In the Shadow of Crows Read online

  “Where was he?” she hissed in whisper, certain they were now being spied upon.

  Jyothi pointed towards a towering peepal tree, the sacred fig of Shiva, symbol of the liberated mind. Some said that to tell a lie beneath its shade brought upon the culprit the very affliction his mother now bore, yet Jyothi had only ever known her to speak the truth.

  Soft rain rustled the tree’s vulva-shaped leaves, symbols of the Goddess, as Bindra forged into the undergrowth towards the pale, peeling trunk. At its base stood an old stone lingam, emblem of universal union. The upright stone was garlanded with an offering of fresh flowers, and yet she could see no footprint, no broken foliage. She touched the base of the tree, touched her heart, then waded back to Jyothi.

  “How did he look, this man?” she asked, in heightening alarm. Jyothi shook his head.

  “Son, tell me!” she cried out.

  “He was like a child. Small, like a child. A red child,” he blurted. “Red?” Bindra gasped. “Was he naked? Stained with sidur?”

  Jyothi rocked his head from side to side in anxious affirmation.

  “Wearing many malas around his neck? Around his arms? A drum in his hand?”

  Jyothi had not stopped nodding.

  Bindra put her bandaged hands to her mouth, as though to muffle the words she feared to say out loud.

  “Ban jhankri!” she cried. “Jiwan has been taken by the ban jhankri!”

  Chapter Six

  First impressions of Gujarat’s principal city of Ahmedabad convinced me to remain no longer than the time it took to travel between the train station and the bus depot.

  Seven hours in a sweltering second-class carriage, with a projectile-vomiting infant beside me, and two itching strangers sitting on my backpack due to the lack of room, had left my nerves frayed and my patience worn. This city may have beckoned tourists to its splendid Indo-Saracenic architecture and the Mahatma’s celebrated ashram, but the blinding dust, lung-solidifying pollution and relentless roar of the traffic drove me to seek an escape just as quickly as I could.

  Unlike the cheery rickshaw-wallahs at Valsad, those waiting outside Ahmedabad station were aggressive and bad-tempered. They fought each other for my custom. They pulled at my dampening clothes from every direction. I defiantly ignored them all and marched straight for a young man, so thin that his eyes bulged from his face, so gaunt that his arteries pulsated visibly beneath translucent skin. He smiled weakly at me and glanced nervously towards his competitors who were now jeering as they wrestled with each other to be the first to reach us.

  “Long Distance Bus Station chalo!” I shouted above the hullabaloo.

  He shook his head in incomprehension.

  As his native Gujarati was beyond me, I tried, “Drive me to the Long Distance Bus Station, please!” in my most pedantic RP.

  Still no joy. I had thought that “Bus Station” was widely understood.

  The other drivers were already upon us and had begun to pull at my backpack. As I struggled into his rickshaw, they punched my emaciated peddler with their fists. I hastily scoured my limited memory of childhood Urdu for some appropriate term for him to get going, while fighting with his rivals to retain my luggage.

  “So jao!” I shouted at my driver.

  I cringed. I had just ordered him to go to bed. Under such duress, my minimal childhood vocabulary had become completely muddled. I berated myself for never once having thought to learn a word of Gujarati from Priya, or her parents. I had never imagined that I would have had a reason to make this journey alone.

  The crowd was now maddening itself into an incomprehensible frenzy. It seemed I was about to be dragged from the rickshaw, and the skinny man gripping the handlebars brutally concussed. Despite my dismay at the forceful fingers now trying to wrench the shoes off my feet, I was distracted by the physical state of my malnourished driver. As bare toes kicked hard into his spindle shins and stark knuckles slammed against xylophone ribs, he turned around to me with tears in his eyes and lips drawn thin. It looked to me as though he was about to expire.

  “Go!” I yelled at him. “Drive! Pedal!”

  This was ridiculous. I was being attacked and robbed on a busy station forecourt. My driver was having his bones broken by bullying competitors because he did not understand a word I said, yet still he patiently awaited my direction.

