In the Shadow of Crows (30 page)

Doctor Dunduka lurched towards her, as though to bring down his trembling right hand hard against her face. Through his fury, he remembered that these foul creatures were cursed. Cursed by God for their sins. Cursed for their pagan profanities. He backed away, panting for air in a narrow alley tight with bodies that exposed through ugly deformity the true depths of their spiritual decay.

“You'll be reported to the Office!” he spat, his straining eyes wild and bloodshot. “I'll see the Major cuts your rations! Withholds all medication!”

The doctor's perspiring head pivoted dangerously on his pulsating neck.

“Let this be a lesson to all you ungrateful wretches! Let's see which of your ugly gods steps down from its rusting plinth to tend you now!”

He turned one last time towards Bindra.

“Christ alone can save you,
daayan
!” he grimaced, one petulant, plump finger pointing. “Christ alone!”

***

Lesson VIII - “Pleasing & Surprising”:

“You are my pride, O son.
Let us take an evening stroll along the road.”

“Nonsense, most worthy father. Heavy traffics a-coming and agoing, dins and bustles all around, dusts and rubbles.”

“Come on boy, what does this matter, my joy knows no bounds. Annie dear, arrange for us a pompous dinner with sumptuous puddings.”

“Good husband and lord, see me already busy in my wifely duties. Go take a stroll with your most honourable son, and soon return to a table fully spread with tasty treats.
”

Whilst we continued to struggle through our unfathomable Hindi language course, local eyes were peering up at the hills. Heads were shaken. Already no snow left upon their peaks. This was devastating. The temperature was too soon approaching that of early summer and, as foliage charred, the mountainsides were darkening into an ominous, desiccated black.

“By July there'll be no water!” they told us in despair. “Then what will happen to the poor?”

When I thought of the slum below us and the septic ooze upon which they would become reliant, I started losing sleep.

The early heat had also encouraged the biting
saal
-tree bugs to swarm. Great, black drifts of the belligerent beasts clogged the corners of the rooms and covered the floors in a crunchy carpet. We emptied our sheets every night only to find whole tribes of new bedfellows by dawn. Their unintentionally squished comrades left vivid, tie-dye prints of their demise. Indelible, accusatory stains.

Heavy stones were now placed on all internal drain covers to keep out cobras from the rooms and shoes were shaken to avoid a nasty case of scorpion-betwixt-the-toes. My youthful years of practice with red Wellingtons on kitchen steps had finally proved fruitful.

The unseasonable weather was blamed for the outbreak of gastric infections in the hostel. The subsequent loss of abdominal control amongst the children had resulted in the panicked evacuation of classes. Repeated summoning of the depressed
dhobi
. Frantic beckoning towards the grumpy man with his Dettol-drenched ragon-a-stick.

It was amidst this explosion of heat, bugs and bowels that Ben and I had called a meeting. We had threatened to pack our bags and leave.

It was not just the misappropriation of foreign-raised funds. The new furniture and satellite television for the Office, the five-star hotel catering ordered in for Office staff meals, the first class air travel for the Major's fund-raising tour of North America. Nor was it just the self-congratulatory Office party, which consumed a budget of more than three times a teacher's annual salary.

Rather, it was the relentless beatings, kickings and slappings of the most vulnerable. The dragging by the hair of the unintelligible. The cruel twists of cheeks and nipples of the blind and deaf. The ever-inventive “punishments” meted out as a matter of course, by teachers, orderlies and
ayah
nannies alike.

It had become unbearable.

The Office personnel refused to attend. Only the hostel staff gathered, intrigued by our inscrutable passion, the inexplicable intensity of our purpose.

We addressed them with quiet confidence. We chose our words with care. We remained commendably calm, clear, concise.

Thereafter, the pale-faced men to whom the children ran were ostracised. The pale-faced men against whose chests the pupils laid their heads were avoided and ignored. Not only did the staff refuse to speak to us, but they would not even deign to rest their steely eyes upon our newly broadened shoulders.

Never again was any child in the charity hostel beaten in our presence.

Yet still we found bruises when we treated their ringworm. Still we found teeth marks when we powdered their fleas.

