Garbo’s Faces
a Novel — Part 3: Shoes and News
I got my first pair of shoes in 1942. My new school would not hear of bare feet in class, so there you have it. It was not my idea. And of course I had to go to high school, both Harriet and Jiddu insisted apparently, and what was an old useless woman to do, said Madhuri. So, freshly shod, off I went to a private school near Hindupur, two dusty days of travel from Madanapalle and my life so far, to learn how to speak English, and how to wear the damn things.
It took me four months and a lot of pleading with incarcerated toes and protesting insteps, along with many a long discussion with stiff leather and slippery soles stiffer still, to use them with even a modicum of comfort. For weeks the greatest thing on Earth, what kept me going, that shining light ahead, was that one moment, that one glorious moment when after hobbling into my room, after closing the door behind me, I could finally sit down on my bed and ease my feet out of their twin prisons. And there I would sit, on the edge of my bed, for minutes without moving, watching these two sore escapees pulse with hurt and indignation. They didn’t care much for the British, did my feet — for these unreasonable English teachers who saw fit to enshoe their Indian pupils without even the fleetest of notions that Indian feet might beg to differ with their stuffy protocol.
Free at last.
Until morning, and what kept me huddled under the blanket until there simply was no putting if off any longer: the painful reintroduction of blistery feet to their dark, constricting cells.
But, as Madhuri told me more than once, everything can be mastered, even shoes apparently, and in the end I tamed them (or they tamed me, one or the other).
By spring the shoe-battle was but memory and I was free to fall in with the many books they gave me to read. And read I did. And read. Which is how I discovered I had a gift for the English language.
Another thing I discovered that spring was that I loved buildings. The grace and mystery of their rising — the British were nothing if not industrious — the alchemy of their conception and design. Seeing marble, or bricks, or plastered, or wooded walls rise around the intricate skeletons of beam and balk to the beat of the architect’s score, a little every day, until one day, new and complete, and with pomp and sometimes a marching band, they almost shone with the long effort, I decided to make buildings my life. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. But now I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
At this time I still did not know who my mother was.
Over the years I had asked Madhuri often enough; pleaded with her for an answer. Especially on those days that the question of my parentage was cruelly raised by those neighborhood boys who knew me to be motherless. But while Madhuri would do all she could to comfort me — she’d cook my favorite meals, tell me wonderful stories, she would even teach me snake talk — she could not answer my question, for she did not know either; Jiddu refused to tell her. But, she’d add, your mother must be someone very special. Just look at your eyes. Look at your beautiful blue eyes, Nachiketa.
In the end it was Jiddu himself who told me, and this on the very day I graduated from college. This was in May of 1951 and I had just turned 23.
“You’ll be going to England now, to attend a real school,” and this he said as if there was something quite the matter with Indian schools, even those run by leftover Englishmen. “I’ve secured you a place at King’s College,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, I know you’ve been pestering Madhuri about it: Your mother is Harriet Brown.”
At first — I’m sure you can imagine — I misunderstood him. What other choice did I have?
“Sorry,” I said. “What did you say? I must have heard you wrongly.”
“No,” he said. “You heard me just fine. Your mother is Harriet Brown, is exactly what I said. And now you’ve heard it correctly, twice.”
Coming from anyone else, I could and would have shrugged this off as the insanity it surely was. Good joke, fine show, and all that. But this was Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the terrifying thing about hearing this from him, and twice now, was that my father, from what I had so far experienced, just didn’t lie. And to make matters worse, Madhuri had told me on more than one occasion that Jiddu was the most truthful person she knew. “Were my son to tell you that the moon would strike the Earth tomorrow,” she’d laugh, “I suggest you find some very solid cover.” And so I had no choice but to assume that his news, no matter how far-fetched, was true.
I had heard of her, of course. All the world had heard of her. And, yes, it would explain my pale blue eyes, the twin mystery of my dark face. Pale Eyes, that’s what they used to call me in elementary school. Motherless Pale Eyes. And had Madhuri not taught me snake talk, I am not sure I would have survived my shoeless Madanapalle school days.
Motherless Pale Eyes, son of a whore or a goat or a dog, bastard son of no mother to be found. And sometimes the larger — or richer — boys, the principal bullies, would then chase me and push me to the ground and kick me, or poke at me with sticks, once or twice even urinate on me. Motherless Pale Eyes. Get out of here. You don’t belong here. Go find your whore mother, if you have one, if she’s still alive, if she didn’t kill herself when she set eyes on you. Find yourself a she goat.
Look at Pale Eyes, crying now for his goat mother.
But I did know snake talk, and in the end, after I had reached my limit of shame and humiliation, it took only one demonstration for the word to get out.
Ganaraj, a fat boy with a very rich and much fatter father, was usually the first to goad, the first to kick, the last to leave me to my misery. One morning they found him not dead but near enough to serve my purpose, bitten not once but thrice by cobras during the night.
Such a thing had never happened before. Not in Madanapalle at any rate, and nowhere else either, that the doctor knew of. Never, he said again. Three bites, and by three different snakes — different spacing between the fangs you see: here, here and here. The wonder was that Ganaraj was still alive. Well, a wonder to them. I had asked the snakes specifically not to kill, only to mark, and they had done exactly that, deep bites with only a trace of venom from each, though even hardly any venom at all had been enough to usher Ganaraj next door to death.
