In the Shadow of Crows (32 page)

“To see both the good and the bad, or rather the wise and ignorant, in myself, before finding them in others,” Bindra explained. “They taught me to choose in every thought, word and act to turn anger into compassion, and jealousy into generosity. To transform hatred into love, and conflict into peace. To change chaos into order and ignorance into knowledge.”

Bindra stroked the thick, dark head of hair that rested against her breast. “They have all taught me to understand, my sweet child, that in truth you and I are limitless sky!”

But Aarti was already fast asleep.

***

“A call for me?” I was baffled.

Bad news from home? Sickness? A death?

Ben ran with me to the Office, where a greasy telephone earpiece was awaiting my arrival, clasped in a nervous secretarial hand.

“Good morning,” I anxiously began. “Yes, speaking . . . I'm sorry, who? Are you certain? This afternoon? Well, of course . . . thank you. And you'll send a car?”

I grinned at Ben with eyes wide.

Without a word, I strolled directly to the Major's open door. I rapped confidently against the chipped paint of its wooden frame, causing him to start from his weekly task of sharpening all the pencils to identical lengths.

“Excuse me, sir,” I beamed, purposefully stepping into the room in advance of his invitation. “Just to let you know that we shall be out of the compound this afternoon . . .”

“No leave of absence without prior permission!” he barked.

“A car will be collecting us at three,” I stated blankly.

“Requests for social interaction beyond the boundary fence must be submitted for official consideration a minimum of forty-eight hours in advance!” he ordered, flaccid cheeks reddening. “Any fraternisation with any member of the local population must be presented for initial clearance with the Office!”

I stood beaming in silent confidence, awaiting the inevitable question.

“And to whose residence are you requesting permission to travel?” he snapped, shoulders heaving in escalating tension.

“Oh, didn't I say, sir?” I smiled in apology. “We are invited to take tea at the
Raj Bhawan
palace, at the personal invitation of a dear, personal friend of my aunts in Kalimpong: His Excellency the State Governor.”

The heaving shoulders had fallen still.

***

Bindra had lain on her back for much of the morning. The broken ankle caused her entire leg to throb unceasingly. Sushmita and the girls had been out since dawn, wandering deep into the
saal
forest to find the necessary plants to replace her poultice. It always ached more fiercely after they had changed the splints.

Bindra had little appetite. She had insisted that her remaining month's ration be taken for the girls. Sushmita had brought kindling and a little wood from their excursion amongst the trees. She had cooked on the fire in Bindra's hut, to keep her company, and had insisted that she eat a full portion of their combined
daalchawal
.

As dusk now approached, Bindra was again alone. Sushmita had carried the surplus kindling to the river bridge, in the hope that she might sell it for a rupee or two at the dusty roadside.

Bindra watched a solitary lizard scurry across the ceiling. It paused to confront her upside-down world with an unblinking stare, before darkling back to shadow.

She listened to the laughter and songs of children in the alleyway. She could distinguish Aarti and her sisters by the confident, clear melody of their voices.

Bindra smiled and closed her eyes. Almost a bamboo hut on a hillside. Almost sons and daughters in their hunt for
iskus
and tapioca roots. Almost a nearly forgotten home.

A sudden quiet beyond the door.

And then, the explosive caw of crows.

Bindra opened her eyes and looked towards the single oblong of fading light.

“What is coming, Kali Ma?” she whispered out loud.

“
Mataji
!” Aarti and Poojita burst back into the room. Dipika and her friend, Tamanna, quickly followed behind. All ran to Bindra's
charpai
and turned back to face the door.

“
Kya baat hai
?” Bindra asked, awkwardly pulling herself onto her elbows. “What's the matter?”

“
Mataji
,” gasped Aarti, protectively clasping the stick-doll in her arms. “There's a man at the end of the alleyway!”

“Talking to Karishma and Sachi!” hissed Poojita.

Bindra was puzzled by their excited fear. She drew herself up to sit, ignoring the pain that scorched through broken bone and damaged flesh.

“The slum Collectors can't be back already!” she exclaimed, darting her eyes up to the high shelf and the empty tiffin tin.

