Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  I can’t wait to tell Barbara. I ring her straight away. Her mobile ringing tone goes to that continental brrrr, brrrr, brrrr, brrrr. Still on holiday, then. My heart is beating with happiness and excitement. Everything is going to be all right. The phone picks up. Hello! I am so eager to tell her that I blurt it out without preamble, how a man and boy appeared in the garden, but Barbara cuts me off quickly. What do I want? I tell her the purse has turned up! But before I can explain, she cuts me off.

  ‘I am glad you found your money,’ she says curtly.

  I am confused by her word choice. Although I am wrong-footed I start to relate the story, of the man and the boy suddenly appearing in the garden, but she cuts me off again. They are on holiday and busy and she needs to go. What she is making very clear is that she is not interested. I am the child-accuser. The phone goes to dialling tone. My elation slumps. It is too late. The damage has been done. There will be no stepping into each other’s shoes. As far as she is concerned I suspected her innocent children of the most heinous crime. She is pissed off. And will remain so. And, frankly, who can blame her?

  So, naturally, I do begin to blame her. After all, they went out for tea and left the bleeding window wide open; it was open when we arrived home, and our kitchen chairs were out in the rain, and the backgammon and chess boards were all moved about and not put back, and the key was in the wrong place, and, and, and worse, she had never called us back, even if it was just to talk it through. No, I shouldn’t have said anything, Rob was right, it would have all sorted itself out, without them ever knowing. I fucked up big time.

  And it is not the end for Barbara either, because what filters back is that she is convinced I have made the whole story up. That the black purse was never lost in the first place. Or there was no purse. I just decided to accuse them. Barbara doesn’t believe me. Barbara has never believed me. Teach me to mess with a mother and her children. So I email Barbara. Yes, I do, I still want to try to make amends. I say I can only imagine how horrible it must have been for them and that I am SO SORRY and I apologise and scrape. I am so sorry and I was careless of her feelings. I want to make it better. I really do. Because I hate bad feeling and we see each other, not all the time, but at social events sometimes. I hate not being able to defend myself, and somehow I feel it’s all my fault, because it certainly isn’t theirs. And also because there the unlanced carbuncle sits, ugly, throbbing, suppurating in my head, and each time I think about it, it is toe-curlingly bad, and not getting any better. Nothing. Two days, three days, a week. Until at last, my email is coolly acknowledged. But it is clear that the offence committed and the offence taken is fixed.

  Back I go into my writing shed, tap, tapping away, trying to get on with it, deleting, trying again, deleting. Meanwhile, Barbara’s new novel is published. How brilliant it is, everyone says. I hear her interviewed on the radio. I see her handsome face in the papers. I see (but don’t read) her glowing reviews. Then I hear she is on the longlist for a most prestigious prize. Then she is on the shortlist. I imagine being woken up by Barbara being interviewed on the Today programme. Then paraded all over the front pages. Beaming out. My guilt is stalking me, and there is a great big rub-your-nose-in-it judge in the sky. No rising above it, not big enough. If only there was a way to make the impending possibility of Barbara’s win bearable . . .

  Ha. I go online. I click on William Hill. And I put a hundred pounds on Barbara to win.

  THE GOOD UNCLE

  India. Neither Jonathan nor I have ever been. ‘You’ve never been to India?’ our Australian friend, Trevor, exclaims. But where on earth (or in India) should one begin? We tend to gravitate to places away from people, not towards billions of them. I’ve seen pictures of the streets. It looks hectic. And hot. Trevor says we will be sissies if we go to Goa and lie on the beach. That isn’t really India. I make a lame attempt to read up. Mark Tully begins No Full Stops in India with the reply he gives to people who ask him how he deals with the poverty: he says he doesn’t have to deal with it, the poor do. Günter Grass witnesses India with words and drawings: fast ink-splat pen-work across the page – bones, cows, crows pile up in the refuse heap, circles of drying dung decorate walls. ‘Ignore the misery,’ he wrote. ‘Custom invites you to ignore it.’ I get the guidebooks, doorstoppers of leaden prose full of names I’ve never heard of. In the library I find a photograph in a book on Rajasthan of an ornate carriage drawn by two deer. Trevor thinks we should begin, no messing, in Varanasi. So gladly I put the books away. Our main debate becomes whether to splash out and get a driver, but that feels like a cop out, and so middle class.

