The Death of Mr Love, page 13
Yelliya grew more and more excited. ‘Babu, jaanvar dekhenge jaroor? Pukka?’
‘Arré yaar,’ said Babu, who enjoyed jibing at the cook’s superior Bombay airs, ‘yeh tere ghar ke log thodi hain. Aate jaate hain. Is hi liye to jungli kehlate hain. Timetable thodi rakte hain!’
‘What are you laughing at?’ Fever whispered.
So I told her.
‘Yelliya asked, “Babu, will we definitely see animals? Pukka?” and Babu said, “Arré yaar, these are not members of your household. They come and they go. Why else are they called jungli? They hardly keep to timetables.” ’
So we watched, and in the headlights saw a pangolin, large monkeys crashing about, several hares and a giant-squirrel leaping through a tamarind tree.
When the jeep stopped, we walked for a mile or more in darkness on a path that wove through tall grasses shining blonde in the light of our torches. Eventually we came to a place where Babu had made a hide out of dry thorn branches, near the lake where the animals came to drink.
‘Be very quiet,’ my father warned us. Perhaps an hour went by. I began to get hungry. My tummy rumbled.
‘What was that?’ whispered Captain Sahib. Fever had a fit of giggles that would not stop.
It was almost dawn, and the first smears of light appeared above the hills of beyond and a day.
Babu and my father decided to take their shotguns and go in search of jungle fowl. Fever and I didn’t want to remain with Yelliya, so we went for a walk.
Even though it was so early the heat had already begun. The grasses were brittle. The forest trees were dusty, but it was cool in their shade. In a clearing we found some mahua trees, their trunks scarred where people had cut them to gather the intoxicating sap.
‘If we stay still, might we see a bear?’
Maya had said that bears and wild boar often came to lick the mahua wounds. So we climbed into a nearby tree and waited. The forest was very still, all browns and ochres and yellows.
‘Bhalu, there’s someone else here.’
I could see nothing, in the mosaic of sunlight and leaf.
‘There!’
In a patch of deep shade, by the mahua tree, was a man. Was there? The shadow pattern shifted and he was gone.
There were people in the hills whom even the villagers knew little about. Dark men who wore next to nothing and carried bows. Dhondu told me they were called Kathodis.
‘You want to watch out. They’re masters of magic.’
We met my father and Babu coming back through the woods with their guns and a jungle fowl for the pot. We fell in behind them and pretended that we too had guns, and took pot-shots at anything that moved. The path we were on led through a clearing, a place where lightning had felled a large tree and opened up a gap in the forest canopy. It was a place where you would often see unusual butterflies. We were almost across when Babu, who was leading, stopped so suddenly that my father almost collided with him. He held up his hand in that hunter’s gesture which means, ‘Hush, be quiet and still,’ and, very slowly, motioned with his chin. There! In the trees at the edge of the forest, a man was standing watching us. He was dark, darker than the villagers, and appeared to be naked. For a few seconds we stared at him and he at us, then, to my surprise, my father took a pace forward with his hands respectfully folded, and called out a greeting in Marathi. The man replied, also in Marathi, and stepped forward out of the forest. I got a good look at him. He wore nothing but a small pouch. In his hand was a bow, and strung from his waistband, a dead lal-chuha, a squirrel rat. He and Babu began a conversation, too rapid to follow, but from the man’s arm waving, and the cunning twisting-turning motions of his hand, he seemed to be telling us where the game in the forest had got to. I grinned and aimed my airy shotgun at him. My father angrily struck down its invisible barrel.
‘He’s young, he has no sense,’ my father said and the man laughed and made some sort of admonishing gesture. My father gave him the bird we had shot and we went home empty-handed.
My father was enthusiastic about the cattle. He said their warm reek reminded him of his boyhood in Kumharawa, where he used to milk the cow. He talked of starting a dairy, and suggested that we could give Jula a full-time job. Maya vetoed this idea. She would have done it anyway, I can see that now, but the immediate cause was rude Mr Daruwalla, our tutor, an angular young man in a pale lemon suit who, as he taught, would stand at the window, handkerchief to his nose, staring with distaste at the dusty country surroundings.
