Hillstation (21 page)

For some reason, Malek appeared to have developed respiratory problems, breathing in short gasps, hands flapping loosely at the ends of his arms.

‘Well, straight away he was on to me. Saris, badges, designer clothing…'

‘Of course,' said Malek. ‘For this was my sole purpose, to ply my wares. And, as any good wares-plyer might, I had ventured into a business establishment seeking commercial opportunities.'

‘With a flipping big grin on his face,' said Mike. ‘But anyway, I said I didn't have any money and he asked why. So I told him and he mentioned he had a concert venue. I said, but there's nothing up there and he said, the proprietor's always been a dumbo.'

‘Ba!' said the Sergeant.

Malek had gone pale again.

‘So I thought it could work,' said Mike. ‘I wasn't exactly rolling in options. We'd come here, flog some merchandise, sell some tickets. Get the cash. Book a plane. Get home.'

‘This is creepy,' said Sharon, standing now. ‘I mean… I don't know, the music…'

‘It is a Shiva-Rag,' said the Sergeant. ‘Not creepy, but awesome.'

‘Well, whatever,' said Sharon. ‘It's giving me the heebies.'

‘But what clinched it,' said Mike studying Sharon for a moment, ‘is that it doesn't exist. It's off the map. It's nowhere.'

‘If this were not here,' chuckled Malek, sweating, ‘how could we be asking if it was?'

‘Stop it,' said Sharon quietly. ‘The music, it's… ‘

‘I cannot,' said the Sergeant. ‘For it is your music. The music of Shiva. The music of Sharon.'

‘Oh yeah,' said Sharon, giggling. ‘Sharon Shiva. That's really funny.'

‘Not funny,' said the Sergeant. ‘But meant to be.'

‘The fact is,' said Hendrix, ‘we're hiding out. Laying low.'

‘And what is meant by the hiding of out or even the laying of low?' I asked, puzzled.

‘It's keeping your head down,' said Mike, ‘so people can't find you.'

‘By putting on a show?' I said. ‘For all to see?'

‘Depends who's seeing it,' said Mike.

‘I could do this,' said Sharon. ‘Mike? I got some moves.'

‘Remember,' said the Sergeant, rippling off a series of notes, ‘that it is only Shiva who moves.'

‘So if you can play a tune, why the bloody hell didn't you play one for the inaugural concert?' said Malek.

‘Tell me about him,' said Sharon. ‘This Shiva, what's he like?'

‘Search your heart and you will know,' said the Sergeant. ‘He is the splendid and the terrible, the firmament of all and the dissolution of everything that lives. He is alone, solemn, without a second. He is playful, frivolous, toying with our little lives, the fearsome shadow in the fleeting span of us all.'

‘I don't know what you're on about,' said Sharon. ‘But I like it.'

‘There is another way out,' said Mike, glancing at Hendrix. ‘But that's not up to me.'

‘Woah,' said Hendrix. ‘If you're saying what I think you're saying, then all I can say is she said what she said and that's that.'

‘That was then,' said Mike, turning to me. ‘This is different. You fancy a walk? Up in the hills?'

‘Perhaps,' I said.

‘Well, if you bump into Marty,' said Mike. ‘Tell her we're stuffed, that your sisters are gonna burn, and that it's up to her.'

‘But how is it up to her?' I asked.

Hendrix sighed. ‘She's a big girl. Go tell her.'

‘You want to see her, don't you?' said Mike.

I nodded.

‘Use the back door,' said Hendrix. ‘Behind the curtain, turn left, follow the corridor, take a right, it's in front of you.'

Perhaps it was Shiva's music lilting from the cavernous bowels of Sergeant Shrinivasan's Veena. Perhaps it was the sight of Sharon's feet as they traced a pattern of colourless nerves in the dust of the stage. Perhaps it was knowing that I was about to face the boundaries of a world that could spring free or clamp shut forever. But in that moment I was afraid.

The back door needed a bit of a shove before it burst open to the dizzy sunlight of the street. A dozing dog lifted its head to look at me. A crow flapped noisily from a heap of vegetable peelings. A monkey scrambled up a tree, chattering angrily from between its trembling leaves. From the other side of the hall I could hear the villagers arguing. Somebody was shouting about ice-creams. Fish was mentioned. The road stretched upwards, both familiar and not. For me, it had always meant freedom of a sort, if only the freedom to dream. As I stumbled slightly over the roughening ground, I thought that nothing could stop us now. Not even the screams that had erupted, mysteriously, from the village behind me.

