The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  He shuddered a little, but phlegmatically. If the worst came to the worst, he always had his catapult and it was well known that the one thing the Beetles couldn’t do was run. Free drinks and meals from prudent hoteliers and restaurateurs, to say nothing of driving endlessly about in jeeps, had rendered them quite unfit for running. ‘They should run on their hands,’ went the stock Malomban joke. ‘God knows their arms get enough exercise.’

  Tonight when Laki finally went into his hutch to sleep, he locked the door with especial care although more from caution than real anxiety. The Beetles were just something one lived with. Meanwhile, a morning’s swimming with Jason in the water hole as well as his exertions in the Redemptorist Fathers’ garden had left him with a pleasant weariness and he soon fell asleep on his straw mat.

  An unknown time later he sat up abruptly on the floor, trying to remember what had woken him. Then the noise came again. Someone had opened the hatchway on to the roof and then closed it. At this very moment, maybe, fat men in slacks and sunglasses were surrounding the dovecote, canes tapping softly and expectantly against their legs.

  When Tessa had said good night to the children and gone to her room, she found that despite the day’s wanderings through the Wednesday Market and the excitement of discovering all the unfamiliar essences in Mr Mokpin’s shop, she was not yet ready for sleep. She went to the window and leaned out, savouring the night air. The moon which had earlier lit Laki’s climb of the pagoda was now nearing its zenith and striking blue metallic gleams off blades of vegetation in the garden below. A thick whirr of frogs and lizards and crickets rose up as from a generator. Fancifully, she thought it was this machine which kept the night ticking over, the sheened leaves stirring, the moon pouring out its light and the fireflies aloft. Facing away from the city’s neon prodigality, she could almost believe herself miles from the nearest town and the mouldy hothouse fragrance that of virgin jungle.

  On arriving, she remembered, she had thought Malomba was going to be playful and numinous. Nothing had yet happened to change that view, although the peculiar mix of these elements was not quite what she had expected. Her few days here had indeed been numinous to the point of overdose. Never before had she visited so many holy places, each with its own distinctive approach to the Other. This was unmistakably a place of the spirit, one in which people had always taken spiritual things seriously and lived their lives accordingly. And yet she could not deny that the vibrations were a little weaker, perhaps, a little more elusive than she might have predicted.

  Undoubtedly, too, she had encountered much that was playful. Their guide, Mr Bundash: was he not sweet with his theological nightmares and pompous rote-learning? His dismay at being overheard and corrected by the Spodist High Priest was particularly touching; for a moment the timid, bewildered-child look on his face had made her want to take him in her arms and comfort him. That would never have done, she smiled at the cloud-tree’s glimmering outline. As for the boy, Lucky, he was playfulness incarnate. But underneath his coltish comings and goings, could she not glimpse elements of disquiet? She had clearly seen Mr Muffy tugging the child along by the ear with a look of venom which bespoke imminent punishment, whether merited or not. What trivial crime had he committed? Or was he simply the virtual slave of a cruel and sadistic employer? What was going on below?

  That was it, thought Tessa, as she let her eyes drift out of focus so her retinas bacame mere blackboards for the fireflies’ scribbles. Behind this lush and exotic town were constant intimations of menace. Vertiginous pits kept opening up beneath the most innocent things. A scarlet jeep passing in the street; fish dying in the market; a fruit with deadly seeds. Even a ride on a children’s train led to bloodshed. And behind Lucky’s tearful story about his mother’s illness what narratives of peasant misery, of hardship and separation might not be read?

  Leaving the window for a moment, she fetched from the bedside the Master’s greatest work, The Fragrant Mirror. This book contained his distilled wisdom and countless million copies of it in one hundred and thirty-eight different languages were abroad in the world. These were mostly cheerful paperbacks whose covers depicted Swami Bopi Gul himself seated in a meadow deep with flowers and holding up a mirror in which was reflected a single lotus bloom. Her own copy, though, was one of a special autographed edition limited to favoured disciples, and had black leather binding embossed with a yellow mandala. Opening it she turned to a chapter entitled ‘The Mirror Speaks’ and re-read the following, heavily underlined, passage:

  17. O my friend, would you expect a pine tree to sprout from an egg? Then do not expect from me what is not in my nature to be. Hold me up to evil and you will see it reflected unwaveringly in my heart. Hold me up to good and you will see that, too, no less clearly. I am a mirror, so I may not strive to change what I see. I am a mirror, so I may not grasp at one image instead of another. All I can do is reflect truthfully everything passing before me.

