The Inheritance

by Sheena Kalayil

  THE INHERITANCE

  SHEENA KALAYIL was born in Zambia in 1970 where her parents were teachers seconded from Kerala, India. She arrived in the UK aged eighteen and, after graduating, worked all over the world. She has a doctorate in Linguistics and teaches at the University of Manchester. Her novel The Bureau of Second Chances won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel, and was shortlisted in the Fiction category for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. She lives near Manchester with her husband and two daughters.

  The Inheritance

  Sheena Kalayil

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Sheena Kalayil 2018

  The right of Sheena Kalayil to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 450 2

  eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 041 4

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  Clouds come floating into my life,

  no longer to carry rain or usher storm,

  but to add colour to my sunset sky.

  Stray Birds, Rabindranath Tagore

  For my daughters

  Part One

  1

  WHEN she tried to remember how it had all transpired, her memories always played out in front of her through a filter, as if viewing the past through raindrops, broken shards of glass, a thin gauze, so that, depending on why she was casting back, the two figures intersecting would be distorted, lucid or faded. There was always a beat in her head. Just as she told a tale through her feet when she danced, she could count the steps of each encounter from the beginning: rising, arcing, then falling to its end. Each memory unfolded with its own rhythm, its own tempo, distinct from the other. Later, she understood that it was her way of enclosing each moment in its own musical sheath, as one would wrap a precious jewel in cotton wool, to be unpacked and gazed at, before storing it away.

  Those first days, before it all began, she took great big gulps of air, great big gulps of freedom. Once her family had taken leave of her, she knew not one person, there was not one familiar face. She devoured the newness: the clean sharpness of the air, the green against the grey of the stone buildings. Then, as the days slipped into weeks, she felt unsettled, struggling to mimic the sang-froid of her peers, pressing her books to her chest not in ease but rather so she could hold herself in, not betray her uncertainty. Did she really want to be here?

  She had grown up in a house of elders. Her brother was ten years older; she was a belated surprise. Her parents were now in their sixties. She was suddenly now immersed in a world of youth, but she was determined to fit in. She was in halls, and the first month in she made dinner for the girls on her floor, which soon became a weekly tradition. And after the Christmas break she invited Julian, on whom she had had a crush since their first seminar. He was also studying anthropology, he clearly fancied himself and, if she had interpreted his signals correctly, her. The fact that he was interested in her was earth-shattering. She garnered a certain amount of respect from the other girls, but she adopted a blasé attitude which suited this new, more reckless self. Their first kiss, at the door to her bedroom, quickly became a frenzy of passion: his hands were inside her T-shirt when she drew away.

  ‘Can’t I come in?’

  She pressed her face against his neck.

  ‘It will be my first time,’ she whispered. And then, ‘Do you think that’s weird?’

  He had smiled, avuncular.

  ‘Of course not. We can take our time.’ But as he spoke she could see his mind whirring: how long would she take?

  Years of yearning under the watchful eyes of her anxious parents, of terror at what her body could do, dissipated; she suddenly believed, more than anyone, in herself, and her right to make her choices. At a departmental cheese-and-wine gathering – where the more louche members of the faculty exchanged double-entendres with the more confident female students – Julian held her hand possessively, even protectively. At one point, he kissed her on the mouth, with intent, in front of the cluster of academics near the cheese board. She could feel their eyes on them – her personal tutor Ben Martin was among them – and she recoiled inwardly at Julian’s bravado, while simultaneously recognising a pleasure in feeling owned, staked, desired. A validation. But only a week into their couple-hood he was sulky. He was busy, he said. He became unreasonably busy. Days passed when their schedules, once the same, could not intersect. She knew what that meant: he was waiting; she should not take too long.

  The next time, he came into her room. There was the sour taste of beer on his tongue, which she found exciting in its unpleasantness. The expression in his eyes scared her slightly, but her body was alive as never before. She could only think of the moment, and when he tugged unsuccessfully at the waistband of her jeans, she drew her hands away from his neck and unbuttoned them herself, making him smile into her mouth. His voice was hoarse.

  ‘I knew you wanted it.’

  His words flicked a switch, and she took a step back in surprise, both at his tone, which had been triumphant, and her own sudden unwillingness. Perhaps it was the word ‘it’: harmless and frequent, but now ugly. She pushed him away, catching sight of herself in the small mirror above the washbasin in her room. Everything was now cold, and while she flinched at his assessment – that she was frigid, or a cock-tease – both epithets she was not sure she even understood, her eyes kept finding her own in the mirror, so that she was watching herself. Her pitiful performance in a disastrous ensemble.

