A House Called Askival

by Merryn Glover

  FORTY-SEVEN

  In the days after Ruth and Iqbal swapped stories at Askival, she found herself sleeping long hours at night and falling into a doze through the day. It was a healing rest and she gave herself up to its deep work. In bed at night she read the letters sent to James on her mother’s death, and with the familiar ache of loss, felt a swelling of love and pride.

  Through the day, she stayed beside James and wondered how to begin. He slept even more than her and Ruth would watch him, fearing that this time he would not wake. She caught herself praying for time. For courage.

  But Iqbal made her leave the house, sending her on small errands to Sisters Bazaar or the post box near Morrison Church. Just enough time to breathe and feel the sunshine and smell the quiet earth. It was late October and the rains were only a memory, the hillside lush and scrubbed clean, the blue skies clear as a bell.

  ‘A new day!’ Iqbal would say each morning. Did he know it had been Ellen’s line, especially on mornings when the day before had been difficult or the day to come? Like the days they left for boarding, or the morning of Hannah’s wedding.

  Hannah would be with them at the end of the week and Ruth felt both eagerness and anxiety. She had always been welcomed at her sister’s house, but the visits invariably caused mounting tension till Hannah was reduced to polite, strained sentences and Ruth to swearing. Then she would leave. They never got to the bottom of things; it was too far down.

  On her errands, Ruth met people who asked after James and she found it in herself to be courteous, to answer and to listen. It was for him. He’d always had time to stop and be with people. It had annoyed her as a child, and she’d tugged on his legs and whined at him to keep going, but now that he could no longer do it himself, she felt she must. She was his embassy in the world and the knowledge of how poorly she had represented him brought shame.

  It was the feeling that had dogged her since her teens, when her rebellion became wilful, rather than the mere product of personality or pain. She had tried to smother the shame with her sense of injustice, but it only deepened the wound, causing a kind of life-long internal bleeding. And now she was weary. There was no strength left for arguing half-truths or upholding well-worn defences. And strangely, letting them fall did not feel like defeat but a relieved surrender. She had drawn her battle lines in all the wrong places and misunderstood the enemy.

  When she arrived home one day she saw Iqbal through the window, kneeling beside her father’s bed, talking with him. He was holding James’ hands and his face was intent and earnest, almost pleading. As Ruth walked in, he looked up, startled, and with a quick squeeze of James’ hands, stood and started bustling with the shopping bags. James’ gaze was on the forested ridges to the east, a rumpled blanket of fading greens beneath the wide sky. A great bird wheeled on the currents above Witches Hill and far off, a truck lumbered like a beetle on the Tehri road.

  That night Iqbal and Ruth made chapattis and channa for supper. Whenever Ruth looked across, James was watching her, completely still but for his eyes. They spread the food on the coffee table and sat on the sofa opposite his bed, bowing their heads for his prayer. It did not come and Ruth stole a glance. He looked asleep, hands folded in his lap, a soft rise and fall in his chest. Then his eyes suddenly flashed open, bright and steely as a hawk’s, looking from her to Iqbal.

  ‘Who will pray?’ his voice rattled. Though faint, it sounded to Ruth like a prophet’s cry. She blinked at him, then turned to Iqbal, who simply nudged her in the ribs and dropped his head.

  ‘For what we are about to receive,’ she mumbled, ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

  Grandma Leota’s prayer.

  ‘Amen!’ exclaimed Iqbal as James gave a small grunt.

  Iqbal offered each dish to James, who shook his head and lifted a crabbed hand in refusal. As the other two ate, they talked about the Oaklands Activity Week. The students were all away on their projects: a hike to the source of the Ganga, a team to Mother Theresa’s in Kolkata, an art tour of Rajasthan. Iqbal’s Indian music pupils were performing in Delhi, though he had made his apologies in order to stay with James.

