In the Shadow of Crows (25 page)

I awoke to discover that I had slept through a great storm.

Rain squalled across perse peaks, filtering dawn light into fickle, iridian hues. Ghoulish clouds hung low over a sodden landscape, trailing in vast wreaths about fantastic hills.

My new cousin Samuel had insisted upon keeping me company at the Himalayan View the previous night. I had felt him tremble as his arm slipped round to hold me as I prepared to sleep. He had said it was their custom, that his parents would be proud, and with some glee asserted that his cousin-brothers would now be jealous that he had been “the chosen one”.

After breakfast porridge, we shared a soapy bucket-bath, then strolled out into clarty streets. Samuel first led me up to the old Scottish church, its stained glass lately broken when a schism in an already diminished congregation had resulted in the hurling of bricks to vent a doctrinal sulk. We tried the doors, but found them locked, so squelched through soggy cottage garden, muddy chicken yard and on to forest in which a hillside graveyard lay. Above us, punk-fuzzed monkeys grumbled in the wet, whilst far below, beneath a pall of mist, the Teesta scored between Bengal and Sikkim its circuitous incision.

Samuel clutched fast my arm as we braved a dangerous declivity to press on amongst dense scrub and scattered stones. Monsoonmellowed epitaphs bore witness to the lives of lowland missionaries who had arrived with foreign burr and Bible, only to soon sicken in exotic climes and swiftly merge with mountain humus.

Beneath dark, dripping trees, Samuel slowed us to a halt.

“This is where they lie,” he whispered, I thought to mark respect. “So now let's go,” he hissed and tugged to draw me back.

I stood astonished to have reached this isolated patch of unmarked ground, precariously perched on a Himalayan foothill's fragile slope. And yet to now know the tranquil saturation of this place, that to another would bear no significance or worldly worth, was the culmination of an abundant life of familial inheritance and grandmotherly affection.

“
Dajoo
, please!” Samuel intruded with a beseeching scowl. “I've got the proper creeps!”

“Just one last thing,” I insisted, bending to place a hand upon the earth. I touched my heart and spoke aloud the names of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Isi, then chose a stone to fit my pocket.

Samuel crouched to peer in puzzlement at my quirk.

“A final gift my Grandmother asked of me,” I explained. “From

Uncle Oscar's resting place to hers . . .”

I looked hard into the trunk-cut mist. I had now eaten a mango from its tree, as she had asked, and held a
Dalit
. I had sat with
sadhus
and collected a memento of a grave. I had fulfilled her every wish, and yet found no solace in their attainment. Only sorrow at one more conclusion. Sadness at another end.

“Well, good! You've done your duty,” Samuel hurried his approval, glancing anxiously around as though
bhut
ghosts might be prepared to leave their foggy peace and hunt us home. “So now,” he spluttered in my ear, pulling on my shoulders to heave me upright, “let's please be getting out of here!”

We dredged our way back into town where, despite the weather, the
haat
market bustled, barter babbling over vegetables and fruits, bloody meat and stinking fish. Drifts of embroidered shawls and woolly jumpers, kitchen utensils and handmade tools. Neat bluffs of
churpi
yak's cheese and
murcha
yeast-pats to ferment
chhang
millet-brew. Tumbles of milk lollipops, flip-flops, Durga-covered calendars and all the paraphernalia of
puja
.

Then, the spices!

Multi-hued hillocks of clove, cassia, coriander seed and peppercorn, heaped high onto squares of saffron cloth. Turmeric for colouring, preserving and treating tender inflammation. Pink garlic, bay and curry leaves for flavour. Sweet cardamom to fragrance puddings, and knotty clumps of ginger root to make digestive teas. Tamarind, fenugreek and mustard. Cumin, aniseed and mace. Mountainous rainbow ranges of tongue-scalding chillies of every size and shape, piled into sparkling pans of beaten brass.

I closed my eyes to draw the piquant air deep into my chest.

I was instantly back in Priya's house. Her mother cooking
dhansak
and chopping
kachumber
. Her sisters grating jaggery and nutmeg. Her father sitting in his armchair watching Betamax Bollywood and crunching crisp, peppery
papads
that glistened with warm peanut oil. The sudden clarity of memory offered unexpected comfort and I found myself smiling, even as it stole my spice-laced breath.

