A House Called Askival

by Merryn Glover

  When James listened, he said nothing, but his face lay open like a pool. It was bottomless and shadowed, the shape of his skull rising like a stone beneath the surface, the gap of his mouth revealing yellow teeth, jutting and crooked. Looking at him, she felt the burden of what lay unsaid between them and the fear that it was too late.

  One evening she stood on the terrace with Dr Lakshman as dusk settled over the mountain. The lights in the bazaar were winking on and the sun was gathering the last colours of the day under wings of cloud.

  ‘You need to be ready, Ruth,’ he said. ‘It’s not long now.’

  She nodded. ‘Is he in pain?’

  ‘He will be, but he hides it. I’ve given him morphine and I’ll come back again in the morning. Call me in the night if he seems to get worse. I mean it – call me.’ His eyes were like deep wells, drawing her in, drowning her. She broke his gaze.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He hesitated. ‘Are you all right here with Iqbal?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s great. And the Rev visits a lot.’ She jerked a thumb to the house, where Verghese was sitting with James.

  ‘When’s Hannah coming?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Five days. Ok. Let’s hope…’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Are you ok, Ruthie?’

  She looked back at him for a moment, knowing his concern was real, but also his desire.

  ‘Yeah. Fine,’ she said, and folded her arms, squinting across to the sunset. He sighed and took his leave. Once he had disappeared around the side of the hill, she rammed her hands in her pockets and turned up the higher path to the road, where she started to run.

  By the time she got to Askival, she was crying. Panting for breath, her side splitting with cramp, she scrambled over the locked gate and up the path. At the veranda steps she grabbed a loose brick and hurled it at the front door. It smashed through the rotting wood and bounced down the hall, splitting open on the floor. She followed it, pushing through the house, crashing into doors, hitting walls, kicking anything that lay in her path. All that she had cleaned and scrubbed and painted she now spat upon.

  When Iqbal found her she was a sobbing clot on the south veranda, a mess of dirt and scum and tears. He squatted and offered his handkerchief.

  ‘He’s leaving,’ she said, shaking as she pressed the hanky to her nose.

  ‘He’s going home,’ murmured Iqbal.

  ‘Don’t give me that. Don’t give me any of that heaven, God, going home shit. I don’t believe it!’ There was a rage in her voice as if a fissure had opened and released a jet of fire.

  ‘But he believes,’ pleaded Iqbal.

  ‘I know he does. And that’s the problem. Always has been. God, God, God, God, GOD!’

  Iqbal took her by the shoulders, shaking his head, shushing and clicking his tongue. ‘No, no, no,’ he hushed.

  ‘Oh, yes! Everything – us – given up for God – sacrificed, thrown to the birds.’

  Iqbal sucked in his breath. ‘Never, never,’ he breathed.

  ‘Yes, ALWAYS. God took everything!’ And she flung Iqbal’s hands off her shoulders and curled up again, overcome by sobs.

  By the time her cries had settled to occasional shudders, the night had become dark. She blew her nose and sat up, pulling her jacket close. Just off the edge of the veranda, Iqbal was building a small pyramid of sticks over dry leaves. There was a rattle of matches, a spark, then a tongue of flame. Iqbal fed it with tiny twigs until there was a crackle and spit and one of the bigger sticks flared.

  Ruth felt another tear run down her cheek and brushed it roughly away, fumbling in her pocket for a cigarette. Lighting up, she leaned back against a pillar and cursed the trembling of her hands and the after-sobs that kept rising, unbidden. Iqbal did not look at her and it was a long time before he spoke.

  ‘You have celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr with me.’ He paused. ‘But there is another Eid, coming soon. Eid-ul-Adha. I hope you will be here for that one also – it is very special.’ The fire hissed, a burst of sparks. ‘It remembers when God asked Ibrahim to lay his only beloved son on the altar.’

  Ruth watched him, the way the firelight played over his face, alight, shining, etched with dark.

  His voice held sadness. ‘Because Ibrahim loved that child more than anything.’

  Hers was a rasp. ‘And God can’t bear that.’

  ‘God loved him even more. And he gave the sheep.’

  ‘Not for me.’ Or for Manveer, she thought.

