The Death of Mr Love, page 14
‘Half-past two. And yes I do. So get dressed. Quietly. Mustn’t wake the old hag.’
It was a stifling night. We pulled on our thin dressing gowns and tiptoed past the room where Rosie slept. She lay on her bed, her old worn-out form covered by a thin sheet, grey hair spread out on the pillow. Please let her not wake. That time we failed to find the jaadugar purush, it had been dark when we got home. Maya and Sybil were waiting for us in a state of something like panic. They asked where we’d been, and if we had seen anyone on the mountain. ‘You mustn’t go out alone any more,’ Sybil told Phoebe. Maya said that from now on Rosie must keep an eye on us, wherever we went.
It was not yet raining, but the moon was hidden by low clouds and the darkness was thick. Our path up Bicchauda was a faint line, the trees on either side, threatening shapes. We had a torch, but its beam only made the world beyond seem blacker. Lightning lit up the sky again, over Duke’s Nose. Grotesque shadows leapt at our feet and fled up the hillside. We were frightened, but neither of us would admit it. We had protection – a string of dry red chillies from which dangled a withered lime. It came from the kitchen doorway, where Yelliya the cook had hung it to repel evil spirits. Fever was wearing Rosie’s silver locket. If you pressed a catch, it flew open to reveal a calm, madonna-like portrait. ‘Saint Rodenda,’ Fever said. ‘Rosie says it protects against the snares of the devil.’
‘The devil?’ I had seen his picture, horned and cloven-hoofed, with huge bat’s wings. It was unnerving to think of what might be awaiting us at the top.
‘Do you believe in the devil?’
‘No! You don’t have to, if you’re a Hindu.’ But I believed in rakshasas. Maybe it came to the same thing.
‘Mummy believes in the devil,’ said Fever. ‘I heard her say that she never knew what the devil was until now.’
The path wound up a steep slope dotted with karvanda and dived into a tangle of woodland. Thick, dead creepers hung from the trees. Sal leaves waggled in the dark air.
‘Fever, don’t talk of devils.’
We had come to the edge of the basalt drop. Far below us, the lake lay like a sheet of hot ink. The moon emerged briefly from behind a cloud. The rock under our feet was glistening.
‘Watch out,’ I warned her. ‘It’s already rained here.’
As if in confirmation, a wind started up from the direction of Duke’s Nose, cool, with the scent of rain in it. Moments later came a big flash and the roar of an approaching downpour.
‘Here. Hold my hand. The rock is slippery.’
She reached out and grabbed, almost pulling me off-balance. By the time we got across, the rain had stopped. Fifty more yards and then, in front of us, there was the glade and the little shrine, its interior in shadow, and the standing stone. An uneasy moonlight was flowing across the place. I don’t know what I’d been expecting; drums maybe – we sometimes heard drumming high up on the hill, and saw a pinprick of fire – flames round which we imagined monstrous shapes dancing; slobgobbledy laughter; demons having a good time. But the glade was utterly deserted.
Fever said, sounding almost disappointed, ‘There’s nothing here.’
I bent down and peered into the shrine. Lightning flashed again and eyes jumped out of the darkness.
‘Bhalu, there is something!’
‘Don’t be scared. It’s only a stone.’
But she was staring back the way we’d come.
‘Quick! Hide!’ She snatched at my arm, started running towards the nearest trees. I stood still. Anything could be in the forest.
‘Bhalu!’ she screamed.
Just entering the glade – a pale figure caught in the lightning glare – it seemed to hang there, white and shining.
Then I ran too. Bicchauda erupted with noise. Boom crash of lightning. Chittering like many tiny, sharp-toothed voices. Thorns clawing my face, arms. Where was she? The rain began again, hard as before. Another huge flash. I saw her crouched at the foot of a big tree. She was looking at me, saying something, but whatever it was, was drowned by the thunderclap right overhead.
I shouted, ‘We can’t stay here.’
She stared at me. I tried to pull her up. Shouted again, ‘We’ve got to go home.’
She shook her head. ‘No! No! There’s a thing out there!’
There came a thin shriek, choked off suddenly. Then a scream that seemed to hang on the wind.
