Excerpt: The Garden of Forgotten Time

Part One

The House of Endless Corridors

Chapter One

Death

The old lady was dying.

It was a long drawn-out death. They had been waiting for it since the past two days, but the crone hung on to life with unbelievable tenacity. It was as if Yama, the God of Death (named after time who he indeed is), had put his noose around her soul and was pulling with all his might, and succeeding only inch by inch. The sound of life being sucked out was almost palpable.

The woman lay on a thin mattress on the floor. The only light in the room was from a lamp placed in front of the pictures and idols of numberless deities in a prayer alcove. The flame kept flickering, throwing gigantic and terrifying shadows on the walls, making monsters of the inhabitants.

The boy sat cross-legged on the floor. It was early morning, and sleep was building cobwebs in his brain, but he forced his eyes to stay open, and recite the lord’s name by rote: “Rama… Rama…Rama…” He knew that “death” was near: at seven, he still did not know what it was, but knew that it was terrifying and final, a border beyond which there was no hope of return or redemption.

The atmosphere of the cavernous room was appropriate to the situation. The boy ran his eyes over the walls, the shadowed corners where strange shapes lurked, the faces of the adults strangely transformed by the dancing light; taking care to avert his eyes from the idol of Kali with her garland of heads and cummerbund of severed limbs and wall poster of hell full of blood and gore and pain and the hopeless faces of the damned and the gleeful faces of grinning demons. Here was Valiammaman, grandma’s eldest brother, with his face of perpetual sorrow. At the foot of the bed was Cheriyamma, his youngest aunt, serene with her face on the verge of a smile. Behind him sat his mother and father, his mother grim in her dislike of the dying woman and his father, indifferent as ever. Cheriyammoomma was at the head of the bed, reading from the Ramayana, the great Indian epic, supposed to speed the departing soul on its way; her daughter sat nearby, his closest companion in a house bereft of children and sixteen years his senior. Then there were various aunts and uncles gathered in the outer darkness, with whom he were only vaguely familiar.

“Siddharth,” his mother asked. “Do you want to go sleep?”

Siddharth wanted to leave the room; but going alone to his bedroom through one of the long corridors alone at this time of the night was not an appealing prospect. Here was death: in the hidden corners of the huge house, there may be worse things. He was caught in a dilemma; he had decided that staying here would be the better option when his father pronounced the verdict.

“No, Maya, let him stay,” he said in his deep gruff voice. “It is the appropriate thing.” Siddharth’s father was very stringent on tradition.

Maya directed a scathing look at her husband. Siddharth knew that his mother hated the old woman. She was a great-aunt of sorts, but always referred to as “that old woman”. The crone had been responsible for many BAD THINGS, which were only spoke about in hushed tones in the darkness of the bedroom when his parents thought he was asleep. Even then, his father used to hush his mother before anything was described in detail, so Siddharth only had the vaguest impressions.

The old woman had KILLED Valiammayi, Valiammaman’s wife, who was only a photograph of a pretty woman hanging on the stairwell as far as the boy was concerned.

The old woman had prevented Cheriyamma from marrying.

The old woman had made Cheriyammoomma’s husband to ABANDON her.

Then there were some sins which were whispered but never spoken aloud.

These crimes Siddharth had heard in the half-light of his comfortable bedroom in the city, and they took on frightening hues in the surreal surroundings of his ancestral home in the village. But he had his own reason to be frightened of the old woman…

… It had happened last summer, when they had come for their bimonthly stay during the school holidays. Siddharth spent his time wandering around the house and the vast grounds; and reading from the enormous collection of musty books on the various shelves, most of which he didn’t understand. He loved the days and hated the nights, when the house put on its shroud of shadows and corridors lengthened endlessly, and strange beings wandered the earth. It was a time when fantasy and reality mingled seamlessly, the way it was not possible in his town residence.

The compound was so large and variegated that Siddharth had not finished exploring it so far: every summer, there was something new to find out. It was his magic kingdom, populated with fairies, princes, princesses, and ogres. The small rivulets through which the trees were irrigated were brooks and rivers: the anthills were mysterious hills full of caves. A thousand fairy tales were enacted every day in his mind.

