inhabited: there were piles of firewood stacked along the walls, and she could see flints scattered on the floor. The ground beneath was littered with husks and she almost cut her feet on the shards of a cracked calabash. In one corner there was even a scattering of ossified human dung, rendered odourless by age: it was strange that something that would have excited disgust elsewhere, was here a token of reassurance, proof that this cavern had once sheltered real human beings, not ghosts or pishaches or demons.
Later, when the storm broke and the winds began to shriek, she piled up some wood and lit a fire with the flints: that was when she discovered that some parts of the chalky walls had been drawn upon with bits of charcoal; some of the marks looked like stick figures, made by children. When the raging of the wind made Girin howl in fear, it was these older images that gave Deeti the idea of drawing upon the wall.
Look, she said to her son: dekh – he is here, with us, your father. There is nothing to fear; he is by our side…
That was how she began to draw the first of her pictures: it was a larger-than-life-size image of Kalua.
Later, in years to come, her children and grandchildren would often ask why there was so little of herself on the walls of the shrine. Why so few images of her own early experiences in the plantation? Why so many drawings of her husband and his fellow fugitives? Her answer was: Ekut: to me your grandfather’s image was not like a figure of an Ero in a painting; it was real; it was the verite. When I managed to come up here, it was to be with him. My own life, I had to endure every sekonn of every day: when I was here, I was with him…
*
It was that first, larger-than-life image that was always the starting point for viewings of the shrine: here, as in life, Kalua, was taller and larger than anyone else, as black as Krishna himself. Rendered in profile, he bestrode the wall like some all-conquering Pharaoh, with a langot knotted around his waist. Under his feet, engraved by some other hand, was the name that had been thrust upon him in the migrants’ camp in Calcutta – ‘Maddow Colver’ – enclosed in an ornamental cartouche.
As with all pilgrimages, the Fami’s visits to the shrine followed certain prescribed patterns: usage and custom dictated the direction of the circumambulation as well as the order in which the pictures had to be viewed and venerated. After the image of the founding father, the next stop was a panel that was known to the Fami as ‘The Parting’ (Biraha): there was no inscription or engraving below it, but every Colver spoke of it by this name, and even the youngest of the chutkas and chutkis knew that it depicted a critical juncture in the history of their family – the moment of Deeti’s separation from her spouse.
It had happened, they all knew, when Deeti and Kalua were on the Ibis, making the Crossing, from India to Mauritius with scores of other indentured workers. Bedevilled from the start, the misfortunes of the voyage had culminated with Kalua being sentenced to death for a simple act of self-defence. But before the penalty could be administered a storm had arisen, engulfing the schooner and allowing Kalua to escape in a lifeboat, along with four other fugitives.
The saga of the patriarch’s deliverance from the Ibis was often told amongst the Colvers: it was to them what the story of the watchful geese was to Ancient Rome – an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary destiny. In Deeti’s depiction of it, the scene was framed as if to freeze for ever the moments before the fugitives’ boat was swept away from the mother-ship by the angry waves: the Ibis was portrayed in the fashion of a mythological bird, with a great beak of a bowsprit and two enormous, outspread canvas wings. The fugitives’ longboat was to the right, only a foot or so away, and it was separated from the Ibis by two tall stylized waves. As a contrast to the schooner’s bird-like form, the boat’s shape was suggestive of a half- submerged fish; its size, on the other hand – perhaps to underscore the grandeur of its role, as the vehicle of the patriarch’s deliverance – was greatly exaggerated, its dimensions being almost equal to those of the mother-ship. Each of the two vessels was shown to be bearing a small complement of people, four in the case of the schooner, and five for the boat.
Repetition is the method through which the miraculous becomes a part of everyday life: even though the outlines of the tale were well known to everyone, Deeti would always be confronted with the same questions when she led family expeditions to the shrine.
Kisa? the chutkas and chutkis would cry, pointing at this figure or that: Kisisa?
But in this too, Deeti had her own orderly ritual, and no matter how loudly the youngsters clamoured, she would always start in the same fashion, raising her cane to point to the smallest of the five figures on the lifeboat.
