The Game (20 page)

A good start.

Still seated on the ground, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cap, a simple Moslem cap such as Holmes wore. I peered inside and took from it an egg, which I held up to look at, and to allow the village to look at, before placing it on the ground in front of my tucked-in legs. I looked back into the cap, and drew out a flower, then a mouse (which ran, fortunately, away from my cloth-covered legs) and a small sparkling ring and a clay cup full of tea, which I drank thirstily and set down. I gazed again into the cap (which measured, of course, no more than the circumference of a head and four or five inches tall), then reached into it. This time my hand went in, and kept going. In a moment my forearm was buried in the shallow headgear while I frowned, deep in thought, over the heads of the villagers (all of whom had by now emerged from behind their walls, even the women). I felt farther into the cap, up to my elbow and beyond, scowling ferociously now. A boy of about seven started to giggle, and it spread through the audience. My upper body contorted with effort, my arm almost entirely consumed by the inadequate scrap of cloth—and then triumph! I jerked as my hand (which had travelled unseen up my other sleeve as far as my rib cage, through a well-concealed slit in the cap) seized some elusive object hidden impossibly deep inside, and began to draw it out. Arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, then—slowly, slowly—two fingers, delicately pinched around a scrap of bright orange, clear in the flashing torchlight. I tugged gently; the scrap grew, and I pulled and it grew some more, inches and feet of silk until I was hauling yards of the brilliant stuff out onto my lap. I swam in it—a sari length is a lot of silk—and beat it away from my face, drowning in orange, until with a sharp jerk the last of the fabric snapped into the air. I worked to gather it, armloads of orange with a sparkle of silver along the border, climbing awkwardly to my feet with the unwieldy burden bursting from my grasp in all directions. And then I bent to look at the ground, and freed one hand to pat at my clothing, and looked in increasing desperation at the ground all around, but the cap was gone.

Putting on my face a look of Harold Lloyd sadness, and crumpling the stubbornly escaping ends of silk back into the wadded armload, I carried it over to the audience and handed it to the first person who did not draw back from me, a boy of about seventeen. He took it, half reluctant, half pleased, and I heard a gasp from the darkness behind him where his family stood—probably a young wife, who I hoped would know what to do with all those yards of orange sari fabric. Saris were a costume of the south and of the cities, but it was hard to create humorous drama by pulling the legs and sleeves of a
salwaar kameez
out of a cap.

With the villagers warmed up, I retired to the sidelines while Holmes came forward to claim the light. His portion of the act was more dramatic, closer to the heart of the magic arts, and demanded a fine understanding of the sensibilities of the audience. If he went too far, drew too heavily on the
mysterium
of awe, the rustic folk would retreat, might even turn on us, fearing that we brought true darkness into their midst. Holmes had to read them at every instant, keeping them on the edge of discomfort and mystification without allowing them to slide into open fear, convincing them of his power, but only over the inessentials, transforming a mouse into a sparrow; setting fire to an inert glass of
lhassi
; and separating and re-joining two sets of clashing rings, one of silver bangles, the other big and brass; and setting into motion the dancing figures in a cloud of perfumed smoke, projected from the phantasmagoric lantern he had brought from home. As a climax, he drew me from the shadows, passed his hand over my face to put me into a trance, and then levitated my senseless form some feet above the earth.

Very basic stuff, dependent on quick hands, firm distraction, and simple equipment sold in magic shops the world around (or, in our case, made to specification by Delhi metalworkers). We garnered a handful of coins and a lot of wary glances, and moved on in the dawn when the buffalos were back ruminating in the lanes and the grindstones had begun to sing, with the snow-topped Himalayas little more than faint pink ghosts riding high above the horizon. The menfolk interrupted their morning ablutions to watch us leave, while the women pulled their curious babes back inside the gates of their humble compounds, just in case.

During the days of our partnership (or, as he no doubt viewed it, of his management of this road show) Bindra had grown ever more cocky. He was, after all, a city boy among farmers—he kept himself aloof from the village children, occasionally deigning to answer them while he worked on the cart by the light of the lamp, and it occasionally seemed to me that his moon face was older than those of the others his size. He did not understand how our tricks were done, but by this time he was convinced that they were tricks, and that was enough to make him superior to the gullible. On this, our sixth morning on the road, he got the donkey started, then hesitated, and turned to me.

“Teach me to draw a coin from an ear,” he commanded.

“You have not the purity of spirit,” I said blithely.

He was not impressed. “I do not believe it is the spirit that does the act. It is a trick of the hands, and I wish to learn it.”

“I cannot teach it,” I told him, and that was the end of it for the moment. I did not imagine the boy would let it drop, however; nor did I imagine the way in which he would force me into teaching him.

With the morning sun behind us and Bindra and the cart far enough ahead to give the dust time to settle, he discovered a new game. My first inkling of it was when the road ahead of me exploded into a flare of light, painful and completely blinding.

“Damn!” I cried, and raised my hand to block it—only it had stopped. I blinked furiously, and when I could see the road again, it was as before, with the boy and the glittering cart. At first I thought one of the looking-glass stars had caught the light, although they seemed too small for that. Then I noticed the boy’s hands, holding the folding ladies’ looking-glass up before his face.

“Bindra!” I shouted. “
Khabadar! Shaitan ka batcha!
”

He turned around to walk backwards, shrugging his shoulders at me, all innocence.

A few minutes later it happened again. Deliberate, the little brat, I knew. The kid needed something to keep his hands busy—oh.

“He really is something,” I muttered to Holmes, and trotted ahead to dig the cloth practise balls from the cart.

