Song Of Time (16 page)

After I’d been posed and digitised into the image of the lost, pretty, orphan gypsy they wanted, I was whisked across town to choose a new instrument at Guiviers. Stupidly, I fell for something part plastic, part metal, part made from the new synthetic woods, which functioned in any of ten thousand modes.

“And the money you’ve made,” Mum said as the faces and hands amid her sheaf of pictures faded back into her bag, “I hope you haven’t done anything stupid with it, Roushana Maitland, like put it in a bank, or invest it in property?”

Wearily, warily, I shook my head.

Our journey to India took four days. Mum, or the strange, irritating and appealing woman she seemed to have become, said that that was good; she said a great many things were good when it seemed obvious to me that they weren’t. My new violin was twice mistaken at airport security checks for a weapon. I felt constantly queasy, and reeked of sweat and the failed chemicals of my self-refreshing clothes.The foolhardy or desperate souls who now indulged in global travel all had a story to tell, but I’d soon heard enough of lost families, bureaucratic malice, military ineptitude, religious hatred. As the only planes we could find began to head back-wards across the time zones, I came to long for our arrival in India simply so it would bring this nightmare journey to an end. Then, at midnight, with no lights showing and the engines stilled to an eerie glide to make us a less obvious missile target, we were finally there.

There was a smell of shit and burning as we climbed out from the plane. Even as dawn rose over the perimeter shockwire of the Blue Zone, the heat was greasily oppressive. Greenish smog hung beyond the sleepily moving construction vehicles. There were huge, swirling flocks of some kind of big bird. Then mountains—enormous, and enormously distant. So this was India, whatever India meant…

After several hours of hassle and form-filling in stifling rooms, we took at ride out on one of the food convoys. Fearsome autonomous tanks trundled front and rear between the decrepit lorries, and the main worry was landmines, no, it was snipers, no, it was the radiation winds, no, it was the delays for quagmires and breakdowns—or it was the UUN soldiers who were supposedly protecting us. Mum had warned me especially about the UUN. They eyed my blouse and denimed legs and stroked the snouts of their subsound guns as we shared the swaying eyrie of a half-track cabin. Many of them were software junkies: there were inflamed sensory input jacks in their arms and you’d have put them down as gangsters if it hadn’t been for their various UUN sponsorship badges—Hezbollah, Nike, McDonalds—which they bore on their armour.

Sprawled outside lay the endless plastic tents and cardboard semi-shacks of Ahmedabad Two. Children and keening widows swarmed dangerously close to the caterpillar tracks. Mum explained as I told her what I saw that the big birds which seemed to flock everywhere were called kites, and how you could identify the rubbish dumps by their denser swirls, and also the places where the Parsees, who were in resurgence, laid out the bodies of the dead. But there, Roushana, those dark columns which you say hang in the distance towards the east? That’s probably the real smoke of funeral pyres…For this was India, and the peace talks in Moscow were stalled and the nation, whilst still officially still at war, had collapsed into hostile segments, but people were still getting on with the business of living and dying just as they had always done.

The convoy divided and our half-track and a remaining half dozen lorries headed south along what had once been the Memdabad Road. I recognised the name of Mum’s village on the bullet-holed sign, but it was no longer the place I had visited in virtuality. The rice fields and banyan trees which had once made this a rural haven had been swarmed over by the displaced. We disembarked into a corral formed by the remaining lorries. Dogs were barking, women and children scurried, men shouted, gesticulated and scowled, and everyone pushed forward as the handing out of sacks of supplies began.

It was chaos, and the UUN soldiers were getting nervous. Fearful that we’d be trampled, I tried to draw Mum away, but she resisted, saying she had to supervise. Then, as the sacks vanished, the flock of saris which was my aunts began to elbow their way through the crowds. Their faces were thinner, paler and older than those I’d seen in Mum’s recordings and in the photographs which lined Nan’s shelves. Reputedly once-wild Auntie Jilli now hobbled on a crutch, Auntie Sinra was as blind as Mum, and could no longer use her scarred and bloated hands, Auntie Oonah had died recently from the bad water, and so had baby
Timin
, whose name I’d loved.