Fever loathed lessons. A lot of the time we did sums. We also read history, but unlike me she didn’t study Akbar and Aurangzeb and Shivaji. Instead he’d ask her, ‘What happened in 1066? Who was the last Plantagenet?’
If Jula happened to be around during our lessons he would make faces at the window, or throw pebbles at it and run away. Mr Daruwalla would fling the shutters wide and yell, ‘You ignorant little boy. Go away!’
He taught us literature too. He was reading Macbeth and Fever, who claimed to follow barely one word in three, was bored. One day Jula came looking for us and found Maya and Sybil at the back of the room, listening. Mr Daruwalla didn’t dare shout at Jula with them there, so he said he could wait.
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Daruwalla declaimed sonorously, giving each word its full weight in the line. I fidgeted and nudged Jula. But he was lost, caught up in a kind of rapture.
When the hurly-burly’s done
When the battle’s lost and won
That will be e’er the set of sun . . .
When he finished, Jula clapped loudly.
‘Oh my, thank you!’ said Daruwalla, with heavy sarcasm.
But Maya asked Jula if he had really enjoyed the speech.
He said, ‘I didn’t understand a thing, but I liked the sound.’ He mimed slapping a dholak. ‘It was like drums.’
It was after this that my father proposed Jula for the job with our buffalos and Maya said no. She announced that Jula must go to school.
‘School’s not for the likes of us,’ Dhondu said, when this was put to him. ‘He has to work, as I did.’
But Maya said that a school would be made in the village. She would find a teacher to begin classes. It would be free to all village children who wished to go.
She opened a ledger and wrote in it,
I. Jula.
Fever came to me looking upset. ‘Something bad has happened, I don’t know what.’ A phone call had come from Bombay for Sybil. She took it in Maya’s writing room and came out looking like a ghost. Maya instantly ran to her. ‘What is it? What is it, darling?’ They went back into the room. Fever applied her ear to the door. She told me, ‘I didn’t hear much. Something about “letters” and “shaitan”. I don’t know what it means.’ She thought a moment. ‘Could we ask your mother?’
‘She’d never tell us. We’re just children. We’re not supposed to know anything.’
‘It’s horrible being just a child!’ said Fever. Then, in that oddly precocious way of hers, ‘I wish she’d pull herself together.’
‘Shaitan means devil,’ I said. ‘A demon. Satan.’
She looked at me. ‘Bhalu, you know what Jula said about the temple on the hill? Getting wishes granted? I want to go there.’
‘Well, if you’re not afraid of ghosts.’
‘Of course not,’ she said, full of scorn. ‘Are you?’
‘Never,’ I lied. ‘But there’s no point, yet. It has to be at night, when there’s thunder and lightning.’
The path up the side of Bicchauda wound through bleached grasses and thickets of scrub. Up and up it went, skirting the edge of a sheer basalt drop that, when the rains came, would be slick with water, with ferns growing in every crevice. Far away across the lake, the peak of Duke’s Nose shimmered in the heat.
At last, in a clearing near the top of the mountain, we came upon a tiny whitewashed shrine. It was no bigger than a tea-chest and stood open. A garland of withered marigolds hung across its opening. We bent down and peered in. Mad eyes glared back at us. A flat red stone that stood upright in the earth with wide staring eyes, done in silver leaf, black dots for pupils. Nearby a tall stone rose out of the ground, daubed with vermilion. Around it were more flowers. We had seen other such stones deep in the forest, touched with red powder or garlanded with flowers. Babu said they were worshipped by the Kathodis. ‘That wild man you saw, Bhalu, he’s the master of the forest.’ The hill tribes didn’t have proper gods, they worshipped evil things, things that could harm them, hoping they would go away. So their gods were nag-devta, haiza-devta, chechak-devta: Lord Cobra, Lord Cholera, Lord Small-pox.
The shrine was different. It belonged to Jaakmata. That was her village name. The townsfolk called her Kali, or just Ma.
