20, Communion

Birdsong. A cockerel crowing. A gentle chinking sound… bangles? A milking pail? A murmur of voices, soft voices, women’s voices. Kamala bobbed to the surface of her consciousness and floated there, luxuriously, with the lightest touch of sunlight warming her eyelids for long, timeless minutes. From beyond the walls of the hut, she sensed a stirring of intention - anticipation, it set off an echoing tingle in the base of her spine. She opened her eyes, swung her legs over the side of the low, wooden cot, was just about to let her feet make contact with the cool mud floor and remembered. She swung them hastily back up again and peered under the cot. No. No scorpions.

Still wrapped in the purple tie-dye sarong she’d slept in, she went to stand at the door of the hut, thinking to feel the new sun kind on her skin, before it worked itself up into a vengeful rage. Just outside the door, she found the large-bellied earthenware pot of cold water which had appeared there soundlessly every morning for the last week. The sting of the ice-cold water as she stooped to wash her face made her gasp - a sharp intake of fresh, morning forest air - she felt as if she’d just been born. A lance of sunlight ricocheted between the shattered surface of the water and the twined golden snakes at her throat. Which swung forward, writhing and twitching in the stream running down her chin and throat.

Kamala heard her name. She looked up and noticed for the first time that the women - all the women of the village it seemed - were standing silently in front of her hut. They seemed to be waiting for her. Banu stepped forward, smiled and beckoned to Kamala. Kamala smiled uncertainly. She wasn’t dressed. What did they want? She gestured to her rumpled sarong and shrugged apologetically. The tall woman, Dhanmatbai they called her, spoke quietly to Banu who stepped forward and took Kamala gently by the arm, ignoring her stammering explanations about bare feet, bed hair, furry teeth etc. Kamala had to keep reminding herself that this was the same woman who had cowered from her in the bungalow, had barely dared to look directly at her, had taken refuge behind Mohan from the searing lance of Kamala’s attention. This was the same Banu that now had a firm grip of her elbow and was steering her across the clearing towards the edge of the forest.

The other women walked silently (completely silently, Kamala noticed - not a rustle, not a murmur, not a jingle - though they were all heavily decked in chunky silver, bone and glass jewellery). The last sound the group had made was when they'd first entered the forest and Kamala had cried out sharply as a thorn bush twig gave her a vicious swipe across the ankle. For a little while after that, Kamala stepped gingerly, wary of more thorns, scorpions, sharp stones, nameless creepy crawlies… but she soon realised that the women were treading a well used path, pounded to a soft, smooth surface by generations of bare feet. They were moving at a rapid pace, many of the women, Kamala now noticed, carrying empty baskets. Banu pulled a short brass knife from her waistband, reached up into one of the trees and swiped off a couple of twigs. She trimmed the leaves off them and handed one to Kamala, who - completely bewildered but eager not to offend - took it, and said “thank you“. Her voice sounded like an explosion in the soft, muted air of the early morning forest. No head turned, no foot faltered, no tongue shushed, but nevertheless, Kamala felt the command for silence as firmly as if it had been a big black and white sign in a library. Banu squeezed her arm and smiled reassuringly at her. She put her own twig in her mouth and started to chew - gesturing to Kamala’s twig and mouth.

As she bit into the innocent looking twig a burst of appalling bitterness was unleashed. Kamala saw that Banu was biting her lips together in an effort not to laugh at her grimace. She waved Kamala on encouragingly - apparently, she was going to have to chew this awful twig whether she liked it or not. But after a few chews the bitterness seemed to reach a plateau and Kamala sensed a sharper, cleaner taste beneath it. Then she remembered having seen many of the villagers chewing twigs in the morning and realised that this was how they cleaned their teeth - the fibres of the chewed twigs were their toothbrushes, the sharp, bitter juice the toothpaste.

It was only now starting to occur to Kamala to wonder in earnest about where they were taking her, why they had been so insistent on her coming with them. Anxiety prickled at the back of her neck, like the stinging of her thorn-grazed ankle. For a fleeting moment she had a lurid picture of human sacrifice - but no, she didn't sense anything like death or violence... she felt included, enfolded. This was obviously something that all the women did together - whether they were outsiders or not. Kamala glanced around - actually there was one woman missing; Ms Jensen. Kamala had picked up a few words of the local language - water, hut, woman, man, child, sleep, tree (well - she learned some of the words for tree… there seemed to be an infinite number of these). But they were not enough for her to ask for an explanation - and in any case she couldn’t break the silence command. So she trotted along with them, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the feel of the forest air on her bare shoulders and thinking her own thoughts.

She’d tried to find out the words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ having been brought up to be well mannered - but the women had looked blank when she tried to ask. Then Deepak had explained that they had no equivalent words - gratitude was demonstrated in the way you spoke, not in what you said. As he pointed out, it makes no difference what words you use in any language, what you really mean is communicated through the eyes, the face, the voice. She laughed with delight at the idea and her eyes were alight with the charm of it - and for an instant she found herself caught in his gaze - a deep, questioning, questing gaze… but then a shutter seemed to go down, and his expression returned to the one of blank, almost hostile neutrality he usually wore. She thought that she had wrenched something open for an instant, glimpsed into the shadowy recesses of him, but now he was inaccessible again, and she was back on the outside. Homeless. He stomped off to photograph something. I must have imagined it, she thought.

The caravan of women slowed, then stopped. In the centre of a small clearing was a tall, slender tree with branches flung up skywards like the victim of a street robbery. With a stab of excitement, Kamala thought, this must be it! The sacred tree… but then she realised that the women were taking no notice of the tree itself. They were busying themselves on the ground, gathering the flowers which she now noticed carpeted the clearing, a waxy white iris around the green pupil in the centre of which the tree stood. Now the women seemed to relax, they talked, laughed, called out to each other.

One young woman - a girl really, thought Kamala, not more than 16, though she walked with the assurance and gravitas of a mature woman - held up one of the flowers to her. “Mohua” she pronounced, emphasising each syllable with her lips so that it emerged like a slow motion kiss. “Mohua” repeated Kamala, the girl-woman laughed and fixed the flower in Kamala’s still junglee (as Aunty Seema used to call it) hair. She told Kamala - through mime mostly - that they used the flowers to brew alcohol. The laughter rippled through the women as the girl mimicked the staggering state it induced in the men… and the women too apparently, one old woman seemed to be getting ribbed for having a particularly keen appetite for the stuff. Dhanmatbai snapped, and the laughter broke off like a twig. “When everyone drinks alcohol all the time, nobody eats, the children aren’t taken care of, no work is done. It is not good.”

