Chapter Fifteen

Settled on an old sofa in my private sitting room, with a smoky fire blazing in the grate and a chilling fog beyond the windows, I leafed through the musty pages of the Club minutes and felt my “Hindoo Uncle” drawing closer.

Oscar had been one of eight children born to well-to-do AngloSwedish parents. His father had boasted descent from no less than two red-headed royal mistresses, a noble illegitimacy the family proudly asserted through the liberal use on letterheads, rings and curricles of their crest of a broken lily rising from a crown. A collection of much-treasured Rococo and Gustavian silver bore witness to this august, if illicit, lineage, for snuffboxes, teapots and tankards engraved with regal seals had been given in dowry by kings to compensate lovers discharged in their gravidity. Oscar’s parents had also retained a number of fine portraits depicting the imperial family, including an oil painting of the dashing Karl XIII, his left eye discreetly incised, it was claimed, for use in espionage at Stockholm’s copper-topped palace.

Oscar and his twin, Olivia, had been born in 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny that had initiated the violent end of the Mughal Empire and the founding of the British Raj. However, despite his Scandinavian ancestry, Oscar had taken his first breath far from Nordic intrigue and palatine paramours, on the southern crest of Crouch Hill, in London’s fashionable Northern Heights. He had been named after the popular and humane King Oscar II of Sweden, with whom his mother had danced at a celebratory ball to mark the royal engagement to Princess Sophia of Nassau. Eleven years later, on the morning of their shared birthday, Oscar had lost his twin sister to cholera.

Oscar had been educated at a boarding school for the sons of gentlemen in Oxfordshire, before taking a position - arranged by his mother’s cousin and based on little more than a vague knowledge of rose pruning, the maintenance of toy engines and the care of sick pets - with the Upper Assam Tea Company. At the age of twenty, and with the “glamour of the East” upon him, as he had put it, Oscar had sailed from London’s Victoria Docks for India.

Oscar had first paid his respects to an uncle at Lucknow, then had travelled on to Calcutta, where he had taken a train to Goalundo, close to the junction of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers. There, he had boarded a paddle-steamer and, thirty-three days later, arrived at Dibrugarh, near the Burmese border.

In time, Oscar had become manager of the tea-garden, and when, in 1883, a proposal had been made to build a railway into Upper Assam, he had offered a successful bid for the contract to supply the sleepers. It was thus that Oscar had made his fortune, just as his Swedish grandfather had in Britain half a century earlier - one with Germanic crosscut-saws and Scandinavian skogshuggarer, the other with Nepalese sawyers, Assamese elephants and mahouts.

In those days, the tea companies had forbidden their managers to marry until the age of thirty, in order that they might afford a standard of living worthy of a sahib. A polo horse was, naturally, far more important than a wife. It was, therefore, quite normal that Oscar had taken an Assamese mistress. The result was the beautiful and captivating Theo, of whom my Grandmother had so wistfully spoken.

Oscar had later moved west, across the Dooars from Assam and up to the temperate climes of Darjeeling, in order to manage an extensive tea-garden in the hills below the town. It had been there that the family legend had been carefully silenced.

However, my Grandmother had whispered to me that Oscar had once contracted dysentery from his plantation workers. She had hinted that he had been nursed back from the brink of death by a tribal princess, who subsequently bore him children.

If there was any truth to this tale, I had come to reveal it.

If there were indeed descendant generations, I was here to search them out.

***

The Aghori Baba smiled broadly as he approached the bed. Bindra placed her bandaged hands to her heart and bowed her head in pranam.

“Namaskar babajyu,” she greeted him in respect, reminding Jyothi to join her.

“Behenji, aaj aap kaisi haiñ?” he said to Bindra, respectfully asking how she felt today. She did not respond. “Aap Hindi bolte haiñ?” he tried, asking if she spoke Hindi.

Bindra laughed shyly. She had guessed his question. “Ma Hindi boldaina. I don’t speak Hindi,” she replied.

“E bahini!” the Aghori grinned. “Sister, of course you are Nepali! I live many year in mountain with Nepali people. I speak ali ali little little.”

Bindra immediately burst into anxious, animated life.

“Babjyu, my son is on the cremation ground where he’s joined the Aghori Babas and I would go to find him myself but I cannot yet walk and I fear to send my Jyothi as he speaks no Hindi and does not know this great city . . .”

