The White Ambassador

Won third prize in the Brittle Star journal short fiction competition 2016. Photo: Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash

The old man’s breath came in short bursts as they climbed the road’s steep grade. His legs worked like pistons against the rickshaw’s pedals. Cate stared into the carpel of scalp on the back of his head, rocked side to side by his efforts.

This afternoon’s walk had taken her to the poor part of town, down labyrinthine streets with dogs lying flat to the road, panting. She passed dark boys in shirtsleeves leaned against parked rickshaws. Their eyes followed her as they sucked on their cigarettes. The roads grew narrower weaving between derelict homes. Women stared out of doorways, with kohl-eyed babies strapped to their chests. The air was pungent with refuse and shit. She stumbled on until finally she was lost. She sat at the roadside and watched the cows nose through the mess, the beautiful curves of their hollow hips.

The cycle rickshaw had slowed to a halt in front of her at some point. She saw the man’s shock in finding this strange white woman sitting in the dirt. For her part, she tried to feel relieved as she climbed into the clapped out vehicle and started for home. At a crossing towards the centre of town, a boy with green chillies stepped up. She put some coins into his small hand. He dropped the chillies in her lap and ran.

Then she was inundated.

'Shampoo! Shampoo! Pen! Pen!'

Children circled the rickshaw. The stench of exhaust. The driver’s guttural tones as he tried to shoo them off.

As the traffic began to move again, a boy pinched her on the arm hard.

As they crested the hill, the house came into view: a whitewashed bungalow set back from the road. A bougainvillea purpled one side, a savage burst of colour amongst the parched lawns. The White Ambassador was parked on the drive, newly washed. Subhash was striding towards the gates, leaning to shift the heavy wrought iron from its rest.

She climbed down and stood in the shade of the mangosteen tree. The driver sat on his haunches outside the gate. Subhash placed some coins in his outstretched hand and the man threw his body against the cycle’s frame. As he moved off, he leaned over and spat. A splash of red amongst the suds on the cobbled stone.

Her husband appeared on the porch, his linen suit. She raised her hand and he nodded. A servant spoke to him from the door and he withdrew. The door closed. She felt the coarse string between her fingers, the gnarled chillies dangling from her hand.

The boy at the crossing had been much younger than Tim; he hadn’t even looked like him. It was just something in the way he’d looked at her. An infinitesimal moment… Hope. That blind assassin.

She smudged the sweat from her top lip. The wind was picking up. The house seemed alive with the shivering bougainvillea. Her sandals nudged the rotting fruit at her feet. She looked away down the drive. All four doors of the car stood open, reflecting the sun. Subhash was crouched by the back wheel, working a bit of cloth across the seat. He looked up as she approached.

Delhi passed by outside the car window. She rested her cheek against the cool leather seat, the chill of the air-conditioning. They passed through leprous slums, the buildings losing their bricks, a chaos of washing and power lines. A boy swung a kick at a passing dog. An old woman walked a goat from her house with a grass whip.

Stopped in the traffic round Delhi Junction, she wound the window down to watch the families camped out on the platforms. The smell of masala tea and oily street fare. Cries of Chai! Coffee! Tea! Water! She saw her husband striding towards her through the crowds. His legs gave way beneath him. She closed her eyes.

Tim was small for his age; pale, and freckled like his mum. He looked more like six, than eight years old. The bike was a Christmas present, red for speed. It seemed funny at the time – Tim was so precautious. It was for riding round the gardens but he could walk it to school to show his friends. Two streets from home, he insisted on trying it out.

As he made his unsteady progress along the pavement, two boys in a jeep careered up the outside lane. They cut off a motorbike, causing it to swerve sharply across two lanes of rickshaws and pedestrians. In the screeching of brakes and the trade-off of horns, the boy’s newfound bravura came undone. He jerked his handlebars and tipped into the road. The motorbike clipped his front wheel and he was thrown high and hard.

It all happened so quickly. Except for a graze on his cheek, the boy looked untouched, but there was no mistaking the unnatural angle of his neck. His servant, not much more than a boy himself, tried to throw himself into the traffic for shame.

Subhash found Mark in the study, drove him to see his son. Mark was bent over the sheeted white bed, eyes burning, when Cate ran in.

‘No!’

She clasped at Tim’s hands, pulling his small body to hers. His small white face bruised at the temple, grazed at the hairline of his strawberry blond hair. His cold lips. His lifeless body against hers.

Mark pleaded her, sobbing, as she rent her throat. He grasped at her wrists, trying to prevent her hurting herself.

