Spell of the Flying Foxes

Sylvia Dyer

Description

It is a commonly held belief in India that flying foxes augur prosperity. They were certainly abundant in the Champaran region of north Bihar. Here in 1845, an Englishman, Alfred Augustus Tripe, fascinated by the prospect of farming indigo, known as Blue Gold, was drawn to its isolated wilderness. He acquired a large tract of rich, fertile land by the river Baghmati, married an Indian lady of means and reaped prosperity in the days when dust turned to gold'. Their children were sent to England for an education, but tragically only one, Joseph Rowland Tripe, lived long enough to marry and produce a daughter, Gladys. The disastrous earthquake that struck Bihar in 1934 annihilated the ancestral home and those members of the family trapped within its walls, sparing only Gladys, who was left helpless with her young children and her powerful, unscrupulous cousin Harry. Taking advantage of this development, Harry attempted to usurp Gladys's entire inheritance, but was foiled by the mysterious intervention of a formidable dacoit leader. With the advent of Independence and the ensuing drastic land reforms, the flying foxes disappear, and with them a golden era. In The Spell of the Flying Foxes Sylvia Dyer, Gladys s daughter, recaptures what now seems a fairy-tale world of picturesque beauty, peopled by unique and unforgettable characters.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184755794
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sylvia Dyer
The Spell of the Flying Foxes
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
PART 1
The Flying Foxes
The Beginning
Home Sweet Home
Disaster
The Aftermath
PART 2
The Sugar-Coated Days (Of Parrot and Pig)
Moving On
Evenings at Home
Bringing in the New
Harry s Soft Spots
Tea and Its Discoveries
A Man and a River
The Khariyan
The Merry Days of Winter
Spirits
Coming Events
Our Bovine Creatures
A Grave Tale
Seasons with Reasons
The Monsoon
Games of Chance
Bachoo the Barber
Something Strange and Sinister
Lust for Land
Education
Christmas Time
Shikars
PART 3
1942: The Great Change
Comings and Goings
Independence
A Festival of Affliction
A Time to Die
Mother
The Last Sands
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Spell of The Flying Foxes
Sylvia Dyer was born in 1928 and grew up in the wilds of Champaran in north Bihar, on a plantation pioneered as an indigo estate by her great-grandfather, an Englishman. She spent ten years of schooling at St Helen s Convent at Kurseong, Darjeeling, was married twice, and widowed both times, to Indian Army officers. There were two sons from her first marriage and a daughter from the second. She now lives alone in Pune and her two surviving children have settled abroad.
PART 1
The Flying Foxes
Nobody would ever forget Dhang, though after all these years it seems to me that it never really existed, and was just a long-ago, stretched-out dream. But it was there all right, tucked away at the foot of the Himalaya, in the district of Champaran in Bihar, sharing a common boundary with the Forbidden Kingdom , as Nepal was then known. Previously, there had been no boundary at all, just an understanding with the Forbidden , for in those days the Terai spread across the brow of India in a belt so dark and dense that people scarcely knew, or cared, where India ended and Nepal began, so engrossed were they in the ceaseless tug of war with the ever-encroaching jungle.
But the British had, as usual, decided the where , pushing forward the frontiers in an action that seemed to say, People of the hills, live in the hills! They set up new boundary posts at a desolate spot named Majorgunj, five kilometres north-east of Dhang, and a cemetery to speak for their dead, most of whom had been felled not by the kukri, but by raging tropical diseases like cholera, smallpox and malaria, so the gravestones revealed.
The jungle too was pushed back by determined cultivators, and slowly, very slowly, lush green fields began to appear in progressively widening patches leading to a momentous discovery. The soil of Champaran was capital for the cultivation of indigo, which in those days was the world s only blue dye and regarded as Blue Gold . Naturally it attracted men from the West, adventurous and enterprising men who were looking for a new beginning like my great-grandfather, Alfred Augustus Tripe. That is how it all began.
Slowly the scene changed. Villages sprang up, and shallow embankments that served as demarcation or boundary lines planted with rows of shisham trees. These were quality timber trees known for their strength and durability, and they stood like ramparts against the worst floods of the river Baghmati, which during heavier monsoons went berserk, flowing savagely away with any weakly rooted thing, whether cultivation, habitation or line of demarcation. But the shisham trees, like invincible green sentinels, stood fast, holding their ground against the worst floods, as though it had been decreed, Stand fast, and the madness of the river shall not prevail against you!
The Baghmati wreaked its havoc; yet, as if guided by an underlying sense of fairness, it paid for the damage with the glorious silt it spread lavishly over its transgressions. So in the final count, you loved this river and saw why it was called the Baghmati , which means Garden Earth . And you knew that Dhang was the gift of the Baghmati.
