But the two were happy to get the palkhi out of storage for Mrs. Kohlah. Maneck asked if they would be able to carry her safely, since they might have lost their surefootedness after years in their soft hotel jobs, padding between kitchen and dining room.
“Have no fear, sahab,” they said. “This work was our family tradition, it is in the blood.” They were visibly excited about the chance, however brief, to exercise their old skills.
“Maneck, will you stay and finish the box?” asked Mrs. Kohlah, as she was helped into the palkhi.
“Yes, he will stay,” said Mrs. Grewal, deciding for them. “Maneck, you finish the ashes and catch up with us later. Your mummy will be safe with me.”
She motioned to the porters; they hoisted the palkhi to their shoulders and trotted off in perfect unison, their legs and arms moving like well-oiled machinery, finding a smooth rhythm over the rugged paths to spare the passenger unnecessary jolts. Maneck was reminded of the steam engine his father had once shown him at close quarters … Daddy lifting him in his arms at the railway station, the engine-driver blowing the whistle … shafts and cranks and pistons, darting and thrusting in a powerful, clanking symmetry…
“Oh, if only Farokh could see this,” said Mrs. Kohlah, smiling and crying. “His wife going home in a palkhi after scattering his ashes. How he would laugh at my stylish clumsiness.”
Maneck watched the porters disappear around the next bend, then retrieved the box hidden by the boulder. He resumed scattering the ashes. By and by, a wind came up. The slow clouds, drifting lazily, now began a rowdy race across the sky, their shadows threatening the valley below. He let the ashes trickle from his fingers into the clutches of the wind. He scraped the inside of the box, turned it over, and tapped on the outside. The last traces flew away to explore the vastness.
From time to time, Mrs. Grewal, striding right behind the porters, called out instructions for them. “Careful, that branch is very low. You don’t want Mrs. Kohlah to bang her head.”
“Have no fear, memsahab,” they panted. “We haven’t forgotten our work.”
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Grewal, doubtful. “Watch out now, that’s a very big stone, don’t stumble.”
This time, Mrs. Kohlah did the reassuring on the porters’ behalf. “Don’t worry, they are experts. I am very comfortable.”
The friends and neighbours following after them gave the two palkhiwallas a round of applause as they emerged from the mountain path and continued along the road into town. It had been years since anyone had seen a palkhi float through the streets. The ghost from the past was greeted with delight by all who met it on its journey. Many decided to tag along, swelling the ranks of the spontaneous celebration.
Now and again, the chair party had to stop at the side to allow lorries and buses to pass. After the fifth such halt, Mrs. Grewal became indignant. “Enough of this nonsense,” she said. “Come on, everybody. Step out, all the way out – into the middle of the road. We shall not move for anybody. Not today. Mrs. Kohlah has the right of way, this is a special day for her. The traffic can wait.”
Everyone agreed with Mrs. Grewal, and for thirty-five glorious minutes they marched into town in a determined procession, trailed by lines of impatient vehicles, the drivers honking and shouting. For the most part Mrs. Grewal ignored them, determined not to dignify their cheap cacophony with a retort. Occasionally, though, her outrage made her pause and shout back, “Show some respect! The woman is a widow!”
About an hour after they had started, the rescue party reached home safely, and Mrs. Kohlah was made comfortable in an easy chair, with an ice pack round her knee. Mrs. Grewal sat opposite her in a straight-backed chair, erect as a sentry. She refused to leave with the others, declaring firmly, “You cannot remain all by yourself on the day after the funeral.”
Mrs. Kohlah was a little amused at her manner, and grateful for the company. They reminisced about the General Store, the prosperous old times, the tea parties and dinners, the cantonment days. How wonderful life used to be, how sweet and healthy the air – any time you felt sick or tired, all you had to do was step outdoors, breathe deeply, and you felt better immediately, no need to swallow any medicine or vitamin tablets. “Nowadays the whole atmosphere only has changed,” said Mrs. Grewal.
