Chapter Five

Bindra could not determine how long she had slept. Hours, days or weeks? The air of the little room in which she lay was heavy with the scent of plant oils.

“Kasto cha, bahini?” a broad-faced Tibetan woman smiled, asking how she was in perfect Nepali.

“Better,” Bindra replied, surprising herself.

“Timilai pira cha, bahini?” the woman gently asked. “Do you have pain, younger sister?”

“Little,” Bindra replied, again in surprise at the change she felt in her body. “My boys!” she suddenly gasped.

“Listen,” the woman grinned, emphatically cocking her head towards the open door.

Bindra could hear Jyothi and Jiwan’s voices flooding into the room on the bright sunshine, with the pungency of fermented lentil phing noodles drying outside on bamboo poles. The boys were playing a boisterous game of cricket.

“We said they could stay in the house and keep my Dawa and Pemba company,” the woman explained, rolling a string of coconut and carnelian dzi prayer-beads between thick, stained fingers. “But every night, they sleep here on the floor, to be near you. You have good sons, bahini.” She opened a large bottle, from which she removed two pungent balls. “Now’s time for more medicine,” she smiled, and popped them into Bindra’s mouth. They were chewy, gritty and slightly sweet.

“Mithai cha?” she chuckled. “Taste good?” The Tibetan woman raised a broad hand to her dark-skinned face to conceal her amusement. “Last week, bahini, you were still spitting them out!”

Bindra moistened her mouth and rasped, “I thought you were feeding me gobar goat dung!”

As Detchen Dhondup’s broad shoulders began to rock with boomy chortles, Bindra’s smile returned.

***

I wiped my face with a sodden handkerchief and squinted through the brilliance. Five kohl-eyed girls at Dalba’s single stone well released the bucket-rope. They left their water-pots and scurried on flat feet for the darkness of doorways.

I stepped out of the rickshaw into the midst of a handful of cowdung houses, bleaching, splitting and crumbling in the summer’s blaze. Not until my eyes adjusted to the glare could I discern silent figures clustered together in the shade, scrutinising me with a contradiction of delight and alarm.

“Salaam-alaikum,” I offered towards my umbral Hindu audience in uncertain and starkly inappropriate Muslim greeting. “Mehta ka ghar kaha hai?” I attempted, asking in self-conscious, “kitchen” Urdu where I might find the Mehtas’ house.

There was no response.

“Mehta?” I persisted, convinced that the clipped, Anglicised pronunciation I had inevitably inherited from my Raj-born forebears had rendered my limited vocabulary unintelligible. “Mehta ka ghar?”

A sudden clamour of Gujarati made me start.

Two grinning boys were escorting an elderly, near-toothless woman draped in mazarine silk. All three were talking at once, waving their arms at each other and at me as they approached. I put my hands together to greet them, at which the boys hid behind the woman, giggling.

“Salaam-ji,” I bowed. “Mrs Mehta-ji?”

Priya’s grandmother nodded her head from side to side and began to chatter at me in excited Gujarati.

“Kiy aap angrezi boltay hain?” I fumbled, in the hope she might speak at least some words in English. She shook her head. She scolded the boys who were staring at me with wide eyes from amongst the drapes of her sari, and shooed them off to fetch a bilingual relative.

I rapidly dredged through the vague remains of courteous childhood phrases and found, “Aap se milkar khushi huye.” Accordingly, I declared that I was pleased to meet her.

Mrs Mehta rocked her head in incomprehension and sucked her remaining teeth through an unconvincing smile.

I decided it prudent to remain silent, leaving Mrs Mehta and me to stand blinking. Politely. At one another.

To my great relief, the boys soon returned, escorting a cheerful young man who introduced himself as Mukund. His English was admirable. My arrival, he explained with embarrassment, was entirely unexpected. The letter sent had not arrived. The embarrassment, I insisted, was all mine.

Back in England, where affluence abounds, an unexpected stranger could be most unwelcome. The arrival of an unplanned guest could inflict havoc upon schedules and diaries. Hands might be thrown up and excuses voiced of unprepared larders and lowstocked fridges, imperative Scout activities and Church meetings, insufficient bed linen and no clean towels.

But here - where the people lived from hand to mouth, fighting against the seasons to feed their families when one bad crop could bring starvation - they offered me their all.

I was led away from the low mud houses, across a rough dirt yard, to a building that stood beneath the welcome shade of tamarind and neem trees. Fronted by a finely carved, wooden verandah, this was by far the grandest house in the village. I was invited into the central hall and directed to an old, wicker-seated chair. The room was dark, lit only by shafts of spiralling dust that broke through the fine filigree of closed shutters. The house was ancient and, although much decayed, retained an exquisite beauty in its intricately carved doors and cupboards, its chequer-board floors of green slate and pale cream alabaster.

Brusque orders were given.

