“And,” Shiv said, “she, Mrs. Chauhan, that is, she said she asked the woman who told her this, is this true?”
“Yes,” Frankie said. “And the woman said?”
“The woman said—yes, it’s true, I tell you it’s true, because Janamohini was my mother. I saw her hair turn white, she said, I saw it white in the first light of the morning. All of it white. And I am twenty-two and my hair is white. And perhaps my daughter’s hair, if I have a daughter, will be white also.”
“And it was white, her hair? The woman who told Mrs. Chauhan this?”
“White, yes. She was young but her hair was white as salt on a beach, as metal in the moonlight, as the sun on a flag.”
“That’s white,” Frankie said. “Poor Zingu.”
“Poor Zingu.”
They walked back towards the long length of the station, with the huge mottled sky above, and the wind pulled at their shoulders.
“What about her, Shiv?” Frankie said. “Did you find out anything about her? The husband?”
Shiv thought, his head tilted back to the grey glory of the clouds. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“You didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to know, Shiv?”
Shiv shrugged. He knew he was smiling awkwardly. “I know it’s strange,” he said. “And I suppose I do want to know. And I suppose I’ll find out. But right now, today, I just like her name.”
“Shanti?”
“Yes.”
Frankie put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and laughed. “Some people fall in love with dark eyes. Others with pale hands glimpsed beside the Shalimar. Why not a name then?”
“It’s a good name.”
“I know,” Frankie said, and put an arm around Shiv’s shoulder. “But, brother, a fact now and then is a good thing.”
“You’re talking about facts, Frankie the lover?”
“Lovers are practical, my young friend.”
“Really? That’s interesting. It means, I think, that I’m not a lover.”
Frankie nodded gravely. But as he looked away Shiv saw that he was smiling. The grass made a sighing sound as they walked.
Now Shanti—and this was how Shiv thought of her—came to Leharia often. As the trial of Dhillon and Sahgal and Shah Nawaz was argued in Delhi, and lawyers and advocates and judges jousted with each other to establish once and for all who was traitor, who was hero, she followed anecdotes and hints and the visions of delirious men up and down the country. Now she pursued the merest whisper, a shadow seen on a jungled hillside years before, a fevered groan floating across fetid bunks laden with dying men. But each time she came she told Shiv of something that she had heard on the way, the things that came to her on all the ways that she went, some incident, some episode, told to her by an old man, a young bride, a favourite son, an angry daughter-in-law, a mother, an orphan, and all of it true, true, and true. She told him about The Ten Year Old Boy Who Joined the Theatre Company of Death, The Woman Who Traded in Oil and Bought a Flying Racehorse, The Farmer Who Went to America and Fell Through a Hole to the Other Side of the World, The Moneylender Who Saw the True Face of the Creator, Ghurabat and Her Lover the Assassin Who Wept, The Birth of the Holiest Nun in the World and The Downfall of the Mughal Empire. And each time Shiv said, it’s true. Of course it’s true.
But one day in January she had nothing to tell. Or perhaps she hadn’t the strength to speak. She sat in her usual chair, an empty teacup in her lap, and her eyes fluttered shut as Shiv watched. He saw the way her mouth trembled and the slump of her shoulders from the taut line he had come to know. He took the cup from her and put it on the table, and with the tiny rattle she opened her eyes.
“They let them go,” she said. “They went home.”
“Who?”
“Dhillon, Shah Nawaz, and Sahgal.”
The papers had exulted in huge black letters: “GUILTY, BUT FREE!” They had gone home, the three, heroes or traitors, finished with it one way or the other. They had been convicted, cashiered, but finally they were told, you’re free, you can go. They would go home, and even if nothing was finished, not ever, they would batten away the memories and find new beginnings. All of them were going, going home. Shiv thought of them, the thousands and thousands of them, jostling and jolting across the country in trains, in busses and bullock carts. He pulled a chair toward Shanti, set it squarely in front of her. He sat down in front of her, his hands in his lap. At the back of his neck there was a trembling, as the words pulsed in his chest, exerting a steady pressure against his heart: you’re free, you can go.
