Hillstation (16 page)

‘But they make homes and grow food,' said another. ‘Which beetles don't.'

‘Ants are not more intelligent,' said yet another, chewing thoughtfully. ‘They are just more organised.'

‘Well, whatever,' said Father tersely. ‘An ant or a beetle, frankly I'm not fussed so long as it fits under my foot.'

At which they all chuckled.

‘I have heard it said,' said one of the elders, wiping dribble from his chin, ‘that photographic materials of a chronometric nature have been circulating in some of the more salacious quarters of our blessed purlieu.'

‘One cannot help pondering their choreographic intentions vis-à-vis this “performance”,' said another, inadvertently spitting crimson over my father's shoe. ‘I mean, as a matter of cultural curiosity, not that I care to find out for myself.'

‘It was cultural curiosity that took my son to the roof of the Hotel Nirvana,' snarled Father. ‘Frankly, if it wasn't for my three good children I would surmise the line corrupt.'

‘An aberration,' consoled one of the elders. ‘Nothing more.'

‘By their exception are proved the rules,' offered another. ‘And the very wretchedness of Rabindranath makes it abundantly clear that your lineage is in otherwise excellent fettle. More Paan?'

‘Not just now, thank you,' said Father with a bow. ‘I have domestic matters to attend to.'

I made some attempts, as we walked home, to explain that I was only acting, as I supposed, at the behest of the gods but only got as far as, ‘Please, Father, I was only acting, as I supposed, at the…' before he gave me a resounding slap and told me not to answer back.

As we reached the front door I wondered what sort of Rabindra had sneaked from it only hours before. Could that have been me? The fleeting fantasy of a picture-book hero, a fluffy-haired magazine marvel in a carefully dishevelled shirt gazing melancholically at the destiny that he alone can see? It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. And my father was right.

Once or twice, treading the cold pavements, I had been seized by a momentary spasm of defiance. I could run. I could thrust my head back and stare at some distant star as my legs flung me fearlessly to other lives. But what lives? And where? The hotel? Up the stairs, along the corridor, left, right, up some more stairs, probably getting lost for a bit, and out to the sweet serenity of a moonlit roof where my beloved cradled a bottle of beer, its shimmering refractions cascading the fabulous contours of her ludicrously beautiful face as she laughed at me?

‘Where,' said Father, kicking his shoes off for my sisters to put away, ‘in the entire history of our illustrious family has the son of a Sharma been found on a hotel roof consorting with foreigners?'

‘But they are not foreigners,' I protested. ‘They are from England.'

‘With their ridiculous clothes and preposterous hair?' he snapped back. ‘I know what English people look like. Is there not a photograph of your revered brother in the company of an English person? And is this person wearing a t-shirt and no brassiere, or a pink headband with “Kiss My Arse” embroidered in purple lettering?'

‘Not at all,' I said. ‘She is wearing a copious evening dress with a glittering tiara but…'

‘There are no buts in matters of English haute couture,' shouted Father stamping his foot and hopping around since he'd just removed his shoes.

‘She is formally dressed for an important occasion,' I insisted. ‘And even though she's the Queen whatever the occasion, I very much doubt she wears that sort of thing while eating breakfast or cleaning the car.'

‘So when, exactly,' he roared, ‘do you suppose she sports cut-away jeans the rear crease of which all but disappears? When she's walking the corgis? In the company of His Royal Highness The Prince of Whales thus insulting all aquatic mammals over which he has dominion? Hnn?'

My sisters sobbed as I passed them, but they often did that anyway.

Tucking into bed with the blankets around my chin, I tried to remember when my father's rages had begun. Which struck me as an interesting proposition. For a thing that has a beginning suggests a time when it was not. And if there is a time when it was not, then it is reasonable to assume that it has a cause. And if it has a cause, it is equally reasonable to assume that it will have an end, since its continuation is dependent on the continued interest of that cause. I chuckled to myself. Up to this point I had assumed that the rage had simply been the result of me being something to rage at. Which is to say that it existed because I did. But if there was a cause beyond the mere fact of my existence, what was it?

In my humble role as Clinical Assistant I had learned much about cause and effect. For instance, if somebody has a cough, generally speaking, it is because they have inhaled something detrimental to their lungs. If they have a swollen leg it might be that their shoes are too tight. Headaches are often associated with exposure to irritating people, and sleeplessness can be put down to diet. It was all very simple. I only had to observe a symptom to understand that somewhere lurked its provocation. Once discovered, it could be dealt with. And once dealt with, the symptoms desisted. If the symptoms remained, one had simply failed to find the true cause and had to look again. In life, the usual assumption is that a thing is there because it's there. Which would make for an odd sort of medicine, telling people they were coughing because they had a cough, or that their joints ached because they have aching joints. In medicine we look for causes. In life we shrug our shoulders, blame the gods and get on with it.

