The Sound of Things to Come
III
The banging had already started as we strolled down the main road to the village. It was early evening and the sun was low in the sky, casting warm long shadows through the trees and across the dusty orange track. A tuc-tuc beeped as it racketed past, picking a wiggle between potholes. A lazy-eyed, skinny brown dog sniffed at a pile of plastic bits in the ditch to the side of the road, ignoring the chicken that pecked at the same stuff.
A boy and girl walked towards us in their old-fashioned school uniforms; the girl in a blue checked dress and the boy in a white shirt which was tucked in to his shorts. We smiled and said ‘hallo!’ as we walked past them, and they giggled ‘hello good evening!’ in response before covering their mouths with their hands and skipping off together.
We continued down along the main road in to the village and soon found an orange sign on the left-hand side of the road. It pointed up a path behind some low houses and a small shop with hand-painted Pepsi and Vodaphone signs, towards the lush green hilltop and the sound of the drums.
‘This way?’ I asked.
Grace took my hand and we started up the narrow path. The route took us past the back of more small houses and shacks and the smell of evening cooking. To either side of the path, little fields of plastic litter caught patches of the evening sun and rippled and quivered in the balmy breeze.
The path led us up and up and through denser vegetation. Bright low sun flickered and broke through the inky shadows of the forest; dazzling full in our faces before disappearing again behind dark green leaves. The dazzle coincided with the syncopation of the increasingly loud percussion.
After a few minutes we reached a clearing in the forest. The path led steeply up a rocky hill that glowed yellow, as if all of the day’s sun had been trapped inside and was now being slowly released. On either side of the path, were a series of small stone shrines, alternating from the left to the right of the path every ten metres or so up the hill.
Grace let go of my hand and ran ahead to peer inside the first shrine before skipping up the rocks to the next one, looking back at me with a puckish smile. She skipped ahead up the hill, jumping between black rocky outcrops and sprigs of bushy scrub, and I followed.
I looked in to the dark interior of each shrine as I climbed the hill, moving from left to right in a slow, reverse slalom. Each small temple was home to a different little statue of Ganesh.
One Ganesh was light pink with a golden headdress with a big crowning red circle. The pink and red matched the colours of the horizon outside. Another Ganesh had light blue skin, piercing little eyes and twinkling golden pyjamas. The next one was all silver with huge floppy elephant ears and a triangular belly button. Another Ganesh danced on a stool, as if dancing to the drumming being broadcast from the top of the hill, his trunk twisting and contorting along to the rhythms, like his other incarnation in the Guesthouse bedroom.
As I climbed the hill, the percussion continued and the flurrying flute arpeggios that I remembered from the early morning became discernable, except now much closer and crisper. My long shadow skipped up the hill in front of me, chasing Grace, who had disappeared over its brow.
I reached the top of the hill to find that if flattened out in to a large wooded plateau. I caught a glimpse of Grace running ahead through some trees towards the drumming. I turned to look back down the hill and across the village towards the river valley and long low shadows spreading far across golden fields.
Moving through the trees on top of the hill towards the ever louder banging, I could see snippets of shapes moving around in time to the drums. An arm here, a leg there, a flash of red, a bare chest. As I got closer I moved more tentatively, until I could clearly make out the scene.
In a large clearing, a whirling character with a bright orange face and wide white eyes was shaking, and jumping and clacking together two long rattles. Stopping still for a moment, the character opened its eyes wide and moved them slowly from side to side, blinked slowly then rolled them around in their sockets before shaking the rattles again. Behind the character, standing beside a simple tin-roofed shelter, five men wearing white sarongs had drums slung over their bodies and furiously pounded them with wooden sticks. Another one accompanied the drumming with apparently random arpeggios on a long flute.
A man in a red shawl with a bald head and bloodshot eyes emerged in to the orange glow of the clearing from a small shed. The concrete block construction and was covered in hand-painted signs and symbols in red and black and yellow and white. Looking over at Grace and I, who were standing at the edge of the clearance, the red shawl man beckoned us forward and signalled towards a patch of open ground with both of his open hands. Taking off our shoes, we moved forward with bare feet on flattened damp earth.
