Hillstation (5 page)

‘The pursuit of destiny,' said Pol, thumping on the door in spite of my attempts to restrain him, ‘is to do that which, ordinarily, one cannot.'

After a moment we heard a low moan.

‘Revered brother?' I called gently.

‘Go away,' answered Dev.

I shrugged at Pol but he pushed my face to the door.

‘Mahadev?' I said, mouth pressed to the keyhole, ‘the clinic would seem to be closed.'

‘Who cares?' said Dev.

‘I think people who need a Doctor might care,' hissed Pol, pulling me aside. ‘Mahadev, Doctor Sahib, this is Pol Bister.'

‘Hello, Pol,' said Dev. ‘How are you?'

‘I'm fine, thank you very much.'

‘Then you don't need a Doctor, do you? So piss off.'

Pol's face reddened slightly. I gently nudged him aside.

‘My most noble brother,' I said, ‘by virtue of diverse supplications to the gods, I'm happy to report that our English brides have arrived safely. There is also a third one, oddly, both numerically of course, but also in the sense that we hadn't asked for her. It may be that she has come to marry Pushkara's most eligible bachelor, which is to say my handsome and distinguished elder brother who has been to England and is a Doctor. You may wish to know that she is quite striking in appearance and would, I am certain, make for an agreeable wife.'

Something thudded against the door under which, after a moment, an amber puddle of sterilisation fluid began to seep.

Pol turned back to the entrance while I sat down in a ‘Brahmins Only' chair.

‘I have often said,' I said, though in truth I probably hadn't, ‘that the gods are cruel.'

‘Yes,' said Pol.

‘That they toy with us as we toy with flies.'

‘I didn't know you toyed with flies,' said Pol.

‘Well, I don't. But then I'm not a god.'

‘You are not cruel,' said Pol, picking at the frayed edge of a ‘Do Not Expel Your Nasal Contents Onto The Floor' notice.

‘Once the elders meet, it's all over for us,' I said. ‘Dev gets first pick, obviously. Then Mr Bhota's son. After that it might go to Jaganath from the bakery or even Ramadev who's a bit old now but gets a decent salary.'

‘Did they perform sacrifices?' said Pol. ‘Did they endure penances? Did they go without food, sleep on the floor and hold their hands over an open flame?'

‘Did we?' I said, slightly shocked.

‘Didn't you?'

‘Of course,' I mumbled.

He stared at the wall as if to some distant horizon. ‘I have always believed,' he said, ‘that there is good in all beings which, when confronted by The Good Itself must emerge from all that is bad to greet it.'

I looked at him, sceptically.

‘That our wives have come is good,' he continued. ‘That we shall speak to them must also be good. Your father, when he sees all this good sloshing around, must surely crawl in his good form through everything that isn't and embrace both the will of the gods, if that had anything to do with it, and the prospect of your happiness.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I suppose anything's possible.'

My two sisters were huddled in the sitting room while Father put a tie on, shouting.

‘That wretched Bister,' he roared, ‘And his wretched hall. We should have burned the damn thing down, with him in it, and jumped on their stinking remains. What's he doing here?' he said, seeing the genetic extension of his nemesis leaning in the doorway.

‘I think he lives here,' said Pol missing the point, I suspect, deliberately.

‘Father,' I said, ‘It is my belief that there is an element, be it ever so small, of what might be called the good in…'

‘The only thing Bister's good for,' snorted Father, turning back to his tie, ‘is the cheap batter stuffed with floor scrapings and rats droppings he dares to call a samosa.'

My sisters glanced nervously towards the kitchen from which I could smell cooking.

‘That hall is closed for a reason,' added Father. ‘And closed it will remain. Whether you will or no. It is an outrage, a wart, an architectural obscenity that will be destroyed.' He stared at the ends of his tie having forgotten which was which. One of my sisters rose to help him. Father's hatred of the Hall had often erupted over supper when there was nothing else to erupt at. He had led both the campaign against its construction and, subsequently, for its demolition, toiling far into the night collecting precedents,
obiter dictums
, and biscuit crumbs under his chair as he ruminated on the downfall of his enemy. That it had remained closed was a source of much satisfaction, even if the reason for that had more to do with Malek Bister's decision to avoid further humiliation than Father's legal prowess.

