The feast took two hours, and after it, much giggling and jangling behind a thin rattan curtain, and then Talika had appeared resplendent in a tangerine sari.
She cleared her throat.
“Miss Wiwa, this is our special dance for you,” she’d announced, and with a stern glance toward the troop of little girls, they’d appeared. Each girl had worn a red, an amber, or an orange sari. The hundred little bells worn around their ankles had made a thrilling shivery sound you felt in your spine as they’d walked around the perimeter of the tamarind tree, the boys sweeping the path before them. Musicians appeared: fat boy Suday, playing tabla, a trumpeter from Byculla. And then the music and dance had exploded, the girls stamping and twirling, their arms graceful as saplings in the wind. When the music stopped, Talika singing in her reedy voice had prompted Viva:
“Aaja Sajan, Aaja.
Aaja Sajan, Aaja.
Come to me my lover, come to me.
Come to me my lover, come to me.”
When Frank held her hand tightly, Viva knew he wanted to kiss her, but they held back, not wanting to shock the children. Barefoot, they’d walked around the sacred fire four times, praying for long life, harmony, peace, and love.
After the ceremony, Viva made a point of going over to speak to Jack, who was sitting on his own looking amused and watchful. But when she sat down beside him, she saw that what she’d taken to be English reserve was in fact an attempt to control some violent emotion. He was swallowing hard and clearing his throat. His big hands were wrestling with each other and he was sweating under the arms of his khaki shirt.
“Well done,” he said in a constricted voice. “First class.”
“I wish Rose could have been here,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be here without her.”
“Ah, well.” He glanced at her quickly. “Have you heard from her?” he said. His hand was crumbling a chapatti.
“Not much,” she said. “A quick letter, last week.” Splotched, hastily written.
Dear Viva. I am so happy for you. I miss you all. Love, Rose. A duty letter, no news, making her feel that Rose was well and truly back in her shell again.
“She didn’t say much.”
“No.” Jack seemed to be focusing on a spot above her head. “Tricky time. I think her mother needs her for a bit, and of course the regiment’s all over the shop, so I’m hardly ever home. So—” He made himself look at her again. “What about you? Where are you chaps going to live?”
She told him about going back to Lahore, that when the funding came through, Frank’s work on blackwater fever would resume this summer. She was, she said, determined to go, too—she could work almost anywhere.
“Yes, go,” he said, with surprising ferocity. “It doesn’t work staying apart. You’ve got to be one thing or the other. I haven’t been. I’ve been…” He said something else but she missed it. A shattering sound drew their attention away. Suday was blasting away at his tabla again; a group of children were blowing on recorders, others through combs on to Bronco paper. Frank moved toward her. He was laughing; he put his arm around her and she felt the extra glow of life beginning in her again.
Daisy, the sun bouncing off her big spectacles, stood up on top of a box that had been decorated with crêpe paper. She beamed at them. She hit a glass with her teaspoon. Tor, standing beside her, winked at Viva.
“People, people! If I might.” Daisy, head cocked, waited for silence. “This is a good news day,” she said at last. “Daktar Frank and Miss Viva are married, the sun is shining, we are at the feast of life. Hard times will come.” When she closed her eyes, everyone knew she was thinking about the home again. “But we must not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Hear! Hear!” said Toby stoutly.
“We owe each other so much,” said Daisy in a faint voice. “We owe you so much,” she told the children.
Then Talika, after a certain amount of prodding in the back from Mrs. Bowman, stood up on the crêpe-covered box Daisy had suddenly vacated.
“Sanskrit poem,” she said. She took a deep breath, and read out in her piping voice:
“Look well to this day,
For it is life.
In its brief course lies all the realities of existence.
For yesterday is but a memory and tomorrow only a vision.”
But then a gust of wind took her poem away, it stirred the leaves in the tamarind tree and when a donkey honked thunderously in the street outside the children burst out laughing.
“Look well to this day.” Talika made a last-ditch effort to be heard and inject some solemnity into the proceedings.
Everyone cheered; she hopped down, tucked her thin arms into her sari and bobbed her head shyly.
Viva glanced at Tor, who was smiling. She thought of water rushing by, of a huge sky above them all, of being so lost she thought she’d never be found again, and then Talika tugged at her fingers. They were ready to dance again.
Acknowledgments
First I must thank Kate Smith Pearse, who inspired this book.
To the Indian friends I met during its writing: To Vaibhavi Jaywant (Vicki), who showed me around Bombay with such gusto and charm. To Sudhansu Mohanty, author and friend, who looked after me in Poona and Shukla and to his wife for her help with plants and birds.
Many thanks also to Lieutenant General Stanley Menezes, Indian army soldier and historian, for the care and professionalism with which he read the book and for his many helpful suggestions. To Dr. Rosie Llewellyn Jones, professional lecturer on Indian history and also the Hon. Secretary of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia.
