A House Called Askival (27 page)

FORTY-THREE

When James left India in December 1947 he was surrounded by well-wishers, but sick at heart. He stood on the deck of The Highland Queen as a small host of missionary friends waved and called from the quay side at the Calcutta port. The sea breeze tugged at him and filled his nose with the smells of salt and diesel and the brackish, dead-green water that slapped against the bow of the ship, frothing with rubbish. Seagulls skated the air and shrieked, flapping to land on the ship's rail then clawing up and down it and leaving their droppings like spits of contempt before taking off again. At his right, Leota was waving furiously and calling out, ‘G'bye all, g'bye! We'll be back, we sure will! God bless you all! Bye!' Her voice was caught by the wind and tossed aside like a rag, as if the spirits of the air already knew its futility. At James' left, Stanley sat in his wheelchair and made no sound. His strong farmer's body was ravaged and shrivelled and he had finally accepted the Mission's demand that he return home.

To James, “home” was an absurd word for America. His only memory of the place was a year in Iowa when he was ten and had been tossed between the doting attentions of relatives and the remorseless persecution of schoolmates. The latter had laughed at everything about him: his clothes, his accent, his ignorance of the American way, (his
scorn for it!) and his ineptitude on the football field. And they had pushed and tripped and kicked and beaten him. It was far worse than anything that had happened in boarding and he'd told his parents he would never go back. But now he had to, and despite his mother's avowals, he knew there was a finality about this trip. They were leaving India for good.

Working with the refugees in the Kurukshetra camp, Stanley had become host to a sinister cocktail of parasites, and despite long stretches in the Hillside Community Hospital, he was beaten. James now had to help Leota lift him from bed to chair and on and off the commode. This made him burn, to see his father's slack flesh and the way the bones pressed against the skin as if about to tear it. The smells of his sweat and his sewer breath and his streaming diarrhoea brought a pall of shame.

Yet his father had done nothing to deserve shame, James believed, or this suffering. As Bishop Lutz had said last night at their farewell service, Stanley was a giant of God, laid low in service and sacrifice, in his obedience to the Call and his taking up of the Cross.

Whereas James… His hands tightened on the rail in front of him. The weeks after Aziz' death had become increasingly unbearable for him. When he left Mussoorie he gave everything away – his guitar and books and binoculars, his hunting trophies and guns (which he had not touched since that September night), his collections of ferns and butterflies, even his beloved beetles. Leota had been shocked.

‘We can take the beetles with us,' she'd said. ‘That's the finest collection ever made up here.'

‘Be good for the school to have it,' he muttered. He didn't explain the desperate need for penance. For punishment, even. How else could you expunge guilt? He had wanted to send as many possessions as possible to Pakistan for Salima and baby Iqbal, but Leota had refused. With the ongoing troubles across the border there was little chance of the goods arriving, she'd argued, and anyway, the Connors were making regular payments to them through the Mission headquarters in Lahore.

Payments. The word stung. How could you possibly, ever,
pay
for such a thing? For the first time in his life, he decided to study hard. He
would get into medical school and after that, get whatever experience he needed to be of maximum use. Then he would return to India and lay down his life in atonement. He did not know if it would ever suffice, but of one thing he was certain: he would kill himself trying.

FORTY-FOUR

James was now sleeping on the camp cot in the living room, as he could no longer climb the stairs. Iqbal had carried him up and down for a while, but he so often fell asleep at odd times through the day, that it became easier not to move him. He no longer stood or walked. Ruth and Iqbal raised him to sitting and eased him down, plumped pillows, changed his clothes and his bed pan. He ate little, despite Iqbal's tireless array of mousses, juices, jellies and custards offered on small trays. Ruth sometimes held his glass and angled the straw to his cracked lips when his own arms were too slack.

Every day she read to him, choosing volumes from the dusty shelves in his bedroom. In a book on Himalayan flora she found the tree from the Peace Garden at Oaklands:
padam
, a wild cherry that bloomed both spring and fall. She had seen it the other day, covered in flowers, a shout of joy in the face of winter. There were only a handful of novels – cheap airport paperbacks and a mildewed Kipling – and one collection of poems.
Mountains: An Anthology of Silence
. These captured her, hung in the air, brought new notes to her voice.