  Iqbal was quiet. Poked another stick in the fire.

  ‘For you too. The Lamb of God.’

  Ruth felt the heat of the fire on her face, the swelling of raw eyeballs, the cracks in her lips.

  ‘But sometimes,’ Iqbal went on, ‘we keep our beloved on the altar because we have not seen the lamb.’

  The pines above stirred in a soft breeze, a sighing chorus.

  ‘Or,’ he propped his elbows on his knees, hands dangling, ‘because we cannot believe it is enough.’

  She waited, but he was still.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  For the first time since lighting the fire he looked at her, his gaze gentle yet penetrating; then he turned to the dark archway of the living room behind.

  ‘Is very quiet for a house full of ghosts.’

  Ruth followed his gaze, then looked back to his face.

  ‘The poisoned British family,’ he went on. ‘The caste-breaking lovers, hmm? Perhaps my own father is sometimes visiting.’

  A silence.

  ‘And the other ghosts, Ruthie? Shall we let them go?’

  She said nothing. Just smoked and kept her gaze on the fire.

  ‘I read your letters, but they are stopping at the most interesting part. You are in Delhi, rehearsing for Gospel of Jyoti. But then? Nothing more.’

  The breeze in the pines picked up, the fire whipped.

  Her voice held a vast weariness. ‘The end.’

  ‘Please tell.’

  ‘What do you already know?’

  ‘Not much, I think. Not your side.’

  She was quiet for the longest time, and then began, in a low, ragged voice, to tell the whole story, from assassination to lovers tryst, mob violence to haircut, Manveer’s death to Mr Haskell’s lie. How no-one believed her and she had been blamed. How, after her expulsion, she was not allowed to go home, but made to stay with another family in Kanpur because Ellen said her presence would make James worse. It seemed Ellen herself could not bear to be near her. How, when they packed for America a few weeks later, Ellen told her she would not be coming back. And how, at Hannah’s wedding in Tennessee, just after they arrived, the bride was radiant but the rest of the family so destroyed they could barely speak. The day after, Ruth had got on a Greyhound bus and left.

  ‘But the worst thing,’ she said, ‘was thinking about Manveer’s parents. They had to come all the way from Canada to collect the body of their first born, their only son, their beloved. And what did they find, when they took him in their arms? His hair hacked off and no sacred comb. No shorts to guard his purity, no kirpan at his side, no kara. Not one of the Five Ks left. Nothing but a body that had broken the law of chastity and – so they were told – the law against addictive substances. Their son was not just dead, he was desecrated.’

  She was quiet. Her voice, when it came, was a whisper. ‘And all… because of me.’

  There was a long silence, with only the hushing of the trees and the burning of the fire.

  ‘You are carrying great burden,’ Iqbal said at last. ‘And this is why you are losing God.’

  There was silence.

  ‘No Iqbal,’ she replied. ‘God is why I lost everything.’

  He shook his head softly and held a stick in the flames.

  ‘Please,’ he asked. ‘May I also tell one story? Is not explaining all things, but maybe casting the light.’

  Ruth nodded and moved closer to the fire.

  The story Iqbal told was not his own, but t
he story of one who had been unable to speak it himself. The whole story, from a buck’s head to a pair of burnt boots, from a widow’s screams to a boy’s silent pledge, from a father’s cross to a daughter’s fall.

  FORTY-FIVE

  James had often played with the baby Iqbal on the south veranda of Askival where the sun fell in slanting rectangles. When they returned to it over fifty years later, the house was quietly falling apart, a sheet of tin roof missing, windows long gone, walls crumbling. But on that late May day the sun was languid and soft, sweet with the sap of deodar and the warm fragrance of grass. Wild roses grew up the pillars and tangled with the broken guttering. Stands of purple cosmos filled the terraces, butterflies skittered. The two men sat in pools of light, sunshine warming their heads, and looked down to the spread of the bazaar and on to the gauzy blur of the plains. Crickets sang.

  James did not need to tell the whole story – the truth at last – because Iqbal already knew it. In fact, Iqbal had told it to him the night before when James finally let him in. It was the night, three weeks after Ellen’s death, when James had tried to cook Tuna Hash but ended on the sofa, sobbing.

