The Death of Mr Love, page 12
Curiously, Nafísa constantly drew attention to this failing. She told Qasim that she wanted to learn to ride. She would go to war at his side like Rani Laxmibai. Of course neither she nor he could have known that there would be no more cavalry charges. The next battle in which anyone from Kumharawa would fight was at Ypres.
Nafísa, ey, Nafísa Jaan
khaati hai supari-paan,
chooma chaata Qasim Khan
choos nikaala uska maan
zameen pe thooki uski jaan
Bhalu, shall we translate for our guests?
Nafísa, hey, Nafísa Jaan
loves to eat supari-paan,
licks and kisses Qasim Khan
sucked out all his royal pride
spat his life out by the roadside
So sang the street urchins of 1896 (and yes, you children can chant it too, I will teach you later). The street children made this rhyme because when Qasim Khan ordered that Nafísa Jaan be given riding lessons, there was something he did not know. She had fallen in love with one of his cavalry officers. More than this, she was expecting the man’s child.
Thus, some months passed and there came a point when Nafísa could no longer disguise the fact that she was going to have a child. She pleaded that she was too unwell to leave her house. The Raja wished to send his own hakim to her, but she refused. But she could not keep her news totally secret. Inevitably, tongues wagged.
When the Raja discovered Nafísa’s affair, he drank himself into a nasha, a chaos of jealous rage . . . children! Listen to the thunder in the sky above us. Hear the wind dashing rain against the house as if it wanted to wash it away. That was what the anger of the Raja was like. So, to complete the metaphor, the lightning struck. No one in Kumharawa ever learned the fate of the officer, and I too have no idea. He simply vanished. But everyone knew, or thought they knew, what had happened to Nafísa.
Nafísa Jaan, they said, heavily pregnant, her child due any day, had been obliged to leave her house and all her possessions and flee Kumharawa on foot. She had gone back, one said, to her old haunts in Lucknow. No, said another, she had been sighted in Delhi. A third said that she had travelled to Calcutta and married a rich Englishman. None of these stories were true. Nafísa Jaan never left Kumharawa.
It was night time when Nafísa’s servant warned her that men were coming for her. Nafísa had no time to collect anything, let alone her precious belongings. She left her house and ran. She ran blindly through the darkness. Behind her, faintly, she could hear the pursuit. She ran till the breath was like sandpaper in her lungs and the blood was pounding in her veins. She was carrying a child in her womb, don’t forget. She ran through the back lanes of Kumharawa until she came to the Shiva temple that stands opposite our house. She entered the temple and crouched behind the effigy. That is where they found her. They took her back to the palace and led her to the Raja, who struck her on the face and told her that she was going to die.
[My mother’s voice at this point faltered, and we all shouted at her to continue. She looked at Sybil. ‘Go on,’ said Sybil, ‘don’t stop now.’ So Maya carried on.]
Nafísa said, ‘Let my baby be born. Then kill me. But don’t kill my innocent child.’
He said, ‘Your baby’s death is not my concern.’
She knew then that there was no hope, and she said scornfully, ‘It’s not unborn children, but men like you who deserve to die!’
They took her down to the cellars under the palace. Down they took her, down, and down again, into the lowest basement, where the walls are supported by brick arches. In this deep dark place, they stood her in a niche. There were iron rings set in the wall and one of them unwound his turban and used it to bind her wrists to these rings.
Nafísa struggled and screamed, ‘If you do this, I promise you, there will be retribution!’
But he stuffed the loose end of the turban into her mouth to muffle her screams. Then other men came with bricks and trowels and baskets of wet cement, and across the niche they began to raise a wall of bricks. Layer upon layer, higher and higher it rose, past her knees, her waist, her shoulders, her neck, until only a pair of eyes could be seen, pleading, through the vanishing gap and . . . oh my goodness, just look how dark it’s become, it must be time for supper.
This was how my mother told the ‘sweet’ story of Nafísa Jaan.
‘Bullshit!’ said my friend Dost, when I told him the story many years later, in a Dongri alley darkened by blackout (the lightest thing in the street was the snowy white of his kameez). ‘Your ma lifted the story of Anarkali from Mughal-e-Azam!’