  18. You say, ‘How inert, how useless! Is that all you can do for a world so muddied and unhappy?’

  19. And I reply, ‘Yes.’ But that ‘all’ is everything, and to do it is the hardest thing there is. For to give in to the temptation to ‘right’ ‘wrongs’ is to intervene. And to intervene is always to stir up the mud and make things still muddier, yet unhappier, even though in the short term this may not be apparent.

  20. But if by supreme effort I can keep my heart unclouded and crystal clear, then the world will be confronted by true reflections of how it is. Thus ‘evil’ on seeing me will in time weary of its own face and be dissatisfied, while ‘good’ will in time weary of its own face and yearn to dissolve.

  21. Never doubt this truth, my friend: the world is like your body and likewise contains the power to heal itself. Only do nothing to destroy its mysterious balance. Restrain your egoistical desire to change it according to your own ideas of morality. Like any flower it is too intricate and delicate for your understanding.

  22. For what are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but two faces of an imagined cloud?

  23. He who yearns to dissolve knows that bliss is where there are no clouds of any kind. Not striving, not grasping, he is in bliss. He makes himself pure mirror. What, then, is this Meditation of the Mirror? I will tell you. It is this: What is it that one clear mirror sees when confronted by another? And where is that image formed? Think on this, my friend.

  These familiar words generally brought tears to her eyes. It was one of the Teacher’s own preferred passages and whenever she read it she could hear his slow, resonant delivery during which he never looked at the page but always at a spot on the ground about eighteen inches beyond as if at an invisible autocue. It was thus, in a semi-trance, he would quietly declaim whole chapters at a time, a faculty which merely reinforced the fame of the astonishing circumstances in which the book had been written.

  Gul had not been a swami then, but just any young man of twenty born in a village a few miles from Bombay who had gone to the city in search of work. He had found employment in a warehouse, but was always on the point of being sacked for his dissolute lifestyle. One day – stupefied with drink and bhang – he fell asleep in a huge crate, was nailed up for a prank and transported to the goods yard. There he was loaded into a freight waggon together with seven similar crates containing equipment and stationery for blind schools in Gujarat state. He came round in pitch darkness and from the muffled sounds and motion deduced what had happened. Realising that nobody would hear him if he shouted, he conserved his energy and what little air there was until the train stopped. When it did, he shouted for hours but nobody came.

  What Gul could not know was that the train had been uncoupled and his waggon was now standing with a dozen others, padlocked and deserted, in a siding on the outskirts of Bannapur. His legend began with the unloading of the waggon three weeks later. If the navvies were puzzled by the powerful scent of flowers which rolled out as they opened the doors, they were astonished by what they found in a lidless crate. A young man
was sitting in deep meditation. Before him was a Braille typewriter, beside him a stack of blank pages. Then someone noticed that the pages were not, after all, blank. During those eighteen days Gul, without knowing how to type in any language, still less in Braille, had seemingly composed The Fragrant Mirror in pitch darkness and without any food or water. From that moment he became a swami. For all those who cried ‘humbug!’ and ‘stunt!’ there were others who had not the slightest doubt of his authenticity.

  Tessa herself had never questioned his divinity. Over the years she had, she considered, experienced ample evidence of his powers. He was a wonderful healer: there was no lack of witnesses who could testify to that. Why, then, couldn’t he heal her backache the way he healed others? He had taken her hand and she experienced a shock as of electricity strong enough to make her snatch it away with a cry.

