Eleven

As the Maharana Pratap Sagar reservoir recedes behind them, the road becomes steeper, embedded in the cliffs that have been carved out of the mountain. The hired Tata SUV veers left, right, and left again, following the road’s curves, and Reema holds the handle above the door as she studies the ochre swirls of stone embedded in the mountain wall. This stone was also what lined the shore of the reservoir. Beside her in the back seat, Jackson remembers his geography lessons. He knows the origins of the Himalayas: they were once beneath the Tethys Sea. Under the sea, a mountain takes its time to grow.

Reema feels the pitch of the road in her legs, her groin, her belly, and she tightens the seat belt across her lap. The peaks of the mountains are close, like neighbouring hills, not framed like a postcard as they were from the meadow. And the road is rough. She looks at the back of Yosh’s head, then beside it through the front windscreen, and finally beyond Monica in the passenger seat, as she tries to hold a fixed point on the horizon. The fan of the air conditioning is a riot of wings inside the jeep.

Yosh glances in the rear-view mirror and she catches his eye. He looks quickly back at the road and presses the play button on the console. Bhangra music pours out too loudly; he reaches for the volume, turns it down low. Reema touches her forehead where there are small beads of sweat.

‘We’ll start with Masroor Temple,’ Yosh says and looks at her again in the mirror.

Reema feels a vinegary bile in her throat, swallows it back.

‘… made by Pandavas, and dedicated to Rama, Lakshman and Sita …’

She pushes the door open on a slow curve and vomits bile and tea.

‘You’re ill!’ Jackson puts his hand on her shoulder.

Reema sits back and pulls the door shut, glances up front to see Monica’s shocked face.

‘It’s nothing,’ Reema says, wiping her mouth. ‘Just carsick.’

The car veers to the side of the road, but there is not enough space for it to stop on the shoulder, and beyond it is a steep drop. ‘Hold on,’ Yosh says and puts the car gently in motion, as though it is made of glass.

‘It’s nothing,’ Reema says again.

Jackson touches her hand, but she steels herself and holds her gaze on the horizon. He fetches the water bottle from the floor of the car and hands it to her. She shakes her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Yosh says, ‘the road …’ and she feels the car pull off onto the gravel shoulder. She looks at Monica, who rummages through her handbag. Reema closes her eyes.

‘You should sit up front if you get carsick,’ Yosh says.

No, she thinks, as she opens her eyes to see Monica holding out some mints. Then Monica’s face falls as she lowers her hand. She pops out one mint from its pack and puts it in her mouth before she opens the passenger door to get out.

As the exchange takes place, Jackson sneaks a look at his suitcase. Amelia, bear with them. They are young; it’s normal to have a commotion.

Elephants. A few in a line, head to tail, one following the other; some solitary elephants, others in herds, still others accompanying armies. These lines carved in rock are worn and yet so precise that Jackson can almost feel their hides. He touches the wall of the Masroor temple, which Yosh tells him is one of the oldest in the Kangra valley.

Cut out of free-standing rock, the walls are carved altars with framed pedestals for Ram, Lakshman and Sita. As Yosh explains how rock-cut temples are more difficult for the artists because the shape is determined by what is already there, rather than by the imagination, Jackson fans his face with his hand and says, oh, please, not now, to his bladder. The group moves among the temple carvings, running their hands over the shapes on the walls. There is a chai seller with a stall to their left. Jackson watches as the middle-aged man sets a pot on a grate over a gas cylinder and then stands staring into space, as he must do day upon day.

In those early years of their marriage, as Jackson and Amelia travelled by train in the north and dipped down to the centre of India, they visited many temples like this. Madhya Pradesh — the Khajuraho temples, with their elephants at war, their nymphs in anklets caught in the moment of stripping off diaphanous saris or straddling a male. Couples depicted in intercourse, while attendants assist and fondle, partaking in the coupling: small orgies of entry, back and front, upside down, male and female in equal pleasure. Amelia stood among them, entranced. She told him that life in the west was limited and stale, that he should take note, that life was short and they must make the most of it. The sculptures aroused yet embarrassed him, the stiff penises of the men that entered horses as well as females.