‘No, you’re wrong,’ I replied. ‘I remember her telling that story before Mughal-e-Azam came out.’
I can remember everything about that evening in Ambona, the non-stop growl of rain, the glow of lamps in the house, the dark afternoon slipping gradually towards night. I remember that when my mother finished her story her friend Sybil was in tears. And that when Maya thought other people had stopped listening, she sang quietly to herself.
hué mar keh ham jo ruswa hué kyun na-ghar-e-dariya
na kabhi janaaza uthaata na kahin mazaar hota.
Since I was to die disgraced, why did no river drown me?
Then I’d have had no funeral, and no tomb built around me?
KARVANDA (AMBONA, APRIL–MAY 1959)
A sun so hot it burned the blue out of the sky. The hills crouched like beasts around the lake, reaching rocky tongues to the water. In our garden, the guava trees were coated with dust. Captain Sahib would no longer allow his roses to be watered during the day. He made Dhondu wait till the evening cowdust-hour before laying the hose to their roots. In Bicchauda’s forest bloodsucker lizards clung to mango trunks, mouths agape, but the stifling air resisted attempts to breathe it. At this season, sixteen centuries ago, the poet Kalidas saw a cobra, maddened by heat, slide for shade under a peacock’s tail.
Something happened, far away. A brief éclat, so faint, it might have been a coconut falling on the other side of the mountains; so distant that we heard only its echo, half-caught in the heat of a drowsy afternoon. A tremor ran through the rocks. Light shook. A pulse of nothingness split the world and made a hole in time. Then everything was as before, and everything had changed. It was 1959, the year Fever learned to herd cows, I stopped going to school, Jula won himself an education and we met the wild man of the hills. All these things happened within a few weeks, at the very hottest time of the year, the furnace weeks before the monsoon.
At the beginning of May my mother announced unexpectedly that Sybil and Fever were coming to stay with us again. They had returned some months earlier from their trip to England. Sybil had been feeling much better, my mother said, but the clammy Bombay weather had made her ill again.
‘Phoebe will miss school so I have found her a tutor. Someone who will come here to teach her.’
‘To our house?’
‘Yes.’ Then she added something really exciting. ‘I’ve arranged for you to be taught here as well. Just for the rest of this term.’
As before, we all went to the station to collect them. Fever had grown taller, and her floaty dress now barely reached her knees.
‘What was England like?’ I asked, when we were alone. Apart from what Ben’s dad had told me, I knew it only through books: Enid Blyton mostly, her stories were everywhere. We had them all, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Adventure series, the Mysteries that all began with R (Ring O’ Bells, Rilloby Fair, Rat-a-tat). I also knew the Jeeves books, and Sherlock Holmes. Maya had made me read David Copperfield and Jane Eyre – ‘If Jane could practise her Hindi verbs then so can you’ – and everything of Kipling’s. ‘One can forgive Kipling for being an imperialist,’ she told me, ‘because he loved India.’ I admired, but did not quite understand Stalky & Co. and loved The Jungle Book, but my favourite was Puck of Pook’s Hill, about a faraway magical place called Sussex.
‘It was cold and Granny’s house smells of apples,’ said Fever. ‘But the weirdest thing was everyone else was English.’
‘What do you mean everyone else?’
‘Well, I’m Indian,’ she said.
It had never occurred to me before that she was not ‘one of us’. Really, it was obvious that she had never been anything else.
Fever was restless. She mooched round the house and was rude to her ayah. She took my poster paints and made a picture of a fearful hag on the bedroom wall. Rosie was furious, and Sybil apologetic, but Maya insisted it be left.
‘I don’t know who it’s meant to be,’ she said, ‘but it glows. That child has talent.’
Sybil and Maya spent a lot of time with their heads together. They smoked incessantly. They would vanish into my mother’s writing room and sit there in a fug of smoke.
Fever told me, ‘Mummy isn’t really ill at all. She’s unhappy.’
