Night of Fire Page 30

  Behind a bank of candle flame, the light wavers over the god’s carved face. The worshippers are all smiling. The god is lapped in the fire of their devotion. He is a masked bull, I think, the bull of Shiva. Perhaps my memory is returning. His horns curl high over his head in the firelight. As if drugged on incense and candle smoke, I reach up to remove the mask, and my fingers meet solid stone. My hand looks like somebody else’s. Perhaps, like the gods, I am many others, or have no profound being. I cannot hear myself pray. I’ve forgotten how. I am only the recipient of sensations. There is no reason, particularly, that I should exist, except in my own imagination. I have never existed before, and never will again. But the smoke smarts in my eyes.

  Now the worshippers are clustered before an inner sanctuary. A white-robed priest, concealed behind lattice doors, is bathing and anointing its deity for our sight. The pilgrims form a corridor before it, women on one side, men on the other, and I wait in the smell of incense and stale flowers. Then the gates burst open with a deafening clamour of gongs and drums. The priest is tracing circles of fire before the image, to the sound of a piercing bell. I crane forward. Down the tunnel of worshippers, bathed in brilliant light, dances Kali the goddess of destruction. She is black-skinned and white-fanged, brandishing a severed head and a bowl of blood. Her jewellery is human skulls. Her eyes swerve up like scimitars in her head, sloping back almost to her tiara. They are obscenely beautiful. I gaze back at her, into dereliction. Half obliterated behind her, in concentric silhouette, is her other self, Parvati, a face of formulaic sweetness. The worshippers are bowing before Kali. One of them falls forward, striking his forehead. My nostrils fill with incense and rotting marigolds. I take out my camera to capture her. Her painted eyes glare back into the viewfinder.

  Then a man slaps my hand, shaking his head, and I close the lens. She is, after all, holy. In some guises, in a feat of creative change, she devours time itself, then sinks back triumphantly into her abyss. To photograph is to diminish her. A rankling guilt follows me out of the temple and into the cold night.

  At first I did not want to go. But a Swedish couple from the hotel said they were going that morning, and for a long time we walk along the ghats together, conspicuously foreign, so that the boatmen and beggars and the vendors of flowers and candles for Mother Ganges swarm around us. Somebody seizes my hand to claim it for Ayurvedic massage; somebody else clamours to cut my dishevelled hair. Close to the cremation grounds on Manikarnika ghat, the offers and threats intensify: invitations to cremation viewing platforms, demands that we pay for bundles of firewood or feed the hospices of people who are waiting to die.

  Beyond a palisade of logs and kindling, twenty or thirty feet high, an arena of scaffolding, temple spires and dingy houses is fogged in smoke and lit by an aureole of fire. We peer down, with other tourists, from a temple balcony. The Swedish woman says she is going to be sick. On their different terraces, the various castes are going up in flames. Just beneath us, six or seven pyres are lined up like dormitory beds. The corpses are carried in from the streets, blanketed in crimson and gold, and sometimes heralded by a din of drums. A few male relations follow – women are forbidden – and carry the bier down to dip its feet in the Ganges. Then the funerary sheets are stripped away and the body – bandaged stiff and white – is laid on its allotted pyre, where a caste once called untouchable heaps on whatever logs the family has paid for.

  I stare down, numb at first. Most bodies take three hours to burn. The eldest son, his head shaved, circles the corpse anticlockwise and lights it from another pyre – the fire on this site must never die. Then he throws on sandalwood, and the flames start. The man joins his relatives where they sit to watch on the slopes of firewood. I cannot tell how much they grieve. Sorrow is unseemly here. It will offend the dead. Some of the mourners are chatting together. One is reading a newspaper. A few old men are staring in silence. A whole wooden hillside of men, it seems, is waiting: and beyond them on the river there are barges sunk to their gunwales, carrying more stacks of logs which are chucked up to the riverbank, and yet more are piled on the balconies of the disused temples round about.