She was barely taking a breath.

The Aghori put up his hand to quieten her. “Behenji,” he said softly, “sister, what you ask me?”

Bindra held her breath for a moment, but could not hold back new tears. In a single sob she burst, “Where is my son?”

“Behenji, you no need fear,” he offered in confident assurance, his eyes tender with compassion. “Sister, I send and find him. No problem.”

***

Mr Sengupta shook my hand warmly and offered the worn, green leather of his most comfortable chair. He sat back into his own seat, smiling benevolently. Billowing cigar wraiths haunted the air around him, clinging to his tweed cap and moleskin waistcoat, nestling into the burrows of his neck-scarf and the folds of his face.

Word had reached the Club office that their single guest had once counted family amongst their number. Mr Sengupta was intrigued and promptly offered to arrange an appointment with a Mr Duppa.

“This chap claims to be in his nineties,” he explained, “and is exceedingly knowledgeable in matters of tea history. This Mr Duppa was once a planter, you know, in olden times past.”

Mr Sengupta paused to slowly draw on his pipe.

“As for his longevity, you must be most naturally wondering,” he continued with smoke-shaped syllables. “Well, this he attributes to his not eating of meat, but,” he suddenly dropped his voice and craned his short neck towards me, “it is thrice that I have seen him dining on a fine Club sausage! Pinch of salt, young man!” he grinned through tobacco-tinged teeth. “Pinch of salt!”

I stood to shake his hand in grateful farewell, when Mr Sengupta placed into my proffered palm a piece of paper on which he had carefully inscribed an address. As I stepped back into the dense fog, he suggested I study an old photograph in “Billiards”, which he felt certain would prove of interest. I thanked him again and hurried back along the verandah.

Above the sooty mantle, against the smoke-stained wall, hung a heavy-framed print of the Club Committee. It recorded a formal gathering of starch-fronted buckram-sahibs, in 1928. And there was Uncle Oscar! He was seated with arms folded, his face a portrait of solemnity and distance, seemingly unaware of the photographic occasion to which the other twenty gentlemen had risen with appropriate pomposity.

“Please be excusing, sir,” a soft voice said beside me. I turned to meet the cheerful eyes of my Nepali room-boy standing in the doorway. “Mr Sengupta-sir is asking that I am guiding you-sir into bazaar.”

I was puzzled. I had no intention of doing any shopping.

“Yes, sir,” he continued with an unfalteringly mischievous grin, “bazaar is where we are finding Mr Duppa-sir. He most olderly. Such an olderly man you-sir never before seen! Not even anyone so olderly as he!”

Yashu followed me up to my room, where he insisted on helping me with my coat, scarf and woolly hat. As we ventured out into the blindfolding mists, he asked if he could take hold of two of my fingers, “to be most sure I may not be losing you-sir,” he impressed with earnest sincerity.

Darjeeling was not unlike Shimla, sprawling over a ridge and spilling down the hillsides in a complicated maze of interconnecting roadways, footpaths and narrow flights of stairs. The town itself was a jumble of Victorian cottages, villas, hotels, schools, churches, temples and small shops, all of which were disintegrating, slipping down the steep inclines and further into oblivion with every season. Surrounded by fast-diminishing forests, the town nestled beneath the Kanchenjunga range of the Himalaya, tempting Plains-weary tourists with the promise of views to Sagarmatha, the Head of the Sky, as my ever-attentive Yashu called Mount Everest.

I had asked Yashu to first take me to purchase a gift of sweets for Mr Duppa. He clasped my index and middle fingers tightly and led me straight to an extraordinary survivor of the Raj, named Glenary’s, a bakery that faithfully adhered to the old recipe books left by the British. The elegant, Edwardian glass cabinets that lined the old shop were heavy with jam roly-polys, scones, tea buns, chocolate cakes, handmade confectionery, and all manner of Billy Bunter-worthy fare. I indulged in a bag of soft-centred chocolates to sustain us both on our foggy excursion, and a light fruit cake for my anticipated hosts.

As we stepped back into the street, a pair of urchins waved and grinned at me. I knelt down and offered them each a sweet. Their slanted mountain eyes widened in disbelief and they burst into a giggly gabble of chat. They nibbled at the dark coating and peered at the gooey sweetmeat within, showing each other and me their discovery. Never had I seen two children more grateful for, or as excited by, a bag of chocolates.

