Hillstation Page 12

  ‘And you prayed?’ he interrupted. ‘How often? Once? Twice? For a couple of weeks hoping they’ll be impressed? Are you kidding? What about before then? You think they don’t keep count? And I don’t mean the daily requests for Mrs Pallabhi to cook something other than egg curry for once, or “please god, direct my shoe more accurately at that bloody cockroach.” That’s nothing. We still get egg curry and the shoe bounces harmlessly away as the cockroach scurries off laughing at our futile beliefs.’ He leaned forward, earnestly now. ‘When have you prayed, really prayed, with your entire being stretched out, flayed and sobbing, ’til it hurts?’

  ‘When Mother was sick, I prayed for her to get better.’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ said Dev quietly.

  ‘And after she died, I prayed for her not to be dead.’

  ‘Let it never be said,’ he muttered, ‘that you are undemanding.’ He looked down for a moment. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s just as I was saying. Things happen as they will and beyond the odd bit of tinkering with the few things we might be able to tinker with, there’s nothing much we can do about anything. These holy men drone on about causality and connection but the truth is nothing means anything beyond this big, ugly, meaningless muddle we muddle along with until we muddle no more.’

  His eyes had clouded now as they did sometimes after dinner, or when I needed him to advise on a diagnosis, or just because the day was warm, or cold, I could never quite determine the cause. In the days after Mother’s death I had thought they would never sparkle again. It was during his first year back, newly qualified and the clinic thriving. They said he had the touch. Whatever that was. Until it came to Mother. He had tried every remedy at his disposal. Finally he was forced to pronounce her beyond the reach of medical intervention and we could only wait. Young Doctors, fired with the zeal of their new skills, often believe they can accomplish anything. That Dev’s first disappointment should have concerned his own mother made the ineluctable rites of professional seasoning all the more bitter. Thereafter he had confined himself largely to research, leaving the humdrum ailments and clinical management to me. I was never quite sure if it was a misguided sense of guilt or the desire to find a cure for everything that made his devotions to the frontiers of medical science so earnest.

  I left him to his contemplations, having long ago given up trying to lighten them, and went round to the Puja Room at the side of the house to talk to Mother. It was the quietest place I knew, with its soft lights and warm shadows, in spite of the busy streets outside. In the presence of love, they say, even the gods hold their breath.

  My sisters had lit some oil lamps and sprinkled fresh rice over the altar. The centrepiece, as in every Pushkara household, was a figurine of Lord Shiva, God of The Dance, his four hands raised, one foot on the wriggling monstrosity of The Turtle. For generations these had been crafted by the same Pushkaran family, the Aptalcharys. Indeed, some said that every Shiva tended to look a bit like its maker, especially as their hair receded and the Great God began to sport a comb-over. When he’d grown a beard one year there was uproar. Later attempts to introduce a moustache met the same fate.

  I knelt on the cushions, folded my hands into my lap and bowed reverently for a few minutes. When I looked up he was smiling back through his spectacles with the bemused squint characteristic of the present Mr Aptalchary. To his left was the newspaper cut-out of a guru, since no shrine was complete without the image of some venerable gent swathed in flowers. To his right was a picture of Mother in her twenties, long before I’d known her, though the slightly anxious eyes were familiar enough.

  ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I am confused.’

  ‘You should try being a dead mother speaking through the imagination of her child,’ she retorted.

  ‘How are you?’ I said.

  ‘Dead,’ she said. ‘How do you think?’

  ‘Silly question, I suppose.’

  ‘When was the last time you gave your ears a good poke out?’ she said. ‘I’ll bet you’ve got wax in there from two years ago.’

  ‘That is no longer recommended,’ I said. ‘Scientifically speaking, it has now been established that cleaning your ears out only makes them dirtier.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘You listen to these people rather than your own mother? And look at your hair, all ragged at the edges. You need a good trim and I don’t mean by your sisters, go into the village and get it done properly.’

  ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘if you are just in my imagination, how is it that you are still able to rebuke me?’

  ‘I may be just in your imagination,’ she said, archly, ‘but I am still your mother.’