Just then Maneck walked in, and there was an awkward silence. He wondered what they had been discussing.
“You are back very fast,” observed Mrs. Grewal. “Young people, strong legs. And you managed all right with the ashes?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You are sure you did it properly, Maneck?” inquired his mother.
“Yes.”
There was another little silence.
“And what have you been doing in Dubai?” asked Mrs. Grewal.
“Besides growing a beard?”
He smiled in reply.
“Very secretive. Making lots of money, I hope.”
He smiled again. She left a few minutes later, saying there was no need for her to stay any longer. “You can look after your mother now,” she added meaningfully.
Maneck checked the ice pack, then offered to make cheese sandwiches for lunch.
“My son visits after eight years and I can’t even prepare his food,” lamented his mother.
“What difference is it who makes the sandwiches?”
She took the warning in his voice and retreated, then tried again. “Maneck, please don’t get angry. Won’t you tell me the reason you are so unhappy?”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“We are both sad because of Daddy’s death. But that cannot be the only reason. We were expecting it ever since his colon cancer was diagnosed. There is something different about your sadness, I can sense it.”
She waited, watching him as he cut the bread, but his face remained impassive. “Is it because you did not visit while he was still alive? You shouldn’t feel bad. Daddy understood that it was difficult for you to come.”
He put down the bread knife and turned. “You really want to know why?”
“Yes.”
He picked up the knife again, slicing the loaf carefully while keeping his voice level. “You sent me away, you and Daddy. And then I couldn’t come back. You lost me, and I lost – everything.”
She limped to his side and took his arm. “Look at me, Maneck!” she said tearfully. “What you think is not true, you are everything to me and Daddy! Whatever we did, we did for you! Please, believe me!”
He withdrew his arm gently, and continued with the sandwiches.
“How can you say something so hurtful and then become silent? You always used to complain that Daddy was fond of dramatics. But now you are doing just that.”
He refused to discuss it further. She followed him around the kitchen, hobbling, pleading with him.
“What’s the point of me making the sandwiches if you are going to keep marching with that knee?” he said, exasperated.
She sat down compliantly till he finished and lunch was on the table. While they ate, she studied his face in snatches, when she was sure he wasn’t looking. The sky started to darken in earnest. He washed their plates and put them on the rack to dry. The rumble of thunder rolled over the valley.
“We were so lucky this morning,” she said as the drizzle commenced. “I’m going up to rest now. Will you shut the windows if the rain comes in?”
He nodded, and helped her climb the stairs. She smiled through the pain, leaning with pleasure on her son’s shoulder, taking pride in its strength and firmness.
After his mother was in bed, Maneck returned downstairs and stood at the window to watch the display of lightning, to revel in the thunderclaps. He had missed the rains in Dubai. The valley was disappearing under a blanket of fog. He strode restlessly about the house, then went into the shop.
He examined the shelves, savouring the brand names on the jars and boxes that he had not seen for years. But how small, how shabby the shop was, he thought. The shop that was once the ce
ntre of his universe. And now he had moved so far away from it. So far that it felt impossible to return. He wondered what was keeping him away. Not clean and gleaming Dubai, for sure.
He descended the steps into the cellar where the bottling machinery slept. Cobwebs had taken over, shrouding the defeated apparatus. Demand for Kohlah’s Cola had almost vanished in recent times, his parents had written – just half a dozen bottles a day, to loyal friends and neighbours.
He pottered around amid the empty bottles and wooden crates. In a corner of the cellar stood a stack of mouldering newspapers, partially hidden by a bundle of gunnys. He stroked the coarse jute sacking, feeling the bite of the fibre, breathing in its extravagant green smell of wood and vegetation. The newspaper dates went back ten years, and jumped haphazardly over the decade. Strange, he thought, because Daddy used them up regularly in the store, for wrapping parcels or padding packages. These must have been overlooked.
