The Smoke is Rising (24 page)

There was nothing Ramanna wanted more than to sell his blighted holding. But he wanted the right price. He would not give up the one thing of any value that he owned for anything less than its proper worth. Now that determination saw him preparing to take a seat on a bus, his face blank, making common cause with some of the people who spat at his children in the street.

Vasu began his headcount for the third time.

The oldest person in the group was Kenchamma; at least, that was the general supposition. Neither she nor any of her female contemporaries knew their exact age. When asked, she would throw her head back and let out one of her soundless laughs, her jaw quivering delicately.

‘All the girls in my family grew up like weeds. Who knows the age of weeds?’ she would ask.

Kenchamma owned a small parcel of land that lay across the
proposed site for one of the HeritageLand ring roads. She had spent the last fifteen years sitting in the doorway of her house, listening to the smack of her tongue against the roof of her mouth and looking out at the surrounding fields. Her constancy was as much a feature of the landscape as the crackling beds of dried sugar cane leaves or the kites that traced daring arcs with their frozen wings. Her two remaining sons worked the fields and it was their shifting forms that Kenchamma watched. She had lost five children in childbirth, two to measles and one son had been found hanging from a tree at the edge of their smallholding. She had lived on this land for over sixty years, arriving as a girl, already married three years. The land was bordered by a stony ravine, a line of wood-apple trees and the narrow lane that led to the nearest village. These markers traced the physical edges of her experience but their nearness had not blunted her intuition or her foresight. Today she had insisted on making the trip to Bangalore, as the stakes were as high for her as for anyone else.

A woman walked to the front of one of the buses and cracked a coconut on the ground with a deadly swing. A few heads bowed in silent prayer. The elderly had already been allowed to board the buses and make themselves comfortable. Now Vasu began to direct the others towards the bus doors. Two buses had been borrowed from a milk cooperative’s local office and the third hired from a tour company. The arrangements had been made, then cancelled and then reconstituted. The angry charge that ran through the community had not helped Vasu in his attempts at planning this journey. But, in the end, he and his colleagues had managed to convince the majority of the importance of a solid presence at the High Court.

The buses moved out of the compound and made their way towards the Bangalore–Mysore highway. The woman who had cracked the coconut took a steel
dabba
out from under the folds of
her
pallu
and began to pass around some
prasada
. Her morning prayers had been the culmination of twenty-one days of fasting and the sugary semolina would yield good luck. As the buses gained speed, Kenchamma’s reedy voice punctured the chill air. The message was clear. If a woman her age could sing all the way there, no one else had any excuse to brood.

Getting his hair cut had always made Jaydev nervous. Even as a child, every time the barber visited the house to administer to the men and boys in the family Jaydev would steal up the back stairs and seek asylum in one of the unoccupied rooms on the top floor. His elbows piked into his lap, he would endure an anxious spell in a rosewood cupboard that smelt of camphor or behind knobbly sacks of paddy, listening for the sounds of pursuit. All the while, as if in sympathy, a fretful rumble would descend from the pigeons settled in the ancient rafters. The pattern continued throughout his childhood in spite of his mother’s exasperated warnings, her fingers twisting his ear into a red ball of flame.

His adult years had meant an inevitable but uneasy accommodation with the monthly ritual. It was not vanity or sloth that brought the unsettling pall. Jaydev felt a disconcerting loss of control at delivering himself up to these silent, sullen men who manipulated his head with brusque gestures and appraised him unabashedly. Trussed in a towel, being goaded by an inconvenient reflection, a handful of waiting men watching his transformation, Jaydev endured his sessions in clenched abeyance. Over the years, habit had brought relief at a shop squeezed into a nook on 5th Cross, its owner as much a creature of routine as Jaydev. The slack hours were predictable, the service rapid and the lights relatively dim. But now, after thirty years, the barber had wound up his business and Jaydev suddenly found himself trying to identify a replacement.

It was not particularly urgent. He could probably go without a haircut for another week or so. But he had thought, in passing, that today might be a good day. It was a Tuesday afternoon and people tended to avoid Tuesdays for haircuts. He had spotted a place that looked passable and he had the time, as long as he could be home by four to have a shower. Susheela was expecting him to pick her up at about half past four. It was the first time he was taking her anywhere and it would not do to be late.

There were a couple of empty chairs outside the shop. Inside, no one was waiting and there was only one customer. He leant back in his chair, eyes closed as the barber dusted off his shoulders with a brush. The barber gestured to Jaydev to take a seat on the bench against the wall. An assistant stood at the end of the room, twisting a button on his shirt, his body popping with neglected energy.

Jaydev sat down, hoping it would not take too long. Seating with no back could turn into a problem. Above his head, a poster of beaming blond men had almost faded into the wall, the images teal with age. He picked up a film magazine and began to turn the pages. He stopped at a story setting out a top star’s plans to launch a website dedicated to tackling climate change. The star described in detail the moment he realised that urgent action was necessary during the filming of a chase scene in the jungles of Borneo.

The barber was showing the customer the back of his head in a mirror. Did any man do anything other than nod in buttoned-down approval at this point?

The customer’s head bobbed in contentment and he stood up. The barber bowed at Jaydev and indicated the vacant chair.

‘My name is Raju, sir. How can I help you today?’ he asked.

‘I think it needs a good trim. It feels heavy at the back. It might start curling up,’ explained Jaydev, sitting down.

