‘Why didn’t you kill the snake?’ I demanded.
‘It’s harmless,’ he said, without looking up.
‘Harmless?’ I said incredulously. ‘I have never seen a cobra that big!’
‘Cobras don’t come up so high. That was a rat snake, keeps the rat population down,’ he said irritably. I was instantly deflated. I hung around uncertainly for a minute or so, and then, feeling the weight of the gardener’s scorn, turned and made for the gate.
I walked past several barred gates and driveways that disappeared into vast properties, and eventually reached the valley. I knew roughly where the huts lay, and began to walk in that direction. I had no definite plan in mind besides the vague thought that perhaps I could get a glass of tea at a teashop and directions to places of local interest.
The cluster of huts came into view, fronted by the inevitable teashop. As I ordered my tea, I asked the grizzled proprietor if there were any interesting things to see within walking distance.
‘Meham,’ he said, after thinking for a while.
‘But that’s too far away, it will take me hours,’ I said, immediately regretting the words. All these people, the proprietor, the three old men who sat on one of the benches under the thatched awning of the shop sucking at beedis, probably walked to Meham every day and thought nothing of it. To my relief, the proprietor did not react to my comment. The tea he served me looked thick enough to grow trees in. I took a hasty gulp and almost gagged. Not only was the tea hot, it was so full of tannins from repeated reheating that it nearly took the roof of my mouth off. But I wasn’t about to be discomfited yet again, so I forced the tea down, paid, and under the impassive gaze of the customers and owner, strode purposefully away. I had no idea of where I might go but, as I left the huts behind, I saw the steeple of the church, and it occurred to me that I could call on the old pastor. Perhaps I could interview him about the Tower of God; as a priest surely he would have an opinion on the controversy.
The church was farther away than it looked. After walking for half an hour, I finally got to a road that wormed its way through a tunnel of green—cypress, casuarina, eucalyptus. As I emerged from it, I saw the church before me. It was unlike any other church I had seen—bright cherry red for the most part, with red-brick walls and a sloping tin roof and steeple painted red. Behind its impressive frontage of turrets and stained-glass windows was an altogether more modest structure rather like a low-roofed shed. Together the two halves of the church looked like a squatting unicorn. I was about to make my way towards it to examine it more closely when I was stopped short by the sight of a pack of dogs cruising aimlessly around the building. They were all mongrels, the skinny, smooth-haired creatures that fought for scraps at every rubbish dump and bus stop in the country, but the leader of the pack seemed to possess some pedigree—the shape of the head, the powerful jaws, the black and liver colouring and size all seemed to indicate some Dobermann in its ancestry. I’ve always been nervous around dogs, and my fear of them had increased when I was bitten by a stray about a year before I left K—and had had to undergo a series of painful anti-rabies injections. As I was hesitating between backing away quickly and standing still until they disappeared, the dogs turned and started cantering towards me. I looked around for stones I could throw at them but the hard-packed earth was devoid of anything I could use as a weapon. I couldn’t outrun them on the road I had come by, and as I was frantically looking around for some refuge I spotted a high stone wall topped with broken glass. A small sign announced that the wall enclosed St Andrew’s Cemetery. Without giving the matter any further thought I sprinted towards the cemetery’s gates, hoping they were only barred and not locked. As soon as I began to run, the dogs started to bark and gave chase. We arrived at the gates scant feet apart, when they abruptly opened, and a voice, brimming with laughter, shouted, ‘Godless. Bad dog!’ I couldn’t see the speaker, and the barking had not decreased, so I continued sprinting onwards.
‘You don’t need to run anymore,’ the voice said. ‘Godless doesn’t bite.’
I risked a look back and saw the pack milling around within the gates. A tall, thin man with an abundance of unruly hair and a full beard stepped out from behind a headstone, still laughing, and tossed something to the big dog, which leaped up and caught it in its jaws. ‘Good boy, Godless. Now take your bitches and get lost; man can’t get peace and quiet anywhere these days.’ The barking died down, and the pack wandered off. The stranger shut the gates on them and turned to me.
