The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (62 page)

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Authors: Paul Scott

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‘How are you, Barbie?’ the girl with the fair helmet of hair said.

The calendar said, June 30th, 1945. She wrote: I am in good health.

‘Is there anything you want?’

She wrote: Birds.

‘Birds?’

She wrote at length:

From the window, beyond the minaret, there are birds. Smudges in the sky. Not necessarily now. But there are birds there often. You can hardly see them but they circle, as though there is a nest there. There is a hill. Trees, I think.

She watched the girl reading the note. She put out her hand to touch her. The girl looked momentarily startled. Miss Batchelor withdrew her hand not wishing to frighten her. But the girl then reached out and held her.

‘It’s all right, Barbie. Let’s look at the birds.’

They went together to the barred window.

Miss Batchelor tried to articulate. Her throat rattled.

‘It’s all right, Barbie,’ the girl with the fair helmet of hair said. ‘I understand. Where now, beyond the minaret?’

Together they watched. Distantly where the land folded there was a haze. Above it, birds.

‘Yes, I see. I don’t know why they’re there. I’ll find out. They must be quite big birds, mustn’t they?’

Miss Batchelor nodded. She was proud of her birds.

She wrote to the girl: Do you live in Ranpur?

The girl said, ‘No, in Pankot, at Rose Cottage. I’m only in Ranpur for two days. I’m going to Bombay to meet my father.’

Miss Batchelor held the girl’s hand. She felt that she had to say something important but could not remember what.

The girl came the following morning. She said, ‘The birds belong to the towers of silence. For the Ranpur Parsees.’

Then she wrote it down on Miss Batchelor’s pad as if she thought Miss Batchelor might forget it.

Miss Batchelor wrote: Yes, I see, Vultures. Thank you.

She looked round the room. She shook her head. She wrote: I have nothing to give you in exchange. Not even a rose.

For some reason the girl put her arms round Miss Batchelor and cried.

‘Oh, Barbie,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember anything?’

She nodded. She remembered a great deal. But was unable to say what it was. The birds had picked the words clean.

Often now she was left alone. Sister Mary Thomas More had used the word incorrigible. She sat at the window watching through narrowed hungry eyes the birds that fed on the dead bodies of the Parsees. At night she blew dandelion clocks and continued to blow them long after they had become bereft, deprived. To blow them to the bone was the one sure way she now had of sleeping, sure in the Lord and the resurrection and the spade.

A young Madrassi nun, observing her thus, and thinking old Miss Batchelor’s hour had come, ran out into the darkling intermittently lit medieval corridor and brought the stark night-sister, who, standing in the traditional pose, with shriven fingers on patient’s pulse, and uncommitted eyes, merely firmed her lips in imitation of the daylight brides, and then made a high mark on the bed-bottom board that charted the old missionary’s journey across the hilly country of exodus.

Asleep, Barbie no longer dreamed. Her dreams were all in daylight. Do not pity her. She had had a good life. It had its comic elements. Its scattered relics had not been and now can never all be retrieved; but some of them were blessed by the good intentions that created them.

One day after such a dreamless sleep, she woke, rose, knelt, prayed, splashed water on her parchment face from the rose-patterned bowl that sat like one half of a gigantic egg in an ostrich-size hole in a crazy marble top, dressed, had breakfast and marked off the calendar of the fair-haired girl’s absence.

It was August 6th, 1945.

The date meant nothing to her. No date did. The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.

She took her seat at the barred window. Today it was raining. She could not see the birds. But imagined their feathers sheened by emerald and indigo lights. She turned away and rose from the stool. And felt the final nausea enter the room.

She stood, swaying slightly, in the ragged heliotrope costume which was stained by egg and accidents with soup, and then holding her naked throat, padded slippered to the secure refuge of her bed and sat, leaning her shoulder casually against the iron head.

She strained at the rusted mechanism of her voice and heard its failing vibrations in her caved-in chest.

‘I am not ill, Thou art not ill. He, She or It is not ill. We are not ill, You are not ill, They are all well. Therefore . . . ’

She raised a questioning or admonitory finger, commanding just a short moment of silence for the tiny anticipated sound: the echo of her own life.

They found her thus, eternally alert, in sudden sunshine, her shadow burnt into the wall behind her as if by some distant but terrible fire.

Appendix

‘I find myself uncertain which of two recent events – the election of a socialist government in London and the destruction of Hiroshima by a single atomic bomb
–
will have the profounder effect on India’s future.’

Extract from a letter dated in August 1945 from Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim to Mr Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

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Epub ISBN: 9781409006954

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Published by Arrow Books in 2005

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The right of Paul Scott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This work is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in the United Kingdom in 1971 by William Heinemann

Reprinted twice by Mandarin

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A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099436164