This temple, Yosh says, was built in the eighth century. He points to a man and woman entwined in the rock face. Yaksha and Yakshi, he tells them. Jackson watches Yosh’s expression; he seems to disdain the very things he’s describing, as though these gods are connivers, as though he has to struggle to share this knowledge, is hired to do so, but believes none of it. Yosh’s eyes take in Reema’s shoulders from time to time, and move to her long, shapely arms. Everywhere there are breasts and elephants and Jackson must be vigilant on Reema’s behalf.

An Indian lawyer, Yosh says, has recently filed a case in Bihar against the Hindu god Lord Ram over alleged mistreatment of his wife Sita, citing Ram’s brother, Lakshman, as a conspirator in renouncing Sita.

‘They filed a lawsuit against a god?’ Monica says.

Yosh nods in agreement at the absurdity. He explains that Lord Ram banished Sita to live in exile in a forest and the lawyer claims the move was cruel and hypocritical treatment. Reema watches Yosh as he touches the wall with Yaksha and Yakshi. She senses that by unfolding these stories he is earning his fee. But he is like her father in these matters, distrusting of any belief for which a statue has to be sculpted.

Looking up to the outer edges of the temple grounds, Reema sees three young men sitting on rubble, watching them. One of them wears shoes; the other two have strips of dungaree tied around their feet.

Yosh leads them deeper into the temple grounds. She wanders among the stone carvings, stares at the head of Buddha and the six-headed god holding a weapon, riding on top of what looks like a peacock. She is no longer using accha in her thoughts. There is no way in which she could fake her belonging here.

‘I didn’t know there were elephants this far north,’ Jackson says, coming up beside her. ‘They could have had one at the wedding.’ She doesn’t catch the joke, not interested. ‘It’s quite hot,’ he adds, because of course a young woman could care less about relic carvings; a young woman should be, what? Dancing. Making the world bow to her energy like the S-curved Devi in her dance, as though saying make way for me. ‘There’s dancing,’ he says as he points to the likeness of Devi.

Reema holds her hand out to touch the carving. ‘My mother showed me things like these as a child,’ she says, ‘but I was having none of it.’ When Sadhana, her teacher, taught her to sing sa, the peacock, she held her arm up like this carving, made her body a snake, not a peacock.

‘I began to learn Urdu when I was an intern in the Punjab, many years ago. Just a young fella. After Partition and before I met Amelia. I had a room in a guest house in Amritsar, run by a Parsi woman.’ He doesn’t have to try to remember her name, but he pauses nonetheless. Her face has come to mind from time to time, these past sixty years. She had been the first woman in the Punjab to drive a car, then to own one, a woman far ahead of her time. ‘Mrs Bhandari,’ he says. He closes his eyes. It’s so hot today. He wonders what became of Mrs Bhandari, if she’s still alive, if she’s stopped driving. What if he could drive himself to Amritsar to see her?

‘Refugee nonsense,’ railed the engineer at the sight of Mrs Bhandari bent over reams of cloth as she worked through the night stitching garments for the half-clad children who crossed into the city, and I saw his sneer and I saw his Rolex watch and there was war raging across the border between Pakistan and Kashmir. I was learning from Guldasta, her nickname, but oh, the engineer complained and grinned.

The temple terracotta is cracked and dry before him when he opens his eyes again. ‘I don’t have much time,’ he says.

She steps towards him urgently but sees that he looks well. ‘Do you mean for what is in your suitcase?’ she says, realising.

‘I need to decide,’ he says. ‘Why not here?’

She surveys the area: rock walls with bodies carved into them, the ochre deepening at the foot of the temples where untouched by the sun. The small pond is stagnant, mossy, and as green as a meadow. Come, little fish. Why not? Why not here for the old man’s wife?

‘It could be very peaceful here. There aren’t many tourists,’ she says.

Jackson makes a fist while he considers it.

She sashays like a model on her cross-country skis, I slip and slide behind her to catch up and forty years disappear as the snow blinds me, the sky becomes Panama and I say wait, I want to tell you about wooden ponies, lawns with swings, rubber inner tubes in rivers, train sets, coos and whispers at night and the unfathomable ways a man can be jealous, wait …

‘I think I would like to go higher up, into the mountains,’ he says, but Reema is not listening. She is looking towards the fence.

He glances over to see the three men lined up, dishevelled, like tired soldiers fronting a barricade.

Reema watches the young men, while Jackson watches her.

