The Death of Mr Love, page 39
She reached out across the gap and touched my arm.
‘Bhalu, will you give me twenty longs?’
FRANCES
She said, ‘I worked it out. I know where the notebook is. I realised when you rang me and said that Sybil had gone alone to Ambona . . . Do you remember that day, of Rosie’s funeral? The cemetery in Ambona? Well, there was a tin that was buried in the grave. I wanted to give Rosie’s locket back to her. We all put something in.’
‘It was buried,’ I said, ‘but not with the coffin. It was just placed under the earth and covered up.’
‘That’s where it is!’ she said. ‘Bhalu, that’s what they did with it. It was a place nobody was going to disturb. I bet Mummy thought she could get it later. Except that Daddy stepped in and suddenly we were on a ship heading for Aden. Bhalu, that’s why she came back to Ambona. To get it. And I am sure it didn’t come home with her. So unless your mother removed it, it is still there!’
‘Are you suggesting we dig up a grave?’
VT might have been renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, but its smells and sights had not changed. Last time I’d been here was when I travelled up to Ambona to see Jula. Now Phoebe, wearing dark glasses, hair pulled back under a scarf, stood beside me in the bustle of porters and fellow travellers. We were drinking tea, the real Indian Railways tea. That too, thank God, had not changed.
‘How do you find it? To be back in India?’ I was consumed with curiosity about her feelings and wanted to see everything through her eyes. I was excited that we were returning to Ambona together, but at the same time I was afraid that going back would threaten our old, precious, carefully-preserved memories.
A small gaggle of beggar children had gathered round us, attracted by the firangi lady. She opened her purse and solemnly gave each of them a coin. They smiled their thanks, then sent their brothers, sisters, cousins and friends to see us.
Phoebe said, ‘I know I shouldn’t give to the children. Isn’t that what everyone says? . . . Do you have any more coins?’
Don’t give to beggars. That was the standard wisdom. You may feel sorry for the children, but the money will only be taken off them. They work for grown-ups, criminal gangs, they get nothing for themselves. To give these children a chance, eradicate begging. But how likely was this, in a country where to give alms is a sacred duty, where the world’s poorest people uncomplainingly support a population of five million wandering ascetics? It was also a fact that thousands of homeless children worked desperately hard, scavenging rags and plastic, shining shoes and doing anything, including begging, that could buy them a meal. I knew with what shame I had sat in taxis determinedly refusing to see the pleading faces and tiny fingers at the window.
On the way to the train Phoebe’s charity faced a sterner test. A ragged man – he might have been drunk, drugged, or ill – lay on the platform, urinating through his clothes, the pool of his piss spreading away from him. Nobody was paying him any attention. Phoebe clutched my arm. We would have to step over the yellow stream. The man groaned and rolled over.
‘Bhalu, we must get help.’
‘There isn’t any. We’ll miss our train.’
‘There must be someone. You go and find someone. I’ll stay here with him.’
‘Phoebe,’ I said. ‘Nobody is going to help this guy. No doctor will come out for him.’
‘Then you wait here,’ she said, and was gone.
A few minutes later she returned with a small elderly gentleman carrying a briefcase. He was a doctor, she said. She had found him by going to the crowded booking hall and calling aloud for help.
The doctor bent down by the man’s head, then drew back sharply.
‘Madam, this man has been drinking.’
By this time a small, interested crowd had gathered, offering comments and advice.
‘Leave him alone.’ ‘No, make him go outside. Filthy devil.’
The doctor said to Phoebe, ‘At J.J. Hospital this man could get help. I will ask if he can be taken there.’
‘What about money?’
He smiled at her. ‘No, no, the treatment is free. Now dear lady, you may take your train.’
Phoebe knelt beside the man, opened his hand and folded a banknote into his fingers.
To me the doctor said in Hindi, ‘Take her quickly. Because she’s a foreigner and made a fuss, the railway police will come. I’m afraid they’ll throw him out into the street. Certainly they will beat him. She is a tender-hearted lady, it would be hard to bear.’
As the train began its sliding run through East Bombay, I took her arm and said, ‘Phoebe, I’m ashamed.’