‘We’ll have to come back at night,’ Fever said.
‘What about the evil spirits?’
‘I’m not afraid of them. They’re just stories, they’re not true.’
We didn’t go back that year. Not in thunder nor in rain. What I chiefly remember of that bright blue day is not the ferocious heat nor the glorious view, it is the small things: the buzzing of insects in grass, dry rustle of leaves, shimmer of heat above the slopes. Above all, the deep, pure, clear silence. The peace.
ROSIE (AMBONA HILLS, MAY–JUNE 1960)
Those three monsoons we spent in Ambona blur in my memory into one long idyll, a happiness-trap. I was growing tall and strong with all the exercise. I could ride a bike up a steep track, climb tall trees. The forest knew me. By the time they returned, that last year, 1960, I felt that I, along with the Kathodi, was its master.
Sybil, Phoebe, Rosie. No more Mr Daruwalla. Phoebe was taller, more grown up too, though it’s hard to tell when you are only ten. She no longer wore those old-fashioned dresses.
When we were alone, Fever took off her glasses. She seemed more like a child without them. She said, ‘Bhalu, something very bad is happening.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s why we come here. She gets miserable. She cries a lot and quarrels with my dad. Then he gets angry and walks out looking grim. Rosie says the servants snigger about her. I can’t bear it. I don’t know if she’ll ever get better.’ She looked away, then said, ‘I hate Rosie sometimes. She seems to take such pleasure.’
‘I hate her too,’ I said. ‘Because she makes you unhappy.’
‘Bhalu,’ said Fever, with real purpose, ‘I need to see them. The ghosts. Let’s go and find Jula.’
Jula was at the village school during the day, learning to read and write and cowherding before and after lessons. I would still join him when I got back from my school in Ambona. Throw my satchel down, tear off my shirt and run, clad only in shorts, out into the rain.
I said, ‘She wants to go to the temple.’
‘What? Now?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Fever. ‘At night. When there’s a storm.’
‘Are you mad?’
‘No. Do the spirits really grant wishes?’
Jula said, ‘Are you serious?’ I thought at first he was teasing her, but he said, ‘If you are, I’ll take you to someone who knows.’
Following Jula, we set off up Bicchauda mountain. The path led across the familiar cow-grazing land, between karvanda bushes, round tall stands of feathery bamboo, but Jula took a fork, a faint line of beaten-down grasses, that headed into the forest. It climbed up over rock ledges and roots that jutted like steps from the hillside. Fever was soon some way behind. Even I found it hard going. The path ran into a thicket and stopped. Jula, ahead of us, had disappeared. Then we heard his whistle, and saw his head and shoulders emerge from a gap under a lantana bush. It was a track that looked as if it had been made by deer, a low tunnel through the undergrowth. Thorns nipped at us and branches pulled at our hair, but we crawled through into a clearing I’d never seen before. All around us birds began calling in alarm, tur-r-r-rkutur-kotur-kotur and green wings flashed in the sunlight. Another tunnel led away through more thorns before broadening so we could walk upright. There beneath our feet again was the faint animal trail. It soon began a steep descent, which ended at a dry stream bed. On the far side the forest was darker. The faint track began again, leaping up the hill at an impossible angle, lost in the gloom of trees.
‘Where are we?’ I asked Jula.
‘We have crossed onto Dagala mountain,’ he said. ‘We have to go up and follow the west ridge.’
Again we began to climb, the trail leading upwards through thickets of karvanda and other trees, whose names I did not know. Around one, covered in dense panicles of yellow blossom, a flock of rosy finches was whirling, diving into the flower pads. It was a wilder forest than Bicchauda’s. The trees were taller, their roots somehow gripping the precipitous ground. Dead creeper stems trailed from their branches. The forest floor was dark, but to our right we began to catch bright bursts of light through the leaves.
‘No one from our village comes here,’ said Jula, in a whisper. ‘Not to this part of the forest. Not even the woodcutters.’
‘Why not?’ asked Fever, also in a whisper. It didn’t seem right to talk out loud.
