The Mission House Read online

  Do not make eye contact with the drivers of auto rickshaws, said his guidebook. Once you make eye contact, you are lost. It was true. Over and over, down on the plains, he had repeated the same mistake.

  ‘Please, sir,’ said the voice. ‘I am begging you. Please.’

  5

  For dinner there was a large ugly-headed fish, sambar, dosas, and a dish of fryums, which seemed to be the Padre’s favourite food – he munched almost exclusively on the multi-coloured snacks while Byrd tried to concentrate on his fish and his rice.

  There was a brief moment of awkwardness when they began – Byrd plunging into his plate without hesitation as soon as he was served, the Padre joining his hands together in prayer to say a short grace.

  ‘Forgive me –’ Byrd managed through a large mouthful of fish, but the Padre only smiled and waved his hand as if to say it didn’t matter, though he did tilt his head to one side and ask – in the same gently curious way he’d asked Byrd on the train what brought him up into the hills – ‘You are a Christian, sir?’

  Byrd, his mouth full, shook his head, swallowed. ‘No, Lord, no – I mean, no. Sorry. No.’

  He was blushing, he could feel the blood rush into the roots of his thin hair. It had not occurred to him that he was supposed to be a Christian; that the Padre, perhaps, had assumed it; that it might be a condition of him renting the missionary’s cosy bungalow.

  He began to burble. ‘I mean, you know, I was brought up going to church but as to any belief, no. None at all, I’m afraid. I’m sorry if –’ but the Padre interrupted him. He told Hilary Byrd not to be sorry, it wasn’t important, he had only been curious, he hadn’t meant to pry.

  All through the rest of the dinner, Priscilla came and went. She brought more water and a re-fill of fryums for the Padre. She cleared their dishes and disappeared and returned with a plate of sweet limes, quartered and sprinkled with salt. She fetched and she carried, and every so often, while Byrd and the Padre ate and talked, Byrd found himself looking at her.

  She was small, about five feet tall, and appeared to be about twenty years old, perhaps a little older, it was hard to say. The skin of her face was very dark, darker even than the Padre’s, and she had a leather boot at the end of her right leg. When Byrd glanced at her she looked down at her hands and he saw that she had no thumbs.

  6

  In the evenings, in his hut by the river, the old man, Jamshed, wrote down in English, in a graph-paper exercise book from Higginbotham’s bookshop, the significant events of his days. He was proud of his English and practised it whenever he could.

  Tonight, on a fresh page and from time to time consulting the battered brick-sized Collins dictionary given to him by his old friend, Prem, he described how he’d gone as usual to the terminus of the mountain railway and waited for the slow blue train. How he’d watched the new tourists and the new do-gooding people come out of the ticket hall into the street. How the younger drivers had darted forwards as they always did until there were hardly any tourists and do-gooding people left.

  One fat lady, (he wrote) size of house.

  One family with red bags. One mother, one father, one girl, one boy.

  Two big hippies maybe the same age as Ravi only not with Ravi’s moustache and big hairstyle. Ponytails only, beards.

  Fat lady, family, big hippies, all saying NO!

  They had all gone hurrying past and climbed into the autos of the other drivers, and then the cold unfriendly man had appeared.

  Skinny and tall like a eucalyptus tree, his straw hat hanging from his hand like a big useless leaf. Maybe a tourist, maybe a do-gooding person, it was hard to say.

  The man had stood without moving. Still as a pole, he’d looked down his giant nose at the jostling drivers and the line of yellow autos out in the street.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ Jamshed had called out, wishing the other drivers were not also shouting, ‘Sir! Sir!’ He’d scurried closer, hating the noisy racket of his ancient flip-flop and his ugly broken clog. He was hungry and he was thinking of the stupid promise he’d made to his crazy nephew, Ravi.

