Shadow Play (4 page)

The neighbours were proving useless; if anyone was going to achieve anything it would have to be me with my first-hand knowledge of her wiles. I chased her down one side, we circled once and once again, the others merely watching. By the time we finished our second round, I could tell that she was tiring. I was gaining upon her, and in a flash of quick thinking, I shut the door leading to the staircase. Now I would get her; now in one smooth motion I would bend while still running and grab her.

Except, once again she outwitted me: she leapt up and stood on the railing. And as I drew nearer, preparing to lunge, still with no sign of recognition or understanding of what she would do next, of what she would have to do next, I fancy I saw her eyes flash – her eyes, not the kitten's – and that was the last time I saw her.

Everything crashed in upon me in the few seconds it took the little ginger ball to shoot down seven storeys: who was actually falling down, what I had lost forever. I screamed her name in terror and my heart stopped for an entire lifetime before I realized she hadn't quite fallen. There was no smashed mess in the courtyard; somehow she was lying suspended just above it.

Someone else shouted ‘the spider', and then I noticed. A giant black creature was hanging right in the middle of the emptiness, and it had spun an invisible web to every corner of the second-floor veranda. It was large even from where I stood, twice as large as the kitten which was lying still a few feet away from it. I shouted her name again and begged her to wait, that I was coming, I was sorry, I had now understood everything. Just to wait until I ran down, just hold on and trust me, and we would see this through together. We would run away the moment I picked her up and never return to the area. She was right, I shouted, even now no one else had seen anything.

I don't know how much she heard of my reassurances, or how much she believed me, because I was speeding down the stairs as I screamed. Perhaps she would have held on if she'd heard everything; perhaps she thought it was all a ploy. But it wasn't: my whole life had been about to shatter before me, I had myself pushed it over the edge and now only a miracle had saved it. I was running down flooded by tenderness; I was running down in absolute terror; I was running down full of love. Just her eyes kept pulsing before me, as she had stood on the railing. That, and the picture of her in the corner, so cowed she could only turn into a kitten. Now all I wanted was to hold that kitten – it seemed that even if I never saw her again, all I needed to be happy was in that kitten.

The web gave way around the time I reached the second floor; I saw her last paw letting go when I looked out of the little window. She didn't land on her feet as cats are supposed to do, perhaps because this time she was only a kitten. There was no blood on the courtyard floor when I reached her, and for a second I continued hoping. But my hands felt wet the moment I picked her up, and then they both turned red.

I still don't know whether the web collapsed from the strain of holding her, whether she fell through one of its holes, or whether she let go out of fear of my approaching. I don't know if she heard those last words, if she realized I had changed completely, that I was ready to see us through anything, that I only and unconditionally loved her. I don't know. What I can tell you is that the incident didn't even go to the police, because no one had seen anything besides a raving man chasing a kitten. Everyone shunned me afterwards; they thought I had lost it out of worry for my missing woman.

Yes, the police did pay me a visit, but there wasn't a single question about her uncle. That case was closed without any fuss, as a pure and provable accident. The only case that remains open is the one about my missing woman.

 

The biographical note at the back of every book phrases it thus: ‘After university, he remained in England…', and I have never contradicted that. The memoir follows the same arc. But they omit four months in India, during the rains of '74, when I returned to be closer to my mother. Although the job I'd found was far away from Calcutta, in the Garhwal hills, we could spend my holidays together, and she would always have a lovely spot to visit, and perhaps even consider moving to one day. That was how I persuaded myself on the eve of my flight home. I was going to deliver us both once and forever from the disturbances of our family.

My ‘career' at St M.'s College lasted a month, but it telescopes in worthwhile memory into the night of my arrival, followed right after by the day of my leaving, so that is how I'll tell the story. The school rose high up on a cliff that would have been impossible to climb, a deep chasm away from the village where the train deposited me. As I stood on the hanging bridge to regain my breath and gather myself for the steeper walk that lay ahead, the building with its lit windows, towers and turrets resembled one of those ominous backdrops from an early horror
movie. The sky above it was a wash of orange and purple-yellow, and there poured down a haze of sunset mist that swathed the school rapidly as I watched, until it felt even more unattainable and dimensionless than it already was.

I had put my suitcase down in the middle of the bridge, and was trying to estimate how much time the light would leave me to make it to the front gate in case there weren't street lamps all the way up. My arms were aching and I realized I'd have to hurry if I wasn't to be one of those infuriatingly unsuspecting heroes who is forever being caught out on the road by sudden nightfall, after which every hint – from the ominous cellos wailing in the background to the sinister cackling of the coachman in the deepening mist – is intended for the viewer to grasp that he is doomed. I was occupied in these thoughts, and that is why I failed to hear what the man said as he emerged behind me, opened my left fist, and entrusted it with the rope of his cow. All I could catch were his last words as he turned back towards the village – that I would find his brother right outside the school gate, waiting to take charge of the animal from me, and how it would save him the long trip down in the darkness.