Kamala realised with surprise that she was almost beginning to understand the language… without actually understanding the words. She was reading gestures and tones and looks and absorbing information… how was it possible? And yet unmistakably now, Dhanmatbai was saying that in times of famine, sometimes these flowers were all they had to eat… and they may look beautiful but they had a terrible bitter taste and they left you feeling just as hungry as before. And she told her about the bears which sometimes came in the early morning also on the hunt for mohua flowers… that’s why the women no longer went out to gather them alone if they could help it. She pointed out one of the other women, who looked up briefly from the rapid dance of her flower gathering - step, reach, swipe, drop, step, reach, swipe, drop - the whole of one side of her face was missing. Well not missing exactly, but featureless, blank. No eye, no nose, only half a mouth - and three deep, purple troughs slanting across her face from the centre of her forehead to her jawbone.

After the baskets were full of flowers, most of the women heaved them onto their heads and set off back up the path to the village, swaying like slender reeds. Kamala was reminded again of the girl in the comic book with the white flowers at the nape of her neck. But a few of them remained behind, Banu, Dhanmatbai and a two or three others - mostly older women. They indicated to Kamala that she too should stay. When all the other women had gone, Dhanmatbai led them in the opposite direction, further into the forest. The shadows were deeper here, although the sun was by now quite high. The canopy of trees closed over high above their heads and sent down showers of bird sounds, leaf sounds, light motes, shadow fragments. With a shudder, Kamala recognised the shriek of monkeys, but this group was high above them, swinging rapidly through the branches - on a mission to somewhere and not interested, for the time being, in terrorising innocent women.

If the women were to leave me now, thought Kamala, I would be lost forever. I have no idea where I am or how to get home. Home. Where was that, she wondered? She’d meant the village - how quickly that had become home. And before that the bungalow. And even, for a day, the guest house in the city. Before that the student house. But before it all, home. Where Mother was. All her life she’d been English, so defiantly English - explaining away her little pigmentation peculiarity… “there’s some Indian blood in me” she would say, copying Mother. And even though Mother was 100% Indian, she was quite fair skinned, and had somehow made herself English enough to get away with it, to make it sound as though some specks of Indian blood had somehow accidentally infiltrated their way into her English body, but they were nothing to worry about. Once, when Kamala had told someone at a party that she “…had some Indian blood in her” he’d said. “Really? It doesn’t show” and although Kamala herself had been dismissing her Indian-ness, she didn’t like this implication that it was something to be ashamed of, to be hidden, and she‘d felt guilty and offended at the same time.

When Aunty Seema talked about home - or Back Home (she always said it as though it was a proper noun) - she meant India. Mother never talked about India as home - never talked about India at all. Home was England, apple pie, Royal Doulton, The Times, Radio 4. And because they were home to Mother, to Kamala these things had grown so familiar they were like her own skin. Then. But now when she thought of them, for the first time in months, they seemed like preposterous affectations, utterly unnecessarily complications, unattached to the real, raw pulse of life.

The waxing warmth of the morning sun, the cold slap of fresh stream water, the first sharp gasp of morning air, the feel of a smooth trodden mud path on the bare soles of your feet, the bitter taste of the toothbrush twig, the blazing slash of a bear‘s claws across your face. These were the things that seemed real to her now - more real than her skin, they were in her blood, in her nerves. The women had stopped in a shady hollow between four large trees where the undergrowth was a little less dense and were examining the ground there. Kamala reached out and leaned her palm against a tree. She thought about all that she knew about trees, all the text books, the internet pages, the experiments, the samples, the Latin names of parts and processes and the tree said - you missed the point. And Kamala said, yes, I couldn’t see the trees for the wood. And Kamala and the tree smiled together.

And in the plane between the skin of her palm and the surface of the smooth tree bark, a warm balm spreads, and through it Kamala feels the pulse of the tree racing, slowly, inexorably upwards. She closes her eyes and journeys with the pulse upwards and outwards, parting and spreading and dividing herself along countless branches, she turns her palms, her face, her belly, her thighs up to the light, stretches herself across the canopy and feels the sun pump life into her, her breath exhales and she swells and empties herself into the essence that pours from the pores of her skin and spreads across the skies, she grows heavy and moist and the winds tug at her. Slowly, slowly she gathers up her limbs from the corners of the sky and curls herself up in a ball and she melts, melts and falls through the sky, through the canopy of leaves, through the pillars of light and dark, through the surface of the brackish, black earth, she enters it, trickling between grains of soil, sliding beside molecules, sinking deep into darkness, to where the nerves of her body reach down through the soles of her feet, probing the darkness, reaching out cobweb fine fibres and grasping at the molecules of life. The circle is complete. Kamala sighs deeply and satisfyingly and opens her eyes.

The women were all looking up at her from where they squatted, twisting their heads back from their tasks, their small, brass knives poised in mid-gouge, their fingers frozen around the knobbly white roots they were dislodging. Oh god, thought Kamala, what the hell have I done now? She’d run out of little yellow pills days ago and though Jerome had emailed her to say he’d sent more out to her at least three weeks ago, they had never arrived. She hadn’t been too worried at first because she hadn’t had one of her funny turns since that time in the forest near the bungalow (the dream with the flying snake didn’t count - that was a dream, lots of people have weird dreams). She wished she could remember what she’d just done - hadn’t she just been leaning against the tree, resting her eyes for a minute, thinking about photosynthesis and sap and rain? So why were they staring? She couldn’t read their expressions at all now, were they looking at her like they looked at the crazy Ms Jensen? Or were they looking hostile? Or concerned? But they were just looking, without judgement or comment or emotion. Simply taking in something they saw.

Then, at a word from Dhanmatbai, they turned silently back to their work. Two of them were making incisions in the bark of a tree, using twisted vines to fix leaf bowls at the mouths of the cuts, to catch the thin, colourless liquid that had already started to drip. The other three were worrying at a half dug-out root, a fat, bulbous thing, as shockingly white as a bone emerging from the flesh of a broken leg.

