Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned.
And as guests become witness to the drama that plays out on the border, little do they realize the drama unfolding within the hotel precincts itself : a grandfather who is a war veteran, a love affair, a friendship with a British officer who himself turns strangely senile; a disinterested father who develops a maniacal obsession with the hotel and then the narrator grandson whose love for melodrama has tragic consequences. In this surreal story, real life borders mingle with borders between what is real and what could be almost so.
This is part five of the long tale…
Old and New
I would think often of my grandfather’s time. How the same guests had come year after year, even summer, and he had made them welcome,”Its your summer home, sir. You are welcome.” I would look up at their windows, count the lanterns that shone through the windows, then kept open, the breeze trapped within curtain folds in the darkness looking like an ensnared animal. That was how I learnt to count. A poem taught me by a servant once accompanying the guests, and we made things up as we end along..
One lantern, standing alone.
Two lanterns, marching together, left, right.
Three of them, now holding hands
Four lanterns, at a picnic
One two, three, four and five, fingers of a hand
Six, shining beads on a woman’s anklet
Seven dwarfs looking for Snow White
Eight men plotting evil
and so on it went.
Sometimes a light would be abruptly snuffed, and in the darkness an invisible hand would draw the curtains. Or it would be the wind, passing by me with a whoosh that snuffed it out, and vanishing just as fast as it had come. The light of the lone lantern in the courtyard would show up the horses, only their eyes, lit up with an eerie red glow, that flitted in the darkness. Red fireflies, the servant told me.
In the mornings, when I checked the rooms, and found the rooms empty, everything in place, I would indeed think that there had been ghosts stalking the rooms the previous night. Who stood at their window and blew down at me. That explained the whooshing sound. Ghosts who kept watch at me, flitting in the darkness, dark figures with dancing red eyes. Spirits of the night who laughed, shrilly in the manner of horses. Sometimes on some nights, I would hear voices, raised and then hushed.
One night, I remember the sudden splash of something hitting water. The galloping sound of a horse moving away fast. And also gunshots. But those days, with no border in place, sounds too travelled freely. It could have been a hunter, my grandfather told me when I had once raised the matter. And the splash. Someone wanted to leave early, I remembered his evasive explanation. They had to draw water for his bath. The night had its mysteries then, but soon this too would go. The driveway was being lit up with neon lamplights and my father had ordered furniture in bulk, thick red wood with a shiny varnish that hurt the eye.
But there were the other mysteries that I could not accommodate any more. Like Robertson’s veiled reference to Martha, my grandfather laughing in a way he had never done before. As if his laughter, low and suppressed, would not let the story live. Or maybe I simply grew up, and with time, forgot.
But in spite of father’s raving and the all too obvious disappointment that crossed his face when we met in the corridors or chanced to sit across each other in the special dining quarters in his own wing of the hotel, he did not really push things to the brink. The hotel did well. The tension crackled along the border, especially during the three war years, when the few soldiers still posted at the fence, paced alongside it, hurling abuses, snarling at each other. Father built a lot of goodwill for himself those years.
With the soldiers away, he kept their families entertained, doing everything he could to ease the anxiety that could never have been far away. Every day would be dedicated to one of the wives, when she would direct the menu for the day. They were also given patches of their own in the garden, where they could plant and nurse anything they liked.
Sometimes towards dawn, there were special bus tours right up to the border, where they could watch the action, carefully camouflaged, but with the windows rolled up, and doors tightly bolted, and the children given special instructions not to make a noise or do anything that could provoke the soldiers on the other side. I remember on one such trip, the manner in which the children held their hands over their noses, trying to stifle their own breath. Their eyes, wide with fright and the excitement that comes with half-knowledge – the thought that you are on a precipice, but that somehow you would still hold on.
In that silence, as the dust crept in, slowly, crawling in, from unseen crevices, with that odd slurry sound dust makes when it thinks it is unheard and unseen, we could hear the footfalls outside, sometimes slow and watchful or furious, so desperate that we could hear the man’s breathing. It made the bus shudder too. When the cursing broke out, when soldiers on either side of the fence pointed their guns at each other, mothers would ask children to put their fingers into their ears and look at me reproachfully, upset I didn’t do so either. There were frequent exchange of gunshots, for much longer duration than those mock sessions earlier. Ferocious and bitter, first low pitched but that could rise suddenly to a shriek, a volley of snarls that seemed to have no end. It was like two dogs, hopelessly aroused and thus forever locked in combat.
Father liked to think that it was those close encounters with war that steeled most of those children. Most of the boys did go on to a career as a soldier, and the girls married soldiers. We knew because they never outgrew their childhood ways. The hotel became a favourite retreat for them too. And father, given his long experience as a soldier’s son, would hold forth on the perpetuation of a career within a family. You imbibed lessons at an early age. Every moment of your childhood then becomes a training ground. He would look at me very meaningfully or raise his voice if accidentally I managed to make myself seen on these occasions. He and I of course, had different views of this too.
“They are now soldiers because what else can they be? They know the system well, father. Like you do yours’.” Thus I remonstrated. But I had my more persuasive moments too. When I caught him alone, by the deck chair, casting a possessive yet fond look at his telescopes, when I felt that unexpected lump settle in my throat like the onset of a cough, because it was moments like these when he most reminded me of my grandfather. It was then sitting beside him, I would endeavour to explain. Its not that the plays are bad, in fact, they have been very good for the business. The soldiers and the families like them, they are so very involved in every production. It helps them too in a way.
“It helps the theatre troupes, certainly. They seem to be raking in quite handsome profits,” he would say, with some trenchant humour. I did get my cut of it, which all went into the hotel’s revenues. But I am afraid that its making them, the soldiers, very soft. And I shall never understand, he looked at me then, his tone sad but his blue eyes curious, speculative, “why you are so fond of it? None of us has a theatre background.”
I shrugged, a background doesn’t matter. One just needs a sense of drama. And more mischievously, I went on, if you and grandfather didn’t have a sense of excitement and drama, this hotel would never have happened.
Father only nodded, before turning his attention back to the telescopes. They were already too old now. Over 30 years back, he had purchased them, second hand from an scientist who was finally returning home to London. But now they were falling to pieces. Some parts had to be replaced but no one made the machines any more. Father placed orders but the letters came back with the note ‘Addressee unknown.”
To be continued..
Anu Kumar’s latest book is The Dollmakers’ Island. (http://www.flipkart.com/dollmakers-island-anu-kumar-book-8190939130) More about her on Story Wallahs.