In the Shadow of Crows (19 page)

Chapter Fourteen

I could see nothing of Darjeeling. The town was not only suffering a total power cut, but had disappeared in dense fog.

The chatty soldier drew up his jeep in front of what he promised was the Planters' Club. To express my gratitude, I handed him the taxi fare I would have spent. He grinned broadly, touched the notes to his heart, then wished me a gracious farewell and vanished back into the gloom.

Without the headlights of the jeep I was suddenly quite blind. The main gates of the Club had been firmly chained for the night, so I felt my way around the outer wall and cautiously entered an unlocked door. The fathomless black of the interior burst into shimmering shadow as a Nepali servant lifted a glowing oil lamp high above his head. The
darban
doorkeeper could not understand a word I said, so made a phone call and handed me the receiver. It was the manager.

“Sir, you are very late,” the fatigued voice pointed out astutely. I apologised and asked if there might be a vacant room for my

use. He replied that he would be pleased to allow me to stay, even though he had already retired for the night. I asked whether the price included breakfast.

“Oh my, sir!” he exclaimed. “You are driving a hard bargain, but for you I'll say most certainly, ‘Yes'!”

The sleepy-eyed servant led me down a broad, open verandah, and up a rickety wooden staircase to my room. He lit two candle stubs, stoked up a coal fire, bid me goodnight and disappeared back into the mist. Exhausted, I dropped onto the bed as heavy rain began to patter over the skylights.

So here I was at last, in the club to which Great-Uncle Oscar had belonged all those years ago, lying on a bed in which “Hindoo Uncle” - as he had signed himself on the photographs he had regularly posted home - might also have once sought sleep.

The bedroom was large, yet still cluttered with colonial furniture. I had my own
en suite
sitting room, in which stood a dusty bureau, an empty plant-stand, and an open-cane three-piece, set around a badly torn green-baize card table. I had my own Victorian
gussalkhana
, with a porcelain flush-toilet and washbasin made in Aldershot, and a gargantuan, grimly stained bath tub, with heavily encrusted chrome taps, made in Birmingham.

I unpacked my essentials and threw more coal onto the fire. I bathed in four inches of tepid brown water, which was all the tap enamelled “hot” eventually managed to produce, then snuggled deeply into chalky sheets, beneath a damp eiderdown. A Yuletide roaring in the grate, thermal long johns, scarf and woolly socks, yet still I shivered with the cold. It seemed impossible that, just hours before, I had been limp and panting in stifling heat.

I blew out the candles by my bed and vigorously flailed limbs in all directions in an effort to warm myself by friction, just as Grandmother had once taught me in my chilly bed in Sussex. I quickly drew the blankets around my chin and curled up to watch flaring embers in the grate flicker phantom battles across walls and ceiling.

“Just look at me now, Grandma!” I said aloud, as though she were sitting in the lumpy armchair, ready to enchant me with another ancestral tale. “All tucked up in Uncle Oscar's very own Planters' Club, with Darjeeling outside my windows! Who'd have thought?”

I waited, as though for her reply.

“
Your breath like the full moon in the summer night shall hover about my dreams, making them fragrant
,” I smiled, quoting Tagore to the empty room.

And still I listened for “my Johnny Sparrow” until, as sleep swiftly stole away all thought and memory, I was aware of nothing more than raindrops slipping down the chimney to make the fire hiss.

***

Bindra was awoken by crows. She turned her head to find an untidy row of black feathers sitting on the sill of the open window.

“Kali Ma,” she whispered towards them from her bed. “What have you brought for me today?”

There was no response from the six steadfast stares.

“I don't know that I'm yet ready for more learning,” she murmured in admission. “I don't know that I'm yet ready for more wisdom.”

She had first learned of wisdom from her grandmother. Bindra had lived with her after her mother and sister had died beneath the elephant, and had grown to love her dearly.

Bindra's grandmother had never been into the town. She had lived her entire life in the mountain hut in which she had been born. Even when she had married a Nepali from lower in the Hills, she had defied custom and refused to move in with her husband's family. He had stayed on his ancestral farm, and she had stayed in her mountain hut. Bindra's grandfather had visited his new wife once a week initially. However, when she had given birth to a daughter, instead of a son, he had abandoned them both and had taken a more compliant, conventional village woman with whom to raise a family.

