by Neil Grant
This could go on forever but Rudra knows Raj would win – he has the patience and persistence. Instead they move back into the cremation grounds. As they pass the funeral pyres, Raj nods at a woman in white, staring directly into the flames. ‘She is a widow,’ he says. ‘It is usual she would be only at home. But, yet, there she is.’
The woman is too close to the radiating heat. Her skin is dull and loose around her elbows. Her hair is a bunch of brittle twigs beneath her sari. She might catch fire.
‘Sometimes in the olden times it was needed that the widow do sati – that she burn on her husband’s fire. The government do not allow it now. Sometimes it still happens. Maybe over many hundred years all of our old, bad things will be taken by the government.’
‘What about the other things? The good things – the ceremonies, the festivals and languages? The beautiful stories?’
‘That will also go.’ Raj shrugs as if this is a done deal.
Rudra feels the red cord the woodcutters’ bauliya gave to Gita still on his arm. You need protection more than me, she’d said as she handed it to him on the riverbank. And that very night a tiger dragged her from her room. Slipped her silently into the river and swam away.
It is time now. With his mission done he can make a final offering. He pulls at the cord until it cuts into his bicep. When it breaks, he feels the release in his muscle and a tingling where it once was. As they walk back past the funeral pyres, he casts the cord into the fire.
He can’t be sure it is anything – just a trick of the light, a flare of the fire that might make the extinguishing of a holy item more than the mere burning of a cotton thread. ‘Did you see that?’ he asks Raj. But Raj is intent on lighting his beedi – rolling it through the match-flame.
27
THE TIGER DRAWS HIMSELF FROM THE FOREST like a filament of night, the dark knives on his pelt exhaling shadows. He is not running and not walking. It is a pace that will allow for kilometres of village paths, of bunds and paddy fields and the vast gleaming snakes of train track. His hunger is tinder-dry inside him. It rattles like a bone in a cage.
He pauses only to drink and the closer he gets to the city, the more he can taste it – a film of oil and soot dribbled over puddles, and over streams that thin into veins. The city is not his place and that troubles him.
When the metal tracks shake and hum, he knows to retreat to the verges, to allow the noise and light to pass by. Mud huts pump tin music into the air, cow-shit smoke dimples the night. And still he keeps on, feeling the rhythm in his shoulders and in his rump. The soft trumpeting of his footfalls, calling, answering a mantra that checks his stride.
The spaces between grow smaller. Things start to pile on top. Wires enter and exit the wounds of houses. Mud gives way to brick then to concrete and although he does not have the words for these things, he does not fear them. He has stored the forest inside and it sustains him now.
Here everything has been scoured. Here, these people, these animals who think they are above it all, have replaced what lay beneath with everything they have made. He pities them. Because it cannot last. Because everything they throw against the world is futile. One day, when they are gone, the forest will return. This is true savagery – the art of waiting and persisting.
Soon there is too much light. It catches in his eyes and makes them flare. It burns his pelt, bleaches the fire orange to dulled rust. He trots between patches of shadow and, when the stars disappear, he begins to run.
Rudra wakes as the light in his room shudders and dies. The way to the window is paved with plates and cups. He weaves his way through and looks out on a Kolkata devoid of light. This happens, he knows, when the city flicks off the power for hours at a time. Brownouts, they call them, because they are not as serious as blackouts, though they can be equally dark.
Slowly, lamps are lit, bleeding pools of copper. As his eyes adjust, he sees the peepal tree and below it the hump of the sweetmaker’s cart. Something is there – the slightest movement between oily shadow and night. He narrows his eyes in an attempt to drill into the dark.
He closes the door to his room and creeps down the stairway. The Beamish creaks and groans like a ship at anchor. He crosses the foyer and slips down the front steps. The sweetmaker’s cart is twenty paces off.
The tiger swallows the light as if it is nothing. He sees the boy at the window and then coming down the stairs. He snarls at his arrogance.
