The Solitude of Emperors (15 page)

7

The Essence of Women

I walked to the cemetery the next morning through a world choked with mist. The birds were silenced, and the trees that lined the road seemed as insubstantial as ghosts. I hoped this would not mean that we wouldn’t be able to get to the Tower of God; I remembered my neighbour on the bus telling me that nobody was allowed to climb up in inclement weather. Fortunately, by the time I got to my destination, a strong wind had begun dispersing the mist.

When I arrived at the gates, I found they were locked. There was no sign of Noah. To my relief, Godless and his pack of mongrels were not around either. I walked along the wall calling out to Noah, and then decided to scale it. I found a place where it had crumbled a bit, and clambered up. As I dropped to the other side, I heard the sound of giggling coming from the direction of the peepul tree. I hesitated; I wasn’t prepared for the possibility that the cemetery might be frequented by others. Just then I heard Noah yelling my name. A moment later he appeared from behind the peepul, his arm around a good-looking young woman dressed in a dirty sari and threadbare blouse. She was struggling coquettishly in his grasp, and he let her go after whispering something in her ear. She giggled some more, darted behind the tree, and the next I saw of her, she was running towards the far wall of the cemetery carrying a large cane basket and a sickle.

‘Ah, my friend, have you ever unwrapped a young woman in a sari? Gently, with your teeth?’

I must have looked somewhat scandalized because he laughed and said theatrically, ‘Imagine her walking towards you, her thighs working smoothly under the cloth, the pleats of the sari rustling… each step an intricate movement that inflames the senses. Imagine, yes imagine, your teeth ever so gently plucking at the knot of the sari—tell me now, don’t you think that that is quite the most sensual experience you could have?’ An image flashed through my mind of the gross body of the whore in Shuklajee Street, and my distaste must have shown on my face, because Noah said, ‘Not a sari man, are you?’

‘It’s not that…’

‘Well then, if you’re not partial to the sari perhaps you prefer exquisite bodies clothed in fitting sarong kebayas, or maybe your choice of garment is the flowing kira, or, let me see, a tight-tight cheong sam, slit all the way to paradise, the kimono maybe, taut at just the right places, or perhaps your tastes are not that exotic, maybe you’re simply a connoisseur of the little black dress or jeans as tight as skin… come on, you can tell me what turns you on?’

Somewhat overwhelmed by this flood of oratory, I had nothing to say. Noah smiled mischievously, and said, ‘You’re a hard man to please, but believe me when I say that nowhere in the world will you find a garment that better celebrates the beauty of a woman than the sari. Flowing like water, settling like rain, tantalizing and bold as it switches and slides off breast and buttock, it’s a garment that’s untailored and pure, unsullied by the slicing of scissors and the piercing of needles, a garment of the Gods that’s lasted, virtually unchanged, for three thousand years…’

He paused and said in his regular voice, ‘Don’t mind me, da, sometimes I get in the mood for a bit of heavy declamation. By the way would you like a grass-cutter?’

‘What?’

‘Here, no two-bit sanctimoniousness from you, one of my grass-cutters is worth a dozen of your city-bred belles. No airs, no artifice, just great fucking, you should try one of them sometime. Have you come across Rimbaud’s verse about backsides? Sheer genius, and although he was actually talking about men, we shouldn’t quibble. Anyway, I saw Saroja’s arse one day when she squatted to relieve herself and I was smitten. Completely. Don’t even begin to look appalled, don’t you like women?’

‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘It’s just that I thought it would be good to get to the Tower of God early. The weather’s clearing up… and…’

‘Sure, no problem, let me just have a smoke first.’ He produced a joint, lit it and inhaled luxuriously. I refused his offer to take a couple of hits, and he said, ‘What, no dope, no women, what sort of life do you lead, da?’ He quickly finished the joint and said dreamily, ‘What a way to start the morning—a glorious fuck, great dope. Come on, let’s go. I have a feeling that today’s going to be amazing.’

As we threaded our way through the graves I noticed that the path was littered with used condoms, empty bottles of beer, plastic bags.

‘This is where the whores of Meham bring their customers,’ he said when I asked why the cemetery was so dirty. ‘Quiet, private and the dead don’t mind, you know.’

