In the Shadow of Crows (13 page)

Was this not the path - stony and somewhat treacherous, wild forest to the left, British-built bungalows through the trees to my right - that I had seen in over twenty years of lucid dreams? Was this not the path down which I had vividly pictured my father being carried by two bearers on a wax-cloth and wicker
dhoolie
litter, his mother running behind shouting that they were trotting too fast and would drop him straight down the precipitous
khud
? Was this not the route along which I had imagined my father running to school, whilst scheming monkey hordes had bombarded him from above with a shower of fir cones, urine and worse?

A narrow track led me to the garden gate of a deserted bungalow. Monsoon and snow had stripped the red paint from the corrugated roof. Summer sun had blistered the window frames. Forest scrub had consumed the garden.

My heart was pounding, as though I were a young Pevensie finally ready to push his way to the back of the wardrobe.

I forced open the rusting metal and walked to the front steps of the verandah. The view that lay before me was exactly as it had been described over many years of childhood bedtimes.

I had found Ketunky.

And yet, never once had I imagined myself stepping alone onto this overgrown circular lawn, with its open views across deep valleys and dark mountains. This was a discovery Priya had made me vow to undertake with her, so we might together reveal the veracity of all those childhood stories on which I had been raised. This was always going to be
our
adventure, to prove to both of us that for all the bright, breathless intimacy that was our own, we also shared a deeper, cultural connection.

I had planned to show Priya that it had been on this grass that my father had regularly had his hair cut by the dreaded
napi
barber, with shears so blunt their blades had not so much cut as plucked the hair from his scalp. I had intended to tell her that it had been around these borders that the family servants had placed little oil lamps every
Diwali
, their domestic Festival of Lights so enchanting my father as a child that the twinkling flames had continued to burn brightly in his memory for forty years.

I had wanted to tell her that it had been amongst these same flowerbeds that my father's pet dog had been mauled in the night by a leopard. He had found it before breakfast “without a face and with its head turned upside-down”, a much-repeated phrase that had haunted my own upbringing, just as the memory of the gruesome discovery had haunted his.

I had anticipated making her grimace with the story that it had been from the verandah upon which I had expected us to sit together that my father's mother had once found a servant, his
dhoti
cloth raised high to expose thin legs covered in seeping sores. She had knelt before him to clean the wounds and apply antiseptic ointment. These benevolent treatments had been repeated for three days, but when his condition had not improved she had sent the man off to the doctor with a letter and a one-rupee note. Within the hour, an urgent summons had arrived from the surgery. The entire family and all staff were to attend the hospital directly. The servant had been riddled with aggressive syphilis.

I imagined that Priya walked beside me as I approached the house and rattled the doors. All were locked. It was as though my father's mother were still inside, clutching her
Flit-
gun for fear of spiders, humming wholesome hymns for comfort and hiding from the
loose-wallahs
. Such local rogues had regularly attempted to slip into the house stark naked and so greased with oil that, had they been disturbed in their burglarious transgression, no part of their anatomy could have been grasped in capture.

I shaded my eyes and peered through the small-paned windows, but all the rooms were derelict and dark. I looked into the sunless
bawarchi-khana
kitchen, where once my father's mother had kept an attentive eye on the staff, horrified by rumours that the servants used socks to strain soup, held mutton rissoles between their toes, and shaped fish patties in their armpits. I winced at the echoes of my grandfather's incensed splutters when a newly hired hand had attempted to impress by presenting a platter of mashed potato at dinner formed by his talented, though dirty, fingers into a menagerie of animals. The sight of a perky
aloo
elephant, smeary cobra and goggle-eyed monkey seated in a wallow of gravy beyond the braised pigeons and vegetable darioles had been too much for a seasoned
sahib
to tolerate. Angry voices had been raised, plates had been broken and at least one well-meaning domestic had been sent to bed in tears.

