Hillstation (3 page)

He remained motionless.

‘I'll invite you to my wedding,' I said.

‘I would not be allowed at your wedding,' he replied

‘The reception?'

‘We'd still need a Brahmin,' he said, ‘even if I performed the rites.'

‘I'm a Brahmin.'

He stared at the sky, stared at the floor, took a deep breath and said. ‘Very well, if that is your wish.'

And so we began.

Over the next few weeks Pol devoted himself with all the zeal characteristic of those for whom the road to enlightenment runs via discomfort. He took to wearing the itchiest clothes he could find, eating nothing but vegetables and drinking only water. He spent hours at night reciting the
Mahabharata
, the
Ramayana
and even verses from the
Vivekachumadi
. His Father stopped me in the streets one morning.

‘What have you done to my son?' he said, jabbing at me with a cigar. ‘Poisoning his mind with all this Brahminical shit. I caught him in the bathroom yesterday trying to stick his leg round his neck.'

‘Your shadow is on my foot,' I said.

‘Huh?'

‘It is not proper for a low-born shadow to cross a high-born foot.'

At which he marched off, muttering.

My contribution was to wash more thoroughly and to bow each morning to the little effigy of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, on our mantelpiece. It is Ganesh, after all, who imposes and removes obstacles and, since the obstacles to my finding an English wife included, among other things, an eight-hour drive from a city foreigners rarely visit, plus the many thousands of miles she'd have to cross even to get that far, I reckoned he was worth a few nods.

I also refrained from eating meat which worried my father who was of the opinion that red meat enhances virility and if I was to get married it wouldn't do to be non-virile at the very moment when such things are most called for. He consulted Dev about this. Dev consulted his text-books and, after a few days' research, advised my father that vegetarianism was not inconsistent with Hindu practice which had done the Indian people well enough over the centuries. Father asked if ‘well enough' included getting our arses thrashed by the British who ate nothing but meat all day and invented guns. This rather upset Dev who didn't like to hear ill spoken of the people who'd taught him to be a Doctor. After which Father, feeling contrite, expunged the remainder of his rage in my direction by telling me that every family he'd approached on my behalf had slammed the door in his face.

Each evening, after sweeping the floor and putting the instruments in a tub of hot water to soak, I would close up the large front doors of the clinic and head off towards the mountains. The clinic was at the lowest end of the village, near the bus stop. The mountain road, with its teasing glimpses of a world beyond, ran from the other side, along the high street, past the shops and houses from which people would call me over sometimes, asking for a little more of whatever it was I'd given them last time. Perhaps their rash had returned or their grandmother's disposition was still cantankerous. More recently some of them had taken to making fatuous remarks along the lines of ‘no daughter of mine would be seen dead marrying a Clinic Skivvy', and I would make a mental note to give them something for constipation, whether they had it or not. But at last, leaving the houses behind, my breath would catch a little as the road turned sharply upwards, hard stone giving way to dusty dirt, the sides growing precipitous, as the distant slopes across the valley stretched into haze, veiled in the silver shrouds of early evening.

Pol would be waiting for me with a crackling fire and some tasty samosas from his mother's kitchen. Just as I worked for my brother, as a menial in the clinic, so Pol worked in his father's various business ventures. Although Malek Bister had started out with a simple scooter repair shop, he had soon expanded to saris, foodstuffs, jewellery and domestic accessories, taking advantage of his frequent visits to the plains to buy in bulk and undercut the competition. The collective fury this provoked in the village was not, however, merely the result of failed shops, bankruptcy and destitution. Although Brahmins are genetically obliged to look down on merchants, it is the privilege of merchants to look down on everyone else. That a low-born outcast should have engaged in commercial activities was seen by many as imperilling the spiritual equilibrium of the entire village. For proof, they pointed to the growing divisions among them since, while many vowed never to buy a single item from the tainted shelves of a Bister retail outlet, others found the prices a bit too tempting.