A thick root, slick with rain, lit up by lightning flashes: this became our world. After that second scream, there were only the sounds of the storm. The root formed a kind of cave in which we huddled, pressing our backs to the tree trunk as though it were an animal and could warm us. Fever was shaking, though it was not cold. I put my arms around her and she hugged them tighter. She must have been exhausted. She laid her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes.
At some point while she slept the rain died away. The darks of the forest changed to greys. A faint pre-dawn light crawled through the trees. Menacing shapes resolved to karvanda bushes, a claw became a dipping mango branch. It seemed that we had run far into the wood, but dawn showed us the shrine no more than forty feet away. Beyond the clearing, across miles of empty air, sunlight was already touching the tops of hills across the lake.
We came slowly down Bicchauda mountain. Everything looked different in the morning light. The storm had washed the sky clean and blue as a mynah’s egg. From a high ridge, we saw the sun rise behind the hills of beyond and a day.
The valley below was still in shade. But all the lights in our house were on. There were people with lamps on the hillside. My father and the servants out looking for us. Hullabaloo too, inside the house. Sybil was lying on the sofa. My mother was sitting beside her. It was the only time I have ever seen her crying. Phoebe and I stood, guilty, scared, shocked to have caused all this.
‘Where did you go?’ yelled Maya. ‘You wicked children. How could you do this? We’ve been out of our minds.’
But Sybil came running to us. She hugged us both and kissed away our own tears. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she kept repeating and I wondered why she was thanking us.
A servant came in and said, ‘Madam, the ayah has not returned.’
It was several hours later, the sun was high, when they brought her in. Men from the village, carrying her. Walking behind them, a dark-skinned man wearing nothing but a loincloth. The Kathodi, jaadugar purush. What was that look he gave us as he went past?
The villagers said the Kathodis had found her, under a cliff on Bicchauda mountain. Maya translated for the benefit of Sybil and Sybil opened her mouth very wide and screamed. In that instant I knew what it was that I had seen up on top of the mountain. Rosie had followed us. She must have got up out of her bed and followed us, just as she was, in her old cotton nightdress. She had followed us up the mountain, alone in the darkness, in rain and lightning. I also knew then beyond any doubt that it had never been spite, or nastiness, with her. She really loved Phoebe. What else would have driven her up a dark, steep mountain in a storm? Poor woman. She must have been as terrified as we were. Had our shrieks unnerved her? Maybe she tried to run. She was old. She must have slipped. Slid . . . She was so much braver than we were.
Fever was inconsolable. She wept and wept. She said it was her fault. If she had not insisted . . . I didn’t want to tell her what I had overheard the villagers saying. They found her with her feet twisted back to front. Maybe she was a Haadal all the time.
The rest of that day remains in my memory as a bad, confused dream. The police came, a khaki-clad inspector and two constables from Ambona. Were they going to arrest us, we asked Maya. Of course not, she said. You were not to blame. For reasons which they would not explain, the police searched the entire house. They opened every drawer and cupboard and trunk. They insisted on searching my mother’s writing room and spent a long time in there.
When they left at last, Maya tried to comfort us.
‘Not your fault,’ she said. ‘An accident.’ But the hand stroking my hair shook and there was something in her voice. ‘It could have been you lying there.’
The coffin lay in our house, open for inspection. Rosie’s old face looked so peaceful. The undertaker’s skill had hidden the bruises, soothed away the hurt. The Catholic priest from Ambona came. Candles were lit.
Getting ready on the day of the funeral. My father was wearing an old suit he had bought in London during the war.
Fever, dressed in a dark dress and hat, began to cry again. She said, ‘I wanted to give back her locket. I should have put it in the coffin. It’s my fault.’
Maya had an idea. She said we should each give something we cherished. She found a square biscuit tin and had it washed and dried. We spread a cloth in the tin and Fever put in the locket. Ninu said that she would like to give Rosie her doll. I put in my catapult. ‘Something from each of us as well,’ said my mother. She and Sybil went into her writing room. When they came out the tin was sealed with sticky tape and tied up with string.
