A River Sutra (15 page)

I put up my hands to stop her, afraid her story was intended to arouse my sympathy for her captor and distract me from the guns locked in my cupboard. She ignored me.

"Not until I conceived did my husband truly believe I loved him. Then he became reckless. He wanted enough money to go to some distant part of the country where no one had heard of him, where we could grow old like any married couple watching our children play while we sat in the shade of a neem tree.

"On one raid he found himself near Shahbag. Thinking to please me, he went into the bazaar to buy something to remind me of my childhood. He had forgotten that the whole bazaar knew his face. There were still old posters on the walls from the time when he had kidnapped me. Before he could escape the police arrived.

"He was badly wounded in the exchange of gunfire. The others managed to get him back to our camp in the jungle and I sat nursing him through the nights and days. But I knew he was dying. He never once opened his eyes, even to bid me farewell.

"Without him as a leader, the gang could not continue. We divided what we had and I hid in a village, waiting for my confinement. My grief was too great to sustain the life within me. I lost the child."

She walked to the window and stood there looking at the river for a long time in silence. "Last month I sent a message to my mother. I wanted to return to Shahbag and discover who had wounded Rahul Singh. Then I planned to take vengeance on the men who had killed my husband and my unborn child."

She turned to face me. All the artifice had dropped from her demeanor. Now her eyes had the desperation of a trapped animal. "Perhaps my husband willed you to find my guns. He never wanted me to live his life, on the run from the police. But tell me, sir, how long can I keep our secret?"

"Secret?"
"That I am Rahul Singh's woman. It will not be long before the police find out, and some ambitious policeman accuses me of assisting in my husband's crimes. Can you imagine my fate then? Locked in a cell? A girl known to be a courtesan and a bandit's wife?"
There was a timid tap on the door. I was saved from replying as the old lady entered. She looked much stronger and her eyes glistened with tears of happiness as she thanked me repeatedly for allowing her to stay in the bungalow.
Taking her daughter by the hand, she left my office. I watched them walk across the velvet lushness of the garden's monsoon grass to the gate, two figures dressed in white, the girl's slender arm around the bent shoulders of the older woman.
To my surprise they did not take the path that leads to Rudra. Instead they walked to the cliffs above the river. I could see them in the distance standing under a tree, their heads close together as they talked. Suddenly the girl embraced the old woman and she was gone. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, but when I looked again there was still only the solitary figure of the old woman supporting herself against the tree, staring down into the river.
An engine sounded in the distance as she sank slowly to the ground, leaning forward to look into the rapid current flowing below the cliff. I realized the police jeep was on its way to the bungalow and I was unsure what to do next. I watched the old lady anxiously, wondering if I should go to her assistance, but to my relief she pulled herself to her feet and made her way slowly up the road to Rudra.
The roar of the jeep's engine was much closer. I unlocked the cupboard and unwrapped the rifles, lining them up in a row on the floor behind my desk. Then I stacked the cartridges next to the guns and sat down behind my desk to wait for the police.
A chain rattled as Mr. Chagla secured his bicycle to the fence outside the rest house. A moment later he entered my office, a mournful expression pulling his chubby features downward. "What a sad occurrence, sir. Simply a tragedy."
"Let's at least hear what the police have to say, Chagla."
"Police! What is the use of police now, sir?" he asked in distress. "I met our visitor on the road. She's going home because her daughter is dead."
"Nonsense, Chagla. The daughter was here, in my office, only half an hour ago."
"It can't be, sir. The old lady said her daughter drowned escaping recapture."
The police jeep braked to a halt at our gates.
"Keep an armed guard at the gates!" the sergeant shouted to his men as he ran across the garden. "Someone round up the staff and ask them if any strangers have been seen in the vicinity"
"What's happening, sir? Why are the police—"
"Quickly, Chagla," I interrupted. "Tell me what the old lady told you before the police join us."
Mr. Chagla paced my office in agitation, moving from window to window to watch the policemen. "She said she saw her daughter drowning, sir. With her own eyes. Can you believe such a tragedy? These police, sir—"
"Did the old lady say anything else?" I urged.
He turned to me in exasperation. "Only that she was happy her daughter had died in the Narmada because she would be purified of all her sins. But why are the police ... "
Suddenly he saw the rifles on the floor behind my chair. He backed away in bewilderment. "What are you doing with these many weapons, sir?"
Before I could answer the door was flung open. The police inspector strode into my office, calling over his shoulder to the constable following him, "I want an inventory of the arms. Serial numbers, types of cartridge, any signs if they were stolen from an army depot."
He pulled out a notebook and sat down, facing me across my desk. "Now, sahib, start from the beginning. Tell me everything you know."