  ‘Not as good as your Gospel of Jyoti,’ he said, spooning dahi onto his plate, ‘but we have done our best.’ Ruth stopped chewing. Slipped her gaze to James. Since their long-ago phone call on the day of Mrs Gandhi’s cremation, the production had never been mentioned. He looked at her and tilted his head the tiniest bit. Letting out a soft, whistling breath, he dropped his gaze to the chapattis.

  ‘We sure were sorry to miss that show.’

  She swallowed. ‘It was understandable.’

  ‘So sad it all went so wrong. A terrible time.’

  The air pressed around her, pricking with the quietest of sounds: the faraway buzz of a motorbike, the hinges of a screen door, a distant child crying.

  ‘The show was nothing,’ she mumbled. ‘You were going through much worse.’

  ‘And you, Ruthie. Much worse than we knew.’ His voice was slow, infinitely gentle. ‘But we should have known.’

  ‘No, no. How could you? You weren’t there.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  It caught her breath, held her. Then words came in stutters. ‘But I know you couldn’t be, with all the riots – I don’t – I do understand—’

  ‘No. Not then,’ he said, and paused. ‘All the other times.’

  He reached for the chapattis, his bony hands trembling, and Iqbal quickly extended the plate. James took one, tore it in half and raised his eyes to Ruth.

  ‘In the end, when you needed us, little Piyari, we were not there. I’m sorry.’

  She could not speak or move.

  He offered half the chapatti to Iqbal and half to Ruth.

  ‘Take,’ he said.

  They held out their hands like beggars and he rested the pieces of chapatti in their palms. Iqbal lifted it to his forehead and then lowered it to his knees and gazed at it. Ruth was still.

  ‘Eat,’ James said. ‘It is given for you.’

  She understood. Keeping her eyes on the chapatti, she tore off a corner and ate it, slowly, the bread taking the longest time to soften and slip down, where it was a lump in her throat. She looked up at James and saw his eyes resting on her. It was the face she remembered from childhood. The searching intensity of his eyes, the looking right inside her but not fathoming; the knowing and the not knowing, the understanding and the questioning.

  She moved around the table and knelt at the side of his bed. Tearing a fragment of chapatti, she laid it into his outstretched hands. He lifted them, shaking, and lowered his head till his cracked lips closed over the bread. With his face in his hands, he ate and she could see the effort as he swallowed. He reached for the cup of water on the table, spilling it over the rim. Iqbal leapt to help, but James turned it to him.

  ‘Take,’ he said. ‘Drink.’

  Iqbal knelt and sipped. James held out the shaking cup to Ruth and she drank, the water sloshing over the sides and down her chin. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, took the cup and held it for him. He folded his hands over hers, which made the cup jerk and bump against his teeth. The water spilled over his lips, down his jaw and neck and onto his clothes. But he held it there till he had drunk and swallowed.

  Her voice came in a whisper. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Iqbal took the cup and left them, Ruth kneeling beside James, her arms flung across him, face buried in his side.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The next night, as the Friday prayer call pierced the dark outside, Ruth watched Iqbal set down his cloth at the kitchen bench, wash his hands and open the cupboard next to the sink. He drew out his rolled mat and cap and she knew his next move would be to get James’ Bible from the bookshelf. But this time she took it down herself, lowering the ancient book to her father’s lap like a sleeping bird. James was propped up on a dike of cushions and even lifting his head was a strain.

  As Iqbal donned his white cap, Ruth sensed him waiting for
her to go, as she always had done. But she returned to her chair in the corner and sat cross-legged, feet tucked in. He stared from her to her father, but James merely continued turning the pages of the Bible, which he could barely hold. The fragile paper shook. A rustling of words, a stirring of feathers. Iqbal finally took a seat opposite Ruth and clutched his mat.

  In a faded, rattling voice James read:

  Come let us worship and bow down,

  let us kneel before the Lord our God,

  our Maker.

  There was silence. Waiting.

  Ruth closed her eyes. The night was full of still, small voices: the notes of birds, the movement of deepdown things, the breathing of trees. They whispered of all that had passed the night before, in the mystery of bread and cup and the making of peace.

