I walked out of bed into the balcony, my cigarette winking its red eye in the night. Behind the misty curtains, my nocturnal admirer took his spot. And I peered through the haze of the muslin that made him unreal, trying hard to really see his face.
Like I tried to remember Papaji's face. It was my Number One preoccupation. I dug up old photographs, but he, cussed trickster, had turned away from the camera at the critical imprisoning moment, so what remained of him was a thin neck shooting out of a homespun shirt and a dark, glossy head that became one with the shadows. I vividly remembered the day on the roofs in Ramghat, but Papaji had buried his face in his hands. Long and lean hands, with slender fingers slightly swollen at the knuckles.
You are the key to all this, Papaji, I thought. The sole, clean-thinking hero in our midst. And to find you, I must go to Ramghat. All a bit melodramatic, I know, but my life is a drab drag, so I seize the moment when I can. "Carpe the diem," as the fool who teaches Latin to my children supposedly once intoned to his brood.
Going to Ramghat was easier said than done. For one thing—the main thing, really—I couldn't find Ramghat. Ramghat was the name Papaji had given to that little hidden valley. It wasn't registered as such, and no maps listed it. So where exactly was it, our particular valley? There must be thousands of valleys just like that all across the Himalayan range. Asking my family was out of the question. I mean, we've never been that open; we've always been veiled in what we say and do, like aging beauties who fear the scrutiny of light.
In keeping with family tradition, I sneaked into Mother's house one afternoon and snooped around in her study—the Lopsided-Wonder herself was not at home, having joined Anoop's wife at the club for bridge and afternoon tea. My search yielded nothing—except some silly letters Papaji had written to her when he was very young (what else could account for their embarrassing inanity?), and which I brought home with me to read thoroughly before I shredded them to bits.
My next stop was Calcutta University's Department of Economics and Commerce. I bribed a clerk for the phone numbers and addresses of all the geriatric geniuses who were still alive and able to speak. Five in the former group, only one in the latter. I rushed to see this last before he too was struck dead or dumb. One Vishnu Narasimhan. The clerk was right—Professor Narasimhan could still talk. What that low-class clerk bastard forgot to mention was that no one could understand the esteemed professor any more—not even his merry little bright-eyed wife, who sat by the old man's divan, gamely attempting to interpret his garbled gurgle. I got up in disgust.
"He used to be such a chatter-box in those days. Lectured as much to all of us in the house as he did to his students, " chortled the wife, full to bursting with glee that her once voluble spouse could no longer produce anything but wheezing squeaks and bubbling froth, watching him with the same delight that proud parents are supposed to reserve for baby's first words.
Faced by wall after wall of blankness, I was seized by a wild panic (a new one) that maybe Ramghat did not exist at all, that it was some collective fantasy spun out by my family. This new panic goaded me, all feral smiles and wicked eyes, knowing the answer himself, taunting me to find it where he has hidden it—in his slavering, sharp-toothed maw. I ignored his prods and pushings, and kept the spotlight of my mind on one thing and one thing only: Where is Ramghat?
My newfound sense of focused, disciplined purpose made me feel terribly busy and important as I rushed around from dead end to dead end. I felt hugely superior to the languid lotus-eaters I saw wasting away the hours in Calcutta's ubiquitous coffee shops, talking their way from dead end to dead end. Not for nothing do Calcuttans call themselves the French of the East—and they actually believe that comparison is a compliment....
In the strange way in which things sometimes work out, Mother ended up showing me where Ramghat was—quite literally. She pointed it out on a map. We'd dumped the kids with her during another one of my husband's business promotion dinners. I'd gone alone to pick up the children, my lord and master being too drunk to drive. I heard Mother's high, still girlish voice float out into the lawn as I entered the living room: "And that's Ramghat." I froze.
She was pointing it out in the atlas, which was spread over her knees. My children were peering at the spot indicated by her pointing finger. I put myself on a rapid de-frost—I ran to the atlas and pushed the children away and pulled back her finger. The place she was pointing at was nameless in the atlas, just berry-blue mountains on the page, but I could see where it must have been, not far from Simla.