I looked up to find an elderly Buddhist monk standing over us, his grin as broad as those of the sticky-lipped boys. He indicated towards the children and chuckled away to himself in Tibetan, which earned him an exploratory rummage in the paper bag for his own moment of un-monastic indulgence.

As Yashu and I commenced our descent into the rabble of the bazaar, he pushed his fingers between mine to take hold of my whole hand, and I found myself smiling.

I was falling in love with these mountain people.

***

The Aghori Baba stayed beside Bindra as the nervous Bihari nurse unwrapped the heavy dressings on her feet and hands. He tutted in concern.

“Much hurt to your feet, sister,” he grimaced to Bindra. She nodded her head from side to side in resigned silence. “But now you eating good medicine, no problem.”

“Babajyu,” Bindra asked, her mind far from the poor condition of her remaining clawed toes and unhealing ulcers. “Is my Jiwan safe? Safe with the Aghori Babas?”

“Very safe, sister,” he smiled in answer. “No problem.”

“But I know of the Aghori Babas,” she persisted, “I have heard what they do. Such a life is not for my Jiwan. He is a gentle boy. He’s too young for such a life on the burning ghats.”

The reputation of the Aghori was well known, even in the distant seclusion of Bindra’s beloved Hills. She knew they directed their puja to Kaala Bhairava, Shiva in His fiercest form, to whom they offered a handful of scarlet blooms drenched in their own semen. They called Him Kapaleshvara, the Lord of the Skull, He who Assimilates All Existence, for Bhairava was not “fierce” in an ordinary sense, but rather an expression of the natural cycle of dissolution in the universe.

“Lord Bhairava is ‘fierce’ only to those who identify themselves merely through the limitations of the material world,” her grandmother had once taught her. “To look into His face exposes the absurdity of our judgemental attitudes and worldly attachments, the futility of our obsessions with social conformity and habit. And as for the Aghoris’ life on the cremation grounds, how better to acknowledge that we do not take our worldly wealth with us! That social station and prestige are worthless!” her grandmother had impressed on the young Bindra. “Such a life amongst the remains of the dead reveals that as the fear of death is exorcised, so the fear of life is dispelled.”

Bindra suddenly could not bear to think of her little Jiwan amongst the taboo-breaking Aghori Babas.

“Behenji,” the Aghori looked into her eyes, drawing her back from the dark anxiety in which she was losing herself. “Sister, no need for fear. No problem.”

***

“Young chap,” Mr Duppa announced, “I’m as old as the century! I had an English father, became a planter in 1919, and attribute my uncommon longevity to an unfaltering abstinence of salt, chillies, meat, alcohol and tobacco - in addition, of course, to the devotion of a loving wife.”

I nodded with an appreciative smile, and thought of his plate secretly piled high with lamb chops.

We were sitting in an old wooden house handsomely furnished with Victorian mahogany and teak, its walls and floors draped in richly dyed cloth and hand-woven carpets.

I looked up to meet the eyes of Mrs Duppa, who had appeared in the doorway. She bowed in greeting and offered me a plate of spiced egg sandwiches. Like her kindly husband, she had retained a remarkable elegance, even beauty, despite the stains of age.

“Now, Mister David,” he continued, “I am informed by the Club of your search for your Uncle Oscar.”

I nodded, my mouth full of peppery deliciousness.

“We knew him well,” Mrs Duppa added nonchalantly, thrusting a plate of sweetly scented sour-milk cake slices beneath my nose.

I was stunned.

“You knew him?” I spluttered, in such surprise that I momentarily lost co-ordination and inhaled my first mouthful of cake. “Oh my, yes! You did not realise this?” asked Mr Duppa.

I shook my head, unable to speak as I was trying to dislodge the lump of creamy stodge now stuck in my throat.

“My wife’s cousin, Premlal, married Lily. So you see, we are related! You know Lily?”

I shook my bewildered head.

“Oscar’s eldest daughter. A most luxurious woman. She wore golden ear pieces, precious native necklaces and never used the same handkerchief twice. She also had a passion for pet rabbits, which was considered highly eccentric in these hills,” he chuckled, sipping noisily at his tea. “Then there was Tuss, of course, who disappeared off to sail the seas with a parrot on his shoulder. Winnie was a wild one - called a ‘flapper’ in those days - who was always running away, until her pet monkey bit her and she died of lockjaw. The youngest daughter, Elinnie, was beautiful, intelligent, with a gift for music, and loved by all - but she went away and never came back. And last of all, Harry, who was named after me!”

