The Silence of the Rocks

[Balder]

Here's a short story I wrote years ago, which I have just resurrected -- typing it up from the fading pencil scrawl in an old half-Rupee notebook from India.  I wrote it while living in Varanasi, after a brief, several-week trip to South India.

This is a picture of me from that trip (taken about a week after the visit to Hampi):

~*~

The face was like a hive of bees.  Someone had let the infection grow over it like a mask, and now it was shoved towards me:  this horrible child stumbling out of the crowd.  The mouth worked, infected hands reached out, but the child could not see clearly, if at all.  Another hand tugged my sleeve.

“Bruce!”  Kyeong-Mi had made it out of the bus before me and had somehow missed the surge of beggars.

There was a commotion in the street in the crowd ahead, a frantic movement and an angry buzzing sound.  Kyeong-Mi stood to the left, under a sign that said, Tourist Home.

The beehive boy had gotten lost in the rush of street kids pushing towards me.  Faceless, he was elbowed by the needy throng.  I retreated and joined Kyeong-Mi where she stood by the brightly painted gate of the tourist garden.  The children did not follow.

We took the only room left, a bare cell with a mat, a few sheets, and a screenless, iron-barred window looking onto a quiet side street.  Guests had drawn and painted on the walls: the peace sign, the yin-yang, the yoni.  We showered and then lay for a moment on the thin sheets, looking up at the fan whirling and rocking on the ceiling.  Kyeong-Mi’s hair was down now and she looked refreshed, but she said, “The mosquito is never sleeping here.”

The bathroom had been crowded with the insects, newly-born out of the buckets of water.  “Let’s go out,” I said, “before the sun goes down.”  “Chai first,” she said.

The hotel sported a courtyard with a few tables and some bamboo-mounted loudspeakers playing Tracy Chapman a bit too loudly.  Long-haired Westerners in sloppy T-shirts sat around writing post-cards, beers half-finished on the tables.  We walked out.  These were not our people.

But neither were the faces on the streets, the serious brows, the bright kumkum, the betel-stained teeth.  Old women squatted on blankets, selling watches, locks, stainless steel cups, hair pins, pyramids of kumkum powder.  Two girls in uniforms stood looking at a can of pencils.  Up the street the commotion continued, and the buzzing, a drone that oppressed the city like the sun on the blasted earth.  Crumbling, white-walled buildings glared and hummed with it, this insistent light and heat and sound, this fire on the brows.

Kyeong-Mi held my arm, as she used to do in Korea.  But this was not Korea.  This was a somber, stirring mass of bodies, all gathered here somehow amidst the boulders and the scrub brush and the filth on the streets.  Walking quickly now, we could see there were temples ahead, huge ancient structures that had somehow pinned these people here.  The buzzing became more insistent; it entered through the skin; it throbbed in the body.

Someone in the crowd ahead was leaping.  A woman with a stick was striking a drum, which buzzed, brzz-bzz-brzz-bzz-brzz, and a man moved as through thrown by the sound.  His hands were up over his head, and through his face a long knife had been thrust, though no blood flowed.  He danced about the crowd, turning on people, stalking.  But his eyes would not meet them, captured by some hidden light.

The drum continued to crack and buzz.  People were pressing and passing on all sides, not much disturbed by this frantic, bloodless dance, some not even noticing.  And yet it seemed the whole town was propelled by it, from underneath.

We skirted the skewered dancer and found ourselves on the road facing the mouth of the temple.  No motorized traffic passed this way.  People rushed and eddied under the pyramidal gate, and vendors sold their wares in the middle of the street.  A number of makeshift restaurants had been set up, rickety roadside affairs advertising Continental Food and South Indian Coffee. 

We sat at a table under a bright yellow tarp.  The evening was advancing, but the sun still bore down hard.  The coffee was mostly cream, sweet like jungle flowers.  The buzzing seemed distant now, retreating.  Banana leaves swayed, just visible behind rooftops and huge grey stones.