  He could see the fat bulge of a money belt around the tall man’s waist at the top of his long, tea-coloured shorts. ‘Sir!’ he’d called out again, pulling out the wallet of photographs from the breast pocket of his world class shirt, wishing the pictures weren’t so cloudy and dull, wishing the wallet’s plastic didn’t stick to them like that, and make the town sights look like they were sinking underwater – the Botanical Gardens and the Assembly Rooms and the Savoy Hotel, the racecourse and the chocolate shop and the Highfield tea plantation. He’d spat on the wallet and polished it with the corner of his worn-out shirt, calling out over the other drivers, ‘Sir! Sir! Please! This way! Come! 500 rupees only, whole day! Please, sir!’

  But the cold unfriendly foreigner had stuck his giant nose in the air and his pointy elbow in Jamshed’s chest. He’d dragged his suitcase wheel over Jamshed’s unprotected foot and gone striding across the road, into the ocean of people on the other side, and vanished.

  The old driver paused with his ballpoint pen above the graph-paper page, unsure what else to write. He put the point of the pen back inside its blue plastic lid; hesitated. Pictured the fat money belt and the man’s long, anxious face, his useless hat and heavy suitcase. He took the lid off the pen again and held it above the paper, wanting to write more about the tall unf riendly foreigner but not knowing quite what it was he wanted to say.

  That night he slept fitfully. In the morning, at the river, he washed his trousers and his shirt, and on the warm corrugated roof of his hut, before the rain returned, spread them out in the sun. He gave his black flip-flop and his red clog a wipe, and opened his journal, a picture in his mind again of the tall man’s long, anxious face and his fat money belt. He still wasn’t sure what it was he should have written before he closed his journal before going to bed, though on balance, he thought it was probably: Tomorrow: Look for cold unfriendly man.

  Pictures of the tall foreigner had drifted all night through his interrupted sleep and short, broken dreams – sharp, detailed images in which he saw the man again and again: not only his suitcase and his money belt, his thick-soled sandals and straw hat, but also his pale blinking eyes and long anxious face; the way he’d looked out at the town with a kind of bewildered hope.

  All night while Jamshed had lain in his bed – when he closed his eyes and when he’d opened them – the man had been there in the dark.

  The whole thing filled him with uncertainty.

  He shook out the blanket on his bed and folded it into quarters. He straightened his journal and his dictionary and checked the gas was off. He gave his clog another wipe and picked up his keys.

  Then he stepped out into the street, locked the J. J. Legge padlock that secured the wooden door to the rest of his tin hut, and set off.

  7

  ‘She likes you,’ said the Padre.

  Byrd hadn’t seen him standing there.

  Dressed in his fleece hat and his snowman’s scarf, he seemed to have emerged from behind the hydrangea bush. He held a pair of rusty secateurs. Damp grass clung to the mottled blades. Byrd had no idea what to say – he thought of the room where they’d dined, dim in the foggy twilight, the drizzle of the day outside beyond the long windows, the different dishes spread out between the two of them, Priscilla coming and going quietly on her clumping boot, the Padre munching happily on the fryums and chatting about the choir and last week’s concert by the girls from St Cecilia’s school; about the problem of the fallen gravestones in the churchyard; about his difficulties with Miss Moreland, the Australian organist who insisted on playing a steady two beats behind the singing congregation.

  She likes you.

  Byrd experienced a rush of horror, not unlike but at the same time more intense than the feeling he had when he was being pursued by the auto rickshaw drivers: a feeling of fear mixed with guilt. The Padre was smiling happily at him, and Byrd had the impression – fleetingl
y to be sure but no less appallingly for that – that somehow, crazily and without being aware of it, he had made some sort of overture with regard to the unfortunate girl, Priscilla, and the Padre was now going to talk to him about it.

  Then the Padre gestured at the dog in her sink and Byrd realised his mistake.

  Ooly sat with her nose on the lip of the sink. She was looking at Hilary Byrd with what seemed like frank, intense longing.

  ‘Be careful, Mr Byrd,’ said the Padre, chuckling. ‘She is a very bad dog.’

