Chapter Fourteen

I could see nothing of Darjeeling. The town was not only suffering a total power cut, but had disappeared in dense fog.

The chatty soldier drew up his jeep in front of what he promised was the Planters’ Club. To express my gratitude, I handed him the taxi fare I would have spent. He grinned broadly, touched the notes to his heart, then wished me a gracious farewell and vanished back into the gloom.

Without the headlights of the jeep I was suddenly quite blind. The main gates of the Club had been firmly chained for the night, so I felt my way around the outer wall and cautiously entered an unlocked door. The fathomless black of the interior burst into shimmering shadow as a Nepali servant lifted a glowing oil lamp high above his head. The darban doorkeeper could not understand a word I said, so made a phone call and handed me the receiver. It was the manager.

“Sir, you are very late,” the fatigued voice pointed out astutely. I apologised and asked if there might be a vacant room for my

use. He replied that he would be pleased to allow me to stay, even though he had already retired for the night. I asked whether the price included breakfast.

“Oh my, sir!” he exclaimed. “You are driving a hard bargain, but for you I’ll say most certainly, ‘Yes’!”

The sleepy-eyed servant led me down a broad, open verandah, and up a rickety wooden staircase to my room. He lit two candle stubs, stoked up a coal fire, bid me goodnight and disappeared back into the mist. Exhausted, I dropped onto the bed as heavy rain began to patter over the skylights.

So here I was at last, in the club to which Great-Uncle Oscar had belonged all those years ago, lying on a bed in which “Hindoo Uncle” - as he had signed himself on the photographs he had regularly posted home - might also have once sought sleep.

The bedroom was large, yet still cluttered with colonial furniture. I had my own en suite sitting room, in which stood a dusty bureau, an empty plant-stand, and an open-cane three-piece, set around a badly torn green-baize card table. I had my own Victorian gussalkhana, with a porcelain flush-toilet and washbasin made in Aldershot, and a gargantuan, grimly stained bath tub, with heavily encrusted chrome taps, made in Birmingham.

I unpacked my essentials and threw more coal onto the fire. I bathed in four inches of tepid brown water, which was all the tap enamelled “hot” eventually managed to produce, then snuggled deeply into chalky sheets, beneath a damp eiderdown. A Yuletide roaring in the grate, thermal long johns, scarf and woolly socks, yet still I shivered with the cold. It seemed impossible that, just hours before, I had been limp and panting in stifling heat.

I blew out the candles by my bed and vigorously flailed limbs in all directions in an effort to warm myself by friction, just as Grandmother had once taught me in my chilly bed in Sussex. I quickly drew the blankets around my chin and curled up to watch flaring embers in the grate flicker phantom battles across walls and ceiling.

“Just look at me now, Grandma!” I said aloud, as though she were sitting in the lumpy armchair, ready to enchant me with another ancestral tale. “All tucked up in Uncle Oscar’s very own Planters’ Club, with Darjeeling outside my windows! Who’d have thought?”

I waited, as though for her reply.

“Your breath like the full moon in the summer night shall hover about my dreams, making them fragrant,” I smiled, quoting Tagore to the empty room.

And still I listened for “my Johnny Sparrow” until, as sleep swiftly stole away all thought and memory, I was aware of nothing more than raindrops slipping down the chimney to make the fire hiss.

***

Bindra was awoken by crows. She turned her head to find an untidy row of black feathers sitting on the sill of the open window.

“Kali Ma,” she whispered towards them from her bed. “What have you brought for me today?”

There was no response from the six steadfast stares.

“I don’t know that I’m yet ready for more learning,” she murmured in admission. “I don’t know that I’m yet ready for more wisdom.”

She had first learned of wisdom from her grandmother. Bindra had lived with her after her mother and sister had died beneath the elephant, and had grown to love her dearly.

Bindra’s grandmother had never been into the town. She had lived her entire life in the mountain hut in which she had been born. Even when she had married a Nepali from lower in the Hills, she had defied custom and refused to move in with her husband’s family. He had stayed on his ancestral farm, and she had stayed in her mountain hut. Bindra’s grandfather had visited his new wife once a week initially. However, when she had given birth to a daughter, instead of a son, he had abandoned them both and had taken a more compliant, conventional village woman with whom to raise a family.

