Flame Tree Road

by Shona Patel

  “Really? I must remember to ask the office peon to pick me some leaves.” He turned his attention back to the file and tapped a kettledrum beat on the page with his pencil. “All right, here we are. Like you say, we have never had a problem with the water gypsies, but lately there have been several altercations between them and the weavers’ village. We need to find out exactly what is going on. Which is where you come in.”

  “Have you asked around the weavers’ village?”

  Griffiths snorted. “You think they are going to tell us? They don’t want government interference. When the police show up, both sides clam up. As soon as the police leave we have another flare-up.”

  Griffiths snapped the file shut, swung his chair upright and handed the file to Biren. “All yours with my blessings. The police reports are all inside. You can talk to the police inspector, but I suspect he won’t be able to tell you anything more than what’s already in here.”

  Biren took the file reluctantly. “So how do you suggest I go about this?” he asked, feeling suddenly inadequate.

  Griffiths shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest clue. Be creative. This is your chance to play detective. Get on the inside and see what is going on. You have advantages we do not have. If you solve this problem, you will be Thomson’s blue-eyed boy and he will do anything for you.”

  Biren flipped listlessly through the file. It was full of carbon-stained copies of reports with scribbled notations. He thought to himself if he had only known the petty nature of this job he might have declined Thompson’s offer. But maybe it was too early to tell.

  Griffiths cracked his knuckles. “Cheer up, old chap. There are nice perks in this job. Like trips to Calcutta and stays at the Imperial Hotel. The ladies of Calcutta are quite lovely. You’ll have a very good time, I assure you.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Biren. “I have to earn my feather first.” He walked to the doorway, turned and waved the file. “I’ll take a look at this.”

  “Oh, Roy!” Griffiths called. “Tell my peon the name of those leaves for prickly heat, will you? I want to take some home and get my bearer to make the paste. I think I will pack up early today. I am totally wasted. It was club night yesterday. I must have gone to bed at 3:00 a.m.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  Biren found himself in a peculiar predicament. His high-profile job as a government officer set him apart from the Indian community. None of the other Indians had moved above their babu clerical status. He was the only one who lived in the European section of town and rode a horse, all of which garnered a great deal of unwanted attention. The Sylhetis at first gloated to see one of their own moved up the ranks. Everybody claimed to be a “cousin” or “uncle.” But when they found he would not do them any favors, the tables quickly turned against him and Biren was viewed as a snob.

  “Who does he thinks he is?” they grumbled. “With his fancy mustache, riding a horse and wearing big-big boots. He acts like he is a belayti. Why, he is just a Bengali village boy and he should have more respect for his elders. When I go back to Sylhet I am going to complain about him to his uncle.”

  Biren finally understood why the challenges of the job had overwhelmed Griffiths. It was enough to overwhelm anybody, not just a foreigner. There were several ethnic groups living in close proximity to one another, with their own religious and cultural differences, caste issues and language barriers. One had to be an insider to grasp what was really going on. To win the trust of the different communities he would have to be careful not to take sides—especially that of his own people.

  He gave his peon boy strict instructions. “I don’t want to see anybody in the office. No uncle, no cousin, not even my own father or mother, understand? If somebody wants to see me, ask him to leave a note. Tell them I am busy.”

  “These people are too faltu to be your relatives, sir,” scoffed the peon boy, who had started cultivating some high and mighty airs of his own. “Only this morning a poor fisherman with one eye came here asking to see you. He said he was your brother. I told the scoundrel to get lost. Otherwise, I would beat him with a stick.”

  Biren, who was absently flipping through a file, sat up. “One-eyed fisherman? Where did he go?”

  “He went back to the river,” said the peon boy, startled at Biren’s reaction.

  Biren sighed. He had been to the river several times looking for Kanai. The other boatmen knew of Kanai but said he never stayed in one place for long. He moved from village to village, ferrying people and cargo. Sometimes he was spotted far north, fifty miles from town.

