Hillstation Page 17

  ‘You can’t!’ blurted my sister as I reached for the door handle. ‘He can’t. Father, tell him he can’t.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Father looking hesitant now. ‘Rabindra’s argument, albeit unusually, is not without merit.’

  ‘Too right,’ said an elderly lady holding up a blistered palm. ‘This is beginning to sting like crikey.’

  From time to time, by some odd conflux of radio waves across the snowy peaks, our domestic transistors, usually tuned with fading hope to ‘All India Radio’, would pick up an ebullient gentleman called ‘Brian’. With a curious accent, neither quite English as we knew it, nor anything else that we understood, he would exhort us to ‘loop our lugs to the latest cool grooves’, at which point somebody would shout random words while banging on a dustbin. Some of our youths would get terribly excited before Brian and company switched abruptly to the crackling tones of a Tagore poem. At other times, equally unceremoniously, a nearby parent would simply pull the plug out. Over the years some of Brian’s favourite phrases had seeped into the local patois, although an edict had been issued forbidding his least pleasing usages. Thus, ‘crikey’ was deemed acceptable in situations of duress, while any reference to women as ‘Sheilas’ was strictly prohibited. As an act of defiance, Malek Bister had named one of his daughters ‘Sheila’, though it was never something she was entirely comfortable with.

  ‘And my finger is well-sore, matey,’ said an elderly gentleman holding up the evidence.

  ‘Which, of course, is unfortunate,’ said my sister. ‘But wounds will have to be borne with dignity for the time being since, by order of the Supreme Executive of The Pushkara Resistance Council, the office has been declared “out of bounds”.’

  ‘And who is this Supreme Executive?’ I asked.

  ‘We are,’ said both of my sisters simultaneously.

  ‘Well, can’t you just give me permission?’ I asked.

  ‘It would be far too much trouble,’ said one of them. ‘We would have to convene a meeting, making sure both of us were present. An application would have to be submitted, an agenda drawn up, minutes taken…’

  ‘We are wasting time,’ said my sister, sweeping her shawl back. ‘By means of futile discussions Rabindra is deliberately jeopardising the very edge without which our undertakings are doomed to fail.’

  ‘We will not tolerate jeopardisers,’ shrilled the other sister.

  ‘Cavillers, obstructionists, or…’ added the first one fixing me with a penetrating stare, ‘infiltrators. For why else should he so harm our cause but that he sympathises with the enemy?’

  ‘There has been more than a little evidence to that effect,’ muttered Father darkly.

  ‘What evidence do you need?’ shrieked my sister. ‘See how he stops us working, how he flouts our directives, impedes our progress and frustrates the very urgency of our mission. Are these not the acts of a traitor?’

  I could see a number of people warming to her theme as they muttered to each other.

  ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry is not enough,’ declared my other sister. ‘The penalty for treachery is death!’

  ‘What about this?’ announced Mr Dak from the other side of the room. I breathed out for a moment. The silence following my sister’s last words had been disturbingly void of objections. He was holding up his placard with the words, ‘No Show!’ scrawled in large red letters.

  ‘It is suitably emphatic, I grant you,’ offered Mrs Poon, ‘but lacking grammatical propriety. I would suggest, “No To The Show.”’

  ‘Or indeed, “No To The Show Here In Pushkara”,’ said Mr Goli, ‘to be more precise.’

  ‘Perhaps, “No To The Show of Ladies Dancing Around Scandalously Here In Pushkara”,’ suggested Mrs Knapp. ‘For the avoidance of doubt.’

  ‘I think we ought to add, “In Their Underwear”,’ said Mr Peerival. ‘Since we are not against the perfectly respectable activity of dancing per se, just this sort of thing.’

  ‘And then what?’ said one of my sisters. ‘We chant it? How? One of us calls out, “No to the show!” and everyone chimes in with, “of ladies dancing around scandalously in their underwear we’re not against the perfectly respectable activity of dancing per se just this sort of thing”?’

  ‘Well, it gets the message across,’ said Mrs Peerival. ‘Which I thought was the point.’

