Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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СКАЧАТЬ was extremely difficult to deal with. Frightening Indi – with the fresh-butter complexion who shouted at the top of her voice. Night-blind by her early teens, the family shuddered everytime they heard the thud of Indi against a bathroom door or an unladylike grunt when she stubbed her toe. During the day, although she was losing her ability to cross roads, her frontal vision was still strong and she would run out of the house, in taxis or in the family Ambassador, manically filling her days with a panorama of sights and feverish reading; committing it all to memory, building a restless visual bank for her future poverty. She was always impatient, her mind fixed on the coming apocalypse, always enraged that all those millions of rod and cone cells were giving up on her, noisily enclosed in a self-centred world of her relationship with the sometimes steady, sometimes wavering prison bars.

      ‘Don’t you get tired,’ Indi blinked scornfully at her mother, ‘of using only small small words? Why don’t you ever use a really big word?’

      Shiela Devi had been confused by this question and had run off to Indi’s father, Ashish Kumar, quivering in fear. They had tried to dress her up in the conventional way. In fresh pink saris and white linen blouses, with ribbons in her hair. But however pretty and sweet they tried to make her, however kind and gentle they convinced each other she could become if they tried hard enough, they knew that, at any moment, Indi could throw off her pink clothes and emerge hissing and sensual, her speech as arch as her body, as boastful and as blind as only she could be.

      The family lived in a house called Victoria Villa, in the Civil Lines area of Delhi, the genteel enclave where Indian collaborators with empires had been allotted spacious bungalows for their loyalty. Victoria Villa was a single-storeyed house built in the British style and named after the Queen Empress. A wide veranda ran around it, leading through triangular arches into a flat lawn. In the lawn were two splendid old trees. A jamun with its leaves hanging shyly to the ground. And a tall semal covered in the early part of the year with brash red blossom.

      Victoria Villa was the property of the Ray family, who had owned it after the British left. The Rays were one of India’s most energetic clans, successful soldiers, businessmen and doctors, but fatally cursed. Cursed, it was said, by the the Four-Armed-One.

      A century ago, the patriarch of the Ray clan had been a poor fisherman in West Bengal. One morning, out on a catch, his boat sprung a leak and began to sink rapidly into the sea. But, suddenly, miraculously, a beautiful woman with eyes the colour of the ocean came rising up from the deep, black hair streaming behind her, fitted – so the legend went – with four arms. The Four-Armed-One was as strong as she was beautiful and quickly ferried the patriarch and his boat to safety. He immediately fell in love with his supernatural lifeguard and together they founded a huge family.

      The Four-Armed-One brought luck to the patriarch and he soon grew rich. But as it turned out, she was as evil as she was beautiful and one night when the children were asleep, she stole into his bed and devoured him. Hair, bones, tongue and all. Then she walked back to the ocean from where she had come, fell into it and never returned, leaving her children orphaned and confused about what exactly had happened to their folks overnight. However, since they were all of semi-divine (although slightly macabre) lineage, they all grew up well enough, developed vigorous brains and healthy appetites, escaped the village and became civil servants and businessmen in the city.

      The Four-Armed-One left the family an enduring legacy. When any of the family were near death, wherever they might be, they always saw her standing stockstill at the foot of their bed with her four arms crossed.

      Great-aunt Pola had had a heart attack when the spirit of her long dead cook (so she claimed) came flying out of the refrigerator, still apparently agitated about the cut in wages, and tried to suffocate her with a cauliflower. Great-aunt Pola never recovered from the attack and came to live in Victoria Villa where she uttered a dire premonition before she died: ‘Be warned,’ said Great-aunt Pola to Ashish Kumar as she lay on her deathbed. ‘One day a girl will come, who will be like her who now stands by my bed. She will devour all those close to her.’

      ‘It’s Indi,’ Shiela Devi whispered to Ashish Kumar after Great-aunt Pola died. ‘The Four-Armed-One has been reborn as Indi. I’m sure of it.’

      Indi was sent to Holy Mary Convent School where the nuns tried to teach her not to shake her legs while sitting in a chair and to button up her shirt, which she always left a little undone. She worked little, read voraciously in spite of her eyes, and streaked effortlessly to the top of the class, much to the disbelief of her parents.

      After an impressive career in college where, because she couldn’t play tennis or go to the cinema, she spent most of her time fiercely reading in the library, she began to prepare for the civil service exam, as her father had.

      If she passed, she would become a civil servant, like her father.

      Ashish Kumar, six feet two and dashing in his youth, was a man of immense personality. When he was in a rage, government clerks whispered that the fire in his eyes could ignite piles of files and send official notices up in smoke. He liked his yoghurt thick and perfectly set. During meals, he would turn the bowl of yoghurt upside down to see if it was runny. If it ran water even a little, he would hurl it across the table at Shiela Devi’s face.

      One night, as Indi watched her mother stand on the frontlines of her father’s airborne yoghurt, she had a bad idea.

      A few days later, Sister Cyril, principal of All Saints College for Women where the girls from Holy Mary Convent went, rang Ashish Kumar saying that she was sorry to hear of his son’s death in a car accident.

      ‘Death of my son?’ exclaimed Ashish Kumar. ‘But, Sister, I have no sons!’

      There was a silence at the other end of the line.

      ‘That’s what I thought, Mr Ray. But your daughter told us that you also have an older boy. Or you had one.’

      ‘No, Sister, I am blessed with only two daughters. The elder has graduated recently, thank god, and is now studying to join the civil service. Indira. As you know. The other remains in your college.’

      ‘Yes, of course I know your daughters, Mr Ray,’ said Sister Cyril briskly. ‘Indira was one of our best, if not the best. How proud we were of her and what she achieved in spite of her suffering. Paromita, your younger, unfortunately has none of her gifts…In fact Indira was the one who told us about your son. She rang the college and told us. It was very kind of her. We’ve just had a memorial service for him. A fine young man by Indira’s account.’

      ‘A fine young man…’ said Ashish Kumar carefully.

      ‘We are so proud,’ said Sister Cyril.

      ‘Of who, Sister?’ inquired Ashish Kumar politely.

      ‘Your son, Mr Ray,’ said Sister Cyril after a pause. ‘Apparently he was a fighter pilot.’

      ‘Ah,’ mused Ashish Kumar. ‘My son. The fighter pilot.’

      There was another silence. The rituals of sorrow are indeed extraordinary, Sister Cyril sighed. Perhaps bereaved parents cultivate a certain forgetfulness that shelters them against the empty days. ‘God bless you, Mr Ray.’

      He thundered for her to present herself before him in his study. The study was a semi-circular room with casement windows set with dusty window seats. Outside the windows, swayed the jamun tree. Ashish Kumar often СКАЧАТЬ