Garden of Dreams, page 27
‘What! When?’ He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
‘Never the same time, unfortunately. Tell us what he looks like, so we can be sure it is the same Mr Anton, exactly.’
He had no idea what his father looked like now. He drew from the memory of their last encounter, over a year ago. ‘As tall as you,’ he told the big sadhu, ‘and not quite so …’ He didn’t say it but outlined a belly curve with his hand. ‘Light brown hair and a light brown moustache and …’ He realised there was nothing to distinguish his father, really. Then added: ‘I look nothing like him.’
The sadhus were buzzing. ‘Yes, he is the one,’ said a smaller one, with thick brown dreads.
‘He comes here many times,’ said another.
‘Yes,’ said the big sadhu, ‘you wait here in the square and you will find him, it is most certain.’
But where would he come from? From which direction? His head was spinning as he looked at the strange silhouettes against the sky. Then he remembered.
‘My father told me he worked near the palace where they were all shot, the king and his family.’
‘Very terrible story,’ said the big sadhu, resting a large, gnarled hand on his shoulder and guiding him up the temple steps. ‘You wait here and watch. He will come from there, there where the palace lies. Wait and see.’
He could tell by the insipid smile on the big sadhu’s face and the others closing in that payment was expected. He gave them each ten rupees, and when they didn’t move, doubled it. To be rid of them. He was almost sure they were lying, but he wanted to believe them. He wanted to believe that his father would appear momentarily, or even in a few hours, walking through the square unaware that his son would be watching, waiting for him.
The sadhus trudged down the steps and wandered off, searching for other targets. Eli had no clue what time it was, but the sun was arcing toward the west. Hunger stabbed him in the gut, and he bought two bags of roasted peanuts when a little girl with a peaked knit cap came selling them. He threw some to the pigeons flapping around him and wondered how many peanuts he’d have to eat before his father would walk past. Or before he’d give up, at least for the day. He was so close now, and it seemed cruel, crazy, that he didn’t have a phone number, address or office name. He had nothing. All he had was word of mouth, and he’d just received the word from the mouths of holy men.
After several hours, the sun was slipping towards the skyline, and his father still hadn’t appeared. Eli was dizzy from watching the crowds flow back and forth, trying to single out someone, or even something, familiar. Sickened by the goats and buffaloes being dragged through the square to meet their maker, all in Durga’s name. Chilled by the autumn air and falling shadows.
He stood with a divided heart, wanting to stay, wanting to leave; he still needed to find a place to sleep. That awful moment, like a forked path, wondering which way to take, to remain or go. He might just miss his father if he left. But he walked down the steep temple steps, headed for the gate he’d entered through hours before.
From a long stretch of wooden shops people were selling everything – painted boxes, embroidered silk bags, scarves, books, pipes, shoes and much more inside, he was sure. He stopped at one shop with a postcard display outside, on a revolving metal rack. He pushed it round, it was old and crooked, the photos looked dated. Temples from the square; a child goddess; a Bengal tiger; many snow-capped mountains. When he stopped turning, the card in front of his eyes was a garden, deep green with an ornate white pavilion, a pond and a pair of stone elephants, mother and child. The image stirred his heart for a moment. He removed the postcard and flipped it over.
The Garden of Dreams was all it said.
He’d heard of it. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, where all his father’s words had drowned, it came floating to the surface like a dead person.
‘Where is this place?’ he asked the shopkeeper. Accepting the directions like a gift, he ran but wished he could fly.
He had to stop running because people were staring, as though he were a thief, fleeing. His heart drummed in his chest, his pulse quickened, he felt light-headed. But here it was, the main thoroughfare glutted with cars and rickshaws and Honda bikes, Kantipath. The road to the garden. Where his father came for tea, for peace, for sanity. We’ll go there one day, his father had told him.
At the intersection, across the street, he saw a high, old wall, once white, and an old mansion towering behind it, sheltered by tall trees he couldn’t name. ‘Ministry of Education’ said the sign on the wall at the entrance, where a guard in rumpled khakis, shouldering a rifle, strolled back and forth. He crossed the street and entered.
