The Other Side of the World (17 page)

“Mummy?”

“Coming,” she calls again, as she walks on still further. What did he feel, she wonders, when he left them, when he flew away? Three minutes, four—she has not gone far, but already she can't
see her children. They have their sandwiches, she thinks. They are sitting on the blanket with their lunch and their toys. The bush thickens. The trees are taller here, the air shady and cool underneath, and all about is the smell of eucalyptus, damp earth, rock and salt and river weed. She stumbles across the remains of a fire—a ring of stones, cans left behind. Rocks kids have pulled up to sit on. She rests on one and looks to the sky; a pelican flies overhead followed by a flock of white-tailed black cockatoos. She thinks of the history of this place, thinks that she has something in common with them after all—with the people before her who tried to understand it as home, while feeling they belonged elsewhere. Did they, she wonders, ever succeed? She would like to know them. She tries to imagine them.

“
Mummy!
” the two children call together.

“I'm here—” she calls. But where is here? The bush soon gives way to water. Rocks slope down to the tide edge. The surface of the rocks is covered in greenish algae and oyster shells. Dense mangrove trees lean out over the rocks, making the air briny, cool, and dim. The only sound is the wind high in the trees and the water sloshing in and out of the small caves between the rocks. Shadows of leaf and tree branch tremble across the surface of the river. Beyond the shadows the water is bright.

“
Mummy!
” the children call again, frightened now, and Charlotte turns back.

H
enry's mother lingers for days. Nobody expects this. He sits at her bedside, reads to her, offers sweet food that she cannot eat. Time wears on. In a nearby room the staff chatter and drink tea. Beyond the window there is the forest. Henry comes and goes. He thought he'd be back in Delhi by now, making his way home. He misses the children. Soon he finds he no longer hurries to be at the nursing home before midday. He sleeps in, arrives late. Each day he takes his mother something—biscuits that sit untouched on a plate, a new book, an extra blanket for her bed. Today, he thinks, he will bring her flowers, remembering her bedroom graced with roses when he was a boy.

It is afternoon by the time Henry has dressed and eaten and left the hotel in search of the flower stall. The concierge told him it could be found behind the post office and gave Henry directions. Henry turns left up the hill, then veers right at the bend. From somewhere up ahead comes the tune of a brass army band, the call of the trumpets rolling out across the valley. Whistles join the trumpets in a marching beat and a series of cheers erupts from the ridge. He walks towards the music, passing numerous tea carts, market stalls selling fake pashmina shawls, chemists, the old bakery, the Maria Brothers antique bookshop, the public library, the brass statue of Gandhi, and a small girl sitting on a square of cardboard who says to him as he passes, “Hello, ­Money. Hello, Money.” At the top of the mall stands a row of white ­horses available for hire. They are mottled with dust and
mud and tethered to the fence. Many years ago one whole strip of the mall was kept for the horses. Children received an hour's ride for a small fee and the horses were led all around the hills. Henry remembers this. He remembers his mother handing him a chewy yellow sweet spotted with green pistachios before a man lifted him into the saddle. There was the smell of hay and horse dung and the sight of his mother standing below, waving as he set off on his adventure.

But no, it is not at all how it was before. Where is the cottage they lived in during the summer of '38? He thought it was further up, in Lower Jakhu, but now, standing in the center of the mall, looking about, he can't be sure. He's lost his bearings. There had been a fireplace, and his mother had collected sticks from outside, and his father had spent the day chopping wood so that in the evening they could burn great logs of sweet-smelling pine. The memory of the smell is clear, fleeting. It comes from nothing.

