In the Shadow of Crows (12 page)

A young, short-bearded Kashmiri porter approached me and asked if he could suggest a hotel. Wary and mistrustful after my experiences in Bombay and Udaipur, I declined. I had decided to stay in the YMCA, which I anticipated to be cheap and clean. He emphatically insisted that I had made a bad choice and that he would accompany me to prove it.

The building we approached must have formerly been a grand mansion that had stood in extensive grounds. The rotten mahogany doors, the grimy decorated floors and collapsing central staircase gave mere glimpses of what this house must have once been. My Kashmiri companion collected a key from the front desk and took me to a room on the upper floor.

It was the fine cornices that first caught my attention as I stepped through the door and tripped over one of many shattered clumps of ornamental plaster, which lay scattered across the wooden boards. As I brushed off my hands, my earnest escort insisted upon brushing off my knees. This intimate moment evidently broke our mutual reserve, as he took it as a sign that he could now hold my hand. He only let go when I laughed out loud, in sheer delight, as he told me his name was Dilruba, “which, sir, has for its most finely meaning ‘Heart Throb'.”

Returning my gaze to the room, I stared in puzzlement at the ceiling rose that dangled precariously on taut tufts of horsehair. I sighed in despair at the elaborate marble fireplace, piled high with soot, rubble and empty Coke bottles, the yellow-stained sheets and the all-pervading stench of blocked lavatories. I needed no more convincing. My new-found chum had been entirely honest in his judgement. I conceded. He could now guide me instead to the one hotel in the town he had strongly recommended. “Heart Throb” was thrilled and immediately restored his hand to mine.

The Municipal View was an ugly, concrete shoebox that stood high above the town. However, my room was large, the bedding acceptable and the price within my limited daily budget. Even the bathroom was clean and promised hot water for an hour every morning. Although I was the only guest and the eighteen-year-old proprietor just happened to be my Kashmiri's cousin, I agreed to take the room. The young manager was thrilled at my custom. As he left me to unpack and wash, he advised that I “be keeping windows well indeed closed shutly, sir, for rascal monkeys cause much havocs and guest displeasures.”

I expressed my thanks for his warning, turned the key behind him, and immediately opened the door onto the balcony. I stepped out and inhaled the crisp, enlivening air with a forceful gasp. Before me spread an astonishing view of the Elysium and Summer Hills.

And beyond them all, the great white peaks, range upon range, sweeping into infinity, of the mighty Himalaya.

***

“She's not here!” the young woman barked.

Bindra had taken hours to find the house. It lay well off the road, beyond an abandoned tea garden. Her exhausted, but uncomplaining, boys had stopped to pick a few leaves. They had been cheered by the hope of a flavoured brew before nightfall, but the bushes had been left unclipped for far too long. Their foliage was overgrown and bitter.

“Then what time is she back?” Bindra asked politely.

“She won't be back. She's not here, I told you! Never has been!” came the curt reply, in strongly accented Nepali.

Bindra was confused. Jayashri had started her life as a maid over a year ago. She had been taken to Kakariguri, to the home of this chicken farmer, by a woman who had come asking for children to go into service. She had promised good food, education, clean clothes, even wages. She had promised that Jayashri would be allowed home to visit once a year, in the hot season. Bindra had waited, but she had not come.

“Then where is my daughter?” Bindra tried again. “In whose house is she working?”

The young woman curled her lip. “I don't know who your daughter is, nor do I know where she is. What I do know is that she's not here!”

Bindra would not be deterred.

“Then where is Mrs Mukherjee?” The woman had already turned away. “Mrs Mukherjee, who brought my Jayashri to work in this house?”

“Never heard of her!” came the irritated reply. “Never been any Mukherjees here!”

***

Behind Shimla's incongruously neo-Gothic church rose Jakhu Hill, some thousand feet above the town. I climbed its steep, thickly wooded slopes, dark with pines and deodars, but soon had to pause. I sat on the forest path to the ancient temple, breathing in the sandalwood that floated through the Himalayan cypresses from the shrine dedicated to Hanuman, the Monkey God.