‘That was quite a sprint, I must say, but Godless would have got you if he’d had ten more feet.’
Now that the immediate danger had passed I could examine my benefactor a little more closely, and I wasn’t entirely reassured by what I saw. The untamed hair and beard, the wild staring eyes, the torn T-shirt that might once have been green, the lungi casually knotted about his hips, the Bata chappals and his general unwashed air made me wonder if I should be looking to leave just as soon as I got my breath back.
‘Don’t worry, I’m as harmless as Godless,’ the man said smiling, his teeth gleaming against his beard.
‘Did you say Godless?’
‘Yep, that’s the brute’s name.’
‘It’s unusual…’
‘Just reflects his master’s outlook on life. By the way, the name’s Noah, what’s yours?’
‘Vijay,’ I said, ‘I’m a guest at Mr Khanna’s house.’
‘Ah, the house-sitter from Bombay,’ he said.
‘But how…?’
‘Nothing’s a secret in these hills, da. If the people don’t tell you, the ghosts will.’
I must have looked incredulous, for he winked and said, ‘Don’t be fooled by the seeming emptiness of the place, there are eyes everywhere. I knew the moment you had arrived in town. So to what do I owe the honour of your company?’
‘Oh, I thought I’d visit the priest, Moses. He came to the house earlier this morning.’
‘Yes, he’s going crazy trying to organize his annual concert. It’s quite good, you know, but it drives him nuts.’
We were walking slowly along as I caught my breath. I studied my companion covertly. He seemed as unprepossessing as when I had first seen him, and I would have passed him without a glance in the city or even in the Meham bazaar, but his unaccented English didn’t fit with his appearance. A thought occurred to me: perhaps he was the priest’s son, although his unkempt appearance remained a mystery.
‘Sorry to be asking, but are you related to the priest?’
‘Yes,’ he said shortly, ‘you might say I’m related to him.’
He said nothing more, and I wondered if I had offended him by being too direct. We continued in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘Say, do you like gardens?’
‘Well I suppose I do,’ I said, a bit hesitantly.
‘Ah, one of those city boys who prefers his flowers in vases, eh?’ he said, his tone mocking.
‘Well, I haven’t really had much to do with gardens…’
‘Never too late to start, da,’ he said. ‘This place is famous for its gardens, you know, best in the district, and the Nilgiris, as even you must know, is famous throughout the country for its fruit and flowers.’
‘Yes, I knew that.’
‘But I bet you don’t know where the finest garden in all of Meham is, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, you’re in for a treat, come on.’
I wondered if he was having me on; this was a cemetery and a fairly run-down one at that. Everywhere gravestones poked out of the earth like weathered molars. Several of the headstones had toppled over, weeds grew thickly on the path we were walking down, and none of the graves themselves looked tended in the least. We reached an enormous peepul tree that dominated the place; there was a concrete platform under it and on it was a mat, a smoke-blackened kettle, a kerosene stove, two Horlicks bottles containing tea and sugar respectively, and a small tin trunk. Noah sat down, lit the stove, put the kettle on a
nd asked me if I would like some tea.
I was getting more puzzled by the minute. Even if Noah was the priest’s son or nephew just what was he doing in this place? He seemed to live here—perhaps he was a poor relative who was employed as the cemetery keeper or maybe as the gardener? Or maybe his father and he had fallen out—hadn’t he made a cryptic reference to being Godless?—and he had been banished to the cemetery, although the elderly pastor, from what little I had seen of him, did not seem to be the type of person capable of meting out such harsh punishment. But Noah didn’t seem interested in providing an explanation and I didn’t think I could probe just yet. I refused his offer of tea, saying I’d just had some at the teashop down the road.
‘Velu’s? You must have a strong constitution; he’s kept his kettle boiling with the same leaves for about two centuries, if you ask me. Well, sit down anyway, let me have some tea.’ I sat down on the platform, and then jumped up again when I realized it was a tomb, surmounted by a weather-beaten angel that was shielded from view by a low-hanging branch.
