The Mission House, page 4
The old man watched his nephew go stalking off.
In his whole life Jamshed had never left the town, had never left the hills to go down to the plains. Not in a car, not in a bus, and certainly not on a horse. Not by the slow blue train either, though every day since he was twenty-five years old he had awaited its arrival in the hope that one of its passengers would choose him to drive them to their hotel, or to one of the town’s famous attractions, or better still, to take them on a day-long tour of the sights and visit a few shops.
He had forty-two of the graph-paper exercise books: his current one, and one for each of the last forty-one years of his sixty-two-year-old life. Some were blue and some were green and others were a dusky pink, and in them he’d recorded the big things and the little things; all the events of his days.
He’d recorded how, as a young man, he’d worked as a labourer – felled eucalyptus trees and chopped them into scaffolding and lashed them together and scurried around with wheelbarrows full of gravel and lime, lifted and shovelled until his hands bled, and coughed and blinked with his eyes smarting and tears running down his dusty cheeks.
He’d recorded how, in the evenings in those days, he’d go for a smoke on the uprooted backseat of an Ambassador taxi which lay amongst the mechanical debris of the overflowing courtyard in the repair garage of the Bharat Petroleum Station where his friend Prem spent his life lying on his back or hunched over his own stomach, delving into the broken innards of buses and other people’s cars. He’d recorded how Prem, who’d spent four years in English medium school, helped him learn English.
He’d recorded the death of his mother.
The marriage of his brother, Bipin.
The birth of his nephew, Ravi.
The death of his father.
He’d recorded the departure of Prem to Kerala.
The death in a car wreck of his brother, Bipin – Ravi’s father – and Bipin’s wife, Deesha, Ravi’s mother. Ravi going to live with Deesha’s sister.
He’d recorded what he’d told his nephew, not once, but many times over the years: that life was hard and full of unexpected calamities, and that all religions were only designed to ease its pain. They were all nonsense, he’d told his nephew again and again, and they were all the same, none of them was any better than any other. They’d all been dragged by people through time, and Ravi was better off without any of them. Better off relying on nothing and no one, better off remembering that he had only one life, this life, and that there was nothing beyond him or outside him. On many different pages, he’d recorded how his nephew seemed to have taken all this to heart, only to become fixated on the notion that he could one day turn himself into a famous Country and Western singer.
Jamshed picked up one of the oldest and most faded of his graph-paper journals and began to read. He read how one evening he’d been sitting on the broken springs of the seat of the Ambassador taxi in the chilly forecourt of the Bharat Petroleum Station, having a smoke with Prem, when the miserable remains of a crashed auto rickshaw had arrived in a cart drawn by a young brown horse and how, for less than the price of a new pair of shoes, he’d bought it.
It was a fine thing, an auto rickshaw.
Nimble and light and shaped like a steam iron to work into the smallest and least friendly of spaces on a busy road. And so many people, all the time, in need of one – the do-gooders from Europe and Scandinavia and North America and Australia who came to volunteer at St Mary’s Catholic orphanage and St Peter’s Protestant church and the Women Workers’ Co-operative; the tourists from everywhere who arrived on the slow blue train, wanting to visit the Botanical Gardens or buy chocolate at the famous King Star Chocolate Shop or have lunch at the Savoy Hotel. And on top of the do-gooders and the tourists there was everyone else – people going to the market, schoolchildren who needed to be ferried to and from school. It was a good place for such a vehicle. He would not have to break his back with a wheelbarrow, his eyes would not sting from the lime, his hands would not bleed from scraping gravel off the ground onto his shovel.
It was all written down on the last graph-paper page in his third book: how Prem helped him take apart all the separate pieces of the vehicle’s body that were not already detached from each other, and hammer them out, and patch them. Inside, the engine was small and black like a tiny shrunken heart. It took days to get it going – every time Prem thought he had it, it sputtered to life only to cough and die with a single puff of dirty smoke. ‘Try again,’ said Jamshed, late one night when they’d been working on it since dawn, ‘one last time,’ and Prem tried, and the thing breathed and came to life at last. From the market Jamshed bought two pieces of new blue tarpaulin to hang over each side of the open cab to keep out the weather. He attached a green rubber horn he could reach from the driver’s seat. He had no idea how to drive but he was sure he would master it, and he’d been certain then, that it would be the beginning of something.
