Where The Long Grass Bends

Yesterday, two of the Sisters walked me between them to the edge of the cliff and told me I was not born of rape. I think this must be what they tell every child like me; something false crusted their speech, something practiced and charitable. Underneath the pipal tree, where the bats hang upside-down, the Sisters told me I was born of love, a love polar and incongruous. My mother was Gharwali and my father British. They orphaned me in the lake where they drowned, drowned each other. In trying to keep their own selves afloat, they pushed the other down, again and again, under the water. I never knew them.

At the mission, I am the only child with yellow hair and a black face. I hear there is another like me, a boy, who lives at the bottom of the cliff with the sadhus. Among the children it is said that the boy’s father is the man who shakes the pipal tree at midday. The man smiles as the bats smash into his body and the trees and the walls of the mission church. Chris the Colonist, he calls himself; so we do, too.

Not all the children who go to school here are orphans. At the end of the day, most walk down the mountain to their homes, to their mothers and fathers. I watch them go, staying under the pipal tree, looking down to where the long grass bends. Today, as I stand with the slitted eyes of the bats all around me, I do not like the name Elizabeth. No one I know gave it to me—a name as cold and dark as deep water.

Because their parents told them so, the children believed the tension of elections started the riots. The Sisters and I knew that without the sixth-grade exams there would have been no trouble.

The day of the test, the Sisters called in the police and asked them to surround the school. In past years, parents had stood outside the windows of the mission and shouted answers to their children, or tried to bribe the test proctors with money and home-cooked sweets. This year was no exception, and around the ring of police, a semicircle of parents formed, shouting and shoving: “Meechu! Meechu! Don’t forget the square root of 81 is 9 and the prefix neo means new!” I stood under the pipal tree. When I take the exam in two years, no one will shout to me and I am glad for that.

I looked down the cliff and saw a large group of people parading on the mission road. They held election signs and sang. They advanced up the mountain to the school, and then the election group shoved and shouted at the parents who in turn shoved and shouted at the police, and so began the riots. I stayed under the pipal tree with the bats. One person died, an old man trampled by the crowd. No one seemed to know who he was or where he came from, and two weeks into the war, no one remembered the role the sixth-grade exams had played in the violence.

In the third week of riots, the local government demanded that classes end. The rebels in favor of the Dalit candidate were believed to be hiding in the thick forest around the mission. The government issued shoot-on-sight orders for the one road leading from the mission to town, and police patrolled the area. They traveled by foot or scooter. One drove up and down the mountain in a car. He had stars on his uniform and carried a lathi cut from a neem tree. It smelled of garlic.

The Sisters continued school on the rise above the garbage pit. Since the town children were unable to get up the road, only boarder students attended class. At first, the Sisters taught us all together, regardless of age and ability, but an edict declaring groups of more than three people to be seditious and revolutionary forced them to stop. Then the Sisters took two students at a time to the rise above the garbage pit and taught the day’s lesson. If we heard anyone approaching, we tossed our books into the dump and lay back comfortably, as if resting in the sun. Whoever said his times-tables slowest was made to clamber down the stinking, slick sides of the dump to retrieve the books. I never had to.

This arrangement lasted about a week before the government sent a policeman with a machine gun and bullet belt to patrol the garbage pit. We began meeting in the chapel. Because we lived at the mission, the police assumed us to be Christian. They let us alone when we studied inside the church. Kneeling on the pews as the Sisters taught class, we were prepared to tuck our lesson-books behind the Bibles and assume an attitude of prayer.

On election day, another student and I sat in the chapel learning geography. We smelled torch-smoke and heard chanting, angry choruses and refrains; we pushed our books into the pew-backs. The Sister and the other child ran from the church. I do not know why I stayed behind.

I heard the mob-chants fragment into disorderly yelling; I heard the Sister’s voice praying for mercy, mercy for her and the child. Her scale of Hail Marys climbed in pitch and the child screamed and screamed and then they both were silent. I still cannot remember the child’s name.

I looked for a place to hide. The church was open and bare except for a grand piano that had been donated by a British widow in the year of Independence. Only one Sister could play the piano, but she was frail and often sick. When she felt well, she pounded out hymns. I hummed along. The music was nice but I did not like the words.

Dropping to my hands and knees, I crawled to the piano. Dust moved in the roads of light filtering through the cross-shaped windows. I climbed the piano bench, then stood on the covered keyboard. Using all of my strength to hoist up the top of the piano, I balanced the edge of the lid on my shoulders and propped it open with the thin, lacquered stick. The stick looked too small to support the lid—shaped like a subcontinent, heavy as a subcontinent. Sideways, I slipped inside the piano and kicked the stick until it folded. The lid slammed down, and I heard the mob enter the chapel.

