A mangy-looking dog with three legs and its ribcage showing snuffled its way through a pile of rotting garbage in search of something edible. It thought it had found something but then a bare foot connected with its nose and a loud voice yelled, ‘Chalo!’
The dog whimpered but moved on as requested. It threw a sorry glance behind it to see that the foot belonged to a young boy who was already setting the rubbish heap on fire. The smell of burning plastic in the morning air mingled with the scent of incense and hot chai boiling at a roadside stall – tea leaves stewing in milk.
A few trucks added their noxious fumes to the cocktail. Their wheels trundled noisily over a surface that seemed more potholes than road. They kicked up clouds of dust as they passed. The sons of the drivers rode on top of the trucks, munching their way through a cargo of melons on its way to market.
The dog felt hunger pangs again and edged cautiously closer to the chai stall in the vague hope that the man working there might throw him a morsel. A stern glance from the chai wallah dispersed any such hopeful illusions, though, and the mongrel crept off.
Damned mutt , the chai wallah thought, shooing away flies from his pot of chai. Seems like everyone wants something for free these days. Even old dogs.
His scowl dropped as two potential customers jumped off the back of a truck and waved goodbye to the driver. He squinted and rubbed his eyes but the two new arrivals seemed to be dressed in circus costumes – their faces were daubed in white and their noses were red. They both wore long, blue, baggy trousers and shirts, and the younger one had a strange look about him, something foreign. At least that much could be guessed by the way he stopped to stroke the mangy dog. Foreigners were known for being sentimental about animals.
‘ Namaste,’ the taller one called in a cheery greeting. ‘For how many smiles will you part with two cups of chai for a couple of weary travellers this fair morning?’
‘Not for a thousand smiles of a stranger,’ the chai wallah sneered. Typical. How was an honest businessman supposed to turn a profit in a world of penniless vagabonds and dogs?
‘Indeed, we would not sell you any of our smiles at any price,’ the older clown retorted, nudging his comrade in the ribs. ‘For they are quite priceless. But it looks like you haven’t played host to a good grin – much less a hearty laugh – in many a moon.’
‘What cause have I to be merry?’
‘We would give you cause if you would wet our lips and perhaps fill our stomachs a little in return?’
The chai wallah looked them up and down and sighed. ‘All right, if you can make me laugh, I’ll give you each a cup of chai and a biscuit. But I warn you, you’re wasting your time.’
‘What’s going on?’ Theo whispered, for he had not understood a word of this chatter in Hindi.
‘It’s time for you to do your banana trick,’ Buntee smiled, gesturing at a bunch next to the pot of chai.
‘I already told you – I can’t do it anymore,’ Theo sighed, stroking the dog’s back distractedly.
‘Can’t or won’t? Maybe your magic is too good for us peasants,’ Buntee snapped, his fatigue and hunger overcoming his gentle nature.
‘Oh, honestly. I left the home of Parvati and her rich family to travel with you, Buntee.’
‘And maybe you should go back there. At least then you’d have teams of cooks and servants to serve you three meals a day. On the road you have to work for every crumb!’ Buntee yelled.
The dog watched the argument unfold with growing impatience. Theo’s fingers were spreading the warmth of love and acceptance through his bones for the first time in years. And now this big guy was bullying his new friend. Yes, he knew what it was to be pushed around by others.
‘So wake up, Theo,’ Buntee continued, leaning over him as he shouted. ‘You have to learn how to …aaaargh!’ The clown screamed in pain as the dog jumped up and sank its teeth into his behind. There was a ripping sound and the mongrel came away a mouthful of Buntee’s trousers between its teeth.
‘Hahaha!’ the chai wallah chuckled. ‘Not bad at all. Ha ha! That was worth a breakfast.’
Buntee froze in shock and then relaxed with a grin as if it had all been planned. He hopped over to claim his reward while trying to cover the exposed part of his bottom with one hand.
The chai was sickly sweet but it gave them a warm feeling in the stomach and that was a welcome change. The sun had yet to climb above the tree tops and Theo sipped his tea gratefully. He was grubby, bruised and travel-worn – but altogether rather happy.
It had been more than a month since he and Buntee had hit the road, travelling north through India by the lesser-trod routes in the countryside. They passed through villages with no electricity and where water was drawn from a well. Women cooked pots of rice using cow dung as a fuel and everyone went to the toilet at dawn on the edge of a field.
‘It’s like time travel,’ Theo told Buntee one day, as they caught a ride in the back of an old cart pulled by a young bull. ‘I often wondered what it might be like to visit the past, and here it is – in India.’
Buntee listened carefully to everything his young friend said and, apart from occasional quarrels, his respect and love for Theo grew by the day. It wasn’t easy to explain to the endlessly curious Indians why he was travelling with a small foreign boy, but he usually claimed Theo was half-Indian and that he was his nephew.
In truth, the boy was more like a son. Although Buntee had the face of a child, the lines around his eyes betrayed that he was well over 30. The older he became, the more he missed not having a family.
‘Why have you never married?’ Theo asked him one day.
Buntee shrugged. ‘It’s hard enough to feed yourself in a country like this,’ he explained.
‘What about your folks?’ Theo asked another day.