  “If the one-eyed fisherman comes again you must tell me,” said Biren, adding, “Of course, that’s highly unlikely now that you chased him off with your stick, but keep an eye out for him. I need to talk to him urgently.”

  The peon, imagining his boss to be of charitable nature, piped up, “There is also a man with only one leg who stands outside the...”

  Biren cut him short. “No, no, nobody else. Only this one-eyed fisherman,” he said, waving him away.

  * * *

  It was just as well Kanai had not taken off on one of his sojourns, because Biren found him a few hours later sitting alone in the riverside tea shop. Kanai was now a wisp of man, hunched and beaten with none of the youthful cockiness Biren remembered so well.

  Biren cantered up on his horse and called out his name. Kanai looked up with fear and dread. There was no recognition in his eyes and Biren realized, only too late, riding a horse and dressed in Western clothes, he must have looked like an officer of the law. Even after he identified himself, Kanai cowered and acted as if Biren was about to strike him for something he had not done.

  “Will you take me for a ride in your boat, Kanai?” Biren pleaded. “It will be like old times. If you wait for me here, I will return this horse and come back.”

  Half an hour later, dressed in an inconspicuous lungi and shirt, Biren walked down to the river to meet Kanai’s boat. It felt comforting to blend in. As a local, you could observe life much more closely.

  They drifted out on the river. Under the open sky and with the familiar oar in his hands, Kanai finally relaxed.

  They rowed past a cluster of waterfront villages pungent with the smell of drying fish. Naked children with ebony skin splashed in the water, and women sat on their haunches scrubbing clothes on slabs of river rock. Then the villages became fewer and farther between, and they passed a giant bog with dead tree branches sticking out like petrified hands. In the far distance gray spirals of smoke twisted above the treetops from the cremation grounds.

  Bit by bit Kanai told Biren his tragic story. He had lost all the members of his family in the floods and the cholera epidemic: his parents, his young wife and two children. His village was full of ghosts, he said, and he could no longer bear to live there. He had abandoned the house where his family had lived for three generations, packed his meager belongings in his small boat and taken to the open water. He had been at the mercy of the river tides ever since.

  As Kanai related his story, his single eye welled with tears that coursed down one side of his face. Biren could feel his sorrow, the endless drifting with no shore to call his own. He understood for the first time the true heartbreak behind the Bhatiyali boatman’s songs. Wandering the open waters alone, the boatman was constantly reminded about the fragility of life. His song was a call for God’s mercy.

  “Why did death spare me?” Kanai wept. “What good am I to anyone?”

  “You are plenty good to me,” Biren said gently. “Kanai, you are the only person who knows the real me. All people see is my fancy clothes, my horse and my belayti job. But you knew me when I was a village lad. You took me fishing to the backwaters. I sat with you under the old flame tree and listened to your stories. You told me about river ghosts and devil’s mud that swallowed a water buffalo whole, do you remember?”


  Kanai gave a wry smile. “Yes, mia, I remember.”

  “I, too, am alone, Kanai,” Biren said softly. “I don’t belong anywhere. You are the only person from my past. You connect me to myself and I need you.”

  “If you say so, mia.”

  They came to a fork in the river. Kanai pointed to the left. “That is the Damaru River. It separates the living from the dead. We boatmen avoid that stretch. All the outcasts—Doms, tantriks, water gypsies, lepers—live on that side.”

  They passed the gypsy settlement of moored boats and threadbare tents pegged in the river mud. Two bare-bodied men sat on logs prying open oysters, surrounded by clamorous crows. One of the men looked like a dreamlike creature from a water world—a merman, if there ever was one. His long hair hung down his bronze back like river kelp. A muscle in his upper arm flexed as he twisted open each oyster before he tossed it into a pile. He looked up as their boat passed, his eyes the color of wild honey.

  “These people are the bedes. The river is in their blood,” Kanai said. “They dive for seed pearls and sell them in town. Some of them get quite rich but they are still considered outcasts.”

