The Lily Hand and Other Stories (2 page)

But
I
knew! I pressed my cheek close to his shoulder, and gasped into his ear: ‘Don't you see? Don't you understand? Where else could it have come from? Who put his hands into your pockets? Who was it turned out all your belongings, and then pushed everything back in again?'

‘Mahdar Iqbal!' he breathed, and stared and stared at the money; but I knew it was not the money that was bringing back feeling and form and meaning into his face.

‘Read the note,' said my mother urgently.

It was as he read it through for the first time, silently, that he became in his essence the man he had always been, and a little nearer, surely, to being indestructible. And when he read it the second time, aloud, he was already a little less and a little more than he had always been. A little less by not being able to make amends, a little more by accepting humbly his eternal disability.

“‘Forgive me,'” he read, “‘but there is no other way of getting this to you. If I spoke with you as a friend both you and I would be torn to pieces. Take in kindness to me what you now need so much more than I. Forgive me, and remember me not as I am to you today, but as I shall be to you always in spirit. I shall never know a better man.'”

There were more than fifteen hundred rupees in the roll of notes. Mahdar Iqbal had given us everything he had.

Light-Boy

The boy with the name of a god was standing among the tamarinds at the edge of the clearing when they came, one shoulder hitched easily against a tree, his thin brown thumb just piercing the membrane that covered the first sweet juice-pocket of a palmyra fruit. Before him, beyond the trees, the tumbled sandy rocks were piled, the dark mouth of the cave-temple cool black in their hot redness; and beyond again was the wide waste of beach and the infinite blueness of the sea. Behind him was the narrow road, and on the other side of it the squat houses of the village. All through the day he had one ear cocked for any sound of a car approaching by that road; but this time there had been no car. The two women walked out of the trees below him, close to the temple, on the dusty path from the Mission settlement.

One of them was an Indian woman from Madras, with a green and gold sari, and jasmine flowers in her coiled black hair; but the other was an Englishwoman, tall and fair-haired and slender in a sleeveless cotton dress. True, she carried no camera, but by the winged sunglasses and the un-Indian sandals, and the very walk, aloof and a little self-conscious, the boy recognized a migrant. He put down his palmyra fruit against the bole of the tree and came running, eyes and teeth flashing in an eagerness and purpose that looked all too familiar.

‘Oh God!' said Rachel. ‘Even here!'

Sudha turned her head, following the blind, hooded stare of the sunglasses, and saw the boy bearing down upon them at a headlong run, beaming gleefully. She lifted an indifferent shoulder. ‘Oh, well, we're fair game. Did you think you'd be immune in Anantanayam?'

‘I suppose it was too much to hope for. But after all, Andrew's a resident. He's been digging and teaching and doctoring here for four years now. I hoped I might get by under his shadow, and be tolerated, anyhow – resident by courtesy.'

‘How's he to know you're connected with Andrew? It doesn't show yet. Now if you'd been staying in his house …'

But that was exactly what Rachel had not wished to do. It would have committed her too far, and she was not yet sure how far she wanted to go. Andrew Cobb was a pleasant enough person, she respected and liked him, but she wasn't sure of anything beyond that.

They had met at a cocktail party in New Delhi; she couldn't even remember now how she had come to be invited to such an improbable function. She had wandered aghast among the sophisticated chatter of nylon-sari'd ladies with lacquered western faces and pointed scarlet nails; slender, languid males in dinner-jackets; expatriate English merchants and officials, thinking of the beggars in Old Delhi, and the labouring poor clinging to life by its fringes, aware that these people were insulated from that outer world with disastrous thoroughness by their cars and their servants and their calculated want of imagination.

Andrew Cobb had come as a breath of fresh air, blurting out, as they met in the crowd, exactly what she had been wondering: ‘For heaven's sake, what are you doing in this shower?'

