Chapter Two

I had three heroes as a child.

Ricky from Champion the Wonder Horse, who lived with his cowboy uncle in a dusty land, got into endless scrapes with local rogues, yet always managed to be saved by an indefatigable team of feral stallion and wily dog.

Rabindranath Tagore from Calcutta, who never had his own television theme tune, but had written poems that showed me the world was brim full of beauty, if only I would take the time to notice.

And Uncle Oscar.

Uncle Oscar had been a pioneering tea planter in the storylandsounding Assam and Bengal, a fact for which we all felt inexplicably grateful. I was told he had never drunk tea on the few occasions that he had come back to visit, which had made everybody laugh. He had said English brews were made from floor sweepings, over which everybody had laughed still more.

I laughed too, every time this family anecdote was recounted, even though I did not understand the comparison. I had never tasted tea. My parents would not touch it. They only drank dandelion roots, roasted barley and ground acorns.

Of the lives of my many relations, as related by my Grandmother, it was undoubtedly Uncle Oscar who most captured my juvenile imagination. It was not just his reckless derring-do of first sailing to India with nothing but a frock-coat, a pair of homemade pyjamas, a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and a loaded rifle. It was not just his courage in navigating the full length of the Brahmaputra, from the great Ganges Delta into Upper Assam, when still a fresh-faced youth, to commence, as he put it, “the uncertainties of a jungle life.” It was not just the prestige of surviving the great Darjeeling earthquake of 1898, which he had barely allowed to disrupt his tennis match at the Amusement Club. Nor was it just his heroic status amongst the locals, earned by his introduction of hygienic milk to protect them against TB, cinchona trees to produce quinine for malaria, his hunting down man-eating tigers and rogue elephants, and for generally saving the day.

No.

It was because, Grandmother hinted, Uncle Oscar had taken a native princess to wife in those deep, dark jungles.

It was because, she whispered, I had secret cousins hidden in those distant hills.

***

“Silly boy!” Bindra scoffed as she walked home from the market that evening. “Such foolish words.”

Yet still she trembled.

Bindra lived some miles beyond the lights of the busy town and its jeep-filled lanes, below the step-cut paddy fields and farms. When the floods had swept her husband and some seventy other passengers in the crowded Kakariguri bus off the road and to their deaths in the surging Teesta River two monsoons before, she had been unable to meet the rent on their little house.

They had never found her husband’s body. The fact that the jhankri mountain shaman had been unable to carry out the proper death rites still haunted her. Unfinished business. Not good for the dead or the living. Ill-boding.

The farmer had promptly thrown her out of their home with her four fatherless children. To prevent their return, he had immediately moved in a phing-maker. Employee of the Dalai Lama’s wealthy brother, the new tenant could at least guarantee the monthly dues through the profitable production of glass noodles, despite the paucity of his wages.

Bindra had begged and sobbed, but her superstitious landlord had not wanted a young widow on his land. Inauspicious.

“Leave this place!” he had spat. “And take your miserable fate and your feathered demons with you, Dhumavati!”

Bindra had recoiled. He had called her by the name of the largenosed goddess, who rides a chariot drawn by crows. A widowed goddess whose name is normally only ever spoken as a curse.

***

Grandmother and I were sitting by the fire.

We had just finished one of our Naughty Teas of “noisy toast” topped with marmalade on chunky cheese. Beetroot soldiers with horseradish pickle so strong it made our noses run. Pilchards in a pepper sauce, with all the bones “to make our hair grow curly”. And then the seedy cake we had baked together in the afternoon, with such a dousing of condensed milk and lemon curd that the very thought of it made our hearts hurry.

Grandmother now sat sunk into a sagging, ancestral armchair, surrounded by a clutch of crocheted cushions. Cheek resting on the back of graceful fingers. Tiggy-Winkle legs draped with new knitting.

I was perched on some great-aunt’s harlequin leather pouffe that had long leaked its horsehair innards onto the scorch-spotted hearth rug. I listened to the grandfather clock counting out another generation in the hall, as Grandmother hummed one of her nondescript tunes in time with the ticks and Cesspit added a wheeze of syncopated snores. I stared into flames guttering in the grate, and breathed in the ever-present reassurance of coal smoke, well-Vimmed sink, mint humbugs and lavender wool-wash that pervaded her cottage.

