OTHER PEOPLE TIPTOED around the topic of my mother’s departure, but to my grandfather it seemed to be above all a helpful marker on the calendar. “When did you get that scar?” he might say. “Was it before your mother left or after?” It was his way of stating that it was normal for life to be broken into two distinct halves, a change you made light of. Took in your stride. As if mothers left their homes and children all the time, and from Siberia to Sialkot there were boys like me who had stepped from normal life to motherless life as easily as walking through an open door into a different house. My mother had been there, and now was not, that was all. My father, on the other hand, preferred to act as if my mother had been a candle that had burnt down and away, leaving no trace, not the smallest blob of dried wax. I knew instinctively that I was not to mention her in his presence.
Around that time, Delite Cinema was running three shows daily of Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead. The film was about a man who is killed by his enemies, then brought back to life by a doctor who puts a mechanical heart into him. Resurrected, the man is gifted a sixth sense that makes him search out his murderers and drive each of them to a grisly end. At last, the resurrected man is shot dead, but this second time he dies in peace, avenged. Dinu could not sleep for a whole week after he saw the film, waking up whimpering, crawling into his older brother’s bed for comfort, only to be kicked and told to get the hell away.
I was not allowed films, but the story proved to me that death might be reversible. The first few weeks after my mother left, when I thought she had died and nobody had told me, I lay at night talking to whoever looked after the stars beyond my mosquito net, and Rikki and me, all of us. “Let her come back, after a week, in a month, or a year. Like Boris Karloff.” I added a coda to my prayer: “Let her come back exactly as she was. Not as a killer.”
I had dreams in which the severed hand in the jar at my grandfather’s clinic floated away and I ran after it in anguish, handless, crying for it to be restored to me. When I woke from those dreams hardly able to breathe for terror, my first act was to check if my arm was still intact, so painful and real was my sense of having lost a part of my body.
My mother did not come, but with the approach of winter the first letter from her appeared, an envelope fat with words and pictures. Although the exact month slips my mind, I know how warm her pictures felt in my cold hands. The first picture showed an expanse of water and the horseshoe of a yellow beach ahead, palm trees bending confidentially towards each other. In the foreground was a set of railings—she must have painted it on the deck of her steamer. There was another picture, this one a painted map showing a boat leaving the coast of India at Madras and making its way through white-topped waves and smiling fish to Singapore, and onward to Surabaya, Java, Bali. Like a child’s drawing of land and sea. All the places were marked in the neat, tiny hand my mother used to label things with. Her normal handwriting was made of loops and flourishes and sloped away from the margins and up the page.
Yet again, my father had not gone to work and it was he who took the letter from the postman and examined the envelope. He held it towards me, his face impassive. “It’s for you. Your first ever letter.” The envelope contained those painted pictures and lines which began “Myshkin my darling” and went on to say how much she thought of me and of home, and how sad she was to be so far away. She asked how Dada and my father were, but did not say she was coming back. My father waited till I opened the envelope and when he saw that it contained nothing for him, he turned away and went into the house. We did not see him at tea that day, nor at dinner.
That letter altered something in my father. He said nothing, but it was the final note in a dirge that had begun to play in his head a long time ago. Over the next few days he moved his things from the bedroom he had shared with my mother to the outbuilding at the back. It had two rooms and a covered verandah, and stood at a slight distance from the main house, shaded by a tamarind tree. I had seldom seen the door to the outbuilding open. Nobody needed to go there, we had forgotten why it existed at all.
Ram Saran kicked hard to open the damp-jammed door and the choking smell of bird droppings surged from the place like poison gas. Pigeons flew out in a flurry of wings and beaks. We stepped into stacks of old newspapers glued into a block with age, limbless chairs, empty bottles, gunny bags caked with manure, amputated table legs, a warped cage made of chicken wire, rolls of frayed cow-rope, cracked lamp bases, dead fireworks. Ram Saran made a bonfire out of everything that would burn. The fire leaped and crackled and he sat on his haunches before it, warming his hands, scratching his head, and smoking until some of the fireworks, against all expectation, exploded in a bright shower of light, causing him to leap away back to his cleaning. Despite his efforts, though, the walls felt grimy, the whitewash having sickened long ago to a moldy yellow scarred with gray patches. The floor was dull red and no amount of swabbing could brighten it. The web of cracks that went across the floor remained black with dirt, impervious to soap and brush.
After the room was cleaned, my father had Ram Saran and Golak bring in his cedarwood desk and chair as well as his books. From Rozario & Sons came a narrow bed and a rigid wooden chair that had been moldering there for as long as anyone could recall. These and his bookshelves were all the furniture my father allowed. He had no rugs, no pictures, no clock, no radio. Our house had electricity, but the connection did not extend to the outbuilding. After dark it was to be lit by candles and oil lamps. Dada asked my father what he planned to do once the summer’s heat came: Would he live without a fan? My father said he would see about that when the time came.
Now the house was empty all day, Dada at his clinic, my father in his outbuilding reading. In the early mornings before I left for school, when I went to the outbuilding to say goodbye, my father would be on the roof, eyes closed, murmuring his newfound Buddhist mantras. When I came back, he would be locked up in his room. I ate lunch alone, then went to find Dinu or ran down the road to my grandfather and spent the afternoon in the clinic.