In moments, the tepid water from the bottle I had been carrying was offered to me in a metal beaker, on a tray engraved with dancing deities. The clatter of pans, the hiss of oil and the ambrosia of cooking spices drifted from an unseen kitchen. Through open double doors I could see a broad wooden bed being stripped and hurriedly remade.

Sad eyes lingered on me for a moment. Whispers were exchanged.

I wondered whether they were saying that if I had arrived with Priya, they would have been scattering the sheets with flowers.

I pressed hard against the sudden, waxing weight in my chest, as a steady stream of women, young men and children, some thirty in all, were presented to me. They bowed shyly, smiled and departed as quickly as they came. I gave up trying to remember their names, and hoped they did not notice the quaver in my pleasantries. In every pair of dark, bright eyes I had seen only hers.

Mukund stayed by my side. He politely clarified that Namaste was the appropriate greeting in Hindu company and laughed out loud at my earlier blunder.

“Please no need for apologising, Mr David,” he assured me. “No offences being felt. We are rather most tickled to be hearing our Muslim brothers’ salutation in our village for the first time in history,” he grinned, squeezing my shoulder as though to indicate a new affection.

Mukund explained that he was visiting from Bombay, on study leave from college. He told me that the men of the house, Priya’s Uncle Piyush and her grandfather, were out giving offerings at the temple of Hanuman, the Monkey God, far across the fields, but that they would return before dark. He enquired after the health of English cricket and the Queen, Winston Churchill and Mrs Thatcher. He asked if his three cousins, who were standing against the wall and whispering, could feel my arms.

“What do you eat, Mister David, to make you grow?” he translated for them.

The second time in one day that I felt big and butch.

***

“How am I?” Bindra asked.

“Doing well, bahini,” Detchen smiled reassuringly. “Doctor Dhondup’s very pleased. You are healing. Your thick woollens stopped the burns from going too deep. The shawl you were wearing protected much of your head and face. Gu-Lang, our Protectress of Mothers and Children, was with you that night.”

“Thank you,” Bindra tried to say, but her voice broke. “I have nothing,” she choked, “nothing to pay for all you’ve done here.”

The Tibetan placed a hand on Bindra’s arm. “Bahini,” she gently said, “those who can, pay for those who can’t. You owe us not one rupiya, younger sister. We can treat your burns and ease your pain, but you need still more.”

Bindra seemed to know the words she was about to hear and held her breath.

“You have a great sickness,” the woman began softly, “that even the wisdom and knowledge of our Bönpo cannot cure. For this, my husband-doctor says you need paraiharuko dabai,” she explained. “Foreigners’ medicine. You must leave the Hills and go down to Kakariguri. Ask for the Gad Sap Hat Ashram, where free medicine is given. They will want you to pray to their dead god that hangs on the wall and bleeds. But do it, bahini. Do it for the paraiharuko dabai.”

Gad Sap Hat Ashram. The Tune-Snake-Hand Ashram.

Bindra repeated the peculiar name to herself and weakly rocked her head from side to side on the hard, flat pillow to show she had understood.

The woman drew closer.

“But, bahini,” she almost whispered, “you know you cannot come back to this place, even when your sickness is cured. They will never let you return. Your children will not be allowed in the school. Your money will not be accepted at the haat bazaar. You must find a new life. Away from here. Where nobody knows.”

Bindra turned her head towards the doorway. She knew these words were true. She closed her eyes tightly and held her breath again, as the streams of tears across her face sparkled brightly in the sunshine.

***

“Hot or cold, Mister David?”

Nothing in the world had I wished for more than Mukund’s kind offer of a bath. He and the muscle-squeezers had led me to a small stone room leading off the busy kitchen.

I blinked at the single tap protruding from the wall. “Oh, cold, please!” I said, wondering how I could possibly have a choice with only one oxidised pipe. I looked around, unsure what I was expected to do. The boys pressed into the doorway, grinning in anticipation.

“Do you wish a seat, Mister David?”

I declined the offer. The potential addition of furniture in such a confined space only seemed to further confuse the situation.

I wondered whether an audience when visitors bathed was customary, as I tentatively began to undo my shirt. It was the sign for which they would seem to have been waiting and all joined in my undressing with unreserved delight. One of the boys promptly whisked off my dust-impregnated clothes to the dhobi washerman, whom I had noticed beating brightly coloured bundles against broad, smooth stones at the back of the house. Farewell buttons, I thought.

Now naked, I declined their repeated requests for limb-feels or an exploratory finger in the navel, however politely translated by Mukund. Instead, I gently ushered them out, enabling me to shut the door and squat in private. With a deeply instilled fear of contracting amoebic dysentery, I kept my lips tightly closed as I poured the cool water from the tap over my head with a wooden bowl.

Even above the splash of water, I could hear the boys whispering and giggling outside. Even with sandal soap in my eyes, I could see them peeking through the gaps around the door.

***

Bindra held her sons close as they pressed themselves into the crowd that forced itself onto the Kakariguri bus. She was wrapped in a full shawl, given to her by the Tibetan doctor’s kindly wife. Detchen Dhondup had also ensured that the telltale signs on her feet were covered with woollen socks and protected by loose flip-flops.