  Biren remembered the file sitting on his office desk.

  “I heard there was some trouble with the bedes in the weavers’ village and the police were called out.”

  “Oh, that!” Kanai shrugged. “The police are called when somebody wants to get somebody else into trouble. The villagers are trying to get the bedes evicted from these waters, so they just go and file a faltu complaint.”

  “See! This is exactly the kind of information I need,” exclaimed Biren. “I can’t trust anyone else to give me a true picture of what is really going on.”

  Kanai narrowed his eye and gave Biren a critical look. “Why should people trust you if you go riding around on your big horse wearing a belayti suit-boot?” He slapped his forehead and broke into a cackle. “Hai Khuddah, when I first saw you I thought you had come to take me to jail! Wait till I tell Chickpea, Dadu and the rest. They will fall down laughing!”

  Biren grinned to see the old Kanai he remembered so well. For a brief moment, Kanai had forgotten that his old tea shop friends at Momati Ghat were all dead and gone.

  * * *

  A local fisherman is a government officer’s best ally. Biren kept a tab on village activities through Kanai. Kanai brought news of any unrest before it brewed into trouble. Biren took to visiting the villages by boat rather than on horseback and chatted with the locals in tea shops. Often he was able to sort out petty grievances without involving the authorities. In most cases, an impartial mediator was all that was needed.

  One sunset evening on the boat ride back from the villages Biren saw a floating flower. Or was it a dream?

  She passed in a swish of oar barely six feet from his boat. Perhaps it was the fragrance of her passing that made him look up. Biren was staring at the water, lost in the hypnotic pattern of swirls and the clumps of water hyacinths as they floated past. Later, in retrospect, he wondered what it was that shifted his gaze up to the passing boat. He would never know.

  She sat gracefully on the rush mat, chin in hands. Her dark silken braid twisted with jasmine hung to one side. As she passed, Biren got a fleeting glimpse of her delicate oval face, her finely arched eyebrows and the dark lashes resting softly on her cheek. The long tail end of her orange-red sari fanned gently in the river breeze as she passed.

  He peered around the side of the boat but all he could see was the back of the boatman growing smaller against the slanted evening sun.

  The image of her played on his mind: her jolting beauty, the delicate jasmine in her hair, the iridescent flame of her sari ignited by the setting sun as she floated by.

  CHAPTER

  42

  The following week there was a note from Thompson asking Biren to submit an estimate for building his house. His own house! Biren had been so caught up with day-to-day affairs, he had not given the matter any thought. To his frustration he had not been able to talk to Thompson about the school project, either, as most of the time his boss was either in a foul mood or out of the office.

  Designing a house tickled Biren’s fancy. It was one dream he could see turned into a tangible reality for a change. To build a house he first had to find a plot of land. He kept his eyes open and stumbled upon the perfect location on one of his jaunts. It was a stretch of vacant land between the fish market and the river. Although relatively close to the center of town, there was no access road leading to it. Later he discovered he could ride his horse through a patch of dense scrub and thicket to get to the mile-wide vacant lot. It had rice fields and bamboo groves on one side and the tall embankments of the river on the other. Across the river was a fishermen’s village.

  Biren halted his horse to gaze at the open sky and waving green paddy and he knew in his heart that this would be the very spot on which he would build his house. Looking at the vast expanse of nature lifted his spirits and made the petty world of office politics fade away.

  He found his way back to town through a residential neighborhood with rows of pukka houses made of brick and mortar with tin roofs. Many had neatly fenced yards, potted marigold plants decorating the front walk and latched gates with hand-painted signs of fanciful house names: Bono Kusum, Flower Garden; Ananda Niketan, Joyful Abode; Asha Nibash, Hope Dwelling. Middle-class Bengalis lived in houses like these, office babus, schoolteachers, postal and shipping clerks.

