Ganesh

by Malcolm Bosse

  “Now they want me gone.”

  “It’s that they don’t know what to do, Ganesh. You’re alone, and it puzzles them. Everyone has someone in India. If a man dies, his son can always count on uncles, brothers, cousins. But you can’t, Ganesh, and people don’t know who you are anymore — except a foreigner.” He added shyly, “That’s what my father says.”

  Jeffrey sipped the Fanta, avoiding his friend’s eyes. He couldn’t understand why, but he felt somehow ashamed. Here he had always been Rama’s equal, but now he was beneath his friend. He was unwanted.

  “My father says you can come live with us.”

  Jeffrey looked up and saw Rama smiling.

  “That’s what my father said. At breakfast this morning he said it. He said, ‘Rama, tell him to come here.’ I was going to tell you today.”

  Jeffrey stared at his small, thin friend, whose eyes were brilliant in anticipation of his acceptance. And Jeffrey almost leapt up and shouted “Yes! I will come here! This very day!” Almost, but something held him back. For a moment he didn’t even know what it was. He had tried to forget it, the promise made to his father during those last days together. Until this moment, when he had the chance to stay here, Jeffrey hadn’t thought about it, had put it out of his mind whenever the idea of going to America nudged forward. He wanted to accept the offer, because he knew Rama’s father was a man who meant what he said. Jeffrey got along with his friend’s mother and four brothers too. He could envision a good life with them: walking to school with Rama, coming back again, eating with the family, playing cricket with the boys, enjoying the peace of this large safe compound.

  Jeffrey got to his feet. “I will never forget your offer,” he said. “I thank you, Rama. I thank your father. But — I am going to leave, just as people expect me to do.”

  Rama rose, frowning. “Forget what people say! My father is known here. If you live with us, it will be the same as it was. They won’t dare to call you a foreigner!”

  “No, I have a promise to keep.”

  “What promise?”

  “Made to my father before he died. That I would go to America.”

  “You promised him?”

  “So I must keep my word.”

  Rama nodded. “Yes, I would feel the same.”

  The boys looked sorrowfully at each other.

  “When must you leave?”

  “I am going tomorrow. First to Trichy and the Cauvery River. With the ashes.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Then by train to Madras to look up a man who’ll help me reach America.”

  “Do you need money?”

  “No, my father left me enough.” Jeffrey laughed faintly. “I think it was the first time in his life he ever saved money for anything.”

  “Are you sure you have enough?”

  “I’m sure. Thank you —” Jeffrey didn’t know what else to say.

  Rama bit his lip and said, “Write me.”

  “I always will. All my life.”

  “That is a promise?”

  “Of course!”

  “Because you keep promises, Ganesh.”

  “I promise. And you?”

  “I promise!”

  *

  That evening Jeffrey packed his one suitcase, having scarcely enough things to fill it. He kept his Sanskrit dictionary, but decided to leave his school books — he would not have time to look at them before arriving in America, and then he would probably have new ones. America. He would not think about it now. That would come later. He then rolled a small bronze statue in a pair of pants and placed it in the suitcase. On his last birthday Jeffrey had been given this statue by his father. It was a replica of the god whose name he went by in the village: Ganesh, son of Shiva, with the head of an elephant, the body of a fat man, and four arms holding a club, a noose, a rice cake, and a broken tusk. On the base of the statue crouched a rat, the god’s servant, looking reverently up at him. Ganesh was a strange-looking figure — half man, half elephant — but for someone raised in such knowledge, the god represented both strength and wisdom. An elephant’s trunk could uproot a tree or discriminate among peanuts, sifting through them to find the best one. The enormous belly represented the universe or knowledge, depending upon the interpretation. His servant, the rat, could gnaw through most obstacles, just as an elephant could push aside whatever lay in its path. That is why Ganesh was sometimes called Vinayaka, Remover of Obstacles; and sometimes Akhuratha, He Who Rides a Rat; or Heramba, Protector, along with a dozen other names, all of which Jeffrey knew. It was his only possession, along with his father’s penknife, some clothes, and the Sanskrit dictionary.