10

Sometimes they welcomed me as
a cherished friend. And sometimes they crushed the soaring feathers of my fragile dreams against the brute fortress of their implacability. Today they simply waited. Which I suppose is pretty much all a mountain does in the end. As for the rest of us, frolicking about on its granite flanks, we never wait for anything. Flowers bloom and beetles crawl, goats leap and people amble around musing on its majesty or, putting a foot wrong, splatter themselves against it. But never so much as a twitch in the mossy hollows of its bleak indifference.

For what they wait, I do not know. Perhaps they don't even do that. Perhaps they do nothing at all. If that's possible. I wasn't sure that I'd ever done nothing at all. Even desisting from action is the act of not acting. Nothing, it seems, can divest our nature of its need to run around up to something. And thus we fidget away the short span of our busy lives, building nests and hunting food until we slip and fall and finish it all in a moment. Even asleep we invent actions of one sort or another, chasing sweets or fleeing tigers, which probably amounts to the same thing. And for what? By what means are we freed from the relentless pulse of our restless nature, flouncing ludicrously towards the inevitable, if not the inevitable itself? Which hardly seems fair recompense for all our efforts. Death or penance. I had always thought the latter smacking too much of the former and a taste for either unhealthy under any circumstances. It could only be love. There was no other bliss, in my experience, so profound, inclusive and complete. In the loving arms of its mother sleeps the child at ease. In the loving glance of a true friend, the young man feels happy. In the loving embrace of one for whom we are destined there is nothing else to be wished for. With the love of Martina, no mountain could slice my joyful horizons into silhouettes of pitiless rock, nor serrate the azure canopy of my yearning spirit. In the arms of Martina there was nothing to fear, nothing to want and nothing to do.

For all the times I'd taken that road in my short life, it still felt, sometimes, like a road from the life of another. As a child I had crept up to its forbidden places to play with butterflies, until Mother fetched me home to my father's wrath. Later, I had understood that so long as people thought they knew where I was I could wander undisturbed. But it was hard to hold the time in mind with bees hovering around my feet, the wide sky above me and a gentle sun sinking over the incandescent snows.

As the years went by and my absences became more easily explicable, so I ventured further. I learned that those first fields sprawling out from the end of the road were just the beginning. Over the rise, once I'd summoned the courage to cross it, for it seemed like the edge of the world, were rolling pastures, verdant groves and twinkling ponds. And beyond even these, fading to the distant haze of a late afternoon, were the first hard contours of the mountain range, sweeping off to impossible heights. There were the caves, of course, each with its own shape and smell. Some crouched over you like a hungry bear, dank and gloomy. Others teased you with their innermost shadows like the impenetrable thoughts of a girl whose smile makes your head spin. But every one of them shared a cool dark space and a mouth that opened to the dazzling sky.

I took a breath as I always did when my feet met the spongy turf beyond the last hard steps of track. This was partly because I was out of breath anyway, and partly to sniff the air, its heady smells a vivid carousel of sense that was never the same twice. In Spring, it was a drunken swoon of giddy blossom, in autumn, heavy with the softness of warm loam. When the sun was a blazing ball and the ground itself seemed to shrivel in protest, the shifting cocktail of scents changed with every step. Even the sprayed claims of myriad creatures brought their own tart pleasures to the perfume of a summer day. By the time I reached the caves I'd be drunk on fragrance. Sometimes I'd even forgotten to fret, my little worries of school, or the clinic, or Father's latest rages so very small and distant in the vast emptiness of all this.

