Last Labyrinth Read online

  ‘What do you want to become when you grow up?’

  ‘I’ll sit in the shop,’ he replied without hesitation.

  So, that was that. I introduced myself. ‘I am from Bombay,’ I said. ‘I make plastic buckets. I have two very young daughters. Have you been to Bombay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever seen the ocean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t mind if I don’t.’

  Suddenly, the boy asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ His large brown eyes were clear and shiny.

  ‘To the shrine, I hope.’

  ‘You want to take a vow?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Then?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘I have to pick up something.’

  ‘Prasad?’

  ‘No. No. I have to gather some shares. You understand shares?’

  He did not and I did not care to elaborate.

  We had been climbing steadily. In spite of the cool breeze the sun was sharp. Little bits of snow stuck to the boulders on either side of the road. There were no tress or bushes or birds or flowers. It was a barren moonscape, a volcanic eruption that had swallowed all except the rocks. The gorge to the right of us was as deep as before.

  We paused by a little stream. I wanted to wash my face but the water was icy. The stream fell a few feet, disappeared under the road, then emerged on the other side to make a sharp waterfall. We climbed a boulder and waiter for the others. It was nearly noon. I was hungry. The boy put on a pair of dark glasses. I thought of Aftab.

  In the distance I could hear the song of the palki bearers. It was an odd sound in the stillness. K and the palki arrived a little later. The palki went by without stopping. The boy’s uncle paused briefly to take him along. The two of them hurried after the disappearing litter.

  ‘Very strange,’ said K after they were gone and the sing song of the porters had died out.

  I said, ‘There is his sick grandfather in that litter, the boy told me.’

  ‘I know.’

  K sat beside me where the boy had been. He did not look any the worse for the journey, just thoughtful. The mule arrived with the food.

  We ate with relish. There was beer that the mule driver had picked up in the town.

  ‘If we don’t consider your share-nonsense it is not a bad trek,’ K said.

  ‘But you shouldn’t consider my share-nonsense.’

  ‘I wouldn’t if it were not so badly entangled with so much else.’

  After a pause he continued, ‘There are so many things that I can’t figure out. Here are these shares, for example, quite worthless according to Thapar but you are bent upon acquiring them. I can’t imagine you are not aware of what Thapar thinks of them. Then, there is the strange manner in which these shares have travelled. There is Aftab. I can’t understand his silence,’ I thought of my meeting with him in Delhi. ‘Above all, there is Anuradha,’ K said.

  ‘Yes, what about her?’ I said, my heart picking up a bit.

  K looked up sharply. ‘That name does work on you, doesn’t it? Are you still in love with her?’

  I kept quiet.

  ‘I suppose you don’t know.’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t.’

  I watched the silent barren hills around us. Had the time come to share other things with K?

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘for many years now, I have had this awful feeling that I wanted something. But the sad thing was it didn’t make the slightest difference when I managed to get what I had wanted. My hunger was just as bad as ever. A year ago, I couldn’t imagine, a wish, which if fulfilled, would have made the least difference to my life. You know all this. Then came Anuradha. It could be that she made an impression on me because she was so different from the women I had known. So, at least, I thought in the beginning. Later, it became more confused. There was more to her than met the eye. A world spinning all by itself. I was infatuated with this mysterious world. Here was a woman, I thought, who could make a difference to me, to my life. The more I took of her, the more I wanted. Until, of course, she ditched me in this awful manner and I felt like a dunce.’

  K shrugged. ‘You could be romanticizing, you know. Blowing things larger than life.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘But there is something about Anuradha... Pass me another beer, will you?’

  I opened it for him the wrong way. We watched the foam bubble down the sides. After a couple of swallows K said. ‘You know, Som, my life had been spent amidst misery and suffering but I know of no other human being who suffered as much as Anuradha.’

  I looked at him in surprise. That was oddly sentimental stuff to come from K.

  ‘You know much about her?’ I said.

