Shining Hero (15 page)

Karna stared at her blankly.

‘Do you hear me?’ commanded Dolly.

‘But where are you going, Ma? You keep saying you are going to go away but you mustn’t leave me,’ he wailed.

‘I will try to stay with you, my son. But in case I am not able
to, you must remember this place. Remember how we got here. Remember the name. Now do you promise me?’

‘I promise, Ma,’ Karna whispered.

Dolly, lugging her heavy load with one hand because the other arm hurt so much, cried as she and Karna walked along the road towards the village. She did not stop even when Karna told her, ‘Don’t be sad, Ma. You’ve still got me.’

In the village, the first shopkeeper glanced scornfully at the tattered soap packages. ‘What do you think, that we villagers will buy any dirty thing that is not good enough for the town?’ Then he scrutinised Karna with surprise and said, ‘Apart from being so scrawny, your child is the very image of our Arjuna Baba from the Hatibari Zamindari. There is such a likeness that they might be brothers.’

But to save the pilfered cattle,
speeds he onward in his fear
While these warriors stay and tarry
to defend their monarch’s rear
.

Koonty’s parents wrote frequent letters to their grandson, Arjuna, from their new home in Canada, describing cold that was so intense that it came right through, from the outside to the inside, so that blobs of ice appeared on the bolt heads inside the central-heated sitting-room. It was the hot weather when Arjuna got the letter, and, sweating under a slow-turning fan, he tried to imagine such a thing and could not.

He grew up by a river, with a playtime filled with cousins and friends, in a home smiled over by an ancient grandfather. He lived in a house where the doors were never locked and the children went free and wild. Meals were filled with family chatter, fragrant with saffron, Basmati rice, mutton in mustard oil. Milk from Pandu’s herd provided the children with rich milk, dahi, ghee and trays of Bengal milk sweets. It was a world where tomatoes grow so big that one, stolen from his grandfather’s garden and cut with Durio’s secret knife, was shared, scarlet-dripping, among the six of them. Showered with petals and spotted leaves, the boys climbed the trees in the mango and lychee orchards where koels called and crystal-green parakeets with scarlet necks swooped, screaming.

Kuru Dadoo gave his older grandsons bikes and, their knees hitting their chins because they grew so fast and with Arjuna clinging to
Durio’s carrier, they would escape to the village to challenge the local boys to a match. Or they would play tennis on the weedy, uneven court that had been built by Kuru Dadoo’s father. Shivarani often came to stay in her parents’ vacated bungalow and she and Koonty would sometimes challenge the boys while Gadhari watched scornfully from a window. Wearing white kurta pyjama, their hair in single long plaits which beat against their backs, the sisters, who did not have the advantage of school tennis teaching, would rush from one side of the court to the other and hardly ever manage to return a ball. For a while Koonty and Shivarani would behave like girls instead of two nearly middle-aged women while Pandu sat in the shade of a mango tree, a brandy soda in his hand and loved them both.

He never played himself. He was no longer the right shape and, these days, a long walk to him was a fifteen-minute stroll round the estate in the cool of the evening, a servant walking ahead whipping the falling dew from the grass tips so they would not wet the ends of his pyjama. He was amazed at the energy of his family and certain that his mother would not have dreamt of rushing round after tennis balls. Kuru Dadoo, who was over eighty, had to use a stick when he walked these days, and needed help when he rose from sitting. But sometimes he arranged for a chair to be brought to the side of the tennis court. Then, leaning on a servant’s arm, he would stagger out to watch the tournament and delight in the way his grandsons always managed to beat the grown-up women. He felt increasingly pleased with his grandsons and most impressed of all with Arjuna, who did not yet go to school but because his older cousins had taught him to play was already showing talent. Though Arjuna was the youngest, thought Kuru Dadoo, in the end he might become the greatest hero of them all.

On the whole his cousins patronised little Arjuna, as he toddled patiently after them all day long, but he had one skill which they admired. He could pee an arc of six feet. The cousins had measured it, cheering at the sight of the golden bridge of urine spanning so much red earth, so many tufts and bushes. Arjuna greatly admired all his cousins, but in particular was impressed by the eldest, Durio,
who walked in a swaggering way and had a habit of whacking at his inner thighs with open palm. Durio taught Arjuna to swim in the Jummuna river at the end of the garden, gripping him by the back of his pants, shouting, ‘Kick can’t yar. Flap your arms, idiot,’ panic shooting Arjuna’s skinny arms out of the water every time his cousin loosened his grip. ‘Kick, you batcha. Don’t dangle like a corpse.’