He decided to take them upstairs and browse through them. Reading old newspapers seemed a fitting way to spend the gloomy, rain-filled afternoon.
He settled in a chair by the window and opened the yellow, dusty sheets of the first issue in the pile. It was from the period after the post-Emergency elections that the Prime Minister lost to the opposition coalition. There were articles about abuses during the Emergency, testimony of torture victims, outrage over the countless deaths in police custody. Editorials that had been silenced during her regime called for a special commission to investigate the wrongdoings and punish the guilty.
He skipped to another paper, impatient with the repetitious reportage. The new government’s dithering over how to deal with the ex-Prime Minister did not make stimulating reading either, except for one article which quoted a cabinet minister as saying: “She must be punished, she is a terrible woman, wicked as Cleopatra.” And the only unanimous decision of the paralysed government was to expel Coca-Cola from the country, for refusing to relinquish its secret formula and its managing interest; with a little twisting and turning, the action suited all ideologies in the coalition brew.
Not many newspapers later, the coalition had vaporized in endless squabbles, and fresh elections were to be held. The ex-Prime Minister was poised to shed her prefix and return to power. The editorials now reined in their rhetoric against her, adopting the obsequious tone reminiscent of the Emergency. One grovelling scribe had written: “Can the Prime Minister have incarnated at least some of the gods in herself? Beyond doubt, she possesses a dormant power, lying coiled at the base of her spine, the Kundalini Shakti which is now awakening and carrying her into transcendence.” There was no sarcasm intended, it being part of a longer panegyric.
Fed up, Maneck looked for the sports pages. There were pictures from cricket matches, and the statement by the Australian captain about a “bunch of Third World beggars who think they can play cricket.” And then the jubilation and fireworks and celebration when the bunch of beggars defeated Australia in the Test Series.
He began going more rapidly through the newspapers. After a while even the pictures looked the same. Train derailment, monsoon floods, bridge collapse; ministers being garlanded, ministers making speeches, ministers visiting areas of natural and man-made disasters. He flipped the pages between glances out the window, at the theatre of weather – the lashing rain, windswept deodars, bolts of lightning.
Then something in the paper caught his eye. He turned back for a second look. It was a photograph of three young women. Dressed in cholis and petticoats, they were hanging from a ceiling fan. One end of each of their saris was tied to the fan hook, the other round their necks. Their heads were tilted. The arms hung limp, like the limbs of rag dolls.
He read the accompanying story, his eyes straying repeatedly to the scene that floated like a ghastly tableau. The three were sisters, aged fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen, and had hanged themselves while their parents were out of the house. They had written a note to explain their conduct. They knew that their father was unhappy at not being able to afford dowries for them. After much debate and anxiety, they had decided to take this step, to spare their mother and father the shame of three unmarried daughters. They begged their parents’ forgiveness for this action which would cause them grief; they could see no alternative.
The photograph dragged Maneck’s eyes back to it, to the event that was at once unsettling, pitiful, and maddening in its crystalline stillness. The three sisters looked disappointed, he thought, as though they had expected something more out of hanging, something more than death, and then discovered that death was all there was. He found himself admiring their courage. What strength it must have taken, he thought, to unwind those saris from their bodies, to tie the knots around their necks. Or perhaps it had been easy, once the act acquired the beauty of logic and the weight of sensibleness.
He tore his eyes away from the photograph to read the rest of the article. The reporter had met the parents; he wrote that they had suffered more than their fair portion of grief – they had, during the Emergency, lost their eldest under circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained. The police claimed it was a railway accident, but the parents spoke of wounds they had seen on their son’s body at the morgue. According to the reporter, the injuries were consistent with other confirmed incidents of torture: “Moreover, in view of the political climate during the Emergency, and the fact that their son, Avinash, was active in the Student Union, it would appear to be one more case of wrongful death in police custody.”
