In the Shadow of Crows (26 page)

The tall, thin man lingered outside the hut for much longer than Bindra felt comfortable. Only when he finally left did they break the candy into pieces with a stone and share them with Kavindra. The old woman talked endlessly to them in her sibilant Hindi, frequently shaking her head and tutting, shaking her head and tutting. Bindra understood a few of her spittle-wet words, but little more.

As dusk fell and the biting flies began to rise, the sky was soon fluttering with paper kites. Jyothi was excited and ran up the steep railway embankment to watch them spiral and soar in daring dogfight. He clapped his hands and cheered as a small, green kite with glass-impregnated string cut free a bright blue opponent.

“Stay close!” Bindra called, as she watched Jyothi run along the railway line, laughing, to see if he could catch it. “Stay close where I can see you!”

The liberation of the chase sustained Jyothi's legs in their flight far further than he had intended.

His eyes were so fixed on the twisting, tumbling paper that he did not see the bright-bleached
kurta
until his face hit hard against the tall, thin, perspiring body to which it clung.

***

“He says this is your time,” Samuel announced, “that you are ready.”

“Ready for what?” I asked, in puzzlement. “I don't even know why we're here.”

I had removed my shoes and was sitting on the cold stone, before the inner doors of the
jhankri
's temple.

“Well,
dajoo
, he's saying you have come for
diksha
- initiation,” he insisted. “And these
jhankri
fellows are rarely wrong.”

“Initiation into what?” I asked with a bemused chuckle.

Kushal Magar smiled with me. “
Thuture Veda
,” he replied.

“The Spoken Knowledge,” translated Samuel. “The
Paramparaa
- the Tradition.”

I could not pretend to understand. But sitting there, beneath the fulgent heights of the Kanchenjunga, I knew that I instinctively trusted this quiet, gentle man.

I did not need to think.

I smiled and nodded, unperturbed by the fact that I had no knowledge as to what I had agreed.

***

Bindra had collected sufficient twigs and dry leaves to bring to a boil the sandy hydrant water in her blackening canister. She scooped a little rice and lentils from the bag given by the temple novices back in Kashi and added it to the rolling foam.

She called out for Jyothi to come for his food, then turned to invite Kavindra to share their evening meal of plain
daal-bhat
.

Bindra stood quite still.

Her arms fell limp to her sides.

Sitting along the edge of the old woman's hut was a single line of silent crows.

***

The kindly
jhankri
placed his hands on my head in
ahashis
, then turned to prepare himself.

I watched as he donned his white tunic before positioning a headdress stitched with feathers and shells. He reverently opened the red wooden doors of the little shrine, to the accompaniment of an unintelligible stream of rhythmical syllables.

Kushal Magar turned to sit before me.

He placed a palm-worn drum in his lap. He unwrapped from its cloth binding an elaborate dagger of ornate metalwork and carved rock-crystal. He drew a circle on the ground and repeated a distinctive, reverberating chant.

Kushal Magar placed grains of rice upon my tongue and turned to face the altar. He burned handfuls of carefully selected mountain herbs in metal bowls. He lit pungent cones of incense in scorched, clay cups.

“I'm sorry,
dajoo
,” Samuel muttered, “but the
jhankri
is asking that you remove your clothes. Yes, everything.”

I inhaled a swell of scented smoke and found myself unhesitating. During these many weeks in India, I had learned that Westerners so often asked the wrong question. We asked ‘Why?' Here they asked ‘Why not?'

So it was that, in a moment, I sat again before the temple doors, oblivious to the chill of mountain air against my naked skin.

As Kushal Magar's palms began to voice the drum's taut top, I felt the union of earth, sky, mountain, breath. As our eyes drifted closed, as the vibration of his mantras seemed to mingle with my marrow, both he and I began to tremble.

All sense of time was slipping. All sense of self.

Had I been sitting before the scarlet temple for hours, days or months? How many moons had waxed and waned? Had I arrived today or was this the place in which I had been born? Was I infant, adolescent or ancient? Was I man or woman? Tree or crow? Earth or sky?

