River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [5]
Later, when the storm broke and the winds began to shriek, she piled up some wood and lit a fire with the flints: that was when she discovered that some parts of the chalky walls had been drawn upon with bits of charcoal; some of the marks looked like stick figures, made by children. When the raging of the wind made Girin howl in fear, it was these older images that gave Deeti the idea of drawing upon the wall.
Look, she said to her son: dekh – he is here, with us, your father. There is nothing to fear; he is by our side …
That was how she began to draw the first of her pictures: it was a larger-than-life-size image of Kalua.
Later, in years to come, her children and grandchildren would often ask why there was so little of herself on the walls of the shrine. Why so few images of her own early experiences in the plantation? Why so many drawings of her husband and his fellow fugitives? Her answer was: Ekut: to me your grandfather’s image was not like a figure of an Ero in a painting; it was real; it was the verité. When I managed to come up here, it was to be with him. My own life, I had to endure every sekonn of every day: when I was here, I was with him …
*
It was that first, larger-than-life image that was always the starting point for viewings of the shrine: here, as in life, Kalua, was taller and larger than anyone else, as black as Krishna himself. Rendered in profile, he bestrode the wall like some all-conquering Pharaoh, with a langot knotted around his waist. Under his feet, engraved by some other hand, was the name that had been thrust upon him in the migrants’ camp in Calcutta – ‘Maddow Colver’ – enclosed in an ornamental cartouche.
As with all pilgrimages, the Fami’s visits to the shrine followed certain prescribed patterns: usage and custom dictated the direction of the circumambulation as well as the order in which the pictures had to be viewed and venerated. After the image of the founding father, the next stop was a panel that was known to the Fami as ‘The Parting’ (Biraha): there was no inscription or engraving below it, but every Colver spoke of it by this name, and even the youngest of the chutkas and chutkis knew that it depicted a critical juncture in the history of their family – the moment of Deeti’s separation from her spouse.
It had happened, they all knew, when Deeti and Kalua were on the Ibis, making the Crossing, from India to Mauritius with scores of other indentured workers. Bedevilled from the start, the misfortunes of the voyage had culminated with Kalua being sentenced to death for a simple act of self-defence. But before the penalty could be administered a storm had arisen, engulfing the schooner and allowing Kalua to escape in a lifeboat, along with four other fugitives.
The saga of the patriarch’s deliverance from the Ibis was often told amongst the Colvers: it was to them what the story of the watchful geese was to Ancient Rome – an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary destiny. In Deeti’s depiction of it, the scene was framed as if to freeze for ever the moments before the fugitives’ boat was swept away from the mother-ship by the angry waves: the Ibis was portrayed in the fashion of a mythological bird, with a great beak of a bowsprit and two enormous, outspread canvas wings. The fugitives’ longboat was to the right, only a foot or so away, and it was separated from the Ibis by two tall stylized waves. As a contrast to the schooner’s bird-like form, the boat’s shape was suggestive of a half-submerged fish; its size, on the other hand – perhaps to underscore the grandeur of its role,