The Artist of Disappearance (11 page)

Outdoors was freedom. Outdoors was the life to which he chose to belong—the life of the crickets springing out of the grass, the birds wheeling hundreds of feet below in the valley or soaring upwards above the mountains, and the animals invisible in the undergrowth, giving themselves away by an occasional rustle or eruption of cries or flurried calls; plants following their own green compulsions and purposes, almost imperceptibly, and the rocks and stones, seemingly inert but mysteriously part of the constant change and movement of the earth. One had only to be silent, aware, observe and perceive—and this was Ravi's one talent as far as anyone could see.

Outdoors, Ravi had watched as a snake shed itself of its old skin, emerging into a slithering new length, leaving behind on the path a shroud, transparent as gauze, fragile as glass. Once he had come upon a tree with long, cream-coloured cylinders for flowers, attracting armies of ants coming to raid their fabled sweetness and sap, armies that would not be deflected by the intervention of a stick, a twig, and would persist till they reached the treasure, and drowned.

Outdoors, the spiders spun their webs in tall grass, a spinning you would not observe unless you became soundless, motionless, almost breathless and invisible, as when he had seen a praying mantis on a leaf exactly the same shade of green as itself, holding in its careful claws a round, striped bee buzzing even as it was devoured, which halted when its eyes swivelled towards him and became aware it was being watched.

And there was always the unexpected—lifting a flat stone and finding underneath an unsuspected scorpion immediately aroused and prepared for attack, or coming across an eruption from the tobacco-dark leaf mould of a family of mushrooms with their ghostly pallor and caps, hats and bonnets, like refugees that had arrived in the night.

Or a troop of silver-haired, black-masked monkeys bounding through the trees to arrive with war whoops, or sporting like trapeze artists at a circus, then disappearing like actors from a stage that the forest provided.

And everywhere were the stones—flat blue splinters of slate, pebbles worn to an irresistible silkiness by the weather and that could be collected and arranged according to size and colour in an infinite number of patterns and designs, none of which were ever repeated or fixed.

Infinite—unless you were like Bhola who always brought with him a catapult and almost automatically raised it whenever he saw a dove or a squirrel that could be brought down with a shot. Ravi was not for such sport; a heap of dead feathers or fur were for him as unnatural as for the slain creature. Ravi was interested only in the variations and mutations of the living, their innumerable possibilities.

 

It was as if the curtains came down on all this, if not entirely obliterated it, when the monsoon rose up in thunderous clouds from the parched valley below to engulf the hills, invade them with an opaque mist in which a pine tree or a mountain top appeared only intermittently, and then unleashed a downpour that brought Ravi's rambling to a halt and confined him to the house for days at a time, deafened by the rain drumming on the rooftop and cascading down the gutters and through the spouts to rush downhill in torrents.

Everything in the house turned damp; the blue fur of mildew crept furtively over any object left standing for the briefest length of time: shoes, bags, boxes, it consumed them all. The sheets on the bed were clammy when he got between them at night, and the darkness rang with the strident cacophony of the big tree crickets that had been waiting for this, their season. From the pond down in the clearing below came the gleeful bellowing of bullfrogs. Lying awake, listening, Ravi wished he could slip out with Hari Singh's big flashlight and catch them in its beam, but perhaps the gleam emitted by the fireflies flitting among the trees by the thousands would be light enough. He shivered with cold and anticipation.

But Hari Singh locked him in carefully every night, and by day filled his ears with tales of the leopards that came out of the forest to prey on any poor goat or calf left outdoors and were known to carry away even the fierce bhutia dogs people kept to guard their homes and livestock. What chance had a small, thin boy like Ravi against such creatures? Hari Singh demanded as he served Ravi his dinner at one end of the dining table, standing by with a dishcloth over his shoulder. While Ravi picked at his food, Hari Singh talked of his glory days when Ravi's grandfather had taken him on hunting expeditions and allowed him to carry the guns with which he shot the bears, deer and panthers whose pelts, horns and glass-eyed heads watched Ravi make his way through his meal. Of course the boy ate very little, his mouth hanging open with wonder as he listened, and consequently Hari Singh gave up setting a place at the table with the requisite glass and silverware, and took to letting Ravi eat his meals at a small table out on the veranda where he would not be separated from the outdoor world that provided all the nourishment he wanted. When it rained he gave Ravi his food on a plate and set him on a stool in a corner of the kitchen by the sooty glow of the kitchen fire while he himself smoked a biri which he was strictly forbidden to do when the parents were present.

