Guardian of the Dawn, page 2
No, I thought, in the voice of the child I’d been. Even though I am not what I was, there’s still too much glue on my soul for it to leave me so easily.
Two guards hunted on all fours for the beads – men turned to groveling boars by the incantation of my contempt. For no reason I could think of I began to paint the stripes of a tiger on my face with blood from my wrists. Later I remembered Wadi’s nickname for me and thought: Yes, I need to become another kind of being, someone ferocious, for if I don’t, I shall name others and sentence them to my fate.
It was my father who had told me that our Dominican and Jesuit masters craved the identities of all those who were like us. Sooner or later, the priests would try to torture the names from me.
I drifted into a feverish slumber. My memories were needles, and all my past was prickly and poisoned – a childhood twisted and finally deadened by fate.
The next morning, just after the bells of prime, guards brought an old, cinnamon-complexioned man with bristling white hair into my cell, undoubtedly hoping that his companionship would keep me from reopening my wounds; the Church would not easily give up the pleasure of deciding how and when I’d be murdered.
The old man’s feet were crabs of crusted skin. I turned away; compassion comes through the eyes and I did not want him to know I could still feel such a useless emotion.
He crumpled to the ground when my usual guard – a dimwitted Lisboner with the dull green eyes and fetid breath of a man always sneaking a drink – pulled away his hands from under his shoulders. The prisoner’s head fell back at a cockeyed angle and his eyes closed.
O Analfabeto, the Illiterate, as I called my guard, told me that my guest was a Jain accused of sorcery. Torturers had coated his feet with coconut oil and roasted them like meat.
The old man’s metallic black eyes opened for a moment and he looked at me as though we shared a damning secret. What it was, I had no idea. Maybe he was only hoping I would be kind to him in his misery.
Striding out of our cell triumphantly, the Illiterate slammed our inner door closed and kneeled down, so that his bulbous face was sectioned by the grille. He showed me a wry smile. “They used coals,” he said. “Coals burn much hotter than wood.”
Even fire works on their behalf, I thought.
Once the guard had gone, I soaked my shirt in my water jar. I draped it over the Jain’s feet, which were hot to my touch. Likely, his very dreams were ablaze. He would never again walk without assistance.
In the night, his breathing was like sand falling into my hands. I slept fitfully. Time panted beside me in my nightmares and became a cyclops with crusted blood on his lips – like my father the last time I’d seen him. He tore the wings off a parrot and pressed the bird’s mangled flesh into my hands. I carried it gently, as though it were my own dead child. I pictured Tejal in labor, calling for me to come to her. Was our baby still alive?
Whenever I awoke, mosquitoes buzzed insanely in my ears, whispering that my efforts to help the Jain were pointless.
At dawn, my guest greeted me with a cheerful wave of his hand. Seated on the floor, he was sunken-cheeked and goat-ribbed, and the skin on his chest and belly was pleated old parchment. He looked from the bandages around my wrists to my eyes and smiled gently, inviting me in the way of my homeland to speak. I turned away.
“You should not be so eager for the wings of your next life,” he said in Konkani.
I resented his advice. And I didn’t trust his voice, which was quick and bright, as though his thoughts were jumping through him. Perhaps it was the pain.
I made no reply, hoping he would assume I did not speak his language and leave me be. Instead, he raised a crooked finger and pointed at my eyes. My mind must have greatly weakened during my confinement, because my heart tumbled at the thought that he might hiss an incantation against me. I backed against the wall.
“There’s no need to fear me,” he said, pronouncing his words slowly, thinking me a foreigner. “It’s just that I’ve seen your blue eyes before.” When I made no reply, he added, “On the butterflies that come to my village every spring.”
He raised and lowered his arms as though fluttering his wings, his hands curling out elegantly, like a dancer from Kerala. He smiled, inviting me again to speak.
“Talking to me will only bring you more trouble,” I said in Konkani. “I am damned.”
