The Death of Mr Love, page 9
It was late afternoon before the first of the high hills appeared, shadow-on-shadowy shapes out of the haze in the east.
Soon we were climbing, the plain dropping away. Up around hairpins that crept along the edges of precipices. Up into turns where there were lorries lying on their sides; some rusty wrecks had been there a long time. Up past the Hanuman temple with its monkeys. Up to the top with its spectacular view where we found boys selling sweets we had never tasted before, a sort of toffee studded with nuts. ‘Chikkee’ they called it. Babu said the district was famous for it. ‘But the best is from Ambona.’
We knew the turning for Ambona was near when to southward appeared a peak that seemed to fling itself up into the air.
‘Look at the mountain, children,’ said my mother, turning in the passenger seat of the Humber. ‘What does it look like to you?’
‘It’s a rabbit,’ said Nina. She was five.
‘No it’s not, it’s a ship,’ I said. ‘It’s HMS Hood.’
The peak looked like the artist’s impressions in my ship book of the Hood sinking stern first, her bows jutting into the air after the Bismarck’s salvo struck lucky. I was eight and, having a naval father, knew all about warships.
‘It’s a nose,’ said my mother. ‘A giant nose.’
She told us the peak had been named after a British general who had a huge snout. About a hundred and fifty years ago, he had fought the Mahrattas in these mountains.
‘It’s called Duke’s Nose,’ she said. ‘Only he wasn’t a duke until later. After he won a battle at a place called Waterloo.’
As we drove past its slowly altering profile I could see why it had got its name. Imagine a giant dead to the world, his head flung back, the sort of position that invites you to tickle nostrils with a straw. The bridge of the nose was a huge ridge rising out of the forest and climbing starkly to a cleft peak, on which grew a few small trees. The nostrillar side dropped sheer, thousands of feet of naked rock, and vanished from view. I kept my eyes fastened to the mountain. With every bend of the road its shape slowly changed. It became a cobra hood, mellowed to a mere cone, then turned into a bear before vanishing behind nearer hills. By the time we turned for Ambona, shadows were lengthening and the squinty rear windows of the car were filled with sunset.
We drove on between mountain shapes that were beginning to blur and be lost in the dusk,
swam past lights of a small town, through a bazaar
where a man was sitting cross-legged behind piles of sweets
clang clang of drowsy bells
When I woke we were crossing a long causeway, a sort of stone bridge with nothing but darkness stretching out on either hand.
‘How far now?’ came the sleepy voice of my mother.
‘About ten miles, madam,’ the driver replied, on best behaviour in front of his new memsahib. ‘We’ve been through Ambona. Now we go round the lake and up the hill. The last three miles, the road is rough.’
Ahead of us, outlined against a luminous sky, was a high black ridge behind which the moon was threatening to rise.
‘That hill in front is Kalighat,’ said Babu. ‘Gets its name from a small shrine on top. They say strange things go on up there. Hey Bhalu, do you like ghost stories?’
‘Don’t frighten them,’ said my mother.
‘I’m not frightened,’ I said. I was intensely interested in ghosts. ‘The local name is Bicchauda – don’t ask me what it means, it isn’t Marathi – some village thing. Last year, about this time, a woodcutter was killed up there by a panther. He was taking honey from a beehive and the panther had the same idea. Your house is on the other side, but don’t worry, the panthers won’t bother you unless you keep a dog. They adore dog, for some reason.’
The road on the far side of the causeway began to twist and turn. Babu told my mother, ‘They’ll have supper ready for you, but I’m thinking the children will be too tired.’ He turned to us, and said, ‘Hey, Bhalu! Hey, Nina! Don’t nod off. Want to see something special?’
He swung the car round a spur of the mountain. ‘Look!’
There was the moon, hanging over a wide lake whose margins vanished into darkness.
‘Stop!’ my mother commanded. Babu pulled over and switched off the lights and engine. We climbed out. The lake lay glittering under the moon. Beyond, more mountains lifted dark shapes into the sky. Besides the moonsilvery water, there was no other light in the landscape. The night was soft and full of small unfamiliar sounds. Chirrings. Calls that might have been birds. I was aware of trees near us. The earth and the air had a smell I can never forget, which to this day fills me with excitement and sadness, and the longing to be back.