Being so vast and empty, it didn't surprise me that I couldn't see Martina, Pol or Cindy anywhere in it. The animals had scurried off at the sound of my approach. Although they usually reappeared once they realised that neither Pol nor I were capable of catching them. The rabbits, for whom death was a particularly transitory apprehension, would hop out first. The deer, slightly more cautious, being a better reward for the efforts of chase, would keep their distance, watching us warily as they reached down to pluck the grasses. If we were all part of the hurly burly of busy creatures, I thought, then we were also a part of the emptiness. Even filled, as a jar might be filled with water but remain defined by its inner space, so the mountains, crowded with summer breezes and winter winds, floating eagles and spinning butterflies, remained in essence the nothingness their arms embraced. It was only up here that I no longer felt surrounded by my surroundings, where the dull fabric of mortal existence might, it seemed, be most easily rent. And it was here, at last, where I could declare my love, if only I could stumble upon my beloved. It struck me as entirely consistent with cosmic irony that I would be among the rocks when she was in the woods, and in the woods when she was among the rocks, and that we would miss each other by a casual glance not taken or taken by something else.

Set above the highest meadow, where the rolling grass bowed to kiss the first bleak toes of stone, was our special cave. It was larger than most though smaller than some, cajoling from its granite neighbours a view of the valley that felt like floating in space. It was here that I'd turned one day to see a little boy creeping out of the gloom to beg for mercy. Personally, I was so relieved not to be fiend food, having been warned by Mother, whose versions of reality I normally respected, that ‘up there' was crawling with them, that I gave him a hug. We spent the rest of the morning playing together. As we grew older we began to ponder the imponderables. What was life and why was it mostly a pain? How can a man find freedom? And by what, in the end, are we confined? Our bodies, obviously, were a limit of sorts, shaped of clay and dependent on it. Our minds too, forged of dreams and longings, were a constant torment of restless passions, while our souls, if such things exist, were as indecipherable as a mash of trampled aubergines. Pol thought it was the remarkable ability of the human brain to get things completely wrong. Which struck me as a confine more crushing than the tiniest of caves. Once, I had lain on my back gazing in wonder at a soaring eagle only to have it land on my nose, a tiny fly. You can be lucky, of course, like whirling round to find that a low-born, casteless ragamuffin smelt no worse than anyone else. But otherwise we are condemned to believe what we believe. I had believed in Pol, in his trust, affections and, above all, his endearing, slightly foolish but infinitely well-meaning honesty. I had even defied my father, believing that solitude was all the more tranquil in the quiet presence of a friend. But had I got him completely wrong? The hard look this morning as he casually dismissed all that we held dear. The Pol spoken of with a wry smile by Hendrix on the roof. Cindy turning in circles, like the folds of a paper parachute, and the blush on Pol's face as he watched.

Our little shrine lay in pieces, the marigolds gone, the butter licked, and everywhere the small, grey indications of rabbit. But that was all part of the offering. The gods could hop around as little brown bunnies if they chose. It wasn't all fire-breathing omnipotence, though they did that too. Further in, as the air cooled, I could feel Pol's presence, the ghost of his longing, flicking shale at the entrance, Rabindra beside him, worrying at the audacity of our dreams. We had quickly agreed that only thoughts of spiritual transcendence were permitted here. Pol's theory was that if we made an effort never to think of worldly things in a particular place then, after a while, it became impossible to do so. And he was right, in a way, though in my experience they merely waited further down to pounce again. Still, if transcendence meant getting the hell out of Pushkara, preferably by aeroplane, then my thoughts were positively stratospheric, even if Pol's understanding of the term was a little more philosophical. I tended to assume, and often hoped, that the passion of his sanctity would make up for the frailty of mine.

‘Oh, wow,' said Cindy. ‘Does it echo?'

‘Shh!' said Pol.

‘Why?' she whispered.

‘It's sacred ground.'

‘Oh gosh, is it?'

‘So would that be sacred goat shit?' said Martina.

‘Watch your step,' chuckled Pol. ‘It gets slippery.'

‘I'm a dancer,' said Cindy. ‘I never fall over.'

‘I've seen you fall over,' said Martina.

‘They spiked my drink.'

‘Ah,' said Pol.

‘What?' said Cindy.

‘It's the Brahmin.'

Although I'd shielded my eyes, I couldn't see more than a vague blur melting out of the sky.

‘Will he mind us?' said Cindy.

‘Probably not. So long as your low-born shadow doesn't fall on his high-born foot,' snickered Pol.

‘I thought he was your friend,' said Martina.

‘Depends,' said Pol.

‘On what?' said Cindy.

‘The charts,' said Pol.

