Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [57]
‘Um – thank you,’ said Zaki, embarrassed that their midnight comings and goings had not gone unnoticed.
While Mr Dalal was busy making a fresh pot of tea, Zaki looked around the room. Every available surface seemed to support a little line of carved elephants. Some lines were arranged in ascending height; in other lines all the elephants were more or less the same size but were carved out of different materials. The majority were made from wood, but some were fashioned from coloured stone. They marched across the tops of cupboards, shared shelves with the crockery, and one very large stone elephant served as a doorstop.
‘The elephants belong to my wife,’ said Mr Dalal. ‘She bought one when I first took her to India. My family decided she must love elephants and now they send her one every time they find a new one, which in India can be very, very often.’
Mr Dalal poured mugs of tea and pulled a chair out for Zaki at the table.
‘I was thinking about something you said last night, about not being just bodies,’ Zaki said.
‘Body and mind?’
‘Yes. Do you think it might be possible for our minds to – I don’t know – to get changed somehow?’
‘I change my mind all the time. Ask my dear wife.’
‘I didn’t mean like that.’
‘No, of course you didn’t. Excuse me – I was only teasing.’
‘What I meant was . . . can something happen so that your mind can exist without your body?’
‘Some say there is really only one mind, that exists everywhere, and that each of our minds is a little bit of it.’
Zaki shook his head, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Imagine a big, big window that has been painted completely black. Now, I scratch a hole in the paint on the left side and you scratch a hole in the paint on the right side. When we look through the holes, we can both see the same view but we see it from slightly different angles. The holes are our minds, what we are looking at is the one mind. Does that help?’
‘A little,’ said Zaki.
‘When we talk about mind like this, we are not talking about brain.’ Mr Dalal wagged his finger.
‘Could my mind work in somebody else’s body?’
This time it was Mr Dalal’s turn to shake his head in puzzlement. ‘That is a truly wonderful question . . . and, if you ever find the answer, you must tell me what it is.’ The next to arrive in the kitchen was Anusha’s mother. She regarded the two at the table, heads together, like a pair of conspirators.
‘Sandeep, has that poor boy had any breakfast?’
‘Certainly! Cup of tea, and yogic wisdom.’
‘Oh, honestly! You could at least have given him some cereal. And where is Anusha?’
‘Sleeping, I expect. Perhaps I should wake her.’
‘Perhaps you should. Now, Zaki, what would you like? Cereal, toast, eggs?’
‘Toast would be fine, thanks.’
Mr Dalal left to wake Anusha while his wife bustled around the kitchen making toast, and setting out plates, bowls and cereals on the kitchen table.
Zaki went back to examining the carved elephants. He noticed one that looked rather odd and he got up from the table to take a closer look. The little elephant had been given a place of honour. It was seated in a niche in the wall. Unlike the other elephants, it was brightly painted. Now Zaki saw that it had the head of an elephant but the body of a human, except that the body had four arms. One of the four hands held a noose, one held a sort of stick, the third was held up, palm forward, the fourth held a broken tusk. There was a snake around the creature’s waist and a mouse at its feet.
‘That’s Ganesha,’ said Anusha.
Zaki turned to find her standing behind him. Her hair was still wet from the shower.
‘Why does he look like that?’
‘Well, there are two different stories, but anyway he lost his head when he was a baby and his father, Shiva, who is a god of course, gave him an elephant’s head. The really important thing is that he’s the remover of obstacles.’
‘The remover of obstacles,’ Zaki repeated.
‘What are all those things he’s holding?’
‘That’s a goad, a stick to prod you forward,