The Death of Mr Love, page 10
The rains again. I told Ben what Jula had said about mangoes and magic and muzza, which means ‘fun’, and invited him to our house. After that he came most weekends and we would roam the hills looking for Jula and make forays into the jungle pretending that we were hunting for wild animals. About two miles from our house was a cliff, a three-thousand-foot drop over which a tiger, in hot and reckless pursuit of a deer, was said to have fallen to its death. We would creep to the edge, lie on our tummies and peer down into the dizzying gulf. Even with my body pressed full length to the warm rock, I always felt my feet were rising into the air, about to tumble me over the edge. The place was called Tiger’s Leap.
By our day the tigers were gone, but the hills were covered in forest – sal, teak, mango, bamboo – and full of animals. There were wolves, wild boar, deer and of course, dog-eating panthers.
We knew that Babu loved hunting, but we soon found out that he had a reputation locally as a famous shikari. We children loved hearing his stories. Out on a forest path one night, he saw two green eyes in the darkness, at the height of a man’s head.
‘At first, obviously, I assumed it was a ghost,’ he said. ‘But then I noticed that the eyes were too close together.’
Our heads bobbed in agreement. Of course.
‘Babu, what did you do when you saw the green eyes?’
‘Well, I lifted my gun and fired,’ he said. ‘There was a terrifying shriek, and this huge snake crashed down right in front of me.’
We knew this story was true because we saw the snake. Babu brought it home in my father’s Humber. He opened the boot, and there it was, two large coils of brown and black python with a head like a dog’s, blemished where Babu’s bullet had punched a hole in it. The python smelt musty. My mother talked of having it skinned and made into a handbag and shoes. For weeks afterwards I fancied I could smell it in the car.
When he found out that we liked wandering in the forest, Babu gave us some important advice. ‘If you are in the trees,’ he said, ‘and it’s near evening, or if you come to a place that’s deeply shaded, keep your ears open and if you hear a long low whistle – like this – run for your life and don’t ever look back.’
The whistler was deadly. It was a flying snake, a cobra with two stubby aeroplane-like wings, which uttered its strange cry when it sighted prey. If you weren’t careful it would swoop down on you out of the trees.
‘How can you tell it’s not a bird?’ we protested.
‘Birds don’t make noises like that,’ he said, and proceeded to imitate the calls of the forest birds: chakor, koel, bulbul, mynah, crow, drongo, did-you-do-it, shrike, kite, woodpecker.
One day he brought home two ragged balls of feathers which he’d found on the ground under a nest. Baby birds. He said a snake had probably had the rest. They took up residence in a shoebox. Babu would feed them milk with an eye-dropper, then mash up a little meat for them and offer it to them on the tip of a finger. Within a few weeks they were glossy, plump and very tame. Babu presented them to Maya. They were her first pair of bulbuls.
Even Babu’s stories seemed ordinary beside the things that Dhondu and Jula talked about. The forest was full of ghosts and goblins – it seems odd to me to use these English words – bhoots and prets, we called them, pisachas, rakshasas. There was no question but that these spirits were real. People saw them, often. Some were well known. There was Bhensachor who went round masquerading as a buffalo, ‘But if you get near, pow! He attacks!’ Bhensachor could change in a flash to a goat, or a wind in the trees, or a flame. All spirits were devious. A perfectly ordinary-looking man might come up to you and ask for some tobacco, but if you replied, his head would start whirling round and round and when it stopped you would be looking into a face with glaring eyes and teeth like daggers. You might be going through the forest and see a child half-hidden near a place where paths crossed, crying its eyes out. ‘Don’t be fooled! It’s Rowlia and if you say even one word to her, her legs start lengthening and she grows and grows until she’s a monster.’
Some spirits made no pretence at being human. There was a man with the head of a fish, who cried out that he was thirsty.
‘If you give him water, you are done for, because his throat is as fine as a needle and he will drink a dozen pots of water before he’s satisfied. Even then, instead of being grateful, he’ll follow you to learn where you live and he’ll steal the food from your house.’