Of course, it's true enough that blaming the gods can provide us with a consolation of sorts. Our son's ugly nose can be elevated from the merely unfortunate fact of a bulbous hooter to some vast celestial plan. That powers charged with the maintenance of all the universes, known and unknown, could spare a thought for our son's nose makes the problem of its protrusiveness infinitely more tolerable. But if I were to inform a patient that their stomach upset was simply the will of the gods and there was nothing to be done about it, the will of the gods might very well be expressed by a slap to my face.

Across the flickering haze of my dreams, Sergeant Shrinivasan rattled his chest, Sharon raised a bottle to her lips, and Malek Bister waved his whisky about. Hendrix rolled a remarkably large cigarette, while Martina stared over the rooftops saying nothing. I opened my eyes and gazed at the shadows of my room. A couple of geckos crept gingerly out from behind a picture to feast on insects that otherwise might have feasted on me. Either it all makes sense, I thought, or none of it does. Outside, a dog howled mournfully. Then it yelped once and didn't howl again. At which point, I think, I fell asleep.

7

‘Rabindra,' whispered a voice. ‘It's
me. Wake up.'

‘Shiva?' I answered, dopily.

‘What? No. Don't be silly. Come on, if your father catches me…'

I scrambled out of bed and pulled the windows open. Pol climbed in, grinning.

‘Bad dreams?' he chuckled.

‘I was The Turtle again.'

He slumped on the floor. ‘You don't even look like a turtle,' he said.

‘My reflection did. When I cupped the waters.'

‘You're all mixed up,' he said. ‘It was Shiva who cupped the waters. So what was he carrying this time, an axe?'

I nodded glumly.

He smiled. ‘I didn't sleep much either.'

‘Were you the demon or the god?' I asked.

‘To be honest, probably both.'

‘Then that is the worst kind of dream,' I said. ‘One moment purity personified, the next a fanged turtle, endlessly shifting position until you sink at last into the brittle comfort of oblivion.'

‘That pretty much sums it up,' he chuckled.

By now I had begun to notice that he was looking oddly pleased with himself.

‘My dear friend,' he said, ‘I feel it is my duty to inform you that spending the night with one's English bride is a joy beyond measure.'

‘As indeed,' I retorted, ‘is its unlikelihood a grief beyond fathom.'

‘What are you talking about?' he laughed. ‘How can what has happened be unlikely to happen? It is now. It is here. Hasn't everything we dreamed of been granted, plus a couple of things we hadn't?' He grinned again. ‘Alright,' he said, ‘I'll admit I was a bit sceptical. And when they arrived I thought at any moment I'd wake up having nodded off in my father's workshop attempting to glue someone's engine back together. Was I deluded? Had we gone mad? Were these creatures but the product of our imagination conjured by some dark art that you and I had inadvertently stumbled upon in the fevered lust of our impious supplications? But could everyone be mad? Could every young man of the village, stricken with the hot fires of lascivious blood, and every old man craving the substance to match his whim, have also gone completely la la? No, dear friend. My wife is as real as a freshly spiced chapatti. However close you look, she is real. However hard you squeeze, she is real. Wherever you taste, she is more real than anything I have ever known. And what's more, my brave, loyal and most gentle friend, she loves me as ever woman loved a man, with a totality beyond the totality of all the spinning stars threshed together on a cloudless night above the mighty peaks of our mountain abode. And how do I know this? Partly because my own love is an answered song-bird calling from a forest grove. But mainly because she said so. Over and over. She has cried it, called it, even screamed it. And though it stings me to wear my shirt, with every jab of agony my thoughts fly back to the wonders of the night and the endless declarations of her love through body, soul and fingernails. Rabindra, such marvels await you as you have never dreamed of. Smile. Stand. Rejoice. For our lives have changed forever!'

‘Yours might have,' I sniffed ungraciously. ‘But mine remains exactly as it was. If anything, it's got worse.'

‘Oh, phooey,' he said. ‘I suppose your father told you they were leaving and you'd never see them again.'

I shrugged.

‘Well, he's wrong,' said Pol. ‘For they danced here on the wings of prayer. They shall dance away with their husbands beside them. And, in the meantime, they shall dance for the village in the Shri Malek Bister International Arts and Entertainments Complex, book early to bag a seat!'