  ‘We’re too close, sister,’ the Teacher said. ‘You see? Our magnetism is not right. I probably couldn’t heal a member of my own family, either.’ He gave a deprecatory laugh. ‘I can’t always heal myself, even. You remember the wound on my foot? It was you who healed that.’

  She well remembered the occasion early on in her discipleship. They had been climbing the path up to Valcognano with two mules laden with supplies, the Teacher walking barefoot beside her. It was November and the stone steps were partly hidden beneath drifts of golden leaves through which they rustled. Suddenly he had stopped and brought a foot out into a shaft of sunlight. Stuck at an angle in its sole was a curved piece of iron which she had taken for an old mule shoe, but which she later found was the reinforcement from the heel of a boot. At any rate his foot was impaled by a pair of rusty nails. She had looked helplessly at it with a cry almost of fear, for she had never touched any part of his body, had only ever felt the energy in his hands.

  ‘Why not remove it, sister?’ he had asked with a smile. ‘If you would be so kind?’

  And she had knelt in the leaves and tugged the iron out and at once two streams of blood came from the punctures. She would never forget that extraordinary instant: his smiling down with a kind of mischievous serenity, the spots of his blood on the leaves which sparkled in the sun’s rays like spinels, the autumnal smell of leaf-mould.

  ‘Now stop the bleeding, sister.’

  ‘I … I don’t know how, Master.’ She looked about her for recognisable herbs, but could see only brambles.

  ‘Just touch it with your hand and mind.’

  And when nervously she had passed her fingertips beneath his sole, they came away with no trace of blood on them. She was amazed, but before she could look under his foot at the wounds themselves he had set it firmly down.

  ‘Go on!’ he shouted, pointing towards the mules’ retreating rumps as they plodded upward. ‘When in doubt, go on! See – even mules know that!’

  They had resumed their journey, but when they arrived in Valcognano he said, ‘You are troubled, my dear Tessa?’

  ‘Forgive me, Teacher. I didn’t know a great swami could tread on a nail. I never thought of you as being … well, vulnerable.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if there were much you didn’t know,’ he said. ‘For example, you never knew you were a healer, did you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not, Teacher. I’m just a student of herbs. I know a bit about what not to do, that’s all. Maybe we should put something on your wound now in case it infects?’

  ‘If you think it necessary,’ he laughed. ‘I’m in your hands, doctor.’

  And he had raised his foot so that she could see the sole: pale, unmarked, without a trace of blood or puncture and with not even so much as a stain of leaf-mould.

  ‘You were looking at the wrong foot,’ Jason told her in one of his moods when she was recounting this story, not for the first time. What had upset her was not the crotchety cynicism of the suggestion, the childish scoffing, but that her son had so unerringly placed in her mind a simple alternative explanation for an incident which held for her nothing but sacred significance. The worst of it was not that it made her doubt, but that she couldn’t put it out of her head.

  Since then it had been Zoe, strangely enough, who had contributed most to Tessa’s disquiet. She had gone to England to spend a fortnight with her father. Bruce now had another family with whom she seemed to get on well, to her mother’s concealed regret. Zoe had returned looking thoughtful. One day she said to no one in an exasperated voice, ‘So fucking what?’ She was standing in the open doorway of their house in Valcognano, staring out across the blue panorama of adjacent mountains. Behind her at the kitchen table Tessa was wrapping bundles of dried comfrey.

  ‘What do you mean, Zo?’

  Zoe gave herself a shake, surprised at being caught speaking aloud.

  ‘Just thinking.’ There was a long silence. ‘But so fucking what, all the same. It’s a cultural thing, that’s all, isn’t it? All this Indian stuff. I don’t mean the healing: I suppose that’s good and useful in any language. But why are we expected to go along with all the other crap about reincarnation? You don’t believe in the Christian version of heaven, why should you believe in cycles of re-birth? You’re not an Indian. Anyway, I’m not an Indian and I don’t believe a word of it. But the point is, even if it was true I’d still say so fucking what? It’s crazy to live your whole life just trying to avoid being born as a woodlouse the next time around. If there is a next time; which there won’t be.’

