The Game (19 page)

With this reminder of the curious Oriental concept of ethics, back my thoughts circled to the enigma of Kim. “And do you think O’Hara might not have done the same? Was the Survey part of the world with which he was casual friends, or was it family, to which he bound himself irrevocably?”

Holmes sucked his teeth, a peculiar habit he had never demonstrated before coming here—a part of his current persona, no doubt. “That’s the essential question, is it not? I had the impression that O’Hara would lay his life down for Creighton’s organisation, but it is, I suppose, possible that his mind differentiated between Creighton and the Survey. That when Creighton went, the ties of brotherhood lapsed, and O’Hara merely stayed on for a while out of good manners.”

“The same good manners Nesbit was talking about, that drive an Indian to tell you yes when he knows the answer is no.”

“Precisely.”

“Which means that if O’Hara has joined the other side—whichever side that might be—it isn’t so much treason as a resumption of deeper loyalties.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t see that helps much.”

“No.”

By dusk,
we had a mostly blue donkey cart, and Bindra went about preparing the meal with a hum of satisfaction between his teeth. And while Holmes and I were occupied with the evening’s performance, the donkey-boy laid claim to our paraffin lamp to continue his work. I looked down the road at the bright glow of the light, and saw him dusting off the wheels preparatory to painting them, squinting over the smoke from his
bidi
. Later I saw that he had begun to sketch some other design along the upper edge of the cart with a charred twig. Before Holmes forcibly reclaimed the lamp and shut it down for the night, the boy had laid a precise border of yellow Indian
swastik
s along all the edges, and begun a large, all-seeing magic eye on the front panel, to proceed us down the road. The next day he found frustrating, as the painting of the sun and moon he wanted on the side panels was not made any easier by the jostle of the cart, and eventually he gave up, sulking when Holmes would not stop the night at a pleasant village reached at two in the afternoon.

However, the enforced delay proved beneficial. The night before, I had been replacing the small mirrored juggling balls back into their protective bag, under the watchful eye of the young artist, when the method of their manufacture attracted my closer attention. The balls were made of some sort of plaster into which, while it was soft, many small pieces of mirrored glass had been set. Holmes had chosen them carefully, lest they have protruding edges that shred our fingers, and the plaster nestled closely against each segment.

If damp plaster could hold glass, other things could as well, I thought, and began watching for a shop that sold manufactured goods. These were rare in rural India, but late that day we passed a shop with tins of marmalade and boxes of Mrs Bird’s Custard stacked in its door, jammed in between a carpenter’s piled high with half-sawed tree trunks, wooden ploughs, and half-finished furniture, and a lacquer-goods manufacturer draped with toys, utensils, and decorative
charpoy
s. I ducked inside, made my purchases, and was out before Bindra noticed. That evening after dinner, I handed him the parcel.

He undid the twine, taking care with the knots, and unfolded the newspaper from the broken pieces of a looking-glass. It was enough to cover about a square foot, although it was in eight or ten pieces.

“If you press small pieces into the wet paint,” I told him, having checked my vocabulary with Holmes earlier, “I believe they will stick.”

He turned the shiny treasure over and over in his hands, relishing the potential. Then he picked up the other object, a dented, palm-sized metal case missing most of its original enamel which, due to the wear, had not cost me much more than the broken glass had. I waited for him to find and manipulate the side latch, then said, “This is the looking-glass of an English lady. The cover protects it from breakage.”

I might have given him solid gold. He peered into it, looked at me over it, and went back to the contemplation of his own eye. I stood up to get ready for the performance, and as I pulled open the tent flap, I heard a small voice say, “I thank you.”

“It is nothing,” I told him.

That night the cart’s sides grew stars, the mirrored glass broken down further with infinite care, rock against rock, each splinter treasured. And despite the proliferation of sharp edges, the boy didn’t so much as scratch himself in the process.

Under the morning sun, our progress was glorious.

Chapter Eleven

T
he next day began like the others. The dust rose and the villages
passed—variations on mud walls, communal well, and fields—while we left behind the early-morning murmur of grindstones and walked to the music of the bells on grazing cattle, the melodious dirge of camel-drawn Persian wheels, and the chorus of cooing doves. Halfway through the morning we bought bowls of yogurt-like
lhassi
from a veiled woman and crumbled some of the
gur
over it, taking our refreshment in the fine-speckled shade of a
neem
tree while Holmes traded news with the farmer who came to see who we were. As the sun slanted and softened into the smoke of the horizon, we began to look for a village of the right size and, preferably, state of affluence, to appreciate our labours with an offering of food and perhaps a few annas—not a town, just a centre of fifteen to thirty mud houses around the inevitable small stone temple. Up to that time, when we had spotted a promising candidate along the road or across some fields, Bindra and I would wait with the donkey while Holmes went ahead to consult with the village headman. On our first day out of the caravanserai, this had been quickly done, and permission granted to make camp just outside the village walls. The next day, Holmes had been gone for two hours, since the man he sought was working in his fields and had to be tracked down. Today, Bindra took charge.

I thought at first the scamp had tired of us and decided to steal away—with all our possessions. Holmes and I had been deep in conversation when I looked up and realised the boy and animal were nowhere to be seen.

“Hell!” I exclaimed, in English. “The brat’s gone.”