Sometimes when I think I am becoming too set in my ways I leave the familiar surroundings of my bungalow and spend a day in the temple town of Mahadeo.
I usually arrive in Mahadeo in the afternoon and go straight to the bazaars sprawling behind the stone temples overlooking the river.
When I was a bureaucrat I had no reason to enter a bazaar, since my wife saw to our household requirements and my own infrequent shopping expeditions only took me to air-conditioned stores. Now, as I walk through the streets observing the pleasure on the faces of bargaining customers and the cynicism of the shopkeepers, I am reminded how circumscribed my life has been.

I often lose my way while wandering through the warren of shops built so close together they appear to be almost a single building with balconied bridges crossing the narrow gaps above a man's head. At this hour the shopkeepers are opening their establishments for the evening, and their only customers are farmers' wives choosing glass bangles for their daughters or haggling over the price of a bar of soap with a film star's face on the wrapping.

But at dusk the bazaar takes on the appearance of a fair as Mahadeo's residents arrive to make their purchases. Strings of colored electric lights flicker from the overhead balconies. Children hold clouds of spun sugar to their mouths. Hawkers shout, shaven-headed priests push their way toward the temples on the riverbank, housewives argue, women squeeze wet henna in elaborate patterns onto the hands of giggling schoolgirls, young men slip furtively into shops selling country liquor, white-robed pilgrims hurry to complete their purchases for the evening devotions.

For generations the traders of Mahadeo have lived off the Narmada pilgrimage, measuring piety by gullibility, and it amuses me to watch them sitting cross-legged in shops lit by kerosene lanterns, providing the pilgrims with everything they need and convincing them to buy much they do not need: another box of the most expensive incense, more fragments of saffron-colored cloth, the most expensive of the auspicious gems. Surely, at least a dozen clay lamps to float on the river?

My fascination with the energies exploding inside the bazaar always delays me, and it is usually late by the time I reach the stone steps stretching the length of the thirty temples crowded one against the other on the riverbank.

These shallow steps, maybe twenty of them, lead from the forecourts of the temples down to the water and contain, like the bazaar, a whole world of human activity. Beggars and holy men. Priests instructing the devout on how to make their obeisance to the river. Horoscope readers and palmists. Vendors selling baskets of marigolds to be offered to the idols, or glass paintings of the gods as souvenirs. Women, after their ritual baths, drying their saris on stone steps still warm from the day's heat. Pilgrims pouring oil into clay lamps to float on the river.

Above the steps the temples rise like a city, their forecourts crowded with families entering the sculpted stone arches to make their offerings to the idols, then ringing the temple bells when they reemerge, holding their children up to strike the clappers. While the clanging still resonates in the dark, the families descend to place sweets in front of the beggars and holy men sitting on the steps.

The diversity of the people provides me with a constant source of interest and I often fall into conversation with the pilgrims. Across the river the solitary lights of my bungalow shine like a lighthouse in the blackness of the jungles, inviting me to return and consider what I have learned.

I have found when I am talking to some stranger on these steps I discover things about the river that I never knew before.

For instance, once I was sitting behind a woman who was examining the lurid glass paintings of the gods displayed on a cloth before her while the vendor cajoled her to buy one.

I could not see her face, just the thick hair wound at the back of her slender neck and her elegant fingers holding each painting to the light. I was imagining the beauty of her face, when a child shoved her from behind and the picture dropped from her hand. She reached into her bag to pay for the shattered fragments. The irate seller, still shouting at the child, moved on to another customer.

Seeing the woman stoop to collect the glass fragments before some passerby cut his foot, I went to help her. She turned to thank me and I gasped, astonished that she should be so ugly when I had imagined her so beautiful. A large nose tilted across her almost masculine face to overshadow the thin hps lost in a chin that curved upward like a handle.

"People are always alarmed the first time they see me," she said gently as she took the fragment from my hand.

I could have wept at my own cruelty. "No, no. It was not that at all. I cut my hand with a glass splinter."