“
Nahiñ-ji
! Not those
badirchand
!” replied Poojita, pulling a face in imitation of her mother.

“At the end of the alleyway,
Mataji
,” Aarti breathlessly burst, “we've seen a foreigner!”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The rain was so dense, the wind so wild that trees buckled. Tea-stalls and wing-clipped chickens took flight. Children and their grandmothers were knocked off flip-flop feet.

Two
dhoti
-wearing
malis
squatted on the flooding lawn, clutching an empty fertiliser bag above their sodden heads. They peered at us with forlorn eyes as the topsoil of carefully tended borders whelmed naked toes, splashed darkly across soggy nappies that flapped in frenzy around their loins.

Liveried
khansamah
s raised black umbrellas above our heads and accompanied us in our dash from a pot-plant-piled verandah towards an emblazoned state Ambassador. Both
malis
released their hold on the sheet of plastic to bow in reverential
pranam
. As yet more blooms were torn from straining stems and consumed by the slick of mud, we watched through cascading glass as two men danced on pin-thin legs across manicured grass, in pursuit of a volatile rectangle of billowing blue.

Our afternoon tea with the State Governor had been deeply unsettling, despite his warmth of welcome, his interest in the aunties' health in Kalimpong and the well-being of their seasonal neighbour, the Dowager Queen of Bhutan.

It was the proximity of the lives of those with whom we lived, beyond the formal gardens and twenty-foot-high ornamental gates, that I had found so disorientating. It was the contrast of slum, disease and despair, with tree-lined promenades, mock-Mughal gazebos and rifle-bearing guards in splendid ceremonial dress. The contrast of poverty, pain, abuse and squalor, with gaudy gilt, colonial chintz, antimacassars and fine china.

Seated on cushioned armchairs, in a cavernous state reception room of pretentious splendour, attended by a swarm of servants bearing silver platters of tongue-peelingly spiced savouries and succulent sweetmeats, the world into which we had been swept seemed to be nothing more than the fleeting fancy of my own deranged mind. It mattered to me that I could sit here when those others could not. It mattered to me greatly.

And yet, as our State Ambassador plunged back into the swell beyond the gates, Ben and I found ourselves brimming with new optimism. Such was the genial governor's interest in our efforts that we felt assured that our determined pleas would now be heard by newly opened, ex-military ears.

Perhaps now those who lived in the colony would be permitted fruit and vegetables, their monstrously infected wounds treated. Perhaps now the bedridden would be washed and fed, their urinesoaked clothes no longer left unchanged for days.

Perhaps now there was a difference to be made.

***

Sushmita was wet and breathless.

“There
has
been a foreigner here,
behenji
,” she panted, squeezing out the rain-drenched cotton that clung to her gaunt frame. “Yes, it's true, a tall man. Not old. White skin, pink nose. He's been going to every door, one row every day.”

“He carries bottles of hot water,” added Aarti, “a big red bowl, clean bandages, a whole box of foreigners' medicine . . .”

“And he speaks our Hindi!” grinned Poojita, who was helping Dipika feed the stick-doll with a moist porridge of carefully crumbled leaves.

“Well, a sort of Hindi!” Sushmita clarified with a giggle. “But he talks to everyone. He even
touches
everyone! Some are saying he's the foreigner's Jesus, come to heal us!”

Bindra was intrigued. “Was I sleeping when he came?” she asked in disappointment, gently shifting her inflamed ankle in its homemade splints.

“No,
behenji
, he left early today, just before the rains,” Sushmita assured her. “He stopped at Karishma's door. Gave her medicine and a big, prickly fruit he says is called
ananas
. Pravit says he's seen one before and that they cost fifty rupees in the market,
behenji
! Can you imagine? Fifty rupees for one fruit! This is the food of kings!”

Aarti expressed her own amazement for Bindra's benefit, with eyes stretched wide and brows arched high.

