In the Shadow of Crows Read online

  A movement in the shadows suddenly made me start. An ancient man was silently rising from amongst rolls of woollen weaves that lay scattered on the cutting-table. He looked towards me with slow, deliberate eyes and wished me welcome in impeccable English. He enquired as to what might have brought me to this far-flung, foreign spot. I told him of Ketunky, of my father’s love of Kasauli and my own childhood reveries. I told him of the surviving account book of my father’s mother, which listed her weekly visits to this very counter, and of a paper bag of thimbles, printed with his name, that still languished in her sewing box.

  “Manners?” he mumbled to himself, sifting through the dust of distant years. “The Captain Quartermaster’s good wife?”

  I was astounded.

  “Ah, yes,” he smiled. “An excellent customer, sir. Paid her bills and benefited every chilly toe in the district by teaching our women to knit socks with four fine needles. To this day, we still remember her very well and warmly.”

  ***

  “You have Hansen’s Disease,” the doctor announced. “Leprosy. The tuberculoid strain, to be precise.” His voice was flat, devoid of expression. “It’s bad luck for you, as the majority of us have a natural immunity to the germ. Do you understand? You people call it Mahaa Rog, don’t you?” he yawned. “The Great Disease.”

  “Kali Ma,” Bindra whispered, her mouth dry, her eyes sore from many hours of painful tears.

  The nun had brought them to the ashram in a three-wheeled vikram. Bindra and her boys had never been in such a vehicle before. They had sometimes seen the little blue vans pass by in the town, hailed by pedestrians and crammed with as many as twelve passengers at a time. The nun had had to pay extra to the driver. No other passengers would join them. Bindra had cried the name of Jayashri all the way.

  “You’ve had it for years, by the looks of you,” the doctor droned, as he scribbled on a pad of paper.

  “Not so long . . .” she muttered.

  “Oh yes, many years,” he insisted. “You know, you can carry the bacteria for two decades before the first signs show. You probably caught it from a member of your family. It’s spread by droplets from the nose and mouth, or contact with open sores, and then can be activated by puberty or pregnancy. So who else do you know with leprosy?”

  She heard his words, his strongly accented Nepali, but she did not understand.

  “Your mother? Father? Are they lepers?” he asked with sudden impatience.

  Bindra shook her head. Her mother had died beneath the feet of a wild bull-elephant. It had stamped out her life and that of Bindra’s sister when they had been walking home one evening after working in the paddy. Bindra had only survived because the frenzied beast had knocked her into a ditch. She could still smell the dana in her nostrils, that sweet pungency that exudes from elephants when they are in rut and insane with lust. In the confusion of his grief, Bindra’s father had abandoned her. Bindra had only been six years old. She had heard that her father had remarried, but no one could say where he had settled with his new family.

  “Of course, it could be from your husband,” the doctor muttered.

  Bindra did not respond. It was evident that he did not really want to know.

  “The disease settles in your lungs and nose,” he continued, “then seeks out your cooler, peripheral nerves, you see. Makes them swell. Cuts off the blood supply. Kills them, if it’s left too long.” He glanced towards her feet. “You’ve been left too long,” he stated blankly.

  “Kali Ma,” Bindra repeated under her breath.

  “It often affects the skin first. Raised patches, with no feeling, no sweating?”

  She nodded her head from side to side in tired affirmation.

  “Loss of blood supply!” he announced. “Gradual loss of feeling in your fingers and toes? Weakness in the limbs? A rolling gait due to numbness in the outer soles? All indicates death of nerve endings.”

  She had no idea what the man was saying.

  “And then you injure yourself. Starts with a small cut, a blister, a burn. But you don’t feel it. You leave it unprotected. You don’t keep it clean,” he emphasised, as though in accusation. “It gets infected. Ulcers, gangrene, cartilage reabsorbs, fingers shorten, toes claw. Rot sets in.” He waved vaguely in her direction with his pen. “Then we have a nasty mess.”

  He had still not looked up from his pad.