  8

  The old driver, Jamshed, had been looking now, for five days. He’d spent each one moving between all the likely places, waiting in his auto and scanning the crowds. He’d stopped at all the different entrances to the market and outside the Botanical Gardens, at Modern Stores and the Global Internet Cafe and the old racecourse, at the Nazri Hotel and the Savoy. He’d gone to the lake, and back once more to the train terminus in case the man had gone down to Coonoor for the day to visit the barracks or the arboretum or the tea plantation. Cruising the streets, looking left and right in search of the tall foreigner, cutting the engine on the hills to save fuel, cursing every bus and horse and tartan-skirted schoolgirl that blocked his path or his vision, Jamshed circled the town. Once, for a moment, he thought he glimpsed the straw crown of the man’s hat exiting the internet cafe, but it wasn’t him, it was only his nephew, Ravi, wearing his white Stetson.

  ‘Ravi! Hey, boy!’ he called out.

  He always spoke to Ravi in English. He spoke to practically everyone he could in English. English was his only advantage over the younger drivers with the tourists and the do-gooding people. His English was far better than the younger drivers’. Some of them hardly spoke a word. Ravi’s English was good. Ravi was sharp, had picked it up f rom the television. Ravi had an American accent.

  But Ravi hadn’t seen the tall foreigner. Ravi wanted to know when his uncle would have the money. Ravi said he had to go now. Ravi said he had to see a man about a horse.

  Jamshed watched his nephew go.

  A horse?

  The old man shook his head. Everything Ravi said made him anxious these days. He felt caught between wanting to encourage the boy’s crazy plan, and standing in its way.

  What a sight the boy was in his American hat! Jamshed watched as a small barefoot girl in a dirty sari and a brown V-neck jumper ran in front of his nephew and held out her hand. All along the pavement men squatted in front of tiny stoves, soldering rings and necklaces. An old woman shelled peanuts and a young one laid out yellow gourds on a black cloth. Above the housewares store was the big green sign that said permanent life cure guaranteed, and past it all, along the crowded street, the big white Stetson moved rapidly off, growing smaller and smaller until eventually Jamshed couldn’t see it any more. ‘Ah, Ravi,’ he muttered softly, and slowly eased his old auto back into the traffic to resume his search for the man.

  9

  ‘Take some flowers and put them in Mr Byrd’s bungalow. A new cloth also, for his table.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle.’

  From the front door of the presbytery, beneath the pantiled porch, Priscilla waved goodbye to the Padre, who was going to talk to the stone mason about the falling headstones in the churchyard. She had not been inside the mission house since Mr Byrd came; she’d been in town the morning he arrived, and the Padre had cleaned and prepared the place himself. Inside the presbytery she made her clumping uneven way up the wide creaking stairs and along the long worn-out rug on the landing to the small room at the back of the house which had once belonged to the Padre’s daughter, to fetch the new cloth for Mr Hilary Byrd’s table.

  Opposite the linen cupboard, on the floor, was the metal chest, which she tried not to look at. It was an ordinary blue one, like the ones for sale at the market. Indeed, she was fairly sure the Padre had bought it there. She paused, still trying not to look at it, then took the key f rom its hiding place inside the china sheep and knelt down. She lifted the lid and took stock of its contents once again. Nothing had been added since she last looked. Kneeling on her leather boot, her mouth slightly open, her top teeth resting lightly in the shallow furrow they had made over the years in her bottom lip, she gazed for a moment or two into the trunk, then gently closed the lid, crossed the room to the linen cupboard, picked a cloth from the top of the pile, and clumped back down the creaking stairs into the hall and along the passage to the kitchen and out into the little yard behind the house where the boiler house and Ooly’s sink were and, beyond them, the small peppermint-green mission house which was usually occupied by the Canadian missionary, Mr Henry Page, but was for the time being rented by Mr Hilary Byrd from Petts Wood UK.

  When she knocked, he came to the door and she saw that he’d been eating his breakfast. There was a bowl and a cup on the table and he stood before her with a napkin tucked by one corner into the top of his pyjamas. He thanked her for the new cloth and said the flowers were very nice.

  He was about the same height as Mr Page, but quieter, and much older.

  Later, she stood with the Padre at the presbytery window, watching Mr Hilary Byrd walking in along the red puddled driveway. He was eating something from a small shiny bag.