But Gujaratis are unremittingly proud, and seemed embarrassed by any suggestion that things here weren’t as good as they had always been. After the half-tracks and the lorries had rumbled away, the village headman shook my hand and attempted a welcoming speech. Like most of my relatives, he seemed to know enough English to speak to me, but not to understand what I said in return. The children pinched and butted me. My head was stroked. There were astonished mutters at how
ripe
us English-born girls were.

In some ways, Mum’s village really hadn’t changed. Motor scooters still puttered about on stinking clouds whilst the women mopped their porches with water and dung each morning, then scattered decorative swirls of ash and washed themselves out of doors but modestly fully-clothed. Perhaps the village deity really had been kind, even if there was drought, starvation, cancer and looting. Ahmedabad, I was repeatedly assured, had always been more than a city—something mere bombs could destroy. It was an outlook, a way of life. Consider England, I was told, where our cousins and nephews all arrived with nothing, but now own all the shops…

Mum and I were provided with a hut of our own for the night, with flowers in a brass vase set on the dirt floor, and we were given many bowls filled with precious food which I, still nauseous, struggled guiltily to eat. That evening, my head spinning, weary and jet-lagged, I lay on my mat whilst Mum, who needed nothing and could sleep anywhere, snored blissfully beside me. The sound of thunder, or the guns of one of the militias, rolled down from the hills. With each thud and rumble, I vibrated like a touched drum.

Being here in India was a kind of death—a dissolving of the precious identity which I had imagined was a birthright. But it wasn’t—I under-stood that now. I was just sweating, transitory flesh. I wondered as I lay trying to sleep about cousin Kapil, and whether he really was still alive somewhere in this huge sub-continent just as Auntie Rupa, who sat still endlessly waiting for him beside her front window in Handsworth, claimed. I pictured him in what was left of Bombay, gamely fighting the monsters which had once populated the screens and suits of his computer games.

There was more food in the morning, and yet more relatives who’d come from further afield as news spread of our arrival. In a communal yard which was sheltered from the sun by the huge, alarming lipstick smile of an old advertising hoarding, they gathered to watch me perform. I’d never felt more nervous, standing there with an instrument which had probably cost more than everything they had ever possessed. But they even cheered my over-protracted tuning-up, and then clapped and nodded their heads as I careered through a selection of popular Western classics. I sensed from the uniformly positive reaction that this music was entirely new to them, and probably quite meaningless. After-wards, my new violin attracted much attention, especially when I demonstrated its ability to play by itself. An impossibly thin-looking lad was pushed towards me. I was told he also played the violin. After the cheap, dried-up instrument on which he’d previously had to work, my clever instrument must have been an exquisite revelation. His small fingers, as he played ragas with staccato precision, simply flowed. He was good—he was more than good—but what was the use, what was the point?

“Well,” Mum said as she felt her way around our fetid hotel room after a twelve hour journey back in the Blue Zone, “this is good. This is excellent…” An ambitious charity concert had been organised for the following day, or perhaps the day or the evening after, at the old cricket stadium. I was sharing the bill with several other so-called international stars and local celebrities, and the chaotic organisation was in the hands of a doe-eyed young man named Hakim whose failed assurances and patronising manner I soon found infuriating. Still nauseous and jet-lagged, I gave a series of interviews to journalists who plainly had as little idea as I did myself of who I was and what I was doing here.

The concert in the cricket ground finally took place on the evening after the one which had been advertised. Sick, hungry, water-retentive and permanently jet-lagged, I sat alone waiting for my call beside a ruinous bank of showers in the away changing room. It was both saddening and cheering to think of men sitting along these benches as they prepared to go and do battle in the mythically happy days when India versus Pakistan could end in a harmless draw, and stopped each day for tea. Hakim had warned me about snakes here, but I’d taken his advice as another of his obscure jokes. I even remained unconcerned when I saw a ribboned gleam emerge from a heap of fallen tiles. The cobra seemed too beautiful, too smooth and stately, to be dangerous. It and I regarded each other, and I felt a resignation come over me which I learned afterwards wasn’t uncommon. Its tongue sipped the air. Outside in the stadium, music blared, the crowd stamped and seethed, but the space between this creature and I remained entirely silent. Somehow, I found that I was willing the creature to come closer, but its tongue flickered again and then it slid away. All I was left with was my own rising nervousness and a sense of empty disappointment.

