Hillstation Page 13

  Mrs Jafferjee, meanwhile, got straight to business. She hired some lawyers from the plains who said she had a strong case and could be confident of an early hearing, possibly within the next twenty years. But shortly after she began to sicken. Some thought she was pining for her late husband, or regretting that she’d never had a kind word to say about him when he was alive. But the general opinion was that Mrs Dong was poisoning her. Sergeant Shrinivasan was asked to investigate but said he could find no evidence. The fact is, he didn’t like Mrs Jafferjee very much, especially after she’d accused him of ‘disappearing’ supplies from the top of the bus. In any case, Mrs Dong was at pains to point out that if it wasn’t for her, there would be no-one to look after Mrs Jafferjee at all. The Buddhist Cook moved in to the kitchen but his menus weren’t a success. He refused to cook meat, fish or poultry and what he did cook was exactly the same whatever the names he gave it in the menu. On Sunday people would order the ‘Himalayan Dish Of The Day’ and get rice and Dahl. Then on Wednesday they’d ask for the ‘All India Spice Supreme’ and get what they’d eaten on Sunday. The puddings weren’t much better, and some people were rather put off by the new names Mrs Dong had given them. ‘So What Do You Think Of It Now You Bitch?’ was just a lump of vanilla kulfi, while ‘Ha Ha Ha! The Foot Is In The Other Boot!’ was two lumps of vanilla kulfi.

  When Mrs Jafferjee died at last, everyone felt a bit sorry and perhaps slightly guilty that they’d rather neglected her towards the end. Still, they put on a good show with flowers and incense, a big pyre on the lake, and the whole lot pushed out to smoulder while everybody wept and wailed. Mrs Dong asked for the privilege of lighting it but, as this traditionally goes to the holy man, her request was declined. The Buddhist Cook didn’t attend, perhaps because he doesn’t believe in birth and death, but more likely because he was too busy preparing for the reception. It was a disappointing feast, according to Mother, just the rice and Dahl, and not much to go round. Mrs Dong said if people didn’t like it they could find somebody else’s funeral to go to, preferably their own. Father wrote to the lawyers in the city telling them of Mrs Jafferjee’s demise and that was the end of her case. To this day nobody knows if Mrs Dong was the rightful owner or whether, as Mrs Jafferjee had argued, the bequest was invalid on the grounds of insanity.

  ‘Is noborry here!’ shouted Mrs Dong from the lobby as I knocked on the door.

  Behind me, the patter of slippered feet suggested the approach of a patrolling elder.

  ‘But what about Pol?’ I hissed through the letter box. ‘What about the English people?’

  ‘I said is noborry!’ she yelled back. ‘Why you talk like a snake?’

  My shadow wobbled suddenly in front of me.

  ‘Who’s there?’ called the elder, his balaclava dark against the shadows of the street. I dodged the torch beam as it swung after me, hoping it was one of the older elders, preferably deaf, mostly blind and unlikely to chase me round the back.

  The rubble, hazardous even in daylight with its fragments of bathroom fittings and old wardrobes, was doubly treacherous in the dark. But I’d crossed it a couple of times already and quickly managed to find my way back to the windows.

  ‘Identify yourself!’ shouted the elder, panting from the effort of traversing a broken chest of drawers. I glanced round to see Mr Chatterjee who, far from deaf, could spot a conversation worth interrupting at five hundred paces. I lifted myself to the ledge, wedging my foot against a drain-pipe. Through a gap in the shutters I could see a dark room with a door at the end, slivered with light, which blotted out suddenly and reappeared. I tapped on the shutter.

  ‘There you are!’ said Mr Chatterjee. But he had only succeeded in grappling a tree at the edge of the precipice.

  I tapped again, the stone ledge cutting into my fingers. Brick-dust trickled down from beneath my foot.

  ‘A noise!’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘I am sure of it. For I have heard many noises in my life and consider myself, not to speak immodestly, more than qualified to know what is and what is not a noise when I hear it.’

  Inside, the room flooded with light. A burly shadow moved tentatively towards the window.