The only visitor to the house during the long summers when the parents were away was the teacher they had employed to supervise Ravi's homework, a Mr Benjamin who taught at one of the many boarding schools strung out along the ridge, and supplemented his income by giving private tuition on the side. The parents approved of him because he always wore a suit and tie and spoke in what approximated to 'good English', so they did not look too far into his qualifications for teaching their son mathematics whose strong subject it was not (nor was it Mr Benjamin's). Ravi wished the subject might be something else—ornithology, for instance, or geology, but Mr Benjamin regarded himself as far above such frivolous matters. He cleared his throat on arriving, hung up his walking stick and umbrella, scraped his shoes ferociously on the doormat to dislodge the dirt they had collected on the way to the house on the hilltop, wondering aloud what had possessed Ravi's parents to live so far from the civilised centre of Mussoorie (though he knew perfectly well that Ravi's father had inherited the house from
his
father who had owned a brewery in these parts and used to come up from Bombay ostensibly to inspect the brewery but actually for the shikar and its trophies). Then Mr Benjamin would tell Ravi to open his books and get to work.

As the afternoon dragged sluggishly on, Ravi drooped lower and lower over the smudged and spotted copybook, chewing at his pencil till it splintered and had to be spat out, for which he received a smart whack on the head from Mr Benjamin's ruler. He could hear Hari Singh's children playing in the clearing below, their rooster crowing, their goats bleating, and he grew despondently aware of the afternoon light dying all the while.

But Mr Benjamin stayed till punctually at four o'clock Hari Singh brought him a cup of hot tea frothing with milk and thick with sugar. Ah-h, the tutor sighed, and let slip his professional manner enough to pour out a bit from the cup into the saucer and blow on it, then slurp it up blissfully. Ah-h, ah-h. It was not what he would do in front of his employers but of course Ravi was not that and all Ravi was thinking was that Hari Singh needed somehow to be persuaded to bring in the tea earlier. When Mr Benjamin came reluctantly to the end of this sweet pleasure, he gave Ravi a few more taps of the ruler to remind him he was only a miserable schoolboy and ought to be attending to his schoolwork instead of staring at him open-mouthed, then picked up his walking stick and umbrella and disappeared into the floating mists of the monsoon.

 

Why did his parents never take him with them when they travelled abroad? The boy never asked and they never explained. It seemed they believed the child belonged at home while they belonged to the wider world where of course they would not have the time for him (or a servant to see to his needs). One day, they said, he would be old enough to accompany them and it occurred to no one that there was no reason he could not accompany them now. (What was not said, never even mentioned, was that they were a childless couple, Ravi the child they had adopted—at the suggestion of a distant, philanthropic aunt—yet as far as anyone could see, they never made up a family.) And of course, in a way, their absence
was
his vacation, which came to an end when the parents returned.

Their return coincided with the beginning of the school year—the taking out and putting on of grey flannels and crimson blazer with a crest on the pocket proclaiming a Latin aspiration no one understood, the knotting of a noose-like tie under the shirt collar; each day a slower and more reluctant walk uphill to the prison of the school buildings grouped around a courtyard from which rose a roar that bubbled fiercely as a kettle on the boil till a gong was struck and the kettle was abruptly lifted off the fire. Rows of boys filed off to the regime of lessons administered by furious teachers who threw chalk at one or twisted another's ear, picking on the most miserable targets to punish in inventive and fiendish ways. This was considered the only way in which the Latin motto that no one understood might be upheld.