Soon after this, we turned off the road and began bouncing up the rough track of which Babu had spoken. At last we pulled up outside a house in whose windows an apricot glow flickered, fading in one place only to reappear in another – the servants going from room to room with oil lamps since the electricity was not yet connected. Inside was my father to greet us in a muddle of trunks, packing cases and furniture from the Bombay flat. I saw Maya’s typewriter perched on a box of books. Nina and I ran from room to room of this strange new house. ‘Yes, there’s lots to see,’ said my father, catching Nina up and giving her a hug. ‘But it’ll have to wait, because you’re going to have supper and go right to bed.’
In the morning, everything was different. A thick mist swirled outside, making it impossible to see. We explored the house. It was a large bungalow with a steeply tiled roof and a verandah running all the way round the outside. There were many bedrooms – it was built for a large family. Maya said, ‘We’ll need them all when our friends come.’ She was busy, directing the servants, arranging the furniture. After consultation with my father she chose a corner room, and had her desk, a long rosewood table with drawers and carved legs, moved in and her typewriter placed upon it. This was her writing room. In here she would carefully cut out and file reviews of Badnaami ka dilaasa, and write Silver Ganesh, and the bitter and sweet versions of Nafísa Jaan.
Our house had a sheltered courtyard in which grew papayas, bananas, a lime bush, guava trees with smooth grey trunks, and a frangipani tree. In front was a fishpond with a fountain, a cherub whose wings had become black with mould. Round the back was a vegetable garden in which a gardener, squatting on his haunches, turning the earth with a trowel, was already hard at work. When he saw me he stopped, gave a gappy grin and said something in Marathi. I told him I didn’t understand and in terrible Hindi he said, ‘You boy. I have boy just like age you.’
Further up the slope, where the mist was hanging, my father planned to clear a plot of land and plant his nursery. Here he’d rear the blooms that would make him famous. The soil was a rich, voluptuous red and the air thick with the scent I had caught the night before, soft and clean, with a hint of sulphur and herbs. I wanted to start clearing the ground right away, but my father warned me on no account to go turning over rocks. The hillsides were alive with snakes. After an hour the mist began to thin. It became a bright pearly haze that was slowly suffused with gold. Then it lifted completely and I saw where we had come to live.
Our house perched halfway up a valley bounded on three sides by hills and on the fourth by a huge chasm that faced south across a gulf of air. Just visible in the distance was a bit of the lake we had seen the night before and beyond it, far away to the northwest, was a smudge that my father said was Duke’s Nose, back to its old shape, but from this angle oddly reversed. Above us, the slope of Kalighat, thick with trees, climbed impossibly high into a pure blue sky. Instantly I forgot the city. Already, on that first day, I knew that this place, with its air, its earth, its birds, its animals, and its friendly bad-Hindi-speaking people, was my real, destined home.
Everyone needs to feel that they have somewhere on the earth that is uniquely theirs. This was mine. Although I never owned the land, the water, or the creatures, I knew that this was my proper place. After all these years, I still do. I still recall our three years in Ambona as the most perfect time of my life. Each of us has a true self, an inner self, the essence of the being that we are. When I imagine Bhalu’s true self, he is always that eight-year-old boy.
BICCHAUDA (AMBONA HILLS, FEBRUARY–JUNE 1958)
Dhondu the gardener did all his work squatting on his haunches. He worked barefoot, big feet splayed, toes wide apart. To move forward, he’d lean to one side and lift the other leg, still bent, and waddle. With each step his body made a half turn in the opposite direction. In this way he moved stolidly through the vegetables. Dhondu always smiled when he caught sight of me and would summon me closer with cries of ‘Ey-one-rey!’ At least that’s what it sounded like to my Hindi-tuned ears. He worked the red soil with a small mattock, mixing in cowdung, which he brought in flat dry cakes and crumbled onto the ground. I watched him scoop pits and place into them tomato seedlings with black soil clinging to their roots, and big melon seeds. He dug a network of canals and laid the hose at the top end. Water churned down, carrying bits of straw and dust before it, and spread out across the beds, turning them dark.
