by Shona Patel
More disconcerting was the fact that Thompson had appointed a young Indian named Biren Roy to spearhead the project. McCauley knew from experience that most proposals looked grand on paper, but getting the bullock cart to its destination was the main challenge in India. Also, to hand a plum position reserved exclusively for Europeans to an Indian—Oxbridge educated or no—was unprecedented in government circles.
Yet Roy came highly recommended, and McCauley was curious to meet the young man before he gave his final stamp of approval. There was also a slightly crafty motive for inviting him to lunch at the Royal Bengal Club. McCauley wanted to see how the young Indian would fare in the rarified European ambience of the Royal Bengal Club, with its insider etiquette, formal dress code and fine dining. Hopefully, it would send a message to the young upstart to stay on his side of the turf. A bit of intimidation was not necessarily a bad thing.
McCauley was just finishing his second drink when the bearer arrived with a chit to say Biren Roy was waiting for him at the reception.
At first McCauley didn’t see him, or perhaps he was expecting someone a little different.
“Mr. McCauley, sir?” said a tall, handsome young man holding out his hand. His grip was firm, his eyes steady.
“Ah, Biren Roy, how do you do,” said McCauley, appraising him. The fellow was a dapper dresser. McCauley was suddenly conscious of a spot of egg yolk on his tie from breakfast that morning. He had been running late for the committee meeting and not had time to change.
He led the way toward the tall-ceilinged dining hall, where they were seated at a corner table. McCauley observed the young man closely during lunch. Biren Roy had the most impeccable manners. What he had envisioned as a short business lunch turned into the most enlightening afternoon. Roy was well versed in both Indian and Western ways, and he was a persuasive talker. His vision was clear and he had carefully planned out the steps toward achieving the goals.
By the time they retired for coffee to the smoking room, McCauley was firmly convinced Thompson had picked the right man for the job.
“Your funds have been sanctioned for the next three years for both the Teachers’ Training Institute and the flagship school,” McCauley said, filling his pipe. “You have the full cooperation of my department and, if you need to, please feel free to contact me directly.”
“Perhaps you would care to visit Silchar sometime to see how the project is progressing?” said Biren. “It will be my pleasure to show you around, sir.”
“Yes, I would like that,” said McCauley. “I have always wanted to visit the Silchar Polo Club. It’s the first polo club in the world, I believe. Talking of which, would you like to be my guest at the races tomorrow? It’s the Viceroy Cup challenge at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club.”
“Thank you, but I must catch the steamer back to Silchar this evening. My wife is not very well, sir.”
“Then, I should not detain you any further,” said McCauley. He stood up and held out his hand. “I hope your wife gets better. It was indeed a pleasure meeting you, Roy, and good luck!”
CHAPTER
58
Biren arrived home in Silchar to find Buri Kaki hobbling up and down the veranda, muttering to herself. She tailed him into the study, wringing her hands. At first he thought she was worked up about Maya and Moni. With him being gone as well, she must have been lonely in the big, empty house. However, he quickly gathered that something had happened to agitate her. According to Buri Kaki, three rough-looking men had come twice to the house looking for him.
“Rough looking? What do you mean rough looking?” he asked.
Buri Kaki said they had red-red eyes and looked like ugly demons. Asuras.
Biren frowned. “What did they want?” he asked.
“They did not say, Jamai-babu,” said Buri Kaki. “They just wanted to know when you would come back.”
Biren was puzzled. What would three “ugly demons” want with him?
“What did you tell them?” he said.
“I chased them out of the gate with my broom. Then they came again the next day and I said, ‘I will put a curse on you if you come to this house.’ People are very afraid of my curses, as you know.”
Biren smiled. Buri Kaki, bent double at three feet ten inches, was gnarled and knobby. She had a beaked nose, three elongated teeth and a chin that sprouted a crop of springy hairs. What she lacked in size she compensated for with a cackle that sent every hen in the neighborhood scurrying. Buri Kaki’s reports tended to be dubious, like her story of the petni who lived in the fig tree and the “stinky spit” it cast on people passing below. It ultimately turned out to be fruit bats and bat guano.
Biren was about to dismiss her story about the three ugly demons in the same vein when she piped up, “When I said I would put a curse on those ugly demons, do you know what one of them said?”
“What?” said Biren, absently sifting through his mail. He turned over an envelope with a Russian stamp. It was a letter from Boris Ivanov.
“He said, ‘Save your curses, you ugly witch. My shameless daughter has cursed me already. She has run off with a low-class Muslim. I wish she was dead.’”
Biren stopped slitting the envelope and looked at her. “Did he mention the girl’s name? Was it Chaya?”
“I don’t know, Jamai-babu, but the man said it was all your fault. You encouraged their immoral relationship and let them meet secretly in this house. That is why she ran away.”
Biren looked at her, startled. “He blamed me for Chaya running away?”
“They were very bad men, Jamai-babu, that’s all I know. I hope they never come to this house again,” Buri Kaki muttered as she hobbled away.