  ‘Hendrix?’ I said, pressing my mouth to the shutters. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Well, that’s a start,’ said Mr Chatterjee, swinging his torch across the rubble. ‘But you will need to be more specific. Who is you, exactly? An under-forty-three, I’ll bet.’

  ‘The Doc?’ said Hendrix.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Let me in.’

  ‘Let me in?’ scoffed Mr Chatterjee. ‘That is hardly a credible response to my simple enquiry. A name. Your age. That is the sort of information you need to come up with if you wish to avoid a sharp rebuke from my umbrella.’

  ‘Where are you?’ said Hendrix. ‘Is this some kind of yogic thing?’

  ‘I’m outside,’ I said. ‘Right here.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘You are outside and wish to be let in. But how am I to let you in if I too am outside? This makes no sense whatsoever.’

  The drain pipe creaked under my foot.

  ‘How did you get there?’ said Hendrix.

  ‘Does it matter?’ I squealed as the pipe broke free of its bolts and swung loose.

  ‘Now, this is clearly a rhetorical question,’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘Does it matter that you should be let in? But into what or where? This has not yet been established. I demand that you not only elucidate your meaning but reveal yourself, for I see nothing here but a lot of old junk and this tree. Unless it’s the tree that speaks, of course,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Hendrix.

  ‘I’m trying,’ I said, as my other foot began to lose its grip.

  ‘Trying?’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘Do you mean this in the colloquial sense of “effort” or the jurisprudential sense of establishing the truth, neither meaning being mutually exclusive since any effort tests the truth of ourselves while no truth is won without effort.’

  Hendrix fiddled with the locks.

  ‘Just open it, please,’ I gasped.

  ‘Open it?’ queried Mr Chatterjee. ‘What is there to open? What is it within my powers to open? My sensibilities? My senses?’ His feet slipped on the scree, forcing him into a clumsy pirouette, umbrella flailing. He recovered his balance and stumbled to the edge of the chasm, knocking a bidet into oblivion.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Right there.’

  ‘You what?’ said Hendrix.

  ‘Not you,’ I whispered. ‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘I am the tree that is speaking to you. Here I am. The tree that you embraced a few moments ago, the warmth of which still ah… warms me in an… an agreeable way.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Chatterjee, stepping carefully towards it. ‘Trees do not talk. And if they did, I am sure they would make more sense. No. I am certain of it. There is an under-forty three about the place making mischief, in fear, no doubt, of the sharp edge of my brolly. Not that it has a sharp edge, since it wasn’t designed for that purpose, although, to be honest, it isn’t much good for the purpose for which it was designed. It collapses in the slightest breeze and though I took it back to Bister’s Bits and Bobs for a refund, all I received was the discovery, sharp edged or not, that it can deliver a most discomforting blow. What? Have you gone silent? Riddles, enigmas and then silence?’

  ‘It’s all rusted,’ grunted Hendrix heaving at the lock.

  ‘You have to understand,’ I said, ‘that I don’t normally talk to people. So I’m a little bit shy. Usually I just chat with the other trees and some of the shrubs. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

  ‘Even if I tried,’ he murmured, ‘I am not sure anyone would listen.’

  The window jolted sharply upwards. ‘There we go,’ said Hendrix. ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s just the shutter,’ I whispered. ‘It’s latched somehow.’

  �
�Where?’ said Hendrix.

  I peered through the slats. ‘On the left,’ I said.

  ‘The left?’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘What do you mean? What is on the left?’

  Hendrix forced the catch open, flakes of rust flicking against my face.

  ‘Now the right,’ I said.

  ‘The right?’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘You say it is now on the right? What is on the right?’

  Hendrix snapped the catch. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said pushing at the shutters.

  ‘And above you,’ I said. ‘Look up. Just there.’

  Mr Chatterjee stared at the night sky and shook his head. I pressed myself against the bricks.

  ‘Come on, please,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘If I only knew what you are referring to.’

  The shutters opened suddenly, knocking me backwards. I grabbed one of them, my legs swinging helplessly in the air.

  ‘Hey Doc,’ said Hendrix, ‘you’re flying.’

  ‘I am clinging,’ I muttered. ‘There is a difference.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Mr Chatterjee as Hendrix reached out and hauled me in. ‘Clinging does rather describe one’s predicament these days.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Hendrix.

