Blind Faith Read online

  Anand’s death had had a very different effect on Mithu. Mithu, after a few days of robust weeping, had rapidly gone global. She became re-sexualized. She cast off her dowdy, professor’s-wife clothes and mutated into a sari-clad Boy George with plucked eyebrows and powdered cheeks. She became lively and democratic in her friendships and dumbed down from novels to glossy magazines in relief that she no longer had to please Anand by pretending to be highbrow. She sprinkled gold dust on her forehead and streaked her hair with Natural Auburn 5.1. She painted her fingernails a rich red and dangled gypsy earrings from her ears.

  Mithu’s survival skills were admirable, thought Mia. Lost in the Amazon rain forest she would speedily contract a marriage with the king of apes so he would take her into his protection. Abandoned in the Sahara she would jump on the back of the passing captain of the Bedouin and take over the best tent. Mithu’s need for marriage was equivalent to the immigrant’s need for an air ticket. Marry with steely determination and give birth to a range of new passports.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Ma,’ Mia climbed the wooden steps to her room. ‘You deserve all the happiness in the world. I’ll meet someone, there’s no hurry. You go ahead. Get married. Go to America. I’ll stay here with SkyVision and move back to Putney.’

  Since this morning, between the time I left for work and came back, I’ve made an extraordinary discovery. A false discovery perhaps, but for me, a discovery nonetheless. What would Rosenthal and Silver say? They would say that the man was nothing but a delusion, a mirage caused by the drunkenness of grief.

  ‘No hurry?’ shouted Mithu. ‘What do you mean, no hurry? Of course, there’s a hurry. You might get prolapse of the rectum! Mejo Mashi had it and nobody would stay with her because of the smell. Only her husband cared for her. Until his dying day. Even though they were staying in a leaking place overlooking the basti because they had no money left. Oh god,’ Mithu shuddered at the memory. ‘Thank god, I never have to go back to that horrible country.’

  ‘No point thinking of rectums and all, Ma, and you don’t ever have to go back,’ Mia called down from her room. ‘You’re on your way to America.’

  ‘Only if you help me, Goldie!’ Mithu called up the stairs. ‘I can’t get married before you. I can’t. First you. Then me. If you don’t, I won’t. You have my life in your hands. Remember that. You must get married. Married! Married! Married!’

  The silence of death was the most annoying thing of all. The hushed wipe-out, the impossibility of further contact, the irritatingly vacant space. Quiet runways stretching towards other quiet runways. Everything as it was, yet everything in mourning. Why had he not stormed into death more grandly? Drowning was such a weak surrender, such a slothful fall. Do not go gentle into that good night, Papa, Rage, rage against the dying of the light…

  The streets, the billboards, the trees would remain, but she would be gone one day too.

  Gone where?

  Perhaps to some Hollywood-created studio where there were layers of shining clouds or an oily pit crawling with spindly arms.

  Rain whispered in the cherry tree outside. In her room – where Mithu had often burst in smelling of chicken essence demanding explanations about men and music; where Anand had knocked softly when she had a fever and laid his palm on her hot forehead – was the painting that contained him. She kicked off her shoes, sat cross-legged on her bed and peered at it on the wall. Yes, the face in Anand’s painting was exactly like that of the man at the Purification Rally. She could see no difference.

  She had seen him every day for the last seven years. She had watched him looming above her Raggedy Anne. She had studied him in the evenings, glowing in the light of her bedside lamp. Her father’s gift to her on her twenty-first birthday had been his painting of the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious festival in the world.

  ‘What an experience, Maya,’ Anand had exulted. ‘How can I describe it so you will understand? Imagine a huge Hindu Woodstock … a spiritual Glastonbury… crowds of people! Thousands! Hundred thousands! The water with the sun overhead, mist along the banks, sadhus and nuns, tourists, yoga teachers, a giant celebration of being a nobody.’

  ‘A nobody?’ she had asked.

