An extract from 'Arctic Summer' by Damon Galgut

ARCTIC SUMMER

ARCTIC SUMMER DAMON

GALGUT

“Orgies are so important, and they are things one knows nothing about�

E.M. Forster to P.N. Furbank, 1953

c h a p t e r

t h r e e

INDIA

a

the much finer things he had seen on his journey, the caves were a little disappointing. The approach was almost more dramatic, for you were carried towards the Barabar Hills on the heaving back of the elephant across a parched plain, while the shapes of the giant rocks emerged from the haze. The first was the most astonishing: what appeared to be a huge, stony thumb pointing straight up at the sky. Only as you drew closer and saw it from the side did it slowly reshape itself as a mountain with an extended spine, and the single perched boulder on top became a fanlike arrangement of numerous similar boulders.

“That is Kawa Dol,” Imdad Iman said, smiling.

“What does it mean?”

“It is the place where the crow…” He made a rocking motion with his hand.

“Swing, you mean? The crow’s swing?” fter

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“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “Exactly.” But the rock, however precariously balanced, did not look like a swing, and what seemed understood could possibly be understood differently. Whatever its meaning, the name stayed almost elementally with Morgan, along with his first image of the stone tower. Kawa Dol: the sound of it was ominous and old, evoking a darkness out of the earth.

It was not their destination, however. They toiled slowly past its base and on towards a second scattering of hills. Made of the same globular grey stones, piled atop each other in unlikely formations, they evoked other, living forms. While he appeared to listen to Imdad Iman, who wrote poetry in Urdu and felt warmly about many things English, from poetry to playing polo, Morgan’s mind was elsewhere.

They were on an outing, which Masood had told him would be a wonderful experience. But he had said it without enthusiasm, and Morgan himself did not especially want to be here. This whole day had been planned, he knew, as a salve and consolation, because last night he had said goodbye to his friend for the final time on this journey.

Although he was only halfway through his Indian sojourn, the rest of his wanderings would be completed without seeing Masood, and that knowledge pressed on him like a blue and suffocating weight.

When they drew abreast the second upthrusting of hills, the worn grey textures of their surface, unbroken except for greeny clumps of vegetation, distracted him from his melancholy. The place was so sudden, so violently improbable in the middle of the steaming flat plain, that it gave off an odd intensity. In a grove of trees at their foot were the tents of their advance party, with a line of smoke going up. But breakfast, which was supposed to be ready, wasn’t; and they were advised that it might be best to see the caves first.

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Nawab Imdad Iman was Masood’s friend, and had been told to look after Morgan’s every need. He was displeased at the tardy preparations and said that he would stay behind to oversee the food, so his two nephews – who were loutish and unlovely – accompanied Morgan up the nearest hill. They walked along a path under trees. Almost immediately they came upon a shrine, a hollowed-out alcove in the rock with a graven idol in the centre of it, garlanded with dying flowers, but if there was a holy man in attendance there was no sign of him. The path began to climb, lifting into light and heat. The trees thinned out, bird calls giving way to a buzzing of insects. None of them spoke, and the only sound between them was a panting of breath.

It wasn’t a bad ascent. After only a few minutes they emerged onto a shoulder of the hill and the nephews steered him towards a long, rounded rock with a double-ridge on top, made of granite, looking something like a whale emerging from the deeps. The first cave was simply there, a rectangular doorway cut into the side. It was late in the morning already, and the night’s coolness had long since departed the few remaining shadows.

But the inside of the cave, at least, provided some relief.

A single domed chamber, perhaps thirty feet long. The walls were polished and smooth. There was nothing whatever inside it; nothing to see, nothing to admire. But immediately the nephews were wanting something from him, plucking at his sleeve insistently, saying a word over and over. He didn’t understand; he said, “Yes, yes,” impatiently, only to shut them up. He could tell already that these caves were going to let him down. Then the little party was outside again, in the brightness, and they were taking him up a flight of stairs in the side of the rock, to two more caves on the other side.

They led him to the second entrance first. This was the only 74

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cave with anything like an ornate doorway, a stupa-shaped arch with elephants carved in procession along it, and a sprinkling of what he took to be Pali. But compared with some of the statues and temples he remembered, what was on offer here seemed curiously unfinished.