Samuel clasped tight my hand in his and drew me on through boisterous crowds. Deep amongst the throng, beside a stinking culvert clogged with sewage-caked plastic and rat-gnawed cat, I caught sight of an elderly Nepali in tatty traditional dress. The old man bowed, beaming in delight as we crouched to scan the dusty offerings scattered across his damp blanket stall. I rummaged through mouse-dropping-peppered piles of
mani
prayer wheels and
japamala
prayer beads, insect-riddled manuscripts and mothmunched cloth. And all the while, the aged peddler looked backwards and forwards, from Samuel to me.

He spoke and Samuel chuckled, translating that the old man had asked if it were possible we were related.

“Why would he think that?” I asked, bemused.

“He says we feel like brothers!” Samuel laughed and proudly hugged my arm with both of his.

Beneath the clutter, I found a wormy wooden plaque inscribed with angular calligraphy. I asked its price. The Nepali shook his head and told Samuel that he could not let me walk away with anything so beetle-tooled and broken. He attempted to direct my attention instead to a cardboard box of shiny, new trinkets. I insisted on the ancient board.

The old man smiled.

“He says you have an unfettered mind,” grinned Samuel. “He wishes you to take it as a gift, because you are my
dajoo
.”

I was deeply touched, but insisted upon giving him money, as a “donation”. I bent to pass him the rupees with my right hand supported by my left, in an effort to show what I had learnt to be a traditional form of respect, when he took hold of my wrists and pulled me close. The man looked hard into my eyes.

Samuel intervened and an intense conversation was exchanged between them.

“David-
dajoo
,” Samuel said, his face rumpling in perplexity, “he tells me the words on this piece of wood are hidden knowledge, written in the ‘twilight' language of the
Tantras
. You know, our mountain tradition. He says this inscription was concealed thirteen hundred years ago, for future generations to discover and interpret - but no one ever has . . .”

Samuel raised a hand to silence the excited questions on my tongue.

“But the strangest thing of all,” he continued, “is that he wants me to take you to a place in the mountains even I have never heard of. He says a man is waiting for you there.”

I was astonished.

“And what is this place?” I asked.

“He calls it Lapu
basti
,” Samuel replied. “The village of Lapu.”

***

It was a hovel. One of at least a hundred shacks built of dismantled packing cases, corrugated iron and plastic sheeting that skulked below the entire length of the railway embankment.

Bindra shook her head, but the thin man just kept grinning his hematic slit. He pointed to a water pump, at which children were washing. He pointed to a reeking, communal toilet shack and partially buried sewage pipe.

“
Aacha ghar hai
!” he exclaimed joyfully, impressing that this was a good place to make a home. He kicked away a crippled chicken and shouted out, “Kavindra!”

An old woman, bent double and wheezing, peered around a length of sacking that hung across her empty doorframe. The man roughly pulled the woman into the light and smirked, “
Dekhiye
!” inviting Bindra to “Please look!” with disquieting courtesy.

Bindra was embarrassed. She bowed to the woman and respectfully called her “grandmother”. She apologised in polite Nepali for the intrusion and asked her forgiveness. The old woman understood her meaning. She smiled kindly to Bindra and struggled to lift her skeletal arms in
pranam
. She had only one eye and no fingers.

Jyothi was rummaging in the bag given to them by the Nepali novices at Varanasi. He offered two bananas to the old woman with both his hands, as a sign of deference to her.

The thin man watched with swelling satisfaction. He lengthened one long finger to stroke the back of Jyothi's neck.

Bindra grasped hold of her son with her forearms in instinctive alarm and drew him tightly to her side. The thin man wagged his stiff digit in playful reprimand. He leaned in close with eager, heavy breath, wafting a sickly infusion of sweet spice, armpits and dental decay into Bindra's face.

She looked directly into his dry, bloodshot eyes, but held her breath. Bindra would not breathe in this man. She would not let him in to fan the full ferocity of her despair.

One last bleedy grin and the bright-bleached
kurta
turned as though to leave.

Suddenly, a bony arm extended towards Jyothi.