I peered back down the hillside and thought of poor cousin Dill and the steamroller that had crushed out his life as he had tried to save an unwary local, somewhere below me in 1923. If only Grandmother could have known that I was here. If only Priya . . .

I stopped myself.

No more “if onlys”, I had vowed. Never again that single, selfdestructive clause of the unreal past. Pointless.

The deluge of despair that threatened to defeat me was swiftly dispersed by the arrival of a mob of merry schoolboys. Smartly attired in royal blue blazers and caps, they clustered around me with a communal wish to practise their English. They wanted to talk about cricket, Milton and Wordsworth. Uninhibited by the petulant narcissism so common in Western adolescents, they spontaneously recited favourite passages from
Paradise Lost
, then in unison “
wandered lonely as a cloud
”. In turn, I recited a passage of Tagore, much to their surprised delight, only to expose my easy sentimentality by sharing out the bag of cashews I had procured in the Lower Bazaar. They leapt at the opportunity to milk another credulous tourist, and so, in response to their tireless entreaties, I handed over the last of my British coppers for their “collections”.

Satisfied to have made a new, foreign friend - or at least an exploitable benefactor - and content with the gifts in mouths and pockets, they collectively waved goodbye and scuttled off home “for tea”. As I watched their cap-topped heads bob back down the hill path, I wondered at the legacy of Empire that would maintain the rigours of pre-War uniforms and classical curricula, whilst allowing roads, buildings and any level of civic efficiency to slip into oblivion.

I strolled back towards the Mall and made for a small temple dedicated to the hill goddess Shyamala Devi, a form of Kali after whom the town was said to have been named. As I reached Scandal Corner, where
memsahibs
once gathered to exchange the salacious gossip for which these hills had been so well known, I walked straight into Kamlesh with his wife and her sister. The women giggled furiously and sauntered away to a fruit stall, casting longlashed looks over their woollen-wrapped shoulders. Kamlesh took the opportunity to clasp my arm with unsettling excitement.

“I am loving you, Mister David,” he announced.

I laughed and said that I thought him a fine chap too.

“No, no!” he protested. “I am loving you most deeply!”

The heat of his hand and the ardour in his eyes initiated a sudden, alarming realisation.

I called to mind that I was an intruder on a distinctly different culture. I thought of the farm boys in Gujarat, the soldiers at New Delhi Station, my new friend Dilruba and the unselfconscious ease with which he took my hand. I was coming to learn that both emotional and physical bonding between men had long been judged wholly natural and valid in India. “Heroic dalliance” shared between male companions bound by a deep and trusting friendship had long been deemed auspicious.

Back on the farmhouse roof in Dalba, Mukund had astonished me with talk of
Gandharva
marriages, in which men cohabited through a bond of love that required neither parental consent nor priestly ceremony. He had explained that this “celestial” tradition - named after mythical, irresistibly handsome musicians who possessed the secrets of the gods, with which they enlightened men in the arts of divine pleasure - had even been defended by ancient laws as a means to maintain individual stability and thereby social harmony. In Mukund's opinion, it had only been when a censorious British judiciary formally reversed these historic edicts that the Subcontinent had suffered a cultural blow of imperial, foreign “morality” from which it had yet to recover.

Kamlesh interrupted my hasty deliberations by grasping both my shoulders, to hold me squarely in his fervent gaze.

“Please be coming to my friend's house this evening,” he pleaded. “My wife is being elsewhere, with no doubts.”

I politely declined, in spite of the grin and raised eyebrows he proffered in excited anticipation. I claimed to be busy, although could not think of a single activity in this sleepy hill station that could so occupy my time.

“You are not understanding, Mister David,” he pressed. “I am loving and respecting you. I am not laying one unworthy finger on you. Only as you are wishing. No jiggy-jig if you are not wanting, that I am promising. Please be having no fears.”