Through a square-cut passage you went into an inner chamber with a vaulted roof, which took you, by way of another short passage, into yet another dome-shaped room within. But the surface was only halfcarved and its roughness was off-putting.

As he stumbled back towards the third cave entrance, the middle one of the three, he struggled to remember what it was that Imdad Iman had said about them, as they rolled atop the elephant. Buddhist caves, two hundred and fifty BC‌? It was the Emperor Ashoka who had ordered them to be made, he felt almost sure about that. But there was something else, something to do with the shape of the caves, that escaped him. Was it about meditation? He hadn’t been paying close attention, his mind had been preoccupied, and now their purpose remained a mystery – as it seemed so much in this country was destined to, at least for him.

This cave was by far the most impressive. Again there was the vaulted first chamber, but in this one the rock had been worked to a planed and polished surface, so highly refined that it might have been done with a modern machine. And again there was a doorway leading to an inner room, high and conical, shaped like a beehive.

The darkness here was total, till one of the boys lit a candle. Then another flame seemed to well up from inside the granite itself, and the rock revealed its grain in a swirling of red and grey. The walls had been polished to the consistency of glass and the hard smoothness, under his trailing fingertips, was pleasing and beautiful.

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The two unpleasant nephews, who had very little English, were still repeating their word over and over, which he still couldn’t make out.

But the word – indeed, every word that was spoken in here – set off an overlapping mirror of itself, which hissed and rustled all around.

Then at last he understood. The word was “echo”, and that was why the cave walls had been so highly polished: to help the echo along.

The dome-shaped room was meant for chanting, and the chanting was meant to reverberate. But the effect, like the caves themselves, was less than remarkable, returning every sound in the form of an indistinct surf-like roaring.

Then one of the nephews said, “Breakfast”, and blew out his candle, and the expedition was apparently over.

They descended the hill again in silence, leaving the rocks and the darkness behind. But the caves were not what Morgan had supposed.

They were not Buddhist, and the language inscribed around that third entrance wasn’t Pali, though it was equally old and equally dead. The caves had been inhabited by a different sect, people who followed an ascetic path more extreme than most. Indeed, they had been avoided by those who followed gentler faiths, for their custom of abandoning their old and their sick, out in the open, to die. What exactly they believed, and their way of believing, was lost now. But some of their presence, perhaps, had remained behind, a kind of ghost, or another reflection in the stone, to brush against the visitor whose skin was receptive to it.

Breakfast was still not ready. The Nawab sighed and tugged at his beard in rumination and spoke fiercely to his nephews. Then, more kindly, he said to Morgan, “You go and see the other caves. After, we eat.”

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More caves! There had been nothing sufficiently inspiring in the ones he’d already seen to make him excited. But he plodded behind the nephews, who were sulking and hitting at weeds by the roadside with sticks, for a mile or two along the bottom of the hills. The sun was fierce by now, and the temperature seemed to match an emptiness he felt inside.

Nor did the other caves help. There were three of them, also carved out of boulders, and harder to find. They were similar to the ones he’d already seen, all variations on the same theme, with polished walls and geometric outlines, though none of them had the dark inner chamber where no light could reach. The last required a climb, up stairs cut into the stone. But when he got there, perspiring and weak in the knees, because he was really very hungry by now, he couldn’t summon up the necessary enthusiasm. The inside of one rock was much the same as another and the echoes were all alike too.

By the time they made their way back to the encampment, breakfast was still not ready. The Nawab looked wretched. One of the nephews said angrily to Morgan, “You come.” There was one last cave, apparently, part of the first group, which they had somehow overlooked. With his hunger very insistent now, and the start of a headache, he returned to where he’d begun.

The cave was off to the side, past a sullen pond of green water, over some slippery rocks. It really wasn’t worth the effort; it was much rougher than the others, hardly more than a hole crudely hewn out of the hillside. But he lingered in it for a while, halfcrouched over under the low roof, to keep out of the sun. He became fascinated by a wasp that was clinging to the wall, trailing its yellow back legs behind it and, by the time he came to himself 77

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again, he realised that the nephew had departed, leaving him alone.