My mother’s first letter threw my own feelings into turmoil. I read it when I was alone, nobody there to see what I was doing. In some obscure way I think I knew I ought not to have received that letter, it was my father’s by right. I was angry with my mother for many things, for not writing to my father, for going away, for not taking me with her, and yet, more than anything, I knew I wanted her back, and if I saw anything I associated with her—an empty vase that always had fresh flowers before, a white sari drying on a line—a giant fist of pain squeezed my chest hard enough to break my ribs.
I read the first letter every day. At times I hid myself in the old carriage to read it in private, and before I knew it I was back with my mother cycling, me perched on the pillion, my legs swinging away from the ground. I drifted off on a ship sailing away from India, going to her in Bali. I sat there for what felt like the whole day, dreaming until I fell asleep. I woke hungry and confused, Banno Didi and Ram Saran’s voices coming closer, then fading. I longed for one of them to notice my suffering and come and get me, but they always had other things to do. When I did come out of the carriage and go into the house, Banno Didi scowled at me. “And where have you been? Not a thought about bath or food or studies, just idling.”
Early in the spring, the carder came as usual to redo our mattresses. He sat outside at his twanging machine, suspended in a cloud of cotton that drifted and floated as if it were snowing in our sunny garden. My father came and sat on a stair by the carder, transfixed by the thrumming wires. He rested his chin in his hands and did not move. Gradually, flakes of cotton covered his hair in white, turning him into an old man. Wisps rested on his shoulders and lap. All day, as the carder worked, my father sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, not taking his eyes away from them.
That evening, he said to Dada, “The carder’s been coming to our house every year and I didn’t know his name. Before him it was his father, he says. Do you know his name?”
“I knew the father’s name, I treated him for pneumonia once, a nasty bout, as I recall,” Dada said. “His name was . . . let me think. No, it slips my mind.”
“Exactly,” my father said. “We have no relationship with all these people who work for us. They are no more to us than cattle. In fact we know our cows’ names, don’t we, and our dog’s. But what is Banno’s youngest child’s name? Myshkin?”
“He’s called Dabbu,” I said. “And the other two are Mantu and Raju.”
“You only know them because you play with them.”
“Playing together is friendship of a kind, Nek, is it not?” Dada said.
“Well, you didn’t know their names—did you?” My father turned swiftly to Dada, who now rustled the pages of his newspaper and said, “Imagine that, Rajputana’s beaten Lord Tennyson’s Eleven. Do you know who Tennyson is, Myshkin?”
“Typical . . . go on about cricket and dodge anything uncomfortable,” my father said. “Can we not change the subject, please? Do you know the names of Banno’s children?”
“If you’re determined to prove that I am unconnected with the toiling masses, Nek, yes, that may be true, though I treat them for a dozen illnesses every year. I think it’s enough that I remember Banno’s name—at my age.” He took off his glasses and folded up the paper with a frown. “I think I’ll go and see Lisa. A cup of coffee.”
“Coffee? Really? Is that what you drink there?” My father raised an eyebrow and shook his head. He got up from the table. He began pacing the room, rearranging a book here, a vase there. He stopped before a painting by my mother, of the boat and river, one that she used to threaten to burn because of its childishness. He examined it as if he had never seen it before. Then he lifted it from its hook, turned its face to the wall, and with care set it on the floor. “It’s got nothing to do with age,” he said. “There must be another way to live. It’s a question of finding it. A simpler way. A truer way.”
A few days after this, he seated Dada and me in the drawing room again. We waited for news: perhaps my mother had told him she was coming back. But no. He informed us that he was embarking on a pilgrimage. He quoted Hsuan Tsang, the ancient Buddhist pilgrim who, he said, walked from China to India more than a thousand years ago in search of the Ultimate Truth and to settle the perplexities of his mind. He quoted the Buddha, who had apparently said there were only two mistakes one could make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting. My father planned to follow in the footsteps of these Great Souls, going to Patna, Nalanda, Lumbini, and maybe further afield to the Bhaja caves near Poona, to Ajanta and Ellora, even Burma and Ceylon. He chanted the names of these sacred places with a kind of breathless fervor, as if he were declaiming poetry. He wanted to live as Buddhist monks did, with no money, seeking food and shelter from the charitable, meditating and learning about Buddhism along the way. He did not tell us for how long he planned to do this.
He went away one morning before I was awake. I did not hear him go. This, Dada explained later, was because he did not leave in a tonga or a car, he merely walked out of the gate with no more than a cloth bag containing a blanket, a metal bowl and tumbler, and a few clothes. He told Dada he planned to walk to the edge of our town and then down the road that led to the next village and onward to the next. He would beg for a little space on bullock carts or tongas, whatever was going in the northerly direction and where they stopped he would sleep the night in a verandah or temple or wayside teashop. He had not woken me because that might have weakened his resolve, he told me in a note he left for me along with a rupee to spend on anything I wanted. He would be back soon, he said in his note. I was not to worry.