And so it was. A land so fertile, locals claimed, that my great-grandfather s walking stick, once left out in the garden, had taken root and sprouted leaves overnight! Men had to be mindful of their walking sticks. It was a tall story, like so many others in the days when people amused themselves with stories, squatting under a wide, shady tree in summer or around a bonfire in winter with the flames spitting cinders at their nonsensical talk. But even Alfred Augustus Tripe, who was a hard-headed, no-nonsense man, used to say that when he touched this soil gold came forth from it. And so it did, in the beginning.
Over this enchanted land the sun rose, touching the tips of the mighty old shisham trees, slowly, almost reverently washing them down with sunlight, a daily head-to-foot ritual like the Hindu bath. They presented a singular appearance of grace and strength, this particular row of trees, since for some reason unknown to us they had been exempted from the yearly pruning that shisham trees were normally subjected to. So their many branches grew out laterally graceful, like the arms of gods and goddesses in serene and benevolent attitudes, hung with streamer-like offshoots and cascades of little coin-shaped leaves.
And just about this time, if you happened to look up, little, black specks began to appear in the brightening sky, taking shape as they drew nearer in twos and threes and fours, moving with the awkward elastic progression peculiar to flying foxes hurrying home from their nocturnal excursions, which, contrary to what some people think, were really quite innocent. They were not blood-crazed Draculas, but merely little foxes with membranous wings, pointed snouts, stand-up ears and clear, vegetarian eyes. Soon, there were scores of them, softly screeching their chaaaans and chiiiis as they flapped about their favourite trees to hang themselves up for the day. Hooked-up, soft, furry bodies with stomachs full of fruit, suspended in the black-ribbed latex of their wings like foxy people in hammocks, getting an upside-down view of the world, day after day, year after year. At sunset they unhooked, unfolded and flew off, the right way up. Verily they had, you might say, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of life that rendered them fairly omniscient creatures. Who knows?
But why? we wanted to know. Why only this row of trees?
Mother gazed at them searching for an explanation for something that had never crossed her mind. Could it be that since these trees were never pruned, they had so many branches for the flying foxes to hang upon?
But then, why were they not?
She couldn t say. How or why, nobody could say, or even remember. Sukhesar Ojha, one of our oldest retainers and the intellectual among the Brahmins, peering into the mists of time, recalled that even when they were children, the trees and the flying foxes had been there.
One thing is certain. They were here in the time of your great-grandfather, he said clearing his throat, as he always did before the delivery of a revelation, while the eyes in his fine-featured brown face lit up with a keen fire. Flying foxes, he said, are believed to be a symbol of prosperity; and during that time there was a curious prediction concerning these creatures.
That day we learned from Sukhesar about the spell of the flying foxes.
In the hazy past, a sadhu had come out of the Terai jungles in the north; a strange being, like a shrivelled old dwarf-tree from the foothills that had uprooted itself and walked away, moving southwards with a purpose. He could have walked out of a book of witches and magicians. Long, silvery grey hair covered him like a cloak and a beard like wispy snow flowed over his front almost to the knees. Even his body, stark naked in the bitter cold of December, was smeared silvery with ash. He strode along, carrying a staff far taller than himself, and the village people followed in his wake, drawn like dark, wingless insects to an oil lamp. He had still a considerable distance to cover, in this his final journey to the Ganges; for the Hindu mystic knows when his time is near and his spirit draws him to the great sacred river.
It was midday when he reached our khariyan, and stopped with the rigid discipline of ascetics, to rest and revive himself with water fresh from the well and a portion of the roasted besan he carried. Only then did he become aware of his surroundings; and looking around, his eyes came to rest on the row of shisham trees with the flying foxes hanging asleep in them. His gaze locked on the scene, trance-like; and when he spoke, the many who squatted around him like a restrained cordon of flies, heard him clearly: See those trees, he said in a husky voice, raising one of his twig-like arms to point, now heavy laden with scores of flying foxes, like the wealth of this kothi. But when they leave these trees and go, so will the prosperity. He sighed, casting his eyes wearily around. And everything fair as we see it this day!
What could we have done to hold back the flying foxes, even if we had believed?
It was a serenely wooded place, with the cool, aromatic fragrance of wild flowers. Undisturbed. In fact, close by our ancestors lay resting in peace. Keen rays of the sun, dodging through the leafy density above, played on the marble statues and slabs in the little family graveyard, covering it with shadow lace. Few people passed this way, and those who did simply joined the palms of their hands and, bowing their heads in reverence to the marble angels, moved on.
Sometimes in the summer, when daylight lingered awhile after sunset, we watched the flying foxes wake and leave their trees in low, erratic flight. Our dogs ran after them, taking wild leaps in the air, landing on one another or having head-on collisions that sparked off skirmishes among themselves, leaving the flying foxes chuckling. Or, once in a while, the boys took out their air rifles and brought down a couple for the locals to prepare as