Oddness, like aches and pains, fits of tears and lethargy, always made him uneasy and he had a fear of these uncomfortable, messy puddles of life, the sticky humanness of things. He intended to keep his own involvement with such matters to the minimum, making instead firm progress in the direction of cleanliness and order.
Above, there weren’t any stars, only the lights now and then of planes, flying on their way to who knows where. To Calcutta? Madras? Madurai? To England or America? It was a terrible thing to be awake while some people flew, carrying the world over his head, and others slept, claiming it from under his feet.
“But the world is round,” said Ammaji, pleased by her own cleverness. “Wait and see! Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up out on the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking the longer route.”
He felt far away, lifted to another plane. Held within this frame, he could have been a photograph, or a painting, or a character caught in a storybook. Distant, tinged with mystery, warm with the romance of it all, he felt a sudden sharp longing, a craving for an imagined world, for something he’d never known but felt deep within himself.
Here a person’s experience of silence and space squeezed and warped into underground forms that were forced to hide, found in only a few places that Sampath could discover. In his small lapses from duty; between the eye and the print of a newspaper held by someone who never turned a page; in a woman who stared into the distance and past the blur of knitting needles in her fingers; behind muttered prayers; once in a long while in eyes that could look past everything to discover open spaces.
He thought of Public Transport, of the Bureau of Statistics, of head massages, of socks and shoes, of interview strategies. Of never being left alone, of being unable to sleep and of his father talking and lecturing in the room below.
“No,” Sampath answered. His heart was big inside his chest. “No, I do not want an egg,” he said. “I want my freedom.”
Then, if she has fulfilled all the requirements for a sound character and impressive accomplishments, if her parents have agreed to meet all the necessary financial contributions, if the fortune tellers have decided the stars are lucky and the planets are compatible, everyone can laugh with relief and tilt her face up by the chin and say she is exactly what they have been looking for, that she will be a daughter to their household. This, after all, is the boy’s family. They’re entitled to their sense of pride.
With a wife like this, and two children to look after and manage, Mr. Chawla grew more and more firmly established in his role as head of the family, and as this fitted his own idea of the way he ought to live, it gave him secret satisfaction despite all his complaining.
Sampath might make his family’s fortune. They could be rich! How many hermits were secretly wealthy? How many holy men were not at all the beggars they appeared to be? How many men of unfathomable wisdom possessed unfathomable bank accounts?
Whenever she saw him upon his cot, saw his face peeking from between the leaves, she was reminded of the day when he was born, his birth mingling in her memory with the wildest storm she had ever witnessed, with the arrival of famine relief and the silver miracle of rain. There, in the midst of the chaos, her son’s face had contained an exquisite peace, an absorption in a world other than the one he had been born into.
And he began to think of stocks and shares. Stocks and shares were a good idea because they were not in the least ostentatious and Mr. Chawla realized, when he saw the respect for the austerity of Sampath’s life that visitors displayed, that he must keep a careful balance between the look of abstemiousness and actual comfort.
“Ah! For one like him, it is hard to keep the mind on such petty and mundane matters. He will look out of the window and everywhere there is the glory of God.”
The behavior of the monkeys was just another proclamation of Sampath’s authenticity. “Think of all those shams,” said Miss Jyotsna, “all those crooks posing in their saffron, those gurus who are as corrupt as politicians…”
Oh, they gloated, their Baba was not like that. He was an endless source of wonder. He had even cast his spell upon the wild beasts of the market.
No doubt, weighed by the same concern with fragility, inevitability and doom, Sampath had been driven up into the branches, away from this painful world. She remembered his face as he was going to school, how he would always try to climb up on to the roof to be alone when he came home, and she felt terrible about how she had harangued him, shouting up the stairs… Now, she felt, she too understood the dreadfulness of life, recognized the need to be by herself with sadness…
He and his father were as different as black from white, as chickens from potatoes, as peas from buckets. What did he think? Did he think he would just climb down and return to his old existence like some old fool? He had left Shahkot in order to be alone. And what had they all done? They had followed him.
In frustration, the Brigadier took up his cane and, feeling grubby behind the ears, got into his jeep to visit the CMO. The CMO, despite a distinct pain in his side, had donned his Gandhi cap and set off along with Mr. Chawla to see Verma of the university, albeit by a roundabout route that gave them the benefit of a good view of the mountains. Verma himself had left his house for his customary walk to the university through the Badshah Gardens with his friends Poncha of Epidemiology and Sinha of Virology.
Thus they all missed each other and that morning, anyway, the monkey menace was not discussed by the authorities.
He could not claim it. If only it would reach out and claim him instead. If he stayed here long enough within reach of its sights and sounds, might it not enter him in the manner landscape enters everything that lives within it? Wouldn’t the forest descend just this bit lower and swallow him into its wilderness, leaving his family, his devotees, to search fruitlessly for a path by which they might follow?
“All morning they have been calling you in,” he said, in such a way that Sampath was covered with goose bumps. “Ten relatives to cook for and you’re the girl. Their voices echo in jungle darkness, but no, don’t answer. Stay by this shore. For what do they know of fin’s fine gold rising to light in pale water?”
As it was, only those who managed to enclose themselves in their own worlds and disregard the battles going on managed to sleep at night.
But all the same, he was sure he could not have felt this emotion, which was stronger than the men who displayed it. What was it? It existed beyond a person and anything any person could individually be capable of. They shook with this gigantic force.
Immediately he decided he was not going to approve Verma’s plan. It was an absurd plan and why should he pass it when his own had been dismissed so readily? Nobody was considerate of him and he would not be considerate of Verma.
Behind this frustration, though, there was something more: a terrible sadness and a feeling of vulnerability he did not wish to investigate, though it lapped against his immediate concerns, giving him, despite himself, the unsettling feeling of being afloat upon an infinite ocean. He would not, could not, consider this. To think of such things, he was sure, would mean drilling holes in his watertight heart; all sorts of doubts would pour in and he would be a lost man.
How much had changed since he had first arrived in the orchard such a short time back. How quickly it was becoming more and more like all he hoped he had left behind forever. Ugly advertisements defaced the neighboring trees; a smelly garbage heap spilled down the hillside behind the tea stall and grew larger every week. The buzz of angry voices and the claustrophobia he had associated with life in the middle of town were creeping up upon him again.
Sampath stared up into the mountains, tilting his head all the way back, to look upon where there was not a trace of civilization. There, up high, as if tumbling from the sky, a waterfall cascaded down sylvan slopes, so pale, so distant he did not know if it was real or merely his imagination melding with the power of sight to produce and trick upon him. There there were no villages, no houses, no people…
Here and there in the branches near him, the season’s last guavas loomed from amidst the moonlit leaves. One, two, three of them…so ripe, so heavy, the slightest touch could make them fall from the tree.
He picked one. Perfect Buddha shape. Mulling on its insides, unconcerned with the world… Beautiful, distant fruit, growing softer as the days went by, as the nights passed on; beautiful fruit filled with an undiscovered constellation of young stars.
He held it in his hand. It was cool, uneven to his touch. The hours passed. More stars than sky. He sat unmoving in this hushed night.