“Where are you from?”  The questioner was an older gentleman in thick-framed glasses, standing a polite few feet from the table.  I had not seen him approach.

A bit reluctantly, we introduced ourselves. We had done this countless times in the streets and alleyways of India, and it had almost invariably led to an offer of silk or drugs, or to the chance to meet a hundred-year-old holy man behind a temple somewhere.

But in Hampi we did not expect this.  Travelers had said the town was sleepy, little-visited, and extraordinarily beautiful.  And it was indeed striking, with its banana groves and its dominant, scattered boulders.  Perhaps in the morning we would set out to find the ruins that skirted the town.  I told the older gentleman this when he asked what we thought of the scenery.

He pulled up a chair.  “It is better, I think, if you don’t go there unaccompanied.  Unfortunately, there have been a few incidents.”

“Thank you, but we don’t need a guide,” I said, a little too quickly.

“No, sir,” he protested.  “I am not a guide.  My name is Mr. Ramanujan.  I own a bookstore near the temple.” He handed me a card.  “We have an excellent selection of travel and spiritual books, in English and European languages, and also in Japanese,” he said, looking at Kyeong-Mi.  “Please do come.”

Kyeong-Mi was watching me.

“What sort of incidents?” I asked.

“A few robberies only.  You must have been hearing stories of the dacoits,” he said, and then frowned at me.  I noticed the long hair on his ears.  “The farmers here lead simple lives, and tourism is just developing.  Sometimes the temptation is too great, if you understand me.  You people should be very careful here.”

Perhaps he felt he had said too much, for he stood up suddenly and pushed the chair back.  “If you are having the time, please pay me a visit.”  He made to leave and then hesitated, reaching into his shirt pocket.  He handed something to Kyeong-Mi and then went back to his table.

“It’s Sai Baba,” she said, “a photo of Sai Baba.”  She gazed at the face a long time.

I noticed Mr. Ramanujan had left the question open, whether the danger was really from the dacoits, or from the farmers themselves.

When the crowd in the market had thinned a bit and the dust motes hung in golden light, we circled the temple, past the orange and white striped walls, and followed a narrow lane out of town.  To the right the land sloped down to a river winding through huge stones.  A few boys bathed on the far shore, near broken pillars that cast long shadows, and swift birds feeding.

We passed a group of tourists in a grass hut on the roadside.  They spoke German loudly over plates of papaya, and their T-shirts showed the bulge of their fat money belts.

“Do we look like that?” I asked Kyeong-Mi.

“You do,” she laughed.

The road wound past old ruins in black stone that looked out over the valley, and then we veered left, away from the river and up into banana groves, thick with sweetness and shadows.  The evening was utterly still.  A creek muttered under a foot bridge.  We had passed no one for ten minutes now and the eyes, occupied by the dark under the banana leaves, began to look for movement.

Clouds of mosquitos arose.  Footsteps came up behind us, and we stopped.  A shirtless, dark man came up the road, carrying a scythe.  The metal was dull grey, but the handle looked new. 

“Namaste,” I said, stepping aside.  He never glanced at me.  His eyes were on Kyeong-Mi.

I took her by the arm and led her back to town.  In a small math a group of sannyasins had begun singing, and the sound of the tambourine shimmered up the lane.

That night, while I was bathing again, the power went out.  Kyeong-Mi brought me a flashlight so I could finish the task.  Back in the room, we lit a few candles, and soon they crackled with the insects they attracted.  The choice was either heat or insects, and we chose insects and left the shutters open.

Kyeong-Mi sang softly to herself in Korean, a song I knew about fingers like new snow and eyes like clear creek water.  The alienness of it here stirred anxiety in me.  I blew the candles out and lay down to sleep.

I did not lay long in the darkness, however, before I felt something crawling on my leg.  I brushed it off, but then Kyeong-Mi squealed.  I scrambled out of bed and felt around for the flashlight.  Kyeong-Mi was standing.

“Look at all the bugs!” she cried.

