Garden of Dreams

Your father is making a map of the world,
the boy’s mother had told him –
the countries he has saved, those yet to save, the unredeemable.
It’s funny how some countries don’t exist because you don’t think of them, the boy thought. He hadn’t really thought of India before a month ago, when his mother suggested they travel east to find his father. Now here he was, in a shabby guest house on the edge of the Thar desert, at a little round breakfast table being explored by flies. Alone, except for the woozy, heat-drugged flies and a waiter swishing around in a dirty white dhoti, straightening tablecloths, ignoring him. Voices drifted through the small window carved from cool stone walls, strange children’s voices and earthy smells he didn’t want to name. His mother was upstairs still sleeping, and he was desperate for her to wake up.

They had taken the train five days ago from Delhi to Jaipur, the gateway to Rajasthan – land of the rajas, the ancient kings. It slid off your tongue: RA-JAS-THAN. A magical landscape, full of palaces and forts, royal tombs, temples and people in bright traditional dress, like fruit drops. The train onwards to Jaisalmer was less magical: steamy and smelly and packed with Indians even in July, chugging across scrubland and semi-desert. The landscape looked like Africa, home now, with acacia trees and mud and grass huts, an occasional dog or farmer with his goats, scenes endlessly replayed. They were going almost as far west as you could go in India, to a golden city.
You must see this place,
his mother had said.
And then we’ll go north, to your father, in the Himalayas.
She had stared silently out the window for nearly seven hours, as though she was seeing something he couldn’t.

It’s not the same
, his mother had said upon arrival. But Jaisalmer hadn’t disappointed him, a newcomer. Like something out of
Arabian Nights
or
The Adventures of Tintin
, from the desert suddenly thrust a hill crested with the ancient fort and town of golden buildings. ‘Founded in 1136, and once an important caravan way station,’ the guidebook said. Inside the town walls, streets curved and twisted, choked with humans,
cows, dogs, pigs and chickens. Young guys on beeping motorbikes just missed them. The havelis, the old palaces, were beautiful, like wedding cakes carved in stone, but the people were more interesting. The young ones wore Western clothes much like his, but the old ones wore costumes. Men with giant silver moustaches floated by in white tunics and trousers, with huge turbans of orange and red; their women, with hennaed hands and feet, wore red, orange and gold saris, veils, nose and toe rings, stacks of ivory armbands. Most surprising were the men’s shoes: dark, narrow slippers, embroidered in gold, with toes that curled up like the prow of a ship. He hadn’t spoken to any of them, which made everything seem unreal.

They were staying at the Rajput Guest House, a dingy block of rooms at the end of town, far from the fort. His mother had stayed there years before, when she’d backpacked her way through India on her own, hitching up with people, mainly young men, along the journey. She’d been telling him the stories, more than once. He liked calling her a hippie, which made her laugh, reminding her of a freedom she had lost. She couldn’t remember which room she had stayed in before, but chose one that seemed vaguely familiar, in the back on the desert’s edge, with his room next to it.
There have been so many rooms
, she’d said.

Now, at the guest house breakfast table, he sat playing with his spoon and waiting for his toast, and his mother. He badly wanted to wash his hands but fought the impulse; the bathroom was too dirty, anyway. He rubbed his hands on his jeans, and wished his mother would hurry. It was their last day in Jaisalmer, and she had promised to take him on a camel safari into the desert. Something she was sure he’d want to do, but he didn’t, really. She had been promising since they arrived, but hadn’t felt well most of the time. She was sleeping a lot.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep
, he’d wanted to tell her, but hadn’t. He’d been wandering through the alleyways mostly on his own, not understanding the language, not really grasping where this trip was headed. Except that his father, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly a year, was at the end of it. He lived in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, another amazing name – but so far away. The country had been at war for years; it was finally, maybe thanks to his father, sort of safe to go there.

His mother now proposed that he go there on his own. The night before, they’d argued about it – she in bed already, looking small and distant, he standing in the doorway connecting their rooms, propped up by the frame.

‘You’ve travelled solo before,’ she’d said. ‘You’re nearly fourteen. You’ll be fine.’

‘No, I won’t.’