“Johnny Sparrow,” Grandmother murmured, reaching out to stroke the arc of my ear. I looked up, smiling in intuitive expectation. “Fetch me the key in your Grandfather’s shaving mug,” she instructed with a twinkle, the soft white waves of hair around her face revealing in the embers’ glow a memory of the rich auburn they had once been.

I had never met my Grandfather, and yet I knew and loved his face that smiled with tenderness from behind framed glass on piano and wall. I often gazed into his kind, unblinking eyes, his silent, ready smile, and thought he looked a lot like me. He may have died too soon, the year before my birth, yet I knew where to find his gloves and braces, his goat-head inkwell and farmyard gaiters, his unused cut-throat razorblades still in their printed paper wrappings, his penknives, collar studs, draughts board - and his china shaving mug.

“Now open the dresser drawer, darling,” she instructed. “And bring me the rosewood box.”

I rattled the poker in the grate with no real purpose as she rummaged through old letters written on lilac paper, funerary ribbon, ration cards and a pressed posy of desiccated violets.

“Ah, here he is!” she beamed, studying her find with unguarded affection.

She handed me an old photograph taken in Burma. The young man looking back had a sensual mouth and intelligent, gentle eyes.

“Handsome, isn’t he?” I observed with interest.

“Oh, Theo was beautiful!” Grandmother agreed, her face and hands suddenly busy with memories. “So elegant. So witty. A voice like sweet, soft fudge before it sets. We girls all fell in love in a moment and would just sit looking at him, quite unembarrassed by our stares. You see, Theo was like a prince from a storybook, brought to life before us!” she enthused.

Gazing into the finely formed features, now faded by time and Sussex damp, I knew that I too would have been sufficiently captivated for some surreptitious staring of my own.

“Uncle Oscar only let him come to London between the wars, because he was . . . well, more European than the others,” she revealed. “Very important in those days, I’m sorry to say. My father did not approve, of course. All the same, we girls once secretly saved our pocket money just to buy our lovely Theo a box of chocolates. Very bold back then, when we were forbidden to skip in the street, or swing on a gate, just in case we showed the hem of our long knickers!”

I wanted to know what had become of this entrancing new relation.

“Dead,” she sighed, melting back into the faded chintz. “Long dead. Left rubber in Rangoon for confectionery in Putney - but didn’t survive the Luftwaffe.”

I was intrigued. “Then who was he, Grandma?”

She leaned close to me and laid a papery palm on my shoulder. “Why, Johnny Sparrow, Theo was the eldest of Oscar’s secret

sons!”

***

The stars were bright that night, bright enough for Bindra to pick her way down the hillside path. She struggled to cling to the low tree branches as she climbed from boulder to boulder, a bundle of unsold vegetables and kindling twigs tied across her back.

“No rice again,” she sighed to herself. “Just more carrots. More woody radishes. More chewy gundruk.” At least there were now only two mouths waiting to be fed.

The previous summer, she had given her eldest daughter as a maid. Only eleven years old, she was now working as a houseservant to a wealthy poultry farmer, down in Kakariguri. It gave Bindra peace of mind to know that her beloved Jayashri was no longer hungry and had hot milk tea to drink every day.

Her second, Jamini, had been taken away by a Christian “orphanage”. In exchange, the owners had paid Bindra enough to buy a bakhri goat and daal lentils to feed the remaining children for a full three months. The Christians had promised to teach Jamini to read and write, on the strict condition that she changed her name to Mary, wore a wooden cross around her neck, and slept with an American Bible beneath her pillow. It had seemed a small price for an education and the daily doling out of a millet gruel that had earned the school its local name of “St Porridge”.

And yet, Bindra knew that if she allowed herself to stop and think too long, she would unleash a weeping cry for the loss of her daughters that would never cease. Every day she doubted that she had made the right choice for her girls. So every night she reminded herself of their shared hunger, huddled together for sleep in the bamboo hut they had built for themselves on the abandoned burial ground, the only land for which nobody demanded payment.

There had been a time, and not so long ago, when there had been no hunger in their home, with food enough for all six members of the family. Food enough, until the day Kailash had not come home. He had been a good husband and father, a good friend. Now waiting for her tonight were just the two boys, Jyothi and Jiwan. Light and Life. So long as they kept hunting out wild iskus and tapioca roots in the forest, they could manage. So long as they still came home with a pocket of spilled grain collected from the roadside, she could keep them together a little longer.