* * *
No ugly demons or runaway daughters were going to stand in Biren’s way, so impatient was he to see Maya and Moni. He consoled Buri Kaki as best as he could and immediately took the next available boat to his father-in-law’s village, Shomapalli Ghat. The boat landing was just a rickety bamboo jetty with not even a tea shop. Several paths forked out leading to small hamlets. Biren remembered Maya telling him to take the one with the three date trees with all the vultures sitting on top.
“There’s a madman who lives under those date trees,” she said. “You will see a ragged tent strung across. You can’t miss him. He’s a permanent fixture.”
His name was Bhola Pagol and he was the village idiot. Bhola looked like a giant catfish with small eyes set too far apart in his oversize head. His fat, blubbery lips stretched from ear to ear in a grotesque clown grin. He sat cross-legged in the shade surrounded by neat little piles of dates. All day long he swayed back and forth and counted his dates, moving them from one pile to the other.
Seeing Biren walk down the crooked path, Bhola gave a scream and waddled toward him. He wore burlap shorts with faded factory markings and a filthy vest with potato-size holes.
“Gurudev!” he greeted him, smiling with his blubbery lips. He offered Biren a handful of dates.
“No, thank you,” said Biren. He smiled, remembering Maya’s story about the dates. Prior to her recent fever, Maya had insisted she would never touch another date in her life, thanks to Bhola. As young girl she had felt sorry for him and eaten the dates he offered her. They were rather tasteless with a funny texture, she said. She had not given it further thought until she made an appalling discovery—all the dates under Bhola’s tree had passed through vultures’ stomachs and popped out of the wrong end! No wonder the villagers never ate them. Just recalling the incident had made Maya gag.
Biren often teased her about it. When they were newly married, Regina Thompson invited them to the bungalow for high tea. She had baked a date loaf and Maya had politely declined, saying she was allergic to dates. She’d had a hard time keeping a straight face and had avoided looking at Biren the whole time they were there.
* * *
In Maya’s father’s house a group of small children played hopscotch in the front yard on chalk-drawn squares with pieces of broken tile. They were between the ages of four and eight, but Biren could not tell one from the other because all of them were completely bald. Seeing him approach, they stopped playing and ran up to meet him. To his shock he realized the littlest one was Moni.
“My goodness!” he cried. “What happened to everyone’s hair?”
Moni touched her head and looked bashful. Then her face crumpled up to cry.
“No, no, don’t cry,” said Biren hastily. He set down his suitcase and held out his arms. But Moni just ran away and hid behind the eldest girl.
“We got lice,” explained the girl. Biren recognized her as the daughter of Maya’s first cousin, whose wife was a religious fanatic. “Ma put ant powder on our heads and covered our heads with old cotton vests. But the lice did not go away so the barber came and shaved all our heads.”
Biren listened, running his hand over Moni’s head. It was smooth as a boiled egg. He had no idea what to make of it. Then Moni smacked his hand away.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you love your Baba anymore?”
She shook her head so hard it became a blur.
“She also eats mud,” said another small girl, who was missing a tooth.
Moni again shook her head vigorously in denial. The girl wagged a finger under her nose.
“Liar! Liar!”
Moni’s eyes brimmed with tears and her chin started to wobble.
“Shush, now,” Biren admonished the girl. “Don’t call her a liar. You are not a liar, are you now, Moni, maiyya?” He stood up. “Where is her mother?”
“Inside,” said the little girl. “She’s sleeping.”
He went inside the house. The whole house was sleeping. When winter temperatures dropped, people in the village liked to stay in bed under their quilts. No wonder most village babies were born during the fall.
All the rooms were dark and shuttered. Biren could make out lumps and bumps on several beds and snores and wheezes came from under the covers. Defeated, he went back outside.
“Which room is she in?” he asked, and held his hand out to Moni. “Come, let’s go and find your mother.” But Moni just shook her bald head into another blur and hid behind the older child.
He sighed. “Can someone please take me to her mother?” he begged, feeling irritable. He had been looking forward to seeing them, and had expected Moni to fly into his arms with shrieks of “Baba!” Now she was bald as an egg and showing signs of hostility toward her own father.
“I’ll take you,” said the one missing a tooth.
She led him past the mud-floored kitchen, where a cat was cleaning its paws in the doorway, past the prayer room, to a small bedchamber with a slanted roof. The room smelled of something strong and bitter, like turpentine, Biren thought. The girl pointed to a small figure curled up under the quilt.
“There,” she said. “She’s sleeping.”
Biren sat on the side of the bed. “Maya,” he whispered, and touched her gently on the shoulder. “Maya. I’m home.”
She opened her eyes. “It’s you,” she said softly, stretching out her hand. “When did you get here?”
Biren turned to the girl, who was standing at the foot of the bed fingering the quilt, watching them. “Thank you,” he said. “You can go outside and play.”
She left the room reluctantly. When he was sure she was gone, he bent down and touched his cheek against Maya’s. “Oh, Maya,” he said, his voice breaking, “I missed you so much.” He looked anxiously at her face and pushed back her hair. “How are you? I can’t see your face. Can I open these shutters?”
“Do that,” she said. “Come to think of it, I have never opened the shutters all the time I have been here.”
