Half Light

He came to see what exactly had been destroyed. The woman who raised the alarm had made it sound as though half the hill had come down: a huge blitz of trees, rocks and mud. When Pavan reached the bend in the track, he saw that it was a more modest landslide. But it was bad enough. A chunk had been gouged out of the hillside, boulders and scree piled across the road below. A tangle of roots pointed skywards. All around him, the soil was red and oozy. As he looked at the men scrabbling to try and shift the rocks with their bare hands, a fresh drizzle gusted into his face. He lowered his head and turned back towards the hotel, fists balled in the pockets of his jeans.

Sometimes the cold up here felt clean, a purity that came from the mountains, with each glassy intake of breath. Today it seemed dirty, dark clouds closing in on the hillside, acrid smoke drifting across from someone’s bonfire, slush seeping into his shoes. His teeth chattered so hard he felt they would come loose and fill his mouth. He had never known cold like this where he had grown up, a hard-baked village almost on the other end of the subcontinent, where people put cotton wool in their ears to protect themselves from even a slight early-morning breeze.
Over the course of the three years that he had lived in these hills, he had heard about landslides. One had crashed through a neighbouring town, flattening part of a nursing home. He had been told that passers-by on the road could see old ladies in nighties on the first floor motioning to them in terror from the open maw of the building. Several people had perished, a couple of the bodies found only days later. As rescuers dug through the rubble, the stench of dead cows filled their nostrils. A freakish tumult had meant that a little hairy hog had ended up in the branches of a tree, shrieking in panic. There had been astonishment that, in spite of the mass of tin and timber churned into the mud, all that debris and chaos, a potted geranium had managed to remain secure on a gatepost.

Pavan could not see the full extent of the damage below but for now it looked like they had merely been cut off. He had already discovered that the power lines had come down. The water tanker would not be able to make it up the road, so that would soon be a problem too. But at least no word had been received of any deaths or injuries.

When he was halfway up the track, he saw the boy again up ahead. This time the hood of his windcheater was up but the same eyes glanced at him, filled with enquiry. The boy had made himself conspicuous, dawdling in Pavan’s field of vision, ever since he had arrived with his family three days ago. While Pavan swept the entryway that first evening, the boy had stood on the parapet, taking in the forested slopes or pretending to be interested in the view: it was hard to tell. On the second day he had watched Pavan haul his bucket of cleaning supplies into different rooms, meeting his eyes every time he emerged from behind a closed door, all the while playing cards on the terrace with two women. That afternoon the boy had almost collided with Pavan when he came rushing down the back corridor, his arms weighed down with bags of flour. The boy had apologised, with much more sincerity than Pavan had expected, and so, wrong-footed, he had simply shrugged and rushed on through the courtyard to the kitchen.

At first, Pavan had been irritated. Along with the mountain peaks and the tea gardens, apparently his daily grind was also a tourist attraction to be enjoyed in the winter sun. But the gaze had been too persistent and pointed. He guessed that the boy was twenty-one or thereabouts. He had a face that spoke of softness, from the tangle of curls over his forehead down past his long lashes to the contours of his nose and the deep dip of his Cupid’s bow. Pavan had tried not to look at that face. But even in the first few instances he realised that he had rarely seen a smile achieve such a transformation. In a moment the boy’s features turned from tentative, thoughtful, almost anxious, to a great beam of mischief and vivacity.

Pavan forced himself to think about what he had unwittingly revealed to this boy. All his life, he had tried to maintain a protective equilibrium between aloofness and involvement. He knew bodies gave the game away so he had policed his limbs and his expressions ever since he could remember. At school the other children had needled him but for other reasons: the threadbare hand-me-downs he wore, his father’s brawls, the ramblings of his grandmother as she wound her way through the village slowly losing her mind. His most private fears had gone undetected and he experienced this concealment like a miracle.

