28, Solution

Kamala emerges into daylight, panting and flushed, from the shadowy forest cover and reaches her favourite spot on the hillside above the Greenfields bungalow... Well my bungalow now, I suppose, she thinks. Our bungalow! She smiles as she remembers her first walk through these now familiar forest paths, feeling alienated and insecure, stalked by the kitchen boy, spooked by monkeys...! The monkeys know her now and she knows them. She carries a stout stick with her on her frequent walks which she says is to fend them off with - crossly brushing off suggestions that she needs it nowadays to lean on. She eases herself down in slow, heavy stages onto the rock that the mountain seems to have set there deliberately as if to say, Come, sit! Just look at this mind-bending view I've got for you! Even now, when walking is so laborious and Deepak is so anxious about her 'wandering around on her own' she can't resist its lure.

She lifts her head so that she can get the full, fresh blast of a gust of breeze which has come bounding up to greet her. She leans back on her hands, feels through her palms the solidity of the mountain, the weight of her body pressing down into the rock, (and of the rock pressing back - holding her up), senses the sureness of her roots going deep, deep into this land, this earth. She opens her eyes, and takes in the vast vista of the plain stretching beyond the foot of the mountain and her outstretched toes. From the sprinkling of tiny buildings below, something glints at her in the early morning sunshine, and in her mind's eye she sees again the sunlight sliding over the roof of the House and striking the arching marble hoods of the gateposts - a daily revelation.

She sighs a long, happy sigh, still hardly able to believe that all the ragged loose ends that she and Deepak returned to after that terrible night in Manjaria have already almost completely healed themselves... the great, gaping scar on the face of the forest, the armed soldiers preventing the women from going about their forest business (and conducting unsavoury business of their own if they caught any of the women on the forest paths alone) while the government enquiry went on and on into the explosion and the death of the wealthy, powerful foreigner on Indian soil.

When it became clear that they just couldn’t be explained - not within the parameters they had set themselves, anyway - they still refused to leave, certain that this scorched and shaven patch of hillside held the key to some secret which, if they could only unlock it, would somehow give them the means to attain vast power and wealth. They were furious that despite all the help and support they’d given his research, they couldn’t get a thing out of White - who clearly knew something but had now gone to ground. The clearing was the locked cupboard guarding a lethal weapon, and they were the petulant toddlers stamping their feet outside it, certain that it contained the cookie jar.

Kamala thinks back to the demonstrations... real, un-orchestrated, demonstrations, raw with anger and life-or-death determination. The Manjaria marching again on Greenfields' offices, on government offices, on courthouses and police stations in the local town, in the state capital in the national capital itself. They handed copies of their petition over to anyone with any influence. Out on the streets they danced their impromptu dances and mimed their impromptu mimes which argued their case more vividly and heart-warmingly than any legal document.

They charmed the media, and through them the general public. Their courage, and their gentle, smiling, dignity never wavered despite their outrage at the violation of their most sacred space and of themselves, at the turning-inside-out of their peaceful, private lives. All over the world, people saw Deepak's intimate, haunting images of the Manjaria going about their lives, plucking, peeling, grinding, churning, flickering in and out of the forest shadows, and something inside them yearned back to their own ancestral simplicity, synchronicity... and they fought against it being destroyed a second time.

Seema and the leading Manjaria campaigners sat for hours at the big dining table, tea-cups bobbing precariously on a sea of documents, teasing out the legal conundrums, finding a path through the mind-numbing complexity of it all towards a solution... or at least towards possible arguments which, if put in such and such a way and argued in such and such a tone may hold sway against a grimfaced judge and jury.

Meera threw herself into the campaign too, spending hours at Kamala’s laptop sending emails to her contacts at the University, to the British government, to the United Nations, to Amnesty International - challenging the world to ignore this travesty of justice. And quite quickly - under the pressure of an almost global wave of empathy for what the world saw as a little band of plucky innocents being trampled by a heartless regime - the government caved. Overnight the soldiers were transformed from vicious guard dogs, snarling, snapping, attacking, into planters of new saplings, smiling deferentially and standing aside on the forest paths to let the Manjaria women pass, or smoking companionably with the men, swapping stories of hunting down dissidents and terrorists with the Manjaria tales of tracking wily wild boar and deer. Then they left and the Manjaria were alone again.

But when I visited Dhanmatbai some weeks later with Kamala, Deepak, Seema and Meera, she told us that a restlessness had entered the village. It had probably been going on for sometime, she acknowledged, but, following the same smooth, circular path of her life year after year, tuned into the rhythm of the trees and the soil and the rains, she had not noticed the undercurrent of discordance growing amongst her people. The younger men and women seemed distracted when the elders tried to teach them the forest lore, and often when they were sent to gather mohua flowers or firewood, they were found standing idly gazing out over the plains.