  The next morning, ready to leave, he took a handful of turmeric powder — for purity — from the kitchen and wet it down with water, just as his father’s ashes had been wet down. Then he modeled a little image of the god Ganesh. He bowed his head and asked Ganesh to protect him on the journey, just as he had so often heard his father do before embarking on a pilgrimage. Then he scattered the image made of red turmeric, which, for those prayerful moments, had become the wise and compassionate Lord Ganesh. Staring at the wet lump in front of which he had just bowed, Jeffrey wondered if his prayer had been meaningless. During Father’s illness, he had prayed not only to Ganesh but to Shiva and Vishnu and Shakti as well, but without success. His father had always warned him never to beg but only to worship, yet this time he had pleaded for his father’s life, and the gods had not heard him. If the gods existed to hear him. What, after all, could he believe if his belief had failed him in the one thing that really counted? Still, out of habit perhaps, he had prayed to Ganesh for a safe journey.

  With the suitcase in one hand and the copper urn in the other, Jeffrey left the house. He did not turn for a last glance at it, but stood under the peepul tree, squinting through its tangled limbs at the sky, recalling how Father and he had sat under it in the evenings to talk and watch the stars.

  Then he walked to the bus stop. It was a long wait for the district bus bound for Trichy, but then no one ever knew when it would come rattling along, its red sides peeling and caked with dust, belching a black exhaust, too crowded for all prospective passengers to climb aboard. Fortunately the bus, when it came today, was only half full; then Jeffrey remembered it was Tuesday, which many Hindus consider inauspicious for traveling. So he found a window seat and laid his suitcase on his lap and the urn on top of it, snuggled in one arm. The bus drew off in a gnashing of gears. It commenced a lurching, swaying progress, as if it were not a single unit but a succession of small boxes linked together, somewhat like a train. Leaving the village, Jeffrey saw the cream-colored Mission School; in a first-floor classroom sat Rama, who at this hour must be struggling with math.

  “Write me.”

  “I always will. All my life.”

  Jeffrey clutched the urn and gazed resolutely ahead. A few kilometers out of the village he saw a half-dozen men coming along the road, single file, dressed only in scanty loincloths, bearing pointed staffs that could be used for spears. Jeffrey knew them and waved; one, seeing him, waved back and grinned, his flat face and heavy jaw glistening in the sunlight. These men were Irulas, who lived in a forest not far away. The tribe lived by gathering roots and hunting small game. His father used to say that no people in the world were as independent as Irulas. An Irula could digest almost anything. For a feast he would catch a field mouse and cook it in rice dug up from stores buried in the ground by gerbils. Some of the local Irulas caught poisonous snakes and sold them in Madras to visiting naturalists who bought them for museums abroad. Once when Father tried to interest the Irulas in farming small vegetable plots, they only laughed, but generously repaid his kindness — by bringing him, as a gift, a five-foot banded krait, a snake whose venom matched that of a cobra. Father graciously accepted the cage with the krait in it, but next day took it into a field and released the snake. Jeffrey had never told Father about hunting vipers with Rama and selling their skins to local farmers. Father wou
ld never kill anything, not even cockroaches that often rustled across his pillow at night. Did Father now know that Jeffrey had once hunted snakes for money? “I am here.” Jeffrey clutched the urn tighter. But he felt nothing against his arm except the cool metal of a copper jar. Inside there was nothing but a fine white ash.

  The bus trip was long, arduous. Hour after hour he stared at the passing fields of ground nuts and black pulse. Dark-skinned farmers bent over irrigation ditches. Trails of ducks waddled through the half-submerged squares of paddy. Buffalo pulled carts loaded high with hay along the winding dirt roads that radiated off the main highway. More than once Jeffrey had the urge to leap off the bus and take one of those roads, following wherever it led, deeper into the India he loved. Lakes, streams, tiny villages nestled under coconut groves came into view, vanished, while frequently the bus halted to take on passengers who led down its narrow aisle a goat or a lamb, or held a wire cage filled with chickens for marketing.