Dhanmatbai beckoned Kamala to help. Kamala willingly stepped forward, relieved that whatever she’d just done to attract their attention hadn’t made her forfeit her place inside this select group (though she couldn’t say how she’d earned it in the first place). She found a space to grip the root, slippery with life, and helped them to tug and tease and wiggle and worm it, until finally, with an exasperated pop, the earth relinquished it. And the tree said; ouch. And Kamala and the women said; sorry. And the tone of their voices said; thank you. The root smelled fresh and faintly lemony. Its juice felt slippery and cool on her fingers, she suddenly longed to feel that coolness where the cut on her ankle still burned and rubbed it quickly on, sighing with pleasure as the stinging pain receded. Dhanmatbai carefully wiped the lumps of mud and smeared fingerprints off the bulbous root mass and then wrapped it in a black cloth which she pulled out from somewhere in her clothing. She fixed the cloth around her waist, like a money belt, thought Kamala, and went to check on the work of the sap tappers. Satisfied, she called to the other women and they set off home. On the way back, they told Kamala that the sap from the trees would be good for curing headaches and that the root had many uses; easing childbirth (or inducing abortion), curing stomach pains, period pains, getting rid of bad dreams, and… other things, they said. Kamala sensed that if and when they wanted her to know more about these 'other things', they would tell her.

Dr Singh, shaded by a tarpaulin stretched across a makeshift construction of freshly sliced wooden slats, was annoyed at first. He leaned forward against the trestle table spread with papers, samples, microscopes, callipers… and looked at her earnestly over his glasses. His voice implied that he was more disappointed, saddened, than angry.

“Ms Steel, please do not forget that we are here to work. This is not some exotic, tropical holiday. I have been calling you for the last hour. Yes, yes, thank you Ms Jensen.”

He absent mindedly received the ostentatiously presented charts which Ms Jensen - by contrast with the feckless Kamala - had clearly been working hard on all morning.

But then, when Kamala had described the activities of the morning, he softened, and got more and more interested. “Good, good, you are winning their trust,“ he smiled. Ms Jensen dropped a pair of pliers with a loud clatter and muttered “Faen!” Dr Singh questioned Kamala about the route they‘d taken - she was vague about this, she hadn‘t been paying attention. He asked her to describe every tree she mentioned. Here she was precise, she translated every leaf, every knot, every aspect of the trees into the scientific data that she knew Dr Singh was thirsting for - and she knew he was missing the point. It was like describing a person as ’a carbon-based life form’. It told you nothing about that individual person, her dreams, her motivations, her idiosyncrasies. Her self. He was particularly interested in the root they’d dug up. She told him what they’d said about its medicinal qualities (but didn’t mention the ‘other uses’ - what could she say about them after all?). He asked her to get a sample of it for him later, and she nodded slightly - would they give it to her? Don't suppose there'd be any harm in letting him have a look at it...

Then he was thoughtful for a long time. Finally, he looked up from the trestle table. “Who all did you say was on this little expedition?” Kamala named the women there whose names she knew. “What about Bapu? Wasn’t the headman involved in this important mission?” Kamala shook her head. “Which men then?” Kamala shrugged and shook her head again. Dr Singh nodded slowly - as though something had just become clear to him. Kamala heard a sharp exhalation of breath behind her and turned to see Deepak glaring at her, his fingers raking through the thick, dark, forest of his hair.

From that morning on, Kamala was excused from the minute slog of sample gathering, of wiring up tree after tree with meters and labels and dials, of 'interviewing' villagers. She was relieved about this latter, she was starting to feel that what they were doing was not so much interviewing as interrogating these people despite the fact that they had work of their own to be getting on with, despite the fact that it was their forest, their home that Dr Singh and his group were guests in. She was encouraged to spend as much time as possible with the women, to win their trust and report back to Dr Singh everything she learned. She did her best, but she could not report everything she learned. Some of the things she learned did not lend themselves to being described in words, some she learned at such subtle levels, she barely knew she had learned them. And though she was aware of Deepak sending her dark - and she felt somehow accusatory - looks, she knew she was not actually betraying their trust. She couldn’t say this to him, because he never said anything to her. And every day the weight of unsaid things between them grew a little heavier, drew them a little closer.

She watched as Banu ground spices in the shallow stone bowl, trickling water onto the mustard yellow powder-turning-paste without interrupting the rhythm of the pounding wooden pestle, its end smooth and rounded with generations of use. She squatted beside Dhanmatbai learning to use a back to front knife like the one she'd seen Banu use back at the Greenfields bungalow, and to blow life into the fire through a blackened metal pipe thrust into the base of firewood in the hollowed out pit in the kitchen floor. The other young women showed her how to throw her freshly washed hair forwards and thrash the water out of it with an instrument like a long, thin wooden cone. She learned the rhythm of the foot-treadle at one end of the Heath-Robinson-like wheat grinding contraption, and the rhythm of the flung grain in the grinding pit at the other.

She learned the proper tone of voice in which to talk to a goat that was not giving milk or a bow whose arrows were not delivering meat, how to massage the belly of a pregnant goat so that its unborn kid turns, ready for a smooth delivery. She learned to fling rice into the air from a flat shovel-shaped basket, to let the wind blow away the chaff. She learned to mix the extracts of plants with clay, with dung, with tears, with blood, with murmured words and focused energy and she learned which combinations of these would help sooth a woman in labour, which would disinfect a hunter's wound, which would ease a child's chesty cough, which would make the vegetable curry taste just so. She knew already how the juice of the root they'd got from the forest could hasten the healing process; where the thorn bush had ripped the skin on her ankle that day when they'd gone to collect mohua flowers in the forest there was now barely a scar.

The women beamed proudly at her with each art that she mastered, however clumsily, and clapped their hands and laughed. And in the evenings she sat with them around the fire, with the darkness cricketing and crackling outside, and Dhanmatbai would tell long tales which Kamala only understood a tenth of. But she felt almost as though she was back in Uni in the shared house with her mates.