  Which seemed like a fair point.

  ‘So what are you confused about?’ she said, her voice softening. ‘I seem to remember, Rabindra, that you were always confused about something.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you probably don’t know this but some English people arrived yesterday.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And a fine lot they are too. Particularly that Martina. What a beauty. I hereby offer my unconditional blessings on your marriage.’

  ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘are you just saying that because I’m imagining it or are you really saying it?’

  She chuckled.

  ‘The problem,’ I said, ‘is that I don’t know what to do. If I cannot see Martina, I will be unable to pledge my troth, we will not get married and she will die, eventually, broken-hearted and alone. So either I disobey an edict of the elders or stand idly by to see the dreams of my beloved crushed. Could any lover worthy of the name do such a thing?’

  ‘What exactly is preventing you from going to see her?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Father,’ I said.

  ‘You have not answered my question,’ she said. ‘What, exactly, is preventing you from going to see her?’

  ‘Obedience,’ I said. ‘Duty.’

  ‘Does this answer my question?’

  I felt that somehow it didn’t.

  ‘You think that you do not know,’ she said. ‘But you know that you could know if only you knew how to know. Rabindra, there are many things unknown to you. Many of these are not worth knowing so I shouldn’t worry about them, to be honest. But you will never learn anything until you learn to listen to your heart.’

  ‘But what is it telling me?’ I said. ‘To obey my father as I have always obeyed him? More or less? To run helter-skelter to my beloved? If it is telling me both of these then it is asking me to cut myself in half, which is impossible.’

  ‘Not impossible,’ she said. ‘For you have already been cut in half. And this is what causes you pain. There are two half-Rabindras running around, each desiring to be whole. But that can never be for they are running around in opposite directions.’

  ‘Then how can they meet?’ I asked.

  ‘When you realise that you are neither of them,’ she said.

  ‘Help me, Mother, for I do not understand.’

  ‘If your head stopped for just a moment, what would your heart do?’

  ‘Fly to my beloved.’

  ‘Then you know.’

  ‘But what then?’ I said. ‘Father would beat me. The village would scorn me. I would be like Mr Chatterjee, trying to strike up a conversation while people walk past me humming loudly. I would be dismissed from the clinic. I would have to leave Pushkara and never be welcome back. And although I have dreamed of marrying an English wife and living in England, this is the only place I have ever known and I am afraid.’

  But she said no more.

  Was that all? I thought. The fear of going. The fear of staying. Perhaps a fear of fear itself. How ridiculous we can seem if only we take the time to look. Shiva danced across the fold of my hands, cast by flickering candles, over the walls of the room, spectacles and all, his limbs a shifting serenade of shadows, creating and destroying in a singl
e moment that was now and forever. I thought of Father patrolling the streets, and the young men pining for their confiscated calendars. I wondered what my beloved had indeed got up to in April. I thought of the Buddhist Cook, a thing of air and light on the hotel steps. I thought of smoke rising in a fine tendril from the fires we’d lit, of butter crackling over the charred wood. I thought of my socks in the corner of a drawer for some reason. And then I sat up.

  Outside, the air was very still. Two elders on their respective patrols exchanged pleasantries and moved on. A dog was trying to squeeze through the railings to get at some rubbish while another sniffed at the front gate and, just for a moment, I felt as nameless and desolate as the nameless desolation of their grubby lives, furtively searching, incessantly sniffing and yet, with the open street and a vacant destiny to call their own, somehow free. I crept over to the shadows across the road and began to run.

  6

  The Hotel Nirvana, forever haunted by the warnings and injunctions imprinted on my soul about its lurking venalities, loomed dark against the starry sky. Mother had finally told me about Mrs Dong, having initially refused, saying some things it were best not to know. But when an elder caught me resting in its shade one morning and declared that I had thus imperilled my future lives, and I had thereafter scrupulously avoided treading on worms and beetles in case I’d be accused of murdering relatives in a previous life during my next one, Mother had sighed, fearing that I might develop a permanent limp, and said perhaps it was time.

