Hillstation (4 page)

Malek was sitting in their spacious lounge with his head in his hands. Mrs Bister could be heard in the kitchen throwing pots around. They had long ago put anything breakable under lock and key, so the worst she could do was dent some pans or smash the occasional window.

A cigar curled threads of haze from an ashtray on the table.

‘Father?' said Pol.

Malek didn't move. A smashing sound came from the kitchen.

‘Father?' said Pol again, ‘Whatever troubles we may have, they can be overcome with humility and trust.'

‘I don't believe in karma,' said Malek, staring at the floor, ‘And I don't believe in gods.'

Pol shrugged apologetically towards the ceiling.

‘You know what I believe in?' said Malek leaving us a little space in which to decide that we didn't. ‘Hard work and thinking straight. That's what. Hard work and thinking straight.' He savoured the words for a moment. ‘And do you know what else? Do you?'

‘Tell me, Father,' said Pol, quietly.

‘Luck!' he said looking up with a grin, which quickly disappeared when he saw me. ‘Oh, what an honour,' he sneered. ‘The Brahmin. So long as he doesn't mind the shadow of my low-born occasional table falling on his high-born bloody foot.'

‘Please Father,' said Pol, drawing him back to the point, ‘Tell me about luck.'

‘Huh?' said Malek, ‘Oh, yes, luck.' He stood up. ‘I'll tell you about luck. Ha ha.' He circled the table, lighting a fresh cigar. ‘You're on the plains, yes? On the plains doing some business. Some bloody business. I'll tell you about business. What do these bloody people with their stinking tea know about business? Huh?'

‘I expect they know nothing,' said Pol, patiently.

‘They don't even know that,' said Malek triumphantly. ‘But I can make business,' he stubbed his cigar next to the ashtray, ‘from nothing. From Nothing!'

‘And a bit of luck,' said Pol.

‘What are you talking about, luck?' Malek glared at his son, lighting another cigar. ‘Luck has nothing to do with it. Everyone sits on their arse waiting for luck. But you have to get off that arse and make your luck. That's luck. That's business.' He breathed out heavily and sat down again.

‘But on the plains,' prompted Pol, ‘what happened there?'

Malek grunted. ‘Ah, yes, the plains. Well, alright, there I was, doing my business, staying in that tatty shit-hole I inexpensively stay in when I'm on the plains doing my business! And what should happen? Hm? An Englishman. That's what happened. In the bar. Well, so what? I've seen Englishmen before. You think I haven't but I have. Your brother, Maha-la-di-da, drinking tea with the Queen, well I've met them all. English, Dutch, French… and… and all sorts.' He pulled on his cigar having, I suspected, run out of countries he knew the names of. ‘Not that they talk to you. Obviously. They read their bloody guide-books and hope you'll go away. Well, I am not an idiot. I go away. They can have their mausoleums and colourful bloody markets and the railway timetables they'd cocked up big time or they wouldn't be there in the first place. But this man. Well, this man…' He blew some smoke out to join the rest of it above his head. ‘He wanted to talk. Now, if somebody wants to talk, I'll talk. If they don't mind my low-born bloody shadow falling on their high-born bloody glass of English whisky, I'll talk 'til morning. Which we did.' He leaned round to adjust the pillows behind him.

‘What did you talk about?' said Pol.

‘Everything. Anything,' said Malek kicking his slippers off and settling back. Pol and I glanced at each other. If his father was beginning to feel a nap coming on we had to act fast.

‘For instance?' I said.

‘For instance what?' mumbled Malek.

‘Did you talk of anything in particular?'

‘History,' he said, resting his chin on his chest.

‘The history of what?' asked Pol knocking a chair slightly to make a noise.

‘India,' said Malek, straightening a little. ‘Where else has any sort of history worth talking about? And do you know what he thinks?'

‘I have never met him,' said Pol, ‘so I cannot.'

‘I said he's English,' grunted Malek, ‘so obviously he thinks we're a bunch of idiots. He said they did us a favour teaching us how to wear clothes and read. I told him they'd have done us a favour by shooting the bloody snobs like they did everywhere else.'