"Let me see." She held my hand to the light as she had done the paintings. "There is no cut."
In silence we continued to collect the glass fragments. When we had gathered them all, we pyt them into a newspaper blowing down the stairs. To my surprise she extracted a piece of glass from the newspaper and sat down on the step to study it. I sat down next to her. She handed the shard to me. It was a crude painting of a woman's torso, the breasts painted in bright pink on an aquamarine background.
She seemed not to notice the vulgarity of the painting. "Can't you see? It's a picture of Shiva's consort, the Goddess Parvati, who performed all those great penances until Shiva returned her love. Don't you think it is only proper that such great love should give birth to music?"
I must have looked perplexed because she said shyly, "Musicians believe that one morning after Shiva had made love to the Goddess all night— and a night in the lives of the gods is thirty thousand years of human time—Shiva rose from his bed and saw the Goddess still asleep. Her breasts were like perfect globes and her slender arm rested across them, her fragile bangles sliding up and down with each breath. Shiva was moved to such tenderness by the sight that he created an instrument to immortalize his wife's immortal beauty—the first instrument of music, the veena.
"Look, the two globes that provide the veena's resonance are the breasts of Parvati. The neck of the veena is her slender arm, the frets of the veena her glass bangles, and the music of the veena the expression of Shiva's love."
I studied the painted torso but could find no trace of beauty in it. She seemed to understand because she said, "Perhaps only genius cam see beauty in what appears ugly. My father can. And he is called a genius."
She lapsed into silence. Below us two pilgrims were standing waist high in the dark river, cupping water in their hands then letting it fall in a stream through their fingers as they chanted, "Om. Om. Om."
The woman pointed at them. "My father recites that every morning before he plays his veena. First he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then, when I think his lungs must burst if he does not exhale, he intones Om, his eyes closed, his body motionless so that only the vibration of his deep voice issues through his lips.
"As I child I thought I could see things in the room shaking with the vibration, although when I looked at them nothing moved. But sometimes I could hear the merest note from a string on his veena, a sound so fragile it disappeared into the air before I could hold it in my memory. Then he would open his eyes and say,

" 'Om is the three worlds. Om is the three fires. Om is the three gods. Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva.' "

She smiled at me and we continued to listen to the bathers chanting. Suddenly she added, "It sounds like one note. But actually it is three and a half sounds. Can you hear them?"

I listened closely. All I heard was the single note being expelled by the bathers into the night.
"No, listen. It is created by the three separate actions of your body—when you open your lips, when you release your breath, when you close your lips. Try it."
Still embarrassed by my own rudeness when I had first seen her face, I obediently opened my mouth and rounded my hps. I was astonished by the force with which the Om issued from my mouth. As she listened to me she recited,

"The first sound of Om is the manifest world. The sound of waking consciousness. The sound of gross experience."

"The second sound of Om is the unmanifest world.
The sound of dreaming consciousness. The sound of subtle experience."

"The third sound of Om is the nonmanifest world.
The sound of dreamless sleep.
The sound of potential experience."

There was no breath left in my lungs but I still felt my lips vibrating as I took a deep breath while she recited,

"The half-syllable of Om is silence. The sound of the unmanifest world. It is the ultimate goal.
The incomparable target."

She laughed when she saw me gasping for breath, and I thought she was trying to make a fool of me to avenge herself on my earlier tactlessness. Annoyed by her experiment, I asked crossly, "Why are you in Mahadeo, anyway?"

"I am on a pilgrimage."
"You are not dressed as a pilgrim."
"Oh, I am not making a religious pilgrimage.

This is part of my musical education."
"I thought musicians were supposed to practice,
not walk around a river."
"Most musicians do not have the misfortune of
having a genius for a teacher."
"And I suppose you are absolutely certain your
teacher is a genius?"
"Oh, yes. He is the finest veena player in the
world. Our house is always crowded with famous
musicians, begging to be my father's students. But he has only ever shared his knowledge twice. With
myself ... "
She fell silent and I watched her wrap the glass
fragment in newspaper and place it carefully in
her bag.
"And the other?" I asked, unable to restrain
myself.
Her large eyes seemed to melt into an inner
darkness as she observed sadly, "The other is the
reason for my presence here."
Intrigued, I asked her to explain her pilgrimage. She shook her head. "It would make no sense
unless you knew about my father."
"Then tell me about him."