by Sara Banerji
Julia tried to grip the stone with her mind but seemed at first to only be able to rock it, increasing the risk of its toppling. Feeble efforts were only increasing the danger. She squeezed all the power of her body into the effort, pulling her mouth back into a grimace like a grin, and wet grit carried on the wind smashed against her teeth. The stone slipped another inch, but sank slightly too. Julia gathered up her mind again until she almost felt her brain creaking. And the stone swung slightly, but did not fall further. She let her mind go after two or three minutes, her head reeling with the strain of it. At once the boulder, with a smacking suck, rose out of its feeble muddy grounding, and rolled slightly. Hastily Julia got her mind tightened up to hold it again. After that for long minutes she held on until she could no longer endure the pain and then she would stagger with a sudden blinding lethargy that was like a second’s fainting. Each time she stopped the boulder started its gravity-induced forward rolling. Then quickly Julia would grab it with her mind again. Sometimes she screamed, “Kali! Kali!” though he never heard. Then she would quickly have to return to the swinging stone.
Julia’s head began to burst with the effort of holding the stone that threatened the Milky Butterfly. Her body was shaking, tears ran down her face. But all the time the stone was sinking deeper and settling. After minutes which seemed like hours it did not stir even when Julia took her mind off it for long moments to rest or scream for Kali. Kali must have been calling too; shouting, shouting for his cow, but even if he had made no sound at all he would never have heard Julia’s voice over the roaring of the storm. Julia thought the cow had become aware of the calling of her master, for she turned her eyes towards the other side of the valley where Kali ran. But the mud pressed too hard on her throat for her to moo her love.
The boulder should have punched its way through Julia’s bungalow, blotting out the party guests, the double gins, and all the kisses. But instead it paused and hung like a drunkard’s eyelid, plunging the Milky Butterfly in shadow.
Then very carefully, Julia took a tiny part of her mind to stroke the mud away. A little finger of Julia’s thinking began, like a tongue, to lick the clinging clay that held the cow, just as, five years before, a mother cow had licked the mucus of the womb away from Pallpapatti’s body. Gently, gently, so that the stone should not be unseated, Julia’s mind drew the mud from under the cow’s belly, from around her hocks, from over her shoulders. Mud that held her like manacles began to loose its grip. The tired cow stirred.
“Softly, softly,” whispered Julia Clockhouse, who still held the boulder in the mind net. The mud around the cow began to loosen and run wetly from around her, red, as though it was blood that was flowing. “Softly, softly,” whispered Julia to the little cow, and the cow, as though she understood, became still and waited. Now great dollops of mud were tearing away, and sploshing down on to the roof of Julia’s bungalow.
Then suddenly, with an almost audible plop, Pallpapatti came out of the mud. She emerged as though she was being born a second time, shivering, wet, and dripping red. Shuddering like a new born calf she sprang out of the shadow of the boulder, and her movement sent it toppling over. It plunged deeply into the ground. It would probably be a million years before it moved again.
Julia sighed like someone tired and now free to sleep and stepped towards the gap as the little cow tottered stiffly towards the road.
Julia took the full force of the wind in her face as she approached the gap. It was eternally black beneath; it was infinitely black above.
And then Kali, on the other side of the valley, and three bends of the road below, who had not turned when his cow emerged, now looked up and saw Julia standing silhouetted in the goose’s gap.
“Oh, Missie Baba, no! No! No!” he shouted, though Julia had no way of hearing him. “Don’t die, Missie darling, please don’t die!” he yelled, understanding her too well. He began to rush up towards her.
The little cow, desperate for home, cantered away towards the village, in the opposite direction.
The wind pushed at Julia hard and she found it difficult to take the final step.
Kali came running up the road towards her, and when he was a turn away she could hear him shouting.
Julia butted her head into the battering wind and tried to get her legs to follow, scrambling over the final rocks that stood between her and the freedom of the goose.