  ‘That is not the point,’ said my sister, clenching her fists. ‘If we want to get our message across we could write them a letter. We could advertise in the Daily Gazette.’ She stamped her feet losing control of her bun which unravelled wildly over her shoulders. ‘The point is to stop it, to drive them out, to save the soul of this sacred enclave, this jewel of the mountains, this blessed domain of the Great God, or die in the attempt.’ She paused, panting.

  ‘Couldn’t we put that on a placard?’ said Mr Mahmoud. ‘It’s rather stirring, don’t you think?’

  ‘We’d have to use smaller writing,’ said Mr Dimpas contemplating his latest effort.

  ‘Who’s going to die?’ interjected Mrs Poon, nervously. ‘I was asked to come here with a felt-tip pen, that’s all I know.’ A ripple of concern shuddered around the room.

  ‘Nobody’s going to die,’ said Father. ‘Honestly, you girls are getting far too emotional about it all. I think what we should do now is go to the hall. I heard the Sergeant has already arrived at the hotel, so they’re probably on their way by now.’

  ‘We must act!’ shouted one of my sisters. ‘Before it’s too late!’

  ‘More placards!’ shouted the other sister.

  ‘You’ve got plenty of placards,’ said Father, wearily. ‘And since most of Pushkara is already apprised of our intentions, it surely can’t be necessary to declare it so repeatedly in a variety of colours. When all’s said and done, we’ll mostly be waving them at ourselves.’

  ‘And the demons that lurk among us,’ said one of my sisters, glaring in my direction.

  ‘Yes, well, if you see a demon by all means wave your placard at it,’ said Father. ‘But I really think we ought to get going before everyone starts talking about tea and snacks.’

  ‘Our revered pater is right,’ said the other sister. ‘The talking is over. The battle begins. Rise up, my friends, to the barricade!’

  ‘Ah, yes about that,’ said Father. ‘As you know, I’ve just come from the hall where a number of those tasked with the construction…’

  ‘Did you give them our designs?’ interrupted my sister.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Father. ‘Though, as Mahadev pointed out last night, some virtue of a barricade is lost in the absence of its spontaneity…’

  ‘But they must be impervious and resolute,’ interjected my other sister, ‘as the people behind them. For it is at the barricades that we shall face the enemy, our heads high, sinews tight, breasts bared…’

  Father opened his mouth to speak but my sister continued.

  ‘… hearts bursting, voices crying the ineluctable vehemence of our demands.’

  ‘No Show!’ cried my other sister.

  ‘No To The Show!’ echoed a couple of elders adding one or two modifications.

  ‘Of salacious dancing by people purporting to be from England and such-like,’ added Mr Buliwal hopefully.

  ‘As distinct from the performance of dance, per se, some of which is perfectly respectable and rather nice, actually,’ chipped in Mr Parasurama.

  ‘… our faces turned to the dying rays of the setting sun,’ continued my sister with only the slightest flicker of irritation. ‘As the fires rage and The Turtle begs: “Please, please, have mercy.” But what mercy did he show when…’

  ‘Yes, yes, we get the point,’ interrupted Father. ‘But listen to me. Construction met with one or two difficulties. I’m not saying insuperable but certainly there are difficulties. I
t’s a question of materials.’

  ‘But did we not say they should tear down their houses to furnish the wood?’

  ‘Over this there was some discussion,’ muttered Father.

  ‘Earnest discussion?’ asked my sister.

  ‘I would say heated even,’ answered Father.

  ‘Impassioned?’

  ‘Certainly it was moving in that direction.’

  ‘Then there is hope,’ said one of my sisters. ‘For nothing can withstand the impassioned fire of the Pushkaran heart. To arms! To arms! Let us go, my comrades, for destiny or death awaits!’

  After which Father stood to one side scratching his head while my sisters busily marshalled the villagers into groups and sent them off to the hall. I took advantage of the distraction to nip into my office where the first thing that struck me was the smell. It me took a while to find the source but eventually, behind one of the filing cabinets, I discovered a collection of jerry cans, ropes, back copies of the Pushkara Daily Gazette and a box of matches. The smell, I realised, was of petrol.