‘The garden?’ he asked the guard. Obviously it wasn’t.
‘Library,’ said the guard, inclining his head towards it.
He’d followed the shopkeeper’s directions, he didn’t understand. Perhaps inside, in the library in this weird old home, they’d redirect him.
Like other libraries, this one was musty and hushed inside; it looked an old, very rich uncle’s study, with Persian carpets, tall shuttered windows, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, overstuffed chairs and ancestral portraits on the walls. Except that the men in the paintings all wore turbans and carried swords. Not to mention the stuffed tiger at the far end of the room.
He walked down the central aisle, between the tables on either side, and didn’t dare to disturb the heads bowed over huge, antique volumes. By the time he reached the tiger, a well-dressed Nepali man in tweeds, scarf and shiny brogues, about his father’s build and age, had come through from the next room and stopped him.
‘May I help you?’ he whispered, smiling wrinkles on to his face, meticulously clean-shaven. A whiff of sickening cologne. ‘Do you need a guide?’
‘I’m looking for the garden.’
‘Ah, the dream garden,’ the man said, running a long, manicured finger over the dead tiger’s skull. ‘It’s just next door. But first you must visit this, once a royal palace.’
‘What is this? Besides a library …’ His voice sounded extremely loud. Several people looked up from their books.
‘Come,’ said the man, gesturing towards the room he’d just left. ‘I’ll show you the wonders here.’ He offered Eli a peppermint, which he refused.
‘I can’t – the garden …’
‘It will be closing, if it isn’t already closed. Are you a tourist?’ The man rested his hand on Eli’s shoulder. Eli twitched.
A tourist? He supposed he was, but the thought made him laugh. Here to see the sights, to photograph these people’s faces and children and homes and streets and temples and mountains, and to take it all home on a memory card. Back to life as you left it. If he still had his camera, he’d probably be doing the same. But life as you left it?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I do need a place to stay.’ Adding quickly, in case the man got the wrong idea, ‘A hotel.’
The man reached into the pocket of his grey tweed jacket and produced a card, with the all-seeing eye on it, a name and an address. Nirvana Guest House, Jyatha, Thamel. ‘Tell them I sent you …’
He didn’t want to know the man’s name, didn’t wait to hear it. He took the card but then turned swiftly and almost ran out the front door, down the steps and towards the guard at the gate, now sprawled in a wooden chair.
‘The Garden of Dreams, where is it?’ he asked ferociously. Better tell me this time.
The guard half-heartedly, vaguely, pointed for him to exit and walk around to the other side of the wall. Entrance there.
As dusk softened the city’s edges he raced around the high wall, running down another street and stopping at a door with a wrought-iron gate, still open. Eli walked through and saw a small ticket booth, the ticket seller nearly invisible behind the glass, but still there. Several metres to his right, through an archway and a tangle of vines, lay a flowering oasis that denied the city’s existence, though the sound of horns penetrated faintly through the trees. Two young lovers, oblivious to time and everyone else, embraced on the other side of the arch. He thought of Sanjana.
He pushed his money into the trough, but a hand shoved it back at him.
‘Garden closed,’ the ticket seller grumbled, snapping the trough shut, pulling down a shade and stepping outside. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
The man, too dour and taciturn for this enchanting place, guided him with thick hands away from there.
Outside the garden walls Eli stared longingly at the gate, just locked in his face. But the noise and crowds soon reminded him where he was. People were rushing home ahead of the dark, or rushing somewhere. Maybe to kill a few more animals. To say a few more prayers. He walked quickly in the direction of Thamel, in-between the garden and the square, to the west of Kantipath. Thamel? he asked a young passerby, barely stopping, just to be sure. He was headed in the right direction.