There were many others – Jimp and Khechar, Khais and Vetal and Satvi, Bhoochadiya and Haadal, who from the front looked like a lovely woman, but from behind was nothing but a skeleton. ‘If you meet a pretty girl in the forest, first look to see if her feet are on back-to-front, for if they are, it’s Haadal.’
Dhondu and Jula knew where the evil spirits congregated and from time to time held parties – the burning ghat by the lake, the small shrine on top of Bicchauda mountain. The villagers were wary of these places by day and never went near them at night.
On nights of thunder and lightning, the ghosts gambolled and played, drank and swore, told jokes and smoked, up at the shrine of the old Mother, up on top of the hill.
‘But if one has the courage to go, and survives, then the ghosts and goblins are forced to grant that person’s wish.’
Shashi the ayah seemed scared too.
‘What lies he tells!’
One day, Jula appeared in the garden, dressed as usual in his khaki shorts, but wearing on his head what appeared to be half a boat, woven of wicker and lined with leaves.
‘Don’t you know anything? It’s an irrla.’
‘What is it for?’
‘To keep the rain off, of course.’
‘What rain?’
‘The rain that’s coming. It’s going to piss down.’
That afternoon the sky clouded and there was a fierce lightning storm. We could see the flashes miles away, over Duke’s Nose, which soon disappeared as a sullen cloud swept over the lake. Almost before we knew it, the rain was pelting down all around us in fat drops that exploded in the dust. Such a smell arose, a sweet woody earthy scent (Tagore called it ‘the goodly smell of rain on dry ground’) that cannot be imagined unless you have experienced it. Within minutes the rain was falling so hard that it blurred the landscape. It softened all the colours, mixing them with white. It was like looking through a gauze curtain. The hillsides immediately streamed with water.
After a week the quiet lake had become a sea. When we went down to the shore we could no longer see the other side, just water stretching to a cloudy horizon, and choppy waves surging in over our feet. The rains had come. Everyone was happy. Dhondu sang as he worked, wearing a larger version of Jula’s rainhat.
‘just smell the milk in the pot
so fresh the steam is rising
and it hasn’t even been boiled,
oh yes, this is the kind of milk
a man needs before
he goes off to fight the Mughals’
‘Dhondu, who are the Mughals?’
‘How on earth should I know? They’re the people you go off to fight in songs. But the world is full of Mughals, hey Bhalu? The landlord’s a Mughal. The moneylender’s a Mughal. The cook, he’s definitely a Mughal.’
FEVER (AMBONA HILLS, AUGUST 1958)
When I think of Ambona, she is always the first one to come to mind, before Jula, Ben or any of the others. I know I have told this story chronologically, from the beginning of my time there, but that’s not how it is in my memory. When I think back to those years, she is always the first one. She is there instantly. I am with her. We are at a pool on the slope of Bicchauda, with rain making rings on the surface. It’s the best weather for fishing, I tell her they’ll bite at anything. I am proudly teaching her everything I know, which is everything that Jula and Ben have taught me. We’re after mawra, a kind of catfish. They have whiskers and like worms. Does she know how to find a worm, break it into bits and thread a hook? She looks appalled. She does not. She is eight years old, the same age as me and tanned almost as brown, with hay-coloured plaits tied up in ribbons. Her glasses have splots of mud on them.
Her mother is my mother’s best friend.
Auntie Sybil – we called all our parents’ friends Auntie and Uncle – sometimes spent weekends at our house in Ambona in the first months after we moved there. I used to look forward to her visits because she was cheerful and jokey, and always brought me some exciting toy, a tin aeroplane from Crawford Market, a red B. E. S. T. double-decker bus with a key sticking out of the side.
It was August. We had been living in Ambona for six months and were well and truly into the rains, on school holidays – well, all except for Jula who had no school and no holidays – when my mother told us that Auntie Sybil had been ill and was coming to stay with us for a few weeks.
‘She’s bringing her little girl, who’s your age, so I want you to be nice to her. Take her round with you.’
I received this news with mixed feelings. Auntie Sybil was nice, and it was fun to wonder what she would bring me, but a girl?
Babu and my mother went to fetch them and took me along. Ambona station was crowded with people waiting for the Deccan Queen and loud with the cries of hawkers.