A big, energetic, blunt-jawed man of nearly forty, so she had seen him; a good, pig-headed, upright medical missionary, so her Aunt Mildred had afterwards recalled him. A doctor first and a schoolmaster second, who ran an Anglican school and clinic attached to the archaeological site of Anantanayam, far south in Madras State. Within ten minutes, heaving breaths of the spiced evening air into him as if he were stifling, he had seized Rachel by the arm and invited her urgently to get out of there with him. And since, whatever else he might be, he was undoubtedly real, she had gone with him gladly, and sat out the evening in a small restaurant uptown, listening as he talked about the sculptural school of Mahabalipuram, that ebbed to its remotest ripple just where the archaeologists of Anantanayam were digging, and his medical practice, and his colony of precarious converts, of whom he spoke as of unpredictable children. Later she had talked in her turn, telling him about her three-month's visit to her scattered relatives here, and about the tour south which she was planning in March. And something, too, of the bewilderment, disillusionment, doubt and hope with which India had presented her since the day of her arrival. This he had understood; he had been through the same throes. And did it, later, begin to fall into proportion and make some kind of sense? He still hoped it would, he said ruefully, some day.

And it was then that he had invited her to his remote and minor settlement, looking at her across the table with the first spark of calculation in his eyes. She had observed it, and been experienced enough to recognize it. He was lonely, and she was congenial; and where was the harm in inviting the acquaintance to unfold, and waiting to see what kind of growth it achieved? Their recent experience of the insulated bubble-civilization of wealthy India had shown them how to value each other.

So she had come. From Madras it was not so far. But she had come cautiously, jealous for her freedom and respectful of his. If she had come alone he would have insisted on her staying in his own household, but she had brought her friend Sudha with her, and made her the excuse for taking the travellers' bungalow at the edge of the beach. Nothing but a narrow plantation of young trees between the compound and the sands, deep, wide, honey-pale, with that incredible sea beyond, shading from aquamarine along the rim to the dark cobalt of the deep water. Southward, the Bay of Bengal opened into the Indian Ocean. The waves were too rough for good swimming, but to bathe there was a delight, and the view from the windows of the bungalow was beautiful beyond belief.

Andrew had accepted humbly that his own cramped quarters by the schoolhouse could not possibly compete, and had made no attempt to persuade her to alter her plans. With Sudha presiding over the domestic arrangements he could be easy about the comfort and propriety of her stay. And this neat and convenient distance between them gave him time to think before he did anything irretrievable; his good Scottish blood would appreciate that.

The boy arrived before them gleaming and panting, and halted with bare toes spread in the sand. He was slender and small, his head came no higher than Rachel's shoulder. He might have been eleven or twelve years old, she judged, but it was difficult to put an age to him. He stood straight and easily, embracing them both in a broad, white-toothed smile. No mendicant palm crept out wheedlingly, and no throaty whine fished for small coins. She saw that she had mistaken him. He was not ordinary, he was not a beggar. He had a rope knotted round his waist over the brief khaki shorts and tattered brown shirt, and an old-fashioned glass-sided lantern slung by a loose yard or so of cord from one hip. He held the lamp up before them by the metal ring at the top, and addressed Sudha confidently in Tamil.

‘We were both wrong,' said Sudha, contemplating him with a quizzical smile, ‘This one works. He wants to show us the shrine.'

‘I am Subramanya,' announced the child in English in the voice of honey and gravel to which Rachel had become accustomed, but with a large dignity all his own. ‘I am light-boy.'

‘It seems it's quite dark inside the temple,' said Sudha. ‘He says we wouldn't see anything without his lamp. All right, Subramanya, you lead the way.'

‘Are there still priests here? We're allowed inside? Even me?'

‘No priests,' said Subramanya, beaming. ‘You come with me, I show you the god. You come this way.'

He pattered before them to the rough steps that led up from the first outcrop into the low face of sandstone, and there paused to open his lantern and put a match to the wick. The light was feeble enough, the corners of the glass panels ingrained with smoke from long years of use; but he held it up towards the velvet black of the entrance as if he had been lighting princes to their coronation.

