“Yes,” said Christopher, ‘he was dressed very like that.” But he wanted to move on, to narrow the field even more.
“Did you find anything,” he continued, ‘that might have told you where he came from? The name of his monastery, perhaps?”
Norbhu could see what the Englishman was trying to do. Why was he playing such games with him? Did he take him for a fool?
“Where your friend come from?” he asked.
Christopher hesitated.
“He didn’t say. Do you know where the dead man came from?”
The tsong-chi smiled.
“Not every mountain has a god,” he said.
“Not every monastery has a name.” If the Englishman expected him to play the part of the wily and enigmatic Oriental in this masquerade, he would at least put on a virtuoso performance.
Christopher recognized the shift in mood. He would have to change tack.
“Did you see this man Tsewong before he died? This house is on the road he must have taken to reach Kalimpong. Perhaps he called here. Perhaps you saw him. You or one of your staff?”
Norbhu Dzasa shook his head.
“Not see. No-one see.” There was a pause. The tsong-chi looked at Christopher intently.
“What you really look for, Wylam-la? What thing you look for? What person?”
Christopher hesitated again before answering. Did the little Tibetan know? Was he teasing him with this questioning?
“My son,” he said.
“I’m looking for my son.”
The tsong-chi sipped tea from his cup and set it down elegantly.
“Not find him here. Understanding, perhaps. Wisdom, perhaps.
Or things you not wish to find. But no son. Please, Wylam-la, I advise you. Go home. Back to own country. The mountains here very treacherous. Very high. Very cold.”
The two men eyed each other closely, like fencers with raised foils. In the silence, the mantra sounded clearer than before.
“Tell me,” Norbhu Dzasa said abruptly.
“Is Wylam a common name?”
Christopher shook his head. Not common. Not not common, he wanted to say. But he didn’t.
“No. There aren’t many Wylams. Lots of Christophers but not many Wylams.”
Norbhu Dzasa smiled again. There was something about his smile that unsettled Christopher. A lamp on the altar spluttered briefly and went out.
“I knew man called Wylam,” the tsong-chi said.
“Many years ago.
In India. Look very much like you. Father perhaps?”
Had Norbhu Dzasa suspected all along? Christopher wondered.
“Perhaps,” he said.
“My father was a political agent. He died many years ago.”
Norbhu Dzasa looked hard at Christopher.
“Your tea getting cold,” he said.
Christopher lifted his cup and drank quickly. The thick, lukewarm liquid clung to his palate and his throat.
“I’ve taken enough of your time, Mr. Dzasa,” he said.
“I’m sorry to have wasted it on a wild-goose chase.”
“No matter,” answered the little man.
“There are other geese.”
He rose and clapped his hands twice. The sound of the hand-claps rang out dully in the shimmering room.
The door opened and the servant came to show Christopher out.
“Goodbye, Wylam-la,” Norbhu Dzasa said.
“I am sorry not more help.”
“I’m sorry too,” said Christopher. The heavy tea was making him feel slightly nauseous. He wanted to get out of the stuffy room.
Norbhu Dzasa bowed and Christopher left, escorted by the servant. The tsong-chi sighed audibly. He missed his wife and children. They had gone to Lhasa for the New Year celebrations at the end of January and the three-week Monlam Festival that would follow. It might be months before they returned. His new wife was young and pretty, and he felt almost youthful when he was with her. But here, without her, he felt age lie upon him like a covering of hard snow that will not lift. On the walls around him, gods and demons danced and copulated in solemn gradations of ecstasy and pain. So little ecstasy, he thought; and so much pain.
Curtains parted in the wall to his left. A man dressed in the robes of a monk stepped into the room. His thin, sallow face was covered with the scars of smallpox.
“Well?” asked Norbhu Dzasa.
“Did you hear?”
The monk nodded.
“Wylam,” Norbhu Dzasa went on.
“Looking for his son.”
“Yes,” said the monk.
“I heard.” He ran a thin hand over his shaven scalp. Light from the lamps flickered on his mottled skin, making small shadows, like ants crawling.
“The gods are coming out to play,” he said.
“We must be ready when the game begins.”
As Christopher returned to the outskirts of Kalimpong, the sun sank steeply in the west. The light was snatched away with fierce rapidity. Night invaded the world, precipitately and without resistance, save for a few pockets of illumination in the bazaar and one light burning faintly in St. Andrew’s church, just visible from where he stood.
He walked back through the bazaar, filled with flaring lights and the deep, intoxicating scents of herbs and spices. At one stall, an old man sold thick dhal in rough pots; at another, a woman in a tattered said offered a selection of peppers, chillies, and wild pomegranate seeds. On small brass scales, in pinches and handfuls, the whole of India was being parcelled out and weighed. The old kaleidoscope had started to turn again for Christopher. But now, for the first time, he sensed behind its dazzling patterns an air of cold menace.
He found the Mission Hospital at the other side of town from the orphanage. The British cemetery lay symbolically between.
Martin Cormac, the doctor who had tended the dying monk at the Knox Homes, was not available.
The nursing sister who saw Christopher was unhelpful. She said that Cormac had gone to make an urgent call at Peshok, a village between Kalimpong and Darjeeling. More than that, she said she knew nothing.
Christopher left a slip of paper bearing his name and the address of the rest-house where he had put up. The nurse took the paper between finger and thumb as if it bore embedded in its fibres all the diseases of the sub-continent and most of the plagues of Egypt.
She deposited it in a small, neglected pigeon-hole half-way down the hospital’s austere entrance hall and returned to the ward with a look that promised much wiping of fevered brows.
He returned to the rest-house, took a cat-nap, and fortified himself with another chota peg before shaving and donning some thing suitable for dinner with the Carpenters. The rest-house was quiet when he left. No-one saw him go.
He was met at the door of the Knox Homes by Carpenter himself, now dressed more formally than before, but not in evening attire. The missionary conducted him straight away to the orphanage proper, or rather, to what constituted the girls’ division.
There were more girls than boys in the Knox Homes: boys were economically viable offspring who might grow up to look after their aged parents: girls were burdens who would end up being married into someone else’s family. Girl babies were dumped quickly on someone else’s doorstep if they were lucky.
The girls’ orphanage was a scrubbed and spartan place, more a way-station than a home; its walls and floors and furniture were pervaded with the smells of carbolic, coal tar soap, and iodine, and its musty air seemed laden with the ghosts of other, less immediately recognizable smells the thin vomit of children, boiled cabbage, and that faint but unmistakable smell that is common to all institutions where adolescent girls are gathered in one place. A r sour, menstrual smell that lingers on all it touches.
In a dark-panelled hall hung with the portraits of patrons and pious mottoes edged in funereal black, Christopher was introduced to the children. Rows of silent, impassive faces stared up at him as he stood, embarrassed and awkward, on a low platform at the end of the hall. The girls were of all ages, but all wore the same drab uniform and the same dull look of incomprehension and sullen endurance on their faces. Most appeared to be Indian, but there were Nepalese, Tibetans, and Lepchas among them. Christopher noticed a few of mixed parentage, Anglo-Indians, and two girls who seemed to be of European origin. There were rather over one hundred in all.