I was struggling with the culturally appropriate response to such an offer, hardly daring to consider the implications of his bouncy colloquialism, when Kamlesh's wife suddenly screamed. A rhesus monkey had leapt on top of her, tearing a newly purchased bag of bananas from her hands.

While Kamlesh ran after the beast, waving and shouting in violent Punjabi, his sister-in-law fumbled to cover the gaping hole torn in his wife's long
kurta
with her own
dupatta
headscarf. While the onlookers laughed out loud and clapped their hands in delight at the entertainment, I took the opportunity to scuttle off in the opposite direction just as quickly as I could.

***

Nobody would stop to answer Bindra's question.

Some simply shrugged in response to her Nepali. Others kept a wide berth, pretending not to have seen her smiling to catch their attention.

At a busy intersection, she approached a man dressed in Western clothes. “Brother, where is the
Gad Sap Hat
Ashram?” she asked again. He tossed a coin towards her, but would not stop to listen. Bindra sent Jyothi to return it, but the man refused to take the money back.

Bindra led her boys to rest in the shade of a tree. The heat made the new skin on her back and neck prickle painfully. The lack of food and water was dulling her mind and clouding her sight. Jyothi and Jiwan had been quiet for a long time. She knew they were hungry and thirsty, and yet had never once complained since their arrival in Kakariguri the previous day.

The ringing of a bright bell caused Bindra to turn around and peer into a thicket of bamboo and banana palms that lay far off the road. Jiwan pointed directly at it and nodded, without a word.

The sight of a small Kali temple in the trees brought life surging back into Bindra's exhausted body. As they hurried towards the red
dhajo
temple flags protruding above the treetops, she thought she could hear the cheery, expressive intonations of their own Kalimpong Nepali.

They passed a single stall laden with all the usual
parsat
offerings of incense, scarlet garlands,
sidur
pigment, paper icons and metal
trishul
tridents. She smiled apologetically at the stall-holder and quickly led the boys towards the low steps. As they paused to brush the dust from their feet, Bindra noticed an elderly woman sitting on the ground. She showed all the ravages of long years of untreated leprosy.

“
Namaste didi
,” Bindra smiled, respectively raising her hands to her heart in
pranam
.

The woman bowed her head in return and lifted a bowl between the shrunken stumps that had once been hands.

“Forgive me,
didi
,” Bindra replied with regret. “We have nothing. Not even
chaamal
to offer you, not even raw rice.”

The woman had only now caught sight of Bindra's bindings. She did not need to ask.

“No, wait!” Bindra suddenly beamed. “We have a coin. Jyothi, take it from your pocket.”

Jyothi looked at her in disbelief. “But
Ama
!” he protested. “It's all we have to buy food!”

The Nepali woman raised her own arms to them in
pranam
. “
Bahini
,” she croaked through a dry throat, “little sister, my children and husband are all gone. I've only one mouth to feed. You have three.”

“A man dropped this coin and wouldn't take it back,” explained Bindra. “So whether you have it or we have it makes no difference. Your hunger is my hunger.”

The woman lifted her arms again. “No
bahini
, I need nothing from you. Just a prayer to Kali Ma. And
ahashis
from your little one.”

“My Jiwan?” Bindra almost laughed. “You're asking for a blessing from my little Jiwan, as though he were your elder?”

The woman tipped her head and smiled with knowing.

Jiwan stood and confidently approached her. He bowed in
pranam
and muttered a long phrase under his breath. He drew the woman's thin, cotton shawl over her head, then bent forwards to whisper in each ear at a time. The woman bowed low in gratitude and touched his small, blackened feet.

Bindra was astonished.

“Come,
Ama
,” he said, turning back to his mother. “Kali Ma awaits.”

Chapter Ten

The sun had dropped behind the mountain peaks and with it the temperature of my room in the Municipal View. I covered my bed with the extra quilts provided, only to have to open the window to dispel the fungal mustiness.

I used the chilly bathroom for a moment and returned to find the room full of monkeys.