One of them is smiling, another is talking, as though to himself, but his voice is deep and coaxing. Her father always told her that to have strength you needed nothing more than a sense of your own voice. But these men hold power by being shoulder to shoulder: stronger together. Softly, softly, we must go in life, her father would say. But these men standing by the fence are not going softly. The third man searches the ground, sweeps rubble aside with his feet. She turns to Jackson.

‘Did your wife like the mountains?’

‘She liked the snow,’ he says. ‘I’d like to take her to the snow.’

Reema looks up towards the mountain range, to see how possible this might be. The peaks are iced like a dessert. She doesn’t know anything about snow or roads to snow; in London it comes every few years and creates havoc. ‘That sounds like a good idea,’ she says.

‘We should move on,’ Yosh says, arriving beside them. ‘We would like daylight when we arrive in Dharamsala.’ He gestures for them to follow him. Reema looks around for Monica, who is on the other side of the pond, too close, she thinks, to the young men by the fence. Yosh waves to get Monica’s attention, but she doesn’t see him.

‘I’ll get her,’ Reema says.

As she walks across the temple grounds the sun on her shoulder is intense. Monica seems more exposed there beside the pond, taking photos from different angles.

‘We’re going,’ she calls. Monica lowers her camera and waits for Reema to reach her. ‘Yosh said I should get you.’

‘It looks like Stonehenge,’ Monica says. Reema turns to take in this perspective of the pillars of the temple. ‘Or chess pieces,’ Monica adds. ‘I wonder if there is an Indian chess set.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I need some gifts to take home.’

Reema hasn’t considered gifts for Robert, for her parents.

‘No one knows I Iost my job. They’ll be expecting them,’ Monica says.

‘We need to go.’

‘I learned a mantra once, to Krishna, goes like Vamshee vibhooshita karaan navaneeradaabhaat. Peetaambaraadaruna bimbaphalaa dharoshthaat …’

They laugh. Monica really is just like that clever girl from school.

‘My family won’t understand,’ Monica says, looking to her for approval. They share a moment opposite to the ones she’s had with Jackson. This moment is fluid and slippery, and aware of all the things that don’t matter anyway.

The only thing to understand is the absolute nonsense of things. Ridiculous would be the word she would borrow from Robert. One month you can have everything; the next month you fling yourself from a skyscraper. She worries about her brother. He has told her that things are bad now in the States, burying her with new stories and statistics every time they speak. He is obsessed with imminent danger. A financial analyst threw himself out of the window of his twenty-ninth-floor apartment in New Jersey; a real estate broker blew his head off at a wildlife reserve; a twenty-three-year-old woman from Pennsylvania robbed a bank to pay her rent; and a woman in Georgia, who instead of going to court for her eviction hearing, called the police to warn them that she was about to take her own life. It was too late when they arrived at the apartment: she had chosen to die rather than leave a place she couldn’t afford. When Reema objected to his regular barrage of fatalities, her brother hit her with one last story: about the twenty-four-year-old man from Milwaukee, fired three weeks previously, who had suffocated himself with cellophane.

She reaches for Monica’s shoulder and brushes off a small leaf that has landed there. ‘You’ll get another one …’

There’s a hiss to their right, at first like an animal’s, but no. Reema adjusts the straps of her tank top. More sounds, rustling and laughter.

‘You fuck me,’ calls one of the young men. The others hoot, laugh.

‘You fuck me,’ he calls again, to the same response from his friends.

Monica and Reema quickly turn in the opposite direction, heading around the back of the pond. When they finally reach Yosh, neither of them mentions the men; something hangs between her and Monica like smoke from a joint shared in secret. The shame that you fuck me could have been their fault. But now the men are hooting loudly.

‘We’re going,’ Yosh says, and she and Monica follow him. She glances back to see that the young men have disappeared.

When they reach the carvings of Yakshi and Yaksha where they left Jackson, he is nowhere to be found. ‘I’ll see if he’s around the other side,’ Yosh says, and he and Monica leave Reema to wait for Jackson in the shelf of shade provided by the temple.

Jackson zips up his fly, relieved he’s been left alone to go about his business in a corner out of sight of the others. ‘My apologies, sir,’ he says with a salute to the stone elephant as he leaves. He sees Reema, waiting for him by the first temple tower. Sweat drips from his chin to the collar of his shirt as he walks with purpose towards her. There’s nothing like Indian temperatures, Amelia, you remember that. Nothing like plains and hillsides and the dust when the heat is like dry steam. He quickens his step. The light emanating from the rock walls is nearly pink. In Boston there is snow that turns green a few days after the pissing dogs have marked their territory. The snow in the mountains will be just the thing. He hears a noise and looks up towards the top of the temple.