“We've never seen such a thing before!” Sushmita continued in excitement. “But the foreigner says it may help the swellings in Karishma's hands and elbows. She has no idea what to do with it - and nor do I! But she was too embarrassed to ask him, poor old thing. Does she eat the prickles? Does she cook it and rub it in her skin? He didn't say. Just handed it to her!”

“So what's she done with her maharaja's medicine-fruit?” Bindra asked.

“What could she do,” Sushmita chuckled, “but hide it in her bed?” causing both women and all three girls to join in a chorus of unrestrained laughter.

***

The town into which our chauffeur cautiously drove was violently awash. Black, refuse-filled water tore down streets and stairways, driving their inhabitants into neckless huddles beneath straining trees, shop canopies and rickshaw hoods.

As we approached the river bridge, the car came to a choking halt. The waters had finally submerged hubcaps, extinguished sparkplugs, reached our feet. The chauffeur was more concerned about the condition of his shiny shoes than that of the state vehicle in which we had begun to wallow. He raised his legs to the safety of the dashboard and lit an asphyxiating cigarette.

Ben and I steeled ourselves as we stepped out into the swell with feet freshly bared and trousers rolled. The driver protested, briefly. Whilst he feared dismissal for the loss of his master's passengers to the storm beyond the windscreen, he had no wish to pursue his errant charges in their madness.

The filthy, flooding stream, where there had once been a potholed road, spliced into swirling rapids as it hit the solidity of our pale calves. We began to wade forwards, but paused in confusion. Ahead there was no bridge, only a single, raging torrent on which rolled corrugated iron, splintered wood, sewage froth and dead pig.

We had no option but to slop inland and follow higher ground to the only other river crossing: an unsteady wooden span that still maintained its passage above the intemperate surge. A single, narrow footbridge that led directly into the putrid heart of the forbidden slum.

***

Doctor Dunduka was angry.

He cast a long shadow as he peered across the small room towards Bindra.

“Where is it,
daayan
?” he snarled. “Give me the medicine, you old witch!”

Bindra pulled herself upright on the
charpai
and looked directly at the silhouette that filled her doorway.

“Good afternoon, brother!” she smiled cheekily. “How are you today?”

He had no patience with these people. No patience with their filthy morals or vile gods, their stinking, rotting bodies.

“Give me the foreigners' medicine!” he spat. “They have no right! And
you
have no right! No right at all!” He was shouting through his perpetual grimace for all to hear.

Bindra's mouth lifted into a gentle smile of non-attachment, a smile devoid of self-interest. The smile of Durga Ma.

“No foreigner has come to see me,” she declared in honesty. “You have nothing to fear,” she assured the agitated black outline that now blocked out the light. “Nothing to fear from any foreigners, or their medicine. Or from me.”

Doctor Dunduka swiftly stamped a shiny-shoed foot to crush out the life of another black scorpion that had sought escape from a flooded lair.

“Fear, desire, attachment, and all the conflict they bring, are just tangles of our own making in the threads of life,” she continued calmly. “The tangles of a spiderwebbed fly that keep us from the innate joy that underlies all life.”

The dark figure at the door did not move.

Bindra eased herself to the edge of the
charpai
and leant towards him.

“And this because we believe ourselves to be separate from each other, from Nature, from the cosmos,” she persisted. “Separate from the very knowledge, wisdom and truth we seek. Only as we understand our innate unity with all life do we come to see that - like sunshine, foreigners and scorpions - we are an equal expression of the same perfect union of all its energies and consciousness.”

But Doctor Dunduka had gone.

Bindra's room had already filled with light.

***

The storm had passed as abruptly as the violent devastation it had wrought. It had come and gone as suddenly as the bursting of new froth-topped streams of raw sewage, the engorging of new foul pools in which children now splashed at every turn.

The slum was already busy with its own emergency reconstruction as we waded a route through its inundated alleyways. All industry fell silent as we approached. Hands dropped sopping bamboo poles to wave in astonished welcome. Straw-laden heads relieved their soggy loads to bob in
pranam
. Mouths of bent and rusting nails grinned in dismayed greeting, as we squeezed between spewing sewer pipe, pregnant cow, pack of balding pye-dogs, collapsed walls and elderly Pashtun with a tangerine beard.

