Winter is ending, spring is coming, the snow is clearing, and the cattle will be taken to graze again soon. At the farm he is shown the cows, taught how to give fodder to the animals and clean out their sheds, take them for milking, tie them up to graze. Every morning Ajay must run up and fetch two pitchers of milk for the house. The rest will be delivered by the farm workers for Ajay to process for ghee or bottle to be sold.
The work is hard and he’s always tired, but he eats three meals a day and no one abuses him or threatens to kill him. It’s a better life than any he’s ever hoped for or known. Each morning he has his glass of fresh milk and several hot rotis doused in the finest ghee. The lunches and dinners he makes, using recipes passed on from Mummy, are full of fresh vegetables, and the rice never runs out.
In his free moments, when no one is looking, Ajay loves to roll around the stepped garden, muddying himself in the grass, jumping from each small terrace down to the next, descending just like the house toward the valley floor, toward the wide and powerful river. Over and over, every week a little more meat on his bones, a few more words in his mouth, a laugh, a smile. Then the guilt comes, and he comforts himself with the lie Daddy taught him. His family are living well now because of him. He builds a vision of their day. His sacrifice has paved the way for their prosperity. He tells himself this over and over until he can’t remember the truth. He decides that he likes it here. He likes to run through the trees, to play with the farm dogs, to splash cold water on his face, to sit with Mummy beside the fire in the night. And he discovers something else: It gives him pleasure to please, it gives him pleasure to anticipate every possible need, not just Mummy’s and Daddy’s but everyone’s, the farm workers’, the animals’, the shopkeepers’ pleasure. Not just pleasure, not really, more like the stanching of a wound, more like the holding of a tide, a sacrifice, negating the trauma of his birth.
* * *
—
In the beginning of summer something unexpected happens; the foreigners come. They arrive in buses and on motorbikes, strange, wild, happy people with long hair who sit and smoke pipes like the sadhus and who make noise and play music and bring chaotic life to the mountainside, who appear to exist without structure or ritual or rule. When the first biker convoy arrives, it’s the middle of the afternoon. Ajay darts from his room to find the source of the noise. He hears the rumbling far off, mistakes it for an avalanche or an earthquake, until he spies the bikes at the bottom of the valley sweeping up the river road and disappearing below the hump.
He waits, listening, not daring to run, not yet ready to be disappointed.
He spots them emerging half a kilometer away.
He leaps up the pathway two steps at a time, runs to the road as the first bikes roar through, jumping and whooping alongside them as fast as he can, cheering as they wave back, a blur of joy.
This summer is made of wonder. In the hours he is supposed to rest, he sneaks from his room and climbs into the village near the hot springs where the foreigners spend their days, gawping at these wonderful people who sit in cafés, smoking and talking and playing music, running away if they try to talk to him, in awe, wrestling with his shyness. They see him and wave and invite him to join them and every day his courage grows. When he gets the nerve to approach, they laugh and joke with him, they smile at him kindly. And when someone spills a drink, he runs to bring a napkin to them. When someone needs a light, he runs with the box of matches he keeps and strikes it and watches the laughter. He decides to carry a box of matches with him everywhere he goes. Lighting a chillum and a cigarette wherever he can. The Matchbox Kid. That’s what they call him.
All summer long, the cafés and restaurants that were shuttered are now bright with music and light, with the smells of strange and exotic food, with men and women who wear flowers and bloom. Before the first month is out, he has learned a handful of English words. Please, thank you, yes and no. Sorry.
Daddy even opens up some of the rooms on the floors below, Ajay giving them a quick clean, and rents them for fifty rupees a night.
But when the long summer ends, the foreigners vanish as quickly as they came, a great exodus of bikes and buses to the south, down into India once again; and the autumn colors explode and the cold sets in, the earth turns hard and fades. The animals are brought down the mountain and kept in the winter sheds, and when the snow begins to fall, the household retreats to the central room with the fire burning day and night. Ajay sleeps through the winter in the main room next to the stove. He feels lonelier than ever here, and in the orange glow, with the snow falling thickly in the moonlight, he remembers his mother and sister as he dreams.
6.