Jamshed closed the old journal and replaced it near the bottom of the pile beneath the others.
He could hardly believe in the coming of Mr Byrd, who since his fall had insisted he would use no other driver. The younger drivers had been envious at first, but their envy had now turned to mirth. They did imitations of Mr Byrd, of his thin height and the way he walked with his nose in the air – Siva on the shoulders of Manoj, Prabhu scuttling in their wake calling, Sir, please! Botanical Gardens! Lake! Chocolate Shop!
Well, he didn’t care.
‘Stupid boys,’ he called to them.
15
Byrd had never been to sea, but in three short weeks he’d come to love his bungalow in the presbytery garden the same way he thought a sailor must love his ship. The way the five small rooms all fitted neatly together. The tidy order of everything. The stowing away of his supplies in the orange plastic vegetable stand and the green f ridge and on the paper-covered shelves. The arrangement of his books on the windowsills. The feeling of calm he had in the evenings when he came back after a day driving around with the old man, when he’d had dinner with the Padre, or had made himself supper and eaten it and was sitting with a book in the Carter’s Nest For Rest, reading, or looking out through the windows over the tops of the trees at the edge of the presbytery garden, towards the tea-covered hills above the town. The mist and the clouds and the rain. High up here by himself, on the slope of this other hill, it was like being in an ark that had come to rest, happily, in this precise spot.
He still had some bad days.
They arrived without warning and he could not get up. Days when he stayed in the three-quarter bed and it seemed impossible that the things that had given him pleasure only yesterday could do so today.
On these days he didn’t go down to the concrete steps where the old man, Jamshed, waited for him. He didn’t go outside into the presbytery garden or take a stroll up and down the driveway. In the evenings he boiled some rice and mixed in a packet of biryani paste and ate it and went back to bed and hoped for sleep.
On other days when he felt low, but not defeated, he ventured out as usual in the old man’s auto, touring the town and talking to him as they drove, and for the most part, he was OK. Most days, in fact, Hilary Byrd felt remarkably cheerful and excited and generally up.
It seemed a long time now since he’d arrived; an age since his chance encounter with the Padre on the mountain train; an eternity since his first morning when he’d sat at his table eating the bun he’d bought in Modern Stores (which had turned out, to his surprise, to be pineapple, not banana).
Under the white eaves of the dark red post office, he posted a package to Wyn: a pound of cashew nuts and a packet of local tea, a small bottle of eucalyptus oil, and a letter which he knew would be superseded by his emails, but which he included because it seemed wrong to send a parcel without a letter. She’d been so against him coming, the whole idea of him travelling by himself.
He was much better, he’d written.
And – wait for it, Wyn – I have been clothes shopping.
Yes, I know. Me, clothes shopping!
He explained how when he arrived in the hills he’d been wearing all the wrong things – how ridiculous he’d felt, as well as very cold, stepping off the train in his shorts and his short-sleeved travelling shirt, his Panama hat. Suddenly the lightweight wardrobe that had actually oppressed him down on the plains, sticking to his skin like a heavy and uncomfortable shroud, had been ludicrously insubstantial. Down on the plains he’d looked with longing at the men in their breezy sarongs – what his guidebook called their lungis. Folding and unfolding them around their legs through the day. But in the mountains, he’d stood on the station platform shivering in his inadequate clothes. The most foolish thing of all was his hat. He’d been torn between keeping it on as a barrier against the drizzle and squashing it into his suitcase. In the end he’d carried it.
Since then the old man, Jamshed, had driven him to a number of different shops where he’d bought a pair of long trousers, two long-sleeved shirts, five pairs of socks, a new pair of sturdy sandals, a waterproof jacket, and a fleece hat. He was warm and well-dressed and properly defended against the weather.
Don’t worry about me, Wyn, he’d written, I’m fine, I really am.
