down the freezing lino-covered stairs, to the front door. She opened it in time to see the milkman climbing the front steps with cheery face beaming out at her from beneath his peaked cap.
‘Hello, my little early bird,’ he whispered, as with practised silence, he set down the various groups of milk bottles in their proper places. ‘Looking for worms?’
She grinned back, remembered how it was he who taught her the saying, ‘it’s the early bird that catches the worm’.
Then, suddenly, his face became grave, and he bent forward confidentially. ‘There was news on the wireless this morning that’ll interest you,’ he murmured.
‘Oh?’ Marvinder was puzzled.
‘Mahatma Gandhi.’ The milkman said the name with reverence. ‘He’s been shot.’
It was Friday, 30th January 1948.
So, Marvinder in England heard the news before the clerk in India. The clerk didn’t hear till almost evening. He had been accounting all day, sitting in front of large dusty ledger books, with his specs balanced on his nose, pencil in hand, roaming up and down columns of figures, calculating, adding and subtracting and dividing, his brain revolving and clicking like the beads on an abacus.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded of the gangly youth who lingered somewhat insolently in the doorway.
The clerk knew he was something of a laughingstock with his colleagues, who liked to tease him for being such a faithful disciple of the Mahatma – especially as he came to work wearing a coarse khadi dhoti, instead of refined white cotton trousers and shirts or even western-style suits. What’s more, he had insisted on removing the top of his desk from its frame, placing it on the floor and working cross-legged. ‘We Indians should do things the Indian way, not ape the Britishers,’ he had declared with an air of moral superiority. However, it irked him no end, to think that he was being smirked at behind his back, by the cocky young messengers who hung about the office.
‘You haven’t heard the news, then?’ asked the youth with mock concern.
‘What news?’ The clerk frowned. He straightened his back from his cross-legged position, and adjusted his spectacles which had slipped down his nose. As he did so, he was aware of the sound of women wailing in the background and agitated voices, rising and falling in repeating sequences of distress. Anxiously, he gathered up his dhoti and got to his feet.
‘It’s your beloved leader; the Father of the People . . . Bapu . . .’ The youth drawled out the words slowly and sarcastically, relishing the puzzled anxiety he could see beginning to furrow the clerk’s face.
‘Gandhiji? Gandhiji?’
‘He’s been shot!’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Oh yes.’ The youth tittered, then fled.
Slipping . . . slipping . . . the ground was slipping away from beneath his feet. The clerk clutched his heart and then his head. The whole world became dark and began to spin around him as if out of control . . . it was a past betrayed . . . a future lost . . . what would happen . . . what would become of them? All that slaughter . . . destruction . . . and a terrible sickness of the soul . . . who could heal the wounds? Who could save them now? What revenge would God take for the death of a saint? Slipping . . . slipping . . . there was nothing solid for his feet to stand on.
The clerk crumpled to the ground, his arms clutched around his head as if waiting to be sucked away into oblivion.
In his distraught mind, he wandered through beautiful gardens of ornamental lakes and perfumed fountains; down shaded avenues of cypresses; into fruit groves and walled gardens, where flowering bushes were bursting with colour and profusion. They were gardens of order and peace created out of a jungle of danger and chaos. Yet a voice whispered in his brain. Beware! Beware the beast that lurks; the enemy disguised as a friend; the serpent coiled among the boughs of the tree in the garden of Eden, waiting for Eve; beware the Judas seeking out Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane to embrace him with the kiss of betrayal; Ravana, king of the demons disguised as a holy man; the devil who has gained access into the inner sanctuary.
But it was too late for warnings. In a garden in Delhi, an assassin lurked among the shrubberies of Birla House. A man, pretending to be a disciple, waited for Gandhi.
The Mahatma was still frail and impossibly thin after his long fast. Flanked by his faithful women followers, on whose shoulders he rested a hand for support, he walked trustingly to a prayer meeting. The assassin stepped forward. So close. As close as friends. He faced him, looked him in the eye, then shot him three times.
‘Hiya Ram, Ram, Ram!’ were the last words on the Mahatma’s dying breath.
‘The light has gone out of our world,’ wept the Prime Minister.
Later that day the horse was seen again, galloping in a frenzy down the long white road. Some said a strange rider crouched on its back; some demented creature with wild hair flying – small as a child or a hunchback.
But that night, the horse came again to the palace. Bublu heard its footfall on the terrace. Bublu moved with the silence of a hunter. This time, he would catch it. He heard its breath and saw its white shape gleaming in the darkness. It looked up. The horse saw him with glittering eye. It didn’t run away. Bublu held out a hand of friendship. ‘Come to me, my beauty! Don’t run away. Come to me, O wondrous one!’
As he spoke, he moved closer and closer. Now he could feel its warm breath as he held his hand up to its nostrils. He stroked its nose and murmured lovingly to it. ‘Let’s be friends. Stay with me. I’ll feed you and groom you and ride you well. Stay, my beauty.’
The horse stood stock-still. Then Bublu realised that, sheltering beneath the horse’s belly, protected between its four legs, crouched a creature with long wild hair. In the darkness, he couldn’t make out the face, but its eyes, like the eyes of a snake, stared at him, glittering and hypnotic.
Bublu cried out loud with shock, but still the horse didn’t move.
What had come to them? What was this creature? Was it a demon? Was the horse a bringer of bad luck? Bublu remembered the words of the old sadhu.
He dared not move either towards the horse or back to his place by the fire. Instead, wrapping his sheet around him, Bublu sank down on his haunches, and stayed like that for the rest of the night, with his head sunk on to his arms.
Jaspal leaned over the old metal bridge and looked down onto the railway tracks below. The shining metal slithered away like parallel serpents, till they reached a point in the distance where they merged as if one – but he knew that this was only an optical illusion.
The sight of the tracks always gave him an intense feeling of excitement. Sometimes, when the sun was shining in a particular way, he could block from his view the grubby backs of those London houses and flats, with their grimy windows and straggles of grey washing hung out to dry. He could fix his eye on the patch of blue sky between the tenements, and imagine he was back in India. For a while, he could try and forget the
