Max of India

The heat was stifling. It was everywhere. It wafted in through the screen door off the baking streets, where the pavement was white-hot and the road was deserted even by ice-cream men. Like a heavy blanket, it hung around indoors while the ceiling fan wobbled and spluttered ineffectively, unable to offer any relief.

The room had been tidied casually- it was far too hot to clean. The coffee table had been partly set with tea cups and china saucers. Pearly lotus flowers adorned a curious ceramic pot filled with dried rose petals whose fragrance melted softly into the settled air. A copy of the Ramayana rested beside it.

Nearby, a fat man sat in an open robe.

Like a comfortable Buddha, he assumed the centre of the couch, his face contemplative behind a bushy beard of tangled, orange wire. Foreign strains lingered in the air around him, twanging melodically as the needle on the record player etched the patterns of strange new instruments.

Max was back from India.

The rats, he said, were everywhere over there. He had slept one night on a bench in the train station, and had felt them surge beneath him in a tide of furry, writhing bodies, vicious teeth in chattering mouths, when the clock struck midnight. You could sense them coming as they scrambled down the platform, he said. The echoes of their million claws scraped over the concrete as they were flushed out of the underground.

Uncle Max had a real Ghurkha knife. It was long and curved, its rusted blade concealed inside the case of thick, hardened leather that he never let us touch. He had bought it from a street purveyor, or so he had told us, and it had probably been used in a real War. We would sit enthralled for hours on the rug around our uncle’s knees, picturing jungles choked with coarse, obstructive vines, ripe for hacking, and fearsome men in turbans who fought the British in the Olden Days.

There were tigers in India, and elephants, too. There were ladies with gold in their noses and very long, braided hair. Everyone wore sandals, even on school days. There were monks who lived in ornate temples amongst stone jaguars and statues with too many arms and legs, because that was what Uncle Max called A Representation Of Real Gods And Goddesses.

The monks were always meditating. They sat cross-legged, even though they were adults, and they never, ever ate ice-cream. Sometimes they ate only Brussels sprouts and other green things. They could live to be a hundred-and-sixty, which was twice as old as our grandfather.

Uncle Max had met one of the head monks. That was why he never wore a real shirt anymore, or so our mother would mutter. She used to make his tie-up shirts, which were like short dressing gowns, by hand, copying the pattern off the ones he had brought back from overseas. You couldn’t buy them in the shops.

At night, after dinner and when our TV shows were over, when crickets chirped in the yard and the sky was still grey outside in summer, Uncle Max would tell us other stories about India. He had done a lot of travelling, he said, with different companions. Once he had stayed a night in the ruins of an abandoned English fort, with a man who never spoke, not even to say his name.

The man would sit for hours by himself and play with a pocket knife, watching Uncle Max and his other companions as they slept. That night, he had put something funny into Uncle Max’s water, to Enlighten him, we were told. Uncle Max said that it had been the wrong thing to do, but that he didn’t mind, because it meant that for the rest of that night he got to roam along the crumbling battlements beneath the moon, thinking that he was the old English Governor in a town full of ghosts.

We wanted to hear more about the ghosts, but were sent to bed.

In the morning, Uncle Max had told us more about the jungles, which had plants with leaves as big as your head that were flat, perfectly dented to collect rainwater. You could catch a hold of one, if you wanted, and use it for a drink like in The Jungle Book.

It was hot every day in January. In the early afternoon, when the sun was at its zenith, Uncle Max and our father retreated to the garden, and drank wine from cardboard boxes on a patio beneath the hanging grapevines. Once, Uncle Max took a silver bag out of one of the boxes and had blew it up like a balloon. It made a good pillow for camping, he said, as we wriggled to get comfortable on the lawn. That was what you did if you wanted a pillow when you were Doing It Rough.

One day, Uncle Max was not in the mood to play. He just sat out in the garden, even in the morning when our father wasn’t there, drinking wine and tea by himself. He needed to think, he said, but not about India- about another place, Vietnam, that was also a country in Asia. We asked where Vietnam was, and he told us that the two countries were not too far apart.

A lot of men like Uncle Max had left the War in Vietnam and had run away to India and to another place called Nepal. Most of them had few possessions. They carried everything they owned in their army backpacks, along with their bundled up camouflage and knives. Some of them, like the man in the fort, didn’t have any names. We asked what happened to them, but we never found out.

He and the nameless men had drifted through the subcontinent together, having adventures, meeting interesting people and eating rice.

That was beside the point.

‘You were in a real War!’ we exclaimed. ‘You were a soldier!’

In an effort to cheer him up, we told him that we thought that being a soldier must have been very cool, but Uncle Max frowned and shook his head. He told us firmly that it was not.

Later that day, we played Army Men in the front garden, but our mother stopped us and ushered us inside. It was too hot, she said, to be playing in the sun.

Then, one day when we woke up, Uncle Max wasn’t in the house anymore. We were sad, but not surprised, because he only ever visited for the summer. We asked our parents whether he had gone on holiday again. They denied it, in a tone that meant No More Questions.

We read The Jungle Book a lot for the rest of that summer, hoping to imagine more tigers and jaguars like the ones that had inhabited the house during the hottest weeks of the year. But reading was never as good as listening to Uncle Max’s stories. Neither was anything we made up. There were no ghosts in The Jungle Book, no Ghurkha knives and silk robes with pretty patterns, no funny gold adornments and ferocious warriors. And there were no ghosts.

Slowly, as the smell of tea and curry faded from the house, those things all faded too. The grapevine outside was not home to monkeys and tropical birds anymore. It did not veil a treasure-filled temple or a forgotten pool filled with water lilies, as it might once have done. The couch was not a fort, and when you took the cushions off and lined up them up along its back, they made a space-station, not a battlement.

Gradually, the summer waned, and fantasy was pushed aside as school returned. We sometimes wondered, vaguely, whether Uncle Max was back in India, in high-up, misty mountains with the monks. Sometimes, on a lazy afternoon, when the ceiling fan rattled in the classroom and numbers blurred together in our workbooks, we would exchange new adventures that we thought Uncle Max might be having while we struggled to Apply Ourselves.

Briefly, we would think about those moon-haunted forts, with their ghosts and lonely soldiers seeming ever more far-fetched. We had our own dramas to enact by then, playground concerns that were immediate and pressing.

Summertime faded into myth as the autumn leaves descended, and jungles were forgotten. We still liked Max’s stories, but we were getting too old for that.