And Khan? What of him? He would be beaten half to death – as he deserved, thought Bimla savagely – and then thrown into the street, to find his way back to his native mountains as best he could, since he would find it difficult to obtain another job without a reference. He could not help Nulini – supposing even that he was able to take her home, high into the Himalayas, she would die after a few weeks of harsh life as a mountain woman – would die as certainly as if she had remained in Delhi.
Bimla’s sly old Ayah asked if she was well.
‘Of course I am,’ said Bimla testily, as the car drew up in her father’s driveway.
Khan got down and opened the door for her. She cast a fleeting glance at him through her veil. He was a sturdy specimen of manhood, though small. The slightly Mongolian cast of feature was not unpleasing and the expression was genial. Bimla wondered what it would be like to be kissed by such a man – and then hastily flung the thought from her as being most unmaidenly. She flinched, however, at the idea of such excellence being beaten into utter ugliness.
Ayah must have looked at him too, because she said as they walked up the front steps: ‘If I were Singh Sahib, I would not employ a man such as that in a house where I had a young daughter-in-law. A man of more mature years would be a better choice.’
‘What do you mean, Ayah?’
Ayah looked even more cunning than usual: ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said. ‘You are too young to understand such matters.’
‘I am twenty-five and about to marry.’
‘Tut, tut, my pretty. Do not be angered. I only made a remark.’ And Ayah folded her lips virtuously, picked up the slippers which Bimla had kicked into two different corners of the hall, and went away, leaving Bimla full of dread that Nulini’s secret was already out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
At lunchtime, two days after Ruksha Bandhan, as Ajit sat on my bed eating the thick village bread and lentil soup which had been prepared for him by our old sweeper woman, the postman handed him through the window an unusually bulky letter. There was also a letter for me from Mother.
As I had been largely confined to bed for over a fortnight Ajit had moved the bedstead into the living-room, and in this new position I had some hope of seeing, without getting up, what was going on in my neglected home.
Ajit had suspected that the doctor was deliberately not hurrying about curing me, since by his standards we were rich and well able to pay his bills. He had threatened to find another doctor unless I was cured within a fortnight, and whether it was the threat or a fortuitous combination of circumstances, I do not know, but I had become slowly better and for four days there had been no recurrence of the dysentery. I was very weak, however, and had no strength left with which to fight any other disease I might easily catch in such damp weather.
The monsoon had been unusually heavy for the district, and everywhere the earth steamed and gave birth to crops, insects and germs. I had been astonished to see the endless stretches of sand round our house become clothed in a few weeks with a closely patterned carpet of wild flowers and grass, and I longed to go out and walk and drink in the loveliness of it. But I was too weak and had to be content with the bunches of tiny flowers which Ajit stopped to gather for me on his way back from the power house.
Occasionally, I saw a snake slide silently along the path in front of the house, and Ajit warned me that if I found one in the house I was to leave it undisturbed, shut the door of the room in which it lay, and ask Kamala or the watchman to get someone to kill it; non-violence did not extend to snakes.
Typhoid and malaria were frequent visitors to the villages, and, according to Miss Shah, some cases of cholera in the city had made a harassed Director of Health order mass injections, to avoid a repetition of the epidemic of the previous year.
I dragged myself into a sitting position and pushed my damp hair away from my face. My head buzzed, but I asked as cheerfully as I could: ‘What have you got there?’
Ajit gulped down the last piece of bread, picked up the letter again and turned it over and over in his hand. The address had been laboriously written in English. He tore open the envelope – and a glittering bundle fell out.
I could see that the bundle consisted of a piece of tinsel, to which was attached shiny red and green paper fringed with gold; a few grains of rice were clinging to the tinsel and there was also a folded paper stained pink and much finger marked. In addition, there was a letter.
‘Ruksha Bandhan,’ Ajit exclaimed immediately he saw the collection from the envelope. His hands shook as he unfolded the letter.