Encouraged, Arjuna tried again. During his third lesson something bumped into him and knocked him out of his cousin’s grasp. Whatever had hit him seemed alive and Arjuna tried to scream, his cousin’s mocking laughter lost in the splashing of his own flailing body. Choking water, Arjuna waited for the grab of last year’s sunken goddess. A dark lump blotted everything out. The banana trees, the paddy crops, the glistening bodies of wallowing buffaloes all vanished so that Arjuna thought he had been dragged into the goddess’s underwater kingdom. He tried to scream again, took in more mouthfuls of water and couldn’t breathe.

It was a buffalo corpse, on its back, swollen with gas. The legs stuck out at each corner of the square bloat like four black sticks of sugar cane poked into an enormous puri, out of proportion because the legs had not swelled at all and the body swelled so much.

Durio jerked Arjuna up till breath returned, gave the corpse a casual shove with his free hand and as though it was Durio’s toy boat, the gassy body settled back into the current and went bouncing away down the river.

‘You’re such a baby,’ Durio scowled. ‘Crying at the least little thing.’

‘He’s scared of being pulled to the bottom by the snake goddess like happened to the Mahabharata Arjuna when he swam in the Ganges. That’s why our cousin can’t learn swimming,’ teased the cousins.

‘Is it true? Arjuna wept to Koonty. ‘Will I get grabbed by a snake?’ In the Mahabharata, the goddess Ulupi had fallen in love with Arjuna and said she would kill herself if Arjuna did not return her passion so he spent one night with her and in exchange she granted him the boon. ‘Ulupi made Arjuna invincible in water. He couldn’t be drowned,’ said Koonty. ‘You tell your silly cousins that.’ She tried to
teach him to swim herself, holding him more gently than Durio, one hand cupped under his chin to stop him toppling, while the cousins stood on the bank and watched, scornfully. Her skirted bathing-suit frilled out on the water’s surface as she struggled through the mud and, to horizontal Arjuna, her thighs looked like pillars and her breasts overhung him like a pair of cliffs.

‘Ya. Baby,’ shouted Durio from the bank.

Arjuna refused to let his mother teach him again.

‘But your cousin makes you cry,’ she persisted.

Arjuna was adamant and instead begged Durio.

‘So long as you promise not to cry.’

‘I swear. God’s honour, yaar.’ Arjuna held up scout’s fingers while his mother stood on the verandah watching anxiously.

Durio tied a piece of coconut string round Arjuna’s waist and striding up and down pulled Arjuna along like a wet puppy till he got the knack.

The river was the boys’ playground. Their games that needed no more rules than those dealt out by unrelenting flora and strict and ruling currents were bounded and administered by its holy water. During the monsoon, when the river ran very fast and strong, Boodi Ayah would try to stop the children diving in, but could never catch them for the boys were fast and slippery as hilsa fish.

‘Let them, let them,’ smiled Kuru Dadoo. ‘They are strong.’

The boys would use the bathing buffaloes as bridges, running barefoot over the submerged haunches, past – the mynah birds tick-picking, till they reached the middle and found a good place to dive in.

Then they explored the watery darkness that glittered with the melting eyes of the goddess and glowed with the bones of sacred children and occasionally lost ones. They found clay fingers decorated with nail varnish, glittering with tinsel rings, joints tilting, cuticles twirling. Once they came across the face of the goddess, hair falling away from the dissolving clay as though she was suffering from some depilatory disease. But the grown-ups had told them to leave such sacred things alone and they never brought them out of the water.

Arjuna learnt to dive and, sometimes, as he slid through the weeds that waved like a woman’s hair, he entered a new strange state in which thought was banished from his mind. When this happened he seemed to need less breath than usual and stayed under the water for so long that Boodi Ayah panicked and even the bigger boys were impressed.

Coming up to the surface the boys would grab passing puja coconuts and, treading water, scrabble out the flesh with their fingers. They would pull up lotus roots and catch in their fingers scaly fishes that tasted of mud, then roast the food over little fires. ‘You boys always seem to be eating something,’ laughed Kuru Dadoo.

The grandsons found other things in the water, a car tyre, a slipper, a fresh marigold garland, a child’s plastic toy. They would speculate on how these things had got there, ghoulishly imagining corpses and disaster. Anything found floating denoted tragedy. People did not throw away a single chappal, a plastic cup, pieces of clothing. These meant a drowned person or flooded house. Babies, and sometimes older people, occasionally bobbed by, bellies puffed, sandal paste on the brow, marigold garland round the neck, hands and feet sticking out stiffly like doll limbs, ball people stuck with pin limbs. They had been let loose in the sacred current by those who could not afford the wood for a funeral pyre for their lost ones.