  Utterly desperate, I shouted, “Bawasir!”, a word with which I had vague recollections of my father’s father once filling me with alarm. To my amazement, it did the trick. My rickshaw driver immediately began pedalling at top speed and fast pulled away from our abusers.

  Not until the raging mob was far behind did I look down to find my clothes and skin covered with a Pollock-like paroxysm of dirty fingerprints in sweaty smears. I slumped against my rucksack in exhaustion, and puzzled at the dynamic response I had finally achieved. A fact made all the more inexplicable as the word I had inadvertently yelled was “haemorrhoids”.

  ***

  Bindra clung to Jyothi as they made slow progress through the dense undergrowth of mountain jungle. She called Jiwan’s name at every difficult step, certain that the ban jhankri could not have taken him far. He was somewhere in the shadows of these misty trees. He was somewhere on this hillside.

  The ban jhankri was a figure of mountain folklore, whose continuing appearance and interaction with the local population enabled the diminutive forest shaman to move with ease between myth and man. Many tales were told of children who vanished whilst walking in the forest, or working in the fields. Their disappearance was always so swift, so gentle, that even those by whose side they stood did not feel their departure.

  It was said that the ban jhankri stepped out of the tree line and beckoned to those innocents he chose. It was only they who could see him. Some denied their capacity for the path he offered and ran straight home. Others willingly followed him into the jungle, where they were initiated into the limitless potential of the Words of Power.

  Bindra had met a man when she was a child, who had been taken by a female ban jhankri. The ban jhankrini, as such mystical women were called, generally lacked the discretion of their male counterparts, and she had charged down the hillside, pendulous breasts slung over her shoulders, to simply snatch him as he had foraged amongst the trees. He had been returned two years later, barely recognisable to his own family. Bindra thought of him now and found herself sobbing into the damp quiet of the trees.

  “Ama, look!” Jyothi suddenly tugged at her arm. “Ama, there are soldiers!”

  Bindra peered down the hill to a large army truck drawn up against the roadside. A row of uniformed men was gathering along the cliff edge to urinate into the river below.

  Bindra had forgotten her fear. She had forgotten the damage to her body that others found so threatening.

  “Dajooharu!” she shouted as she stumbled, slid and fell towards the serpentine length of grey road below them. “Brothers, help us!”

  The abrupt appearance of Bindra and Jyothi as they tumbled out of the undergrowth and hit the wet tarmac caused some of the young men to start. Bindra instantly became self-conscious again and prudently drew the shawl over her head, around her face and hands, as Jyothi helped her to stand upright. They both stared at the soldiers, at their mottled-green uniforms, their heavy, shiny boots and unwieldy wooden rifles. They had often seen the enormous army trucks grinding up towards the Tibetan border posts, but these Bengalis, Biharis, Rajasthanis and Punjabis, with their incomprehensible speech and inexpressive faces, were normally avoided by the local population.

  “Kali Ma,” Bindra whispered under her breath, and stepped forwards. “Brothers, my son is missing. My son is gone. In the trees...”

  They stared back at her in incomprehension.

  “Brothers, my son is gone . . .” she repeated. “I beg you to help me.”

  M
ore men buttoned up their flies and joined their comrades on the road. A Bihari with a large belly that refused to be reined in even by his broad, regulation leather belt, laughed out loud. He crudely, flatulently encouraged the others to return to the vehicle.

  “Please, brothers!” Bindra pleaded. “My son!”

  The tumble to the road had loosened the long length of cloth bound around Bindra’s hips. In a moment, its knot unravelled, releasing her meagre provisions to the ground. The scavenged iskus rolled straight toward the row of obsessively polished toes. Jyothi ran to grab the precious yellow gourds, but a tall, slender Sikh stepped forwards and caught the vegetables in his large hands. He walked across the road to help Bindra scoop up the few remaining items, then chased off three mangy rhesus monkeys that were showing a little too much interest in her greasy paper parcels.

  “Dhanyabad dajoo,” she said in thanks, her gaze exploring his finely coiled, green pagri turban and the impressive length of his well-shaped nose. “It’s my son, my little boy. He’s lost in the trees!”

