Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  The sky darkened and the wind howled in my ears. I looked behind me at the house. The tur-nado was over it. The verandah was so dark I couldn’t see the professor. I saw the lit screen of the computer disappearing as he went into the house. Above us the tur-nado looked like a monster. I have never been so scared. Then my wrist strap beeped. A woman’s voice said out of nowhere, “Find low ground, low ground,” and “Run! Run!” I wanted to see if the professor was all right, but he had told me to warn the village. So I ran.

  There is a narrow ravine not far from the village. Old people say that it is a crack that opened in the earth during an earthquake. In the monsoons it fills with water, but right now it is dry, full of thorny bushes and rocks. The goats like it there. That was the only low place I could think of. I began to shout as I got closer, yelling to people to stop gawking and trying to lead them to the ravine. I couldn’t hear my own voice because of the wind, but Dulari mai started to scream at people and gather them and point them to the ravine. Everyone worked quickly; they are afraid of her temper. There was even someone carrying Joti Ma, old Gobind-kaka’s mother, on his back, the terrified children were all holding hands, some were carrying the babies. Behind me the tur-nado danced across the fields, ripping up everything in its path. It picked its way across the land. I saw people rushing toward the ravine, some carrying bundles with them. There was a lot of shouting but everyone was moving. I thought: I’m not needed here, I could have stayed with the professor. I thought I should see if I could go around the tur-nado and get to his house. I made my way back across the fields, keeping a careful eye on the storm.

  When I was halfway there, I saw the children. It was Ranbir Singh’s younger daughter and son, returning from school on the footpath through the fields. Usually someone takes them from Songaon to the town and back by bicycle, but they were walking home. She is older than me, maybe fourteen, and he is only about five years old. Her father once had Bojhu kaku’s son beaten because he said he—Kankariya bhai—dared to raise his eyes and look at his daughter. Before I was born, there was trouble that nobody talks about and the Rajputs came and burned down some of our huts, and three people died. That’s what I mean when I say they can do anything to us. I hesitated, because if I said anything to the children they didn’t like, their father could have me thrashed and the village burned down.

  The children looked scared. The girl was trying to use her mobile but she gave up and put it in her schoolbag, looking upset. They looked at me and looked away, and the older sister said to the boy, “Come,” urgently, and pulled on his arm. He was tired and about to cry.

  I thought: Why should I try to help them? But I pointed to the tur-nado raging behind us:

  “Sister, that is a bad toofan. The professor told me we have to hide. We are all at the ravine near my basti. I can take you there.”

  I took extra care to be polite. I didn’t want her to accuse us later on and get the whole village in trouble. She hesitated. The little boy said:

  “Why are you holding a dead crow?”

  The girl came to a decision. She said:

  “Show me where this place is.”

  They followed me. There were leaves and branches flying around, and I saw the thatched roof lift off a hut and vanish. A brick came hurtling through the air and missed us by two spans of my hand. I didn’t dare look back—we were racing over the fields. The little boy stumbled, and the girl picked him up. Panting, she followed me. It would have been faster if I’d carried the child, but she wasn’t going to let a dom boy touch her brother. Then she half stumbled. She said: “Wait!” I almost didn’t hear her but when I looked back she was crying. She thrust her brother at me. Her breath was coming in sobs. He was crying too.

  “You want me to carry him? Your father will break my neck!”

  She was wailing and shaking her head, and the tur-nado was very close, so I put the child on one hip and handed her the still-warm body of the crow.

  “I’m not going to hold that,” she said, scowling.

  “Then take your brother back,” I said, losing my temper. “This crow is a vahan of Shani Deva, and we must not disrespect it. Don’t you keep pigeons?”

  She wrinkled her nose but took the crow in her dupatta, and we ran the rest of the way until we were at the ravine.

  It was dark inside, because the low, thorny bushes growing on the top edges of the ravine blocked the sky. Wind screamed over our heads and we heard the most terrible sounds, as though the world was being torn apart.