‘It’s Shushila,’ he said softly, and, after a pause to scan the letter, he added: ‘Father did not even ask if I would be free to come home for Ruksha Bandhan.’ His mouth quivered, as he reread the letter.
‘Darling, what is it?’ I asked, slipping my arms round him.
He dropped the letter on to the table and explained the ceremony to me, its importance to his caste and Shushila’s disappointment at his absence. Normally, he would have gone home for the ceremony as a matter of course, but this year he knew he was not very welcome and he had hoped that his father would write and tell him to come. His father had not written.
I took the tinsel bracelet and, kneeling up on the bed, I tied the emblem round his wrist. ‘Now,’ I said gaily, hoping to divert his thoughts, ‘you are my warrior and will protect me.’
He looked down at me and I must have seemed a helpless, tousled wretch to him. His eyes went moist.
‘My dear,’ he said, lifting me close to him, ‘I have not been able to protect you from anything. You are so sick – and I dreamed of making you so happy.’ He wept, his head resting against mine.
I stroked the smooth black head and tried not to cry myself. ‘My love, don’t cry. You have made me very happy – do you hear me – very happy. I would not change my present life for anybody else’s. All I need is to get well – and I will get well, never fear.’
I crooned the words to him and because I spoke the truth he was convinced and a little comforted. In the depth of my being I was happy. I loved my husband and I was content in this strange, isolated flat, despite the crushing amount of work and the lack of any semblance of Western culture.
Since our misunderstanding on the morning after my arrival in Pandipura, Ajit had been careful to remember that I was a stranger to his customs and outlook, and we had spent many evening hours discussing religion, politics, love, domestic customs and so on, until gradually I began to understand at least a few of the complexities of Indian life and became less easily irritated by the slowness with which everything moved and the inefficiency with which even the smallest service was performed.
My heart went out to Ajit whose job it was to help to build a modern power house in a country where tomorrow is still a better day for working than today, where workmen’s hands are more used to milking cows than fixing circuits and where persistent undernourishment and malaria make those hands soon tired. And yet the power house was going up. I had seen it myself, one day when I felt stronger and had sat on the back of Ajit’s bicycle while he peddled me to it over the scrub land.
Occasionally some of his colleagues came to our flat for a game of bridge, which they played sitting on a mat spread on the veranda, and I heard their bitter complaints of the inefficiency here, the corruption there. Their complaints may have been well justified, but the fact remained that Mother India was building her children something better than they had ever seen before, and there was no doubt in my mind that very soon the water-drawing ox at the back of our flat would be replaced by an electric pump lifting water from a much deeper well, so that the villagers who owned it would be able to irrigate a larger area with less backbreaking work, and the food in the village would be that much increased.
There were plenty of men like Ajit, who, although their tongues were acid-dipped when talking about the shortcomings of their country, worked like demons, so that electric power might be provided and industry and agric
ulture might flourish in a district which otherwise was destined to become an unpeopled waste.
The man in my arms ceased to weep and lay rested. Usually buoyantly optimistic, he occasionally plunged into the depths of depression, and this seemed a particularly bad bout. I thought of all the small hardships he had had to endure, in addition to re-accustoming himself to his own country and teaching me how to live in it. I held him close.
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I think you forget the wonders you have performed since I came here. You have held down an important post although you are so young; you have struggled back and forth to work on that awful old bike in appalling heat; you have hardly known what it is to come home to a properly prepared meal; you have cooked and taught me how to cook when you must have been weak with hunger and weariness – and you have even had to wash and iron your own clothes. All this, from a man who has been waited upon all his life, is quite a wonderful achievement to me.’
I lifted his face and kissed him: ‘Now the dysentery is gone, I’ll soon get strong – you will see.’
He smiled. ‘When you are stronger I will send you up to the hills.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said, appalled at the idea of going six hundred miles away to a hill station without him. ‘No – I couldn’t leave you – I just couldn’t.’