Bindra's grandmother had not believed her husband's excuse about the birth of a daughter. Amongst their people a daughter was a blessing, a goddess incarnate. They had not held to the misogyny of the orthodox, patriarchal traditions of the Plains.

Bindra's grandmother had known too well why he had really abandoned her. She was a
bojudeuta
, a “Grandmother God”.

Others had preferred to call her
bokshi
.

Witch.

***

At seven in the morning, I woke to find a Nepali room-boy opening the curtains and tying back the skylight blinds. He introduced himself as Yashu, wished me a chirpy “Fine morning, sir!”, then left me to rouse myself with a hot pot of ginger brew, which he had laid out with great care on the bedside teapoy.

I attempted some semblance of a wash in the granular, brown trickle proffered by the bathroom taps, dressed, then wandered down to breakfast. The fog had returned after the night's rain, thwarting all hopes of any views from the balcony of the snowypeaked Kanchenjunga.

A smart, Tibetan-looking doorman showed me to the single laid table, informing me that I was the only guest in the Club. Impatient to begin my search for some evidence of Uncle Oscar's life in these tea-clad hills, I pressed him to know at what time the Club Office might be manned.

The doorman shrugged. “Perhaps after breakfast, sir. Then again, perhaps not.”

As he wandered back towards his post, an elderly, Nepali
khitmutgar
servant approached with some effort on his arthritic limbs. He bowed with undisguised discomfort, took my order and laid a heavily stained napkin across my nippy knees.

The dining hall in which I sat was floored in Burmese teak, thick with decades of wax polish. Between the alcove windows, with their accommodating inset seats, stood pristine stone fireplaces. The Brunswick blacking of the grates gave the room a delicate taint of asphaltum, linseed oil and turpentine.

Set into one wall stood display cabinets, congested with past members' tarnished trophies. They dated far back to the time when sport had been a near mania in British India, an antidote perhaps for the grinding boredom inherent in the disciplined formalities of the Raj. Cups for polo and cricket, badminton and tennis. Medals for
shikar
and archery, jackal hunting and pig-sticking.

Mounted above the picture rail, my only companions' glass eyeballs stared down with contempt, each decapitated chinkara and blackbuck, muntjac and cheetah leaking sawdust and hung on hooks, having proven to former generations that they had indeed dominated all animals. And foreigners.

The wild rattle of a wooden screen made me start. Breakfast had arrived. I watched my elderly
khit
slowly wind his way through the dining tables with their matching sets of sub-William Morris chairs. He gradually set before me cornflakes, toast, poached egg, marmalade and hot milk, then proudly indicated towards the large opening in the wall from which he had collected the tray.

“Our fine buttery hatch, cut into the dining room in the old days to facilitate a more efficient service, due to complaints of insufficient attendance at table being made. It is, sir, to your satisfaction?”

I assured him that it was. His clipped, pre-war vowels had been faultless.

As he poured my tea, I wondered why I found such satisfaction in the faded elegance amongst which I now so delightedly sat. Had the prized modernity of my generation so banished all hints of gentility from our tediously sanitised lives, that it drove us to seek out the cosy reassurance of nostalgia? Even on this, my own sentimental journey, I had become acutely aware that I was doing little more than grasping at ghosts, ultimately dependent upon my own imagination, my own terms of reference. Kipling, Forster, Waugh. Jhabvala, Merchant, Ivory.

In truth, the tablecloth spread before me was no longer starched or pressed. The years of tea, coffee and Colman's mustard had patterned the cotton in stains no
dhobi
, however energetic, could erase. Decades of unwiped vases had left a myriad of concentric ripples across the bare tabletops. The cruet had been left to tarnish, the cutlery all belonged to different sets. The leather upholstery had worn through so long ago that it now exposed horsehair and cotton flock, torn scrim and rusty spring.