At the bank, next to the post office, he changed a little more money, and then he went to the library, because he’d made up his mind to educate himself about the place, about the town and its history and how it had come to be what it was. It would be interesting, he thought, to unpick everything that was familiar about it from everything that wasn’t. Everything that made him feel as if he could be in Sussex, say, or Kent, from everything that made him feel he was somewhere completely incomprehensible and foreign and strange.
In the reading room he found what seemed to be a suitable book and settled himself into one of the wing-backed chairs. The only sounds were the dry rustling every few minutes of his fingers turning the pages, the ticking of the timbers somewhere in the wall or in the roof space. This, he almost wanted to shout, is what a library should be like! A silent sanctuary, a place of quiet repose and reading and peaceful contemplation and learning! Not the tapping of keyboards and the singing of babies and the hysterical shouting of the drunk and the angry, not the loud show-offy inquiries of the family history folk. Not a place where even the other librarians were noisy. Not a place where, when you told a young woman in a floral dress to please stop zipping and unzipping her backpack she kicked a hole in the counter and told you to go fuck yourself. Not a place where, when you asked an elderly man in an Aran sweater and tweed trousers to please make notes on a pad of paper instead of speaking into a tape recorder, you were called a bald cunt. No. It was none of those things. It was a place to feel calm and cocooned and happy and faraway f rom the clamour of the world.
His hands had begun to shake. His heart was beating very fast. ‘Stop,’ he told himself. ‘Don’t.’ He took a few deep breaths. Slowly his heart settled and his hands grew still. ‘There,’ he said softly. ‘Good.’
On the opposite wall, beneath the eaves, a collection of mounted hunting trophies hung above the bookcases: a bear and a leopard, a buffalo with one glass eye missing. Lower down, newspapers were suspended from polished wooden poles, some of them in English, some of them covered in the strange hieroglyphics of languages he couldn’t identify or understand but supposed must be Tamil or Hindi, or both. He moved towards them and stood scanning the headlines he could read and those he couldn’t. man mistaken for pig killed, he read.
He went back to his book, read, sank deeper in his chair, slept.
16
With the mattock the Padre used in the garden, Priscilla prised open the bungalow’s bedroom window and climbed in. Everything smelled damp because Mr Hilary Byrd had closed all the windows. On the dresser, the brim of his straw hat was floppy with moisture. She put it on and studied herself in the mirror.
She’d never seen him wear it, not even the day he arrived, when she’d returned from town to see him approaching the presbytery along the driveway, tugging his big wheeled suitcase through the puddles – his thin knee-shorts fluttering in the breeze, the hat hanging from his hand, limp and pale. It had struck her then, that very first day, how like a mop he looked: his skinny legs, white as flour and shockingly exposed; his tall body and the pieces of thin, fluffy hair wafting about in the air above his head.
She made her rolling, lopsided way through the small interconnected rooms of the bungalow: out of the bedroom and through the bathroom with its big pink bucket full of Mr Hilary Byrd’s washing that he’d put to soak, into the little kitchen with its neat paper-covered shelves and curious assortment of groceries – the porridge and the jam, the Nescafé, the many packets of biryani paste, the silver bags of chocolate. A pan sat on the rear burner of the stove.
She turned into his sitting room. In the corner the green fridge hummed, a twig popped in the grate though there were no flames.
She sat down in the big comfortable chair in front of the still-warm fire and closed her eyes.
She remembered grasses and thorns and soft pungent wrappings and looking out through a sunlit gap and seeing people walking beside the lake.
It had been her whole world, being in the grasses and the thorns and the wrappings, and looking out through the gap and waiting for food to come. What it signified, everything she could see beyond the gap, she’d had no idea; was it the same world as hers, or a different one?
She’d seen the woman before, walking with the girls along the lake: the tall woman who’d reached in one day and brought her out. The tall woman who was Aunty. Who’d worn a blue sari and a white cardigan that day; Priscilla will never forget it. The soft cardigan, the rustle of the long sari against the grasses and reeds at the edge of the lake. Later, Aunty would tell her that she’d heard the sound of a child; that, like Pharoah’s daughter by the bull rushes, she’d seen something hidden in the greenery.
Aunty said the other person who was with Priscilla sometimes in the grasses and thorns, who came and went and brought food, and arranged the wrappings around Priscilla when she left, was likely her mother. That the wrappings had been to hide her, to keep her safe till her mother returned f rom her business.
