Garden of Dreams (16 page)

Sanjana lived on the far side of the jungle, that’s what she told him. Somewhere to the north of Chitwan, in a village whose name he couldn’t pronounce. Now here they were, on the edge of this vast overgreen, overgrown tangle of trees and vines and bush where snakes and tigers and thousands of other creatures awaited them. Which they had to get across, or around. They’d skirt the jungle perimeter, but sometimes would have to enter its lush shadows to disappear from view – of the local villagers, and anyone coming after them.

The bus from the border had left them in the brassy light of midday at the foot of the Churia Hills, Chitwan’s southern boundary. There was a crossroads and a village of thatched ochre houses to one side, emerald fields in the other directions. The monsoons had passed; it was clearly harvest-time. Villagers, mainly middle-aged women and men in traditional dress – trousers or skirts, full shirts and scarves – stooped to pluck the rice stalks and throw them into piles on the ground. From the distance came a line of girls dressed in jewel colours, balancing on their backs long stalks of elephant grass. No one seemed to notice their little gang appearing out of nowhere.

‘Who are these people?’ Eli stared at the workers bent in the fields, at the girls coming closer like a herd of strange animals with long, sharp horns, at a pair of small boys in a red hammock strung from the roof of the house nearest them.

‘Tharu people,’ Sanjana said. ‘Not my Tharu people, forest people.’

‘Are they friendly?’ As foreign to Shanti as to him.

‘They look friendly,’ Deevyah said.

‘Would they give us food?’ His stomach was clenching; his last real meal had been a few days ago, only stolen apples, chai and a few dry biscuits since then.

‘We can ask,’ Shanti said hopefully.

Looking at her now, really seeing her, he was shocked at how thin she was – horribly gaunt, and dirty. Deevyah, the same: she’d shed most of
her curves, and her hair hung in limp strings. Both had lost their scarves and wore only their sari tops and skirts, with battered sneakers, too big. Like the red high-tops he’d stolen outside a temple just before they’d left Sunauli.

‘Why not wait till next village?’ Sanjana suggested. She was hungry, too, he knew it, but her desperation to get home overrode the hunger pangs. Shanti and Deevyah, too, evidently; they came from a village not far from Sanjana’s.
Three days’ walk
, she’d told him,
and I be there
.

Of course he had an idea of a jungle – from
Tarzan
and
The Jungle Book
– but he’d never been in one before. His mother had read those stories to him over and over when he was small, curled in the crook of her arm and hiding his face in her breasts when they turned the page to one of the villains. Especially, in Kipling’s tales, Shere Khan, the evil tiger, and Kaa, the giant python. In
Tarzan
the wicked ones were human – the hunters who destroyed the apes.

Yet as they walked through the moist, warm, shockingly green bush, under the canopies of towering sal trees, escorted by the shrieks and cries of rhesus monkeys who periodically swung into view, a growing alarm made him tingle all over. It was the invisible he feared most – a hidden rhino, or snake, or some sort of wild cat, God forbid a tiger.

‘They all asleep now,’ Sanjana said, reading his mind, bashing ahead with a big stick and holding the lead with Shanti and Deevyah. ‘All off in the bushes.’

But she was wrong. Ahead in a small clearing where the light filtered through like a spotlight was an old stump, and coiled around its top was Kaa himself – a huge black and bronze snake that could eat a person whole. The younger girls held back but Sanjana walked towards the snake like an old friend, on tiptoe. Then she touched it, again and again, until the snake awoke and quickly slithered into the rotten stump, only its tail protruding.

‘He sleep after eating,’ she said. ‘He won’t eat you now.’

She yanked his arm playfully, pulling him in another direction. ‘If we see more animal,’ she added, ‘climb tree.’

Yes. Of course. That’s what they did in those old jungle movies where people ended up in a pot.

He put his trust in Sanjana, not in any God or gods; she was what he could see. As they walked on silently, pushing giant leaves and scratchy brush aside, he followed her, moving with a cat’s grace through the
undergrowth, swinging her stick in a rhythm that kept time, kept them together. It was sticky, not too hot but humid enough to make sweat slip down his body; he was sure there were insects crawling all over him. He checked down his trousers and up his sleeves. There weren’t, just an occasional mosquito humming past, or a little cloud of midges materialising, then vanishing. The girls didn’t seem to be sweating at all.

