Yajnanath was rather impressed by this novel kind of courtesy from a young stranger. He had not had such daring familiarity from any boy for a long time. By much shouting and coaxing, he managed to bring him to heel.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Nitai Pal.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Shan’t tell you.’
‘Who’s your father?’
‘Shan’t tell you.’
‘Why won’t you tell me?’
‘I’ve run away from home.’
‘Why?’
‘My father wanted to send me to school.’
Yajnanath felt immediately that to send such a boy to school would be a waste of money and that his father must be a fool.
‘Will you come and live in my house?’ he asked.
Raising no objection, the boy came along and settled in there as easily as under the shade of a roadside tree. Not only that, he issued barefaced orders for food and dress as if paid for in advance – and roundly disputed such matters with the master of the house. It had been easy to win arguments with his own son; but with someone else’s, Yajnanath had to give in.
III
The villagers were amazed at the unprecedented affection that Yajnanath showed for Nitai Pal. ‘The old man has not got much longer to live,’ they thought, ‘and this strange boy will inherit all his wealth.’ They were all very envious of him, and were determined to do him down. But the old man hid him as closely as the ribs of his chest.
Sometimes the boy fretted and talked of leaving. Yajnanath would appeal to his greed, saying, ‘You’ll get all my wealth when I die.’ The boy was still young, but he knew the measure of this promise.
Then the villagers started to search for Nitai’s father. ‘How sore his parents must be about him!’ they said. ‘What a wicked boy he is!’ They hurled unrepeatable abuse at him – but their feelings were fired more by selfish malice than moral outrage.
One day Yajnanath heard from a passer-by that a man called Damodar Pal was looking for his lost son, and was on his way to the village. Nitai was alarmed at this news – he was about to abandon his prospects and flee; but Yajnanath reassured him, saying, ‘I’ll hide you where no one will be able to find you. Not even the people in this village.’
‘Show me where,’ said the boy, very intrigued.
‘If I show you now, we’ll be found out,’ said Yajnanath. ‘I’ll show you tonight.’
Nitai was excited by this promise of a new adventure. He vowed that as soon as his father had gone, having failed to find him, he would use the place to challenge his friends in a game of hide-and-seek. No one would find him! It would be great fun. It amused him greatly that his father had scoured the whole country for him and had failed to find him.
At midday Yajnanath locked the boy into the house and went out somewhere. When he returned, Nitai pestered him with questions; and as soon as dusk fell he asked if they could go.
‘It’s not night yet,’ said Yajnanath.
A little later Nitai said, ‘It’s night now, Dādā – let’s go.’
‘People are not asleep yet,’ said Yajnanath.
‘They’re asleep now – let’s go,’ said Nitai a few moments later.
The night wore on. Though he was doing his utmost to stay awake, Nitai began to nod as he sat. At one in the morning, Yajnanath took Nitai by the hand and led him along the dark paths of the sleeping village. There was no sound anywhere, except for a dog barking from time to time, answered loudly by other dogs near and far. Sometimes nocturnal birds, startled by the sound of footsteps, flapped away through the forest. Nitai nervously clasped Yajnanath’s hand.
After crossing several fields, they came at last to a tumbledown, god-forsaken temple surrounded by jungle. ‘Here?’ said Nitai, rather crossly. It was not at all as he had imagined. There was no mystery here. He had sometimes had to spend nights in ruined temples like this after he had run away from home. The place was not bad for hide-and-seek, but not totally beyond discovery.
Yajnanath lifted up a slab in the middle of the temple. The boy saw that beneath it there was a kind of cellar, with a lamp flickering. He was surprised and intrigued by this, but rather frightened too. Yajnanath climbed down a ladder into the cellar, and Nitai nervously followed him.
Down in the cellar, there were brass water-pots everywhere. There was a mat for a deity in the midst of them, with vermilion, sandal-paste, garlands and other pūjā-materials laid out in front. Nitai noticed with amazement that the pots were full of rupee-coins and gold mohars.
‘Nitai,’ said Yajnanath, ‘I told you that I would give you all my money. I haven’t got much – just these few pitcherfuls. Today I place it all in your hands.’