  “Often affects the mucus membranes too, of course,” he persisted with particular pleasure. “Starts with a snuffly cold, sinus pain. Then the face begins to collapse. Upper palate goes, nose caves in. Then we have to operate to open the airways, if there’s time, to prevent suffocation. Most unpleasant for all concerned.”

  He was scribbling again.

  “How’re your eyes?” he glanced towards her, fleetingly. “The leprosy bacillus can attack the trigeminal nerve too. Lids don’t blink, ducts don’t produce tears. Leads to iritis, lesions. Horrible pain, apparently. Usually you go blind. And then there’s the nephritis, inflammation of the kidneys. Very nasty. And if your husband has it, we’ll have to check for testicular decay.”

  The doctor abruptly slapped his palms together, missing the intended mosquito, but knocking his pen and papers onto the floor. With irritation he repeatedly rang a shrill brass bell, which eventually summoned a lethargic orderly who restored them to his desk.

  Bindra sat very still. She was confused and frightened.

  The ashram unsettled her with its unpleasant, acidic smell and its collection of the brightest, whitest buildings she had ever seen. There were crosses and dead gods on every building, in wood and in paint. Even the doctor had one nailed to the whitewashed wall behind him, and another on his desk beneath a little plastic dome that had torn open its chest to expose a bleeding heart in which pulsated a little red light.

  The Ancestors, or rather Fathers as they had turned out to be, were quite ordinary men as far as Bindra could tell. They all wore foreign clothes, although only one was a foreigner himself, with his pale skin, big nose, hairy face and clumsy body. He had smiled, he had been kind, but they shared no language. He had pointed her towards a low roof on long, wooden legs, where she and the boys had been given daal-bhat with bananas and water. Jyothi and Jiwan had swallowed handfuls of the thin lentil soup and steaming rice. Bindra had struggled to eat. The very thought of her eldest daughter had overwhelmed her body and mind with debilitating nausea.

  The doctor returned to his aimless scribbling.

  “You know there are plenty like you? India and Nepal have seventy per cent of all leprosy in the world,” he grumbled. “You’re just one of some two thousand new cases diagnosed every day - and that’s just the official figure. Keeps the likes of me very busy!”

  He spoke with pointed censure in his voice.

  “Good news for you, however, is that, firstly, you don’t have the lepromatous strain, which is far more contagious - and would probably kill you,” he muttered as an aside. “Secondly, we can start you on M D T today - that’s Multi Drug Therapy, the medicine to stop the bacillus. So let’s hope we’ve caught it before the disease damages your face or kidneys.”

  Bindra had fixed on a word she had recognised. “You have paraiharuko dabai? You have the foreigners’ medicine for me? To make me well?”

  The doctor ignored her. “You’ll have to take them every day for between six months and a couple of years. Most likely you’ll be on some sort of medication for the rest of your life. My staff will have to keep an eye on you and check that you’re responding, without any strong ‘lepra reactions’, which can sometimes be as damaging and unpleasant as the disease itself.”

  “You have the medicine that makes me well?” she repeated. She wanted to be sure that she had understood.

  “The damage is done, of course,” he said to the spiral-bound pad in his hands. “The nerves will never grow back
and we’ll probably have to amputate some of those worst infected digits. But for now just go to the dispensary . . .”

  “Brother, I have no money,” she interrupted, “but I can still work hard.”

  “No need for money. No work. This is all paid for,” he announced. “See what we do for you people? In the old days, you’d just have been buried alive to redeem your sinful soul. You stay in the ward until there’s improvement.” “And my boys?”

  “Oh yes, I had a note that there were children,” his eyes gazed blankly. “It’s not hereditary - although the Americans would’ve once had you sterilised as a matter of course - but we’ll check for infection there too. The Fathers can then put them into the school. They’ll live in the boys’ dormitory. We can’t let them near you, in your state, now can we?”

  But Bindra did not reply. She was losing herself in the whiteness of the walls beyond him.

