by Abhishek Roy
Once we were inside, I handed Vivek the tickets and passports and from then on, he started managing everything. It was probably the fact that he was like an elder brother to me made me like him more. From childhood, I had shown the way around while travelling with Ram in London. Ram was older to me by a few months and yet I felt like the elder brother. After finally having someone I could completely rely on as a senior was a warm feeling.
The procedures went good. We had the person at the counter check in our luggage and once we were handed our tickets, we passed the security frisking. Our hand bags passed through the X-ray machine. We roamed around the duty free shops for a little while.
“Hey Mathias! What are you reading?” asked Ram when he spotted me in a book store.
“Oh! Nothing, nothing.” I said and put the book back in the shelf.
“Are you hiding something from me?” he asked me, arms akimbo.
“No, no! Nothing at all. Where is Vivek?” I changed the topic.
“He is looking for a wristwatch. Come along,” said Ram.
“You carry on. I am coming right away,” I replied.
Ram didn’t seem to like my behaviour but said, “Okay.” And walked away. When he was gone, I picked up the book I had been reading.
“How much is this for?” I asked the cashier.
***
Vivek checked his watch. “I reckon we have nearly 10 to 15 minutes to discuss. So...we are going to Japan but where exactly in Japan?”
Ram threw a blank face at Vivek. Vivek in turn, faced me.
“I don’t know either guys because the poem does say on top of the million years rock, but it doesn’t say where exactly on top.”
The three of us pondered about it for a few minutes. “The parchment looks really old. Probably a few hundred or maybe even thousands of years. So Mathias, you found this in the book Miss Dawson gave us, no?” Ram asked me.
“Yes, I did.”
“And it was given to her by your parents when they left you at the orphanage?”
I nodded.
“Still, it looks really old. So, obviously, the key itself will be really old. But we don’t even know what the key looks like!” Ram expressed his frustration.
“You say the Seven times down, Eight times up is associated with the Daruma doll?” Vivek inquired for confirmation.
“Yeah. It is basically written alongside the Daruma doll.”
“Then perhaps we have to find a really old Daruma doll seller in Tokyo who could help us.”
“You might be right, Vivek,” Ram seemed to like the proposition.
“So do we have peace on that?” Vivek looked at both of us.
“I guess,” I said.
“I agree,” Ram followed.
“Flight JAL 740 has started boarding. All passengers are requested to be present at the gate. “ The mechanical voice of a lady announced through the speakers. All of us got up from our seats and took a place in the boarding line. I bade farewell to India in my mind and said konnichiwa to Japan.
Kapittel 32
Mathias’s story
ON THE WAY FROM DELHI TO TOKYO
March 11, 2017, Saturday, 2045 hours 1ST
The flight was bound straight for Tokyo without any stop in between.
As we found our set of three seats, I felt pity for the person who had booked these seats. The person would surely not get his or her tickets and after having a look at the packed flight, I knew that the customer would have to catch the next flight which was not before next day early morning, which was a hopping flight.
Vivek opted for the window seat, Ram sat in the middle and I was left with the aisle. I kept our hand bags in the stowing compartment overhead and in a matter of minutes, we were in the air. Once, the pilot had started to cruise, the inflight staff switched of the lights and the entire plane was engulfed in darkness. Except for the few LCD displays on which some individuals watched movies, the light from the small space where the crew worked and two or three stars in the sky, the cabin was dark. The only sound was the muffled voices of some people and the constant hum of the aircraft engine.
Vivek was thoroughly exhausted after his forty five minute run across the hills of Rishikesh. While Vivek was fast asleep, leaning on the cold window, Ram switched on the reading light overhead and started reading the inflight magazine.
“Umm……Ram.”
“I know that you want to tell me something, Mathias. What is it?”
“It is a sensitive topic mind you.” I warned him and he nodded, wanting to hear me out.
“You remember you told me that your father had gone to the Himalayas as he had found something eerie in the ‘chronoscale’?”
