A House Called Askival (21 page)

The mob crowed with delight.

‘Their eyeballs to the birds!' a man squealed.

‘Bones to the dogs!' cried the bus driver.

‘Balls to the rats!' called another.

More cheering. The driver laughed and swayed his head. The men shook their torches and weapons in the air and trumpeted,
‘Khoon ka badla khoon!'
‘
Blood for blood!'
the driver echoed. The men clapped him on the back and shook his hand as they filed off the bus, chuckling and cheering. The one with the stick grabbed his head and kissed the top of it, leaving dark smears on his temples. As the bus started up, the mob drummed their fists on the side and called out praise to God.

Mrs Banwarilal was crying, and Dorcas moved to sit beside her, putting an arm around her shoulders. Ruth's shaking had taken over her whole body and tears stung her eyes as she knelt in the aisle and reached in to Manveer. He gripped her hands and she bent forward, pressing her face into his fingers. Sita twisted round in her window seat trying to see him and fumbled underneath till she found a shoulder. They patted and stroked him, murmuring softly in the cramped space as Mr Haskell came down the bus. There was little to say and his assurances sounded lame; Manveer refused to come out till the bus stopped for a toilet break. The girls squatted in the dust on one side of the road while the boys lined up on the other, a herd of them standing close around Manveer as he relieved himself into the dark. Back on the bus he sat next to Ruth again. She dusted some fluff off his turban and once the bus lights were switched off, took his hand.

Everyone was silent. It was like fear had sucked half the air out of the place and breathing was difficult, chests tight. Old Mr Das, sitting half way along, finished the last of his paan and leaned over the boy next to him to open the window. There was a sudden blast of cold, a loud spitting and then the window slammed shut. Clearing his throat, he began to sing.

‘
It is dark now, my God, my God. How dark and cold now, Father God
.' It was the Song of the Cross, which Jesu begins and the others join. ‘
All alone now, Man of God, Save yourself, oh Son of God
.'

But no one joined Mr Das. Some watched him, a grey shadow in the dark bus. Others kept staring out the window. Others were asleep, or pretending to be. Mr Haskell sat on his front row seat, head in his hands. Ruth leaned against Manveer, resting on his shoulder, wishing to curl up inside him. Mr Das sang on, stopping once to cough and clear his throat, but starting again in his wavering voice.

‘
All is lost now, Son of God, It is finished; where is your God?
'

THIRTY-ONE

James and Ruth walked across the foyer to Benson Hall, his stick tapping on the polished concrete, her running shoes squeaking. It was the Hall where she had rehearsed
Gospel
but never had an audience, where her seat was empty that last Chapel service, and where she and Manveer should have graduated with their class in a parade of saris and speeches and embracing – but hadn't. The great double doors stood wide and today a drama group was working on the stage with a young black woman.

‘She's very good,' said James, with a wag of his head. ‘She directed Othello in the summer. Set it during the British raj with Othello as a Muslim prince.' He clicked his tongue. ‘Just wonderful.'

He smiled at Ruth but she only murmured
hmmm
and turned to look at the Senior Art paintings on the foyer wall. They were all in traditional Indian styles: Mogul scenes, Tibetan iconography, village art. One was luminous in its beauty: a face with eyes closed and a high, porcelain brow. The mouth was delicate, the eyes curved in the exquisite lines of the Buddha in meditation, the hair a flaming red.

‘That's an amazing painting,' she said, moving closer. In the hair, she saw an eagle, an ox, a lion and a winged man. ‘Done by a student?' She peered at the signature in the top corner. KN.

‘He was in your class,' said James. ‘Kashi Narayan. He comes back
now and then to work with the kids. Made a Peace Garden with them last year. Do you remember him?'

Ruth nodded.

‘A very gifted artist,' he went on. ‘That painting at home, you know? The woman in the desert. That's his.'

‘Oh,' Ruth said, remembering the red orb in RE class and her own snickering.

‘It's called Hagar's Kiss. Your mother chose it.'

James had asked her last night to make this trip with him. She had nodded but not looked up from slicing her mango. Iqbal was beside her at the kitchen bench grinding cinnamon.

‘Oh yes!' he'd cried. ‘Excellent plan!' As if it was news to him. In fact, it had been his idea, pressed on James so frequently and with such confidence that James had finally swallowed his fears and put it to Ruth. Iqbal was now humming as if the whole thing was settled, but James knew it was not. It would take a lot more than Iqbal's wiles to win that girl. He searched her face, but she gave nothing away. In fact, it was the kind of face that took everything – all the light from the room, the notes of Iqbal's song, the smell of spices – and stole it. The kind of face you wanted to slap.

‘I've got to run a few errands,' he said, trying to sound casual. ‘Thought you might like to look around.'

‘Yeah, sure,' she breezed, tossing the mango stone into a plastic bucket and washing her hands.

