After Love (14 page)

The road connecting the place to the main highway would only reach as far as the administrative centre. I placed three small bridges over the stream, since I loved designing them. But because I didn't want them to stand out I asked that they be built of local wood. They were meant to appear simple, light and delicate.

Once the whole design of the village had been approved by the Board, then properly re-drawn and drafted, it would be shown to the members of the Co-operative. I wanted to know what the members really thought about my ‘village' but had doubts that Comrade KPS would allow them to talk freely to me.

I had received very few and rather brief letters from Anna. I was hoping that more were waiting for me in Delhi with Uncle Triple K. I had asked him to mail them to me, but since not many had arrived, I assumed he had other more important things to worry about. Lately he hadn't been well and the arthritis in his knees and wrists following the attack had become unbearable. He could put up with bad knees, he told me, but the pain in his wrists often forced him to give up on writing or typing. That must have been a terrible blow for him. Mala Didi thought that his continual depression was caused by his difficulties with writing.

The day after the Board approved my design, Kody took me to meet his cousin, an expert coffee-maker, in a little village an hour's walk from Kalpetta. I had come to like Kody although he probably didn't feel the same about me. I enjoyed my long walks with him, tracking through the forest and learning how coffee, cashew nuts and spices were grown. He no doubt thought my ideas for the village utterly impractical, in contrast with his own understanding of the world, grounded in his experience. But he was a true guide and I was grateful to him. Without him it would have been impossible to complete the project.

Coffee, Kody's cousin told us, had been introduced into the area some two hundred years before, by a man named Baba Budan. Returning from the Haj to Mecca, he had fallen ill as he passed through Yemen. There a merchant had given him seven magical beans of
Coffea Arabica
. Back in India he had planted them in a small garden on the hillside near Chickmagalur. To his amazement the plants relished the sun, the moisture and the soil and began to flourish.

Kody's cousin wanted to impress me with more stories about Baba Budan but Kody rudely shut him up. The cousin was younger than Kody but looked much older and seemed sickly. ‘Liquor, women and too much smoking,' Kody whispered to me. He told his cousin the main reason he had brought me to meet him.

‘Will be done sir,' the man said, and pulled out a mat for us to sit on the floor. Jute bags were lined up against the wall of his hut. He opened one or two, considered them, and then settled on one tied up with thick red string. Out of it he took a handful of round beans with pointed heads, bluish-grey and leathery to touch. ‘
Robusta Kaapi Royale
,' he announced proudly, ‘the best variety. They're strong and they're royal.'

He roasted the beans in a pan and then put them into a hand-grinder. He brewed the powder in a small pot on a kerosene stove, heating it for a few minutes without letting it boil, allowing it to settle and then pouring it into steel glasses with rimmed mouths. He added creamy milk followed by two spoons of sugar for each glass.

Kody showed me how to drink coffee out of the glass with the rimmed mouth. He raised it and tipped in half a mouthful, swirling the coffee around to enjoy its soft, smooth, mellow flavour before swallowing. He waited for me to follow him. I did, clumsily, spilling the coffee.

On the way back Kody told me stories of gruesome events that had happened in the area. I suspected he thought I harboured some affection for the Party. That he was suspicious of it and held it in contempt wasn't news to me. In fact, I had been surprised that he had agreed to work so closely with Comrade KPS.

These were the years when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency in the country. ‘To save India from anarchy,' she announced, but most people believed that she was really trying to save her own hold on power.

The main reason for her paranoia was her son. He and his cronies ruled India. He was a dictator, brutal and ruthless. He wanted the country to be rich and prosperous and he wanted it to happen fast. He was desperate to make the cities beautiful and wanted to clear the slums where the poor were forced to live. He wanted to control the growing population by forcibly sterilising the underprivileged and the ignorant. He hated the unions and wanted to get rid of them. They were either banned or bribed. The factories, he declared, should run without strikes and the trains should operate on time. ‘All power to the government' was his motto.