“So you are from here!” he exclaimed happily, as if we were now on friendly terms. “Then maybe you know which butterflies I mean? Yes? They are purest black, each one like a moonless night, except that they have blue spots here and here.” He touched the sides of his chest. “In my village, they say they are the north wind given form.”
I can still feel how I resisted the tug of his musical voice pulling me back toward life. “I am useless to you,” I told him, turning aside, wishing I could be as hard and senseless as the prison walls. I felt his curious gaze pressing down on me. Did he want me to vow that I’d never again try to take my own life? I buried my head in my tattered mattress and squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could vanish. After a time, I thought of confessing to him how I’d murdered Papa, but I believed then that silence had more to offer me than any man.
Only later did I realize what needed to be said first: I will never speak to you as if you have any authority over me. Only my father had that and I have killed him …
We were soon given breakfast through the slat in our inner door. My companion hunched his shoulders as he scooped up his rice into his mouth, his meticulous slowness seeming to mock my hunger. As a Jain, he was permitted only vegetables and grains, and I thought of a plan to distance him from me after he held his fried fish up by its tail and nodded at me to take it. The guards must have given it to him as a cruel joke.
“When I was a boy,” I said, waving away his offer, “I caught one of those black butterflies you mentioned.”
“I knew it!” he said with a sprightly laugh. “You were drawn to it.” He touched his chest again to indicate the blue spots. “It was a kind of destiny. Yes, don’t you think so?”
“I do not believe in destiny,” I replied brusquely. I thought I was speaking the truth. Now, I’m not so sure; so much seems to have happened in the only way it could have.
I knew that all life was holy to a Jain – down to the tiniest worm. So it was that I was certain that sooner or later the old man would ask if I’d taken the butterfly’s life. When he did, vengeance glowed in my chest like a dark star. “I crushed it in my fingers,” I told him, “and I’ve never regretted it.”
Tears welled in his eyes.
“Don’t waste your sorrow on a speck of being that has neither soul nor sense,” I said. I spoke as though I knew what I was talking about; confinement had given me a grudging, bitter arrogance and a teacherly voice I barely recognized as my own.
Those who claim that people cannot ever really change have never been in prison and learned that miserable walk of confinement that can end only in death.
He pursed his lips tightly together as if unwilling to voice a terrible truth, and I realized what should have been obvious – I was the small, soulless creature he felt sorry for. I laughed for the first time in ages; to be more pitiful than a crushed insect seemed quite an accomplishment.
“If my mind weren’t nearly gone, I would find a way to kill us both,” I told him.
He gazed up at me, his black eyes sorrowful. I despised his willingness to feel so much for someone he knew nothing about.
“How would you like it if I beat you now?” I said, jumping to my feet. “Would you still care so much about me?” The urge to punish him surged in me with the destructive force of a house collapsing. “I could break your bones and no one here would stop me. They would welcome it.”
I made a fist and shook it at him, as though confirming I was the dramatic villain in a play written for me by a secret enemy – the person who’d betrayed me and caused my arrest. The Jain’s hands rushed up to protect his face, and in that gesture I saw he’d been beaten as well as burned. When I knocked them away it was as if a rope inside me had snapped, and I was falling freely away from myself. I kept hitting him until I drew blood from his mouth.
Afterward, my fear at what I had become was akin to drowning. I whispered an apology and retreated to my cot, hugging my legs to my chest. I closed my eyes and said nothing for hours, trying to think of what Papa would want me to do, but his voice had disappeared from inside me.
At dusk, I kneeled next to my cellmate. “Kill me,” I whispered.
“I can’t. It is forbidden to me.”
“Please, you don’t understand. I couldn’t bear being burnt or made to swallow water until I drown. If I’m tortured, I might reveal the names of people who’ve helped my father and me. If I am dead, the girl I am betrothed to will be able to marry another man.” I held his shoulder. “Smother me in the night, while I sleep. I’ll give you all I own for that one act of kindness. I’ll tell you now where to go when you are free, and you will collect my belongings from my sister and uncle.”
