River Town Chronicles (5 page)

T
HE MONSOON RAINS FINALLY SUBSIDED
and more pleasant weather arrived. We were now able to sleep soundly without having to move our
charpois
around the room at night and rearrange buckets and pans to catch the rainwater. (Incidentally, buffalo manure is a good fix for a leaky roof). But lately, night time brought other concerns that kept us awake. Pat began poking me in the ribs as soon as the lights went out. “Did you hear that? Listen!” “I don't hear anything. Go to sleep.” This continued for several nights in a row, until I couldn't deny that I too heard a strange sound, but couldn't tell where it was coming from. “It must be the wind,” I thought out loud. “That's impossible. There isn't any wind.” “Maybe it's the monkeys up on the roof,” I suggested. “No. It's coming from inside the house.” This dialog continued for several nights as soon as the lights went out. There was no mistaking the sound. It was a squishy “thump” sound, like a balloon filled with water being dropped from somewhere above. Determined to solve the mystery, the next night I placed a flashlight next to the
charpoi.
I turned out the lights, got into bed and waited for the “thump.” It didn't take long. I turned on the flashlight and saw something scurry across the floor. I flashed the light on the wall above and saw three sets of beady eyes staring at me from inside a basket of sugar hanging from a peg about six feet up the wall. “Thump.” A rat, a large well fed rat, jumped out of the basket and hit the floor with a squish before heading in the direction of the drain that ran along the courtyard wall. “Holy cow. Did you see that?” Pat screamed. “That's impossible,” I said, trying to refute what I had just seen with my own eyes. “Rats, can't climb six feet straight up a vertical wall.” “Yeah, well these rats can,” Pat assured me.

The next morning I explained the rat problem to Ram Swarup. I told him that we didn't like the rats and wanted to get rid of them. He said they didn't bother him. “They are sacred, just like the monkeys.” I insisted that we needed to do something about the rats and he suggested that I talk with the sweet shop
walla
across the lane. “He has a rat trap.” I went to the sweet shop
walla
and asked to borrow the trap. “Of course. Here, take it.”

That afternoon I baited the trap and placed it in the middle of the room. Then Pat and I and the children went shopping in the bazaar. When we returned to our house later that afternoon, we were greeted by a half dozen snarling rats trapped in the sweet shop
walla's
cage. They were huge rats, the size of squirrels, with long tails and soft, plump bodies. They had obviously roamed unmolested in our part of town. I took the cage over to the sweet shop to display what I had caught in the trap. Six less rats in River Town, I proudly thought to myself. “Here. Give the trap to me. I'll get rid of the rats,” said the shopkeeper. I was happy to hand them over, since I wasn't quite sure how to dispose of them. Drown them, I though, would be best. I returned home and both Pat and I were relieved that our rat problem was solved, or at least their numbers reduced.

That night we went to bed more confident than the night before. I turned out the lights. “Thump.” Then another “Thump.” “They're back.” Pat whispered. The next morning I went back to the sweet shop to borrow the trap again. “There are more of them,” I said. “By the way, what did you do with the ones I caught yesterday?.” “Oh, I took them down the lane and let them go,” he responded. It didn't take long for me to realize that the rats would be in River Town long after we would be gone. They, like the monkeys, were permanent residents of the town. We were only transients. I felt the pull of the ocean's rip tide once again and decided not to struggle, to let myself be pulled along by that sweet feeling of helplessness that obliterates an otherwise individual sense of impending doom.

L
OCAL VILLAGERS MAINTAINED
that Akbar The Great, the 16th Century Mogul Emperor of India, liked to stay in a village near River Town on his way to hunt tigers and other wild game in the jungle just north of the village. He liked to bring his harem of women and even built a small palace for them, called the
rang mahal
(colored palace,), where the women could sit behind a screen, enjoy the fresh country air and gaze out on the village activities without being seen behind the screen. I heard this story, or some version of it (some claiming it was Akbar's son, not Akbar himself) from different people and was anxious to see for myself what remained of the palace.

There were many remains from the Muslim past in River Town, all woven in with elements from the present. Muslim armies passed by River Town, traveling along the old
badshahi sarak
(King's Road), near River Town, leaving their cultural and linguistic footprints behind them. Signs on shops in the bazaar were still mainly written in Urdu, the Persian script brought to north India by the Muslim invaders. The older shopkeepers still read Urdu newspapers, while their sons and daughters, often unable to read or write a word in Urdu, conversed in Hindi or Punjabi, and did their school work in Hindi. Everywhere one looked, the earlier influences of the Muslims were apparent in dress, speech and architecture, though most Muslims fled the town in 1947, during the Partition of India into India and Pakistan. Those who fled were replaced by Hindu merchants and Sikhs who fled Pakistan and settled into life in River Town. The language of the marketplace became a mixture of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.