Bindra’s grandmother had not believed her husband’s excuse about the birth of a daughter. Amongst their people a daughter was a blessing, a goddess incarnate. They had not held to the misogyny of the orthodox, patriarchal traditions of the Plains.

Bindra’s grandmother had known too well why he had really abandoned her. She was a bojudeuta, a “Grandmother God”.

Others had preferred to call her bokshi.

Witch.

***

At seven in the morning, I woke to find a Nepali room-boy opening the curtains and tying back the skylight blinds. He introduced himself as Yashu, wished me a chirpy “Fine morning, sir!”, then left me to rouse myself with a hot pot of ginger brew, which he had laid out with great care on the bedside teapoy.

I attempted some semblance of a wash in the granular, brown trickle proffered by the bathroom taps, dressed, then wandered down to breakfast. The fog had returned after the night’s rain, thwarting all hopes of any views from the balcony of the snowypeaked Kanchenjunga.

A smart, Tibetan-looking doorman showed me to the single laid table, informing me that I was the only guest in the Club. Impatient to begin my search for some evidence of Uncle Oscar’s life in these tea-clad hills, I pressed him to know at what time the Club Office might be manned.

The doorman shrugged. “Perhaps after breakfast, sir. Then again, perhaps not.”

As he wandered back towards his post, an elderly, Nepali khitmutgar servant approached with some effort on his arthritic limbs. He bowed with undisguised discomfort, took my order and laid a heavily stained napkin across my nippy knees.

The dining hall in which I sat was floored in Burmese teak, thick with decades of wax polish. Between the alcove windows, with their accommodating inset seats, stood pristine stone fireplaces. The Brunswick blacking of the grates gave the room a delicate taint of asphaltum, linseed oil and turpentine.

Set into one wall stood display cabinets, congested with past members’ tarnished trophies. They dated far back to the time when sport had been a near mania in British India, an antidote perhaps for the grinding boredom inherent in the disciplined formalities of the Raj. Cups for polo and cricket, badminton and tennis. Medals for shikar and archery, jackal hunting and pig-sticking.

Mounted above the picture rail, my only companions’ glass eyeballs stared down with contempt, each decapitated chinkara and blackbuck, muntjac and cheetah leaking sawdust and hung on hooks, having proven to former generations that they had indeed dominated all animals. And foreigners.

The wild rattle of a wooden screen made me start. Breakfast had arrived. I watched my elderly khit slowly wind his way through the dining tables with their matching sets of sub-William Morris chairs. He gradually set before me cornflakes, toast, poached egg, marmalade and hot milk, then proudly indicated towards the large opening in the wall from which he had collected the tray.

“Our fine buttery hatch, cut into the dining room in the old days to facilitate a more efficient service, due to complaints of insufficient attendance at table being made. It is, sir, to your satisfaction?”

I assured him that it was. His clipped, pre-war vowels had been faultless.

As he poured my tea, I wondered why I found such satisfaction in the faded elegance amongst which I now so delightedly sat. Had the prized modernity of my generation so banished all hints of gentility from our tediously sanitised lives, that it drove us to seek out the cosy reassurance of nostalgia? Even on this, my own sentimental journey, I had become acutely aware that I was doing little more than grasping at ghosts, ultimately dependent upon my own imagination, my own terms of reference. Kipling, Forster, Waugh. Jhabvala, Merchant, Ivory.

In truth, the tablecloth spread before me was no longer starched or pressed. The years of tea, coffee and Colman’s mustard had patterned the cotton in stains no dhobi, however energetic, could erase. Decades of unwiped vases had left a myriad of concentric ripples across the bare tabletops. The cruet had been left to tarnish, the cutlery all belonged to different sets. The leather upholstery had worn through so long ago that it now exposed horsehair and cotton flock, torn scrim and rusty spring.

I recalled, from delving into my Grandmother’s treasured box of mementoes, that there had once been a time when the breakfast menu at the Club had offered plain or parsley omelette with a variety of grilled offal. There had been bacon and tomatoes, sausages and mashed potato. Patties of meat, best steak and mutton hash. Eggs boiled, poached and “rumble-tumble”.