It was already darkening into dusk when the
jhankri
indicated for Samuel to lie me flat upon my back. Kushal Magar knelt to pour a viscous liquid into the pit of my throat, chest, belly and the hollows of my groin. He ran vermilion-stained fingertips in long lines across my skin as he mumbled unceasing, vibratory syllables.

He doused in new chrism a sudden, inexplicable tumescence, then pressed into my forehead and pubis with his thumbs. He dripped into my nostrils a bracing, bitter oil that set alight my sinuses and swelled my tongue. It seemed to cause my face to melt, my head to bloat, my eyes to open wider than the beam of every star.

Kushal Magar withdrew both hands to touch his heart, then plunged into my abdomen with tightened fists. He threw back his head to pronounce a chant that resounded through my cells. A chant that caused my limbs to shake without restraint.

My chest began to freeze, as though to mountain ice. My navel to ignite, as though some hidden, residual dock of my infantine umbilicus were now fiercely on fire.

I stretched down to grasp his wrists.

I tried to cry out, to restrain him in his rite.

But my entire body and mind were violently, rhythmically convulsing.

Chapter Nineteen

It was Kavindra who called for the neighbours.

Word spread quickly. The newly arrived Nepali boy was lost.

It was already dark when some of the men agreed to search amongst the haphazard rabble of shacks that squatted between the railway embankment and the stinking irrigation gully.

They soon tired. They would wait until morning. No point now. He would find his way back when he was hungry.

The women gathered to chatter and stare at the quiet outsider in their midst. One woman gave Bindra an onion; another, a paper twist of turmeric. One woman spared a green chilli; another, a measure of mustard oil and a small, round lemon.

Bindra was grateful. Really she was.

But all that she could do was to look beyond the sympathetic shaking of their heads and stare out into the darkness.

***

It had been a full five days before I had stopped trembling.

My new aunts had scolded Samuel for taking me to a
jhankri
, “of all people!” These men had great knowledge, they had been unable to deny. However, they considered that any close contact with mountain shamans was always best avoided.

Samuel had said nothing in his defence. Neither of us spoke of what we had witnessed in the wooden temple at Lapu
basti
. There was no need. I had experienced something that defied my understanding. All I knew was that a profound and lasting change had been wrought, for which I had no words. An inner freedom for which I would have to wait many years to begin to comprehend.

Then, suddenly, it was time to leave. My permitted fifteen days in the militarily sensitive district were already spent.

The family was fearful at my departure. Kalimpong was in monsoon six weeks early. Shutters were closed and market stalls tarpaulined. Every street was a river of sludge and refuse. Trees had fallen, hillsides had slid. The few jeeps and buses that managed to reach the town were hailed as heroes, having slipped and veered their ascent through the watery mists of mountain jungle.

We all stood outside Uncle Oscar's house and hugged in the pouring rain. We all gave and received blessings. We all cried and kissed.

“
The morning light aches with the pain of parting
,”
Phupu
smiled forlornly, as she placed her hands on my head in
ahashis
, again quoting her beloved Tagore. She asked me to bear her love to her relatives in England, the family she would never meet. She begged me not to forget my new cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters, my new cousin-aunts and cousin-uncles. She implored me to return quickly, back to their eager arms.

“We shall never forget you,”
Phupu
promised. “Please, do not forget us. We shall be waiting.”

Cecilia stepped forwards and pressed her lips to mine. Through her tears, she said they had all grown to know and love me. That they would not be able to bear my leaving.

“I will return,” I vowed.

“I know,” she smiled, looking deeply into my moistening eyes. “And one day, David-
bhai
, you will write a book that describes this moment. Remember my words. You'll see . . .”

Samuel held my hand tightly as we walked up to the road through the sodden bamboo grove. I looked down at the dark fingers he had slipped between mine and caught my breath.

For a moment, it was Priya.

I stopped still.

“It's too hard to say goodbye,” I mumbled, my hand purposely letting his slip free. I turned away to calm the savage surge that threatened to tear apart my chest and stared hard into the immensity of cloud that plunged before us.

“There are no goodbyes,
dajoo
,” Samuel said gently by my side, insistently taking hold of my hand again. “Only gaps between hellos.”

