I watched Epifania praying and gave thanks that somehow, by some great fluke that seemed at the time the most ordinary thing in the world, my parents had been cured of religion. (Where’s their medicine, their priest-poison-beating anti-venene? Bottle it, for pity’s sake, and send it round the world!) I looked at Camoens in his khaddar jibba and remembered that he once went, without Belle, all the way across the mountains to the small town of Malgudi on the river Sarayu, just because Mahatma Gandhi was to speak there: this, in spite of being a Nehru man. He wrote about it in his journal:
In that huge gathering sitting on the sands of Sarayu I was a tiny speck. There were a lot of volunteers clad in white khaddar moving around the dais. The chromium stand of the microphone gleamed in the sun. Police stood about here and there. Busybodies were going round asking people to remain calm and silent. People obeyed them … the river flowed, the leaves of the huge banyan and peepul trees on the banks rustled; the waiting crowd kept up a steady babble, constantly punctuated by the pop of soda-water bottles; longitudinal cucumber slices, crescent-shaped, and brushed up with the peel of a lime dipped in salt, were disappearing from the wooden tray of a vendor who was announcing in a subdued tone (as a concession to the coming of a great man), ‘Cucumber for thirst, the best for thirst.’ He had wound a green Turkish towel around his head as a protection from the sun.
Then Gandhi came and made everyone clap hands in rhythm over their heads and chant his favourite dhun:
Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram
Patitha pavana Sita Ram
Ishwara Allah tera nam
Sabko Sanmati dé Bhagwan.
And there was Jai Krishna, Hare Krishna, Jai Govind, Hare Govind, there was Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb Shiva Har Har Har Har. ‘After all that,’ Camoens told Belle on his return, ‘I heard nothing. I had seen India’s beauty in that crowd with its soda-water and cucumber but with that God stuff I got scared. In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram. And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don’t mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.’
5
A FEW WEEKS AFTER his wife’s death, mysterious scratches began to appear on Camoens da Gama’s body during his sleep. First there was one on his neck, round at the back where it had to be pointed out to him by his daughter of all people, then three long raking lines on his right buttock and after that one on his cheek right down the edge of his goatee. At the same time Belle started coming to him in his dreams, naked and demanding, so that he would wake up weeping, because even as he made love to her dream-image he knew it wasn’t real. But the scratches were real enough and even though he didn’t say so to Aurora his feeling that Belle had returned had as much to do with these love-marks as with the open windows and the missing elephant items.
His brother Aires took a simpler approach to the riddle of the lost ivory-tusks and Ganeshas. He assembled the staff in the main courtyard under the peepul tree with the lower part of its trunk painted white, and in the afternoon heat he strutted up and down before them in a straw panama, collarless shirt and white duck pants held up by red braces, icily bellowing out his certain-sure conviction that one of them was a thief. The domestic servants, gardeners, boatmen, sweepers, latrine-cleaners, all faced him in a sweating, terror-stricken line, wearing the ingratiating smile of their fear while Jawaharlal the bulldog emitted a low menacing rumble and his master Aires taunted them with nicknames.
‘Who will speak up here?’ he demanded. ‘Gobbledygokhale, you? Nallappaboomdiay? Karampalstiltskin? Out with it, pronto!’ And the houseboys were Tweedlydum and Tweedlydee as he slapped them once each on the face, and the gardeners were nuts and spices as he poked them in the chest, Cashew, Pista, Big and Little Cardamom, and the latrine-cleaners whom of course he would not touch were Number One and Number Two.
Aurora came running when she heard what was happening, and for the first time in her life the presence of the servants filled her with shame, she couldn’t meet their eyes, she turned to the assembled family (for impassive Epifania, Carmen with the ice-splinter in her heart and even Camoens – squirming but not, it must be pointed out, interrupting – had come out to study Aires’s interrogation technique) and in a high ascending shriek confessed, it-wasn’t-them-it-was-ME.
‘What?’ Aires screeched back, mocking, annoyed: a tormentor deprived of his pleasure. ‘Speak up can’t hear a word.’
‘Stop bullying them,’ Aurora howled. ‘They did nothing; they didn’t touch your something something elephants and their blankety blank teeth. I did it all.’
Her father paled. ‘Baby, for what?’ The bulldog, snarling, bared his gums.
‘Don’t call me baby,’ she answered, defying even him. ‘It is what my mother always wanted to do. You will see: from now I am in her place. And Aires-uncle, you should lock up that crazy dog, by the way, I’ve got a pet-name for him that he really deserves: call him Jaw-jaw, that all-bark-no-bite mutt.’ And turned, head held high, and marched off, leaving her family open-mouthed in wonder: as if they had truly seen an avatar, a reincarnation, her mother’s living ghost.
