The Road Back

by Liz Harris

  She shook herself. She must stop thinking like that or she was only going to get upset. What happened to James was one of many awful things that had happened during the war. It wasn’t her mother’s fault; it wasn’t anyone’s fault, and she shouldn’t dwell on it. It was only getting to her that evening because of the row she’d had with Ruth.

  She passed the Town Hall and started down the stretch of wide pavement that led to Belsize Grove. On the other side of the road, a little further down the hill, the underground station was clearly visible. The entrance to the deep-level air-raid shelter where her mother had met Mary Shaw was just past the main entrance to the station.

  She glanced towards it, then turned away and stared fixedly at the pavement in front of her. She must force herself to think only about the future, not the past.

  When she reached her house, she went in and quietly closed the door behind her. She slipped out of her cardigan, slung it over the coat stand in the corner of the hall and started along the corridor past the front room. The door was closed. The light shining through the crack at the bottom of the door told her that her father was in there, but she was sure that he wouldn’t want to be disturbed.

  A little further along the corridor, she heard a sound coming from the back room. Her mother must have waited up to hear about her birthday evening. She went quickly to the foot of the staircase and started up the stairs, making as little noise as possible – she just wasn’t in the mood for any more conversation that evening; she’d had more than enough as it was.

  ‘Is that you, Patsy?’ her mother called from the back room. ‘You’re earlier than I expected.’ She heard her mother open the door. ‘Come and tell me what Ruth had to say for herself, darling.’

  She reached the landing, ran into her bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  Through the wall, she heard her mother’s footsteps on the hall lino as she went along to the kitchen, looking for her. ‘Where are you, Patsy?’ her mother called.

  She opened her bedroom door, hurried on to the landing and leaned over the banister. ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ she called. ‘I’ve come up to bed – I’m very tired and I’ve got an early morning ahead of me. We had a really nice time. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, I promise. Goodnight.’ She went back into her room and shut the door.

  She leaned back against her door, her heart thumping loudly. She could tell that her mother was standing in the kitchen doorway, and in her mind’s eye, she could see her looking vaguely around the empty room, wondering what to do next. She could almost feel the weight of her mother’s disappointment and loneliness.

  Well, it wasn’t her fault, she thought, swallowing a rising sense of guilt. She moved away from the door. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Things were as they were and they all had to cope with them as best they could. She went across to her bedside table and switched on the lamp. Her mother being unhappy had nothing to do with Ladakh or her father or her. Ruth didn’t know what she was talking about.

  She took the box of cologne out of her handbag and threw it on to the bed.

  Chapter Eight

  Ladakh, September 1961: Kalden, aged 17

  Carried in the arms of the autumn wind, the strains of the harvesters’ songs soared across the ochre and grey wilderness, over the crumbling stones of the wall and the house where the missionary family once had lived, over wayside shrines, rippling many a mantle of multi-coloured prayer flags as they drifted to the far reaches of the plateau where they met the mountains and gradually faded away.

  Kalden stood still and listened.

  In past years, his heart would fill with happiness when he heard the reapers’ songs as he went out to the fields to help with bringing in the fruits of the year’s toil. But not this year. This year, his heart was heavy, and he would not be singing with them.

  In the early weeks after Peter and his family had abandoned their house, the vegetable patches, the orchard, the place that had been their home for so many years, taking their world with them, Kalden had gone to the house most days, waiting, hoping.

  Unable to accept that they’d truly left for good, he’d repaired the surrounding stone wall, made dung cakes, tended the vegetables, plugged leaks in the irrigation channels, picked the ripe apricots from the trees and spread them out to dry on blankets that he’d laid out on top of the flat roof, and he’d piled armfuls of alfalfa and hay next to the apricots, ready for the missionaries’ animals during the long, hard winter ahead.

  On occasions, when night had fallen before he’d finished what he needed to do, he’d stay there overnight, using the blankets and few pieces of equipment that they’d left behind them, and he’d feel close to them again. For weeks on end, he’d done everything he could to keep the place alive, all the while scanning the distant horizon, waiting to see the family return.

  In vain, he’d waited. The Hendersons didn’t return, and no other missionary family had taken their place. Finally, he’d had to accept that they’d gone for good.

  He’d thought about living in their house himself, since nobody else was going to live there. His family, however, had tried to make him recognise that he’d be too far from the village to be given help when he needed it. However hard he worked, it would be difficult enough to grow and harvest sufficient crops by himself to feed himself throughout the year; if he had to feed a family, too, he’d face an impossible task.

  What’s more, Tenzin had added later, when they were on their own in the kitchen, if Kalden was living so far from their community, it would not encourage anyone to want to be his wife.

  If he’d had any doubt about Tenzin being right, Dolma had made the situation very clear not long after that.

  A few days after Tenzin had spoken to him, he and Dolma had been walking around a field of ripening wheat on the outskirts of her village. The missionary house still in his mind, he’d decided to bring up the subject of their future together.

  ‘I am sorry that in the last few weeks I have not seen you as often as I would have liked, Dolma,’ he’d begun. ‘But when the missionary family left, there were many things to be done at their house. They are now finished, and I am thinking about making a home there for myself, and for a wife.’ Suddenly very nervous, he’d tried to smile at her. ‘I would like you to be that wife.’