  Biren was passing under a leafy plum tree when a small green plum whizzed past his ear, followed by another that bounced off the horse’s flank, causing it to shy. He jerked his head around in time to see a flash of brown leg and a crimson skirt disappear into the tree’s upper branches. Cowering among the leaves was a small girl, who looked down from the safety of her perch with big brazen eyes. She stuck a pink tongue out at him. Biren wagged an admonishing finger at her and rode off smiling to himself.

  * * *

  He made inquiries about the land and found it did not belong to anyone. It was a no-man’s-land that separated the Muslim and Hindu sections of town. The two communities lived in clearly demarcated areas, and the land between them was used as a grazing ground for cattle.

  The challenges of constructing a house in such a location were many. It involved clearing out dense vegetation, constructing an access road, and there would be no neighbors to speak of. All this to Biren’s romantically inclined mind was beginning to sound quite appealing. His one concern was the budget. Surely the cost would be prohibitive? Thompson had told him he had an open budget at his disposal, and Biren wondered if asking for an access road leading up to his residence would be stretching it too far. But when he submitted the written proposal, the budget was quickly approved and he was given the go-ahead.

  Two elephants were commissioned to do the bulky work of clearing the land, and Biren rode out whenever he could to watch them work. Meanwhile he worked feverishly on a floor plan. It morphed from a romantic jumble in his head to a concept of increasing complexity that kept him awake at nights. He made countless sketches, changing them frequently, only to scrap everything and start over again. Silchar had no architects to speak of, and he was at the mercy of Chinese mistris. They were skilled, diligent house builders who could construct anything to specification from even a rough sketch. Their specialty, however, was the faux-English-style bungalow with big formal rooms and long connecting passages. Biren had a radically different idea in mind. He knew what he wanted in his head but found it impossible to translate it into a sketch for the mistris to follow.

  He finally enlisted the help of Ren Yamasaki, the famed Japanese architect and Haiku master whom Biren had met at the College Street Coffeehouse in Calcutta. Biren wrote to him explaining the project, and was overjoyed when he accepted his invitation to visit Silchar. Biren took him out to see the plot, and back at the guesthouse Yamasak
i sat at the dining table and deftly drew a detailed sketch on a roll of rice paper with his beautiful calligraphic pens and black squid ink. It was a remarkable floor plan, stunning in its simplicity. The house had a wide-skirted veranda, sloping roofs and a clean skyline opening out to a vista of the river. The rooms flowed easily into one another with no dark, narrow passages. Yamasaki specified natural building materials—thatch, cane and bamboo—all cheap and abundantly available in Assam. The materials integrated the house seamlessly with its surroundings and gave it a very natural feel. He also agreed to send a Chinese master carpenter to oversee the project. The detailed plan with the handwritten notes was an exquisite work of art in itself, and Biren went to great lengths to get a woodblock print of the original made in Calcutta to send to Estelle. He was excited to share it with her. Estelle was the only person he knew who would appreciate the beauty of the design. She was a free-spirited country girl, after all, who embraced bold ideas and dreamed as freely as he did.

  He waited impatiently to hear back from her.

  I would have excepted nothing less from you, dear Biren, she wrote. The house is as extraordinary and as original as you are. I can clearly picture the green rice fields, the big river and open sky just as you described them. Your idea of planting an avenue of shade trees leading up to your house is nothing short of magnificent. The only thing left to complete this picture is, of course, a beautiful Indian girl with jasmine in her hair sitting on your veranda! Don’t mind me, dear friend, but you have put me in a dreamy mood with your beautiful descriptions.

  The image of the girl on the boat immediately flashed through Biren’s mind. It was uncanny, almost as if Estelle had described her. He recalled the girl’s poetic beauty, the pensive look on her face as she floated past. Which lucky man was she was dreaming of? he wondered. A man waiting for her on some distant riverbank, silhouetted against the setting sun. His eyes would light up to see her boat. He would rush up to hold her hand as she stepped delicately on the shore. She would lift her lovely eyes up to meet his and smile...