‘Chayvadé vadévadé! Chayvadé vadévadé!’ (tea, vadas)
‘Chikkivadé! Ambona chikkivadé!’ (chikki, Ambona chikki)
The grumble of the train slowing down, a comfortable, warm sooty smell, and hawkers running alongside.
‘Tsai, tsai garam, garam tsai garam.’ (tea, hot tea, hot-hot tea)
Among the crowd that had just got off the train was Auntie Sybil, her pale skin accentuated by dark sunglasses, looking a little lost. My mother went up to her and hugged her for a long time. To my great disappointment, she had not brought anything for me. ‘This is Rosie, our ayah,’ said Auntie Sybil to my mother. Standing just behind Sybil was a dumpy old lady in a long skirt who turned to the carriage and said something that sounded like, ‘Commisskilly.’
Off the train climbed a girl dressed the way English children are portrayed in old books, in a floaty dress that made her look as if she had come to take tea on a lawn by the Thames. Under a straw hat tied with ribbon I saw a pointed chin, like a fox. Eyes, made huge by her glasses, of a startling grey-green and hair the colour of the grasses on the hillsides before the rains.
‘Oh, isn’t she lovely?’ my mother sighed.
Her name was Phoebe. She was an intense little girl, with an aloof air that at first made me think she was stuck up. But I soon realised that she was under the thumb of Rosie the ayah. All day long it was, ‘Come, Misskilly, time for your bath,’ or ‘Don’t go out there, it’s dirty.’ ‘Come and read your book.’ ‘Drink some milk now.’ ‘Don’t go there.’
‘Why does she call you Misskilly?’ I asked.
‘Killy’s my father’s name, short for Killigrew. So I’m Miss Killy and Mummy is Killymem.’
I couldn’t understand their relationship. Sometimes she would nestle in the old woman’s arms and let her comb her hair. At other times she would run and hide, or hit out at her and then Rosie was angry. But she’d soon be stroking her hair saying, ‘Silly, so silly, Misskilly. If I don’t look after you, then who will?’
‘I don’t need you to look after me,’ shouted Phoebe.
‘Who is there but me to look after you, Misskilly?’
My mother suggested that I should take Phoebe with me on my expeditions. I didn’t want to. ‘If you come with me,’ I told her, ‘you have to do what I do. Can you speak any Hindi?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and recited solemnly in her English accent:
‘muffety maaí, dahí malaaí
ghaas pé baitth ké khaaí
ék badaa sa makda
kapda ko pakda
aur bhaag gayí muffety maaí!’
‘Who taught you that?’
‘Rosie did. She’s been my ayah since I was born. Her aunt was my dad’s ayah.’
One day, soon after their arrival, Phoebe went missing. We had a shack at the back, where my father kept chickens: Rhode Island Reds, White Leghorns, Black Menorcas. I found her hiding at the back, crouched behind a piece of sacking.
‘What’s the matter?’
She wiped her hand across her nose, which was bubbling with green stuff. ‘Nothing.’
‘Then why are you crying?’
‘I’m not crying!’
‘Yes, you were.’
‘Sometimes I don’t like her, that’s all.’
I didn’t have to ask who.
One day, Shashi was sent to fetch Phoebe and her Indian tongue garbled the name. Phoebe said, ‘She made it sound like “Fever”!’
‘Hahaha!’ I cried, eager to have a jab at my unwanted guest. ‘Fever! Chicken-pox, malaria, small-pox, typhoid.’
She looked at me gravely and said, ‘Oh, don’t be so utterly silly.’
Such an expression in those green-grey eyes, something between amusement and hurt.
Then she said, ‘You can call me Fever if you like.’
How I enjoyed showing off to Fever. I bossed her about, told her how to do this, not to do that.
‘That’s not how you hold a catapult! Look, put your fingers round here, like this, and pull.’ Or, on Dagala mountain, shooting at wild mangoes, trying to knock them out of the branches, ‘This isn’t the best tree. I know a better one.’
I never admitted that until a few months ago, I myself had known none of these things.
She was an amenable student. And learned fast.
We went in search of Jula and found him in his rainhat with his cows a little way up Dagala, near the village.
‘What on earth is he wearing?’ she wanted to know.
‘Ask him,’ I said.
‘But I don’t know how.’