There was a sharp clap and a flame leaped through the storm like a diwali rocket. It stopped both Julia and Kali, and sent the cow galloping home faster than ever. An elephant had blundered into the fallen electric wires at the valley bottom. The elephant shrieked with a sound that made the valley shudder, then the hills shook as the herd came rushing back up again.
Kali, who had lived here all these years, recognised the sound; knew the danger. He began to try and run up the road, but he was old and tired from his steep climb.
The galloping herd reached the road along which Kali ran in minutes, and began to scramble on to it, mashing out great clay clumps with their feet. On either side of the old man were high clay banks. There was no way out for Kali. He had no more running in him. He stood in the road his arms out, saying “Shoo,” as though he was confronted by chickens.
The elephants rushed towards him screaming, with the wind in their ears and their trunks raised, rage and terror from the gigantic electric shock blurring their minds and their sight. When they were almost upon Kali he turned, and tried to run back up the hill. Julia stood shouting, screaming to no one for help, trying to get a grip on her elephant-moving mind, but she had used up everything in her struggle to save the cow.
She began to scramble back across the rock, trying to get to the old man, though there was nothing she could have done, even if she had managed to reach him.
The herd caught up with Kali and the old man stopped running. There was no escaping. To Julia, seeing from above, he was a tiny figure about to be swallowed by the moving mountains. His tea towel, astonishingly, still fluttered on his shoulder. He looked up to where Julia stood. Her whole frame was shaking, her eyes full of tears, but she could see his face, and thought that he was smiling. Then Kali shouted a word. A moment later the great tusker caught the old man in its trunk and threw him almost casually into the air. Kali’s tea towel fell from his shoulder, and came floating down on to the road like the banner of a defeated soldier. Then the panicked herd crossed the road and began to scramble up the opposite bank.
As the wet-shining grey buttocks slithered up on to the grassland the body of Kali went over the black edge of the gap.
There was silence. The elephants, having reached the top of the bank, stopped suddenly, and began milling as though their mood had changed in a moment from rage to confusion. The great tusker that had flung Kali turned and peered down on to the road, as though he had become aware of his action, even regretted it, and hoped that perhaps the man had not gone spinning through the night to his death.
But Kali had vanished into the same night that had swallowed the goose.
The elephants began to amble away in the end, subdued, like a crowd of exuberant drunks made suddenly sober by some awful damage they had done.
Julia crawled over the scarred rocks, her mouth open, howling aloud, as she groped among the shadowy stones in the vain hope that the old man would be lying among them.
Into the rock’s crevices she screamed “Kali! Kali! Kali!” and it did not matter how loudly she cried, for there was no one any more to tell her, “Sh, Missie. Not be sad. Life is for happy not sad.”
She plunged her arms, already scratched from the lemon picking of the morning, into the cracks, not caring if snakes slept in there. He had said something before the elephant hurled him. He had shouted out something. As she crawled and sobbed and searched she tried to remember the word.
“Saham!” she decided. “Saham,” he had called before his body went racing off into forever. She kept murmuring the word that was all that was left of Kali over and over as she search
ed for him. Saham means “I am that”. Saham saham saham, until she realised she was saying hamsa. Hamsa which means Goose. She remembered then that long long ago Kali had told her, “One day you will hear the song of Hamsa.”
Is that what he meant? she wondered. Does the goose sing, “I am that”?
“When you understand the song of the wild gander,” Kali had told her, “then you will never again be unhappy. Nor ever make anybody else unhappy either.” Well, the words had come too late for Julia Clockhouse, Big Madam of Arnaivarlai Tea Company.
★
And so because so many of those she loved had been hurt, and even died because of her, she put an end to all that and stepped off the edge of the world; followed the Hamsa, followed the old man who had loved her.
Chapter 18
Because Julia had slowed the tumble of the boulder so that Pallpapatti would not be crushed it lost its impetus and only rolled a short way then sank deeply into the ground. When the tree fell the boulder had already found a resting place and was not moved further, so it was only branches that plunged through the roof of the Senior Manager’s bungalow. The weather followed the tree and whistled through the standard lamps, upturning brandy sodas and bowls of ice, and tickling the guests in the neck as they crept giggling and screaming among the mud and foliage.