  Beneath us the white-bound heads and feet protrude from their pyres, facing the Ganges. When the fires are slow, the attendants stoke the flames with long branches. In time the shroud is burnt away and in the furnace the body breaks up. Goats and starved dogs scavenge at its foot. If the corpse does not disintegrate fast enough, the attendants beat it with sticks and lever it deeper into the flames. Closest to me, the head has become a charred ball. I watch in frozen fixation. Then the skull cracks like a pistol shot, and a blackened mass spills out into the flames: shards of bone, flesh, memory.

  My knuckles are white on the balustrade in front. I do not think of my mother or of Sylvia or of anyone at all. I only repeat inside my head: What is being consumed is not a person. It is just a recipient of sensation, a transitory consciousness. If I mourn, I am mourning the illusion of a self. That is all. The brain is seventy-five per cent water. It can desiccate to a walnut. The Hindu world dies and is reborn in conflagration, and the human being is its microcosm, a fragment of the undying cycle. My throat has turned tight and dry. The individual is nothing. Someone kept Einstein’s brain in two mayonnaise jars for twenty years. All that is lost is her hand’s touch, the timbre of her voice.

  The Swedish woman has forgotten to be sick. As she turns to leave, she asks: ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  I answer surprised: ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘You are weeping.’

  I put a hand to my eyes. ‘I didn’t know.’

  On the nearest pyre, the fire has died. When the fire is dead, water is poured on to the embers, and the ashes find their way into the Ganges. Fragments may survive, of course – the boatmen call them ‘floating souls’ – but they are left to go to the sea.

  If you watch from the hotel windows at dawn, and the fog is not too thick, the pale line of the river’s eastern shore appears. It looks no more than a bar of sand suspended there, and by the time I go down to the waterside it has disappeared.

  It is to this shore, in the generous diversity of Hindu belief, that the soul crosses on a twelve-day journey to join its ancestors. A boatman, on the other hand, offers to take me there in ten minutes, but volunteers that there is no point. ‘Nothing to see there, Uncle. Instead I take you burning ghat. Twenty rupees.’

  ‘Let’s go, all the same.’

  We push out into the fog. Within minutes Varanasi has blurred to a land as insubstantial as the farther shore, a few lights shining in its vapour. A kite, flown from somewhere invisible, hovers out of the mist above us, then vanishes. Our oars dip into a grey calm. Swallows flitter over its surface. Near the farther bank an abandoned boat shrills with a colony of mynah birds. There is nothing here but sand and etiolated scrub, with the faded start of trees on the eastern horizon. Don’t get out, the boatman says. There are bad people beyond the trees. I ask: ‘What kind?’ But he does not know.

  I walk here lightly. The sand is soft as dust underfoot. The boatman repeats that this is a landing stage for souls on their way to reincarnation. But the shore is hemmed in flotsam: sodden garments, withered flowers. A dead dog. Garish funerary sheets, apparently imperishable, glint in the shallows. There are things I do not want to examine. Then an aqueous sun comes out and solidifies the shore we left behind. And it is time to go back.

  * * *

  Next day he turned south and took a series of buses towards Rourkela. The roads were marked only thinly on his map, and the towns far apart. He was never sure where he would spend the night. It was a mild land at first, edged by low hills under a rainless sky. Plates of rock heaved up from its plains like the backs of tortoises sleeping under the earth, and farming villages were scattered along the paddy fields. Random sights brought a strange comfort out of the blue. They seemed to replace the memories he feared his mind had lost: a view of stone temples on forest hills, a chain of rainbowed waterfalls dropping from a plate
au. And the people, slender with poverty, who shared his relay of buses, were sometimes beautiful.

  After three days he disembarked and began to walk. His way threaded between rocks and whitened trees. He saw almost nobody. Dried-up irrigation channels latticed empty fields, then faded into scrub and yellow grass. He filled Ricky’s water bottle from a trickle of sunken streams, and fed on curried vegetables which he had wrapped in chapattis several days before. Now he was no longer anticipating anything. There was nothing he knew ahead. He spread his sleeping bag under the stars, warm in the early night, and woke at dawn shivering with cold. His body felt hard, but his mind had emptied. In the rusted mirror of a village shop he saw a face shriven to its bones, its eyes fever-bright. He had been walking only five days, and still moved easily over the cracked tarmac. His pack felt light as a shell on his back. He was afraid to stop. Yet he walked sometimes with a feeling of delicacy, separate from his body, as if his gaze was turning back inside his head, and an emptiness ached there. He was afraid of a brain haemorrhage. In the end, he no longer knew where he was. The village names had never reached his map. He did not understand anyone he tried to speak with. Once he spread out the map among farmers, and they ran their calloused fingers over the foreign script of its towns and exclaimed among themselves, and could tell him nothing. He was not sure they could read.