‘Mine?’ Priscilla had asked, wonderingly. ‘My mother?’
Aunty had nodded. They’d looked for her, she said. Some of the older girls had stayed close to the hiding place by the lake and waited for her to return but she didn’t come. They’d gone back many times and so had Aunty but she never came. Aunty said they thought that Priscilla’s mother was likely a Toda woman, and that she had hidden her while she went off to work. Priscilla, though not tall, had a Toda look about her, said Aunty.
‘What work?’ Priscilla had asked, but Aunty didn’t say. She told Priscilla her mother was a poor woman who likely did what no one should have to do.
Priscilla went back into the kitchen. She ate a spoonful of Hilary Byrd’s jam and a square of his chocolate. She read the headlines of the newspapers the Padre had used to line his shelves, some of them new and some of them old – one about the repairs to the east stand at the old racecourse, one about the appointment of a new buildings supervisor from Perth, Australia, at the expensive boarding school in town, and one about the smashing of the oil lamps and some statues on the altar of the Chapel of the Sisters of St Clare in Karnataka.
She walked through into the bedroom where, hanging still f rom the hook on the back of the door, were the clothes the missionary, Mr Henry Page, had left behind: his dark brown trousers, his red and blue plaid shirt, his hat with the bobble. Above the bed was the embroidered placard which said, I will be your Shield, your High Tower, the Horn of your Salvation.
Well.
Still wearing Mr Hilary Byrd’s straw hat, she studied herself one last time in the mirror before she took it off and set it down on the dresser where she’d found it. Then she slipped out through the open window, and went back to the presbytery.
17
It had been terrible, trying to talk to Kerrigan in his little ointment-coloured surgery next door, and it was always Kerrigan, somehow, he’d ended up seeing.
Even though their neighbour’s practice had expanded over the years – even though Wyn had asked more than once if one of the younger doctors could see her brother this time – it was always Kerrigan who was sitting there with his back to the dark, pink-painted walls when they walked in; Kerrigan asking him to describe his feelings. Perhaps the old doctor thought it was a kindness, but the sight of him, that last time, sitting behind his desk and looking out expectantly f rom behind his wire-f ramed glasses, had made Byrd cry. How was it even possible, he’d asked Wyn afterwards through his tears, that Kerrigan was still there after all these years? How old was he? Eighty? A hundred?
Every illness, every setback, in Byrd’s life had been investigated beneath the chill circle of Kerrigan’s stethoscope moving across his chest, and by the little light which for almost half a century their doctor-neighbour had shone in his eyes and his ears every time he’d ever gone in there. Every prescription that had ever come had arrived across Kerrigan’s desk in Kerrigan’s unchanging blue-black handwriting and Byrd could not bear, any more, to look at it. The familiar backwards slope of the large, boldly formed letters felt to Byrd like a part of everything that was wrong. Looking across Kerrigan’s desk at Kerrigan, at Kerrigan’s mouth opening and closing, and hearing himself being asked to describe his feelings, he couldn’t speak. Wyn had taken him over there a dozen times this past year, and in the end, like his Aunt Peggy, he’d refused to go again.
But something about the old auto rickshaw driver’s hunched shoulders and occasional brief, softly spoken replies, was soothing, and made him want to talk. Perhaps it helped that he was always speaking to the back of the old man’s head as they were driving around – perhaps that made everything easier, he wasn’t sure.
In the mornings now, his habits were regular as clockwork. By eight he was up and about and moving around his bungalow, boiling water for a shave and tea. He had not repeated the experience of the sticky pineapple bun for his breakfast: every day since that first one, he’d carried a bowl of porridge to his desk in the long verandah room and eaten it looking out across the presbytery garden and over the tops of the trees, to the hills and the mist on the opposite side of the town. Then he went round checking that all the windows were closed, and at nine, he let himself out through the bungalow’s front door and locked it, made his way along the red earth driveway to the road and down the broad concrete steps past the women in the field there, and by 9.15 he was at the bottom of the hill where Jamshed and his yellow auto awaited him.