My head was spinning. My Grandmother’s clandestine whispers had been true. Tears began to run down my cheeks.

“Oh, how we understand your emotion at hearing our chitterchatter of your old family, all now expired,” Mrs Duppa nodded in sympathy.

A touching moment it may have been. However, the cause of my watering eyes was the cake lodged fast in my windpipe, which was now causing me to struggle for breath.

Mr Duppa continued, oblivious.

“Young Harry and his wife - also a Eurasian, as we mixed-blood of the so-called ‘Domiciled Community’ were once called - spent much time here with us. He was a freeman of independent means, so left for New Zealand, or some such spot that was British and sunny, and we unhappily did not hear of him again.”

My distress at the prospect of having survived violence, disease and dangerous jungle in my journey across India only to lose my life to a surfeit of teacake, caught the attention of Mrs Duppa. She had, at last, begun to realise that my strained expression was much more than immoderate sentimentality.

Still Mr Duppa continued.

“Oh, but Darjeeling was magical then, of course. The Governor and his entourage would spend the six summer months here, if not at Simla, to escape Calcutta at its worst. They would stay at the Club, while the planters moved into the Elgin and Park Hotels. And such balls we had! The Darjeeling Gymkhana had a Burmese teak floor so perfectly sprung that we could dance all night and never once tire! And every day the streets were washed so as not to soil the memsahibs’ white dresses, all ordered from European dhurzi tailors. They even had hairdressers brought in, just for the season, all the way from Paris! Can you imagine?”

I could not.

Rather, I had given up all hope for myself and had turned my concerns instead to the effect on my genial hosts of a discourteous demise on their chaise longue.

At that moment, the octogenarian Mrs Duppa leapt to her feet. She swung towards me with alarming speed and belted me across the back with a force that quite surpassed her age.

The incident seemed to endear me to Mr Duppa because, whilst they laughed and I apologised as a servant cleaned up the ejaculated soggy crumbs, he told me that in the future I was to call him Uncle Harry. He glanced at his pocket watch, then indicated to me that it was time that we go together into the bazaar. I obediently bade fond farewells to his sweetly smiling, powerfully dextrous spouse, who insisted I take with me a full tiffin’s-worth of cake and sandwiches, which the maid had already bound in brown paper.

My new uncle took my arm as we walked back into the crush of the old bazaar, busy with all manner of mountain people from across the Eastern Himalaya. In his three-piece suit, wide-brimmed hat, and with a confident swing in his polished cane, he walked me straight to the home of a swarthy Tibetan. They muttered to each other on the front step, whereupon Uncle Harry announced that at seven the following morning, Gombu would drive me in his jeep, eastwards across the mountains, to a town called Kalimpong. There, I was to stay at a hotel called the Himalayan View.

“Ask the proprietor for directions to the home of Doctor Alex,” Uncle Harry insisted. “None but he has the answers for which you have come.”

***

Bindra was sitting up in bed.

The heat was unbearable. The air stagnant. Her head throbbing.

Jyothi had gone to the Nepali temple for the afternoon. He had promised to do puja at the lingam on her behalf. He had promised to bring back sidur to mark her forehead, to honour the divinity within.

Bindra shifted herself again. She had been warned by the doctor not to remain in one place for too long. The loss of sensation in her body risked her lying motionless for hours, unaware of the deficiency of blood in her veins, the ulcerating pressure on her bones.

Even so, Bindra could not stay still. These days she was constantly agitated until Jyothi was back with her, cuddled against her on the bed. He had not used his bedroll once since Jiwan had gone. She could feel his loneliness.

She wondered whether the Aghori Baba was really out on the cremation ghats searching for Jiwan. Was he looking properly amongst the crowds? Was he asking every dom that cremates the dead? Was he searching all the Bhairava temples in the city, and not just the Aghori mandir near Thatheri Bazaar?

Bindra wiped perspiration from her forehead with a bandaged hand. She scanned the other women with whom she shared the little room. Most were sleeping in the heat. None could speak Nepali. All had been ravaged by leprosy. She wondered where they had come from and what had brought them to Kashi. She wondered if they too had lost their homes. And their children.