‘Mr Bister,' I interrupted, ‘what has this to do with him coming to Pushkara?'

‘Did I say it was him who came to Pushkara?' said Malek. ‘I said I met an Englishman in a brothel and then an Englishman comes here and what do you do, you put two and two together and make five!'

‘A what?' said Pol.

Malek blinked for a moment. ‘I didn't say that,' he shouted. ‘Why would I say that? Clearly you have something wrong with your ears. Somebody says something and you hear something else entirely. It's ridiculous. I met him in that grubby little piss-pot I stay in because I do not wish to squander the inheritance of my progeny. But yes, he is the man who came here. You are right but for the wrong reasons. For no reasons. You just threw a wild fact into the air and hoped it would fall butter-side up. And you call that clever, you people, it's no wonder this country's such a bloody mess.'

‘So it was him who came here?' I confirmed.

‘Plus,' said Malek, ‘once you receive a fact you can't help turning it over and over to see if it remains a fact however much you turn it, until it's hardly a fact at all, just a filthy, grubby thing in your sweaty little hands.'

‘So why has he come here?' asked Pol.

‘I was getting to that!' said Malek fishing his cigar from the ashtray. ‘He was impressed, obviously.'

‘By what?' said Pol.

‘Well,' chortled Malek, ‘it's not everyday you meet somebody famous.'

‘Who?' said Pol.

‘The founder of the Sri Malek Bister Memorial Entertainment Complex, of course,' said Malek. ‘Who do you think?'

‘You mean the village hall?' said Pol.

‘To men of vision,' said Malek thumping the table and making us jump, ‘a thing is not just what it is but what it might be. A hall, yes, for now. But in years to come, who knows? Of course I did not boast. Why should I boast? Do you suppose that I boasted?' He glared, challenging me to suppose it. I shook my head. ‘I merely informed him of it. That is all. And he was impressed because he knows a man of vision when he sees one.'

‘So you told him what, exactly?' asked Pol.

‘They will see,' he said waving his hands to the world at large. ‘You will see,' he said to me personally. ‘Men of vision. Men of art. They get together and what happens? Art and vision. That's what. Rudra bloody Veena. I know your game. One note every ten minutes, everyone dying of boredom. But now we shall have it all. Music and dance. And why?' He chuckled again. ‘Men of vision. That's why.' He picked up his empty whisky glass and drained it anyway, leaning back with hooded eyes.

‘What sort of music' said Pol, a bit confused now, ‘and who will be dancing?'

‘Aha,' said Malek, smiling mysteriously as he drifted at last into a sleep from which nothing we said could rouse him.

‘No, no, no,' said Pol as I grabbed his hand and pulled him through the door. ‘It would not be appropriate. Rabindra, please, by the celestial deity after which you are named…'

‘I am not a deity,' I said, recalling a recent comment by my father. ‘I'm just a boiling cloud of hot gas.'

‘Without which every plant would perish and every stray dog would die and what would become of us then with nothing to eat?' said Pol trying to get his other hand round my wrist.

‘Since when do you eat stray dogs?' I said, gripping tighter.

‘These are just figurative illustrations,' said Pol using his fingernails now to scratch at me. I let go and laughed.

‘Come on,' I said. ‘Our wives await us.'

‘Of that I have no doubt,' he said breathing heavily. ‘And for that very reason I ask only that we act with propriety. Think, please, Rabindra. You can't just rush in and sweep her off to your conjugal boudoir.'

‘Why not?'

‘Formalities,' he gasped. ‘Your father must be informed of your intentions. Her father must be informed of your intentions. After which, via some carefully selected intermediary, she herself will have to be informed of your intentions.'

‘If I swept her off to my conjugal boudoir,' I said, ‘I don't think my intentions would be much in doubt.'

But I knew what he meant. The last thing we wanted was elders meddling on the grounds that we hadn't followed procedure. But I was also concerned that Father's response would more likely be, ‘Why would she want to marry a Clinic Skivvy when there's a first-born Doctor who has been to England knocking about?' A question to which I had no answer. Why indeed would she opt for a life of drudge and vicarious derision when she could sit around all day being attended to by my sisters? The gods might have delivered our destiny but they hadn't changed human nature for all the millennia in which they'd tried.