The charcoal-masked mob froze.

They stared at me with eyes wide, thieving fingers outstretched, suspended in compromising positions of pilfer.

My father's careful bedtime training flooded back into my mind.

Run in tight circles when faced by a crocodile.

Play dead with a cobra.

Keep face to face with a porcupine.

Remove your clothes and walk backwards if surprised by a bear.

But for monkeys?

My finest snake-hiss imitation induced mass panic amongst the guilty scoundrels. They scuttered straight back out of the window through which they had crept. However, despite the frenzy of their departure, they first managed to grab two pairs of underpants, nailclippers, lip salve, alarm clock, dirty socks and tube of antiseptic cream, whilst scattering flurries of fleas across my bedding in their flight. I burst out onto the balcony in vain hope of restoring at least some of my accessories, but all were gone.

The distant glow of a full moon reflected across the snowy heights beyond my window, as I huddled down into damp blankets and reviewed the day to distract myself from my shivers. MockTudor gables and collapsed chimneystacks. Unhinged garden gates and broken bay windows. I thought of grandparents, aunts and uncles in these hills. I imagined my father practising on his wooden tricycle along these forest paths, under the watchful eye of his turban-topped
khansamah
.

And in the darkness, the voices of my Dead-'n'-Gones seemed to whisper around the room, seemed to echo across distant mountains inside my head, as I closed my eyes and lay on my hands to stop myself from scratching.

***

“Tune-Snake-Hand?” the portly Keralan nun was mystified. “I'm sorry, but I have never heard of the
Gad Sap Hat
Ashram.”

She beckoned the little family away from the edge of the road as another bus blasted by.

Bindra was exhausted, but nodded in gratitude all the same.

“
Didi
,” she asked, “how do you speak such good Nepali?”

The nun smiled with satisfaction and explained that she had worked for some years amongst the tea pickers at Kurseong. She looked down at the two tired little faces blinking back at her.

“What is this place you are trying to find?” she asked with growing interest.

“There are Ancestors there,” Bindra explained. “They have medicine to make me well.” She had not meant to glance down at her hands.

“We want to go home,” Jyothi added quietly.

The nun shook her head. “I'm sorry. I've just never heard of this Tune-Snake-Hand Ashram,” she apologised, her Malayali accent at times impenetrable.

All of a sudden, her dense, dark eyebrows lifted in broad arches. She burst into giggles.

“No, no, wait!” she squealed, covering her discoloured teeth with a fleshy hand. “It's not
Gad Sap Hat
- it's the
Good Shep-herd
Ashram! And they're not Ancestors - they're Fathers! Catholic Fathers!”

Bindra joined in her laughter. But she did not understand.

***

The burghers of Kasauli proclaimed their town to be “The Cleanest and Calmest Hill Station”. As I alighted from the bus onto the old parade ground, there was little to contradict them. Laid out before me were quiet, leafy lanes, dominated by a fine country church. There were handsome houses in well-kept grounds, smart army barracks and an intriguing array of pre-War shopfronts.

The journey from Shimla had been uncomplicated. There had been only one change at the decaying row of tiny shacks that constituted Dharampur, where the population had gathered to intimidate me with the steadfastness of their stares.

The final stretch of the journey towards Kasauli had been undertaken in a vehicle that looked as though it might have been driven across a minefield in a recent military manoeuvre. We had bumped and lurched our way through forested hills where strawberries, apricots and cherries grew wild. We had crossed deep valleys violently splashed with magenta rhododendrons and cut through by quicksilver streams. We had passed British bungalows with arcaded verandahs, and handsome “chummeries” where four or five bachelors once lived together and shared their servants. We had frightened skinny women who balanced foraged fodder on their heads, and skinny shepherds who herded skinny sheep.

Kasauli had always been spoken of by my father with the greatest affection. It had sounded to me more Narnia than his other homes at Risalpur or Sialkot, more Never Never than Khanspur or Murree. My greatest desire was to find the last house in which my father had lived, before the upheavals of Independence and the insanity of Partition.