A golf-ball-sized stone strikes his forehead above his right eye.

There’s a whooping call from the top of the rock. The voices of the three young men blend with the sound of a scattering of stones. Footfalls. A shower of pebbles. Some lodge in his hair; others fall to his shoulders.

‘Oh my god!’ Reema says, running towards him. Jackson’s legs have folded beneath him with the blow. He holds his head; blood seeps between his fingers. ‘Are you all right?’ She kneels, opens her pack and fetches tissues.

She moves his hand away and examines the small gash across his eyebrow where blood drips towards his eye. Looking around for Yosh, she sees him at the temple wall holding on to a horizontal bar of the scaffolding that has been erected for temple repairs. He pulls himself up, climbing the rungs, reaching a platform towards the top of the temple. He calls out in a dialect, threatening. Somehow he knows how to speak to the men running away with their dungaree-wrapped feet and rope belts loose and falling. He backs down the scaffolding and runs towards the entrance to the temple grounds.

‘I’ll call the police,’ he shouts to Reema and Jackson.

Reema holds a tissue under Jackson’s cut, but the blood soaks through it. She unfurls the sheer scarf from her pack and hands it to him. Jackson hesitates, shaking his head, but she insists. He takes it and presses it to the cut over his eye. The blood trickles. Reema watches him, one hand raised ready to take over from him. His face seems suddenly younger.

The chai seller brings cups of tea on a small silver tray, and places the tray on the ground beside them. He speaks to them in an urgent and apologetic voice, pointing and complaining, then retreats. Jackson looks into Reema’s face, worried that he has lost his sense of smell — no jasmine, cardamom, or nutmeg coming from her.

‘Did you see them?’ he asks her. She hands him a cup of tea and looks back towards the temple. The driver for the few other visitors to the temple ushers his clients towards their mini-van.

‘Not throwing the stones, no,’ she says, putting down the chai, and leans forward to take the hand in which he holds the scarf. She pulls his hand away; the blood still trickles. Taking over from him, she presses down on his brow. She draws out another tissue with her free hand and catches some blood that is about to drip into his eye. A bird caws loudly behind them.

‘It’s still bleeding,’ she says. ‘I’ll press harder?’

‘It’s the warfarin,’ he says, but she doesn’t understand. ‘Makes the blood thin. Clotting will take some time.’

She looks around for Yosh and Monica but can’t see them. There is no breeze as she continues to press the scarf against his brow.

‘They’re just boys,’ Jackson says.

She notices that his chest is rising and falling quickly. ‘Are you thirsty?’ she asks, nodding at the cup in his hand.

‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m never thirsty enough. Amelia always said, drink, drink!’ Feeling blood, he wipes his cheek and takes one sip. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he says.

She looks towards the top of the temple, almost expecting that the young men might appear. More birds caw, but then there is nothing for a long time: no rustling, no sound, and the pink light from the temple seems to fade.

‘We’re a long way from home,’ she says.

The trick with young children, she’s learned from teaching, is to distract them. A child who has an injury and is crying becomes a child who would like to learn about a lion with a thorn in its paw. ‘Did your wife know India too?’ she says.

He takes in her face again — elegant, not dangerous; he doesn’t know what all the dread was about. ‘She loved it,’ he says. But he’s not entirely sure this is the truth. Amelia loved the spice, the textiles, the food, the music, but did Amelia love India?

‘Even the chaos?’ she asks. English people always mention the chaos of Delhi, but she has no sense that it was chaos she was born into. Life before memory is a cocoon of other people’s stories, punctuated by a vague soundtrack of voices, cooing, whispering, praying for a baby who will make everyone proud.

‘She loved it,’ Jackson says. Again, he wonders. Amelia liked the household ordered, the table set a particular way, a schedule for laundry and cleaning. He remembers the tone of her voice once, to a housekeeper they employed in Jalna … How dare you? … when the woman smelled of Amelia’s perfume. Jackson skulked down the hallway pretending not to have heard. ‘She was perfect,’ he tells Reema, quickly, then removes Reema’s hand from his forehead to check how much blood has soaked her scarf.

‘Yes, I can imagine,’ Reema says.