“I heard something,” Shiv said.
“What?”
He cleared his throat, and for a moment he felt fear, blank and overpowering, and he was afraid of speaking, he felt profusion pressing up against the clean prison he had built for himself, but then he looked into Shanti’s eyes and he spoke. He told her what he had heard. Afterwards they sat in silence, and Shiv was grateful, because his shoulders ached and he was very tired.
When she was in her compartment, settled in the window, Frankie came strolling down the platform to announce that the train was delayed for twelve minutes. Shanti nodded, but Shiv was too lost in a sudden panic of emotion to say anything. He felt terror and joy mixing in his stomach, and a slow creep of pleasure at the sunlight across his shoulders, and grief. Frankie looked at him, and then took him by the arm and led him away.
“This time you were talking,” Frankie said. “And talking and talking. About what?”
“I was telling her something.”
“You told her a story?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Shiv tried. He opened his mouth, and tried to form the words, but they were gone from him. “I can’t,” he said, trembling. He gestured at his throat, meaning to explain the tumult under the skin.
“All right, sure,” Frankie said, baffled but quick to the chase. “I’ll ask her.”
And he did. Frankie stood by the window, his head cocked to one side. Under the long flutter and hiss of steam, Shiv could hear her words.
Amma woke in the morning and cleaned the house. She cleaned the storerooms, the rooms around the courtyard, she swept the dark mud floors and wiped the mantlepieces and the tops of the doorways. She put new wicks in the lanterns and filled them with oil. She washed the red brick of the courtyard and emptied out the ashes from the choola. And the children going in and out of the house, through the big door with iron hoops, told their mothers, Amma’s cleaning. And the women of the village said, one of her children is coming.
It was a small house, with a granary at the rear and a good well. Amma’s grandfather had built it in some time so far away that she thought of it as beyond numbers. He had built it solid and strong, and she came back to it after her school-teacher husband died of typhoid. She came back with four children, two sons and two daughters, the oldest just eleven, to this village called Chandapur, and here she lived and grew old. Her name was Amita but the village called her Amma. She could not read or write, but she educated her children. There was money, just so much, from the farming of her land, and she lived quietly and with a simplicity that was exactly the same as poverty, but she sent her children to school in the city. In her house books were sacred. She wrapped them in red cloth and stacked them on a bed in the biggest of the rooms in her house. Amma lived in a village and ate only twice a day but her children went to boarding school. Her eldest son went to Roorkee and became an engineer. Amma went sometimes to the cities, north, south, east, and west, to visit her children, but came back always to her house in the village, fiercely alone and happy.
It was this engineer son who came home that day. He sat on a charpai in the courtyard and spoke to the men from the panchayat, who came and sat around him in a circle and smoked. There were women in the kitchen, helping Amma and laughing with her. She had a wicked tongue, and liked to talk. They could hear her laughing in the courtya
rd, as they listened to the engineer. There were children running in and out of the house. The engineer was telling them, everyone, about the end of the war. He was wearing a white shirt, dark blue pants, and his hair came up on his forehead in a wonderful swell which the villagers, knowing too little, couldn’t recognize as stylish. He had a high querulous voice, and he was telling them about the American bombs.
“The bomb killed a city,” he said. “There were two bombs. Each finished a city.” He snapped his fingers, high in the air. They looked at him, not saying a word, and he felt the stubborn peasant scepticism gathering around his ankles, that unmovable slow stupidity. He was irritated, rankled now as he used to be when his mother laughed at his modernisms. Aji-haan, she would say, unanswerable. It baffled him that his most sophisticated explanations of cause and effect were defeated easily by snorting homespun scepticism, sure-yes, aji-haan. He could see her now, standing in the sooty doorway to the kitchen, her arm up on the wall, listening. “Fire,” he said. “Whoosh. One moment of fire and a whole city gone.”