‘You are a strange girl. Most women would jump at the opportunity of a holiday in a fashionable hill station.’
‘I would die of misery without you.’
He pinched my cheek, his eyes twinkled and he said: ‘In that case, after I have been here six months I will take the ten days’ leave which I shall have accumulated and we will go together to Bombay – it’s at least a trifle cooler and the sea air may help you. We will have a honeymoon – yes? – and thus avoid a funeral pyre.’
‘That would be wonderful.’
‘I need a holiday myself.’
He did. I realised with some fear that his face was lined and thin. Poor food was having a deleterious effect on him too. Milk diluted to a blue thinness by the milkman, no butter, meat or fish, few eggs now I was too sick to fetch them, improperly cooked vegetables and bread – what chance had either of us on such a diet? I must get up, I thought, I must get up and I must learn to provide properly balanced meals. But from whom should I learn? The lecturers and teachers amongst whom we lived could not afford to eat very well, and most of them were undernourished, eating too much starch and too few proteins. Even the villagers looked better fed than they. I must ask Kamala how she prepared her father’s food and find out what made her so strong. Unfortunately Mrs Patel was a very unapproachable person and had, in any case, gone to visit her parents in Kathiawar, so I could not get advice from her.
In the absence of his wife, Chundabhai had called on us several times and his visits were a delight. He always brought fruit and lettuces from his garden, and sat for an hour cracking jokes in his roaring voice, until his chauffeur came to remind him of his next engagement. Then he would depart in a cloud of sand, the big voice getting fainter and fainter as the car threaded its way through the narrow path.
‘I must go back to work,’ said Ajit, easing himself away from me. He seemed comforted, and kissed me lovingly before he left.
When he had gone, I lay staring at the dirty vessels on the table. The flies were already collecting on them. Suddenly I began to weep. To muffle the noise of the sobs that came from me I turned my face into the pillow.
‘O Lord,’ I prayed, ‘if you really exist, help me to get well. If I can get strong, I can learn to do everything here. Help me, O God, to help my husband.’
But Lord Krishna looked down from his shelf near the kitchen door and smiled his same ivory smile and fingered his ivory flute with his ivory fingers; and from a print of one of Raphael’s pictures which hung by my bed, the Holy Child smiled equally enigmatically. Ajit believed that they were two manifestations of the same great God, and I was prepared to believe him, but they were of little comfort to me.
I wept myself to sleep.
Now, although always warned by Ajit to keep the outside doors bolted, I never did so during daylight hours. Even the advent of the frightening stranger who had lit my fire had not been able to persuade me that there was anything outside that would harm me. The bleak land was always so quiet, and I loved to see the shifting light and shade on the sand. I used to take as much of my work as possible on to the veranda, and from there, as I cleaned grain or mended shirts, I could watch the crows and other birds go about their noisy business. A myriad of strange multicoloured insects, from locusts to tiny spiders like red velvet pin-cushions, lived in and around the veranda, and whenever I had time to spare I would squat on my heels and watch them work. With the coming of the monsoon their number had multiplied, and to keep out the larger and more dangerous ones, such as scorpions – and also snakes – Ajit had got a carpenter from the power-house site to screw a bar of wood across the threshold, so that when the door was shut nothing very big could crawl in. It was still necessary, however, to deter ants from entering. They were worthy adversaries and endless kettles of boiling water and sprays of insecticide stopped their coming only temporarily – they always returned to the attack.
There were plenty of animals to watch, too – baboons, wild ponies, jackals, wild cats and dogs, and, of course, cows, buffaloes, camels and goats which came to graze on the sparse herbage. With the domestic animals came the herdsmen and boys. I think it was knowing them that made me feel so safe. At first I was an intruder into their world, like the other people in the flats, but after a while they came to know that I would always give them water if they asked, and that I never made a cup of tea without sharing it with some small boy or girl. I was never angry if by chance a goat strayed into my living-room or a very small boy scrambled up my steps. My washing frequently blew off the veranda and when they brought it back to me they found I could speak their language a little, so they stayed to talk and thus they got to know me. The other flat dwellers swore that the village people would steal from me, but, although my open doors would have made it simple for them to do so and Kamala came and went freely, nothing was ever stolen.