When the rains let up and a cool breeze dried up the roads, Roshan and I set out to find “Akbar's Palace.” We rode tandem on my new India made bicycle, a sturdy balloon tired model, heavy but indestructible and well suited for the rough village roads. There was a rack on the back where one could sit side-saddle, while the other person pumped the pedals. We fought our way down the lane leading out of River Town and into the fresh air of the countryside. The villages looked lush from the rains, with tall stalks of sugarcane ripening for the Fall harvest. Other crops, mainly wheat, grains and vegetables would be planted and then harvested in the Spring. The villages were mostly occupied by Rajputs and Jats, the main agricultural castes in the villages around River Town.

Every mile or so, Roshan and I switched places. My legs burned when it was my turn to pedal, but Roshan urged me on from his perch on the rack over the rear fender. Finally, we reached a village of tumbling down houses and crumbling mud walls. As soon as we entered the village, we were swarmed by a gang of young kids tagging along at our heels and asking questions. We asked to be taken to the village headman's house, where we introduced ourselves. As usual, the introduction involved an account of some relative of Roshan's who had a connection to the village sometime in the past. The headman pulled out two chairs for us to sit on, while he sat on a
charpoi
and continued to suck on his
hooka
(water pipe). Between long drags on the pipe, he filled us in on details of the village past, explaining that the village had once been the home of opulent Hindu merchants and skilled Muslim artisans who made musical instruments for the Mogul court in Delhi. It was also, the headman maintained, the birthplace of the legendary Birbal and, though a Hindu, an important advisor to Akbar The Great. Birbal was a man known for his wit and wisdom, which made him a favorite of Akbar.

The headman confirmed that the
rang mahal,
Akbar's palace, was indeed located here in the village. We walked with the headman to the outskirts of the village, where we found a badly deteriorated building and a crumbling staircase. There were beautiful, but faded, floral paintings and images of elephants and peacocks on the walls, which must have looked magnificent at one time. “This is it,” the headman announced. “This is where Akbar left his harem while he went hunting in the jungle.” “That must have been quite an honor, to have the Emperor of India visit your village,” I remarked. “No. Not at all. The villagers had to work extra hard and expend huge resources to make sure Akbar and his entourage had a good time here.” He told me that Akbar's presence was a terrible burden for the villagers. “So the residents of the village put a plan in motion that was devised by Birbal, Akbar's own clever administrator and native son of this village.” According to this plan, Birbal invited some women from a nearby foothill village to sing for Akbar's harem and some
hijaris
(transvestites) to dance for them. The harem was delighted with the dancing
hijaris
and were eager to hear the women from the foothill village sing. What the women in Akbar's harem didn't know was that Birbal had brought in women who suffered from grotesque swollen necks, caused from a lack of iodine in their diet (a condition known as goiter). When the women with the swollen necks appeared before the harem and began to sing with deep husky voices, the women in Akbar's harem were panic stricken and demanded to know what was wrong with them. Birbal told them that the swollen necks and husky voices were the result of drinking the village water. Hearing this explanation, the harem secluded itself behind locked doors and as soon as Akbar returned from the hunt, the women in Akbar's harem demanded to be taken back to Delhi. Akbar never returned to the village after that.

The
rang mahal
had been left to disintegrate
in situ.
No effort had been made to restore it during the time I visited it in the early 1960s. It stood there like a mute sentry of stone commemorating the past, while animals grazed on the vines that covered it and villagers carried on their lives with scant awareness of its presence. Everywhere I turned, the events of the past remained mixed with the events of the present to form of a unique alloy of time and place.

L
ALLAJI STOOD IN THE MIDDLE
of the lane outside our door, dressed in the same white
dhoti,
long white shirt and small cap I had seen him wearing the first time we met. He held a large account book in one hand and with the other he greeted me by touching his forehead.
“Namastee.”
I could barely hear his voice above the clatter created by cart loads of brass utensils heading out of River Town on their way to the train station seven miles away. “I hope you and your family are well.” “We're fine, thanks to you,” I shouted back at him. I didn't bother to tell him about the leaky roof, or the rats, or the power shortage, or the monkeys on the roof, or the birds that flew through the iron bars of our windows. What good would it do to tell him about these things, when I knew everyone in town experienced these same things.

Lallaji moved from workshop to workshop recording the amount of finished and unfinished utensils in the workshops of the artisans. He possessed nothing more than his account book, and yet there he stood, in the middle of the lane, gesticulating like a grand maestro directing The New York Philharmonic. As he moved from workshop to workshop he counted and calculated, weighed and measured, alternately pleading and scolding the artisans seated in the middle of the heaps of utensils and scrap metals.