Of Marriageable Age (46 page)

The train screeched onwards, and the stillness it left behind was the satisfied silence of death.

39

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

NAT

A Village in Madras State, 1969

S
HORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT
they finished the makeshift platform of waterlogged branches. In spite of the roughness of his bed and the proximity of so many men lying foot-to-head like sardines Nat, overcome by jet lag, fell asleep almost the moment his head touched the folded
lungi
on the plastic sheet. But long before dawn he was awake again, wide awake. A word, a name, had gnawed itself into his consciousness but it took some time before it dawned on him what that name was trying to tell him.

Gauri Ma.

Where was Gauri Ma?

'Dad?' he whispered. His father slept next to him; he did not want to wake him, for Doctor needed every moment of sleep, but the question was urgent and if, by chance, Doctor was awake he'd hear the whisper and answer. No answer came. Nat fumbled in the folds of the
lungi
that had been his pillow for his torch, switched it on and looked at his watch. Twenty past three. Not an unreasonable time; in the country, people rose at four and by the time he got there it would be four. He'd have to go, there was no other way. If she was safe, then no harm done, he couldn't sleep anyway, and he'd be back by five. But he had to go.

Of course, she might not be alive at all. She might have died in the years of his absence. But maybe not.

He listened; the silence outside seemed to speak to him, to tell him something important, very important, something he'd overlooked in his worry about Gauri Ma, and suddenly he realised what — it was just
too
silent. No pouring of rain, no incessant splashing into the lake that was the world outside the school, not even a gentle patter. The rain had stopped! He said a prayer of thanks in his heart; it was a good omen.

He got up and stepped gingerly between the sleeping bodies, the beam of light from his torch cutting through the pitch darkness to guide him. Outside the school room it was just as dark, for even though the rain had ceased the night sky was still filled with clouds and Nat had only his own instinct and the narrow ray of his torch to guide him out to the road. The water reached almost to his knees, he could feel the mixture of sand and mud and grass beneath his bare feet, squishing up between his toes as he walked on through the thick blackness, through the deathly silence. It was as if the water had absorbed all sound: not a frog croaked, not an insect chirped. There was only the splashing sound Nat's feet made as he stepped onwards through the floods. Not a building, not a ruined house, not a tree or a bush or a high rock could be seen, only the shining, rippling surface of the water as it caught Nat's light and played with it, disturbed by the pair of feet moving steadily, rhythmically forwards.

It was a walk into nowhere. Since there were no stars, no landmarks, not even the hulking form of the hill in the background, Nat could not possibly know in which direction he was going. He could not even know if he was on the road, or walking through a field, or straight towards the yawning depths of the Ganesa Tank, for the whole world was one big black shining lake, opening up to him with each step he took and closing behind him again. And yet he walked on, into the nothingness.

After what seemed a small eternity, gradually, the world turned a shade less black and to Nat's amazement and deep gratitude he made out that he was right on course and almost there. He could make out the collapsed forms of isolated huts, crumbled into the water that surrounded them, the neatly woven coconut fronds that had once been their roofs cleft through the middle as if a ruthless giant hand had dealt them a quick karate stroke. He wondered where their residents had fled — but that was not his business now. A man could only do what he could, and right now Gauri Ma was his business.

Her hut, he estimated, could not be more than a hundred yards further down the road, and several steps further on he heard through the silence a quiet whimpering, as from a puppy. Probably the puppy had been left behind when the desperate family it belonged to had fled to a safer, higher place; maybe it had found refuge on an abandoned rooftop, or on a rock ranging out of the water. It was the first sound, besides the splashing of his own feet and the whisper of his own breath, that he had heard this morning.

The whimpering grew louder, and now he was almost at Gauri Ma's hut, and for the first time since setting out he felt foolish. Of course Gauri Ma was safe! His father would surely have taken care of her, evacuated her to some safe lodging; or else she and her husband would have fled to the Town and taken refuge… somewhere, or else, well, certainly they would not just have sat there and waited for the floods to capture them. He would find a soggy ruined hut with a caved-in roof, empty, abandoned, no Gauri Ma or her husband or any sign of where they had gone, and he would have to turn around and go home again, arriving back just as the others were stirring and having to explain his senseless, panic-filled rescue mission, thwarted because there had never been anyone to rescue. Idiot! Well, maybe he could at least save that puppy.