What have these lonely mountains worth revealing?

More glory and more grief than I can tell;

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling

Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell
.

For his sake, she also read from the Bible. His old King James was almost indecipherable – so scored and scribbled by years of wrestling – but she chose it over the newer versions lying around. It was the language of his heart, but also of her childhood. Long-forgotten passages rose up like bees from a stirred hive, and they both stung and gave of their sweetness. While she almost choked at the stories of God's people ploughing a bloody trail into the Promised Land, she was moved by the beauty of the Psalms. And though the lists of laws and sins and punishments galled her, the mingled decadence and despair of Ecclesiastes brought surprise. She'd never realised such a book was included in the Scriptures. It had not featured in childhood devotions.
‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!'
the philosopher cried. It made her look further and deeper, and she took to reading on her own, in several versions and was troubled. The thorn-in-the-flesh prophets, the dancing for joy, the nightmares of kings, the songs of love. It was all there. All that was made and smeared, pure and profane, all who laboured and lost, who gave birth and took life, every place that blossomed or was burnt, every voice, every silence, every fall, every rise. All of it. And throughout it, from beginning to end, that wrathful, weeping, terrible, tender God.

When James listened, he said nothing, but his face lay open like a pool. It was bottomless and shadowed, the shape of his skull rising like a stone beneath the surface, the gap of his mouth revealing yellow teeth, jutting and crooked. Looking at him, she felt the burden of what lay unsaid between them and the fear that it was too late.

One evening she stood on the terrace with Dr Lakshman as dusk settled over the mountain. The lights in the bazaar were winking on and the sun was gathering the last colours of the day under wings of cloud.

‘You need to be ready, Ruth,' he said. ‘It's not long now.'

She nodded. ‘Is he in pain?'

‘He will be, but he hides it. I've given him morphine and I'll come back again in the morning. Call me in the night if he seems to get worse. I mean it – call me.' His eyes were like deep wells, drawing her in,
drowning her. She broke his gaze.

‘Thanks.'

He hesitated. ‘Are you all right here with Iqbal?'

‘Yeah, he's great. And the Rev visits a lot.' She jerked a thumb to the house, where Verghese was sitting with James.

‘When's Hannah coming?'

‘Saturday.'

‘Five days. Ok. Let's hope…'

There was a pause.

‘Are you ok, Ruthie?'

She looked back at him for a moment, knowing his concern was real, but also his desire.

‘Yeah. Fine,' she said, and folded her arms, squinting across to the sunset. He sighed and took his leave. Once he had disappeared around the side of the hill, she rammed her hands in her pockets and turned up the higher path to the road, where she started to run.

By the time she got to Askival, she was crying. Panting for breath, her side splitting with cramp, she scrambled over the locked gate and up the path. At the veranda steps she grabbed a loose brick and hurled it at the front door. It smashed through the rotting wood and bounced down the hall, splitting open on the floor. She followed it, pushing through the house, crashing into doors, hitting walls, kicking anything that lay in her path. All that she had cleaned and scrubbed and painted she now spat upon.

When Iqbal found her she was a sobbing clot on the south veranda, a mess of dirt and scum and tears. He squatted and offered his handkerchief.

‘He's leaving,' she said, shaking as she pressed the hanky to her nose.

‘He's going home,' murmured Iqbal.

‘Don't give me that. Don't give me any of that heaven, God, going home shit. I don't believe it!' There was a rage in her voice as if a fissure had opened and released a jet of fire.

‘But he believes,' pleaded Iqbal.

‘I know he does. And that's the problem. Always has been. God,
God, God, God, GOD!'

Iqbal took her by the shoulders, shaking his head, shushing and clicking his tongue. ‘No, no, no,' he hushed.

‘Oh, yes! Everything – us – given up for God – sacrificed, thrown to the birds.'

Iqbal sucked in his breath. ‘Never, never,' he breathed.

‘Yes, ALWAYS. God took everything!' And she flung Iqbal's hands off her shoulders and curled up again, overcome by sobs.

By the time her cries had settled to occasional shudders, the night had become dark. She blew her nose and sat up, pulling her jacket close. Just off the edge of the veranda, Iqbal was building a small pyramid of sticks over dry leaves. There was a rattle of matches, a spark, then a tongue of flame. Iqbal fed it with tiny twigs until there was a crackle and spit and one of the bigger sticks flared.