When, the following day, I brought the three perpetrators to school — well, that’s not exactly right: the cobras had agreed to come and appear with me at first recess, which they did — it grew very clear to the children what had happened. Especially after I first told the stunned little crowd that I would, then did ask the three cobras to circle me three times in the dirt and then leave in a straight line — one after the other — for the nearby brush, all of which they, as agreed, did, much to the wide-eyed and still shocked amazement of now very meek bullies and their hangers-on.
And so, word got out and I had no problems with bullies after that.
Of course, Madhuri soon put two and two together, and while she understood why I had done what I did, she did not approve. She never said anything, though, not as such, but her eyes, usually warm, turned cold and sympathetic both — if that’s a possible mix.
And so they remained — reproachful and loving, both — until she finally spoke with the perpetrators herself and learned that the cobras had indeed agreed that something had to be done about my unfair treatment at school and were only too glad to do my bidding. Not that this made her approve, but it softened her considerably, and that night she hugged me again, and read me some more of her stories.
They are a wise race, cobras. More of that later.
Ganaraj was nursed back to life, but he was never quite the same after that. There was nothing wrong physically, is what they said, but every now and then, especially when he saw me, seems he had trouble working his tongue and he would grow hard to understand. He also had some problem controlling his bladder whenever snakes were mentioned. As you may have already gathered, he never called me Pale Eyes again, and neither did anyone else. Nor was I called motherless, by anyone.
There was a downside to this, however: I now found myself alone, left to myself even by those who had been my friends, few though they were; they were now afraid of me. Which left me and Madhuri, with a lot of time on our hands. “Perhaps not such a bad thing,” she said. “I have a lot to teach you.”
So, “Oh, and by the way, I know you’ve been pestering Madhuri about it: Your mother is Harriet Brown.”
I still held his hand in mine. The light curtains upon which many white suns and golden moons danced in a repeating pattern swayed slowly in the open window and I could hear many people moving about outside, some talking, some laughing, some taking what sounded like tearful leave of each other. We, too (though now suddenly stranded), were in the middle of a goodbye. Jiddu was off to somewhere again, America I believe, or Japan, I could never keep track; well, I could, but chose not to. At least he had come for my graduation, that was something, but now he was off again.
He was always formal with me, always shaking hands, never embracing, just hand embracing hand.
“Sorry,” I said. “What did you say? I must have heard you wrongly.”
“No,” he said. “You heard me just fine. Your mother is Harriet Brown, is exactly what I said. And now you’ve heard it correctly, twice.”
“Harriet Brown?”
“Harriet Brown.”
“The Harriet Brown.”
“Yes.”
I still held onto his hand, no longer in farewell, but for support. The curtains still moved with the breeze, still swelling with light, but everything beyond them had gone silent, as if the world outside had simply emptied, or as if everybody in it had suddenly frozen in place, holding their breath, the better to hear.
“But of course,” he went on, as if all this were well-known to me, “no one knows, or must know. You have no mother, Nachiketa. Officially. You know that, of course. You cannot tell anyone.”
I didn’t know that, of course, at all, but I said yes, of course, of course.
He then, with some difficulty, let go of my hand — or rather, made my hand, which now seemed to suffer some strange rigor mortis, let go of his. And with my hand now left clutching the air, he turned and walked out.
“Take care of yourself,” he said as he reached the door, and with that quick, dark backward glance of his that I had come to dislike, he left.
The door closed behind him with a light squeak and a soft click, leaving me still clutching his hand, or so my hand seemed to think. Left me thinking of Harriet Brown and her blue eyes and of me and my blue eyes and of Jiddu leaving me to pack my books and clothes and not so many other things and travel back to Madanapalle on my own, and of me and who I was, and who I had suddenly become: no longer motherless; though I had no mother, of course. Officially.
Three days later, safely back in Madanapalle after a blistering and a little too eventful a journey, I told Madhuri. By this time Jiddu had told her as well, because she hugged me and cried and spoke to me first in snake talk (which she always used when she wanted to show how special I was to her and how precious was our relationship) then — snake talk no longer up to the task at hand — in our normal tongue about how unfair the world had been to me and about how much I looked like Harriet Brown, really, if you paid no mind to my black hair (it was so black by then it was nearly blue), or my dark face, and looked at me as I would look had I been born a Scandinavian prince, which is what Madhuri said I was, wasn’t I? And would I please to take off my shoes in her house, if I didn’t mind so very much. Her house was not a Hindupur school for snobby boys, you now.
We didn’t mind so very much at all, neither me nor my feet.
And Harriet Brown was my mother. My mother. Harriet Brown was my mother. Now that Madhuri said so too, it was wholly true. Completely, if not officially.
But no matter how true it was, you might as well have sat me down and told me that Devaki was my mother and that Lord Krishna and I were indeed brothers, the news could not have been stranger to me. Born to a living Hollywood goddess. Jiddu, as my father, yes, that made sense — at least he looked like me — and I knew that Madhuri was my grandmother, some things you just know. But Harriet Brown. That would take some getting used to, to put it mildly.
Scandinavian prince: pale blue eyes looked back at me from the bathroom mirror. Scandinavian eyes, perhaps, yes, but that was about all. All that made any sense.
Naturally, I became not a little obsessed with her. Especially once I arrived in England and could see, over and over, her many films.
Harriet Brown: my mother.
Still, there were studies to attend to, and perhaps luckily so, for they took my mind off her, sometimes for hours at a stretch. And so my days passed, and my years.
I got to go back and see Madhuri during the summer of 1953; Jiddu even paid for aeroplane tickets this time, but other than that, it seems I did nothing but study and watch Harriet movies for four years.
And yes, of course, my love for buildings grew: somewhere along the way I had decided to become an architect.
© Wolfstuff