A House Called Askival (5 page)

When the butchering was done and a cat and two dogs were licking the scraps off the ground, Aziz began chopping vegetables as Bim took Stanley and James up to see the buffalo. She was lying in a field beside a stretch of forest, her eyes bulging as if caught in that first fit of terror, her torn throat a mass of flies. They stood in silence at her side. From the village they could hear the dogs fighting and more distant, the repeated
whoop whoop whoop
of a river mill.

‘Leave it here,' said Stanley at last. ‘The leopard will come back tonight to eat and we'll deal with it.' Bim lifted his hands in a gesture of assent and hopelessness. James was transfixed by those hands. Their skin was cross-hatched with a thousand lines, each a seam of dirt; the palms were calloused as the buffalo's hide, yet marked by unhealed cuts and the swelling of splinters; all the fingernails were broken, some black, one missing. Bim's life was written across his hands, but it was like a fortune told backwards: the story of his past so deeply inscribed that it was impossible to see a future.

The three of them built a
machan
in the nearest tree, a make-shift platform on which to sit and watch, and then Bim led them back to his
chaan
. It was only mid-afternoon, but the sky was growing dark and an icy wind rose from the gully. The trees on the opposite slope were waving their branches like shipwrecked passengers and the air smelled metallic. As clouds massed overhead there was a rumble of thunder and the first spitting of rain. Hard as arrows, it pelted through their clothes, and as they started running, it turned to hail. Lashed with ever bigger stones, they fell wet and breathless into the door of the hut, the ground behind turning white, the last shreds of the crop flattened into the mud.

Inside, the air was thick with smoke and the aromas of curry. Aziz was kneeling by a pot on the stove and delivering swift instructions to Bim's mother and one of the older girls. On the bed, the younger children sat like crows and watched, firelight in their hungry eyes. Their mother did not appear to have moved since the day before, but she was smiling.

Bim poured out home-brewed liquor from an urn in the corner and tried to press it on his guests. All refused with pained apologies till he finally shrugged and gave some to his mother and his wife. Then he sat nursing his own dirty glass between his knees, sipping and talking and pushing away the tears that kept running down his face.

‘What have I done?' he asked, over and over again. ‘How have I angered the gods? What must I do to appease them? How will we live?'

James shifted in his damp jeans and wished his father would say or do something that would help. There seemed to be little.

At last the meal was ready and they all fell upon the food in relief.
The children were like vultures and their grandmother barked at them to slow down, but they ignored her. James ate slowly, complimenting Aziz on his cooking but struggling to enjoy it.

When they were finished, he and Stanley re-assembled their guns, letting the children stroke and hold them before they loaded the ammunition and stooped to head out the door. The storm had passed but the night was still cold and banks of cloud hid the stars. They crunched across the ghostly carpet of hail and up through the fields to the forest. The buffalo lay like a dark boulder, one silhouetted horn rising in salute. They climbed onto the
machan
and sat in silence. James wriggled his toes in his shoes and pushed his hands into his armpits, feeling the bumping of his heart. Stanley barely moved. It was a long wait. The night deepened, the clouds slid away and a weak moon rose above the ridge.

Just when James had grown so stiff and cold he thought he would die, there was a low growl behind them. His hair stood on end. He took up his gun. They heard the leopard growl again as it moved right under the platform and over to the buffalo. It was hard to see it in the darkness, little more than a shape of deeper black sliding through the shadows. A few feet away, it turned and went back into the forest. James tried not to make the slightest move, controlling his breath so as not to hiss. Twice more the leopard came out, once circling the buffalo, but each time slipping back into the trees. Finally it moved to her side and sniffed around the bloodied neck. James could just make out the line of its body, but could not tell if it was crouching or lying. Then they heard it growl again and the sound of tearing flesh as it savaged the buffalo's throat.

James' guts turned to water. He felt Stanley raise his gun and did the same. They waited, their eyes boring into the dark, seeking out the leopard's shape, searching and probing. If they missed, the startled beast could easily leap to their platform, ravenous and enraged, a rippling cannon of teeth and claws. James heard the click of Stanley's safety catch and the holding of breath.

There was a shot and a wild scream and the leopard flew towards them and James fired and Stanley fired again and the scream died.

They held still. All was silent.

James was panting, the sweat pouring down his sides, hands starting to shake. At last Stanley moved.

‘I think we got him,' he whispered, and James was shocked to hear a tremor in his voice. They turned on their torches and shone them on the ground below. The leopard lay at the foot of the tree, long and sleek, as if caught mid-bound.

