The Mission House Read online

  It terrified Byrd, the way they sped along in the middle of the road into the path of the oncoming traffic; the way the old man brought them within inches of crowded buses and gigantic fruit trucks, announcing their presence with nothing more than the squeezing of a green rubber horn that made a sound like a mechanical mouse Byrd had owned as a child.

  Today, on the hill from the presbytery into the town, the old man swerved almost the whole way across the road to bypass a pile of rocks and eucalyptus branches.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jamshed, what was that?’

  ‘Warning, sir. Repairing pothole.’

  Byrd’s heart raced. He shook his head and blew out his cheeks, which still hurt a little from his fall.

  ‘You live in a dangerous country, Jamshed.’

  For the next ten minutes, as they puttered along past the police station and the bank and the Collector’s Office, Byrd made a list of the dangers he’d had to contend with since he left home: his encounter in Chennai with a metal post that had sliced open his shin and filled his shoe with blood; his diarrhoea in Thanjavur; his headlong fall, here, down the lumpy steps outside the market. Only last night, when he was heading out for a walk, the Padre had thrust a torch into his hand. ‘Take this, Mr Byrd. Otherwise you might fall into a drain and drown.’

  At the same moment, the old man swerved to avoid another warning pile of rocks and foliage.

  ‘Every time I get into this vehicle, Jamshed, I feel as if I’m taking my life in my hands. I’d be safer if I were a cow or a goat or that mangy horse we just passed back there.’

  The old man’s eyes flicked to the tiny mirror suspended from the ceiling in front of the windshield. Byrd’s face was still an ugly patchwork of black and blue, bleeding now into brown and yellow.

  The old man looked sorrowful. ‘Sir doesn’t like it here.’

  ‘Sir does like it here. I’m just saying it’s not the safest place for a tourist to come.’

  ‘I will look after you, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Jamshed. That’s very reassuring.’

  For the remainder of their short journey they rode in silence. Byrd was rocked to and fro by the movement of the speeding auto. At the market he climbed out and the old man waited. Byrd bought bananas and lychees and a bag of pistachio nuts for himself and a box of Arabian dates to send to Wyn. After that they headed up the hill, in the direction of the lake. At times the tiny vehicle’s straining progress was almost painful, as if the two of them were riding a dying mule, but at the top of the hill Jamshed cut the engine and they began their swift cruising descent on the other side and Byrd loved this – in spite of all his fear of travelling at speed in the old man’s flimsy auto, it was thrilling. He had never skied but he thought skiing must be like this. The cool breeze rushing past his cheek. The glitter of silver-green trees.

  11

  In due course, the old driver, Jamshed, will be questioned about the tall tourist, Mr Hilary Byrd.

  In a leaf-green room with a small high window and a broken electric heater he will sit for hours during the investigation on a moulded plastic chair and tell the brown-uniformed policeman that looking at the tall Englishman that first day at the terminus, he had seen only money.

  Money so that the tank of his auto could always be full, so he did not have to beg his customers for a 100 rupee note when they’d barely set off so he could call at the Bharat Petroleum Station to buy fuel for his empty tank. Money for a pair of shoes which matched. Money for his nephew’s crazy costume.

  ‘Don’t leave anything out,’ the policeman will say and the old man will nod. Even though there are certain details, now, that do not seem important.

  Please, sir, he had begged the tall Englishman but the tall Englishman wouldn’t even look at him. He had stood straight as a pole with his big bony nose in the air looking out towards the market and the town as if he’d heard nothing, as if he could not even see him or hear him. Jamshed had riffled the photographs beneath his thumb in their greasy plastic wallet, all the chief tourist attractions of the town – the Botanical Gardens, the Assembly Rooms, the Savoy Hotel, the chocolate shop, the lake, the racecourse – but the tall man had shooed him away like a fly and walked away from the railway terminus with long, hurrying strides, pulling his big suitcase behind him on its smooth-rolling wheels.

