The Last Nomads

Chapter 1


The river was tense when she arrived. Deep green, fat and muddy from everything it had swallowed the night before. She stood on the riverbank as the mist rose and the sun’s rays parted overnight clouds to anoint a new day. The Hooghly was littered with corpses. Laundry and trash passed by while sages and devotees purified themselves by the ghat. Bathers washed away grime and dust and chanting worshippers shed their sins. Vendors sold ice cream and streetfood along the river. Nila’s family had arrived at Babu ghat by the Strand, Calcutta's main cremation ghat where neither curiosity nor cameras were welcome. This was a place for ceremonies of birth and death.
Nila bought garlands strung with red oleanders from a flower vendor who sat outside the eroding colonnade. She saw from the top of the steps, fishermen sewing large nets, their dark backs turned away from the sun. She lifted her skirt and walked barefoot towards the embankment, down the steps leading to the river. Just above the steps stood a large tree with outspread limbs, casting a huge shadow. A man sat at a distance, vigorously rubbing mud all over his body, believing, as most of the people living near the banks of the Hooghly believed, that bathing after scrubbing mud serves a therapeutic purpose. That the river had an undercurrent, which reacted well with the body and kept it fit, free from infection and disease.
On the floors of the stone room beside the tree, the moisture collected quickly. Lanky boys in torn undershirts brought slabs of mud for the priests to scroll Sanskrit symbols with their lean fingers. Her grandfather sat on a wooden bench and stared at the ceiling, which had been painted white once, but now it was grey and the paint was cracked and peeling. The crumbling wall overlooked the river, the gaps between the stones allowed light and sprays of water to enter the room. There were cobwebs in the corner of the room, too, but her grandfather did not see these things because he was tired and happy and devastated, all at the same time.
Nila was watching him when she heard her family call her, “Nilanjana! Stop daydreaming. Come here for your grandmother’s rituals!” They sat in one corner of the large room where she witnessed other families going through motions of similar ceremonies. Barbers were shaving sons and grandsons of the dead. Shreds of raven hair lay strewn across the floor. Bald men and shiny scalped boys poured jars of river water over their foreheads. Immersed themselves in the river. She watched the other families bickering over mantras and offerings.
It was her family’s turn to release Didan’s ashes into the river. Nila’s uncle hailed a small tugboat and the fisherman helped board both her and her mother, Bella. Her uncle jumped on the boat last while her mother held the clay urn tightly. Nila looked up at the great blue sky. It was a cloudless morning and as they faced the waves of air in the boat, the green river turned gin clear. The waters were translucent and reflected birds passing above. The fisherman stopped the boat once they reached the middle of the river. He told Nila’s mother to release the urn.
“I can’t do this.”
“Ma, let her go,” she said impatiently.
Her mother closed her eyes for several minutes, almost as if she was meditating. She inhaled deeply and released a sigh. “Before Didan lost her speech, she had one final request.”
“What was that?”
“She asked that you be responsible for her ashes. She said you would know what to do.”
“Me?”
“I was surprised too. I always thought she wanted to be here, with the river. But she said you would know what to do. Do you?”
She nodded. “I have no idea.”
“I thought so. That’s why I was ready to release her here, but I can’t.”
Bella kissed the urn and handed it to her daughter. “Honour her last wish. I trust you.”

The day Nila discovered the news of her grandmother’s passing, she had returned to an empty house. The others were at the cremation ceremony, where she should have been but instead stood still in the doorway. A key in one hand and red oleanders in the other, trembling. She put her backpack down and looked around. The doors and windows were closed. The front verandah was bare. The house exuded a sad silence that Nila caught in her throat. The patchwork slip cover stitched by Didan’s hands. The room for Bella that gathered cobwebs over the years. The half singed song book. Shattered pieces of cassette tapes.
Nila wandered into the bedroom where she had spent most of her childhood. She leaned over the mirror. The drawer rattled open. She held Didan’s hair bun. Her frosted bottle of perfume. A powder compact. And a torn board of Ludo. Her hands shook with each smell.
She had run away from Didan and runaway from Bella, women she knew she could not help and secretly who she did not want to become. And now she was back inside the house where she had hidden her nightmares away. In the shadowlands of dust and cloud, where light poured in just as quickly as dark rain clouds destroyed.
But here in this city Nila knew it was a more complicated life of survival. It was a city of extremes, where exquisite refinement rubbed shoulders with the coarseness of the streets. This was the mythical land of Kali, where destruction and birth met every day; where streets chewed and spat out people with pleasure, and the grandmother she once knew, wholesome and strong was now reduced to ashes.

