14

Salisbury! The dream of so many days!…

Today, he was truly standing on the pavement of a large, European-style city. Great buildings, banks, hotels, shops, wide asphalt-paved roads, electric trams running along one side, Zulu rickshaw-wallahs pulling their rickshaws, newsboys selling papers. Everything seemed new, as if he had never in his life seen such sights.

He had reached civilization, but he was utterly destitute. He didn’t even have the money for a cup of tea. He was overjoyed to see an Indian shop nearby. How long it had been since he had seen the face of a countryman! The shopkeeper was a Memon Muslim, a wholesale dealer in soaps and perfumes. It was a very large shop. The moment he saw Shankar, he understood that the man was in distress and in trouble. He helped him with two rupees of his own and told him to go and see an Indian merchant.

With the two rupees in his pocket, Shankar stepped out onto the street again. As he left, he had said, “Thank you so much for the money. I’m taking this as a loan—when I have the means, you must let me repay you.” Right in front of him was an Indian restaurant. He could not resist the temptation of a proper meal. How long it had been since he had tasted civilized food. He went inside and, for one rupee, ate his fill of puri, kachori, halwa, and meat chops. Along with them, he had two or three cups of coffee.

At the table, his eye fell on an old newspaper. In one section, a headline was printed in large letters:

National Park Survey Party’s Singular Experience. A lonely Indian found in the desert. Dying of Thirst and Exhaustion. His strange story.

Shankar saw that a photograph of him had also been printed in the paper. A completely fabricated story had been attributed to him as well. He had told no such story to anyone.

The newspaper’s name was the Salisbury Daily Chronicle. He went to the newspaper office and introduced himself. A crowd gathered around him. It turned out that a team of reporters had been trying hard to find him. There, for telling them a story about having broken his leg on the Chimanimani mountains and for allowing them to take his photograph, Shankar was paid fifty rupees. From that money, the first thing he did was to go and repay the two rupees to the kind-hearted Muslim shopkeeper.

He wrote an article for the paper about the volcano they had seen. In it, he named the volcano Mount Alvarez. However, this story of such a large, active volcano hidden in the forests of Central Africa was believed by some, and not by others. Of course, he breathed not a word to anyone about the cave of gems. Hordes of people would rush off in search of it.

After that, he went to a bookshop and bought a great many English books and monthly journals. How long it had been since he had read a book! In the evening, he saw a film at a cinema. After so long, as he lay that night in a proper hotel bed, reading under the electric light, he would occasionally glance out the window at Prince Albert Victor Street below. Trams were passing by, Zulu rickshaw-wallahs were pulling their rickshaws, a bell was tinkling—thun thun—in the Indian coffee house, and now and then a motor-car or two went past…. And with this, another image came to mind—a fire pit before him, and a little way off, a circle of coyotes and hyenas. Behind them, in the darkness, the two round eyes of a wolf glowed like embers.

Which was the dream?… That terrifying night spent on the Chimanimani mountains, or this night?

Meanwhile, in Salisbury, he became a famous man. The lobby of his hotel was always filled with a throng of reporters. Newspapermen came to arrange contracts to publish his travelogue; others came to take his photograph.

He told the Italian Consul General about Attilio Gatti. A search of the old papers in his office revealed that an aristocratic young Italian named Attilio Gatti had gone ashore on the coast of Portuguese West Africa in August 1879, following a shipwreck. After that, no further trace of the young man was ever found. His relatives were wealthy and distinguished people. Until 1895, they had relentlessly plagued the consulate offices of East, West, and South Africa in their search for their missing kinsman; a reward had even been offered for finding him. From 1895 onwards, they had given up hope.

With the help of the aforementioned Muslim shopkeeper, he sold four of the stones at the shop of Rydal & Morsby, the great jewellers on Blackmoon Street, for thirty-two and a half thousand rupees. The remaining two fetched an even higher price, but Shankar wanted to take those two stones back to his homeland to show his mother. He had no desire to sell them now.

The blue ocean!…

Standing on the deck of the Bombay-bound ship, watching the coconut-grove-green shores of the port of Beira in Portuguese East Africa fade into the distance, Shankar thought about this adventure of his life. This was life; this was how he had always wanted to live it. A man’s lifespan is the wrong measure of his life. He had lived ten years of life in these one and a half years. Today he was not just a wandering traveller, but the co-discoverer of a living volcano. He would make Mount Alvarez famous throughout the world. Across the distant Indian Ocean, his heart had now grown restless for India—his motherland, his sacred land of birth. His soul was eager for the day when the high spire of Bombay’s Rajabai Tower, visible from afar, would announce the proximity of his motherland’s coast… and after that, at the edge of a Bengal resounding with the songs of Bauls and kirtans, their own small, green village… spring was coming… a day when clusters of sajne flowers would carpet the village path, when the bou-katha-kao bird would call from their big bakul tree… when his small dinghy would touch the river ghat.

Farewell, Alvarez, my friend!… In this joyful moment of returning to my homeland, it is of you that I think today. You are one of those men for whom the whole sky is a roof, the whole earth a path for their feet—bless me, from your lonely tomb in the great wilderness, that I might become like you in life, just as indifferent to joy and sorrow, just as fearless.

Farewell, my friend Attilio Gatti. You were a friend of many lifetimes.

Together, you all taught me the truth of that ancient verse from China—

To be a fine, foursquare tile on the eaves, living motionless in comfort and ease— it is better to be a crystal stone and be shattered, better to be shattered, better to be shattered.

He would have to return to Africa. But for now, the pull of his homeland was too strong. He would spend some time in the lap of his motherland. After that, back in his own country, he would try to form a company—to return to the distant Richtersveld mountains in a renewed search for the mine of jewels. He would find it. He would.

Until then—farewell