One day Fever and I were in the garden. The window of Maya’s study was open and we caught bits of what they were saying, their voices alternating . . . me reassure you, this anguish you’re going through . . . often accuse myself of trying to filch sympathy which is not mine by right . . . no no, if one has a true heart, one does not stop loving people . . . unimaginable torture for those directly involved . . . you must not worry, nothing will happen . . . works itself into nausea at least once a day . . . only draws bad situations towards you . . . Maya, such terror . . . not a religious person but if prayers come to your lips say them with complete concentration and belief that you are safe . . .
Fever whispered, ‘Let’s go.’ She seemed very upset. I could not understand why.
We went in search of Jula. The village cows and buffalos were spread out on a spur of Bicchauda, eating the ajwain that perfumes the hillsides like a double-strength oregano.
‘Won’t have to walk so far when the rains come,’ he said. We spent the day with him, chasing the cow that liked wandering.
‘Hey, Pandri! Hamba!’
‘Teach me how to do it.’
So he taught her the calls. ‘Hamba. Come here! Haik! go! Haalya! turn round! Trrru or hurroo! to make them run.’
‘Can we help you take them home?’
‘Sure. Then you can come to my house. Will you come? Ma’ll be so pleased. She’s sure to make poli. Have you tasted poli, Fever?’
She turned to me and asked, ‘Can we go, please?’
I said, ‘We can do anything we like.’
So Fever ran around practising cowherding.
‘Do you know all their names?’
‘Of course.’
‘What are they then?’
‘Okay, this one is Gaulan, she’s sweet. The white one is Pandri. She likes wandering off. You have to keep an eye on her. This one,’ (a dark cow with a white blaze on her brow) ‘is Chandri, ’cos she has the mark of the moon.’
‘Where does she go to?’
‘Well she likes shade, so she goes up to the trees. But she has gone miles sometimes – Bicchauda, Dagala, Dinkara.’
‘Dinkara, where’s that?’
‘As far as you can go in a day.’ He pointed to a cone shaped peak that rose blue in the haze above the far slope of Dagala.
‘What about the one behind it?’
‘That? It has no name. It’s a hill of beyond.’
She pointed to the palest, most distant line of mountains, a faint blue graph barely distinguishable from the sky. ‘What about those?’
‘Those?’ said Jula. ‘I don’t know. I guess they are the hills of beyond and a day.’
Rosie the ayah, always on the look-out for new ways to cause trouble for us, told Maya that we had been eating meals at Jula’s house.
My mother said, ‘I’m happy about you going to Jula’s house, but they can’t afford to be feeding you.’
Jula had three younger brothers and sisters. They ran around naked, with strings round their waists, but they were better fed than some of the village children, whose swollen bellies made them look like cooking pots on stick legs.
‘I usually just have milk,’ I told her.
A few days later there was a man’s voice outside our house.
‘Haik! Trrooo!’
‘. . . Grandfather will be pleased,’ Maya was saying. ‘His wayward daughter-in-law sees sense at last.’ We were gathered in the shed next to the chickens, watching four large buffalos chew through a mound of green fodder.
‘He was adamant, when they came to stay with us in Bombay. I did my best to make them comfortable, but nothing was right. The fruit was pulpy, vegetables from the bazaar lacked taste.’ She did a fine imitation of my grandfather’s growl. ‘ “Call this an aubergine? You should see mine at home . . . Call this a tomato? Ours are so much juicier.” Grandmother was nodding like a doll. Grandfather said he could not allow us to feed the children this inferior stuff a moment longer. He said there was nothing for it, he’d have to send us baskets from their garden. We gave them Alfonso mangoes from Crawford Market. Grandmother made a face and swore the wild tukhmi mangoes in Kumharawa had more flavour. “We’ll send you mangoes from home.” But the cow was the final straw.’
‘Oh please tell!’ said Sybil, in stitches of laughter. The first time I had seen her laugh since her illness. It suited her. She used to be such a lovely, happy lady before she got sick.
‘Grandfather said “These milkmen are wretches.” He had a row with the doodhwalla. Asked him did he just water the milk or also urinate in it? The poor man was most offended, although of course he was watering the milk. So Grandfather told us, “You must keep your own cow.” I pointed out that living in a flat, we had nowhere to keep one. “What nonsense! There’s a patch of grass below. You can tether it there.” “But Grandfather, that’s the lawn.” Before they left he told me, “These Bombay cows are wretched things. I’ll send you a cow from Kumharawa”.’