But he's walked too far. Henry turns and retraces his steps, the valley far below him and full of cloud. The blue peaks of the lower Himalayas stretch out into the distance, each rise paler than the last, a series of indigo shadows resting one behind another. At the back of the post office, two paths lead in opposite directions. On a whim he heads right, passing a line of coolies who carry impossible items upon their backs—a tank of gas, a wooden trunk, vast sacks of grain. There is a tiny porter balancing two enormous suitcases on his head, his arms hardly able to reach the top of them. Henry follows a stairway down and down but there are no flowers. There is the smell of shit and sweat and rotting bananas. A green-and-blue sari, the colors of a peacock tail, has been pegged out to dry on a length of wire. The path flattens and narrows. Lopsided wooden houses built by the British more
than a century before hang over him, darkening his way. A rabid dog runs out and barks; Henry startles. Water drips onto his head from the buildings above. He has taken a wrong turn. He should have gone along the other path. No one told him. He is hot and sweaty and the hems of his trousers are wet with mud. Or is it sewage? There is a raw stink in the air. A man dressed all in white sits on his haunches in the alcove of a door. “Flowers?” Henry asks, pointing down the dark path and imitating, with opening hands, the unfolding of a blossom. “Flowers?” The man grunts and points the other way.

In the lower markets he finds what he is looking for—a tiny stall set up in the dirt beneath the veranda of a tall house. A ­wooden bench displays the vendor's wares: a yellow bucket holding carnations and red roses; another bucket with lilies, the bees dancing in and out of the brown and curling petals. A thin, short man steps out of the shadows, addressing him in Hindi, and ­Henry apologizes, explaining that he does not know the language. The stallholder backs away in confusion, then returns when Henry nods his head and points, holding up his fingers to show he wants two bunches of carnations—one pink, one white—and at the last minute adds a small posy of roses.

He knows he's already taken too long. He must leave the nursing home by dusk, before the monkeys come down from the trees, and at this rate he won't get there until three. He holds out money for the flowers but the man does not take it. Instead he places the flowers carefully on the bench, picks up a single carnation, and flicks open the petals as if dusting a tiny ornament. Henry expected to be handed the bouquets and then be off. But every flower is carefully tended to. The carnations are laid out in a row, then the roses flicked at and checked, one after another and another. The man gathers up the carnations and tapes their stems
together. Then he disappears and comes back with a handful of greenery that he cuts and arranges and tapes to the carnations. The roses are pushed into the bunch, then they too are taped. Each time Henry thinks the production over, something else is introduced. Gold ribbons, silver glitter. More Sellotape. Plastic wrapping, then a wrapping of old newspaper; a first, then a second spray of water. Passersby stop to look. A woman asks the price of the roses, stands watching awhile, then walks on. After an interminable period of time—what has it been, ten minutes, twenty, half an hour?—Henry hands the man a bundle of notes, takes the flowers, and walks up out of the markets towards the nursing home on the hill.

It is almost four when Henry arrives. He knocks, enters, and takes his place in the wicker chair beside his mother's bed. He leans forwards and rests his hands over hers. She does not appear to have moved since he saw her the day before. Perhaps they've rolled her over and rolled her back again. She does not open her eyes to see the flowers. A nurse comes and tends to her hip bone where a bedsore festers. Henry suspects this is done for his benefit—­evidence of care in the face of obvious neglect. But they all know he is the one who left her here.

He knows he should speak to her, he knows she believes that the dead can hear everything said by the living. Of course she is not dead, but nor can he say that she is alive. He does not know what is keeping her. There is nothing here for her now. There is nothing to hold on to. “It's me, Mother. I'm here. It's Henry.” The son who was named after a king of England. This was the plan: a line of boys all named after royalty. He squeezes her hand and
for a moment thinks he feels a small movement in her fingers. “It's Henry,” he says again. He pulls the chair closer and strokes her arm. There is the shush shush of rain on the roof and the distant racket of car horns in the valley. Her breathing has been quiet but now it begins to change. Air rasps and drags at the back of her throat. In and out, out and in. The chair screeches on the floor as he pushes it back and stands and calls out for the nurse. At the same time he knows that it does not matter if something is wrong. Of course there is something wrong. She needs to die, he knows that, that's why he's come.

The nurse appears at his side. “Shhh,” she says, pressing a hand against his shoulder and urging him to sit. He lowers himself slowly into the chair and takes his mother's hands in his. How terrible it is now that death is here, gurgling back and forth in her throat.