After dinner one night, Dr Singh asked her to accompany him on a stroll around the village. They walked in silence for a little while - the day sounds of the village winding down around them; the goat bells clinking, the babble-brook sound of lullabies being sung, the low murmurming of the men reliving the highlights of the day’s hunting over a last smoke. The night sounds were yet to start cranking up… the tanpura drone of crickets, the hypnotic night birds, the bark of the leopard, the tap of the allotted guardsman’s staff on the tamped earth around the perimeter of the village. In the near silence, Kamala noticed for the first time how loud Dr Singh’s footsteps were… tramp, creak, shuffle, tramp, creak, shuffle, then realised it was more that her own footsteps had grown quieter. She hoped that this meant that like the other village women, she was walking less on the earth and more with it.

“It will be soon” Dr Singh murmured. They had come to a stop at a place where the edge of the mountain dropped away revealing a vast sweep of treetops over which, this evening, the sun spent its last, and most glorious portion of light, like a dying king drenching his beloved with his most precious jewels in a parting gesture. “Look” He pointed to the sky just south of where the sun was setting and Kamala traced the almost full bellied outline of the moon - pale and translucent now, like a disc of rice paper, but she knew from the last few nights that as soon as the sun had gone, the moon would strengthen, gorge itself with light until it seemed dripping to overflowing with white-gold honey. There was still a sliver of shadow slanting across its bottom edge.

“It will be full in just a few more days… It's clear from the interviews that these primitives set very great store by things like the full moon. In their uneventful lives, something like that seems to take on a great significance. Then again, there might be something in the gravitational alignment that helps the power-generation process...certainly none of our tests have demonstrated that any of the trees around here are generating any significant amounts of energy... What do you think, Ms Steel? What do your undercover investigations reveal?”
Kamala stared at him. The dying sun somehow filled in both panes of his glasses with a dull red glow. The long, oil-slicked lock of hair which was trained to conceal a bald patch had slipped sideways and fallen forward across his face. His lips were set in a prim pinch, twitching patronisingly at the corners.

“'Primitives'? 'Undercover investigations'? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr Singh.” She reached up to her throat, brushing the curving edge of one of the snakes.
“Come now, my dear. This is no time to start getting coy. We both know why we’re here. Don’t tell me you’re going native on me.”

She didn’t like the way he laughed. As though the idea of her being native to this land was somehow preposterous. He brushed his hair back into place with his fingers and turned to face her. “Ms Steel, you haven’t forgotten the importance of this venture, I hope? It’s not only important for us, the scientific community, for the economy of this country, for the civilised world in general - it’s also important for your precious tribals as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember what we were talking about on the way here? The pharmaceutical companies who want to exploit these people? And there’s also the mining industry, haven’t you noticed how red the earth is in these forests? That’s because it’s mineral rich - buried under the ground here there’s bauxite, coal, iron, limestone… not to mention the timber itself, the potential hydro-electric power in that river…” He pointed to the streak of silver that broke the tree cover near the bottom of the mountain’s sweep. “How long do you think that this village idyll is going to be allowed to continue, with these people plucking forest leaves to eat their food off and digging up roots to rub on their sores? Progress is coming whether they like it or not - whether they know it or not. And they don’t. They know nothing. They are children.”

Kamala spoke quietly, trying to keep her voice steady.

“They’re not children, Dr Singh. I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that. They’re infinitely older and wiser than us. They know more than we ever will.”

Dr Singh gave an exasperated tut, and then appeared to get a grip on his feelings. He spoke more gently now.

“Ok, ok, I agree, they are full of wisdom and charm. But don’t you see? Their kind of knowledge is of no use in the modern world. The world wants energy, drugs, weapons, minerals to make miracle machines out of, so we can communicate, so we can go faster, cure cancer, defend our countries, slow down the ageing process... Their kind of life is a rut. A charming, peaceful, idyllic rut, I know - I feel it too - but a rut nevertheless. It’s going nowhere. They’re living in the stone age. They are happy to go round and round with the days and the seasons, accepting nature's pace of life and death, while the rest of the world defies nature, lights up the night, flies in the face of gravity, cheats old age, cheats death even!

"These people are living in a time warp. If it’s not us who pulls them out of it, it will be someone else. Wouldn’t you rather it was us? They trust you, Kamala. They have accepted you as one of their own. Don’t you owe it to them to protect them? Anyone else would simply brush them away like cockroaches, crush them, to get at what they want. We could protect them. If we find that tree, if we can harness that energy, we could have this whole area protected. It would take just one word from me, one word and the PM’s office would put us solely in charge of this place and no-one else could touch it. No-one. Do you see, my dear?”

“I don’t know… I… it feels like I’d be betraying them…”

“No, no. On the contrary, you would be betraying them by not helping. But, listen, if it makes you feel better - you don’t even have to do anything. Here, take this. Put it on.”

He handed her what looked like a wrist watch, one of those chunky, sporty ones with so many dials that it looked like it had been turned inside out.

“What is it?” She asked, reaching out, tempted by its promise of precision and megabytes of memory, and at the same time holding back.

“It’s a GPS - geographical positioning device. You know, like people have in their cars to tell them where they are, in case they get lost between the office and their house. This one is just a little more compact. Neat, isn't it? Look up there...”

He gestured up towards the pale points of light that were starting to pepper the darkening sky.

“Somewhere up there is a constellation of three satellites. Desi satellites - Indian made!" His chest visibly swelled, "You must have seen them sometimes, like stars - but tracking quickly and smoothly across the sky...?" Kamala nodded, "This gadget is beaming up its presence up to them, and the sats are cross-referencing those beams and sending the precise co-ordinates of where they intersect down to a receiver in Mumbai. Put it on. Put it on. Then you don’t have to tell me anything, you don’t have to “betray” anyone. All you’re doing is being there. We’ll take care of the rest. You’ll be helping them protect their forest and their way of life. What do you say? Hmmm?”

Kamala stared at the GPS watch. Then at Dr Singh. He nodded encouragingly. The sinister glints were gone - foolish imagination! Now he reminded her, as he usually did, of her headmaster at school. She suddenly felt like a very silly little girl - Deepak’s bark came back to her “You’re not going to achieve a social revolution and overturn centuries of social conditioning in one car journey!” he’d said. Who was she to interfere in any aspect of this society anyway? Surely this eminent scientist, who’d lived here all his life, knew more than her about the people here, about the risks they were facing, about the benefits of this research to them, to the world? Who was she after all? A tourist, a foreigner, a ‘coconut’ (she’d heard Deepak using the term about someone he’d met in America - “brown on the outside, white on the inside“, he‘d said). Could she really claim to know better than Dr Singh, the University, Greenfields… the ‘PM’ even?! She took the watch and nodded.