  She’d put her hand on his arm, and left it there. He’d looked down at her hand, and then back up at her face. She’d been gently shaking her head.

  ‘I feel very close to you,’ she’d told him. ‘But I would not be happy living where the missionaries lived. It is too far from my family and my friends.’

  ‘It is away from our villages, yes. But it is not so far that we could not come back to see our families, and not so far that our families could not come to see us. And we would make a new family, too. You and I …’

  She’d put a finger to his lips. ‘There is something I must tell you.’

  He’d moved her hand away and stared at her, waiting.

  ‘For much time now, you have not been coming to see me. At first I am upset, but then I begin to accept it. Namgyal, who lives in my village, sees that you are no longer visiting me, and he has come to me. In recent weeks, we have often been walking together and have become friends. We are happy together and Namgyal is now going to see the onpa. If the signs are favourable, my family will accept the gifts he sends, and we will marry and live in the family house that he shares with his brother.’

  A tightness had closed around his heart. He’d taken a step back.

  ‘It does not make me happy to hurt you, Kalden. You are a good man and you make me feel something inside me that no one else can make me feel. But I think it will not be a very deep hurt for you. I have not wanted to face it, but I have known for some time that your heart has only once been truly captured, and that was by your missionary friends. That is so, is it not?’

  He’d looked at her, then slowly nodded.

  Her smile had held a trace of regret as she’d turned away and gone b
ack to her village.

  After that time, he’d stopped going to the missionary house for anything other than the occasional visit, during which time he’d trail disconsolately through the deserted building and among the overgrown vegetable patches, trying not to think about things as they used to be.

  Instead, whenever his help wasn’t needed by his brothers, parents or neighbours, he’d filled his days by walking across the plateau and among the mountains, exploring further afield than he’d ever been before. At the height of summer, he’d gone as usual to the high mountain pasture with his brothers, but when they’d got there, he’d wandered off on his own.

  When the long, cold winter had come, he’d sat on his bench in the shadowy corner of the kitchen, his recorder in his pocket, watching his family and neighbours laugh, dance and tell stories to each other. Whenever they turned to him, he’d nodded, smiled or laughed with them.

  But whatever he did, wherever he went, no matter how much he struggled to suppress his memory of the days when music, books and new ideas had given a purpose to his life, the Hendersons were always with him in his mind. Not Dolma – he never really thought about her – only his second family.

  Although he’d never written to Peter after the Hendersons had returned to England – he didn’t write well enough, and anyway there was nothing interesting to say – he’d received some letters from Peter. In his letters, Peter told Kalden that his parents were busy helping in a poor part of London, and that they were really enjoying the feeling of being wanted and needed. He mentioned his new school, the orchestra he’d joined and the friends he’d made, but he didn’t say much about them. Kalden could tell, though, that Peter loved every minute of his life in England and that the family would never return to Ladakh.

  At first, there were only a few weeks between the letters from Peter, but the gaps became wider, and as he went out of the village to join the harvesters in the barley fields, it suddenly hit him that he hadn’t heard from his friend since the barley seeds had been sown.

  He didn’t blame Peter for not writing to him any more: there was no point in writing as they’d never meet again. And what’s more, Peter would know that the delivery time for letters sent to Ladakh was completely unpredictable, and that whatever he wrote would be out of date long before his letter reached Kalden.

  This wasn’t the fault of the runners who carried the letters between the peasants’ stone huts along the road from Leh; it was the fault of the weather. The runner could only do his stretch and pass the post bag to the next runner when the weather allowed it. In bad weather, it could be weeks before a letter reached its destination, which in Kalden’s village was a small post hut that stood just outside the village wall.

  And in a way, he was glad that he didn’t hear from Peter any more. He didn’t want to learn any more about something he could never have, and he knew that Peter wouldn’t be interested in being reminded about things that he’d been delighted to leave behind. For both of them, that part of their life had ended.

  But just occasionally in the evenings, he would sit in the corner of the kitchen, his eyes on his brothers and Deki as they played with their children, and although he didn’t want to, he’d find himself wondering what Peter and his parents were doing at that very moment, and he was filled with envy.

  Envy. It was a word that he’d never heard before he met the Hendersons. He’d first come across it in one of the books he’d read with Mrs Henderson, and she’d explained that it was an unpleasant emotion that one person felt for another, when that person wanted something, or someone, that the other person had.

  When Mrs Henderson had finished explaining the word, Kalden had looked at her in amazement. It was very strange that one person could feel that way about another, he’d said. Ladakhi people didn’t envy each other; they needed each other, so they had to be friends. Everyone helped everyone else, and they all shared what they had.

  Mrs Henderson had smiled at him and said that he was very lucky to live with people who didn’t know what it was to be guilty of the sin of envy. Envy, she’d told him, could destroy a person’s peace of mind. She’d looked at Kalden to see if he’d understood.

