Work Text:
Aunty
The first morning when the boy did not come to break his fast, she was not concerned. She thought, perhaps, that he had come and gone before the sun rose high enough to pull her from her dreaming. It had happened before, and would again, and The Little Friend of All the World was clever enough to find someone who would feed him for the sake of his smile or the stories he spun. She missed his help in raising the awnings of her shop, and his legs as she shuffled to the pastry shop, her leg aching as it always did before she’d had her pipe. But she did not worry. Not that day.
The second morning she grew restless while the sky was still dark, and lay with her eyes closed and her ears open, telling herself that she would soon hear him come in and rattle through the cooking pots, and find the sweet bread she had saved for him in the basket on the shelf. But he did not come. In time, she rose, and ate the bread herself. She was angry with the boy, she decided when it came time to begin making supper. Angry that Kim did not come, did not run to bring her ghee and mutton and rice for the pot, or dance impatiently as the fragrant spices filled the verandah with promise as she cooked. But he did not come. And she did not go to look for him. Not that day.
The third morning she squatted down in the corner of the verandah where he ought to be sleeping, and rummaged under the rope-strung cot, unearthing the small box where he kept his boyish treasures. There was the key he’d found half buried in the sand near the well. Here was the belt buckle from his father’s belt, stiff with rust. Small things: a gutta percha ball, a tiny glass bottle turned purple with time, two nails the farrier must have dropped before they ever were used in a horse shoe. The kerchief his father had told him to keep in his pocket was there, too, and she clucked to see it. “Heedless child,” she told the space where he should have been. “Not even your father’s words do you remember.” She closed the box again and put it aside. Then she went to the cabstands in the square and told the drivers to send Kim home when they saw him. One she took to the Gate of the Harpies, so she could climb up to the women of the balconies and make arrangements the cursed boy would not. She looked for him as she came carefully down the long, treacherous stairs; looked for him as limped back to her kabarri, and did the evening chores; looked for him as at long last she settled down to her pipe. But he did not come. Nor did any word of him. Not that day.
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On the fourth morning she took her walking stick and set out for the Jadoo-Gher, the Magic House of the mysterious Masons, in fear that the papers of Kim’s amulet had finally led him to be entrapped there. But her questions went unanswered. The rude young Sahib who sat at the desk inside the door knew nothing, and ordered her away. The sweeper at the gate was little better, claiming to be certain that no street boy had come within, not in the past week, not in the past year. Frustrated, she turned back toward the City, counting the missions and the jails inside her head. The policemen and the missionaries would abuse her, too, she knew, for failing to take care of her charge if nothing else, and her heart was already sore.
But there before her was the Motee Bazar, where the boy had a hundred playmates and the merchants were her friends of old. There she might be given better consideration. She stumped down past the Ajaib-Gher,the Wonder House, past the great green bulk of Zam-Zammah, and begin to ask of each person she met, where was the Little Friend of All the World? Where was her Kim? Not till she came to the vegetable seller did she find word of him, and then it was days old. He had begged a meal for a holy man, and promised to keep the cow away. But he had not come back, and the cow most certainly had. And that was something to know, and yet not enough, until she came to the shop of the sweetmeat seller, whose son Abdullah shuffled his feet and ducked his head before telling her that Kim had been entranced by a pahari from Bhotiyal. A guru, the child said he was, and Kim unafraid had led that stranger into the Wonder House and never come out again.
So up went she to the Wonder House, in spite of her fears, past the turnstiles, to look through the rooms of images and oddments to see if her Kim was somewhere there within. The white-bearded Belaiti who kept the place watched her for a time, and then asked what she was seeking in Urdu so sweet to her ears that she forgot about the rudeness of the Sahibs of the Magic House and told him of her Kim, who had not come home, not even to eat the biryani she would make for him, and how she had heard of a pahari who had hidden him within the wonders of the wonder house some three days since.