After that treatment—and Ravi was too ashamed to tell anyone or even admit to himself that he was the inquisitors' favourite target—he could not turn light-heartedly to the escapades of his fellow victims who lingered around the school gates after classes to watch the girls in their pleated skirts and green sweaters come out of the adjoining school, and attempt to lure them, sometimes, sometimes successfully, with the promise of an ice cream at Magnolia's or a film show at the Picture Palace. Ravi was too crushed by the school day to take the risk of any other failure, and heaved his school bag onto his back to slink home with the hope of going unnoticed—which he mostly was.

To be released from school meant only being released into the house where the parents now presided. If they did not use a ruler to crack across his head, or throw things at him in a rage, they had other ways to plunge their son into misery. The house, in their presence, had a set of rigid rules. The bell rang at intervals, punctually (punctuality being one cardinal mark of their Westernised ways), table manners had to be observed meticulously (another of those cardinal marks of which they possessed an arsenal), each infraction was pounced on and corrected (spare the rod etc. was the maxim by which they had been raised so they thought of themselves as permissive), and great lengths of time went by at the table as soup was followed by an entrée which was followed by a pudding which was followed by a savoury, some with enticing names—'angels on horseback'!—which they never lived up to.

And then there was the entertaining they did which required his complete invisibility and silence while the parents played bridge and canasta and drank tea or cocktails. There was a certain pleasure to be had in hiding in the kitchen and watching Hari Singh arrange a tea tray or whip egg whites for a pudding and being slipped a sweet or a savoury titbit—but there were also the hours he had to sit more or less confined to a chair, swinging his legs till his own supper and bedtime could be seen to, also by Hari Singh.

It was better when his parents dressed up, sprayed themselves with exotic Parisian perfumes, got into their car and went out—but this did not happen nearly often enough for Ravi because his parents went abroad during what was known as 'the season' in Mussoorie, when British society came up to the hills to 'escape' from 'the plains' and brought their plays, balls, charades and garden parties with them.

Ravi's father sometimes said, wistfully, 'Why don't we spend the summer here for once, Tehmi? It's very jolly, I'm told,' but Tehmi had been brought up—in Bombay and at finishing school in Switzerland—to think summers had to be spent in Nice or Montreux where many of her family were now ensconced. Sometimes the father went on to complain, 'It's a damned expense, you know, Tehmi,' which made her screw her face into an expression of distaste at the mention of anything so unmentionable.

Fortunately for him, the father, these excursions were brought to an end when war broke out. Although the family liquor business flourished as never before, it was out of the question to risk a sea voyage when ships were being regularly torpedoed. And Mussoorie had never been as gay as now, nor its salubrious climate so needed for the health and recreation of the British soldiers on leave from the war fronts in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, and it was incumbent on the ladies of Mussoorie to provide them with the fun and relaxation that was their due.

The father was finally able to enjoy their exile in Mussoorie in what had been his father's 'hunting lodge' (once his brothers and uncles had discovered the disasters he could create in their business and the need to keep him away). He could now go to dances at Hackman's every night he liked, in his evening clothes with a silk scarf thrown over his shoulders and the astrakhan cap he had purchased in Berlin set rakishly on his head gleaming with pomade. He literally danced his way through one pair of shiny patent leather shoes after another. He would come home with a breath as fierce as a dragon's and putrid as a tiger's, singing his way to bed, and Ravi in the room next door cowered under his blankets to shut out the horror of it.

It was his mother who wilted in these years. She went with her husband to the parties and dances but it was clearly not her milieu and not her style. She set out, as exquisitely dressed as always, but drawing her light summer shawl about her as if she needed its protection, and with an expression on her face not radiant or expectant but rather as if she was about to swallow an unpleasant potion. She would not dance with the English officers and watched from among a group of likewise scandalised but dutiful wives, as her Hosni went blithely up to the English WAAFs and invited them to dance. Most of them were amused by this little man who did not seem to understand his place, and many accepted: he was an excellent dancer if a bit of a show-off.