The concert was as big a mess as the botched rehearsals which had preceded it. Standing in a pool of light amid squalls of rain as the stadium glittered and dissolved into a placeless blur, I couldn’t hear what I was playing, nor if there was any applause.

“And this as well. You must wear this.”

It was my last full day in India and Mum, who would be staying on, was sorting through passes in the depths of one of her striped shopping bags.

“What use—”

She was holding out a strip of off-white card with a safety pin yellow-ingly Sellotaped to its back. “No, no. Not for the journey. You must wear this now—today. And a suit as well. Hakim promised to get me one— where on earth is he? Otherwise, you will not be safe.”

The radiation suit which eventually arrived was a thing of treated transparent polythene which smelled of its previous inhabitants. I felt ill as soon as I pulled it over my head.

The sun and the moon both hung in the dust-wreathed sky beyond the bullet-proof glass of our half-track. This was a different kind of aid convoy; more overtly military although at first there were the same endless shanty towns, running children and pleading, rag-and-bone women. Then we passed the dangling bodies of looters, left to hang as food for the kites and it became harder to tell just how many of the rubbled buildings were still inhabited, and how much of their destruction was caused by the bomb, or by the subsequent chaos. Then the damage became unequivocal. Walls leaned. Scraps of roof and concrete gouged the earth as if strewn by giant hands. Soon, everything was flame-blackened although there still remained flashes of fresh plastic, swirls of new smoke, dangles of washing, sour odours of lingering humanity. But perhaps the last was down to me, sitting sweating and gut-aching inside this ghastly suit. Once or twice I thought I glimpsed faces in the glittering holes of blasted-out windows and the soot-shadowed backs of twisted buildings, but it was hard to be sure.

“Can you see anyone?” Mum asked, rustling within her own malodorous sheath of plastic. “Of course, they don’t trust us. They never have. Why should they?” Her fingers squealed over my hood. “You
are
still properly sealed in, aren’t you? What colour is that badge of yours?”

It was still safely grey, but I felt iller than ever. I’d already had a bad bout of the runs this morning, and wondered how you were you supposed to deal with such a situation inside this suit if it returned. Things were different here in Ahmedabad One, but kites were still circling, a troop of thin-looking monkeys ambled along the ridges of an old car showroom, the skeletons of trees glinted with fresh bottle tops and failing diodes of roadside shrines, and a large lizard clung to a stone. Inevitably, it was the dalits and the untouchables who now lived in this ruined city. Nothing, here in India, ever really changed.

We stopped. Considering their masks and armour plating and the size of their guns, the guards seemed nervous as we climbed out into silence and settling dust. Mum, clinging to me as I helped her through the side hatch, muttered that they were afraid of the ghosts.

A soft wind was blowing, tinkling the shards of glass which dangled from the freshly growing creepers. A beaten pewter moon still hung above the twisted bars of broken concrete but the sun had vanished, and the heat was intense. The sky seemed even darker ahead towards the burnt-out plain of ground zero which lay between the river and the post office.

The citizens of Ahmedabad One were slow to emerge. They came like the dust, in drifts and whispers, and were equally pale. Their hair was sparse. Their eyes had hollowed. They wore scarcely any clothes. Yet they seemed almost sexless, nearly ageless, chalk and charcoal sketches of humanity—half-finished beings discarded by some god—who spoke only in muted squeaks and groans.

I was conscious of the steamy muffling of my ridiculous plastic suit, and of the warily masked and lumbering UUN soldiers. Perhaps the citizens of Ahmedabad One imagined that this was how everyone now looked and feared to leave. Not that the pickings here were bad. The city, wrecked though it was, was entirely theirs and there were houses stuffed with useless affluence, and shops, entire streets, which they would once have been considered too stained even to sweep clean which they could now roam at will. Anything which the firestorm had spared was now theirs. But life would be short shuffling these ruins, toying with melted handhelds and bracelets, picking over the wreckage of better lives amid the ash and bones. Apparently, the bomb which had ignited =in the space of sky between the river and the post office had been loaded with contaminants, and, as the dalits of Ahmedabad One clus-tered around us, I saw how their smooth, near-naked bodies were often distorted by goitrey lumps, swellings, and wet, red sores. I glanced down at the strip of my badge, but the winds were kind today, for its colour had barely changed. Or perhaps it didn’t work. Or perhaps it didn’t matter.