Nitai jumped. ‘All? Aren’t you going to keep a single rupee for yourself?’
‘It would bring leprosy to my hand if I took any of it. But one more thing: if my long-lost grandson Gokulchandra, or his son or grandson or great-grandson or any of his descendants come, then all this money must be given to him or to them.’
Nitai decided that Yajnanath had gone mad. ‘All right,’ he agreed.
‘Now sit on this āsan,’ said Yajnanath.
‘Why?’
‘You must be worshipped.’
‘Why?’
‘It is the custom.’
The boy sat on the āsan. Yajnanath smeared sandalwood on his forehead, and a spot of vermilion, and put a garland round his neck. Then, sitting before him, he began to mutter mantras. Nitai was terrified at finding himself worshipped as a god; terrified by the mantras. ‘Dādā,’ he cried.
Yajnanath continued reading the mantras, without replying. At length he dragged the heavy pitchers, one by one, in front of the boy and dedicated them, making him say each time: ‘I count and bequeath this money to Gokulchandra Kunda son of Brindaban Kunda son of Yajnanath Kunda son of Paramananda Kunda son of Prankrishna Kunda son of Gadadhar Kunda son of Yudhisthira Kunda; or to Gokulchandra’s son or grandson or great-grandson or any of his true descendants.’
The repetition of this formula over and over again had a stupefying effect on the boy. His tongue gradually lost all movement. By the time the ceremony was over, the air of the little cave-like room was thick with smoke from the lamp and the breath of the two of them. Nitai’s palate was dry; his arms and legs were feverishly hot; he was finding it difficult to breathe. The lamp guttered and went out. In the darkness, the boy sensed Yajnanath climbing up the ladder.
‘Where are you going, Dādā?’ he cried in alarm.
‘I’m leaving you,’ said Yajnanath. ‘You stay here: no one will find you. But remember Gokulchandra son of Brindaban son of Yajnanath.’
He climbed out of the cellar and pulled the ladder up after him. ‘Dādā,’ gasped Nitai, barely able to speak, ‘I want to go back to my father.’
Yajnanath put the slab back into place, and straining his ears just managed to hear Nitai gasping the word, ‘Father.’ Then there was a thud, and after that no sound at all.
Consigning his wealth in this way to the care of a yakṣa, Yajnanath pressed some soil over the slab, and heaped it over with sand and broken bricks from the temple. He covered the heap with clumps of grass, and heeled in bushes from the forest. The night was almost over, but he could not bring himself to leave the place. Every now and then he put his ear to the ground. He imagined that he heard a crying from the innermost depths of the Earth; that the night sky was filled with that one sound; that all the people asleep in the world had been woken by it, and were sitting on their beds, listening. The old man went on frenziedly piling up more and more soil, as if trying to stop Earth’s mouth. But somebody called out, ‘Father’ – and Yajnanath thumped the ground and hissed, ‘Be quiet, everyone will hear you.’
Again, somebody called out, ‘Father.’
The old man noticed dawn arriving. Fearfully he left the temple and emerged into open country. Even there someone was calling, ‘Father.’ He turned in great alarm: ther
e in front of him was his son Brindaban.
‘Father,’ said Brindaban, ‘I hear that my son has been hiding in your house. Give him back to me.’
The old man lurched towards Brindaban. His eyes and face were horribly distorted as he leant forward and said, ‘Your son?’
‘Yes,’ said Brindaban, ‘Gokul. Now his name is Nitai Pal and my name is Damodar. You have a bad name with everyone round about, so we changed our names – otherwise no one would have talked to us.’
The old man clawed at the sky with all his fingers, as if struggling to clasp the air; then fell to the ground, fainting. When he came round again, he hurried Brindaban to the temple. ‘Can you hear the crying?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Brindaban.
‘If you strain your ears, can’t you hear someone crying “Father”?’
‘No,’ said Brindaban.
The old man seemed relieved at this. From then on he would go round asking everyone ‘Can you hear the crying?’ – and they all laughed at his madman’s words.
