Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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      In Alqueria, Indi reached for her Braille novel and ran her fingers along the pages. Alqueria-on-the-bay. Here the forests are havens and the homes are plump matrons who forgive me for everything I’ve done…. I’m a gatecrasher in this old silence. A sinner who has slipped, unnoticed, into heaven.

      She turned her face towards the space where she sensed the ocean. Was he there again? No, he hadn’t been here for a few days now. Where had he gone? Perhaps he had lost interest in her and found some other person to haunt.

      She called him the Phantom Listener because he reminded her of Walter de la Mare’s poem. The Phantom Listener who watched her and heard her, but whom she couldn’t see. For almost two months now she had felt that there was someone standing silently outside her house near the lagoon. The presence sometimes vanished, then it was there again. Sometimes she felt a hot stare on her skin. Sometimes a quick breath next to her arm. She smelt something, something damp, something chemical, like a dye or glue. The presence of someone walking behind her when she went for her evening walk to Sharkey’s.

      The Phantom Listener lay on her roof, peering at her with an upside down face as she sat in her veranda.

      She knew the scraping sounds on her roof weren’t the monkeys that always swung between the trees and occasionally jumped down on roofs, because the monkeys made jumping sounds. This was a rhythmic scraping; human hands clawing for a grasp.

      One night, she had heard what sounded like a human yawn, a yawn so close that she had felt the exhalation ruffle her hair. She had lifted her cane and slashed it through the air and heard an ever-so-faint gasp.

      She had heard the Phantom Listener step back. She had smelt the stale chemical smell again. She knew all the smells in Alqueria. But there was this new smell suddenly. A stink of decay and neglect.

      She turned her face towards the lagoon…He was playing a cat and mouse game with her. He was mocking her sightlessness, testing her sense of hearing and smell, trying to confuse her with his arrivals and departures. She shook her head. No, he wasn’t there now. But she felt certain he would be back.

      When he came back she would be waiting for him because she had never been scared in her life and didn’t intend to start now.

      3

      LONDON

      ‘Never,’ said Karna. ‘I never watch CNN, BBC, Fox etcetera.’

      ‘ Of course not. So you won’t get to see this interview?’

      ‘ No.’

      ‘ Right. Okay, could you look into the camera for a second?’

      As the cameraman filmed, the sun scampered out of the clouds like a child running out from behind his mother suddenly wanting to play, twinkling briefly down through the trees, forming leaf patterns against Karna’s white shirt, before being engulfed again by a dark, mother cloud. He sat at a comic distance from her on the bench, refusing to risk even the slightest touch, looking like a visitor from another century trapped against his will in 21^st century London.

      ‘ Good idea not to watch the big networks,’ she smiled, waving at the cameraman as he gestured that he had enough shots of the mad guru. ‘But you should tune in to us. We’re much smaller.’

      ‘ All you media people do is make fun of us. Make fun of things you can’t understand. In fact, you are programmed to make fun of us. There may be many among us who are frauds. But, there may be a few of us who have some value. And all you do is look at me and think about yogic sex, tantric orgasms and snake tricks.’ He seemed edgy, ill-at ease, someone buffeted about by the world, forced to grow up fast and develop all sorts of philosophies to make the world more bearable for himself.

      ‘ There is that temptation,’ she agreed.

      ‘ I also can make fun of you. I can make fun of you as someone chained to big companies, wearing foolish clothes, having all forms of base physical relationships, leading a second-rate life.’

      ‘ Absolutely right,’ she smiled again. ‘Mine is exactly a second-rate life. In fact, it’s a third-rate life. But I’m trying to make an improvement. That’s why I’m interviewing you. We interview people from all parts of the world. Politicians. Movie stars. An international range of guests.’

      ‘ I don’t want to be your international guest,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m a sadhu. A priest. I wasn’t earlier. But I became one because of the way the world treated me. You know,’ he pointed his finger at her, ‘it’s not a coincidence that people who question the world are consigned to the corners. If they didn’t consign us to corners, they would all go mad themselves.’

      They talked all afternoon and into the rainy darkness of six o’clock. The cold began to close in around them as crowds hurried home and tourists melted away towards the pubs. Across the path, she noticed the Purification Journey Brothers were dispersing quietly through the freezing mist.

      She wished she could see his face more clearly under the Castro beard. If Anand had painted him in such perfect detail, could it be possible that she too might have seen him before? Perhaps Karna was famous, perhaps his face had appeared in magazines or newspapers and inspired Anand. Perhaps they had all seen him on their trips to Delhi to visit Anand’s mother. Seen him in a puja pandal in Kolkata, among the people gathered to watch as the women danced during sindoor khela. Or in Varanasi, on Assi Ghat, huddled in a blanket of hash smoke on the steps leading down to the river. He had existed all this time in some distant city. She might even have heard his voice on the phone in a cross connection. Seen the arch of his neck in a crowd.

      The Purification Journey didn’t matter. It was only a joke he was playing on the world. A marketable formula to lead the gullible to his ashram. She could process it into a headline and dump it in the daily trash can of journalism to be taken away by paper recyclers and made into grainy sheets scribbled on by children and crumpled into waste. That would be the public arrangement. But in private, alone, he would be the idealist riding in to rescue her from the luxuries of cynicism.

      ‘ You talk about the Mother Woman,’ she waved the pamphlet. ‘Where’s your own mother? Your father?’

      ‘ Oh,’ he laughed. ‘I have no mother or father.’

      He was an orphan, he said, one of the thousands abandoned on a footpath in India. The only mother he had known was a billboard with the picture of a cow above his head, saying ‘Drink More Milk’. He had lived under that billboard for the first three or four years of his life, sheltered by it, fed by charitable folk on festival days, sleeping in temple verandas, at the mercy of the beggar syndicates. Then, on one Independence Day, when the prime minister in a speech from Red Fort exhorted citizens to help the poor, the Purification Journey Brothers had adopted him and a few others as part of their new Hope-on-the-Road street СКАЧАТЬ