I chuckled aloud, as though I were telling Priya of the Christmas my father's mother had entrusted the icing of the cake to her Madrasi
bawarchi
. The cook had been proud of his spoken English and had emphatically stated that he needed no help whatsoever in its festive decoration. On the day, the cake had been carried into the dining room with great ceremony to be placed before the family and their guests, in the centre of the table. There had been a momentary silence before the entire company had burst into hysterics, to the bewilderment of the ever-obliging, but illiterate bearer. Inspired by a pretty, seasonal advertisement in the
Times of India
, he had pasted across the royal icing the confident cochineal legend: “Buy Littlewood's Pools”.

I moved on to gaze into the patchwork shadows of the conservatory that had once been my father's playroom. Here, he had listened to the BBC's regular appointments with the plucky “Front Line Family” on the wireless, and first learned of rationing, blackouts, parachute-silk blouses and doodlebugs in a distant, unknown Britain. The door curtains of this room had been my father's theatre, his magic tricks and puppet shows deemed so amusing by an eager audience of servants that they had named him
joker-sah'b
. The geometric patterns of the Afghan rug that had once lain upon the playroom floor had been his giant game-board, across which my father's lead soldiers had boldly marched in tidy regimental lines, and his treasured Hornby train set had puffed its tireless circle.

I strolled to the side of the house and a row of derelict go-downs, the single-roomed huts in which the servants and their families had lived. There had been Burket, the well-liked
bawarchi
cook; Kondi Ram, the
khansamah
butler-bearer; Manu, the Pashtun
chowkidhar
watchman; Samir, the
mali
gardener; Harish, the
bhishti
water carrier; and Fakeru, the lowly
bhangi
sweeper, whose sole job it had been to deal with the “night soil” in his masters' “thunder box”.

Despite the customary practice of employing native nannies, my father's mother had adamantly refused to hire an
ayah
for her children. She had believed the rumour that opium was commonly secreted beneath such women's fingernails, on which their charges were expected to suckle at bedtime to secure for their nurse a night of unbroken slumber.

I peered into the windowless, chimneyless rooms of these godowns, where my father had regularly sneaked to share meals with the servants' children. It had been on these dirt floors, wreathed in wood smoke and tempering spices, that he had developed his taste for all manner of native delights, which I in turn had inherited.

It had also been in these lowly quarters that, with no
ayah
in the household, the servants' wives had unofficially adopted the role of communal nanny. Upon discovering my father's insatiable appetite for sweetened condensed milk, these devoted and indulgent women had taken it in turns to proffer liberal spoons of the sticky, viscous pleasure until all his nascent teeth had been reduced to blackened matchsticks. The repetition of this chilling fact, with its unnerving image of carbonised incisors, had terrified me into an intimate relationship with my toothbrush from an early age, through which I had undoubtedly ingested an excess of baking soda and fluoride in my efforts to retain the pearly brightness of a youthful smile.

As I circled the house for a second time, my thoughts of tarnished teeth, toy trains and trusty staff became a constellation of curling pictures taken in these very hills, all now preserved in ancestral albums. Tea parties and church bazaars, Scout parades and Sunday School picnics. Sola topee-topped
sahibs
with their cricket bats, polo mallets and pig-spears. Broad-brim-crowned
mems
with their parasols, gossip and tennis-coach lovers.
Chota sahibs
and
missy babas
with their chatty pet mynahs and dog-collared monkeys. Smiling, confident, pale-faced generations, who had believed themselves omnipotent, now reduced to fading faces pressed between glassine interleaves.

Priya would have chided the mounting melancholy of my nostalgia.

“Come on! I'll race you to the church!” she would have laughed, delivering a pinch, then skipping ahead for me to catch her.

I left the overgrown garden of Ketunky and wandered up towards a tired tower. The great, ornamental iron gates of the entrance were so rusted that they could barely open. I breathed myself thin and squeezed through.

The building was near collapse.

“Untouched since the British left,” a voice beside me apologised, “and only six Christians living here now.” It was the vicar's wife, who indicated with an outstretched sweep of a thin, dark arm that I was welcome to explore at my leisure.