But what caused the most outrage was his ‘cynical attempt to emulate the natural philanthropy of his betters', as it was put one evening at an angry village meeting, with the construction of a new village hall, ‘on his own land, from his own design and with his own bloody money' as he riposted at the very same meeting. Thereafter, The Sri Malek Bister Memorial Hall had continued to be a source of acrimony, particularly between the musicians who would have liked to play there and the elders who forbade it. Eventually after several hikes in the price of petrol that Malek was forced to institute ‘in order to recover the costs of his civic munificence', it was agreed that a concert would be held. To Malek's delight, the first recital, a classical performance on the Rudra Veena, had taken place to a sizeable audience though some of the elders refused to turn up and one or two walked out during his opening speech. For various reasons the concert itself had not been a success, and the hall, thereafter, had remained closed. At any rate, Pol was at liberty to exploit the diversity of his father's enterprise since nobody knew, at any time of day, which of the many premises he was in.

We had decided that, along with Ganesh, the principal deity to whom we should direct our sacrifice was Parvati, whose strenuous efforts to win the heart of a beloved would, we hoped, naturally dispose her towards a couple of mortals struggling to meet theirs. Pol kneaded an effigy from river mud, with a tuft of hair from his own head, a tubby belly and voluptuous breasts, which is how Indians like their goddesses. In the meantime, I made a simple shrine with stones gathered from around the cave on a little plateau by the entrance. Pol doubted that Parvati would be impressed with flowers collected from the meadows but the repetitive purchase of marigolds from the village shops might have aroused suspicions. I hoped that the sincerity of our offerings would compensate for the fact that we hadn't paid for them. Along with some ghee, rice and the earnestness of Pol's prayers, we reckoned we had everything necessary for even the most intransigent deity to take pity on us. Personally, I was a bit sceptical in spite of my early assurances. I had no doubt that gods existed, either as abstract representations of natural phenomena or as quasi-tangible beings in some heavenly abode, but either way I feared their reaction to our supplications might fall somewhere between ambivalence and scorn.

Pol's fervour reached its crescendo on what we had agreed would be the last evening of our penance. He even brought a knife suggesting we add some blood to the fire, but I thought that was going a bit far. His chanting had grown softer but more powerful over the weeks. Sometimes I could almost believe there was a point to all this as I watched him pray, eyes closed, swaying gently, a flare of burning ghee lighting his face with momentary incandescence. Untouchable or not, I thought, there was something about him in that moment that made the moment sacred. We walked home in silence, the first of the stars peeking out through the darkening sky, our rituals complete, penances done, mantras recited. All we could do now was wait.

The next day, a bank of clouds draped the peaks with plumes of ominous purple. Even Mr Dat glanced up briefly and shuddered. As night fell, a thick mist began to finger its way into our houses. Outside, the sky was darker than anyone could remember. Elders muttered. Children hid. And then the mountains flashed with spears of white. A moment later, the sky roared, the valleys shook, dogs barked, ornaments toppled over and people spontaneously expostulated Vedic aphorisms. After which it rained. For three torrential hours the heavens wept their rage over the sodden streets, washing a muddy river into living rooms as distracted wives dashed about their bobbing furniture exhorting husbands to do something about it. Father sloshed around with a bucket saying this was just typical, though of what he wouldn't elaborate. Dev retreated to his room. My sisters prostrated themselves in front of Ganesh promising to be good. I looked out from my bedroom window and wondered if this was the answer to our prayers or the sound of gods laughing.

By morning it was quiet again. And two days after that our English wives turned up. Which, I suppose, only goes to show.

