Arrival

Four wedding guests disembark separately from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station in the state of Punjab.

Yosh, the yoga teacher, arrives a day before the others, from Vancouver. He has come reluctantly, to work for tourists in the country he vowed to leave behind once and for all five years ago. His father is a millionaire in American dollars now, but many in India have not forgotten that his family was once deemed untouchable. He grips one wrist nervously.

Monica arrives from Toronto with maps and pink fingernails. She buys trinkets and garments — souvenirs to fill her spacious suitcase — ignoring her shrinking bank balance. She has not yet told her family the truth.

As Reema steps off the train onto the platform, she searches for her Indianness: something that might be bred in bone, or skin, or song, because she left this country before she could speak. The text messages from her Scottish boyfriend arrive with a dissonant ping in the Indian soundscape. She places a hand on her hip.

And then there is Jackson, knees brittle, a coin he has carried for fifty-four years tucked into his shirt pocket. As he sees Reema’s hand fall from her hip towards her thigh, a crack splinters in his memory that lets dread through. Unknowingly Reema has brought with her a key that fits the door he had once locked tight. With only one task left to complete, he leaves the train station with strange whispers in his ear.

The stratosphere is dust and water, as well as particles — oxygen and nitrogen — so small that they are imperceptible. They make the sky blue. From here it’s all one shade of blue. But there … remember? There, all the colours seem separate, individual, the way the sky over the Himalayas has to stand back so as not to be pierced by the snow-capped peaks. Perhaps that trick of light is responsible for Jackson’s blindness all those years — in fact for his whole life? And perhaps the slanted light accounts for Reema’s fortitude.

No.

During those few weeks, snow and fire felt composed of the same chemical elements.

At a small train station in a town called Pathankot, four people with unrelated desires arrived for a wedding. Weddings are mirages; these four had no idea they would climb a mountain together and see different things from the top.

One
Jackson is as light as paper.

Here, on the lawn chair in the garden that looks out over the Maharana Pratap Sagar reservoir, he stares down at his legs and notices flakes of skin on his shins like moths in their final twitch. His once hairy, muscular calves are now scales on bone. He examines his socked feet in the leather sandals that Amelia told him never to wear with socks. Forgive him, Amelia.

Music rises in the distance. He glances towards the reservoir. The water is languid, the way it is on Long Pond lake, but this is a man-made body of water, hedged by mango and mulberry trees, not pine, not Massachusetts cedar.

He listens.

The wedding procession approaches, the music grows louder, and an echo bounces off the wall of the dam at the far reach of the reservoir. Jackson wipes his brow. He raises his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, and the dam winks at him. He knows the wizardry of hydroelectricity. He has been an engineer on projects like this on many rivers around the world, over decades in service to British and American engineering firms. But he has never before considered their acoustic drawbacks. He cups his hand over his ear as he stares down at his feet again, deciding he must release them from their cotton and leather cages.

Wicker chairs have been arranged on the lawn, and some guests are sheltering from the sun beneath the thatched roof veranda as they watch the revellers approach the compound’s gates. Dancers make their way up the dirt road towards them. The crowd of extended family around him — women in blue, red, yellow saris, and men in embroidered sherwanis — clap their hands, and some whoop with excitement. Servers stand waiting, their uniforms crisp in the sun.

He raises his damp foot.

A horn bappaws, bells tinkle, cymbals shiver, and Jackson wipes sweat from his cheek, where there is the smell of jasmine. He slides his left foot out of the sandal and leans over in the chair, closer to the tree with heart-shaped leaves that make shade over his shoulder. He yanks at the sock to just come off, damn it. Patience, okay, Amelia. He peels, little by little, squinting as the sock reveals skin like casein on milk.

Dancers enter the garden, the women leading the band like conjurors come to rescue him. Tall, white English women — one who reminds him of his mother from a photo of her when she was young — are among the Indians, their arms flying as high as the baraat dancers, their rhythm no less precise. All of the women have bells on their ankles, tiny cymbals tied to their fingers. Their brocaded lehenga skirts hang heavy in the heat. Drummers beat their dhol faster than the horns can keep up with. The women stomp their feet.

Jackson examines his own foot, the fungus-yellowed toenails and the swollen, veined ankle. This ankle, for a man of eighty-six, is really not too bad. Another horn bappaws across the garden. He looks up to see the groom approaching on horseback behind the dancers. Jackson fixes his eyes on the bells at the women’s ankles, tuning in to their pitch and to a high frequency vibration of the India he has known since he was a very young man, the India where he remains foreign. The horse snorts and shakes its head.

Amelia would never have let him wear the socks or go without a hat in Himachal Pradesh in March, but Amelia now watches from out there. Perhaps in the afterlife, toenails grow long, clear and unfungussed. Amelia is in the jasmine, the horse’s tail, flicking small reminders to him: don’t forget to wear your sunscreen, and never, ever, hork in front of the wedding guests, please, dear Jackson, because you’ll embarrass me — we’ve known the bride’s family for decades.

The dancers hop up and down, their hands in the air; the drums beat faster, a horn calls out, the recorded singing answers from a speaker positioned at the entrance to the garden, where a cement wall separates the retreat from the small village perched at the end of the peninsula. The horns blow in double time and more people jump. Up and down. He inhales. He is woozy with jet lag and droopy like the thin hanging pods of the laburnum across the garden. The shape of the leaves at his shoulder reminds him of sweets he missed as a boy when their family left England for Canada.

‘I can hear the colour green,’ I whisper to the boy next to me in the field with the others from our class. He pays me no attention. This Calgary boy is tall, and I know him only in my lies to my parents, who believe I have made my first friend in Canada. I repeat myself in case he hasn’t heard — ‘green, I hear green, isn’t that …?’ But the boy’s friendship remains only the lie that saves face. I will never be popular, like my brother.
Jackson touches the leaf at his ear. Just come back, Amelia.

He picks the leaf and examines it.

Yesterday, as the bride, Jyoti, welcomed him to the garden and then took him on a tour of the retreat, she told him how grateful she was that her father’s British friend, the owner, had let them use the place for the wedding. There was pride in her voice. Family and friends from Delhi, England, America and Kangra Valley were all gathered here for a week of festivities. Jyoti told Jackson that Vishnu hid under a tree like this to escape demons. Jackson declared it suitable for the shade he knew he’d need for the ceremony.

As they strolled in the garden, Jyoti pointed out flowers and views of the reservoir, but he was distracted by her hands, the swirls of dirt along the fingers and at her knuckles. He felt embarrassed for her, wondering how a bride could work in the garden the day before her wedding and greet guests with dirty hands. As she touched his arm and led him to meet her school friends from Delhi and her colleagues from London, he wondered if he should mention it, but then she introduced him to Reema, who had been her roommate at boarding school in London.

Between Reema and Jackson something thickened — a moment of recollection or apprehension, neither was sure which, because the something was without thought. He nodded as he reached out to shake hands. She took a step back while offering her own, her fingers clean, unlike Jyoti’s. His mind flashed to a dark alleyway in Amritsar. She felt her throat tighten, like stage fright, while she examined the hairs that sprang from his ears and the way the skin of his chin hung nearly to his chest. Her green almond eyes, with lashes that nearly touched her strong brows, flickered before he quickly released her hand and glanced again at the ochre lines on Jyoti’s fingers.