But the boy had seen something. Even though Pavan had been fully occupied, hurrying from one task to another in his baggy trousers and old grey sweater, certain that there was nothing about his gait, his gaze, his demeanour that betrayed him, the boy had persevered. He had sought him out, in the courtyard, on the stairs, even down by the wild patch where the chayote squash vines had almost overcome the chain-link fence. He was a constant apparition, like a god who intended to remind him of his weakness. It felt like a huge intrusion and filled Pavan with an acute sense of jeopardy. And now the boy was planted outside the hotel gates.

Pavan stood level with him and then turned around, so that they were both looking down at the mutilated hillside. He could have walked straight back to the hotel but he was curious about the rescue efforts. And in that odd moment he felt an unusual need to assert his presence and not be cowed by this youngster.

In the distance, a trio of figures scrambled up the hillside. He could hear a few anxious shouts and a small clang of metal, some tool being used at short intervals, a ridiculously puny sound in the face of the task at hand. The sweetness of mulch filled his nostrils but it held a trace of a darker rot, sharp and sulphurous, as though he would find something terrible if he dug around in the shadows under the pines.

A few weeks ago Pavan had spotted a word scrawled in red marker on the inside of a cupboard door in the supply shed. It was in Bengali and he could not read it. But the angry shade of red, the unstable lines, its sudden appearance, all unsettled him. He opened the cupboard once or twice a month to get a light bulb or a washer and was sure the word had not been there before. Who else came to the cupboard? He had no idea. Possibly everyone, apart from the hotel owner, Bumba Das. Pavan had taken a photo of the word, wondering who could read it to him, tell him why it was there and whether there was any menace in it. Anyone at the hotel was out of the question. Days later he mustered up the courage to ask an elderly market trader who was kindly but brisk, a busy woman who would not linger over his question. Their conversations, held in broken Hindi, only ever covered the strict practicalities of the weather, her stock and the whereabouts of any roadblocks. She glanced at his phone as she sorted through plastic buckets and basins.

‘Homo,’ she said.
‘What?’ he asked.

‘That’s what it says,’ she said. ‘Homo.’

A pulse boomed at his temples; blood seemed to fill his head. He searched her face for any sign of disgust or even comprehension.

She handed back his phone, unruffled and uninterested, and began to stack the basins.

‘Take some for the hotel? I’ll give you a good discount,’ she said. He mumbled his thanks for her help and hurried away.

Like ‘selfie’ and ‘toilet’, some English words travelled into almost every Indian language. He could guess that this was one of them. Reading that word was like being stripped bare in a crowded street but with no clue as to the identity of the attackers. None of the other staff at the hotel had changed in their attitudes towards him and no one seemed to bear him any ill will. Bumba Das continued to alternate between his usual calculated benevolence and irrational impatience, all the time speaking to him as though the expanse of a field lay between them.

Pavan had barely interacted with any of the guests and, in any case, none of them would have been able to get into the locked shed. He had tried to put it out of his mind but occasionally he would return to the photo, unable to delete it. In one sense, it was just as well that he was overworked. The endless stream of tasks kept his mind off these matters. During the low season when few rooms were occupied, Bumba Das made sure he employed only three men to keep the hotel running. One cooked and everything else was left to the other two. Now with the hotel cut off until the road reopened, there would be even more to do, anxious guests to pacify, supplies to locate urgently. They would have to manage with the generator for as long as it took. He would need to make sure that nothing had tripped in the main fuse box and then he would have to check the stock of diesel. There would be continued demands on his initiative and resourcefulness. And accompanying each of these thoughts was that same unease, a fierce awareness that something had changed since he had first spotted the word on the cupboard door.

The boy was still standing level with him. Pavan could sense his gaze. Feeling he had remained there long enough, he turned and walked through the gates, the crunch of the gravel seeming louder with each step. Do not look back at that boy, he said to himself. Keep walking. He would do the opposite of looking back, shoulders square, neck stiff, head upright in the rain. A few steps, half a dozen more, all the while ignoring the tug that came from the figure near the gates. The wind flew into his face. He tried to empty his head of all thoughts. The gravel crunched for a few more steps and then, at that precise moment, as if it had been preordained, he turned to look back. The boy was still in the same place, staring in his direction.