She took a swig from the Kingfisher beer on the night table, standing sentry with two other empty bottles. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like you could kill me.’

He didn’t think he could kill his mother. But maybe he could. Nothing seemed sure at that moment.

‘I can’t come with you …’

Won’t
come with me.

‘It’s a big story, my editors are on my case. I’ve got to get back, and up to Limpopo by Wednesday morning. Witchcraft allegations – we’ve heard they’re arresting people … I’ll get someone to drive you to Delhi, right to the airport, and you’ll fly to Nepal from there.

‘What’s the problem, Eli? Come here …’ She patted the bed next to her. He didn’t move. ‘What are you afraid of?’

Things always go wrong, Mom
, he wanted to tell her, feeling the dread closing in, choking him, making his chest and stomach ache.
I need you to help them go right
. If he pleaded with her, he thought, she might not go. He was too old to cry but felt he might. He stared at his feet, still wearing his ankle-high black Converses in spite of how sweaty they were. They rooted him a little.

‘So you’ve decided then?’ was all he said, and he slunk back into his room to a night of fitful dreams.

It was now nearly nine a.m.; he’d waited forty minutes, torn his toast into bits, when he decided to take a walk, take some photos, let his mother sleep. Maybe she’d act less crazy if she got some rest, stop swinging between her highs and lows. He ducked under the transom of the guest house’s front door, into the dusty street, blinding sunlight and already hammering heat. He walked vaguely towards the fort, unguided by the rough sandstone buildings merging into one other, a continuous wall with few landmarks, disorientating. If he could find the Patwon ki Haveli, the most famous of the fancy old stone houses, once home to Jaisalmer’s cloth merchants and opium smugglers, he might find his way. So he headed towards it, hiding behind his little camera and snapping away from a distance: ornate temples; on housefronts, carved and painted Ganeshes; the people in fancy dress; the bikers; the tuk-tuks; and of course the holy cows, whose shit he kept stepping over.
When he stopped to take a photo of the Bhang Shop – he’d heard of the infamous bhang lassis – his reflection in the window startled him, flagged by his conspicuous hair, blonde and almost down to his shoulders. He kept walking, shrugging if children ran up to him, leaving their marbles or game of catch to ask ‘Photo? Rupee? Pen?’ He wondered if he could be friends with any of them.

It felt like being in a film – all of India did. As he walked he thought back on their three weeks there so far, to the first day in Mumbai, after a sixteen-hour flight: landing in the middle of the night with the airport nearly empty but dozens of faces pressed against the plate-glass windows, peering in; the sticky air outside; the lumps piled along the sidewalk as the bus took them into the city, the sleeping poor. They’d stayed up all night ordering drinks at the Taj Mahal Intercontinental, watching, from the terrace, the sky turn violet as the sun rose and the bats disappeared. Then, that morning, as the traffic was just getting crazy, their first temple visit, to a Jain temple, and the gleaming eyes of the Hindu gods; the stump of a leper thrust at him through the taxi window as they sped back to the airport to fly south.

I’ll take you everywhere
, his mother had said,
but not Kerala, the other place I love – it’s too far
.
Next time
. Goa was a strip of white beaches full of druggies’ shops and slender palms; Madurai, a Disneyland of temples, pilgrims, cows and half-naked sadhus in the streets; Agra, home to the disappointing Taj Mahal, so pristine and cold, meant to be a monument to emperor Shah Jahan’s love but to the boy a symbol of death. Everywhere, people on the move. He’d never seen so many people, so much of humanity walking, cycling, driving, worshipping, spitting, shitting, breathing, living, dying. It both intrigued and frightened him. It was a relief to get to Rajasthan, to the less crowded, still fantastical, desert. He wouldn’t forget that evening in Udaipur, a purple dusk, when he had lain on the roof of their hotel and watched the sky fill with thousands of green parrots, squawking overhead, with a palace’s silhouette on the horizon.

Till now his mother hadn’t let him down. Much. Over the eight years since his father had ‘checked out’, as his mother put it, and gone to sort out other people’s conflicts, his mother had had to be both parents, impossible of course. Lately she’d started collapsing into tears, from the weight of it. Scaring him. But he loved her sense of adventure, her rebelliousness, her passion – though that often pitched them against each other. He was just finding his own loves – a girl back home in Cape
Town and, more reliably, his dog Max and his guitar, rock music mostly. His father hated rock, urged him to play the piano.
If you hate rock you hate me
, he’d told him.