  Fearsome as Mrs Dong now was, when she first came to the village she was merely Little Amchila, discovered on the upper slopes by a goatherd, a waif in rags fleeing the tyrannies of Tibet. We’d had a few in those years. Many, of course, never made it across the passes which were said to twinkle with the bones of fallen travellers. Of those who did, most moved on, but Little Amchila decided to stay. She was put up in the Hotel Nirvana which was very popular in those days. Its owners, Mr and Mrs Jafferjee ran an excellent kitchen, Mrs Jafferjee was often to be heard shouting at the cooks, and the food was first rate. Little Amchila, with her ragged hair and skinny arms, soon made herself useful clearing the tables and washing up. Mother said that Tibetans are often thought of as dreamers because they won’t admit the existence of anything, but in her view they knew how to work. Mrs Jafferjee, who believed that a good beating now and then was an excellent tonic for staff morale, was especially severe with the scrawny wretch with no history, family, or name worth mentioning. But one day all that changed. The ‘pitiful ragamuffin, who had climbed her way over the mountains to collapse at our feet’, as Mother put it, had become a young lady, in fact, a rather striking one. She had stood by the kitchen doors, a plate of shondish in one hand, a tray of tea in the other, hips tilted slightly in one of Mrs Jafferjee’s cast-off saris, gazing around at the suddenly silent room. After that there were many hushed conversations among the young men of Pushkara. Several boys of marriageable age even enquired about the possibilities, but of course it was out of the question.

  In the meantime, Mrs Jafferjee became ever more vehement in the application of disciplinary measures, although she complained that the girl’s quiet defiance in the face of a rebuke rendered the act of rebuking oddly unsatisfying. Mr Jafferjee, it has to be said, had never supported his wife’s approach to staff supervision, though he lived well enough on its rewards. He preferred to smile and ask if they were having a nice day. With Little Amchila he would offer soothing words, dainties from the dessert trolley and, it was said, even the occasional hug. That is, until he died.

  It came as no great shock. He’d already collapsed a few times clutching his chest and, since people who do that tend to drop dead sooner or later, there wasn’t much anyone could do except wait. Unfortunately, Mr Chatterjee had joined him on the bench under the bhodi tree, so when he slumped forwards with a glazed look in his eye, everyone thought it a natural response to Mr Chatterjee’s discourse. It was only when Mr Jafferjee failed to move as the bus arrived that his condition was fully appreciated. Some people, rather unkindly, accused Mr Chatterjee of boring him to death, but at any rate, that was the end of Mr Jafferjee who always said he’d like to come back as the owner of a Parisian Bistro. One hopes, said Mother, that he achieved this, assuming one comes back as anything at all.

  For a while that also seemed to be the end of Little Amchila. The funeral smoke had hardly wafted away before her clothes were out on the pavement. She picked up what she could, left what she couldn’t and walked off down the road. And that was the last anyone ever thought they’d see of our Tibetan waif.

  Mrs Jafferjee mourned with characteristic extravagance. Most ladies like a bit of sympathy when their husbands die, but she turned it into a culinary art. ‘The Mr Jafferjee Memorial Meringue’ was especially successful, a sort of lemon mousse with a crusty top, and though the ‘Widow’s Lament’ was a little too chocolaty for most tastes, it was edible enough with a dollop of cream. She hung a flag at half-mast, painted the front door white and even declared the anniversary of Mr Jafferjee’s death a public holiday, though the elders felt this ought to be discussed.

  As the village lawyer, Father had been asked to read the will at an occasion to which everyone was invited. Most people got a little something, though not necessarily what they’d expected. Some got recipes, others blessings or even advice, such as ‘if you will steal napkins from the restaurant, kindly do so with more discretion, what do you think I am, a bloody idiot?’. Of course Mrs Jafferjee began to look increasingly pleased as Father read down the list. Until it got to her. Mr Jafferjee had much to say about his wife. Father had tried mumbling it but people at the back told him to speak up. Mrs Jafferjee stood up a few times and shook her fist but had to wait to the end to hear what she’d got: a room, a bed, some linen and ‘enough food to maintain corporeal wellbeing’, as he put it, to the end of her days. She accused Father of not reading it correctly and demanded he start again. So he did. ‘To Mrs Gheenkal, a recipe for plum pudding.’ At which she screamed that she’d only meant the last bit. But it was exactly the same the second time around.