And the Keeper of Images did not laugh nor send her away, but found a chair for her to rest upon, and prepared sweet tea for her to drink. He knew of the holy man, and remembered seeing a boy in the clothes she described come in alongside him. “You must not worry,” he told her, for the holy man was a lama from Tibet, very old and very learned. A seeker of a dream, as gentle, the Keeper of Images promised her, as the morning dew. He had seen both boy and holy man from his window in the shadow of Zam-Zammah, sharing in friendly fashion a luncheon of rice and vegetables, although now that he remembered, the hillman had lost his disciple in Kulu. Might the boy have chosen to go and beg for the lama?
Nay, she told him, remembering Kim’s prophecy; remembering the Red Bull on a Green Field, and the 900 devils. There was nothing of holy men in that. If she had lost Kim to his bull, well that would be another matter altogether. But for him to simply disappear? That was hard to bear. The boy might yet have brought himself enough trouble for a policeman to notice, might he not? And perhaps not all of them would be as rude as the men of the Magic House. She might yet find the boy in jail.
She might, the Keeper of Images conceded, although whether that would be better or worse than knowing he had gone with lama was anything but sure. Would she let him ask for her? Surely no one would be rude to him. She took the handkerchief he offered and wiped the tears from her face, finding a smile for him, even as she wondered what payment he desired for his kindness. He was old, yes, but kind, and good to look upon. But he did not ask for anything. And so she went home and waited for news. But the boy did not come. Not that day.
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Day followed day. The police and the missionaries knew nothing, came the report from the Keeper of Images, but other stories came to her veranda, rumors blooming in the bazars like flowers after rain. Kim had been seen here or there, doing this or that or nothing at all, but laughing and dancing away before he could be touched. She clung to the rumors, but she treasured more the stories her old friends came to share. There were shopkeepers who remembered the bright eyed boychild squatting by her side as she haggled for better prices, and a nurse who recalled singing with him with a song from far off Belait to keep him from squirming as his back was poked for the vaccination. The vegetable seller came one afternoon, bringing some wares as an excuse. They squatted together as the supper cooked, gossiping all the while about the times when Kim had gone to this cookshop or that one to beg a bowlful for a faquir at Taksali Gate or some other ungrateful mendicant. And when she was alone again she had more than vegetables to chew upon. She had taught the boy to beg herself, long ago, in a time when it was too hot for even the young men to wish to climb to the balconies of the women and the rupees and annas were thin on the ground. Had taught him, too, that it was better to beg for two, to get both food and the hope of a blessing, than to follow a full belly with bad luck. Could it be true that he had gone off with a strange holy man? And if he had, when would she see him again?
Then came the day when Mahbub Ali appeared on her doorstep. He told her the boy was gone to a madrissa for Sahibs, which seemed unlikely, even for Kim. She laughed and wept to think of it, because it was both gladness to think of the boy back with his own people, and grief to know that he would be taught to turn away from the people he had made his own.
She said as much to Mahbub Ali, and the red beard nodded and brought out a bead of opium for her. He stayed while she smoked and told him all the gossip, and together they wove the words into new patterns. The best one had the red clad lama transforming into Kim’s bull, and carrying him away on its broad back, leaping over the walls of the city and never touching down on the other side. When she woke in the morning she could not remember which story was true, and could only be grateful for the small sparrow of a beggar girl who squatted by the bed, holding a posset of hot milk and watching her with hopeful eyes.
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Weeks followed weeks, months followed months, as her leg grew harder and harder to convince it must climb the stairs to the balconies of the dancing women. She spent more hours in the mended rattan chair on the edge of the veranda, trading stories with street children in exchange for the help she needed with awning and stove. A few she could trust to run commissions, and those she paid in money, but most were content with small chores and a chance to listen to her tales of the Friend of All the World and his Bull. She set Kim Rishti Ke alongside Little Anklebone, Raja Rasâlu, and the Son of Seven Mothers, and when the European clothing he had always worn was brought to her empty and smelling of deodars it was only proof that he was no more real than they. Sometimes she wondered if she had dreamed him. But no, there was his box, still on the dusty shelf above the bed in the corner where the sparrow girl had built a nest.