“They are like girl-children who have started to grow breasts and are no longer interested in their childish games. They want to play more interesting games now. They have seen the clothes and books and magic things - boxes with voices and music... which the soldiers brought and which their sisters who went away to the House bring back when they visit, and they are curious, they want things like that for themselves.”

The soldiers had told the young men stories which prised open their narrow, leafy horizons and made them burn with curiosity. One or two of the girls had fallen in love with soldiers and run away with them.

I nodded. This was always going to happen, but they needed to discover it for themselves.

“What will you do?” I asked her.

She was silent for a while. She was not a woman to speak without weighing her thoughts carefully first.

“Time is changing. We cannot fight it. Once the eyes have been opened, even closing them again does not take away what we have seen. We have seen the world outside the forest. We must find a way to converse on equal terms with it and not lose ourselves in its waters. We have things they don’t have, and they have things we don’t. We can exchange the things which are valuable. But we must guard against the poisonous things in that world or we will be destroyed by it. It must be done gently, slowly.”

I touched her arm.

“You are wise.” I said.

She nodded. We both knew that this was not a compliment, merely a statement of fact. Young Kamala had been sitting beside me throughout the conversation, scribbling in her notebook. Seema, Meera and a group of Manjaria women were talking animatedly together under the big tree, and Deepak was wandering around clicking away as usual.

“Daughter is smiling.” said Dhanmatbai, inclining her head slightly towards Kamala. We both looked at her. Her pen was still, hovering over the notebook. Her body was tensed. She looked up at us, her eyes shining, broke out in a huge grin and leapt to her feet.

“Dhanmat-Ma - give me some of the root!” Her voice said please. And that grin stayed on her face and the black-cloth-swathed root stayed clutched in her lap all the way back to the House. After that none of us saw very much of her. I took to my bed again, struggling every hour against the surge of Time washing back against me (I had one last task to perform and knew I had to muster every ounce of my remaining energy for it). She spent a lot of time in the kitchen and was silent and distracted the rest of the time. When the others asked her what she was up to, she just laughed and said wait and see. And when they asked the cook, he just shrugged and looked disgruntled muttering about his pots and pans being used to cook god-knows-what which wasn‘t even for eating. I didn’t need to ask. I was just relieved to see that things were unfolding as they should on this, their new path. That the violent changing of direction of those awesome tracks up on the mountain had not caused things to derail completely.

And finally one night she came up to my room and held a little jar of white cream out to me.

“It’s ready, Great-grandmother”.

I nodded.

“Ask your Aunty to have the car ready tomorrow morning”.

Seema, with very bad grace and only after I spoke to her quite sharply, waited with her son and her sister in The Palace Hotel lobby while young Kamala and I went up in the lift. The receptionist had been rather snooty when we said we had come to see Mr White. She tried to claim he was not there, skulking in the Presidential Suite, licking his wounds and unable to face the world since his little escapade on the mountain. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so harsh on him, he’s only human after all. You all are. But I was getting a little impatient with humanity - my own pathetic little human shell was barely able to hold me up nowadays, and I clutched onto Kamala’s arm with a tiny, claw-like hand as she argued with the elegantly quaffed and icily unmovable receptionist. Eventually I had to raise my scraggy little head, almost bald but for a few smoke-thin white wisps and, laboriously hauling up my cowl-like lids, hit her with one of my Looks.

Suddenly Mr White was there after all. She chirped at him shrilly on the telephone that two guests were on their way up, and we could still hear his outraged squawks as she slammed the phone down. Her saucer eyes followed us, sculpted eyebrows skimming the immaculate hairline, as Kamala walked and I tottered towards the lift. In the lift, I had to clutch with my other claw-like little hand onto the handrail to steady myself. What a sight we made, reflected in the two long tunnels of eternity in the mirrored lift; me a bent little bundle of wrinkles barely reaching the slightly-built Kamala’s shoulder, Kamala glittering with life and excitement, clutching me on one arm and her black brief case under the other.

To give Andreas White credit, he hadn’t been idle while he’d been closeted away in one of White Enterprise’s most luxurious hotels. He turned from his laptop as the lift doors opened into his spacious living room, and I caught a flash of the avalanche of figures and lists of White Enterprise company names cascading down the screen. With Laine gone, he’d obviously been taking a good look at last into the activities of his own many concerns. The look of weary dismay on his face told me how much he’d discovered of what Laine had been ‘protecting him’ from; the arms factories, the chemical weapons, the secret caches of fuel biding their time while prices rocketed and people and economies suffered, the swift trade in electric people prods and leg irons, the swifter trade in people, the truth about the kind of uses his serum had been put to... Andreas White looked sickened. He’d always suspected, but never allowed himself to look closer.

