The Ivory Swing (21 page)

35

Prabhakaran had been sitting in silence beside Yashoda for several hours. She had passively refused to be moved. She had brushed away with nervous and abstracted gestures the entreaties and suggestions of Juliet. When Professor David came, she had covered her head and face with her sari. She did not speak. She seemed suspended, floating, in a state of almost catatonic indifference.

The boy had hesitantly touched her, stroked her hand. She had made no sign so he had left his hand there in compassionate contact, not moving. Hours had passed.

The rain had begun again, sealing them in their solitude, in their cave behind the waterfall that hurled itself from the eaves.

Yashoda shivered a little from the dampness and Prabhakaran went inside her house to look for a shawl. He draped it around her shoulders and sat down again beside her, taking his flute and putting it to his lips.

He played of ancient sadnesses, of burning and impossible loves. He played of a child's longing for a mother, of the adoration of a boy beginning to be a man. He sounded the notes of beauty and pain, the long haunting cadences of memory.

At last he saw her tears and felt the faint stirring of movement in her. He touched her hand again and she opened her arms to him. They wept together, his head on her mothering shoulder, his hand caressing the smooth bare kernel of her head with infinite filial tenderness.

It was then that his formless and inarticulate grief began to harden around a seed of purpose. He left her to go to the house of his master.

Shivaraman Nair's anger filled the house as heavily as the clouds of cloying incense that drifted about the brass
puja
lamp.

His wife and daughter hovered nervously out of sight in the kitchen. Anand had gone to stay with a friend at the university.

First his son. And then Professor David in intolerable questioning of his moral authority. And now a servant, a
peon
, a mere slip of boy whom he had saved from village starvation, a
sweeper
whom he had fed and clothed! This nothing, this pariah, this scum on the surface of earth had dared to look him in the eyes, to accuse him of unjust and private revenge!

Truly the world was in chaos. All proper boundaries were in dissolution. He was almost choking on his rage.

And his kinswoman! He dared not even think of her. When her face came unbidden to his memory, he was alarmed by the violent trembling of his body. Now that punishment had taken place he did not want to see that face. He would have her sent quickly to her father. He would never see her again.

Ritual purgation was indeed called for, to cleanse the family, to preserve society. His correct action within the family would be followed by his participation in tomorrow's
arat
festival, the ritual cleansing of the kingdom itself, the bathing of the temple deities by the Maharajah.

He was leaving the house to meet with the city and temple officials, to join in preparations for the civic and religious rituals of the next day, when the delegation of Harijan labourers forestalled him.

“Hah!” he said with bitter and explosive scorn when he had heard their story. Now he was to be shamed by Untouchables, by the pickers of his own rice! “Hah! Your story does not surprise me! Anything can be expected of that woman! You are quite correct. She is a female devil, a
yakshi.
She has been punished, she will be further punished.”

And in raging contempt he flung a handful of silver rupees on the ground in front of them.

As he walked away from their wild scrabbling he spat on the swept sand of his courtyard.

He would, after all, have her sent to Palghat. There could be no compromise.

36

“I know you both blame me,” Annie said, pacing back and forth.

David sighed. “No, we don't. In any case this barbarity had nothing to do with —”

“All the same they wouldn't have been so prone to be outraged if I hadn't … I wish you did blame me. I might be able to feel a bit indignant instead of sick with guilt.” She had bought a packet of Indian cigarettes and was chain-smoking. “What I can't bear is her abject submissiveness. She
consented
to it! How could she do that, how could she?”

“There's nothing we can do until her father comes. I'm sure he will when he gets my cable. And in the meantime no one's going to harm her. Shivaraman Nair promised.”

David waited outside the house in the forest until Prabhakaran reappeared.

“Professor David, she does not want to see you.”

David went to the closed door and called through it.

“Yashoda!”

There was no answer. He turned the handle, rattling it purposely, and pushed the door slightly open. There was a startled cry, a rushing movement, and the weight of her body slamming it shut again.