  For a week (the old driver will tell the brown-uniformed policeman) he’d circled the town, hoping to see the tall man and entice him into his auto. One day’s excursion, five hundred rupees. That’s what he’d hoped for. To drive him around all day and any other day as well, whenever he needed an auto.

  The policeman will clasp his hands together. He will lean forward across the small metal table separating him from the old driver and say, ‘Yes, but why Mr Hilary Byrd? Why him?’ The town was full of tourists and charity workers and all of them had money. What was it that had made the old driver pursue the Englishman all over town for five days until he found him?

  In a quiet, almost inaudible voice Jamshed will say he doesn’t know, because even though he will be afraid of this policeman, he will also be determined that there are some things he will not tell him.

  The policeman will lean back in his chair and rock himself gently on the rear two legs. The old auto driver will have stopped speaking and will be looking off to the side, as if he is replaying some scene, or series of scenes, in his head. The policeman will wonder what he’s hiding. He’s been surprised many times in the course of his career, to discover what sort of improbable things people are capable of, and if there’s anything he knows for certain, it’s that people are endlessly mysterious and unpredictable. They tell the truth and they lie; they are direct and they are devious, they are rational and they are irrational. He is not yet sure which category this old man falls into, though he strikes him as the shifty, secretive type.

  ‘Why me, Jamshed?’

  What would the old driver have said if Hilary Byrd himself, at the beginning of it all, had ever asked?

  Would Jamshed have said – more or less as he will eventually say to the policeman – that it was because Mr Hilary Byrd, in spite of his haughty nose stuck high in the air, seemed to have no clue about where he was going or how to get there, and that he was likely, therefore, to be an especially profitable sort of tourist – one who, if he would just step into Jamshed’s cab, would do so again and again?

  Or would he have shrugged, and said, ‘Maybe useless hat. Maybe long sad face.’ Would he have said that he didn’t know and he couldn’t explain it – that in the beginning, things had been one way, and eventually, they’d been another.

  The brown-uniformed policeman will stretch and yawn, because this has been going on for a while now. He will tap the point of his ballpoint pen on his notepad and ask Jamshed again, what it was that had made him follow the Englishman like that, day after day, all over town?

  But Jamshed will say that all he knows for certain is what he has already said: that he’d looked at the big Englishman that day and seen only money – only the promise, the chance, of a steady week’s work. Money for a new pair of shoes and a cup of tea at the market. Money for his nephew.

  The policeman will look sceptical, but he will nod, and ask, what was this nephew’s name?

  ‘Ravi,’ the old driver will say.

  ‘And where is Ravi now?’

  ‘Gone, sir.’

  12

  The Botanical Gardens, Byrd wrote, were laid out in 1848 by a Scotsman called William McIvor, from Kew.

  He paused, thinking of his letter falling onto the mat at home, Wyn opening it. She seemed impossibly far away.

  To begin with, he continued, the idea was just to provide a place where the British settlers could grow vegetables. Where once there’d been a forest and a swamp, there was soon a sort of giant allotment where (for an annual subscription of 3 rupees) they could come and dig up what they wanted. Cabbages, I suppose, and potatoes, peas and leeks and carrots and Brussels sprouts and whatever else they were used to eating
which they thought would do well in this humid and temperate climate.

  Once McIvor got stuck in though, it all turned into something a lot grander. He began importing plants for the purposes of medical and scientific research. But the overwhelming impression you have, walking along the winding tree-lined paths and around the lawns and ponds and past the rose gardens and the herbaceous borders and the bandstand, is how at home a garden like this must have made the settlers feel.

  I was in there for two hours today. Strolling around and poking my nose into the greenhouses, looking at the ferns. When I came out, the old man I told you about, the one who rescued me, was sitting at the kerb in his little cab, waiting.