  And then silence.

  We all looked at each other. Bojhu kaku and the others saw that I was holding Ranbir Singh’s son in my arms, and his daughter was standing next to me, holding the body of a crow in her dupatta, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Bhola, what have you done?” someone said. Maybe it was Barki kaki. People gasped.

  “I couldn’t leave them to die,” I said. The boy wriggled out of my grasp and went to his sister. She handed me the crow and held her brother close. Tears ran down her face.

  Bojhu kaku said to the girl, “We will see you home. Come, there is nothing to be scared of.”

  So the children were escorted to Songaon by the crowd. If Bojhu kaku went by himself, he might have to bear the brunt of Ranbir Singh’s mood. There was no telling whether he’d be grateful or angry. So Barki kaki said she would go, and then Dulari mai (and we had to tell her no because she would insult even the gods if she lost her temper, and where would we all be then?). So about fifteen people went.

  We climbed out of the ravine. The village was smashed flat. There were pots and pans scattered about the fields, and bricks also. The bargad tree that has stood at the crossing on the way to Songaon for two hundred years was completely uprooted. The pathway was covered with big tree branches. Our homes were gone. You might say, What’s a mud-and-thatch house? It is nothing. But to a poor person it is home. Our hands shape it, our hands weave the bhusa. It is where our hopes live. When you have very little, everything you have becomes more precious. We wept and in the same breath we thanked the gods for sparing our lives.

  I didn’t go with them. My duty was to my dadaji now, and I had a terrible fear growing inside me. I went to the house on the hill. Midway the crow stirred in my arms, and I saw that it was only stunned, not dead. I stopped in the field and found a pocket of moisture where some hailstones had fallen, and let a few drops trail from my fingers into its throat. Suddenly it struggled and flapped its wings. I opened my hands and it flew. It was unsteady at first, but it got stronger as it flew, making two big circles over my head before it went off. Then I went up to what was left of the house.

  The windows and doors were gone, and I could see the sky through the roof. Two walls were down. I thought: This is a pukka house, how could this have happened? How could brick and mortar come down like this? There was dust in the air. It made me cough. There were pages and pages torn from his books, fallen everywhere like leaves. I saw that his computer had fallen under his desk and was all right. Bricks fell as I walked around. I fell too, and broke my arm, and hurt my leg. That’s why I’m in hospital.

  I was the one who found him. He was near the drawing room window, under a pile of bricks.

  He was my grandfather, no matter what anyone says about caste and blood. He gave me everything I have—he was like a god to me. I would have given my life for him, but instead he is the one who is gone. He said I would grow up to be a learner and a singer—someone who could change the world. A dom boy like me—nobody has ever told me such things. I’m telling you, he was my dadaji; I don’t care what anyone says.

  His sons came for his body. I’m not allowed to be there for the last rites. But I know, and he knows, that I should be there. He used to tell me that if you look at things on the surface, you don’t know their true nature. You also have to look with your inner eye. He looked at me with his inner eye. He was my dadaji and he’s gone.

  That’s his computer on the table. His sons didn’t ask about it.

  N
obody has come to see me and I am scared.

  What is that you say? Half of Songaon is destroyed? That is a terrible thing. Seven people dead!

  I am glad Ranbir Singh’s children gave a good account of us. It is strange for him to be in our debt.

  Earlier today there was a TV program about the tur-nado. They interviewed an expert. He said that although a tur-nado is strong, it is also delicate. I think I know what he means. Before it is born, the tur-nado is a confusion of cloud and wind. It takes only a little touch here and there to turn the cloud and wind into a monster that can destroy houses. Even once it is made, you can’t tell where it is going to go, because it is so delicate a thing that maybe one leaf on one tree might persuade it to go this way instead of that. Or one breath from one sleeping farmhand in the field.

  When I leave the hospital, I’m going to help rebuild my village. And I’m going to collect all the pages of Dadaji’s books that are scattered all over the fields. I imagine I will find the thoughts of a scientist or philosopher, or the speeches of a poet, stuck in a tree’s branches, or blowing in the wind with the dust. I will pick up every page I find and put it together.