Before Bindra could respond, callous fingertips twisted hard the boy's unwary cheek, as the tall, thin man released from his lips a long, scarlet stream of muculent phlegm.

***

It was early morning when Samuel and I mounted a borrowed motorbike, to make a difficult and bumpy ascent up Deolo Hill.

We broke our journey to pay respects to many-armed goddesses, whose scarlet dresses drew us from the road and into the dappled shade of deep forest. We found tiger-riding Durgas enwrapped by tree roots. Purifying Parvatis standing in the shallows of woodland springs. Long-tongued Kalis marking the entrances to womb-like caves.

We stopped at an army base that lay tucked into dense pine trees, to ask Sikh and Gurkha guards for directions to Lapu village. They pointed onwards, down into yet another distant valley.

We eventually drew to a halt near a scattering of neatly painted, wooden
kuti
cottages. The air was sheer, the mountain peaks lucid. An elderly woman approached, followed closely by two nanny-goats and six uninterested chickens. She expressed no surprise at our sudden appearance, but bowed and confirmed that Lapu
basti
lay below us, on the lower hillside. She looked intently at me, then spoke quietly to Samuel. His forehead wrinkled.

“I don't know what you've started,
dajoo
, but this woman says the man who's waiting for you lives down there!” he exclaimed, pointing to a narrow track that disappeared into thick jungle.

The powdery path down the hillside was treacherous, but as we stepped out of the trees, the entire Kanchenjunga range was revealed before us.

I held my breath.

It was as though both heart and time were momentarily suspended.

Ahead of us lay two small, wooden buildings. One a singleroomed hut, the second a simple temple. Both were surrounded by carefully tended flowers. Both were topped by quiet crows. The birds fixed their attention on us as we commenced our approach, only to come to an abrupt halt.

The man had been so motionless, sitting in the shade of the temple canopy, that neither of us had seen him. He smiled and bowed.

“
Dayagari aunuhos
.
Ma asa gardaitye
,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Please come. I have been expecting you.”

Samuel turned to me with alarm in his eyes.

“David-
dajoo
, I don't understand why we're here,” he whispered. “This man is a
jhankri
!”

“A what?” I hissed.

“The people here say the Goddess first formed man from earth and fire, wind and stone, leaf and water. But then she suffered to see the effects of all his self-inflicted afflictions - you know, like jealousy and anger.” Samuel dropped his voice yet further and leant towards me. “So she took a handful of purest snow from the mountain Pundim Chyu, and formed the first
jhankri
, to heal mankind and oversee his welfare.” He glanced back towards the man. “Well ... this is a
jhankri
! One of those very same hill shamans!”

I was enthralled.

“Look at the
marensi mala
around his neck!” Samuel exclaimed in an animated mutter. “Little skulls carved from old men's bones as a necklace. And you see that flute pipe in his lap?” I did. “Do you know what that's made from?”

I peered at its long, brown, knobbly length partially bound in cloth. I shrugged and innocently suggested, “Bamboo?”

“No,
dajoo
!” Samuel grimaced. “It's also bone! Cut from a dead man's forearm!”

I looked back, into the face of the quiet figure on the temple steps. He smiled warmly and nodded for me to approach.

“Be careful,
dajoo
,” Samuel hissed. “The
jhankri
have great power...”

I stepped forwards alone and bowed in
pranam
.

“
Namaskar hajur
!
Ma
David
huñ
,” I announced in introduction, courageously experimenting with my new Nepali.

“
Namaskar bhai
,” he replied warmly, addressing me as “little brother”. “
Ma
Kushal Magar
huñ
.”

***

Bindra blamed the heat.

She had been unable to think. She had been unable to make a decision. Nobody had understood her questions about the mountains or the
Aghori Babas
. Nobody had seen Jiwan.

Bindra had told the tall, thin man that she had no money to pay him for the temporary use of the shack, to which she seemed to have inadvertently agreed. He had grinned in understanding. He had shrugged nonchalantly. She had assumed that it had been in lieu of rent that he had taken four boxes of her medicine and the oil for her deeply creviced skin. In return, he had given Jyothi two brightly coloured boiled sweets.