He remembers the temple grounds, the slabs of stone cracked open with tendrils, the forest fingers pushing and finding. He still has the taste of his meal, the blood dried on his muzzle.
He recalls a man with a waxed moustache, gun glinting with starlight. Then that long-ago night slashed open with gunpowder flash; that noise, that hit – a pummel, a hoarse bark. Them dragging a broken bag of skin-and-bone, breaking shins so he fits. The stencil of a skull in his mind, carried to a far land. To a boat in the darkness, burning, set fire by madness and anger. Flint and steel, he cried, that madman. Flint and steel. And the fish singing their crazy-making song. The boat drawn down, belching clouds of air. And the skull resting, seaworms turning in eyesockets.
Rudra watches as the tiger steps from behind the sweetmaker’s cart. So big that it makes him gasp. So unfair, he thinks. The advantage is always with the hunter. It can so rarely work out right for the prey. If only he had a gun, he could crack that skull open one more time. But he has nothing. Just bare hands. He threw the red cord into the funeral pyre. You need protection more than me. He curses his stupidity.
He thinks of what he has killed in his life and what he has demanded to die so he can keep on living. We all end as food, he thinks. He is no longer afraid and wonders if that is how Gita was in the end. Wonders if everyone surrenders at the right time.
Then he thinks about the equation that has led to this final reckoning. His mother’s grandfather taken by the tiger. The tiger taken by his father’s grandfather. And now him, alone on this the last night on earth in Kolkata – the city of Kali.
Kali – the black one, the destroyer. The goddess of taxi drivers and poachers. And sweetsellers. A modern goddess for modern times. The annihilator of ignorance.
The tiger looks at the boy sideways, avoiding his direct gaze. All tigers despise the look of a human face. That gloating guilt-giving stare. Something about the open ground between the features causing them to squirm.
A time past, under the sea, fish worshipped the skull, singing songs of praise that rose as bubbles in the blood. Shadows passing above and nets widening their greedy mouths to gulp and gulp and gulp. The skull beneath all that water. Not enough to keep it drowned. Uncovering itself.
Rudra doesn’t speak, doesn’t need to speak. He has walked the tiger paths in his dreams – from Dark Corner to Patonga Creek to Netidhophani. He understands that this tiger, that Dokkhin Rai, is part of him, of his family. Anger and revenge have kept this going – leapfrogging their way through history. He must cut the line now and watch it tumble back into the dark. He must let go.
The tiger opens his muzzle and roars, and the leaves on the peepal tree quiver. His whiskers twitch. He takes a step back. But it is not a retreat. He turns into the shadow of the sweetseller’s cart. And as he goes, he feels fingers brush his pelt, playing each one of his stripes like the string of a sitar. The wound on his flank knits, heals, scars, then disappears.
Across Kolkata lights return. TVs flicker into life. Bollywood drama flares across the suburbs from North Dumdum to Tollygunge. Cricket matches played in far-off lands erupt onscreen. The shadows that had played the parts of ghost and goddess are driven off.
Rudra feels a hand on his shoulder.
‘You have been dream-walking,’ says Raj. ‘I was watching you from there.’ He nods to the Beamish steps.
‘Did you see the tiger?’ asks Rudra.
‘A tiger in Kolkata?’ Raj smiles. ‘There was no tiger.’
‘I saw him.’
‘Maybe so,’ says Raj. ‘But he wa
s not there.’
28
THE PLANE COMES LOW OVER SYDNEY – the towers of the CBD nicked with morning light. The coathanger bridge hangs over the harbour, all dark and spidery in some steam-punk dream. Beside it, the Opera House is a lotus grown from the cracks in Bennelong Point.
Everyone returning is cowed by it. They sit in rows, silently fingering beads bought on Sudder Street or flicking through their photos of wild-eyed sadhus smoking chillums by the Ganga at Varanasi, a camel safari (one day too long) in the Thar Desert. Some are expat Indians, coming back to Australia. They do not call Australia home, even though their children were born here. Even though they have lived here twenty years and have houses in Eastwood and Marrickville and go to Bondi on Sunday and sink their toes into the sand; when they spread picnic blankets, they cover them with tiffin pots of rogan josh, aloo gobi, rice and naan. This is not home. Will it ever be?