The article proceeded to comment on the parliamentary committee’s inquiry into the Emergency excesses, but Maneck had stopped reading.
Avinash.
The rain was pounding on the roof and coming in through the windows. He tried to fold the discoloured newspaper neatly along its crease, but his hands were shaking, and it flapped and crumpled untidily in his lap. The room was airless. He struggled to push himself out of the chair. The paper, with its cellar smell of mould and decay, rustled to the floor. He went to the porch, stealing deep gulps of the rich rain-laden air. The wind rushed through the open door. The fallen pages were blown around the room while the curtains whipped against the window. He closed the door, paced the damp porch a few times, then walked out into the rain, tears streaming down his face.
His clothes were soaked within seconds; wet hair plastered his forehead. He circled the house: down the slope, into the back yard, around the lower level, and up from the other side. Through the wall of falling rain he saw the steel cables tethering the foundation to the cliff. The trusty cables, that had held strong for four generations. But he could swear the house had shifted in the years he had been away. A house with suicidal tendencies, Avinash had called it. A little bit, and then a little more – and eventually it would rip out the anchors, tumble headlong down the hill. It seemed fitting. Everything was losing its moorings, slipping away, becoming irrecoverable.
He took the road out of the town square, almost running now. He did not notice the people who stared. He saw only that photograph. Three saris gripping those fragile necks… Avinash’s three sisters… he used to enjoy feeding them when they were little, they used to bite his fingers in fun. And the poor parents … What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn’t He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He was managing a corporation, the things He allowed to happen … to the maidservant, and the thousands of Sikhs killed in the capital, and my poor taxi driver with a kara that wouldn’t come off.
Maneck looked up at the sky. Daddy’s ashes, scattered that morning. Getting wet, getting washed away. The thought was unbearable, because then there would be nothing… and Mummy, left all alone…
He raced along the path, which was fast becoming soft and slippery. Running, sliding, stumbling, hoping to find a place that was still green and pleasant, a place of happiness, serenity, where his father would be walking, sturdy and confident, his arm over his son’s shoulder. r />
Squelching through the mud, he skidded; his arms shot out sideways to keep him from falling. Now he felt the despair his father had felt as the familiar world slipped from around him, the valleys gashed and ugly, the woods disappearing. Daddy was right, he thought, the hills were dying, and I was so stupid to believe the hills were eternal, that a father could stay forever young. If only I had talked to him. If only he had let me get close to him.
But the ashes – they lay in the cold, driving rain. He ran to where he had emptied the wooden box in the morning. Panting, he stopped at each familiar spot where his mother had lingered, but could find no trace of the grey ash. His breath coming in great sobs, he brushed aside leaves, kicked over a rock, shifted a broken bough.
Nothing. He was too late. He stumbled and fell on his knees, his fingers in the ooze. The rain descended pitilessly. He felt unable to rise. He covered his face with his muddy hands and wept, and wept, and wept.
A dog pattered lightly in the muck towards Maneck. He couldn’t hear it through the noise of rain. It came closer, sniffing. He started and uncovered his face when he felt its muzzle upon his hand. The dog licked his cheek. He patted it; was this one of the pack that Daddy used to feed on the porch? He noticed a suppurating ulcer on its haunch, and wondered if the homemade ointment with which his father treated the strays was still on the shelf below the counter.
The downpour was less heavy now. He stood up, wiping his face on his wet sleeve, and looked out across the hillside. Breaks were beginning to appear in the clouds, and fragments of the valley were emerging from the fog.
He stayed where he was till the rain had almost stopped. Now it was a very fine drizzle, so fine it felt lighter than human breath upon the skin. He returned to the place where the tree grew out of the overhang. The dog followed him for a while. The abscess was making it limp, the infection had probably penetrated the bone. Only a few weeks of life left for the poor creature, thought Maneck, no one to nurse it and heal it. Without Daddy around, who will care?