  I have to find out how I can keep learning. Dadaji was going to teach me so that I could be a learned man like him when I grow up. How is it possible for a tur-nado to be so powerful and so delicate at the same time? How do we tell Dharti Mai we are sorry? How do we stop the mining company that wants to take our land? Please print that in your newspaper—we cannot let them mine and burn more coal, because that is destroying the world. Please tell the big people in the cities like Delhi and in faraway places like America. They won’t care about someone like me, but ask them if they care about their own children. I saw just yesterday that it is not just the poor who will suffer in this new world they are making. Tell them to stop.

  I have been seeing crows at the window all afternoon. They land on the sill and caw. The orderly says Shani Deva has shown me grace, because of the crow I saved. Everyone fears Shani Deva because he brings us difficult times. But crows remember, and they tell each other who is a friend, and maybe the crows will help us. It’s their world too.

  I’m very tired. In one day I lost my grandfather, hid my people from the tur-nado, saved two Rajput children, and became a friend of crows.

  Something strange happened after dinner. I was half asleep. I heard a woman saying very sadly, “What shall I do to bring the rain?” Then I saw it wasn’t a dream, because there was this young woman on the computer screen, a foreigner. I thought she must be one of the people who used to talk to the professor. She looked sad and tired. I told her, you have to sing to the clouds. You have to sing the rain down. Between the radio and my dadaji’s lessons I have learned a little of the raga—Malhaar, the rain-calling raga. I sang a line or two for her before the connection broke.

  Dadaji told me once that sound is just a tremble in the air. A song is a tremble that goes from the soul into the air, and thus to the eardrums of the world. The tur-nado is a disturbance of the air, but it is like an earthquake. Perhaps it is the song of the troubled earth, our mother Dharti Mai. One day I will compose a song to soothe her.

  . . . IN TEXAS . . .

  . . . it was the kind of day Dorothy Cartwright’s husband wouldn’t have allowed. Wasn’t it just a year and a half ago—he’d gotten so mad at the heat wave at Christmastime that he’d cranked up the air-conditioning until she had to go find a sweater? But they’d had the traditional Christmas evening fire in the fireplace, and weather be damned. It was nowhere near Christmas Day, being March, but it was hotter than it should be, the kind of day when Rob would have had the AC going and the windows closed. Closed houses always made her feel claustrophobic, no matter that her old home had been over four thousand square feet—just the two of them after their son, Matt, grew up and left home. But now Rob was dead of a heart attack more than a year ago, and Dorothy lived in a little two-room apartment in an assisted-living facility. She could open the windows if she felt like it. She did so, and turned on the fans, and checked the cupcakes baking in the oven. There was a cool breeze, no more than a breath. The big magnolia tree in the front lawn made a shade so deep you could be forgiven for thinking evening had come early. She arranged the chairs in the living room for the fifth time and glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes and they would be here.

  As she was taking the cupcakes out, the phone rang. She nearly dropped the tray. Shaking, she set it on the counter and picked up the phone. It was Kevin.

  “Gramma! Guess where your favorite grandson’s calling from?”

  He was cheerful in the faked way he had when he was upset. Which meant—

  “I’m in rehab and this time I’m going to quit for good.”

  “Of course, hon,” she said. Who could believe the kid when he’d been in and out of rehab six times in two years? She remembered Rob’s cold fury the last time the boy had been over. Her grandson was adrift, and she was helpless and useless. The other day she’d watched a show on PBS about early humans and how the human race wouldn’t have survived without old people, other people than the parents, to help raise the young and transmit the knowledge of earlier generations. Grandmothers in particular were important. That was all very well, but in this day of books and computers and all, who needed grandmothers? They lived in retirement homes, or in huge, echoing houses, at the periphery of society, distracting themselves, waiting for death. Times had changed. Kevin was beyond anyone’s help. She gripped the edge of the counter with her free hand. An ache shot through her chest. She felt a momentary dizziness.