His mother announced a ten-point programme to remove poverty in India, but his own plan was simpler. He wanted to get rid of the poor themselves. ‘He's a very dangerous man,' said Kody. ‘He is Ravana, the ten-headed monster.'

One of the stories he told me concerned Rajan, a student at an engineering college in Calicut. The police had arrested him along with some other students, and taken them away to be questioned. Rajan never returned home and his body had not been found. Everyone knew he had been tortured, Kody said, because the police accused him of being a member of the Naxalite Party that had attacked the Kayanna Police Station. The students were beaten and then tied to a wooden bench. A heavy wooden roller was run over them.
Roly-poly
it used to be called,
roly-poly with a lollipop
, because they would gag them with a foul-smelling rag.

Equally brutal was the ‘pencilling' used on others. The interrogator would roll a sharp pencil in his hands, then suddenly stab it hard into the suspect's thigh, working it deeper and deeper into the flesh. The chief police interrogator, who often administered the punishment himself, was an educated man, thoroughly cultured, said Kody. He loved the devotional songs of Thyagaraja and often played the violin at home, accompanied by his daughter on the harmonium.

I hesitated to tell Anna such stories in my letters. She wouldn't be surprised, but Leonid Mikhailovich and Aunty Olga might be. They seemed to believe that in India, blessed with bright light and warm sun, people weren't aggressive and kindness came to them naturally. Of course this wasn't true. Brutality and barbarism know neither country nor passport.

Anna

When Aunty Olga said that she didn't want to talk about something, it invariably meant that she had an important revelation which she would deliver when she felt like it. Being hurried along didn't work with her.

It was obvious that she wanted to return to Kiev as soon as possible. Her wrist being in plaster didn't matter. ‘I can look after myself perfectly well,' she kept muttering.

She phoned me at the Institute during my lunch break asking if I had picked up a parcel redirected to her from Kiev. I told her I was on my way to the post office. The woman there checked the note Aunty Olga had given me, examined my passport and handed me a packet ripped along the top. I carried it back to work and dropped it towards my desk. But somehow it slipped and fell on the floor.

There was a sharp crack. Quickly I opened it to check what I had broken. I found a thick book in German,
Travelling with Bach
, published in Munich and lushly illustrated with coloured photos, paintings and engravings. What had cracked was a framed black-and-white copy of an engraving showing the castle of Köthen where Bach had worked as
kapellmeister
in the court of Prince Leopold. I carefully removed the broken pieces of glass and found the engraving intact. Underneath it, however, were tucked two photos: one of Aunty Olga alone and the other showing her on a bench with a handsome man.
Dorogoi Olechke
(To dear Olechka) it said, on the back, and it was signed Grisha. No date. No place.

I put the frame and the photos back in the packet and gave it to Aunty Olga that evening. I lied to her about the breakage, saying that the woman at the post office had apologised for the damage. She didn't ask if I had looked inside, but I'm sure she knew that I had seen the photos.

‘Aunty Olga has a secret admirer and his name is Grisha' is how I began my letter to Vasu. He would have loved to have seen the expression on the face of our dear Aunty Olga looking at the photos, an expression worthy of preservation in another photo.

Grisha's face seemed familiar. I remembered a man like him visiting Aunty Olga when I was a child. He never stayed overnight but each visit had been marked by an elaborate dinner.

He took me to the circus a few times.
Maya Dorogaya Lastochka
(My dear little bird), he used to call me as he hoisted me onto his shoulders. He taught me to skate and would glide along beside me. He was large and strong but moved like a well-trained dancer.

‘Why don't you ask Aunty Olga to skate with you?' I said to him once. ‘She's a very good skater.'

‘I know,' he said, ‘but I'm scared of what might happen.'

He told me that many years before, when the two were still young, he had tried to lift her above his head as skating couples often do, but that he had found he couldn't support her. He had slipped and fallen on the ice, injuring the back he had already hurt in the War.

Aunty Olga was all right but Grisha decided that it would be wise not to go skating with her again.

Grisha as I remembered him was a handsome man. He would dress very elegantly, his thick black hair neatly combed and his shoes or boots always polished. But my strongest memory was the way he smelled, of some distinctive cologne.