He shook his head. I pushed him away.
That night, he crept to me and lay down beside me. He took my hand and gripped it hard.
“Forgive me for failing you,” he whispered. “I am very sorry.”
I pushed at him, but he held me tight. He was much stronger than I thought. I was sure that his persistence was a sign of madness, but that seemed a blessing; we would be equals during our time together.
We lay in silence. I pictured my sister when she was four years old, her eyes bright with joy; inside the basket I held out to her was a butterfly I’d caught – not the kind the Jain had spoken of, but one that was scarlet and gold. It fluttered to the rim and flexed its wings, glowing in the sunlight like stained glass. My sister giggled as I sniffed at it. When it took wing, she raised her arms and yelped with joy. I stood behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, pressing my love into her, as I’d learned from Nupi, our cook and housekeeper. I was sure we’d always be together.
The Jain caressed my cheek. I knew somehow that he was requesting my thoughts. Or maybe my loneliness over the last year made me want to believe that his every gesture was an invitation to speak of my past.
“The butterfly I caught was not the kind you mentioned,” I confessed. “And I didn’t kill him. I really only wanted to show him to my sister. And to smell him – though that seems so odd now.”
He laughed softly. I turned on my side toward him. His moist breathing was warm against my face. It seemed like the wind of God I’d been missing.
The blackness of our cell made it impossible to see more than the smoke-shapes of my own imagination, but I believed he was looking for something deep inside me. I felt his probing as though it were a stone in my chest. I wanted to embrace him but knew that I’d begin to sob if I did so.
“And what did he smell like?” he asked.
“I thought he’d have the scent of jasmine, since he’d been feeding at the vine climbing up our verandah, and I was too young to know better. But he had the faint smell of the earth.”
He was silent for a time, pondering my words. “I shall try to prevent that,” he told me.
“Prevent what?”
“Even the smallest animals are observant of our lives,” he replied.
I thought he would go on, but he offered no further explanation.
“Keep talking to me,” I pleaded. “Say anything you like, only don’t let me lie here without your voice.” Our whispers will protect us both, I thought.
He curled his arm under my head and began to speak of the soothing night sounds we could hear in the city below. I allowed myself to imagine I was with my father and it proved a mistake; terror spread through me. It was centered in my gut, cold, like a stillborn life. I sat up. Who had betrayed Papa to the Inquisition? Aunt Maria? Wadi? Perhaps it had been someone I’d never even met.
“What’s wrong?” my companion asked.
“Memories seem to betray me at times. And there is someone I need to find. I have a debt to pay.”
“They do not want you to be here,” he replied.
“Who?”
“Those memories you speak of. They want you to be free. Don’t you think so?”
“If they do,” I said skeptically, “then they don’t seem to have much of a strategy for helping me.”
He uttered a prayer in a language foreign to me. I told him then that we called the butterfly he’d mentioned trevas azuis in Portuguese, meaning “blue darkness.” He was pleased by the sound of that and said he would call me Trevas Azuis from then on. Feeling the slow rise and fall of his chest beside me, I became aware of our frailty. We had no weapons – no prayers or arguments that would do any good. All we had was each other, and it would never be enough.
He told me his parents had given him the name Ravindra, meaning sun, but everyone had called him Phanishwar – King of the Serpents – since he was a toddler; his father had found him sleeping on their patio one night with a hooded cobra guarding over him. “I cannot remember that particular snake,” he said. “But it is true that I have never been afraid of them like other men.”
His parents had sent him to apprentice with a snake charmer in Poona when he was ten years old. He was now fifty-seven. “It only occurred to me when I was already a parent myself that my father might have made up the story of the cobra to suit his plans for me,” he told me. “That would be just like him. How he worried over us when we were children! My goodness! You see, he wanted to be sure that all of us had a way of earning an honest living. Such a good man he was – always fasting and going to temple. He could never bear how the Hindus and Moslems would kill snakes as if they had no place in the world. ‘Phanishwar, you shall show them there is another way,’ he used to tell me.”