It was as she approached the shaktiko roukh, the dedicated Shakti Tree, its broad trunk bound with offerings of coloured thread, that Bindra slipped and fell on the stones.

“Twice in an evening, you clumsy thing!” she groaned. “Come on now, you’re better than this.”

Bindra sat to rub her shins and elbows with wrists and forearms. “No harm done,” she assured herself.

It was dark beneath the spreading branches. Bindra found her way to the painted image of Durga that lay embraced amongst the tangle of roots, daubed with dung paste. She sought the remains of any sidur at the feet of the tiger-riding goddess and marked her own forehead with a smear of the scarlet pigment, to remind herself that she was as much an expression of the universal forces represented by Durga as the bark of the distant dogs, the moon above, the breath in her lungs.

“Jaya Ma,” she voiced into the darkness. “Give me victory.” Bindra took a carrot from her bundle and winced at the deficiency of her gift as she placed it amongst the roots.

“Aung hring dhung Durga devyai namah-aung,” she repeated, even as her voice wavered and the hands clasped at her heart trembled. She had determined to invoke the strength and wisdom in herself to overcome what she knew to be her gathering enemies, Fear and Despair.

As she approached the shack, Bindra could see through the wide gaps between the bamboo slats that her two boys already had a low fire burning on the mud floor. With a single call, they came running to relieve her of her bundle.

“What did you sell, Ama? And what did you buy?” they both asked with excitement.

“Nothing and . . . nothing!” she smiled with disappointment. “But fetch the tasala and I shall make us a feast!”

The boys cheered just to brighten her and ran to lift the blackened pan from its hook on the wall.

As Jiwan turned, his face drew tight with horror.

“E Ama!” he gasped, his finger pointing to the little toe on her right foot. Whilst they had seen it gradually curling under during the past months, the toe was now twisted, torn and bleeding.

Bindra looked down and cried aloud at the sight of tattered flesh and splintered bone.

She had not even noticed.

***

I met Priya at a party.

My eyes were first drawn to the Siouxsie Sioux backcomb as it bobbed through a crowded, monochrome kitchen. I had heard her name for weeks as two acquaintances had independently confided that they intended her for themselves. I leant with calculated disinterest against the black Formica breakfast bar to watch Tom and Toby take their turns with practised chat and artful nonchalance. I sipped at something sickly in a plastic cup, looking on in envy at their boldness and in pity at the impotence of their stumbling seductions.

It was as her glazed gaze drifted from their competitive attentions that Priya discovered the intensity of my interest amidst the throng. I felt my face flush furiously, but could not look away. I had never seen such beauty without vanity. It quickened my heart. It silenced my self-consciousness. She glanced at the floor to veil her own blush, then back at me to reveal with her dark, kohl-stained eyes that we had shared a secret intimacy.

I made my way towards her through what had suddenly become an empty, silent room. I could hear nothing but a pounding in my ears. I could see nothing but a shy and tender smile I knew that I would kiss.

At midnight, we wandered away from the house to talk without interruption and to escape the fierce disdain of friends who would never find it possible to forgive me.

Priya was intelligent, but shy. Self-possessed, yet vulnerable. She made me laugh. She made me laugh a lot.

We walked back holding hands and sucking on humbugs from my pocket, indifferent to the threat of a chill, hair-flattening drizzle. “Can I phone you?” I asked, above the clamour of twenty-five at breakfast, above yet more Stranglers and The Jam. “I’ll have to ask my father,” she replied.

It was not the response I had anticipated.

She put a hand to her mouth and giggled at my silence.

“It’s just that he’s never let me see a boy before,” she confessed. “And I don’t know if he’ll approve of a white one!”

***

Bindra had been walking since before dawn.

As she had pushed through the towering dhatura she had repeated the name of Shiva, to whom these plants with their hanging, trumpet flowers were dedicated. She had walked so far that lush jungle had become scented pine and dark oak. Where there had been bamboo thickets, scarlet poinsettia and rhododendron, there was now maple, birch and knee-high cardamom, their soft leaves brushing against her legs and sweetening the air of the bindra ban deep forest, after which she had been named. And as she walked, Bindra sang softly to warn the Punyajana, the Good People who live in trees and plants, that she was passing through their world.