Our house was served by a large cistern cut into the rock high up the hill. Water was siphoned to a tap in the kitchen and we stored it in buckets and pans. It was boiled for drinking, cooled in the refrigerator and my mother said she had tasted worse. There was not enough pressure to operate a hose, so my father, fearful for his roses, installed an oil pump, which ran for two hours every morning. He himself supervised the planting and manuring of his roses, but it was Dhondu who watered them. I admired his skill with the hose. By stopping the end with his thumb, he could make a spray, and with tiny movements vary its fan, density and force. When I got to know him better, he squirted me.
Dhondu sang as he worked, mumbling words I couldn’t follow. I asked our cook to translate, but the cook, Yelliya, who had come with my father from Bombay and fancied himself a cut above the locals, said, ‘It’s just nonsense from a nonsensical sort of person.’
‘get planted – you hear? – in you go,
go into the earth and make some roots
what’s that? did i hear right? hey!
didn’t i just dig a nice hole for you,
wasn’t that water i just gave you to drink?
there’s only so much i can do,
you’ll have to do your own growing’
I asked Dhondu which song it was, which film it came from. He told me – or rather I eventually understood – that it did not come from any film, but that he sang whatever came into his head. At any rate, his plants grew fast and sturdy. My first friend in Ambona was his son.
On most days Dhondu ate lunch from our kitchen – he would take his food outside and eat it sitting under a tree in the shade – but one day he announced that it was a special puja and his wife was sending lunch from the village. ‘Today’, he told me, ‘you meet my son.’ Sure enough, at midday a boy appeared from the direction of the village carrying a cloth bundle. Dhondu called me over. ‘Bhalu, ey-one-rey! This is my chicken,’ he said in his dreadful Hindi, standing, a picture of parental pride, with his hands on the lad’s shoulders.
‘This is Jula. Jula, this is Bhalu.’
The boy and I sized each other up. He was slightly smaller than me, with hair that in strands was bleached nearly blond by the sun. He wore a ragged pair of khaki shorts. The two of us watched as Dhondu undid his bundle. Inside, wrapped in leaf packages, were two chappatis, some mango pickle, a green chilli, half an onion and a dab of red halwa. Dhondu unfolded the leaves and, with sighs of satisfaction, settled down to eat.
At first I couldn’t get the boy’s name out properly.
‘Jula.’
‘No. It’s Jula!’
‘Jura.’
‘Jula!’
‘Juda.’
‘No! Jula!’
‘Julda.’
‘Jula!’
In Marathi they have a special ‘rldl’ sound, the one written like an 8 lying on its side. To pronounce it the tongue must rear up, form a cobra hood in the back of the mouth, then flick forward.
‘Why did he call you a chicken?’
‘Not chicken, muraga! Boy, murldlaga!’
Jula and I soon discovered that if he stopped trying to speak Hindi and I stopped trying to speak Marathi we understood each other much better.
‘Want to play a game?’ I asked.
‘Sure. What do you want to play?’
‘Chhupan-chhupai?’
‘What’s that? I don’t know it.’ I noticed that he had a slight lisp.
I explained the rudiments of hide-and-seek and he exclaimed, ‘Oh! You mean lapandav!’ We were soon running round squirting one another with the hose.
The cook scolded me, when I came in soaking, and told me that I was not supposed to mix with Jula. ‘When you start school you can make friends with proper people.’
Jula didn’t go to school. His regular job was keeping an eye on the village cows, which were turned out to wander the hillsides. I sometimes came across him halfway up the slope of Bicchauda, or Dagala, the next mountain towards the village. He had all sorts of ways to amuse himself and taught me the excellent game of gulli-danda, which is played with two sticks and is essentially a form of golf, although several thousand years older. Our gulli was roughly four inches long, whittled at both ends. With the danda, which was a stout stick about eighteen inches long, we would strike one end of the gulli, flipping it up into the air, and then smash it again as hard as we could, the distance of the hit being measured in dandas. Or we would name a distant target and see who could get there in the fewest hits. Jula and I sometimes played marbles, bending our middle fingers back towards our wrists, like medieval trebuchets, and letting fly. Jula used small round pebbles and was amazed by my glass marbles with swirling centres. His toys were simple in the extreme.