The Patwon ki Haveli rose before him, three storeys of intricately carved ochre stone, curved windows and balconies where ghosts surely dwelled. The small square in front of it was already swarming with tourists, touts and men selling puppets and peacock fans. He took their photographs. He walked towards the market, following people with birds in cages, baskets of vegetables and grain on their heads, stacks of cloth. He felt less lonely in their company.

He came out of the alleyways at the entrance to the fort and entered through the towering stone walls into the first square. Along with the textile merchants, the gypsies were there as usual, camped out on the stones to one side, selling silver anklets and playing their ravanhattas, skinny two-string fiddles with bells on the bows. He wished they didn’t just want to make a deal, that he could talk to them about music. Maybe he could. After he photographed them.

‘Namaste, Ellie,’ said a voice behind him, slightly familiar. He turned; it was Badresh, the manager from the Rajput Guest House, who had shared tea with them a number of times and loved to brag about his
Rajput
– warrior – heritage. He was friendly enough but made silly jokes, mostly for Eli’s mother’s amusement, and teased him about his hair,
like a girl’s.
He foolishly called him ‘Ellie’, not ‘Eli’, and had a ridiculous moustache – huge, with tips that flipped skywards.

‘Your mother asked me to find you and take you with me,’ Badresh grinned, ‘to ride camels in the desert. We will go now?’

‘Where’s my mother?’

‘She is sleeping, still sleeping. It is very worrying, is it not, all this sleep she is doing? I think the sun of India is too much for her.’

That’s not it
, Eli wanted to say. But he didn’t want to discuss his mother with Badresh, and wanted to ride camels with him even less, though maybe it was better than wandering around all day. ‘OK, let’s go. Whatever.’

Badresh led the way out of the fort, through countless alleyways that seemed to go nowhere. At last they came to a small enclosure with high stone walls and a dozen scraggly camels tethered to posts there. ‘Beasts of burden’, Eli thought, and began to wonder if he should really try riding one, add to their burden. Besides, they spat. But Badresh was insistent.

‘Come on, come on, you will not regret it,’ he said as one of the larger
camels lowered itself for the boy to mount the tasselled saddle. ‘We see the Amar Sagar Lake and palace, the Bada Bagh and I take you to my very own family’s home. You will like all that.’

The camel rose in a rocking ascent and they were up, following Badresh and his camel out the enclosure’s gate. Eli felt uneasy up so high, but the camel’s gait was slow enough. He tried to enjoy himself.

They made their way through the winding streets, above much of the traffic, the scooters and rickshaws; the camels seemed oblivious to the commotion and loped along. Soon they were leaving the town behind them, with sloping sand dunes stretching endlessly ahead. There were a few scrub trees here and there, and noisy black crows, but not much else – them, the sand, the sun. They rode in silence for a while, until Badresh spoke, jarring him.

‘Your mother tells me you are going to find your father, isn’t it?’ he half-shouted back to him. ‘Good, it is good. A boy must have his father. So you will live with him from now?’

‘No!’ he shouted back. ‘That’s not the plan.’

‘I must misunderstand,’ Badresh continued. ‘Your mother tells me, “my son misses his father terribly … they need to be together now, for some change.” She is right – how will you become a man without a father?’

None of your fucking business
, he thought. He hated his father, how did he explain that? Well, maybe it wasn’t hate. It was a great, overwhelming disappointment at being left when he was only five years old, left behind so that his father could save the children of strangers who kept fighting with each other for so many inexplicable reasons.
My father’s a peacemaker
, he used to tell his classmates, and though he was supposed to be proud, he wasn’t. At school functions, ballgames, concerts, all the places that families gather, he was ashamed that his father wasn’t there.

They rode past the blue-green lake at Amar Sagar, and the seventeenth-century Amar Singh palace, in typical Rajasthani style, with turrets, arches and crenellations and another temple. ‘For Shiva, Lord of Destruction,’ Badresh smiled as they rode by. ‘Badresh – Shiva, same. Ellie, we stop?’