Diamond Dust (15 page)

The baby let drop the narcotic rubber nipple, delighted. His eyes grew big and shone at the flowering outside. The little girl was perplexed, wondering what to take from so much abundance till the perfect choice presented itself in a rainbow of colour: green, pink and violet, her favourites. It was a barrow of soft drinks, and nothing on this day of gritty dust, yellow sun and frustrating delay could be more enticing than those bottles filled with syrups in dazzling floral colours. She set up a scream of desire.

'Are you mad?' her mother said promptly. 'You think I'll let you drink a bottle full of typhoid and cholera germs?'

The girl gasped with disbelief at being denied. Her mouth opened wide to issue a protest but her mother went on, 'After you have your typhoid-and-cholera injection, you may. You want a nice big typhoid-and-cholera injection first?'

The child's mouth was still open in contemplation of the impossible choice when her brothers came plodding back through the dust, each carrying a pith and bamboo toy—a clown that bounced up and down on a stick and a bird that whirled upon a pin. Behind them the father slouched morosely. He had his hands deep in his pockets and his face was lined with a frown deeply embedded with dust.

'We'll be here for hours,' he informed his wife through the car window. 'A rickshaw driver has gone off to the nearest thana to find a policeman who can put sense into that damn truck driver's thick head.' Despondently he threw himself into the driver's seat and sprawled there. 'Must be a hundred and twenty degrees,' he sighed.

'Pinky, where is the water bottle? Pass the water bottle to Daddy,' commanded the mother solicitously.

He drank from the plastic bottle, tilting his head back and letting the water spill into his mouth. But it was so warm it was hardly refreshing and he spat out the last mouthful from the car window into the dust. A scavenging chicken alongside the tyre skipped away with a squawk.

All along the road with its stalled traffic, drivers and passengers were searching for shade, for news, for some sign of release. Every now and then someone brought information on how long the line of stalled traffic now was. Two miles in each direction was the latest estimate, at least two miles—and the estimate was made not without a certain pride.

Up on the bank of the culvert the man who had caused it all sat sprawling, his legs wide apart. He had taken off his bandana, revealing a twist of cotton wool dipped in fragrant oil that was tucked behind his ear. He had bought himself a length of sugar cane and sat chewing it, ripping off the tough outer fibre then drawing the sweet syrup out of its soft inner fibre and spitting out, with relish and with expertise, the white fibre sucked dry. He seemed deliberately to spit in the direction of those who stood watching in growing frustration.

'Get hold of that fellow!
Force
him to move his truck,' somebody suddenly shouted out, having reached the limit of his endurance. 'If he doesn't, he'll get the thrashing of his life.'

'Calm down, sardar-ji,' another placated him with a light laugh to help put things back in perspective. 'Cool down. It's hot but you'll get your cold beer when you get to Solan.'

'When will that be? When my beard's gone grey?'

'Grey hair is nothing to be ashamed of,' philosophised an elder who had a good deal of it to show. 'Grey hair shows patience, forbearance, a long life. That is how to live long—patiently, with forbearance.'

'And when one has work to do, what then?' the Sikh demanded, rolling up his hands into fists. The metal ring on his wrist glinted.

'Work goes better after a little rest,' the elder replied, and demonstrated by lowering himself onto his haunches and squatting there on the roadside like an old bird on its perch or a man waiting to be shaved by a wayside barber. And, like an answer to a call, a barber did miraculously appear, an itinerant barber who carried the tools of his trade in a tin box on his head. No one could imagine from where he had emerged, or how far he had travelled in search of custom. Now he squatted and began to unpack a mirror, scissors, soap, blades, even a small rusty cigarette tin full of water. An audience stood watching his expert moves and flourishes and the evident pleasure these gave the elder.

Suddenly the truck driver on the bank waved a hand and called, 'Hey, come up here when you've finished. I could do with a shave too—and my ears need cleaning.'

There was a gasp at his insolence, and then indignant protests.

'Are you planning to get married over here? Are we not to move till your bride arrives and the wedding is over?' shouted someone.

This had the wrong effect: it made the crowd laugh. Even the truck driver laughed. He was somehow becoming a part of the conspiracy. How had this happened?