‘It reminds me of Tbilisi,' he told me. So dear Grisha was a Georgian, like Shurik's Tamrico.

I had once asked him to bring a little bottle of the same cologne for Papa.

‘Leynya doesn't like such things,' Aunty Olga had intervened.

After the parcel arrived there was a week of silence. Then Aunty Olga filled in the missing details of Grisha's story for me. She told me that he had courted her for more than thirty years. They had met in 1955 in Volgagrad, where she had gone to remember Misha Schubert, the first and real love of her life, who had died defending Stalin's city. Grisha had been injured in the same battle and his war finished there. After that they met during her annual pilgrimage to the city. But she had told Grisha firmly that she would never marry him and that to live with a man as husband and wife was now impossible for her. She had her dear Leynya and his daughter to look after. Besides, she was moody, strict and very hard to live with. It would be better for him to find someone more suitable.

Grisha already had a wife in Tbilisi, a Georgian with dark eyes and a slender waist who, he told her, walked like a gazelle. That meant they had to wait.

‘Wait for what?' I asked Aunty Olga.

‘Wait for her to die,' she replied. His wife had terminal cancer.

After his wife died Grisha had proposed but Aunty Olga had refused him. Soon he found another woman to marry while still visiting Aunty Olga in Kiev and often staying with her. I doubt if their relationship ever became intimate, but Grisha was an attractive and charming man, and it's possible that Aunty Olga did consent to sleep with him.

When I talked to Papa about Grisha Guramshvili he said he had met him several times and that they were good friends. They wrote to one another and whenever Papa went to Tbilisi he stayed with him.

So why were the photos in the packet hidden?

‘He's dying,' said Aunty Olga simply, ‘and he wants me to visit him.'

‘Go,' I said. ‘Go, my dear stupid Aunty. I'll even come with you to say thank-you and goodbye to your Grisha.'

Two days later I went to the airport to see her off. Grisha died a few minutes before her plane landed in Tbilisi. She was, however, able to attend the funeral and the wake.

‘But we love you too
'

Vasu

A week before I left Kalpetta, a large packet from Delhi arrived. It contained three letters from Anna, one of which brought bad news. Tamrico had been hurt. She had been waiting at a bus stop not far from her theatre when a truck swerved off the road and ploughed into the crowd. Three adults and two children were killed on the spot. Luckily her injuries were minor but she had been taken to hospital for a check-up and
observation.

As for Aunty Olga, it was hard even to imagine her injured. To me, she seemed absolutely indestructible. Strangely, Anna's story about Grisha didn't surprise me. Grisha, I suspected, was a kind and sensitive man able to breach the wall of indifference that Aunty Olga had erected around herself. Silence and understatement were her trusted friends. To endure the upheavals of her life without them would have been impossible. She preferred the beauty of life's subtle gestures. It came from her music, I remember Anna telling me once.

In India that week I made a day trip to the port city of Calicut to buy a proper frame for an aquarelle I had painted for Kody as a reminder of our walk to the lake which feeds the Kabani.

The overcrowded bus took two hours negotiating the bends down the winding road through the Ghats. A student on the bus told me about an archaeological museum in the city and after my arrival I went looking for it. Since it was closed for maintenance I decided to visit an art gallery just across the street. Its paintings were simple, excessively naturalistic and too bright and loud. The sculptures were more attractive, reminding me of Henry Moore's reclining figures.

An old man at the gallery told me about a second-hand bookshop with a good collection of books and records. The young woman there was unusually friendly. I told her that I was looking for atlases of colonial and pre-colonial maps of the area. She produced a book containing four beautiful sixteenth-century Portuguese maps of Calicut, but it was too expensive for me.

I was putting it back on the shelf when I discovered that the book next to it was facing the wrong way. As I turned it round I suddenly heard the unmistakeable sound of Bach being played on the cello, one of the six cello suites Anna had been rehearsing last winter. I was stunned by the coincidence. Both books slipped from my hand, and as I tried to catch them, I lost my balance and bumped my head against the shelf.