But now all choice was gone. The cornflakes were stale, the butter rancid. The greasy milk was speckled with ash, the Bhutanese marmalade served in its shop-shelf jar.

And yet, whilst battling with incinerated toast, I seemed to catch an iridescent sparkle thrown across the room by cufflinks and tiepins. The lustre of pearls and precious stones resting softly across pale throats, wrists and fingers. The scent of skin doused in Rowland’s Kalydor, “Friend of the Complexion, Solace of the Flushed, Last Hope of the Freckled”.

As I picked crystallised ants from the sugar bowl, I seemed to sense the rub of gum-stiffened cuffs and collars on old koi-hai. The tintinnabulation of silver on fine imported china, as pukka burra sahibs and sakt burra mems tucked into Oxford sausages, mutton pillau, salmon loaf and Brown Windsor soup. Walnut blancmange, guava fool, mango mould and Taj Mahal jellies.

The tireless talk of tea crops, Cold Weather tours and tiger shoots. The ceaseless flow of billayati-pani pink gin sodas and Murree beer. The orotund toasts to Queen Empress, King Emperor and the confident delusion of an eternal Pax Britannica.

***

Bindra often longed to speak to her grandmother.

The bojudeuta were highly respected in the Eastern Himalaya for their knowledge, secret arts and wisdom. People came from all around for medicines and advice, understanding and answers.

As a child, Bindra had assisted her grandmother. She had gathered plants for pounding in the wooden okhli musli pestle and mortar to treat sickness and bestow second sight. She had collected tree bark for crushing on the silauto grinding-stone, to make a poultice that would heal wounds and mend broken bones.

She had bartered for putkako maha, the rare, intoxicating insect honey that cured all infection, and its kut wax that proved such an effective antidote for snakebite. She had sought the bitter, black bikuma plant that was the only remedy for the deadly, yellow poison of the ghost-like kapat insect, and fetched yak’s milk churpi that, when dissolved in plant oil, could dull the pain of grief.

Bindra had seen many people come. Infirm men, sick women, diseased children. There had been young repas and aged lamas from the monasteries. Gurkha soldiers from Deolo camp. Even a personal maid of the Queen Mother of Bhutan who had scurried in one day with a secret trouble, when her mistress had been staying in her hot season palace.

Bindra had watched her grandmother’s visitors walk away from their hut with ease, when they had been carried up the hill path in crippling paralysis. She had seen them laugh out loud with fearless joy, when they had arrived weak and drawn with devastating suffering. She had seen her grandmother’s ministrations enable women to sing as they gave birth to their children. She had seen men struggling against Lord Yamantaka’s inescapable noose of death smile softly and embrace their end in peace.

Over the years, Bindra had watched the constant course of visitors bow to touch her grandmother’s feet upon departure. She had seen them, in their gratitude, lay before her rice and daal, atta, milk and mustard oil, yet never once did she demand a fee for her remedies or request money for her wisdom.

And yet, it was only Bindra who saw the ensuing pain and fever, exhaustion and debility, the fits and phantom labours endured by her grandmother when others hurried home to show their miracles.

It was Bindra alone who knew the hidden price of the bojudeuta’s healing.

***

The broad verandah of the Planters’ Club was bedecked with mounted skulls, hat stands, three-tiered plant holders, marble-topped tables and long-sleever chairs with drink pockets in the arms.

I peered through the door labelled “Billiards” and found a large, empty room painted in a restful shade of soot-stained, buff Kosmo. I looked into “Bitters” to find red Keystone walls, frayed moonj matting and a sleeping servant tucked against the skirting. I popped my head into the red velvet plush and guinea-gold brass of the “Lounge”, and discovered a jumble of sagging armchairs and lumpy sofas in need of reupholstering.

The walls of the “Reading Room” were a madman’s map in old distemper, its warren of wormy bookshelves packed tightly with web-laced tomes. Flyleaves listed previous borrowers, with return dates from the days of the Queen Empress. All Lord this and Lady that. The signature of a Bonham-Carter, Yeatman-Biggs and Wrangham-Hardy. The flamboyant scrawl of a Ptolemy Carew-Hunt and the ever-so-thrilling W. F. Maguire-Luzeo-Péppé.