  ‘Sure, a nobody. That’s what we are. Non-entities next to a river that is millions of years old. One of India’s greatest contributions to world civilizations is the idea of the naked body. The naked body not as a pornographic product, but as a civilizational ideal, the most pristine surrender to being a nobody, a non-individual, nothing but a technological member of the Milky Way.’

  Anand had bought her a dog-eared copy of GS Ghurye’s Indian Sadhus written half a century ago. The sadhus and their ascetic reformist spirit was unique to India, Mia read. But while some are beautiful lotuses, the vast majority have become unhealthy scum. Only when the water begins to flow again and the people are awakened to life, then, and only then, will the scum be carried away. Until life returns to that long dead spirit of rebellion and renunciation, sadhus will remain monstrous distortions of the ascetic ideal.

  Sadly, no one was interested enough in the ascetic spirit to re-ignite the flame of philosophical protest that once burned so brightly. The relegation of almost the entire tradition of sadhus to hippies and dharma bums, to comic book depictions by India’s scornful elite, Anand said, was no less a tragedy than the intellectual conquest of India by the British. Indian historians write of workers, peasants and kings, but they never write of sadhus or the Kumbh Mela because their minds are imprisoned in scorn – scorn for themselves and a squeamishness about their own traditions.

  None of Anand’s paintings had been as talked about, as written about or as appreciated as this particular painting. It had been displayed at the Tate Modern. At the back of the painting, Anand had written in black paint: To my dearest little Maya, love from Papa. ‘Maya’ was an improvement on ‘Mia’ Anand had said. Mia was as pretty as a Hollywood heroine, but Maya meant god’s dream.

  The Kumbh Mela or the Festival of the Pitcher. Every four years, on the banks of the Ganga, thousands gathered to take a dip in the river in the conviction that the cleansing bath would wash away their sins. If they didn’t gain peace in the after-life or everlasting union with the almighty, at least there might be a raise in salary or favourable rates of interest in a new bank loan. In Anand’s depiction, a ghostly white river arched across the painting like a sky. Below the river sky, pilgrims, ascetics, elephants and cattle-drawn carts were drawn in painstaking detail. In the foreground was a face in magnified close-up, of a young bespectacled priest with black hair down to his shoulders and a thick beard down to his collarbones.

  And under the hair and beard, a careless slant of cheekbone and a thin line of jaw.

  ‘All well?’ Her SkyVision producer asked the next morning. ‘How are you feeling today?’

  ‘Fine. Sorry. Just a headache suddenly. Bit strange living with my mother after all these years…’

  ‘Get them today, won’t you?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Not yoga instructors…not Kashmiri protestors. So what is this Purification Journey all about? Should make a cute tailpiece.’

  ‘Yes.’ She felt his hand on her arm, ‘Never heard of them before, I must confess.’

  ‘Mia,’ He gripped her elbow. ‘We’re a little worried about you, darling. You’ve not been yourself lately. You need to get back into the swing of things. Your mind is all over the place; you’re simply not being able to concentrate. You forget something almost every day. Is there something wrong?’

  ‘ I’m fine,’ she shook herself free. ‘ I’m absolutely fine.’

  ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll need some help,’ he said firmly. ‘We all think so.’

  ‘Oh rubbish!’ she tossed over her shoulder. ‘Just been a bit preoccupied, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s your dad, isn’t it?’

  ‘Come on, it’s been a whole year.’

  ‘Then stop acting as if you’re going mad.’
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  ‘Fuck off!’ she laughed. Mad! That tired term used by men to dismiss women, as the sisterhood says. Maybe Rochester locked his wife away because she was a real big cheese.

  ‘You’re losing it, child,’ his voice echoed after her as she ran through sparklingly empty corridors. ‘You need a break.’

  She confronted him again.

  He was standing among the group, standing very still, as if concentrating hard. The red-haired man was shouting, ‘We are in the process of getting ready for a new Inner War! The war to save our values! The war to save our ability to love! A war to save our families! To save ourselves from ourselves!’

  The men were all young. They were tall, spare, a ramp-row of trendy faith-healers in their white clothes; a chorus-line of groovy godmen.