Phoebe’s father arrived from Bombay. James Killigrew. It was the first time I had ever seen him. He was a tall man, with bushy eyebrows. He seemed in a bad temper, greeted my parents shortly and to his wife said barely a word. He took Phoebe into Maya’s office and shut the door.
When she came out Fever was crying. She took off her glasses and wiped them on her blouse. ‘Daddy says I have to go to school in England.’
‘Why? You can stay here and go to school with Jula and me.’
‘I’ll always love you, Bhalu. Promise me that we’ll always love each other, no matter what?’
‘I love you too,’ I whispered.
‘For ever. We must love each other for ever, till we die. No matter what happens.’
It rained throughout the funeral. We buried Rosie in the cemetery in Ambona. I had never been in a Christian graveyard before. It was a scary place, green and shadowy, with its eyeless angels, people rotting under the ground, tombstones bearing the faded names of long dead English people. Tall trees cast a green gloom and dripped without stopping. The red earth was soaked, and water was flowing along the paths. Tall lilies sprouted from the graves, pink flowers on fleshy stems which, if snapped, smelt faintly of rain.
We stood under a cluster of umbrellas as the priest led prayers. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, it splashed into thick red water gathered at the bottom. Mr Killigrew and Sybil stood side by side but did not touch each other. Phoebe was on the other side of them. My mother stood next to Sybil, then came our family. I would have liked to be near Phoebe, but there was no chance.
At last it was done and the priest led his little procession away.
Phoebe and Sybil did not come back to our house. We took our farewells there at the cemetery gate. Fever and I shook hands, rather formally, while our mothers embraced. There was nothing more to say. Then her father piled them into his car, into which their suitcases had already been loaded. The last sight I had of her was a small figure, still in her hat, waving from the window of the car as it drove away, past cows grazing at the edge of the road, and turned the corner into Ambona bazaar.
My mother said, ‘We’ve forgotten the tin.’
She started back, but Rosie’s grave was covered with a two-foot high mound. Maya called to one of the gravediggers, and told him to scoop a hole. She placed the tin there and watched the man cover it with dark red Ambona soil.
She told me two days later that Sybil had telephoned to say goodbye. Killy had booked her and Phoebe on a ship to England. They sailed the same evening.
III PHOEBE
LUNACY (BRIGHTON/LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1998)
All week I had been coping with lunacy.
‘It’s insane,’ I said to Katy, ‘that there is a huge hole in the West Pier because some idiot drove a ship through the middle of it.’
Katy, who was driving me along the Brighton sea front, reached across and, good soul that she is, rested a comforting hand on my knee. ‘It’s something we’ve all got to go through.’
‘It’s mad that at the top of North Street there’s a shop selling dildos and crotchless panties, and at the bottom is a bloody great pleasure dome, an opium eater’s fantasy if I ever saw one.’
‘You mustn’t take it so hard,’ said Katy.
‘Piglet is crazy,’ I said. ‘He wants me to act in a play. Says I can wear a turban and robe and be some kind of spiritual adviser from the East.’
‘Well, you might enjoy it,’ Katy said. ‘You’re good at pretending to be spiritual.’
‘Piglet and his friends are mad.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Katy. ‘But he and I, and everyone else, are doing our best to cheer you up.’
Eleven o’clock Piglet. ‘Bugger me, lad,’ he said, ‘you look like something Henry the Eighth brought up after a dish of lampreys.’
‘I don’t feel up to Charlotte today.’
‘It’s natural that you should grieve,’ he said kindly.
The problem is not that I’m grieving, I wanted to say, it’s that I am unable to grieve. I am too angry. Angry with myself for not believing Maya when she said she was ill. Angry with her, because – anything to avoid unseemly emotion – she’d made quite sure I didn’t.
‘I will be all right,’ I said to Piglet. ‘Just takes a while.’
‘It’s no good sitting here moping. Come to our rehearsal, that’ll cheer you up. The play’s coming along nicely . . . By the way, don’t let me forget to take those.’ He waved at the box of moulding planes that still sat beside my desk.
‘What rehearsal?’
‘I wasn’t going to tell you till I’d finished it, I wanted it to be a surprise, but . . . well, you see, seeing as it’s Shakespeare who caused the whole problem in the first place, I decided to take the bull by the horns. Rewrite the bloody thing.’