Bindra gradually climbed the steep path to the cave temples. She gave a handful of bhui-kaaphal wild strawberries to the docile sadhu, who had watched her difficult, rolling approach. The wandering ascetic looked her in the eyes, then narrowed his own, as though with misgiving.

“Funny old man,” she giggled to herself. “He surely recognises me. I’ve met him in these hills for years!” She turned to sound the bell above the gateway, to wake the deity within. She did not see him toss the sweet, red fruit to the floor.

Bindra crouched down and eased herself into a crevice in the rock face. Before her stood the row of lingams. She touched her head, mouth, heart and pubis in pranam, reverently saluting the divinity in all life, of which she recognised herself as but one expression. From an old medicine bottle in her bundle, she poured a little goat’s milk over each of the stone-cut symbols of universal union. She laid an offering of large, white dhatura flowers and then belpatra leaves from the woodapple tree that she had collected on her slow ascent. Both were favourites of Mahadeva, as the androgynous Paramshiva was better known in the Hills.

“Aung namah Shivaya,” she softly sang to the Lord of Yoga, Lord of the Mountains. “Shri Sakha, my Supreme Friend, your lingam reveals the stability of the cosmos. May I recognise that same stability within myself,” she began. “May I understand better that there is no separation, no difference between you, the universe, and clumsy little me.”

“E!” a gruff voice shouted from behind her.

She turned with a start. Silhouetted against the sky beyond the entrance of the temple crag stood a Bahun priest. She had heard that a Brahmin had been recently posted to the cave temples. His job, it was said, was to wean the villagers away from their ancient, unorthodox, mountain traditions.

“Come out here, where I can see you!”

She waddled on her haunches, until she reached the entrance and could stand again. Even in the sunlight, Bindra struggled to draw herself upright. The bindings on her feet, which protected her increasingly clawed toes, had caused her to limp the entire length of the morning’s arduous trek. This, in turn, was causing a new and unrelenting pain in her lower back.

“Where have you come from?” he asked, with his heavy Hindi accent.

There was a mystifying aggression in his voice. She felt no inclination to converse with this hostile stranger, so waved vaguely towards the mountain road along which she had walked.

“What’s wrong with your hands and feet?” he almost snarled. She looked down at herself. “It’s nothing,” she joked. “Just silly accidents.”

She noticed the sadhu standing to one side, watching.

The Brahmin stared at her dirty cloth bindings and made a loud clacking sound with his tongue.

“Leave here,” he said, his face suddenly expressionless. “What did you say?” she asked in disbelief.

“You heard me, leave here!”

He had raised his voice to her. The men in these hills did not raise their voices to women. Women were shown respect. Women were honoured for the divine qualities they embodied. Men bent to touch the feet of their cheli-beti sisters and daughters. Men undertook day-long fasts if they raised their voices to women.

The Brahmin turned to pick up a long, metal trishul from a pile that lay against the rock face. To Bindra’s utter dismay, he abruptly, forcefully jabbed her with the ritual trident.

“Leave here!” he bellowed, thrusting at her again, so hard that he caught her between her ribs.

She looked into his eyes with bewilderment.

All she could see was his fear.

***

For three years I loved Priya.

Together we cooked curries, made our own clothes, and hiked the Stiperstones and Clees. We spent rainy afternoons in matinees and galleries, our evenings outside theatres and concert halls in hope of cheap returns. We took Philosophy and Art at college, music lessons, language classes, and night trains to Bavaria. We sailed the Baltic with a Finn, then spent a spring in an Amsterdam squat, living on old Edam and peeing in a sink, until a pot-headed neighbour fell through our roof and brought in the weather.

Back home, we would seek out ruins to explore by starlight, twist our ankles and dent our shins. And when the weather warmed, we would cycle after country graveyards with picnics in a basket, to dream of our shared future and fall asleep in each other’s arms on time-worn tombs.

For three years, Priya loved me.

“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,” she would recite from Tagore, as though to prove it, “In life after life, in age after age forever.”

For three years, I did not live a day without Priya. I did not sleep a night without whispering her name.

