The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories

by Stephen Alter

Formerly, I alone was getting wet; now, sharing the single umbrella, he also got drenched.

  ‘There is a rest-house some three kilometres from here, but you will have to climb all the way.’

  ‘Can I get a coolie?’

  ‘In this weather?’ His eyes took in the row of shops before returning reflectively to me. He picked up my trunk by its handle.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  He strode away without waiting for me. It was too late to ask him to stop. I had no option but to grab my hold-all and follow him. It was surprising how a man as thin as he was could walk so fast with a trunk in one hand and an umbrella in the other.

  The bus-stand and the shops fell behind as we continued to climb. It was hard to keep pace with him. It seemed as if I was being dragged along behind him. Now and then my shoes got stuck in squelching mud and submerged potholes. Once he turned round and said something which I could not catch. I could only listen to the pounding of my heart, which got worse with each step. Sweat mingled with rain as it washed down my face.

  Now when I think of that arduous climb I’m surprised I could make it at all, so soon after a tiring journey and despite a gnawing feeling of uneasiness. So far, I had only climbed in years, never a mountain. Indeed, mountain climbing isn’t easy for a man whose biological alarm clock begins to clamour midway up a flight of stairs. For the first time in my life, much against my will, I had set foot in a town where I was a complete stranger. Had it been left to me, I wouldn’t have crossed my threshold to come all the way here. I had no choice in the matter. The choice had been made by the person whom I had come to find.

  He opened the door. ‘Here we are,’ he said.

  It was so dark inside I could see nothing. I lingered in the doorway, trying to keep out of the rain. Soon there was a scraping and the flash of a burning matchstick as he lighted a hurricane lamp. Only then did I realize that he had not brought me to a dharmshala, hospice, or even a lodge, but to his own place. I hesitated at the door. A blast of wind pushed me inside.

  Is there such a thing as will? Perhaps it is one of man’s fondest illusions. Even as our will strikes out ahead, we lag behind, dragged along somehow. Our will goes on, cleaving us into several parts. One part of me was left behind at home and the other, powerless to move, stood inside the open door, shivering in the rain-soaked draught—while yet another watched on helplessly. The schoolteacher led me to his room in much the same way as the wind had blown me in. I had no say in the matter.

  ‘Please, sit down,’ he said, indicating his low-slung bed which, besides a stool, was the only piece of furniture in the room. He pulled up the stool and started to unfasten the laces of his sodden, muddy shoes.

  ‘I’d asked you to take me to a hotel,’ I said irritably.

  ‘Come on now! Take this for a hotel room, if it helps any. Tell me, where would you go in this weather?’ he said with a laugh. His laughter, the mean walls swaying in the lantern flame, my body spattered with mud—did any of this make sense? Of course, it had to make sense or I wouldn’t be here, I told myself. I closed the door behind me on wind, rain and darkness, and walked into the room.

  At a first glance it looked like a hovel, dank and gloomy, suspended in air, open to vagrant clouds which could enter at will, although the fumes of smoke within seemed reluctant to leave. It gave on to what looked like a godown where a kerosene stove on a wooden slab and some utensils could be seen. Evidently, he cooked his food there. In another corner were a pail of water, a brass mug and a low slatted seat, which meant it also served as a bathing place. There was a barred window in a wall strung with his washing, hung out to dry under the eaves; of course, now it was dripping wet.

  He was lighting the stove, his back towards me; but he kept an eye on me to make sure I wouldn’t give him the slip. I am not a heavy man but I sank so deep in his low cot that my bottom was almost scraping the dust on the floor.

  He brought tea in glasses and squatted down cross-legged on a mat opposite me.

  ‘This is your first time out here, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could tell it the moment I saw you.’

  I looked into his sallow face behind the plume of steam spiralling up from the tea in his hand.

  ‘It wasn’t hard to tell,’ he continued. ‘When you got down from the bus you kept standing there by the roadside in the rain. Anyone from this town would have hurried away at once.’ He laughed, displaying yellow, but not dirty, teeth. His teeth went well with his pale, weather-beaten face.