Before I had become too weak to do so, I had wandered round the nearest villages, avoiding, however, the Criminal Tribe village about which Kamala had warned me repeatedly. This was a village started by the Government in an effort to transform a tribe that had lived for centuries by raiding into a peaceful farming community. The Government seemed to be having some success with their experiment, but the local inhabitants were still deeply distrustful of these ex-raiders. Most of the villages were a close huddle of huts, with an occasional small brick house. Narrow alleys filled with rubbish turned and twisted between the dwellings, and as I walked, stopping occasionally to stroke a baby goat tethered near a doorway, dogs barked and snapped at my heels.
People stared at me, but they soon found out from whence I came and almost invariably I was offered water or buttermilk to drink. Inside the huts, I saw, cleanliness and neatness reigned. The thalis and cooking pots were ranged neatly in niches in the wall, spare clothing was hung tidily over a clothes line across the hut and the floor was swept smooth. The thick mud walls gave some measure of protection in the heat of the day; but life went on mostly in the little space in front of the hut, where sometimes a rough wooden bed would be placed on which people could sit. During the monsoon, however, life in the villages must have been most miserable, as the water dripped through inadequate roofs and the cooking fires had to be brought indoors.
The village women heard from Kamala of the strange way of living of the Memsahib. They also heard that I was sick and although they were too shy to walk up the veranda steps to inquire after my health, they peeped through the window, smiled at me as I lay on my bed and wished me soon well.
I had other visitors – beggars and holy men, for whom I kept a pot of annas, and to each supplicant I gave two annas; a few of them came every week to collect this small dole but most of them travelled onward to
unknown destinations. I kept also any food left over from the last meal and any old clothes we had, and these also I gave. Ours was the only well for several miles from the city and so I offered water to all who knocked at our door; this made the Brahmin lady who lived on the floor above point out that Ajit was a caste Hindu and his water pots should not be polluted by those of lower castes or by untouchables. When I told Ajit about her complaint, he just laughed and told me to scrub the vessels they touched very thoroughly as many beggars were diseased.
Although I hardly realised it at the time, I was slowly becoming part of India. Each friend I made, each custom I learned to understand and tolerate, was a thread which bound me closer to her and made me part of her multicoloured pattern. Just as in times past she had absorbed invader after invader, she was absorbing me, tolerating my idiosyncrasies and asking only toleration in return. The desperate mental loneliness which had afflicted me at first grew less as the good teachers living round me strove to understand me and meet me half-way in my struggles in a strange society. We did not always approve of each other, my neighbours and I, but we recognised each other’s virtues and hesitated to condemn what appeared to be vices.
And so I slept with my door open to the hot desert wind, feeling perfectly safe amongst the people and animals who knew me. I slept so deeply that it was the eldest Miss Shah, and not I, who heard the taxi draw up. She immediately abandoned her vina practice and went outside to see who had been so extravagant as to hire a taxi, and it was she who directed a very fed-up Thakkur to Singh Sahib’s flat.
Thakkur’s disapproval of this journey was clearly observable in his long face and dragging step. At Jaipur, on the way to Shahpur, his mistress, his honoured Ma ji, had poured into his ear a confused story of how Ajit Sahib had married an English lady, about which his master was not pleased – and who would be pleased at such a marriage? Thakkur wanted to know. Anyway, Ma ji did not want her husband to be worried by anyone telling of this visit to her son. Thakkur was not, therefore, to write home about it. Ma ji and Thakkur would stay about two weeks in the house of the foreign lady.
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