  ‘One of the old ones,’ I said, brushing the dust from my shirt.

  ‘An elder?’ asked Hendrix.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s a difference.’

  ‘Like clinging and flying,’ grinned Hendrix.

  Outside, Mr Chatterjee was staring at the tree. ‘You have beguiled me with conundrums,’ he was saying. ‘And yet I think I understand what you are trying to tell me. Your secrets are the mysteries I have been seeking as I cling, if I may use your terminology, to the treacherous ledge of hopes and dreams. And when I say treacherous, believe me, it’s all gone frightfully horrid quite recently.’

  ‘Can you though?’ said Hendrix, ushering me towards the corridor.

  ‘Can I what?’

  ‘Fly?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Have you tried?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘So you don’t know. I mean, for sure.’

  ‘I am pretty sure,’ I said, ‘that I can’t.’

  As Hendrix closed the door behind us I could hear Mr Chatterjee saying, ‘You see, I’ve never told this to anyone but for many years now I’ve rather admired the wife of my second cousin. And I don’t mean intellectually.’

  ‘This way,’ said Hendrix, trotting downstairs. ‘We’re on the roof. War council.’

  ‘War?’ The word surprised me.

  ‘They’ve shut us down.’ He turned left, setting a brisk pace along the corridor. ‘Padlocked the venue, took the gear, posters, memorabilia, the lot.’ We turned up some stairs. ‘The Sergeant went nuts. Mike’s happy as a buggered bunny. Nearly there,’ he said. ‘It’s just a passage off the passage, down a couple of steps, across a landing and voilà!’

  ‘But how do you know this?’ I said. ‘Even people who come here regularly can wander about for hours, stumbling into Mrs Dong at last and getting shouted at.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s what I do. Corridor-Man. Stairs and alleyways. Fag butts and spider crap. Carnegie, Sydney, I’ve done Earls Court more times than I’ve paid for a shag, Hammersmith’s my second home, Blackpool, Hamburg, Bognor bloody Regis and the arse end of just about everywhere else. Here we go.’

  He waved me to a door so small I had to crawl through.

  ‘Is Pol here?’ I asked.

  ‘Doubt it,’ said Hendrix with a smile.

  ‘On your knees, you worms!’ shouted Malek, paradoxically, as I stepped onto the roof. ‘For the gods are among us or at least the nearest thing you’ll find to one that doesn’t fart stardust.’ He waved a glass, slopping whisky over his lap.

  Sergeant Shrinivasan, perched on a wall at the edge of the terrace, slapped his thigh and laughed.

  I began to notice other figures on the roof. Sharon’s face flared briefly as she lit a cigarette. The hunched tumble of a shadow in the far corner I took to be Mike, his crumpled jacket folded over him, snoring gently. I looked round hopefully, a little anxiously perhaps, but every hope and anxiety that had ever kept me awake at night or made me stare into space while a patient explained their symptoms melted suddenly into a cool, quiet ocean of peace. For there she was, the object of my adorations, sitting in a low seat, slim legs in blue denim, a bottle of beer poised on her lap. The soft moonlight cast a pale shadow of her profile over the broken slabs and in that moment I could have knelt and kissed them, sufficient merely in the joy of her silhouette for all eternity.

  ‘So what do you want?’ said Malek. ‘Or have you come to gloat?’

  ‘Oh, leave him alone,’ said Hendrix sticking a glass in my hand. ‘Poor little chap.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Malek, ‘They don’t do that.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hendrix.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ said Martina.

  Hendrix dragged a chair over.

  I wondered why the gods had so rewarded my feeble efforts to win their grace. Perhaps I had inadvertently pleased them on some occasion of which I was unaware. Sauntering off to work one day, my head in a dream, I might have thought: ‘That bloody Mrs Ginko is nothing but an irritating hypochondriac with bad breath and alopecia but come now, Rabindra, that’s not a very nice thing to think about a fellow human being, is it’? Or maybe I’d avoided treading on a beetle that, unbeknownst to me, was an incarnation of Brahma popping down to the world of his making to test our merit. Or, in a previous life as a toad or a mouse, I might have declined to croak from the pond beside which a monk sat meditating or, having sneaked up to the biscuit of an ascetic, had elected not to nibble it. Who knows why or by what means our destinies are shaped? What if I’d stepped on that beetle in a moment of carelessness, or nibbled the biscuit behaving only as the mouse I was, for Brahma surely made mice to nibble? The gods, omnipotent but unkind, play to rules that we mortals, shuffling in the fleshy confines of our fleeting bodies, can hardly guess at.

