Sharmila came every day to visit her old home. At first she came in order to boast, to show off the saris and shawls and jewellery presented to her on her marriage, and to tell about her strange new life and the house she lived in and all her new family. She was brimming over with excitement and talked non-stop and danced round the courtyard. Some time later she came with different stories, about what her mother-in-law had said to her and what she had answered back, about her sisters-in-law and all the other women, how they tried to get the better of her but how she soon showed them a trick or two: she tucked in her chin and talked in a loud voice and was full of energy and indignation. Sometimes she stayed for several days and did not return till her husband came to coax her back. After a year the first baby arrived, and a year later the second, and after a few more years a third. Sharmila became fat and matronly, and her voice was louder and more raucous. She still came constantly, now with two of the children trailing behind her and a third riding on her hip, and she stayed longer than before, often refusing to go back even when her husband came to plead with her. And in the end she seemed to be there all the time, she and her children, so that, although nothing much was said on the subject, it was generally assumed that she had left her husband and her in-laws’ house and had come back to live with her grandmother.
She was a little heavy now to go running up and down the stairs the way she used to: but she still came up to Miss Tuhy’s room, and the English lady’s heart still beat in the same way when she heard her step on the stair, though it was a different step now, heavier, slower and accompanied by children’s tiny shuffle and patter. ‘Miss Sahib!’ Sharmila would call from the landing, and Miss Tuhy would fling her door wide open and stand there beaming. Now it was the children who moved from object to object, touching everything and asking to know what it was, while Sharmila, panting a little from her climb up the stairs, flung herself on the narrow bed and allowed Miss Tuhy to tuck a pillow behind her back. When the children had examined all the treasures, they began to play their own games, they crawled all over the floor and made a lot of noise. Their mother lay on the bed and sometimes she laughed and sometimes she sighed and talked about everything that came into her head. They always stayed for several hours, and when they left at last, Miss Tuhy, gorged with bliss, shut the door and carefully cleaned out her little room which the children had so delightfully disordered.
When she didn’t feel like going upstairs, Sharmila stood in the middle of the courtyard and shouted, ‘Miss Sahib!’ in her loud voice. Miss Tuhy hurried downstairs, smoothing her dress and adjusting her glasses. She sat with Sharmila in the courtyard and helped her to shell peas. The old grandmother watched them from her bed inside the room: that terrible old woman was bedridden now and quite unable to move, a huge helpless shipwreck wrapped in shawls and blankets. Her speech was blurred and could be understood only by Sharmila, who had become her interpreter and chief functionary. It was Sharmila, not one of the older women of the household, who carried the keys and distributed the stores and knew where the money was kept. While she sat with Miss Tuhy in the courtyard, every now and again the grandmother would make calling noises and then Sharmila would get up and go in to see what she wanted. Inside the room it was dark and smelled of sickness and old age, and Sharmila was glad to come out in the open again.
‘Poor old Granny,’ she said to Miss Tuhy, who nodded and also looked sad for Granny because she was old and bedridden: as for herself, she did not feel old at all but a young girl, sitting here like this shelling peas and chatting with Sharmila. The children played and sang, the sun shone, along the galleries upstairs the tenants went to and fro hanging out their washing; there was the sound of voices calling and of water running, traffic passed up and down on the road outside, a nearby flour mill chucked and chucked. ‘Poor old Granny,’ Sharmila said again. ‘When she was young, she was like a queen – tall, beautiful, everyone did what she wanted. If they didn’t she stamped her foot, and screamed and waved her arms in the air – like this,’ Sharmila demonstrated, flailing her plump arms with bangles up to the elbow and laughing. But then she grew serious and put her face closer to Miss Tuhy’s and said in a low, excited voice: ‘They say she had a lover, a jeweller from Dariba. He came at nights when everyone was asleep and she opened the door for him.’ Miss Tuhy blushed and her heart beat faster; though she tried to check them, a thousand impressions rippled over her mind.
‘They say she was a lot like me,’ said Sharmila, smiling a little and her eyes hazy with thought. She had beautiful eyes, very large and dark with heavy brows above them; her lips were full and her cheeks plump and healthy. When she was thoughtful or serious, she had a habit of tucking in her chin so that several chins were formed, and this too somehow was attractive, especially as these chins seemed to merge and swell into her very large, tight bust.
But her smile became a frown, and she said, ‘Yes, and now look at her, how she is. Three times a day I have to change the sheets under her. This is the way it all ends. Hai,’ and she heaved a sigh and a brooding look came on her face. The children, who had been chasing each other round the courtyard, suddenly began to quarrel in loud voices; at that Sharmila sprang up in a rage and caught hold of the biggest child and began to beat him with her fists, but hardly had he uttered the first cry when she stopped and instead lifted him in her arms and held him close, close to her bosom, her eyes shut in rapturous possessiveness as if he were all that she had.