She said, ‘Don’t be. If you open yourself to the pain all around you, you’ll go crazy. That’s what they say, Bhalu. But what if you’re already crazy?’
Bombay had grown. The train rumbled past vast new housing developments. What once was just mudskipper marsh, now housed rows of new apartment blocks. They were building a whole new city on the mainland. The centre of gravity was shifting northward and the old town, already known as South Mumbai, would one day suffer the strange fate of becoming a distant suburb.
Beyond the new city, not much seemed to have changed. The countryside spun away, flooded fields, lines of women bending, plunging fistfuls of rice-paddy into the ooze. I knew exactly how that mud felt, soft and squelchy between the toes. The field edges would be alive with crabs, black and yellow, and there would be small inexplicable fish among the paddy stalks. The twenty-six tunnels re-enacted themselves exactly as I remembered. Then we were out, among hills clad in monsoon green. Vast drops, waterfalls roaring down the escarpment. Then the familiar shape of Duke’s Nose came looming to the right. I felt a huge upwelling happiness: this would always be the centre of my world, the place where I was completely and utterly at home.
Ambona was unrecognisable. The town had expanded across the railway line and large hotels and shops lined the main road. The small market with its old houses was still there, but was now just a corner of a much larger bazaar that stretched away as far as I could see. The statue of King George had gone, replaced by a woman holding a water pot. The lanes were thronged with men on scooters, threading their way between puddles. Village women. Cows wandering through the crowds. Bustle, commerce. No one wearing poverty like rubies.
Phoebe, in her jeans, T-shirt, and dark glasses, attracted a small crowd. ‘Where from? Where from?’ the children yelled.
‘From India,’ she replied. ‘I was born in India. I’m Indian.’
The Christian cemetery in Ambona is off a back road that runs away from the bazaar towards the lake. A sloping hillside full of trees, overgrown to waist height by elegant plants with drooping spade-shaped leaves. Green light. Rain falling through the trees. Graves submerged in a sea of leaves. Here and there a marble angel or an urn poked through the jungle. We brushed back the leaves, trying to read the names on the gravestones and wooden crosses. Some of them had names, most did not. The place didn’t fit at all with my memories. Surely we had stood over in that corner. But now it looked completely different.
In the midst of the wilderness was a small chapel, green with moss and mould. The door was locked, but round the back was an open wooden shed. Wooden crates were ranged about its walls with utensils, tools and a few clothes strewn about. Towards the back of the hut, a pot was bubbling on a blackened kerosene stove. In the centre of the floor was a large boxed-in wooden chair with arms, like a throne. A naked man suddenly stood up from where he had been crouching, behind the chair. He was very thin, very black, with a round amiable face that aimed to please.
‘Just a minute, uncle, I was having a bath. Oh my! Aunty too! I’ll just put on my pants. Come, come, sit. Uncle, madam. Yurr. Sit yurr, sit sir, sit.’
His accent was old Anglo-Indian, like Ben’s parents. I had heard nothing like it for thirty years. He vanished again and we caught the rustle of clothing. In a moment he called out and told us his name was Frances. He was the caretaker. He said he lived in the tiny hut.
A couple of minutes later, we were following him along rainy paths between the graves, looking for poor Rosie’s tombstone.
‘Now what name you said, Richards? We got a Richards over yurr, came in las year. Richards?’
‘Not Richards,’ said Phoebe. ‘De Mello. Forty years ago.’
All over the cemetery, gravestones and monuments peered out of the sea of tall plants. At their bases grew the strange succulent flowers I remembered from my childhood. I asked their name.
‘Dese flowers, they call dem Gauri, the Hindus call dem Gauri. Dey buy de flowers twenty, thutty rupees each. Dey take them and use them in a puja. A Ganpati puja, sir, yes . . . Sorry, what name you said just now?’
‘De Mello.’
Frances said vaguely, ‘Look yurr sir, don’t walk on bare earth, it’s been raining, raining, raining tree days, de ground is soaked, you’ll sink. Walk yurr, sir, walk dis way. De Mello is it, come den, dis way.’ But after another round of graves, all smothered in the tall drooping gauri lilies, we were no nearer finding Phoebe’s old ayah.