In the guts of the piano with my knees drawn to my chin, I lay on my side. Wires pressed meanly into my arms; wooden hammers knuckled my back. I heard the mob faintly now, as the walls of the piano muffled sound. When smoke seeped inside, I coughed into my hair.

I do not know and will never know how many people moved the piano. It suddenly jerked forward, and the back of my head slammed into the felt-tipped hammers. The piano moved perversely, first in one direction, then another, as if those who pushed it were not in agreement. I knew when we exited the church because of the cool, smokeless air passing through the strip of space between the lid and body of the instrument. Still, the mob shoved at the piano and, wedged inside, I lurched along, too. When I heard the shrieks of disrupted bats, I knew we were rolling under the pipal tree, toward the edge of the cliff. Then the piano stopped moving. I kissed my knees and snapped piano wires with my feet. The mob-sounds drifted away.

My crunched bones ached. I listened to the inner ticks and sprangs of the piano till I was sure of the silence, and then I decided to lift the lid, to unfold myself and see what shape I was in. I wiggled till I kneeled on the bent wires and row of hammers, then squared my shoulders and heaved. The lid lifted easily.

The piano was perched on the edge of the cliff, under the pipal tree and the regrouped, slumbering bats. Below spanned the road, a capital “S” slithering down the mountain. At the first curve of the road, I saw the mob circling a burning police car.

A flaming man rolled from the car and onto the street. The mob surged forward and put his fire out with rocks and fists, then reset the fire and chanted faster and faster. He took a long time to burn into a small pile, and the mob waited patiently till he disappeared. I smelled his flesh; it smelled like my own, smoky and sour. The mob had uncovered the keyboard so when I stepped from the piano, my feet pronounced a quick din of incompatible chords.

Walking under the pipal tree, I slammed into the chest of Chris the Colonist: he hung upside-down, his legs hooked over a low branch. He was barechested in a white dhoti. His long yellow hair pointed at the ground, and his face and neck looked purple.

I stood looking at him, at his yellow hair, till the Sisters found me and put me to bed. They told me that my teacher and the child whose name I cannot remember had been killed. The mob left their fractured bodies inside the chapel. One Sister gave me a hot-water bottle. She said it would comfort me. Last year, when I had pneumonia, they gave me a rosary. I broke it in half to make a set of beaded anklets.

In the house where I slept, there was a toilet with no flush. Two buckets of water triggered the siphon and swirled everything away. When the Sisters left, I added the water from my hot-water bottle to the flushing bucket, then lay in bed listening to the rats scout the hall. Outside, the mists hung mute and private. I opened the window, curious to see if the fog would enter my room in a mass; instead, a man with a bloody cut on his forehead appeared and dropped onto my bed. I think he was afraid he had landed on my legs. He patted the bed all around till he touched my feet, then nodded contentedly at the wall. I liked him then. He sat on the bed, and I took my pillowcase from my pillow, stood on tiptoe, and wrapped it around his head. I put my finger to my lips to silence him. When he crawled under my bed, I handed him the deflated hot- water bottle.

Every night for two weeks, he appeared in the same way and slept in the same place. I washed my pillowcase in the flushing bucket and poured the stained water down the toilet so the Sisters would not find his blood and look for him. Later, I saw his face in the newspaper and read that he was the rebel leader. He knew I could keep a secret. This is the first time I have told.

The Sisters found him in the chapel and turned him in. After his capture, the little war petered out and school resumed its normal schedule. The sixth graders were not allowed to retake their exam although they and their parents claimed the noise of the old man’s death had lowered the scores. Weekends, the Sisters volunteered at the hospital and brought me with them. They left me on a gurney while they talked to patients. I played dice with the lepers. I let them touch my yellow hair, and they let me touch their cratered sores. One afternoon, the nurses projected The Longest Day onto the wall of the waiting room, and I fell asleep watching it. What is a fake war when you have seen a real one? And with the shoot-on-sight orders rescinded, I began sneaking down the mountain, crouching in the long grass after dark. I wanted to see the boy, the boy with yellow hair and a black face, like me. I wanted to see the leeches of Chris the Colonist.

To get to his hut, we crossed a bridge of stones poking through the black sludge. Inside, glass terrariums covered the dirt floor, all of them filled with leeches. Chris the Colonist dropped me onto his mattress and walked to the cages.