It was as he'd thought. Gauri Ma's hut was nothing but a heap of sodden rubble covered with the remains of a one-time roof, and Nat felt even more foolish.
Who do you think you are, some kind of a movie hero? No, you're not. You're a spoiled little boy back from the self-indulgent West and you'll never be even half the man your father is.
Of course Doctor had taken care of Gauri Ma and every one else he could; that was his whole mission in life and what put it into Nat’s idiot mind to come out here before the crack of dawn to rescue a puppy?

But what else could he do? Better a puppy than nothing. Certainly, the last thing they'd thank him for when he returned home was a puppy, one more useless mouth to feed —
bouche inutile
; now where had he heard that before, something from the war — but how very ridiculous, how typical of his thoughtlessness, to plunge into such a misadventure! It would save face, in fact, to turn back and go home empty-handed, and just say he'd been out for an early-morning stroll through the floods — Nat had the good humour to chuckle at his own joke.
Coward!
Okay, so he'd found the puppy on his early-morning stroll. It would be his mascot for the rest of his stay here. He followed the sound.

It came from the mango tree, which stood a few yards behind the hut. The puppy must have somehow managed to scramble up into the branches, which fortuitously forked off quite low to the ground. Goodness knows how he'd managed that — it was still too dark to see up into the gloomy cave made by the spreading crown of leaves, so Nat shone his torch and let the beam of light wander along the tree's wide branches, searching, and he made little crooning noises to quiet and comfort the puppy.

In response the whimpering not only grew louder, it turned into a torrent of language, human language, clearly discernible as Tamil though the words were nothing but a disjointed, unintelligible babble, and when Nat aimed his beam at their source he saw her. Gauri Ma, up in the tree, not two yards away from him, a stick-doll of a Gauri Ma wrapped in a ragged piece of sari wound not only around her body but around an upright branch against which she leaned, and otherwise clothed only in an even more ragged sari-underskirt.

'Gauri Ma!' cried Nat, and he took a step nearer to the tree-trunk but his foot hit against some hulking object in the water, a large, slippery thing like a log. Somehow — he could tell for his foot was bare and the thing was not rough and hard like a log but smooth and soft — he knew it was
something else
and he shone his torch on it and saw that it was a corpse, a bloated black corpse, and he gave a cry of alarm and disgust and Gauri Ma blabbered all the louder, and now he understood her.

It was her husband Biku who had tied her to the tree so she would not fall when she slept; he had tried to tie himself but couldn't, and then he had fallen out of the tree in his sleep and must have been hurt and she had called to him and called, but he had not stood up again. That had happened one, two days ago, she had been in the tree for three days, she had a pot next to her hanging from a branch and it was full of
iddlies
, which Biku had bought from a coffee stall in the market and she had been eating
iddlies, iddlies, iddlies
but now the remaining
iddlies
were all sour, and if she ate any more she would get ill and Biku was dead and she had been calling out all the time but there was no-one, no-one, no-one. And then the whimpering began again.

'It's all right, Ma, I'm here and I'm coming to get you. Do you remember me? I'm Nat, your
tamby,
I've come back from far away? I've come to get you, Ma. Do you know, I woke up this morning and I heard you calling so I came to get you; is that not a miracle, Ma? I heard you from my father's house and I walked through the big water to find you. It was very dark, Ma, but I found you. Do you see how great God's grace is, Ma? So don't worry for your
tamby
is here to help you. I will take you to my father's house and you will not die. Biku has gone home to Shiva Mahadeva, he has found rest from this world. Ma, do not think you are alone now, for your
tamby
is here to take you.'