At the top of the mountain where the wild elephants had waded in the morning, on the very rim of the green spoon, sat the yogi. Because his body appeared only to brush the tips of the grass and not bend them at all it seemed as though he was floating.
As Julia stepped over the world’s edge the yogi breathed a word. Then Julia’s body that should have gone plummeting straight down to death as the goose’s had done, grew suddenly lighter. It was as if the floating of the yogi had infected the dropping body of Julia Clockhouse. As the sound of the word the yogi had given her began to reverberate in her chest Julia’s body stopped its deathly fall and began to drift. And because when you are falling to death a thousand feet below you can’t worry about things like your soul coming out, and because a tongueless yogi had made her system rumble with the sound of a special word that felt in tune with the turning of the universe, Julia’s soul came rushing out of its body like a foot that has been walking all day comes out of a tight shoe as soon as it gets home.
As the holy tree smashed through her home the body of Julia Clockhouse began to amble toward the plains below. Her hair stood out around her head like a luminous globe, wobbling with the gentle floating, so that Gwen Buxton, if she had been there to see it, would have been reminded of the dandelion clocks of her childhood.
“Look Julia, blow, blow, tell what time it is.” But the dull child had sat yearning for deadly trumpets of datura, and pullichums to pop upon her forehead. It was the Indian hill flowers that the child Julia threaded round her forehead in summer, and now the clocks of Kerala swirled through her mind as she fell to the floor of India.
The storm was gathering strength again, and it bit Julia with rain, and momentary consciousness. Her soul too was hurled, and it went towards the sky, up and up, catching the light of the stars.
Down below, in Julia’s bungalow, Babuchi the cook went out to have a fevered pee and saw something twist, sparkling in the sky. He touched his palms to Vishnu.
Julia’s soul was hurtled into the universe, so that stars brushed its cheeks, and the planets slid sharply through its ears like rubies. Sometimes she could see a little but because the madness that makes us people was melting out of her she began to see the things as they really were, until she could no longer make sense of anything. Seeing smaller and smaller she came to observe only particles colliding. She saw the making and the breaking of the cosmos but lost the ability to know what all this action was accomplishing. She became submerged in creation, and creation became submerged in her, until the distinction vanished, and she went into the area where time runs backwards.
Julia, sinking into forever, who was the whole of creation, now knew that there is nothing but perfection, that there are no sins but only mistaken directions, that there is no wrong but only misunderstanding, that there is no devil but only God’s face hidden.
The soul of Julia Clockhouse spun shining, fulfilled at last because it was allowed to spread across eternity, instead of being checked on reaching the bedroom wall, instead of being stunned with gin, like a goose pinioned to waddle in the henhouse while longing for love in the sky.
And God drank the refreshing draught that was Julia, and in return, for the cosmos turns on give and take, filled her with God.
Ben Clockhouse, driving home at last, got a shock as he thought he heard his wife’s laugh. He thought he heard her say, “I thought you were dead!” The words sounded so real that Ben turned his head, expecting to see her sitting in the car beside him. “I am so happy you are alive,” whistled the voice that sounded like Julia’s, so that Ben nearly crashed the car and wondered if all the troubles of the journey had done harm to his nerves so that he had begun hearing imaginary voices.
For three days they searched for Julia, beating the bushes with sticks, prodding the jungles with bamboos in case the panther had taken her. They did not find any trace of her, though quite soon they came upon the smashed body of the bearer Kali.
Babuchi, who had lost his friend and who had been ill, became very depressed. Ben Clockhouse, because he had not felt at all hungry since the disappearance of his wife, to keep Babuchi occupied handed him Julia’s broken birthday present and told him to stick it together.
“A great wind seized her, and blew her up into the sky,” said Babuchi pointing, and his finger trembled at the memory. “I am sure I saw her.”
Ben shook his head sadly, and decided that the shock of the death of his close friend had unhinged the old man’s mind.