  Varanasi, holy city, city of temples, city of pilgrims, is famous, amongst many things, for its ghats – successions of wide stone stairs leading down to the holy river, the Ganges. I make Jonathan come with me to Manikarnika Ghat, which is famous for being the main cremation ghat, where funeral pyres glow day and night, and bodies wrapped in shrouds queue up on biers beside enormous stacks of wood. Wood is very expensive, but to be cremated on the banks of the Ganges is auspicious for the next life as it bestows instant liberation from the cycle of life and death. I’m curious to see a burning hand or foot. Jonathan is more interested in the bloated dead dog in the river, gliding amongst chrysanthemum petals just next to a young boy cleaning his teeth. We sit on the stone steps and wait.

  How very fortunate we are, a whispering man who has appeared from nowhere tells us. We have a great opportunity. A karmic chance. A blessing of good luck from the holy river, he tells us, because we can help the Waiting to Die. The man’s dark eyes bore into our pale eyes. He points upwards. The Waiting to Die are waiting to die in the building right beside the cremation ghat. I look up at the stark, ominous Waiting to Die building. Huge and square and overbearing and derelict-looking, its concrete walls zigzagged with stained cracks. I pale. But how can we help the Waiting to Die? We can visit them. Oh no, please don’t make us. He knows we have come to watch the burning bodies. The accusation is in his stare. He beckons. I really don’t want to go. Certainly not right this minute. I want to stay and see a burning body. We have only just arrived. Yet to refuse, in favour of watching his fellow countrymen burn, feels, well, shameful. He is very insistent. Jonathan is giving me the eye. He seems to think we should visit the Waiting to Die. Jonathan follows the beckoning whispering man. I plod after them. An invisible chain binds us as we are led from spooky room to spooky room. Plod, plod. Everything is bare and stone-coloured: skin, wood, stone. An emaciated old woman sits by the window looking out; another lies on a hard wooden pallet, her bony hand held out for money for wood, like a little bird claw. Blood bangs in my ears. Serves me right. My clot of shame trampling in their death-dust. Plod, plod. Another room. Bony smiles and outstretched bony hands. Plod, plod. More dust, more hands. Bugger this. I pirouette around on my heel, don’t even bother to tell Jonathan, and flee. I speed-walk back the way we came, past the skeleton women on the broken cradle, past the outstretched hands, kicking up the stone-coloured dust as I escape the building, leaving Jonathan to the whispering man.

  I wait for him at the ghat where there is a burning baby and a naked sadhu. In seconds, I am surrounded by children, big children, small children, entrepreneurs in the making: Where you from? Where you going tomorrow? Where you going now? You have ticket? How much you buy ticket?

  Eyes, so many eyes.

  At dawn we take a riverboat to watch the sunrise. Shoals of petals and armadas of candles in tiny coracles float past. Jonathan is aghast when I say, at the boatman’s inquisition, that we have two children. Daughters. ‘Eight—’ I begin, until I realise I shouldn’t have left such young children at home, and clumsily change it to eight-teen, and nineteen. The boatman smiles. Content. It felt weird, Jonathan tells me later. But I say it was easier to deflect the interrogation than have to explain ourselves and be sold lucky stones, or blame God, or meet those saucer eyes. But there was also, if I am honest, a brief sweet moment of parenthood – eighteen and nineteen, mooncal
ves.

  Along the banks, children scavenge the ashes for gold teeth and wedding rings. Dogs fight over black meat. Trees are dressed in living monkeys and paper kites.

  After hours of agonising we decide. (Three days in Varanasi might have helped.) At Agra we are getting a driver. He will meet us off the train. A driver from Delhi to drive us around and wait for us while we see things.

  ‘So what will he do when we’re, I don’t know, looking at a palace?’ I ask Jonathan.

  ‘He’ll wait.’

  ‘What, just wait?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just wait for us? In the car?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what you pay for.’

  ‘What, for hours?’