And yet, my father’s mother was not happy.

“Listen dear, she’s a nice enough girl, but we don’t want her sort in our family.”

Her sort?

“Are you referring to the colour of her skin?” I asked, struggling to remain respectful, “because, as Priya likes to point out, I go darker than she does in the sun!”

This was evidently no argument, but I persisted.

“In fact, she jokes that I must have more Indian blood in my veins than she has in hers!”

My humour was not shared.

“You have not been listening,” she replied, with calculated restraint. “So listen now and listen well: No. No. Never!”

***

Bindra had scurried down the hillside, back to the road. She was panting and perspiring.

When the Brahmin had said she did not deserve to step onto consecrated soil, that her karma denied her the right, she had pulled herself tall and had felt the fire of Kali in her bones.

“Your talk of karma is not our way in these hills,” she had protested. “Karma is your Vedanta, used to justify unkindness, dishonourable thoughts and acts towards others. And this because you judge them to have ‘sinned’ in a previous life, according to your own, man-made laws!”

“Aap apne aap ko kya sumujhtey ho?” the Brahmin had hissed, suddenly reverting to his native Hindi. “Who do you think you are? Preaching to me your jungli superstitions!”

He had reluctantly returned to Nepali and continued with tight teeth.

“I am a Brahmana! Whilst what are you? A woman! A mere phase of illusion! Don’t you know that your sex is the root of all worldly attachments?” He had barely been able to catch his furious breath to repeat, “I am a Brahmana! Keeper of the Vedas and the Manusmriti! I am the mahanta, the owner of this temple! And what are you? Nothing but an illiterate, black-faced female, whom God has seen fit to suffer the foulest of His curses! For your audacity to one of His chosen, twice-born sons, divine justice will return you to your next miserable life as a mange-ridden pye-bitch!”

Bindra had listened with astonishment.

“Dajoo, elder brother, your attachment to the divisions of caste is not ours,” she had asserted. “All such hierarchies only undermine the many to afford an imagined superiority to the few. They are a falsehood, leading humankind ever deeper into the delusion of division and separation, and yet further from the underlying truth.”

Her voice had stayed steady.

“And how can you claim ownership of something that cannot belong to anyone?” she had challenged. “This cave temple has been here, open to all, without restriction, since the beginning of time!”

His face had flushed florid.

“But you and I have no argument,” she had softened, with a conciliatory smile. “Our ways may be different, yet still you and I are one! All life is Mahadeva! All life is Kali Ma! You are Shiva! I am Shiva!”

The sadhu had looked on, motionless and silent.

“And brother,” Bindra had continued, roused with new courage by the naming of the Dark Goddess, “do not be deceived that that janai sacred thread across your shoulder makes you any more pure, any more worthy of respect than the penniless crone who span it. It is only a length of greasy old twine!” she had chuckled, playfully. “No more or less holy than the soil at our feet or the hair on my jungli, uneducated, ‘black’ head . . .”

It was then that the Brahmin had spat at her.

***

Grandmother was delighted.

“She’s perfect! You’re both perfect!” she exclaimed at the news. “And both your names mean ‘Beloved’! All I could have ever hoped for you, my darling boy!” she burst, with enough excitement for the both of us. When I revealed that the gold jewellery had already been entrusted to the post by Priya’s family in Gujarat, she visibly trembled with tingles.

“Do let me buy the silk for the bridesmaids’ saris!” Grandmother insisted. “Just imagine, the ultimate Anglo-Indian wedding! Let’s have kedgeree with your favourite eggs ‘rumbletumble’ at the breakfast! Bel puri and cucumber soup, gajar halwa and warm plum cake with cardamom custard at the lunch!”

I threw my arms around her. “Thank-you-so-much-Grand-ma,” I tapped out on her soft cheek in Morse Code kisses.

“You-are-wel-come-John-ny-Spar-row,” she pecked in reply.

***

Bindra broke into a lumbering trot, despite the bruising of her ribs, until she reached Lapu basti, the village of Lapu. She made her way directly to the narrow path that would lead her to the jhankri.

At the sight of the smiling man, sitting on the steps of his simple wooden temple, Bindra burst out with an explosive sob.

“Come, bahini,” Kushal Magar beckoned. “Sit with me. Drink hot masala chiya.”