Around her middle, wrapped in a long cloth, Bindra carried a bundle of food and medicine. Amongst the crisp rice-flour phinni, the crunchy sesame til mithai, the soft yak’s cheese churpi and the spicy potato aloo dum, she had tucked the little bag of ash balls given to her all those weeks ago by the jhankri at Lapu basti. Jyothi had two small blankets tied across both shoulders and carried the heavy canister of water. Jiwan had a strap bound around his forehead, from which a string bag of suntalaa oranges hung down his back.

Bindra found movement painful. Her back and shoulders remained unforgivingly tight. Still, she pushed her way to a seat on the bus, perched on its edge and drew the boys close. All were silent and kept their eyes away from their fellow passengers. She had not told the full truth to her boys. And yet they sensed they all bore an unspoken secret, for which others would willingly punish them without warning.

As crowded town and busy shops quickly became lush forest and plunging valleys, Bindra looked up the hillside towards the white pinnacle of the Kali temple.

“Kali Ma,” she whispered, “protect my sons and daughters. Remove my fear. And brighten my understanding.”

***

Refreshed from my bucket bath and satisfyingly fragrant once more, I stepped back into the kitchen.

To my irrepressible surprise, the aunts, cousins and looselyrelateds had returned. They were standing, quietly awaiting the completion of my ablutions and, though I was skimpily towel-clad and struggling to retain my modesty, they led me directly to the table.

Spread before me was a great feast of khichdi rice, kadhi buttermilk, papads, achars, fresh kachambar, crispy farsans and curd. I assumed we were all to eat together, but they impressed that this gastronomic prodigality was for me alone. The gathered kin were merely onlookers, a position which, by their delighted smiles and enthusiastic nods at my every mouthful, they seemed to find most satisfying.

I ate heartily. The merest suggestion of an empty space on my plate, and a host of female hands lifted spoons and bowls to pile high new, spicy servings, despite my protestations. When I could eat no more, they presented me with a harvest festival of village-grown bananas, chicoos, guavas and mangoes.

Mukund impressed that they were very touched by my willingness to adopt their custom of only eating with my right hand. I did not tell him that my left had been fully occupied holding down my towel, his rorty young cousins having spent the entire meal peering steadfastly under the table.

Fed and dressed, appreciative audience departed and scallywag cousins dismissed, I lay on the bed that Priya and I had been meant to share.

I fought to drive away the pervasive thoughts that threatened to stifle both mind and breath by trying to remember the many new names of the unreservedly smiling, gentle faces I had met since my arrival. The honest warmth of these strangers was conferring on me a comfort that, until now, I had not allowed myself to know. Whilst I had rejected any possibility of the least expression of sympathy back in England, here my careful restraint was yielding to the unqualified kindness of Priya’s relations, the tenderness of a family that had so nearly been my own.

I distracted myself by considering the fact that the Mehtas were probably more affluent than the others in the village due to the benefits of their emigrant son. Where others were dependent upon the communal well, their house had a tap. Where others had beatendung floors and walls infested with sore-inflicting, vampiric pests, their rooms were stone-tiled and plastered in pale yellows, pinks, blues and greens. In these pigments the humidity had painted figures, faces and fantastical beasts, which seemed to breathe, move and converse in the torrid air.

My room span with the tickling twitter of sparrows that nested on cupboards and shelves, and sat in restless lines on the top of the mirror. The sultry skies beyond my windows throbbed with the percussive calls of insects. The warbling song of girls pulling water at the well. The pounding of soapy cloth as my dirties had their seams and gussets sorely tested on the dhobi’s wash-stone.

And yet, as my mind began to slide and my eyes were overwhelmed by the weight of their lids, all I could hear was the excited chatter of the boy cousins on the verandah, relating I-dared-notthink-whats to their curious friends.

***

The bus spluttered to a temporary halt at Teesta Bazaar, affording its passengers a chance to purchase a cup of hot chiya tea and an array of local fruit, nuts and vegetables. Bindra had no intention of losing her seat, but Jyothi and Jiwan needed to relieve themselves.

“Don’t let go of your brother’s hand,” she instructed Jyothi as the two boys climbed down the metal steps onto the roadside. “And keep away from the wheels!” she called, but they had gone.

Bindra looked out to the low huts that balanced precariously on bamboo stilts along the steep hillsides. Below their unstable balconies, she could see the raging torrent of the deep green Teesta.

She thought of Kailash. Her sweet, simple Kailash. She thought of him sitting in the bus as it slipped off the monsoon-shattered road and plummeted into the swollen river. She thought of him trapped in his seat and the water flooding in.

Bindra leapt to her crumpled feet and struggled to the open door.

“Jyothi! Jiwan!” she called, her heart gripped tight with terror.

She climbed down into the crowd and called again, “My sons! My sons!”