In the cluttered tobacconist's, gob-stopper-stuffed with discoloured sweets in dusty jars, the chatty
dukandar
shopkeeper directed me to an old hotel on the Lower Mall, and its proprietress, Miss Holt.

I climbed the stone steps of the Hill Top Hotel and nodded to a tense
mali
gardener. He was busy deluging rows of potted geraniums on the verandah with two long-spouted watering-cans.

I had paused to watch a pair of long-limbed langurs negotiate the telephone wires, when a narrow glass-fronted door opened and the windfall face of a stooped figure appeared between the floorlength net. I was so taken aback to see a shrivelled Englishwoman high in the Hills that I was momentarily lost for words. She seemed unperplexed by my imbecilic expression and, in spite of it, offered her hand, simultaneously giving instructions to the
mali
, who was still fussing over the scented-leaf perennials.

“Dear boy,” Miss Holt sighed wistfully, as though summoning vivid picture-book scenes of a secret life in another world, “I saw the Raj at its height. I lived through the Raj!”

Her voice was strong and retained the glimmer of a distant youth. It contradicted the crumpled body in its breakfast-egg-and marmalade-toast-fronted cotton dress and cardi.

“The Raj was glorious, truly glorious,” she continued, resting her palm on a plant-pot-piled reading table. “Everything . . . beautiful. The likes will never be seen again by any generation, believe you me. I went to England once and was horrified. The seat of Empire maybe, but it was cold, grey and dirty. And all those sooty chimneys! I never went back. Now all my relatives are dead. Not one left.”

I asked whether she knew of a house named Ketunky.

“Your family home?” she asked, pouting her sunken lips into a puckered scar. I nodded. “Once in a while, you people come on your sentimental journeys, in search of some grandfather's house or other,” she tutted. “And every one of you is shocked and disappointed, because India is collapsing and so are your ancestral piles. However, Kasauli has changed little, except there's now half the population we had before Independence. And, of course, the whole place is falling down around our ears!”

She turned to shout at the
mali
, who had watered the geraniums so generously that they were now floating. “
Acha, memsa'b
!” he squealed, as he proceeded to tip up the pots to drain them, dropping sodden soil and flower heads all across the verandah floor.

The old lady rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, “It's all so disappointing.” She shook her head slowly, causing the pendulous skin of her wizened neck to drift from side to side like a lazy
punkah
fan. “Simla was glorious, of course. Every summer the viceroy and his council travelled over one thousand miles from Calcutta. He'd bring hundreds of his own attendants and guards, in addition to envoys, representatives, tradespeople and the like. It was like watching Hannibal coming up the mountain - without his elephants!”

Miss Holt had become animated with the commotion of her memories. She unconsciously began brushing down her worn clothes and straightening the unpressed Eton collar on her dress, as though she were about to be presented to Lords Willingdon or Curzon themselves. She raised an arthritic hand to sweep thin thrums of white hair from her face, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of a young woman looking out from her twinkling eyes. A bright, lively girl, still in awe of the grandeur and elegance of her youth.

“And the Viceregal Lodge, you've seen it of course,” she continued, “five stories high, and all furnished by Maple's of Tottenham Court Road. Oh, my dear, the social life was so . . . eventful. Grand balls, the likes of which you couldn't possibly imagine. And eight hundred guests at a time!”

Over her head, I could see the
mali
getting himself into a proper pickle. His hands were full of mud and broken geranium stems. He seemed unable to decide whether to first re-pot whichever plants looked redeemable, or to clean the mess extending up his arms and across the verandah floor, which was now covered in dirty footprints, or whether to sneak past the reminiscing
memsahib
and make good his escape. Whatever his decision, it would not have made the slightest difference to her now. She was too far away in her reveries to have noticed the domestic disaster unravelling around us.