  The bearded Punjabi stood up and sought out Bindra’s eyes. He did not speak Nepali. She looked straight back with an unfaltering gaze. This uncommonly tall man, with his noble, foreign features, was going to help her. She had decided.

  The soldier turned and in English called, “Hey, Kabir! Nathu! Come out here a moment!”

  Two dark, broad-cheeked faces peered through the canvas cover of the truck. Gurkhas.

  “Brothers! Brothers!” Bindra called in excitement, her heart brightening in relief at the sight of Nepali-speaking kinsmen.

  She quickly recounted Jyothi’s sighting of the ban jhankri and Jiwan’s disappearance. The two men listened intently, then turned back to their comrades. Bindra strained to hear, but could not understand the foreign tongue shared by the soldiers, into which her account was now translated.

  “Mero chora!” she just kept repeating. “My son! My son!”

  “Sister,” one of the Gurkhas smiled, “we’ll help you look, but we don’t have long. We’re expected up at Deolo camp.”

  And into the forest the soldiers swarmed.

  ***

  The main road along which my scrawny Gujarati rickshaw-wallah and I trundled was melting and sticky in the noonday sun. The fablon-covered bench on which I perched, balanced atop rusty bicycle wheels, gave me little confidence. We swerved wildly between lorries, buses, motorbikes, ox-carts, pony-traps and countless fellow rickshaws, my heat-plumped fingers whitening as I dug them deep into slippery upholstery.

  Every jolt and slue drove us further into dark, obscuring fumes that billowed in aggressive threat from innumerable engines run on low-grade petrol cut with oil. I choked through my grimace, briefly clutching a handkerchief to nose and mouth until I had to concede defeat and, with near-feral gesticulation, direct my dishevelled driver to turn off down a narrow backstreet. He drew to a halt and turned to stare at me with vacant eyes. It occurred to me that in our panicked departure from the train station, I had not yet determined whether he had understood my desired destination. I took the opportunity of comparative quiet to try again. “Bus Station. Long Distance Bus Station.”

  My pronunciation was now that of a baritone Joyce Grenfell. Still it did not appear to register with him. I had but one option and winced in anticipation.

  “Long Distance Bus Station, please,” I said in an embarrassing imitation of Peter Sellers’ Doctor Ahmed.

  “Thik che! Thik che!” he responded in delighted Gujarati, releasing his grip on the handlebars to shake my hands in triumph.

  “Boom ditty boom ditty boom,” I sighed in relief.

  I decided to celebrate our advance in communication by dismounting to approach a dhaba food-stall, where I bought two cold bottles of an over-sweetened fizzy drink called Limca. My driver’s delighted grin stretched his gaunt skin to its limit. Looking into his face, I had the distinct feeling that this was a man whose life would not be long. It was difficult to tell, but I guessed he could have been no older than about twenty-five. Frustrated and angry with my own helplessness, my impotence to make the slightest bit of difference to his life, in a pathetic attempt at a philanthropic gesture I returned to the stall and bought him a selection of savoury pastries and fruit. Harsad, as his name proved to be, seemed astonished, whilst I, with a pang of ancestral colonial guilt, fretted as to whether I was, in fact, being condescending.

  With new confidence and strength, Harsad pedalled on through a squalid quarter of pollution-corroded tenements. As we rattled over bricks, cracked pipes and spasmodic sections of crumbling tarmac, we approached a young husband and wife struggling to pull five small children and all their belongings on a heavy cart. The wagon was also piled with cardboard boxes, scrap paper and a mound of broken stones. Amongst this refuse, presumably collected for reselling, lay a shrivelled old woman with watery eyes who was partially covered in pieces of sacking and rag. She was feverish and breathing heavily. Although the couple leaned into the yoke with all their weight, they failed to move the wooden wheels.

  I was still stupefied into pathetic inaction when, as we turned a tight corner, a violent buzzing filled the air and the sky turned black. We had disturbed a frantic swarm of innumerable flies. My driver had to swerve to avoid not only the reeking corpses of what appeared to have once been two dogs lying in our way - so bloated that their stiff limbs no longer touched the ground - but also the pack of hairless mongrels that now tugged with cannibal dementia at bulbous bellies and paws.