“Yashoda,” he said gently, his forehead pressed against the weathered wood. “I have cabled your father. I want to talk to you.”

Silence.

He applied gentle but steady pressure to the door.

“No, no, no!” she sobbed through the opening. “I beg you, Professor David, I beg you. I would rather die than have you see me like this.”

He stopped pushing but the door remained ajar, the fingers of her right hand clenched around its edge. He traced the outline of her fingers gently and her grip relaxed a little.

“Your father will come to take you home, Yashoda.”

“No! I will not go! Can I let my father see me like this? Even for him it will be disgrace. I will go to Palghat.”

“You will not be sent to Palghat. Shivaraman Nair has promised.”

“Yes, I will be sent. I will ask to go. I do not want anyone to see me ever again.”

His fingers followed the curve of her hand and wrist, caressing, like a father with a wounded child. He reached in behind the door. She did not move.

“Yashoda,” he whispered. “You have the most beautiful face in India. Nothing can change that. Nothing. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

He stroked her arm, his shoulder curving through the door opening. She did not move.

“May I come in?”

“Oh Professor David,” she faltered. She came to life now, taking his hand in both of hers, holding it against her cheek, out of sight behind the door. “You are very kind, Professor David, and I am loving you. But you do not understand. I am so tired, so tired. There is too much danger living between your world and the old world. I do not want to try any more. Please go away.”

“This is called shock, Yashoda. It's natural to feel this way now. But it will go away. You will be happy again, I promise you. Even though you think it's impossible right now. I don't want to bother you. I'll go away now. But you must send Prabhakaran if you need me.”

He pulled her hand gently through the doorway and kissed it.

“I want to talk to her father,” David told Juliet. “Its impossible to say enough in a cable. I'm going to try to telephone him from the Trivandrum post office.”

They all walked to Shasta Junction, the children trailing wearily behind. But the taxis had gone to the
arat
festival and they hitched a ride on a buffalo cart, jolting along dustily and uncomfortably. It would have been faster, but more tiring, to walk.

When they reached the post office, it was closed for
arat.

“We might as well stay and watch the procession,” David said gloomily. “It will take us hours to get back anyway.”

The crowds began to surge forward onto the street where the sweepers and water bearers were still running along sprinkling sand and water. The burning strip of potholed blacktop had to be cooled for the feet of His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore. It had not rained for three hours and already the ground was searing to the touch. Thousands of umbrellas were hooked over arms, hanging black and folded like bats in temple niches, waiting for the rain.

Police with
lathis
ran to and fro, beating people back from the roadway with indiscriminate blows as the elephants, fabulously decorated, lumbered gracefully by at the head of the cavalcade. In the midst of the festive chaos, a tiny wrinkled white-haired old man walked alone. Barefoot and bare-chested, he carried a naked sword vertically in his hands.

He looked like a fantasy creature from Middle Earth.

He was the Maharajah of Travancore.

And then the gods themselves were among them, tolerant gods demanding ritual but not dignity, wobbling along on their flower-strewn palanquins, swaying precariously on the uneven shoulders of the bearers.

And all around, pervasive and close as the humid air, the noise. The sound of India. Brass bands and pipes and Vedic chanting and cheering and laughing and shrieking and car horns and
lathi
blows and screams. The tumult of the people of Vishnu, who began now to defy all attempts to separate spectators from participants, who surged in the wake of the palanquins to follow them to the sea.

And on the way the rains began and the umbrellas went up like a disturbance of bats. It poured. Sluicing down like a cataract, battering umbrellas and shoulders, coursing around the feet. Relentless, sullen.

On the beach everything was in milling disarray. Elephants and people swirled in a rain dance, crowds huddled under the snake boat awnings. The deities were lined up at the edge of the ocean where the Brahmin priests surrounded them in a dedicated choral block, chanting the Vedas in sonorous counterpoint to the drumming rain.