  ‘We have very few tourists around this time of the year,’ he observed after a pause. He regarded me with rippling curiosity, as if he expected, at the mention of tourists, I’d confide in him the reason for my visit in this bad weather. I kept silent. I had already made a mistake in coming here with him. I did not wish to make another.

  ‘How long have you been living here?’ I asked, parrying his implied question.

  ‘Five . . . no, six years.’ He placed his glass on the floor and counted on his fingertips. ‘I came to this place in the year when Shastriji died in Tashkent. I remember hearing the sad news here in a hospital bed.’

  ‘You were hospitalized at that time?’ I said as if offering my sympathy.

  ‘My uncle, who was a doctor at the hospital, brought me over for medical treatment, although there was no dearth of physicians at Almora where I lived. Anyway, when I was up and about again I learned that the local high school had a vacancy for an English teacher. I got the job.’ He smiled. ‘I’d come here for a cure, little knowing it would solve my problem of unemployment also.’

  ‘So you don’t belong here? This isn’t your own house?’

  ‘Would you call this shack a house?’ His eyes flitted mournfully across the room to the bucket in the corner, the stove on a plank, the wan lantern flame, and back to me buried in the bed: all objects of pity.

  ‘Are you cold? Shall I make a fire?’

  ‘No, please don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’ I was fine if fine meant growing numb, so numb that even fatigue fell back in despair. I could only see things on the surface—a rainy night, a leaking roof; but deep down inside, I felt nothing. He was upset at my aloofness, my lack of response, and probably felt guilty for bringing me to this place.

  ‘There is a forest rest-house here, you know,’ he offered helpfully.

  ‘You have to have official permission to stay there, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s true,’ he agreed. ‘But the caretaker isn’t so fussy if one wishes to stay for only a day or two . . . How long will you need to stay anyway?’

  There was no hint of inquisitiveness in his tone this time. All he wanted was to be of help. His gaze rested on me, steady and even.

  I could have confided in him then and there. I suspected he had already figured out that I was neither a pilgrim nor a tourist. Who was I? What was I doing here? I was suddenly overcome with despair and weariness. In order to make sense of what I had to say I’d have to go into my family history. I doubted if even then he would understand the compulsion of my visit.

  I’m not sure what he saw in my face in the pale half- light. Was it the desperation of middle-age or something else? Whatever it was he did not persist. He went to collect his dripping clothes and wring them in a corner of the kitchen.

  Left to myself, I heaved a sigh of relief. I rolled out my bedding on the floor. The lantern was kept on a tripod by my head. In its yellow light I took out a sheaf of papers from my briefcase. I wanted to look them over one last time. I was like a student preparing for his examination who suddenly discovers that his notes are in a mess, devoid of meaning, worthless. The paper of the property deed left by father was already fusty and brittle with age. The deed itself looked all the more forlorn in the dimly-lit room. Among its pages were three letters, one from my recluse brother and another from our younger sister, both easily distinguishable by the handwriting on them. The third was folded and rather crumpled. Mother had sneaked it to me
before I left for the bus terminus, and I’d hurriedly thrown it among my papers. I did not know what words had been used by mother whose lips quiver as she writes. I still had not read her letter nor did I want to. In the feeble light the letters of the living appeared as dead as the dead property papers bequeathed by a dead father. If I held out the sheaf of papers over the stove, our house and all the family, the pulls and pressures of relationships among the living and between the living and the dead, would instantly be consumed by the flames . . . Only I would survive—and he, who I had come this far to see.

  The schoolmaster’s shadow fell across the papers in my hand. He was standing at the door of the kitchen, his hands wet, the sleeves of his shirt folded up above the elbows.

  ‘Are you preparing to contest a lawsuit?’ He smiled at me.

  I returned the papers to the briefcase. He was right, in a way. I had to face the hearing tomorrow—after ten full years; I was seized with an insane desire to seek him out at once to get it over with and catch the morning bus back to Delhi. The schoolteacher broke in on my reverie, ‘You should wash up. I’ve heated the water.’

