THE LOST TEMPLE – Chapter Four
A Song of India in Five Parts
The Tapping
Eventually Granny made her long journey back to Cedargraves Farm. The children’s loneliness returned and they were drenched in tears for days. They felt abandoned in the shadow of their parent’s marital complexities. Life in India was not a cakewalk. They were alone in a jungle in an enigmatic country in constant flux as it tried to integrate and be part of the modern world, assisted to a small degree by Hubert Holme’s dedicated efforts on behalf of the U. S. State Department.
Hubert’s absences increased. Other than when he and Miggie were guests of honor at state dinners, she saw little of him. To make an impression of solidarity at parties with the Indian elite, they often dressed in traditional attire: dhotis and Nehru jackets, and silk sarees in myriad patterns and the brightest colors.
His trips away seemed interminable and the enormity of the house felt like a pressing weight. It was soon clear he was embroiled in an affair with a woman who was a close family friend.
At bedtime, Katherine would say to the children, “Come Lucky Man and Little Angel, sleepy time for little master and memsaab. Big memsaab need reading time and child be gone.”
They would climb the stairs to their room, change into their night clothes, and climb or be put into their canopy beds draped with white netting, soon oblivious to everything but the inspiration of their dreams. The sound of the jungle soothed and caressed them while they slept; insects vibrating in tandem or slightly out of sync, starting and stopping for God knows what reason. The strange cries of unknown animals and other life seemed to call to them, like spirits from the spent coals of the cool night.
Their mother believed that nature was their god, and told them so. They were indeed surrounded by God like nowhere else they’d ever been, but their beloved family farm.
With Hubert away so much, in her solitude and alone in the mammoth house, Miggie developed the classic signs of melancholy, suffering from a plague of persistent insomnia. Alone in their titanic bed built for a diety, she tossed and turned in search of elusive rest, tolerating hours of cycling rumination, helpless to pacify it. The nagging fear that her marriage was over before it had begun, and having seemed so perfect, haunted and deprived her of restful sleep, all that might assuage her sadness, but not to be. It refused to come no matter how hard she tossed and turned in search of it.
Over the months of nights she helplessly lay in thought, an odd sound became a regular part of her bedeviling exhaustion—an unidentifiable tapping—an effluent out of the opiate of the darkness, blending into it, but oddly distinct from what seemed in her state the screeching racket of the jungle. It was a sole and separate sound, perseverant with an undying resolve, as it passed through the black chaos of the darkness on its determined but unknown calling.
At first she thought little of it. It was barely discernable in the dark stadium of the night filled with cheering insecta, churning and erupting without pause until the light’s conquest of the stars and the sun rescued the day.
Not dull like a bird or an animal excavating a hole, it reverberated unnaturally through the humid air. It evoked an uneasy sense in her sleep-deprived consciousness of something ominous that hovered on the axis of her sanity.
As days turned to weeks, a pattern emerged in the stubborn enigma. It was most active in the moonlight and always in the earliest hours of the morning, as if it had waited patiently for the stillest part of the day, when the whole world but the nocturnal was asleep and still. But it could just as easily appear on the blackest of equatorial nights.
In fits and spells, after two or three groups of taps in a row, it seemed to pause to examine before moving on its uncanny way, along the cement paths and porches circumventing the ground floor. First it traveled east before stopping and reversing to the west, then east again, tapping itself around one end of the house, favoring a counter-clockwise bearing through the frowning darkness. Dejected, it seemed to move away and fade at first light, gone at dawn as a cooling layer of humidity yielded to falling dew in welcome forgiveness of the night’s sins.
After long hours of cascading thought, Katherine’s accented voice broke the comfortable silence of the morning, when Miggie was most likely to have finally drifted off into the kindness of sleep and into the light.
As she lay in the loving arms of sleep, as in a morning’s sunrise Katherine whispered softly, “Rise little kittens. Time to shine. Mama finally sleepy. Be veddy, veddy quiet.” Dutifully the children rose from their beds, tiptoed to the laboratory and dressed themselves as best they could, as their mother had already instilled in them the importance of being thoughtful and independent.
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Hubert, a handsome and very intelligent man, wouldn’t make a habit of affairs. It had been a young man’s selfish fascination, an exploration of a typical adolescent obsession, something disingenuous he’d rid his system of. As a father and husband to a beguiling wife, he would soon move on from it with the understanding and forgiveness of her, a woman of prodigious emotional intelligence.