I recalled, from delving into my Grandmother's treasured box of mementoes, that there had once been a time when the breakfast menu at the Club had offered plain or parsley omelette with a variety of grilled offal. There had been bacon and tomatoes, sausages and mashed potato. Patties of meat, best steak and mutton hash. Eggs boiled, poached and “rumble-tumble”.

But now all choice was gone. The cornflakes were stale, the butter rancid. The greasy milk was speckled with ash, the Bhutanese marmalade served in its shop-shelf jar.

And yet, whilst battling with incinerated toast, I seemed to catch an iridescent sparkle thrown across the room by cufflinks and tiepins. The lustre of pearls and precious stones resting softly across pale throats, wrists and fingers. The scent of skin doused in Rowland's Kalydor, “Friend of the Complexion, Solace of the Flushed, Last Hope of the Freckled”.

As I picked crystallised ants from the sugar bowl, I seemed to sense the rub of gum-stiffened cuffs and collars on old
koi-hai
. The tintinnabulation of silver on fine imported china, as
pukka burra sahibs
and
sakt burra mems
tucked into Oxford sausages, mutton pillau, salmon loaf and Brown Windsor soup. Walnut blancmange, guava fool, mango mould and Taj Mahal jellies.

The tireless talk of tea crops, Cold Weather tours and tiger shoots. The ceaseless flow of
billayati-pani
pink gin sodas and Murree beer. The orotund toasts to Queen Empress, King Emperor and the confident delusion of an eternal
Pax Britannica
.

***

Bindra often longed to speak to her grandmother.

The
bojudeuta
were highly respected in the Eastern Himalaya for their knowledge, secret arts and wisdom. People came from all around for medicines and advice, understanding and answers.

As a child, Bindra had assisted her grandmother. She had gathered plants for pounding in the wooden
okhli musli
pestle and mortar to treat sickness and bestow second sight. She had collected tree bark for crushing on the
silauto
grinding-stone, to make a poultice that would heal wounds and mend broken bones.

She had bartered for
putkako maha
, the rare, intoxicating insect honey that cured all infection, and its
kut
wax that proved such an effective antidote for snakebite. She had sought the bitter, black
bikuma
plant that was the only remedy for the deadly, yellow poison of the ghost-like
kapat
insect, and fetched yak's milk
churpi
that, when dissolved in plant oil, could dull the pain of grief.

Bindra had seen many people come. Infirm men, sick women, diseased children. There had been young
repas
and aged
lamas
from the monasteries. Gurkha soldiers from Deolo camp. Even a personal maid of the Queen Mother of Bhutan who had scurried in one day with a secret trouble, when her mistress had been staying in her hot season palace.

Bindra had watched her grandmother's visitors walk away from their hut with ease, when they had been carried up the hill path in crippling paralysis. She had seen them laugh out loud with fearless joy, when they had arrived weak and drawn with devastating suffering. She had seen her grandmother's ministrations enable women to sing as they gave birth to their children. She had seen men struggling against Lord Yamantaka's inescapable noose of death smile softly and embrace their end in peace.

Over the years, Bindra had watched the constant course of visitors bow to touch her grandmother's feet upon departure. She had seen them, in their gratitude, lay before her rice and daal,
atta
, milk and mustard oil, yet never once did she demand a fee for her remedies or request money for her wisdom.

And yet, it was only Bindra who saw the ensuing pain and fever, exhaustion and debility, the fits and phantom labours endured by her grandmother when others hurried home to show their miracles.

It was Bindra alone who knew the hidden price of the
bojudeuta's healing.

***

The broad verandah of the Planters' Club was bedecked with mounted skulls, hat stands, three-tiered plant holders, marble-topped tables and long-sleever chairs with drink pockets in the arms.

I peered through the door labelled “Billiards” and found a large, empty room painted in a restful shade of soot-stained, buff Kosmo. I looked into “Bitters” to find red Keystone walls, frayed
moonj
matting and a sleeping servant tucked against the skirting. I popped my head into the red velvet plush and guinea-gold brass of the “Lounge”, and discovered a jumble of sagging armchairs and lumpy sofas in need of reupholstering.