  At the crowded depot, I purchased a ticket for the “luxury bus” to the city of Udaipur, which lay over the state border in Rajasthan. Harsad saw me right to the door. I put an arm around his fleshless shoulders to express my thanks for his courteous and efficient service. He weakly shook my hand goodbye, with a grin so triumphant that it seemed to threaten to tear his fragile face.

  As he walked away on spindly limbs, proudly clutching the meagre bag of food I had purchased from the street stall, my head began to swim with the sights, sounds and smells encountered since boarding Harsad’s rickshaw at the train station.

  Distress, disease and death. Cruelty and corpses.

  This was not the India of my father’s stories and Grandmother’s tales. Not the India I had tasted in Priya’s burning kisses. This was not the India of my childhood imaginings, my lifelong dreams.

  I was suddenly submerged in a confusion of memory.

  I cried out and ran towards Harsad and his rickshaw, but he had gone. I had no idea what I might have done if I had found him.

  I sat on my rucksack in the billowing dust, confused and disorientated.

  I needed a moment. To catch my breath.

  ***

  As the army lorry’s grumbling roar faded, Bindra slumped to the sodden earth.

  “I’m sorry, Ama!” Jyothi choked. “It’s my fault. I wouldn’t go with the little red man. So Jiwan went instead.” He dropped to the ground beside his mother and covered his face in shame.

  The soldiers had been kind to them. They had searched hard. They had shouted Jiwan’s name loudly. None had called her bokshi. None had tried to hurt her. The Gurkhas had pressed a little money into Jyothi’s right hand as they left. The Punjabi with the warrior eyes had given them mewa papaya that he had found growing in the forest. They had all been kind.

  “It’s not your fault, mero ramro, shashi keto,” Bindra assured Jyothi, “my good, brave boy.” She cuddled him to her breast and sought for words to comfort both of them. “We must believe that Jiwan is not gone. The ban jhankri are not bad men. They bring their chosen ones back, in time. We must just stay here and wait - until Jiwan is returned.”

  “But Ama, the doctor said I must take care of you. The doctor said I must see you get good medicine from the Ancestors at the Tune-Snake-Hand Ashram,” Jyothi insisted.

  “They’ll have to wait,” she replied
with tired resignation. “Just as we must wait for your brother to come back.”

  “But Ama,” he persisted, “where shall we live? We have no house here. No bakhri goat for milk. No kukhurii hen for eggs. No haat market for rice and daal!”

  Bindra did not reply for a moment. She looked far into the trees.

  “Then we shall sing sweetly for the Punyajana,” she announced quietly. “This is their world and we shall show them respect. We shall apologise for the disruption we have already caused to their peace, and offer our best songs in our finest voices.”

  She smiled at Jyothi and wiped his dirty, tear-streaked face with the frayed hem of her shawl.

  “There is nothing to fear, my darling son,” she promised. “The Good People of the forest will watch over us.”

  ***

  The “luxury bus” was filthy.

  The seats had lost much of their upholstery and rusty springs poked directly out of the exposed horsehair, which crawled with mites. I sat in the stationary vehicle at Ahmedabad for almost two hours of unexplained delays in paint-blistering heat. Not only was I sticking to the tacky seat and, though desperate for air, forced to breathe shallowly due to the abominable stench of the open cesspools outside the bus, but I had also begun to scratch.

  I had convinced myself that our deferred departure had enabled some unseen miscreant to steal my backpack from the roof-rack above. My minimal funds would never accommodate a new wardrobe and I now mentally prepared to live in the same shorts and shirt for the coming weeks. In addition, I was trapped behind cracked windows, which would not open, and was drinking my bottled water too fast. I quickly realised that I would have to limit my intake if my diminishing supply was to last the journey.

  My fellow travellers were all local and a sullen set, so unlike the hearty rurals of Valsad and Dalba. I tried to initiate conversation, but felt that I was regarded with suspicion and my attempts remained entirely without success. I did however discover that I had been charged over twice the price for my ticket than any other passenger.