‘Come sir, come, dis way, I want to show you . . .’
He stopped in front of a grave which was covered with a bed of cracked sand. ‘Look sir, it was nice marble. People come at night, dey jump over de wall, dat side dere, the Bori side. They have taken away the marble. What name you said?’
On some graves, the mounded red soil of the ghats had been drilled away by rain, leaving mud sculptures like miniature termite mounds.
‘De Mello.’
‘We got a Da Silva. I remember. Come, come, I tink over yurr. Came recently? Dis year?’
‘A long time ago. Nearly forty years.’
‘Fotty years, oh my! She was Protestant?’
‘Catholic.’
‘Okay sir, I’ll look dis side, you look dat side . . .’
We heard him crashing round in the undergrowth, still talking. ‘Boys come over de Bori wall. Trow stones for the fruit. I shout, chase dem, but dey just run way. Den dey come back trow stones at me too.’
‘Not quite all there,’ I whispered to Phoebe, and was surprised to see the anger that jumped into her face.
‘He’s lonely! How would you like to live in a graveyard on your own? I bet he has no family. Poor man.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, kissing her. ‘You’re more compassionate than me. You were right to get help for that man, on the platform.’
‘It wasn’t just compassion,’ she said. ‘What he was doing, I’ve been there.’
I remembered then, the tape, Phoebe squatting beside her dead mother. That evening, her bedroom, candles, Kensington, London, all seemed improbably far away.
‘De Mello? Boxer, is it? ’Bout five years ago,’ came the voice of Frances.
‘No,’ said Phoebe patiently. ‘She was an ayah. Forty years ago.’
‘Ayah. Fotty years ago. Fotty years ago, I was not even born. Ah, dey mus’ have put her wid another one.’
‘Another one?’ Phoebe and I said together.
‘What name? Da Silva?’
‘De Mello.’
‘Oh sir, it’s coming to me now sir, I am getting her now. I seen dis one. De Mello?’
He led the way back up the hillside to a new site. ‘I am starting to feel her now, sir. Dis way, over yurr, dey brought her dis year only, opened another one and put her in. De Mello, ayah from fotty years ago. Look for a blue cross, sir.’
But the grave we stopped at was marked JOSEPHS.
‘Sir, I’ll ask the registrar, sir, at the church. He has the records. In the morning I’ll ask, sir. How long will y’all be staying yur? Till tomorrow. I’ll just go and ask, sir.’
We could not find the grave.
‘I’m sure it was about here,’ said Phoebe, stopping by an angel with a broken wing, covered in green mould and monsoon slime.
‘I’m sure too,’ I said. ‘We were standing just here, in a line . . .’
But there was a strange name on the grave.
‘What did you mean, put her with another one?’ Phoebe asked.
‘What I said, madam?’
‘You said she might have been put with another one.’
‘All de old graves been changed now, madam. No space left. Since maybe about seven, eight years back. Before my time.’
Sybil had come six years ago. So she’d been too late. The graves had been reorganised. God knows what had happened to the tin.
‘What happens when you run out of space?’ Phoebe asked.
‘Each person get tree tree years,’ said Frances. ‘See suppose I die, madam, so I go in. Tree years later uncle dies, dey open it and uncle here’s going in . . . Den tree more yurs, you die, auntie, we put you in same. Plenty of room, dere is, madam . . . Come, come, I’ll show you. Dis is de oldest ting sir, see sir, see madam, see de angel with de broken wing? Dat’s the oldest ting, goes back to 1861.’
He led us back past his shack. Phoebe stepped inside and had a quick look round.
‘Bhalu!’ she said. ‘Poor man. He’s been drinking kerosene.’
The day, which I had imagined as a joyful homecoming, was turning out to be anything but. We walked back, defeated, to the bazaar, followed by gawping locals.
‘Batlibhoy’s shop has gone,’ I said. ‘It used to be there. Do you remember? Babu would bring us and we’d buy sweets.’
‘I don’t remember.’
By the time we found ourselves a rickshaw, I was dreading going back. What else had changed?
‘Do you know an Abdul Razaq?’ I asked the young driver. ‘Friend of mine, used to drive one of these things.’