I disturbed dense dust to discover not only an extensive miscellany of reputable British writers - from Shelley to Stoker, Scott to Sackville-West - but all manner of Anglo-Indiana. The classic Curry & Rice by Captain Atkinson. Major Shadwell’s all-essential Economy of the Chummery, Home, Mess & Club. The spirited rhythm and rhyme of Aliph Cheem’s satirical Lays of Ind, on which I had been raised, with all those childhood favourites of the sullen Humptee Dumptee Frumtee Chundrer, the liberal Baboo Humbul Bumbul Bender, and good Rajah Kistnamah Howdie Doo.

The red-nosed Tibetan librarian, who sat behind a paper-piled desk, expressed delight at my interest in the damp-mottled volumes with the faulty beam of a tooth-depleted grin. She was evidently eager for me to borrow a book, just to have the rare chance of using her crumbling rubber stamp and arid ink pad, to enter a title and author into her mould-stained “books out” ledger.

The Club office was still not open. I returned to the verandah and looked down towards the town. It remained thickly enshrouded by an impenetrable fog. I decided to wait a while before venturing beyond the garden walls, so summoned a smiling servant for a blanket and settled down in a wicker armchair on the verandah. I would pass my misty morning in the company of the borrowed edition of Sir Henry Cunningham’s Chronicles of Dustypore and a pot of scalding ginger tea.

The servants thought me paagal mad to be sitting out in the dank cold. And yet, alone with my book and with the town submerged in all-obscuring cloud, I could imagine that it was still 1920. I could imagine that Uncle Oscar was out there, in the bazaar, purchasing supplies for another campfire meet with his ferociously hedonistic planter chums, all ready to sit around open flames on elegant sofas and comfortable chairs hauled through deep jungle by an army of attendants.

I could have imagined that it was still 1920, except my flight of fancy had fundamental flaws. The paint of the Club was peeling, the windows all unwashed. The wicker and cane had been allowed to split, the floors left un-soda-scrubbed. The puffings of muslin in the rooms were long unlaundered, the damask and chintz untouched by flannel and bran.

I could have imagined that it was still 1920, except hidden traffic blew impatient horns beyond the garden walls, whilst the mali gardener, indolently weeding a herbaceous border, sported fake Adidas trainers, a baseball cap and over-sized polyester slacks.

***

Bindra had been just eight years old when her grandmother had first taken her to the old cave temple above Lapu basti.

They had arrived long after nightfall. In their carrying cloths they had wrapped toriko tel lamp oil, batti wicks, dhup incense, sidur pigment and tori mustard seeds. They had been laden with parsat offerings of phalphul fruit, chamal rice, kapur camphor and supari betel nut. Once settled, they had chanted together in the darkness, until sunlight had illuminated the peak of the Kanchenjunga.

They had spent all the next day sitting at the rock face. Bindra’s grandmother had given her plant-infused water to drink, on which had floated scarlet hibiscus flowers. She had gently blown smoke from burning moss and dried herbs into Bindra’s lungs that had made her sigh. She had bathed her in the fish-churned temple pool, from which rose Lord Shiva’s weather-wasted trishul trident.

She had sat Bindra in the warmth of the sun, as she had slowly circled her, moving her hands in carefully chosen mudras to focus her intention and express her purpose. She had muttered indiscernible mantras as she had gently marked Bindra’s young body with indelible symbols of supreme, universal union.

All day long, Bindra’s grandmother had methodically taught her. She had given her knowledge that, when applied in daily life, she had promised would lead her to the wisdom for which she yearned.

As dusk had fallen, Bindra’s grandmother had initiated her with her first mantra. She had told her that she was to repeat these Words of Power every day. Firstly, as the sun rose from behind the mythical mountain in the east, called Udaya. And then again, as the sun set behind the mythical mountain in the west, called Asta.

In time, Bindra’s grandmother had imparted a second mantra to be whispered into the ears of each of her future children as they married. And finally, a third mantra, to be whispered into her own ears at the moment of her death.

Bindra had imagined that she would be an old woman herself before she would use the last. And yet, she was only in the third month of her womanhood when called upon by the jhankri to whisper the Mantra of Severance into the ears of her grandmother. To share the final breath. To bury a cloth-bound portion of charred flesh beneath the river sand.

