Awesome Blossoms: Horn OK Please (25 page)

SECTION VII

BLUEBELL

By Devyani Kalvit

***

How I wish I could be on the move

It breathes life, I will someday behoove.

Mountains and forests so close to the heart

At the same time, beach is where life starts.

Beauty and beholder, just a matter of one's eyes

Even before the body, the mind flies

Don't stop me; I am the zealous zephyr

I'll go where the air smells of myrrh.

If you want to be the co-traveler, bound me not

Take as it comes, just be there as a bright spot.

Free bird, the unbound limits, my home is the horizon

I'll be here, I'll be there, I'll always keep moving on.

***

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

By Ashleigh Carter

***

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

- Aristotle

An Ode to the
Litter Man

M
uhammad was different from the other year 7’s. He held so much anger in him that it spit out of his eyes and mouth with smirks, muttered insults and spite. He was a stocky boy with a potentially handsome little face that darted around in the hood of his black jacket, of which he often rolled up the sleeves to show off his massive, shiny watch.

“My cousin got it for. It’s proper Armani. Stop staring at it- you can’t have it.”

“I don’t want your watch Mohammad. Listen to Mr. Wilson now please, and take your flipping coat off”

He didn’t listen to Mr
. Wilson, but continued spitting and muttering under his breath at me with pure hatred in his eyes.

Shipton Academy
was a pretty standard English state secondary school by all accounts; a high-security, odd-smelling and echoey collection of several blockish buildings with lino-floors and
polystyrene ceilings. Between lessons the corridors burst and crash with herds of kids, teachers, and the many, many support staff there to control behavior and help the ‘Special Educational Needs’ pupils through some pretty lackluster teaching.

Like the majority of the pupils in the school, Muhammad
was second, or perhaps third generation South Asian. Muhammad was like an egg; hard and quite strong on the outside but soft and fragile beneath the shell. Every so often a crack would emerge. Over the coming weeks he began to soften, somewhat, towards me, after a number of detentions and one or two phone calls home. One sunny Wednesday morning, this finally culminated in a strangely serene English lesson whereby I was asked to sit next to him and his friend trying to get him to write five sentences with commas in the correct places as per the teacher’s instructions, however, was a fruitless endeavor.

“Miss, what’s your
favorite curry?”

I’ll try to impress them with something obscure and Asian, I thought, in order to lead in to a story about myself being a grand traveler of the Asian Subcontinent.

“
Channa Masala
” I replied.

Hilarity ensued. The boys erupted inevitably into fits of throaty giggles

“Miss, say that again.”

“What?”

“Miss, say
Channa Masala.
”

“No
!”

He turned to his friends
.

“No really, listen to her, she says it proper white!”

It had been 6 years since I had left India, and clearly, my having successfully acquired
Channa Masala
almost every day during my life in the nunnery was no longer impressive, relevant, or said in an acceptable accent. Despite this, Tilokpur still ran through my veins like an embarrassing infection, causing me to thread it in to every aspect of my life.

Tilokpur was a small village of
colorful, concrete and brick bungalows stretched out atop a leafy-green hill, penetrated by red dusty roads and bustling with macaques. Amid the silence and the whooshing of the breeze through the mango trees and barley fields, one could often hear the tinkling of temple bells, the gossiping of aunties, the bellowing of a cow, and, occasionally, the roaring, belching, and beeping of a bus. Tilokpur is dedicated to ‘Tilopa’ (some holy person or other) and is nestled into the lush, steamy foothills of the Indian Himalayas. There was an ecru  area of grass in the heart of the village, with a fenced-off medieval ruin to one side. In the center of the ‘green’, stood a large, thick tree with widely stretching branches and big, waxy leaves. At dusk the place would fill with villagers; barefoot schoolboys playing cricket; stray dogs; the smell of incense, the echoing song of a
tabla
from the
gurdwara
, and a group of elder men who would sit beneath the large tree in their beige cotton clothes, and chat about very important things. I would sit on a rock and eat my sweets.