‘It is not just my father,' I said, morosely.

‘The elders,' he snorted. ‘Stalking the streets while young men fester in the lonely sweat of their grubby rooms. I say, let them publish their edicts. Let them punish the children. But they cannot tell us what happens in my father's hall, built on his own bloody land with his own bloody money.'

‘You can say what you like, but it's a village edict. Which applies to everything. Me, you, everyone.'

‘I think you will find,' smirked Pol, ‘that a previous resolution of the Grand Colloquy of Elders declared that the hall was henceforth to be understood as existing beyond any formal description that might encompass that which is generally known, or may be construed, as being, blah blah, an attribute of village activities. It is beyond the bounds. I think your father drafted it.' He leaned back, smiling. ‘Honestly, Rabindra, you don't think I'd defy an edict, do you?'

‘Fine,' I said. ‘So let them dance. They can dance all they like. But they won't have an audience.'

‘That remains to be seen,' said Pol, darkly. ‘There are some of us who aren't afraid to know what happened in April.'

‘Now you have gone mad,' I said. ‘Edicts aren't a matter of consent. That's why they're edicts. You can agree with them or not but you cannot disobey.'

‘Possibly,' said Pol, wincing slightly as he adjusted his shoulders.

‘No,' I said. ‘Certainly. For this is what certainly is. An edict is the very essence of certainly, as impermeable as the ground beneath our feet, the sky over our heads, the mountains that encircle us…'

‘Until they do so no longer,' said Pol.

‘Pol!' I slammed my hand, albeit soundlessly, on the blankets of my bed. ‘Are you to move the mountains now? Has momentary success inflated your ego to monstrous proportions? I'll concede that you summoned our wives, and that is, admittedly, impressive. Moreover, it confirms what I have always believed, that your present embodiment is a mere chastisement for some minor infraction in a series of otherwise unblemished lives. Perhaps you… I don't know, threw stones at a dog not realising it was Krishna, or looked out one day from your forest hermitage to see a beautiful doe and wished it would stay longer. It doesn't matter. The point is that the gods have not forgiven you, they are testing you. Don't you see? Your redemption hangs in the balance. You know how it is. They grant you a little wish and wait for you to feel pleased about it. That's the trick. And out comes the Turtle. Have you forgotten the words of our revered teacher as he marched between the desks chiding us for turtle-like tendencies? Did he not say on a daily basis that Shiva would do well to practise his decapitation skills on half the wretches in this stinking rat-hole? And did you not hear his favourite dictum, every syllable punctuated with a whack round somebody's head, that the greatest peril facing the aspirant to virtue is arrogance? Then listen to yourself. It is enough that you summoned lightning to strike an aeroplane. But to think that you can move these mountains that have circumscribed our sacred environs since the beginning of time is an arrogance too dark to contemplate. Strike it from your mind, my imperilled friend. Strike it now.' I leaned back, mopping my forehead with a pillow.

‘I only meant,' said Pol, ‘that when we leave Pushkara we shall no longer be surrounded by them, obviously.'

‘Oh,' I said.

He chuckled. ‘But aside from that, I'm really not sure I agree with anything you've just said. Oh, I know we performed austerities and yes, it kept us amused. But, frankly, I don't think they had much to do with an electrical short-out on an aeroplane.'

‘But was it not struck by lightning?' I asked. ‘And was this lightning not caused by a storm? And did this storm not follow the culmination of our solemnities?'

‘True enough,' he said. ‘But maybe it's my turn to ask if you learnt anything at school. Perhaps you weren't listening when our revered teacher explained how hot winds go this way and moisture that, whipping up thermal vortexes over the mountains. Seriously, Rabindra, are you really suggesting that a handful of wildflowers and a pot of butter somehow conjured two women out of nothing and deposited them here for our personal amusement? And you call me arrogant! But think about it. If they didn't exist until we invented them, of what use would they be? They wouldn't know what a tree was. Or a shoe. They wouldn't know how to eat. They wouldn't know who their parents were because you and I had spun them out of some ethereal mishmash of hope and devotion. But the fact is they know stuff, oh boy. Stuff we didn't even know was there to be known.'

‘Pol,' I said, ‘this doesn't sound like you.'

‘You're wrong,' he hissed. ‘For the first time in my life I have begun to sound like me. Who am I, Rabindra? The low-born progeny of an outcast brood? A malignant blight on the fragrant face of the social order? Well let me ask you another question. Who says? In whose gift is it to pronounce my place on this earth, this globe, this mighty orb of soil and water spinning endlessly in space? The gods? And in whose ear do they whisper? To whom did they send the memo? Is it carved on my brow, written on the winds, muttered from mountain to mountain? So let me ask you again: who says?'