Between the cemetery and the church was a large grassy field, and it was here that the grass-cutters were at work, a group of six or seven women who started giggling and chattering when they caught sight of Noah. He waved to them and then set off in the direction of the parsonage. When we got there he began acting strangely. He cautioned me not to make any noise and inched his way up to the priest’s ancient scooter, which was parked outside the house, the ground beneath it darkened by oil. He took it carefully off its stand, put it in neutral and began to wheel it away. He beckoned to me to help him.

‘Are we stealing your dad’s scooter?’ I whispered as I pushed the vehicle along.

‘What does it look like to you?’ he retorted. ‘But don’t worry, I’ve done it before, and as long as we return it in one piece, we’ll be fine.’

Once we were on the slope leading away from the church, we hopped on, Noah produced a spare key, turned on the ignition, put the scooter in gear and we were off. I had never ridden pillion on a two-wheeler before, and I was acutely conscious of how close to disaster I was perched. Noah drove very fast and the ancient vehicle protested at every bump in the road, but the fact that he was stoned out of his mind terrified me even more. I tried shouting to him to slow down but my injunctions were torn to shreds by the speed at which we were travelling. I wished I’d told the butler back at Cypress Manor not to cancel the taxi he had ordered.

As we left the church behind and took the narrow twisting road to town, the mist rolled in and visibility came down to a few feet. To add to my discomfort, the horn wasn’t working well, and its weak chirp could barely be heard above the noise of our passage. Noah didn’t slow down but resorted to shouting at the top of his voice in Tamil to say that we were coming and that approaching vehicles should give way. After about ten minutes of this, I could bear it no longer. I leaned forward and shouted into his ear to stop as I was feeling sick. In response, Noah braked abruptly and I was almost thrown off. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked innocently, as he pulled the scooter to the side of the road.

‘If we drive like this, we’ll die,’ I said shakily.

‘This is the only way I drive, and I’m still alive,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Do you want to take over?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know how to drive a scooter,’ I confessed, adding, ‘but if we can’t go any slower, I’m sorry, I’d much rather walk.’

He looked at me and smiled, still high, and I thought he might decide to go on without me, but then he said, ‘OK, da, have it your way, but I tell you, you’re going to miss the adrenalin rush of shooting through the mist like a meteor.’

We set off again, at a pace that was much more moderate although it was still too fast in my opinion. I shut my eyes and prayed that we wouldn’t meet another vehicle every time we took a corner, but I wasn’t as paralyzed with terror as I had been before. To our great good fortune there was no traffic until we were on the outskirts of town, where Noah had no option but to slow down because the road had been churned up into a quagmire which every passing car and lorry only made worse.

Up close, Meham was a squalid town, in total contrast to the beauty of the landscape surrounding it. The decline in the fortunes of the tea industry, which had been its mainstay for almost a century, was evident everywhere. Its single main street was rutted and muddy. Above it, dingy computer training institutes, minute department stores, shops, bakeries, two inhospitable-looking lodges, the local branch of a national bank, small one-room restaurants, a travel agency, three tea showrooms and a liquor shop clustered together, all looking as if they had been assembled from whatever materials the builders could find close at hand. Rows of small, badly constructed, weather-beaten houses ascended the slope from the shops. On a hill facing the town proper, there were three temples, a mosque and a church—there was obviously no dearth of piety around here. What worried me were the knots of young men I could see standing around aimlessly everywhere I looked. If their frustration and anger were to be exploited by the fundamentalists, then this town could become like all the others that Mr Sorabjee’s old Gods had taken over.

Noah wanted to buy some bones for Godless, so we parked the scooter by the side of the road and went into the bazaar that descended from the main street to a dirty river that carried away the town’s waste. We made slow progress through a warren of tiny lanes, on either side of which were stalls that displayed all manner of goods; everyone seemed to know Noah, and we were obliged to stop every few minutes to chat to the shopkeepers. Eventually, we arrived at a vegetable market, redolent with the smell of curry leaves, where Noah spent a long time flirting with the fat proprietress of a stall on which mounds of aubergines, bitter gourd, tomatoes and carrots were heaped. From here it was a short walk to the butcher’s shop, a low-roofed shack that stood a little apart from the rest of the stalls. Outside, wire cages bulged with quails and chickens, all of them strangely quiet. A mangy black dog slunk out of the doorway as we entered. I was leading but I had barely taken a few steps into the shop when I noticed that Noah was no longer with me. On the far side of the establishment the butcher was chopping up a slab of mutton with a small axe for the only other customer in the place, a well-dressed, pompous-looking man with a high-domed forehead from which a great wave of white hair swept back. The butcher looked up briefly, and then went back to his work, while the customer ignored me. I hastily retraced my steps and found Noah behind the cages of poultry, smoking a cigarette.

