In the Shadow of Crows (29 page)

Ben nodded and chuckled at his enduring disquiet. He seemed content with my reply, as we swept crab-pincered spiders from hidden lairs. Yet still I wondered whether I had done a selfish thing to ask of him this sacrifice of precious savings, time and all the comforts to which we were so casually accustomed.

Ben had spent his working life in the management of opera companies, mingling with the artistic aristocracy of Western classical music on two continents. He was more familiar with millionaire budgets, champagne receptions and Green Room gossip than the pestilence and privation into which he had followed me. I watched him now as he crawled on his knees with a dirty rag in one hand and a long stick in the other, hectoring cockroaches from dark dens into sunlight, and felt my heart swell.

His support of me, in what had become a particularly personal objective to offer something of myself to both a country and a people that had played an essential part in who I had become, filled me with respectful wonder. Ben possessed a strength, compassion and integrity that constantly inspired me. I had found in him kindness, confidence and companionship that I had once believed would never again be mine. I watched him as he chuckled his apologies to the biting beetles he now banished with his broom, and knew that Ben was a man whom Priya and Grandmother would have very easily loved.

It was dusk when we finally sat back to survey our labours, relieved with the results achieved in our new home. Relieved, until a large section of the festering bedroom wall, the surface of which our enthusiastic cleaning had made unstable, exploded, leaving the entire room and our few belongings covered in a thick layer of lunginfesting fungal spores.

***

Bindra was woken by a choking wail.

“
Jyothi, ma yaha huñ
!” she cried out. “Jyothi, I'm here!”

Bindra opened her eyes wide in the lightless hut. She fought to raise herself from the sagging jute-twine of the wooden
charpai
bed on which she lay. Her violent heart vibrated listless air, pounding restless waves through inscrutable shadows.

Bindra felt her way to the sacking across her doorway and stepped out into a moon-bright vault. She breathed a temperate breeze into the deepest reaches of her tight lungs, and looked up to the brilliance of stars above.

There was not a night that she did not still hear the calls of her lost children. There was not a night that an insistent guilt did not threaten to consume her.

And then again, a suffocating cry. Jasoda.

Bindra stumbled forwards, lifting the door-cloth high for starlight to cast its gentle gleam. The room was acrid with the stench of vomit. Jasoda was on the floor, fitting.

“
E didi
!” Bindra gasped. “What's happened here?”

Jasoda could not reply. The whites of her eyes flickered in the darkness. Her emaciated body shook.

“Oh sister, no!” Bindra exclaimed. “You've been taking his medicines!”

But Jasoda had no defence to give.

Her worn and weary heart had fallen still.

Chapter Twenty-One

“You people!” the retired army Major growled with an undisguised sneer through his inadequate moustache. “You come over here with your good intentions and your sentimental philanthropy, as though a fleeting charitable gesture might appease your colonial guilt . . .”

He interrupted his caustic sermon to beckon a man into the room, who had been hesitating apprehensively at the door. The secretary kept his narrow shoulders hunched and his precise, wellgreased fringe bowed low as he nervously offered the ex-officer a handful of poorly typed letters to be signed. He did not once raise his face to acknowledge us.

“Good morning, sir,” I offered, cheerfully. Both of them ignored me. “Perhaps we should come back at a more convenient time?” I directed at the Major with explicit purpose.

He raised a manicured finger, inadvertently pointing our attention to the unnaturally matt-black hair with its stark white roots that lay scraped across his scalp. He wagged the poised digit from side to side in rhythmical condescension, whilst he continued to scrawl his mark with an antiquated fountain pen.

This, our first meeting with the charity's director, was unpromising. He had already left us waiting in the corridor for an hour, whilst he drank his morning tea and leisurely emptied an entire tray of Vanilla Puffs. He evidently felt he had a point to make.

As the secretary slunk away, the Major once again turned his face towards the unfailing generosity of our pink-lipped smiles.

“We have never accepted two male foreigners here before,” he stated blankly, as though in anticipation of gratitude for his concession. “Your work is solely in our hostel for the subnormal, the mentally deficient. You never go out of the compound on your own. You never set foot in the neighbouring slum. You never send or receive post without the Office's approval of its contents. You fraternise with neither teachers nor staff. No alcohol. No assignations. Staff prayers and director's sermon in the chapel at seven thirty every morning. Understood?”

I was astonished by his tone.

“Thank you for your guidance, sir,” I smiled, with perfect patience, “but there seems to be a little confusion.”

His eyes tightened as though he had been slighted.

“We are here to work with those affected by leprosy,” I reminded him, “a disease I've been privately studying for many years, ever since I was first touched by the desperate plight of the people outcast by its stigma. If you refer back to the letters exchanged last year regarding our application and your own confirmation . . .”