  ***

  With the roar of the bus as it pulled away for the slow journey back to Shimla, images of my father and his parents on these streets, in this church, these houses, schools and shops, crowded in. Kasauli had altered so little in half a century. And yet life had released my grandfather and uncle before their time, and had cruelly reduced my father’s mother to an arthritic cripple.

  As we wound our way down the steep, serpentine route, I looked for a hill path that cut up the khud-side. It marked the place where my grandparents’ loyal staff had stood to weep their final farewells to three sahibs, a memsahib and missy baba. The inevitability of Indian Independence had finally driven my father’s family to commence their long journey to Bombay, via Ambala and a pause in Pune, with a Cox & King’s truck of trunks marked “Wanted on Voyage” for the Hot Weather leg, and “Cabin” for the Cold. Little could they have imagined the safe, dank domesticity of a red-brick semi named Westward Ho!, nor the interminable blandness of Bognor to which they were sailing with such urgency.

  They had left Burket, Harish, Fakeru, Manu, Samir and Kondi Ram, their wives and children, wailing on the roadside for the loss of a family to whom they had been so long devoted, and with them the security of homes and salaries, and the stability of a united India. It had always haunted my father that he had abandoned those of his servants who were Muslim and their children with whom he had grown up, to walk towards the setting sun and cross the pen-stroke of a Boundary Commission cartographer. When settled beside Sussex shingle, he had never dared look at the images of burned-out trains and corpse-filled ditches that filled the papers and Picturedrome newsreels. He had always feared that he might recognise the charred face of a man who had once shined his shoes, the bloodied features of a woman who had palmed perfect chapati for his tiffin, or the terror-stricken eyes of a child with whom he had once shared his marbles and had considered a friend.

  A well-dressed youth shuffled up beside me on the bus bench and introduced himself as, “nearly fully eighteen years in age and called by my goodly parents Ravikiran. Sir, I am Sunshine!”

  He wanted me to buy his incense sticks, but I declined. I told him they made me sneeze.

  “Ah yes,” he nodded seriously, “I am seeing you are most gentle in your habits - both inly and outly.”

  Such was Ravikiran’s confidence in this assessment that he linked his arm in mine and, as though by open invitation, cuddled into my shoulder. “So now tell me, Mister David,” he grinned an eccentric arrangement of incisors, “tell me everything about the living of life in UK. Tell me how London is to see. And are you knowing Queen Elizabeth the Second?”

  We chatted and laughed all the way to Shimla, whereupon Ravikiran gave me his address, requesting that I send him postcards of “Mrs Lady Di and Mr Big Ben”.

  I walked in slow motion through the ramshackle Lower Bazaar. I had discovered it to be the only way to cope with the altitude. I stopped to eat a bowl of noodles and plain vegetables, smiling at the thought that such a deed in the “native quarter” would have been forbidden to my father. For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine sharing this with Priya.

  Fortified for the climb, I took a leisurely stroll up Jakhu Hill to give sweets to the schoolboys by the monkey temple. They were waiting for me. However, our pastille-sharing was brief, as an unseasonably cold wind rapidly began to animate the trees and pinch our noses. The boys postponed a competitive recitation of passages from Byron’s Childe Harold for another day, and scurried off home.

  I turned in early at the Municipal View. The night was especially dark. The moon and stars had been obliterated by dense clouds rolling across the mountains. It seemed I had been asleep mere minutes when I was woken by the furious screams of monkeys and the distant howling of wild dogs. I sat up in bed to switch on the light.

  Nothing.

  Shimla was without electricity. I was itching frightfully and in the pitch black could feel tender lumps on my arms and torso.

  Suddenly the monkeys and dogs fell silent. I held my breath.

  The room ignited in an almighty flash and the mountains roared with violent thunder, as though the local goddess, with fierce weapons held aloft, were charging down Jakhu on her giant tiger, to wipe us all away.