***

A sudden detonation of light woke Bindra.

A moment of blinding brilliance before firm hands clasped tightly around her throat.

She threw her mouth open to cry out, but all sound had been silenced. She twisted and kicked, but a crushing weight had rendered her still.

Bindra closed her eyes and drew deep within.

She visualised Durga Ma riding into battle astride Her roaring tiger, bare breasts daubed with gore, arms and weapons raised against the enemies of fear and despair, restoring stability to both individual and universe.

“
Aung hring dhung Durga devyai namah-aung
,” Bindra struggled to voice within herself.

Fingers grasped her jaw. Gripped so hard, so fiercely that

Bindra's teeth were forced apart.

All reverence to Durga Ma who is Vidya, knowledge personified! The knowledge into which all differentiations disappear, all perceptions of opposites, all concepts of duality, all separation and division!

“
Aung hring dhung
...”

Splintering wood pressed hard between her teeth. Nose crushed closed. Throat forced open.

“
Aung hring dhung
...”

All homage to wild, untameable Durga Ma, Her smile placid with non-attachment, devoid of self-interest! The ascendancy of truth over falsehood, knowledge over ignorance, liberation over selflimitation!

Objects small and solid pushed deep into Bindra's mouth, deep into her throat. She choked. Pushed deep again. Her tongue flexed. She swallowed.

“
Aung hring dhung
...”

All honour to triumphant Durga Ma, as bright as sun, moon and fire combined! Once more She dances upon the corpse of Mahishasura, the Buffalo Demon! Once more, She destroys the destabilising forces of
krodha
anger and
mada
pride that separate man from his own inherent truth!

Wood roughly ripped from Bindra's mouth, cutting tongue, splitting lips.

The hands released their grip, leaving flesh to bruise darkly.

The crushing weight lifted, leaving brittle bone broken. “
Aung hring dhung
...”

Salutation always to Durga Ma, who shows compassion even to Her enemies! Salutation always to Durga Ma, who embodies fearlessness of life, of death, of fear itself!

Hushed voices in the room.

The light fading. Fading.

Durga Ma.

Gone.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ben and I had been banished.

The hostel staff so resented our popularity with the children and our interference in their abusive regime that they had finally ordered us out of the building.

Ben had turned his administrative skills instead to the Office, where he had been placed at the far end of the corridor, in a shabby little room with a wobbly table, broken chair, pickle jar of chewed pencils and dangerous electrics. Back home, he was accustomed to co-ordinating the working life of over a hundred singers, musicians, dancers and staff from all around the world, organising their schedules as far as five years ahead. Here, he was assigned the daily task of tidying drawers and uncluttering cabinets, filing damp paperwork in perpetual binders, and copying lists of residents' names into loose-leaf ledgers for no discernable benefit to anyone.

However, this new proximity to the charity's bureaucratic nub had afforded Ben unrestricted and increasingly unsupervised access to its records and accounts. As he had toiled to unravel an archaic and eccentric system, he had discovered extensive financial details, drafts of correspondence and lists of international sponsors. Ben had inadvertently become our mole.

One evening he returned to our room in an uncharacteristic depression. He sat slumped on the edge of his bed.

“These bloody people!” he suddenly roared in angry frustration. “Thirty thousand pounds they've been given over the last three years by one English parish alone that has been raising funds on their behalf! That's over twenty-five
lakhs
! Two and a half million rupees!”

He was shaking with fury.

“They've been sending back reports that claim they've used it to build a new school, open an IT centre for the children and staff a hi-tech medical centre - but it's all a lie! None of it exists. Instead, they neglect and even harm their defenceless charges, with no accounting for where all the funding's gone!”

He thrust towards me six crumpled sheets of paper. I sat beside him, staring at dense lists of names and addresses. Britain and the North American Bible Belt. Chennai and Bangalore. Sponsors. Wellmeaning, but duped.

“This place is rich!” he thundered. “So where's the money?!”

Our instinct was to write to them all, to reveal the truth. But to what end?

If this charitable compound, with all its abuses and cruelties, were gone, what would become of its residents? Back into the slum that festered beyond its boundary fence. Back to the pitiless streets from which they had struggled and fought to reach its gates.