‘Yes, sir. And the front?’

‘The front? Just do something that will go with the back.’

‘Not to worry, sir. First time here, sir?’

‘Yes, my first time. My usual man left town.’

Raju bowed again, as if in deference to that decision. When he tucked a towel into Jaydev’s collar, the skin on his fingers felt cool and grainy. With a flourish, he spread another towel over Jaydev, fussing over its edges. He smoothed out the creases over Jaydev’s arms and brushed imaginary fragments off its surface.

The assistant darted forward and asked Raju a question. As he replied, he rested his hands on Jaydev’s shoulders, like a friend in the playground making a declaration of solidarity. Jaydev waited for the haircut to begin. He stared at the counter in front of him, not wanting to look in the mirror. This type of lighting played tricks. It made his neck look like it had receded into a cavern and his eyes appear even more deep set, trying to catch the light from their submerged lair. Even Raju looked grey and pinched in the mirror. On the counter there stood small tubs of pomade, hair oils arranged by colour, from amber to mahogany, and muscular bottles of aftershave. An open razor loomed in a jar of milky solution, turning grooming into chemistry. The towel around his neck smelt of talcum powder, which always reminded him of his children, white specks mottling the rubber sheet whenever his wife changed them.

‘Sorry sir,’ said Raju, speaking louder than was necessary. ‘You have to tell these youngsters everything a hundred times.’

The assistant began to move a broom around the clean floor, delivering loud clacks as he manoeuvred it into the tight corners around the chairs.

Raju shot him a look of distaste and then squeezed Jaydev’s shoulders.

‘Sorry sir, I will start now.’

His hands swept up the nape of Jaydev’s neck, bunching the white locks for a quick assessment. He then placed a palm on
either side of Jaydev’s head and contemplated his face. Satisfied, he picked up a spray and, placing his hand decorously over Jaydev’s eyes, he released clouds of fine mist into the air, all the while looking like someone who would really rather not have to intrude in this way.

He put the spray down.

‘Sir, machine?’

‘No. No machine.’

Raju bowed again. He picked up a pair of scissors and began cutting, blade over fist, the same closeness of clicks that always made Jaydev grind his teeth and look down at his knees.

A man with two young sons walked into the shop and sat down on the bench.

‘But last time you said he would cut off my ears,’ wailed the smaller of the boys.

‘I said if you didn’t sit still, he would cut off your ears.’

The prospect of not moving seemed even more terrifying and the boy buried his bushy head in his father’s lap.

The assistant tried to engage the older boy in some play involving enthusiastic winking but was roundly ignored.

The white snips were falling like snow on to the floor. Once a glassy black with a noble wave in it, over the years Jaydev’s hair had turned into a more tentative sweep, threaded with strands of soft grey, and had eventually settled into a timid, feathery drop, like thoughts made of tulle. Still, at least he had held on to it at his age, more than enough to worry a comb.

Raju picked up a razor and, pulling taut the skin on Jaydev’s cheek, began to scrape at his sideburn. The rasping seemed to be coming from inside Jaydev’s head and was curiously satisfying, like itchy worries being scratched. The process was repeated on the other side. Jaydev’s eyes met his own in the mirror. Everything looked neater, strapped in, kempt. He looked like a boyish old man.

Raju leant forward and said, almost into his ear: ‘Sir, head massage?’

‘What?’

‘Head massage, sir?’

Jaydev had no idea what to say.

So he said: ‘Fine.’

He supposed it would be.

His usual barber liked to keep things uncomplicated. There had never been any doubts, ambiguities or massages. Undoubtedly the glitzy salons in town managed to muddy these waters. But Jaydev had never even stepped through their doors. This was why change in these matters was so unsettling.

Raju poured a liquid into his palm, something brown that smelt of forests. Slathering it over his palms, he smiled reassuringly at Jaydev. The fingers that had been like a strip of wet sand were now like warm wax, melding, easing and quelling. The skin on Jaydev’s head felt fluid, teeming with spores, as Raju’s palms slowly gave up their heat. Jaydev’s eyes were screwed shut, the rings and waves of Raju’s touch only palpable as an irresistible foreign manipulation. The fingers migrated to his temples, stole on to his crown and then dropped to the back of his head. At the base of his neck, they reasoned and resolved. They fled back up his head in jittery bursts, cool, then hot, then cool again, and spread out over the top of his forehead. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours in that soft-cornered darkness.

‘All done, sir.’

Raju ran a comb through Jaydev’s hair and smoothed it down with his hand. Silky bristles caressed the back of Jaydev’s neck and a cooling wad of cotton dabbed the skin behind his ears. Raju finished the process with a mysterious crack that brought Jaydev back to the grey light of the shop.

Jaydev put money down on the counter, nodded at Raju and the
assistant and pushed open the door with more strength than it needed. Outside, he crumpled on to one of the empty chairs. His head and neck smarted from the recent contact. All of a sudden, a great galloping sob rose through him, convulsing his body and placing a chilly finger in the hollow of his throat. He slumped forward, crying tearlessly, long absent tremors billowing out, one after the next. He covered his face with his hands and sat bowed in the chair, until, just as suddenly, the ferment fell away, leaving only complete stillness. It felt like the first moment of the early morning. Slowly, he stood up and stepped off the shop’s porch. It had been exactly ten years since anyone had touched his temples, held his head or made much of his neck.