Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp (2 page)
Amelia kept them to herself, or at most, she shared them with the one other person whom she knew would never utter a word of what she told her. That person was right outside her window. If Amelia leaned out, she could see the face of the sculpted lady with the coffee and the coral who sat at the top of the front of the house, not more than two metres away from her.
The sculptor who created the lady had given her no eyes, but only blank surfaces between her eyelids. You couldn’t tell this from the street, but you could see it when you were this close to her. In a way, it made Amelia sad to think that all the time the lady had been sitting there she had been blind. It would have made it so much easier for her to pass the time – and she had been there more than a hundred years, which is a lot of time to pass – if she could at least have watched what was happening in Marburg Street. But then Amelia would imagine that the lady, even though she was blind, had some other, mysterious way of knowing what was happening below her, a way that was more powerful than merely seeing, and that everything was stored up in her memory. Sometimes Amelia imagined the stories the sculpted lady could have told, if only she could have spoken, about all the things that had happened in Marburg Street since the day Solomon J Wieszacker put up the plaque above the door on the ground floor. Sometimes, when Amelia leaned out of the window and looked down at the street, she would murmur something to the lady about what was happening down there, almost as if she expected to hear the lady’s opinion in response. And sometimes she imagined that she could tell what the lady was thinking by the expression she saw in her face – a hint of amusement, a cloud of concern – even though she knew that the lady’s features were carved in stone.
When Amelia looked straight down, she could see the bulge of the curved window at the front of the shop on the ground floor. But if you went down to the street, you couldn’t see anything through the glass. For years, and certainly for as long as Amelia could remember, a kind of big white sheet had hung behind the window, obscuring the view of whatever might be happening inside.
And the only clue that anything, in fact, might be happening in there was a small handwritten sign taped inside the glass. The sign had been there for years as well, and the tape that held it was yellow with age.
In faded red letters, very neatly written, was a name.
LK Vishwanath.
CONTENTS
There were all kinds of rumours about Mr Vishwanath and what he was up to behind the sheet in the ground-floor window of the green house on Marburg Street. According to some people, he was a kind of a dervish, and went into trances standing on one leg and not eating for months at a time. Or he was some kind of crime boss, according to others, with a secret communications network and a room stashed full of money, but the police could never prove anything against him. And those were only some of the rumours. Most of Amelia’s friends were quite frightened of him. He rarely came out of his shop, and some of Amelia’s friends had never seen him at all. They were the most frightened of the lot. Amelia, on the other hand, saw him often, not in the street at the front of the house, but in the garden behind it.
She would look out the window of her mother’s weaving room on the third floor, and Mr Vishwanath would be in the garden, amongst the sculptures in the grass, wearing nothing but a piece of shiny clothing that was like a kind of big blue nappy. He would be standing on one leg, with the other foot wrapped around his neck, or kneeling with his back arched and the top of his head touching the ground behind him, or holding some other pose that Amelia couldn’t have held if her life depended on it. She knew, because sometimes she tried. She would twist herself into the shape he had assumed, or start to, but she always ended up keeling over on the floor of the weaving room before she managed to get her foot anywhere near around the back of her neck, or the top of her head on the ground, or whatever Mr Vishwanath seemed to be doing with such ease in the garden below her. When she got herself up again and looked out, Mr Vishwanath would still be there, holding the pose perfectly, as still and as steady as one of the sculptures around him, with his eyes closed and the dark skin of his tall, thin body gleaming in the sunlight.
The truth was that Mr Vishwanath was a master of yoga. The room behind the sheet on the ground floor was the studio where he taught, and he lived in the back part of the shop behind it.