  Days later, she was returning from a seminar, down a now-familiar route: the small reading room to her left, Ben Martin’s office at the end to her right. She looked out of the window down to the square below to see Julian, his arm linked through that of one of the other girls from their seminar group; as they walked, he leaned in and whispered. The girl laughed, throwing her head back, and he seized the opportunity to kiss her lips. A kiss when in motion, which the girl returned: practised, competent. The scene became blurry as her eyes filled with tears, which arrived suddenly in such copious amounts that they splashed off her chin onto her hand. Even then she knew they were tears over a job badly done rather than those of the thwarted. Even then she knew that she had found Julian’s posturing unedifying but lacked the confidence to reject him. She might never get another chance, never turn another head. She backed away from the window, bumped blindly against someone who was walking down the corridor. Two hands steadied her.

  ‘Come in here for a bit.’

  He opened the door to his office, led her inside, pulled a chair out, made her sit down. For a while he stood next to her; she could see his trousers in the corner of her eye. Then he moved away to sit at his desk, swivelling his chair slightly so that his back was not completely turned to her, and started tapping on his keyboard. She scrambled in her bag and found a used tissue crumpled into a ball at the bottom. It was quiet – there was no one else now in the corridor and the office was high enough so that there was little noise from the traffic on the street below. When she looked up, she saw that he was
watching her.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she croaked, and her eyes swam with tears again.

  ‘Anything I can help with?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Something to do with your studies? An essay crisis?’

  She shook her head again.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ he smiled. ‘I only hear good things about you.’

  She kept her eyes on her shoes.

  ‘Is everyone all right back home?’

  She cleared her throat.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where is home? Didn’t you say London? Where exactly?’

  ‘Tooting.’

  ‘My parents live in Clapham,’ he said. ‘We’re neighbours, relatively speaking.’

  She attempted a smile.

  ‘Just stay here until you’re ready,’ he said. ‘To face the world.’

  He turned away, started typing again. It was a small office with one wall completely lined from floor to ceiling with books, the other holding a collection of prints. There was a cream rug, shot through with crimson, thrown over the requisite blue carpeting of the department. His desk was large, extending across the width of the window. On the end, there was a photo in a frame. A woman, fair hair flying back in the wind, laughing into the lens.

  She got up and said thank you, to which he mumbled not a problem, without turning round, and so she crept out, closing the door behind her.

  It was a week later when she next saw him in one of the cafés around the square. He was sitting at a table with other members of the faculty, two other men and a woman. She was queuing for her coffee when she heard a voice behind her.

  ‘Rita.’

  He was smiling down at her. He had walked over, leaving his colleagues, and was standing beside her. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, feeling her cheeks grow warm. ‘Thank you again.’

  She was unsure how to address him, shrinking from appearing over-familiar, and the sentence felt unfinished. As if reading her mind, he said, ‘I think when you’ve been through what we’ve been through, we get to use first names. Call me Ben, and I’ll keep calling you Rita.’

  She tried to smile. ‘OK.’

  ‘Plus we’ve both got that London connection, right? Safety in numbers and all that.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Good to see you on better form,’ he said. He briefly touched her arm, before returning to his table. She had intended on sitting in the café, but she got a takeaway. She did not want him to think her solitude was a permanent feature. Why had he come over to her? A wave would have sufficed, or nothing even. Later, she would marvel at how much import she had given his decision to stand up and walk a few metres to where she stood. Perhaps it was an indication of the isolation she must have been feeling at that time, the sense of not being where she should be.

  And yet, there was never a moment when she did not know that he had a wife. Everyone knew that he was married. His wife was working on a thesis of some kind but had a condition that made her chronically tired. She could be seen walking around the library, but she was just as often seen in a wheelchair, being steered by Ben Martin. He was a devoted husband. The kindness he had shown her was only an extension of his nature, evidenced by the care he gave his wife. There was no call to interpret his actions in any other way. But his voice, commanding her attention, had set her heart thumping. What was more: it was nice to hear him say her name.

  She felt as if she were starting again, post-Julian. She had wronged herself; her impatience to shrug off her sedate upbringing had only resulted in humiliation. Her friends at school had always teased her as prudish, berated her for not using her looks to further advantage. She had welcomed Julian’s advances and so she could not blame him: he had only seen through her pretence. She decided to make up for the weeks, months actually, when her infatuation with Julian meant she had done only just enough to keep up with her studies. She returned to her books with determination to make up for her insipid attentions. She cooked dinner for a group of girlfriends she was afraid she had neglected but whom she found harboured no grudges: a reminder that Julian had taken less than a fortnight to disentangle himself from her. She joined two other girls from her floor on a Sunday trip to the beach, during which they arranged to leave halls in their second year and share a flat. And one Thursday evening she found herself waiting outside a dance studio, in the dark, in the chill wind on the other side of the city, responding to a nagging emptiness.