“It is you who is confused,” he retorted with a new intensity. “You people may
never
approach the leper colony. You have
nothing
to do with them. You are here to assist the retarded. That is all. Without question. Understood?”

Ben and I were astonished.

The Major dialled the heavy number-wheel of his Bakelite telephone and began speaking in rapid Hindi.

He paused to glare back up at us, the lonely bristles of his moustache taut with his evident disquiet.

“You may leave,” he impatiently hissed.

***

Bindra had spent all night beside the naked body of Jasoda.

She had first marked a boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead by stepping over the low fire she had lit, passing her unbandaged hands through the flames, and touching her senseless skin against a twig of sharp thorns.

Bindra had then washed Jasoda's skin with diluted
tulsi
tea and smeared her with turmeric paste. She had marked her disfigured feet, her shrunken pubis, wrinkled belly, desiccated breasts, sunken throat, crumpled forehead and near-hairless crown with careful lines of the
sidur
she kept concealed in her own bedding. At the intersections of these scarlet strokes she had laid the red hibiscus flowers sacred to Kali Ma that flourished on the bushes Bindra carefully tended around her hut.

Bindra now took a good, straight stick from Jasoda's meagre pile of kindling. She found the old, twine-bound blade used for wood, food, and the removal of dead flesh from decayed feet and hands. Into the dry bark, Bindra struggled to mark the nine notches of
Dharti
: the eight directions, plus the middle point of human awareness. She turned the stick to mark a further seven notches into its length: the seven levels of consciousness into the inner world of
Patal
.

Bindra laid the stick along Jasoda's motionless breastbone, then circled her body three times. She visualised specific
mudras
, formed by fingers she no longer possessed, and scattered a few grains of rice across the corpse. Three times she cried aloud the secret
bijas
of separation, followed by three moments of mindful silence.

Bindra lit a piece of the camphor she had long kept hidden, and slipped it between Jasoda's empty gums. She watched the yawning mouth flare, then plume back to darkness.

Bindra covered the quiescent face with a length of Jasoda's own head cloth. She lifted its corners to whisper the Mantra of Severance, once imparted on distant mountains by her long-departed grandmother, the much-loved
bojudeuta
.

Bindra slowly bowed in
pranam
to the husk of a woman whom she had considered a friend.

“
Behenji
,” she spoke softly in Jasoda's Hindi, “respected elder sister, it is finished. Release your hold on this body and this place. The knot must now unravel. The wisdom of your life's experience must now be shared. Tomorrow's
shraddha
cremation will speed your return to animal and plant, earth and sky.”

Bindra carefully drew the soiled cotton blanket around Jasoda's body and tied it at her feet and head.

“There is no need to fear,” she assured the silent features, before finally drawing the cloth across them. “Just as all colours are expressions of the same light, so god and man, birth and death are all aspects of the same endless tide of universal knowledge, universal wisdom, universal truth.”

Bindra sat at Jasoda's feet and closed her eyes.

When next Bindra looked up, golden light streamed in brilliant, rotating spirals onto the silent bundle before her.

Dawn had come.

The crows were calling.

***

Ben and I were unsure what to do.

The Major's refusal to allow us access to the very people with whom we had come to work had left us at a loss. We discussed leaving immediately in order to find another charitable leprosy colony, but had no idea where, from this remote location, we might begin our search.

We came to the decision that, having travelled so far from Kalimpong, we would give ourselves a fortnight to become accustomed to the climate and colloquial Hindi, whilst exploring the possibility of establishing new and more accommodating contacts in other districts.

During our first week at the charity hostel, the candid stares of children and teachers refused to tire. Over eighty inquisitive pairs of eyes fixed upon the pale-faced men amongst them. Pale-faced men inanely smiling, who taught the time with cardboard clocks and Hindi names of wild animals with poster-paint
jungli janvar
. Palefaced men who taught long multiplication and times tables, volleyball and cricket. Seed planting, dental care and safe cooking. Skittles, Snap! and lice control.

As we clumsily attempted to lead lessons, without experience or preparation, we quickly learned “
Muh saf karo
!” for “Wipe your mouth!”, and “
Naak saf karo
!” for “Wipe your nose!” “
Milkar bajao
!” for “Share it!”, and “
Sabse mel rakho
” for “Be friends to all.”

I spent my afternoons teaching Hatha Yoga on prickly grass. Every day, more caretakers, orderlies and cooks slipped in behind the children to become
gaya
cows and
magarmach
crocodiles,
hathi
elephants and
kaak
crows.
Paramvajra
, the Supreme
Lingam
, and
Perki Devi
, Goddess of the Trees. Together they learned to chant like
sadhus
and to hum like
bhramari
bees.