Looking back now, I feel embarrassed by the thought of how the residents must have originally seen me. White girl from Yorkshire, five feet ten inches, 19 years old, wearing ill-fitting
salwar kameez
, teaching English in the Tibetan Buddhist nunnery that was situated at the edge of their village. Only the fact that I am a ‘real’ English teacher nowadays saves me from maximum embarrassment. I know now that I taught quite well; I know now that I did a good job. Despite this, the thought that I felt when I was going to India to ‘help people’ makes me cringe, that I was oblivious to what I was about to experience.

The nunnery was a peaceful gated area at the end of a track next to the village primary school. The buildings were all whitewashed and the yard at the
center was filled with trees; quiet and serene besides the breeze tinkling through the wind chime, or the sounds of stones ricocheting off walls when they missed their intended target of a pack of rogue macaques. The majority of the nuns were glorious human beings, with huge smiles, shaven heads, plastic sandals, and an astonishing capacity for consuming large quantities of white rice. The nuns were headed by Ani Karma La, a top-dog with the most masculine face I had ever seen on a Tibetan, with new, maroon cloth wrapped around her girth and over her shoulder, and who always looked like she was chewing a big wasp and was really pleased with herself for doing so.

It was a very rainy afternoon in May, and the cool, crashing sheets of water were turning the powdery roads into red paste and puddles, driving the monkeys into hid
ing, and the nuns into the smoky kitchen. Avoiding the dark and evil kitchen nun (embittered due to an unfairly long stint on kitchen duty), I tried to inspect the contents of the kitchen, tried to predict the dinner. Overcooked okhras, again excellent. Half an hour of trying to swallow whilst simultaneously vomiting into my own mouth, before discreetly emptying my dish of sticky solids over the balcony? No thank you.
Ji Nahi
. I’m going to escape.

After mumbling something about going to get some photocopies done, I grabbed my grubby canvas bag and disappeared past the prayer flag and through the metal gate. Flip-flopping hastily down the wet steps past packs of monkeys beadily eyeing my bag, past the water tap, through the tunnel and onto the path, I slipped in a flash right onto my backside, gliding through the algae on the path, past two gawping sisters carrying oranges in their
dupattas
, and stopping with a splat, conveniently at the bus stop. The air smelled metallic and hot, of leaves and of frying oil as I clambered onto the dented bus and was passed a baby to hold for the journey. Following ten minutes of vomiting children, leering men, and the tinny sounds of Mohammad Rafi echoing from a tape player in the front of the bus, and screeching round hairpin bends along a river valley, the bus came to a shuddering halt. I hopped off.

This was all, I must add, a quest for Channa masala. That glorious, heavenly, tasty slop on top of a samosa with a steaming cup of sweet chai in exchange for only nine rupees and the whole dhaba staring at you over their plastic plates. They understood me perfectly there- maybe it was because they expected me to sound proper
white. It was on my way there that I met him. The litter man.

I’m not sure for how long he had been behind me. Tall, grubby, and naked but for the badly-stitched cloak, made (from what I could see out of the corner of my eye) entirely of snack packaging, he followed me along the muddy verge. As I stopped to cross the road to my dinner, so too did he. Staring at what stood expectedly before me, I saw a lithe man, his dark skin and white beard smeared with ashes, and dressed in a flowing gown of Good Day, Lays, Monaco, and Party-time wrappers. He lurched when he moved towards me, almost like a large, thin bird. A vulture.

“Britishers” He said, stopping for dramatic pause. “Britishers brought too many things here. But now look at you; with your refrigerators and your cell phones and your machine for butter toast, you are still always rushing around”

“If I were a god”, he continued, “I would take you all back to the simple life”.

As I, aghast, slowly crossed the road away from him, he began to shout in a foreign language at the top of his lungs, laughing and spluttering between verses of whatever-it-was. One by one all those on the street began to turn around; women in colorful fabrics shopping for vegetables, little children, dictionary-wallahs, dogs. They all turned around and stared at me, and then began to laugh. 