  Little by little, he filled with foreboding. Not because of the land and its inhabitants, who seemed only rough and poor, but from his own compulsion to continue, perhaps for ever, through this wilderness of boulders and skeletal trees, towards a horizon that had misted away. To the land’s inhabitants he must come from another caste or province. He walked across their gaze and then beyond. And his sense was growing that his surroundings were thinning, reduced at last to the strip of fractured road ahead, while inside his skull this frailty trembled. He felt his head might burst if he laid it too abruptly on the rocky soil at night – he folded his trousers for its pillow – or could implode even with his laboured eating, or with the cold grate of his toothbrush, or with any remembering at all.

  One morning a figure came gradually into sight. It was barely darker than the pink soil around it – it might have materialised from the earth – and was sometimes lost among the stunted trees that overlapped the road. It must have been the faint shimmer from the rocks that gave Steven the illusion that the shape was his own reflection approaching him. Neither of them made a sound. After a while he saw by the man’s saffron robes that he was a sanyassin, a travelling holy man, his trident sloped over his shoulder like a fishing rod. Even as they neared one another, they went on walking. Steven saw now that the man was old, his face daubed white with the ashen bars of Shiva, and that his big, soft eyes were staring straight in front, transfixed by something far away. He passed without a glance.

  The sanyassin, he knew, would walk for ever. The skyline would recede before him until he stepped from his path to die. Steven gazed after the dwindling figure, and heard the faint slapping of his sandals on the earth, where he left no trace. He watched until the man had gone from sight. After a long time a lorry appeared, and Steven thrust out his arm. His mind remained numb and empty. But he paid the bemused driver a few rupees, and after two days he was entering the turmoil of Calcutta’s suburbs, and conceiving his return home.

  Months later, in England, an obscure rankling never quite died – as if there had, after all, been a destination that had eluded him.

  Only minutes after he had stripped his walls of their traveller’s mementoes – the house was burning under him, his brain reeling – he had forgotten that he’d dropped even his Persian vases and Nepalese Buddha into the flower beds below. Choking, he could not raise himself from the sofa. He imagined smoke pouring into the absence where his memory should be. He was staring at bare walls. There was no evidence of his journeys. No evidence, in his suffocating mind, of himself, who might only be sights and sensations, and the horizon he had not yet reached.

  8

  Landlord

  In the cold starlight, at the predicted hour, the Quadrantid meteors erupt in the northern sky and stream to earth. Their flow, in astronomic terms, is young and narrow, and their fall is clustered densely within a few hours. The darkness seems to be weeping stars. They give the illusion of fanning out from the constellation Boötes – on charts they resemble the explosion of a firework rocket – but they may scatter half the sky. Sometimes a meteor may split in two; others shoot out like celestial tadpoles, with big, flaring heads and tapering tails. In the silence they seem to move with arcane purpose, but in reality, of course, they are only cosmic waste – the detritus of a passing comet – rushing to their last combustion in the dense atmosphere.

  A sharp wind rises, and combs the sea into foam. The rooftop observatory only thinly shelters him. He listens to the waves’ rise and fall. In the past, during the Quadrantids’ height, he trained his camera on a long exposure and recorded the peak-time meteors: their magnitude, colour, length of path. He loved their variety: the blurred teardrops that flashed near the horizon, and the swift, needle-like trajectory of others. But tonight he falls into the kind of dreamy scrutiny he indulged in when young. If he ignores his telescope – even his binoculars – and gazes with the naked eye, the hemisphere of the sky, on a clear night like this, is newly moving. Its dimensions mean little to him. The supercluster of galaxies to which he and all known life belong measures four million light years across. But even this number is small in cosmic space, and there his mind gives up, to concentrate on more perceptible phenomena. The computer erected on the telescope mount can lock within seconds on his chosen stars, like a register of favourite telephone numbers, and he still watches with boyish awe the delicate beauty of them. Their changeless-seeming presence is strangely optimistic (yet he knows they too are dying). There is a double cluster in Perseus that hangs overhead in a jewelled mass, so many that the sky pales and softens round them. And beside the tail of the Great Bear he locates the binary of Alcor and Mizar. One burns golden, the other piercing blue. Some obscure gravitational pull unites them, so that every half-million years or so – a blink in galactic time – they complete the orbit around one another.