  She walked up to him. When lightning waits behind a thundercloud, the cloud looks perfectly calm. Only when the lightning bursts out suddenly from behind, does the cloud shine jaggedly. The traffic that rumbled around Marble Arch was as loud as always. But when his voice sounded in her ear, for a moment, everything jangled louder than a fairground.

  ‘Yes?’

  Through his glasses, his eyes on her were sharp and interested. She felt angry that he looked only interested instead of instantly passionate. She felt the atmosphere between them grow charged with memories.

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘Can I help you?’ His voice sounded hoarse, as if he was speaking from the back of his throat.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied. ‘I’m a journalist. You know, a reporter? Television? SkyVision channel. I’ve come to interview you. There’s’ – she pointed to the bulky denim jacket – ‘the cameraman.’

  ‘Me? Interview me?’

  ‘Yes. Can we chat?’

  ‘So I’m your freak show for the day? The mad man with the bow and arrow?’

  ‘Not at all!’ she lied loudly.

  ‘Instead of interviewing me,’ he said wearily, ‘maybe you should interview yourself. Ask yourself a few questions.’

  ‘I do that all the time,’ she smiled. ‘But I’d like to know a little more about you.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to know a little more about you.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of incomprehension, ‘I’d like to know why you think I’m worthy of being interviewed. We have been touring all over England, Europe, United States and Japan and I’ve met many people whom I would like to interview. I would ask them why they are all running to buy gold. Running to buy things. Why they are happy to serve the empire controlled from New York and London. I want to ask them, must everyone be a banker or an accountant? Just run after money? How much money do you want, Ma’am? How much money does everybody want? Is there no such thing as just a celebration of being human? To be remembered not for making money but for taking being human as far as possible?’

  ‘Lovely idea,’ she grinned. ‘Wish I didn’t have to work. Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take being human a little further into the park. Let’s sit down somewhere. Please come.’

  They settled down on a bench, watching the buses circle around the trees down towards Oxford Circus.

  What was his name, she asked. Karna, he replied. K-A-R-N-A. And why the bow and arrow? Just part of the costume of a novice. He wore the bow and arrow because he was a novice. Once he had completed his first mission, he would wear the same white uniform as the others. And could he please tell her a little bit more about the Purification Journey? He thrust a black-and-white printed pamphlet into her hands. It read:

  Rebirth of Pure Love: The Need for a New Inner War

  The 21st Century has dawned. But we have strayed

  from the true path.

  The true path towards Pure Love is the rebirth of

  simple life patterns.

  Let us recreate the peace of the past.

  Let us work towards the Rebirth of the Mother Woman.

  Let us wage the war with ourselves so we may set

  free our best selves.

  Come to PAVITRA ASHRAM, NEW DELHI, INDIA for a

  15-day Purification Retreat.

  In unpolluted lakeside air, learn about the martyrdom of

  past heroes, eat nutritious food; live a simple life.

  Learn to purify being human.

  Learn to serve in the new struggle and the war of our

  century: the war within.

  ‘This particular instruction,’ Mia said, ‘interests me. The Rebirth of the Mother Woman.’

  ‘Well,’ he leant forward. ‘If it was up to me, I would put that right at the top. But the Brothers thought otherwise.’

  ‘The Rebirth of the Mother Woman? What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘Exactly what it says.’ His stare was so sharp that she thought his glasses might crack. ‘Fight the female ego! Make the woman return to her natural habitat, her home, and accept her role as mother. Not aspire to become a computer-tapping sexual slave who wears less and less clothes.’ He shrugged, ‘Lots of people are saying it. We are also saying it.’

  ‘So what’s your solution?’ She scribbled, ‘Purdah? Burqa? Segregation?’

  ‘You are trying,’ he laughed, ‘to sensationalize it. Give it funny names. Make it sound old-fashioned and silly because you are so convinced of the rightness of your ways. You can accept no challenge, you can tolerate no disagreement because you only want affirmations of what you think you already know. All I said is that the human mother is becoming an object of lust. In fact, she is the object of her own lust, her own vanity. In the guise of freedom and equality, women are being degraded, encouraged to pursue their worse rather than their better selves. A mean selfish woman is apparently an ideal woman in today’s times. To paraphrase Rousseau, woman is born free but everywhere she is in chains.’

