Sea of Poppies (59 page)

The space which Deeti and Kalua had chosen for themselves lay under one of the massive beams that arched over the 'tween deck. Deeti's mat was pushed right up to the side, so that the hull provided a backrest when she sat up. But when she lay down, the wooden ridge was no more than an arm's length from her head, so that a moment's inattention could mean a nasty blow to the head. After cracking her brow against the edge a few times, she learnt to slip out safely, and after that, she quickly came to be grateful for the shelter of the beam: it was like a parental arm, holding her in place when everything else was becoming more and more unsteady.

Never was Deeti more grateful for the beam's proximity than during the first days of the voyage, when she was still unaccustomed to the vessel's motion: it gave her something to hold on to, and she found that she could lessen the whirling sensation in her head by focusing her eyes on the wood. In this way, despite the half-light of the dabusa, she became intimately familiar with that length of timber, learning to recognize its grain, its whorls and even the little scratches that had been carved into its surface by the nails of others who had lain where she lay. When Kalua told her that the best remedy for queasiness was to look up at the open sky, she told him tartly to look where he pleased, but for herself, she had all the sky she could deal with in the wood above her head.

For Deeti, the stars and constellations of the night sky had always recalled the faces and likenesses of the people she remembered, in love or in dread. Was it this, or was it the shelter afforded by the arched limb that reminded her of the shrine she had left behind? It happened anyway that on the morning of the third day she dipped the tip of her index finger into the vermilion-filled parting of her hair and raised it to the wood to draw a tiny face with two pigtails.

Kalua understood at once: It's Kabutri, isn't it? he whispered – and Deeti had to jab him in the ribs, to remind him that her daughter's existence was a secret.

Later that day, at noon, when the migrants were making their way out of the dabusa, a strange affliction took hold of everyone who climbed up the ladder: when they set foot on the last rung, they became immobile and had to be shoved up bodily by those who were following at their heels. No matter how loud or impatient the voices below, everyone was stricken in turn as they stepped on the main deck, even those who had but a moment before been cursing the clumsy clodhoppers who were weighing down the line. When it was her turn to emerge from the hatch, Deeti too was seized by the malady: for there it was, dead ahead of the schooner's bows, the Black Water.

The wind had fallen off, so there was not a fleck of white visible on the surface, and with the afternoon sun glaring down, the water was as dark and still as the cloak of shadows that covers the opening of an abyss. Like the others around her, Deeti stared in stupefaction: it was impossible to think of this as water at all – for water surely needed a boundary, a rim, a shore, to give it shape and hold it in place? This was a firmament, like the night sky, holding the vessel aloft as if it were a planet or a star. When she was back on her mat, Deeti's hand rose of itself and drew the figure she had drawn for Kabutri, many months ago – of a winged vessel flying over the water. Thus it happened that the
Ibis
became the second figure to enter Deeti's seaborne shrine.

A
t sundown, the
Ibis
cast anchor at the last place from which the migrants would be able to view their native shore: this was Saugor Roads, a much-trafficked anchorage in the lee of Ganga-Sagar, the island that stands between the sea and the holy river. Except for some mudbanks and the pennants of a few temples, there was little to be seen of the island from the
Ibis
, and none of it was visible in the unlit gloom of the dabusa: yet the very name Ganga-Sagar, joining, as it did, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was as if they were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jambudvipa, their homeland, reaching out to keep them from tumbling into the void.

The maistries too were jitterily aware of the proximity of this last spit of land, and that evening they were even more vigilant than usual when the migrants came on deck for their meal; lathis in hand, they positioned themselves warily around the bulwarks and any migrant who looked too closely at the distant lights was hustled quickly below: What're you staring at, sala? Get back down there, where you belong . . .

But even when removed from view, the island could not be put out of mind: although none of them had set eyes on it before, it was still intimately familiar to most – was it not, after all, the spot where the Ganga rested her feet? Like many other parts of Jambudvipa, it was a place they had visited and revisited time and again, through the epics and Puranas, through myth, song and legend. The knowledge that this was the last they would see of their homeland, created an atmosphere of truculence and uncertainty in which no provocation seemed too slight for a quarrel. Once fights broke out, they escalated
at a pace that was bewildering to everyone, including the participants: in their villages they would have had relatives, friends, and neighbours to step between them, but here there were no elders to settle disputes, and no tribes of kinsfolk to hold a man back from going for another's throat. Instead, there were trouble-makers like Jhugroo, always eager to set one man against another, friend against friend, caste against caste.