  Iqbal told the story just as Salima had told it to him: in quiet voice, with no one else around. Because she knew and had always known. Aziz feared guns and had never touched the Connors’ weapons. Though he’d often accompanied them on their hunts, it was for the butchering and cooking, but never to shoot. And even if, in the terror of that night, he’d dared to lift the rifle, he would not have known what to do with it, how to aim, what to push or pull. Most likely he would have shot himself. What’s more, Salima knew he wasn’t wearing his glasses. The spares, for which he had returned to Askival, were tucked inside his shawl back at Rampur House. She’d found them the next day. But more than all of that, Salima knew because of James: his face when he arrived with Leota, his hands clawing at his sweaty underarms, his running away.

  But she never breathed a word to anyone but Iqbal and swore him to secrecy. It was the Connors’ missionary friends in Pakistan who employed them, the Connors’ pension that sent Iqbal to school, the Connors’ good name that guaranteed them work, shelter and a future, and the Connors’ story, therefore, that must be maintained.

  The truth, she told Iqbal, was that his father was noble and brave and good. He had taken no life, but had given his own for the love of others.

  James acknowledged this truth like a leper unwrapping bandages. It was a truth so deeply buried beneath the accretions of guilt and shame, and such a threat to the family mythology, that he’d never been able to expose it. He’d never told anyone. Not even Ellen. He had come close, in the time after his breakdown when he was recovering in a retreat house in Arizona. It was run by Catholic monks and the very idea of it would have made his flesh crawl a few years earlier, but Ellen had pleaded and James was so deep in despair he was past caring where they put him. He was given a spiritual director who quietly walked him to meals and prayers and out into the desert each day. The Brother asked nothing and James said nothing. Silence. After the mountains of India and the crush of its plains, this place was empty. He could see nothing in it, hear nothing, smell nothing. Slowly, he realised the Brother was talking; just a little bit, now and again. Not about James’ breakdown, or his past, or his faith. He was simply pointing out a cactus coming into flower, the cry of a bird, the colours in the rock. Then one day it rained. James stood in it, the silver needles sloping down and impaling him, the smell of the dirt rising up; it was like a ladder of angels descending and ascending into heaven.

  That night, as he lay his head against the communion rail, the Brother told James that, whatever he’d done, God had forgiven him.

  All James could tell Ellen was that they were going back to India.

  What began through the Brother in the desert, and was nearly destroyed at Ellen’s death, found new life in Iqbal. The man had not come to accuse, to avenge or to demand reparation. He had come to fulfil his father’s heart.

  James did not say much to Iqbal that day, but enough to ask and receive the forgiveness that was needed. As they closed the gate on Askival and walked home, the trees around were alive with birds.

  FORTY-SIX

  It was the final rehearsal in Benson Hall, the day before they squeezed into their bus and drove down to Delhi. Mr Haskell told them to give it all they had, like it was the real thing, a full-on performance with a packed house.

  But because they did not know this rehearsal was all they would have – because they still believed in happy endings – it became something of a farce. People forgot their lines, costumes fell off, ankle bells went skidding across the stage. There was giggling and hi-jinks and so much fun in the dressing room that the Wedding at Kanpur scene began completely without guests. At which point, Mr Haskell threw down his script.

  ‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Leave!’ Everyone froze. ‘I have worked myself to the bone on this show. For years.’ His face was wild. ‘I didn’t force anyone to join me. You wanted to be a part of this. And all along I said it would be hard work and I didn’t want half-hearts or lazy-bones or fools. All or nothing!’

  There was a terrible silence.

  ‘So go!’ His voice was like a cry in the desert, his finger pointing to the door. ‘Go now if you will not give me your best.’ No one moved or made a sound. There was a glitter in Mr Haskell’s eyes as he spun on his heel and walked up the long aisle alone. At the door he turned.

  ‘I’m coming back in ten minutes. If you’re still here, then you’re promising to work your butts off.’

  They were all there. And their butts did not disappoint. They worked like it was the real thing, and when they looked back they were glad of it, for in the end it was all they had.