White’s annoyance at our arrival was almost instantaneously dissolved by his more powerful human instincts when he saw the two young women sashaying arm in arm out of the lift, one with a black briefcase under her arm, the other trailing an elegant, bejewelled hand along the handrail. He took in the gorgeous silks, the jasmine garlands, the glittering gold and jade anklets, and he melted! We watched him melt before our eyes, Kamala and I, and we laughed. I turned on my most dazzling smile, and beckoned to him. He rose and followed, his mouth agape. As he sank back, smiling, against the mountains of satin pillows, I ran the tips of my long, slender brown fingers nostalgically over the silken bodies of the gopis - still bathing after all these years - on the screen beside the bed. They were beautiful, those pale, young, thousand-year-old bodies, but not half as beautiful as mine...

Out on the balcony, Kamala closed the French windows behind her and gazed at the Unfinished Palace, wondering about the rumours that she’d heard. She looked up beyond them and saw the mountains, their green-gold mantle transmuted by the strange alchemy of distance into pale blue, and she hugged the briefcase to herself, knowing that between these black leather covers, lay something that really might be the solution, that might help usher the Manjaria - gently, safely - into a new era. If Andreas White would agree...


* * *


“There you are, sweetheart! I might have known...” Deepak flung himself down on the grass beside her. “I do wish you wouldn’t go wanderi...”

Kamala stopped his mouth with a kiss. “Oh do shut up about that, Deeps, I’m so tired of it. I’ve told you, no harm can come to me in this forest. Now tell me,” she said, snuggling her head on his shoulder. “Has the new batch come through?”

“Yup. Twelve cases of finest Manjaria Forest Solution delivered to the bungalow ready to be checked and forwarded to the House for packaging, and from there sent off to heal wounds and smooth wrinkles in the four corners of the world!”

“It’s really working, isn’t it, Deepak? The root processing longhouse in the village hasn’t ruined it has it?”

“Of course not - after all the trouble Dhanmatbai and you went to to plan it and design it so it fitted in with forest life, used energy saving stoves, renewable fuel and all that... how could it? Everyone’s happy - the Manjaria ladies are loving stirring those pots and gossiping and knowing that their expertise is being valued the world over. Greenfields is lapping up its new “truly green” image (to quote the ads) and coming out as the saviour of the plucky forest tribe... and their market surveys say they’re going to be raking in the money - a good share of which is going back to Manjaria. The young people are over the moon that they’re getting the chance to see a bit of the world beyond the forest, and to use their fancy new accounting skills and all. Everyone loves the new road and the houses and the health centre the government's finally built... Even the kids are loving the school... oh by the way, did I tell you? Banubai says they’re teaching their teacher a thing or two! He had them clearing the ground to plant a school kitchen garden and saw that one of the kids was stuffing the “weeds” into his bag to take home. When the teacher told him it was just rubbish, the kid patiently explained to him the various medical qualities of each herb he was taking home to plant!”

They laughed together.

“Good boy. He must have been paying good attention to his mother’s advice.” But the smile faded again, sunshine gone behind a quick-moving cloud... “But Deepak, what about the money? They’ve never had it before. I’ve heard that some of the young guys are using it to buy booze with and the elders are saying that the young people are even less interested in learning about the old forest ways than they were before... Maybe we’re just making things worse...”

Deepak stroked her hair.

“It was going to happen anyway, babe - even Dhanmatbai said so, didn‘t she? Remember Singh and his plans to have them “living in nice apartments with air conditioning and drinking cold Pepsi Cola”?!” They laughed again at Deepak’s impersonation. Then Deepak looked serious again... “ 'Like taking candy from a baby...' At least this way you’ve helped to make it happen on their terms rather than on someone else’s. You’ve done a good job, my love - don’t fret. You can’t save the whole world.”

They glanced at each other quickly but didn’t dwell on the thought... or memory... that crossed both their minds.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. And they’ve put together a pretty tight contract with Greenfields, haven’t they? All that legal training hasn’t been in vain. They’ll be alright.”

“Yeah. And anyway I’d pity anyone who crossed Dhanmatbai - that’s one tough old dame! I’m really not worried about their future, Kamala. I’m just looking forward to ours.”

And he rested his hand on top of the dome of her stomach and she felt the warmth of his palm sink through her skin and it reminded her of the last moments she and I had spent together.