Bindra stared into the haze beyond the window, searching for the promise of a breeze to ease her mind. She longed to be outside, on hillsides, in forest.

Bindra suddenly longed to be anywhere but here.

***

Back at the Planters’ Club, I sat beneath a dilapidated gazebo in the garden to try to write the first letters home since my arrival in India. It was time to explain my sudden disappearance, both to my parents and to Priya’s. I had been so consumed by my own grief, that I had not once considered theirs. I needed to apologise, to give account of myself, and it was not until now that I had felt able to begin to find the words.

I was still struggling with the opening lines of the first page when a young boy in a smart school uniform confidently approached.

“Uncle,” he addressed me courteously, “will you play TT with me?”

I had no idea what he meant.

“TT, uncle! Tabletop Tennis! Will you play with me?” His polite pleas were irresistible.

Ambreesh from Calcutta passed a very long hour indeed beating me at every game, before we were abruptly interrupted by an anxious Yashu.

“Forgive my goodness, sir. Just to be warning of much possibly troubles in town,” he announced in earnest. “For your sake, sir, please be keeping out from bazaar!”

Little Ambreesh shrugged his shoulders. He shook my hand, graciously thanked me for letting him win, which in truth I had not, and ran to find his parents.

I left the safety of the Club as jeeps began to invade the streets, grinding their gears beneath the weight of angry youths waving green flags and chanting “Gorkhaland! Gorkhaland!” Lorryloads of Gorkha National Liberation Front militants had begun to pour into Darjeeling to hear their leader, Subash Ghising, threaten to revive aggressive agitation for the creation of a new mountain state within the Indian Union. I decided to take my self-appointed valet’s advice and slip away from the town centre.

I walked quickly along the Nehru Road, where shopkeepers were hurriedly pulling down shutters. I scuttled across Chowrasta, where Gilbert and Sullivan had once rung out from the bandstand, but twitchy soldiers now gathered with rifles ready.

I reached the road for Observatory Hill as the mountains began to resound with violent ranting blasted through megaphones, demanding political independence from the Marxist state of West Bengal. Chilled by tales of riots, murders and bombings here just a few years earlier - all of which seemed wholly irreconcilable with these gentle-mannered, tolerant hill people - I decided to keep my distance and visit the Gymkhana Club.

The main doors of the old building were guarded by a stocky little Gurkha. He was unexpectedly rude and adamantly refused me entrance. I grizzled under my breath and was about to turn away, when he promptly softened.

“You’re a Britisher?”

I replied that I most certainly was.

“Oh, I am apologising!” he burst. “I am much accustomed to barging Americans that I was not considering, until I was hearing of your fine speech. Of course you may by-golly enter,” he offered in penance. “And in my friendly sorryness, I am giving you a marvellous jolly guiding!”

The Club was a rambling building, parts of which seemed to be fast approaching dereliction. My diminutive escort led me through the banqueting hall with its precarious musicians’ gallery, and the library with its empty mahogany shelves. The numerous games rooms with their worn baize card-tables and ornate scoreboards from which all brass inlay had been meticulously picked. The drinking salons with their cracked, smoked mirrors and splintered, linen-fold panelling. The cavernous ballroom, the moorghi-khana “hen house” for the mems, and then the vast upstairs skating rink, once so popular amongst the ladies for all those inevitable “collisions” with eager bachelors.

I had to catch my breath at what must have once been an exquisite tiered theatre. It still had its original hangings, now suspended from their fixings in shreds. Painted flats were stacked in optimistic readiness for another season of Barrie and Shaw, but were now rotting to tatters in the scenery store. The auditorium had retained the ruins of once elegant seating, although the orchestra pit was now home to a pack of wild dogs.

My doorman reverently showed me into the old boardroom, still with its original long teak table, surrounded by chairs. He suddenly drew so close to me that I thought he was about to plant a kiss on my chin in appreciation for my nationality.

“I fought for our most goodly king in the War,” he announced with emotion, “and am receiving a bally handsome pension from your fine marvellous country.”

I assured him that I was delighted, and that his annuity was no doubt well deserved.