“Why not?” he said, getting up. “How can you stay in a dark room like this? Isn’t it depressing? Don’t you want to see the outside world?”
“There’s not much of a view from this window,” she said. “Open it and you’ll see.”
He cracked open the shutters and saw she was right. All he could see was a mildewed brick wall, a broken chair and rusted tin cans tumbled about in the corner.
He turned to look at Maya and stifled a cry. Maya’s eyes were dull and sunken in her face, her skin had turned a pasty gray and her hair...her hair... Most of it had fallen out and what remained was braided into a thin rattail.
“Oh, Maya,” he said in a strangled voice, blinking back his tears. “What happened to you?”
She touched her face. “What? I look that terrible, do I? I haven’t seen a mirror for a long time.”
He composed himself. “You’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said quickly. Several medicine bottles lay by her bedside. “What is all this medicine? What did the doctor say was wrong with you?”
She ignored his question. “Look at you! You look so handsome,” she said in a caressing voice. “I had forgotten how handsome you are, my husband.” A touch of the old Maya, sensual and warm, returned to her eyes.
Her tenderness was almost too much to bear. A lump rose in Biren’s throat. He pretended to study the labels of the bottles, blinking back his tears. What was all this? Pepsin, bismuth, creosote, sulphocarbonate of soda, bromides and several bottles of tonic. It looked as if she was being treated for some kind of stomach ailment.
“Who is this doctor?” he said. “I hope he is not some village quack.”
“No, no.” Maya laughed. Even her teeth had turned yellow. Biren felt the pain ripping through his heart. He found it difficult to breathe. “There have been three or four doctors. One of them is a specialist from the Dhaka Medical College, a friend of Ranen—you know, my first cousin, the one with the holy wife, Sabitri...”
“She is the one who put ant powder on the girls and made them shave off their hair! What did this doctor—this specialist—say? What kind of specialist is he, anyway?”
“He is doing his research in malaria. No, wait, wait...” She raised her hand, seeing Biren’s look of exasperation. “He is doing research in malaria but he is very brilliant—first class—from Dhaka Medical School.”
Biren wanted to scream, but instead he grew very quiet. “And what did he say?”
“And he is familiar with my symptoms—the anemia, stomach ailments and the rest. It’s a common illness going around. Baba will know the name of the illness. He wrote it down. Is Baba still sleeping? Does he know you are here?”
He put his hands on her shoulders, his voice shaking. “I am taking you home, Maya. Today. Right now. I don’t know what is going on. All I know is I should have never left you here. I should have never gone to Calcutta. That was a terrible, terrible mistake.”
She tugged his hand, her eyes eager. “You never told me...how did the meeting go? Did you get the sanctions for the school?”
“Yes, it was very successful. I got everything we had hoped for and more. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore, except you getting well.”
She sank back in the bed, smiling, her eyes closed. “Oh, thank God your trip was successful.”
“I don’t know,” he said miserably, covering his eyes. His tears leaked out. He could no longer help himself. “I don’t know, Maya. I expected to come back here and find you well. All I want to do now is to take you home.”
CHAPTER
59
That night Maya caught pneumonia, which quickly spiraled out of control. In the early dawn hours her teeth began chattering, followed by convulsions and long, tortured wheezing that sounded like a broken harmonium. Biren remained by her bedside throughout the first night and the next, applying a cold compress to her forehead and smoothing her sparse hair from her face. She drifted in and out of consciousness, often crying out fo
r her mother, talking animatedly in gibberish. Biren was greatly alarmed. She sounded nothing like his soft-spoken Maya. Then all of a sudden a perfect calm washed over her. There was a new clarity in her eyes, peacefulness in her breath. She looked at Biren and smiled, the old Maya smile—deep, calm and brave. After having stayed up for two nights without sleep, he could not believe what he was witnessing. She is going to be well, she is going to be well, his heart sang over and over again. He saw Maya’s lips were parted; was she trying to say something?
“Tell me,” he said eagerly, her face inches from his own.
“I want to go.” She barely whispered the words.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Biren reassured her. “We will leave first thing in the morning.”
She shook her head slightly as if he had misunderstood and sank back, exhausted. Then she tried again, speaking more clearly this time.
“Please...” She beseeched him with her eyes, her beautiful gray-green eyes with their swimming depths of gold. “Please, I beg you to let me go.”
“What are you saying, Maya?” he said in a stricken voice.
She nodded and closed her eyes.
It came to him with a sickening jolt that Maya was going to die. She was asking him—begging him—for his permission to let her go, and there was nothing in his power and no power in the world that could hold her back. Her eyes were closed but not all the way, a white luster visible between the lids. He gave a strangled cry and fell upon her chest, his body racked with sobs.
Maya, no, no, no, his mind screamed.
With great effort she lifted her hand to touch his hair. Through the thin covering of her nightclothes he could hear her tortured heart, her breath ragged and uneven. A staccato rattling came from the back of her throat.
She was slipping out of his grasp, drifting away to that place between land and water, between earth and sky, that opened to the great beyond. Yet a part of her held back. She waited for his permission. She would not go without it.