Buntee bowed his head and Theo understood that he wasn’t ready to talk about his past.
A week later, though, they passed a gang of workers repairing the road. They were the thinnest, darkest, most hopeless people Theo had ever seen. The men carried enormous rocks on their small heads, cushioned by a thin scarf. The women and children sat on the ground and broke large rocks into smaller ones with a chisel and mallet. They all worked non-stop under the cruel afternoon sun, while a foreman marched around and yelled at them if they paused for a break.
‘There,’ Buntee said, his eyes far away and his voice like lead. ‘That is how I grew up. My parents were enslaved to a contract to work with the road gangs. A day after giving birth to me, my mother was breaking rocks again while I took milk. They barely made enough to eat, and when they fell ill, with all the dust in their lungs, they couldn’t afford a doctor.’
‘Why didn’t they walk away and do something else?’ Theo asked, appalled at such a life.
‘They didn’t know how,’ Buntee replied. ‘They didn’t know where they could go or what they could do. They weren’t even sure the foreman would let them go. After they died, I was put to work breaking and carrying stones to fix the roads. I was four years old. When we had finished one patch of road, the foreman packed us up and moved us on somewhere else. In a country the size of India, it’s a task that has no end. The workers get into debt with the foreman and there’s no way out.’
‘So how did you escape?’
‘I learnt to juggle. When work was over at night, I’d throw five or six stones in the air and try to catch them. One day the foreman caught me at it and I panicked, expecting a beating. Instead, he looked at me with a new greed in his eye. He took me to a roadside café and made me perform for the truck-drivers there. Naturally, he kept all the rupees they put in the hat he passed around.
‘After that he took me along every day, until one time he got so drunk that he passed out under a tree. While he snored away, I climbed on to the back of a truck and hit the road alone.’
When Theo thought back to his days in St Jude’s, it seemed like a life of luxury: water when you turned the tap, comfortable beds, plenty of food, and everything clean and in good condition. On the other hand, there was a lightness of spirit in the Indians he met, a readiness to laugh or to be amazed that he’d never seen anywhere else in the world.
Theo finished his chai and Buntee tugged his elbow to draw attention to an old man walking barefoot down the road as if he owned it. He had long, grey dreadlocks and wore only a saffron cloth around his waist. His face was covered in ash and he had strange beads around his neck. Buntee ran over and touched his feet in respect before humbly making a few inquiries. The old man replied grumpily at first but then seemed to change his mind about Buntee and began to speak freely and with enthusiasm. He blessed Buntee by daubing ash between his eyebrows and then departed down the road without looking back.
‘Who was that?’ Theo asked, his curiosity aflame.
‘That,’ Buntee rejoined merrily, ‘was a sadhu. Sadhus are people who have left the world of society to go looking for Ultimate Truth by themselves.’
‘How do they survive?’
‘They receive donations of food from villagers in return for their blessings. Some heal the sick, others grow wise and give sage advice. Some learn to live on wild roots or simply on one banana a day. They don’t marry, work or live indoors. Some refuse even to touch money.’
Just like an AO, Theo thought.
‘Often they’re also just bad-tempered old men,’ Buntee admitted. ‘And some are little more than con men and fakes. But once this sadhu heard the name of Jadooji, he got very excited and told me all the news.’
‘Really?’ Theo gasped. In the past few weeks of getting by on the road, he’d almost forgotten the next stage of his quest. ‘But how did he know?’
‘Sadhus love to gossip as much as anyone,’ Buntee laughed. ‘Whenever they meet on the road, they share the latest news from all corners of India. This sadhu recently met a pilgrim who had returned from paying his respects to Jadooji in the mountains.’
‘So you know where we can find him now?’ Theo cried excitedly.
‘I do,’ Buntee grinned. ‘It seems my great-uncle has set himself up as a wise man in a cave and receives hundreds of visitors a day, all seeking the answers to their lives. But the big news is about an invisible saint who has set up shop a little further down the mountain. Apparently, he meets often with Jadooji and he consumes vast quantities of food that the villagers bring.’
‘Ha,’ Theo laughed. ‘I thought holy men and saints were supposed to lead strict lives of hardship and fasting, not stuff themselves on the generosity of others.’
Buntee shrugged as if to say this-is-India-there-are-no-rules. ‘I don’t know. But a miracle is a miracle. And another thing about this saint – only the young children can see him.’
Theo’s heart stopped. It couldn’t be, could it? He felt the tiny sprouting of a hope inside his heart and squashed it at once. He had told the Enemy that hope was Hoomanity’s great strength but it could be dangerous as well. To lose someone once was bad enough – to lose them again through a vain hope would be too painful to bear.
Still, suddenly every minute of delay weighed on him like a rock. ‘What’s the fastest way to reach this mountain?’ he asked, jumping to his feet.
‘ “Start early, go slowly, arrive safely,” as Jadooji always used to tell me,’ Buntee laughed.
If Bozo had been here, he would have said, ‘Get up late, drive like the blazes and arrive in a spurt of dust,’ Theo thought with a giggle. He turned around and threw his biscuit to the crippled dog that lurked a few paces away. He and Buntee started off down the road and stuck out their palms to hail the passing trucks.