Bindra pushed through the meandering throng, towards the row of shops that stood above the river’s edge. A little hand suddenly took hold of her elbow. She dropped to her knees and tightly held both her bewildered boys to her chest. “Just for a moment . . .” she gasped. “Just for a moment I thought . . .”

“I know you,” a poorly dressed Marwari interrupted her admission. Bindra looked up. The man had had an accusation in his statement. “You’re the widow from the old burial ground,” he affirmed, his pox-marked nose and forehead starkly revealing their shadowed craters in the low morning sun.

Bindra stood up with difficulty. It was essential that she was not known, that no one recognised her. Holding fast to her sons, she turned and, without a word, hurried back towards the bus.

“Keep away!” the man shouted to startled onlookers, as he followed close behind them. “Keep well away!”

Bindra reached the steps and pushed the boys ahead of her into the sanctuary of the vehicle, urging them to slip between their fellow passengers who were already returning to their seats.

“E bhai!” the Marwari bellowed at the conductor, who was nonchalantly leaning against the front wheel, sharing a Shikari cigarette with the driver. “You have a leper on your bus! I know this cursed woman. She’s a leper and a witch!”

Bindra swung around to face her denouncer, her eyes wide beneath the shawl, her mouth too dry to speak. Passengers were now leaning out of the windows. A crowd was gathering in the road. All were staring at Bindra, at her bandaged hands and frightened children.

“Is this true?” the conductor asked, approaching apprehensively.

“I am no witch!” Bindra cried. “Let Kali Ma be my witness!” The very pronouncing of the name of the Dark Goddess began to dispel her timidity.

“But are you kori?” he pressed.

Before Bindra could respond, a foot kicked her from behind. She tumbled off the bottom step and hit the floor. The crowd cried out. Her shawl had slipped off her head to reveal a large patch of ugly, hairless scalp and swollen ears.

“Ama!” Jiwan cried out from within the bus.

Bindra clambered to her feet. The crowd shuffled back yet further. She brushed off her clothes and called to her sons. Jyothi and Jiwan leapt down the bus steps and ran to stand beside her.

“Do not fear us!” she said aloud, fighting with herself to calm the trembling that now threatened to defeat her limbs. “We are not different from you! It is only man’s limited understanding that sees division where there is none. Your pain and suffering is ours. Our pain and suffering is yours. We are each but one expression of the same Truth. May Kali Ma brighten all our understanding!”

The crowd was unresponsive.

They parted to allow Bindra and the two boys, who now clung to her, to shuffle away. Not until the little family was out of the village and some distance from its rickety bridge and busy market did Bindra speak.

“My good, strong sons, the foreigners’ medicine I need is perhaps five or six days’ walk away, if we stay to the road,” she breathlessly explained. She could hear the Kakariguri bus growling its way towards them and turned awkwardly to glance behind her. “But we may have to walk in the forest . . . away from the wheels.”

“Don’t worry, Ama!” grinned Jyothi. “I shall sing to the Punyajana and they will watch our path.”

And, thus, as Bindra quickly led her sons off the tarmac of the old trunk road and into dark, dense jungle, the Good People in the trees were serenaded by a solitary voice confidently singing, “Resam phiriri ...”

***

I awoke to find an elderly man sitting on the bed beside me. He looked into my eyes and smiled.

“Mister David, you are most welcome.”

Priya’s grandfather was a striking figure, tall and elegant in the pure white dhoti cloth that wrapped around his waist and drew up between his legs. With his thick, white hair and dark, omniscient eyes, he looked to me like Rabindranath Tagore, the illuminating narrator to my life, the bright lantern that, since childhood, had chased my shadows.

I was momentarily transfixed by Mr Mehta’s sun-creviced forehead with its generous daub of deep-orange ochre from his puja to the Monkey God. I then remembered myself, placed my hands at my heart and thanked him for the generosity of the welcome I had received, even though I had not been expected.

“You are the first Westerner this village has ever seen,” he smiled broadly, in flawless English. “You have now become part of our people’s history. They will still talk of you in fifty years’ time!” His face became serious. “And your welcome is such because, for all we know, you may even be God come to visit us.”

Before I could respond to such a startling suggestion, his eyes welled with tears and he wrapped his arms around me. Mr Mehta held me to him with tender, quiet strength. It was as though he sensed the burning blur of previous months had been dominated by such a profound sense of loss that I had become entirely accustomed to an enduring, ill-lit hollowness. I had existed in a void, deprived of any depth of feeling or constancy of thought, from which I had been unable to find the least escape. My only means to maintain control had been to isolate myself, to become anonymous, denying all contact with friends and family.

The facts had been irrefutable: Priya and Grandmother were gone.

No awkward condolences, no pity in self-consciously averted eyes would restore them to me.

However, to be held now by this stranger whom Priya had loved enabled me to soften in his supporting arms. To rest upon his shoulder. To cling to him and weep.

I only pulled away to wipe my face when Priya’s Uncle Piyush entered the room. He was strong, handsome and confident, yet waited with respect until I had regained composure.

