalised. Pomegranate trees hung with what looked like organs cut in half: shrivelled fruit opened by age. Some of the trees had red flowers. The girl hunched before the trees, her arms wrapped around herself, holding her own body in an embrace.
They came into what appeared to be a central courtyard which had the remnants of a large structure, the pile of bricks and construction material was almost as high as a building. Beyond it was the outer boundary wall of the place. She walked back in the opposite direction, almost colliding with the driver. “Can you see a jamun tree anywhere?” she asked him. “Would you recognise one?”
Swatting early evening mosquitoes the driver said, “Half the trees are chopped down, Madam, can’t you see?”
She went back to the outer edge of the compound and ran her finger tips over sections of the boundary wall that had fallen to the ground. It was tipped with shards of broken glass and upturned nails.
“It looked big from outside, but inside it’s not so big,” the driver ventured. “I think there’s no more to see.” The girl was unstable, he was sure, and the oddness of her interest in the ruin was unnerving him now.
She murmured, “It isn’t. I always told Piku it was too far for her to walk to the gates. It wasn’t.”
They walked to where the frame for another gate stood, a smaller one, entirely off its hinges. At its edge, where the wall curved into an inlet, a giant banyan tree shaded the clearing. Tarnished brass bells hung from its aerial roots and were strewn around its trunk. Fragments of cloth, ribbons, pieces of tin, evidence of long-ago worship, now dead, were visible in the dust. The girl bent and prised out from the ground something barely visible to the driver – a rusted metal cross, he saw, once she had rubbed the earth away from it with her fingers, with an arrow on one of its arms. It was rubbish, yet she held on to it, swivelled the arms this way and that.
“Madam, we must go now,” the driver said, his voice insistent. He did not like driving in the dark. The tree formed a canopy under which a few grass-thatched huts nestled in even greater darkness than the road beyond it. All around the courtyard were shapeless forms like corpses wrapped in sheets.
The girl turned to follow him, then appeared to take fright. She scurried closer to him. “Did you see something? Isn’t there a man – behind those bushes? There, look. In robes?”
The driver squinted. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“I’m sure I saw someone. A tall man in robes? We should leave.”
“That’s what have I been saying . . . all along,” the driver panted, trying to keep up with her. She was moving too quickly for him. Then he noticed it wasn’t dark any more. There was lamplight, dancing among the trees, giving their bodies long, irregular shadows. A man had materialised behind them, and was now blocking their way. A tall, hunched form shrouded in yards of cloth – a lungi below, a cloth over his head and shoulders. An arm as thin as a bamboo cane stuck out from the folds of his clothes, holding a hurricane lantern. He was shining it in the girl’s face, lighting up the coloured threads in her hair and all the gold and silver in her ears. He swung it towards the driver, saying, “Come. This way.”
As their eyes adjusted to the new brightness of the light, Nomi saw that there was a congregation of stone figures in the courtyard, some quite small, some so large their faces were too high to make out. Gryphons, elephants, Buddha figures, apsaras. Most appeared fully finished, a few were still struggling out from the stone. The man shone the light close on one of the statues. A woman made of flowing lines and blind eyes, nearly ready for a temple niche.
The man shuffled forward, swung the lantern on another piece of sculpture, this one a winged horse. Then a dancing girl. A lion with moustaches and potbelly. He would not hold the lantern still long enough for them to look properly at the pieces.
“My family has been sculptors to the emperors of this land since the time of the Buddha,” the man said. His voice was reedy and he sucked his gums between words. “They were sculptors when the great old temples came up – and let me tell you truthfully, my family has a chisel hidden away in a place so secret nobody else knows about it – a chisel that carved the walls of temples then, eight hundred years ago.”
The man stopped and swung his lantern on to a gargoyle. “That one’s no good.” He coughed between his words. “The eyes aren’t right. I will always tell you if something isn’t right.”
“Have you been here many years? Were you always here?” Nomi said.
“Always. For generations. If you came here a hundred years ago, you would still have heard the sound of a hammer on a chisel in these parts. Why, it was a flourishing village then, of people from our caste. Now we’re only a few left, all dying of hunger. Who wants these statues? Everyone wants things made in a factory. Of plastic.”