  He’d nodded, although he still hadn’t really grasped what it was to feel envious of someone else. It was only later that same evening as he’d lain beneath his blanket that he’d cast his mind back to the way he’d felt when each of his brothers had married Deki, and he’d wondered if that feeling had been envy.

  When the Hendersons had left Ladakh, and he’d received his first letter from Peter about his life in England, he’d known that it had been. Envy had become much more than a word and an explanation: it had become a pain that ached deep within the core of his being. He missed the life that he’d had, and he was eaten up with envy of his friend.

  When he reached the harvesters in the golden fields that ran down to the small stream, he switched his sickle to his right hand and joined the first line of reapers who were swinging their sickles through the ripe barley. His heart was heavy as he worked, as he knew that this would be the last harvest during which he’d be living with his family.

  His parents had said that the following spring, when the fields had been ploughed and the new seeds sown, they would be moving into the tiny house next door. At that time, he would have to pack up the few things he treasured and go into the monastery to begin the life of a monk. He had no choice.

  Of course he’d come back every year to help his family and the other villagers with the sowing and reaping, but things would never be the same again once he’d left his home. He knew that, and so did they. In despair, he looked at the fields around him, then he lifted his sickle high and swung it hard through the barley stalks.

  By the time that he stood upright again, the sun was hot and almost everywhere around him there was stubble where once there’d been barley: the harvesting would soon be done. The reapers alongside him were singing and laughing as they wielded their sickles, cutting the last of the barley stalks low to the ground, but he didn’t feel like singing and laughing. Next year, when he stood with them, he would have the shaven head of a monk. Raising his arm, he ran his fingers through his dark hair.

  ‘Skyot, Kalden! Come! We need your help,’ he heard Tenzin call to him from the side of the field.

  Handing his sickle to a nearby child, he went over to join Tenzin and Deki, who were with a group of the villagers. They were binding the stalks into sheaves and loading them on to each other’s backs, ready to be carried to the threshing area. He stood still and let them balance several bundles on to his back, and then he followed a laden Deki towards the large circle of packed earth where the newly cut crop was being threshed.

  Reaching the threshing area, he stood patiently until it was his turn for Anil to pull the sheaves from his back and throw them on to the threshing circle, then he started to turn away to return to the field for another back-load. As he did so, he caught sight of his seven-year-old nephew, Tashi, and he remembered that Tashi was acting as the thresher for the first time. His face broke into a smile, and he paused to watch Tashi at work.

  Tashi was beaming broadly as he ran around the threshing circle, following the animals which were trampling the crop with their every step as they went round and round, attached to a pole in the centre of the threshing circle, the dzo in the middle and the horses and donkeys on the outside.

  ‘Ha-lo baldur, ha-lo baldur,’ Tashi kept on shouting at them, encouraging them to keep on moving.

  In his hand, he clutched a wicker basket, and every so often, he lunged forward behind an animal and caught the animal’s dung before it could land on the ground and spoil the grain. Each time that he did this, he giggled excitedly and looked around him to make sure that everyone had noticed how skilful he was.

  Kalden stood and watched Tashi for a few minutes; Tashi, a second son, who was learning to work the land that would one day belong to him and his brothers. With a sigh of resignation, he turned away.

  Seein
g Anil at the side of the threshing area, he went over to him rather than go straight back to the fields, and stood in silence while Anil ceremoniously placed a small religious figure on top of first one pile of threshed grain then another, each time saying a small prayer of blessing for the harvest. The grain blessed, Anil stepped back to let it be put into sacks.

  ‘Tashi is having fun, and doing a good job; a man’s job,’ Kalden told his older brother.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Anil said. He glanced at all the piles of grain waiting to be blessed, and turned to Kalden. ‘And this is a job for you, my brother, I think,’ he added with a wry smile, and he handed the figurine to Kalden.

  His eyes on Kalden’s face, he let his hand rest gently on his brother’s shoulder for a moment. Then he dropped his hand and moved off in the direction of the harvested fields to find Rinchen and Tenzin and help them with the animals that had been brought down from the summer pastures to graze on the stubble left behind in the fields.

  Kalden stared after Anil until he was out of sight, then he looked down at the small figure in his hand. It was shaped a little like his recorder, he realised. His mind raced back to the first time that he’d held his recorder in his hand. What a moment that had been. If only … He blanked his thoughts. Chi choen? What’s in the past is in the past.

  He swallowed hard, placed the figurine on the heap of grain closest to him and said a prayer to the spirits, asking them to bless the harvest.

  With the harvesting finished for that year, the festival celebrating the success of the harvest could now begin. The harvest thanksgiving was one of the occasions that they looked forward to every year, and there was a buzz of excitement among Kalden’s family and friends, who this year were crowding into the large kitchen on the first floor of Kalden’s house for the festivities.

  All around them, the kitchen was a blaze of colour. Garlands of wheat and barley encircled the wooden pillars at the top of the staircase. Caught in the light from the butter lamps that glowed on the low table in the centre of the room, their hues vied with the brilliance of the villagers’ clothes. A number of the men from the village had dyed their long, straight robes from their natural beige to the deep crimson red of the mountain scree, and every woman wore a richly coloured brocade waistcoat over her full, flowing robes.