  At one stop a bewhiskered man climbed aboard, wearing Western pants and shirt, carrying an umbrella. He sat down with a heavy sigh next to Jeffrey and took a long appraising look at the suitcase, the urn, the boy’s sweaty white face. After they had bounced along for a few kilometers, the man turned to Jeffrey and said in hesitant English, “What country?”

  Jeffrey answered in English. “I live in India.”

  “Yes, yes, but coming from what country?”

  “India.”

  The man smiled skeptically, then frowned, so in Tamil Jeffrey described the location of his village. The man only frowned more, as if displeased by the boy’s knowledge of the local language.

  They rode awhile longer before he tapped Jeffrey’s arm — rather hard. “That suitcase of yours has seen better days,” he said in Tamil. “Where are you going all alone? Where is your family? Do they let you travel the roads of India by yourself?”

  The questions came rapid-fire. Jeffrey stared at the man, who was wiping his face with a rumpled handkerchief; there was a purple mottling on the man’s cheek, often seen in this southern country, the result of skin infection.

  Jeffrey politely replied that he was going to Trichy, but volunteered nothing more.

  The man stared at him. “I have never seen a foreign boy your age traveling alone on these roads. What’s in there?” he asked suddenly, pointing at the copper urn. “What can you have in there so valuable as to seal it with wax?”

  Jeffrey did not like the man’s rude insistence. He said, “My father.”

  “What?”

  “My father’s in there.”

  The man’s back straightened; he leaned away from Jeffrey. “What are you saying!”

  “His ashes are inside.”

  The man got up and stood in the aisle, glaring down at Jeffrey. “You speak Tamil, but you’re no Indian. Indian boys don’t make fun of their elders.” Compressing his lips, the man staggered in the swaying bus down the aisle and took another seat. Later, when leaving the bus, he scowled at Jeffrey and on the roadside opened his black umbrella with a vicious gesture, as if somehow the force of it would punish Jeffrey.

  All through the day Jeffrey gripped the urn and watched the countryside unreel kilometer by kilometer, its hot vastness taking a grip on his mind just as he gripped the urn, until at last he fell asleep. Then abruptly he awakened, fearful of dropping the urn. The familiar landscape came into view and vanished, as if running past the window on a conveyor belt and returning: the same stream, the same paddy, the same buffalo plowing the same field, the same village huts clustered at the foot of the same hill. This was home. How could he leave it? And yet he had promised to make his destiny America. Finally the sun slipped behind a distant range of hills, its dull red the color of turmeric in the western sky. Then it became fainter and drained off like a wave receding into the ocean from a beach. He tried to keep awake as the bus continued through the night, as more people climbed aboard and then debarked, until all their faces seemed alike to him, merging together through the long, dark, hot hours into a single flow of features. And still the bus rattled on, coming after midnight into the city of Trichy. It passed near the high Rock Fort at the top of which, lit all night, was a famous temple dedicated to Ganesh. Father had taken him there on another important occasion. From its height they had gazed together at the ancient city of Trichy and beyond the city limits at the fields disappearing on the horizon in a liquid blue haze. They had both offered flowers to Ganesh on that day. And on that day his father had turned to him solemnly and said, “Lord Ganesh understands our grief, Jeffrey. I feel your mother’s presence here.” Thereafter his father had called him Ganesh, the name Jeffrey had carried with him to the village when they moved from Madras.

  At the bus terminal Jeffrey asked for the bus to the Chola Dam. He was told by a yawning official that it would not leave until nearly daybreak. “I will call you,” the man said.

  So Jeffrey sat against a wall, suitcase behind him to protect it from quick hands, and with both his arms around the urn. He let his head fall awkwardly forward, but so exhausted was he that Jeffrey fell instantly asleep.

  *

  “You want that bus to the dam? There it is,” the official said, roughly poking his shoulder. “There it is,” the man repeated with a smile, when Jeffrey held the urn tighter, as if someone had tried to wrench it from him.

  The official pointed to an old bus parked in the terminal. It tilted to the right, because over the years so many passengers, riding outside when inside was too crowded, had bent its undercarriage springs.