“Get that from a greeting card?” I winced.

“Oh no!” he assured me, squeezing my fingers hard. “June page of the Shanti Press calendar!”

As the breadth of his grin reached my heart, I caught a sudden glimpse of livid mountain peaks. They bobbed by, borne on a swelling silver sea, only to souse straight back into the torrent.

And in that moment, I understood that life
is
change. Breath in, breath out. Ebb and flow. Joy and sorrow. And ever the promise of joy again.

I understood that although the facts remained immovable, the past was done. My future did not need to be forever a reaction to it. A new and different life was waiting to be lived. All I had to do was make a choice. All I had to do was choose it well.

We reached the road to find the jeep already waiting to return me to the Plains and to an aeroplane bound for that other, distant life beyond the setting sun. As my rucksack was strapped to the roof, we held each other one last time.

I climbed in as the engine struggled to life, when Samuel suddenly lunged through the glassless window to press a kiss against my cheek.

“David-
dajoo
,” he choked. “Dear
dajoo
...”

A grating of worn brakes, a grinding of ragged gears and he was gone.

Sobbing.

Running into the rain.

***

Bindra washed her mouth, her damaged hands and feet.

She sat facing north, in defiance of the orthodoxy of the Plains that declared such a direction “unclean”, worthy only of defecation. For those of the old tradition, of the mountain
Tantras
and the
jhankri
,
it was northwards that the fecund goddess sat as she mounted the eternally erect
lingam
of Shiva. For Bindra, north was the direction of wisdom.

Bindra lit the single wick she had made from a tag of cotton torn from her hem and dipped in mustard oil. She did her best to draw a simple pattern of interlocked triangles in the dust before her, a pattern her
bojudeuta
grandmother had tattooed on Bindra's body when she had been a child. Bindra had been taught to see in these intersecting lines a representation of the underlying reality of union in the universe. She now methodically stained these contours with the vermilion
sidur
she still carried in her cloth.

Bindra chanted the mantra of Ganesha as the kindly and benevolent Vighneshvara, elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles. Bindra reminded herself to release all her self-imposed restrictions, her doubts and fears. To find the truth within herself, within all life.

Bindra breathed out
kalapran
, the image of “black air” helping her choose to disengage from all anger and ignorance, possessiveness and hatred, vengefulness and greed.

Bindra honoured her teachers: her mother and her grandmother, her children and her lineage, the
jhankris
and crows.

She placed eight grains of rice in the centre of the
yantra
she had drawn, one for each of the qualities for which she strove: tolerance and self-discipline, generosity and patience, contemplation and honesty, dedicated intention and knowledge.

Bindra honoured Kubera, eight-toothed mountain Lord of Abundance, by adding the small, round lemon she had been given: symbol of her desire to dispel all fear of death, and thus all fear of life.

Bindra formed her hands into a fingerless
mudra
and touched head, mouth, heart, belly, pubis, knees and feet, reminding herself to identify not with the limited and individual, but with the limitless and universal.

She closed her eyes to repeat the
mulamantra
of Kali one hundred and eight times, until her body and mind reverberated with the activating syllables of action, discernment, and transformation.

Then, Bindra sat in stillness.

She slowly moved to touch her feet, knees, pubis, belly, heart, mouth and head. She extinguished the single flame and brushed the interlocking triangles back to dust. She offered the eight grains of rice to the solitary crow that waited at her door.

Bindra was ready.

***

As the rains eased, the smudged stamp in my passport was suspiciously scrutinised by the same man who had originally made it. I looked out of the office door to watch the locals venture into puddles and through the torrential gutters of Teesta Bazaar. The narrow street began to ring again with the laughter of children. The melody of Nepali, Lepcha and Tibetan. The loquacious descant of unseen mountain birds.

When the jeep's engine refused to restart, I sat at a dripping teastall and waited. I waited until the sun began to dip away to waken Europe and the first stars began to brave benighting skies. I waited until viscous mists crept in, clinging to the ant-hollowed heaps of the little market town, lingering on its sopping shopfronts, skulking on its slippery wooden stairs. Transforming its damp inhabitants into phantasmic ghosts and incorporeal shadows.

