‘But most of all — and also because I don’t want to blame your father for everything when he isn’t here to defend himself any longer — what I really want to say is that if you still feel this way towards your brother, that he is to blame for much that is missing in your life, then shouldn’t you have this conversation with him before you talk about it to outsiders? And perhaps even before you came …’
In my almost overwhelming disagreement with the cruelty and harshness of Ashim’s implied charges against Abhay, I had totally forgotten to listen out for him leaving the girls’ rooms after turning out the lights. Suddenly Ashim raised his hand to silence me, thereby enraging me further before I realised what he was indicating.
Without another word, I got up from the smaller sofa and walked towards the bathroom, past Abhay in the kitchen, who was pouring himself a whisky.
‘They changed their minds about having the toys at the foot of their beds. They wanted them in bed, even the Lego blocks and the campervan. There were some pretty intricate negotiations after story-time over where exactly all the different toys could be positioned in either room, so that no one would trip over anything in the dark. That’s what took so long. And then just as I was leaving her room, Mira wanted to do her new thing of listing everything we’d done today, beginning with waking up and rushing to see if Santa’s snacks were gone. So that took another five minutes. Do you know if Dada already has a drink?’
I shook my head but was still not composed enough to speak; luckily Abhay was busy pouring. He asked if I would like one. I said yes, but I’d have it in our room because I still had packing to finish. Right then, all I was feeling was dread at the thought of our holiday coming up the following morning — three days isolated in Kaiteriteri together (in the dream bach that I had so gleefully snapped up on the rentals website three months ago), not to mention car journeys and ferry rides. And then a further nine days before they left, including another break all together in the Coromandel and Auckland, where we were heading to see them off, making nearly two more weeks with this bitter man who had come here only to poison his younger brother’s life.
Ha, ha, Lena, someone was going at that precise moment. Ha, ha!
You have no clue.
My computer wasn’t being used as I passed through the living room with my drink, and when I opened it in bed after having packed Mira’s things there was an email from Ashim, presumably sent from that same machine.
You’re right, Lena. Abhay hasn’t ever harmed me. But for a writer, especially for a writer, I do find it amazing how much he chooses not to see. He’s always been like that, and now he lives here where not seeing is so easy. But even here, have you noticed, he plays tennis and doesn’t see the children’s graves right beside the courts! He is friends with his neighbours but doesn’t see their obvious need. For example, he is right to believe that he helps Janaki whenever she asks. But what about all the days and even weeks in between when she has nothing specific to ask for? Does he think her sorrow vanishes when no one’s there? Do those thousands of hours fly by as quickly for her as they do for him, writing or playing tennis or with Mira and you? If only life were as smooth for everyone else as it is for my little brother, and people’s troubles could be switched on or off depending on when he felt like paying attention.
Anyway, I actually began writing only to say that about our past, I do believe he has shared honestly with you everything he remembers seeing. But be careful before you decide whether that is enough.
Your brother,
A.
They were next door, and I could hear that they had switched on an episode of Crime Patrol, Abhay’s true-crime TV show addiction from India. Turning Ashim out of our house wasn’t an option, but I could have announced that I wouldn’t be joining them on holiday, either in Kaiteriteri or later up north. That’s what I’d wanted to do all evening, and I was an adult; I had the right. It was for the best that you didn’t go on holiday with someone whose company makes your skin crawl. That was some good T-shirt advice, that.
I was asleep when Abhay came to bed, and I didn’t show him the email in the rush of the following morning. We took our ferry to Picton, everyone behaving just as they should.
Eleven more days, I kept telling myself. Eleven days, and then they couldn’t return until we decided to sponsor them again. Picturing the distance from Hazaribagh, as well as that thought — that Ashim couldn’t ever just spring a visit on us — helped me stay on the rails.
Ashim sprung his next thing on us six days later.
