arjuna neuman
2008: 2007: 2006:
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Doonk, donk donk doonk. Unrelenting car horns, Indian’s only aggression. Maybe. But I had learnt to unhear it, like the birdsong down the country lanes of my childhood or the rattle and drone of life above a main road. I did a lot of that, unhearing, while I was away – or maybe it was hearing of a different kind, of speech, unintelligible, clak tik clak, a sort of conversation of others, and I was uninvited. Welcomed, yes, but not invited. See, I never felt like an outsider in India, not like in other countries, not like in my own country sometimes. Maybe that’s why I keep going back – something in the water you might say. Vraaam. That was another tuk tuk – the driver leant forward to make obvious eye contact. Having mastered the remedial gestures of un-spoken Hindi I half shook my head half nodded, so as to indicate that I did not need a ride, certainly not at tourist prices. I stepped to the side and let the yellow and black bumblebee of a vehicle pass into the road frenzy. I walked very slowly in the midday summer heat right up to the second market stall across from the bridge – the same place I went most days. She couldn’t have been more than eleven, shapeless as girls that age are; but sharp and clothed well. Her eyes did not look straight, nor were her teeth. But she was all there and often watched the store alone, hawking things to religious tourists – wares like shoddy malha beads, gangajal containers, incense and all sorts of powdered dyes. She looked at me and raised the flat of her palm up to her head level in half wave half salute: “Bapu” she said in staccato English “ he not here” she smiled a crooked smile. I smiled back, happy from a recent yoga binge. “do you know where he went?” she shook her head slowly and sat back down. I noticed her Velcro shoes, the kind a child would wear to school, the kind a tired mother buys when she no longer wants to tie shoelaces. I moved inside the stall and sat down on an empty gasoline can. She picked up a notebook with the pages folded around and resumed writing on it. At first I thought she could be doing her homework, but for some reason I was sure this girl didn’t go to school. I looked again and soon recognised that she was writing the Om sign (like a three backwards in cursive) again and again and again and again. In fact the whole page was covered with them. While she formed each Om, the primal sound, her eyes seemed to come together to focus on an impossible space. I waited, watching the turmoil of a typical Indian town ricochet by. The people, the sadhus, the horse drawn carts and cows meandering lazy, the dogs and the people again. No need to romanticize the place, it is what it is. One billion people, fifty percent poor, and a country left to grapple with Western ideas on life, their progression disrupted and abundantly religious. Maybe because I was in a holy place where Lord Shiva made a giant foot print through which the Ganges flowed. Maybe. But temples are part of the Indian fabric, everywhere praying, even on the side of the road, no petrol station-cum-roadside-super-store just Disney land shrines to Hanuman, Vishnu, or Krishna and a chai stop. It had been a week since I last saw Bapu, before I took the trip into the mountains - but that’s another story. I thought about how we went shopping – for me to get a shawl to face the Himalayan nights and some charity, for him, some shoes. Something in me: perhaps a propensity towards fiction, made me think that a shoe shiner ought to wear good shoes. I offered Bapu a pair. He asked in a meek way if he could get some new clothes as well, or instead of buying expensive shoes, for the thousand rupees I offered (about ten pounds), buy a new shirt and trousers to replace his fraying white pyjamas he wore always. It was a good day although tense as shopping in the heat was bound to be. First we went to the fabric stores in the nice part of town, three different shops until I found a shawl in beige, embroidered. He liked it also and got me the local price. Then we went shoe shopping, some sight we must have been to the store owners – used to selling shoes to upper caste Indians - Brahmas, Patels and the like. A few shops later we found the ones Bapu wanted, he held the shoe to his face to test the softness of the leather and handled them like china. He slipped his foot in and stood slightly taller than usual, his slight frame draped in baggy white cotton. The shiny shoes did nothing to match him. They looked clunky and large, and out of place. He asked the price. And immediately handed them back to the shop owner. I didn’t understand what was going on but he held on to my arm and pulled me out of the store. He didn’t say anything walking away with a sour look on an otherwise tempered face. We found a pair though a few stores later, shoes he was real happy with; you know good leather ones with laces.