Amelia had no idea how old Mr Vishwanath was. He had perfectly white hair, which should have meant he was very old, yet there was barely a wrinkle on his face, which should have meant he was somewhat younger. Sometimes, when he wasn’t practising yoga and he wasn’t teaching, he would come out in a faded red shirt and a pair of old trousers, and sit in a chair that he had put under the verandah at the back of the house. It was an old, battered chair, and tufts of stuffing poked out from tears in the upholstery. Mr Vishwanath liked to sit there on warm days, for hours, sometimes, just looking at the garden, with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile, yet seemed to have some kind of deep contentment in it. Once Amelia decided to see what was so special about sitting there and staring at the garden, and she sat down under the verandah, beside him. Mr Vishwanath didn’t seem to mind. Then Amelia brought down a chair and put it next to Mr Vishwanath’s chair, and sometimes, when she saw him there, she would come and sit there as well. Not for hours, but for a while. There was something peaceful about sitting there with Mr Vishwanath. You could smell the sweet scent of the oil he put on before he practised his yoga. He didn’t expect you to talk, and you could just sit beside him and think your own thoughts – which is an unusual thing to be able to do, if you stop to consider it, when you’re with somebody else. But if she wanted to talk, she could, and Mr Vishwanath didn’t stop her. He just didn’t necessarily reply, and if he did, you didn’t know when he was going to do it. It might be ten minutes after you’d said whatever he was replying to, and you’d almost forgotten you’d said it.
The only problem, thought Amelia, was that Mr Vishwanath had too much time to sit there. He had very few students. Once or twice a week an old lady would arrive in a large, cream-coloured car, driven by a man in a uniform who would wait outside while the lady was in Mr Vishwanath’s studio. Everyone knew about her, because you could hardly miss her grand arrival or the sight of the driver waiting for her, although there were suspicions about whether she was there for yoga or for some other reason connected with Mr Vishwanath’s supposedly mysterious activities. From time to time someone else would ring the bell beside the door on the ground floor, but not very often. And if there were other students, Amelia didn’t know about them. It never once occurred to Amelia that this lack of students was because Mr Vishwanath wasn’t a good teacher. Anyone who could do the poses he performed in the back garden must be a true master of yoga. But how were people supposed to know what he could do, with only one tiny sign on the window of his studio and only Mr Vishwanath’s name on the sign?
Anyone could see that Mr Vishwanath wasn’t rich. In fact, Amelia suspected he was quite poor. And yet she was sure he was an excellent teacher, and could have made a lot of money, if only people knew about him.
‘You should advertise, Mr Vishwanath,’ she said to him. ‘People just don’t know what you do.’
It wasn’t the first time Amelia had said that. Mr Vishwanath turned to look at her, and didn’t reply.
‘It’s just a suggestion,’ said Amelia.
Mr Vishwanath continued to look at her, as if considering the idea. Then he gazed at the garden again.
‘I could write the advertisement for you, if you like,’ said Amelia. ‘You could put it in the newspaper. And I’ll make you a sign, for your shop. A big sign, saying YOGA.’
Amelia watched Mr Vishwanath’s face. A slight frown came over it at mention of the big sign saying YOGA, and then it was gone.
She could just imagine the sign she would make. She would write YOGA in big gold letters, and underneath it she would draw a picture of Mr Vishwanath in one of his poses, maybe the one where he stood on one leg with his other foot hooked around his neck. Amelia wasn’t sure she could draw a really good picture of Mr Vishwanath, but she thought that if she waited until he came out into the back garden, and then sketched him when he was standing there with his eyes closed, she might get it right. On the other hand, she could have asked her mother for help, but Amelia didn’t want to do that, because her mother would take over the whole thing and turn it into one of her artistic projects and poor old Mr Vishwanath would end up with some huge artistic painting in his window. Besides, Amelia didn’t really think her mother could draw people very well. The eyes in her pictures were never quite level, or the ears were too high, or there was something else that wasn’t right about the faces she painted, although her father praised every picture she did as if it was the next
Mona Lisa
. He was always asking people who came to the house what they thought of the pictures, which hung all over the walls. There was always a minute or two when they stammered and frowned while they thought of something to say.