Vwala! that one there with the three eyebrows? That’s Jodu, the lascar – he’d grown up with your Tantinn Paulette and was like a brother to her. And that over there, with the turban around his head, is Serang Ali – a master-mariner if ever there was one and as clever as a gran-koko. And those two there, they were convicts, on their way to serve time in Mauritius – the one on the left, his father was a big Seth from Bombay but his mother was Chinese, so we called him Cheeni, although his name was Ah Fatt. As for the other one, that’s none other than your Neel-mawsa, the uncle who loves to tell stories.
It was only then that the tip of her cane would move on to the towering figure of Maddow Colver who was depicted standing upright, in the middle of the boat. Alone among the five fugitives he was depicted with his face turned backwards, as though he were looking towards the Ibis in order to bid farewell to his wife and his unborn child – Deeti herself, in other words with a hugely swollen belly.
There, vwala! That’s me on the deck of the Ibis with your Tantinn Paulette on one side and Baboo Nob Kissin on the other. And there at the back is Malum Zikri – Zachary Reid, the second mate.
The placement of Deeti’s image was one of the most curious aspects of the composition: unlike the others, who all had their feet planted on their respective vessels, Deeti’s body was drawn in such a way that she appeared to be suspended in the air, well above the deck. Her head was tilted backwards, so that her gaze appeared to be directed over Zachary’s shoulder, towards the stormy heavens. As much as any other element of the panel, it was the odd tilt of Deeti’s head that gave the composition a strangely static quality, an appearance that seemed to suggest that the scene had unfolded slowly and with great deliberation.
But any suggestion to this effect was sure to meet with an explosive rebuke from Deeti: Bon-dye! she would cry; are you a fol dogla or what? Don’t be ridikil: the whole thing, from start to fini took just a few minits, and all that time, it was nothing but jaldi-jaldi, a hopeless golmal, tus in dezord. It was a mirak, believe me, that the five managed to get away – and none of it would have been possible if not for that Serang Ali. It was he who set up the escape, that one; it was all his doing. The lascars were all in on it, of course, but it was so carefully planned that the Captain was never able to pin it on them. It was a marvel of a scheme, the kind of mulugande that only a burrburrya like the Serang could think up: they waited till the storm had driven the guards and maistries below deck and into their cumra. Then they sealed them inside by jamming their hatches. As for the officers, the Serang timed it so that they broke out during the change of watch, when both Malums were off deck. Ah Fatt the Cheeni, who was the quickest on his feet, was given the job of shutting the hatch of the officers’ cuddy – what he did instead was to send the first mate to lanfer with a sandokann between his ribs – but that wasn’t to be discovered until the boat was gone. Me, when Jodu let me out and I came on deck, I thought vreman I’d lost my sight. It was so dark nothing was vizib except when the lightning flashed – and tuletan the rain, coming down like hail, and the thunder, dhamak-dhamak-dhamkaoing as if to deafen you. My job was only to cut your granper down from the mast, where they had tied him, but what with the rain and wind, you can’t imagine how difisil it was…
To hear this description was to assume that the scene had ended after no more than a few minutes of frantic activity – and yet, in almost the same breath that she gave this account of it, Deeti would claim also that the duration of the Parting had lasted for as much as an hour or two of ordinary time. Nor was this the only paradox of the experiences of that night. Later, Paulette would confirm that she had been beside Deeti from the moment when Kalua was lowered into the boat until the second when Zachary bundled them back below deck; in all that time, she swore, Deeti’s feet had never left the Ibis, not for a single instant. But her insistence made no dent in Deeti’s certainty about what had happened in those scant few minutes: she never varied in her avowal that the reason why she had portrayed herself as she had was because she had been picked up and whirled away into the sky, by a force that was none other than the storm itself.
No one who heard Deeti on this subject could doubt that in her own mind she was certain that the winds had lofted her to a height from which she could look down and observe all that was happening below – not in fear and panic, but in unruffled calm. It was as if the tufaan had chosen her to be its confidant, freezing the passage of time, and lending her the vision of its own eye; for the duration of that moment, she had been able to see everything that fell within that whirling circle of wind: she had seen the Ibis, directly below, and the four figures that were huddled