  ‘He has discovered the chocolate shop,’ observed the Padre.

  ‘Yes, Uncle.’

  ‘He seems like a good man.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle.’

  Then Byrd, with his guidebook in one hand and the open silver envelope of Fruit & Nut in the other, turned onto the path that led across the garden from the driveway to his bungalow. He walked past the hydrangea, the banana tree, the Dorothy Perkins rose.

  As he passed the boiler house, the dog, Ooly, climbed out of her sink and fell into step behind him. At the bungalow door, when he stopped to fish his key from his pocket, she sat looking up at him, as if she believed he might allow her inside, but he didn’t, he closed the door in her face, and after sitting there for a little while, looking up at the closed door, she turned mournfully away and went back down the steps and climbed into her sink.

  ‘Poor Ooly!’ said the Padre. ‘I think she is falling in love with our Mr Byrd!’

  10

  Byrd remembered the beginning of his fall, and the end of it, but not the middle, though he thought he must have gone shooting down the steps on his back, like someone competing in the luge.

  He remembered being lost in the market. He remembered looking for something he recognised, some landmark that would indicate the right direction, a way out. He remembered blundering through a maze of passageways hung with meat and cloth and shoes and handbags and thousands and thousands of bananas and lined with people calling out to him, wanting him to buy things. He remembered slipping on the slushy pile of vegetable peelings. He remembered the cold crack of his face on the street, and that when he opened his eyes he was looking at a row of dirty toes, a black flip-flop, a red plastic clog, and into the oily blood-shot whites of a pair of eyes. Do not make eye contact, he remembered thinking. Once you make eye contact, you are lost. He remembered a bag of ice-cold milk pressed against his cheek, a voice.

  ‘For swelling, sir.’

  Outside now, it was light: a pale watery gleam shone between the heavy curtains above his head where they did not quite meet. The hot water bottle in its woollen cover beneath his feet was warm. He had no idea how long he’d slept. He touched his cheek. It felt puffy and tender and sore. He reached up and drew back one of the curtains and wiped the moisture from the glass with the sleeve of his sweater until there was a clear circle like a porthole. Streamers of white cloud drifted in a grey sky, like frills of foam on the ocean. On the linoleum floor next to his bed the tartan blanket from the verandah room had been neatly folded as if someone had recently slept beneath it, on the floor. He smelled warm milk, woodsmoke.

  His face in the mirror was a dark quilt of navy and black, his left eye swollen and red and closed, like a pair of lips. His left buttock hurt when he moved, his hip was very sore, his head woozy.


  In his sitting room the fire burned hot and fragrant and there was an old man stooping over it wearing a greyish short-sleeved shirt that had seen better days. In a black machine-stitched semi-circle across the back of it, Byrd saw the words world class, and like the bag of milk and the dirty toes, he remembered them. They had floated in front of his eyes on the cold, uncomfortable journey to the presbytery, and he thought he may even have held onto them on his way up the concrete steps to his bungalow; he remembered the different textures of the stitching and the thin cloth beneath his hand.

  As near to the heat as it could go, the old man had dragged the enormous chair that had so intrigued Byrd when he first arrived, and which he’d since discovered, by way of a small brass plaque on the chair’s right arm, was called a Carter’s Nest For Rest. The old man had extended every possible appendage – the padded neck-rest, the footplate, the pipe-rack, the book stand, the small Bakelite tray, on which, now, he placed a cup of hot sweet tea.

  Jamshed did not believe in miracles, but it did seem to him like a kind of miracle that the Englishman’s accident had taken place just as he was driving past the foot of the market steps, looking for him. He bowed his head and motioned to Byrd to sit.

  His name was Jamshed, he said.

  ‘Thank you, Jamshed,’ said Byrd. ‘You’re very kind.’

  In the days and weeks that followed, the old man ferried Hilary Byrd all over town.

  He drove him to the Botanical Gardens and the market, to the jewellery district and the bank, to Modern Stores and Higginbotham’s bookshop and the post office; to the Global Internet Cafe and the Assembly Rooms and the King Star Chocolate Shop; to the library and the lake.