Ruth felt another tear run down her cheek and brushed it roughly away, fumbling in her pocket for a cigarette. Lighting up, she leaned back against a pillar and cursed the trembling of her hands and the after-sobs that kept rising, unbidden. Iqbal did not look at her and it was a long time before he spoke.

‘You have celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr with me.' He paused. ‘But there is another Eid, coming soon. Eid-ul-Adha. I hope you will be here for that one also – it is very special.' The fire hissed, a burst of sparks. ‘It remembers when God asked Ibrahim to lay his only beloved son on the altar.'

Ruth watched him, the way the firelight played over his face, alight, shining, etched with dark.

His voice held sadness. ‘Because Ibrahim loved that child more than anything.'

Hers was a rasp. ‘And God can't bear that.'

‘God loved him even more. And he gave the sheep.'

‘Not for me.' Or for Manveer, she thought.

Iqbal was quiet. Poked another stick in the fire.

‘For you too. The Lamb of God.'

Ruth felt the heat of the fire on her face, the swelling of raw eyeballs, the cracks in her lips.

‘But sometimes,' Iqbal went on, ‘we keep our beloved on the altar because we have not seen the lamb.'

The pines above stirred in a soft breeze, a sighing chorus.

‘Or,' he propped his elbows on his knees, hands dangling, ‘because we cannot believe it is enough.'

She waited, but he was still.

‘What d'you mean?'

For the first time since lighting the fire he looked at her, his gaze gentle yet penetrating; then he turned to the dark archway of the living room behind.

‘Is very quiet for a house full of ghosts.'

Ruth followed his gaze, then looked back to his face.

‘The poisoned British family,' he went on. ‘The caste-breaking lovers, hmm? Perhaps my own father is sometimes visiting.'

A silence.

‘And the other ghosts, Ruthie? Shall we let them go?'

She said nothing. Just smoked and kept her gaze on the fire.

‘I read your letters, but they are stopping at the most interesting part. You are in Delhi, rehearsing for
Gospel of Jyoti
. But then? Nothing more.'

The breeze in the pines picked up, the fire whipped.

Her voice held a vast weariness. ‘The end.'

‘Please tell.'

‘What do you already know?'

‘Not much, I think. Not your side.'

She was quiet for the longest time, and then began, in a low, ragged voice, to tell the whole story, from assassination to lovers tryst, mob violence to haircut, Manveer's death to Mr Haskell's lie. How no-one believed her and she had been blamed. How, after her expulsion, she was not allowed to go home, but made to stay with another family in Kanpur because Ellen said her presence would make James worse. It seemed Ellen herself could not bear to be near her. How, when they packed for America a few weeks later, Ellen told her she would not be coming back. And how, at Hannah's wedding in Tennessee, just after they arrived, the bride was radiant but the rest of the family so destroyed
they could barely speak. The day after, Ruth had got on a Greyhound bus and left.

‘But the worst thing,' she said, ‘was thinking about Manveer's parents. They had to come all the way from Canada to collect the body of their first born, their only son, their beloved. And what did they find, when they took him in their arms? His hair hacked off and no sacred comb. No shorts to guard his purity, no
kirpan
at his side, no
kara
. Not one of the Five Ks left. Nothing but a body that had broken the law of chastity and – so they were told – the law against addictive substances. Their son was not just dead, he was desecrated.'

She was quiet. Her voice, when it came, was a whisper. ‘And all… because of me.'

There was a long silence, with only the hushing of the trees and the burning of the fire.

‘You are carrying great burden,' Iqbal said at last. ‘And this is why you are losing God.'

There was silence.

‘No Iqbal,' she replied. ‘God is why I lost everything.'

He shook his head softly and held a stick in the flames.

‘Please,' he asked. ‘May I also tell one story? Is not explaining all things, but maybe casting the light.'

Ruth nodded and moved closer to the fire.

The story Iqbal told was not his own, but the story of one who had been unable to speak it himself. The whole story, from a buck's head to a pair of burnt boots, from a widow's screams to a boy's silent pledge, from a father's cross to a daughter's fall.