“Is your father still alive?” I asked.
“No, he and my mother are long dead.”
“Your burns – they must be very painful.”
“Do not worry, Trevas Azuis. I have suffered much physical pain in my life. Pain and I are old enemies who know each other’s every move. We try to outsmart each other, though he usually wins in the end. I bear him some ill will, it is true, I shall not deny it, but I suppose he is just playing his part and has no choice.”
I got up, soaked my shirt in water again, and kneeled beside him. He moaned while I washed his feet, crying silently, thanking me for my kindness. I had not remembered that a man’s voice could be so gentle.
When I was done, he patted my head with his hands and blessed me. That first day, Phanishwar seemed to me to represent all that was good about the villagers I grew up with: their delicate manners and quickness to smile; their acceptance of circumstance and certain belief that life was a grand struggle linking everything in the world together; their delight in we so much more than I.
“Tell me of your life,” I said. I wanted to hear a story, to give myself over to the sleep summoned by words whispered in the dark.
He spoke to me about his wife, who had died several years earlier, and his five children; the youngest was twelve and named Rama. His village, Bharat, was on the coast, three days’ walk north of Goa. He did not say how the Inquisition had caught him and I did not ask. After a time, he began to sing a soft, golden melody, and I came to see I would not kill myself – just as I now knew that I would confess whatever my masters wanted so as to escape their flames. I would have to stay alive to find the person who had betrayed Papa and me, and take my revenge.
Phanishwar held me through the night, and I could feel his generosity pulsing around us. I had never felt so close to a man other than my father. Our union resembled a dream at times, which is why, I think, when dawn appeared in our window, shaded pink and blue, I found the courage to speak of events I did not believe I’d ever tell anyone.
With him beside me – the King of Serpents – I knew that not only my memories but all of nature wanted to free us. I hoped that together they would be strong enough.
I spoke to him first of my childhood, beginning with my mother’s illness, which was my earliest full memory.
“I once saw someone cross the bridge back from death toward life,” I told him.
CHAPTER TWO
For several years after my mother died, I used to sneak on tiptoe across the carpeted silence of my father’s library, ease open the bottommost drawer of his desk, and slip out the leather case in which he kept his drawings of her. Eager to study her face and compare it with my own, I would carry the sketches to the mirror hanging in my room and press them, one after another, against the glass. Sometimes I imagined she was my reflection – that we were the same person.
Once, when my father was away in Goa, I tore up one of my favorite portraits of her. I must have been eight or nine. I don’t remember my cramped reasoning – I know only that I was so angry that I felt compelled to destroy something beautiful and valuable. It may have been my own way of trying to consign her death to a safe place in my mind – or even of restoring her to life through a flash of wicked magic.
Dizzy with shame, I raced out of the house and tossed my sinful bits of evidence into the waters of Indra’s Millstream, a lazy branch of the Zuari River that slipped through the slender valley of banana groves and palms at the eastern edge of our property. My guilt afterward was so heavy that my gut ached as though I’d swallowed sand. I confessed my mischief to Papa on his return the next day, certain that he would hate me. Instead, he lifted me up and twirled me around.
“One old drawing is nothing compared to being home with you,” he told me.
I couldn’t understand why he didn’t punish me. I wanted him to. I think I wished to be sure – for one stinging moment – that I had all of his attention, and that Mama’s ghost would not lead him away from me. Maybe, too, I wanted to be reassured there was justice in the world, even if it meant a reddened backside.
“But it was a beautiful thing,” I told him. “And you made it so we could keep it.” Confessions must have a way of following one another, because I added, “I go into your bottom drawer every few days and take out your pictures of Mama.”