  I spent the night at the schoolmaster’s. I had with me my own bedding, so it was not a problem; but he became insistent about who should occupy the cot. He insisted on sleeping on the floor himself and letting me have the privilege. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that to me his rickety cot would perhaps only ensure a night full of hallucinations of earthquakes. I might yet have to endure one: I was afraid he would create a scene over the question of meals. My wife had packed my tiffin-box to last me a lifetime. I suggested to him that instead of cooking for the night we should do justice to the tiffin together. Owing to the cold weather, the food had not spoiled despite the twelve-hour journey. The food had the flavour of intimacy, concern and care of a distant household. When he saw the containers full of fried puries, pickle, vegetables and seasoned rice pulao, a wistful look swept over his face—as if he regretted having taken pity on one who apparently did not deserve it. He said nothing and left to warm up the food on the stove.

  His room was as untidy as the kitchen was clean. Books covered with layers of dust and old magazines lay in a pile on the floor. The ceiling was black with soot. A discoloured cupboard stood against a wall, its drawers half-closed with his garments peeping out over their edges. On the whole, it looked as untended and cheerless as a room in a dharmshala. It must be terribly lonely for him to have to live in it all alone the year round. Maybe he had brought me along because he was too lonely. I wasn’t surprised that he knew nothing about me. What was surprising was that having taken me in he should choose not to ask me who I was and where I had come from. I had a nagging suspicion that perhaps he already knew everything. That would explain why he had gone to meet the bus in such rain. Who could have told him to expect me—except the one whom I had come to see?

  ‘Dinner is ready,’ he announced, setting out a tray. ‘Hurry up! It will get cold in a minute.’

  ‘Won’t you eat also?’

  ‘I eat early in the evening before going out for my walk. It ensures sound sleep . . . Please, go ahead.’

  He seated himself on a mat opposite me. As I ate, a vague sadness overtook me. My thoughts went to my family. By this time my wife must have gone downstairs to see mother, leaving the children to do their studying in their rooms. From this distant stark place, they might as well have been creatures from another planet. It was hard to believe we had all been together twelve hours ago.

  ‘Look, it has stopped raining. We’ll have a clear day tomorrow.’ He sounded as excited as a child.

  My hand stopped short of my mouth as I turned to look. Little rivulets were still sloshing down outside from the sloping tin roof. There was a thin mist beyond the eaves through which the stars shone as if scrubbed clean by rain.

  ‘Is your school nearby?’

  ‘I forgot to tell you. In fact, we are sitting in the outbuilding of the school yard.’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ I looked around in amazement.

  ‘Well, this room is a part of the school premises. The management let me move in because it had no other accommodation to offer . . . Anyway, the school is closed at present for winter holidays.’

  ‘Don’t you go someplace during the holidays?’

  ‘I don’t really like to. However, I do go down to Almora once in a while.’

  ‘Don’t you feel lonely here?’

  He was silent for a long moment. Then he said thoughtfully: ‘In a way, yes. Sometimes. Still, I think I’m better off here than at Almora. Besides, if I feel like it, I can always go over to the baba’s.’

  ‘Baba . . . who’s he?’

  He threw me a searching glance. A thin little smile formed on his lips. ‘There is but one holy man here.’

  I could no longer restrain myself. ‘Did he tell you anything about me?’

  ‘About you?’ He was obviously baffled.

  ‘About my coming here.’

  ‘Why, have you come to see him?’ He looked genuinely surprised.

  ‘I hear people come from far-off places to receive his blessings.’

  ‘In this kind of weather?’ He stared at me sceptically.

  ‘I’d some leave to spare. I thought this was as good a time as any to visit him . . . Does he live far from here?’

  He sat brooding for a while. ‘Not very far,’ he said rather indifferently. ‘Maybe a little over a kilometre uphill.’

  It seemed he was annoyed. Perhaps he did not believe me, for one had to be a little crazy to come all the way in this weather to a little-known town tucked away in the mountains to see a local guru.

  Later he gathered the dirty plates and took them into the corner where the pail of water was kept. For long afterwards the only sounds that filled the room were the clanging and clatter of plates and the splashing of water.