Abhay
Lena had noticed it too, from her experiences of bedtime in particular, because it was a combination of evening and stories (although of course it had barely turned dark at nine when we read to the girls — a phenomenon Tulti still found fascinating even after several days in Wellington: she’d look out of the living-room window, then check the digital clock on the bookcase and confirm with me ‘Abhi Kaku, is it really eight-thirty?’), that little Tulti was properly into her spirits and ghosts, which of course meant Mira had been getting more curious about an area of which she’d had no knowledge until a week ago.
‘Baba, are there any ghosts in our house?’ Mira asked me, with Tulti in the room, the day after I’d answered the same question from Tulti at bedtime. I again guaranteed there were none.
‘What about in the garage?’
‘Promise. None there either.’
‘What about the small toilet at the bottom of the steps to the garage?’
‘Well, there I’m not sure, because I’ve never used it at night. One of us needs to go down to find out, and it has to be in the dark because otherwise a ghost would never come out, so who’s it going to be? Let’s do eeny meeny miny moe and decide.’
Mira screamed when I ended up pointing at her and refused to hear of it, and I hoped my joke wouldn’t start off a legend. Lena would not be pleased. But Tulti, although she smiled at Mira’s fright, also looked very interested, as though she had wanted to see what I would say because this was a serious query.
Another time, when it was the girls and me driving down to pick up Lena from work, I asked Tulti in bright afternoon sunshine (and in Bengali) to tell us about some of the ghosts she knew of in Hazaribagh. Mira was busy having her turn making and selling ice cream on a Lego Duplo app on our iPad.
‘There’s one on a path behind our neighbourhood. It’s of a man who was hanged there during the British time.’
‘You mean the police hanged him,’ I wondered, remembering that, growing up in India, I too had probably been acquainted with the existence, and primary mode, of our death penalty at the age of six (for example, with the line from the song commemorating Khudiram Bose’s martyrdom: ‘With a smile, I shall don the noose …’). But Tulti was unclear about the history. What she knew was that you never went down that path to the lakes after dark.
‘And there’s another funny ghost,’ she managed to tell me before we arrived on Kelburn Parade. ‘It’s an old woman close to Ranjana-maasi’s house, behind the houses on her lane, and she won’t really kill you, but will definitely hit you on the head with a branch.’ This made both of us immediately giggle, and Mira got curious, so I had to explain.
According to the system of classification Tulti had absorbed and understood, bad ghosts, which were most ghosts, would grab you by the neck, or hair, and not let go. But this woman was different because she had been robbed in that specific manner by a hoodlum who knocked her on the head and took away all her jewellery. Perhaps the blow had accidentally killed her, or else she died later, still inconsolable about her loss — I didn’t press Tulti for such details — but since her death she’d jealously guarded the ghost of her treasure, and a branch would invariably land on anyone’s head who passed at night under a particular tree, behind which presumably the robber had been hiding.
All this I shared with Lena over an early breakfast on Christmas Eve, while the others were still asleep. But I added that Tulti was also genuinely devout, as
well as incredibly generous in her prayers. She’d told me that while walking down a street or seated on a rickshaw in Hazaribagh she would say a silent prayer for anyone who looked kind or as though they needed help, and because four was her lucky number, the prayer — which she had made up herself — was in four lines of eight words each. She’d been doing the same for strangers in New Zealand too.
And apparently she’d worn a cross at the end of a thread necklace until October, partly because she liked the daily prayers at her convent school but also because ghosts didn’t dare come near anyone wearing a cross, but Moushumi had forced her to give it up because either the metal or the silver paint had caused a rash on her chest. She’d been promised a replacement made of wood.
‘Wow, if she’d come here wearing a cross, Mira would have definitely wanted one as well,’ I said to Lena.
On Boxing Day morning, sitting indoors on the ferry to get some shelter from a middling southerly while Dada and the girls were outside watching us leave Wellington Harbour, I had some further light to shed on the matter. Dada had told me an incredible story the previous afternoon.