  When she opened her eyes, Iqbal had unrolled his prayer mat in the middle of the room and was standing at one end with his hands at his sides. He lifted his hands above his shoulders, fingers open, tips just touching his ears, and began to sing in Arabic. It was ancient and strange but there were words she knew: Allah – o – Akbar. God is great. As his voice rose and wound itself like invisible ropes in the air, she watched the devotion playing across his face, the trembling of his cheeks and lips, the barely shielded light beneath his lids. He sang on, folding his hands across his chest, bowing, kneeling and dropping forward, nose to the floor.

  Ruth looked at James. He was motionless, hands resting on the Bible, eyes closed. Something inside her took flight.

  FORTY-NINE

  On Saturday morning James lay on the camp bed, his limbs hanging like old leaves, ready for the slightest wind to tug them free. There was light in the room and song: an old recording of a ghazal singer lifting a cracked voice to heaven.

  He watched Ruth through half-closed eyes: the gentle curve of her back as she stooped and stretched, the toss of curls, the fluid arms with their brown-backed hands that were never still. She was pouring hot water into a blue plastic basin, the steam rising around her in clouds. A squirt of bubble bath, a gush from the cold tap, a testing with her fingers. The water sloshing slightly, she carried it over to him and set it on the floor. Then she smiled.

  Iqbal came with a towel and soap and squatted beside James.

  ‘Ready ji?’

  James gave the barest nod and felt Iqbal’s plump hands slide beneath him. As they lay him on the couch, covered with a plastic sheet and towels, he felt the sunshine from the tall windows reach across him like a warm wing. Kneeling, Ruth unbuttoned his flannelette pyjama top and talked about the flowers blooming on the hillside: the cosmos and the wild dahlias and the small, bright things that clung to cliff and branch. He smiled. Iqbal draped a towel over his lap and reached underneath to tug his pyjama bottoms down. Gently, they stroked warm flannels over his body, Iqbal working below the waist, Ruth above. She told him she’d walked the back chakkar early that morning and heard the whistling thrush. He nodded and gave himself to the lifting and washing, body loose as an empty sack, head brimming. The snows were out, she went on, and in the sunrise they were lit up. Like angels.

  He closed his eyes and felt her cradle his head in one hand as she poured water over the crown. She began to rub in shampoo, her kara bumping softly against him as the lather rose round his skull and gave off a long-forgotten fragrance. It filled him, humming notes of jasmine, of sun-dried washing, of Ellen.

  At the other end of his body, Iqbal knelt and bathed his feet.

  Then they dressed him in his soft, worn clothes, wrapped him in a thick shawl and carried him to a chair on the front terrace. The sky was an ocean of air, clear from its blue depths to its infinite shores, galleon clouds resting on its wide sweep. A light wind teased the clumps of wildflowers on the khud and trembled the deep green oaks. Then the wind turned and rushed up the slope, flipping the leaves and turning the hillside silver. Below him, the mountain fell away into the green swathe of the Dun valley where the twin sacred rivers coursed like ribbons of light.

  And in the silence, he felt it.

  A creature landing at his side, wings flashing in the sun.

  And in its voice he heard it. At last.

  The Hundredth and the Holy.

  The Beautiful.

  The Beloved.

  FIFTY

  Hannah arrived that night. Iqbal adored her at once and the pair worked in the kitchen together, chattering like old gossips about her children and how India had changed and the difference between chapattis and tortillas. Ruth stayed at James’ side.

  He drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of consciousness. Sometimes, in his faraway place, he smiled. Once, even, he laughed and they turned to look at him. His eyes were still closed, but he was saying something Ruth didn’t understand. A strange tongue, whose name she didn’t know. Sometimes his face was troubled, or his breathing fast and desperate. Even when his eyes opened they looked out on a different world.

  The three laid out their bedding on the living room floor, though none of them slept much. A small lamp glowed in the corner of the room as they took it in turns to sit beside James.