I opened my mouth but couldn't speak.

‘Oh, my friend,' he continued, ‘do you remember, all those years ago, when I first came to school? My shabby desk with its broken legs at the back of the class? Of course they'd only let me in because of my father's substantial contribution to the “Most Desperately Required School Roof Appeal”. And do you remember the elders shaking their heads in disbelief, saying the recent disappearance of roof tiles could not be explained by natural causes?

‘For a long time I couldn't understand it. My father said all I had to do was sit up, pay attention and remind myself that if water wasn't cascading through a hole above my head it was thanks to him. But I was invisible, inaudible. “Please, please sir, I know!” My little hand waving, my desk far beyond the sedate orbit of his pedagogic circumlocutions as he strode the room, correcting here, admonishing there. Until I handed my work in. His red scrawl like a trail of blood. The vicious stab of exclamation marks down the margin of my dreams. Oh, Rabindra! Two out of ten. One out of ten. Nought out of ten. And the smug whispers that you can lead a horse to water but you cannot teach it calculus.

‘Except for one child that I met by chance, or not by chance, up in the caves. And though we played that day as innocents in the free space of the open pastures, I expected only scorn when we returned to the schoolroom with its elbows and whispers. But to my astonishment, on that drizzly Monday morning, he sat next to me and even shared his snack-box. And though I had food of my own, I accepted it as one accepts a lotus petal falling from heaven. For though I had, by this time, understood the derision of my peers, I could not understand the one among them who showed mercy. Surely he, above all, would have known how my presence imperilled him, how my look would shrivel his merits, my shadow his purity; how, by touching his books, I would rob them of the wisdom therein. Looking back, of course, I can imagine your thoughts drifting off as your father ranted, an affliction to which you were prone even then.

‘But one day, scampering up to the school gates, he suddenly realised why the other children no longer played with him. An overheard remark, or simple epiphany, but from that moment on he made amends. From that moment on, there was none so brutal or relentless. The sneers. The jibes. The kick in the back of the legs as we filed in to class. But I do not blame you, Rabindra, for children are as they are and, in any case, it was too late. For by now you too were shunned. Your homework, once adequate, became a burden of woe to those tasked with your betterment. “Must try harder”. “What do you call this?” “No, no, NO!” Carved in flames of red. And in the playground, how they shuffled away from your token Bhaji, how they wouldn't let you kick their ball.

‘And so, because we all crave company however repugnant, you found me one spring morning in a corner of the playing fields and offered me a bite of your samosa. That I accepted was, in part, my infinite capacity to forgive and, in part, the loneliness that necessitated it. And thus we became friends again. I am not saying that you have been kind to me all these years only because you couldn't find anyone else.' I moved to protest but he waved me down. ‘You have been loyal. I believe that you have been true. And you have been more than generous with your karma. For even now as my shadow falls across your sacred bed, do you protest? No. You merely flinch.'

Again I moved to speak and again he shook his head.

‘Listen, Rabindra, not to the friend of yesterday but to the Pol that I have become. Yesterday I was a low-born. Today, I am simply a born. Like you, I was conceived, like you, gestated and, like you, delivered screaming to the chafing brutality of this unforgiving world. Like everyone, I am a shambling sack of bones and meat. And my shadow? A momentary obstruction of sunlight. A dog or a saint without a sensible thought in their heads can do as much. You keep moving to interrupt, but tell me, Rabindra, honestly, when you look at me, what do you see?'

‘My friend.'

‘The low-born.'

‘No no.' This time I ignored his shaking head. ‘I confess that I was weak. That I betrayed you. Does it grieve me? Yes, of course. Have I struggled over the years to make amends for it? Not at all. Our friendship isn't based on guilt. It's based on us. The dreams we've shared, our hopes and fears. This is not the stuff of people who can't find anyone better to be with. Now you listen to me,' I insisted, waving him down. ‘If I spurned you in the playground it wasn't because I detested you. It was because I was afraid not to. It was wrong of me, I know. But for all my reprehensible conduct, and the pain it put you through, I have never considered you as anything but my equal.'

‘You are most gracious,' said Pol with a hint of sarcasm.

‘Pol!' I said. ‘You have put me into the position where to defend my position is to imperil it.'

‘I would have thought the son of a barrister could wriggle his way out of that.'

‘You are right,' I said, tears beginning to smart. ‘I do not know this Pol.'