“Good girl.” Dr Singh beamed, patting her shoulder. “Very good girl, that’s the ticket! Now come along, we must get back to our “luxury guest suites” before the leopards come prowling!” His laughter ricocheted between the invisible trees, now mere presences in the darkness, like a bluebottle trapped between the folds of a black velvet curtain.

19, Hospitality

The top of the hill seemed to Kamala to be getting no nearer as they trudged along in single file. The sun was a white hot thumb bearing down on them - they were tin tacks being pushed back into the dusty red earth. Kamala thought longingly of the lovely big, air conditioned four-wheel drive Tata Sumo that they had left at the bottom of the hill. It had brought them as far as it could get until first the tarmac ran out, and then the rutted road ran out, and then the relatively level ground had run out. Now it stood anomalously, stripped of its context of tarmac and traffic lights, at the edge of the primeval forest below them.

Mohan and Banubai, the cook, had accompanied them on the trip. It seemed that they belonged to the community which was going to lead them to the ‘target zone’ as Dr Singh called it, although as far as Kamala could gather (since the whole project was shrouded in confidentiality) what they were trying to locate was basically a tree. A very special tree, sure. Very old. But Dr Singh seemed excited about it.

Dr Singh was eager to get going. There had been delay after delay which had kept them fretting in the bungalow on top of the hill for the best part of a month. First they had to wait for the final team member; the interpreter. He had been scheduled to meet Dr Singh and the others at the Greenfields sub-regional office in the town at the foot of the hill, but he hadn’t turned up. Then a few days ago, after frantic efforts to contact him, a message had arrived to say he couldn’t make it on the mission - something about his wife being sick. Dr Singh was beside himself. It wasn’t easy to find people who could speak both English and the arcane language of the hill tribes. They kept themselves to themselves, Dr Singh had explained. Deepak had muttered that they didn’t have much choice since there were no schools near their isolated settlements.

Then they had to wait for some vital pieces of equipment for their field trip to arrive - some parts which had been sent from Switzerland had been impounded by customs officials who suspected them of being disguised components for military equipment. According to Dr Singh, the matter had had to be taken right up to the deputy Prime Minister who had ordered their immediate clearance. The customs officer had been sacked immediately. (Kamala thought this harsh, the poor guy was only doing his job and with terrorist alerts every other day of course he was going to be suspicious of some strange looking contraption coming from abroad). They’d been rushed to the Greenfield sub-regional office with an army motorcycle convoy, and Sunil, the driver had brought them up to the bungalow the day before. So now, after Dr Singh had checked them over and Sunil had had a night’s rest, they were finally on their way.

The interpreter problem had been resolved very suddenly one morning when Dr Singh had found Deepak was in the kitchen talking to Mohan and the cook. They discovered that he was speaking to them not in English or the language of the town, but some other language. It turned out that it was indeed one of the hill tribe dialects, and Mohan and Banubai confirmed that it was possible that the village they were going to would understand them. It would slow down the process a little, but if Mohan and Banubai translated for Deepak, Deepak could translate for the team. Dr Singh was triumphal with relief as he bellowed instructions to the bewildered pair to pack up their bags and prepare for an indefinite trip into the forest. Deepak had almost as little choice in the matter but he agreed moodily.

There had been an uncomfortable moment as the party had set out, when Deepak had climbed into the front seat of the Tata Sumo beside the driver, Ms Jensen and Dr Singh had settled themselves in the back and, as Kamala was about to get in too, she noticed that Banubai and Mohan were climbing into the trailer into which was piled with the team’s baggage and the heavily protected scientific instruments.

“No, no!” she’d smiled, holding the back door open for them. “Don’t be silly, there’s plenty of room in the back if we all scoosh up…” Mohan’s dark cheeks darkened further and he stared at his feet, and Banubai looked stricken again - the mad memsahib was at it again. She quickly shuffled round so that she was protected from Kamala’s gaze by Mohan’s body.

“Come along, come along,” shouted Dr Singh “What’s the delay here? We need to get going, we don’t want to be out in the forest when night falls and the wild animals and dacoits come out to play.”

“I was just telling Mohan and the lady not to sit in the trailer, Dr Singh. We can all squeeze into the back, can’t we?” Kamala replied.

Dr Singh looked puzzled for a moment, then…

“Ah, I see. No, no, don’t worry, Kamala, the equipment is well insulated. They can sit on top without damaging it. Accha, challo, bhai.” He finished, turning to the driver.

Now it was Kamala’s turn to look puzzled… “No, Dr Singh, I didn’t mean…”

But Deepak had suddenly stuck his head out of the passenger seat window and snapped, “Oh for god’s sake, girl, just get in the bloody car and leave it alone. You’re not going to achieve a social revolution and overturn centuries of social conditioning in one car journey!”

Kamala was shocked. Every one was a little shocked, actually. Throughout the month Deepak had remained as taciturn as he had been on the first morning, but he had never been rude before. With Dr Singh he sometimes had quiet, thoughtful conversations over whisky late at night after the women had gone to bed. Kamala would hear their voices murmuring in the dark - Dr Singh’s high, excited machine gun fire, Deepak’s occasional single, deep cannon ball, plunging into the cricket-crackling silence, leaving endlessly expanding ripples in Kamala‘s half dreaming mind.

To Kamala herself, he barely addressed a word, indeed he seemed to actively avoid her, though she couldn’t imagine what she had done to offend him. Once, while reading on the veranda she had looked up abruptly for some reason and thought she caught her reflection in the lens of the camera which he’d been tinkering with, but when she looked properly, he was focusing on one of the pale, chubby ghekko lizards on the wall behind her head - she must have imagined it. He seemed to prefer to pretend she didn’t exist. She discovered from Dr Singh that he had studied in America and, when she found herself alone with him in the sitting room one evening, she’d tried to break the ice by asking him if he ever felt homesick for America. But he had tersely retorted “India is my home, Ms Steel” and gone back to reading National Geographic. Kamala, mortified, decided to respond to his arrogance with cheery nonchalance, which, alas never quite came off. Whenever she tried to gently provoke him with mindless pleasantries, her voice always came out a little shriller than she’d intended - as though there was a tiny sob buried deep in her throat.