  When it was Hannah’s shift, Ruth lay and watched her. Her long brown hair was drawn back into a bun at the nape of her neck, a few strands at the side of her face softening the severity. There were streaks of grey now, and Ruth knew Hannah wouldn’t dye it, just as she never wore make-up or jewellery. The single gold band on her finger was her only adornment, as it had been for Ellen. Ruth had compensated for the family spurning of jewellery by piercing all the way up both ears, her nose and her navel and wearing rings on all her fingers, some on her toes, a tangle of necklaces and a shifting array of bands round her ankles. But she’d slowly shed them in her time in Mussoorie, lightening the load. Even the glass bracelets Iqbal had given at Eid were soon slipped off so as not to scrape James when she nursed him.

  All that was left now was Manveer’s kara.

  It was hard against her skin as she lay with her hands folded under her cheek, watching Hannah, who sat so still, watching James. Ruth hadn’t seen her for three years and was struck by the signs of age. Her forehead was creased and there were shadows under her eyes, made darker by the low light. Hannah’s eldest two were away at college now and who could guess the anxiety for a mother who had hovered over them from birth.

  Ruth had always wondered at it. Since marrying Derek in Tennessee at 21, Hannah had stayed in that same small town and never once been back to India. Never been out of America! She, who had graduated Valedictorian of her class and Best All Round Student, had neither finished her liberal arts degree nor ever had a job. She had home-schooled all seven children, made every curtain and cushion cover in the house and grown prize vegetables. As if she’d never had her Indian life. Or needed to counter it.

  When it was Iqbal’s shift, he could barely sit still. He was up and down to the kitchen getting damp cloths, dry cloths, a hot water bottle, a cup of ice, glasses of water and boxes of tissues. None were needed. He mopped James’ brow, smoothed and tucked his blankets, and when he could think of nothing more to do, sat perched on the edge of the chair twisting his fingers and looking from James to the others in desperation.

  Ruth felt for him in the void that lay ahead. James had already put Shanti Niwas into his name and made provision for his retirement, but Iqbal was a man made to pour himself out in love. For whom would he do that now? Then she remembered the mosaic of photos on his wall and the many Oaklands students who would learn from him a ghazal or a sheesh kebab or the wonder of grace. There would be no end.

  At Ruth’s turn, she just sat and held her father’s hand. The dark outside seemed to deepen and spread, like an ink that was leaking into the house, into her aching limbs and all the spaces in her head. She did not know how long she’d been there, but woke to the rasping of his voice and a tug from his fingers. He was using that language again, barely a whisper. That unearthly river of sound, that seemed to come not so much from him, as through him. All she recognised in the spi
ll of words was her name, leaping like a fish from the stream.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Paul Verghese conducted the funeral, eyes brimming behind his blocky spectacles, voice raised like a bugle. Ruth had expected a verbose and florid eulogy and a long sermon, but the Reverend was changed. Perhaps because of the threatening tides of emotion within him, or the standing-room-only crush of the church, or by dint of some other mysterious force, she did not know, but he lost all the usual rhetorical elaboration and wagging of fingers and spoke with a rare power.

  James’ life, he said, was a true story and a parable. He was Pilgrim, he was Everyman, he was Adam. And God’s dealings with him were a picture of God’s dealings with us all, should we only accept it. Verghese pushed his glasses up his nose and took hold of the pulpit with both hands. James did not want his praises sung, he said. He had forbidden it. He wanted one thing only: the truth.

  And so the Reverend did his best to tell it, revealing the long-held secret and its legacy, drawing together James’ tortuous journey to peace and Iqbal’s testimony of love, the counterpoint memories of Hannah and Ruth, his own long friendship and the accounts of others. He knew the truth of a life was not an isolated narrative, but the confluence of all the stories it had created in the lives of others. So as he set out the tale, moving constantly from English to Hindi and back, the throng grew quiet, hearing about a man they treasured and a man they had barely known.