The old woman stayed in a small outhouse in the enormous compound, all by herself. Siddharth’s wanderings took him there once. Initially, he was wary of the old house, standing all by itself in a wooded copse. Its dark windows looked like sightless eyes, and there was a forlorn look to the whole place, as though it existed in another world, another time.

As he looked on, the door opened, and the old lady hobbled out.

His initial impulse was to run. The crone was enormously old, bent, with wrinkles enveloping her face. The toothless mouth and the great hooked nose, along with the elongated earlobes with the enormous holes to hang old-fashioned toda earrings, completed her resemblance to comic book witch. But as Siddharth turned, the old lady said in a raspy voice:

Don’t run away, little one. You’re Maya’s boy, aren’t you?

Siddharth could only nod. He could not refuse to answer a direct query from a grownup, nor make a rude exit-his father had taught him better than that.

Come here to grandma. I’m your grandma, don’t you know? She cackled. Oh, your great-great-great-grandma…

The cackle completed the resemblance to the witch. Siddharth was now terrified, but in the woman’s thrall completely – he could not run away. Dumbly, he moved towards her.

The old woman put her hand across the boy’s shoulders. To Siddharth, it felt cold and clammy, like a fish. There was a sweetly cloying smell from the old lady, somewhat like the old clothes he found in the attic.

Come inside. The crone pulled him inside with surprising strength. I’ve something to give you.

Terrified, convinced that he was going to be cooked and eaten or at least turned into a frog or lizard, the boy allowed himself to be led inside.

The room was surprisingly cool, and surprisingly neat. There was a bed and a table, and a shelf full of the earthen urns he found in the larder, used for storing pickles, grains and herbs. Siddharth speculated that here was where she kept her magic spells.

The old lady sat him down on a corner of the bed and started rummaging among her shelves. All the while, the lady kept up an unending stream of conversation.

You’re here for the vacation, aren’t you?

Siddharth nodded.

Yes, I know you come every year: but Maya never comes to visit me, and I never come up to the house. You’d think that she will have the courtesy to bring you here once in a while-but no, she’s the spitting image of her mother, all headstrong and arrogant. Can you imagine this is the first time I’m seeing you? How old are you?

Six.

Good! I’ve something here, just right for six-year-old boys!

Out of one of the urns, the woman brought up a handful of jaggery lumps.

I used to give this to your mother’s uncle, your Valiammaman, and he simply used to love them…he used to come to me for them every day…of course, that was in the good old days…

SIDDHARTH!!!

His mother’s voice bellowed out just as the old lady placed a bundle of the sweets wrapped in an old newspaper into his hands. It seemed to Siddharth that the crone flinched.

Siddharth got up, murmured a hurried thanks, and ran out. Already his belly was having a thousand butterflies fluttering inside, and his knees had turned to water. There was one cardinal rule in his world-never get mother angry. If mother gets angry, then all hell breaks loose. And from her tone, Siddharth thought his mother was more than angry – she was furious.

Maya was standing at the top of a gentle rise in the grounds. Siddharth’s stomach sank as he understood that from there she would have seen him come out of the old woman’s room. He looked at his mother’s face. The eyes were blazing.

Did you go to that old hag’s house? It was more of a statement than a question, delivered in a dangerously soft, sibilant whisper.

Yes…
The blow fell on his back even before he finished. It almost knocked him to the ground; more fell all across his body as he tried to regain his balance.

Haven’t I told you never to go there? Had to disobey me, didn’t you?

Siddharth tried desperately to remember when his mother had forbidden him that house: but there were so many “don’t”s in his young life that it was hard to remember.

Maya ultimately stopped, her fury spent. And then she caught sight of the packet in her son’s hand.

What’s that? What did the witch give you?

Wordlessly, he extended the packet to her: she opened it, took one look at it, and sent it flying across the ground. Then Maya drew her son alongside, and whispered in his ear:

Never go to that woman. Never take anything she gives you. It’s bewitched. She’s witch. She’s an ogress. She’s…

“…She’s gone,” somebody said. “It’s over.”

Siddharth came back to the present. He found that the room had gone suddenly quiet: the sound of the old woman’s troubled breathing had stopped. Valiammaman was drawing a white cloth over her face.

“Prostrate yourself,” Siddharth’s father said. “Grandma is no more.”

As he lay face down in front of the dead body in sashtanga pranamam, Siddharth first understood the greatest mystery of life, known as death.