He knew he was there when the wares in all the shops changed to tourist merchandise, and overhead was a thicket of signs advertising cheap hotels and budget tours. And wires – wires everywhere, like black snakes hovering, ready to strike. Where did they all lead? Red, orange and blue neon signs lit up the streets like a giant pinball machine. Above him, on every street corner, were tall pink or red and black illuminated signs with young girls in sexy lingerie on them. The dance bar girls. Inviting you in. Teen Dance, many of them said. With shower.
He took the card the well-dressed man had given him and looked at it again. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to go there, if he should. The further he walked into this strange place, the more young men emerged from the shadows and asked him what he wanted. Girls? Drugs? Hotel? Fading back into oblivion when he ignored them.
Faster and faster, he just kept walking. In the distance he thought he heard the animals screaming and moaning again, the victims. A night of slaughter throughout the city, ongoing sacrifice. Through the forest of legs and feet moving with him, he could see the neon lights reflecting in the gutters, in liquid foul as sewage, and dark as blood.
Chapter 37
The last time he’d appeared on Channel Nepal he’d had a wife and a son. Not really ‘had’ them; it was at least eight years since they’d lived together, at least seemed a family. But now they were truly lost. As the young, sweet-scented assistant swabbed his face with make-up, Anton prayed that the interviewer, once the cameras were rolling, would stick to current affairs, ask nothing personal. Tell us about your missing wife and son. Nothing like that.
He followed the assistant past the small army of camera and sound people on to the stage, a modest wooden platform, and sat where she pointed, in one of three chairs. The lights in his face blinded, unnerved him; he felt tracked down and cornered. He focused on why he was here: to report on reintegrating the Maoist soldiers into the country’s army, into society as a whole. Particularly the children. He was here to give the people hope that yes, your children raised and fed on war shall be healed.
The show’s host, a young ex-Oxford chap in a dark suit who’d interviewed him before, came onstage and shook his hand. No pleasantries, thank God. They both turned stage left as the other guest entered, a petite Nepali woman in a plain brown sari, her greying hair upswept in a bun, her stern, worn face lifted by a slight smile. Abhaya Khanal, she was famous. She and her NGO had rescued more than twelve thousand trafficked girls, from India or at the border.
Abhaya settled into her chair as the cameras homed in on the host, smiling cheerfully as he introduced them and droning on about the country’s sorry state of affairs, its damaged and missing youth.
‘Let us start with you, Dr de Villiers,’ the host’s voice rang out. ‘Tell us how you are saving the children of Nepal.’
‘“Rehabilitate” is probably a better word than “save”,’ he heard himself saying. Too formal, arrogant, even, but it was the only script he knew. ‘Of the twenty thousand or so ex-combatants, i.e. ex-Maoist soldiers, roughly three thousand are children under the age of eighteen. We’re working with a number of local NGOs, and the government, to identify former child soldiers and help them move back into their lives before the war.’
‘The child soldiers,’ the host paused for effect and looked straight at the camera, ‘have you found all of them?’
‘We’re still looking,’ he said, not sure what to say after that. Into the silence swam dozens of images and thoughts, from here, from out there. They are still missing. The boy and girl soldiers, the sold children, my wife, my son. The Missing, like the tens of thousands lost in Argentina, Los Desaparecidos.
‘Dr de Villiers?’ The host’s voice brought him back.
‘Yes, we’re still looking. The Maoists are cooperating with plans to return child soldiers to their villages, as they have handed in their weapons, all part of the peace agreement.’ He recalled Storm and his troops, still marching in the jungle. ‘For the most part.’
‘But what happens to these children when they go back to their villages, heh?’ The host was looking at Abhaya now, not him. Which answers to give, the ready answers or the real ones?
‘These children are at risk, like so many others in the villages,’ Abhaya said, leaning forward and balancing on the edge of her chair, urgently. ‘The community often ostracises them, doesn’t accept them back. Which makes them highly vulnerable to trafficking – if their own families don’t want them.’ Abhaya fixed her gaze on him. ‘Have you witnessed this, Dr de Villiers?’