My thanks to historian Dr. Katherine Prior, for sharing her expertise and extensive knowledge of India with me in a series of inspiring e-mails. To Stephen Rabson, the P&O historian and to Iain Smith whose help in tracking down information on the Third Indian cavalry regiment was invaluable.
Many people were kind enough to share either their own memories or the memories of their parents with me: John Griffiths, Philip Moss, Alison Latter, Nick Rahder, Robin Haines, Toby and Imogen Eliot.
Many thanks to Peter and Rosemary Waghorn, for lending me Mrs. Smith Pearse’s tapes, and to Corinna King for lending me her mother, Maeve Scott’s tapes. To Violet Adams for her diary and to my sister-in-law, Betty, for editing it so expertly.
Special thanks to Sue Porter Davison, for her encouragement and research on my behalf and to Peter Somer for his books. To David and Jenny Clifford and Maureen.
Many thanks, too, to Clare Alexander, for her professionalism and encouragement.
I owe Kate Shaw a big debt of gratitude for her advice and support.
As always, huge thanks to my husband, Richard, who told me about the Fishing Fleet to begin with and who encouraged me to write the book. To Caroline and Delia, to my daughter Poppy for her youthful enthusiasm, and to my large and loving extended family for early readings and helpful advice.
Touchstone Reading Group Guide
East of the Sun by Julia Gregson
For Discussion
Viva’s decision to return to India is a complicated one. What does she expect to discover? What life does she want to create for herself? How does that change over the course of the novel?
The notion of home is an important theme in the novel. Contrast the homes that the girls leave behind with the ones that they create. Viva and Tor thrive in the foreign setting and relative freedom of India, while Rose’s new life is tinged with nostalgia. What constitutes home for each? Discuss the thrills and perils of being a young woman in the Fishing Fleet, leaving home for the unknown.
The author frequently uses rich, colorful imagery to describe the exotic sights of India. How do the sensual descriptions of India contrast with those of England? How do the descriptions and images of daily life differ?
Rose and Tor have no education and little information to prepare them for relationships with men. In what ways does this sexual innocence harm them? What cultural or antiquated atti
tudes contribute to the gap between what’s expected of them and what’s shared with them?
Ci Ci Mallinson and Daisy Barker each act as guides, though of very different sorts. What type of woman, and type of influence, does each represent? Why is Bombay so inhospitable to independent women like Daisy? Why is the sort of independence that Daisy possesses and inspiring work that she does so essential to Viva?
Tor and Viva are polar opposites when it comes to romance; Tor throws herself into love too easily, while Viva always holds herself back. Consider the past experiences that explain their behavior and the new experiences that change it.
In what ways does working with the children at Tamarind provide Viva with a new purpose? What does she learn from them and how does she reexamine her own life as a result?
Guy is a malevolent force in Viva’s life, a cause of fear and distress and, ultimately, danger. But his actions also precipitate many pivotal moments in her relationship with Frank. Discuss how Guy is both a negative and a positive force in Viva’s life.
Did you feel sympathy for Guy, as Viva did? Why does she continue to take pity on him despite all that he does?
Toby tells Viva that “the English are neurotically private.” Discuss the ways that Rose and Viva live up to that description. How does their reserve complicate their friendships and relationships? What is the significance of the fact that Rose is “a soldier’s daughter”?
The unrest in India and the growing resentment of the British rumbles in the background for most of the novel, and many of the characters seem unwilling to acknowledge it. How would you characterize the attitude of the British toward the country? In what ways does the author convey the precariousness of their position in India?
References to birds appear throughout the novel, and the author sometimes compares the women to birds; for example, she writes “their plumage is quite varied.” What do these analogies convey about the women? About the setting?
When Viva tells Frank about her mother, he asks, “Don’t you think most people make their parents up?” Do you agree with him? How did the made-up story of her parents’ deaths shape Viva’s life?
A Conversation with Julia Gregson
How did you come to write the story of three women in the Fishing Fleet? The novel captures three characters and three distinct points of view. Did you base them on real women?
I have always been fascinated by India. When I was a child, our family rented the top floor apartment of a large and freezing country house in Hampshire that belonged to a woman called Mrs. Smith-Pearse. She’d gone to India, aged eighteen, as a member of the Fishing Fleet, married there, stayed for close to thirty years, and had only recently returned to England. I was five when we first met; she was sixty. I loved everything about her: her battered tweeds, her honking laugh, her wonderful stories about snakes under the bath, tiger hunts with maharajahs, the three-day treks on ponies up to Simla. I followed her around like a shadow, and sometimes she’d let me dress up in tiny silk saris, spice-scented tunics and salwar kameeze, produced like magic from her mother-of-pearl trunk. Four years ago, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a box of tape recordings she’d made when she was very old. It was then I realized how hard her life had been in India, too.