Wandering slowly back to the path, he decided to return to the middle cave in the first group, the one that had impressed him the most. It would be good to have a few minutes unaccompanied, sequestered in the rock. Looking out from the first arched room through the entranceway, he had the sense of the sunlit world beyond as a remote dream, which he was looking at through a window. Then he retreated deeper, into the second chamber. Instantly, he felt sunken profoundly into the world, or into himself. He spoke his own name aloud; the cave repeated it endlessly. He said Masood’s name too, and then the word “love” – all of it rumbled back at him.

For the first time today, he allowed himself to experience his feelings. He had spent the last two and a half weeks with Masood in Bankipore, which was a small, ugly town on the outskirts of Patna.

Masood had his legal practice there and Morgan felt a little like an intruder. But it was a benign intrusion, and they had managed to have a companionable, pleasant time together. The knowledge of his coming departure, however, had made him heavy for the past week already, and the previous day in particular had been long and slow and sad, culminating in their peculiar farewell in the middle of the night.

Morgan was making an early start in the morning, and had told Masood not to wake up. Although he’d said it firmly, he had wanted his friend to overrule him; he had wanted him to insist on waking and seeing him off on his journey. But Masood had yawned and agreed that he was very tired and that there was no point in getting up early. It was a sensible solution. So they had said goodbye just before going to sleep, in a stiff, incomplete way, both feeling shy, and then retreated. But almost immediately after, as he’d started to undress, 78

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Morgan had felt himself speared on the point of sharp emotion. He had gone back through to Masood’s room and sat on the edge of his bed and taken hold, very tightly, of his hand. Cold anguish made certain details stand out, the white hanging shroud of the mosquito net, the shadows in its folds. Even if he’d been able to speak, he could not have said what he wanted. But the yearning had made him lean towards Masood, trying to kiss him. In the fizzing white burn of the lamp-light, his friend’s face had been at first astonished, and then shocked. His hand had come up sharply, to push Morgan away, and that little movement had felt enormous, a force that could move a boulder. Morgan had accepted the refusal, because he’d known in advance it would come, and sat hunched miserably over his kernel of loneliness. By then Masood was merely irritated. He had rubbed Morgan’s shoulder and patted him on the back, in a way that was both reassuring and dismissive. Neither of them spoke, but both of them understood. He did not feel as Morgan did; that was all. There was nothing else to say.

So in the end one had to make the journey back to one’s own bed more alone even than before, the step down between the two rooms like the threshold between two worlds.

In the darkness afterwards, he experienced again what he’d just done with a fresh wave of shame. Aie-aie-aie! It was terrible, terrible – to have wanted so badly, to have been pushed so firmly away. The night and the land seemed to spread away around him, emphasising his smallness. He had cut himself open and showed the innermost part; it had been rash and unconsidered and regrettable. Now he had to close himself up again, to seal the carapace, and he began to do what was necessary. It was part of a willed cheerfulness he had 79

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learned, back in his childhood already, as protection against disappointment. The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason.

Understanding made sadness easier to bear.

So the thoughts that he followed, one by one, were like stairs ascending out of his misery, each of them valid and genuine, leading on from the one before. They went something like this: Masood cares for me more than for any other man, I have known that for a long time. That is comforting.

And much that has passed between us on this visit has made me very happy. That is good. To have a little, even a very little, can be enough to go on with; indeed, it’s all I have. Better to hold to that than to yearn continually for what isn’t possible.

In the end, you had to return to your own life – which he did now with an effort, by swimming out, blinking and half-blind, into the vertical light, to let the normal day reclaim him. It was like emerging from the tomb. He hurried back down the hill faster than he needed to, as if he were being pursued, to the tents and the smouldering fire and the elephant, ponderously browsing.

Where by now breakfast was finally ready: after all the delay, a paltry smear of omelette with a cold chapatti and a mug of tea. But it was enough to restore his spirits and, as he sat in the shade chatting to Imdad Iman, he felt again the promise reviving in the vast landscape, with its blond, bleached colours, its scrubby bushes and old, tormented rocks. He knew already that this parting would eventually become a painful detail in a much larger event, one which was still unfolding before him.

Over the past three months, India had already violently rearranged his life, but it wasn’t done with him yet; not by a long way. *

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