by Neil Grant
Swimming, the tiger’s wake broad across the night river. He comes unbidden. Up with the tide he swims, salt sending him furious with desire. Over the bund silently, swiftly, pushing forward on the pads of his feet. He insinuates himself like a sliver of sundari wood under the skin. Behind him, pugmarks swell in the mud. The village is dark but he can smell what he has come for. The sweet scent of blood like perfume on the light wind. The closest huts with their fat infants and grandmothers are easy pickings but he is after something sweeter still.
His feet drum the beaten ground. Rounding the corner of a mud house, he waits at a window, whiskers pulled back, twitching. Flexing out his claws, he pulls himself onto the sill, perches there for a moment, balanced. Then, lightly down inside. Gone like a puff of smoke from the outside world. As if he has never been.
But inside, his tail swishes from side to side. He pushes his nose in the air, giddy with the smell of the human. His lips pull back. Teeth angle in the dark. He sees the spear leaning against the wall and snarls at its forgotten magic.
She sleeps alone – her father gone into the forest to steal yet again. He nuzzles the flesh. Her throat is soft and bright as the moon and, as his tongue rasps across it, she wakes.
Rudra sits upright in bed. Something is wrong. He pulls on clothes and grabs the torch from his bedside table. He runs to the bund to where muffled shouts pepper the soft air. His torchlight breaks into the darkness on the path and soon he is near the river. There, a large group of villagers has gathered around Malo and Gita’s house. They are carrying torches made from sundari branches and lathis of solid dark wood.
What is going on? he asks with his shoulders and puzzled eyes.
‘Bagh!’ they cry. Then, ‘Tiger!’ in English.
He pushes to the front of the crowd but when he tries to enter the house, hands wrap around his biceps and hold him. A low, rumbling growl comes from inside. Rudra breaks free and lunges through the door.
The room is cut by firelight and darkness. There, in the far corner, made of flame and shadow, is a tiger so huge his shoulders are halfway up the walls. He owns the air between them. Gita lies beneath him, a black stain gathering on the mud floor. Without thinking, Rudra grabs the ancient spear leaning against the wall. The tiger roars his warning. The red bauliya’s cord tied around Rudra’s bicep bites into his skin. The tiger snarls. Rudra lunges at him with the spear. The tiger dodges and, picking up Gita’s body in his massive jaws, leaps for the window. Rudra thrusts the spear again. This time it finds the flank of the tiger, slipping into flesh. He snarls in pain but will not drop his prey. Scattering the villagers, he makes for the bund with Gita.
Rudra runs outside. The villagers are frozen by disbelief and fear, their limbs gone heavy, torches snuffed on the ground. A trail of blood leads from the window towards the bund. He flicks on his torch and follows the trail, hoping against all the odds that Gita has survived. Maybe she is just unconscious and the tiger has dropped her. He crosses the bund, slipping on the slick mud. He gets to his feet and continues. The torchlight picks out blood, so much of it – some Gita’s, some the tiger’s. Down the far side of the bund and to the river’s edge it goes, before disappearing into the water.
For a moment Rudra stands there, staring into the night. A wake laps at his toes. The tiger is gone. And with him, Gita.
25
‘HE BELIEVES IT IS HIS FAULT,’ says Raj. ‘He angered Bonbibi by cutting wood, and she deserted him and his daughter.’
Rudra is mute. The words have been torn from him. He cannot believe the violence of this place. How quickly and easily things can change. How do people live here?
They mourn a bloodstain – a ragged stripe that terminates at the water’s edge.
Malo runs a wet rag over his windowsill, turning the black stain to bright red, to pink and then to nothing. When he has finished, Rudra hands him the spear – its tip stained with tiger blood.
‘I tried,’ he says.
Malo throws the spear to the ground and mutters something in Bangla.
‘What did he say?’ Rudra asks Raj.
‘Nothing.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He says that now Dokkhin Rai will come for you.’
Rudra knows what his mother would say – that Dokkhin Rai is a story told to scare village children at night. A myth pieced together to reason with this complicated and uncaring land, to order the chaos of blood and death. Gita was going to college, thinks Rudra. By next season, she would have escaped.