Her ability to fall asleep in the enormous bed returned. Her marriage, in fact, had not failed. Hubert’s business trips became fewer and farther in between during those last months in Madras. Perhaps he was actually trying?
Their time there was coming to an end. They would soon be stationed in Trivandrum, after a long trip to Cedargraves on leave.
In the work and excitement of preparing for another assignment in a different part of India, Miggie’s mysterious knocking became the last thing on her mind, all but gone with the return of rest. Her tapping somnambulist had moved on and out of her imagination.
Two years passed. A traveling circus of exotic experiences greeted them everywhere they went. They saw herds of Indian elephants in the wild and Jasper rode a decorated elephant in a ceremonial parade. A small traveling circus, like something out of Fellini, stopped for a performance and for the first time Jasper fell head over heels in love with a teenage tightrope walker, the memory of whom dogged him for weeks afterward. They thought of renaming him, Little ladies Man.
They watched tigers enslaved in a zoo, after which Alyson’s first complete sentence was, “Do tigers eat nuts?”
With no photographic evidence to document it, years later his crystal mind recalled a strange place and a big celebration. That night they’d seen men and women with children on their shoulders, walking barefoot without injury over red hot coals. The memory of it would perplex him until the day he died, it being the very proof of his belief in the mysteries of metaphysics.
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Their year in Trivandrum passed. They moved into in a new modern house in a huge sprawling city, India’s capital, New Delhi, located on an immense fertile plain at the base of the Himalayas. Risk and adventure never ceased. Hubert was bitten by a rabid donkey and underwent weeks of painful rabies shots before ending up in bed for another three months with jaundice, his skin turning the color of spoiled lemons.
After a hunk of concrete fell on Jasper’s finger and it became seriously infected, doctors were forced to lance the end of his left middle finger to release fluid. That left it deformed. He would take it home with him for life.
On a quiet side street outside the compound, his mother steadied his bicycle as he desperately tried to understand the trick behind its balance. He wanted so much to finally be free of its training wheels. Eventually they were removed and one day, quite suddenly and deliberately, his mother released her hold with a shove. Barely realizing it, he was off like a rocket pedaling balanced and upright, faster and faster with all his might. He could finally ride a bicycle.
One hot summer’s day his little feelings were stricken by a terrible tragedy. A frenzied four lane highway east of the house took the life of his beloved dachshund, Percey, hit and run over by a reckless truck that simply drove on with crass impunity. The seven year old never exorcized the gruesome spectacle from his mind—its sight seared into his mind for life—his best friend lying prostrate and still in death, the iridescence of open eyes visible in the afternoon light, from which the joy of life’s breath would never return.
It was Jasper’s earliest lesson in the excruciating horror of death and demise—that afternoon on a dark highway—like a flowing black river, headstrong and unable to find the grace of the sea.
Soon after, across the same road, he fell from the top of a tall tree. He recalled hitting the ground with a frightening crash, something akin to an automobile hitting a wall, from which he strolled miraculously away without injury.
His fondest memory of New Delhi was during their quiet hour in the hottest time of the day. The family lay down to rest or read during what their father called their quiet hour.
Instead, the impish Jasper began to sneak away to the south of their house to visit what looked to him at the time like a three story, cement skyscraper. It was unfinished, but already occupied and much of it was without exterior walls and open to the surrounding city. He soon made friends with a family of workers living on the third floor in what was their open flat without walls. Each night in front of the worker’s eyes, the setting sun, a giant red balloon of fire delineated in the haze, descended into the outstretched horizon of the vast city bringing with it the cool night air.
The workers grew fond of Mr. Lucky Man’s afternoon visits and were soon the fastest of friends. In the scalding afternoon they would sit in silence not speaking each other’s language. The workers always tempted him with the offer of a bowl of plain white rice—the tastiest Jasper had ever eaten—the memory of which never left him, even in old age. To his last days, he loved nothing more than a bowl of plain Jasmine rice with nothing.
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END OF CHAPTER FOUR
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Tony Heath is an artist, jazz musician, activist and writer of fiction and essays in Arizona. He and his wife, Kate Scott, co-founded a wildlife advocacy on their ranch in Cochise and Santa Cruz Counties.
Photographs © Tony Heath