The bed was crawling with the creatures.  I brushed them off the sheets, but they kept running back, from all directions – brown junebugs, black beetles.  I opened the door and swept the whole host of them outside.

A few moments passed in the dark before we discovered them again, back on the bed and under the sheets.  I sat up. The flashlight revealed more coming, at least twenty scurrying towards our dirty mat.  A popular place, it seemed!  I swept them all out again, sealing the underside of the door with a towel and bolting the shutters over the window.

But the night was too hot. The room stifled us.  And the few undiscovered bugs, scuttling around in the dark, were now sealed in.

“This is impossible,” I said, not very pleasantly.  “Let’s try the roof.”

There were three benches up there, under the laundry hanging on clotheslines.  We pulled them together as a makeshift cot, to elevate us above the insects, and laid the mat across them.  It would not be comfortable.

The whole town was quiet now but for the barking of dogs.  We went to the edge of the roof and watched the wide expanse of the place, the beautiful stars, the jagged shapes of ancient buildings, the crooked hills, the huge broken bones of the earth.  Cows slept motionless in the shadows.

At last we reclined on the benches, Kyeong-Mi resting lightly on my arms.  I felt the stillness of the night like my own breath. The stars gave way to darkness.  I smelled incense, earth and filth, the sweet scent of this young woman’s hair.  We fell asleep watching the faultless moon rise over the temple. The transition to dreaming was seamless.

~*~

The civilization that must have flourished here!  It was astonishing.  Such graceful shapes in the rocks.  The prying sun lay heavily on them, but in their subtle lines they seemed to curve inwards, still hiding secret depths.  What use had the kingdom of Vijayanagar for so many temples, so many stone dancers?  Of what use were they now to these poor merchants and farmers?

The dead kingdom’s dreaming clung to the stony faces of the hills.  The useless pillars, unhoused, led our eyes upwards into the empty sky.  Kyeong-Mi and I walked among these shapes in silence, she a little ahead, her long black hair taking in the light. 

In the morning we had moved to a hotel near the river and after breakfast had followed a few Australian tourists down a trail by the riverside.  Beggars and coconut vendors lined the way.  After a time we had turned aside and had somehow come upon this secret hollow, these black buffalo and sun-blasted ruins, tucked in the stone arms of the hills.  Naked pillars stood alone in the high grasses.  Slow animals grazed.

Beyond the milling buffalo was a more substantial structure, cut from a smoother stone, inviting.  Kyeong-Mi stepped in first, running her hand along the carved blocks, her eyes following the dancers up the arches.  There were cool, empty rooms inside, around an empty courtyard.  And where a pale pillar met the ceiling, an enormous beehive hung, in constant motion.  Below it was a smooth stone figure, itself in motion, askew on its base.  The head and the limbs were broken.

Tinkling caught our attention.  Goats stepped through a doorway at the other end of the courtyard, and a dark young girl in green followed them in.  At first she did not see us.  She shouted and threw stones to keep the animals moving.  Small bells on her ankles rang.

I greeted the girl and she looked at me sharply.  Such an intense little brow!  She scowled and kept the goats moving.  It took a moment to get them herded through the archway.  The girl clearly did not trust us, casting glances in our direction as she threw stones at her flock until they had all passed through.

An odd silence fell on the place.  The bees writhed and hummed under the fierce sun, and the faceless dancer leaned into the stone.

After this, something changed.  The unease that had limned our senses since we had first arrived finally bloomed like a dark flower, and irritation set in.  Kyeong-Mi and I grew testy with each other, arguing without purpose.  I still do not know why our moods turned.  Perhaps it was just the heat.  Perhaps it was the whole feeling of distrust in this place.  At the new hotel there were signs in English on every door telling us not to go out into the rocks alone, and to register with the police for our safety.

But this is said in hindsight.  At the time I did not feel much danger, beyond a mild uneasiness when the silence grew too heavy and I felt suddenly alone, distant not only from those around me but from all that I had known.  Then my eyes would unconsciously dart up the hills, or into the shadows of the banana groves, straining for the slightest hint of movement in the darkness.