Bika, the child of Laxshmi, slipped off a buffalo’s back and was sucked into the swirl of yellow water like a thin soap going down the water hole in the bathroom. The Kaurava boys and Arjuna reached out and offered sticks for her to grab, but the girl was too tumbled up in debris and grey froth and only twirled, choking, screaming, kicking.

Kuru Dadoo was watching from his window and later said, making Gadhari wince with hurt and fury, that it was sweet Koonty’s son who had rescued the drowning child. ‘As though he was the true Arjuna of the Mahabharata,’ he said.

‘Are you sure it was Arjuna?’ asked Pandu. ‘For you weren’t even wearing your glasses.’ But Kuru Dadoo felt certain and rewarded Arjuna with milky sweets, mango leather and sugar cane.

Arjuna munched amshotto and felt confused. He had not been aware that it was he who had done the rescuing, but if Kuru Dadoo said it was, then it must be so.

The ninety-year-old Pishi, who had the reputation of seeing into the future, heard about the rescue and, staggering along on twisted legs, her shrivelled breasts bare and swinging, came to see the little hero. She never wore a blouse, declaring that they had been imposed on the women of India by the prude Victorian British. Traditional Indian women, she maintained, wore only a sari with its end covering the breasts to a larger or smaller degree or not at all according to the stage of life. Pretty breasts were useful as flirtation tools but Pishi considered hers long past the flirting stage so therefore did not bother to cover them at all.

‘I have known from the time this Arjuna was born,’ she said in her creaking voice, ‘that he would grow to greatness. This child will be famous all over India when he is grown-up.’

They made a bore hole in the Hatibari garden, drilling down into the middle of a rose bed, till water squirted up like a miniature oil well.

‘Where did it come from?’ asked Arjuna, thrilled.

‘There is water under all the ground round here,’ Pandu told him.

Arjuna told his cousins grandly, ‘The Hatibari is floating on water,’ and stamped on the ground, expecting to hear a slopping sound.

‘Stupid,’ said Durio.

‘It’s true. My father told me and he never tells lies. Our garden is like a boat.’

‘Idiot,’ sneered Durio.

Later Arjuna asked, ‘Isn’t it true, Ma? Baap? Why won’t they believe me?’

Pandu laughed and gave his son a gentle smack on the bottom.

‘Why doesn’t our garden float away?’ Arjuna persisted.

‘Water, water, water. He is always thinking of water,’ sighed Koonty. ‘But when it comes to being bathed we have to haul
him there.’ Water made her sad. The thought of the river made something go tight in her stomach.

After the cousins went back to school Arjuna wandered round the Hatibari estate and felt lonely till he discovered you could tell what grown-up people were thinking from hiding under the garden chairs and, squatting among their dropped sandals, watch their naked toes. Shivarani’s toes would twitch like the tail of a cat that is angry when anyone talked about marriage. His mother’s toes curled like scorching paper when anyone mentioned the river and then his father’s toes would clench like fists because Pandu was afraid of Koonty’s sadness. If he saw it start to mist her eyes he would try to distract her. ‘You should write poems. There is something very soothing about the writing of verse.’ His mother’s toes curled like cats being stroked, the day she read her poem. ‘I walk in my lonely garden. Koels call. Why is my face smudged with dark in the daytime as though night has already fallen? Is it the kajal that I put on my eyes to make them large? It has fallen down my cheeks. It did not work.’

‘Shabash,’ cried Pandu clapping. ‘Good, good. What does it mean exactly, though?’

‘She cried,’ said Shivarani tartly, raising one eyebrow. ‘You must not discourage her.’

‘No, no,’ said Pandu and wished he had not suggested poetry.

His mother’s toes had leapt like mongooses fighting with a nest of snakes when she told Shivarani, ‘The only thing my husband thinks about is cows and girls. He is here, there and everywhere, doing love scenes. He started it the moment we were married. Of course he loves me too or there would be no Arjuna but the smell of other girls is always on him. He never tries to hide it. He laughs at me, tells me not to be jealous. Says that he has the right to make love with any of his tenant’s daughters. Even wives.’ Her toes had moved in a different way as she added, ‘But I know that he loves me best.’ She bent and saw Arjuna under the table. ‘Are you down there again, you dirty boy? Chi, chi.’