We spent our evenings with the bedridden, in their filthy, dingy rooms. Urine-soaked, unwashed, emaciated and ignored. Yet still they laughed, and through their smiles taught us.

Handsome Debdan, Gift of the Gods, beamed one such smile. He smiled, even though he had fallen from a tree and splintered his spine when still a child, provoking his starving mother to abandon him to a life alone in refuse-filled streets. He smiled, even though he was now often left unfed and confined to long-unchanged sheets.

Ben and I were seeking ways to secretly enable the bed-bound to earn a little pocket money. As Debdan had been taken in by an elderly
dhurzi
tailor who had trained him in his craft, I offered him my badly torn jeans for mending and asked his price.

“I need nothing,
beta
,” he replied with simple consideration, clasping my hands. “Nothing at all, my son, but your love.”

I sat staring into the forest for a long time that evening. I watched in a fading, dappled light the dusk-time rituals of redcrested woodpeckers, silver owls and emerald parakeets. Barely airborne flying beetles, hummingbird moths and butterflies. Hosts of stripy squirrels, squadrons of bats and pukish mobs of monkeys. I sat so long that the bright crescent moon was resting flat on its back in the treetops when I stirred from my silent solitude of thought.

As I wandered back to our quarters, I looked up to the ramshackle town that spread across the hills around us. The ugly clutter of dirty concrete reflected the last rays of day as though it were a translucent Shangri-la of water and glass. An unseen pack of pye-dogs beckoned with incessant barking. Vibrant drums and vivacious voices strenuously proclaimed yet another slum wedding that would last until dawn.

My own evening would be less colourful. Much-needed recuperation and quiet preparation for the following day's classes, whilst Ben and I cleaned ourselves with care. Other's dribble, fleas, nits and worse were now part of the daily routine. We boiled eggs, ate nuts and fruit, and relished our ration of a single spoon of local honey.

We attempted to enhance communication with our charges by reading to each other from
Improve your Hindi in a Term Time
, a densely printed book picked up from a station stall, with pages so brittle they tore if turned with less than antiquarian attention. However, by Lesson IV - “In the Hotel” - we had already begun to doubt that the conversation practice it offered would advance our social skills or endear us to the local population:

“Darling, have you ever seen a cabaret?”

“Such foreign pastimes give little pleasure.”

“Ha, now see how she dances very nice.”

“But very shameless she is.”

“Because she is naked?” “Yes.”

We abandoned our book, laughed out the candles and lay on top of damp sheets in the suffocating stillness of night air pungent with mildew and smoky wicks.

I closed my eyes to the darkness and pondered the peculiar intensity of the life I had known in India. Every day a rip-roaring ride from despair to bliss, bliss to despair.

I considered the life I had shared with Ben on two continents, his faithful presence an unfaltering stability in the erratic eddies of the years. His unalterable generosity of heart and spirit a refuge in the squall.

I heard him turn noisily on his mattress.

“Can't sleep?” I whispered.

“Too hot and too much in my head,” he muttered. “Can you give me some Tagore to see me off?”

If it could be said that we had set our own tradition, then this was it. Favourite recitations when lights were out and sleep evaded.

“Alright,” I considered, searching for the lines of a verse that might voice the feeling of that moment. “
As I stare on and on into
the past, in the end you emerge,” I whispered towards him, “
clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time ...”

“
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours
...” he whispered in return.

“
And the songs of every poet past and forever
,” we concluded together, stretching out hands in the darkness to find affirmation in fingertips.

I closed my eyes smiling, and sought for sleep. In far too few hours we would be woken by the first call to prayer, bellowed once more across the valley through distorting speakers, like the tortured lament of a grief-stricken father.

I found instead an enchanted memory of mountain and cave temple. Of an auntie's
ahashis
and a
jhankri
's smile.

***

Bindra had been called a witch before, on a mountain, long ago. There she had been
bokshi
. Here she was
daayan
.

“How dare you!” Doctor Dunduka was still shouting at her. “You had no right to desecrate this corpse with your mountain sorcery, you filthy
daayan
!”

There, that word again.

“Only the priest is permitted to deal with the dead here! The Christian priest!” he bellowed in emphasis.

Bindra looked him directly in the eyes.

“But Jasoda was a devotee of Kali. Not the foreigners' Jesus,” she stated in quiet response.

“Your rations come from foreign Christians, woman! Your blanket! Your medicine! All from foreign Christians!” His voice had ascended to a porcine squeal.

“Church,
mandir
, mosque,
gompa
. What does it matter?” Bindra replied with gentle conviction. “All is sacred. All divine. It is man alone who discriminates. Not god. For all is god. All is one . . .”