“My father owned Wildflower Hall, built on the site of Lord Kitchener's residence. It was a vast mansion, surrounded by pines. Beautiful. But it's all gone. Burnt to the ground. I refuse to go to Simla now. It's changed beyond recognition into a shabby madhouse. Frightful. All gone. Finished . . .”

She slumped, suddenly exhausted, and the twinkle went dark. “India, the Land of Regrets,” she mumbled, whiskery chin dropping onto her sunken chest. “Ruined. Ruined. Ruined . . .”

The old lady turned away, back bent almost double with the burden of bitter disappointment. She waved a hand weakly as though in dismissal, then withdrew through sallowed curtains into cloth moth-stippled darkness.

***

“
Didi
,” Bindra continued. “Can you tell me where Mrs Mukherjee lives?”

The nun shrugged. “Which Mukherjee? It's a common name here.”

Bindra could not answer.

“Well, what does her husband do?” the nun persisted.

Bindra knew nothing of the woman to whom she had entrusted her daughter. Mrs Mukherjee had spoken so nicely when she had come to the door. She had worn such a smart sari. Expensive. She had given biscuits to the children, handed milk powder to Bindra. She had talked a lot. She had made fine promises.

Bindra looked blankly at the stout woman in her strange blue dress with its matching lank cloth that hung around her thick, dark features.

“Mrs Mukherjee came to us nearly a year ago, asking for my daughter. My eldest, Jayashri,” she began. “She told me good things. Jayashri would learn to read and write, and grow strong on good food. To be a maid is good work. Good training. I want that for my daughter. She is a good girl. She works hard. She is a kind and happy child . . .”

The nun's face had lost all spark of humour. She looked hard at Bindra. “Did this woman take other girls to work as maids?”

“I don't know,” Bindra shrugged, listlessly. “But she offered more money if she could take my Jyothi too . . .”

A portentous alarm suddenly caused her heart to pound. “Where's my Jayashri?” The violence in her chest was causing her to gasp for air. “Good food. Education. She promised!”

The Keralan nun looked grave. “You hill people are so trusting,” she sighed, shaking her head, as though in tired despair. “You're as innocent as your own children. If you could but believe in Christ, He would welcome you with open arms into His Kingdom. ‘Suffer them to come unto me,' He said . . .”

Bindra could make no sense of her. “My daughter,” she interrupted. “Where is my daughter?”

The nun drew close and dropped her voice. Bindra could smell sour milk on her breath.

“I fear your little girl is now in Calcutta. Probably in Sonagachi district. Perhaps in Kalighat. These women come every year to search the Hills for healthy girls. And boys. Young girls. Pretty boys . . .”

The weight in Bindra's chest was crushing out the air.

“My sisters tell me there are almost 70,000 doing such work in Calcutta,” the nun continued. “I've heard that 14,000 are brought in from Nepal alone, every year. Many are still children. How old is your Jayashri?”

Bindra did not want to believe that she was understanding the words through the distortion of their dense, Malayali accent.

“Jayashri has turned twelve. Perhaps soon thirteen . . .” Again the nun shook her head. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“
Ama
,” Jyothi had taken hold of her arm. He was pointing towards the sky. “Look!”

Bindra's face turned up towards the blue. There were kites. Small paper kites, swooping and spinning.

She closed her eyes. “Dark Mother, what have I done?”

But the words were engulfed by the distant sound of her own voice, screaming.

***

A figure in flip-flops struggled up the steep hill path towards me. Beneath a plain shawl, I could make out the face of a handsome young woman. She had a feisty billy-goat on a string in one hand and a chuckling child astride her hip supported by the other.

I greeted her and asked, in Urdu, if she spoke English. She did not. “Ketunky?” I asked, as her son's eyes widened in horror at my strange white face and threatened to flood with frightened tears. The young woman nodded vigorously to my question and pointed back down the hillside up which she had climbed.

It all seemed strangely familiar. It was as though I had visited this place as a child. Perhaps it had been in that twilight region between wakefulness and sleep, my father's bedtime stories enlivening my eager imagination.