Thank goodness the animal was pliant and knew exactly how to be led, because otherwise I would never have managed, even though I kept switching arms to give my freezing fingers some respite. In fact, she kept quite easily in a straight line and it was I who had to remember not to expend myself by zigzagging too broadly across the road. Darkness fell over the woods to both sides of me as I climbed, until I could not even discern the forest floor below the leaves, but belying my worst worries, there were street lights to help me make my way. I stopped and put my case down three times in the next hour, but just when I feared that
the final steep hill was going to prove beyond me, a man who'd been sitting on his haunches under a lamppost arrived running to take the cow. He also insisted on carrying my suitcase all the way to the school gate. I thanked him as he left, looking around in the meantime for a gatekeeper to show me inside. That was when I remembered the map I had folded away in my wallet, which had been sent as part of my appointment package. The letter had estimated that I would probably not find anyone on the grounds if I arrived on the afternoon train on the last day of the holidays. That was why they were enclosing a detailed map to guide me to my room through the corridors and stairways of the building.

The map was as precise as I could have asked for. I found my way to the right front door, then up the stairway exactly as it predicted, past the recommended number of floors, and when I made the correct turn and left the prescribed count of doors on either side, I faced one on the right that had to be mine. Describing the exhaustion this involved would be as tedious as the climb itself, but let me just point out that I was on the top floor of that huge fortress; the roof above me sloped down each way over the rooms. And let me remind you how high above and far away the building had seemed from my place of rest at the centre of that bridge, just before the cow was handed to me.

Of course I turned the door knob and walked straight in – I'd taken for granted that I'd have a room to myself. And though the guy in his bed moved fast enough, what he'd been doing was clear. Besides, his magazine had fallen to the floor. He had whipped the covers over himself as soon as he heard the door opening, but hadn't managed to take his source of stimulation underneath in the same sweeping move. I tried to act as if I
hadn't noticed but the images on the page made clear that it was gay pornography, and obviously foreign.

My first thought was that here was a student who used the room because it was empty, but as I looked around in the dark (he'd been operating under a bedside lamp), I realized these were digs for more than one person, and that more than one person already lived here. In fact, there were three beds with corresponding sets of furniture and things strewn over all of them. So in the last analysis I hadn't used the map as well as I'd imagined. Had I gone wrong in my count of floors, or was it just the door number I misread? It must have been the floor because the number was correct. In which case this was a student performing his business perfectly legitimately under the sanctity of his own sheets, which made it an embarrassment I would find hard to live down.

A bit old to be a student, though, probably in his final year, I was thinking as I turned to head back out, when he called out my name; we were now in darkness as he'd switched off his bedside lamp. ‘I didn't realize you were arriving today. The last train left ages ago, and when you didn't show up for hours afterwards, we assumed you would be here first thing in the morning. What took you so long? I know the train was on time – the students and some other fellows who were on it came in and ate more than two hours ago.'

I explained how I had walked from the station when I heard the village was only a few hundred yards away, and that I hadn't known until I reached the market that the school was in fact high above the village. Then there was nothing to do but continue, stranded like that between the station and the school. I omitted to mention the further delay caused by the cow. As I
spoke I could make out Rakesh was dressing himself while still in bed, and suddenly he sat up, threw off the covers, switched on his lamp once more, and came over and introduced himself. I had missed dinner, he said, and he was sorry about the state of the room. While I was replying that all I wanted was to fall asleep, he rapidly took off the clothes and towels lying on one of the beds and thus cleared out my corner for me. Sandeep was our other roommate, but he was away playing bridge, as he did every evening. After picking up and throwing things away item by item onto whichever of the beds they belonged, Rakesh showed me the room screens, which were folding wooden partitions that the roommates could use for privacy. He shook my hand outside the bathroom two doors away on the corridor and said we would talk tomorrow, because I didn't look like I was registering much tonight. The last thing I remember is returning to a darkened room from the freezing bathroom where I brushed my teeth in the moonlight, and noticing Rakesh was already behind his screen, and the lamp glow was back on again.

Most unusually for me, I dreamt of settings and events referring to that very day. I was on one side of the chasm on a ledge making my way upwards, with the hanging bridge high above and the school not even visible beyond the crest of the opposite cliff, when suddenly it started raining horses behind me. Horse after horse fell off the bridge as I turned to find out where they were dropping from. In the night they made no noise but just plummeted white into the darkness beneath. But they never landed and I couldn't see who or what was pushing them over. Had they been racing across the countryside until they crashed down this opening in the earth? All I could make out as I leaned over were their white shapes plunging, and more
plunging in front of me, legs firmly in line, as if they were stiff and dead. Perhaps that is what they were, dead, which would explain the lack of screaming, and the chasm was a natural graveyard, an ancient resting ground. But there must have been some epidemic to finish off so many at the same time. I was going to continue climbing when suddenly I understood it was pointless. A huge grinding sound of wheels erupted, the bridge folded up high above me, lifted and stood straight up, and then someone switched off its lights. It must have been the shock and the sudden darkness, but I realized with my next move that I had missed my step and that I too was falling, falling, shouting, screaming but not landing. No horses fell beside me now, and that is when I woke up, into a room I had forgotten and where I couldn't see a thing.

My final evening. There isn't really much to tell except perhaps that I had a premonition, and that's why I carried my resignation letter ready in my pocket. I wouldn't stand for anything untoward today: one word out of line and I would express my disdain and leave. As in the last two weekly staff meetings, I was overlooked each time I raised my hand to respond to anyone else's point. This happened as a matter of course with other junior teachers as well, and I had learnt by then not to take such misbehaviour personally. It was the way they treated my specific suggestion that eventually forced my hand.