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In the beginning of summer something unexpected happens; the foreigners come. They arrive in buses and on motorbikes, strange, wild, happy people with long hair who sit and smoke pipes like the sadhus and who make noise and play music and bring chaotic life to the mountainside, who appear to exist without structure or ritual or rule. When the first biker convoy arrives, it’s the middle of the afternoon. Ajay darts from his room to find the source of the noise. He hears the rumbling far off, mistakes it for an avalanche or an earthquake, until he spies the bikes at the bottom of the valley sweeping up the river road and disappearing below the hump.
He waits, listening, not daring to run, not yet ready to be disappointed.
He spots them emerging half a kilometer away.
He leaps up the pathway two steps at a time, runs to the road as the first bikes roar through, jumping and whooping alongside them as fast as he can, cheering as they wave back, a blur of joy.
This summer is made of wonder. In the hours he is supposed to rest, he sneaks from his room and climbs into the village near the hot springs where the foreigners spend their days, gawping at these wonderful people who sit in cafés, smoking and talking and playing music, running away if they try to talk to him, in awe, wrestling with his shyness. They see him and wave and invite him to join them and every day his courage grows. When he gets the nerve to approach, they laugh and joke with him, they smile at him kindly. And when someone spills a drink, he runs to bring a napkin to them. When someone needs a light, he runs with the box of matches he keeps and strikes it and watches the laughter. He decides to carry a box of matches with him everywhere he goes. Lighting a chillum and a cigarette wherever he can. The Matchbox Kid. That’s what they call him.
All summer long, the cafés and restaurants that were shuttered are now bright with music and light, with the smells of strange and exotic food, with men and women who wear flowers and bloom. Before the first month is out, he has learned a handful of English words. Please, thank you, yes and no. Sorry.
Daddy even opens up some of the rooms on the floors below, Ajay giving them a quick clean, and rents them for fifty rupees a night.
But when the long summer ends, the foreigners vanish as quickly as they came, a great exodus of bikes and buses to the south, down into India once again; and the autumn colors explode and the cold sets in, the earth turns hard and fades. The animals are brought down the mountain and kept in the winter sheds, and when the snow begins to fall, the household retreats to the central room with the fire burning day and night. Ajay sleeps through the winter in the main room next to the stove. He feels lonelier than ever here, and in the orange glow, with the snow falling thickly in the moonlight, he remembers his mother and sister as he dreams.
6.
Seven years pass in this place that never turns into home but is the only place he knows, to live, to breathe, to grow, tied to his body, the place he cannot leave. Ajay performing these chores, running after foreigners, learning Punjabi and Himachali alongside his Hindi, picking up a spattering of English, German, Hebrew, and Japanese, filling the hollow proofs of his existence, giving name to many things, Mummy kind to him—sometimes tearful or cruel—but she teaches him with great diligence to read and write, to write his name in English too.
And in the house and on the farm he becomes a strong and obedient teenager, muscled, lean; he learns to shoot, learns to hunt, helps birth the calves, keeps the dogs fed and trained, keeps a watch for leopards and bears, watchful as ever, always there, never quite there; the grains of life picked out and soaked, a functionary, loyal to Daddy, vital but so inconsequential in the scheme, exposed to the rhythms and terminal undercurrents of his domestic cove but somehow sheltered too; he eats, he drinks, drinks his milk, spurts in growth, grows an absurd little mustache, learns to shave—his work is relentless, how can he not become strong? His body inhabits adulthood though his mind is still somewhere behind, sometimes a child, always looking to be needed more than he really needs anyone. He sleeps alone every summer night in his room, listening to the parties in the apple orchards, every winter night upstairs, smothered by the hearth. Soon he’s taller than Mummy, then Daddy, though they never see it like that. And in the village, every summer as the hippies come, clustered with them in the maze of cafés and guesthouses around the hot springs, he keeps learning his English, Ajay Matchbox, the Matchbox Kid, mute performer, silent clown, ever ready, learning to score charas for commission, roll joints for a rupee, pack chillum for five, keeping handy with the gauze; this boy who was once mocked by some strung-out German, some hardened Israeli, some Japanese acid freak, some hardscrabble Englishman, now strong and watchful and more beautiful than he ever had a right to be. But ready to serve above all else, delighting those who return each spring, saying, “Ajay, is it you? God, you’ve grown . . .” And those who ordered him so casually before become hesitant, and proprietorial too, seeking his good favor. And those who never laid eyes on him are eager to impress. Women joke about how handsome he is. “It’s only a matter of time,” one says, and they laugh at each other knowingly. Funny, the passage of time. Funny, this body. But Ajay isn’t built that way. He has no guile and knows how precarious the body can be.