It was one of the other tenants who told Miss Tuhy that Sharmila was having an affair with the son of the Anglo-Indian nurse from upstairs. The tenant told it with a lot of smiles, comments and gestures, but Miss Tuhy pretended not to understand, she only smiled back at the informer in her gentle way and said ‘Good morning’, in English and shut the door of her room. She was very much excited. She thought about the young man whom she had seen often and sometimes talked to: a rather colourless young man, with brown hair and Anglo-Indian features, who always dressed in English clothes and played cricket on Sunday mornings. It seemed impossible to connect him in any way with Sharmila; and how his mother would have hated any such connection! The nurse, fully opening her heart to Miss Tuhy, never tired of expressing her contempt for the other tenants in the house who could not speak English and also did not know how to live decently. She and her son lived very decently, they had chairs and a table in their room and linoleum on the floor and a picture of the Queen of England on the wall. They ate with knife and fork. ‘Those others, Miss Tuhy, I wouldn’t like you to see,’ she said with pinched lips (she was a thin woman with matchstick legs and always wore brown shoes and stockings). ‘The dirt. Squalor. You would feel sick, Miss Tuhy. And the worst are those downstairs, the—’ and she added a bad word in Hindi (she never said any bad words in English, perhaps she didn’t know any). She hated Sharmila and the grandmother and that whole family. But she was often away on night duty, and then who knew – as the other tenant had hinted – what went on?
Miss Tuhy never slept too well at nights. She often got up and walked round her room and wished it were time to light the fire and make her cup of tea. Those night hours seemed very long, and sometimes, tired of her room, she would go out on the stairs and along the galleries overlooking the courtyard. How silent it was now with everyone asleep! The galleries and the courtyard, so crowded during the day, were empty except where here and there a servant boy lay sleeping huddled in a corner. There was no traffic on the road outside and the flour mill was silent. Only the sky seemed alive, with the moon sliding slowly in and out of patches of mist. Miss Tuhy thought about the grandmother and the jeweller for whom she had opened the door when it was like this, silent and empty at nights. She remembered conversations she had heard years ago among her English fellow-teachers. They had always had a lot to say about sensuality in the East. They whispered to each other how some of the older boys were seen in the town entering certain disreputable alleys, while boys who came from princely or landowner families were taught everything
there was to know by women on their father’s estates. And as for the girls – well, they whispered, one had only to look at them, how quickly they ripened: could one ever imagine an English girl so developed at thirteen? It was, they said, the climate; and of course the food they ate, all those curries and spices that heated the blood. Miss Tuhy wondered: if she had been born in India, had grown up under this sun and had eaten the food, would she have been different? Instead of her thin, inadequate, English body, would she have grown up like the grandmother who had opened the door to the jeweller, or like Sharmila with flashing black eyes and a big bust?
Nothing stirred, not a sound from anywhere, as if all those lively people in the house were dead. Miss Tuhy stared and stared down at Sharmila’s door and the courtyard washed in moonlight, and wondered was there a secret, was something going on that should not be? She crept along the gallery and up the stairs towards the nurse’s door. Here too everything was locked and silent, and if there was a secret, it was being kept. She put her ear to the door and stayed there, listening. She did not feel in the least bad or guilty doing this, for what she wanted was nothing for herself but only to have proof that Sharmila was happy.
She did not seem happy. She was getting very bad-tempered and was for ever fighting with her family or with the other tenants. It was a not uncommon sight to have her standing in the middle of the courtyard, arms akimbo, keys at her waist, shouting insults in her loud, somewhat raucous voice. She no longer came to visit Miss Tuhy in her room, and once, when the English lady came to be with her downstairs, she shouted at her that she had enough with one old woman on her hands and did not have time for any more. But that night she came upstairs and brought a little dish of carrot halwa which Miss Tuhy tried to refuse, turning her face away and saying primly that thank you, she was not hungry. ‘Are you angry with me, Missie Sahib?’ coaxed Sharmila with a smile in her voice, and she dug her forefinger into the halwa and then brought it to Miss Tuhy’s lips, saying ‘One little lick, just one, for Sharmila’, till Miss Tuhy put out her tongue and shyly slid it along Sharmila’s finger. She blushed as she did so, and anger and hurt melted out of her heart.
‘There!’ cried Sharmila, and then she flung herself as usual on the bed. She began to talk, to unburden herself completely. Tears poured down her cheeks as she spoke of her unhappy life and all the troubles brought down upon her by the grandmother who did not give her enough money and treated her like a slave, the other family members who were jealous of her, the servants who stole from her, the shopkeepers who cheated her – ‘If it weren’t for my children,’ she cried, ‘why should I go on? I’d make an end of it and get some peace at last.’
‘Sh,’ said Miss Tuhy, shocked and afraid.
‘Why not? What have I got to live for?’
‘You?’ said Miss Tuhy with an incredulous laugh, and looked at that large, full-bloomed figure sprawled there on the narrow bed and rumpling the bedcover from which the embroidery (girls carrying baskets of apples and pansies on their arms) had almost completely faded.
Sharmila said, ‘Did I ever tell you about that woman, two doors away from the coal merchant’s house? She was a widow and they treated her like a dog, so one night she took a scarf and hung herself from a hook on the stairs. We all went to have a look at her. Her feet were swinging in the air as if there was a wind blowing. I was only four but I still remember.’