Back at the hotel, Kyeong-Mi said she only wanted to write postcards and would I please leave her alone.  I went across the street to a little restaurant and had coffee served by a little boy who danced like MC Hammer.  He would not tell me where he had picked it up; he said he had no parents and no real home.  Two of his friends watched us through a hole in the wall.  I invited them in and ordered them a plate of samosas.  These boys, too, said they had lost their parents.

“Then how do you eat?” I asked them.

“Our uncle help us,” Manjappa said.  His brother just smiled.

We spoke for a time in very broken English.  I still had not picked up any Kannada.

“You swimming?” Manjappa asked.

“I want to,” I said.  “In the river?”

“No,” he said.  He made a gesture like a whirlpool.  Signs painted on the rocks had warned of that danger.

“Where do you swim?”

He said something in Kannada and then pointed away from the river.  “There,” he said.  “Good place.”

I asked him something inconsequential, but he brought me back to the subject.  “Tomorrow swimming?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I go,” he insisted.  “Tomorrow we swim?”

“You really want to take me swimming?”

“Yes,” he said seriously, without the hint of a smile. 

The boys grabbed the last of the samosas and ran off.  After a while I went up to the room to call Kyeong-Mi down for dinner, but she did not want to eat.  I stood for a while alone on the balcony, watching the people and the cows pass on the streets below, then went back to my table and ordered a thali plate.  In the morning at breakfast we had seen an old couple in the corner reading a Dutch newspaper.  Kyeong-Mi had remarked to me, perhaps with a touch of apprehension, that she had noticed how rarely they exchanged glances or spoke.  Now I saw they were still there, still turning through the pages, glum, icy with each other and curt with the staff.  The heavyset man had a large, expensive-looking camera he carried with him, and a fat money pouch from which he pulled Rupees to pay the staff.  I wondered what they wanted here; what they were looking for.  At another table sat a wasted-looking American man, beating his fingers to the reggae music on the radio.  He wore his shirt open over rudraksh beads and a necklace of seashells and teeth.  An old hand.

Suddenly the power went out.  The fans slowly stopped whirring and the music, cut short, broke onto the quiet sounds of the village, the shouting of children, the animal noises.  Candles were lit in the shop fronts and the street became welcoming.

A commotion rose at the gate.  An Indian man was trying to enter the restaurant.  He was shouting and waving his hands, but the owner barred his way.  The two cooks came from the back, one with a knife, and they grabbed his shirt roughly and threw him out.  He stumbled away unsteadily, obviously drunk.

When the moon had risen low over the temple again, I entered our dark room quietly. Kyeong-Mi was sleeping.  I lay down beside her, my heart strangely quickening, alone.

~*~

“Let’s go,” I said to Manjappa the next morning.  He and his brother had been waiting for me outside the hotel gate.  “But first take me to a good sweet shop.”

The tension between me and Kyeong-Mi had eased a little, but she still wanted to keep to herself.  I left my passport and most of my money in her safekeeping.

Now, with the little brothers, I bought a bag of laddoos at a roadside shop and then followed them up the lane out of town.  The sky seemed enormous that morning, and faultlessly blue.  The valley stood redeemed in all that clarity: the women with their heavy baskets; the wiry men, shirtless, some carrying scythes; the travelers, snapping pictures, picking their way gingerly over rocks by the riverside and laughing out loud.

“We go this way,” Manjappa said, turning off the road and then pointing up a slope of scattered boulders.  “Where your father now?”

“In America,” I said.  “I have not seen him for a long time.”

“That is very bad,” Manjappa frowned.  “Not far now.”

“Not far” meant ten more minutes of walking, first up the rough slope and then through greener, cultivated land, wet, full of long grasses waving, until we topped a rise and saw below us two big pools of water among the rocks.  Manjappa’s younger brother whooped and ran down the hill.

“He’s just a boy,” Manjappa said.

“And how old are you?”

“Eleven.”