  Mithu, for example, Mia confirmed to herself, was definitely not capable of the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. In fact, Mithu was an excellent candidate for the Purification Retreat. Perhaps she should be sent off with this sporty brotherhood to their ashram and return, purified, dressed in white, and raging about the Inner War.

  She frowned into her notepad. Yet another eccentric whose life made an excellent alliterative tagline. How easily a clever sentence might leapfrog out of the paper. ‘Male Mystic Meets Modern Mom’. ‘Furious Forecaster Fights Feminism’. ‘Demagogue Demands Domestic Duty’. Just another clank of metal in her prison of 20-second summaries of events, her armoury of one-liners and text messages, a deluxe steel prison set back comfortably from the flabby rough heartbeat of the day-to-day business of evolution.

  Her father had analysed her predicament on many occasions. He would say:

  An excess of instant-knowledge has made you too easily pessimistic. Too many pictures have finished off your capacity to see and too many words have robbed you of the ability to speak. You’ve ceased to grow. Unless you free your mind to the possibility of faith, you’ll never understand the world.

  She had protested: But you don’t need to believe in order to grow! You just need to travel and read.

  Aha, but what is travel after all but a kind of pilgrimage, basically a journey seeking unknowable truths? One of the world’s greatest travellers, Ibn Battutah, wrote of how a nameless fakir carried him through a parched landscape when he was too exhausted to walk any further…

  Nameless fakir, who?

  Exactly. Just a stranger who carried Battutah to safety and then disappeared…

  You mean it was god?

  Maybe. Maybe not. The important thing is he never could find out.

  So the tourists on the Costa Del Sol are on a pilgrimage…?

  Of course they are! They don’t know it but they too are pilgrims, they’ve gone there to pray for love and happiness in the future. And they’re naked, just like the naked sadhus at the Kumbh, perhaps there’s some unconscious link between the search and nakedness.

  Perhaps Karna was searching too, trying to reconstruct a bruised world in the way he could. His words were meaningless. Yet he wasn’t just playing a part. He was strugg
ling to believe his own clichés. He hadn’t said the right things. He hadn’t tried to reassure her by affirming that he was a mere anecdote. Instead his words had come tumbling out, amateur and raw. He had no polite skills. He was only a bespectacled monk from a river bank who had rushed out of his ashram to teach people how to love each other. For his pains, Scotland Yard might drag him away, strapped to a stretcher, and slam him in a cell for daring to be so corny.

  Her father’s painting was even more attractive in the flesh. The hare-brained speech and crazy costume made her want to hug him hard and never let go. Anand had deserted her, but she would hold on tight to Karna. She imagined him injured, beaten by the police or stoned by Neo-Nazis, a battered Jesus, a suffering diviner. She felt awakened to fantasy. He would create a new body for her with his hands – a moonlit, newly voluptuous body. His skin would be darkly luminous, and when he threw his hair behind him, she would catch a glimpse of his long throat. In the rain, he would be a bedraggled rock star on stage, wet with sweat and dripping hair.

  His formal manner infuriated her, so did his talk of this stupid Purification Journey. She wondered if she should tell him about the painting. Had her father seen him somewhere and captured his exact likeness? Maybe Anand had caught a glimpse of him on one of his many trips to India. She wanted to tell him that she knew him very well. That he was more muscular and tall than she had hoped for. That to see him now was a message from the dead, that her father hadn’t even seen his subject’s best angles. Perhaps most people in the world are waiting to be carried away by strangers on the street, or searching out fervent religious preachers to fall in love with because the software sector was turning out to be far too unromantic and their camouflage of office jokes was wearing thin.

  She bent into her notepad, but instead of taking notes, drew a face that was an ideal version of her own, with every feature stretched to perfection. ‘Interesting,’ she said after a pause. ‘Tell me, d’you ever watch TV?’