There was an eerie little pause which Miss Tuhy broke as briskly as she could: ‘What’s the matter with you? A young woman like you with all your life before you – I wonder you’re not ashamed.’
‘I want to get away from here! I’m so sick of this house!’
‘Yes, Miss Tuhy,’ said the Anglo-Indian nurse a few days later, when the English lady had come to pay her a visit and they both sat drinking tea under the tinted portrait of the Queen, ‘I’m just sick and tired of living here, that I can tell you. If I could get out tomorrow, I would. But it’s not so easy to find a place, not these days with the rents.’ She sighed and poured the two of them strong tea out of an earthenware pot. She drank in as refined a way as Miss Tuhy, without making any noise at all. ‘My boy’s wanting to go to England, and why not? No future for us here, not with these people.’
Miss Tuhy gave a hitch to her wire-framed glasses and smiled ingratiatingly: ‘No young lady for him yet?’ she asked, and her voice quavered like an inefficient spy’s.
‘Oh, he goes with the odd girl or two. Nothing serious. There’s time yet. We’re not like those others – hurry-curry, muddle-puddle, marry them off at sixteen, and they never even see each other’s face! No wonder there’s trouble afterwards.’ She put her bony brown hand on Miss Tuhy’s knee and brought her face close: ‘Like that one downstairs, the she-devil. It’s so disgusting. I don’t even like to tell you.’ But her tongue was already wiping round her pale lips in anticipation of the telling.
Miss Tuhy got up abruptly. She dared not listen, and for some unknown reason tears had sprung into her eyes. She went out quickly but the nurse followed her. It was dark on the stairs and Miss Tuhy’s tears could not be seen. The nurse clung to her arm: ‘With servants,’ she whispered into Miss Tuhy’s ear. ‘She gets them in at night when everyone’s asleep. Mary Mother,’ said the nurse and crossed herself. Instantly a quotation rose to Miss Tuhy’s lips: ‘Her sins are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.’ The nurse was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘She’s not Christian,’ with contempt. Miss Tuhy freed her arm and hurried to her own room. She sat in her chair with her hands folded in her lap and her legs trembling. A procession of servants filed through her mind: undersized hill boys with naked feet and torn shirts, sickly but tough, bent on survival. She heard their voices as they called to each other in their weird hill accents and laughed with each other, showing pointed teeth. Every few years one of them in the neighbourhood went berserk and murdered his master and ran away with the jewellery and cash, only to be caught the next day on a wild spree at cinemas and country liquor shops. Strange wild boys, wolf boys: Miss Tuhy had always liked them and felt sorry for them. But now she felt most sorry for Sharmila, and prayed for it not to be true.
It could not be true. Sharmila had such an innocent nature. She was a child. She loved sweet things to eat, and when the bangle seller came, she was the first to run to meet him. She was also very fond of going to the cinema, and when she came home she told Miss Tuhy the story. She acted out all the important scenes, especially the love scenes – ‘Just as their lips were about to meet, quick as a flash, with her veil flying in the wind, she ran to the next tree and called to him – Arjun! – and he followed her and he put his arms round the tree and this time she did not run away – no, they stood looking at each other, eating each other up with their eyes, and then the music – oh, Missie, Missie, Missie!’ she would end and stretch her arms into the air and laugh with longing.
Once, on her little daily shopping trip to the bazaar, Miss Tuhy caught sight of Sharmila in the distance. And seeing her like that, unexpectedly, she saw her as a stranger might, and realized for the first time that the Sharmila she knew no longer existed. Her image of Sharmila was twofold, one superimposed on the other yet also simultaneous, the two images merged in her mind: there was the hoyden schoolgirl, traces of whom still existed in her smile and in certain glances of her eyes, and then there was Sharmila in bloom, the young wife dancing round the courtyard and boasting about her wedding presents. But the woman she now saw in the bazaar was fat and slovenly; the end of her veil, draped carelessly over her breasts, trailed a little in the dust, and the heel of her slipper was trodden over to one side so that she seemed to be dragging her foot when she walked. She was quarrelling with one of the shopkeepers, she was gesticulating and using coarse language; the other shopkeepers leaned out of their stalls to listen, and from the way they grinned and commented to each other, it was obvious that Sharmila was a well-known figure and the scene she was enacting was one she h
ad often played before. Miss Tuhy, in pain, turned and walked away in the opposite direction, even though it meant a longer way home. For the first time she failed to greet the vegetable seller and the cold-drink man as she passed between their two shops on her way into the house, and when she had to step round the refuse trodden into the mud, she felt a movement of distaste and thought irritably to herself why it was that no one ever took the trouble to clean the place. The stairs of the house too were dirty, and there was a bad smell of sewage. She reached her room with a sigh of relief, but it seemed as if the bad smell came seeping in from under the closed door. Then she heard again Sharmila’s anguished voice crying, ‘I want to get away! I’m so sick of this house!’ and she too felt the same anguish to get away from the house and from the streets and crowded bazaars around it.
That night she said to Sharmila, in a bright voice, ‘Why don’t we all go away somewhere for a lovely holiday?’
At the End of the Century Page 9