And all the time he talked he climbed into the branches till he was sitting next to Gauri Ma on her branch. Her sari was tied very tightly to the branch, and because of the wetness the knot had hardened so that it could not be loosened, so Nat took the sari in his teeth and ripped it across and it was so ragged that it split easily. And then he gently laid Gauri Ma over his shoulder and descended back into the flood, and adjusted her weight so that he was holding her in his arms across his shoulder, and he carried her through the floods and the lightening dawn and just as the sun sent its first beams through a hole in the clouds Nat reached his father's gate, and so he brought Gauri Ma home on the day the deluge ended. And he brought not only Gauri Ma, but good luck.

Nat, they all remembered now, was the boy with the Golden Hand.

40

CHAPTER FORTY

SAROJ

Georgetown, 1969

S
AROJ AWOKE AS IN A FURNACE
. When Trixie felt her forehead she whipped back her hand and shook it as if scorched. 'Chile, you're cooking,' she said, and all Saroj could do was grunt and turn over.

Lucy Quentin came in wearing a dark green seersucker wrap, shaking a thermometer which she stuck under Saroj's armpit. She picked up some pieces of clothing, threw them across Trixie's clothes-horse, read Saroj's temperature and made some noises of her own. Saroj was too dizzy to hear what she said. She drifted into sleep. When she next awoke Ma was there, bending over her, wiping her forehead; then she was gone, and so was Saroj. She woke up again, and there was Dr Lachmansingh. Lucy Quentin. Trixie.

'We won't move her,' she heard someone say. '…an infection,' said someone else, and, 'Too much excitement; she needs rest.'

She smelled some delicious smells, and Ma brought a tray loaded with bowls containing her favourite dishes; but she could not eat, just sleep sleep sleep. She drifted in and out of soft clouds, and every time she drifted back, Ma was there, looking down with limpid black eyes, as she'd been there in the hospital; but this time the face was her own, it was no hallucination and Saroj sighed in relief for when a hallucination seems real as it had back then, seeing her own face on Ma, sanity seems a balancing act on a razor's edge.

It was as if Saroj's body, denied the rest it had needed after the operation, now demanded it with a vengeance, keeping her nailed to Trixie's bed. Delicious healing curled through body and mind, sweet and syrupy like molasses. Rancour melted away under Ma's ministrations. She was in the hands of an angel in a space unlimited, where time could not be measured.

When her fever finally wore itself out three days had passed. Ma was still ministering to her. She finally ate; and then she sank back into her pillow with a long deep sigh and wished she could just turn back the clock, rearrange her life so it was just her and Ma in a bubble of perfection, and it would stay that way for ever.

'Ma . . .' she murmured.

'It's all right, darling, don't talk. You're much better now, I was so worried!'

'Ma . . . I want to talk to you . . .'

'I know, dear, and we will, we'll have a nice long talk, but not today. First you have to get really healthy again, and then when you feel up to it you can come home and . . .' Saroj stiffened ever so slightly, and Ma must have felt it because she went on, '. . . Or I'll come here, or we'll go for a walk together, just you and me, and I'll tell you a long, long story, everything you want to know. But not now.'

Saroj nodded, and felt the tears squeezing out of her eyes. Ma wiped her cheek with a corner of the sheet.

'Don't cry, dear, everything's going to be all right. I promise. And remember this: I love you very, very much.'

She leaned over, stroked a strand of hair from Saroj's forehead, and kissed her between the eyes. Saroj closed them; and when she opened them again Ma was gone, as silent as the moon.

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
S
ATURDAY
. Saroj was well enough to get up and take a walk with Trixie. She felt good, better than she had done for weeks, months, even years. Strong and determined, clear and free.

Trixie rode her bike to the Sea Wall, Saroj perched on the carrier.

'It's funny,' Saroj said to Trixie as they walked up the little stone staircase to the wall, 'I've forgiven Ma completely. Absolutely. It doesn't matter what she did. And as for Baba . . .'

'Does that mean you're going back home?'

'No, no, that's just it! I just feel clean, somehow, and yet strong and sure of myself, as if I know leaving is right, and yet without hating Ma into the bargain. I don't know. I want to have this talk with her and get things cleared up between us — it's as if I've grown up in a few short days, as if I'm willing to hear her side of the story and, well,
understand
her and what makes her tick.'