She eased herself down beside him and sipped at the brew of tea leaves spiced with black cardamom, peppercorns, cloves and ginger root. It was sweet, milky and deeply comforting.

“I remember when you made this journey once before, sister,” the jhankri smiled, “when the monsoon took your husband. So what brings you back today?”

“I need your help, dajoo,” Bindra stated, with newly restored composure. “There is something wrong, elder brother. There is something very wrong with me.”

He looked her kindly in the eyes.

“Fear diminishes understanding,” he offered. “It reduces man’s inclination towards compassion. Fear only gives rise to conflict, both within and without. So do not be afraid, bahini. You are Durga. You are Shiva. You are Kali Ma.”

Bindra laughed and wiped away more tears. “I used almost those very words this morning to someone else who was afraid. It is a lesson indeed to have them returned to me.”

The jhankri left her sitting on the temple steps. She looked out to the relucent peaks of the Kanchenjunga, whilst he prepared himself. He donned his jama pagri white tunic, then the headdress stitched with feathers and precious kauri shells, symbols of the Goddess, the active force of the universe. He began to intone the mind-focusing syllables of mantras as he opened the red doors of the little shrine.

Kushal Magar took up his mura, the sanctified drum that would take him into trance, enabling him to perceive beyond the boundaries of mere intellect, beyond the debilitating confines of petty ego.

He unwrapped the thurmi from its cloth binding and raised the ceremonial dagger with both palms. He repeated resonating syllables and clasped the rock-crystal handle between firm fingers to draw a circle on the dry ground with its iron tip.

“Aung satom bhi dhumba damdim ...”

This was now the ritual space, the focus for all his will and power, for all the knowledge bequeathed to him by innumerable preceding generations.

Kushal Magar sat cross-legged, facing the than altar. He burned handfuls of mountain herbs in metal bowls. He lit cones of heady dhup incense in scorched clay cups. And all the while he muttered an endless stream of anciently configured “seeds” of sound, bijas with the vibratory power to effect a change in consciousness.

To Bindra, the air seemed to thin, the air seemed to shine, as the jhankri closed his eyes and started to tremble.

His journey beyond all limitations had begun.

***

She was found by children on a muddy track we often cycled together.

She had been crushed against a tree.

The driver was never discovered. The accident never explained. Beautiful, bright, funny, loving Priya - she who had become the reason for my every waking hour, my every breath - had died alone. None of us had had the least idea. I thought I might have felt it.

It was my mother who had to tell me. Ringing from a distant telephone. Line crackling. Voice strained.

Two days later, Grandmother slipped away into her lawless reaches for one last time.

She never again awoke from sleep.

***

Kushal Magar’s drum lay silent. He blinked vaguely towards the mountains.

“Bahini,” he whispered. “I have passed through Akash, the world of the gods. Through Dharti and Patal, the worlds of man, of water and crystal upon which all else sits. But, there is nothing I can do. You are bearing the one affliction I have no power to heal. Forgive me.”

Bindra dared not take another breath.

The jhankri moved decisively. He threw a length of scarlet cotton over her head and gave the instruction that she was to listen with her heart.

He drew her close, lifted one corner of the cloth and whispered an urgent but precise stream of sounds directly into her right ear. “Aung tato purushaya bitnay madevarcha . . .” he began.

Three times he repeated the same torrent of syllables, blew smoke from newly ignited plants into her face, anointed her forehead with dark oil.

Kushal Magar turned to her other side. He lifted the opposite corner of the cloth and repeated the long mantra three times into her left ear.

“Aung tato purushaya bitnay madevarcha ...”

Again, three times the aromatic smoke. Three times the benevolent anointing.

Bindra remained slumped and silent.

“Younger sister, take these,” he said, thrusting into her bound hands a small cloth bag. “In here are balls of cremation ash mixed with buffalo ghiu. When you believe you have no more choices, repeat the mantra and throw one ball for every bija, every seed of sound, into fire,” he instructed her with urgency. “Forgive me. I have nothing more . . .”

Bindra rocked her head from side to side in resignation and understanding. She listlessly handed him a small bunch of carrots, held together with a cord that had been tied to her waist. But Kushal Magar shook his head.

“You have far greater need. Now hurry, sister. Hurry home. The storm has come.”