Ms Jensen seemed utterly oblivious to his lack of conversation (as arrogant as each other, thought Kamala) and they were often to be found sitting on the veranda in silence, each absorbed in their own task - she usually reading print-outs from her lap-top (“It is essential to keep abreast of the latest dewelopments in Svedish scientific circles” she explained), he usually tinkering with his lenses and light meters. He had an old fashioned SLR in a battered leather case as well as an array of digital cameras and other photographic paraphernalia which now, fully prepared for the long awaited field trip, festooned his chest like military medals.

The only people he really seemed to relax with were Mohan and Banubai. Kamala felt slightly hurt by this too. She had met them and, she’d thought, befriended them first, and they were still painfully shy with her, especially Banubai. Why should they feel so relaxed with Deepak, the newcomer? He smoked with Mohan on the back veranda, leaning his long back against the pillar, the morning sun illuminating the smoke from his cigarette… Banubai calling out comfortably to him from the kitchen in her gravelly voice. As usual they all fell silent when Kamala opened the door. She would hand her bed tea tray to the new odd-job boy (she knew they’d rather she left it for them to collect - but she felt she had to make a point) and then turn away from the threshold of the kitchen door, the boundary of her banishment, feeling as though her gesture had been childish and pointless. And then she would hear the conversation start up again as the door swung shut behind her.

At Deepak’s uncharacteristic outburst, Kamala pinched her lips tight shut and climbed into the back seat as instructed, stroking with her thumb the smooth curve of the golden snakes at her throat. She’d thought Deepak was Mohan and Banubai’s friend, he was the one person she’d expected to support her in sticking up for them. She stared out of the window as they pulled away, trying to avoid Ms Jensen‘s supercilious look. It wasn’t just the dust which was making her eyes sting as they set off.

But the long drive had blunted the edge of her hurt. The rise and fall of the road, up hill and down, repeated and repeated until to Kamala it seemed like she was part of the slow motion heave of the hills, breathing. Even over the straining whine of the Sumo’s engine, a silence, immense, ancient was gathering in intensity around them - oozing out of the very rock of the hills. For mile after mile, the gradually strengthening sunlight strobed through the forest canopy. Occasionally they would burst out into a clearing and the whole world would be splashed out in front of them for an instant. They would catch, for a moment, the flash of whitewash on the low, square-hewn rocks that lined the road’s edge, which acted more as a warning - “You are now mere feet away from plunging several hundred feet to your death” - than a barrier, and then the forest would open its branchy jaws and swallow them again.

When she was a child, Kamala had come across a comic book tucked away in the bottom of an old trunk under her mother’s bed. It was before she could read the words, but she remembered vividly the images; a slender, beautiful girl with great, heavy lashed eyes slanting across her almond face; her hair, inky black swept down her back, caught at the nape of her neck with a clutch of white flowers. She was gazing longingly into a cave in which a man sat cross legged. The man was as impossibly beautiful as the girl, the same luxuriantly inky black hair, a black thread slanted from his broad shoulders down to a nut-brown six pack where a leopard skin was knotted low on the hip. His eyes were closed, long, dark lashes sweeping down almost to his cheekbones, but his lips, broad and shapely, smiled with a deep, and sensuous… knowingness. The girl stood in a forest just like this. There were caves in the hillside just like the one the prince (she assumed that’s what he was, though he was half naked) sat in. Kamala could have sworn she saw a deer flash through the undergrowth just like the one that peeped curiously out at the beautiful girl and the beautiful man in the comic book picture.

She wondered if the indigenous people whose village they would set up camp in for the first phase of their work would look like that. But then she remembered, Banubai and Mohan were from the same ethnic group. She had glanced back at the trailer and its occupants with a mixture of guilt and embarrassment - Mohan was curled up asleep in a kind of nest he had hollowed out for himself amongst the bags and the boxes, apparently impervious to the Sumo’s violent lurches and bumps. Banubai was sitting bolt upright looking out at the forest, her chin raised, eyes bright, and nostrils flared... Kamala realised she’d never seen her face properly before.

Banu wasn’t tall and slim and honey skinned, her beauty worked on a different level, thought Kamala; her skin the colour and sheen of walnut, except where the tattoos smudged it like finger prints smudging a polished dining table, broad forehead, high, shapely cheekbones and gleaming black eyes, slightly creased at the corners like those of people from further east. Her small, sharp chin drew her face into a perfect heart shape. Kamala felt against the skin of her back the reflection of something glowing and tingling in Banu's eyes - this is what the earth might feel, she thought, when the rain returns to slake its parched surface. For the rest of the drive, the waves of crackling aliveness kept radiating from somewhere behind her. By the time the Sumo gave its final shudder into silence under the trees, the tingling had grown to a blazing warmth and the back of Kamala’s shirt was soaked through, before the sun on the hill path ever started beating down on it.

“Not too far, now, Kamala, my dear” chirped Dr Singh as their calves strained against the slope. Deepak and Ms Jensen were in the lead, then Dr Singh, then Kamala, with Mohan, Banubai and the driver bringing up the rear helping them carry their equipment up. Two men, armed - Kamala was thrilled to see - with bows and arrows, were sent back later to guard the Sumo until the driver returned to take it back to Greenfields HQ in the little town in the plains. Kamala tried to picture cool waterfalls, ice packs, the air conditioned bedroom at the guest house back in the city, to distract her from the heat and the ache in her legs.

“See,” said Dr Singh “the cook is going on ahead to ask them to have some cold drinks ready for us!”

At the mention of ‘cold drinks’ Kamala pictured a chilled glass of Coke chinking with ice… and then laughed wearily. She looked up and saw that Banubai was indeed some way ahead of them now. Again, Kamala felt a stab of guilt - poor woman having to slog up the hill in this heat just so that they could have drinks waiting for them - it was bad enough going at their plodding pace. But then she noticed that Banubai wasn’t running, and she wasn’t panting or even sweating. She was walking briskly, purposefully, but as easily as though it was level ground. And her eyes were raised towards the peak of the hill. Kamala turned her own gaze down to her feet again, willing them to keep moving, unable to bare the glare of the sky.