“It is all right,” he says. “You can go now. I am here. I am here.” There ought to be something else to say, something more, but he doesn't know what. That he is sorry for buying the flowers. For taking so long. For staying away. For the years and years he has stayed away. Instead he repeats what he's said before:
It's all right. You can go now. I am here. I am here.
He strokes her hand, her arm. He knows it is too late. He knows he's waited until it is too late. Her breathing grows slower and more labored. Henry leans closer still and strokes her hair. It is fine, thin hair and he can feel the bones of her head—the narrow band of her forehead, the rise of her skull. There is the dark hole of her mouth, the smell of her sour, meat-dank breath. It comes intermittently, her breath—long and rasping, then nothing. Then long again. Every time she falls quiet Henry starts forwards, thinking it is over. Then she breathes, the sign of life giving him fright. Henry
sweats through his clothes. His trousers cling to his thighs, his shirt sticks to his back. He notices a breeze stirring the branches at the window, causing water to drip down onto the glass, tap tap tap, like the second hand of a clock. Thick cloud moves past, obscuring the trees, and when he looks back down he knows that she is gone. He holds her hands for a few moments longer, then lets go.

C
harlotte looks up at the clock on the kitchen wall and realizes that it has stopped. It is the silence she notices. Henry usually winds the clocks before he goes to bed. At first Charlotte remembered to do this but at some point must have forgotten. It doesn't matter—somehow, in Henry's absence, time has changed, softened. The hours undulate rather than divide as they used to, an hour for this, half an hour for that, each day an equation. Now there is no one to check such progress, such efficiency. No one expects a packed lunch ready on the table by seven, dinner at six. Her watch is in the bedroom, but she will fetch it later, once she's finished the dishes.

She does not always dislike domestic duties. She enjoys bringing in dry washing that smells of clean air and feels warm with sunlight. And she likes washing up at dusk, as she does now, the garden blackening and fading away, the bright interior of the room beginning to shine on the inside of the kitchen window. The girls are quiet in front of the television—they've both fallen ill and for the last few nights Charlotte has padded back and forth between the bedrooms, tending, tucking in, bringing milk or water or chamomile tea. Henry has been gone two weeks now. In the background the children sneeze and sniffle.

Charlotte is just lifting the saucepan out of the water when she hears a knock at the door. She looks around, then hears it again. Three taps once. Three taps twice. “Just a minute!” she calls, wiping her hands on the tea towel and untying her apron.

Nicholas stands at the door. “Oh,” Charlotte says, taken aback. “I wasn't expecting you.”

“No. I thought I'd just drop by on my way home—I hope you don't mind.”

“Yes—I mean, no,” she says, faltering. “Henry's away, and the children are unwell. I haven't heard from you since, I thought maybe—”

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I didn't realize you were on your own. Can I do anything? Get you anything?”

“No, no. We're fine, thank you,” replies Charlotte, pulling a crumpled handkerchief from her pocket and blowing her nose.

“Can I come in—at least let me make you a cup of tea? You could put your feet up a minute.”

“Oh,” Charlotte says, still barring the door with her arm. “Well, no, I suppose not, I mean there's no reason not to come in.”

“You mean yes?”

“Yes, come in. That would be lovely. But let me make the tea.”

Henry pulls the sheet up over his mother's face and then returns to the hotel. He orders tea and drinks it sitting by the window. Seven sparrows perch in a row along the red awnings of a nearby building. Each time a new sparrow flies in to join the line, another sparrow flies off from the end, so that no matter how many new birds alight, there are only ever seven sitting on the roof. The fog lifted in the afternoon but now returns, rolling and creeping and floating down the hillside. Low-flying crows appear and disappear in its white depths. It is Monday. On Wednesday his mother will be buried in the British cemetery, as she requested, and Henry will not attend.