“How?” It was Amma. Her hair was white, and she was wearing white, and she had a strong nose and direct eyes. The engineer looked up at her, a glass of milk in his left hand. “If you break a speck,” he said. He didn’t know how to translate “atom.” “You release energy. Fire.” Amma said, “How?” Now the children were quiet. Amma took two steps forward. “How?” The engineer gestured into the air. “It’s like that thing in the Mahabharata,” he said finally. “That weapon that Ashwatthaman hurled at Arjun.” “The Brahmasira?” Amma said. “That was stopped.” “Not this one,” the engineer said, turning his hand palm down. “They used it.” Then the food was ready and he ate.
Nobody noticed until the next morning that Amma had stopped talking. “What happened?” the engineer asked. “Why aren’t you talking?” A little later he asked, “Are you angry with me? Did I do something?” Amma shook her head but said nothing. She refused to talk to her friends, and to their children. Now some people thought she had taken a vow of silence, like Gandhi-ji, and others thought that she had been witchcrafted by some secret hater. The engineer was annoyed, and then concerned. He wanted to take her to the city, to a doctor. She put a hand on the ground and shook her head. But she wouldn’t talk, couldn’t. Finally he left, her son. In the weeks after her other children came, one by one, and still she spoke to nobody. She smiled, she went about her daily business, but her silence was complete and eternal.
First it was just one child, Nainavati’s daughter, eight years old. Her skin cracked on her hands. Her mother rubbed her skin with neem-leaf oil, and held her close. The next morning the cracks were open, a little wider, and spreading to the elbows. And that afternoon Narain Singh’s son had it too. There was no bleeding, no pain, only the lurch of Nainavati’s heart when she looked at her daughter’s hand and saw the white of bone at the wrist. A week later all the children in the village were splintered from head to toe. Looking at each other they wept with fear, and their parents were afraid to hold them. Pattadevi said it first. One morning her baby, ten months old, gurgled against her thigh, and Pattadevi raised her head, forgetful and so smiling, and she saw the pulsating beat of a tiny heart. Pattadevi shut her eyes tight, and in her anguish she said, “Amma’s son brought it home, with his Japanese bomb.” That was then the understanding of the village, true and agreed upon.
Finally the horror was that they grew used to it. The months passed and they were shunned by the neighbouring settlements, and certainly they did not want to go anywhere. Life had to go on, and so they tended the crops, saw to the animals, built and repaired, and lived in a sort of bleak satisfaction, an expectation of precisely nothing. On the three hundred and sixtieth day Amma came to the panchayat.
They were sitting at their usual places under the pipal tree, the old men, and the powerful, and then the others. They fell silent when Amma walked among them, surprised by her appearance in an assembly of men, and a little afraid of her, her witchy quiet and her confident walk. She sat under the pipal tree. In her hand she had a letter.
“What is that, Amma?” the sarpanch said. “A letter from your son? What does he write?” He took the letter from her, as he usually did, tore it open, and began to read. “Respected mother …”
“I want to praise,” Amma said.
“What?” the sarpanch said, dropping the letter.
“The kindness of postmen, their long walks in the summer sun, their aching feet. The mysterious and generous knowledge of all those who cook, their intimate and vast power over us. The unsung courage of young brides, their sacrifices beyond all others, their patience. The age of trees, the years of their lives and their companionship. The sleeping ferocity of dogs—I saw two kill another last week—and their stretching muscles, their complete and deep and good happiness with a full stomach and a long sleep.”
The sarpanch opened and closed his mouth. Before long all the women gathered too, with their children, and the whole village listened to Amma.
“The long song of those who drive trucks on the perpetual roads. The black faces of the diggers of coal, and their wives who try ever not to hear the sound of rushing water under their feet. The staggering smell of the birds that clean bones, their drunken walk with its anxious greed. The roofs of the village houses in the morning, seen from the ghats above the river, and the white glimmer of the temple above the trees. The roaring familiarity of the dusty brickmakers with fire. The painful faith of unrequited lovers.”