  ‘Yes. However long it takes.’

  ‘Oh, what, every day he drives us around and waits for us, for two whole weeks, like Lord and Lady Muck?’

  ‘It’s his job,’ Jonathan tells me.

  ‘That’s going to make us feel really great, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s how it is.’

  I can’t see the point of having a feeling-guilty holiday.

  ‘And where does he sleep? In the car?’

  ‘They have drivers’ accommodation.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know where we want to go yet.’

  ‘All these places have rooms where the drivers sleep.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I do. It’s all catered for. Look, it’s different here. It’s a job. It’s a good job. They want to work. They need to work. We are employing them. Or do you want to catch a bus? You want to catch a bus all over Rajasthan with your bag? Have you clocked the buses? We need a driver if we are going to see things properly. If we want to get off the beaten track.’

  ‘So, he is just going to be there, away from his family, twenty-four hours a day at our beck and call?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It feels preposterous, but we decide on it all the same. We book a driver, but not a posh car, not one of those nice Morris Oxford saloon cars – an economy car, without aircon.

  It is with some relief that we board the night train at Varanasi Junction, and find our second-class carriage. The close proximity of our fellow passengers, a family of six, is strangely liberating. Eight of us, three bunks on each side and two at the end. Plus the other members of their family who join us for supper from further up the train. For the next thirteen hours we share our air, front passage, back passage. The father regularly lifts a cheek high off the seat to satisfyingly break wind. We sip sweet chai and rock along. Or pad up the train to the eye-smarting Indian-style loo, where a sticky stainless-steel hole frames the Indian continent flashing by. I traverse it like a spider, keeping my body as far away from everything as I can, bury my nose in my sleeve, then crouch down. After we have been put to bed by the train-bunk wallah, from under my railway blanket I spy on the father in the opposite bunk. His mouth is a fat rosebud of trapped air. It swells like a blister, then bursts. Seven instruments in the orchestra of this carriage. Trumpet for a bottom, oboe for a mouth. The snores are so loud there are times I burst out laughing, like a child.

  *

  Our train pulls into Agra station at dawn. As we look out across the sea of people on the platform and wonder how we will ever find our driver, there’s a voice in the train’s corridor heading straight for our carriage, calling ‘Mr Jonathan, Mr Jonathan’. It is Ajai, our driver, with whom we will spend the next two weeks. The moment I see Ajai, I am filled with an overwhelming gladness. He is young, twenty-three or twenty-four, his clean white teeth flashing in tandem with his pressed cotton shirt.

  Ajai’s not-a-Morris-Oxford is a white Nissan Sunny, a two-door hatchback. Our luggage overflows from the boot onto the back seat. No problem, no problem. We squeeze in. He is very happy to be our driver, very happy. We are very happy too, we tell him.

  Indeed, we couldn’t be happier as we drive off, safe, protected, enwombed in Ajai’s Nissan Sunny, towards the Taj Mahal. What a contrast already. Varanasi, holy city, city of pyres, burden on the senses, altar of the imagination, streaming away in our exhaust trail; flowing away with the holy river in the billowing smoke from the cremation fires, with the orange petals, and dead dogs, and charred pelvises. What a relief. Hooray. No more self-appointed guides. No more compromising situations.

  And so, after Ajai waits for us for the whole morning at the Taj Mahal, we set off to drive across Rajasthan. Within ten minutes of beginning our journey he turns off the main road, and suddenly we are outside the door of a souvenir shop, Enjoy, enjoy. The owner has been waiting for us. He welcomes us with a voice as warm as ripe fruit. I look at the rows of statues and carvings and soapstone ashtrays and my happy fluid mood sets like jelly and my expression sets like soapstone, and we don’t buy anything, and back in the car I tell Ajai we don’t want to go to souvenir shops. He looks uncomfortable. He says it is his job. We say it is his job to drive us around. Ajai explains he will get into trouble if he doesn’t take us to the souvenir shops because his boss tells him to take us there, and we realise we are on the two-door-no-aircon-souvenir-shop-stop-super-economy package. We tell Ajai to call his boss and say that we are a very awkward couple who refuse to go to souvenir shops, and if we are taken to souvenir shops again, we will cancel the trip. Ajai says he will talk to his boss. And we set off again, Ajai’s Indian pop music playing, the windows open and dust billowing everywhere.