Although he spent most of the time slouching around the house in a loose dhoti, when Father dressed up he could really look the part. And when he took his glasses off, carefully wiping them on his tie, you could almost believe that he had once been the scourge of the criminal classes in Allahabad. It was in Allahabad, up to his waist one morning in Ganges water, that he had realised two important things. The first was that his home village was in need of a lawyer. The second was that his eldest son, when he had one, would travel to England and come back a Doctor. In commemoration of this epiphany, a postcard from Allahabad was proudly displayed in the clinic waiting room wishing whomsoever beheld it to be there. My sisters helped him on with his coat.

‘From now on, Rabindra,' he said, ‘you are confined to the house and, in so far as your duties require it, your brother's clinic. Is that understood?'

‘Not entirely,' I said.

‘What is difficult about this?' he sighed. ‘You are not to be seen anywhere else except this house and the clinic.

‘But how am I to reach the clinic,' I said, ‘except by means of the streets which must surely fall under the designation of “anywhere else”?'

He stamped his feet a little. ‘Well, obviously you can walk there and back, you imbecile. But you must do so in such a way as to not be seen. Why is this so tortuous?'

The truth is that a cold sense of apprehension had begun to creep through my bones. If I was confined to the house and clinic, how was I to meet my beloved? Moreover, how many pretenders would queue up in the meantime to protest their superiority, or convince her that my absence was the result of indifference? The answer was probably half the eligible young men in Pushkara.

‘But if, as I have heard, there are visitors from England,' I ventured, desperately, ‘then surely our family, above all, should be among the first to greet them.'

‘You are not to go near them,' he hissed through lips so tight they whitened slightly. ‘And how many times,' he said, nodding towards Pol, ‘have I told you not to go near him?'

And with that he was out of the door.

It is true that the inaugural concert held to celebrate the opening of the Sri Malek Bister Memorial Hall had been excruciating. Even some of the elders could be seen digging fingernails into their flesh. The performer was Sergeant Shrinivasan, our policeman, who was said to have played the instrument to great acclaim through numerous lifetimes, though less so in this one. In the hands of a lyrical artiste, the Rudra Veena is quite capable of producing lilting melodies. In the hands of Sergeant Shrinivasan this was never going to be the case. He preferred the traditional motif in which a single note, resonating slowly back to the silence from which it came, is followed by another note some time later. Allegros, which is to say two notes played within several minutes of each other, are rare. It is said that by following the drift, as it were, the listener too can melt back to the silence from which all things come. This is all very well if the people around you aren't coughing and snoring. Never has a clock on the wall so longingly been stared at. Never were the hands of time so earnestly beseeched. Never have buttocks been so numbed by the unforgiving rigours of a wooden seat.

Since the Sergeant's usual role conferred on him considerable powers, along with a stiff cane with which to exert them, nobody dared question his artistry. The elders meanwhile, having decreed a strictly classical programme, were obliged to grunt the more ecstatically the more agonising it became. Euphoric croaks of ‘ba!' could be heard periodically as they plunged helplessly into the bliss of eternal nothingness. Since this only encouraged the Sergeant to play even more languidly, with every ‘ba!' came a chorus of groans from the back row. At one point, I swear the second hand on the clock came to an actual stop. When I remarked on this to Pol, he said that I had evidently entered the blessed realm of undifferentiated timelessness, though I noticed that he too had teeth marks on the back of his hand.

The applause, when Sergeant Shrinivasan finally laid his Veena to one side, was thunderous. Overcome with relief that it was all over, some of the elders even chanced their luck with a traditional and, as it turned out, unfortunate call for an encore. Malek Bister who had persuaded himself, as benefactor, to sit ostentatiously at the front, unable to fidget never mind catch a snooze, vowed never again to let the elders dictate what he did in his own bloody hall built with his own bloody money. And from that day the place had remained closed.