  ‘I know enough. Illegitimate child, insane mother, no home. Molested as a child. Witness to murders, suicides, every conceivable evil of the world. Can you imagine what a childhood she must have had?’

  ‘I don’t know everything about her.’

  ‘You don’t think she is an industrialist’s daughter, do you?’ K snapped.

  ‘Not that but...’

  ‘Anyway, from all that, she is suddenly plucked out and put in a convent. Even the gutter is denied to her. Such desperate loneliness amidst all those priggish daughters of the well-to-do. All those years she does not make a single friend. She thinks only of her dead, insane mother. She comes out. Her aunt manages to put her on the screen, probably makes a neat packet for herself in the bargain. A couple of producer types paw her now and then but there is a year or two of success. Then Aftab comes along.’

  ‘What she saw or sees in him is a mystery to me.’

  ‘What she saw in him was Gargi. It was to Gargi that she was drawn.’

  ‘To Gargi?’

  ‘Yes. Not that Aftab was not an attraction in himself. None of this goggles stuff at the time. An impressive horseman. A polo player of sorts. They had a stud farm. Then there was his father, an imposing figure, a true gentleman. Anuradha was happy for a couple of years. Then Aftab’s father died and Aftab went to pieces right before her eyes. She lost her looks and tried to kill herself. There was endless humiliation. Misfortunes piled, one upon another. You see?’

  He did not look at me.

  ‘Do you consider me one of the misfortunes?’

  ‘I am afraid I do,’ he said with a sigh. He got up, dusted his trousers as though getting rid of me. A little later, we were on our way.

  We arrived that evening on a narrow ridge, high in the mountains, and the first thing I saw through the settling dusk was the bright ochre of the litter. It sat in the yard of a ramshackle hut. There was no sign of the boy or his uncle although I could see two of the porters squatting a little distance away. We camped in a similar tumble down room. I sat on the steps, smoking, while K washed up. From now on, the journey would be downhill. A space had been cleared in front of the huts. A little shrine, waist high, faced the huts, housing a vermillion daubed statuette. Someone had lit an oil lamp at its feet. Beyond the shrine, as far as I could see, stood enormous boulders, as though piled in a hurry by a giant hand. Beyond the boulders, I supposed, were more mountains, endless valleys. Even as I looked, night fell. It came down with the abruptness of a faulty stage curtain. It was dark before I had finished my cigarette.

  After dinner, K and I sat sipping brandy, exchanging an occasional word. Had K told me all he knew about Anuradha? I could ask but I knew I would get nowhere. K talked in his own good time.

  I do not know what awoke me that night. A drop in the temperature? The scampering of a rat? There was a high wind. I lay in my sleeping bag listening to its howl. Above the rush of the wind, I thought I heard a muffled chant. It came as though carried down from a great distance, like the imaginary chant among the voids that I had heard all my life. But there was nothing imaginary about this one. I sat up and listened more carefully. From his side of the dark room K said, ‘It is the old man.’ He wa
s already out of his bed, pulling on his boots. I followed suit. As we stepped out of the room the chaste Sanskrit hit us in the face. The other hut had come alive. A knot of men stood near the litter holding lanterns. Their shadows, long and tremulous, did an eerie dance against the crumbling walls of the hut. I looked at K.

  ‘I think the old man will die now,’ K said.

  ‘The boy’s grandfather?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you mean he will die now?’

  ‘There is a lake somewhere here. He has come to die near it.’

  ‘He has travelled nine hundred miles to die near a lake!’ I said in a amazement.

  ‘So it seems.’

  We now moved towards the lights. They had transferred the old man to a cot. He lay with his hands crossed over his chest. His face, gaunt and austere, was nothing but bones. There was life yet in the eyes, though. Slowly, they travelled in an arc over the faces that surrounded him. As his gaze passed over me I had the unreasonable impression that he recognized me. He lingered a little longer over his son and his grandson, then his eyes closed. The porters picked up the cot. The priest led the way. At the tail end, K and I joined the little procession. The impenetrable looking wall of boulders now opened to reveal a path that snaked gently down. At the head, the priest resumed the recitation. The immaculate Sanskrit echoed against the cold rocks. The crowd of porters at the back muttered their own prayers. And then, quite suddenly, K stumbled to a halt.