The shots woke the sleepers in the
chaans
, and they came running, Aziz with a flashlight and Bim with a flaming torch, a couple of children scampering beside. At the sight of the fallen leopard Bim danced and sang, his breath high with spirits and sorrow, his face lifted to the moon.

The next night, as James lay back in his bed at Askival, he was woken by the cry of a leopard in the forest. It was far down the slope below the house, a distant, chilling howl that seemed to rise out of death itself. Then another voice joined, and another and another, and they rose in pitch and fury, getting higher and closer, till the trees around the house were ringing with their unearthly screams.

EIGHT

To Ruth, arriving at Shanti Niwas in the dark and rain with her father, the singing inside sounded like an angel. But when she walked through the door it stopped, and it was the smell of the cooking that caught her like an ambush.

In the centre of this swirling, seductive aroma was a plump man in a floral apron, laughing. He wiped his hands and held them out to her, damp and stained yellow with turmeric. His grip was excited and squeezing and left her own hands smelling of garlic. Everything about him shone. The glossy black curls that bounced with the nodding of his head, his creamy skin, slick with sweat and oil, the white teeth, the Gandhi glasses, the eyes brimming with light.

Iqbal.

James stood smiling from one to the other.

And now, with her bag across his shoulders like a sack of grain, the incongruous man was ushering her up to his bedroom. Most pleased to have vacated it for her, he hoped she would approve. She did not, and fought the arrangement fiercely on the landing, but he merely laughed at her protests and refused to give way.

‘I will be at bliss on the camp bed in Doctor-ji's room,' he beamed.
‘And the Rani Ruthie cannot sleep on the sofa!' He wagged his finger.

‘Yes I can! I've slept on a lot worse.' She stood with her back to his closed bedroom door, arms folded across her chest.

‘So have I,
beti
, but is no need when a comfortable bed is there.' And he reached round her to take hold of the handle, his breath smelling of cloves. She blocked his arm.

‘I will not put you out of your bedroom.'

‘Come,' he appealed. ‘I have scrubbed my hands to the bone for you. Do me this kindness.'

She looked from his soft hands to his eyes, brown and warm. They reminded her of that dark sugar syrup she used to pour on pancakes. What was it called?
Gur
. Yes! A word of Hindi, at last. She felt it hum in her head as she met his gaze: dark and sweet, a lure for flies. Then she sighed and let him pass. Iqbal flashed an enormous smile and flung open the door like a ring master.

She stared. Iqbal set down her pack and bowed deeply.

‘I am trusting your happy comfort here,' he said and stood erect, gazing about him with satisfaction. The walls were a crowded scrapbook of pictures, posters, calendars and photos, the floor an archipelago of rag-rugs, the bed teetering with cushions. Every surface was bedecked with lace and shiny fabrics, and on top of these, Iqbal had martialled a mind-boggling array of ornaments: Chinese fans, bowls of marbles, cuddly toys, fake flowers, shell sculptures, wooden trinkets and a plastic Scotsman with bagpipes. On the desk, a set of lacquered Kashmiri boxes bristled with pens and assorted stationery and beside them stood a vase of marigolds, their sharp smell fighting with the clamorous notes of a cheap deodorant. A large window above the desk looked south to the plains, though by now it was dark and raining and merely bounced back Ruth's reflection. She looked lost and shabby next to this radiant man in his florid world. He grinned and waved. She forced a smile and yanked the curtains shut.

‘You will be performing your toilet,' he said, gave a little bow and swept out of the room.
If smelling Iqbal's food had caught her in the seductions of memory, eating it was surrender to the moment. The meal was a gift: fluffy rice topped by a golden river of daal; a mound of
sag
with buttery chunks of
paneer
; a ladle-full of steaming mutton curry and a hot chapatti, fresh from the
tawa
. Iqbal served them with small flourishes and fragments of song, and Ruth found herself laughing and caught a glow in her father's hawk eyes.

Throughout the meal, Iqbal beamed at her like she was his own child, plying her with extra helpings and questions.

‘Did you manage to eat that rubbish they gave you on the plane?'

‘Oh yes. I always eat it. Every last cracker.'

‘You must have been so, so hungry! Here, have some more
gosht
.' And he dolloped the mutton on her plate as if trying to compensate for years of inadequate rations.

‘Oh thanks. No, I wasn't that hungry. Just the habit of a life time. I can't leave food.'