Outside the perspex windows, Sydney does not care for them. And inside, their kids are on their phones, faces blue with reflected light, sweeter than Krishna sometimes. They took them home to meet the family – outside Chandigarh. Took them to the village where they were born. Showed them the tractor they had bought and given to their brothers. The kids were bored to tears. Hated the flat fields and the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Blushed at the ceremony and poverty. Were frightened by dogs and beggars. Were charmed by the monkeys until they bared their teeth.
And now they are all coming home. Home? The adults confused and stateless, refusing to believe the India they left behind has gone forever. The children determined to become more Australian, to never eat puris or dosas, to never visit the gurdwara or mandir, and utter those high, rattling syllables. They are practising their rising inflection even as they land, their quickfire east coast prattle that their parents can only catch half of, words that the old folk will never understand.
But there is one boy – older than the others – alone (in that, some suspicion). His hair smells of Kolkata – the charnel houses down by the river, ghee from a sweetmaker’s pot, the bitter breath of Hindustan taxis. He is staring at the seatback and imagining a land where eighteen tides worry mud-walled houses and reclaim the bunds. And as they taxi to the gate, he knows it is vanishing from him, slipping back under the cha-coloured waters.
Cord is laid up in a four-bed ward with wires and masks and beeping machinery. Rudra recognises shame, or something very like it, as he catches his father’s eye. The nurse has prepared him. Cord is paralysed down one side.
‘Like a stroke,’ she says. ‘No air, you see. It starved that part of his brain.’
‘Will he work again?’ Rudra asks.
She says, ‘You’ll have to ask the doctor that,’ and refuses to look at him, so Rudra thinks not.
He takes a chair by the bed. Damp plastic. The sweet alcohol scent of hand sanitiser. His dad rolls his head towards him, one side of his face a landslide. He doesn’t speak. Not even hello. Rudra is braver now, but he can still feel the words stuck like urchin spines in his throat.
‘I took it back,’ he blurts.
His dad’s eyes narrow.
‘The skull. It’s back in the Sundarbans now. Back where it belongs. The curse is done.’
Curse. Where did that come from? What curse? He should have said anger – something Cord could grip hold of.
His dad snorts, pulls the covers around him. The sheets are stained slightly around the edges, like the scum on a flood tide. He grabs a remote with his good hand and clicks on the TV. That’s all from us for today, announces the talk show host. And Rudra, picking up his bag, exits the room.
29
HE MAKES THE NEWCASTLE TRAIN, RUNNING DOWN Platform Nine at Central, entering the carriage breathless and sweaty.
After the Long Island Tunnel, they cross the Hawkesbury Bridge. He remembers that night – so long ago now, it seems – when they came up under the bridge in the Paper Tiger. Out for prawns and mere hours away from pulling up the skull. Dredging up the past, Cord might call it.
Downstream, the old sandstone pylons battle the tide. Once, long ago, before the bridge existed, a paddle-steamer would cart passengers down to Broken Bay and into Brisbane Water, dumping them at Gosford – their tall hats, tweed suits and petticoats freckled with salt.
In the future, in the present, in the stinging blindness of right now, the train pierces the Cogra Point tunnel. Rudra welcomes the darkness. He has left behind the ghost island, a bund that does not protect, an aunt who is not an aunt, and a blessing cord from a girl he barely got to know.
They drift up beside the oyster leases at Mullet Creek, trees scudding by like ghosts, the escarpment bleeding vegetation to the water’s edge. The train slows, then creaks to a stop at Wondabyne. The platform is so short passengers have to ride the last carriage to get off.