‘Relax, the dear departed May Reston will not be offended if you rest on her grave.’ I indicated that I would prefer to stand, and he shrugged, made himself some tea, and when he had drunk it, got to his feet, saying, ‘OK, my friend, prepare to be dazzled.’
Past the peepul, the ground inclined steeply. From where we stood up to the far boundary, which was marked by a sagging barbed-wire fence, row upon row of flowering plants tumbled down the slope like flaming opals.
‘My garden,’ Noah said simply. ‘Do you know Pessoa?’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, there aren’t too many people I can discuss modern European poets with around here. Are you a poet?’
I shook my head.
‘Pity,’ he said. ‘He was Portuguese, strangely elusive even for a poet, invented a whole raft of alternative identities for himself, called them heteronyms, and attributed his poetry to them. One of them was called Alberto Caeiro, a sort of nature poet, and one of his poems goes
‘Poor flowers in the flower beds of manicured gardens,
They look like they’re afraid of the police….
‘It’s kind of the way I feel, da, which is why I’ve let my garden grow wild. Do you like it? Do you even have an opinion?’ The mocking tone was back, but it was clear that he was proud of his garden. I recognized some of the flowers—roses, lilies, hibiscus—but even my untrained eye could see that these were somehow more beautiful, more richly coloured and showy than the ones I had seen at Cypress Manor.
‘It’s amazing,’ I said.
‘It’s taken a lot of work,’ he said, stooping to pluck a weed from a bed of carnations the colour of clotted blood. ‘Many years ago, when I was at a bit of a crossroads, I thought I might become a plant hunter, you know like the guy who first collected the Tibetan blue poppy, Kingdon-Ward. But I was born a century too late, nobody pays you big money now to wander around in exotic places collecting plants… So I did the next best thing, I just set out to grow the best garden I could. The thing is, you can’t simply follow a gardening manual or copy what someone else is doing. Plants have a will of their own, you’ve got to understand each one of them, empathize with them, know when to coax them, when to be stern, when to be patient, rather like trying to get a gorgeous woman to do things your way. You can’t just blunder in and hope for the best, but if you get it right, the results can be astonishing.’
Close by, I recognized a few stalks of the brilliantly coloured flowers I had admired in my host’s garden, and I asked Noah what they were.
‘Fuchsias,’ he said, ‘the best you’ll find in town, better than anything those old fools at the Fuchsia Club of Meham will ever grow in this or any other lifetime.’
‘I was admiring them in Mr Khanna’s garden.’
‘They’re an obsession here. There’s something about the climate that makes them grow especially well and the competition among those who cultivate them is fierce. Many years ago the elite of Meham, all of whom were gardeners needless to say, took over a gardening club and renamed it the Fuchsia Club of Meham, which they claim is the oldest continuously active club in the Nilgiris. They are venerable and distinguished every one of them, but when it comes to fuchsias they are as competitive and amoral as a Bombay high-society wife.’ He smiled and added, ‘But I grow better fuchsias than any of them, except they don’t know it. None of them has come up here, and I don’t enter my garden in any of the competitions. Take a look at this one, isn’t it a beauty?’
The flower he was pointing to was extraordinarily striking, looking like an exotic dancer with her flounced skirts thrown back from long white legs. It had the same delicacy and blazing colour of the other fuchsias but where most of them had straight, elongated blooms, this one’s petals were flounced, crinkled and coloured a flagrant pink with flared white and pink sepals and a pure white tube.