“If it was not Missie Baba up there in the heavens then it was someone, and who else could it have been?” mumbled Babuchi, as he glued up china chips.
They searched the gushing gullies in case Julia had been swept away in the water; they sent boats with nets along the swollen river, and did not find her body. The women pluckers were told to abandon the tea and hunt the hills for Madam. The men went out with dogs to sniff for her, and wild tribal men were lured with whisky and chickens from the low jungles, to track her footprints.
The wild men and the dogs and the women and Julia’s golden Labradors all arrived together at the same moment on the lip of the valley, on the highest point, at the gap of the goose.
They called Ben, and he arrived furiously in a skidding jeep. There, caught on the thorny part of the last bush of the valley was a piece of the white dress of Julia Clockhouse.
When Ben got out of the jeep everyone was leaning over looking down at something, so that he ran forwards, yet did not dare to look at the same time; shouting, as though terribly angry, “What the bloody hell is happening?”
But neither miles down the hillside, nor on the plains below, lay the shattered body of Julia.
Slowly the wild men and the tame men and the plucking women stopped looking down to the plains, and turned their faces up to the sky, where the sun was now shining and from which rain no longer fell.
“Oh, you stupid idiots!” shouted Ben Clockhouse, who would have liked to knock their heads together, but did not dare for fear of union action.
A yogi, his sandals hanging on his shoulder, an umbrella over his head, came up the hill from the other side, walking quite lightly, though he was very old and the hill steep.
“Have you seen Madam?” shouted Babuchi. “Have you seen Clockhouse Madam?”
But the yogi only smiled, opened his mouth and pointed so that they should all see there was no tongue inside, and went on his way.
Chapter 19
The terrifying happenings on the night of Julia’s birthday had so alarmed the little tribal servant that he, in spite of the fact that his family depended on him, could bear it no longer, and ran away home.
He might have been able to face the tree
that came crashing through the roof and pulverised all the furniture. In his forest village spirits from fallen trees could be vengeful and had to be propitiated by offerings of wild honey and cactus beer. Trees fell quite often, though, and so he was used to it, although he found it frightening.
He had been afraid when elephants had broken the electricity wires earlier in the night. After this accident the Clockhouse bungalow had been lit only by hurricane lamps and candles. When the tree fell all these lights hissed out, leaving dripping darkness punctuated by a few bobbing cigarette glows. Then they too were extinguished and the guests crawled around with wet stubs in their lips.
The little boy had been very afraid when the guests and servants started screaming. Only Babuchi remained calm. He had simply pulled his blanket tighter round his shivering body because he thought that he had died of his illness and was now a corpse. But all the guests had shrieked very loudly and struggled and dragged at their friends in the rubble.
“There is nothing so horrible to look at in the whole world,” the little boy told his brothers when he got home, “as Europeans fully drunk and all over with mud going on their hands and knees.”
Some of the little brothers had never seen a European at all so were prepared for anything.
It was not even the disappearance of Clockhouse Madam that had scared the child into running away. In fact he was quite relieved that she had gone, though he had not the least idea of what might have happened to her. Tribal people, and even the labourers of the valley, were sometimes killed by wild elephants and tigers, but it seemed incredible to the little boy that that sort of thing should happen to a European. But with Julia Madam absent the fear of catching sight of her naked body and getting into trouble with Babuchi was gone. And also the child found Clockhouse Madam very troubling, because, as everyone knew, she was inhabited by evil spirits.
But the thing that had really shocked the boy, and sent him racing alone along the dark roads to his village, was the thing that Babuchi had seen in the sky. Even after the house had fallen and the car drivers had rootled among the bricks and rubble, found their own masters and madams, and taken them away to their homes to be washed, Babuchi had gone on lying in his blanket. Quite a lot of the kitchen roof had remained in place, so perhaps Babuchi was unaware at first of the disaster that had overwhelmed the rest of the bungalow. Or perhaps, thinking he was dead, he did not see any point in getting up and going to help. For there is nothing much a corpse can do to help, is there?