Pol seemed to read my thoughts. ‘I doubt your father will have heard of this yet,' he said.

‘I should think everyone has.'

‘Not so,' he countered. ‘For we all know that Pushkarans are slow to accept that which they have not personally verified. Those who witnessed the arrival will therefore be unlikely to communicate it widely for fear of ridicule.'

‘Except…' I said.

He looked at me.

A vision flashed through my head of all the people in Malek's enterprises who'd stared at me as I burst in shouting, ‘Where's Pol? Our English wives have arrived on the bus!'

Pol put his hands to his temples, a gesture he'd developed to signify too many thoughts jostling in a limited space. ‘Though you are named,' he said quietly, ‘after the flaming orb of the day, and I am referred to as some daft nonsense that doesn't mean anything, please listen to what I have to say.'

‘I'm listening,' I said.

‘We have reached,' he continued, ‘a critical juncture in our lives. On the one hand: our destiny, which is to say the ultimate glory to which our hearts aspire. On the other: fate, being the miserable unfolding of our past mistakes to their desultory conclusion.' He glanced round at a sudden noise, but it was only the mango-seller trundling his empty cart. ‘So we need to stop and think, the purpose of which being, almost invariably, to work out which of the two anything happens to be.'

‘But gifts are different,' I said. ‘Especially from gods. You don't have to think about them. They're just there. So come on. Why are we haggling over the niceties of karma when our wives await us?'

He stared towards the Hotel.

‘Alright,' I said. ‘We'll go and see my brother. For, as they say, impetuosity is the thief of caution, not that I can think of anyone who's ever said that apart from me, but anyway. As a Doctor who has been to England, he can advise us on their courtship formalities along with the cosmic implications of whatever it is we decide to do. I shall explain that our brides have come here for the sole purpose of uniting with their beloveds. They are therefore not in search of Doctors or any other, let us say, more premium candidates. He will give us his blessings after which we'll be free to sweep them off to our respective boudoirs or wherever it is betrothed people sweep each other off to. How does that sound?'

I always found the waiting room a little strange when it was empty, as I did when it was full. The one desolate, the other seething as if there were two rooms in different universes that had nothing to do with each other. Even the framed picture of Her Majesty the Queen smiling at Dev, which was our proudest possession and, indeed, the pride of the village, seemed oddly futile with nobody around to be humbled. The various health notices, some of which had been removed on the grounds that there is no need to warn people of activities they would otherwise know nothing about, hung to no edifying purpose, though they covered some cracks in the wall which was their other principal function. I still missed the one about syphilis. My bulk purchase of condoms in advance of the expected rush had been among my least successful clinical acquisitions, although they came in handy for other things.

The seats had been arranged in strict rows after one of our patients, Mrs Mukapadhyay, had been rudely sniggered at by a group of workers from the plantation. That her husband's book on the conceptual basis of astrological forecast had failed to find a publisher was common knowledge, but it was the cruel remark that ‘he'd failed to forecast that, hadn't he?' which drove her to flee in tears. The elders had decided that if the castes had to mix, we should at least prevent the baser ones from talking amongst themselves. Sniggering is, after all, a collective activity and therefore difficult to accomplish with your mouth shut facing the front. In spite of a notice to that effect, they gathered anyway, in the corners and by the door, sniggering to their heart's content, so potent is the urge, I suppose, for those discredited by birth to discredit others. It was something I had always thought vaguely understandable, though the term ‘Clinic Skivvy' had been coined in just such a caucus.

‘I think he's in there,' said Pol, indicating the door to Dev's office.

‘How do you know?' I asked.

‘I heard a bottle topple over, roll across the table, bump a glass out of the way and fall to the floor.' Years of living with his mother had made Pol an expert on the sound of breakages.

I pressed my ear to the door, but all I could hear was silence.

‘He must be conducting experiments,' I said.

Pol snorted. ‘Try knocking.'

‘I can't,' I said. ‘It is forbidden to disturb him in the middle of his research.'