  ‘All my life…’ I began.

  ‘Quiet everyone!’ interrupted Malek loudly. ‘For lo, the Brahmin speaks. And even if he makes no bloody sense you’ll have to nod meekly and agree with whatever he comes out with or you’ll be reborn squirming in goat shit.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Hendrix gently.

  ‘All my life,’ I began again, ‘I have felt oddly confused. About all sorts of things, really. Who I am, what I’m supposed to be and… and all that. And on days when I’m not confused, I’m confused about why I’m not confused. But at last everything is clear to me. As clear as the night sky and the glittering stars above us.’

  ‘Dude,’ murmured Hendrix.

  ‘For now I know,’ I continued, ‘without a shadow of a doubt, that not croaking beside the pond, nibbling that biscuit, or squishing the originator of all things with a careless step, were blessings of which I am undeserving as I am undeserving of you, Martina.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s clear to you,’ said Malek, clapping his hands. ‘You see? That’s just what I was saying. Now you listen to me.’ He stood up. ‘Hopefully this’ll make sense, but do let me know if it doesn’t. Tell your father, I’m not done yet. The show… what will the show do, Sergeant?’

  ‘Go on!’ said Sergeant Shrinivasan teetering precariously.

  ‘He doesn’t own this town,’ said Malek. ‘In fact, when you think about it, I do.’ He waved his whisky. ‘Where does this come from? I’ll tell you. Bister’s Beverages. And this…?’ He blew smoke towards me. ‘Bister’s Baccy.’

  ‘And these…’ said Sergeant Shrinivasan rattling his medals.

  ‘Bister’s Baubles,’ said Malek, ‘best prices, everything genuine.’

  ‘NASA Space Missi
on,’ said the Sergeant gazing at his top pocket.

  ‘Bister’s Backsides,’ chuckled Hendrix tapping his deckchair.

  ‘Bister’s Fine Furnishings,’ muttered Malek, fixing him with a squint before jabbing his cigar back at me. ‘So he doesn’t tell me what I can and cannot do in my own town. You understand me? This is my town. Not his. Not yours. Not anymore.’

  ‘Is at door,’ said Mrs Dong sharply from the entrance to the stairs.

  ‘Huh?’ said Malek.

  ‘Is at door, jumping red-faced,’ she said.

  ‘Wives!’ shouted Sergeant Shrinivasan, scrambling to hide the whisky bottle.

  ‘No, is man,’ said Mrs Dong.

  ‘What man?’ said Malek.

  ‘Angry man,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Well, tell him to clear off,’ said Malek.

  ‘Told him,’ said Mrs Dong, ‘Made more angry.’

  A sound of thudding came from the front door below us. ‘Bister?’ shouted Father, ‘You let me in or I’m calling the police.’

  ‘I am sorry we are currently unavailable,’ intoned the Sergeant. ‘Please call during normal office hours, which are Mondays to Fridays, eleven to four, excluding lunch which can last from ah… eleven to four sometimes, though not always depending on ah…’

  ‘You’ve kidnapped my son,’ shouted Father in a tone that suggested clenched fists.

  ‘No-one’s kidnapped anyone,’ said Malek. ‘Unless he’s kidnapped himself.’

  ‘Rabindra?’ said Father, darkly. ‘Show yourself.’

  Hendrix looked at me quizzically. I shook my head.

  ‘He’s a bit busy right now,’ said Hendrix, peering over the wall. ‘But I can tell him you called.’

  ‘You tell him nothing,’ said Father, stamping his feet. ‘I will tell him myself. Now let me in!’

  ‘Might as well,’ said Sharon. ‘He’ll never find us.’

  ‘Stomp all over shouting,’ said Mrs Dong. ‘Is bad for guests.’