  Our first destination is the wildlife sanctuary of Bharatpur, famed for its birds – and, I read somewhere, tigers! Which is why we’ve decided to come here instead of the more famous wildlife park, Ranthambhore, because there will be fewer tourists. And there are fewer tourists. I am not sure where I got this tiger information from, because the last tiger in the park was a poor fleabitten old thing who died decades ago. The only tigers we see at Bharatpur are on the walls of our hotel in black and white photographs – and lifeless, beneath the booted feet of Raj princes and their pith-helmeted colonial white guests. We decide to explore the park on bicycle, which we can hire with a guide at the entrance. But when we tell our tall, thin, allocated guide that we want him for two or three hours, after which we want to explore on our own, he is almost suicidal. He has been waiting four days in the queue for his turn. Bad luck, very bad luck, he shakes his head, for he cannot earn enough money in three hours to look after his family. No, no, not to worry, even though only he is a proper ornithologist, and there are too many guides – who are not proper ornithologists, and there is not enough work to go around, and he will have to go to the back of the queue, and it might be a whole week until it is his turn again, and his mother is in hospital waiting for an operation, and if she doesn’t have the operation she will die, like his brother who died only a few months ago, and his mother is heartbroken, and this is the only money he will earn to pay for the operation, and to pay for his family to live, and his wife is sick as well, and we are not to worry.

  We glumly ride our clanking bikes with wobbly seats along the paths of the wildlife sanctuary, following our bone-thin, downtrodden, unappreciated ornithologist. We see a few deer, a few birds, and some eagle-owl chicks in a nest – which is good, but there has been a drought in this park for some years, so now there are fewer birds, and fewer animals, he explains. Nevertheless, there are rows of stone plaques etched with long lists that hint how many there used to be. On 31 January 1913, HON’BLE Mr MONTAGUE bagged 2,122 birds with forty guns; on 3 December 1914, H.E. Viceroy Lord HARDING bagged 4,062 with forty-nine guns; and in 1916, Lord CHELMSFORD, on the occasion of his visit, blew 4,206 brief feathery lives out of the sky with fifty guns; and there are rather a lot of these names on these plaques, and a vast amount of numbers.

  In contrast to our heavily tipped bicycle guide, Ajai could not be more cheerful, affable, or happy with his lot. We feel very lucky indeed. The souvenir shop blip is forgotten. It is hard to imagine a more likeable driver. He seems completely at ease with us, as we are with him. Each day Ajai likes to practise English wor
ds as we drive along. Tin-opener, business enterprise, washing-up, fluffy dice, corkscrew, salary, weather forecast, what time is lunch, is it boring?, refuse collection, coriander. But Jonathan is called Mr Jonathan, and I am Madam, and some things are fixed, however hard we try.

  And for the next two weeks this becomes our life. Ajai waits for us while we visit enormous forts and opulent palaces and wildlife parks. He assures us he is happy to do this – Enjoy! – and that this is his job. And we get very accustomed to having a driver at our beck and call. We tell him we could not imagine a better driver. And we cannot. Except when he pretends to know the way and refuses to ask and we drive miles in the wrong direction, and I keep asking if this is the right way, and he says yes, it is the right way, madam, because he is too proud to turn around. But he does have the measure of us. ‘Would we like go rat temple? Very few tourists and many, many rats.’ ‘Oh yes, a rat temple, yes, please,’ we say. And there are a million rats, dead rats, live rats, floating rats, baby rats, tame rats, and very, very large rats, swarming through the crumbling ruins and swimming across the fetid pools, with hardly anyone around, except for a very grubby holy man who lures us into a tight corner, and presses his red thumb onto our foreheads leaving a circle of henna like a third eye. We stupidly bow our thanks, but the blessing, or curse or whatever it is, is not of course a gift, but a transaction, and the rupee notes which Jonathan gives him are not enough. Holy man is very angry. We pat our pockets. Holy man is shouting at us. We run away.