No, Mr Vishwanath needed a nice, simple sign. Below the picture of him doing his one-legged pose, she would write LK Vishwanath, and under that she would write Yoga Master, or maybe Yoga Maestro, which sounded more important. And under that she would write New Students Wanted. Or maybe New Students Welcome, which sounded less desperate.
Amelia nodded to herself, staring at the garden. She could see the sign in her mind’s eye. In fact, perhaps she’d just go ahead and make it for Mr Vishwanath. When he saw it, he’d realise how much better it would be if he had the sign in his window.
‘Amelia, this is not the way.’
Amelia looked around. Mr Vishwanath had a deep, quiet voice, like a purr, and when he first started talking sometimes you weren’t certain whether the sound was coming from him or from inside your own head.
‘What’s not the way, Mr Vishwanath?’ asked Amelia.
‘This is not the way for students to come to yoga. They must come because they are drawn. They must come because they have the need.’
‘But they may not realise they have the need. If you put up a nice big sign, they’ll realise.’
‘No,’ said Mr Vishwanath. ‘This is not the way.’
‘Then what is the way?’ asked Amelia.
‘The way is the way it is now,’ replied Mr Vishwanath.
The way it is now, thought Amelia. One little sign that was so small you couldn’t even see it from the other side of the street, and with so little information that you wouldn’t know what it meant even if you did see it. Amelia crossed her arms in frustration. ‘You’re just saying that because you don’t like anything to change, Mr Vishwanath. You only like the old ways.’
Mr Vishwanath didn’t reply.
‘You don’t want to try anything new.’
Mr Vishwanath shook his head. ‘Not so, Amelia. In my youth I was a great enthusiast for things that were new. There was nothing that I did not try.’
Amelia looked at Mr Vishwanath doubtfully. It was hard to imagine Mr Vishwanath being young, let alone being a great enthusiast for things that were new. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
‘In some cases, ways that are new may be good. But in other cases, the ways that are old are better.’
‘Well, if you ask me, Mr Vishwanath, in this case, the old way doesn’t seem to be working.’
‘On the contrary,’ replied Mr Vishwanath. ‘It is working perfectly.’ He turned his gaze at the garden again.
On the contrary? Amelia shook her head. Mr Vishwanath had a funny way of measuring whether something was working!
There was silence.
‘I would rather have one true student than a hundred followers,’ said Mr Vishwanath quietly.
Amelia frowned. She had heard Mr Vishwanath say that before. But he’d change his mind if he saw the sign she had in mind. She looked at him. No, she thought, he wouldn’t.
Amelia gazed at the garden as well. It was full of sculptures, her mother’s latest, which Amelia’s father had lowered from the window of the sculpture room with a special winch he had invented. They were all white sculptures, about a metre tall, and very narrow, and they were supposed to represent long thin faces on long thin necks. This was because Amelia’s mother was going through a Linear Phase, according to Amelia’s father. Prior to her Linear Phase, Amelia’s mother had spent a year making dark, squat, rounded sculptures, like foaming bubbles of mud. That meant she had been in a Globular Phase. Now the bubble sculptures were all piled down the very back of the garden, together with the sculptures from all the earlier phases Amelia’s mother had been through. When one of her phases was over, Amelia’s mother couldn’t bear to look at the sculptures again, and Amelia’s father would stack them at the end of the garden, out of view, and replace them with the pieces Amelia’s mother produced when she went into a new phase. Amelia’s mother went through phases in her paintings as well. There had been the Blue Phase, when everything was painted in shades of blue, and the Red Phase, and the Yellow Phase. Her latest phase was a Multicoloured Phase, with numerous colours jostling loudly in every painting. Some of those paintings had so many colours they made you feel quite ill.
Amelia stared at the white, thin sculptures that poked up out of the long grass. The only place her mother would allow her sculptures to be placed was inside the four high walls of the garden. Once, when her father had suggested she should have an exhibition, she hadn’t talked to him for a week.