‘So much has changed. You wouldn't believe.' And he turned his gaze back to the pages of his sermon.

It wasn't going to work. He knew it already, but what else could he try? Ellen's grave had proved a disaster, as had Hillside Hospital, and Askival was impossible. He knew she went – once even with Iqbal – and was trying to clean it up, though he could not fathom why. The place was crumbling and restoration would take more than one woman and her whitewash. But, they could not even speak of it, far less go together. Something twisted inside him, just below his diaphragm. She thought
Askival was all hers: the memories, the downfall, the haunting.

And so, visiting Oaklands was his only hope. He prayed it would open spaces between them and they could make peace, but he knew that simply being there together did not take them to the same territory. It was a place they had both inhabited but an experience that was worlds apart. He acknowledged he didn't know the full truth of her life there, but neither did he trust her account of it. Hers was a history increasingly re-written over time and in conflict with the testimony of others. Yet she wielded this botched text like a legal document: a statement of the crimes against her for which she demanded harsh sentence. For which, he felt, she had already exacted years of punishment, casting himself and her mother to an emotional exile that meant Ellen died in grief. It still brought flashes of anger.

And yet – he rested his inky hands on his notes – it was true. She had been damaged. The death of that boy seemed to break something in her that never mended. He could understand grief, but not the scale of hers; from what he'd heard, she'd barely known him. And surely she could see the damage she'd caused to others was far greater, and for all her protesting, it was clear she was at fault. Perhaps that was it. Shame. The insidious destroyer. Though she held the outsides of herself together, he knew that within everything was a pile of splintered shards and from time to time you could see the sharp corners poking through and the seeping, weeping sadness of it all. And that confronted James with his own shame. For however great her guilt, and however much she slanted her story and even lied, at its heart was a terrible truth and in the dock a guilty man. He had failed her. All because of an older shame. And worst of all, he had been forced to watch Ellen punished for his guilt. It was the story of his life.

He longed to make right his wrong, to tend her wounds and flood her with healing, to reconcile her to himself and, even more, to the memory of her mother, but he could find no way to bridge the gulf. He looked back at her, studying a recipe in the Landour Community Cookbook, elfin chin thrust forward, finger curling around a tendril of hair. It made him ache. Her determination, her delicacy; under all that
defiance, so fragile. He wished he had understood that long ago. Right from the start.

Turning back to the scribbled and scratched text of his sermon he made another margin note.
Faith
. The paralysed man was brought by his friends. Did he persuade them or did they persuade him? He could not have gone without them. And it was
their
faith that healed him, said Jesus.

Could James' faith heal Ruth? Could it restore her own faith? For that was his deepest prayer.

She had returned to Mussoorie. And not just at the eleventh hour to say an obligatory good-bye, but with a few months to spare. Knowing that she was not, in any technical sense,
needed
, she had still come. In that decision James had felt more hope than anything he'd seen in the past twenty-four years. But how battered that hope was now. How faint. Just enough to ask for this visit to the school. It might open a door, help him to speak, or her to speak. But how tied their tongues, and how poor.

They moved on down the big hallway. Most of the doors were closed, breathing out the thick hush of busy classrooms: pages turning, pens scratching, murmured discussions, teachers' voices lifted above the hum. But the door to the bio lab stood open and they slipped inside; it was gleaming, all white and stainless steel. Gone were the ancient wooden worktops carved with initials, the cracked ceramic sinks, the crowded shelves.

‘Shit!' Ruth said. James winced. ‘Where is everything?' There were no specimens in formaldehyde, no cases of beetles, no moulting silver-black kalij pheasant.

‘There was a fire.'

‘But your collections?' He had donated his butterflies, too, his pressed wildflowers, his ferns.

‘Everything destroyed.'

‘Oh my god… that's terrible.'

‘Worse things happen.'

‘I know but….' A hand moved to her stomach. ‘All your precious
things.'

There was silence. He looked away. When he had left his collections at the school in the December of 1947, it was a mere speck of dust in the landslide of loss. The nation's. His own. He wanted to tell her that story, but couldn't begin.

At the bottom of the stairs, they studied the notice boards that ran the length of the main corridor. A large chart set out the fixtures for the Table Tennis tournament and there was a sign-up sheet for a shopping trip to Delhi, which was full, and another for cleaning the servants' quarters, which had two names. Ruth ran her eye down the list for the Honour Roll.

‘Look at those,' she murmured.

‘What?' James leaned in.

‘The beautiful names.' Her finger slipped down the sheet. ‘Sasafras Irani, Rolf Pleitgen, Wungram Shishak, Eldred Zachariah, Madoka Kumashiro, Jemima Rastogi, LeLe Aung, Cleopatra Matovu, Tensing Wangyal, Ambareen Sahoo, Meghal Jatakia, Delilah Rabbany, Song Han Lee.'

