Sixty Lights (17 page)

Two men came and carted the body away in a sling of cloth. A rickshaw wallah loaded the larger pieces of glass onto his rickshaw, and children were collecting hand-sized shards and
small dangerous fragments. Within a few minutes there was only a field of drying blood, sprinkled with sparkles of shattered mirror.
Blood in bucketsful.

At the scene Lucy was in a state of cataleptic calm, but later found herself trembling, as her grandfather and Isaac trembled. There were many deaths in India – everyone knew this – but death by mirror seemed to her particularly meaningless, the counter-logic to finding one's own face, there, alive, as one dressed, or admired oneself, or leaned forward critically or vainly to examine a feature. Lucy did not speak of the accident to Isaac (it seemed so private, like another special thing seen), but found herself rising up at night, in a kind of delayed shock, seeing again the full details of the improbable accident, arrayed before her like an awful apparition. There was the mystery of art, but there was also this mystery, the slash of mortality, the strange mingled order and disorder of death, death which happened, and then returned, in its own numinous glow.

Lucy could not record or exorcise the death by mirror. She stored it as a secret, as an untaken photograph. She carried now a great sense of the inadvertent brutality of life. After their act of witness Lucy had enfolded Bashanti in her arms, mutely comforting, and then they left together, in a hurry, immediately to return home. Later they drank tea and ate milk sweets flavoured with cardamom. They sat beside each other, almost touching, on a patterned rug on the floor. Lucy brushed and braided Bashanti's hair and placed within it a circle of new frangipani blossoms. Their perfume was glorious. It was a tiny communion against all the possibilities of disaster and accident.

“Lucy?” Isaac called softly. His voice floated on the night.

The name returned her to the bedroom, to the bed they shared, to the things here, around her, on this particular night. As if her own name – of course – was a small flare of light.

SHE LAY WITH
her eyes closed, looking inward, like an Indian god. Her hands were knitted over her belly, which was now a sturdy globe, and she had become a kind of global traveller. In her meditation she saw the slow-spinning planet, memorised, as from childhood, according to continents, seas, nations, capital cities; there was corpulent Australia, removed and remote, there were the marine-looking archipelagoes of Southeast Asia (looking like coral, like sea cucumbers, like beaded strings of seaweed); there was the planchette of India, and the Arabian Sea, and there, further on, was the proud body shape of Africa. Upwards – since her route was cursive, perverse and driven by mind-winds – lay lumpish Western Europe, studded with important names, the finicky jagged outlines of the United Kingdom, the feline swallowing shapes of Scandinavia. She zigzagged backwards to move over Russia and China, and settled somewhere in Japan, the site for any number of exotic dreams and conclusions, chosen for the incomparable beauty of its shape. The entire continent of America did not figure on this journey; Lucy's globe placed the Arabian Sea at the centre, and regarded itineraries and destinations by the illogical attractions of shapes.

Her own shape was troubling. Her body quaked and rumbled. She wondered briefly if her flightiness was some
infantile regression, occasioned by the upheavals of her double anatomy, or if indeed she simply needed to counter in light-headed fantasy the inordinate heaviness that encumbered her every movement in the world. As her body had grown the pregnancy seemed more and more monumental; her belly was like St Paul's, like the Taj Mahal, an alabaster dome held up by the gaping architecture of her slim pelvic bone. Bashanti rubbed Lucy with fragrant obstetric oils but still she did not humanise. Her skin looked like polished blue-and-white marble and the baby remained a wholly unimaginable inhabitant, curled like the ammonite in quartz pointed out to Lucy as a child. It was difficult to imagine this tight form movable or uncurled. How could she possibly be large enough? She might crack open, or even die. Lucy was tormented by fearful dreams of her mother's last pregnancy: the high mound of her body, the rose blush of her death, the ruination of her husband, glimpsed, in every dream, standing somewhere in the distance in his dirty pyjamas. The past returned disarranged and symbolic, destroying years of practised forgetfulness in sudden, fevered visions.