It was in the rot and rabble of the slum that we came across a cluster of miserable shacks around which all others carefully skirted. Shacks where there were no children hoisted on shoulders to repatch shattered roofs, no men filling rain-blown walls with dung and straw, no women driving out black water from their rooms with beaten sheets of corroded tin.

Ben and I paused to watch a slow spiral of storm-dishevelled crows descend into the segregated compound ahead of us.

“
Nahiñ-ji
,
sah'b
!” a voice cried out behind us in warning. “
Nahiñ-ji
!”

We stepped into the yard, around which some twenty huts sagged, and found ourselves observed by filthy, dripping figures.

Our instincts had been accurate. Leprosy.

Men, women and children stared out from decrepit doorways at the two waterlogged aliens blown in on wind and rain. Only when we bowed in
pranam
, did their drawn faces crease into astonished smiles.

Two of their number slowly approached to introduce themselves in unexpected English: brothers Bhim and Ajit Vir. They enthusiastically beckoned their companions to waddle, crouch and crawl, to gather at our feet. Broken plastic chairs were wiped with blackened rags, and offered to us with insistence that we sat. We declined, preferring to squat with them as equals in the steaming mud, only to concede when Ajit Vir begged, “
Sah'b-ji
, please be doing us the honour of accepting the only hospitality we have to give.”

We listened to their stories of village homes and land forcibly removed. Of families lost. Of beatings, stonings, burnings.

We listened to stories of medicine given by doctors to declare them “cured”, and then the subsequent removal of their names from all governmental and charitable lists. Of official dismissal. Of total abandonment.

We listened, and burned with anger that anyone should be deserted to endure such conditions. Anger that it would have evidently required simple, inexpensive intervention to significantly relieve their suffering. Anger that nobody cared.

We listened, unable to conceive of contracting a monstrously disfiguring disease that would condemn us to a life of gangrene, disablement, likely blindness and complete social exclusion. A disease that would prevent any dentist from considering treating the agonising abscesses in our mouths, even if we were ever able to pay for his attention. A disease that would prevent even our healthy children from open access to any education in state schools.

We listened, unable to conceive of a disease that would leave us with no possibility of an income, in a society that provided no free social services, clean water, or effective sewage system. A society in which the “official”, orthodox philosophy justified its heartless indifference with the notion of
Karma
- that these people “deserved” their lot, that they had “earned” their suffering.

I found myself longing for the all-embracing
tantrikas
of the Eastern Himalaya. For smiling Lepchas, Nepali
bojudeutas
and mountain
jhankris
, who actively rejected all spiritual and social hierarchy. Who knew the intimate connection between all people, all life. Who taught that we each have a responsibility to maintain a balanced society in which all mankind, even the most vulnerable in our midst, may flourish according to their own natures.

I looked at the inhabitants of the slum colony one by one. Ruined eyes, buckled faces and ravaged limbs. Grossly thickened, rope-like nerves protruding beneath fragile skin. And I wondered at their simple dignity, their warmth and generosity of heart. Their humour and unfailing, fearless smiles.

For all the education, opportunity and security with which I had been able to indulge myself over an excessively comfortable four decades, I felt I knew nothing when sitting amongst these people. We always liked to think that we were the lucky ones, with our easy comforts and pleasures, pandering to our self-imposed isolation and decadent neuroses. But here, I truly wondered.

“So how can we best help you?” Ben asked, his voice muffled by restrained emotion.

An animated discussion ensued and a democratic decision was reached.

Bhim Vir, who had been elected as colony spokesman, first emphasised that they did not want money. Word would spread and bring far too great a price. Instead, they had just three requests:

Firstly, antiseptic, clean bandages, cotton wadding, “fever medicine” and pain relief. This we calculated we could supply from the local dispensary at the monthly cost of just 1,000 rupees - the equivalent of about £13 - for twenty people.

Secondly, they needed help to draw water. With only weeping wounds and protruding gristle with which to work, the residents found it impossible to use the cumbersome pump handle of the communal well during the dry season, when the water table plummeted.