‘Never allowed to,' James said.

‘Say that again. If you didn't eat something on the plane, Mom would wrap it in a napkin and you'd get it for your next meal.'

‘Waste not want not!' chimed Iqbal, lifting a finger.

Ruth tore her chapatti in half and scooped up a piece of slippery mutton. She shot a look at James.

‘Oh yes,' she said, dragging her words. ‘We never wasted anything.'

Pencils had been used till they were stumps and pages from old notebooks folded into medicine packets for the pharmacy. Clothes were patched and repaired, old sweaters re-knitted as socks. Food was never thrown out, not even a grain of rice. And as for time, it was most sacred of all and never to be wasted on idle pleasures.

But the wanting? That never ceased. Ruth had felt it like an ache in the air around them. Her mother's eyes drawn to shop windows, fingers stroking a bolt of silk. Hannah straining for approval, and gaining approval, yet straining still. Ruth's own miserable longing to be at the centre of their hearts, for once. But more than all of them, James. Wanting only to serve God, he always claimed, to take up his cross.
And yet no matter how hard he served and how far he dragged that damn thing – dragging them behind – it never seemed enough. Always that hunger in his eyes, that bent back, the troubled hands. Always the wanting, and never getting.

Like me, Ruth thought. She was not what he had wanted, right from birth – she was convinced of it – because after big sister Hannah, she should have been a boy. They'd even received A Word when Ellen became pregnant. The Lord to Abraham: ‘Your wife will have a son.' Perfect. But when a girl emerged, red-faced and howling, it was clear their appropriation of prophecy had rather let them down. Or Ruth had. One way or the other, it set the precedent.

After supper, Iqbal refused Ruth's help in clearing up and they argued again, good-naturedly, while James' mouth curled into a half smile and he muttered something about an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Iqbal won, again. All grinning and
gur
eyes, damn him. But Ruth extracted a promise that she could help from the next day.

‘
Accha, accha
.' He tilted his head from side to side and sent her off with a mug of chai, its spiced smell rising like a genie. She put it on the coffee table and got out her cigarettes, glancing at James on the sofa, gangly legs crossed at the ankles, hands tucked in his armpits, eyes closed. He looked asleep but she felt his alertness, the tuning of his ears, the waiting. At the sink, Iqbal hummed as he washed the dishes, his tune light and folksy and vaguely familiar. She stepped out the door and huddled under the narrow eaves, the rain against her legs.

I don't get it, she thought, as the lighter flared. Who the hell is this guy and what's he doing here? When she'd tried a few casual questions over dinner, Iqbal had been evasive.

‘Oh, I'm just the fat fellow in the films,' he'd said. ‘How do you say—? Comic belief?'

‘Relief,' said James.

‘Ah yes!' He laughed. ‘I'm that one. Wheeled on when the story gets too sad.' And he winked at James. Ruth followed his gaze but her father gave nothing away.

‘But,' she probed, slicing into her sticky gulab jamun. ‘Do you work?'

‘Not so well,' he said, rubbing his hip and grinning. ‘Rusting a bit, you know, and losing some marbles.'

She sighed. ‘Are you retired?'

‘Oh no! Doctor-ji is retired, Ruthie, and he goes to meetings every day, writes reports, plants trees, clears rubbish and visits the villages. Is very hard work and I am avoiding for long as possible, Inshallah.'

‘But—!' Ruth huffed with an exasperated half-laugh.

James wiped his mouth on a napkin and spoke. ‘Iqbal
was
down at Oaklands three days a week teaching Indian Music and a cookery class.'

‘Really—?'

‘What he doesn't want to tell you is that he has taken leave so he can look after me. It is against my wishes.'

‘Oh,' said Ruth, and swallowed a lump of gulab jamun.

Iqbal tilted his head and eyebrows, a helpless little shrug, a diminished smile. Rain shattered on the stone terrace outside.

‘I'm… here,' she offered, slowly. James turned his gaze on her, a pale blue searchlight; it made her tighten.

Iqbal jumped up and started gathering dishes. ‘But you are not here to be house-maid,' he said, voice bouncy as a ball.

No.

Cigarette finished, she took up the cane chair opposite her father and pulled a kashmiri shawl round her shoulders. Iqbal's tune was slower now, sadder.
A friend
, James had said. Yet he waited on them hand and foot, second-guessing their needs, fussing and spoiling, just like a devoted servant, or a doting mother. Though Ellen, she thought bitterly, had not been allowed the spoiling.