  She had spent every Saturday over the last ten years at the Bhavan in West Kensington, where she was one of five girls who had been chosen to study Kathak. The teacher, Jayshri, had been in residence at the Kathak Kendra in Delhi and was an advocate of the Jaipur gharana – the most dramatic strand, with its intricate footwork, fast pace and swirling – until her husband uprooted her to Battersea. You will have to remember, Jayshri had said in the first lesson, to the small semicircle of awestruck little girls in front of her, that these stories we tell with our bodies are holy offerings to God. Never forget these movements take us closer to the universe and to the divine.

  Kathak soon became all-consuming. Jayshri was temperamental and demanding. Extra classes sprang up. Last-minute performances were arranged, with the girls scrambling to rearrange swimming lessons, play dates and sleepovers. Rita had to forego a Saturday job and a social life, while her friends gathered boyfriends and escapades. The only males she met were the tabla and taal players: middle-aged men whom she called ‘uncle’. There was no room for romance, which she could not deny she pined for. But it was because of her commitment to the Kathak training that her parents had folded at her choice of study. Their worry: what on earth did one do with a degree in anthropology? But by then they had seen how resolute she could be and had learned that even enlisting her older brother to put pressure on her, with his dark forecasts of employment difficulties, would not sway her.

  The classes she now volunteered for were a twenty-minute bus ride from the university, and were led by a vivacious Colombian, Maria, who had spent a year in India training in Odissi, and who had marvelled when Rita presented herself. Maria was delighted to have the help on Saturdays – she might even offer a small stipend – but she was also organising an event. She immediately entreated Rita to commit to the next six weeks. Given her experience, Rita could choreograph her own performance: a fusion, perhaps, of Kathak and modern dance. It was not difficult to be convinced: both the classes with toddlers and children over the weekends and rehearsals for the performance lent a structure to her schedule that meant she need not worry about who she was spending time with and where.

  It might have been only a few weeks after the episode in his office when, cutting through the park on the way to the library, she had seen them walking towards her. It was one of those magical spring days when the light fell through the budding green leaves of the trees. He was pushing the wheelchair, and his wife was talking. As they passed her, he had given her a quick smile and said hello, and at his words his wife had turned to her with a flash of electric-blue eyes. She was tall – even in a wheelchair it was easy to see that – with her white-blonde hair tied back in an elegant bun. But in the photograph on his desk, his wife had been bursting with vigour and energy; now she looked desiccated.

  Then they were gone, past her, and she carried on, her bag bumping against her back, before she glanced back and then stepped off the path. She was out of their line of vision here, and she watched as he manoeuvred the wheelchair to a halt. And then his wife got up and walked ahead, while he remained bent under the wheelchair, probably setting a brake – she couldn’t see. When he straightened up, he had a blanket in his hands. And she turned away, the next scenes playing out in her head: he would throw down the blanket, his wife would lower herself onto it, and he would fling himself down next to her.

  As if fate was playing its hand more ebulliently, in one of the seminars the following week, while she was gathering her papers ready to leave, the
lecturer had pronounced his name: ‘Ben Martin is giving a paper on women’s land rights tonight which I think you’ll find interesting.’ The reaction from the other students only proved to her that she did not have a monopoly on attention from Dr Martin: a few went to his office immediately to tell him they were coming that evening, showing a familiarity with him that was far from what she had acquired. If she was slightly deflated by the time she and a small group joined the sizeable gathering in a wood-panelled office overlooking the square, then she felt a delicious warmth flood through her when in the crowd he caught her eye and gave her a small wave. He clicked through his slides, spoke with no notes. She noticed several things: the dark hair on his forearms, the way his trousers fell long and straight over his legs, the set of his shoulders and his easy grace as he paced in front of his audience. How whenever his eyes rested on her they seemed to linger: this, surely her imagination. Of his topic she could remember little, even though she took notes assiduously.

  The next time she saw him, he was in the library, with his wife; they had clearly had an argument. They were sitting side by side, but he was slightly turned away, browsing the pages of his book with studied nonchalance. His wife had two spots of colour on each cheek; her lips were pursed. He had raised his eyes from his book, given her a smile, as she passed them on her way to the mezzanine. When she had settled, she looked down and saw that he had been watching her, his hands folded in front of him as if in rest, as if he had decided to ignore his books and regard her at his leisure. When their eyes met, he did not break his gaze but smiled again. His wife had her head turned the other way so that the exchange of looks occurred unnoticed. She had flashed him a quick smile and then looked away. The library seemed empty, suddenly, except for the three of them.

  2

  AT their next scheduled meeting, his door was closed when she arrived. She could hear voices inside: his earlier meeting had overrun. She walked back a few paces and stood by the window looking down on the square. The same window from which she had spied Julian who was now, she had heard, ensconced with an American exchange student. The door opened, and he appeared alongside a professor from the faculty who continued talking even as they stood outside the office, before finally taking his leave.