‘It’s called a Wally Yendell,’ Noah was saying, ‘and it’s the only one of its kind in the Nilgiris. Brigadier Sharma, who lives close to you and is the boss man around here, or any of the other members of the FCM would swap their wives and fortunes for this flower, I tell you. In fact, it once belonged to a rich bugger, one of those guys who is not really a gardener but buys a great garden. He lives near Ooty, and the Brigadier paid a friend of mine called Arumugam, the only specialist flower thief I’ve ever heard of, a sort of cut-rate Kingdon-Ward without the scruples, a fair bit of money to steal it for him; and then he stole it from the Brigadier, and gave it to me because he owed me. The Brigadier was furious, he had the fellow beaten up by the police, but Arumugam never did tell them anything. Quite a place, Meham,’ he said with a laugh.
We moved on, walking through detonations of colour that counterpointed the shabby gravestones, Noah expounding on the plants he was growing, and it occurred to me that this was the most unusual place I had ever been, this tumbledown cemetery perched on the lip of a mountain, with its wealth of exotic plants and its reclusive guardian who talked with equal facility of his floral treasures as he did of matters too recondite for me.
We had reached the boundary of the cemetery. Beyond the barbed-wire fence, the hillside fell away in a mass of boulders, lantana thickets and scree. In the distance I could see the towering sentinels that guarded the passage to Meham. Somewhere in their vicinity was the Tower of God. Perhaps Noah could find me a way to get there. Obligingly, he provided me with the perfect opening by asking me what I was doing in Meham. I explained that I worked for a magazine and that my editor had sent me here to write a story about the controversial shrine. I told him I was planning to visit it tomorrow, and to my delight, he offered to take me there.
‘So Meham’s about to clamber on to the national stage, huh?’ he said.
‘Well, not quite,’ I replied. I told him The Indian Secularist didn’t have a very large circulation but that its voice was listened to by those who were worried about the direction in which the country was headed. He heard me out, and then said with an edge to his voice, ‘Hasn’t made much of a difference, has it now, considering what’s been done to Bombay? If I had my way, I would have all those who were responsible castrated and tortured to death…’
He seemed extremely annoyed, and continued to inveigh against those who had destroyed the city for a few minutes. This seemed to take the edge off his anger, and he continued more gently. ‘The greatest city in the world, or it was at any rate when I lived there for a couple of years about a decade ago. It was the best time of my life… It was a city of poets and cafés, and all-night sessions of drinking and versifying, a place to rival Joyce’s Dublin or Cavafy’s Alexandria or Pessoa’s Lisbon: Dom hammering away with one finger at his typewriter in Sargent House, spectacles slipping down his nose, as the poems ran wild in his head, Adil holding court in his eyrie on Cuffe Parade, Nissim spinning his demotic verse in coffee houses and poets’ gatherings, Kolatkar with his strange fierce epic about Gods of stone, Imtiaz and the agate-eyed women who glided throug
h her work… What a time that was, the nights of writing poetry and drinking and partying and fucking the beautiful young women we all shared, the models and wannabe actresses pulled into that vortex of passion, song and metred rhyme… Some of us more impressionable types were convinced that this was what we were meant to do for the rest of our lives, pluck poems from the moist humid air of the city like the maestros did, drink without getting drunk, fuck without getting trapped into dull, lifeless relationships. And it didn’t matter that it was all mere fantasy; we were young and alive and well in Bombay, and were putting whatever talent we had at the service of the Muse, and one day we knew the poetry would well out of us unstoppably fierce and incandescent and beautiful, and some maestro would cast an indulgent eye over it and pronounce us worthy, and the whores and models and party girls who hung around us would have finally realized their purpose, and the verse would continue to flow from our minds, night after night, like a bright shining river out into those dirty pullulating streets, lighting up the city, lighting up the world…’
Noah fell silent for a moment caught up in his remembering, and then said, ‘I am not surprised at all by the violence being done to the city but it is not for the reasons you think. It’s because the poetry is gone, da, the Muse has fled the great and the good, not to mention the people around them. Bombay’s time is behind it now, just like all the other great flaming cities of the past, their brief effulgence spent, you know like in that Cavafy poem where he compares the future to a row of lit candles, and the past to burned-out candles, and doesn’t want to look back because
The Solitude of Emperors Page 10