He heard himself say ‘yes’, and then the woman took over, protecting his reputation, delivering the line. Covering for him. Yes, we’ve received reports that ex-child combatants have in some cases been channelled into trafficking, we’re investigating, nothing solid yet …
‘We go to the border and intercept them, if we’re lucky …’ Abhaya was saying, of the girls she rescued. He imagined hordes of people searching for the lost, or the about-to-be-lost – because once they crossed the border into India they were gone. His boy was headed in the other direction, he was sure; perhaps he should have stayed longer in the jungle, kept searching as far south as the border, waited indefinitely.
But he hadn’t, he’d come back to Kathmandu, where life had taunted him further. Last night he’d heard from a colleague just back from holiday in Kerala about a crazy American woman gaining quite a reputation on Kovalam Beach. Drugs, mostly, even some pornography. Been a fixture at Kovalam, apparently, since late July. The timing was right. He both wanted it to be Margo, and prayed that it wasn’t.
‘Trafficking is not going away, as long as there is demand, and as long as our governments and police have a hand in it …’ Abhaya continued. ‘We can save only so many …’
Save, what a misleading word. Save from what? Save children from war, only so they could live another kind of violence, the violence of poverty, the violation of trafficking and being sold for sex? All the peace accords he’d helped deliver, including Nepal’s, were palliative, not curative – they could never eliminate the violence, only ease the pain slightly until a worse disease, a sharper pain, set in.
He’d sacrificed his wife and child, for this.
‘Dr de Villiers?’ It was the host’s voice again. ‘Tell us how you see our children’s future …’
After his first sound sleep in days, Eli went downstairs to the common room at the Nirvana to find another guest, a hippie with long, greasy brown hair, dressed in just a pair of ripped jeans and smoking a joint, on the floor in front of the large flat-screen television. His eyes were fixed firmly on the screen, his face registering disbelief and disgust.
It looked like a talk show, with some old Nepali lady speaking about children and rescuing them and blah-blah-blah. Eli couldn’t understand her accent that well. He wondered if he had missed breakfast, and what they were offering.
‘Bloody wankers,’ the hippie said, toking on the joint. ‘They think they can save the world. Take a look at this other bloke, ’e’s useless.’
‘Him?’ A young Nepali man in a dark suit had appeared on the screen, nodding and smiling.
‘No, not ’im, ’e’s the presenter. Also a wanker. No, give us a minute, this other bloke, wait, wait – ’ere ’e comes.’
The camera switched back to the woman. The hippie took another toke.
‘There, that’s ’im! Spouting all this crap about peacemaking and reintegration etcetera etcetera. Like anyone believes a word of it. Where’s that bloke from, anyway? Bloody weird accent.’
The man in the chair on the screen looked older than Eli remembered, but besides that, there was no doubt. The voice was the same, ringing true as though he had heard it yesterday, not months ago through a crackling phone. Some people said his father should have been an actor, with that voice. Maybe he had become one.
‘You know that bloke?’
The hippie’s question rattled him. ‘No, why?’
‘The way you’re staring at him …’
‘No, just listening to all the crap he’s saying. Like you said.’
‘What a lot of bollocks … hey, man, where you going?’
Eli had stood and was rushing out of the room. ‘Breakfast!’ was all he could think to say.
He described the talk show to the girl at reception, Nepal Now it was called, and she told him, roughly, the directions to the broadcast station, a few kilometres away. He had no clue if his father would be there, if the show was live or had been recorded weeks ago, but, in the clogged street outside, already humming with tourists and locals, he found a taxi.
It might have been faster to walk, with the Dashain festivities and everyone on the streets, animals as well as people. The taxi dropped him off next to a vast, fenced parade ground where dozens of men in military dress were firing rifles and waving banners, all to the harsh, dissonant sounds of a little brass band. There were puddles of blood everywhere, and in one spot the carcass of a buffalo just felled.
The station was just a few minutes’ walk away, but girded with high wire fencing, guarded by a kiosk and boom at the entrance. A man dressed in military fatigues emerged from the kiosk to bar his way.