What this flipping idiot didn’t understand, was that I was already living a simple life; living in the nunnery, sleeping in a bed of ants, digesting stale chapattis for breakfast, having cold showers, eating two
kilos of
Rasgulla
every week, etcetera. What I didn’t understand; was that he wasn’t a flipping idiot.

Over the coming days I began to notice details about the nuns that I hadn’t before. Some nuns had shoes that didn’t fit, some were ill and without proper medicine, many were brushing their teeth with Dettol. I noticed that the injustice began to slowly boar through their happiness and into their religious practice.

When the holidays finally arrived, women at the nunnery who had previously been waxing on about what they would eat and how much they would sleep when they visited their faraway homes in Ladakh, Spiti, Kinnaur, or Nepal for the holidays; had become glum, cranky shells of humans. When the first day of the holiday arrived, all eighty-one nuns were present in the nunnery compound. I approached Pema, a young, plump nun with wide eyes and rosy cheeks, who was never usually without a smile. She sat on the concrete steps, ignoring the nunnery dog which was jumping excitedly at her legs. She looked at me with tired eyes and then drew a deep breath.

“She took all the money. Ani Karma La”

“What?”

It transpired that all donations and sponsorship, meant to be put aside for shoes, toothpaste, medicine, and travel home, had vanished, and that a new, grand nunnery on the other side of the village had appeared in its place. Head nun Ani Karma lived there with her assistant and ridiculously short-legged dog and had been filtering money into it and her new bungalow, out of the funds pledged to uphold the physical and mental wellbeing of each nun. Her position, for which there should have been an election once every four years, had been held firm for almost two decades. Karma was a dictator.

That evening a sweet, accomplished nun in her forties named Gurme Palmo slowly padded up the stairs to my room, just like she always did for her English tutorial. She liked to leaf through her English dictionary with me and have me demonstrate, draw, or explain what the words meant, in the quiet of the sunset, she sat cross-legged on the floor of the balcony.

She told me that she and Ani Karma had crossed the Himalayas together, through Nepal, and into India on foot, to escape the Chinese occupation of Tibet. She told me that they had survived as friends and trained as novice nuns together. Gurme explained that Karma had forgotten herself; become greedy and power-thirsty. She had forgotten the simple, Tibetan life that she had fought to preserve. I thought again of the litter man.

“I miss my home land very much” Gurme uttered in a clear and calm voice. “Come” she said, as she rose to her bare feet gracefully, and gestured me to follow her down the concrete steps and into her own room which was directly below mine. Her room was bare except for an extraordinarily carefully-ordered shrine to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a Thangka painting of the Green Tara which covered up a damp patch on the back wall, and a collection of little soup bowls. 

Gurme took two of her little soup bowls, shuffled over to some chip-board shelves in the right hand corner of her room, and spooned some thick powder into each from a half-full sack on the bottom shelf. She handed me a cup of milk-tea and we each sat on her little bed.

“
Tsampa
. Please eat. It’s er...roast...” (she looked at me for my approval for the usage of this word) “...barley flour. My brother come over the mountains from Tibet last year, bringing this
Tsampa
for me. He was very sick and he went back on the mountains to go home and he expired”

“He did what?”

“Dead. So on special times I eat a little bit of
Tsampa
and it tastes of my home”

She smiled slightly with the look of compassion in her eyes that she always had, and dipped her spoon of
Tsampa
into her sweet tea and brought the spoon to her lips. I was able to see the human in her then, and the human in all the nuns, all the residents of Tilokpur. I liked the feeling of my bare feet on the floor, I liked the feeling of the hot mug of tea in my hands which had a skin forming over the top. I savored the feeling of being human myself, just like everyone else.

“Jun-too-tem” she whispered, “It means
always remember
”

I did. I knew I would always remember. Nevertheless, I had it tattooed on myself just in case.

Upon my return to Tilokpur almost exactly two years later, I saw a very different nunnery and a gaggle of excitable but confused women, many of whom had been children when I had left. 

I noticed that the temple now had two floors instead of one, and that the feeling of fear that formerly hung in the hot air had gone. I asked one of the older (but still mentally present) nuns what had happened.