He looks down at his packed bag – lighter now without the skull and ashes. So much left behind. The ferry is leaving soon and he doesn’t know what he can say to Malo. Hasn’t the words, even in English, to fill the gap.
As they leave her house, Bansari smothers Rudra in a hug. There are huge glossy tears in her eyes. He realises then how complex people are – that they are not just characters in a book with cookie-cutter traits and emotions.
‘I will miss you, Rudra.’
‘I’ll miss you too, Pisi Bansari.’
‘Call me Aunty.’
‘Yes – Aunty.’
‘Will you return?’
‘Of course,’ he says, not knowing if it is true or not.
‘Give my love to Nayna. And to your father. I wish him all the best.’
‘Thank you. For everything.’
‘Even too much milk tea? With milk separate? And old people’s gossip?’
‘All that.’
He picks up Raj from his hut and together they walk towards the ghat. As they are about to board, Malo arrives; half the man who strode through the village on the day of their first meeting with a rich foreigner in tow and his ambitious daughter waiting on his boat.
As Malo approaches, Rudra offers his hand to shake, but instead Malo grabs him and holds him close – like a brother or a son. Rudra can feel his body shaking. Raj places a hand on his shoulder and, as Malo breaks away, he hands Rudra a book.
Rudra boards the ferry with Raj and it pulls away. Malo turns through the crowd of waving people. They are waving at the young man in a badly stitched suit, a bundle of books tied with string balanced on his knees. And they are waving at the family of six with battered cardboard cases. They are waving at three teenagers, travelling back to school, and at a farmer with a basket of solemn ducks. They keep waving until their smiles and tears vanish, until they are no more significant than mangrove roots.
Rudra focuses on Malo crossing the bund. His tears are not visible from this distance, but Rudra knows they are there. Just because you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it does not exist. The book that Malo gave him is in his hand and Rudra flips it over to read the title – Gitanjali by Rabindrinath Tagore.
‘Gitanjali means song offerings,’ says Raj. ‘Malo could not read. I think this was truly Gita’s book.’
Rudra opens at random to a line in English.
By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom are you threading your course to come to me, my friend?
The ferry makes mid-river and the tide sucks at it. Downstream, in the deep forest around Netidhopani, stripes of light will fall across the paths and the abandoned temple and a tiger will amble up from the water. His muzzle will be masked with blood and he will lick at the wound on his rump. Turning, he will sniff the air and catch the scent of something familiar.
They near the far ghat and, as the crowd pulls their bags and bundles closer, Rudra breathes deeply. He smiles wearily at Raj, white-knuckling the gunnels of the boat. Rudra is going home; repeating the whole journey in reverse. He feels the bungee cord stretched between him and Patonga – his umbilicus, which has been tugging at him since he left. All he has to do is relax and the cord will bring him home.
The taxi to the station delivers them without incident, and then there’s the trip back to Kolkata. Cha-wallahs come and go. Men with fists of bright toys, sweet sellers, chaat men with paper cones of nuts and sp
ices. Through the barred windows, stations come and go, fields and villages. Kids jump on and sweep the train, collect plastic bottles and a few coins. Musicians play, and a man with a cobra in a wicker basket pulls off the lid and lets Rudra peer inside at the wicked silver-grey coils. Despite all this, the day is drab and Rudra knows the snake charmer has pulled the cobra’s teeth. The cha is watery and the music seems grotesque.
Rudra thinks of Gita. How can he not? He tries to see only the landscape, but that thin smear of blood across the windowsill and the drag mark across the dirt path eclipse everything. He imagines what it is like to have a tiger’s jaw tighten like a vice around your neck.
Even though it is an impossible thought, he cannot help but feel she paid for something done by his great-grandfather all those years before. That this awoke a great cataclysm of events that are reverberating even now. He knows that Nayna would wave this away with her hand. Would scrawl these fears on the high tide mark and tell him that the sea goddess will remove them. That goddess of her own making for her new land. A goddess made like all, she would say, to fill a particular need.