The villagers listened to her. One of the children noticed it first. He tugged at his mother’s hand, but she was rapt. He held her index finger and pulled it to and fro, and the gold bangles on her wrist jingled, and she looked down. He held up his arm to her, and she saw the cracks were gone. Then others saw it too. No one could see it happening, not one fissure or the other closing, but if they looked and looked away and looked back, they could see the skin becoming whole. And Amma was talking. She praised the sky, the earth, and every woman in the village, and each of the men, even the ones known for sloth, or cruelty. Then they brought her food, and water, and she talked.
When she finished talking the next day the children were well. Much later, the sarpanch, who was sitting on a charpai in her courtyard, said to her, “Well, Amma, your son brought the sickness, and you fixed it.”
“What did you say?” Amma said, and for a moment the sarpanch was afraid that for all his dignity she would throw the teacup she was holding at his head. “My son brought it?”
“You have to admit that he came, and then they were sick.”
But Amma rolled her eyes. “Aji-haan,” she said, and that was that.
By the time Shanti had finished telling the story, the train was an extra two minutes late, and Rajan came out of his office and looked angrily down the platform. Frankie waved his flag and the bogie began to move. Shiv walked beside the window, and he watched the shadows from the bars move across Shanti’s face. With every step he had to walk a little faster.
“Will you marry me?” he said.
“What?”
“Will you marry me?”
A shudder passed over Shanti’s cheeks, a twist of emotion like a wave, and she turned her face to the side in pain, as if he had hit her. But then she looked up at him, and he could see that her eyes were full. He was running now.
“Yes,” she said.
He raised a hand to the window as she leaned forward, but the train was away, and the platform came suddenly to an end. Shiv stood poised at the drop, one hand raised.
“Is it true?” It was Frankie, eager and open-faced. “Is it true?”
“What?”
“Your story, you stupid man, is it true?”
“Of course it is,” Shiv said, waving his arm in front of Frankie’s face. “It is. Look.”
Frankie was looking past the arm with a deductive frown. “What happened to you? Why are you grinning like that?”
“She’s going to marry me.”
“She is? S
he? You mean you asked?”
“And she said yes.”
“But where is she going now?”
“I don’t know.”
Frankie raised his arms in the air, clutched at his hair, threw down his red flag and green flag and stomped on them. “God help this country, with lovers like you,” he said finally. Then he took Shiv by the arm, and took him home, to Frankie’s lair, and began to plan.
*
Two months and three days later, in a train to Bombay, Shanti slept with her head on Shiv’s knee. They were in an unreserved third class compartment, and Shiv was thinking about the four hundred and twenty-two rupees in his wallet. Next to the notes he had a folded yellow slip of paper with the address of one Benedicto Fernandes, who was Frankie’s first cousin and an old Bombay hand. In the sleeping dimness of the compartment Shiv could see the nodding heads and swaying shoulders of his fellow travellers, two salesmen on their way back from their territories, a farmer with his feet propped up on a huge cloth bundle, his wife, a muscular mechanic, and others. They had made space on the one berth for the newlyweds.
They had been married in a civil ceremony in Delhi. This after Shiv had written to his father, “My Dear Papa,” and “I must ask your blessing in a momentous decision,” and had received a curt reply telling him to come home, and containing no blessing, or word of affection. He had written again, and this time received two pages of fury, “disobedience” and “disgrace to the family” and “that woman, whoever or whatever she may be.” Meanwhile Anuradha was tremulous, and Rajan had muttered about what one owed to one’s parents, and what a bad influence that Furtado fellow was. But finally Frankie had saved them. He had found Shanti, her letters and Shiv’s had gone to his address, and he had made the arrangements, set up their rendezvous, lent money, and had gone with Shiv to wait for the night bus at the crossroads.