I wandered between rows of dusty Victorian pews, where once my father had sung “Jerusalem” and felt proud of King and Empire. I squinted through psychedelic shafts of glass-stained light at timetainted paintings of Israelites and fishermen. I read every ornately inscribed brass plaque, in memory of Rutherfords and Driscolls, Eckersleys and Biggan-Smyths. All dead with disease and battle. Or too much tiger.

I stood at the altar rail and thought of my grandparents' enduring shame of having to attend a service in weekday dress, when rats had eaten all the fine bone buttons off their Sunday best. I turned to walk up the nave aisle, but it was scattered with hymn books and church records that dated back to the 1830s.

“Oh those scallywag monkeys!” the vicar's wife growled. “Old Nick's own terrors they are!” I helped her gather the torn pages, whilst trying to avoid the generous deposits the troublesome beasts had added to their mischief. “Come, I'll show you where these infernal imps climb in,” she beckoned, directing me to ascend a precarious wooden staircase to a broad balcony.

High above the nave, she pointed to two broken panes in a neo-Gothic window, but I was not looking. Perched on the balcony was an ancient organ, of which I had heard my father speak. I ran my fingers around the corroded pump-wheel, at which he had once furiously toiled to earn a treasured Boy Scout badge, and looked about me in astonishment. The long-silenced instrument, its decomposing heart now rustling with rodents, was surrounded by towering piles of Victorian chests and Edwardian portmanteaux.

“Just old junk,” my parochial guide explained, having followed my gaze, “left behind by Britishers from the old days - you know, before your Miss Kendal and our Mr Kapoor came here to film their
Shakespeare Wallah
.”

Disturbed by nothing but indefinable paw prints and snake slithers, decades of dust lay in thick swathes. Between great latched boxes and crumbling leather trunks tumbled libraries of wormmined books. Galleries of heavy-framed portraits of
pukka sahibs
and
mems
, faded sailor-suited sons and ringlet-draped daughters. I wondered who had stored them so safely there, intending to return. I tried to lift the cobwebbed lids, but all were firmly locked, their keys long lost.

I turned to ask more of the vicar's wife, but her slender arm now extended not a welcome, but a donations book and ready pen. I forced the joyless smile of a martyred saint and scrounged my pockets for token change. Grandmother's response would have been far more honest: the recitation of another of her rude rhymes about the clergy involving pigs and potato peelings, and a concluding “Amen!” in a pointed, plagal cadence.

As I pushed my way back through the gap in the gate, an old shop-board opposite caught my eye. It was Mullick's Haberdashery, a store that had also played its part in my bedtime stories. I crossed its well-swept threshold and entered a fusty interior, dimly lit and densely packed with old glass cabinets and shelves of faded boxes. I stood still and breathed in a giddy mix of naphthalene and camphor, stale incense and stewing tea.

A movement in the shadows suddenly made me start. An ancient man was silently rising from amongst rolls of woollen weaves that lay scattered on the cutting-table. He looked towards me with slow, deliberate eyes and wished me welcome in impeccable English. He enquired as to what might have brought me to this far-flung, foreign spot. I told him of Ketunky, of my father's love of Kasauli and my own childhood reveries. I told him of the surviving account book of my father's mother, which listed her weekly visits to this very counter, and of a paper bag of thimbles, printed with his name, that still languished in her sewing box.

“Manners?” he mumbled to himself, sifting through the dust of distant years. “The Captain Quartermaster's good wife?”

I was astounded.

“Ah, yes,” he smiled. “An excellent customer, sir. Paid her bills and benefited every chilly toe in the district by teaching our women to knit socks with four fine needles. To this day, we still remember her very well and warmly.”

***

“You have Hansen's Disease,” the doctor announced. “Leprosy. The tuberculoid strain, to be precise.” His voice was flat, devoid of expression. “It's bad luck for you, as the majority of us have a natural immunity to the germ. Do you understand? You people call it
Mahaa Rog
, don't you?” he yawned. “The Great Disease.”