‘Better hold your breath just in case.’
‘They are still far. They will not hear us,’ Jolly Boy said.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. They’ve got super hearing.’
The boy looked across to the two rusting pylons kneeling together as if in prayer on the valley floor. No cables trailed from them. The bleached bones of livestock animals were scattered round their feet, maybe offered as sacrifices by superstitious farmers or having wandered to their shadows for shade and fallen there, victims of famine or some native blight. The boy played along. He took a deep breath and held it. We lifted our feet and crept past the pylons. When we’d put them behind us we let out our breaths to show how close our shave had been.
‘We are safe,’ Jolly Boy declared. ‘They will not eat us.’
He quickened his pace to make sure. I followed him. We stalked Bibhuti and his Sikh photographer through the scrub towards the tree-flocked hills that rose above the valley, using his bobbing pink turban as a landmark so we wouldn’t get left behind.
Bibhuti wanted to begin our preparations straight away, and later he’d take me to his home and have me meet his wife, but first he had an assignment to complete. We’d joined up with the photographer on the way to the wasteland. He’d appeared on his motorbike when we stopped at the lights and then he flanked us through the streets as they grew wider and older where the suburbs frayed to vine and shadow and the earth took over. I followed Jolly Boy’s lead and waved to the big Sikh on his red Hero Honda, gliding alongside us like a summer-drunk swallow, his beard catching a frosting from the blossoms that sailed down from the trees that fringed the road.
We’d stopped off at a minimart along the way and Bibhuti had bought an armful of disposable razors and cans of shaving foam and deodorant, little soaps sealed in plastic. He made me pay but didn’t tell me what they were for. I was too hot to ask and feared the answer in case some kind of weird initiation was on the cards. Perhaps he planned to shave and fragrance me, a sterilisation rite before the gutting could begin.
The TV on the counter played breaking news footage of a plane crash in Mangalore. It sounded like a mystical place but the falling to its earth of a planeload of doomed humans sucked all its romance dry. A green hillside churned up and strewn with charred metal, a slice of tail stuck in the mud like a coin.
I pictured the lunatic Frenchman taking a bite out of it, gorging himself with the survivors staggering around him, shaking on some salt and pepper while the fires spat rivets and milk teeth.
We observed a moment of grim silence and then we left clutching our purchases close to our chests, as if they were the charms that would see us through a national mourning.
The hills swept up in front of us and we came to rest where the tarmac ran out, at the edge of a tract of creeping villas that looked like they’d been dredged from the bottom of a swamp. An unfinished storm drain dripped abandoned diesel onto the weeds below. I realised if they were going to steal my money and slit my throat this would be the perfect place to do it. They could leave me here to quietly spoil and the world wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
I thought I might have made the biggest mistake of my life.
‘Is it that colour for a special reason?’ I asked the Sikh photographer, pointing to his turban. ‘I used to work with a Sikh. He always wore a black one. I always wondered whether the different colours had different points, like in snooker. Or like the belts in karate, you start off with a white one and work your way up.’
I wasn’t trying to be funny, I really wanted to know. I’d decided that while I was in India I’d be more curious and forthright. Better late than never.
‘No, it is whatever colour we prefer,’ he smiled. ‘I am always choosing this.’
‘Right. I like it, it’s nice and bright.’
‘Thank you.’
The photographer’s name was Jagatdeep but Bibhuti called him the Turbanator. He was happy from the moment of our introduction for me to call him that too. He hitched his camera bag over his shoulder and Bibhuti got the toiletries out of the boot. I took my bag of money and off we marched towards the valley, the sun beating down from between high dirty clouds.
6
Jolly Boy was my guide on the climb up the hill. He found a stick and cleared the path of prickles and hypothetical snakes. He went more slowly than he wanted to, looking over his shoulder for me falling behind. His father and the Turbanator pushed on ahead, entrusting our lives to whatever kind spirit watched over us from the canopy. The thorns cut into my neck and I went slapstick, stumbling over myself. I dug in and pushed on. I had to prove to everyone that I was strong enough to keep my promises.
We must have climbed for half an hour. My legs started to shake. The trees hid the sky and I panicked that I’d never see a car again. Jolly Boy talked me through my fear with fresh robot noises and told me about the time he saw a tiger, when his Baba took him to a place where they roamed around uncaged. He told me how he reached out through the window of their four-wheel drive and stroked the tiger’s tail.
‘It was very soft,’ he said. ‘He let me hold it for a long time.’
I knew it was a lie but it was such a sweet one that I took it to heart. I chewed on it like it was waterbearing. Its succulence got me to the top of the hill and I fell to the ground and heaved. I shuffled over to a tree and sat up feeling the bark against my back. Jolly Boy threw some water over me. I drained the rest of the bottle. I forgot how precious water was in a hot place.
I told Bibhuti I’d be alright. I just had to get used to the conditions.
He agreed that there were adjustments to be made. He stood over me, not a hair out of place, his breathing slow and sure. For him, weather and gradient were things that could be overcome simply by thinking yourself above them.
That’s when we heard the ping-pong.
It was coming from somewhere round the bend in the dirt path. Thock-thock. Thock-thock. That beautiful funny sound of a plastic ball on a paddle. We all stopped to listen. We laughed at each other. The sound sailed to us through the trees and we followed it.
Bibhuti led us past the orange flags hanging from their bamboo masts and down the track where it turned towards the edge of the hillside. There was the monastery with its little temple attached, a crumbling wedding cake perched over a sheer drop into the wasteland below. Peeling under the sun and cracked where the pious gripes of the monks built up behind its walls until they found release in official prayer. That’s what I imagined anyway, like pricking a needle hole in a dam. That’s what I thought a prayer was then.
There was a courtyard beyond the main gate and the sound was coming from behind the pillars. Louder now and unmistakable. I could hear the shuffling feet of the players as they moved round the table, the soles of their shoes scuffing the flagstones.
I wanted to play, we all did. I wanted it so intensely that I forgot all about heat and hunger and the mechanics of dying.
A white man with shoulder-length hair was waiting at the gate to greet us. He looked young and unsuited to the terrain or to holy vocation. He introduced himself as Thomas, said he was the steward of the monastery. He spoke in a soft German accent. I felt cheated out of my station as the only white man in the country and I let the solemn look I’d been holding go slack.