  ‘But what about the Hotel?’ she shouted.

  ‘I haven’t got to that,’ said Father.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, sitting down again. ‘Why didn’t you say? Go on then. Read it.’

  ‘The Hotel Nirvana,’ intoned Father. ‘Founded by my great grandfather, cherished by generations of Jafferjees, no less by me, a testament to the goodwill and community spirit of my beloved Pushkara, I leave to…’

  Father chose an unfortunate moment in which to clean his glasses. At last, however, he tucked his tie back under his pullover and straightened his collar before ruffling through the document in search of where he’d left off. Mrs Jafferjee looked as if she might spontaneously combust. When Father spoke it was to whisper, ‘My Little Amchila.’

  ‘What?’ said Mrs Jafferjee, leaping at Father who had to beat her back with the will itself. ‘What did you say? You leave the Hotel, my Hotel, to that filthy harlot, that whore? And you think that’s funny, do you? You think that’s clever?’ Eventually, Sergeant Shrinivasan, who had been hoping for a bottle or two from the hotel cellars, managed to impress upon her the difference between message and messenger. After which she cancelled the tea and cleared everyone out, which a lot of people thought rather ungracious as they’d only stayed on for that reason.

  A few months later Mrs Jafferjee found a legal adviser, which is to say someone rolling up in search of the sacred shrine who had been told that legal experience was a plus if he wished to stay at the Hotel Nirvana for nothing. For weeks thereafter huge bundles of documents tied with string would appear on our doorstep which, on inspection, turned out to be nothing more than pages torn from cheap novels. He might not have been a real lawyer, Mother had said, but he’d obviously understood the correlation between paper, time and money. He did raise one devastating point, however. Since Little Amchila no longer lived in Pushkara and
nobody knew where she was, how could she contest a refutation of the will? Apparently it’s an ancient legal principle that if there’s nobody to fight with you can’t fight at all. After that, the Hotel offered a whole new menu. The ‘Law Is An Ass’ coconut dessert didn’t taste very nice, according to Mother, but the ‘Victory Over Pompous Imbeciles’ herbal infusion became extremely popular with the ladies. Her efforts to mark the event with an annual ‘Good Riddance To Gold-Digging Whores Day’, however, failed to gather support.

  The legal adviser, meanwhile, proved to have rather more legal experience, and of a different sort, than he’d previously mentioned, when he was caught sneaking off with a bag of Mrs Jafferjee’s brass ornaments. It subsequently transpired that he was wanted for a number of crimes in various states and has probably been adding to his legal experience ever since.

  Nobody knows how she found out about the will, but one day the bus pulled up and out stepped Little Amchila and The Buddhist Cook. Of course she wasn’t Little Amchila anymore, she was Mrs Dong. But whether she’d got married while she was away or had always been married but only now chose to reveal it, or whether she wasn’t married at all but simply used the name for effect, remains a mystery. Some thought the Buddhist Cook might be her husband but monks don’t marry, as a rule, unless he’d married her before he became a monk but really, said Mother, that would be far too confusing for everyone. ‘You see,’ she added, ‘sometimes we know almost everything about a person and sometimes hardly anything at all. But whether we know almost everything or almost nothing there’s always a little bit that nobody ever quite knows. Sometimes people don’t even know it themselves. That’s very much how it is in the business of knowing anything about anyone.’

  To begin with, Mrs Jafferjee refused to let Mrs Dong, as she now was, into the hotel. But Father insisted that, pending a resolution of the dispute, they should both have equal access to the premises. Mrs Jafferjee grudgingly allowed Mrs Dong to sleep in a store cupboard, while the Buddhist Cook crept every night to the rubble at the back, where he’d sit perfectly motionless even when rats perched on his head, which a number of people claimed to have seen.