Holmes examined the dusty track ahead of us, which was devoid of the familiar shapes. He said nothing, but picked up his pace. After half a mile or so we came to a field occupied by an old man clearing his channel from the nearby canal.

“Ho, my father,” Holmes called. “Have you seen a small boy and a blue donkey cart come this way?”

The elderly man straightened his back, with difficulty, and shaded his eyes against the sun. “An imp with a quick tongue?”

“That is he.”

“He asked after the
mukhiya,
seeking permission to bring to the village a
jadoo-wallah
with a wonder show.” He sounded rather dubious; despite the sparkling cart, Holmes and I looked far from wondrous or magical in our dust-caked clothing.

“Oah,” Holmes said with a sideways shake of his head. “He is a good lad, if too quick with his elders. I hope you will join us for the show, father.”

“We have not so many entertainments passing through our village that we turn our backs like city dwellers,” the old man said with a chuckle, and resumed his chopping with renewed vigour.

When we neared the village, a collection of mud walls like any other, we spied young Bindra squatting in the shade of an enormous
peepul
tree, laying out twigs and branches for a fire, the donkey already freed of its load and chewing at a handful of leaves, the noisy little mynas already gathered in attendance. The lad looked sideways at us as we came up, his small body swelled with complacency.

“And to think you would have cast me aside back in Delhi,” he told us smugly. “I shall be earning my salary, I think.”

“If you can find some
puri
s to go with the curry, I shall increase your salary to two rupees a week.”

The boy snorted in a ritual of derision, but he scrambled up eagerly enough and trotted off to the collection of walls that formed the village centre. And with that, Bindra’s responsibilities expanded to include arrangements for our night’s lodging.

On this, our fifth night on the road, negotiations had been swiftly concluded, and dinner was being arranged. Holmes and I bathed our faces and beat the dust from our clothing, then set about erecting the small tent, a necessary shelter in so many ways, concealing us (and particularly me) from curious eyes and allowing us to practice our conjuring in solitude. Bindra returned before the last peg was hammered in, bearing a laden tray. As before, he helped himself from the communal dish and took his bowl to one side, while we unclean types finished it off, after which the boy took the tray and bowls back to their owner. Holmes sat with his pipe while I enjoyed the dusk and the sounds of the fruit-bats that roosted overhead, going out for the evening while their human neighbours came in. Three small children peered at us from the entrance to their courtyard, giggling, until the woman of the house came to shoo them inside; she, too, peeked at us, her scarf securely over her face, before she disappeared with a swirl of garments.

The men came in from the fields, most with rough-handled hoes resting on their shoulders, a few driving dark buffalos and pale bullocks before them into the lanes, where the animals stayed, ruminating and urinating outside the houses while their masters ate the evening meal. India’s quick dusk settled into night, voices rose and fell from behind the mud walls, and we sat in the open beneath the paraffin lamp, that the villagers might see our every move and be assured there was nothing to fear: This land believes in the evil eye of strangers, and would come after us with sticks and fire if they thought us a threat to their crops and cows. The cooking aromas faded, replaced by the occasional whiff of the men’s pipes. When the cattle in the lanes began to be brought inside the walls, Holmes got to his feet, took up the three torches he had prepared from oil-soaked rags wrapped tightly around the end of a staff, and strolled out from under the shelter of the tree.

I followed, silent as always. I played the enigmatic one, never answering if a child called to us, rarely acknowledging a gift. I was also the one to warm the audience up, as soon as Holmes had snared their attention.

He began by planting the torches, forming an equilateral triangle with two straddling the road and one on the side away from the town. He worked methodically and with a touch of drama, as if the placing of the three staffs was a sacrament. Within seconds of his stepping onto the road, the village was hushed, every eye upon us from behind gate and walls.

When Holmes was satisfied with the position of the cold torches, he went to stand in the precise centre, extending his right arm to point his finger at the torch to his right, ten feet away. After a moment, during which he chanted some phrase continually under his breath, it burst into flame, and the darkness filled with exclamations. He did the same with the second, and the third—although his timing was slightly off and the two lit nearly simultaneously, the combustive reactions of chemicals under those circumstances being difficult to control with precision.

Then he retired, leaving the stage to me.

Luckily for me, the demands of our rural entertainments were on a fairly basic level. Indeed, putting on too slick a show would only alarm the simple folk, and cause any of the more knowledgeable residents to ask themselves why we were here rather than in some city or raja’s town where we might actually earn some rupees. Rudimentary and clumsy, and clearly tricks rather than the more sinister magic.

I juggled. Not very well, and taking full advantage of the humour in the odd fumble, I juggled, looking puzzled as the balls turned into apples, then potatoes, and exclaimed and nearly dropped them when they began to sparkle and shine with the shards of mirror embedded in the bright plaster. Then one at a time, the five mirror-balls transformed themselves into small golden birds, which one by one flew away, leaving me with four balls, then three, until I tossed one lonely, sparkling ball from one hand to the other. Finally, it, too, flew off. I stood gazing into the darkness after it, bereft, when all of a sudden the sky began to rain down apples and potatoes and mirror-balls, causing me to stumble and trip in confusion and in the end duck down under cover of my arms. The rain of objects slowed, and ceased, and I cautiously peeped out from under my hands—at which one final potato dropped down on my turban. I sat down abruptly on the ground, and the entire village roared with laughter at my misfortune.