Piyush continued to sit in the rose garden of Jackson’s Hotel after Anasua had carried the coffee pot and cups away. She had piled them onto the silver coloured tray, and with them her reminiscences about her dead daughter and the sadness that went with those memories. In her evident loneliness, despite what appeared to be her happy marriage to Anand, she had felt the need of someone to talk to. Piyush was accustomed to that kind of solitary and abandoned feeling himself, and he was happy to fill the role of a friendly, listening presence for the week or two he would be in Jabalpur. He picked up the Times of India again and thumbed through its crisp pages, scanning for interesting headlines as he went. Most of the news was local to India, and he thought there was nothing wrong with that in a country that accounted for about twenty-percent of the world’s population. To an outsider though, especially one accustomed to a broad spectrum of detailed international news and opinion, the stories about corrupt politicians of whom he had never heard, corrupt police in places with strange names, accidents affecting hundreds that barely merited five lines and parliamentary shenanigans, all seemed very parochial. He tossed the paper aside and with the afternoon warmth cocooning him he descended into a reverie that was, in most ways, purely about his own situation. Later, he couldn’t remember what had passed through his mind in the hour that elapsed as he had relaxed in the fragrance of the garden. Red and pink and yellow rose petals were scattered across the flowerbeds and lawns. As he stared at them, his sensitivity to what was going on around him, little though that was, gradually receded to insignificance. Raucous noise, the ever-present clatter and clamour on the street outside the hotel, became a background murmur. He drifted away. When he returned to awareness there were echoes of his grandmother’s voice in his mind, and that of Mangalesh Dabral as well, but what they had said to him, to each other, was gone. Piyush returned to awareness when a taxi stopped at the steps to the hotel entrance. He counted as six people, all small of stature, climbed out and waited politely. Their black hair glistened in the light. They were smartly dressed in a casual way, perma-press slacks, jeans with knife-edge creases, open-neck cotton shirts. Three were men, three were women. All were in their thirties as far as he could tell. All had Nikon cameras hanging from their necks, the heavily branded black and yellow straps a sober emblems of affluence. One of them spoke to the others in a jagged language he didn’t understand. Japanese he guessed. They all looked across at Piyush. In unison, they smiled at him, all showing perfect white teeth against their far eastern skin tone, the three men gave small, formal bows while the women stood with their fixed smiles, a chorus-line of politeness. Piyush nodded and smiled back at them. Then they turned and went quietly into Jackson’s Hotel. When he later thought about this brief encounter, it struck Piyush as odd in its formality. It was as if the taxi was a spacecraft that had disgorged its crew of intelligent life-forms for a tentative first encounter with human-kind—and perhaps, in a way, that’s what it was. “I think they are not from here,” Mangalesh Dabral said. “I have never seen people like that before except on the television screen. They are not like us.” “No, they are not like us,” Piyush replied, no longer surprised by Mangalesh’s abrupt manifestations. “I think they are Japanese... from Japan.” “Yes, yes, I have heard of Japan.” It amused Piyush that there was a hint of tetchiness in Mangalesh’s words. He hadn’t intended to talk down to the ghost of the old man, but the response amused him anyway. After that they sat in silence. Piyush felt Mangalesh’s disapproving eyes examining him, taking in the way he was dressed, European style, the way he combed his hair. Piyush returned the old man’s gaze and saw only a wiry, brown skinned, barefooted man in a dhoti. Who is the alien here, he wondered. Piyush’s gaze moved on to the street outside Jackson’s. Noisy and dusty, it was thronged with people and traffic passing by and giving no indication that the existence of this haven even registered with them. Perhaps all they saw was a small hiatus in their own reality that they accepted as something that was, something that didn’t concern them and therefore needed no explanation. When his attention returned to the garden he was unsurprised to see that Mangalesh had vanished, he could never wait silently for very long. ******** Although Piyush hinted to Anand on a daily basis that he would like to check Delight Talkies to see what progress had been made on preparing the dusty venue for his recital, it was four days before Anand agreed that they should go there again. To amuse himself he took to wandering the streets of Jabalpur at the coolest times of day. He bought a digital camera and snapped away at almost everything, until he realised that the low capacity memory card would soon be full, then he went through the photographs using the computer in the hotel office and deleted most of them as not worth keeping. After that he became more discerning and began to think about what made a worthwhile picture. During the hottest times of day he hired taxis and told their drivers to take him somewhere beautiful. Without exception he found himself initially heading towards Marble Rocks. When he told his drivers that he did not wish to go there, that there were ghosts there, they affected injured feelings and drove to other places. So it was that he visited the overgrown ruins of temples and chhatris and great buildings, so it was he saw working elephants and sari workshops, so it was he felt the gentle breezes that offered slight but real respite from the oppressive heat of Jabalpur. He would tell Anand and Anasua about his small journeys over dinner or post-prandial drinks, and they would nod their heads and say how very good that was and ask interested questions and smile at his photographs and never make any suggestions of their own as to places he should visit. “We will visit Delight Talkies again tomorrow, if you wish,” Anand said on the evening of the fourth day. “I have been several times and they are making such very good progress.”
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 13:08:39 +0000
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