‘Sorry, no idea. It’s a big town.’
‘It didn’t used to be, when I lived here.’
‘Ambona is a big tourist area now,’ said the rickshaw driver. ‘People come up from Bombay. Lots of big hotels. Five stars too. They come for the scenery. Nature.’
But what was left? As we came out along the lake road – the old crumbling bungalows with their rose gardens still there – I caught my first glimpse of our home mountains. There was the line of the dam, and beyond it the hither slope of Bicchauda. It was monsoon, and the slopes were green, sliced by waterfalls. A shiny slide of rock marked the point where Rosie had fallen. But the mountain had changed. The forest had gone.
By the monsoon lake (Ambona Lake), now fenced off from the crowds of tourists, we stopped, near the foot of a waterfall, by a bamboo and matting stall, in which a man with kind eyes and a thin woman were crouched over a stove. We ordered tea.
‘He kaay ae?’ asked Phoebe, with that little drop of the head, pointing at a plate of snacks. I wanted to kiss her.
‘You speak Marathi!’ said the man. ‘They’re vada pau.’
Their names were Kali Das and Mangala. They lived in Ardau village. He was younger than me, I guessed. Might have been one of those tiny children with kohl-rimmed eyes and round bellies, naked save for a string round their waists, who used to gather round with tin mugs when Maya arrived, the urn of Red Cross milk carried on a pole by two Karvanda villagers. I began to ask if he remembered the milk deliveries . . .
‘The woman who brought milk?’ he interrupted. ‘She would come with huge cans, like this.’ Indicating a four-foot can. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘My sisters and I, we used to drink the milk, when I was a small child.’
It was in my mind to say that the woman was my mother, but for some reason I did not.
Phoebe was looking at the large mountain on the far side of the lake, which was half-hidden in cloud.
‘What was that hill called?’ she asked. ‘Ask Kali Das.’
‘They have no names,’ he said.
‘But they do,’ I said. I knew their English names at least. The big one was called the Sugarloaf, a throwback to British times, when a Mrs Atkinson had lived in these parts and earned herself a reputation for shooting tigers. ‘There are three of them, the big one, Sugarloaf, then a smaller one, then comes Duke’s Nose.’ How many times had we stood on top of Bicchauda and looked across the lake, admiring that view.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There are only two. This one, and Duke’s Nose.’ He pronounced it Dyoosnooze. Was I going mad? Had I really forgotten these hills so completely? He had lived here all his life, since a small child. He should know.
But in the rickshaw on the way to Karvanda, and our old house, I worked it out. As we went past Ardau village, Duke’s Nose, with its hooked double peak, was unmistakable. But the smaller central hill appeared to be no more than a spur of the Sugarloaf opposite. From Bicchauda, above our house, they were clearly three separate hills. Kali Das had counted only two, which meant – incredible thought – that he had never in his life travelled as far as the road to Karvanda. Either that, or he had not used his eyes. Why had he, not I, been privileged to live here all his life?
We rattled through the cutting we used to call the Khyber Pass. The road to Karvanda was once a cart track that wound up the mountain from this point. If you walked on it barefoot, the red dirt pulsed up between your toes and rinsed your feet with a softness like that of talc. Now it was a tarmac road that twisted steeply up a series of hairpins. The rickshaw chugged on through mist – actually cloud – blowing past, the hillside cradling dozens of tiny pools, marshy pools, from which arose the frenzied creaking of frogs. There was more forest here. A tall tree was being shaken in the most alarming manner by a troupe of monkeys. At the point where we should have turned east and up, the new road veered off in a different direction and drew near the edge of the stupendous cliffs opposite Tiger’s Leap. A clearing appeared, a viewing point. I told the driver to stop. We would ask the way. Hawkers pestered us, offering tea and bhuttas – corn cobs roasted and sprinkled with lime juice and chilli powder.
‘Hataanich jevto,’ smiled Phoebe, at her most charming. The bhuttas were very delicious. From a small boy we learned that the old way to Karvanda village was still there, it was just accessed at a different point. He also told us to watch out for tigers.
‘What? Are there tigers here?’
‘Why d’you think this place is called Tiger’s Leap?’