‘Tulti’s superstitions are from her father,’ I felt I could announce, because I was now certain of possessing clinching evidence to make this case. ‘I wonder if Moushumi believes to the same extent as well.’
I then shared a story that Dada had told me in total seriousness the day before, walking along Karaka Bays, which was just a couple of hundred metres to the right of our present sailing path, shortly after Lena, Rosemary and the girls had carried on from our picnic lunch to get changed for the beach. We’d asked to have a stroll first.
One morning three months ago — just after their New Zealand visas had arrived, in fact — Dada woke up with a tremendous headache: it felt like a motor was spinning right behind his eyes. As he walked from the bed to wash his face, he hit his knee against a corner and then knocked over a small table, because he was finding it hard to even see. He’d gone to sleep feeling absolutely fine.
Moushumi, because of the severity of his symptoms, wouldn’t hear of him riding his motorbike as usual to work, especially because on the way he also dropped off Tulti at school. Instead, she arranged for a rickshaw to first pick up Tulti and then to return and take them both to the doctor.
The doctor (Tulti’s ‘Ranjana-maasi’) said his blood pressure seemed fine as did his pulse, but, alarmed by the evident pain Dada was in, suggested a CT scan which could be followed if needed by an MRI. She said she would personally call the hospital to get Dada an appointment as soon as possible, and they would let Moushumi know. Dada and Moushumi took the same rickshaw home, picking up on the way the strongest painkillers the doctor could prescribe. Dada believed he had in fact lost consciousness on the way back — he had no memory of Moushumi getting off the rickshaw to go into the pharmacy — with the combination of unrelenting pain and the ever-stronger sunlight.
It was on the ride home from the hospital three hours later, when the first dose of painkillers had taken effect and Dada could just about keep his eyes open, that he noticed something unusual as they were approaching their gate. He didn’t say anything in the rickshawwala’s presence; in fact, he mentioned not a word to Moushumi even after they were alone, but made a phone call from their bedroom while she was preparing a sweet-lime drink in the kitchen.
By eleven o’clock that night, after six more painkillers, at least the feeling that something was trying to (loudly) drill outwards from his brain through the middle of his forehead had abated. Dada was better enough to be sitting up in the living room with the TV on: even a few hours earlier, at teatime, the colours and noise would have been unbearable. He was also more awake than usual, having slept for most of the afternoon. Moushumi and Tulti were both in bed.
Dada got the missed call alert he’d been waiting for. He left the TV as it was, put on his slippers and went outside. The man with the torch seemed to have felt the pull immediately, because he was standing less than a foot away from the exact spot where they would have to dig. Dada too had a battery-operated emergency light with him.
They began digging at 11.15, and were done by twenty to midnight. Soon the displaced soil was back in place, looking no more disturbed than when it had caught Dada’s eye that morning. He would come back and smooth it over some more first thing the next day. The other man took away the chicken bones they had found — yes, chicken bones, uncooked — and said he’d call Dada the following morning.
Dada woke up to a miraculously clear head, exactly as he’d gone to bed two nights before. He looked this way and that sitting up in bed, and then got out and skipped on the spot, just to see if there was any ringing or heaviness. The test results were due in a couple of hours, but Dada didn’t need them. All he was now waiting for was a name.
At eleven, he was on a site inspection at a government bungalow where they were planning to add an extra wing when he got a message. It was a name that began and ended with ‘S’. Who did Dada know that fitted the bill?
‘Could the name be Subhas?’ he texted to ask five minutes later.
‘Very much so,’ the reply came immediately. ‘But you have to be sure.’
That evening, at the house of the man who had the chicken bones, Dada had his options outlined for him. If he wanted, if he said yes, Subhas would have his evil returned ‘thousand-fold’ upon him. Subhas could wake up tomorrow morning paralysed from head to toe.