Nila looked to the stony shore where her family was waving. Then to her mother. Making their way back to the ghats, she glided her hand in and out of the water, its seductive coolness calmed her.
She thought to herself, “How am I going to do this?”
The boat bumped into the mudbank. Nila’s grandfather reached out his hand as she stepped out of the boat. The family walked towards the parked car, but Nila fell back. She watched the rush of the river’s current grow stronger as it carried memories of lives and secret histories, ferrying stories that had once begun but were left unfinished.
Years earlier, that very river, passing through a small delta town witnessed a little boat being rowed across. Red oleanders spilling into the water. Night after night. And the whistle of a train calling in the far distance

*

When they returned to the apartment, Nila did not have the courage to enter a room fresh with death. Instead, she stood alone on the veranda and watched the amber lit street, listened to the crackle of corn from roadside fires. The apartment was empty. Night had fallen and it was raining slightly. The smell of wet earth rose in the air. A dilapidated lamppost arched over a few stray dogs rummaging through trash. She watched the wet yellow light fall over a dark corner of the city while woodsmoke from a nearby vendor permeated the streets like perfume.

Nila had lived the life of a gypsy her entire life. Her father started his career in Nairobi as a photojournalist. ‘A lucky break,’ he always said. After Bella became pregnant, she returned to Calcutta to stay with Didan and have the baby there, while her husband continued his work. After Nila was born, her father was barraged with assignments and Bella did not want to raise her daughter alone. They both decided to leave her with her grandparents and there she stayed for ten years, inseparable from Didan.
Luck struck again and her parent’s migrated to New York. But when Nila arrived, their relationship had begun to deteriorate. Bella craved his presence but he was always off on an assignment, traveling for weeks on end. She still remembered the fights. Nila would clap her hands over her ears. He would slam the door behind him and wander for days. No one knew if he was okay. Nila knew her mother would stay up nights worrying about him but she put up with it year after year until his luck started running out and the assignments became less and less. He drank on the road and he drank when he didn’t have work. Shortly afterwards he decided to photograph coal miners in India. He took off again. Nila hardly saw her father. When she did, he would bring back toys, candy and beautiful dresses for her. Her favorite dress was a red with white polkadots from Paris, a soft, wet red stain of red wine.
She completed her degree at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. She boasted to the other students how great a photographer her father was. She had saved copies of Time, Life, Newsweek and Esquire, in which her father’s magic was stamped. She was determined to not make the same mistakes he had made and brand herself a name in the international market. This, she was determined to do.
After graduation, she moved to New York, where she studied with photographer Susan Meiselas and took courses at the International Center for Photography.
After returning to India, Nila worked as a photojournalist for Time on stories ranging from AIDS in Bombay to trainspotting across the Asian continent. She soon became a workaholic, committing herself to personal projects about disappearing nomadic tribes and her most recent project, which had brought her here to Calcutta. She invested little in her personal life except for the occasional fling and there was that affair with her editor in Delhi. Since the beginning, she could not separate her life from her photography.
She was the field photographer’s assistant in China, Mongolia and Tibet, where they were covering Asia’s love affair with the railroad. She adapted the local food. Buttermilk tea made with yak’s milk and yak’s butter had made her sick but she never refused the hospitality of the villagers, instead she had learned to find a private place and throw up there.
Beside her was a postcard sized photo album she always carried with her. She flipped to a black and white photograph of an Indian coal miner, holding an axe to a wooden post, setting temporary supports in place. Caught between two wooden pillars, this man, his face tattered and smeared with coal dust, light being thrown from his helmet into the dim, and etched in the raw lines of his sooty skin, of his broken teeth, was a desire. A desire for self-respect and dignity.
It was her father who had taken this photograph in the 1970s. No one had cared to buy it or the other pictures he had taken to raise the issue of health and safety of coal miners in India. No one cared if these workers had brown-lung disease, no one thought about the women and children they left behind when trapped underground. After a certain point in his career, he had tired of selling commercial images to magazines. He traveled around India capturing the unheard cries and tears of underdogs. He always said, “Pictures aren’t good enough unless you get close.” Often he would have dinner with a miner’s family to understand who the miner was, what was the family that surrounded him, what kind of father he was. Sometimes he became too close and that’s what broke him. Nila believed that his emotional attachments to the workers he photographed and his eventual isolation led to his frustration. He took to drinking and his liver collapsed when she was eighteen. The leaves were falling in the school courtyard that day. Rust and copper leaves castaneted onto crisp piles. The wind swept swiftly through the branches, whispering of change. Her mother arrived, a paisley scarf wrapped around her head, round black sunglasses covered her eyes. She removed the glasses to reveal puffed red eyes. Nila knew right then. She ran from her mother into the woods, passing ghostly white trees in her rush. The scent of eucalyptus sent cold chills through her body, until she tripped and fell to her knees, out of breath and shaking. “Nila! Nila!,” her mother called from behind. When she dropped to the ground beside Nila she wiped the tears from her daughter’s eyes, “He’s gone.”
The next week Nila left for India to study photography.
And from that day on when she started to run, she decided never to stop.

