‘Oh,’ said Jagat Ram speculating about me from top to bottom. ‘Oh, you are the guests the college office was speaking about. They knew somebody was coming. But they knew neither his name nor his address. What could I do? They said, the clerk said, “Somebody may come in tonight. May be a Sahib too,” they remarked. Even the emissaries of Yama himself can come. Could I let anyone in? Well, however, you are there. Come in.’ And he pushed the gate sideways. From then on Jagat Ram never spoke a word. He opened up the guest room, a smallish whitewashed room with beds, a soiled table, and proudly showed us the bathroom. Yes, we had a private bathroom, Western style. The dog stood outside examining the newcomers. Now and again she would suddenly twist her tail and howl. She was not sure her master should be so trusting. ‘Master, do be careful, you never know.’
Meanwhile Jagat Ram was giving us bed sheets and mosquito curtains and pillowcases. Moti Ram brought in the luggage. He stood there on the veranda, as if he had accomplished a holy job. And that was the end of the story.
‘You never told me about drums?’ I said.
‘To the drummer night is like a drum. One hears the beats. You know that’s why Lord Shiva has the drum in his hand. He dances in the crematorium, you remember. To beat a leather instrument with God-given hands is easy. But to beat drum that Shiva’s silence become sound could only be the gift of Mother Parvathi. He alone beats the drum true, who knows he’s never there.’
‘How wonderful,’ I remarked, hiding my utter clumsiness. ‘Is there anywhere I can hear you, Moti Ram?’
‘No sir, I beat my drum at home only at prayer time. I beat it that the Lord remove my sins. Every beat rubs off a little of my heavy karma.’ I had no words. I gave Moti Ram ten rupees (eight for the ride and two as baksheesh, I said jokingly), and as he left the door and walked through the garden to the gate, I remembered I would never, never see him hereafter. How auspicious it would be to take the Calcutta Mail, again.
Even after the car had left the dog never stopped barking. After we got into bed, he seemed to remember some forgotten ill we had done to him, and would slowly whine, and suddenly give a bark. Had we done him some harm in another life? Who knows? Every event of life has a double meaning. There is no accident in existence. Yet there is the miracle of chance. To know why you lie on a shaky charpai in this damp building, in what is perhaps the Raj Ghat College Guest House, but is, as it were, a nowhere of anywhere, is to ask the question: Who made this rope that wove the charpai? And the tree, the timbers from which the charpai was made? Whence came they? What destiny brought the rope and the string together, and I and Paul to Benares? Event is always single, simple. Event is action without object.
II
Bhim, the parrot, is among the eldest of the kingdom. Lean at the neck (much hair having fallen during these many decades), and with a wisp of white hood, he moves with natural serenity. He seems to have such privileged freedom of movement across the sky of Benares that even the vultures give way to him. His nest is on the neem tree — that old, wind-twisted and tall neem— just where the Dasi lane ends, and the boats come up for people to have a quick look at the Dashashwamedh Ghat and high up, an ever-ordained hole, as it were, exists for Bhim. The story goes (and any boatman worth his salt will tell you) that Bhim and his wife, Rupvati, have lived here for over fifty years— that is, since the time of the Delhi Durbar until today, and this is till about two or three years ago and the China war — Bhim and Rupvati always moved about with the august marks of princes. They bear a large litter, sometimes of four, sometimes of five, so people thereabouts say, and at least three or four live on. Once in a while a vile vulture used to swoop in or some over-courageous school boy would go and catch the little one, in the deeps of the night, with a torch, and no amount of cries would drive the vicious intruder down.
But since a few years something has happened. Every time a boy wants to go up, he falls off the tree before he is even up to the level of the first veranda of the Bindu House, to the right. Once, twice, thrice, this happened and people in the Bindu House and the Dasi lane now know that some Siddha has come to live on the neem tree. Often women, when they wake up on a moonlit night, and go to the veranda to contemplate the broad river and the silver of her murmurings, a sudden wind seems to shift on top of the neem tree and one hears, as it were, the sound of a mantra. Hum hum humumm it seems to say, with a grave and a ruminant voice. The voice is not human nor is it that of a bird. It certainly is divine, luminescent. Anyhow, from then on Bhim and Rupvati have lived undisturbed and bear their little ones with absolute hope. All little chicks do not survive in Benares nor do all mother birds in Benares have a Siddha to protect them. The little ones grow up and multiply and even today the bird catchers of Benares (and there are none more wicked in this wicked world, I tell you), they say to you, ‘This is the Bhim — Rupvati breed’ just by the ring at the neck, and a sort of pearly mist over the eyes. The colour of the ring is yellow but more close to sapphire than to ochre — there’s more green in it than gold. The eyes of Bhim are somewhat small but Rupvati has eyes as large as an eight-anna, and she rolls them with fire. Rupvati must not be easy to live with, yet sometimes when Bhim stands on one leg on some branch of the tree — and this any pilgrim can see — Rupvati sits on another branch and contemplates her lord with devout attention.
Sadhus throw Bengal gram towards the couple but Bhim and Rupvati do not eat all the gram that’s offered to them, which explains why near the tree you have such a collection of madhu-birds and sparrows, which get a feast as few birds get anywhere in this wide and bent Benares. And the ants have such a feast too that they have a permanent nest in the tree, and you can see them pass along the trunk down and go towards the Bindu House where they always find sugar from pilgrim kitchens. The Jains will tell you that never do you find so many ants on a tree as on this neem, and some knowing people say, of course it’s because of Bhim or maybe it’s because of the mighty mantra-intoning Siddha. But the women who sell clay-pots round the corner and who have lived on the lane for so long say there’s a story of a Queen, rich and splendid in her beauty, who came to Benares sometime in the time of our grandfathers and drowned herself under that very tree. She was unhappy, and she thought a Ganges death were better than a palace rot. So she slipped through the palace guards, warded off her pursuers (in those days you rode on horseback a great deal, even women did), and she and her maid-companion both came here when the river was in floods and they jumped one after the other into the flow. The fisherman found her floating the next day by Rajghat. They called her, just to give her a name, Prabhavathi, and in the lane they still say, ‘By Prabhavathi’s stone,’ meaning a little rock by the ghats where Prabhavathi is believed to have come and sat contemplating the river, and when she disappeared a rock suddenly appeared, and that is why in the land of Benares where no stones grow, why this rock astonishingly emerges. True or untrue, the potters will also tell you that a few years after Bhim, the parrot, came to live there, so the elders said, another parrot was seen evening after evening sitting on the Prabhavathi stone. And of course Bhim was Prabhavathi, and her companion (who soon joined him) was born as Rupvati. The fact that Rupvati lives with such arrogance is simple: she was not so much devoted to God as to her queen. And as she jumped into the river, she still continued to feel the pride of her palace surroundings, bells and carpets and elephant-trumpetings, and the high presence of her companions of honour. And the Rajas of Vikramapur, who heard of all this, came royally to Benares, built a square platform around the neem, smeared the stone with ochre, and gave the tree a golden pole (with a Kalasa-mount) and a flag with their peacock insignia. Thus Prabhavathi is, as you see, still in her own kingdom.