“Yes. Baldr told us about it,” he beckoned me to continue.
“Of course you know the meaning of ‘chronoscale’. ‘Chrono” means time and ‘scale’ is a scale. So what would your father do in the Himalayas with a ‘time scale’?”
“Baldr said that he had found a disturbance in the scale and had followed the data to the Himalayas. You tell me more about it.”
“Well, he said that it showed the river of time, no? I think I know what he actually means by the use of the device and what your father had found on it. You see.Please try to understand what I am going to tell you. It was not a hallucination nor am I lying to you. Alright?”
“Go on,” he said. I narrated to him the whole incident, from the soldier shooting at me to the slowing down of time to a complete stop and finally, when I reached the lake bed and was reunited with Vivek and Ram.
“So you are saying that time had stopped. Everything had stopped and yet, only you were moving?” Ram asked me, incredulously.
“Yes! I know it will be hard to. Think about it. For you, at one moment, I was over the hillock and suddenly, I appear behind you. It could have only happened if everything including you had stopped momentarily and only I was moving. I swear it was true.”
“Alright. I believe you,” Ram told me, though he still sounded pretty incredulous. “So you basically want to say that my father had come to the Himalayas for investigating such a phenomenon?“
“Exactly! The chronoscale as I suppose, was a scale they had built to display the movement of time. On a normal day, the scale would have registered the normal movement of time but on that fateful day, the scale had obviously picked up a gap in the river of time!”
“So how had that happened?”
“I don’t know. Baldr didn’t clearly tell us. According to the theory of special relativity, time runs differently for different things. It runs slowly in a gravitational field or at high speeds. It only stops when a body reaches the speed of light. Either we had started to move at the speed of light or it was the side effect of something entirely different which Baldr and his friends were doing.”
Ram’s gaze slowly moved to the ground. From his face, I knew that he was having a hard time trying to believe what I had said. I was his best friend and he knew I wouldn’t be lying to him but at the same time, the story behind the chronoscale seemed to be utterly surreal.
“Let it be, Mathias. We shouldn’t worry about the past. We should think about the situation in hand right now.” With that, he resumed reading his magazine but not with the same interest he had a moment ago. Even after saying that, I knew he was still thinking about his father’s disappearance. I started mulling over the diary and the more I thought, I knew what I had to do to decipher the text more thoroughly.
Daruma Doll Eyeless
Daruma Doll One Eye
Kapittel 33
Mathias’s story
TOKYO, JAPAN
March 12, 2017, Sunday, 0725 hours JST
“AA GAYA!” Vivek cried out like a small child after crossing immigration and stepping into Japanese territory. “I am in Japan! Again!” He pulled many curious gazes towards him.
“Vivek. What are you doing?” Ram asked him, surprised to see this fun loving side of Vivek.
“What? It’s just that I had
had a really good time here and am very excited to be back. At one time it looked impossible. There shouldn’t be anything embarrassing in expressing my emotions.” He leaned close to Ram and whispered in his ears loud enough for me to hear, “In fact, I think we should go back and dance in front of the man with the disease scanning video camera, at the start of the line. The Japanese should have a chance to check out our Indian diseases.“
The two of them grinned at me playfully.
“Yeah, if you have the guts then go back and do what you want to!” I didn’t back off.
“Come on, Mathias. Now you are getting serious. Let’s get out of here Ram, before Mathias hacks into our brains!” Vivek and Ram held each other’s shoulders and had a hearty laugh together.
” Whatever. Now can we concentrate on what we need to do next?” I smiled.
Before we went out of the airport and grabbed a Taxi, we needed to know where we were headed. Vivek converted some of his Indian rupees to yen from a currency exchange and led us into a small café near the parking area where I hooked my laptop with an available Wi-Fi connection. The three of us sat down on a table. Ram and Vivek adjusted their chairs and sat behind me to have a look at that laptop screen.
