Ryman, Rebecca (45 page)

"Yes."

"Because
of piety?" she asked, surprised.

"Because
it is expected." By Sujata, she wondered? But then she remembered that
Sujata no longer lived in his house. He sensed her question. "By my staff,
those who crew the ships and work in my office, people of the neighbourhood too
poor to raise their own altars." He shrugged. "Anyone else who wishes
to worship." There was no mention of friends or family, but then he had
none.

"The
worship itself—does it mean anything to you?"

"No.
I have neither a vote of thanks to offer the gods nor a shopping list for
future favours. My destiny is my own."

As
it always did, his cynicism wounded her. The isolation he cultivated so
savagely made her heart ache, and once more she yearned to storm the citadels
of his merciless privacy. In America she had sometimes met men who were also
alone—drifters, lone riders, solitary homesteaders, ranchers in the remote
wilderness who called no one family and no place truly home. Jai's isolation,
however, was excessively cruel, for he lacked nothing that money could buy and
everything that it could not. Who was the father who had abandoned him without
leaving even a name? Had Jai ever sought him out, missed him, thirsted for that
paternal affection that was every son's due? And his mother, that unfortunately
ravished woman—had she never resented the child thrust into her womb by a fate
that was callous? Was she really dead? That unknown father—was he dead? Or,
perhaps, was he still living unconcerned in some distant land unaware that
across the oceans existed a son who might bear his face even if he did not his
name? And from which parent had
he
inherited his astonishing eyes?

"Don't
dwell on irrelevancies, Olivia!" He burrowed inside her huddled thoughts
as infallibly as ever. "Think of nothing except what you are about to see.
There is a reason."

A
reason! Unease, this time needle pointed, threaded through her veins. Her
initial instinct had not been wrong; she knew now she had cause for that unease
but could not decipher what, and she was frightened. Her ache, her acute need
now to be held against that inaudible heart that seemed to beat so calmly
within reach of her fingers, intensified into a torrent of longing, but she
swallowed it. Even a foot away he was so far removed, so inexorably padlocked
within the cavernous vaults of his unattainable mind, that she did not dare to
intrude. Yet, Olivia knew that he felt everything she felt, breathed with the
same breath as she, sensed accurately every one of her longings but
deliberately without reaction.

"Observe,"
he said gently. That was all.

Like
a wayward pup commanded to heel, she obeyed. And observed.

They
had entered a stretch of the river where the bank to their right pulsated with
life. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, thronged the shore, now so close to the
longboat that Olivia could see their features clearly illuminated by the torches
that flamed everywhere. Rumbling rolls of drums, regular and rhythmic, floated
across the waters. Within their primitive cadences they seemed to carry
esoteric messages decipherable only by the
aware. The air around them reverberated
with chants and wails, disembodied voices rising and falling like the tides of
the sea under the baton of the winds. The longboat inched closer towards the
undulating river bank, the sinuous movements of the oarsmen now as smooth as
those of a serpent.

In
rhythm with the drums, Olivia's heartbeats syncopated. She watched in
awe-struck silence, prickles of fear playing her spine like a keyboard. They
were now near enough to the river bank to be able to pick out details of the
images being readied for immersion and extinction. The images were carried on
platforms borne on men's shoulders, bare and black against the shining white of
their long dhotis and short loin-cloths, an army of unearthly-looking creatures
engaged in vital communal enterprise. Carefully, lovingly, the images were
balanced between two boats waiting side by side in the water. Wading in waist
deep, the men pushed the boats farther out into the mainstream with eager arms.
A boatman with a long pole gently separated the boats from each other. For an
instant, just an instant, the images teetered and seesawed, and then, as the
boats sailed apart, they fell clumsily into the water. The ritual was repeated
with the remaining images, and each time, a hushed wail of triumph stirred
among the crowd and then died again. Having completed their duties, the waders
returned to the bank.

Not
one of them stopped to look back.

In
silence Olivia and Jai sat and watched the final rituals of Dassera, the
longboat still, the oarsmen immobile save for lips mouthing silent
mantras.
Olivia
dragged away her spellbound eyes to look at Raventhorne and, in the glare of
the torches, found his instantly, for they were riveted to her face. In the
pearl grey depths there was now a question, a question apparently of such vital
importance that she recoiled instinctively; Jai Raventhorne was waiting for her
to say something of extraordinary significance. What?

Olivia
swallowed and it was painful, for her throat felt dehydrated. "I have seen
in Kumartuli the infinite care and devotion with which these images are
fashioned." Was it this that he sought from her—approval and appreciation?
"During the ten days that they are installed on altars, I know they are
cherished and revered."

"Go
on!" he whispered, not yet satisfied, wanting more.

Olivia
licked her parched lips and stared, but all she could see on his face was a
mask behind which there was another mask, behind which there was darkness.
"Yet, when they discard the
images they seem to do so carelessly,
almost roughly, as if they meant nothing anymore. Not one of them looked back
even once."

"Ah!"

He
made a strange sound—part wail, part triumphal—something in between mortal
torment and deliverance. At the same time his body, held in a frame of rigid
tension, fell loose as if released from under some intolerable pressure. He
moved, and with the shift in position his features blazed with the moonlight. A
small cry arose in Olivia's throat but remained unborn as she congealed. His
skin was suddenly like parchment, old and yellow, stretched across his cheek-bones
in a lifeless expanse. But what produced in Olivia a new terror was the sight
of his eyes, like empty sockets in a skull. For a moment she could only stare
at the gaunt apparition who faced her, for it was that of a stranger she had
never seen before.