The orange-faced character was spinning and spinning to the drums, then running in tiny tip-toe steps. I froze as it suddenly careered right up to me with wide eyes before shaking the rattles in my face and rolling its eyes slowly in their sockets and then running backwards, back towards the five furious drummers. The character had an enormous vertical protruding backside and was pear-shaped like the Nowhere Man. Bells jangled around its ankles with every tiptoe and jump. A huge, precarious headdress wobbled as it jerked its head from side and rolled its big white staring eyes. Long, stiff, greasy and black, its hair fell down its back and remained unnaturally straight and stiff as the character span and leapt and ran.
The drums bang, bang, banged continuously; so loud that I could feel them exploding violently in my chest, in my stomach and vibrating through the ground in to my bare feet.
The orange Nowhere Man span around backwards and forwards, shaking his rattles and rolling his eyes. A man in a white sarong emerged from the surrounding shadows and started to engage the orange spirit in a dancing wrestle, without touching, leaping this way and that. The Nowhere Man jumped up on to a small stool and shook his sticks emphatically and rolled his eyes at the man below him. The man visibly weakened as the accompanying drumming sped up to an unprecedented mechanical tempo, like a chorus of road drills. The man succumbed and fell to the floor in a writhing, fitting mess before being carried away behind the shack temple by four men, still jerking spasmodically as they went.
The orange spirit moved under the tin roofed canopy and Grace and I automatically followed. We were now within feet of the drummers’ and the flautist and their power sounds echoed and resonated and pierced the space beneath the tin roof. The metallic pitch made our eyes blink and skulls shake with every drumbeat.
Crackling and rushing, a small speaker attached to the shack temple broadcast the piercing strings and the high female voice that I had heard in bed early that morning, distorted through crackling electric amplification Discordant and out of time with the drumming, the sounds added a further layer of noise that was only really clear when there were occasional pauses in the percussive attack. I was distracted for a moment by the idea that I would have heard such a tiny speaker – and the flute – in my bed earlier that morning and that the same group of drummers – and the orange spirit – had been performing here at four a.m. in the cold half-dark as my bedroom had wobbled and warped.
The orange spirit span and span and jumped and tip-toed and shook his rattles and span and leapt again.
Grace took my hand all of a sudden, gazed into my eyes and smiled. I nodded in response and we edged backwards from beneath the tin canopy, across the damp flat ground to where we had left our shoes. We slipped them on then crept hand in hand back through the trees, leaving the incessant drumming and whirling orange spirit with ringing in our ears and drums thumping in our chests.
We sat down on a rock on the edge of the hill and watched the huge red circle of the sun disappear behind a stand of trees. I felt a bite on the back of my hand and then noticed another on my ankle. I pulled my shirt collar up around my neck.
As we sat there looking out across the darkening fecund valley, my mobile phone ding donged in my pocket, mimicking the sound of a door bell. I pulled it out and thumbed it on to read the message: “Xmas drinks later? Meet u in Dog n Bull at 6 for a Winter Warmer?” I smiled at the beautiful incongruity.
“No thanks, up a yellow vibrating hill in India.”
The white pile of a temple dome popped up from behind some trees and glowed in the twilight. The detail of the pattern on Grace’s dress – a constellation of tiny white stars on a black background – was becoming less clear as the daylight disappeared and her handsome profile became more distinct against the crisp blue evening sky. The pink horizon and the silhouette of a line of trees reflected in her left eye.
The quiet, gentle landscape met the continual rhythm of percussion and distorted electric fuzz in the background. Our ears were still ringing and we imagined that we were floating. Bobbing up and down in close proximity.
A bat flitted past our faces. Moments later an owl hooted somewhere close-by. We looked at each other and I willed it to swoop down from the trees, clutch us carefully in its talons and carry us away, wings flapping along to the beats.