“Wow! She must be super fit!” she gasped.

“Yes, these hill tribe people are strong, no? Strong as oxen. Very pliable too, that‘s why they make such good servants.” Dr Singh replied brightly. “Phenomenal people. Quite underestimated. Most people think they’re completely primitive, but they do have some knowledge - for example, about the medicinal properties of forest flora. Quite a bit of knowledge. You must be knowing, pharmaceutical companies are pushing each other over in their hurry to get at that knowledge, it’s a real goldmine. And since they’re completely uneducated, mostly it’s like taking candy from a baby." He laughed. "But now, now there are these wretched people, these enjyos, who stir them up and start getting them all agitated about their so called ‘rights‘. What about the rights of human kind to benefit from that medicinal knowledge, huh? Where’s the human rights in denying the world that? That’s what I want to know!”

Kamala didn’t have the energy to do more than grunt. How did he manage to keep up his energy when their lungs were pounding against the scorching, thinning air of the hillside, she wondered.

“It’s like this project of ours… these enjyos would be having our 'guts for garters', as you English say, if they knew about it…”

She didn't have the energy to remind him half English, half Indian. “Enjyos?” Kamala managed between gasps. It was clear she was going to have to understand this new phrase if she was to follow the rest of the conversation - or rather lecture.

“Yes, yes, enjyos. En. Gee. Os. Non-government organisations. They pretend to just be charities, but they are dangerous trouble makers these days. They don't just give out alms to the needy. They would be saying that we are exploiting these 'poor people'. They refuse to see that we’re actually doing them a big favour. You see, Kamala my dear, these people are like children. They don’t appreciate the value of what they know. They don’t understand how to put it to the best advantage - look at them, you’ll see them soon, scratching around half naked on top of a burning hillside, when they could be living in nice apartments with air conditioning and drinking cold Pepsi Cola! They could have education, health care, proper jobs with pensions and other fringe benefits. The enjyos just want them to remain in the dark ages. They think it’s more picturesque that way. Such arrogance!” He shook his head sadly, his boundless optimism experiencing a little dip.

At this point, Deepak turned sharply. “In that case, I’d better go and try to get some pictures of them in their natural state before our wonderful project saves them from their ignorance and innocence.” Kamala thought she caught the inverted commas around the word ‘saves’.

“Certainly, certainly, my boy!” he cried “You carry on ahead. Click away! Click away! It would be interesting to have some ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of these people, certainly. Then we could show them to the enjyos and say well, what do you say now, hah?! Ha, ha, ha!”

Deepak bared his teeth in what Kamala supposed was meant to be a smile. He cranked up his pace and set off up the hill after Banubai. A dark patch on the back of his white shirt spread slowly until the chestnut skin beneath shone through. Kamala felt a cold trickle of sweat trace its way down her own back. She looked down at her feet again and willed them to keep moving.

Ms Jensen and Dr Singh, ahead of her now, fell into a conversation about the comparative merits of different methods for analysing molecular energy conversion, which, fascinating though it was to her, Kamala couldn’t quite keep her mind on. She just tried to focus on not melting down and on the idea of the top of the hill.

At Dr Singh’s cry of “Ah, here we are!“ Kamala looked up to see a figure towering over them, outlined against the dazzling sky. A purple haze stood out all around it and spurts of gold blazed at its wrists. Then she raised her arm to shade her eyes and saw a statuesque woman in a purple sari, calmly gazing down at them. Banubai stood behind her.

“Ah, yes, here we are, Banu-ma! Our refreshments are ready? Good, good.”

The tall woman with Banu raised her arm and gestured them graciously towards the village. There was a large reception committee awaiting them when they finally flopped down, dusty and sweaty, onto a rug spread under a huge tree. The tree stood in the middle of a cluster of small, square houses made, as far as Kamala could see, from woven palm leaves. The whole village seemed to be there, eagerly (Kamala assumed) awaiting the strange visitors. But it was actually only the children who seemed excited, staring and giggling and flapping their fingers.

The adults had stood very quietly and watched as the dusty little procession approached. Kamala couldn’t see Deepak. Once they had sat down, the tall woman gestured towards one of the houses and a boy ran out with a large, round bellied, thin necked earthenware water pot on one hip and a glass tumbler in the other. He handed the glass to Dr Singh, and then poured a cool, silvery clear stream into it for him. Kamala felt slightly panicked. Only one glass. Wasn’t anyone else getting water?

She watched, longingly, as Dr Singh threw back his head and poured the water straight down his throat. The glass never touched his lips. He passed the empty glass back to the boy who - she was relieved to see - refilled it for Kamala. Bravely, she attempted to do the same and ended up pouring half of it down the outside of her throat and the front of her shirt. The shrieks of laughter from the children clustered around them were a price worth paying for the delicious, icy drenching. She passed the glass to Ms Jensen who, once it was filled, simply put it to her lips and drank. There was a smear of pale lipstick on its edge when she handed it back to the astonished boy. He took the glass back from Ms Jensen with the tips of his thumb and forefinger and then turned and looked questioningly at the tall woman.

Kamala noticed now that she was not in fact much taller than Banubai, there was just something about her bearing that made her seem tall, statuesque. She was decked in chunky silver and bone jewellery. Like Banubai, she had dark green markings smudged on her high cheekbones and her forehead and chin. The woman’s calm expression never faltered as she uttered a brief command and gestured again. The boy ran to the house and got another glass which was then passed to Banubai and then to the driver and from him finally to Mohan. (Strange, thought Kamala, I thought in this country the men ate and drank first… she also realised that for the first time Mohan and Banubai were sitting with them, sharing the same mat, without any of their usual embarrassment. Kamala smiled, perhaps her little protests had had some effect after all!)

His thirst quenched, Dr Singh was now ready to crack straight on and get to work “Deepak!” he called, “Where are you? Come on, my boy. Come and do some interpreting for us!”

Again the woman gave an instruction, and a child scampered off between the houses, coming back a few moments later with Deepak in tow. As he arrived, so did another earthenware pot, this time filled with tea. The boy plucked a couple of the thick, rubbery leaves from the tree which sheltered them and used them to stop his fingers burning as he poured the tea into glass tumblers, one for each guest this time. Deepak sat down with them and ungarlanded himself of his many gadgets.