In the road, the men stood locked in bafflement. In the vehicles, the tired passengers waited. 'Oo-oof,' sighed the mother. The baby, asleep as if stunned by the heat, felt heavy as lead in her arms. 'My head is paining, and it's time to have tea.'

'Mama wants tea, Mama wants tea!' chanted the daughter, kicking at the front seat.

'Stop it!' her father snapped at her. 'Where is the kitchen? Where is the cook? Am I to get them out of the sky? Or is there a well filled with tea?'

The children all burst out laughing at the idea of drawing tea from a well, but while they giggled helplessly, a chai-wallah did appear, a tray with glasses on his head, a kettle dangling from his hand, searching for the passenger who had called for tea.

There was no mention of cholera or typhoid now. He was summoned, glasses were filled with milky, sweet, frothing tea and handed out, the parents slurped thirstily and the children stared, demanding sips, then flinching from the scalding liquid.

Heartened, the father began to thrash around in the car, punch the horn, stamp ineffectually on the accelerator. 'Damn fool,' he swore. 'How can this happen? How can this be allowed? Only in this bloody country. Where else can one man hold up four miles of traffic—'

Handing back an empty glass, the mother suggested, 'Why don't you go and see if the policeman's arrived?'

'Am I to go up and down looking for a policeman? Should I walk to Solan to find one?' the man fumed. His tirade rolled on like thunder out of the white blaze of afternoon. The children listened, watched. Was it getting darker? Was a thunder cloud approaching? Was it less bright? Perhaps it was evening. Perhaps it would be night soon.

'What will we do when it grows dark?' the girl whimpered. 'Where will we sleep?'

'Here, in the car!' shouted the boys. 'Here, on the road!' Their toys were long since broken and discarded. They needed some distraction. The sister could easily be moved to tears by mention of night, jackals, ghosts that haunt highways at night, robbers who carry silk handkerchieves to strangle their victims...

Suddenly, simultaneously, two events occurred. In the ditch that ran beside the car the yellow pai dog began a snarling, yelping fight with a marauder upon her territory, and at the same time one of the drivers, hitching up his pyjamas and straightening his turban, came running back towards the stalled traffic, shouting, 'They're moving! The policeman's come! They'll move now! There'll be a faisla!'

Instantly the picture changed from one of discouragement, despair and possibly approaching darkness to animation, excitement, hope. All those loitering in the road leapt back into their vehicles, getting rid of empty bottles, paper bags, cigarette butts, the remains of whatever refreshment the roadway had afforded them, and in a moment the air was filled with the roar of revving engines as with applause.

The father too was pressing down on the accelerator, beating upon the steering wheel, and the children settling into position, all screaming, 'Sim-la! Sim-la!' in unison. The pai dogs scrambled out of the way and carried their quarrel over into the stony field.

But not a single vehicle moved an inch. None could. The obstructive truck had not been shifted out of the way. The driver still sprawled upon the bank, propped up on one elbow now, demanding of the policeman who had arrived, 'So? Have you brought me compensation? No? Why not? I told you I would not move till I received compensation. So where is it? Hah? What is the faisla? Hah?'

The roar of engines faltered, hiccupped, fell silent. After a while, car doors slammed as drivers and passengers climbed out again. Groups formed to discuss the latest development. What was to be done now? The elder's philosophical patience was no longer entertained. No one bandied jokes with the villain on the bank any more. Expressions turned grim.

Suddenly the mother wailed, 'We'll be here all night,' and the baby woke up crying: he had had enough of being confined in the suffocating heat, he wanted air, wanted escape. All the children began to whine. The mother drew herself together. 'We'll have to get something to eat,' she decided and called over to her husband standing in the road, 'Can't we get some food for the children?'

He threw her an irritated look over his shoulder. Together with the men in the road, he was going back to the culvert to see what could be done. There was an urgency about their talk now, their suggestions. Dusk had begun to creep across the fields like a thicker, greyer layer of dust. Some of the vendors lit kerosene lamps on their barrows, so small and faint that they did nothing but accentuate the darkness. Some of them were disappearing over the fields, along paths visible only to them, having sold their goods and possibly having a long way to travel. All that could be seen clearly in the growing dark were the lighted pinpricks of their cigarettes.