“Hello, sweeties, I brought someone for you to meet,” he whispered into the screened tops. I was not afraid of him. He is crazy, but he bounces on the balls of his feet when he walks and no one who does that can be bad.

He told me he would feed his most prized leeches at midnight; he showed me the ones he had bred to be green with a line of orange spots. There were giant leeches, too, the length of one strand of my hair, the width of the Colonist’s arm.

He attached seven leeches to his calves, stomach, and arms. I helped him adhere seven more to his back. Then I offered up my own arms and legs, and we lay together on his mattress, nourishing the leeches and making them fat. I felt a little dizzy. After three minutes, the Colonist expertly plucked the leeches from my limbs and replaced them with new ones. Small points of blood spotted my legs and arms. While I was there, he did not feed the giant leeches.

The next night, I hid in the long grass and waited till I felt the Colonist’s hands around my ankles. Again, he carried me under his arm to his hut. He knew I would not run away if he set me down, but he said he was used to carrying the bats this way and I let him do the same with me.

When I asked him why he called me Jarasandha he said he would not answer until I asked the correct question. He avoided attaching leeches to the tiny scabs on my legs and arms where they had fed the night before. After using me for one feeding, he took two giant leeches and plastered them to his own back. “Who is Jarasandha?” I asked, and leaning over his legs with the leeches stuck to his back, the Colonist told me. I had asked the right question.

When a powerful sage came to Magadha, the king lavished him with presents. The offerings pleased the sage, who had recently renewed his strength by standing in fire for seven years. He granted the king a boon.

The rishi closed his eyes and focused on the king’s problem. So strong was the wind of his thought that a woman walking past was lifted and blown to the top of Mount Kailash. After some time, a mango dropped from the heavens into the sage’s lap. Handing the fruit to the king, he said, “Have your wife eat this, and you will be given a son.”

Brihadratha felt he could not give the mango to only one queen. So, as he walked, the king split the mango. He gave half to one sister and half to the other. Nine months later, each queen delivered half a baby. Their midwives carried the two lifeless pieces into the forest, behind the royal apartments, and left them near some ferns.

Just then, Jara, the man-eating rakshasi, walked by. The smell of human flesh led her to the dead pieces. So they would be easier to carry back to her lair, she joined them. The moment she connected the two halves, the baby came to life and cried in her arms. Hearing the cries, the king, the queens, and the midwives came running. Jara handed the baby to the virtuous king saying, “I, Jara, have saved your baby. Take him, he is yours.”

As the years passed, Jarasandha grew into a conceited and ambitious king. Lord Krishna and his cousins, the Pandava brothers, learned of Jarasandha’s tyranny and decided to fight and kill him. They traveled to King Jarasandha’s court and asked him for a single combat.

At the city arena, Jarasandha and Bhima, the mightiest Pandava, fought till their maces broke. For twenty-seven days they continued to fight, but were so evenly matched that neither man ever wounded or beat the other. On the twenty-eighth day, as Bhima was about to enter the arena, he appealed to Lord Krishna, “Please, tell me how to defeat Jarasandha.”

During the wrestling match, Bhima seized the king’s legs and threw him to the ground. Standing on one of Jarasandha’s feet, he grabbed hold of the other and tore the body of the king in two, flinging the halves far away from each other. Thus ended Jarasandha’s life.

I looked at the Colonist. His face was colored a sickly white, and he fainted as I asked him, “Are you all right?” I pried the two giant leeches from his back and put them in their cages. Then I draped some blankets around him and left the hut, thinking of my yellow hair and black face.

I took the path that climbed up the mountain, away from the long grass and the Colonist’s hut. As I walked, light and shadow stuttered through the tree trunks. I remembered what the rebel leader had told me about the grass. He said, “When you see the long grass and fear its height and the terror that might hide in its thickness, just think, yes, the grass is long, but because it is long, it will bend, and I will see what it hides.”

When I reached the summit, I saw a claw-foot bathtub on a shelf of mica. The wind blew roughly; I felt cold. A boy with yellow hair and a black face suddenly popped his head over the side of the tub and roared like a panther. “Look at the fangs on me,” he said. I remembered that the tub had belonged to the British widow. She donated it to the Sisters along with the piano. The Sisters, ever charitable, donated the tub to the sadhus because of their matted hair. There was gold plating on the clawed feet.

So I would have more room, he curled his feet under his thighs. I liked him then. I leaned my head against his thin chest, and he patted my yellow head. We lay flat and comfortable against the curved sides of the tub, watching the light and shadow skip across the sky.