"Have you told them about Ramghat?" I asked her, the children watching us intently from a corner of the couch, clutching each other so tight they looked like a two-headed mutant (I wished they wouldn't touch each other so much).
"Only that we lived there one summer when you were small. The rest is for you to tell them, if you choose, when they are older..." she answered smoothly, washing her hands off what she had stirred.
Driving home with the children, I made my excuses: I would have to go to Bangalore for a day or so. A writers' conference. They watched me quietly from the back seat with grim, coal-black eyes, knowing I was lying, not loving me enough to care.
I booked my passage to Ramghat the next day.
What can I say about that dreary flight to Simla or the train-trip to the last stop on that particular line? Only that nothing seemed even slightly familiar—everything was presented brand-new to my senses. There was no sight or sound to provide a link to the past. The past was an island severed from the shore; remote, unreachable.
The last stop on the line was preceded by some truly awful train-driving—a very wide swerve and a shuddering halt at the edge of a great green field. I found my land-legs and swayed out—I was the only remaining passenger at this point. The train thundered away, and I braced myself to face the fields. Then I saw the mountains—they were way back, in the background, emerging through the mist like titans called to battle, fully armed, monstrous. More massively, mightily monstrous than anything I had ever remembered.
And now I did remember—some things coming back in bits, like bits of shredded paper that contain a piece of the message. I remembered standing here like this, but as a five-year-old, and telling Papaji the mountains looked "untrustworthy." Yes, that was the word that I had used. I remembered him, poor idiot, laughing, taking my hand in his hands with their thin palms and calluses. I remembered him leading the way, right into the fin-blue mountains, his sharp shoulder blades moving with touching mortal fragility beneath his threadbare homespun shirt. And I followed him now as I did then. Up the steep path, watch out for that rock, one last stretch, you can do it, you're a big girl now—and there it was. Ramghat. An endless sea of green, lit by tiny blue flowers. It had always been here—where could it go, held snug as a captive bird in the palm of the mountains?
I walked into the green, and it swelled and rose to lap at my feet. The grass that stroked my ankles was like velvet—but with a rasping edge to the blades. I tried hard to bring to life our childish laughter as we ran between those long-past houses. Silence reigned supreme now—a triumphant, withholding silence; the silence of the mountains and sky. Not a leaf stirred; not a breeze sighed to stir the leaves.
Right in the middle of the valley was something left behind: a long, jagged piece of teak. I took it in my hands, the sharp splinters cutting my palms. I knew what I would see before I saw it: the initials B.K., carved in the heart of a whorl. I stared hard at the fading letters, flogging my unwilling mind to race past the years and bring me the owner of this piece. Once long ago, it had been part of a majestic dining table....
Clutching the piece of teak, I lay down in the grass, and felt the skies and mountains huddle, shoulder to shoulder, crest to crest; to keep all else out, to keep me in. I felt them watch me as I nodded off, and my last conscious thought before I slid into black was that death was watching, too.
When I awoke, it was cool moving towards cold. The sky had turned the colour of slate, and cleared its throat in a growingly frequent flurry of thunder-rumbles. A brisk wind had sprung up from somewhere, and was racing like a rabid dog, bending the blue heads of the flowers with its force. Then the rain began, long hard drops like bullets, tearing into the soft flesh of the earth. I got the hint. It was time to go.
I walked, then ran, up the steep path, here we go, this last stretch—and I was out in the great field again, with the mountains now black and impenetrable in the background, with Ramghat hidden from view, and with the rain whining down to a weak and snivelling stop.
I looked at the piece of teak with the initials—still in my hand, used as a staff to help me in that last frantic ran. But for this single memento, I would have dismissed Ramghat as my family's collective dream. The mountains had taken everything else away. Left nothing behind—to bear witness, to tell the truth. A thorough and perfect obliteration.