I took out the red one, showed the boy how to toss it, then told him to practise the motion until he could do it for fifty paces down the road with his eyes shut.

“Er, do you know how to count to fifty?” I asked him. He glared at me and snatched the ball.

That took care of him for the rest of the morning: no more blinding flashes. The red shape would appear rhythmically over his head for a while as he walked alongside the placid donkey, then he would drop it, run after it, and start again. He improved rapidly, and kept the ball going for longer and longer. I could tell when he began to experiment with closing his eyes, because he tended to veer slowly away from the donkey’s side, the ball slapping between his hands as he headed for the fields to the side, or came closer and closer to the animal’s sharp little hooves as the beast followed a turn in the road and her barefoot master did not.

Most entertaining—although I was glad we were no longer on the crowded Grand Trunk Road. The boy would surely be crushed in the first mile.

In the meantime, Holmes and I conversed, almost exclusively in Hindustani now. My brain had grown calluses with the heavy use, and I no longer found the exercise exhausting.

“How old do you think Bindra is?” I said to Holmes in the vernacular tongue.

“He is of the hill people, and they are small. I think him older than he appears.”

“I thought he might be—he was watching one of the girls in that last village, and she had to be at least thirteen. Are hill people round of face, like him? From his features, I thought at first he was mentally retarded.”

“Oh, that he is not.”

“He really should be in school, then.”

“You may find he has been, at some time in his past. I saw him reading a notice on a wall the other day.”

“Then what on earth was he doing shovelling muck for a horse-dealer?”

But Holmes could not answer that, any more than I.

Chapter Twelve

O
ver the week of our sojourn, the radiant and majestic line of
snow-covered peaks had grown from a line of white teeth to a wall of jagged peaks stretching so wide there was nothing else in their half of the world, towering so high they ate the sky itself. Step by step we had been drawn into their icy embrace, until finally on Wednesday we reached the town of Kalka, huddled at their very feet.

We found rooms for the night, and arranged to leave the donkey and our heavier belongings with the innkeeper while we took the train to Simla. The man swore that no one would so much as lay a finger on anything, and guaranteed it by taking only a small payment, leaving the larger part until we returned. Holmes then went off to make arrangements with an ironmonger and carpenter for some conversions to the cart itself, which negotiations took the better part of the afternoon. We had intended to leave Bindra with our possessions, but the boy, unimpressed by the town, would have none of it, and in the end, it was easier to allow him to come than to keep arguing. At least he did not insist on a space in our room that night, making do with a
charpoy
in the stables. I saw him at dusk, sitting cross-legged, tossing the red and green balls up and down.

The boy was waiting for us when we came down in the morning, no doubt fearful we would sneak out and leave him behind. Still, I could not quite understand why a trip into the mountains with us was preferable to a warm, quiet holiday in the stables. So when we were standing on the platform waiting for the train that would climb with us to Simla, I asked him.

“Why do you keep following us?”

“Because you are so very interesting,” he retorted. “And I learn many things—see?” That morning he had demanded that I give him the yellow ball, and he now stood, tossing the three spheres up and catching them in a smooth rhythm, talking nonchalantly all the while. Soon he would be better than I.

“You’re going to wear them out,” I said.

“When do I throw the mirror-balls? And when do I throw with you?”

“The mirror-balls when you can keep these in the air for two hundred paces without dropping them. And as a partner when you can keep five up.” It would be far more expertise than he’d need to hold up his end of a two-person team, but it condemned the urchin to solitary labours for a few more days while I accustomed myself to the idea of a three-person partnership. “Bindra, can you read and write?”

“Oah yes. I write my name,” he asserted, but he began to concentrate closely on the trio of coloured balls he was tossing and catching with smooth competence.

“Why are you not in school?”

“I told you, I learn things from you.”

“You should be in school.”

He did not bother to answer. I tried another tack. “How old are you, Bindra?”

“Maybe twenty?” But before I could react, he changed it to “Or eleven? I think more than eight, I can remember eight.”

“Where are you from? Where is your family?”

“I have no family.”

“You’re an orphan?”

“I have an auntie in Calcutta. I was with her, oh, two or three years I think, before she sold me to the horse-dealer.”

“
Sold
you?”

“Oah yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I was happy to go. His hand was lighter than hers.”

“There’s no slavery in India.”

The brief look he shot me was eloquent. It occurred to me that I’d just given myself away definitively: He’d long overlooked my chronic oddities of speech and habit, but only a foreigner could assert that slavery did not exist in a place where clearly it did. I tried to regain my standing.

“Truly, Bindra, under the white man’s law, slavery is not allowed. Your aunt could not sell you, although she told you she could.”

“Oah, I know that. But I am a child. If I stand up and say, ‘I am not to be sold,’ what then? I am turned out to live on the street and go hungry. I did not mind. And ho! It has meant that I found you and the magician. I eat good food and breathe clean air. And now I am going to ride a train.”

Every boy’s dream, in this country as in others: to run away and join the circus. “Yes, well. We must talk more about a school for you. Because one day you will be a man, and need the skills you can only learn in school. Unless you wish to be a farmer in a village,” I added, knowing his disdain for the man with the hoe.

“I shall be a magician,” he said, adding slyly, “when you have taught me to pick the coin out of the air.”

I laughed and reached out to clap him on the back, and stopped with my hand an inch from his shoulder. To most Hindus, I as a Moslem was horribly unclean, and making contact with them would be deeply offensive, requiring lengthy purification. “What is your caste, Bindra?”