“Our guest from the dark of the infinite,” he quoted, with a broad and honest smile, “the guest of light!”

“My Grandmother and Priya were the only other people in my life able to recite Tagore!” I stumbled in recognition, astonished to hear their names together on my tongue.

As I continued to sniff my nose and dry my eyes, Uncle Piyush joined us on the bed and held my hand. The unexpected company of Tagore in our first meeting provided a safe foundation on which to cultivate an association. We compared our favourite poems, preferred passages from his prose, and found ourselves engaging like old friends.

Mr Mehta sat by, watching us attentively. He then announced, “I shall no longer be calling you ‘Mister David’. You are my own son, we are your family, and this is your home.”

I suddenly remembered my purpose and turned to my rucksack. I dug deep for two carefully wrapped boxes and hesitantly handed them to Priya’s grandfather.

“The wedding gold,” I murmured. “I have come to return the wedding gold.”

He slowly placed the boxes on his lap and stared hard at the unopened lids.

Again, he took me in his arms.

Again, we wept.

***

By dusk, Bindra, Jyothi and Jiwan had travelled little distance. They had been unable to climb the steep, forested mountainside, unable to clamber across the deep, rocky gullies cut by monsoon streams. Bindra had felt she had no choice but to return them to the “blacktop” road, despite her trepidation.

Jiwan had tired quickly, but his exhausted mother had found herself unable to carry him. The new skin across her back and shoulders was still too fragile, too sensitive to bear any weight. As the light had fallen and the traffic had dwindled, she had led the boys back to the ease of tarmac.

By nightfall, they had reached a promontory, high above the river, designated a “viewing point” by the West Bengal Tourist Board. Where once there had been virgin jungle, now the State offered a pot-holed car park, a pair of dilapidated concrete benches and a roofless shelter for the recreational pleasure of holidaying visitors. The two boys wrinkled their noses as they entered the place. It stank of stale urine.

They were not the first that evening to settle at the “viewing point”. Two tall, lean roti-wallahs had already lit a low fire and were laying out their bedding. Such itinerant pastrymen were a common sight on these hill roads. They came from the distant Plains to walk between mountain villages with large, metal trunks balanced on their heads. These black cases were filled with such tasty and rare delights that the appearance of the boxies in any hill community remained a source of great excitement as the enduring chill of a long winter slowly began to thaw.

Bindra drew the shawl close around her face and tucked her bandaged hands up inside, well out of sight. The men stared hard as they approached.

“Namooshkar,” they offered in mumbled Bengali greeting.

“Namaste dajooharu,” Bindra replied brightly in her own tongue. She indicated towards their small fire with a lift of her eyes. In answer, they both briefly nodded for them to share the warmth.

Whilst she encouraged the boys to run ahead, Bindra moved closer with caution. Bengali roti-wallahs were well-known for their coarse manner and assertive appetites, and these men were eyeing her with more curiosity than she felt comfortable.

She crouched down at a distance, taking care to keep her back to the two strangers. The men watched intently as she discreetly unwrapped her food parcel and passed one piece of soft churpi to each of her sleepy boys. The fragile phinni had been reduced to nothing more than flakes and crumbs, but the boys scooped them from the cloth and licked them off their fingers. Bindra held back Detchen Dhondup’s potato aloo dum and sweet sesame til mithai, in the hope that she could make it last until they reached Kakariguri. After that, she had not yet dared to think.

It was still the custom in these hills to share provisions, however poor. Bindra asked Jyothi to offer a piece of churpi to their camp mates. Both men declined. They had never been able to develop a taste for the pungency of fermented yak’s cheese, so prized amongst these hill people in their jungle-clad mountains. One of the men returned the hospitality by unlocking his metal trunk and handing Jyothi three pastry shingara stuffed with spicy vegetables.

Bindra smiled in gratitude as her boys tucked hungrily into the crisp crusts. The roti-wallah offered a bloody grin in return, his mouth and teeth scarlet with well-chewed betel nut, but Bindra quickly turned away.

She had never felt comfortable with Plains-men.

***

Dawn had barely dissipated the bug-drummed darkness, yet the village was already wide awake and working. I breathed in the sweetness of warm cow dung steaming in the yard, the comfort of spices tempering brightly in the kitchen. I stretched my toes and rolled onto my back to listen to the harmony of voices, tools and animals, the concord of a whole new world beyond the windows.

Suddenly, an anxious cry. Mr Mehta.

I leapt from the bed, wrapped around my waist a lungi cloth, and ran out onto the verandah.

Priya’s grandfather was bending over the buckled body of a perspiring stranger. The man’s head was bleeding badly.

“What’s happened?” I asked, as Mrs Mehta hurried to join us. Her hands were already heavy with clean cotton and a bowl of steaming water.