So I whispered to her, and she said, ‘He kaay ae?’What is that? They made a strange sight, side by side. I told Fever that the irrla, the rainhat, was lined with the leaves of the palasa tree, the flame-of-the-forest, which had been covered in red flowers when we first arrived in the hills.
We stood, surrounded by cows whisking their tails in clouds of flies. Jula had an odd habit of grabbing at the air. The cows’ tails would whisk and Jula would snatch at the empty air.
Fever said, ‘Whatever is he doing?’
I explained that it was just a thing Jula did and we all ran round, catching invisible flies.
Jula was as interested in Fever’s umbrella as she in his rainhat. He asked her if he could open and shut it a few times. He told me that there were a couple of umbrellas in the village, but he’d never been allowed to handle one.
I asked Jula to teach Fever gulli-danda, but he said it was the wrong season. ‘It’s too wet. We’d lose the fucking gulli.’
We were weeks into the rains, and the hills, bare and brown when we came to Ambona, were knee-high in rough emerald grass. So Fever asked if she could wear his rainhat and she chased after us shouting a rhyme of her own invention.
‘I’m the ingle-pingle-pani and I’ve come to take the rani,
I’m bad and I’m mean and I’ve come to steal the queen.’
We stayed out until it began to get dark and I said we should go home. She said, ‘No, not yet.’ So I took her to Karvanda where Jula’s mother, who by now knew me well, received her gravely and gave us glasses of her smoky milk. Something was cooking in the pot on the chhula and Fever said, ‘Mmm, that smells nice.’
Jula’s mother asked me to translate and when I told her, pressed us to have some food. I tried to refuse, because I knew how poor they were, but she wouldn’t allow it. She made us sit on the string bed, that they call a khaat. Fever said it sounded like ‘cot’.
When Jula’s mother put the plate of food in front of her, Fever said, ‘He kaay ae?’
‘Oh, she can speak!’ exclaimed Jula’s mum, delighted. She said, ‘Ha bhat ani he varen. Te kalvun kha.’ (It’s rice and dal, mix them up and eat.)
‘Can I have a knife and fork?’ Fever asked, when I translated.
‘Amhi kaatetsamtse vaaprit nai, hataanich jevto,’ said Jula’s mum, convinced that this little blonde girl could speak Marathi.
When I told Fever that they did not use knives and forks, she won my admiration by dipping her hand without hesitation into the rice. Jula’s mother was equally captivated.
‘Such a sweet little thing,’ she said. ‘Just look at those eyes. Like the brahmin’s wife. Big soulful lamps. Don’t forget to invite me to your wedding!’ And she laughed until she started coughing, cough, cough, cough, fanning the smoke away from in front of her face, her bangles jangling.
When we left she said to me, ‘Bhalu, don’t get that child into mischief. Something is troubling her. You can see it in her eyes.’
I knew exactly what she meant, only it had nothing to do with eyes like the brahmin’s wife. A lot of people in the hills had grey-green eyes, it was a thing peculiar to that region. It was nothing to do with eyes. I already knew what the trouble was.
Fever wanted to go fishing. I knew the good spots and where the biggest fish, the singda, mund and kolus were. Ben had shown me. Fever needed a rod, and I wanted a new one, so Ben took us to see his father.
Ben’s dad was much more exciting than mine. He was a man as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, with bright blue eyes, who had once been a wrestler and still had a tremendous physique. He kept himself fit by whirling Indian clubs on the verandah of their house, and called himself a pahalvan. He put his strength down to the fact that he was part English, though by what distant derivation one was not sure. Occasionally, when he was drunk, he would sing ‘God Save the Queen’, which he said still sounded odd to him, because he had got so used to God saving the King.
Ben’s dad did a lot of fishing for the frying pan. His wife made a catfish curry to a recipe which she said only Anglo-Indians knew.
‘Come, sit, sit, all of y’all. Have something . . . Ben? Where’s that boy gone? Ben, boil some water, put the pot.’
‘Already done it,’ Ben said.
She gave us tea sweetened with jaggery, which was hard brown bittersweet rocks of raw sugar. We watched Ben’s dad trim the rods from stems of bamboo, about six feet long.