2

That the bus had been
arriving once a month ever since I could remember made its arrival once a month no less exciting. Spluttering up the hill, it would cough to a halt beside the old Bodhi tree, bags and boxes lashed precariously to its roof as chickens and sheep peered from their rickety cages unaware that the man who greeted them so warmly was the restaurateur. Apart from ferrying people around the hamlets that speckled the hills beneath us, it would sometimes bring goods from the city ordered by some of our more enterprising retailers, and carry away small quantities of our village produce. Pushkara was known mainly for its yak's wool hats, reputedly among the least itchy in all of India, a special concoction of bats' droppings distributed to herbalists in the South, and a piquant tea, popular with the cognoscenti of the village but spat out, generally, by those who didn't know any better. More recently, Bister's Brocades had become a significant export, described by Malek as a speciality re-labelling service by which garments purchased from the city had their labels replaced with odd-sounding alternatives such as ‘Gucci', ‘Versace' or ‘Pierre Cardin', and sold back for six times the original price. In spite of Pol's repeated attempts to explain it to me, I had concluded that retail would forever remain a pursuit that defied reason.

Once the doors had been wrenched open, visiting uncles would brace themselves for the onrush of elated relatives, while the driver retired with a bidi, leaving the shopkeepers to scramble over his intractable knots. Scrawled across the side of the bus, in blue and yellow letters, was the phrase, which I always thought slightly paradoxical, ‘Long Live Brahman The Immortal!'.

Pol's father was usually waiting with a clipboard and his clerk, Mr Chatterjee, to find out how much of his cargo had gone missing on the way. Mr Chatterjee enjoyed being out of the office since it gave him a chance to talk to people. In fact, Mr Chatterjee loved talking to anyone whether they were listening or not, the latter being more likely since his universal ex-communication on the grounds of working for Malek. Even at home, simple questions to his wife such as, ‘what about these socks?' were met with a stony silence. He tried talking to himself for a while, but found the predictability of response frustrating. Now he only talked to himself with others present which was, at least, communication of a kind.

On this occasion he was trying to ascertain why a batch of saris had mysteriously, if not unexpectedly, failed to appear. The more vehement his inquisition, however, the more nonchalantly the driver, puffing on his stick, slipped into that blessed equilibrium wherein no amount of berating from Mr Chatterjee, or anyone else for that matter, held any meaning. Sometimes Malek would jump up and down shouting, ‘I know what you're up to, you stinking bloody thief.' Which only made the driver smile more.

I had gone to collect some medicines I'd ordered from the Pharmaceutical Rep who came to the clinic from time to time. We'd run perilously low on fruit pastes after an especially virulent outbreak of foot fungus, while our re-useable mouth swabs had all but lost that essential fluffiness with which they came endowed. I was checking my list when something struck me as odd. Everything had gone suddenly quiet. Even the children, who had scampered through its plumes of blue smoke, stood in mute clusters staring at the bus. Malek Bister, hitherto in mid-tirade against all those thieving bastards along the road who were now the proud owners of premium saris they'd bloody well filched, had stopped abruptly, the cigar falling out of his mouth.

A man was standing by the steps, gazing round with a face like nothing I'd ever seen before. It had two eyes, obviously, and the mouth common to most human beings, and animals too I suppose, but there the similarity ended. His hair, neither black, henna nor any recognisable colour, was an indistinct shade of stale chapatti. His blotchy skin, where it hadn't peeled, was pink and wet. He was portly like a businessman, his crumpled white suit patched with darker shades under the armpits, a frayed blue shirt open at the collar. He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, glanced back at the bus and said, ‘Yeah, I think this is it.'

A gasp rippled round as a female face emerged through the doors, though one couldn't see much of it behind sunglasses so large she resembled a fly. Thick tresses of black hair cascaded over her shoulders, while the long fingers with which she clutched the hand-rail were tipped with nails of brilliant crimson. Her shoes were an ethereal matrix of white straps with, I noticed thrillingly, sticks on the underside, although they made negotiating the steps a careful process. Her dress billowed lightly, muscular calves undulating as her foot touched the dusty ground, so blessing the village, its denizens and the mountains around us for all eternity.

She stared at the first few houses that marked the outer tendrils of the village and pushed her glasses up. Faces flinched from the dazzle of her eyes. ‘Mike?' she said in a rich, throaty voice.

‘What?' said the man she'd called Mike.

‘You've got to be joking.'