‘They say it belongs to the evil spirits.’
‘Then why do you come?’ breathed Fever.
‘I’ve only come here once. I was chasing that wretch Pandri. I lost her down below somewhere. On the other side.’ He waved his arm. ‘I came climbing up . . .’
It did not seem possible that such a place could be the home of anything evil.
‘What’s that?’
Hubbub of bees. Small dark shapes flitting round us. Jula said, ‘It’s a honey buzzard. After their comb.’
We looked up, but Jula said, ‘They’re down there.’
For the first time I realised that we were on the edge of a cliff. The trees below us were clinging to an almost sheer drop. The bees were a dark cloud fifty feet down. On a branch nearby sat their nemesis, a dark hawk-like shape, patiently waiting.
I stopped, worried about Phoebe. Suppose she fell. But she was following gamely. Jula was out of sight ahead. I found a place where an overhanging branch gave a grip and signalled that she should go in front. When she squeezed past our faces came close. She kissed me on the lips and said, ‘I love you, Bhalu.’
We caught up with Jula a hundred yards later. He pointed. On a branch swaying out over hundreds of feet of air, a slender green snake with a pointy-tipped nose was lying asleep among the leaves.
‘There’s nothing like this on Bicchauda.’
‘Oh, there is,’ said Jula. ‘On Bicchauda too, on the far side, away from the lake and the road. But he lives here, not there.’
‘Who lives here?’
‘Your Kathodi magic-man jaadugar purush.’
The path heaved itself up over a ledge into a region where trees were thickly massed, with deep shadows underneath. Where a tree had fallen the light was so bright as to be momentarily blinding. We passed a gap where a coral tree, leafless at this season, bore at its branch-tips bursts of orange flowers, around which birds were clustering. Nearby was a shelter, it could not be called a hut, woven from canes and leaves. Inside, a cooking pot lay near a small ring of blackened stones filled with still-warm ashes. He had been here, but the jaadugar purush was not at home.
Jula said, ‘Well, Fever, this is your answer.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘He was here. He heard us coming and left. He doesn’t want you going to the shrine at night.’
‘We have to wait till there’s lightning.’
‘Are you mad?’
‘Bhalu, will you be my friend for ever?’
‘Yes, I will,’ I said, feeling a kind of terror creep into me. ‘But aren’t you scared?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I am. But I will do this. We have to wait for the thunder.’
We were sitting up in our beds, an arm’s length from one another. I was reading.
‘Why don’t you get a book?’ I said.
‘Read me yours.’
So I went back to the beginning. My book was Puck of Pook’s Hill. I got to the bit where Puck has finished telling the children the story of Weland, who became Wayland Smith. Now he’s ready to leave. He tells them: ‘I promised you that you shall see What you shall see, and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year . . .’
‘Will you be here when we come again?’ the children ask.
‘Surely. Sure-ly,’ says Puck. ‘I’ve been here some time already. One minute first, please.’ And he gives them each three leaves – one of Oak, one of Ash, and one of Thorn.
‘If only we had a friend like Puck,’ said Fever. ‘If we were in England we could conjure him up with oak and ash and thorn.’
Over the next few days we tried with mango, karvanda and lime; with sal, mahua and palasa; mogra, purple balsam and jasmine.
On the night it happened, we went to bed as usual. I woke with a start in pitch darkness. A small hand was shaking me.
‘Bhalu. Listen.’
‘Fever? What is it?’
‘Shh, just listen.’
Our own breathing. The beating of my heart. Then I heard it, the faintest growl. Like a panther outside the window.
‘Look over there.’
From our window the sky to the west was lit up by flickerings that momentarily showed the outline of the hills. As we watched, light flared in the direction of Duke’s Nose and a slim twist of energy hurled itself at the dark earth.
A sighing in the trees outside, the first touch of coolness.
‘One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five . . . there!’
Again the low grumble, like a rumbling belly, a hungry panther.
‘It’s five miles away. We must hurry.’
‘What’s the time? You don’t really want . . . ?’