  “I’ll send you some cupcakes,” she said. All she had been able to do for the people she loved was to offer them food, as though the trouble in the world could be taken away by sugar and butter and chocolate. She said good-bye, feeling hopeless.

  He had sent her an orange wristlet, rather pretty. It had jewellike white buttons on it that allowed her to communicate with her new notebook computer (a gift from her son) with a touch. She looked at it and thought how nice Kevin was, to get her a present. She touched the button and her notebook computer lit up, and there was an image of a woman in a diving suit suspended in murky blue water, her arms working, and a reedy electronic voice like a cartoon character saying something about cold Arctic waters and repeating a name, Dr. Irene Ariak, Irene Ariak. Surely she had heard the name in some show or other. A scientist working in the Arctic. What a dangerous thing to do, to go up there in the cold and dark. “Bless you and be careful up there, I’m praying for you,” she said. The cartoon voice said, Mrs. Cartwright, thank you! And the screen went blank. Dorothy wondered if she’d heard right. Well, this was a new world, to be sure.

  The doorbell rang as she was setting the cupcakes on a plate. Patting her hair, glancing at the small oval mirror over by the little dining table (her lipstick was just right), she went to the door.

  There they all were, smiling. Rita, with her defiantly undyed white hair in a braid tied with rainbow-colored ribbons (Rob would have thought them loud), said, “How nice of you to host the meeting, Dorothy!,” and planted herself in the comfortable armchair. The others, Mary-Ann, Gerta, Lawrence, Brad, Eva, and three women she didn’t know, crowded into the small living room. Dorothy handed around cupcakes and poured tea and coffee and felt as awkward as a new wife hosting her first dinner party. She scolded herself: Now, then, you’ve known these people for eight months, and you’ve hosted more parties in your life than you can remember! This was about reinventing herself. Stretching outside her comfort zone, learning new things. Rob would have never allowed these people in their house—there was something not done about their passionate intensity. “Aging hippies,” Rob would have said. He would have told her what was wrong with each of them, and she would never have invited them again. Once she’d had a local mothers’ group over for tea; Rob came home early. He’d been pleasant enough greeting them and had gone upstairs. The women were upset about the firing of the principal at the local elementary school, and one o
f them had raised her voice emphatically, making her point. Rob had banged the bedroom door so hard upstairs that the reverberation made the windows rattle. She’d never invited those women over again.

  She sat down and let the conversation swirl around her, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest. Keeping up the smile was becoming difficult.

  “Well,” Rita said, “our energy-saving campaign has been successful beyond anything we expected. Management has stopped grumbling. We’ve saved them $14,504 in energy bills, annually!”

  “New lightbulbs and more insulation, and cranking down the AC so it isn’t freezing in the middle of summer, and one set of solar panels . . . who’da thought it?”

  “Our see-oh-two emissions are down by . . . let’s see . . . 18 percent . . .”

  “Multiply individual actions by millions or billions, and you’re looking at real global difference . . .”

  It was one of the new women, a blonde with intense blue eyes. Not from the apartment complex. Dorothy had already forgotten her name. Now the woman was smiling at her a little uncertainly.

  “Mrs. Cartwright, we need to recruit people for the protest. The pipeline is coming to us. Janna Helmholtz’s land is being violated—they got a court order to cut a corridor through her woods to bring the oil pipes through, and we’re going to protest. Can we count on you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Dorothy said, feeling foolish. What had she agreed to?

  “ . . . they say fracking for shale oil and gas is going to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but can you believe they base that on completely ignoring the methane emissions from the fracking?”

  “Methane is twenty times worse than see-oh-two . . . cooking the planet . . .”

  “My objection to fracking is entirely on another plane—see, less coal burned here means coal prices fall, and it gets exported elsewhere, so coal usage will go up somewhere else if fracking happens here in the United States—idiots don’t understand the meaning of global . . .”