As the drift of dusk undid our day, we made no move to kindle candles. We dimmed with the darkening forest into which we stared, fading into the stupefied silence of our own impotence.

The following morning, we had barely swallowed two spoonfuls of spiced porridge when the peevish paper-
wallah
came panting to our quarters, careful to avoid all eye contact, all possibility of interaction. He timidly held out a scrap of foolscap, smudged with a barely decipherable scrawl. The inevitable command had arrived.

We were summoned to the Major. Now.

The prerequisite wait for an hour outside his door to ensure we fully understood our status. And then again, “You people!”

“You people come over here with your good intentions and your sentimental philanthropy . . .”

We had heard this speech before.

Even as my eyes were hypnotically drawn to those airy, open spaces between his facial hairs, I wanted to understand this angry man, fearful in his efforts to disguise feelings of inadequacy with the fragile façade of a military bearing.

My years of learning with the
jhankri
had encouraged me to see all life as an expression of a single truth. To try to see this defensive, fretful man, who hid behind the protection of his obsessively ordered desk, as an aspect of myself.

“Before you revere the ‘good' or condemn the ‘bad' in others,” Kushal Magar had instructed on his distant mountain, “acknowledge the same wisdom and ignorance, balance and imbalance in your own thoughts and actions. Only then will you learn to liberate yourself from the self-defeating forces of envy and anger, pride and vanity. Only then will you find freedom from the delusion of separation.”

“You people!” the Major was still bellowing, the stab of his scowl scattering my memories of
jhankri
, crows and Kanchenjunga. “You people understand nothing of our culture, our religions, or our languages! You see an impoverished India on your television documentaries. You hear a nostalgic narrative and your credulous consciences are pricked for the crimes of Empire! So here you come, relishing your short-lived discomfiture as ‘adventure', as yet more dinner-party ‘travellers' tales'. And yet you are nothing more than a disruptive influence, like your meddling forebears before you!” he swiped in disdain, sitting in an old colonial building, in his bureaucratic box, beside a plate of Britannia Bourbons, sermonising in highly articulated English, in his faux-tweed jacket and his regimental tie.

The truth was that the fundamental hypocrisy of this charitable compound had been exposed by our presence, its lies laid bare. From the day of our arrival, our presence had intimidated the teachers and attendants, inhibited their habitual mistreatment of the children, restrained their violent sadism.

“Sir, in which regiment did you serve?” I boldly interjected.

His fury faltered.

“My Grandfather was an officer in the army here, like your good self. Proud of the fact until his end,” I smiled warmly. “In fact, my father has written to inform me that he was stationed close to here, at a camp you may well have known in your own time of service - but no doubt you have already read this for yourself when editing our post.”

The Major was disarmed. His guard was down. His paltry bristles parted in a weak and silent flicker that dared to suggest an attempted smile.

“I also have two uncles living in North Bengal, who were both serving officers in the Pakistan War. The Indo-Sino conflict. Kashmir, of course. Kargil in '99,” I persisted with measured solemnity, speedily composing my next question in what I imagined to be a pseudo-military style. “But back to the matter in hand: sir, have we been summoned to be discharged from our duties?”

He scanned his desk, as though an elusive memo might give promise of an appropriate reply.

“No,” he coughed. “We just needed to clear the air. There is human psychology to take into account in such matters,” he began, gathering his thoughts, rebuilding his confidence, searching for a new category into which to set us down. “Some of us speak at the level of a mature adult, just as I am speaking to you . . .”

I was intrigued to know where this was intended to take us.

“Others speak on the level of an immature juvenile. If one is speaking as a child and the other as an adult, then communication fails. Only when we speak on an equal level is information adequately exchanged . . .”

Ben and I waited.

The Major's eyes returned to their furtive exploration of the desk. He aligned his fountain pen with the border of his blotter.

The dialling of the telephone, the hurried Hindi. I now found myself doubting that there had ever been anyone at the other end.

He paused to look back up at us with an uneasy glare.

“Yes, you may leave,” he testily suggested.