“So — are we looking for some old street or region where we can get Daruma dolls?”
“Yup.” Ram confirmed. I punched in the words in the search engine and hit enter. I selected the first hyperlink which took me to a website.
“Well it says that the best place to get Daruma dolls in Japan is in the place called Takasaki, in the Gunma prefecture. It’s a 1 hour 40 minute ride. Might take two hours if the traffic is high.” I craned my neck to face Ram and Vivek, seated behind me.
“I think that’s the place we should go.”
Ram and Vivek thought about it for a while but appeared to be convinced. “We need to hire a car,” said Ram.
“We should get it somewhere near the airport only,” Vivek replied.
“Alright then. Let’s go.” I shut my laptop and we were off.
Fifteen minutes later, we got a nice spacious Toyota Prius automatic and were off to Takasaki. Ram sat in the passenger seat and while he guided us with a map, Vivek drove the car with me sitting beside. We blended well with the normal traffic. We didn’t face much traffic on the highway and were able to get glimpses of the traditional Japanese houses behind the 15 feet tall boundary walls of the highway. The houses were small and cubical in shape. Behind them rose some of Tokyo’s skyscrapers which were in stark contrast to the residential houses.
“Those two buildings juxtaposed with the huge skyscraper are called Roppongi Hills,” Vivek said while we were passing a group of tall skyscrapers a few kilometres away. “The apartments there are the most expensive in all of Tokyo. If I remember correctly then the average rates there are nearly 2.3 million yen per square metre!“
“That’s something like…thirteen thousand pounds!” I exclaimed in disbelief.
“Wow! Residents there must be awfully rich!” Ram exclaimed.
After about fifteen minutes of driving at high speeds, the ocean of buildings started to thin and morph into green, rolling hills. The air became warmer as noon arrived rapidly. Japan did have sunrise early in the morning and hence, had dusk pretty early. I was accustomed to London but when I looked at the sky, it felt like it was already noon but the watch said it was only twenty minutes past eight!
Finally, at 10:00 we entered the town of Takasaki. Unlike Tokyo’s skyscrapers, Takasaki was a smaller city but beautiful nonetheless. It had some tall buildings but not more than 20 stories.
The morning sun gave the city a whitewash and made the small houses on the outskirts look like small dots of white paint from afar. As we advanced into the city the architecture gradually became modern. At the centre, we passed a garden, surrounded by tall buildings. We guessed this region to be the city centre. Vivek was carrying a handheld translator and after asking quite a few citizens, we finally found our way to the renowned Daruma temple.
If one had the chance to see the whole of the Honshu Island from a satellite, then the entire belt of civilisation, which Tokyo was a part of, would resemble a banyan tree. The pointed tip of the tree was home to the city of Choshi. Coming further down and crossing many other cities, came Tokyo at the bottom right side of the foliage of the banyan tree. Takasaki was at the bottom of the tree, right at the roots. Several other towns and cities branched away from Takasaki.
The Daruma temple or Shorinzan Daruma-ji Temple, as I had seen on my laptop in Tokyo, was at the starting point of one such branches, the closest to the main city. Though it was a part of Takasaki, it was situated at a distance from the buildings and overlooked a sprawling expanse of factories, warehouses and small steel huts. However at the back was an open triangular yard, a few small residential structures and then, a vast expanse of lush green forests forming a sheet over the black igneous hills of Japan.
Our Prius climbed an incline and we found a spot in the parking, just behind the temple. The three of us got out and stretched our legs after the long drive. Suddenly, Vivek looked really intrigued.
“What are those clumps of red hugging the temple wall?” he asked, pointing towards the temple 15 metres away. “Are those Daruma dolls?” he cried in disbelief.
“Maybe. Let’s go see,” I said and led the group to the temple. The Daruma-ji temple was located on a small hillock and sat like a guardian overseeing the city. It was not a lavish or architecturally magnificent temple but was a simple single storied pagoda all dedicated to the Daruma doll.