It was late when I finally reached the tiny railway station. The mountains had merged into the black of the Himalayan night—only their snowy peaks were visible, like fangs bared in the dark. I sat down on the rotting planks of the station's wooden floor. A train was howling into the night, and the station trembled with the vibration.
The station-master approached me. He was carrying a small child swathed in woolen clothes several sizes too big. I smiled at the child and thought of my own. That was one of the few times in my maternal career when I felt some warmth venture into me—warily, as on unknown territory.
"What's that?" the station-master asked, pointing to the teak in my hands.
I shrugged, then showed him the carved initials, watching his face closely. No glimmer of recognition. Just idle curiosity on his part. Polite chat not meant to go further—that was all he had intended. But his weather-lined face was kind, full of grace.
The next train arrived. I was the only one in my compartment, flung from end to end by the same atrocious driving that seems a prerequisite to landing a job as train driver in these parts.
The mountains sped by in window-framed splendour. Range after range, like an unending herd of elephants, etched by an eloquent hand into the blackboard night.
I looked at my reflection on the window. No kindness here, no trace of grace. A hard face—I learned that from the mountains. But not a weak one. It wouldn't flinch from what needed to be faced.
The rains of Ramghat were a collective dream, after all. We each carried away from it what we most wanted to disbelieve and wreck in ourselves. We clung to Ramghat with the tenacity of those who are truly stunted in heart and head. We wallowed in Ramghat, passing the pipe around from hand to hand, inhaling the escapism; exhaling our strengths...
This, too, must have been lying dormant within me. For facing it didn't hurt—not a bit. There was just a grim get-on-with-it sort of acceptance.
The train swerved violently, and we entered the plains. Unexciting flat land fled past, as if ashamed of itself. I opened the window, gummed shut by decades of rust. A rush of fetid air on my face told me that Calcutta wasn't too far away.
I hurled the piece of teak out of the window. It hit a passing tree with immense force and split in two. I looked at the chaotic world starting to take shape outside the window—stray huts becoming settlements becoming townships becoming a heaving mass of people hurtling towards that great city of cities.
"So much is still possible," I thought, but aloud. "So much you can still do," addressing myself in the third person, which I do only when I am totally one hundred percent completely dead serious.
It's in these possibilities—in these "I can's" and "I will's" that the gossamer-texture of life is suspended. Not in what happens afterwards—but in that oft-skipped moment when you make the choice to act, to act despite the past; with the belief that you can and will rewrite the past, make old horror pay its price in blooms as the mountains had expertly done—in this lies the worth of a human being.
I said, in keeping with the drumming wheels:
"I can leave my husband..."
"I can do without Anoop..."
"I can write..."
Thought to thought, the unreal and the merely dreamed of becoming live and solid by the risk and daring of jumping, rock to rock, up the steep path, just this last stretch, you can do it, I know you can, see—you did it, well done, you're my good girl now....
This mood in itself was no stranger to my life. A few times before, it had taken possession of me in an act that had begun as rape and ended with my eager submission. But maybe this time it will stick around long enough to fuel action. Isn't that wish itself part of this mood and its magic?
In the distance, Calcutta's lights and eternal traffic were spread out like a willing whore, and the city winked its million eyes to welcome me.
Radha Bharadwaj is an Indian-born feature screenwriter-director with two acclaimed features to her credit: Closet Land (the screenplay won Bharadwaj the Nicholl Screenwriting award; the film stars Alan Rickman and Madeleine Stowe, and was produced by Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment and released by Universal Pictures), and the Victorian mystery Basil (based on Wilkie Collins's book, with Sir Derek Jacobi, Christian Slater, Jared Leto). Her stage adaptation for Closet Land continues to be performed all over the world by various theatre groups, and is available at CreateSpace.
Bharadwaj has just completed two novels—both literary suspenses; one set in Victorian England, the other in modern-day Philadelphia. She is at work on her third book. Her website www.ClosetLand.com details her film activities.
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