‘Joke? Moi?' he said, dabbing at his cheeks.

‘So where is this, exactly?' she asked, pulling a cigarette from her handbag.

‘Push something. I don't know. Pushmepullyou.' But his attention had been taken by someone nearby. ‘Hey,' he said, pointing.

People drew back nervously as his finger lanced a gap through the crowd leaving Malek Bister in the middle. Malek looked helplessly at the retreating villagers and said in a quavering voice, ‘I don't know. Who is this man? I've never seen him before.'

‘Malek,' said Mike, walking towards him, ‘how are you? What's going on?'

‘Yes,' said Malek, creasing his face into the imitation of a grin. ‘Yes indeed. Ha ha.'

‘So where's the hotel, I mean, you got a car for us? What's happening?'

‘Ah…' said Malek, flapping at his pockets for a cigar. ‘Yes. Indeed. Well, that's… that's very…'

‘It was a crap drive,' said Mike. ‘So we're all a bit knackered. We had people sitting on top of us. Fat gits and everything. Even the girls.'

Malek spotted the cigar he'd dropped and bent to pick it up.

As if to show how it could be done beautifully, the black-haired woman blew a silver stream of smoke into the air. ‘So where's the rest of it?' she said.

‘The rest of what?' said Mike.

‘This place. Pushme whatsit.'

‘Well, it's a mountain resort, isn't it?' said Mike. ‘So I guess it's over that bit of mountain, round that bit of mountain, over the other side of that bloody great heap of mountains over there. This is the outskirts. Okay? What do you get on the outskirts? The bus station. What do you get in a bus station? Buses.'

‘One bus,' she said.

‘So they're out and about,' said Mike.

‘And who's this?' she said, nodding at Malek.

‘He's the bloke I told you about,' said Mike.

‘Mr Bister,' said Malek trying to light his cigar with shaking hands. ‘At your service.'

‘You're kidding me,' she said, looking at Mike.

But before I had a chance to ponder why she continued to suppose jocularity in a man whose demeanour suggested anything but, another gasp rippled out from the rapidly gathering crowd of villagers. A second lady had emerged even more startling than the first with hair so fiery red that I wondered, for a moment, if it wasn't in fact on fire. It was pushed up in ragged tufts through a tattered band of yellow cloth. Large rings of jade and silver undulated from her ears. Her blue jeans were so tight that movement would have seemed impossible had she not descended in slow, graceful steps to the ground where she stood at last, smoothing her white blouse, jaws grinding. Several ladies put their hands over their eyes and some over those of their husbands.

‘I don't know,' she said, ‘I think it's cute.'

At that moment, two leaves, dislodged from the tree by no apparent means, fluttered down to my feet. And suddenly it was clear to me. Two leaves from the same tree. Separate and yet connected. A single being with separate and yet connected aspects of the one tree-ness, as we are all separate and yet connected leaves of the one tree. Actually that part wasn't entirely clear but what I did understand, with absolute certainty, was that Pol's wife had arrived with mine. In fact, she was either the flame-headed chewing one in tight trousers or a third lady who had just poked her head out scowling, her strong face wreathed in blonde hair, the wafting gauze of a petticoat shimmering over powerful thighs as she clambered down the steps. Several husbands were now being marched off to their respective homes as yet another pale hand groped its way towards the rail. I didn't see what apparition this presaged – except that it seemed to be large and hairy – since I was already hurtling up the road to share the news with Pol.

The downside of nobody ever quite knowing where Pol was at any given time was that neither did I. After waking everybody up in the scooter repair centre and bumping into the sales assistant from Bister's Boutique creeping out the back with a bundle in her hands, I eventually found him at home with his mother.

‘It's under my bed!' she screamed as I ran in. ‘Take the money. But leave my last child, I beg of you, that it may comfort me in the twilight of my lonely life. Oh sickness that steals the tender seed of joy leaving only the bitter crusts of desolation for us to weep, to weep!'

‘We all died of cholera,' sighed Pol.