And then to feed the crows.

***

The damp of Darjeeling had reached the hollows of my bones. I put aside my book, sifted the last dregs of tepid tea, and left the verandah to try the Club office once again. The door was open.

The ill-lit room was chaotic, clogged with bureaucratic excess. A stocky Nepali peered at me over a swelling sea of official forms in quadruplicate. He pushed files of flavescent papers and dried-out typewriter ribbons from a swivel chair. He cut a swathe through the jumble on the floor with his feet and bade me join him.

I explained that I had come in search of my Uncle Oscar. He listened intently and with sufficient interest that I felt able to ask if I might examine the old Club records. He was delighted to oblige and began to rummage unsystematically through drawers and cabinets.

Above his deliriously cluttered desk hung a faded photograph. However, this was not the likeness of the usual smiling, bespectacled Gandhi, or tightly buttoned Nehru. Rather, this was an English woman, who in her lifetime could easily have been mistaken for a young Larry Grayson. As to this pukka mem’s identity, or the reason for her pride of place, the office-wallah was about to enlighten me, when he made a cheer of triumph. He had finally uncovered three leather-bound volumes of minutes dating back to the Club’s establishment in 1868. Thrilled and impatient, I hurried to my room with the books, having been allowed to borrow them for “just as long as you do be guesting with us”.

Page after page was inscribed with the name of Uncle Oscar. I yearned to have been able to run to a telephone and share every word with my Grandmother.

At the regular reminders for him to pay outstanding Club bills she would have chuckled, as at his complaints to the sub-committee regarding the tinned plums in syrup, which he had found “utterly inedible”, and the kippered herrings, which he had deemed “quite unfit for consumption”.

She would have approved of his recommendation that electric light be introduced into the Club building, but would have given an explosive snort at his vehement resistance to the suggestion that women be admitted any more than twice a month, and then only to dinner or the public salons.

At Uncle Oscar’s support for Colonel Roberts, who had protested against the posting of a sham telegram regarding the bombing of Alexandria, she would have yawned, but, being a talented musician herself, would have cheered his decision to punish members of a drunken rugby scrum who had damaged the “lounge” piano.

She would have dismissed his judgement on the bold accusation by Mr Bahrer that, one evening after cards, Mr Leg-Jacob had committed an “ungentlemanly assault upon his person in the Reading Room,” but would have applauded Uncle Oscar’s persistent requests for the importation of tins of Jordan’s Chocolate Imperials, and for the delivery of Italian sweetmeats and wafer biscotti direct from the celebrated restaurant of Signor Angelo Firpo in Calcutta.

And at his repeated appeals for the prompt shipping of a volume of Art Poetry, by “The Very Gay Company of the Seven Troubadours of Toulouse”, Grandmother would have stretched her eyes wide and cried, “Pot Herb!”

***

The row of silent crows perched on the ward window sill was undisturbed by the sudden agitation in the corridor.

Bindra sat up. She strained to listen to the excitement of voices beyond the open door.

Jyothi rubbed his eyes.

“Ama,” he croaked through an unmoistened throat, “is Jiwan back?”

Bindra stroked his face with the softness of fresh bandaging.

“I don’t think so, my gentle, loving son,” she replied with regret. Bindra peered towards the corridor.

“But something new is coming that will bring changes for us.” She glanced towards the crows as one began to bob. “Something that will bring new wisdom.”

Jyothi quickly sat up and pressed his face hard into his mother’s chest.

“I won’t leave you, Ama!” he declared with fierce insistence. “I’ll never leave you!”

Bindra tightened her arms around him.

“And one day, we’ll all be together again,” she insisted with a determined smile. “Jayashri-didi, my good boy Jyothi, Jaminibhaini and Jiwan-bhai. Back in the Hills, back in our home . . .” She suddenly, desperately needed to believe that her words could come true.

Again noises in the corridor. Voices. Bindra looked up.

In the doorway stood a man with a single length of black cloth around his loins. His hair and beard were uncut and matted. His skin was caked with ash. His chest was heavy with long strings of gnarled rudraksha seeds. His eyes were full of sky.

“Babajyu!” Bindra gasped.

The Aghori had returned.