About four years later, Yajnanath was on his death-bed. When the world’s light grew dim in his eyes and breath began to fail, he suddenly sat up in delirium; groping with both hands, he murmured, ‘Nitai – someone has taken my ladder away.’ When he found no ladder out of the vast, lightless, airless cellar he was in, he slumped back against the pillows. Then he vanished, to the place which no one playing hide-and-seek on earth can discover.
Skeleton
There was a whole skeleton hanging on the wall of the room next to the one where the three of us slept when we were young. At night the bones used to clatter as the breeze stirred them. During the day we ourselves had to stir them: we were, at that time, studying meghnād-badh kābya with a pundit, and anatomy with a student from the Campbell Medical School. Our guardian wanted us to become instant experts in all fields of learning. To reveal how far his wishes were fulfilled would be superfluous to those who know us and unwise to those who do not.
This was all a long time ago. Meanwhile the skeleton disappeared from the room, and anatomical knowledge from our heads – heaven knows where.
A few days ago there was, for some reason, a shortage of space in the house and I had to spend the night in the room. Unused to being there, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, and heard the big bell of the church clock nearly every time it struck. The oil-lamp in the corner of the room guttered, and five minutes later went out completely. Recently there had been a couple of deaths in our household – so the extinction of the lamp easily aroused morbid thoughts. The flame of a lamp could fade into eternal darkness at one in the morning; the little flame of a man’s life could also go out one day or night and be forgotten. Gradually the memory of the skeleton came to me. As I imagined the life of the person whose skeleton it was, I suddenly felt a kind of live presence groping along the wall and circling round my mosquito-net, breathing audibly. It seemed to be looking for something, pacing rapidly round the room as it failed to find it. I knew perfectly well that this was all fabricated by my sleepless overheated brain: it was the blood throbbing in my head that sounded like rapid footsteps. Nevertheless, I felt very odd. Trying to break out of my senseless fear, I called, ‘Who’s there?’ The footsteps stopped right next to my mosquito-net and I heard an answer: ‘Me. I’ve come to see where my skeleton might have gone.’
I decided I really could not show such fear to a creature of my imagination; so, clutching my pillow grimly, I said in a cheery voice as if speaking to an old friend, ‘The right sort of task for the middle of the night! You still need that skeleton?’
From the darkness right against the mosquito-net the reply came, ‘How could I not? My breast-bone was part of it – my twenty-six-year-old youth flowered around it. How could I not wish to see it again?’
‘I understand what you mean,’ I replied hastily. ‘Finish searching and then go. I’m trying to get some sleep.’
‘You’re alone, I see,’ said the voice. ‘Then let me sit down a little. Let me talk to you. Thirty-five years ago I too sat next to men and chatted with them. For thirty-five years I have wandered about, moaning with the wind of cremation-grounds. Today I want to sit next to you and talk like a human being again.’
I sensed that someone had sat down next to my mosquito-net. Seeing no way out, I said brightly, ‘Fine. Talk about whatever would make you feel better.’
‘The most amusing story I have,’ she said, ‘is the story of my life.’
The church clock struck two.
‘When I was alive and young there was someone I feared like death. My husband. I felt like a fish caught on a hook. That is, a completely unknown animal had hauled me up on a hook, snatched me out of the cool, deep, protective waters of my home, with no chance of escape. Two months after my marriage, my husband died. The grief that was expected of me was supplied in full by my in-laws. My father-in-law, pointing to numerous signs, told my mother-in-law that I was what the Shastras called a “poison-bride”. I remember that distinctly. Are you listening? Are you enjoying the story?’
‘Very much,’ I said. ‘It’s very amusing so far.’
‘Then listen. I returned joyfully to my father’s house. I grew up. People tried to disguise it from me, but I well knew that women as beautiful as I was are rare. Do you agree?’
‘Quite possibly. But I have never seen you.’