Just before dusk they saw a grey mass looming up ahead. ‘Rhino!’ Sanjana whispered, waving them to stop. He looked at the nearest tree, a sal rising up to nearly thirty metres. No low branches.

Like an armoured car in low gear, the rhino shifted forward slowly, browsing off the jungle floor. He was different from the African ones – only one horn, shorter, and with distinctive plates, like a triceratops. Prehistoric. This beast barely seemed to notice them, as if they were all part of the jungle. They kept their distance, walking a wide arc around him and, at Sanjana’s command, back towards the jungle rim. As Eli passed the beast he glanced warily at him, meeting his beady eyes, like two little bullets lodged in his head.
Don’t step back
, Eli whispered. What rhinos did right before they charged.

The rhino let them go, and before long they emerged from the bush, arriving at the edge of a field of tall yellow grass. No village, no road, nothing else in sight, just the hills in the distance and a few tall lala palms ringing the field. The sun had just set and its purple glow hovered above the horizon.
You’re not out of the woods yet
– the saying floated into his head. No, but we’re out of the jungle.

In a bag over his shoulder, Eli carried the two blankets that the four of them shared. The nights were getting cooler now; soon they wouldn’t be warm enough. They cleared some grass, dug a wide hole in the dirt, away from the trees, and stacked broken sal limbs and twigs for a fire. The hippie pants he’d stolen off the rooftop washline in Sunauli came with a small, plastic orange lighter in the pocket, and now he proudly produced it. Did rubbing sticks together actually work? he wondered. He clicked the lighter on several of the twigs, and they blew on the timid flames, making them bolder.

They spread out the rough, grey blankets and sat down. Then Sanjana reached under her skirt and pulled out a jackknife, flipping out the blades, checking.

‘Where’d you get that?’

‘Stole at border,’ she said. ‘Everybody need a knife.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’ She looked like a demon, with the fire on her face, flashing the silver blade around.

‘Kill food for us.’

She turned and summoned Shanti and Deevyah to follow her, back into the jungle. Signing ‘stop’ with her hand, she told him to stay.
Watch our fire. Protect everything.
What was there to protect? Just some moth-eaten blankets, and a few rucksacks of smelly clothing, maybe a biscuit or two hidden away, disintegrating. Not to mention their lives.

As night closed in around him and the fire grew brighter in the dark, with the whoops from strange jungle creatures puncturing the silence, he realised it was happening. It was really happening. He was helping the girls get home. And he was getting closer each day to Kathmandu, to his father. Closer probably to his mother, too – he sometimes imagined them together waiting for him, as it should be. As it might be. He was sure they had looked for him, they were still looking for him, and maybe he should have turned himself in, looked for help, gone his own way. He knew people were willing to save boys like him. But girls like these? They just disappeared.

Not this time.

He heard the girls’ footsteps before he saw them, returning with their prize. As they stepped into the firelight, Sanjana held up, by its claws, a dead bird like a chicken, its slit throat still dripping blood.

‘Ha!’ she said, squatting and starting to pluck it. ‘These junglefowl are so stupid.’

The pale, denuded skin looked revolting, but he tried to imagine it turning crispy brown. Off came the poor bird’s head with a few saws from Sanjana’s knife.

‘We don’t eat the head,’ Shanti explained, chucking it into the bushes, ‘just the feet.’

‘I love the feet,’ said Deevyah.

Sanjana handed him a long, straight, pointed stick she’d also brought back from the jungle. She held up the bird, bringing it closer, within a couple of feet, butt facing him.

‘Stick it in him,’ she commanded. ‘Don’t miss.’

Later as they lay, full-bellied, on their blankets, the two younger girls whispering softly together and he next to Sanjana, not touching, he gazed at the stars in the blue-black sky. More and more appeared by the moment. Or perhaps he was just seeing them for the first time. The fire was dying down, though they’d agreed to keep watch, keep the fire going, against the unmentionables. The striped unmentionables.

He was on first watch. Stay awake; sleep and everyone will be eaten.