The water was surprisingly cool, partly in the shadow of the big stones, most likely nourished by a hidden spring.  No ruins were visible here, and nothing of the village – just the ancient landscape, green and gold and grey, hazy in the mid-morning heat.  I swam with the boys, and wrestled, and reclined on the shore in the shade.

With my belongings back at the hotel, in Kyeong-Mi’s hands, I felt unburdened, at ease.  It was good to have come alone.  I dove in again and let the bright water bear me up.  I floated away from the brothers out to the quiet center of the lake, lungs full and chest wide open, abandoned to time under the cloudless sky.

When I was getting ready to leave, Manjappa told me to wait a moment, and he and his brother sprinted off over the hill.  They came back carrying fresh coconuts, opened on the top.  The water was sweet and cool on the tongue, and my eyes felt vibrant, awake.  I had absolutely nothing to say.

We made our way back quietly.  A crow on a flat stone sat, head cocked, and watched us pass.  The deep black of those feathers, here in all this green, seemed portentous – as if the hidden darkness in the statues and broken stones had risen and come calling.  How alive it looked!  The sky spun round that bright black head. 

Topping the rise from which the cultivated land was visible, Manjappa stopped suddenly and looked agitated. 

“This way, this way,” he said, pulling me to the left.

But it was too late.  I could see the arm sprawled in the grass.  A white arm, too white for this hard sun.

I ran forward, off the trail and down into the irrigated grasses of the field.  The man was in his fifties and overweight, his nose slightly sunburnt, his eyes unfocused.  As I knelt down beside him, I realized I had seen him before: the Dutchman from the restaurant.  His left hand was over his heart.  It was red and vibrant, like a trampled jungle flower; blood leapt in spurts through his fingers.

“The doctor!” I shouted.  “The doctor!  And the police.  Go!”

The boys did not hesitate, sprinting over the rise without a sound.

The man had heard my voice and he rolled his head in my direction.  “My camera,” he said.  “My money.”  His eyes would not focus.  “My camera...”

Little flowers bloomed between his fingers.  Large black ants marched past his head.  I took off my shirt and placed it over his wound.

“What have you done?” I asked.  The words came out of nowhere, and I did not know exactly whom they were for, or what they meant. 

I held my shirt to his chest firmly, trying to stem the flow, but already I thought it was too late.  His eyes had given up.  I noticed the bulky rings on his fingers and the looseness of his jowls.  His skin was pale and fragile in this sun, and his breath was labored and liquid sounding. 

“My cam...” he began, but could not get the words out this time.  So much effort to breathe, and here he was, calling out for his things with what might be his final breaths.  The mindless pumping of his blood under my hand, the mechanical repetition of his words, pierced me with an icy cold.  Suddenly I was angry with him.

“Your wife,” I said firmly, trying to corral his scattering consciousness.  “Where is your wife?”

He did not answer.  I looked around.  The fields here were empty now, the grasses grown still.  In the quiet I could hear the dull, curved blade plunge into the heavy chest; I could hear the sandaled feet slipping away.  I was sure it had been done in an instant.  I saw how this heavy body must have stumbled, sprawling on the earth, pointlessly shouting, pouring a whole life into these last few words.

Suddenly the Dutchman moaned and squeezed his eyes shut.  There was blood on his tongue.  I wondered if the boys would come back for us; if I would be able to find my way back alone.  Carefully I pulled the man’s right arm toward me and took his hand.  He gripped me fiercely for a moment and his big rings dug into my fingers.  Strangely, I welcomed the pain.  I squeezed him back with both hands and kept my eyes fixed on his.  The sun passed behind a cloud and the light softened.  I thought of Kyeong-Mi back at the hotel, and longed for the warmth of her skin, the sweet earthy smell of her hair.

Behind us the crow took flight with a full-bodied beating of wings that released us from the silence of that field.  The man arched and relaxed, and his head rolled to the side.  The doctor would come, I was sure now, but it would be too late.  The long grasses swayed around the warmth of two hands.