  ‘Rabindra?’ called my sister.

  I glanced out quickly but she was only marching around looking for me. I closed the door quietly and joined the crowds with a nonchalant look on my face.

  ‘And you can wipe that nonchalant look off your face,’ she said when she saw me. ‘There is nothing nonchalant about war. Now, choose a placard and get out there.’

  ‘Which one?’ I asked.

  ‘Any, it doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  ‘How about, “We Would Rather Not Have This Sort Of Thing In The Village Since It Is Not The Sort Of Thing That We Would Rather Have In The Village If You See What I Mean!”?’

  ‘Except that one,’ she growled.

  I picked another, hoisting it over my head. ‘I look forward to sacrificing my entrails in the service of Shiva,’ I announced, possibly overdoing the rhetoric, waving it around and accidentally catching a light fitting which shattered over my head in a cloud of glass and plaster dust.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said my sister as I bent down to retrieve the pieces. ‘Get another one.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m not very familiar with the methodology of placard-waving.’

  ‘Well, for a start, you don’t wave it until you are out of operational headquarters,’ she said. ‘I would have thought that was obvious. I mean, what is the point of waving it in here?’

  ‘Practice?’ I offered.

  ‘What practice does it need?’ she shouted. ‘You take it out of here. Once you are out of here, you lift it up. You carry it to the demonstration area. When you arrive you stand and wave it. How simple does it get? There is no methodology, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Rabindra,’ said Father. ‘Stop winding your sisters up.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like this one?’ said Mr Dimpas handing me one of his masterpieces. ‘I think I’ve got the hang of it now.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ shrieked my sister. ‘Just take it and go.’

  Pushkara could be stunning sometimes, with its silent peaks, trails of cloud and a sky too blue for its own good. On days like this the very earth seemed to intimate a substance beyond itself, like some of those beggars who claim to be a secret prince as we hustle them back on the bus. Sometimes I used to wonder if they really were. But how would you know? Flaking paint on a shop-front threw shadows over itself in an ever-shifting carnival of light. That it continued to play, even unobserved, made me think of all the lives around me, of birds, beasts, microbes and vegetation that didn’t give two hoots whether I acknowledged their existence or not (unless they were some kind of bacterial infection, of course, in which case they probably saw me as their nemesis).

  I joined the slow procession of protesters making their way to the hall. Some had stopped to chat while others were checking their shops and stalls. A group of elders had gathered under a bodhi tree to debate the epistemological implications of their slogans which leaned, for the time being, against its knotty trunk.

  ‘Brevity of its own is an intrinsically misleading phenomenon,’ one of them proposed, ‘for it is not in the summation but the detail of a thing that its most fundamental characteristics achieve their proper manifestation.’

  ‘But is not a summation simply the delineation of the essence of a thing?’ queried another, provocatively. ‘The essence being that from which the manifested details emerge?’

  ‘Then you would have it that a human being is but a collection of limbs and body parts,’ retorted the first elder, smiling. ‘But if that were the case, you need only cut up some pieces of wood into the shape of arms and legs and so forth, nail them together and hey presto, you’ve made a human being. And though it may look like a human being, and might even move like a human being, and certainly in the dark you could easily mistake it for one, would you allow your daughter to marry it?’

  ‘This might explain my son-in-law,’ said another, at which they all chuckled.

  ‘Why are you idling around when there’s a war on?’ shouted one of my sisters passing them with several placards under her arms. ‘May I remind you that Shiva does not look kindly upon deserters?’

  I joined her as the elders scrambled to collect their placards.

  ‘Have they no sense of the peril we’re in?’ she sighed.

  ‘Perhaps you could enlighten me, beloved sister,’ I said, ‘as to what peril, exactly, we are in?’

  ‘Can you not see?’ she answered. ‘Already some of the young are asking their parents what’s wrong with a little entertainment at the Shri Malek Bister International Events Arena.’

  ‘And what is wrong with that?’ I said.

  ‘That we should even ask,’ she muttered, clutching the placards to her breast as she hurried away.