I could barely conceive that my journey across India was over.

I had come in search of a house in the Hills, and discovered my father. I had determined to prove Grandmother right, and learned an unimagined truth. I had hoped for a mountain grave, and found a family. I had come to fulfil a duty, and found a way to say goodbye.

Where I had feared alienation, I had been deemed a brother and a son. Where I had anticipated exclusion, I had been embraced, kissed and inordinately loved.

India had shown me life in all its terrible, glorious extremes. She had laid bare both the utter horror and inexpressible wonder of humanity. And through it all, she had revealed that the meaning of life is not found in affluence or poverty, health or sickness. Neither in fame or obscurity, science or politics. Nor in a belief in one, many or no gods. The true meaning of life is found simply in our relationships with one another.

A sudden, violent spluttering and excited, oil-stained hands were waving at me in triumph. I climbed back into the front seat and listened to distant thunder and startled dogs defying each other across the valley. I listened to monkeys arguing with the stall-holders, and owlets pronouncing votive offerings to forest gods.

As mud-encased wheels slowly turned and smiling, unknown faces wished me well, I wept for this most extraordinary of lands and its people who had changed me. I knew then that, until the day I flee this world, mighty India would forever invade my dreams. I knew that she had bound me to her with the very magic in which, as a child, I had believed. That she had captivated me, as I could never have imagined, with the enchantment beyond fairytales in search of which I had dared to come.

***

Bindra had made no attempt to sleep. She had wandered in the night through an unfamiliar terrain.

She had slipped and fallen. She had cut her arm and twisted her knee.

Bindra had struggled to climb the embankment to the railway tracks, grimacing through her task at the stench of urine and faeces.

She had called his name. She had called for Jyothi.

Bindra had stopped many times to ease her swelling leg. She had sat and sung his song, his “
Resam Phiriri
”. She had held her breath to listen for his reply.

She had listened long.

“Kali Ma,” Bindra had whispered into unresponsive silence, “I know I do not own my children. I know that they are but expressions of this body and this mind, just as all life is an expression of the forces in the universe personified by you . . .”

She looked towards the promise of daybreak on the horizon, towards the distant east from which she had come. She thought of home. Of hills and forest. A little house on an old burial ground. The loyal love of a man named Kailash. The laughter of sons and daughters.

“But in my foolishness, I have mislaid them,” she confided to the coming dawn, “when neither my senses nor my breath are more precious to me. When all I long for is to smell their hair, to kiss their cheeks. To cook them
daal-bhat
, to watch them sleep . . .”

Bindra slowly slumped to one side and laid her head in the dry dirt. She was panting and exhausted.

“I have lost my children,” she gasped, mouth muddying with suspended dust. “I have lost my children . . .”

Bindra closed her eyes and listened for a distant voice, a single footfall.

She heard nothing but an incessant wheezing in her throat, a tremulous rhythm in her chest.

When next she opened her eyes, a distant glow had begun to illuminate the haze. Bindra struggled to ease herself up and peered into the gloom.

Again she called out to Jyothi. Again there was no reply.

A sudden fluttering. A solitary caw.

Bindra looked towards the tracks, to the silhouette of a single crow perched upon the points lever.

“Oh Kali Ma,” she choked. “What wisdom now?”

Bindra pulled herself to her feet with difficulty and stood squinting at the bird.

It sat still and staring.

Bindra stepped over the first rail and paused. The new light touched the metallic lines that intersected at the junction. A tangle of parallel, silver streaks that led her eyes back to the solitary crow on the upright lever.

“What,
kaag
?” she cried aloud towards the bird. “What do you know?”

She stepped over the second rail and paused again to stare at the junction point. The sky was steadily reddening, illuminating a neat bundle of smooth cloth.

The pounding of her heart silenced the blowing of an approaching whistle as she crossed the second track.

Not cloth.

Skin. Soft, young skin.

As the crow began to rhythmically bob on the crest of the lever, Bindra began to scream.

To cry.

To run.

To the naked body of a lifeless boy.