She hesitated, drew a breath. “This ruined place next door to you – what was it before?”
“What was it before?” The man brought his lamp down. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything but my own work. I kept to myself, never went in there.”
He moved ahead. “Will you buy something? Look around, a gift for a friend, all the way from the Bay of Bengal? There are smaller ones too, easy to pack.” He went from statue to statue, shining the light on them. “That one is made from sandstone . . . that is pure marble . . . that is black granite, the Buddha, you can see. Foreign people like Buddha statues. Elephants too, all sizes, look.”
“All I want to know is . . . Do you know what happened to the people who lived next door? The children?”
“This one, see? It’s a replica of the chariot in the Sun Temple. Been to the Sun Temple?”
The driver said, “Madam, we should leave now.”
Something caught the girl’s eye. “There, I want to see that one.”
The man brought the lamp across and shone it to where she was pointing, at a statue that sat in a corner of a verandah, as if cast aside. There was a tulsi plant next to it in a terracotta pot and a plate of stone-carved food lay before it as an offering. This one was different from the gryphons and apsaras and Buddhas they had been looking at. Only about a foot high, carved in black marble, soft folds of clothing shaping the form beneath, the sculpture showed a young girl squatting on the ground with her elbows resting on her knees, her palms cradling her chin. Her ears stuck out saucer-like from a large head, her hair fell in two plaits on either side of her face. She had a squat nose and her stone eyes had been given a slight squint. The eyebrows were bunched together in a frown as if she had been too impatient to sit still while being sculpted, she wanted to run off and play instead.
The man swung the lamp away from that statue and it went back into the cover of darkness. “That one is not for sale,” he said.
I remember the sculptor who once came to the ashram and sat there chiselling an idol. It was going to be huge. Slowly the rock yielded some parts of a face, then a neck, then the shape of an arm. He didn’t finish making it. He went away one day and we never saw him again. We wondered for a day or two, but we never asked. So many things happened around us that we did not ask about – and whom would we have a
sked? The half-made idol lay under a tree saying nothing either, unfinished, half a head, a blind eye, an arm and the curve of a shoulder, the rest a block of mouldy grey stone.
I remember many other things that happened, things we could not talk about. How Piku lay in bed and whimpered all night. When she was beaten she didn’t understand why, when she was left alone she had no idea why. The older girls bullied her too. Sometimes they would pin her frock to the bed so she would tear it trying to get up. They would steal her food and the oddments she collected and hid. They would hold those things out as if to give them back to her and when she ran towards them looking delighted, they would fling them far away, out of reach, and guffaw at her tears. I was always getting into fights because of her. I could never fight with words, I didn’t know the right ones, so I would fling myself at girls much bigger and older. I might be bleeding and screaming, but I wouldn’t let go, I tore out clumps of hair from the other girls’ heads if they did anything to Piku. She stuck to me, she trusted only me. I was her protector.
I remember a cat. Its face was in the stomach of a pigeon. When the cat noticed me it lifted its head out of the bird. It was gluey with blood and feathers. Its eyes were shining amber.
I remember how Jugnu would stand in the quadrangle at dawn, screaming, “Evil sucks you in. It’s sucked everyone in! Wake up, you fools! Look around you! Wake up!” He would groan, “Weep, little children, weep that you didn’t die.”
Jugnu would tell me the sea was nearby, pointing at the horizon, saying softly, “Listen and you’ll hear it.” I tried, but I couldn’t hear it. His weathervane had rusted now and hardly moved at all. Still I thought I would wake one morning to find the arrow had turned northward and we were setting off, sailing away.
I remember the boat that had brought us to the ashram, an open motorboat with an oil-tarred hold in which we were hidden, stacked against each other because there was no space. The boat rocking, then steadying itself for long hours, then rocking again. The creamy yellow of the vomit flowing into the pools of black grease all over the floor of the hold. Its stench. Girls crying “Ma-go, Ma-go”, as if moaning would bring our mothers back.
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