  We did not talk about the holy man the rest of the night. Nor about anything else. We prepared for bed in silence. He did offer me his cot again but I’d already made my bed on the floor. As he was settling in with a novel, he spoke briefly to ask if I’d mind his keeping the light on.

  In my long life, it was the first night I’d spent at a stranger’s. I lay down, my head pillowed on my briefcase, and tried to sleep, but it was difficult. In my sleeplessness, the sombre night seemed to have ripped me from my family and my job. Had my wife been told that I would have to put up at a schoolmaster’s my first night away from home, she wouldn’t have believed it. She had always looked upon me as an incorrigible stay-at-home. Her one regret was that I had never once taken her on a holiday. Travelling for me had always been brief trips on work. I had never taken leave to go to a place of pilgrimage or a hill station.

  This place was neither a place of pilgrimage nor a hill station. Set in the mountains, it could only boast of a veterinary hospital and a Shiva temple where he lived . . . where he still lives. When a person walks out of our lives, we quickly take our vengeance and relegate him to the past. We refuse to accept that he exists in his own present, outside and independent of our time.

  I could not get to sleep till late into the night. The wind lashed at the walls and shook the roof. Whenever a bus passed by on the road below, shadows of trees conjured by its headlights swept along the wall. The hiss of the bus tyres on the wet road lingered in the air. Once, as a bus passed below, the schoolteacher raised his head off the pillow, squinted at the clock, sighed deeply, and said, ‘This bus is bound for Bhuvali,’ and again when another bus approached, blowing its horn, ‘This is going to Ramnagar.’ Eyes closed, I pretended to sleep—until the pretense was overtaken by sleep and I was dragged into a dream. When I woke up again, it was after midnight. The lamp had been put out and the room was submerged in darkness. For a moment, I couldn’t place where I was or who this man was, sleeping on the cot, turned over on his side.

  When I came awake in the morning I found an oblong patch of sunlight waiting at the bedside. A cool, bright day filled the room. The cot wa
s empty. The tea-things lay on the floor round the stove. A breeze knocked and thumped outside.

  The clock, unbelievably, read ten; I could not recall ever having overslept this long before. I washed up hurriedly, put my thermos and tumbler away, and riffled through the sheaf of papers which included a postcard he—my estranged brother—had written to me a fortnight ago. I went out to look for the schoolteacher.

  He wasn’t there. Instead, what hit my eyes was a stately mountain.

  The mountain rose solid and rugged into the air, rooted firmly in the rocky ground, unmoving, real—so unlike yesterday’s mountains that had cartwheeled at a distance as the bus sped by. It soared above the town nestling in its shade. The rain and the darkness had concealed it from me at night. Now, this instant, I awoke fully to its splendour. I was right here. This was not just another wayside town but my final destination: a world complete in itself, isolated but not lost in a dense forest—contrary to what we had imagined back at home: a self-sustaining town, it had a shopping centre, a bus-station, a hospital, a temple, a high school . . .

  The school stood on flat ground. Yellowish clumps of trees sprinkled the town spread out above and below the shopping area. In a tree some way down below, I caught a glimpse of the schoolteacher with an axe in his hands . . . and then the mystery of the thwacking-thumping sounds that had woken me cleared up: the axe in his hand rose and fell rhythmically on the branches, which plopped down with a swishing rustle.

  I set out downhill on the road we had come up yesterday. Soon the sunlit grey roof-stones of the shops below came into view. Smoke from the cooking fires in the sheds and the market noises floated up towards me. I went over to sit on a bench which was in the open, in front of the eating-places buzzing with flies. It was cold despite the sun: the sun merely cast a web of illusion over the ineluctable reality of cold. I ordered tea.

  ‘Only one tea, Sahibji?’

  I turned to gaze into a pair of drugged bloodshed eyes which were fastened on me. He was a holy man, stark naked but for a loincloth, lazing on a bench on which he was sitting. ‘You’re staying with the schoolteacher?’ He came over to sit next to me on my bench.