“Ok, shoot” he said, grumpily.

“Right.” said Dr Singh. “Kamala, dear, take notes if you please.” Kamala pulled her notebook and biro out of her back pack and wrote the date and the name of the village - Manjaria - neatly at the top of the page.

“OK. Question number one: Ask them who is the head man of the village.” said Dr Singh.

Deepak spoke to Mohan, who looked a little blank and then spoke to the rest of the crowd. The question generated a ripple of discussion, and set lots of heads shaking and people gesturing this way and that, and then their voices tailed off.

“They don't know what you mean by ‘the head man of the village‘.” said Deepak.

“What do you mean they don't know what I mean? I mean the headman, the leader, the elder, the sarpanch… you know what I mean, Deepak-bhai, explain it to them!”

Deepak shrugged and spoke again, for a little longer this time. Someone asked him something via Mohan and he answered. There was a ripple of laughter and everyone turned to look at Dr Singh. Then the tall woman spoke quietly, gesturing at an old man leaning, half dozing, against the trunk of the tree. And Deepak said, “OK, they say this is their elder. His name is Bapu - father.”

Kamala wrote the name down. Dr Singh namastéd to the old man. He didn’t notice, so someone nudged him - he looked a little surprised but namastéd back politely.

“Ask him about their sacred tree, can he show us where it is and how they extract the energy from it?”

Deepak spoke to the old man, who looked amazed, and stammered a reply. Deepak translated;

“He says they don’t have a sacred tree. He doesn’t know what you are talking about.”

Dr Singh rubbed his forehead irritably. “Oh, these people! Didn’t I tell you they were like children, Kamala, dear?” Ms Jensen gave a loud sigh at this point and got up. She took her bag and started wandering about the village, and - to the huge amusement of the large entourage of children she gathered - started gathering samples of apparently random things in little glass phials - thorns from small bushes, half eaten fruit, the leaves from the tree. The children, as if testing the limits of this crazy creature’s bizarre behaviour, brought her little offerings - goat droppings, strands of their own hair, dust from the ground, bits of palm pulled from the roof of a house.

Each child would tiptoe carefully up to her with the offering held out stiffly at arm’s length, as if approaching a dangerous wild animal and then - as the offering was taken - would scurry away at which his or her fellows would yell with shrill triumph and deliver congratulatory whacks on the back. Ms Jensen accepted everything, solemnly placing each sample in its phial and carefully inscribing the label. Kamala wasn’t sure whether she was in earnest or if she was being uncharacteristically kind and humouring the children. She suspected, though, that it was merely because she couldn’t think how else to react without losing face.

Meanwhile, Dr Singh was persevering with his line of questioning about the sacred tree. Kamala was starting to feel a little uncomfortable at this. She had known they were coming here so that the indigenous people could show them a special kind of tree and maybe they could learn how to get it to generate some kind of power, but she hadn’t realised the tree was sacred to them. However, it was all looking a little academic now, as they didn’t seem to have a sacred tree at all, or if they did, they were not admitting to it. The old man kept looking at the tall woman who, every now and then, would say something quietly. But, though the old man told Dr Singh about the tree whose twigs they used to start friction fires with, and the tree which they raided for the honey that the wild bees who nested there made, the tree whose leaves which the women used to cure fever with and the tree whose branches they used as cooking fuel, he never seemed to be able to offer Dr Singh the tree he was looking for. Eventually, Dr Singh gave up and said;

“Never mind. We’ll talk to them again later. Maybe we have to earn their trust a little first. Let’s go and eat now.”

“Maybe the power tree’s just a myth” said Deepak quietly.

“No, no! It must be existing. Definitely. Plenty of anecdotal evidence. We’ll find it. Don’t worry. They are just pretending. Like I was saying to Kamala here, these people are very simple and trusting, we’ll get it out of them somehow. Candy from a baby, hah, Kamala dear?! Now come, Banu-ma, we are ready to eat! It‘s getting dark now.” Although they were far from the bungalow and this was not Banu’s village, Dr Singh did not seem to be able to relinquish the idea of her as his supplier of food.

And Banu obliged and graciously gestured them towards the largest of the houses. Even though the sun had started going down, it was still bright outside and Kamala’s eyes took a moment or two to grow accustomed to the cool gloom inside the unlit hut. Soon she was able to make out that they were in a large, empty room and that two neat rows of square, green plates, little green bowls and glass tumblers were laid out on the cool, khaki coloured mud floor along each wall.

They were invited to sit down. Kamala didn’t find it very easy to sit cross legged on the floor, but Ms Jensen found it impossible. A wooden box had to be found for her to perch on, and Deepak produced a fork attachment on his Swiss army knife for her to eat with. Their hosts looked at her pityingly - not only is she mad, and doesn’t know how to drink, they seemed to be thinking, the poor thing can't sit or eat properly either. Kamala felt sorry for her too, thinking she must feel terribly self conscious, but a glance at her face showed she didn’t mind a bit - in fact she looked rather triumphant perched up on her wooden throne looking over the rows of bowed heads.

The plates and bowls turned out to be made of broad, green leaves, woven and held together with little stitches of green stalk. Kamala was fascinated, and studied them closely until she was distracted by the food being brought out to them now and ladled onto their plates - hot, spicy vegetables curries, boiled eggs, fish and meat in fragrant sauces accompanied by steaming, nutty flavoured rice. A thin, hot soup was poured into the woven leaf bowls, which didn‘t leak a drop. Then all of her attention was taken up with trying to get the runny food from the plate on the floor into her mouth with her fingers without spilling it all down her front like she had with the water.

Some moments later she paused for a drink of water between mouthfuls. A movement caught her eye, a final flash of the setting sun glinting off a gold bangle beyond the open doorway. There was a small group of women sitting in a circle under the tree - talking quietly and earnestly together, their heads leaning in towards the centre of the circle. Banu and the tall woman were with them. And every now and then one of them gestured sharply towards the hall. Kamala was suddenly reminded of the huddles of conferring teachers you sometimes glimpsed through the doors of the school staff common room after classes had ended, and experienced the same unbidden reflex of searching her conscience.