What the small girl had most feared did now happen—the long, mournful howl of a jackal lifted itself out of the stones and thornbushes and unfurled through the dusk towards them. While she sat mute with fear her brothers let out howls of delight and began to imitate the invisible creature with joy and exuberance.

The mother was shushing them all fiercely when they heard the sound they had given up hope of hearing: the sound of a moving vehicle. It came roaring up the road from behind them—not at all where they had expected—overtaking them in a cloud of choking dust. Policemen in khaki, armed with steel-tipped canes, leaned out of it, their moustaches bristling, their teeth gleaming, eyes flashing and ferocious as tigers. And the huddled crowd stranded on the roadside fell aside like sheep: it might have been they who were at fault.

But the police truck overtook them all, sending them hurriedly into the ditch for safety, and drew up at the culvert. Here the police jumped out, landing with great thuds on the asphalt, and striking their canes hard upon it for good measure. The truck's headlights lit up the bank with its pallid wash.

Caught in that illumination, the truck driver sprawling there rose calmly to his feet, dusted the seat of his pyjamas and wound up the bandana round his head, while everyone watched open-mouthed. Placing his hands on his hips, he called to the police, 'Get them all moving now, get them all moving!' And, as if satisfied with his role of leader, the commander, he leapt lightly into the driver's seat of his truck, turned the key, started the engine and manoeuvred the vehicle into an onward position and, while his audience held its disbelieving breath, set off towards the north.

After a moment they saw that he had switched on his lights; the tail lights could be seen dwindling in the dark. He had also turned on his radio and a song could be heard like the wail of a jackal in the night:

'Father, I am leaving your roof,
To my bridegroom's home I go...'

The police, looking baffled, swung around, flourishing their canes. 'Get on! Chalo!' they bellowed. 'Chalo, chalo, get on, all of you,' and they did.

L
OUIS
was let in at the big door by the old workman who had married one of the maids. He greeted Louis with becoming joy and affection, then led him through the courtyard which was quiet now, the maids having finished their work and gone. Louis had to duck his head to make his way through the rubber trees, the bougainvillaea, the shrubs of jasmine and hibiscus and plumbago that had tangled themselves into a jungle, leaving barely enough room to pass. The evening air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and lemon blossom. As he remembered, every branch was hung with a cage—he had memories that were still sharply etched of day-long screeches and screams that would ring through the courtyard and every room around it: the maids, doing the laundry at the water trough in the centre of the courtyard, crying, 'Pa-pa-ga-yo?' and being answered by twenty screeches of 'Pa-pa-ga-yo!' hour upon hour. But at this hour all the cages were covered with cloth and there was silence. A thought struck him: were they still alive? Perhaps they had all died: he imagined their skeletons clinging to the perches inside the shrouded cages, all beaks, claws and bones, dust and dried droppings below. 'Papa-ga
-yoi
Pa-pa-
ga
-yo!' he whistled softly.

The house, to him, was a larger cage, shrouded and still. It seemed equally dead. There was one light on, deep inside; the other rooms were all shadowy, except for the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her gown of dusty net and tinsel, illuminated by thè glow of a red light bulb suspended over her head.

The old man was hobbling along the dark passages as if he could see perfectly in the dark. Perhaps he was blind, and accustomed to it. Louis bumped, into a sharp-edged table and suddenly all the picture frames on it clattered in warning, and a voice called out, 'Quièro es?'

As Louis approached the innermost rooms—actually the ones that fronted the street, but they could not be approached from it—the scent of lemons and jasmine in the courtyard and the heavy perfume of incense burning perpetually at the shrine receded and were replaced by an overpowering odour he remembered as being the distinctive smell of the house on Avenida Matamoros: that of mosquito repellent.

And there they were, Dona Celia on her square, upright, wooden-backed and wooden-seated throne, strategically placed so that she could look out of the window into the street and also, just by turning her head, into the house all the way down its central passage into the courtyard; and Nadyn beside her, poking with a hairpin at a Raidolito coil which was smoking ferociously and yet not enough to keep the evening's mosquitoes at bay.