The doorbell rang and Nila looked down to see who it was. Dadabhai. The car was supposed to have dropped him off at the house in Ballygunge. It was already 10 o’clock, late in the night for him to return by himself. “I’m coming down to get you Dadabhai.”
She ran downstairs with the key and unlocked the narrow doors. His eyes were vacant and a smile stretched across his face but there was no sweetness in it. She hugged him when he entered and locked the doors behind her. As they walked up to the flat Pratima peeked her head from the door to see who had arrived this late.
“Kuku, I wanted to see the room once more before I slept.”
“Oh, it’s so late. Why don’t you spend the night here?”
Dadabhai brushed past her to go inside the room. Nila looked on but did not enter as she gave them their privacy. She sat on the red oxide floor. It was cool and felt calming to the skin. Lying there in the dark with the shutters open, she felt the chill of her own fear. It was colder than night’s breeze over the city.

She started remembering her childhood days with her grandparents in Calcutta. He understood the heart and pulse of the city. But what was once the Crown of British India, had now become dilapidated, decadent and decrepit memory. Covered by dust and inhabited by desperate people on desperate streets. “Magic works here”, he would say while walking through the chariot festival. Nila watched children and adults alike racing miniature chariots hand-made from scraps of wood, bright tissue paper, string and tinsel. They would pass Lake Market and trifle through baskets of jackfruit, chicory, pumpkin and vegetables that remained nameless in the English language. “Homegrown food,” he would say, “Fresh.” At sundown, street wanderers gathered around the pavement for a game of poker. The elderly retired to evening walks by the lake hemmed in by cottonsilk trees, the young filled their mouths with spicy street food and played football in the park. Gariahat, the main shopping market, bustled by late evening with the ladies of the house marketing for blouses, saris and jewelry.
On the weekends she discovered the whitewashed buildings of Esplanade, lined along streets of British architecture. Dalhousie was a whirlwind, spinning out of control with bankers and lawyers traveling in rush hour through dust. The smell of old books and organic paper wafted in the air. Rickety city buses rattled out of the banking district and headed downtown to Park Street, made famous by its cabarets and gentlemen’s lounges, now filled with ice cream parlors and restaurants for the nouveau rich. When she reached her twenties, he took Nila to see the intellectual fanfare of College Street's book fairs and the coffee house. High ceilings and Portuguese style wrought iron balcony gave the place its antique air. The waiters still wore elegant, navy blue uniforms and their service was impeccable when serving tea and coffee. “Revolutions were created here.” he winked, “Perhaps in the seat you are sitting in”.

This was the last time she saw him happy, joyful even. Now he was in his seventies, his arthritis worrying him. He had written dozens of history books, children’s stories, short stories and poetry. He had written by hand for most of his life until he purchased a Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter in his fifties. He was an elegant figure, tall and statuesque and very proud. He wore the same charcoal colored cotton trousers, crisp white shirts and black-rimmed spectacles. He lived with his history books and diaries, writing on an antique mahogany desk for hours on end. His pride was a trio of glass-encased bookshelves, locked tight to protect priceless and out-of-print books. For him now, history was all he had. Many of the books had become insect-bitten or sun-faded. He realized that we all weather away with time as determined by the elements.
Bella came out of the room while Nila was still sitting in the dark. A hush had spread throughout the house. She heard her mother rustle through cabinets and light the stove. She rose slowly, wanting to join her grandfather. She looked into the room from a window beside the slim, double doors. The canopy bed was washed with white. Dadabhai was sitting not on the bed, but on his knees holding the hem of the white sheet. Beside the bed on a small table, stood a portrait of Didan and one stick of incense. The smoke from the incense swirled in the air. He touched the sheet to his face, dabbed each cheek with great care. He rose to a standing position and tucked the sheet into the bed. He bowed to the portrait, bending deeply, his back, neck and head in one straight line and left the room.
Nila joined them both in the living room. Bella had turned on the lights as they were now drinking tea. Nila took the cups to the kitchen when they all finished and held her grandfather with a deep, melancholic embrace. Bella put on her slippers to escort him downstairs. Before she left she asked, “Can you look inside Didan’s wardrobe for me? There’s a silver jewelry box inside. I need to sort out her jewelry for all the granddaughters. Will you do that for me?”
“Of course Ma. I’ll do it right now.”
She took the clunky ring of keys and opened the almira. Burma teak that smelt of autumn. Filled with memories and secret histories. A timeslip. An error. A memory that had turned into dust.
She reached her hand deep inside to fetch it but a red towel blocked her way. It was hooked onto something inside and as she yanked it out, a bundle of envelopes tumbled onto the floor. The crumpled envelopes were wrapped in yellow-tinged leaf and a note was tucked inside the knot. She snatched the first envelope and drew out a letter. The paper was thin and had a delicate pattern of arabesques bordering the edges. But there was something still inside the envelope. She took that out as well and found a sepia photograph of Didan when she was very young, twenty-two perhaps, and she was standing with a tall man in front of date palm groves. The man was wearing a hat that cast a shadow on his face. She read the letter and was confused with the first line. She dashed back to the photograph, looked closely at the man’s face. It was not her grandfather.