  In a few minutes Jeffrey was headed for the dam. In an hour he would be there and do what was to be done. Then he’d return to Trichy and take a train for Madras and see a Mr. Lowry, who had known his father years ago. It was all in the instructions. And then — America.

  But he was not thinking of the future now; the present in the round shape of a copper urn held his full attention. Jeffrey glanced at his hands; he understood if the bus ride were smooth, he’d see them trembling. Dots of light from naked bulbs in the entrance of small buildings and from candles in the doorways of mud huts lined the streets out of Trichy. The bus stopped frequently, but at this hour only a few people, going to early-morning jobs, boarded. Soon all the lights vanished, as the bus entered the countryside. This was the most difficult part of the journey — the last half-hour before he reached the dam site. Since there was no one sitting beside him, Jeffrey put the urn on the next seat and opened his suitcase. Inside were a half-dozen shirts and pants, some underwear, a comb, a pair of Western shoes, documents his father had left in the strongbox — his birth certificate, his parents’ marriage certificate, passports and registrations of various kinds — and the stack of rupees secured with rubber bands, and the bronze Ganesh. Under the clothes he found his father’s penknife. He put this in his pocket and closed the suitcase.

  “When is the Chola Dam?” he called out in Tamil to the driver.

  “I’ll let you know.”

  There was a faint color outside the bus window now — a deep-water blue slightly distinguishable from the blackness. As the minutes passed, the blue lightened and took on a pinkish hue. When nearly a third of the sky had taken on this shade of pink, the driver called, “Here! The dam!” and stopped.

  Jeffrey got out and watched the bus slowly disappear in the blue ocean of early dawn. Then he looked around. Ahead, through the gloom, was a long bridge, at this time of morning wholly deserted. He could not see across it, but he knew that on the other side was a small island, then the dam, and another channel of the great river. He knew. Because he had been here before. Because he had come with Father when a small copper urn had contained other ashes. Because together they had brought Mother here. Jeffrey had been only nine then. He had not gone to the crematory, but when Father decided that this site on the Cauvery River was the right place, Jeffrey had accompanied him. They had come at midday, but even now, five years later and in the gloom of dawn, Jeffrey could recognize everything: the broad arc of th
e Cauvery between heavily wooded banks and the great length of the narrow cement bridge, and a single oak standing near the entrance of the walkover. He started out, his feet slapping against the cement, making a lonely hollow sound. Overhead a crescent moon and the last few stars were visible; their light was steadily invaded from the east by a pink changing into gold. Beneath him the black water looked like a vast sheet of lead, quiet, fixed in its channel, motionless. Only his feet on the bridge made a sound — click, click, click, click — bringing him and the copper urn closer to their destination. When he reached the small island at the far end, there was enough light for him to see distinctly some bushes and trees, a small deserted kiosk, a sign both in English and in Tamil warning visitors to respect the regulations regarding public property. He remembered the sign. By the time he crossed the little expanse of island greenery to the other side, a shaft of golden light was glinting on the blue water. Beached on the riverbank were three fishing boats, their owners hunkering around a small fire, drinking tea.

  Jeffrey went down to them, carrying the urn in one hand, the suitcase in the other.

  One of the men, sleepy-eyed, glanced up at him. “What do we have here, a foreign kid!” he said in Tamil to the others.

  “Good morning,” said Jeffrey in Tamil too.

  All three studied him curiously. “What country?” a fisherman said in halting English.

  “This country,” Jeffrey replied in Tamil.

  “You,” the man said, pointing at him. “What country? States?”

  “I am from this country.” Jeffrey tapped the earth with his foot.

  The men looked at one another. “Want something?” one asked gruffly in Tamil.

  “Yes. Someone to row me to the middle of the river.”

  “What for?”

  Jeffrey thrust out the urn solemnly. “My father’s ashes.”

  “Not me,” said a fisherman, turning toward the fire.

  “I will pay.”

  “You couldn’t pay me enough for that,” said another, sipping tea. “I’m not starting my day with that.”