“This fellow is a Dalit, from the edge of our village,” Mr Mehta said, gently laying a hot, wet compress across the man’s wounds. “You understand the term Dalit?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Dalit means ‘broken’, ‘shattered’, ‘oppressed’,” he explained. “This fellow is an Achut, an Untouchable - even though Untouchability has officially been illegal in India since the days of the Mahatma!” he added with manifest frustration.

I crouched down to meet the eyes of the ostracised man, whose sort my Grandmother had told me to embrace.

“His name is Pankaj - ‘mud-born’,” Mr Mehta said in introduction, quickly adding in response to my look of surprise, “like a lotus, not a worm! He and his wife are permitted no land. Instead, they must deal only with dead livestock and the removal of the other villagers’ faeces from the fields with their bare hands. Can you imagine such a scavenging bhangi life?”

I could not.

“Gandhi-ji referred to such people as Harijans,” he continued, “Children of God, just to make his point. But you think casteminded people really understood then, or begin to understand today? Do you think they would ever allow this man to enter their homes, or even to take water from the same well?”

Pankaj looked up at me and smiled shyly, even as he winced at another application of scalding cotton. I laid my hands on his shoulders in an attempt at comfort. He looked too hurt to hug. In response, Pankaj placed his pale palms together and drew them to his heart, even as tears trickled down his bruised cheeks to darken the dust.

“Has he had an accident?” I pressed, as Mrs Mehta returned with more clean cotton and a honey-pot. She removed the wooden lid and handed the small clay container to me.

“Son, this is no accident,” Mr Mehta replied, shaking his head and tutting in despair. He dipped in the proffered spoon, then let the viscous, antiseptic syrup drip onto torn flesh. “Neither is this uncommon, nor infrequent. I am sorry to say there are some, even in our own community, who have not yet learned the inherent value of all life. Some who do not yet see that all is one . . .”

A sudden shout interrupted his explanation. Its vehemence caused Pankaj to flinch and retract his undernourished, scab-dappled legs. I had not noticed the gathering of agitated villagers that kept its well-judged distance.

A gaunt, tense man stepped towards us. He seemed angry.

Mr Mehta responded with a pacifying smile and uplifted palm. He refused to be dissuaded from his attentive ministrations, revealing the same quiet strength of character and conviction that had once been Priya’s.

A second, quarrelsome voice was raised, sustained by the swell of a communal grumble.

Mr Mehta turned to face the bared hostility of his neighbours.

I could not understand a word of his Gujarati, yet was transfixed as he addressed the crowd with calm authority. What I took to be his defence of the damaged man, who now cowered at our feet, was such that all dissent was immediately silenced. Every one of the villagers dropped their eyes as though in shame, then silently shuffled back to homes and duties.

Mrs Mehta returned to the kitchen to pile a thali plate with hot khichdi rice and daal for their unexpected guest, whilst Mr Mehta indicated to me for more honey.

“In the old days,” he confided under his breath, as he continued in his care, “my whole family would have now been outcast.”

A restored and reassured Pankaj was soon sent off home in the protective company of Uncle Piyush, whilst Priya’s grandfather carefully cleaned his hands and I quickly bathed in preparation for morning puja.

“The villagers obviously respect you,” I said to Mr Mehta as we walked across the fields towards a little white-washed temple. “Priya told me that you were once a schoolmaster.”

“Indeed,” he confirmed, “some miles from this very village. But that was long, long ago, when I was a young dreamer of a fellow.”

“So, you must have been teaching under the Raj,” I asserted.

Mr Mehta slowed to a halt and took hold of my arm, as though preparing to steady himself.

“Son, when the Quit India agitation was escalating in ’43,” he began with sudden solemnity, “news reached my schoolhouse that British troops were on their way to suppress the demand for Purna Swaraj, for totally independent rule, in our district.”

I remembered hearing that my grandfather had regularly knocked Gandhi topi hats off the heads of Congress supporters in the street, with a swipe of his regimental swagger-stick. I now cringed at my own juvenile naivety that had been amused at the Chaplinesque slapstick of such a story, without a thought for the remarkable self-determination of a subjugated people that underlay it. I now found myself wondering at the colonial fantasy that I had been fed and so easily, if not mindlessly, accepted.

“The moment the warning came, I ordered the children straight home,” Mr Mehta continued, an undisguised strain now tightening his voice. “But word had arrived too late. My pupils met the soldiers on the road. In the impulsive bravery of their youth - enthused, I have no doubt, by the popularity of Non-Cooperation - some of my older boys defiantly mocked the Tommies. In response, the British soldiers emptied their guns into the children’s legs. I heard the volleys from the schoolhouse - tat-tat-tat-tat! I ran to them, ran just as fast as I was able. But all too late. When I saw what had been done to my students, my innocent boys and girls, I fell flat to the ground . . .”

Even as Mr Mehta said the words, he clasped his chest and belly. I held him fast to keep him upright, as, almost half a century on, he sobbed into an empty, sun-baked field the raw lucidity of his memories.

***

Fire-warmed and well-fed, the two boys soon fell asleep.