***

A slow and aimless “
Resam phiriri
. . .” seemed to stray around the room.

Bindra prised open unwieldy eyelids. The singing stopped.

She fought to focus on the formless faces that gathered into view.

“Bindra-
behenji
!” gasped a familiar voice. “Sister, are you comfortable?”

Bindra let her eyes close shut again and swallowed hard to deaden the nausea that threatened to engulf her.

She tried to speak. Her tongue was swollen.

She tried to move. She grimaced in pain.

“No,
behenji
, stay still,” the voice advised. A warm hand rested on her shoulder. “I think your ankle's broken. But we've bound it with a compress from the forest. You'll soon be well again. You'll see.”

Bindra could feel a soft and anxious breath against her cheek. She looked again to find the face that drew so close.

Sushmita. She who Smiles.

“My girls are here,” Sushmita quietly announced, gathering Aarti, Poojita and Dipika into Bindra's dazed sight. “For three days they've been singing for you!”

“Three days?” Bindra rasped in incomprehension.

“Yes,
behenji
,” Sushmita confirmed. “For three whole days you've slept . . .”

“For three whole days we've watched for you,
Mataji
!” Aarti burst. “We've all been waiting!”

Bindra tried to smile. Her mouth was raw with pain. “Good girls,” she whispered to them all. “My four good girls.”

“Do you remember what happened,
Mataji
?” Poojita gently pressed.

Bindra slowly shook her head.

“They've done it before, you know, to others here,” Sushmita affirmed with distress in her voice. “It's too, too dangerous to anger him ... that man ...”

Bindra gingerly nodded from side to side.

“But at least . . .” Sushmita faltered, “at least it was only sleep they forced on you.”

“What would it matter?” Bindra replied with effort. “I'm ready. I have no
dharma
, no duty to fulfil in life. Long, long ago, I lost my children . . .”

Sushmita wiped Bindra's face with a wet cloth, scented with crushed
tulsi
leaves. “Rest now, sister,” she insisted. “We'll stay with you.”

Bindra's eyes closed as mind and memories began to drift.

She found a crowded bus in heavy rain, a foreign book beneath a pillow.

A brightly spinning, spreading flame, and a child long lost in a distant city.

A little red man amongst dark trees, an
Aghori Baba
on a burning
ghat
.

A bright-bleached
kurta
, a paper kite.

And a single, bobbing crow.

***

The path into the
saal
forest was long and dusty. Every step produced a billowing effervescence in my wake that glimmered in the morning sun.

The industry of communal life amongst the rows of block houses and huts ahead soon fell silent. All conversation, cleaning, cooking, card games ceased. All eyes came to rest on the foreigner approaching.

They met me at the peepal tree that spread its sheltering shade across the entrance to the colony. I honoured the
sidur
-laden
lingam
projecting from tentacular roots, then turned to raise hands to heart in
pranam
. They lifted their arms and bowed their heads in amicable return.

I introduced myself in clumsy, elementary Hindi. They were intrigued. I asked permission to call at every house and hut, to meet them all, to better understand their lives.

A sudden swell of smiles. A warmth of welcome.

With book and pen in hand, I began my rounds in the nearest narrow alley. I sat on thresholds to note names and simple histories, amongst mange-ridden pye-dogs, near-naked chickens, hostile scorpions and fearless rats. I examined disintegrated hips and buckled limbs; ran fingers across serpentine spines and swollen joints. I peered into seeping, empty eye-sockets, collapsed sinuses and infected bone; inspected weeping, stinking sores on cadaverous remains that were seemingly once hands and feet.

I listened to the residents of the forest colony sob out their pain and weep for Yama, God of Death, to swiftly end their suffering. I reached out my hands to hold distorted, inflamed stumps in soft, plump digits. And in return, they smiled through tired tears and kissed my pink fingers. They bent to touch my full-toed feet and praised gods for my presence.

No sense of time had passed and yet I wandered slowly home through kite-filled dusk. I looked for early stars, first glimpse of moon, but only found my own ineptitude, inadequacy - and nothing left to offer but the darkness of an empty, hollow chasm where once my heart had sounded.