When
he spoke again he had moved, so that the illusion was gone and his voice once
more was measured. "That is the lesson of the immersions. They teach to
love but to remain detached, to renounce when necessary and never to look back
with regret."

Olivia
started to tremble. "But how can that be?" she breathed.

"It
can be, it
must.
But because there is no regret does not mean there is
no pain." He was again gentle. "Watch!"

Dutifully,
her gaze pivoted back to the shore. Those who had completed their immersions—their
renunciations!—had departed. The crowd had thinned considerably. But those who
remained displayed expressions of racking grief, tears spilling down in
glistening trails on dark cheeks, their eyes stricken with loss. Some cried
quietly, their faces buried in their palms or in the shoulder of a companion;
others mourned openly, their bodies contorted with anguish. The black waters of
the Hooghly were now a battle-field littered with the remains of a hideous
massacre. Arms, legs, painted and grinning faces floated past the longboat on
their way to the eternity of the sea. Among the flotsam and jetsam were scraps
of once beautiful clothing, tinsel crowns and armlets, glass bangles, beaded
necklaces and, waving from guillotined heads, hanks of coarse black hair still
entwined with flowers.

Dust
to dust, clay to clay.

Olivia
knew now beyond any reasonable doubt that something terrible was about to
happen. In her stomach, tension knotted like a cramp and panic lay quivering
just beneath the skin
being warmed so efficiently by Jai's
pashmina
shawl of such exquisite
artistry. Blinded by tears and the foreboding of tragedy, she asked, "Do
you consider yourself a Hindu?" Aware of the futility of her question, she
still refused to despair.

"As
much as I consider myself anything, I suppose."

"And
you too would be able to make such a renunciation without a backward
glance?"

"Yes."
There was not even hesitation.

"With
no regrets?"

"None."

"Or
. . . pain?"

This
time there was hesitation but only fractional. "No."

Olivia's
mind died. With each of his syllables she had hurtled farther and farther into
an icy, airless space in which she was alone. The silence between them was
sepulchral as, divided by their irreconcilable worlds, they drifted apart with
not even the solace of a colliding glance. He stared through her and beyond her
into vacancy; numbed by the enormity of what he had said, Olivia sat in glazed
stupefaction. The polished disc of the moon was now behind the dipping fronds
of the palm trees on its way below the horizon and toward other worlds. The
longboat was again on the move on its return to the jetty. The shore receded
behind them and with it the torches and the crowds and the chanting. Obeisance
to the mother goddess Durga was over for another year and her devotees were
dispersing. Olivia was not aware that with them she too was crying.

At
the jetty Bahadur waited with the carriage. The rest of the street was
deserted. In their homes people slept soundly, neither knowing nor caring that
outside their pleasant dreams there were knells of doom sounding for some. The
night that had brought sleep to many had brought for others a curse of eternal
sleeplessness. They disembarked and, expressionless, Raventhorne held open the
door of the carriage for Olivia. Just fleetingly his fingers brushed hers but
neither lingered nor returned.

"I
cannot see you again, Olivia."

It
was what he had been saying to her all night. Long before the words were
enunciated they resounded and reverberated in Olivia's head like an echo knocking
against a bowl of mountains. She knew now that it was what he had been saying
to her each time they had met, right from the beginning. Her paralysed mouth
formed the word
why?
but no sound came. Like his sentence of death, it
too remained only an echo in her mind. Then she was inside the carriage being
jolted away into a night that did
not include him. She looked back,
unheeding of the rules of a renunciation that had not been hers, but he was
only a speck in the distance. Then, rubbed out by the dark, he was not even
that.

"Stop
this carriage . . .!"

The
thunder of hooves swallowed Olivia's belated cry as she returned to life,
savaged by a despair that was a tangible entity. Unable to grasp or accept the
finality of a sentence as cruel and as undeserved as this, her mind did not
have the strength to rebel yet. Instead, like the images, she started to
disintegrate within herself; like the images, something loved was being
discarded and left to dissolve in some alien sea. The injustice of it crippled Olivia's
thinking powers, save for that one recurring and unanswered question.

Why?

She
thought she was dead, or would be soon.

There
was a desert inside her mouth, arid and sandy. Her eyelids would not lift and
when they did she was blinded by the dazzle. Within her head a maniac with a
hammer drove nails into her skull. And there was fog, everywhere there was fog.
Hidden in that fog there were voices, her aunt's, Estelle's, Dr. Humphries's.
Some foul liquid was forced into her mouth; a cold compress was being pressed
against her forehead and someone ordered her to sleep.

Olivia
slept.

Weaving
in and out of consciousness, she saw mirages—a play of colour and shape as in a
kaleidoscope that made patterns and then fell apart to the roll of drums. There
were also horrible nightmares, of graves and putrefying limbs and hideous
painted faces, all skeletal in their finery, all with talons reaching out to
trap her. Olivia screamed and thrashed to ward off the evil that was in the
very air, and then out of the mist came a pearly cloak of security to enfold
her in an embrace that was as soft as
pashmina.
She purred with
contentment, nuzzling the warmth and the safety of arms. And then she slept
again.