The train pulls into the station of a small town and Raj buys them both an ice-cream through the barred window of their carriage. The day is warm and they sit licking the melting treat from their arms.
‘What will you do now?’ Rudra asks Raj. ‘Will you go to Mumbai?’
‘There is always Bollywood.’
‘Yes, there is always Bollywood.’
‘And when I make it famous, you must arrive to visit. I will also have a special room for you and Mummy. And maybe your daddy too will come, even.’
‘Maybe,’ Rudra says, unable to picture Cord Solace on a crowded Kolkata-bound train, licking ice-cream from his forearm. ‘Do you think you can make it in Bollywood, Raj?’
Raj’s brow furrows and Rudra is reminded of wave patterns on a sandbar. ‘Yes, I will make it. It is my dream.’
‘But there is already one Amitabh Bachchan.’
‘But not one like me. I will be the Nepali one.’
26
AT THE BEAMISH HOTEL, MRS URSU is trapped, like a fly in amber, on the steps out front. Her orange hair is an inferno in the deepening night.
‘Welcome,’ she says, extending her arms. ‘To the Beamish Hotel. A grand experience awaits.’ She pauses, peering into the dark. ‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Hi, Mrs Ursu.’
‘Hello, young man. There is a message here from your mother.’ She brushes down her gown, measled with sequins. ‘Raj, take his bags to two oh four.’
‘But he’s not a porter anymore—’
‘It is okay,’ says Raj picking up Rudra’s bags.
They walk up the stairs and Raj swings the door open. He places Rudra’s bag on the stand and opens the bathroom door. His voice sounds automated.
‘Hot and cold water, on tap, twenty-four-seven hours.’
‘Raj, you don’t have to do this.’
Raj shrugs.
‘You’re the Nepali Amitabh Bachchan!’
‘Am I?’ Raj opens the window and breathes in the smoky Kolkata night. ‘Maybe it is too much for me to do in one life. My village is very small. My life is very small. I escaped to Kolkata. Mumbai, maybe it is too much.’
There is a morning, then an afternoon, then an evening, merging and swallowing each other until night clambers across the courtyard and through the gate to the peepal tree. Rudra is stuck on his bed – an island engulfed by dangerous seas, tricky tides, whirlpools and waterspouts. Raj brings him dhal and parathas; he brings him sugary cha. The plates and glasses crowd the bed like flotsam and jetsam.
Rudra reads, like it is a new thing. Not because someone has told him to, or because he has to write an essay on it, or answer comprehension questions, but because, now, right now, he is looking for answers. It is urgent. He feels it like a dart in his blood. Some words reach down inside and grab him by the gut and make him want to cry out in pain. And others, well … they make him want to strangle the English language.
The book is Gitanjali. The copy Malo gave to him on the ghat. The pages are so thin that the words on each page are ghosted with the ones preceding. The language feels old – if he had the word archaic, that might go halfway to describing it. He has searched this book for clues all day and into this night, hoping it will give some meaning to what has just happened. Instead, all he can remember is a tangle of blood and bone and teeth. He clings to the book as his didima may have wrapped her fist around a talisman – a magic trinket that may have cost her ten rupees.
Gitanjali was translated by Rabindranath Tagore into English and published in 1912. So many thees and thous and dosts. A language of poetry that died, and should stay dead, now and forever. A language that the word flowery was invented for.
He sees Gitanjali, the flesh-and-blood girl, walking across the bund with her prawn net slung over her back, never translated. And again sitting by the river, reading this very book – her finger worrying the stanzas, lips untangling the words as she might unpick a snarl of twine. On this page, Rudra notices, there is a lick of river mud. On the next, a smear of blood where a mosquito, pressed flat, has leaked across the paper. He presses his nose to the book, hopeful of something other than dust.
‘What are you smelling?’ It is Raj in the doorway.
‘Don’t you knock?’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘I’m not sir, I’m Rudra. You know that.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine. I’m reading the book Malo gave me – Tagore.’