“But,” he hissed, “the Britishers have not left this place, I am telling you! At nights when I am guarding they come!” His eyes widened and his lips seemed to pale in genuine fear. “If I am not attentive to my duties, if I am placing these chairs this way and that, in the willy-nillies, they come around when I am at my least expecting to push me so hard that I am left all tipsy-topsy!”

He quietly shut the door and led me, with exaggerated stealth, to the bottom of the main staircase.

“In day-time and night-time, those old Britishers come back, drinking in the bar their top Club whiskies,” he whispered with intensity. “Now you are not believing perhaps, but many have heard their talking, their merry chinkling of glasses and creakly footsteppings.” He gripped my arm tightly. “But one which gives me most the terrorful jeebies is a pukka sah’b who is walking down so jolly quiet and disappearing, oh my gollies, in this very same spot,” and he indicated to the foot of the stairs.

I could have listened to his tales for hours, but dusk was fast descending and I needed to return to the Planters’ before I was caught up in any riots in the darkening town below. As I thanked him for his kind indulgence, my retired soldier, evidently fearful of the coming night and the persistent ghosts of sahibs and mems, hugged me tightly in farewell, his head only reaching my chest.

“Be most forgiving, sir, but you could be my very son,” he mumbled into my coat buttons.

***

When Bindra woke, the sun was low. The cooling air moved sluggishly, bearing on it the sweet incense of innumerable pujas. Jyothi was sitting beside her, in silence.

“Timi thakay ko chau?” she asked him. “Are you tired?” No response.

“Jyothi?”

Nothing. She drew herself close to him.

“Ama?” he asked quietly. “Am I going to die?”

Bindra sat up, enabling him to rest his head in her lap.

“What a question for such a young boy!” she chuckled to disguise her unease at his uncharacteristic demeanour. Jiwan would ask such a thing. But not Jyothi.

She hugged him closer.

“You know we are all born and that we all die. Life and death, sickness and health are just part of the natural order . . .”

She paused to consider her words.

“That’s why we see Lord Shiva as both bearer of the eternally creative lingam and as dancer of the Tandava that causes the cosmos to unravel,” she continued slowly. “And Shakti may be expressed both as Annapurna, who nourishes life into being, and as Kali Ma, who absorbs it all back into its original, inert state. You see? Creation and dissolution are the two principal forces of all existence. One is not ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’. They are both indivisible aspects of the same eternal process. Two ends of the same stick!”

Jyothi did not respond.

“Even the deodars, Lord Shiva’s most revered cypress trees in our high Hills, rise and rise until they touch the sky, only to fall back to the earth from which they sprang,” she explained. “Even the stars in their innumerable crores appear in brilliance, only to tumble back at the twinkle of an eye into the same darkness that gave them birth. We all come and we all go, like sun and moon, cold season and monsoon. It is the natural order,” she repeated. “It is all as it should be.”

Jyothi gently placed his hand on her arm.

“And what happens when I die, Ama? Where do I go?”

“Well,” she took a deep breath, “Bahun priests with their laws and castes, and mountain lamas with their Dharma and Buddhas, believe each of us is born again in another body. Many times, over and over. They believe that if we’re ‘good’, we’re born as a paleskinned Brahmin, or as a holy monk. And if we’re ‘bad’, they say we’re born dark-skinned, low caste - or as a woman!” she chuckled out loud. “But, of course amongst our people, it’s different,” she emphasised. “We don’t hold to caste, do we?”

Jyothi shook his head.

“We see all men, all women as equal.”

Jyothi rocked his head from side to side in agreement.

“We see all life, in all its forms, as an expression of Shiva and Shakti - consciousness and energy - in perfect union.”

“So when I die?” Jyothi reminded her.

“When we die, all the elements from which we are made, including the knowledge we have learned and the wisdom we have gained, return to earth, plant and animal. To fire and water, air and sky. All back to the single, underlying source from which new life continually springs.”

Jyothi now lay very still.

“So you see, we each have a responsibility to seek out good knowledge and learn true wisdom,” she impressed on him. “Each life has a bearing on what comes after. Nothing and no one is lost. For, in truth, there is no ‘death’, no destruction, no end. Only absorption back into the ceaseless course of creation.”

Jyothi listened hard. He listened for answers and understanding. “My good, kind boy,” Bindra assured him, “as you grow older, you will see how our gods and our puja all help us to understand this essential truth.”