  Sometimes, as tonight, the sky fills him with an old notion that there is something to be understood there, something undetectable. The restless constellations remind him of his schoolboy days, when solid-seeming bodies were revealed under the microscope to be a universe of moving particles. But he imagines this celestial secret, if there is one, to lie not in the galaxies themselves but in the invisible chasms of black holes which – if the science is right – may outnumber the stars. The unpredictability of this – the flouting of once-accepted science – he finds oddly comforting. Things are not as they seem. Black holes, ingesting all known phenomena, bend space and light rays until previous laws and time itself break down. It may even be that deep within such an abyss, a wormhole leads to an inverse immensity where matter is not sucked in but recreated, and time reverses, and memory returns.

  In the radiant of the Quadrantids, the darkness where the star T Boötis once appeared has obsessed him for years. But now the cold, and the stench of smoke from somewhere, and a lapse in the meteor shower, combine to compel him downstairs again. He links his telescope for the last time on the site of the vanished star. He has a sudden feeling that this time, astonishingly, it will appear to him. Then he puts his eye to the freezing ocular, and sees only the dark.

  Downstairs, the acrid smell that he had imagined emanating from his old cine projector has fused with a faintest haze of smoke. He peers into the kitchen, but it occupies the innermost recess of his flat, where the smell fades. Casually he switches on the projector to test it, and there arrives on its screen a vista of pinkish African earth, a herd of startled antelope and misted hills. He used to read the labels on his stacked cine films with gratified wonder: Iran, Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, Jerusalem, the Amazon and Ganges deltas. But nothing is stranger to him, as he starts to watch at rando
m – his nostrils inured to the smoke – than his own uninhabited face. After forty, fifty years, it has grown blank with youth: a frightening stranger. Why does he smile that way, as if he’s keeping secrets? And those around him, those he must have smiled at – the actress who felt already old, the black woman who stares unsmiling back, knowing what will happen – are the victims of his emptiness.

  He tries another reel, and a dazzling light fills the room, where three young men are climbing a headland. Their leader marches ahead, his flaxen-haired disciple following, and their steps appear buoyant in the clear air. Shocking how young they look, how bright with belief. And here is Julian in front of a chapel fresco, marvelling at its absence of an individual viewpoint: the world in the gaze of God.

  There are cinematic scenes of the Dorset coast, and a theatre somewhere, and of empty rooms strewn with rubble, the distant cry of a peacock. Then a woman walks in an overgrown orchard. His mother is awkward and big-boned, a feisty housewife with a smile that wrenches his heart. She opens her mouth to speak.

  Then the projector blacks out. Irritably he thinks: who will ever repair such an antique? He flicks a light switch and the electricity has gone. In the dark, the stench and smoke feel more intense. He finds a flashlight and opens the door on to the sitting room. The air hangs blue in the torch beam.

  Then a cold panic starts in him. The exit from the flat lies beyond a fire door. The fire escape drops from the passage beyond that. When he unlocks the door, it blows open in his face on to an asphyxiating blindness. He stands paralysed, unbreathing. Smoke belches over him into the room. Beyond the door it is suffused by a dull crimson light, and through it, before his eyes smart shut again, he makes out the railings above the stairwell where the crimson deepens and flickers. Muffled far below, there are dull detonations and the crash of exploding glass, and beneath it all a low, breathy roaring. He stands for a second longer, disbelieving. Faintly, almost imperceptibly, he feels the whole building tremble. The fire door that has held back this inferno has become a panel of blistered paint and leaking sealants. He slams it shut with his foot.