‘But then Maheshji said to me,’ (and this is Dada narrating with the utmost solemnity that I too tried to convey to Lena in my retelling), ‘“if you’re wrong about him, you will have wreaked havoc on the life of an innocent man. Such a sin creates its own evil. And meanwhile your actual enemy will still be unharmed.”’
Throughout the next day at work, Dada would pull his phone out from time to time to add to a list of people he knew (not just ‘enemies’ — his word), both men and women, whose names began and ended with ‘S’. In several cases, it only worked if you took their first and last names as a whole: was that included in Maheshji’s hint? At one point, he’d called Moushumi for help, and asked her to text any names that occurred to her. But even after all this careful reconsideration and elimination, when he looked into himself to try and hear his inner voice, he remained as certain as before that Subhas was the culprit, a fellow civil engineer whose office was two cubicles away from his own.
At this point, I stopped to allow Lena to react, partly because I’d noticed there was less of the amusement that I was expecting to see, rather something closer to disgust.
‘Abhay, these are engineers you’re talking about, men who build things, who make their living from science.’
‘I know. That’s what makes it hilarious. I was sure you’d see the funny side.’
‘I would, if you’d notice the creepy side. Your brother’s wholly into black magic and seriously believes that he can have some work rival paralysed through a spell for the rest of his life, and then in fact considers this option—’
‘True, but let me finish before they come back, and you’ll see—’
‘And such a person is staying with us, and his daughter, who is a wonderful child but is for better or worse growing up under this man’s influence, is the cool older cousin our four-year-old looks up to. I mean, what if she leaves Mira with a lasting fear of the dark, or a belief that other kids are her enemies and plotting “evil” against her? What a wonderful legacy of this visit that would be, bringing in its wake mistrust, bedwetting and God knows what else. I mean, stray dogs bury bones, Abhay. Children bury things they’ve found. Did your engineer brother ever stop to consider those possibilities? Did he ask Tulti once if she’d seen anything? And what about the truly magical spell that strong painkillers can cast, which if you take eight of them might start to work even before you find some buried bones? What quality of engineer must you be to put chicken bones over painkillers as the cure for your headache?’
Thankfully we had our row of seats all to ourselves to be
able to have this conversation, which you truly wouldn’t want strangers to overhear for what it would reveal about their black-magic-fixated co-passengers, but I was taken aback not just by the strength of Lena’s reaction, but by a dislike that it revealed of my brother which was both unknown and troubling to me. I’d shared the story believing that she would recognise the funny side of science and superstition co-existing to this extent in a well-educated, middle-class Indian mind, especially as someone who’d been with an Indian for thirteen years and visited at least a dozen states over perhaps nine trips. I did immediately see her point about the fear of ‘malign spirits’ and darkness lingering within Mira, and resolved that we would cut out all discussion about ghosts from now on, but I also wanted to finish my story before the others returned, if only to exonerate Dada somewhat in Lena’s eyes. As to whence this dislike sprung, and how deep it ran and whether it was recent or had been concealed out of concern for my feelings from their first meeting at Chhotka’s wedding, all that would have to wait for an early morning talk over the next couple of days in Kaiteriteri.
Dada’s tantrik Maheshji was in fact a wise man, in keeping with the extent of his power and knowledge. He pointed out again the option of destroying Subhas, by multiplying his own malice back in his direction, and such a satisfying revenge could literally be accomplished in minutes — within ten minutes, in fact — because the rite was not a complicated one, but Dada had to consider the consequences before he commanded for it to be unleashed.
‘Are you a hundred per cent sure it was Subhas before sentencing him to a lifetime of suffering? And even if it was, make no mistake — whoever enabled Subhas to do this will not be able to undo the rite I shall perform, but they will certainly guess it has come from you. And then although it is true that I can devise many protections for you from any revenge that they might seek, I must confess right now that we cannot possibly plan for everything, especially not when their targets could include your wife and daughter. For example, if someone in a car drives towards your daughter as she is walking home from a shop, can you or I be there to stop him, because that is not a spell, remember? That is just physics, Ashim.
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