James nodded. ‘Not many places in the world you get names like that side-by-side in class, eating together, sharing dorms.'

Sharing pain, Ruth thought. Swilling around together in the Melting Pot, the Fruit Salad, the Jungle.

She pointed to a poster about a series of films celebrating Independence.
Freedom: Captured on Film
.

‘Looks interesting,' she said. ‘Have you gone to any of those?'

‘No,' said James, rubbing his ear. ‘I'm not into movies.'

‘I know, but I thought you might be interested, having witnessed it all.'

James dug into his trouser pocket and drew out a crumpled hanky. He blew his nose and stuffed it back.

‘No.'

She snorted softly. He had never told any of his partition stories. Always got edgy, changed the subject or simply wouldn't speak. After
years of turning her back on India, she now wanted to know it again, to understand.

There was a loud ringing just above their heads and the thunder of chairs and desks pushed back, a gathering storm of feet. Doors were yanked open and students poured out, rivers of them spilling along hallways, up and down stairs, around corners.

They were mainly Asian, with black and brown hair and skins in every tone from the chocolate of south India to the jasmine of Korea. Here and there was an African face, or a European, a blonde head, a flash of ginger. Some had arms looped casually around each other, a group were laughing, one boy sang.

Beautiful faces with beautiful names.

It did not look like a jungle, or pain.

The bell overhead rang again and the last trickle of students slithered into classrooms as doors closed.

‘There are hardly any westerners now,' she said.

‘No, not so many western missionaries in South Asia.'

‘I see.' Thank god, she thought.

‘In my time,' he said, ‘it was nearly all white kids. Mainly American missionaries, a few from other places and just a handful of Indians, like Paul Verghese.'

‘So, the missionary era's kind of over then, is it?'

‘Oh no. Plenty of these are mish kids, but their parents are Asian.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes. There are more missionaries in the world now than ever before, but you wouldn't recognise them.'

‘Dear me,' she muttered. ‘That's a bit frightening.' She had long ago signed up to the popular charges against the missionary endeavour: missionaries destroyed cultures, imposed western beliefs on the rest of the world, exploited poverty to further their spiritual ends. This swelling of the ranks by Asian Christians was unsettling.

In the Quad they wove their way through the games of tag and skipping to the stairs in the corner. James made slow progress, gripping the
banister and breathing hard, a small thread of spit swinging from his mouth. Ruth wiped it with a tissue, realising it was the first gesture of physical care she had given to either of her parents.

At the top of the stairs they stepped into Lower Dorm, except it was no longer a dorm. In place of the cupboards and bunks and cold concrete, a sprung wooden floor gleamed in the sunlight. Where Kozy Korner had been was now a thick red rug bearing a harmonium, a pair of tabla and a sitar.

‘Indian dance studio,' James said.

The door to Miss Joshi's apartment opened and a young woman in jeans and bare feet walked through. Her face, framed by a short pixie cut, was open and lovely, a tiny diamond glittering in her nose.

‘Hello,' she said. ‘Can I help you?' Then she frowned. ‘Ruthie Connor?! Is it you?' She skipped across the room and clasped her hands. ‘I'm Neetu! Neetu Banwarilal, remember?'

With peels of laughter, she embraced Ruth and told how she'd followed her mother's footsteps, but how Mrs Banwarilal had died two years before.

‘She was still choreographing to the end. Her last project was with Kashi Narayan – remember him? Iqbal was singing in it too, and lots of kids dancing. All about creation. Such a wonderful thing!'

‘Sounds it.'

‘But what do you think of this place?' Neetu waved her delicate hand across the studio.

‘Incredible. Such a change from Lower Dorm.'

‘Yeah? I was never in boarding. What was it like?'

‘Depends who you ask,' said Ruth. ‘I hated it.'

James shifted on his stick.

‘Oh,' Neetu said softly, shooting a look at him. ‘I think it's a lot better now. The dorms are very bright and homey and the kids are really happy.'

‘How nice for them,' said Ruth and walked over to one of the windows. It looked out to the eastern ranges that faded to smudges on the horizon. A lammergeyer vulture hung above them, motionless, its
wingspan wide on the air. In grade two she had lain on her bunk beside this window and wished she could fly.

The greeting from Neetu was echoed many times by a handful of ageing teachers, grey-haired secretaries and long-serving employees, whose faces lit at the sight of her. She was known, remembered and contrary to her belief, welcomed. Some even said, ‘Welcome home.' It un-nerved her.

As they walked down the winding path from the school to the residences, a watery sunlight filtered through the trees and the air carried notes of pine and moss. James pointed his stick at a clump of ferns, bedraggled and yellowing.

‘That means monsoon is nearly over,' he said.

She was silent. There was no sound but their footsteps and the tapping of his stick.

‘You were happy, too, Ruthie,' he said, at last, so quietly it was almost a whisper. ‘Some of the time. You were.'

‘How would you know?'