She had been widowed fifteen years ago when Rajesh was still a child, and soon afterwards her wealthy feudal in-laws had started to harass her. The house in which she had lived with her husband was taken away from her, and her in-laws also refused to return the little dowry she had brought with her. Her parents were dead; her brothers too poor to support her. There was only Rajesh, who’d had his own struggles: he had worked since he was thirteen, first in the maize fields, and then at a carpet factory in Benares, where he had gone to evening school and done well enough to enter the university.
The years had somehow passed in overcoming all these different obstacles. But now she was worried. Rajesh, she feared, had reached a dead end. There were no more openings for him. All the government jobs these days were going to low-caste people, and not only did Rajesh have the wrong kind of caste, he had no connections anywhere. He also had too much self-respect to work for low-caste shopkeepers and businessmen.
Disdain entered her voice as she said this. I had encountered it before. It came from an exalted sense of being Brahmin, of being marked and set above people from other castes, races. Rajesh himself possessed some of that feeling, which in his case was also an awareness of not having lived up to old standards. ‘I am a Brahmin,’ I had heard him say, ‘but I have done things no Brahmin would ever do.’
But I didn’t think of this then. I was shocked by what Rajesh’s mother had told me about his life. How little of his past I had known! Of the childhood spent in maize fields and carpet factories, I had known nothing at all. I did know a bit about these factories. They had been in the papers after some human rights organizations petitioned the government to prohibit them from using child labour. There had been pictures of large-eyed, frightened-looking children in dimly lit halls, framed against their exquisite handiworks. I had read the accompanying articles and then I had forgotten about them.
To think of Rajesh as one of those children was to shrink the usual distance I kept from these things — the cruelties of rural India, occasionally reported in the papers and then buried under reports of similar cruelties. It was to have, however briefly, a disturbing new sense of the harsh world around me.
Rajesh himself changed in my eyes when he came back into the room. Behind his unreadable handsome face, I now saw tormenting private memories of childhood. The instability I had noticed and feared on more than one occasion appeared as a natural consequence of his past.
But the moment soon passed. Rajesh set out small wooden seats on the ground and his mother served out hot steaming parathas with mango pickles in large brass thalis.
She did not eat with us; it was too early for her, she said. She spread a sack on the floor, sat cross-legged on it and then watched us alertly as we ate, quick to offer us more parathas and refill our steel tumblers with water.
She apologized all the time for the meagreness of what she was offering. Once she asked me about my plans for the future; she asked if I was preparing to take the Civil Service exam.
She didn’t say much to Rajesh. Most of her conversation was directed at me; and when after breakfast I said I was going for a walk, it was to give them some time together.
*
The children, whose noises had reached me inside the small room, had quietened down a bit when I walked out into the bright day outside. They stood in a small crowd, watching for oncoming vehicles on the road. They turned and stared as I approached, but averted their eyes and turned back swiftly to the road as soon as I met their gaze.
I walked back the way we had come and was soon past the row of box-shaped rooms. Mud huts lined the road after that, buffaloes tethered in front yards messy with hay, and women cooking midday meals on dung-cake fires, the hot foamy yellow dhal trickling down from above the quivering pans.
The huts ended and the mango groves began. I was a few paces into the grove when the voices reached me, loud accusatory yelps rising from somewhere deep in the cluster of trees.
I walked farther and saw, in a levelled clearing screened off from the road, five or six children playing cricket. The ball was rubber and bouncy; a rectangle cleanly carved on the bark of a tree served as wickets; and the bat was equally improvised, somewhat akin to the wooden truncheon with which washermen beat clothes on the ghats in Benares.
The children were so absorbed in their game, they barely noticed me. Their voices receded as I penetrated farther into the grove on a narrow pebble-strewn path zigzagging between trees, and were reduced to a lone extra-loud yelp.
Soon, the grove was all silence, and the only sound came from my shoes crunching the pebbles on the dirt path. Overhead, the trees, fruitless, with the season still months away, formed a thick awning with their abundant leaves. A few stray sunbeams filtered through them to fall in small bright patches on the ground, carpeted with dead leaves and wild grass.
I had been walking for some time when I stopped, and then stood still for a while. My thoughts, briefly disturbed by the unexpected disclosures about Rajesh, had returned to Catherine. The possibility that I had merely been a source of comfort for Catherine during her troubles with Anand had come to me repeatedly in the previous days. I had begun to wonder if my time with her had only served as a release for her anxieties about Anand.
And thinking about that now, facing the mute trees — old, with gnarled, coarse-fibred roots — I felt again a heavy sluggishness in my heart.
I had been standing there for a few minutes, hearing only the slow regular rhythms of my breathing, when I heard, faint at first, but growing clearer by the second, the tinkling of bells. I recognized the sound instantly. I had heard it countless times in the alleys of Benares; it was the sound of cows going past. The large number of wandering cows in the alleys made it blend into a kind of continuous ringing; and it was, along with conch shells and temple bells, one of the sounds of the old city.
Detached from the city, and in this mango grove, among the still trees, the bells had different associations. Coming closer all the time, they seemed deeper, melodious, almost meditative, an emanation as if from unknown ancient times.
Presently, I saw them, the herd of cows pressing closely against each other on the narrow path, a cloud of dust billowing softly behind them. They came closer and I stood aside as they passed me.
Sharp long horns were raised threateningly for an instant as they examined me with large limpid eyes. Then they demurely dropped their gaze to the ground and moped on.
It was as the last of the column filed past me that I saw the boy.
He had been totally concealed by the cows, by their high, bobbing backs, but he had been there all the time I had been watching. He probably lived in one of the mud huts of the kind I had passed a few minutes ago where midday meals were being cooked on dung-cake fires. He didn’t appear to be more than ten years old, even in his oversized shorts, which hung down well below his knees. The half-sleeved vest he wore above the shorts showed his thin, tender arms. He held a small stick in one tight fist, and there was, in his large brown eyes, below the unruly mop of hair, an expression of pure terror.
He stared at me for one fugitive instant, then quickly jerked his head away. He walked with his stick pressed stiffly to his thigh, his head turned, like the cows’, towards the ground, and watching his retreating back, the twitching folds of his vest, which expressed fear and suspicion, watching him go, the cow bells slowly dying away in the distance, I was overcome by an inexplicable desolation.
I stood for a few more minutes on the spot where I had stopped to let the cows past.
It soon grew quiet again. But something didn’t seem right; the spell had been broken. And when I turned to go back, every movement of my feet filled me with weariness.