My other influence was my husband’s mother, Violet, another Fishing Fleeter, who’d had the time of her life in India and who missed it for the rest of her life. Both these women fired my imagination, but none of the characters in East of the Sun are exactly based on them. My aim was to bring to life take three very different young women and imagine the terror and the excitement they would feel at being sent halfway across the world, often unchaperoned, to find husbands. I wanted to show the madcap speed with which some of them married, to think about the humiliation of failing and being shipped back home a “Returned Empty.” As a marriage market, the system left a lot to be desired.
Rose and Tor arrive in India with everything they’ll need for parties and social events, but little practical information. Building marriages and lives must have been difficult, especially in unfamiliar territory. Based on your research, what do you think were the biggest challenges that faced women arriving in India? How did they overcome them?
For young girls, the immediate challenge—rarely stated or acknowledged—was to find a man. To do this, one had to meet the right people, to go to parties and polo matches, to fit in with a very small, enclosed, and sometimes frightened group of people. Lots of fun on the surface, but the rules of engagement were clear: you had to conform, to look good, to dress well, and not to say anything that might frighten the horses. Bluestockings and eccentrics were not well tolerated.
India itself was another challenge. Some women fell in love at first sight, others hated it: the stinks, the poverty, the heat, the feeling of being cut off from Europe.
Marriage brought a new set of problems, and the realization that the India that could give such pleasure took in equal measure. My childhood heroine, Mrs. Smith-Pearse, spoke on the tapes of the agony of sending children sent home to be educated.
“It was the biggest decision we all had to make: husband or child.”
Passionately fond of nursing—she’d served with distinction in France in 1917—in India, she was allowed only to run a few village clinics. Working memsahibs were frowned on.
Other women of the Raj spoke to me of botched births in remote areas, of burying young children, of flies and heat and snakes, of runaway or workaholic husbands. All of this made me determined in East of the Sun not to make my female characters into the usual caricatures of the memsahib—ginswilling, narrow-minded snobs. Some were magnificent; some deserved our contempt; most didn’t.
Your descriptions of Indian cities and riding the trains feel vivid and authentic. Did you travel to all the places you described?
I’d been to Bangladesh as a foreign correspondent after the war there in 1973 to do a series of stories on orphanages and to interview women who had been raped after the war. My description of the orphanage at Tamarind Street in East of the Sun drew on these experiences.
While I was writing the book, I went back to India twice: once to Rajasthan and Shimla with my husband and daughter, and once on my own to Bombay. I love this kind of travel, with all your antennae out. I went up to Poona to see the polo fields, the ghostly old Raj houses where the British had lived, and to the military hospital where my husband was born.
The India you describe was at a turning point, and the novel is set against a backdrop of unrest and resentment of the British. Was it difficult to capture the intimacy of these women’s lives and also the sweep of the historical events?
I thought very carefully about this. I spent months reading about the history of India at that time and then (maddening!) had to discard most of my research because my girls were very young and often entirely oblivious to the great changes going on around then. In order to be authentic, historical events had to be glimpsed at—a sudden glare from a native; an unwelcome protest on one’s way to a party; a bore at the club going on about unrest. It would have been out of character for them to discuss politics in any depth or with any great understanding.
What happened to women like your characters as the Indian-British relationship shifted? Were the women who had been part of the Fishing Fleet able to maintain the same lifestyle?
At midnight, on August 15, 1947, India became an independent nation.
Although many members of the Raj had started to see the writing on the wall during the ’30s and ’40s, for others going home must have been a terrible shock. Most of them had been living above their means in India, a comparatively luxurious life impossible to replicate in the United Kingdom on small pensions and without servants. Some went to Spain, attracted by a better climate and a lower cost of living; others had to make do in an England worn out by war and suffering the worst winter of the century.
Most of the maternal relationships in the novel are distant or absent, and there’s very little communication betw
een the generations. Was this the cultural norm or a conscious choice for women at the time? Looking back now, what impact do you think this had on mothers and children?
It was the cultural norm when children reached the age of five or six to send them home to boarding schools in England. Many parents, who’d been sent home themselves, believed that if their children stayed with them in India, they might catch some awful disease, or be spoiled by their nannies, or pick up what were called chi chi accents—the singsong voices that their ayahs spoke to them in.
This system, although accepted, caused a great deal of inarticulate suffering on both sides. Boarding schools were tough places: boys were beaten, rooms generally unheated, and holidays, where you were farmed out to relatives or friends, often joyless and tricky.
After years apart, relationships between parents and children were often fractured, formal, and at arm’s length. One of the few positive things you could say about this system was that it did make children very self-sufficient, and that, occasionally, if they didn’t like their parents to start with, they found families they preferred in England.
Daisy Barker, Viva, and the enterprising women like them offer a surprising contrast to the high society of Bombay. Was it common for women to teach and live independently? Would you tell us a little more about Indian women, like Viva’s neighbors, who were choosing education and a more liberated path at this time?
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