  ‘My God, Som, look at that!’

  We had cleared the boulders and stood on a narrow ledge. A nearly full moon hung above. Directly below us, at the bottom of a precipice, lay the dark surface of a lake. Its waters had the smoothness of black glass. Steep cliffs, bronze in the moonlight, arose all around its circumference, as if guarding it from an evil eye. Beyond the cliffs, towering above them, rose a snow covered peak. This was the mountain that I had seen on the poster in the tourist office. I froze as I realized why it had appeared familiar. This was also the mountain of my nightmare. There was a movement in the lake, and now I became aware of a break in its glass surface. It seemed as though there was an island floating in the dark waters. It seemed to heave, move slowly towards us and, then, as it came nearer, K, his voice wonderstruck, whispered, ‘It’s a glacier, Som.’

  The party had passed on, their chant trailing behind them. I stood petrified staring at what lay before me. I had seen lakes and glaciers before but such was the total effect of the scene that I felt shaken to the core. I felt I had been here before. The sense of deja vu left me numb.

  We could no more hear the priest. We waited and watched the glacier approach. Directly below us it seemed to pause, and through blind glazed eyes look up at us, two strangers from another world. I stared, fascinated.

  The glacier floated away. We hurried on. The path, chalk white in the moonlight, dipped sharply. The same moonscape prevailed here. No vegetation, or animals or reptiles or birds. Only the vagrant wind, black waters, bronze cliffs in the shadow of the mountain, a blind glacier gliding from one end to the other, keeping guard on the gates of whatever it was that lay beyond.

  We caught up with them at last, just as they were putting the old man down next to the waters. A hush fell. The priest whispered something in the old man’s ear and turned his face towards the mountain and those unbelievable cliffs. I wondered what his dying eye saw. Did he see the vision of the other world that, like a cosmic magnet, had drawn him over a thousand miles? We settled down now for the vigil. K stood with the uncle. The boy and I sat on a rock as we had done during the afternoon. The porters sat huddled a little distance away. The priest sat by the cot performing the rituals, whispering to the old man.

  I wondered what we were doing there, what I was doing there, I who had always avoided funerals. I marvelled at the boy’s wondrous equanimity. He watched the proceedings through large alert eyes, as if it was a play and not a real funeral. Did he realize that this was Death? For that matter, did I? Maybe that was where the trick lay. Along with the old man we had all travelled to the other world, chanting, free from fear. You might as well be afraid of a train travelling from one station to another. That black lake, those bronze cliffs, were certainly another station.

  One after another, as if by agreement, each one of us fell silent. I looked around and somehow I knew that the old man’s hour had come. Everyone else knew that, too. Once again the priest’s chant rose on the still air, each syllable carved out of stone like the notes of Azizun’s songs. And if her songs had delineated all of life’s possibilities, these hymns outlined those of death. The porters moved a little distance away and started to build a pyre. K and I carried a log or two just as we had done for my father. When all was ready, the dead man, cot and all, was carried to the pyre which was lit by the son. The wood, crackled and burned filling the air with incense. The flames leapt against the rock and also in the mirror of the lake and in the tearful eyes of my young friend. He had been especially close to his grandfather I learnt later.

  3

  We arrived the next evening in a town on the curve of a hill. The descent had been steady, in a series of spirals. The surroundings had gradually turned green. Trees, flowers and birds had reappeared. We had entered the valley that Anuradha had spoken of.

  We sat at a tea shop in the bazaar. It was a narrow street. One could conceivably have nailed two planks and walked from one wooden balcony to another. There were people on the road and in the balconies, good-looking but dirty, in churidars and peculiar caps. They looked us over briefly. They were quite used to tourists in this town. It was, after all, at the junction of several sacred routes. There was dust everywhere, and flies. There was no sign of snow. ‘Have you been here, as well?’ K said. I had told him the previous night, after the old man’s cremation, how Anuradha and I had spent a week in the Guest House.

  ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘I was urged to, though.’

  ‘Urged to? By whom?’

  ‘By Anuradha. I refused.’

  K looked tired.

  ‘Where is this place where your shares are?’

  ‘I don’t know. We shall ask.’

  But we were too tired to make a move. We waited for the mule driver who had disappeared, waited for something to happen. The street rose steeply away from us. Half an hour later the mule driver appeared at the top of the street. Accompanied by an old panda, he threaded his way through the crowd. The panda was handsome and tall but nonetheless, a panda. The mule driver said the Forest Guest House was full. There were, however, little private lodging houses. While we debated the matter the handsome old panda introduced himself. What he said was unexpected.

  ‘Shrimanji,’ he said, ‘your father came here twenty years ago and he had the same problem. The Forest Guest House was full. So was the P.W.D. Guest House. I went with him everywhere. I said to him: Bhaskarji, I am your servant. My forefathers have looked after your ancestors for two hundred years. I am poor but can my humble hut not hope to house you for two nights.’

  I was speechless with surprise. The panda had to be bluffing as, I was told, they always did. I turned to K. The expression on his face was not of surprise but of a sudden alert. A mule train passed, jingling bells, spreading an extensive stink. When the bells had died I said, ‘This is very strange. Do you know, K, if Father came here?’ K said. ‘He might have. This gentleman could not be lying.’

  The panda — his name was Vasudev and he wasn’t such a bad man after all — had us where perhaps he wanted.

  An hour later, we sat in a narrow dingy room with a skylight, staring at the yellowing leaf of a long ledger at the bottom of which stood the large bold signatures of my father. A date was mentioned below the signatures.

  ‘Are these his signatures?’ K asked.

  ‘I think so. What about the date?’

  ‘I think it is soon after your mother died.’

  Muffled noises — the cry of a mule driver, quarrelling of a child, a radio — seeped softly into the room. The house was
in a crowded locality. We had walked twenty minutes across a crisscross of undulating lanes, not unlike the lanes of Benaras. The light in the skylight began to falter. It would soon be night.

  I mentioned the temple to Vasudev.

  ‘Yes, that is a very famous place.’

  ‘I know. I want to go there this evening.’

  ‘This evening! No, not this evening. I took your father early in the morning. Everyone goes there in the morning. It will take you at least one hour.’

  ‘My father went there, too?’

  ‘Everyone goes there. The old and the cripple. The blind.’

  ‘Where do you include me?’ I said, with a laugh. I had a feeling it was after many hours that I had laughed. Vasudev was all apologies. How could Somji talk like that? Let his enemies be cripple and blind, and so on.

  At night we ate with him. By now I had grown to like him. For his manners, and for something else as well. He provided a kind of security. Only now did I realize how insecure I had been all during the trip. He was no doubt doing all this for money but he was something — a man, an institution — one could fall back upon. For all I knew, his family had actually looked after ours for two hundred years. If the old man who died at the Lake could trust his priest to escort him to another world, I could surely trust Vasudev for a day or two.

  In spite of Vasudev’s prodding, we did not start early. Watched by a restless K, I dawdled over little rituals like trimming my nails, shaving twice. Finally we set out: Vasudev, K, and I. We descended the main street of the town watched by men on shop fronts and ladies in little green first-floor windows. Once again they reminded me of Benaras, of that particular street where Azizun and the two little girls lived. Men, their caps tilted at rakish angles, laughed like children, at nothing at all.

  At the outskirts of the town a man, an acquaintance of Vasudev’s fell in with us. He, too, he said, was going to the temple. A little later another joined us and then another until we were a little group. Gradually, I became aware of the knots of pilgrims scattered all over the plain, converging from every direction. The colours of their clothes, yellow, orange and maroon stood out against the green of the valley.