The sunlight and cool breeze was wonderful. Atop the hill, there was almost no sound bar the whistling wind and the footsteps of some tourists circling the temple. It was as if the varied green shades of the trees surrounding the temple formed a natural barrier against anything but natural sound.
After we reached the top of the hill, we finally got a chance to see the temple up close. The dark shadows caused by the bright sun, accentuated the green tiled roof. The main temple itself was entirely wooden and gave us a taste of Japanese architecture. The gateway was like a wooden Japanese stupa covered with carvings. Three wrought iron gongs hung from the top, directly above an iron chest. On both sides of the doorway, like sentries, stood two wrought iron cauldrons. The four walls of the cuboidal temple had wood work and a few carvings but the thing that amazed us was the hundreds of red, stubby Daruma dolls stuffed inside a compartment made of wooden planks. The people surely believed in the doll’s ability to bring good luck. Apart from this, the figurines gave the otherwise dark temple a sprightly look.
“These are Daruma dolls. Lots of Daruma dolls.” said Vivek, staring at the huge overflowing clumps of daruma dolls hugging the temple walls.
“Should we go inside?” Ram asked expectantly.
“I feel it is to be admired from outside only,” answered Vivek while looking at the temple. “We should go find an old Daruma doll seller first.” Vivek had already started to walk towards the triangular yard behind the temple.
“We will go inside the temple once this is sorted out, Ram.” I tried to console Ram who looked a little disappointed. He was greatly fascinated by history and mythology. As a result, he always had a keen interest for temples and religious sanctuaries.
“Don’t worry, Mathias. I know what’s more important.” he gave me a smile and together, we followed Vivek.
While descending the flight of stairs, we could see Vivek already asking the locals some questions by occasionally looking down at his translator in the right hand. Then he would greet them Arigato Kuzaimas and walk briskly towards some shop. When we finally caught up to him, he was standing at the doorway of one of the shops slightly closer to the flight of stairs than the others.
He had a confident smile on his face, “The locals say that the owner of this shop is a 95 year old chap. Moreover, his shop itself is more than 250 years old but the tradition of making and selling Daruma dolls and dealing with old manuscripts has been passed on
in his family from generation to generation, dating back more than 700 years!” he had a look of glee in his eyes, “They say, he has got papers.. .actually manuscripts as old as many hundreds or even thousands of years. Many are mysterious. This could be our man.“
“Well, then let’s go see.” I added.
As we walked into the shop, we noticed the air to be old and musty. We felt like having been suddenly teleported to a world hundreds of years back. The windows were small, and the light that was coming in played with our imagination. The shafts of light lit up various parts of the room leaving many other parts dark, generating a surreal effect. It was a small shop but filled with various Japanese goods, talismans and mostly Daruma dolls of all sizes. Some the size of an average human fist and some the size of a big pumpkin.
All of these products lay arranged on the ground, eking a path for the customer and covered the shelves on the walls. Though the entire shop was made of wood, the only bare wood we could see was the roof.
Amidst these talismans, was an old man, sitting among a veritable museum of scrolls, all splayed out in front of him. He was hunched over an ancient tome and studying the tiny Japanese writings with a magnifying glass. Even with our young eyes, the script looked like an organised army of ants and yet the man was studying them with great interest, his focus not deterred even by the sound of a customer walking into his shop.
“Ohayo Kuzaimas, “Vivek said ‘hello’ in Japanese.
The man finally looked up, his eyes emanating an ancient wisdom and self-respect, “Ohio Kuzaimas,” he greeted back in a thin, high pitched voice.
“Nihongo o hanisemasen/Vivek said in Japanese.
The man gave us a warm smile, his skin wrinkling into numerous folds at his dimples, “You speak English?” he asked in the flat, fluid Japanese accent.
“Yes, yes,” Vivek’s face lit up with relief. He was pretty tired of constantly referring to the translator and trying to understand the language.