Jyothi put his arms around his mother and hugged her tightly.

“Ama,” he whispered, “I hope I have life enough to learn.”

***

With “Gorkhaland! Gorkhaland!” still ringing through the town, and half-sized Rambo-imitators storming through the streets in green headscarves, waving flags and tying banners to drainpipes, I was relieved to reach the Club without incident.

The fog that had enshrouded Darjeeling since my arrival had begun to dissipate in the late afternoon sun. I paused to look from the balcony across rooftops and market, wooded heights and dark valleys, but was quickly driven inside by an increasingly aggressive wind. I entered the room to find my bed prepared and curtains closed, the fire lit and bath towel hung nearby to warm through.

I pulled back a curtain as I undressed to peer out at the dying glow of dusk, when lightning blazed in silence across the distant mountains. I watched from my sitting-room window as the entire view of snowy peaks, forests and tea-gardens disappeared in a second ferocious flash that knocked out the town’s power supply. In moments, Yashu arrived with an oil lamp and ginger tea. “Most mighty great big one coming, sir!” he warned and scurried off to the shelter of his quarters.

It appeared as though forest beasts were opening their heavy eyes, awakening to revel in nocturnal secrets, as little windows and doorways across the hills gradually began to glow with oil lamps and candles hung in jars. In mere moments, a thick, wet fog flowed in with criminal stealth. The lambent, amber eyes blinked momentarily and were gone.

The vociferous rhetoric in the town fell quiet. I looked up from my book and instinctively held my breath.

A roaring wind suddenly tore against the verandah, stealing away wicker furniture and plant pots, blowing in my double doors. Hail the size of Koh-i-noor diamonds volleyed furiously against the roof and windows. I forced a desk up against the doors to keep them shut, and withdrew to the safety of the bedroom and the comfort of my blazing fire.

With the battery raging on outside, I packed my rucksack in preparation for an early departure and the next stage in my search for Uncle Oscar. I attempted a hot bath, but once again there was no water in my taps, only bilious gurgles and a rusty sludge.

I retired instead to my bed, where I lay smiling at the ceiling, replete with fruit cake and ginger tea, a head full of chocolatesmeared ragamuffins, yellow-stockinged monks, and spectral sahibs.

“I’m happy here!” I said out loud, surprising myself.

I listened for an echo of the unexpected words as they pulsated through the room. I sought to seize the syllables as they rebounded from flaking veneer and peeling wallpaper, before they were absorbed by discoloured damask and unlaundered candlewick. I needed to be sure.

“I’m happy here!” I tried again. “And I’m here because of you. Thank you, Grandma. Thank you, Priya,” I whispered into the flame-lapped shadows.

Another assault of thunder and Tagore was once again bright in my memory, like a heartfelt promise:

“In the gusty night when the rain patters on the leaves you will hear my whisper in your bed, and my laughter will flash with the lightning through the open window into your room.”

I closed my eyes smiling and, despite the storm, sank into a sleep that remained unstirred until the crows announced a clement dawn.

***

It was dark when the Aghori Baba returned to stand by Bindra’s bed. She withdrew her arm from around her sleeping son and eagerly sat up to greet him.

“Behenji, many friends is searching your son,” he smiled.

“Jiwan!” she gasped in anticipation. “You have found my Jiwan?”

“Yes, yes,” he assured her. “He’s fine. Very fine.”

Jyothi was immediately wide awake. “Ama, is Jiwan-bhai back?” he asked with excitement.

Bindra looked to the Aghori in hope.

“Behenji, be brave,” he replied. “Your son is choosing his path. Not your path. His path.”

She nodded. She knew.

“Behenji, your son is went away from Kashi. No more here.”

“Went away?” Bindra was unsure that she had understood his awkward Nepali. “Jiwan has gone where?”

“Behenji, your son is went away to guru’s guru. Far away, in Himalaya.”

“But, Babajyu!” she gasped. “He’s just a child! He needs his mother! He is not ready!”

The Aghori raised his hand to calm her.

“Behenji, nothing is belonging to us. Not our clothings, not our houses. Not even them we are loving. All is Shiva, all is one. Be brave. No problem.”

Bindra could not offer pranam as the Aghori disappeared back into the darkness. Her arms were clinging too tightly to Jyothi. Her mouth was pressed too hard against his head as she fought to muffle her sobs.