  This naked barrage had caught Tessa unprepared. She had floundered and continued to do so. Her children were growing up. Old alliances were shaky. An emptiness was in the air.

  Now she leaned on the window-sill of her room in the Nirvana with The Fragrant Mirror closed on one thumb. That was the unease which Malomba diffused stealthily behind its thick scents and lavish spectacle. Never before had she been in a place so quick to take root in the mind. A difficult, significant place where she had arrived with last-ditch punctuality: in her forties, not a moment too soon. She might pretend to rejoice in whatever gave a salutary poke to one’s spiritual complacency, but she had not bargained for Malomba’s hidden glands. The holy city itself was an organism, an edifice of rich and eclectic design. It was an imaginative, aspiring structure; but one around the galleries of whose dome an insidious whisper clearly carried: So fucking what? Oh, poison incense … The only certainty was backache. And with it something as banal as being lonely.

  Suddenly she became aware of what she was doing. She was leaning on a sill which ought not to have been there. Examining, she found that it had been replaced inexpertly but sturdily at a slight angle. She smiled, imagining Lucky at work with a borrowed hammer. Or stolen? She had the urge to find out whether it was really he who had mended the window, whether she had thanked him enough for giving Jason such a lovely time, why that villainous-looking hotel proprietor seemed to have it in for him. She glanced at her clock. Only just past eleven. In any case, she was wide awake and really did want to look at Malomba from the roof. Honestly, really did.

  From Jason’s enthusiastic description of visiting the bell-boy’s den, Tessa had a fair idea of how to reach the roof. She went through the door at the end of the corridor which led on to the servants’ stairwell, holding it open long enough to memorise by the spill of yellow light how the last flight turned, then went through into the darkness and closed it behind her. She climbed the steps, hand outstretched, and came at last to the hatchway. Pushing at yielding wood, she climbed through. Against the town’s neon spangles stood the dark bulk of the dovecote, the vine which largely smothered it giving it the outline of a great heap of briars amid which a white door gleamed. As she crossed to it the scent of vine flowers came to her, together with the memory of Ong Mokpin saying ‘karesh’. Softly she knocked.

  There was silence, then a voice, childishly high with nervousness: ‘Minu di?’

  ‘It’s me, Lucky. Mrs Hemony. You know, the missus.’ She felt an idiot. Why was she here? What was she doing? The door opened a crack.

  ‘Missus? You have troub
le?’ His sleepy mind was still fixed in its groove of impending threat.

  ‘Oh, Lucky. I’m so sorry. No, no trouble. I’m disturbing you for nothing. I … I couldn’t sleep and wanted some fresh air so I thought of the roof. Then I remembered Jason telling me you lived up here.’

  ‘Missus, you no disturb. Wait please.’ There were soft noises in the darkness ahead; a match flared and revealed the boy crouching on the floor, yawning and lighting a rag stuffed into the neck of a bottle half full of oil. He was naked but for a pair of white undershorts. The orange light which took hold glowed on coppery skin and shone in black eyes raised towards her.

  ‘Lucky! What a lovely room!’ She stood just inside the door of the cell admiring its wall of leaves. From behind it came the rustlings and mutterings of pigeons disturbed by voices and light. The boy was now standing awkwardly, slightly trapped. ‘Don’t worry, I shan’t come in.’

  ‘I show outside where can sit. More cooler there. Very beautiful view, missus.’

  He moved towards her, so she had no option but to retreat. The smell of the vine in the room was overpowering. She thought she must be at the very centre of the true Malomba, so much did this chamber encapsulate the city she had hoped to find. The religious glow of burning oil, the sumptuous simplicity of the mat on the floor, the indoor tree dripping its incense. The perfume went into her lungs, made her heart pound, her knees unaccountably weak. She backed away from the outline of his bare stomach. He led the way around the hutch to where the vine threw its pergola over the edge of the hotel roof. Only now did she connect her first sight of the Nirvana as a scruffy building with a bush on top with this bowered eyrie overlooking a numinous city.