‘Rewrite Richard III?’
‘Shakespeare’s hardly in a position to object.’
‘There is the small difficulty of writing like Shakespeare.’
‘Not a problem!’ he said. ‘The way I see it, Shakespeare wrote reams of stuff. Thirty-odd plays, poems galore. Lots of characters involved in all kinds of junketings. People and situations to meet every need. So, my plan is to lift bits and pieces from here and there. Should work perfectly well. Just have to change a few names.’
Everything was mad. The whole of Brighton was casually and charmingly raving. Its narrow bazaars – what else can the maze of lanes to the north of the Mughal Pavilion be called? – full of sibyls and seers; a man with a pink Mohican haircut fumbling a string of Tibetan prayer beads; shops selling Hindu scriptures interpreted by Rolls-Royce-owning gurus; posters offering Shaunee sun rituals, Ashanti drum lessons, Om shanti shanti shanti. Such a thirst for gnosis. People plundering each other’s cultural middens. Bric-à-brac paraded with magpie pride. And here in the middle of all this confusion was I, looking for a large birdcage, a palace among birdcages, for my mother’s bereaved bulbuls.
Khurram and Mumtaz had arrived in Sussex, delivered by Nina. She and Katy strongly disapproved of my plan to release them. It was not only environmentally unsound, they told me, but would be cruel to Khurram and Mumtaz. Imagine them flying off, they said, assuming they remembered how to fly, thrilled to be free, only to find that birdseed doesn’t grow on trees and English woods aren’t centrally-heated. What would they feed on? I consulted my shelves and found a Popular Handbook on Indian Birds (Hugh Whistler FRS, Gurney and Jackson, 3rd ed, 1941, twenty-one plates of which six coloured, 549pp) that had been published during the Raj.
‘Indians,’ it unhelpfully informed me, ‘frequently tame the bird and carry it about the bazaars, tied with a string to the finger or to a little crutched perch, which is often made of precious metals or jade; while there are few Europeans who do not recollect Eha’s immortal phrase anent the red patch in the seat of its trousers.’
Here was the answer then. I must tote Khurram and Mumtaz round on jewelled perches. Far better than freezing their little red butts off in the woods, their Indian instincts scrambled by a world which to them would seem quite senseless. As for Eha, whoever he had been, neither he nor his wisecracks had cracked immortality.
Maya died with her books and photograph albums still piled beside her bed, and her bulbuls calling in their cage. Just before the end her eyes opened and looked carefully at each one of us in turn, as if reading our faces, and then closed and did not open again. I remember the room being filled with the scent of nagchampa, cobra-jasmine, her favourite incense, and the sound of her breathing. I was dreading the moment when a gap between those breaths would grow into a long and lengthening silence, but when it came I felt nothing. Sitting with my sisters beside her body, talking in low voices until light faded, first in the room and then in the world outside, I could not find a tear. From time to time one of us would get up to press a kiss on her forehead, kisses that grew gradually cooler until, when it was time to say goodbye, my lips in the dark touched something waxy and cold, and still I was unmoved. I left the flat and walked to a local bookshop which stayed open late, because there was a title I wanted – about fruit, or fish or something else which I have now forgotten – and it seemed a good opportunity, since I was in the area, to go and get it. I made the journey south to Sussex dry-eyed. We arranged the funeral for the weekend and placed ads in The Times and Guardian. Katy phoned the British Embassy in Athens, to ask if they could somehow find the twins, I & I, who were trekking in Crete.
I wanted something to read at the service, so I began pulling books out of the shelves. My desk vanished under old volumes published in places like Varanasi and Tirukonamalai. I was looking for things that old Hindu texts, especially the Upanishads, or ‘forest teachings’, say about death, the soul’s journey in the afterlife and about karma, the subject on which Maya held such a peculiar and particular view. Eventually I found, shawled in dust, an old copy of the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (Trs Swami Madhavananda, comm. by Shankaracharya, 4th ed, 1965, 678pp): I marked a few verses relating to cremation and the afterlife, and sat chewing a pencil, trying to find words that would connect them to each other and to her life.