‘Do you want to see where he was burnt?’
‘Who?’
Raj points at the book. ‘Rabindranath Tagore. The poet.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘You need to not be so sad.’
‘By visiting a crematorium?’
‘Maybe, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir. It’s weird.’ Rudra sits upright, the world spinning after so long lying down. ‘Sure, let’s go to the crematorium.’
Mrs Ursu is drinking brandy and watching TV in the lobby. She doesn’t see them as they sneak by and out of the Beamish. Raj hails a cab and they set off for the Nimtala burning ghat.
They hit the river at ninety degrees, at twenty kilometres an hour, bouncing over the railway track – a dark corridor with dangerous bundles of rags that might be human. To the left, the double drapes of the Howrah Bridge vault over the Hooghly River. Its symmetry is pinched upwards, bleeding gaudy light to the water. Even at this late hour, the bridge is infested with traffic – cars and buses, blaring trucks and plodding bullock carts, cycle rickshaws and people on foot.
They leave the taxi on Strand Bank Road, the smell of rank mud and smoke grasping at their clothes.
‘This way,’ says Raj, and they cross the stone hearth to the ghat. As they enter the courtyard, a bamboo stretcher borne by a group of sweating, chanting men pass them.
‘ … Ram Nam Satya Hai, Ram Nam Satya Hai, Ram Nam Satya Hai…’ The parcel is topped with orange marigolds and tinsel. ‘ … Ram Nam Satya Hai, Ram Nam Satya Hai…’
It takes Rudra a minute to realise that the white shrouded figure is a body.
‘The name of the god is truth,’ says Raj. ‘Ram nam – the name of Ram – is breath, is truth.’ He indicates the shrouded figure. ‘This body has breath no more.’
Rudra tries not to inhale the smoke, knowing it is full of teeth and hair and flesh. There are two pyres in the open courtyard at various stages of burning.
‘There is not so much burning here now,’ says Raj. ‘People with much money will go to Varanasi. There they are getting a better rebirth. This Hooghly River – it has some Ganga water inside it but it is not so pure. The poorly people – they are burning in the electric ghat.’
‘Electric ghat?’
‘Yes. Cheaper. Not very much smoke. Good for the environment. They have timetables and screens like a railway station. They even have a mobile phones app to tell when is the righ
t time for arriving.’
Rudra looks at the fizzing, smoking pyres nearby – at the men pushing the sandalwood logs with long poles, arranging the bodies so they burn better. If he were a poet, like Tagore, he would say we are fuel for a greedy world, we are tiger meat, we are ashes. But he is not Tagore. ‘But this traditional way,’ he says, ‘it’s more holy, right? Better?’
‘It is slow. And these men.’ Raj looks around. ‘They breathe smoke, they drink too much whisky, they push the skull and the bone into the fire, and their child will do also.’
They move down to the ghat itself – a pockmarked series of steps, slimy with river mud. There, a woman floats a tiny lamp onto the river. Next to her, a family of tired westerners cast handfuls of ashes into the water. Rudra wonders at their shared pain, the lives they are remembering. The river will take these offerings and carry them to the Sundarbans. There, a girl whose name means song offering once lived. There she pulled a prawn net. Rudra closes his eyes.
‘Everyone will die,’ says Raj, as if he knows what Rudra is thinking. ‘Everyone you see, and then their child and their child. Funeral fires in Varanasi – the fire of Shiva – are burning for three thousand years, making everything clean. They will burn forever.’ He claps his hands as if finalising the thought. ‘I promise to show you Tagore-ji’s memorial.’
Rudra had almost forgotten why they had come. So they turn from the river, past the fires and through an archway. There, without fanfare, in front of them is the memorial for India’s greatest ever writer.
‘They chose those colours?’
‘Some people, they do not like it,’ replies Raj. ‘Every new politician makes it new colours.’
It is dumpy, it is gaudy, it is ugly.
‘Do you think he’d like it?’
‘Which person?’
‘Tagore.’
‘He is dead.’
‘But if he was alive.’
‘But he is dead.’