They could barely see the Maharajah, who must surely have been shivering with age and wet and cold. It was his personal religious responsibility to bathe the deities one by one in the sea. Their ablution, signalled by a Vedic crescendo and the trumpeting of an elephant, seemed unduly perfunctory. A frail little figure, his wet
dhoti
clinging to gnarled and skinny legs, ran up the sands to where an official car waited. A sword trailed from one of his hands leaving an erratic line in the sand.

37

Smoke wisped upwards from the mosquito coils. The fans were turning and all the soggy clothes were spread out below them. With its lights on the house glowed like a beacon through the dripping and rainy grove. But they kept the oil lamps burning because the power ebbed and flowed so fitfully. The lights would flicker and dim, the whirring fan blades would stutter and rattle and stagger to a stop.

David and Juliet would remain sitting quietly in the semidarkness travelling private paths. Without Annie's restless pacing the house seemed strangely hushed. She had seen Prem at the
arat
procession and had gone off with him.

When the fans stopped they could hear the breathing of the children asleep in the bedroom. Then the fans would stir sluggishly again and the light bulbs would wink and tease and flutter. They would wait for the surge of energy, the blaze of light, the breeze from above. They would see the lizards skittering across the ceiling and walls, heading for shadowy corners.

Juliet watched David staring into his memories and remorse.

“Should we leave her alone tonight?” she asked.

“Prabhakaran is with her. And Shivaraman Nair gave his word. Nothing more is going to happen.”

It rained as though it would never stop.

The rains sloshed from the thatched eaves of the toddy shop near Shasta Junction. Around the oil lamps inside the men caroused and sang. It was a festival day and they were better fed than usual.
Prasadam
had been freely distributed to the poor at the temple. Besides, they had done well to inform Shivaraman Nair of the strange happenings on his estate. They had silver rupees to show for it. They had been assured that cosmic order would be restored. More toddy flowed. There was a general feeling of well-being and heightened revelry

Perhaps, the thought drunkenly grew, they themselves should attend to the vanquishing of the
yakshi.
Salvation would accrue to them. Also, with reference to this particular and present incarnation, Shivaraman Nair might be moved to greater largesse. Courage burned hot and heady in their veins.

Into the night and the rain they stumbled, a band of high purpose and noble intent.

Prabhakaran sat in the doorway of Yashoda's house looking out through the twisting ropes of water that sluiced off the roof. He played his flute softly to himself. Inside Yashoda slept, a deep and exhausted sleep. The night star was beginning its long slow slide towards morning. Prabhakaran played to keep himself awake, on guard.

Muffled noises reached him through the rain and his own music. He paused to listen. Voices, shouts, noisy singing. He was instantly alert, running through the forest to the edge of the paddy.

A knot of men, stumbling and staggering, were crossing the terraces. They are drunk, he thought. They have lost their way. There will be trouble for them. At the houses they will not have been heard because of the rain and the lateness of the hour. Everyone is sleeping. But in the morning Shivaraman Nair will be very angry. The police with their
lathis
will be called. Bodies in drunken sleep will be found strewn about the levees. For everyone there will be more trouble.

The men weaved and wandered between the terraces, sometimes doubling back in confusion. It was difficult for them in their condition to negotiate the levees. Several fell into the water, thrashing and calling, spitting and coughing the paddy mud. Their comrades shouted encouragement but slipped and slid on towards the forest.

Prabhakaran began to be fearful. Surely they were only lost and drunk, surely they were not …? But they were coming towards him. They had a goal.

All his senses and nerve ends flared like the hood of a cobra, and with snake-like speed he returned through the forest. His heart was deafening in his ears. Yashoda seemed drugged, heavy, bemused with sleep. He was still dragging her, crying, pleading, when the handful of men, like a rabble of monkeys, came babbling out of the trees.

They seized that
yakshi
and her consort, who was also thin and slight as a spirit. They twisted and pounded and smashed out all that evil, purging the world.

David and Juliet found them in the morning.

Yashoda lay crumpled at the door of her house like a broken and discarded doll.

Prabhakaran was floating among the lilies, blue with death.