He sat up, propping himself with his arms behind him. Sanjana’s belly was moving up and down, and she had started to snore lightly. He wasn’t scared. He could probably talk himself into it, but for now he felt no fear. He wasn’t sure why, but wanted to hold on to this feeling, not analyse it. A feeling of lightness, of freedom, even of joy.

In fact he wanted to laugh.

They woke the next morning with a loud rustling noise around them. Monkeys, at least ten, with faces like Kabuki masks and silver bodies, rummaging through their bags. A few were munching old, forgotten biscuits. They sat up on their haunches, and, when Eli stood, backed off, still staring at him, in that suspicious crouch that animals adopt when they wonder what a person plans to do to them. He waved them off but almost didn’t want them to go. They amused him. Like people, taking what they could get out of life. Till they got caught.

The girls rose and wiped sleep from their eyes; they shared what remained in a water bottle.

‘We need to find another village,’ Sanjana said. ‘Soon. For water, food.’

‘Dal bhat!’ Shanti said.

The other girls’ faces lit up. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Famous dish of Nepal. Black lentils with rice. Much better than Indian dal.’

He’d had enough lentils in India to last him the rest of his life. But knew he’d devour it if offered. Devour anything.

‘We go now!’ Sanjana said, standing and rolling up the blanket, grabbing her small bag. ‘Just a little more jungle, Eli.’

The jungle seemed harmless now, he wasn’t sure why. Of course the same creatures lay hidden in its green thickets, but he felt protected by something, someone. The girls, too, seemed more relaxed, lighter, happier – playful, even. Sanjana kept the lead, singing a simple little song he guessed she’d known from childhood. Walking at the end of their short line, single-file, seemed the best place for him. He had a better view of what was coming, and, for the first time in days, he didn’t sense anything following them.

They were lulled by the rhythm of their walking, unsure how long they’d been trekking, when they heard people’s voices, broken but sharp, and spied through the trees a lumbering grey hulk. They moved faster and closer, trying to stay light on their feet. The hulk was an elephant, and it was carrying a family of four in a wooden platform on its back, plus a driver seated just behind its head. The driver, a skinny, barefoot
man, seemed to be steering the elephant with his feet, right behind the ears, urging it forward with a stick and angry shouts. Eli despised this meanness towards animals, and the silly family rolling around on top, the mother shrieking and the girl and boy giggling hysterically as if they were on an amusement-park ride.

Sanjana came back to speak to him. ‘We follow, maybe lead to village. OK?’

Fine, if he didn’t have to talk to these people, rich city slickers on holiday. What did they know about the jungle and its creatures? Even at this distance he could see their absurdity, the woman’s pointy shoes and the man’s suit coat. He was sure the kids had on T-shirts from Disney World, or some designer brand.

And then the worst: the woman’s cell phone rang, and she answered it, yelling
hallo, hallo,
into the receiver, as if she expected to get reception in the middle of the fucking jungle.

Luckily it took less than an hour to get to the village, another Tharu village of mud and thatch, where the elephant trek ended. From a few low bushes they watched the elephant, still being hit occasionally with the stick, move slowly, almost painfully, over to a cleared area on the village’s edge, scattered with straw. The driver – the ‘mahout’, Sanjana called him – agilely dismounted and, at his command, the elephant crouched down so its riders could disembark. The boy jumped off, making a show of it; the girl slid off; the father found a sound foothold on the elephant’s thick leg and stepped down calmly; the mother tried several options before removing her high heels and jumping into her husband’s arms. Brother.

For a moment, Eli felt a twinge in his belly, seeing this family all together, vaguely enjoying themselves. But actually, it was stupid. Glad he didn’t have to do stuff like this with his parents.

‘Hey!’ Sanjana shook his arm. ‘We ask mahout if he can take us across river tomorrow, out of park. We so close now.’

The father paid off the mahout and shepherded his family toward a black Mercedes waiting on the road. They all got in and drove off, the Merc’s motor becoming fainter and fainter until the sounds of nature took over.

The mahout was sitting on an overturned plastic bucket, counting his money. As they walked towards him, he looked up and shoved the rupees in his kurta pocket. He had a scraggly moustache and bad teeth, stained by betel nut. And he was the one wearing a Disney T-shirt, a zany-faced Donald Duck, maybe weasled off the family somehow.