But it was Aurora who was locked up; as a punishment, she was banished to her room on a rice-and-water diet for a week. However, food and drink – idli and sambar, but also mince-and-potato ‘cutlets’, pomfret fried in breadcrumbs, spicy prawn plates, banana jelly, crème caramel, soda-pop – were smuggled up to her by doting Josy; and the old ayah also covertly brought her the instruments – charcoal, brushes, paints – through which Aurora chose, at this true moment of her coming-of-age, to make public her inner self. All that week she worked, hardly pausing for sleep. When Camoens came to the door she told him to go away, she would endure her sentence by herself and had no need of an ex-jailbird father who would not fight to keep his own daughter out of the lock-up, and he hung his head and obeyed.
At the end of her period of house arrest, however, Aurora invited Camoens inside, making him the second person on earth to see her work. Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that Camoens with a proud father’s bursting heart found himself saying, ‘But it is the great swarm of being itself.’ As he grew accustomed to his daughter’s newly revealed universe he began to see her visions: she had put history on the walls, King Gondophares inviting St Thomas the Apostle to India; and from the North, Emperor Asoka with his Pillars of Law, and the lines of people waiting to stand with their backs against the pillars to see if they could join their hands behind them for good luck; and her versions of erotic temple-carvings, whose explicit details made Camoens blanch, and of the building of the Taj Mahal, after which, as she unflinchingly showed, its great masons were mutilated, their hands cut off, so that they could never build anything finer; and from her own South she had chosen the battle of Srirangapatnam and the sword of Tipu Sultan and the magic fortress of Golconda where a man speaking normally in the gatehouse may be heard clearly in the citadel and the coming long ago of the Jews. Modern history was there too, there were jails full of passionate men, Congress and Muslim League, Nehru Gandhi Jinnah Patel Bose Azad, and British soldiers whispering rumours of an approaching war; and beyond history were the creatures of her fancy, the hybrids, half-woman half-tiger, half-man half-snake, there were sea-monsters and mountain ghouls. In an honoured place was Vasco da Gama himself, setting his first foot on Indian soil, sniffing the air, and seeking out whatever was spicy and hot and made money.
Camoens began to pick out family portraits, portraits not only of the dead and living but even of the never-bo
rn – of, for example, her unborn siblings grouped gravely around her dead mother beside a grand piano. He was startled to find an image of Aires da Gama stark naked in a dockyard, light glowing from him while dark shapes closed in all around, and shaken by the parody of the Last Supper in which the family servants caroused wildly at the dining-table while their raggedy ancestors stared down from the portraits on the wall and the da Gamas served as waiters, bringing food and pouring wine and being treated badly, Carmen having her bottom pinched, Epifania’s rump being kicked by a drunken gardener; but then the rapid rush of the composition drew him onwards, away from the personal and into the throng, for beyond and around and above and below and amongst the family was the crowd itself, the dense crowd, the crowd without boundaries; Aurora had composed her giant work in such a way that the images of her own family had to fight their way through this hyper-abundance of imagery, she was suggesting that the privacy of Cabral Island was an illusion and this mountain, this hive, this endlessly metamorphic line of humanity was the truth; and wherever Camoens looked he saw the rage of the women, the tormented weakness and compromise in the faces of the men, the sexual ambivalence of the children, the passive uncomplaining faces of the dead. He wanted to know how she knew these things, with the bitter taste on his tongue of his own failure as a father he wondered that at her tender age she could have heard so much of the world’s anger and pain and disappointment and tasted so little of its delight, when you have learned joy, he wanted to say, then only then your gift will be complete, but she knew so much already that it scared the words away and he did not dare to speak.
Only God was absent, for no matter how carefully Camoens peered at the walls, and even after he climbed a step-ladder to stare at the ceiling, he was unable to find the figure of Christ, on or off the cross, or indeed any other representation of any other divinity, tree-sprite, water-sprite, angel, devil or saint.
And it was all set in a landscape that made Camoens tremble to see it, for it was Mother India herself, Mother India with her garishness and her inexhaustible motion, Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children, and with whom the children’s passionate conjoining and eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave; who stretched into great mountains like exclamations of the soul and along vast rivers full of mercy and disease, and across harsh drought-ridden plateaux on which men hacked with pickaxes at the dry infertile soil; Mother India with her oceans and coco-palms and rice-fields and bullocks at the water-well, her cranes on treetops with necks like coathangers, and high circling kites and the mimicry of mynahs and the yellow-beaked brutality of crows, a protean Mother India who could turn monstrous, who could be a worm rising from the sea with Epifania’s face at the top of a long and scaly neck; who could turn murderous, dancing cross-eyed and Kali-tongued while thousands died; but above all, in the very centre of the ceiling, at the point where all the horn-of-plenty lines converged, Mother India with Belle’s face. Queen Isabella was the only mother-goddess here, and she was dead; at the heart of this first immense outpouring of Aurora’s art was the simple tragedy of her loss, the unassuaged pain of becoming a motherless child. The room was her act of mourning.
Camoens, understanding, held her, and they wept.