‘He's a musician?' said Cindy.

‘Astrology,' said Pol. ‘Brahmins can't fart without checking the planets.'

‘My Mum was like that,' said Cindy. ‘First thing, every morning. Over breakfast. Fag, porridge, mystic monkey or something. Oh yeah, I can see him now.'

‘Pol, you know that isn't true in my case,' I said.

‘For a Brahmin, what's true is what he wants to be true,' retorted the nebulous haze I took to be Pol.

‘So what's he doing up here?' asked Cindy.

‘I don't know,' said Pol. ‘Some ritual, probably. They build these little shrines and sprinkle marigolds on them.'

‘Oh, how sweet,' said Cindy.

‘Then they tell everyone if you don't pay them to do it, your daughters will be ugly and your husbands unfaithful.'

‘Is that true?' said Cindy, looking alarmed. ‘Will they?'

Pol snorted. ‘Of course not. But after they've taken your money, they say because they talk to the gods they must be better than you. And since they're better than you, they have to get the best jobs. So forget about a comfy office flicking papers over a desk. You have to fix cars. You have to sell fruit. And if you ask how come, they say you must have done something terrible in a previous life to get such a crap deal in this one. Meaning you're soiled, polluted, unclean. So now you can't go near them in case you tarnish their celestial presence with your filthy soul. But guess what? They can sort that. A quick chat with upstairs and hey presto: in a thousand lives they might even ask you round for tea. Just hand over your cash.'

‘Well, that's a swizz,' said Cindy, frowning at me. ‘Do they really?'

‘Of course they don't,' I said. ‘Well, not all of them.'

‘Why do you say “them” when you mean “us”?' said Pol.

‘It is true,' I said, ‘That I'm a Brahmin…'

‘Well there you have it,' said Pol.

‘But there is nothing to have,' I said. ‘This is just a fact.'

Pol shook his head. ‘You really don't get it,' he said. ‘Show us your chest.'

‘Steady on,' said Martina.

‘Go on, Mr “We're not all like that”,' insisted Pol. ‘Show us your chest.'

‘Pol, you know perfectly well that I wear the Brahminical thread. I do so for traditional purposes, plus my father would go berserk if I took it off or nibbled it to the point of destruction again.'

‘But you wear it,' said Pol, ‘because you're a Brahmin.'

‘Well, yes, of course.'

‘And is being a Brahmin just your opinion, or is it a fact?'

‘As being a man is a fact for a man,' I said.

‘I've got the bits to prove I'm a man,' said Pol.

‘You certainly have,' giggled Cindy.

‘What have you got to prove that you're a Brahmin?'

‘My thread?' I offered, feebly.

‘Your thread,' said Pol. ‘So you wear a thread because you're a Brahmin, and you're a Brahmin because you wear a thread. And this gives you the right to strut around inflated by your own superiority presiding over meaningless rituals and ridiculous sacrifices.'

‘Oh, really?' said Cindy. ‘Can I watch?'

‘Watch what?' said Pol.

‘A sacrifice. Are there chickens involved though? I wouldn't want to see a chicken all twitchy and that, cause I'm a vegetarian, mostly.'

‘There are no chickens involved,' I said. ‘But anyway, I'm not here to perform a sacrifice.'

‘Oh,' she said, a little disappointed.

‘I came here to talk to…' I faltered. Martina was shrouded in half-shadows but she caught my glance.

‘Oh, right,' she said. ‘Yeah, I'm good. Thanks. It did the trick. Brendan might be after you for a bit more how's your father, but I'm okay. I'm walking anyway.'

I couldn't believe that she recalled nothing of our conversation from the previous night. Had my protestations of felicity fallen like fledglings between the warm nest of my loving heart and the yearned-for twig of her understanding? I thought of asking her but felt the metaphor in need of further refinement.

‘Also,' I said, ‘Mike asked me to give you a message.'

‘Tell him I know my steps,' she said, kicking a stone.

‘What about a little one?' said Cindy.

‘A little what?' I said.

‘Like a bug or something, maybe an ugly one, it's not so bad if they get squished. As long as it's quick. But I don't suppose it will be if you have to slit its throat.' She shuddered.

‘How can you slit the throat of a bug?' said Martina. ‘They don't have throats.'