‘Never seen me? Why? You saw my skeleton! But I mustn’t tease you. How can I prove to you that in those empty eye-sockets there were big, wide, black eyes; that the skeleton’s hideous toothy grin bore no comparison with the sweet smile that played on my red lips? It would be both amusing and annoying to describe to you the grace, the youth, the firm unblemished fullness that ripened day by day on those long dry pieces of bone! The anatomy of that body of mine was beyond even the greatest doctors! Indeed a doctor once said to his best friend that I was a “golden lotus”; meaning that anatomy and physiology could be learnt from any other human body, but I was unique – a miraculous flower. Does a golden lotus have a skeleton inside? When I moved, I knew that I was like a diamond sparkling in all directions when you turn it – such waves of natural beauty broke forth on all sides with my every gesture. I would sometimes gaze at my arms – arms that could have sweetly subdued the world’s most passionate men like a horse’s bridle. Do you remember Subhadra when she scooped up Arjuna and proudly drove him in her chariot astonishing heaven, earth and the nether world? Equal to hers were those delicate, shapely arms of mine, those pink palms, those beautifully tapered fingers. But that shameless, naked, unadorned skeleton bore false witness to me. I was speechless and helpless then, and angrier with you than anyone else in the world. I longed to stand before you as I was at sixteen, in the living, youthful flush of my beauty; to rob you of sleep; to disrupt your anatomy-learning and drive it away.’
‘If you had a body,’ I said, ‘I would touch it and swear that not a trace of that learning remains in my mind. Your world-enchanting youthful beauty is all I am aware of now, radiantly etched against the night’s dark background – nothing but that!’
‘I had no female friend to keep me company. My elder brother had resolved not to get married. There were no other women in the house. I used to sit under a tree in the garden and imagine that the whole of Nature was in love with me, that all the stars were eyeing me, that the wind was sidling past me sighing deeply, that the grass on which my legs were stretched out would, were it conscious, quickly swoon to unconsciousness again. I supposed that all the world’s young men were silently assembled round my feet like a clump of grass. What senseless anguish I felt!
‘When my brother’s friend Shashishekhar passed out of medical college, he became our family doctor. I had previously often observed him secretly. My brother was a very peculiar person – he seemed never to look at the world with his eyes open: as if there were never enough space in the world for him, and he therefore had to retreat to the outermost edge of it. Shashishekhar was his only friend, so of all the yo
ung men outside he was the one I watched most often. And when in the evening I sat like an empress at the foot of my flowering tree, all the world’s young men sat at my feet in Shashishekhar’s image. Are you listening? What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking,’ I said with a sigh, ‘that I should have liked to have been born as Shashishekhar.’
‘Listen to the whole story first. One day in the rainy season I caught a fever. The doctor came to see me. It was our first meeting. I turned my face towards the window, so that the red light of evening might mask my pallor. When the doctor came into the room and looked at my face, I imagined that I myself was the doctor looking at my face. In the evening light it was as delicate as a slightly wilted flower laid on a soft pillow; unkempt strands of hair had fallen on to my forehead, and my shyly lowered eyelashes cast shadows on to my cheeks. The doctor, speaking in a low, gentle voice, told my brother he would need to feel my pulse. I slid my rounded, listless arm out from underneath the coverings. Glancing at it, I reflected that it would have looked better with blue glass-bangles on it. As the doctor felt my sickly pulse, he was more unsettled than any doctor I had known. His fingers trembled most incompetently. He could feel the heat of my fever; I also had a sense of how his own pulse was racing. Don’t you believe me?’
‘I don’t see any reason for disbelieving you,’ I said. ‘A man’s pulse varies according to circumstances.’
‘Gradually, after three or four more periods of illness and recovery, I found that at my imaginary evening court the millions of men in the world had reduced themselves to one. My world was almost deserted – a single doctor and a single patient were all that were left. I would surreptitiously put on a light-orange-coloured sari, plait a string of bel-flowers into my hair, and sit in the garden with a mirror in my hand. Why? For the pleasure one gets from looking at oneself? But in fact I was not looking at myself, for it was not I who did so. I had become two people, as I sat alone. I saw myself as the doctor saw me; I loved and worshipped and was enraptured; yet within me deep sighs heaved like the moaning evening wind.