  I slipped from my bed to peer out of the window through the pounding rain. As lightning again split the skies asunder, I jumped backwards. My balcony was crowded with frightened langurs, huddled together, furrowing their bushy brows and cursing coarsely.

  ***

  “Ama!”

  Bindra woke and turned her head. Jiwan was standing by her bedside.

  She sat up.

  “What are you doing?” she smiled in whispered reply, drawing him close. “They say you’re not allowed in here.” She pressed her nose to his hair and breathed him in.

  “We don’t want to stay in this place any more,” he announced. “We don’t like it!”

  “But where’s your dajoo?” she asked. “Where’s Jyothi?”

  “Outside, watching for the Fathers,” he replied, indicating over his shoulder.

  Bindra snuggled her nose against his cheek.

  “But we can’t leave yet,” she sighed in apology. “The doctor says I must stay many more weeks, until my hands and feet are healed.”

  “But you are better, Ama!” the little boy protested. “You told me!”

  Bindra held him close again. “Yes, the tablets make the sickness stop. But I must take the foreigners’ medicine for a long time yet, the doctor said, to make sure it won’t come back . . .”

  “We cannot stay here any more, Ama!” Jiwan exploded.

  She was surprised by the force of his insistence.

  “We must return to the Hills in our dreams for just a little longer, my good, strong boy,” she smiled, trying to diminish his disquiet. “You know, I too long to be back in our forests, collecting iskus and tarul together, with our snowy mountains in the sky above. I too miss the smell of gundruk drying in the sun, and kinema fermenting in its wrap of leaves. Remember the taste of sour sinki soup? And good, solid churpi as it melts inside your cheek? And how about the sweet song of kalchura on the roof at dawn, or the jhankris’ drums at night . . .?”

  “We cannot go back!” Jiwan announced with uncharacteristic intensity, unappeased by her reveries. “Ama, we can never go back to the Hills!”

  “What do you mean?” she chuckled, unsettled by his unfamiliar passion. “You’ve not forgotten your sister, your little Jamini-bhaini, have you? She’s still with the Christians at Ninth Mile. And we have yet to find your Jayashri-didi, to bring her safely home . . .”

  “They will burn you again, Ama!” His eyes seemed to shine from the darkness of his silhouette. “I have seen it!”

  Bindra faltered at the memory of the spiralling light. The flash of fire. The reek of flaming skin and hair.

  “But, my son,” she pressed, “we have nowhere else to go.” With effort, she lifted her legs f
rom the bed and hugged him gently to her chest. Her hand touched his lower back. He flinched. “Jiwan!” she gasped. “What’s this?”

  She ran her hand down his back. He flinched again. His shirt was stuck fast to his skin.

  “You’ve been bleeding! Who’s done this?” she cried aloud. “Who’s hurt you?”

  “We must leave this place, Ama,” he began again, pressing his little body against her for comfort. “They make us kneel to the dead god on the wall. They say that we are pa-paapi,” he stammered, “that we are wicked, because we give respect to murti images! They say that your sickness, Ama, proves you are paapista paapini! A cursed sinner!”

  Bindra was astonished to hear such words in the mouth of her own child.

  “But there is no sin, Jiwan!” she asserted. “Only lack of balance in our choices. Only lack of understanding . . .”

  She heard herself say the words even as she searched for her own understanding, her head spinning in confusion, her heart pounding in fierce fury.

  “We must leave this place, Ama!” Jiwan repeated, with no attempt to whisper. “This is not a good place to be.”

  “But, where else do we go?” she restated emphatically.

  “Ama,” he placed his hands gently on her cheeks and looked directly into her eyes, “we are going to Kashi!”

  ***

  I rose early to discover that the plaster ceiling had split with the weight of the night’s rainfall. My bed was soaking. Not only was I wet and cold, but also bearing a zodiac of bedbug bites.

  As I left the hotel, I walked straight into the amorous Kamlesh. “My dear Mister David!” he cried in delight. “So here it is you are staying!”

  I greeted his wife and her sister, prompting yet another round of uncontrollable twittering.