A River Sutra (10 page)

"Yaar, I don't know how your liver can take such punishment."
"Practice, yaar. What do you think I do three hundred and thirty days in the year, up on the estate?"
"What, yaar?"
"Drink, shoot, and fuck."
"Come off it, yaar. Who can you fuck in the wilderness?"
"Armies of women. Real women who will do anything to please a man."
"For instance? No, let me sign for this one."
"Cheers. And what sexual appetites! It's all they think about."
"No wonder you tea estate chaps become such elbow-benders. I couldn't touch those hideous creatures unless I was stinking drunk."
"Come on, yaar, admit it. I bet they smell hke hell, your real women."
"I might admit this much. Mrs. Sushila Ghosh smells better than them." The tea estate boy would empty his glass. "And now, yaar. I mustn't keep such a fragrant lady waiting."
Sometimes when I was stuck in a traffic jam behind a bus listing under the weight of passengers clinging to its step rails, I marveled that the clerks squeezed against each other could laugh and joke with each other as they did, and I wondered if the fight for survival could opiate them as luxury had opiated me, or whether they also dreamed of glorious adventures.
And when those free-wheeling tea estate boys came into the office after a night of suicidal drinking followed by lovemaking in air-conditioned bedrooms scented with tuber roses bought fresh every morning from the New Market, I felt a spasm of envious admiration. Life on the tea estates seemed a real man's life.
The nearest we got to danger was gambling. Ashok, who had spent most of his time in the betting shops of London while working toward his accountancy degree, offered odds on the movement of two clouds in the sky outside our office windows. The exact time a peon would take to bring us tea. Whose bored wife's eye would next begin to wander.
Everything was an occasion for a wager. When I was offered the choice between managing a tea estate or going on an executive training course, the betting began again.
"Avoid the estate, yaar. You'll be an alcoholic in a year."
"Six months."

I opted for the tea estate.
"Okay, what odds are you giving me? I say it
will take him a year."
"Now, Ashok. Don't do all that seven-to-two
shit. Just keep it simple. Three to one." "Done. Three to one says he will be an alcoholic
within a year."
"Don't be an ass, yaar Nitin. You will have no
one to talk to. Those tea estate buggers are all
mad. Driven crazy by loneliness."
To me, suffocated by the sheer weight of Calcutta's inescapable humanity, the solitude of the
tea estate was its most attractive prospect.

Still, I found it hard to believe such solitude existed as the jeep wound its way through the deserted Himalayan foothills toward my tea estate.

During the eight-hour drive from the small airport to the tea garden, I stared in awe at the green emptiness stretching in circles below the hill road. Each shepherd beating his animals off the road, each coolie laboring under the bundles tied to his head, required an individual greeting, so rare was human encounter. Overhead the small clouds rose like foam above the distant Himalayas before breaking in a white wave as the wind swept them toward the plains, and I felt like a pebble thrown into a wooded ocean, expanding the empty horizon as an alien object moves the water outward.

Long before I reached my tea estate I had gone from disbelief, to tranquility, to that possessiveness by which one is oneself possessed.

Occasionally the jeep passed a village of thatched cottages that looked more Shakespearean them Indian with their plastered walls and weathered timber beams, isolated in miles of tea bushes just coming into leaf.

As dusk fell we could no longer see the fields of tea bushes. Only the dim lanterns from the tea pickers' colonies broke the darkness. Then night enclosed us in a velvet embrace, and the hghts from the tea pickers' huts were no less gentle than the stars in that tranquil sky.

The sweep of our headlights lit the deodar tree spreading its branches above the walls of my new residence. A guard saluted as the jeep rounded a drive outlined by painted bricks, and in the portico five turbanned and cummerbunded servants bowed to me.

It was all so ridiculously English I started laughing. Even when the driver braked and the servants came forward to open my door I could not stop laughing at the thought that I had entered a British fantasy of India, untouched by the chaos of the last forty years.

To reassure the servants that I was as pukka as any other sahib, I began issuing orders in an unnaturally military way. They lost the looks of insecurity brought on by my display of levity, as I supervised the unloading of my luggage. My barked orders, my courtesy underlined by firmness, my eye for detail, drew a portrait of my persona for them to circulate on the estate.

The head bearer ushered me into my bedroom, and I wanted to laugh again when I saw the massive ebony bed with serpents carved on the headboard enclosed in the billowing mosquito net suspended from an iron hoop in the high ceiling, standing there like an altar built for the worship of the senses.

But I controlled myself as the other servants brought in the large cabin trunk my grandfather had taken with him to Cambridge University three years before the Great War. Although he had been a physicist, my grandfather had been an avid reader of Indian philosophy and mythology, and on the day my transfer to the tea gardens had been confirmed my grandmother had sent me his cabin trunk filled with books. I could not imagine why my grandmother thought someone of my generation would have the faintest interest in all those Puranas and Vedas and Upanishads and God knows what. But I had brought them with me in case I ran out of reading material.

Now I ordered the servants to remove the books wedged into the trunk. They looked embarrassed as the volumes piled up on the floor around them. Facing the magnificent bed shrouded in its veils of fine netting was the house's sole bookcase, a plywood construction obviously used by previous inhabitants for pornographic paperbacks or detective stories. A copy of Gorens'
Contract Bridge
lay mournfully on the warping middle shelf.

I instructed the servants to stack the books against the wall until new bookshelves could be made. From the glances they threw in my direction I knew I had succeeded in establishing myself as a scholar, and they would tell the estate workers that I was a just man, capable of controlling

Satisfied by my own performance, I sat alone in the wood-beamed dining room reveling in my good fortune, the only noise the sound of crickets outside and the creaking of the pantry door each time the head bearer brought me another dish.