Yes, mother; once you were a daughter, too. You were given life, and you took it away … Mine is a tale of much mayhem, many sudden deaths, felos of other fellows as well as de se. Fire, water and disease must play their part alongside – no, around and within – the human beings.
On Christmas Eve, 1938, seventeen Christmases after the young Camoens had brought seventeen-year-old Isabella Souza home to meet the family, their daughter, my mother Aurora da Gama, was woken by period pains and couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the bathroom and attended to herself as old Josy had taught her to, with cotton-wool and gauze and a long pyjama-cord to hold everything in place … thus trussed, she coiled up on the white-tiled floor and fought against the pain. After a time it subsided. She decided to go out into the gardens and bathe her aching body in the shining, the insouciant miracle of the Milky Way. Star light, star bright … we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it’s only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
More than a year had passed since the incident of the open windows, and the house on Cabral Island slumbered that night under a kind of truce. Aurora, too old for Father Christmas, put a light shawl around her night-dress, stepped around the sleeping figure of Josy-ayah on her mat by the door, and went barefoot down the hall.
(Christmas, that Northern invention, that tale of snow and stockings, of merry fires and reindeer, Latin carols and O Tannenbaum, of evergreen trees and Sante Klaas with his little piccaninny ‘helpers’, is restored by tropical heat to something like its origins, for whatever else the Infant Jesus may or may not have been, he was a hot-weather babe; however poor his manger, it wasn’t cold; and if Wise Men came, following (unwisely, as I’ve indicated) yonder star, they came, let’s not forget it, from the East. Over in Fort Cochin, English families have put up Christmas trees with cotton wool on the branches; in St Francis’s Church – Anglican in those days, though no longer–the young Rev. Oliver D’Aeth has already held the annual carol service; and there are mince pies and glasses of milk waiting for Santa, and somehow there will be turkey on the table tomorrow, yes, and two kinds of stuffing, and even brussels sprouts. But there are many Christianities here in Cochin, Catholic and Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian, there are midnight masses where incense chokes the lungs, there are priests with thirteen crosses on their caps to symbolise Jesus and the Apostles, there are wars between the denominations, R.C. v. Syriac, and everyone agrees the Nestorians are no sort of Christians, and all these warring Christmases, too, are being prepared. In the house on Cabral Island it is the Pope who rules. There are no trees here; instead there is a crib. Joseph could be a carpenter from Ernakulam, and Mary a woman from the tea-fields, and the cattle are water-buffalo, and the skin of the Holy Family (gasp!) is rather dark. There are no presents. For Epifania da Gama, Christmas is a day for Jesus. Presents – and even this somewhat unloving family makes an exchange of gifts – are for Twelfth Night, the night of gold frankincense myrrh. Nobody is shinning down a chimney in this house …)
Aurora reached the top of the great staircase and saw that the chapel doors were open; the chapel itself was illuminated, and the light emanating from the doorway made a little golden sun in the stairwell dark. Aurora crept forward, peered in. A small figure, head covered by a black lace mantilla, knelt at the altar. Aurora could hear the tiny click of Epifania’s ruby rosary beads. The young girl, not wishing the matriarch to become aware of her presence, began to back out of the room. Just then, in complete silence, Epifania Menezes da Gama fell sideways and lay still.
‘One day you will killofy my heart.’
‘Patience is a virtue. I’ll just bide-o my time.’
How did Aurora approach her fallen grandmother? Did she, like a loving child, run forward, raising a stricken hand to her lips?
She approached slowly, circling along the walls of the chapel, moving in towards the immobile form in gradual, deliberate steps.
Did she cry out, beat a gong (there was a gong in the chapel) or in other ways do her level best to sound the alarm?
She did not.
Perhaps there was no point in doing so; perhaps it was plain that Epifania was already beyond help: that death had been swift and merciful?
When Aurora reached Epifania, she saw that the hand that held the rosary was still twitching
feebly at the beads; that the old woman’s eyes were open, and met hers with recognition; that the old woman’s lips moved faintly, though no audible word emerged.
And on seeing her grandmother still alive, did she then act to save her life?
She paused.
And, after pausing? Granted, she was young; a certain paralysis can be attributed to youthful panic, and forgiven, but, after pausing, she quickly summoned the household, so that help could be provided … did she not?
After pausing, she took two steps backwards; and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor; and watched.
Did she feel no pity, no shame, no fear?
She was worried, it’s true. If Epifania’s seizure proved to be less than fatal, then her own behaviour would count against her; even her father would be angry. She knew that.
No more than that?
She worried about discovery; and so she went and closed the chapel doors.
Why not go the whole hog, in that case; why not blow out the candles and turn out the electric lights?
All must be left as Epifania left it.
This was cold-blooded murder, then. Calculations were being made.
If murder can be committed by inaction, then yes. If Epifania had suffered so great a blow that she could not have survived, then no. The point is moot.