Until now. For, as my sisters explained, a notice had appeared in the glazed box by the front door announcing that ‘Coming Soon' would be a ‘Renowned Troupe of International Dancers', along with the statement, underlined three times with an exclamation mark, that they were ‘Direct From England!'.

My father had been furious for two reasons. The first was that three underlinings and an exclamation mark represented the sort of facile overstatement more characteristic of some backwoods peasant enclave than a village with its own mythology.

‘What,' he demanded to know, later that evening, ‘will people think of us?'

‘That we are a backwoods peasant enclave?' ventured one of my sisters, anxious to further his argument.

‘With a place in the scriptures?' he barked. ‘With a history that dates back to before there was even history? Have you any idea how long this village, this abode of legends, has nestled here among these hallowed hills? Hmm?'

‘Since a very long time, Baba?' suggested my other sister.

‘Then why do you say this is just some backwoods peasant enclave?' he demanded.

‘But I didn't,' she bleated.

‘Then who did?' said Father, glaring at me in case I had. Fortunately he didn't wait too long before getting on to the second thing that annoyed him. The fact that Malek Bister had organised anything at all.

‘How dare a man with not a jot, nor a particle, nor the tiniest, most microbial speck of learning presume to opine upon, never mind determine, the shape and substance of our widely respected, nay universally envied cultural programme?' Father took the long, slow breath of an advocate who has just delivered a point so weighty that the heaving of it has left him momentarily enfeebled. When he recovered, however, it was not to argue further but to pass judgment. ‘It is clear to all right-minded, clear-thinking people,' he said in the sonorous tones of one whose words cannot be doubted, ‘that these so-called “Artistes from England” are nothing but a fraudulent imposition to be dispensed with at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, let us remember that that which is not achieved by Proper Procedure is not achieved at all.'

That night I slept fitfully, Father's words circulating endlessly through twisting dreams of sunglasses, petticoats and crimson nails. What, exactly, had he meant by ‘procedure'? If the gods had brought our brides to Pushkara, surely they would have arranged for the appropriate visas? Or perhaps this was just another round in the stand-off between Malek and the elders in which Malek never sought permission for anything because they wouldn't have granted it anyway. But where did that leave me? I had tried to explain to Pol that any delay on our part would leave us vulnerable to the exertions of our rivals, but he was in fatalistic mood declaiming the need to trust. There was much talk of karmic inevitability, surrender to universal Will and the unimportance of personal desire in the Grand Scheme of Things. At several junctures I had to work hard to suppress a personal desire to grab him by the scruff of the neck.

‘What if the gods are toying with us,' I had said at one point, ‘and all this is simply an attempt to make us look stupid?'

‘If that is their intention,' he had muttered, ‘they needn't have gone to so much trouble.'

Although I set off early the next day, keeping to the backstreets in order to remain unseen, I was constantly accosted with, ‘Rabindranath, why do you skulk along the backstreets with a pillow-case over your head?' By the time I abandoned subterfuge and returned to the main road, all I heard was, ‘Aha, so you've given up skulking along the back-streets with a pillow-case over your head!' I decided that if my father asked, I could at least say that I'd tried.

When I arrived, finally, it seemed that half the menfolk of Pushkara had fallen inexplicably sick. The queue snaked as far back as the notorious pot-hole, the scene of many a broken bicycle and responsible for much of my clinical endeavours. Several of them were stooping pitifully or holding their heads in pain.

‘And what is wrong with you?' I asked Hanuman whose parents sold brass elephants. Normally, of course, I'd wait until I was behind my desk before seeking a diagnosis but, in matters epidemiological, not only is urgency of paramount importance but, conveniently, to ask of one is to prognosticate the many.

‘My internal organs,' he groaned, ‘are extremely sore.'

‘Which organs specifically?' I pressed.

‘How should I know?' he retorted. ‘Do you want me to get them out so you can have a look?'

Next in the queue was Parasurama, a young man in the company of his wife.