“Hello Bapu” I said excited to see my friend. He reached out and shook my hand. “how the mountain?” He looked ok. Wearing his new bright blue polo shirt, stitched with an unknown brand. And the most remarkable pants that he had picked out for less than fifty pence. They looked like a cross between golf pants and pyjamas – but then who was I to argue with a fifty-year-old Indian’s sense of style – at least it suited him. His stained fisherman’s hat stood just so on his head as he walked a little in front of me. A walk that one could only describe as a lilt, almost a jazz step – his head moving backwards and forwards in his own rhythm, his frame bony but strong carried a dignified yet humble presence, exerting the minimum amount of effort to move just so. He seemed genuinely happy to see me as we moved through the obstacle traffic jam, crossing the bridge, and turning right to avoid the fake sanyasi beggars with their empty chillums. We walked down the steps of the ghat that looked over onto the Ashrams on the other side. I sat down. He took off his rubber flip-flops, and I wondered to myself where the shoes I had bought him were, although it was a bit hot for closed shoes. Bapu rolled up his golf pyjamas and stepped into the cool water, I moved down one step and cooled my feet in the water also. He looked down and with cupped hands splashed the water away from himself while praying to Shiva. After three times he sat down next to me and took out a cigarette, he lit it with two matches that fused together as he shook out the flame. “How are you Bapu?” He looked at me with his head tilted to one side, his eyes rich and yet clouded, at once filled with a kind of happiness and sadness. He shook his head from side to side. “love your Materji, love your Fatherji, love shiva” he said like a mantra “and its ok.” I smiled at his refrain and said “tikh, love you mother, love your father – say om shivaya – and is good.” We sat there for a while, him puffing out small trails of smoke, me watching the rapid flow of the river pass the pink stone and the hot sun dazzle in the flow. Half naked Indians splashed into the cold water, letting the strong current carry them down stream before grappling back up the ghat. In the distance a cd vendor had music of his merchandise playing a fusion of tabla trance and prayer folk, almost hypnotic. Bapu finished his cigarette and moved into the water; out of his pocket he produced a small bar of soap with which he proceeded to scrub his shawl with. His muscles showed taught as he scrubbed, too lean to be healthy, but strong too from living tough and sleeping floorside of a roadside stall. He had left his home in Delhi, I suppose, to clear his head – spend a while in this holy town working for the wonky eyed girl’s father who gave him food, hash and lodging of sorts – in exchange for being, what I can only describe as his slave. Bapu would light the man’s cigarettes, melt the man’s hash, look after the shop, sweep, clean, get food and drink, anything in fact that the man asked for. He even took beatings from time to time that would bruise his dark wrinkled skin. But then these were the ways, a shoe cleaner like Bapu has next to nothing – and this was the only way he could go on holiday. Soon the soap in his hand started to crumble at the edges, where small blue chunks dislodged themselves from the bar and floated away – something of these small pieces drifting away struck itself into my memory. He asked me to take one side of the shawl as he twisted it, I followed suit and tried to squeeze out the drops of water that fell back into the river they had come from. We both sat down for a while, more silence, till Bapu lit another cigarette and told me his story – a story he had told me parts of before, but he began, as best as he could, his mind was sharp today, and it seemed like he needed to talk. He told me the date it happened – April 29th, 1996 – He had come to the town on holiday with his son, who would now be a few years younger than me. They had been to pray at the temples, visited the Chandra Devi Mountain and gave Prasad to the monkeys on the hills. Bapu, having visited many times before showed his young son all around, introducing him to the sadhus and buying ice cream for the boy. As he told me the story, emotion welled up deep inside this small man, his shoulders shrunk, his head bowed lower and his eyes, normally wide began to squint. His English started to falter, words seemed no longer able to convey what he wanted to say. He stopped talking and let the water drift passed, letting the Ganga Maia speak in his place. The river, the holy mother of India looks after her people. He started to speak again with difficulty and confusion, his sense of time seemed wrong as memory often looses its grip on such things. He confessed he had left the boy over here with a friend, he had gone off to speak with a sadhu, who gave him bad charis, bad hashish so that he passed out, fell asleep for a while. When he woke up he went looking for his boy. Dazed and frantic Bapu looked everywhere, he asked his friends and anyone around, but no one could tell him anything. Nothing. For two weeks Bapu searched and searched, until he dropped with exhaustion and had to return to Delhi alone. The boy, his boy was lost for good. I listened more with my eyes than my ears, a habit I had become accustomed to in this foreign land. His body seemed to disappear, shrivel away, like chunks floating down the river; my sense of where I was dissolved also, nothing existed but this expression of loss and a river flowing ceaselessly onwards towards its home. What hunched before me was a vague presence evoking absence, a bundle of misunderstood words coming from without, from somewhere near the edge of a precipice. I slowly began to understand some of this man, his nebulous eyes, his faithful prayers and his lost pieces, cast away into the river. * * * On my way to the station I decided to stop in at the roadside market to say my goodbyes to my friends before embarking on the long journey into the city. I crossed the dirt road with my heavy bag in tow and ducked in at the second market stall. Bapu was not there. The cross-eyed girl was. She looked at me agitated, her lips pursed, she suddenly seemed a lot older than I had thought. Before I could do namaste, she asked firmly: “have you seen ba. pu?” Unnerved by her tone, I shook my head. “he crazy!” she said vehemently “he crazy you know. Not good man.” I didn’t know what to say to her. “I – errr – where is Bapu? I think I felt some relief, although the way she said it made me uneasy. I knew he was crazy, well sad at least. “he crazy. He sold the shoes. Your shoes he sold them.” Something knotted inside of me. “and now he gone, I can’t go to school now,” she said “I have to stay, father is mad, father hit me, see. What he say you? Where he go now? Bapu crazy…” I stood there for a minute, mouth open, sweat beading in the late morning sun, as what this girl was saying slowly took form in my mind. “Bapu went home?” I asked quietly. “tell me, is his story real? did he lose his son? Did he lose his little boy, you know his boy, years ago?” I had trouble saying the child’s name. She looked at me blankly for a minute, not quite knowing what to say, and finally “I don’t know, he jus crazy man, bad m…” I left before she could finish the sentence - I didn’t want to hear it. Later when I was sitting alone on the train back to Delhi I thought to myself that it didn’t really matter, you know, whether or not Bapu’s story actually happened. It was still his totem, a burden he believed in and carried around on his shoulders and in his heart. And maybe that makes him a little bit braver than the rest of us.
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