But she couldn’t calm down. In the end the doctor came. As they slid the needle into her arm, Mark’s legs gave out. She saw him dry-retch. A line of spittle from his lips strung with pearls of saliva hit the linoleum floor before the curtain dropped.

Days became bad jazz tunes in wall-less rooms. She floated in a dead sea, poppy tears peeling out from her body. Burped colours. The acrid aftertaste of aniseed. The world turned into a Picasso painting.

Mark escaped into his work and she wasted in denial. Then the memories came, bringing anger and bright shards of pain. When the drugs wore off, the edges grew sharp – they chafed at her til she was raw.

Then the gnawing banter took hold in her head, the chattering questions, the drum of guilt. Tail-chasing thoughts like brawling dogs. And in the midst of it all – beauty. The most painful. A bright orange bulb like a sheaf of light in the garden after the rain. Subhash, his soft jowls shaking, when she caught him crying in her son’s room.

They stopped to eat at a roadside stall as evening fell. She ate with her fingers. The saffron stain beneath her nails. She wouldn’t stop to sleep. This reckless act. She was testing out her bravura.

Subhash drove the White Ambassador through the night as she slept. When she woke, he handed her bread and a copper tiffin. Outside the window, the terrain had changed. There were fields of grass flashed with colour where stick-people bent digging. Pigeons carved up the morning above the dirt road. Desert willow trees, sprawling scrub.

Beyond the fields came what looked like salt lakes. The sun beat down on them til they gleamed like burnished metal. The sand was marbled, jade-turquoise in hue. She stared out the window. So much beauty.

She thought of her husband. His crisp white suit. The sigh of the linen as he moved about the house.

On Tim’s birthday, drugs couldn’t touch the pain. Subhash handed her a card, its corners curled: a goddess, her dark hair in curlicues across her breast. This was no Ganesh or Laxmi, guarding wealth. Her face was serene; eyes deep against a gilt background.

‘She’s very beautiful. Who is she?’ she asked.

‘Karni Mata. She lost her son. He drowned.’

‘Oh.’ It was like a lance through her chest.

‘She begged Yama, God of Death, to bring him back. But Yama tells her she must bring back her son herself.’

Subhash’s face was solemn.

‘And did she? Bring him back?’

‘She brought him back as kaba, as rat,’ he said.

‘As a rat?’

He nodded. ‘All her sons. And her sons of sons. At Deshnok in her temple.’

She turned the embossed card over in her hand. The woman’s eyes held hers.

‘Thank you, Subhash.’

Subhash shook her gently. The car had stopped. Beyond the mesh of the fence, the temple rose up. Pigeons rested in its alcoves, and along its carved marble walls. It looked like a life-size jewellery box, the silhouettes of birds studding its surface.

In the courtyard, pilgrims stepped amongst the birds that had slipped through the wire netting that protected the arched stone threshold and the temple beyond. Smoke came from somewhere within.

She stood outside the gate. The smoke twisted through her hair and stung her nostrils. She shed her shoes, her feet in the dirt. A man on a bench opposite pointed her out with his wrinkled thumb to the boy beside him. This tall white woman.

She stepped across the threshold, through the silver doors. There were rats everywhere but she was surprisingly calm. The scattered rat food dug into the soles of her feet. She filed toward the tilaka, clasped her hands and bowed before the shrine. Karni Mata’s statuesque form. The priest hesitated. Then his thumb touched her forehead and heat shuddered through her body.

The dirty black and white tiles of the corridors teemed with movement. The rats. The rough plastered walls, a bruised pink. She completed a full circuit almost unseeing. In the outer chamber, she began again, bowing to the divine goddess, moving slowly past huge saucers of cream peppered with dust, rats lapping.

On her third trip, a man stood beside her in the atrium. She saw white hair, white kurta pyjamas, a gentle face. They stood together in silence as the others passed. Then he showed her how to walk without lifting her feet, so as not to hurt them, the rats.

She felt the brush of something against her heel, the thrill of contact. The rat hovered on the edge of the temple’s skirting before disappearing into one of the holes lining the inner walls.

When they arrived in the atrium again, he turned to her.

‘You are looking for the pale one,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Her eyes scanned the floor for a smaller one, thin and pale and young. She felt sick with hunger for her son.

‘Perhaps it is not for today.’

He clasped his hands, bowed to her. Cate felt herself keel forward and tip into the void.

‘But he will come. And you will receive the blessing of the divine goddess.’

She bowed, and walked back through the arch. She turned to look back at the marble façade. The pain rent her throat. She turned and walked back through the smoke, her clothes blown with ash, her body blown-eggshell empty.

A cool breeze lifted her hair from her face. It carried with it a hint of rain. Subhash stood waiting for her beside the car. She walked towards him.