Among the women, the talk was of the past, and the little things that they would never see, nor hear, nor smell again: the colour of poppies, spilling across the fields like
ábír
on a rain-drenched Holi; the haunting smell of cooking-fires drifting across the river, bearing news of a wedding in a distant village; the sunset sounds of temple bells and the evening azan; late nights in the courtyard, listening to the tales of the elderly. No matter how hard the times at home may have been, in the ashes of every past there were a few cinders of memory that glowed with warmth – and now, those embers of recollection took on a new life, in the light of which their presence here, in the belly of a ship that was about to be cast into an abyss, seemed incomprehensible, a thing that could not be explained except as a lapse from sanity.

Deeti fell silent as the other women spoke, for the recollections of the others served only to remind her of Kabutri and the memories from which she would be forever excluded: the years of growing she would not see; the secrets she would never share; the bridegroom she would not receive. How was it possible that she would not be present at her child's wedding to sing the laments that mothers sang when the palanquins came to carry their daughters away?

Talwa jharáilé

Kãwal kumhláile

Hansé royé

Birahá biyog

The pond is dry

The lotus withered

The swan weeps

For its absent love

In the escalating din, Deeti's song was almost inaudible at first, but when the other women grew aware of it they joined their voices to hers, one by one, all except Paulette, who held back shyly, until Deeti whispered: It doesn't matter whether you know the words. Sing anyway – or the night will be unbearable.

Slowly, as the women's voices grew in strength and confidence, the men forgot their quarrels: at home too, during village weddings, it was always the women who sang when the bride was torn from her parents' embrace – it was as if they were acknowledging, through their silence, that they, as men, had no words to describe the pain of the child who is exiled from home.

Kaisé katé ab

Birahá ki ratiyã?

How will it pass

This night of parting?

Through the opening of the air duct, Neel too was listening to the women's songs, and neither then nor afterwards was he able to explain why it happened that the language he had been surrounded by for the last two days, now poured suddenly into his head, like flood water cascading over a breached bund. It was either Deeti's voice, or some fragment of her songs, that made him remember that hers was the language, Bhojpuri, in which Parimal had been accustomed to speak to him, in his infancy and childhood – until the day when his father put a stop to it. The fortunes of the Halders were built, the old Raja had said, on their ability to communicate with those who held the reins of power; Parimal's rustic tongue was the speech of those who bore the yoke, and Neel ought never to use it again for it would ruin his accent when it came time for him to learn Hindusthani and Persian, as was necessary for the heir to a zemindary.

Neel, ever the obedient son, had allowed the language to wither in his head, yet, unbeknownst to him, it had been kept alive – and it was only now, in listening to Deeti's songs, that he recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music: he had always had a great love of dadras, chaitis, barahmasas, horis, kajris – songs such
as Deeti was singing. Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation – of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.

The urge to use his remembered words was strong upon Neel that night and he could not sleep. Much later, after the women had sung themselves hoarse, and a fitful quiet had descended upon the dabusa, he heard a few of the migrants trying to recall the story of Ganga-Sagar Island. He could not keep himself from telling the tale: speaking through the air duct, he reminded his listeners that if not for this island neither the Ganga nor the sea would exist; for according to the myths, it was here that Lord Vishnu, in his avatar as the sage Kapila, was sitting in meditation, when he was disturbed by the sixty thousand sons of King Sagar who were marching through the land to claim it for the Ikshvaku dynasty. It was here too, exactly where they were now, that those sixty thousand princes were punished for their impudence, being incinerated by a single glance from one of the sage's burning eyes; it was here that their unhallowed ashes had lain until another scion of their dynasty, the good king Bhagiratha, was able to persuade the Ganga to pour down from the heavens and fill the seas: this was how the ashes of the sixty thousand Ikshvaku princes were redeemed from the underworld.