  ‘Psst.’

  I looked round to see a group of youths pressed into the shadow of a doorway.

  ‘Master Dimpal,’ I said, ‘how are your arches?’

  ‘Groovin, dude,’ he said.

  ‘You must keep me informed about the dough-balls and let me know if you need anymore.’

  ‘Sweet, bro’,’ he answered.

  His flat feet had been a major impediment, quite literally, to any marriage prospects evidenced by the giggling of girls as he waddled down the street. It seemed a shame, as he was otherwise well-constructed and of an amiable disposition. My solution had been the insertion of dough-balls into his shoes which had largely mitigated the affliction. I’d even suggested that Dev write it up for the ‘Lance It!’ but Dev had said there was more to medicine than the pursuit of noble prizes from the hands of svelte Scandinavian women who, in spite of appearances, are tempestuous little hotties under their tight hair and spectacles. When I enquired, he explained that ‘svelte’ is a compound noun derived from ‘swelter’ and ‘velvet’, which I thought interesting, if difficult to construe many circumstances to which it could be usefully applied.

  ‘You know there are plenty more of these,’ I said, indicating my placard, ‘should you feel so inclined.’

  ‘Word on da street, bro’,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘Is you was over da hotel innit.’

  ‘Well, yes, it’s true, I did pop over there,’ I admitted.

  ‘Respec’,’ said several of them, nodding.

  ‘You’ve been listening to Brian’s friends again, haven’t you?’ I said.

  ‘You dissin’ me?’ Mr Gupta confirmed. ‘Cause we fought you was, like, one of us, know what I mean? Now you is one of dem.’

  ‘And who is us, exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Dude, you is getting the lingo!’

  ‘No, I meant, if I’m “one of them”, then who is the “us” against whom the “them” are juxtaposed. And please answer me normally. In any case it sounds better when someone’s banging a dustbin.’

  ‘Um,’ said Mr Gupta, looking a little chasten
ed, ‘I suppose anyone who isn’t a “them”.’

  ‘That’s what Pol was saying,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘You is either an “us” or a “them”, meaning you is either wiv us or against us.’

  ‘But you despise him,’ I said. ‘In your father’s bakery, you serve him last and give him the worst cakes. How is that suddenly changed?’

  ‘We still despise him, obviously,’ said Mr Ghosh defensively. ‘But it’s the show, innit.’

  ‘You are referring to the show explicitly banned by the elders?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mr Dimpas as the others nodded. ‘And like Pol was saying, you know, what gives them the right?’

  ‘The right?’ I said. ‘Nobody gives them the right. What gives a mountain the right to be a mountain? Does it have to renew its application once a year? Does it require a consensus of opinion from the youth of Pushkara? Does it wait in an ante-room somewhere to learn the outcome of your deliberations? Do we say, “yes, we’ll let you stand mountainously around today but we’re not sure about tomorrow come back in the morning and we’ll let you know”?’

  ‘So what’s with big letters?’ said Mr Shoni nodding at my placard.

  ‘My sisters are of the view that the bigger the letters, the louder the sound they make in your head,’ I explained.

  ‘But it just says “Big Letters”,’ said another youth.

  I looked at the placard which indeed said merely, ‘Big Letters’ in big letters. ‘Well,’ I muttered, strolling off towards the hall, ‘I suppose not everyone understands the finer points of polemic.’

  To my surprise the barricade was considerably advanced when I arrived, though my sisters seemed to be in a state of distress.

  ‘Of what use are vegetables?’ one of them was screaming at Mrs Knapp.

  ‘Aubergines, collectively assembled, are extremely difficult to surmount,’ replied Mrs Knapp, tartly.

  ‘So why are they decorated with flowers?’ She turned to Mr Goli’s ice-creams, neatly arranged in their respective flavours. ‘And what’s this?’ she shrieked, indicating a Banana Sundae, ‘Who is this supposed to stop?’

  Mr Goli picked it up. ‘Let me assure you,’ he said, weighing it in his hands, ‘this is not a pleasant thing to receive abruptly in the face.’