  You’ll find it hard to believe, but I’ve got into the habit of sitting on the floor of his cab, leaning on the rail just behind his seat, talking. It’s true. I find it surprisingly relaxing. Much better than being in that horrible room with Kerrigan. The old man says very little, but I think he can just about hear me over the traffic because from time to time he contributes a well-chosen word or two. Today when I’d finished in the Gardens and we were driving around, I started telling him about their history – the whole business of the vegetable allotment and all the peas and carrots and Brussels sprouts, and then the formal laying out, and McIvor shipping in all kinds of non-native species – all his cedars and cypresses, his junipers and oaks, his lupins and ferns and pansies and begonias. If the old man knew about it all already, he didn’t say so, he just carried on driving me through the teeming streets – which, by the way, he does for a very reasonable price and also, I’ve come to think, not recklessly, as I’d thought at first, but with great care. Even though my cheek’s hardly sore now and sudden jolts don’t cause me any particular pain (the puffy black and blue has faded over the past few days to a rather sickly green and yellow), he still transports me with what seems like a kind of anxious circumspection – whizzing and weaving around cars and bicycles and scooters, people, trucks, buses, animals and all the other racing autos. It’s a strange feeling, because the whole thing is undoubtedly dangerous, but I feel like something precious being carried in a box. A jewel, or an egg.

  Anyway, after the Botanical Gardens I asked him to wait while I went to the Assembly Rooms. I went into Modern Stores first to buy a bag of Nutties (which turned out to be a bit like Maltesers) and then, in the Assembly Rooms, I sat in a box on the upper floor and watched Raiders of the Lost Ark in Hindi, or maybe Tamil, I’m not sure which. When I came out, back into the day, the rain had stopped and the old man was there waiting for me at the kerbside and I felt more relaxed and happy than I have for a very long time.

  Back in the rear of the cab I told him what a good day it had been, and how well I felt; how comfortable and at home.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, letting in the handbrake and drifting gently into the swiftly moving traffic. ‘Like lupin, sir. Or Brussel sprout.’

  13

  Up in the presbytery the Padre was writing his sermon and eating fryums and talking to his dead wife.

  His wife would know what to do if she was here. She would know how to make all the proper plans and arrange everything and bring the whole thing off.

  ‘But don’t worry, Vallie-girl,’ he said, addressing his departed wife in the large, shabby and once lovely drawing room where for four and a half decades she had sat by the fire, reading and doing her embroidery while he wrote at his desk. ‘I am not dead yet. I will work it out somehow.’

  A year ago, there’d been a possibility.

  A year ago, he’d gone to the market on his two-wheeler and brought back a metal chest on the back of it and begun to put a few things inside, and for a while everything had seemed promising but nothing, in the end, had come of his early conversations with the family.

  Well. They would have to see how they got on.

  He laid down his pen. He was tired. More and more, there were times when he thought he would like to go to the bishop and say he was finished, now, with his work – that he had given his life to it and now he would rest, and yet his work did not feel finished. Not just because of Priscilla, but because of everything else – his feeling that he must stay put and not let himself be browbeaten, or worse.

  It was true this was not Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh or Orissa. No one here had demolished a mosque because they wanted a temple in its place. No one had ransacked all the town’s churches and sent the congregation fleeing into the forest. There’d been no Muslim dead, no Christian priests lynched, no nuns raped, no young boys burned in their father’s car. There’d been no riots, no men with sticks and iron rods and sun-coloured flags beating drums. As far as he knew there were no camps full of young men in brown shorts and white shirts and little black hats.

  But still, he worried. It was like a storm which kept rising and then abating, and he wondered if his daughter was right, that it was gathering its strength and when it came again, it would be stronger and more organised and more determined than before.

  A week ago he’d woken sweating from a dream in which he’d been beaten and paraded naked through the streets on a donkey.

  ‘Ah, Vallie. What to do?’

  He stood up and went to the window and looked out across the garden to where Priscilla was sweeping fallen eucalyptus leaves from the driveway, and through the open door, he called to her. ‘Come, Priscilla! The beggars will be here!’ and together Priscilla and the Padre fetched the big buckets from the kitchen store and went out to the presbytery’s gateless entrance where the beggars were already gathering, and for an hour or so they distributed rice and dal.