Warming her hands on the mug, Ruth sipped her chai and looked around the room, struggling to remember the old servants' quarters it once was. Grey concrete, streaked with damp and hung with ragged washing. Scabby children in the dirt at the front, chickens pecking, a broken chair. James had said the servants were moved to a smart, new block about five years ago and this would have been pulled down, had
he not bought it. He'd hired unemployed Garhwali labourers to re-build it with strong stone walls and a tiled roof. Inside was all white and wood and glass. Ruth was surprised by its beauty. James had scorned beauty in all things but nature; only God could create beauty. Man's efforts were vain, illusory and decadent.

Yet on the wall behind James there was a painting: a bluish shape against a background like sun-burned rock. Gradually she recognised the shape was a woman with her eyes closed and face lifted, as if for a kiss. The more Ruth looked at it, the more it gave.

Her gaze dropped to James, his head resting against the wall, fine white hair falling over his forehead and down to the caterpillar eyebrows. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his face and there was a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders of his sweater, a brown thing with patched elbows and sagging sides that hung on him like a dust sheet. He'd always been lean, but when she'd held him so briefly at their greeting on the road, the jutting of his ribs had shocked her.

Like that day in Tennessee when she was seventeen and had walked into his bedroom. It was just a few weeks after they'd left India and the morning of Hannah's wedding. He was curled up on his side, back to her, in nothing but underpants. His ribs were convulsing like the poles of a wind-blown tent, and there was a sound she'd never heard before. A strange, almost silent hacking; the beating of breath; the rise and fall of sobs. In it she recognised a loss greater than her own, and a source deeper than she understood, and though she felt a tearing rush of love, she could not reach for him. She slipped out, frightened and alone.

Outside, the rain had softened into a dripping dark. From the bazaar a voice rose, like a song of lament. Iqbal laid a handful of cutlery on the counter and James' eyes jerked open, roving from him to Ruth.

‘Time for prayer,' James said.

She stared at him. That was the call from the mosque. Time for
Muslim
prayer. He waved his hand at her.

‘You've had a long journey, Ruthie. You get some rest.' She hesitated, but he seemed impatient.

‘Ok,' she murmured and with a slurping draught, downed the last of
her chai and stood up, pulling the shawl around her.

‘Thank you, Iqbal. I've really missed good Indian
khana
.' Another word! Hindi returning, of its own volition, as if some of the curry had slipped down to the old dog and revived it. Just two words so far – no more than whimpers, really – but Hindi, nevertheless. Tiny acts of salvage, of reclamation.

‘A happy day!' Iqbal smiled, untying his apron. ‘Our Ruthie has come home. We have killed the fatted calf.'

‘This isn't—!'

‘Home is where the family is!' he interrupted, gesturing to James.

‘Of course,' she murmured and turned to the stairs. ‘Night Dad.' She leaned over the edge of the sofa and kissed him lightly on the top of the head. His arms flew up like a startled bird and grabbed her, but she pulled back. Then she wished she hadn't seen his face: so briefly lit and then dark.

‘Night Ruth.' His arms dropped and she felt an ache in her breastbone.

As she climbed the stairs she saw Iqbal unfolding a prayer mat and a white skull cap. She froze.
He was Muslim?
She looked at James, who was opening a scuffed, taped-together Bible, thick with papers.

In Iqbal's room she stood behind the door and listened. The low murmur of James' voice gave way to Iqbal singing, but this time a strange and haunting tune that stirred feelings she could not name. After a few minutes the song died, but the feelings remained, lifted and wheeling like a flock of birds.

She shook her head and turned to examine his pictures. Bollywood actresses shimmied beside Alpine meadows; gleaming cars parked themselves around a framed Arabic text; on a hospital fund-raising calendar, a man held up his leprosy-mutilated stumps, and everywhere, teddy bear and kitten greeting cards nuzzled amongst a vast array of snapshots. Many of the photos were of westerners, often standing with Iqbal, and mainly missionaries, judging by appearances. Several of them were women, grey-haired and determined. ‘Women outnumber men on the mission field thirteen to one,' Grandma Leota used to say. ‘The men are just scared.' Ruth was never sure if their fears centred on the mission
field or the women.

In one picture, Iqbal was sitting on a stage beside a sitar and tabla with a group of people, all relaxed and laughing. They looked like musicians and dancers and one man was laughing so hard his eyes were hidden. Ruth was sure she knew the face but couldn't place him.