  Especially Ruth. She danced like her life depended on it; like it was her life. As she waited in the wings during the Feeding of the Five Thousand she felt a speeding of her heartbeat. The disciples were singing and passing chapattis around. Manveer was standing beside her, close enough that they nearly touched. Then Jesu was alone on the stage. He tore a last chapatti in his hands, lifted it to heaven and cried out, ‘This is my body.’ It was Ruth’s cue.

  ‘Break a leg,’ Manveer whispered, his lips moving close to the sparkly scarf on her hair. She flashed him a smile and spun onto the stage. This was Maya Magdalen’s most impressive scene: the exorcising of her demons. The cast had entered a lengthy discussion about what these demons might have been, as the original text is not specific, but Mr Haskell eventually settled on the Deadly Sins. Thus, the scene came to be called the Dance of the Seven Deadly Djinns, with the evil spirits represented by coloured scarves tucked into her waist.

  Maya’s first weapon of attack was Lust, the one by which she plied her trade and gained power over men. Mrs Banwarilal’s original choreography was so potent, however, that a sweating Mr Haskell had been required to edit it. Jesu, of course, was unphased and whipped the offending red scarf from her waist the moment before she pinned him to the ground.

  Maya spun into her Gluttony sequence, rolling her eyes and gnashing her teeth as if she would devour him on the spot. But just as she seized his chapatti, Jesu got her orange scarf and flung it to the corner of the stage. She surrendered the chapatti and he tore off a piece and offered it. She took, but did not eat.

  It was Sloth next, though that was a little harder to dance. They’d tried a few approaches. In one, she had lain on the floor being bored and beautiful with Jesu trying to kick her into action. It made everyone laugh and him look impotent. Then there was the idea of her with a water pot that she was refusing to carry to the well, but it just made her appear petulant and alluring, and him… well, impotent again, so they cut it. It provoked a heated debate about the nature of Sloth. Was it merely a ‘couldn’t be bothered’ Sunday afternoon feeling, and if so, was that such a sin? Or was it more? Dorcas raised the point about the sins of inaction. So, for Sloth, a stream of beggars, lepers and starving children passed across the stage as Maya p
ressed her hands over her mouth, her ears, and her eyes. Until Jesu yanked out the yellow scarf and she turned to see them.

  Avarice was easy. She stole all the jewellery off the girls in the chorus line and gathered it into her blue scarf. Jesu hurled it into the wings where Kashi was supposed to catch it, but failed every time, occasioning a clattering of bangles and bells and a great deal of hissed swearing.

  For Envy, Maya wound her green scarf around herself and then twisted and wrung it till finally it threatened to strangle her. Jesu removed it in the nick of time, stamping on its python head.

  But was Maya Magdalen grateful? No indeed, she was furious. Seething. Like a wounded beast she roared her Wrath at Jesu, her feet pounding the stage, arms flailing. When he finally wrestled the black scarf from her hands, she spun helplessly to one side and stopped, crouching, with arms gripping herself. He let the scarf drop, stood panting and watching her, his bare chest a glistening sheen, eyes like burning coals. Then he offered his hand.

  But did she take it? Was she thankful yet for all he had cast out? No! Of course not. She recoiled from him, drew herself up to her full height and turned her back. One demon remained. The last demon, most deeply rooted, for it was the first. The first sin, indeed, even before the Fall. The one that caused the fall before the Fall. The fall to end all falls, to start all falls, to set the Fall rolling, one might say.

  Maya’s back was like stone, her neck long and hard, arms clenched as if chained, breast cold. How can Jesu break Pride? How remove her purple scarf, now she has pulled it over her face? He seems to have given up. He picks up a broom and sweeps. He carries a clay pot and pours water into a blue plastic basin. Tying the scarf of Wrath around his waist, he kneels at Maya’s feet, the basin at his side. She is still turned away, her face to the back wall. He sprinkles water on her ankles, her heels. Her head drops an inch. He lifts one foot; she trembles slightly, balancing on the other. He washes the foot, dries it with his scarf and sets it down. Her head is lower now, resting on her chest. He washes the other foot, this time with tears, and presses it into his hair. Her back is bent forward, her body shaking. Then he kisses her foot, and she falls. Free.