Bindra, however, forced herself to remain awake. She could feel the boxies staring at her back, but could understand nothing of the muttered exchanges they shared.

“Ei-je!” one of them whispered towards her.

Bindra pulled her shawl close and looked over her shoulder. He had gruffly called her attention. Both men grinned in unison and raised their dense eyebrows. One was rubbing affectionately at a gathering in the dhoti cloth around his loins. Bindra’s heart began to pound. She turned back to her boys and pretended to busy herself with their blankets.

“Ei-je!”

This time, the whisper bore yet greater intent, whilst his companion could barely contain his giggles. Bindra had determined not to turn around again.

Suddenly, an extended finger prodded her back with forthright purpose. She winced with pain and pulled away.

“No, brothers, I am hurt!” she cried, exposing the fear she was fighting to contain. “I am hurt beneath my clothing. You are not to touch me. Please, for the sake of my fatherless boys . . .”

The men burst out laughing. “Nepali oto bhalo bolte pari na!” one mocked in Bengali. “Can’t speak Nepali that well, love!”

Bindra could not be sure what they had said. To make herself clearly understood, she lifted her shawl, deliberately uncovering a broad swathe of burnt, bare scalp. The men gasped and drew back. “Now leave us be!” she growled, revealing a bandaged hand as she pointed for dramatic threat into the impenetrable shadows. “Kali Ma is watching!” she added for effect.

Both men had lost their juvenile banter. They were puzzled by the unsightly signs of damage this woman had unveiled. They were now unsure with whom they shared the comfort of their fire.

The two boxies had long made their living amongst these hill people at the end of the cold season, but still they were unsettled by the tales of bhut ghosts and bokshi witches, hikman chanting women and mata seers. They feared the headless mukatta that bore eyes in their shoulders and stepped from the trees to bring nausea. The tattered tangare, who had died as men in the snows and now latched on to the living to sap them of life. The stories of bijuwa who spoke with the voices of the dead, and madre who crouched in the shadows at dusk to wreak confusion. But most of all, they feared the bojudeuta who, it was claimed, inflicted insanity, infected food and ate the hearts of children.

The disquieted Bengalis settled down to sleep. They eyed the woman and her sons one last time with uncomfortable suspicion, then cuddled up together, blankets drawn over their faces to keep in the warmth and keep out the mountain magic.

The night vibrated with insect life and the clamour of testy monkeys in the dark. Bindra looked up towards Shiva in his form of the moon god, riding his chariot of glazed water through the darkness.

“Soma-shambhu-paddhati,” she whispered, in search of comfort, “look over my fatherless boys and my lost girls as I sleep. Sweeten their dreams.”

Bindra drew up her knees and rested her head on her forearms. There was no position that did not cause new pain.

When next she opened her eyes, it was light. The fire was long out.

The moon and the pastrymen had gone.

***

Before the evening meal, Uncle Piyush and I walked through the sugar cane to his mango orchards. They appeared fiercely aflame in the sinking sun.

“Priya loved this place,” he smiled, his arm sweeping wide as though to encompass all fields, trees, cows and crows as far as the distant, darkening horizon. “Gloom in the forest and glamour in the sky,” he wistfully murmured, as his hands alighted on my shoulders.

I nodded, but found no words to offer in reply. However hard I looked, I would not find her.

“So, now you must take care,” Uncle Piyush hissed into my ear. “There are snakes here!”

As we stepped beneath the dense canopy of thick leaves, I could not initially see a thing and wondered just how he meant me to “take care” of venomous fangs gleefully primed and waiting in the shadow. “

Pitaji says that man has disturbed the balance in the world, because snakes, monkeys and birds all behave differently from when his father was alive,” he explained in whisper. “You see, the snakes are cruel today, they attack for no reason.”

Comfort indeed.

Once our eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, Uncle Piyush tenderly fingered the heavy fruit that hung around us. Having judged one ripe for plucking, he carefully rotated it from its hold and handed it to me.

“Mangoes are always best eaten fresh from the tree,” he advised with an encouraging grin.

“Right again, Grandma!” I smiled to myself, as eager fingernails revealed the fragrant flesh beneath smooth skin, and keen teeth plunged deep into succulent, golden glory.

Far ahead, beneath the sunless ceiling where wild peacocks courted, the solitary tongue of an oil-fed wick flickered weakly. We had come to check on the Rajasthani chowkidhar, hired to guard the fruit from thieves. Despite our underfoot twig-crunchings and constant chat, the watchman did not wake from his slumber until Uncle Piyush had shaken him roughly by the shoulders. He was dismissed the following day.

Back at the village, the women were already extinguishing the lamps. Husbands were returning to waiting wives, whilst young men mounted the flat roofs of family homes to lie together on communal beds. I had been invited by cousins Mukund, Harsad, Amul and Tapan to share their sleep, so climbed the stairs to join them on a mattress of dry rushes, spread out to modify the temperature of the house below.