One night Lucy had a nightmare about her eyes expanding. To match the size of her body, her eyeballs grew and grew, so that she was deformed and saw everything with alarming magnification. At first this was a kind of pleasant surprise, like discovering a new or superhuman skill, but then the world loomed over and crowded her; everything achieved a monstrous proximity and definition. She woke with a start, crying out loud, her hands clasped over her eyes as if to hold them in.

Lucy heard Isaac rouse in the bed beside her.

“My Taj, my belly,” she explained. “Giving me nightmares again.”

Isaac rolled over.

“Don't call it that, please.”

He was silent for a moment, then drowsily went on:

“The Taj Mahal was a tomb. Shah Jahan built it for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, after she died giving birth to their fourteenth child.”

“You're superstitious?”

“Only in certain things. Naming, for example. Those of us without faith have the compensations of superstition.”

Lucy was silent.

Isaac stretched over and touched her cheek.

“It will be all right,” he said tenderly. “I promise, it will be all right. Neville will be a father, after all.”

“Fourteen,” Lucy said, “imagine that.”

But she was thinking still of Isaac's enigmatic words:
Neville will be a father, after all.

The birth coincided with a celebration, since Lucy's ninth month was also the month of Diwali, the Festival of Lights. All over the city lit earthenware lamps, diyas, were arranged around doorways and windows and in neat rows along pathways, to welcome home from exile the mythical king Rama and his wife Sita; more particularly it was a time for welcoming Lakshmi, the goddess of Wealth and Good Fortune. She was one of those voluptuous goddesses, always depicted dressed in a red sari, with lavish gold ornaments, cushiony lotus flowers and sometimes with two friendly elephants, spraying arcs of water. Isaac had been obliged to buy the servants new clothes; Lucy watched Bashanti, dressed in a lovely new garment, woven with beiges and pinks, set forth small rows of diyas along the windowsill and the path leading up to the front doorway. She presented prasad, sweetmeats, at their family shrine and everyone in the house was newly bathed and looking festive. The women had flowers in their hair; Asok had his beard freshly hennaed.

On the night of the birth there were lanterns and fireworks everywhere. Isaac and Lucy had been out walking when the labour began; perhaps the noise of the fireworks, Lucy thought, had disturbed her baby into action. She saw the night blaze up in florid explosions, but felt suddenly blackened by pain and unable to support her own weight. Her knees folded and buckled and she collapsed forward, onto her stomach. Lucy was dimly aware that Isaac was calling out in panic – waving his arms in
farangi
abandon – but she was already transported somewhere and sometime else, conscious that fluid had gushed between her legs, enthralled by the imperative nature of her own body, curious, entirely curious, to know what would happen next. A cart arrived and she felt her heavy body hauled up; and then, in a miraculous ebbing, she was just as before, still and alert.

“It's stopped,” she reassured Isaac. “Just for the moment.”

Lucy could smell pungent firework smoke and the bullock pulling the cart. She saw the driver turn around at the sound of her voice. Sweat ran down the front of her gown and covered her face and she wiped herself, without thinking, with the hem of her skirt. The air rang with distant chanting and drumming and the clash of cymbals.

“At last, it's happening. At last,” she said.

The cart took them back through streets they had earlier walked, back past all the pools of illumination set forth for kings and goddesses, back past light after light after light after light. Lucy's eyes were wide and starry.

“Auspicious,” whispered Isaac, “highly auspicious.”

He had taken her sweaty hand and held it between his thighs.

Later she will move again beyond his reach, and enter the dilations and contractions of time and space itself. There was
a violence to birth; no-one had told her that. None of the women in the albumen factory had mentioned this strange battering sorrow, this engulfing sadness as the body at last expels what it has grown.

An English doctor had been summoned. From her bed Lucy could see him out of the corner of her eye, resting in Isaac's favourite armchair, smoking a cigar, which he waved like a conductor's baton as he spoke. The punkah fan swished in the air above his head, driven by the invisible pock-marked boy.

“We just have to wait,” the doctor told Isaac. He had a pencil moustache and a haughty manner, and Lucy disliked him immediately. She called for Bashanti, but for her pains was left alone. At some stage Isaac poked his head around the door. His face was flushed and anxious, his eyes enormous.