A woman and a young boy step out. A man is there, with his hands in his pockets. He is in exactly the right spot, bringing the woman’s face into his hands and kissing it, tucking a loop of hair behind her ear. Rudra feels that he should look away, but he watches the man sweep the boy into his arms, throwing him into the air as if he is meant to fly. He carries him and a battered suitcase towards the crossing. Through the scratched glass of the carriage, Rudra sees their dog miming barking from a boat tied at the jetty.
They have been away, he imagines, the child and his mother. Overseas – somewhere exotic – visiting family. He, the father, has remained behind; he has to work, otherwise he would have joined them. He’s an oyster farmer but he takes the time to teach his boy the things he learnt as a child – how to kill mullet and make a gumleaf whistle, the secret tracks to caves with scraped symbols and pools deep enough to lose a boy. Their house is across the river, accessible only by boat. That is their yacht tugging at the reflection of Mount Wondabyne. Everything arrives by boat. The mail is carried by the tangled-beard skipper – salt-chapped hands, trousers eyed with fish scales.
The father lowers his son into the boat. The dog licks the boy’s face and they laugh. Gerraway, says the boy. Make him stop. His dad ruffles his hair. He loves you. He pulls the motor into life and the dinghy skips across the river. The woman sits in the bow, smells the air, lets it sit in her throat. She feels like singing. And the boy sits beside his father and is allowed to steer. The father feels like a tree beside him – solid, dependable, supple.
But Rudra is down the line as all this comes into being. Or maybe it never happens, only in his head. He wants this to be so badly. Wants a chance to have that sort of dad.
He turns on his phone and waits for the signal. Then he rings.
A woman sitting opposite him stares at him as he begins his conversation. She has a wispy beard and sallow smoker’s skin.
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Rudra, it’s so good to hear your voice. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘How was the trip?’
‘It was okay. Long.’
‘And now you’re almost home.’
‘I have so much to tell you, Mum. Things happened.’
‘What happened? Tell me.’
‘When I get home. I saw Dad …’
‘He needed to see you. How did he seem?’
‘He was okay.’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing you.’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing you too. Where are you?’
‘Gosford.’
‘How did you know which train?’
‘Us Indians, you know – fortune tellers and all.’
‘You’re too funny. You should have your own show.’
‘You think so?’
‘Not really. How’s Wallace?’
‘He is okay. He’s working for Wink now.’
‘What does Dad think about that?’
‘What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.’
‘I guess so.’
‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘Okay. I’ll stay on until Gosford. I’ll see you then. I love you, Mum.’
&nbs
p; Rudra hangs up. The phone stays warm in his hand as if it has held some of what passed through its metal soul.
‘This is a quiet carriage, you know,’ says the lady opposite.
‘It was my mum.’
‘It’s a quiet carriage.’
‘I know. Sorry,’ says Rudra. ‘I’ve just been to India to scatter my grandmother’s ashes. She was from there. A place called the Sundarbans actually.’
‘I don’t care, boy. This is a quiet carriage and you need to be silent if you’re here. That’s the meaning of quiet. No noise, see.’
‘My friend – she was called Gita.’
Was called Gita. Was a meendhara. Was pulled from her mud hut by the river. Was going to college.
The woman is wary of the tears. The boy could be dangerous. ‘Just keep it down, okay.’
‘There’s this guy too – called Raj. He’s not the best guide in the world, not the best hotel doorman, smokes too much and scared as hell of the water. But he’s going to be a Bollywood star.’
‘I’ll make a complaint, I will. This is a quiet carriage. It means, be quiet. No noise. People sit here ’cause they don’t want to be disturbed. Then there’s you harping on about nothing, taking phone calls, making a general nuisance.’
‘Raj was teaching me a lesson.’ The switch flicks in Rudra’s mind. ‘About going for what you believe no matter what people think.’
‘That’s it. When we get to Woy Woy, I’m telling the stationmaster. You can’t just get away with it.’
‘I’ll finish the summer on the boat, that might make Cord happy.’
‘Alright, you’ve had your say. Can you just be quiet now? It’s not just me, you know, there’s others on this carriage that deserve a bit of hush.’
Rudra smiles at the woman and she looks away.