A woman from the village came to milk the buffalos and Maya explained why she had bought them. She had decided to distribute milk to children in nearby villages. She delivered it herself, walking through the countryside from village to village, followed by two men carrying a huge churn on a pole. Sybil accompanied her on these expeditions and sometimes Phoebe and I would tag along too. The children would run to meet us, bringing tin cups and little pots. When they drank, milk ran down their chins.
The weather was unbearably hot. Something of the mugginess of the coast seemed to have crawled up the ghats. Fever said, ‘It’s so different. Last year it was green. Now it’s all dry.’
‘That’s because you came after the rains had started.’
Fever had never witnessed the change of season, the miracle that happens when the drought finally breaks.
‘Listen children, I’ll tell you how it will be.
‘Murderous as it is now, it will get hotter. And hotter. When it seems that no living thing, human, animal or plant, can bear it any more, the first clouds will appear in the West.
‘Beyond the hills, the clouds will mass like an army of chariots. The sun will falter. As the first dark outriders sweep across its face, halfway up the slopes of Bicchauda, trees will glow like jewels in a strange greenish light. Huge slow thunderclaps will ride across the valleys. Hoofbeats of approaching rain.
‘The first heavy drop will hit the earth. Another drop. Another. Stamping the dust with leopard spots. The earth will sigh in relief, exhaling a strong mineral-and-herb-scented breath. The hills will vanish behind curtains of rain. Above the drumming of rain, the world will come alive with the sound of water, trickling, gurgling, pouring. Where the cracked earth lies in hollows, there will be puddles. Within hours, they will be ponds, then pools in a muddy torrent. Jula, caught on his mountain slope, will put on his irrla and caper. In Karvanda his ma and the other villagers will come out of their houses and open their arms to the pelting clouds.
‘ “May you never be parted from the lightning.”
‘The hills will turn green in one night. There’ll be waterfalls. In less than a day the world we know will be gone. A six-inch high rainforest will cover the land, patrolled by red-and-black centipedes whose fangs can split shoe leather. Giant black butterflies with yellow hind wings will fly on the hill slopes.
‘For two weeks, the streams will run brown as Indian Railways tea, then, as if at a prearranged signal, they’ll clear and we’ll see weed in the current, and tiny fish, where they come from no one knows. Crabs, black ones and yellow ones, will appear in the fields, where the women plant paddy. Halfway up Dagala mountain, there are round holes in the rock. The hill-people use them to brew liquor. They do it in March, pour in water and flowers of the mahua tree and other things, and then seal up the rocky jars with clay and straw and cowdung. When the rains come, the holes that aren’t sealed will become water gardens, complete with plants and the little darting fry. Just wait, you’ll see.’
This is how Maya described the onset of the monsoon.
But the rains had not yet come.
Those last baking weeks were the best time to see (and shoot) animals, because only a few waterholes still remained.
‘Will you take us when you go hunting, Captain Sahib?’
She asked the question with that charming tilt of her head, to which my father, who showed scant interest in his own children, at once succumbed. So an expedition was planned. My father and Babu were going to a waterhole, a remnant of the shrunken lake, after wild boar.
We went to bed early. When we were woken, after midnight, the heat had subsided by a few degrees. It felt almost cool and we were wrapped up in the back of the jeep. Our cook, Yelliya, sat beside us, with a primus stove and a box of foodstuffs. He would make tea through the night and breakfast at dawn.
Babu drove on rough tracks through the forest, our headlights picking out black trees, leaves overhanging, branches sweeping over us so we had to duck, the jeep bouncing on ruts and around stones, raising clouds of that thick sweet red dust. For every turn, he had a new story. One track we passed led off to a small lake, extremely deep. The villagers would not go there because it was supposed to be haunted, so the fish had grown huge. You could shine a torch into the water and up they would come, monstrous shapes spiralling out of the depths. Babu said the best way to get one was to shoot it.