The facade was borne aloft on three rough pillars, with a relief of apsarases in flight over the lintel. A small temple it was, perhaps never used as a temple at all, only as a study in design and carving, like some of those at Mahabalipuram. The deep chamber within was carved out of the living rock. Three paces into it, and the day fell away behind them, and the chill of stone closed on them with the darkness. The boy held his lantern high before them at arm's-length, so that his thin little body might cast no shadow to complicate their footsteps.

Because she had thought him a beggar running to blackmail her for new pice, and felt herself recoil from him in weariness and revulsion, Rachel found herself deeply and penitently aware of him now as a person. Proud, conscientious and self-respecting, a small working man bent on earning his fee, he went before her carefully, step by step; and the deeper he led her into the cave, the brighter and taller grew the flame of his lamp.

‘Subramanya!' she said. ‘That's a fine name you have.'

The long lashes rolled back from his dark eyes as he looked up at her and smiled brilliantly.

‘Do you know who that is – Subramanya?'

‘Yes, I know. He's the same as Kartikeya, the son of Siva. The beautiful one,' she said, to distinguish him from Ganesh, who was also the son of Siva.

He laughed aloud with pleasure, and the lantern waved and danced. ‘Yes, you are right!' He was delighted with her for knowing. Was it possible that tourists so rarely even took the trouble to read a little before they came here? It had seemed to her an obvious thing to do, and she was ashamed of the glow of achievement his response gave her.

‘But this is a shrine of Vishnu, isn't it, not Siva?'

He said: ‘Yes, of Vishnu,' but he said it with a vague smile and a lift of expressive shoulders, as if it mattered very little. ‘Here, on the walls, see – all the comings of the god. Nine times he came.'

Deep within the rock and lost to the outer light, the chamber in which they stood was yet quite small, and all its centre taken up by a great recumbent mass of stone, on which, for the moment, Subramanya turned his back. First he must show the deep reliefs on the walls, four on either side. He reached a hand to lead Rachel carefully along after him, holding up the light to each panel as he came to it. Thicker, vaguer, coarser carving than the best she had seen, but with the same passionate movement and flow. The dynamic figures and haughty, superhuman faces loomed out upon her in the flickering light, every shadow gouged deep into blackness.

‘This is Varaha. You see? He came as a boar, because demons had captured the earth goddess and buried her deep underground, but the Lord Vishnu dug her out with his tusks.'

For every avatar there was a reason, every strange form of divine incarnation had its own logic. He led her through them all, as ardently as if he saw the carvings and told the stories for the first time. Behind her, Sudha rustled her silks against the stone, and the scent of her jasmine flowers revived in the coolness and the dark.

‘And the seventh is Rama. And the eighth is Lord Krishna. All Vishnu. All God. And he will come another time.'

He turned at last to the centre of the chamber, and laid his hand with a possessive gesture on the long curve of a great stone thigh. The lantern, held aloft over the reclining figure, showed them Vishnu sleeping. More than lifesize, the vast, graceful body filled the circle of light and jutted out beyond it. Subramanya lit it for them piecemeal beginning at the head. This was a solitary Vishnu, unattended by the heavenly beings she had seen afloat above him at Mahabalipuram, watched over no longer by his consort Lakshmi, stripped even of the cobra-hood canopy and the tall crown. An older Vishnu, perhaps, and a simpler – austere, beautiful and remote. His body was half-naked, thinly-carved draperies covered his loins. The pure, still features of the great face balanced death and sleep. Rachel was aware of a loneliness and a sorrow that reminded her of something closer to her own experience, and for a moment groped in vain for the key to her memory.

The great hewn slab of stone, the stretched body and the monumental hands laid lax and calm drew curtain after curtain for her, and showed her the image she needed. There was no instant of revelation, only the knowledge with her suddenly that these things had always been one. This noble and withdrawn figure could have been a Christian sculpture of the entombment. The face was not less lovely and lonely and sorrowful. The body contained no less surely all the doom of mortality, all the promise of immortality.

‘It's strange,' said Rachel aloud, ‘he makes me think of my own God.'

‘Strange?' said Subramanya, puzzled. She saw the delicate brown face for the first time utterly grave, lit sharply from above as he held the lantern high. ‘It is not strange. He
is
God.'