  The Padre also straightened the crooked sign at the entrance that said dog is on duty and tore away the vegetation which had grown in f ront of it – not that he believed the sign would really deter anyone who wanted to come in. If someone decided one day that it was what they were going to do, then they would do it, and there was nothing he would be able to do to stop them, except pray to the Lord Jesus.

  It was his daughter and her American husband in California who had insisted on the sign. She’d always fussed about his health – about his diet and whether he was taking any exercise, was always reminding him that he was seventy-five not twenty-five – but these days, especially after the trouble in Kandhamal, she worried about all of this too. ‘Please, Daddy,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘At least put a sign up or something.’ So he had. A blue and white plastic one f rom Modern Stores. He looked at it now and couldn’t help chuckling, just a little. The idea of Ooly ever being on duty! The idea of Ooly doing anything other than lying in her sink, looking depressed beyond words!

  He hadn’t told his daughter about last year’s fire in the church. He’d said nothing, in fact, to anyone about it. Not to Miss Moreland, the Australian organist, nor to Mr Henry Page, the Canadian missionary, nor to Priscilla, nor to anyone in the congregation. It would only have f rightened people, and that, after all, was what was wanted. There’d been no serious damage, only a stack of hymnals and prayer books burned, just inside the door; a pile of cooling white ash and charred leather when he arrived there very early on a Saturday morning to change the flowers in the chancel. He’d swept up the remnants of the books and dug a hole at the perimeter of the churchyard and buried them, thinking as he did so that if Miss Moreland or Mr Page or Priscilla or anyone else asked why there weren’t so many hymnals and prayer books as before, he would say he’d given them away to another church. But no one, as it turned out, had asked. They’d had so many books in the first place, and the fire had not been a big one.

  ‘Here, Priscilla,’ he said. ‘Help me with these old buckets,’ and together they gathered the big containers which had been full of rice and dal and were now empty and began the walk back along the drive to the presbytery.

  ‘The Lord be with you,’ he called softly over his shoulder to the beggars as they made their way down the wide concrete steps, back into the town.

  14

  ‘Please, Uncle.’

  ‘No, boy!’
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  Ravi stood before the old man in full costume: red-piped white shirt, blue jeans, fringed real leather waistcoat. Piebald imitation-suede chaps, also with fringes. Bootlace tie. Black, silver-toed cowboy boots. White Stetson.

  Jamshed surveyed the elaborate outfit hanging off his nephew’s stick-thin frame, some parts tight and some parts loose; the waves of glossy black hair extravagantly styled across his forehead beneath the brim of the giant hat; his big moustache.

  He’d been a sight before, just with the hat, but this!

  Ravi said he was very grateful for the costume. All he needed now was the horse. The horse would be part of his look, his whole act.

  ‘Stupid boy,’ said Jamshed, exasperated and more worried than ever by the scope and strangeness of his nephew’s dreams. He shook his old head and pointed to the boy’s CDs. ‘Show me which one has a horse.’

  Ravi said none of them did. The horse was his idea, it would make him stand out.

  Jamshed shuffled through the rest of the discs, turning them over and looking at them, back and front. Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett. Randy Travis. Garth Brooks.

  He tapped them all with a stubby finger. ‘See. No horses.’

  In two weeks he’d earned more money driving Mr Hilary Byrd from Petts Wood UK than he usually made in two months. ‘Here, boy,’ he’d said to his nephew at the end of the first week. ‘For cowboy boots and piebald chaps and fringed waistcoat,’ ticking off in his mind some of the items the boy had told him he needed. Ravi had thrown his arms around him, kissed his two old cheeks.

  After another week there’d been enough for the piped shirt and a second-hand guitar. Ravi had kissed his uncle then too.

  Now Ravi snatched up his guitar and pulled open the wooden door in the tin wall of Jamshed’s shack. Said he was going out. Said he’d find someone else to buy him the horse.