Beneath the lambent gaze of Orion and a lucent moon, we talked late into a night heady with the scent of liberally oiled hair, salty skin and fervent, fertile earth. The boys asked after their cousins, Priya’s brothers, in England, of the crops they grew, the cows they kept, the women they loved. They discussed test matches and spin bowlers, hooks and yorkers, glides and googlies. They guided me through gods and goddesses of a teeming, joyful pantheon that encompassed all that is, or was, or could be. They told me tales of relentless wars and irrepressible passions, defeated demons and unconquered kings. They described the affectionate intimacies shared in India between closest friends, and, with the names of Lord Krishna and Prince Aravan on their lips as though in benison, tenderly entwined their limbs in mine.

The week had passed too quickly and I now regretted that my time in the village was to be brief. I had so feared meeting Priya’s family, in selfish anticipation of the crippling pain it might expose, that I had purchased in advance a train ticket to leave the following morning. I was about to commence my journey northwards, in search of whatever remained of a distant childhood that had so inspired my own. I had determined that, from amongst the ruins of an empire, I would find some remnant of my father, an echo of a man who had remained so inaccessible in my life and yet so influential in his distance.

However, for that one night, all remorse at my imminent departure was short-lived. The gentle touch of responsive hands and the cool air, so deliciously balming after the searing onslaught of the day, soon seduced me into a depth of sleep I had not known for many months, as heat-lightning illuminated the tops of the mango trees and gave the monkeys nightmares.

***

The mountain was foggy that morning. A dispiriting drizzle was fast dampening Bindra’s shawl.

Before continuing their journey towards the Plains, she gave the boys a little of the aloo dum from its greaseproof paper. They both ate the shingara she had saved from the pastrymen, with a sprinkle of extra salt from its newspaper twist. And they all shared one orange.

Back home, it was haat market day and the road was already busy with buses and jeeps as both shoppers and merchants wound their way up to the old hill station. Bindra kept to the dark tree line as often as she could for protection from both the weather and cruel eyes.

Jyothi cried out in triumph when he spotted an iskus vine heavy with fruit. Together, they gathered the squash gourds and bound them in Bindra’s cloth. Although they hung heavily around her waist, the promise of baked iskus for dinner had already lightened the load.

The drizzle was fast becoming rain, so Bindra called for the boys to find shelter until it passed. She laughed as Jyothi and Jiwan ran ahead, kicking up their legs and whooping in the wet.

When Bindra reached the broad-leafed tree selected as the driest spot to wait out the weather, Jyothi was sitting alone.

“Where’s your brother?” Bindra asked. Jyothi stared back, his face expressionless.

Bindra swung around and called out, “Jiwan! Where are you hiding?”

She looked back at Jyothi. His silence had begun to frighten her. “Son, where’s your brother?” she asked again with greater urgency.

Something was very wrong. She recalled the talk of tigers in these lower slopes, when she was a girl. Her heart began to deafen her ears.

She stumbled towards Jyothi and cried, “Where’s your brother?”

Jyothi looked up at her and shook his head.

“Tell me!” she ordered.

“Jiwan-bhai was behind me, running, Ama. But when I reached the tree, he wasn’t there any more.”

Bindra turned to retrace their path, calling for her little boy at every step.

The forest was silent.

The pain of panic in her chest was catching every breath. She turned back to Jyothi, who had not moved from the shelter of the tree.

“You heard nothing? Saw nothing? Your brother did not call out?”

“Ama, I saw a man . . .” Jyothi muttered in fear, his cheeks beginning to run with tears.

Bindra’s eyes darted wildly as she scanned the undergrowth. No man could move in silence across these thumki hillsides. No man could move without leaving his trail.

“Where was he?” she hissed in whisper, certain they were now being spied upon.

Jyothi pointed towards a towering peepal tree, the sacred fig of Shiva, symbol of the liberated mind. Some said that to tell a lie beneath its shade brought upon the culprit the very affliction his mother now bore, yet Jyothi had only ever known her to speak the truth.

Soft rain rustled the tree’s vulva-shaped leaves, symbols of the Goddess, as Bindra forged into the undergrowth towards the pale, peeling trunk. At its base stood an old stone lingam, emblem of universal union. The upright stone was garlanded with an offering of fresh flowers, and yet she could see no footprint, no broken foliage. She touched the base of the tree, touched her heart, then waded back to Jyothi.

“How did he look, this man?” she asked, in heightening alarm. Jyothi shook his head.

“Son, tell me!” she cried out.

“He was like a child. Small, like a child. A red child,” he blurted. “Red?” Bindra gasped. “Was he naked? Stained with sidur?”

Jyothi rocked his head from side to side in anxious affirmation.

“Wearing many malas around his neck? Around his arms? A drum in his hand?”

Jyothi had not stopped nodding.

Bindra put her bandaged hands to her mouth, as though to muffle the words she feared to say out loud.

“Ban jhankri!” she cried. “Jiwan has been taken by the ban jhankri!”