He showed me how to tear a slot in a mango leaf, and clip it to my nostrils to inhale the tang.
‘Wait till the rains come,’ he told me solemnly. ‘Then we’ll have mangoes, magic, muzza.’
He showed me shiny-leafed bushes covered in white stars. ‘They’re called karvanda, the same name as our village.’ These flowers would turn into berries, he promised me, which we would enjoy hugely . . . when the rains came.
One day Jula took me home with him to a low house that smelt of smoke and cattle, with a cow tethered near the doorway. Jula’s house was made of baked clay. It had a thatched roof with an extra layer of fronds lashed on to keep out the rain. Inside was dry, dark and smoky. Chickens wandered in and out. Jula’s family lived, ate and slept in this one large room and his mother cooked on a small clay hearth in one corner, feeding small twigs and fragments of dried cowdung-cake into the fire beneath her pot, fanning away the smoke.
He said, ‘See who’s come from the big house.’
His mother folded her hands to me and asked if I would like some milk. I said I would. It tasted salty and woodsmoky, but good. Being in Jula’s house did not seem as strange as it might, because the cow and the straw and smell of dungsmoke reminded me of my grandfather’s house in Kumharawa.
School in Ambona was very different from the Cathedral School in Bombay where the boys were sons of doctors and lawyers and businessmen and accountants. The KGV School was for everyone. (KGV stood for King George V – his statue, a dozen years after Independence, still stood in a dusty square outside Patrawalla’s General Store – but we called it KayGee Vee.) I began to learn Marathi and found that it was quite like Hindi. Lots of words were the same, one just played different games with them. Once I was used to the strange accent and that weird ‘rldl’ sound, neither Dhondu’s songs nor Jula’s chatter seemed at all hard to understand. Of course I only saw Jula at weekends, but he would give me the latest reports of goings on at Karvanda.
‘Gokul said I lost his cow and created hell. Stupid shit, I knew where she was. It was Pandri, the white one. She always gets up to that halfway grove . . . My ma sent me to pick green karvandas to make pickle. I ate so many I got a stomach ache and then I got told off . . .’ It seemed the poor fellow was always getting into trouble.
I began using some of Jula’s expressions and got in trouble myself. One day Shashi the ayah rushed to my mother in tears saying I had insulted her.
‘How?’ asked Maya.
‘I can’t say, madam,’ the girl replied. She seemed so old and grown-up to me, but she was probably only about twenty.
So I told my mother, ‘I didn’t want my sisterfucker soup.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Bahinchod.’
‘I’ll deal with this,’ Maya told the ayah, who was still in shock. There was something wrong with my mother’s face, it was twitching and her cheeks were sucking in and out.
‘In future,’ she said, ‘get your swear words from me. That way, when you use them, you’ll know exactly what they mean.’
Jula and I soon had a new friend, an Anglo-Indian boy called Ben, whom I’d met at school. His father was the stationmaster and he would sometimes let us sit in the junction box to watch the signalmen shifting the big levers that moved the trains from one track to another. They ploughed past in clouds of steam and smoke and left live coals bouncing between the rails. ‘See those all?’ said Ben. ‘My dad says they are devils dancing.’
Ben was a year older than Jula and me. He could ride a bike and was allowed to borrow his father’s bicycle, of which he was hugely proud. It was an old British Hercules with a massively strong steel frame. Ben’s legs were not long enough to reach the pedals from the seat, so he rode standing up, with one foot through the frame. I sat on the crossbar and mounted thus we made bandit raids on the Ambona fruit market, swooping down to scoop a guava or an orange off the top of a neatly piled pyramid.
‘Hey Bhalu, you ever gone fishing? My, what fun we’ll have when the rains come.’