“We just have to wait,” he said nervously, echoing the doctor's words.

Then he disappeared.

Lucy began travelling. She flew again over the familiar shapes of the globe, noting landforms and waterways, naming oceans and mountain ranges and capital cities. This time she explored both North and South America, skimming along what she imagined was the route of the Amazon. Brazil, she remembered, was Thomas's own reverie, so she halted there awhile, thinking of her brother. The wind and the sun were in her face and she felt joyful and illimitable, swinging through space like that, like a woman of the future.

The night stilled and the oil lamps finally began to extinguish. A gentle wind from the ocean scattered the embers of dying bonfires in brief bright spurts. In the early hours of the morning Bombay was settling to sleep, subsiding into slow-motioned pyrotechnical dreams. When the baby was at last delivered Lucy didn't know where or when she was: as her dome collapsed the span of her planetary vision also collapsed,
and she felt as if she had entered a new, redeemed time and a new, close focus. Lucy saw her daughter lifted upside-down before her, the umbilical cord asway, the shape still partially unfurled. She was glazed with vernix and blood-smear and was a sign, a wonder. She was irrefutable, glistening, a kind of absolute light.

“It is not merely the likeness which is precious . . . but the association, and the sense of nearness involved in the thing . . . the fact of the
very shadow of the person
lying there fixed for ever!”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on the daguerreotype

THE DAY LUCY
and her daughter left India a thunderstorm rolled in across the harbour. There was a low smothering sky and a sense of cloudburst anticipation, and everything drooped under immense monsoonal humidity. Hibiscus flowers inclined like melancholy faces. Insects sounded mournful and full of complaint. The inanimate world was registering a kind of depression. In the house lay the additional weight of incommunicable feeling. Isaac was restless and unhappy; the servants fussed and kept entering and leaving rooms for no reason.

Early that morning Lucy had given everyone gifts. To each of the servants, a small prettily decorated envelope of money, and collectively a photograph she had taken months earlier. It was an image of all of them together, standing in full sunshine in the back garden, in front of their quarters. They were delighted at her gift and giggled and exclaimed, pointing at themselves and making amused jests. Later, more privately, Lucy gave Bashanti a gold bracelet she had seen her admire (and for which she had to borrow money from Isaac), and Asok a chess-set, carved in onyx and jade, (which had, to her surprise, been ridiculously cheap). Bashanti wept and Asok bowed. Lucy wanted to express gratitude for all they had given her, but was limited to a few phrases of child-level Gujarati. She salaamed
repeatedly, offering a gesture in the place of language. To Isaac Lucy gave a small brass Nataraj, found in the market. It was not rare, or expensive, or a collector's item, but seemed to her both the typical and singular symbol of their short time together. Isaac accepted the common object with grace and good humour. In return he gave Lucy a painted miniature, depicting the popular god Krishna and his consort Radha. Krishna was a blue-skinned lover in proud profile, standing outside in a garden, and Radha waited inside a kind of silky fringed tent, wearing a fine drifting garment which exposed her skin. Details were picked out in paisley-shapes of gold leaf, in the most exacting handiwork. On Radha's chest lay two iridescent blue wings: she had willed her heart to grow wings, Isaac explained, so that it could fly from the tent and see her lover. These were fashioned with real beetle wings, cut precisely to shape and carefully pasted in place. Lucy leaned her face to Radha's breast to double-check the substance of the wings.

“Bioluminescence?” Lucy had asked.

The eroticism of Isaac's gift surprised her. He had seemed so physically placid and inert she wondered, at one stage, whether he had any sexual experience at all. He had occasionally kissed her goodnight, but his touch had been, for the most part, occasional and hesitant. The image she held in her hands seemed freighted with the passion he wished to express.

Now she was on the ship, at the railing, and Bombay was shrinking in the distance. On the dock, she had watched Isaac battle to withhold his feelings, humiliated by his own emotional excess.

“The
Dutchman
effect,” he joked rather feebly.

He blew his nose loudly on a monogrammed handkerchief, and tried to recompose himself by tugging at his cuffs and turning his hat by the rim.