‘How come you disappeared?’ I asked in some bemusement.

‘Oh nothing, just didn’t want that pompous arsehole in the shop to see me. Great friend of the Brigadier’s, would string me up if he caught sight of me,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Fortunately people like him normally have their noses hoisted so high in the air, they wouldn’t notice you unless you bit them on the face.’

‘What did you do to make them dislike you so much?’

‘Nothing, da. You’ll hear about a hundred different versions of what a bastard I am if you stay here long enough, just don’t believe any of them.’

He said nothing more. A few minutes later the man he had been trying to avoid walked out of the shop and, looking impassively ahead, disappeared into the vegetable market. As soon as he had gone, we went into the shop. The butcher greeted Noah affectionately: ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, has that mongrel of yours died?’

‘No, he almost took a chunk of meat from my calf yesterday, so I thought I’d get him some scraps. Ismail, this is my friend Vijay from Bombay.’

The butcher smiled and nodded. As Noah and he got chatting I looked around. A whole goat hung from a hook on the roof, and on the long wooden counter, scarred and criss-crossed by cuts from the butcher’s knives, there were piles of bones, liver and meat. From time to time, the butcher would flick scraps of fat, white and stretched like parchment, on to the floor, and the eyes of four black cats which occupied various vantage points in the shop would flicker imperceptibly. They were well trained and wouldn’t move a muscle until the butcher indicated that they could begin, whereupon one of them would descend noiselessly in a cloud of black fur, scoop up the tit-bit and return to its perch. The cats seemed to have worked out a system for never once did any of them get in each other’s way.

Once Godless’s bones were packed and stowed away, we were finally able to make our way to the Tower of God. When we got there, to my disappointment we could see nothing as the valley was filled almost to the brim with cloud and mist. Noah told me not to worry as it never stayed that way for too long; we would make another attempt to get to it the next day. We sat for a while on the parapet looking down into the whiteness beneath our feet and I commented that it looked solid enough to walk on. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone mad enough to try that,’ Noah said with a laugh, ‘It’s over 6,000 feet straight down.’

A taxi drove up, and four people got out, by the look of them tourists from the plains. The man waddled ahead of his family, his little pot belly pushing out the front of his garish, obviously new sweater, inappropriate leather shoes squeaking as he walked. He was followed by his rotund wife, sari- and sweater-clad, with a little girl of about nine clinging on to her hand. A boy who looked slightly older than his sister brought up the rear. The man walked up to the parapet, looked out at the invisible Tower of God and said rather rudely in our general direction, ‘When will it become visible?’ When neither of us replied, he turned and surveyed us, his small eyes cold above the pencil-line moustache on his upper lip.

‘That is the Tower of God, no?’ he said, his voice a little more conciliatory, although his air of importance hadn’t left him. Surprisingly Noah answered him kindly, even though the man had addressed the question to me. He explained that the Tower of God wasn’t going to show itself that day, and that he should return tomorrow when the weather was expected to clear up. Ignoring him, the man strutted back to the waiting taxi, his family following meekly behind. When the taxi had gone, I said to Noah, ‘That was good of you.’

‘Um, yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was thinking, there but for the grace of God go I, fucking pompous arsehole, apple of his mother’s eye no doubt, less than average intelligence but a great mug-pot so stands first in class in his mofussil school and college, gets a job as a management trainee or something, demands a big dowry, marries a virgin, produces two kids within the first two years of marriage, will work for the same company all his life, is sycophantic to his superiors and obnoxious towards everyone he considers beneath him, bangs his wife three times a year, once on his birthday, once on hers and once on the biggest festival day of the religion he belongs to, Christmas or Deepavali or Id. Then if she’s lucky, she gets a bonus fuck once a year—how many does that make it? OK, four. The rest of the time she looks after the kids and her lord and master. I guess that’s why I was kind to him, little does he know how truly pathetic he is, although he probably thinks the sun rises from his backside. But I could have been him, you know, da, and I… I just couldn’t help myself…’