He falls asleep while there is still light outside and wakes, many hours later, to the sound of morning bells and chanting.
He opens the curtains, looking for the parade, then realizes that the music is coming from the church. Drums and bells and warbling voices.

It is time to go. He takes a car down to Kalka, then boards an express train to Delhi. Fog engulfs the lower hills and then night swallows the plains. He is glad not to see the landscape beyond the window. The huts and the sheds and the rubbish and the mud—the catalog that life is reduced to when moving at high speed over vast tracts of land. There is this and this and this. How simple it is to move forwards, and yet, in another way, how difficult, and how rare. Is he moving forwards now? It is hard to say. Later, he will remember things: three Indian women in iridescent saris emerging from roadside mists as if rising out of smoke. Bright pink and gold and violet. Then, lower down, on the narrow dusty roads, another woman, in black this time, ­carrying a tower of kindling on her head like some great crown of thorns, while two small children tug at her long skirt. The injured cow bleeding in the middle of the road. Stalls selling boxes of red and gold apples, each apple wrapped in paper. He thought of taking some home to the children, then remembered he could not. How he longs for them, and for Charlotte. The train judders over the tracks. A man in uniform pushes a tea trolley up and down the aisle. He pines for the sound of neighborhood boys kicking a ball in the park, for the sight of couples walking hand in hand by the river in the evening, for the hushed nights when whole streets are sleeping peacefully. In this moment, as he ­passes through what he can only imagine are some of the poorest and ugliest stretches of the world, Henry longs for the ordinary suburban boredom that he's always thought somehow beneath him. It is unambitious, dull, so terribly average. But how comfortable it looks from this distance. From the dark window of his berth,
that suburban ­universe seems the very pinnacle of ­civilized life. It is time to go home.

When he gets off the train he takes a taxi to the guesthouse near Lodi Gardens where he first stayed. He is given the room facing the rose garden and sleeps long and deep, waking to a fine gold morning, a haze of damp heat blurring the higher branches of the trees. Above this the sky is a pale brown, colored by smog and desert dust. Birds of prey spiral slowly upwards like pieces of ash rising from an unseen disaster. Beneath them dart the yellow-winged dragonflies, while mynah birds watch on from the roof of the guesthouse, every now and then swooping through the low reaches of the neem tree. One for love, two for joy, three for success, four for boy. It is a song his mother used to sing him on the long trip up to his school in the hills. She didn't like to leave him, but there was no choice, so although the song sounded cheerful, it always made Henry sad. He had forgotten it and now, out of nowhere, the whole of it comes back. Five for silver, six for gold, seven for the secret never to be told.

He takes his morning tea on the lawn. Without warning the rain comes. It brings leaves and feathers down from the trees. It sends the squirrels into hiding. Parrots call from high branches and the guests rush to find shelter under the eaves. A tall ­Frenchwoman catches his attention—she has a small silver chain around her ­ankle with bells on it and they tinkle when she dashes in from the rain. The wicker chairs sit empty on the grass and turn black with ­water. It is not the season for visiting. Henry wants to be gone, but it turns out there's some trouble with the flights: something about ­weather conditions and staffing disputes. It might be another week, they told him earlier this morning, before he can get a flight home.

Henry returns to his room and writes to Charlotte, telling her of the delay and how he misses her. When he next looks up, the rain has stopped. The sun shines and bakes the grass dry.

Through the rosebushes Henry can see the gardener pushing a yellow lawn mower back and forth, back and forth. When this is done a second man comes out with a broom and sweeps the cut grass from the lawn. A third man crouches down with a smaller broom and sweeps the concrete terrace outside Henry's room where stray grass clippings have landed. He sweeps them into four neat piles. When he's almost finished a wind comes up out of nowhere and scatters the grass back across the terrace. The man stops his sweeping and looks up, watching the clippings being blown away. When the wind dies down he goes in search of them and slowly begins sweeping again. The sun is hot and ­Henry draws the blinds, lies down, and closes his eyes. The fan whirrs above him and the sush sush of the brooms keeps on outside.