Season followed season, dry and wet, and she went no farther than she must, on a leg that did not want to hold her, and sat smoking her pipe, fretting at the blanket that didn’t keep her warm as she watched the world that passed by her veranda through eyes that did not want to see as far as once they could. And then one day, when the rains were coming down, and she was struggling to remember what next to tell the girl she still called Sparrow to put in the biryani, she looked up to find two strangers clad in dusky red gabardine sheltering under the awning. She blinked at them through the haze of pain and pipe and mist. One was old, so old, indeed, that his skin was as wrinkled as the bark of a tree. But the other was scarcely more than a boy, and his face was one she wanted to reach out and touch.
He knelt by her, and took her hand between his two. “Khaalá,” he said, and the tears came to her eyes to hear his voice, so much like a man’s, and yet so like a voice she knew. “Dost thou remember me?”
“Thou art a dream,” she whispered. “A dream I have had before.” But she had never been able to touch the dream, and she dropped her pipe to reach with her other hand, to run her fingers over eyebrows, and nose, and chin. His face was wet from the rain, his eyelashes wet from tears like hers. But he grinned, and she knew him for her Kim.
“Were thy dreams hungry?” he asked. “For my lama and I have come from the train, and our bellies are empty. Is there enough in your pot for two more?”
“Even if I go hungry I would feed thee,” she said, and it was true, as it had been true before.
His smile changed, and he bent his head to her. “I thank thee,” he said, and then set about making all to his liking. He spread a rug for his companion, and tossed a coin to Sparrow, sending the girl to the cookshop for vegetables and sweetmeats while he took over preparing the biryani. To make her laugh he told her how carefully he had watched her cooking, and then pretended he did not know which pot held the yogurt. That reminded her of the time when he was small, before his father died, when he had eaten so much yogurt it gave him a belly ache. Did he remember, she asked, and he did. Remembered too most of the way of making the biryani that had always been his favorite meal, and helped her teach Sparrow when the girl returned. A child who could cook, she said, and the words were grooves in her tongue, a child who could cook need never go hungry.
And Kim laughed and asked if she remembered the time he spilt the lentils for he had been hungry enough then, and did not wait for her to answer before he began to tell the story. So many stories he told, as the biryani finished cooking, and the meal was spread before them. Stories of places he’d seen, high mountains and wide plains. Stories of an arrow and a river that washed away all burdens, that made his holy man sit back with satisfaction showing even in the set of his shoulders. And then, for Sparrow, he told the story of an elephant who gave up all its tusks, even the root, to an ungrateful man, who was punished for his ingratitude. It was not a story she knew, but she thought perhaps that he was telling it for a reason.
So she told a story in her turn, hunting for the words, one by one. A story of the boy who had befriended everyone, except perhaps the schoolteachers, and missionaries, who wished to keep him within walls. A boy who had begged, but never stolen, and who had taken a care to learn what the schoolteachers did not know. A boy who built the fire, and raised the awnings, and ran to the cookshop when she asked. A boy, like other boys, too young to see too far beyond himself, to understand whence came the things that he accepted as his own. A boy with a box. Did he see it? There on the shelf? And he laughed and took down the box, and gave all within but the handkerchief to Sparrow.
In time the food was gone, though she had not had the stomach for more than a few bites. The light was going, too, and Kim explained that he and the lama had promised to go to the Wonder House to visit the Keeper of Images. And she knew that the dream was ending.
“But this has been the best dream of all,” she told him, as he lifted her to her bed, being careful of the bad leg. “Never before in my dreams have thee called me khaalá.” She was not his mother’s sister, not in truth. That was a lie they had told to keep the missionaries away.
“I should have called thee ‘mother’,” he said, and his face was wet once more. “For in all of my childhood I remember no other.”
She patted his hand. “I am not an elephant,” she said, thinking of his story. “And thee are not ungrateful.”
And she smiled and closed her eyes forever for she had no more need of dreams.