She has had men tell her about perfection — the shape and colour of her eyes, the length and curve of her legs. The way she speaks, the fullness of her lips. Her pleasant manner. Not Robert, though. Robert rarely mentions her beauty. He hones in on her determination. Robert is a man who believes that if you work hard, freedom will come. He appreciates that she has ambition, but thinks she’s certainly far from perfect.

‘You should see the rest of your country,’ Jackson says.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Amritsar,’ he says eagerly, but that city might not be right for her. The unsavoury history — a shot into a crowd of protesters, the mob killing of an English teacher, the British colonel who forced Indians to crawl on hands and knees, the protest in the garden of Jallianwala Bagh, the colonel’s order for machine-gun fire, the numbers of dead that weren’t tallied. Decades later, the raid on the Golden Temple was supported by Thatcher. He’d rather not discuss this.

‘Mrs Bhandari made fine tea, always put the milk in first, believing that was how a white person would prefer it.’ He takes a deep breath.

‘There now,’ Reema says, pressing the scarf against his eyebrow again.

‘Each day I travelled by rickshaw to the dam offices. But there was a war nearby — new Pakistan and old India — and there was so much …’ he stops. ‘It was very different then.’

The minivan engine revs, and the driver leans on the horn as though to scare someone or something out of the way.

‘There are other places to see, as well,’ he adds.

She nods. Her family never returned to India together. Her mother grieves silently, has come alone just a few times. Her brother has come for business. But her father had never been back, and this has been Reema’s first trip since she was a baby.

She says, ‘My father told me that the Taj Mahal was not real — that it was a movie set for romantic films and that the only people there were extras. He has something against this country.’

Several minutes pass when it seems that nothing special has happened at all, except for the trickles of blood at Jackson’s temple.

The air stirs and he can smell Reema’s clothes again. Coconut oil, grass, tree bark. He is relieved. The breeze swells. The minivan pulls out. The bird caws loudly again and again.

‘This is good,’ he says.

‘What’s good?’

‘Now. This. It’s good.’

She puts her chai back on the silver tray and takes the bent fingers of his right hand. She rubs them, staring at the age spots near his knuckles and thinking that he might have been handsome as a young man, despite the small stature; old people shrink. There is an elegance about him that men her age don’t seem to have. When does that take hold? Who is this Mrs Bhandari in Amritsar who makes a light come on in him?

‘The guard has called the police,’ Yosh says, and Reema looks up to see him stop short, as though sensing he might be interrupting something.

‘And maybe a doctor?’ she says, waving him closer. Yosh approaches and sits down beside them.

‘Those boys were just playing,’ Jackson says.

She and Yosh exchange a knowing look.

‘Where’s Monica?’ she asks.

‘In the jeep,’ Yosh says. ‘Are you fine, Mr Baines?’

‘Absolutely. They’re just boys,’ Jackson says.

Yosh crosses his legs. ‘Yes, maybe,’ he says.

Reema watches as he prepares to say more. It comes out slowly, as though he’s hesitant to make a point that will offend them. He says that with tourists this kind of thing usually never happens, and he’s sorry. Maybe it’s his fault, maybe he shouldn’t have brought them here, but in some ways it’s not a surprise. Boys, like these, he says, they are angry. In his tone he is searching for a kind way to explain.

‘A few years ago, one June, I and two friends trekked from Manali to Bhrigu Lake, crossing snow, right up on top of the world,’ he says.

Reema watches his forehead crease in thought. This makes him look older.

‘We had a lot of trouble with the local boys. They despised us. We think they spit in our chai before handing it to us.’

Jackson fidgets, tries to get more comfortable on the ground. His knee hurts and his feet have let him down again. He takes over from Reema now, pressing the scarf against his wound.

‘I think they were right to despise us,’ Yosh says.

‘Please,’ Jackson says suddenly to Reema, and raises his hand to indicate he’d like to stand.

Both Reema and Yosh rush to help him to his feet. Reema brushes the dirt and pebbles from his trouser legs.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ Jackson says and shakes off their hands.

Reema steps back and lets Jackson steady himself. Some young men are running away with feet wrapped in dungaree cloth; others are throwing themselves from skyscrapers.

‘India isn’t what people always think it is,’ Yosh says, and Jackson wonders why he feels he must repeat this perspective for him as though he’s an old man who does not listen the first time.