Vidya Bister was a pretty lady with a graceful face, much admired by the gentlemen of the village, but quite mad. Her family history, in reality perfectly normal, was variously reinvented to include evil step-parents, rapacious husbands and psychotic children. Sometimes Pol had been kidnapped by thieves and sometimes he had just attempted to strangle her, depending on the novel she happened to be reading at the time. Convinced that the nobility of any credible heroine was equivalent only to the depths of her melancholy, she would stroll the streets, sighing forlornly through the sweet delirium of inconsolable distress as she gazed at the mountains that alone held the secrets of her lost love, family tragedy or cruel twist of fate.

‘Murderer!' she shouted, lunging at Pol. ‘Flesh of my flesh! A dagger to my heart! What do I care of life when my children are dead, dead, dead…?' Her voice tailed off as she flopped back on the divan.

By this time I'd got my breath back and was able to say a bit more than, ‘Pol! Pol!' in an over-excited manner. ‘They're here,' I gasped.

‘Who?' he said.

‘Our wives. They came on the bus.'

‘From where?' he said.

‘From England,' I said, ‘Where do you think?'

‘How?'

‘I've just told you. On the bus.'

When we got to the turning circle, however, they'd gone. For a moment Pol squinted at me, suspecting perhaps that I'd gone as mad as his mother. But they'd left a trail of animated villagers, some of whom had seen them arrive and others who wanted to know all about it. One or two retailers were trumpeting the first wave of an unprecedented tourist boom while several elders thought it the arrival of demons. One stall-holder said they could be the appendages of Ravana for all he cared, so long as their money was good. Which led to some heated discussions. I gave the driver a prod to see if he knew where they'd gone but he just waved at me irritably. Eventually we learned that a party of three English women, two English men and some large English boxes had been taken to the Hotel Nirvana, and that Malek Bister was in some way connected so it had to be bad.

The Hotel Nirvana was a crumbling edifice of tilting windows and sloping walls on the corner of two streets that lurched steeply in different directions. Much of the back had fallen away in consecutive monsoons, leaving several doors opening vertiginously to a pile of rubble that used to be the en suite. It was run by a Tibetan lady called Mrs Dong, and her cook, a Buddhist monk, who prepared its food on the toilet floor. The clientele, such as it was, consisted of an occasional trader from the plains, gentlemen of the village temporarily exiled for some domestic infraction and, reputedly at any rate, the drinking den that didn't exist.

From time to time I'd book the ‘Dalai Lama Suite' for the Pharmaceutical Rep which, being at the front, still had its bathroom intact. Dev refused to trifle with inventory, but I rather enjoyed picking medicines with a satisfying resonance such as ‘Diazepam', ‘Tryptophan' and my favourite, ‘Naftidrofuryl'. I would also order one or two of the latest ‘must-haves', usually new remedies for old complaints like warts and colitis or precautionary treatments for ailments not yet evident in the village though pandemic elsewhere, such as Epidermodysplasia Veruciformis, plus new socks for winter evenings when the clinic got a bit chilly. In exchange for our loyalty we'd sometimes get free gifts, the most recent being a valuable ashtray embossed with the company logo, which promptly disappeared from the waiting room after I'd put it there for all to see.

‘This is my fault,' sobbed Pol, digging his heels in the ground as I dragged him down the street. ‘I have desecrated the ancient rites and brought a plague upon us.'

‘Just wait 'til you see them,' I chuckled. ‘Listen, Pol,' I lowered my voice as a couple of elders glanced towards us. ‘I can understand that you're feeling a bit nervous, especially as you're not exactly presentable at the moment having spent much of the morning, if my nose is correct, chasing cockroaches out of the spice bins. But if you don't want to meet them right now, at least you'll forgive me if I mention you.'

‘Don't!' he shouted with a level of hysteria reminiscent of his mother. ‘It is said that my father has something to do with this. The gods perhaps, but my father undoubtedly. We need to find out what he knows. After that, you have my word, I shall come with you.'