The extraordinary thing about inventing a persona is that one is loathe to give it up, especially if the fiction sits comfortably.

I found I enjoyed being the young paterfamilias of my realm, enjoyed being treated with undisguised respect by the gentle tribal women picking leaves as I walked through the rows of tea bushes with my overseer, Mr. Sen.

A fussy, pedantic man, always looking for the small fault to assert his power, Mr. Sen continually provided me with opportunities to exhibit my tolerant good sense. I took care to do so with a delicacy that could not offend his authority until, over the months, both the tea pickers and the clerical staff under Mr. Sen became dependent on my judgment.

Nature conspired in my fiction that first year. The rains came at exactly the right time to produce the tenderest leaves, and the crop from my estate was the best received by Head Office. The Chairman telegrammed his personal congratulations and the workers responded to their bonus with small presents for me, as if I were a family elder.

I suppose I had begun to exhibit the mannerisms of an elder. Certainly, my old self of the Calcutta days was less and less present, my new self increasingly so, like a shortening shadow merges with its subject. I hardly drank, and I never thought about women. If women showed themselves in my dreams as I lay asleep in the ebony bed, they did so with such subtlety that I awoke with no memory of them.

The dreams I remembered were linked to my grandfather's library.
To my surprise I had become fascinated by the endless legends contained in the Puranas. After a day spent walking through tea gardens laid out with mathematical precision or studying columns of figures at my office desk while the long blades of the wooden fan stirred the air, I found it a delight to sit on the veranda in the evenings reading the labyrinthine tales of demons, sages, gods, lovers, cosmologies.
I even discovered mythological tales dealing with the very area in which my tea estate was situated, legends of a vast underground civiliza* tion stretching from these hills all the way to the Arabian Sea, peopled by a mysterious race half human, half serpent. Naturally I viewed the legends through the prism of anthropology, assuming the nomadic Aryan scribes who had recorded the legends had been overwhelmed by the sophistication of the people they had conquered.
But I enjoyed their poetic descriptions of palaces and universities constructed from manycolored marbles. Of gardens more beautiful than those of the gods themselves with ponds of crystalline water alive with leaping fish, silver among the water lilies, and trees bending under the weight of flowering vines. A world devoted to pleasure and learning, its serenity guarded by hooded serpents with great gems flashing from their hoods.
Apparently its inhabitants had even had a particular love of magic, spending happy hours entertaining each other with magic tricks.
After dinner I would sit on the veranda in my wicker armchair, staring into the velvet night, the stars so low in the sky I felt I had only to reach up and pull one down to shed more light on my open book, imagining that the gentle tribals I had seen bending over the tea bushes were in fact descendants of this civilization, still able to do the great Indian rope trick, and when I fell asleep in my ebony bed under the sails of mosquito netting, I dreamed of legendary kingdoms guarded by hooded cobras.
The second year the rains were again kind to us. Our tea crop was so outstanding the Chairman sent a member of the board to invite me to return to Calcutta as a director of the company. To my delight this exalted person turned out to be my friend, Ashok.
"So, yaar, tell me the truth. How long did it take?"
"Did what take?" I asked.
"Be serious, yaar. To become an alcoholic."
He would not believe I was not a drunk until we passed evening after evening on my veranda, I pouring a single drink for myself but many for him. My abstemiousness exasperated him. When I said I did not want to leave the tea estate, Ashok told me I was losing my mind.
Raising his voice above the singing of the crickets and the deep-throated belches of the garden frogs, he said, "You are definitely going mad, yaar. You hardly drink. You want to stay in this god-forsaken wilderness when you could be a director of the company. You mastermind these perfect crops all day but at night you do nothing but read."
He leaned over and stared at me. "Admit it,
•yaar. It is downright sinister for a man your age not to have had a woman for two solid years!"
He went on and on trying to convince me to return to Calcutta in that soft blackness which had never ceased to affect me as it had from the first night, but which obviously upset him with its emptiness.
Not wishing to offend an old friend, I made excuses. "Which woman would live with me with

"Then come back to Calcutta, yaar, before it drops off or withers away like some unwatered tea bush."

Too much drink made him insensitive to my silence, and I was glad the next morning to wave Ashok good-bye.

But his words left a mark on my mind as if he had dropped a bottle of ink across a favorite book. Like some small night animal sexual restlessness began to gnaw at the edges of my content. After dinner I sat on the veranda, unable to relax in the wicker armchair as insects and moths flung themselves ceaselessly against the glass domes covering the lightbulbs. The darkness that had always seemed so serene now mirrored my restless mind. For the first time I was lonely, and when I entered my bedroom I felt the massive bed sneering at my unused manhood.

Whatever I saw mocked my efforts to recover my composure. The women laughing at each other across the tea bushes now seemed knowingly voluptuous, revealing their breasts, their rounded bellies, their bared calves too much to my view. Even when I went shooting in the jungle I heard only the mating call of animals and I was disgusted with the gun in my hands.

My grandfather's books offered no escape. Once I pulled the Rig Veda from the bookshelf, hoping to find some philosophical consolation in it, but the passage I read shocked me, so accurately did it describe my loneliness.

At first was Death.
That which did mean an utter emptiness. And emptiness, mark thou, is Hunger's Self.

Determined to recover my tranquility, I plunged into my work with redoubled intensity. It did no good. Everything about my work annoyed me. The stupidity of the workers with their constant demands for advances against their salaries. The stubbornness of the union leaders. The inefficiency of the clerical staff in the office.