Belonging

by Umi Sinha

  Simon came home from France on short leave that November. I was shocked when I saw him. His face was grey, his hands shook and his occasional stammer had worsened. At lunch he seemed abstracted, hardly speaking and ignoring all Mrs. Beauchamp’s attempts to draw him into the conversation. All through the meal he rested one elbow on the table – something we had never been allowed to do – and crumbled pieces of his bread roll between his fingers, letting the crumbs drop on to the floor. I could see it was irritating Mrs. Beauchamp, who eventually said in a chivvying voice, ‘Lila has come to see you, Simon. You could try to be a little less gloomy.’ He shot her a look of such hatred that I was astonished.

  After lunch we walked in silence up to the top of the Dyke. I could feel the tension in his body as he stood beside me looking north over the Weald. It was a still grey day, and a hush hung over the countryside. It had been a wet, cold autumn following the glorious summer, and I wondered what it was like out in the trenches.

  He gave a deep sigh. ‘It’s so peaceful. You’d never think that just across the Channel such carnage was going on.’

  ‘It’s very bad out there, isn’t it?’

  He glanced at me. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin, Lila. It’s worse than anyone can imagine, but you must know that, working where you do.’

  I thought of the neurasthenic patients, shaking and stammering, gripped by amnesia or headaches, or dumb from shock. ‘One sees the state they’re in, of course, but for the most part they put a brave face on things.’

  ‘Or perhaps they’ve just grasped the truth, which is that no one really wants to know about how beastly it is. Everyone is constantly trying to cheer one up as if one’s the doomsayer at a picnic, or dishing out advice when they don’t know the first thing about it. But I should be used to it by now… Mother never really cared about me… she always wanted a girl: someone she could involve in her bloody Women’s Movement.’

  ‘I’m sure she does care, Simon. It’s just hard to imagine what it’s like out there, even for me. One doesn’t like to ask. Perhaps if you told them about it you’d find they would understand.’

  He snorted. ‘Strange advice from you, Lila. It’s not as if you were a great talker yourself. You’ve never said what happened out in India before you came here.’

  I was silent.

  He smiled. ‘So you see, we’re not so different. Some things are just too hard to talk about.’ He pushed his pale hair back from his brow. ‘Do you hear from Jagjit?’

  Jagjit had written several times. He told me that his brother, Baljit, had signed up too. They were in the same regiment. In his last letter he had said that they would be leaving India at the end of the month.

  ‘He does write. He doesn’t seem terribly happy now he’s in. He says he realises that it makes the officers uncomfortable when they find out that he was a public schoolboy, because they don’t know how to treat him. It’s easier if he pretends not to speak English too fluently, and he thinks they would disapprove of a sepoy being friendly with an Englishwoman, so he won’t be able to write freely once they’re in the field. Apparently their officers read all their letters.’

  ‘Yes, we do that to make sure the men don’t give anything away. And of course to ensure they don’t say anything about what it’s really like out there. Have to keep up the morale of folk at home, don’t you know? But I can imagine he might find it difficult. Do you know, Father told me some MPs protested when the use of Indian troops was first proposed? They felt it was all right to use Indians to fight other Indians in their own part of the world, but unacceptable to employ them against our fellow Europeans. I can imagine that Army life is not what he envisaged – in the O.T.C. we were all treated the same. Do you know where they’re sending him?’

  ‘No. He hopes Europe, so he can visit. But surely he writes to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were such good friends.’

  His mouth twisted.

  ‘I thought so; obviously he didn’t. When we parted he said he’d write – they were his last words – but he hasn’t. Not once.’

  I remembered that atmosphere of awkwardness between them on the boat as they said goodbye. ‘Have you written to him?’

  ‘The ball was in his court.’ He looked at me suddenly and grimaced. ‘I’m sorry to be such bad company, Lila. It was good of you to come.’

  ‘It’s all right, Simon. I do understand.’

  He looked at me properly for the first time. ‘Do you, Lila? Yes, I think perhaps you do. You know, your quietness used to annoy me when we were younger, but I like it now. It’s restful being with you. I find it hard to talk to most girls… I never know what to say to them. One can’t stop thinking about it, you know, even when one’s away from it. At least I know you understand. You’ve always been different.’

  After Simon had gone, I thought about what he’d said about my being different. It was true that even as a child I’d always felt separate, apart; I had thought it was to do with being an only child, but now I wondered if it was more than that. The servants had always teased me about my solemnity, and I knew other V.A.D.s at the nurses’ hostel thought me odd and stand-offish.

  I had made only one friend at the hospital, a sister called Barbara Melton, who took a shine to me for some reason I was unable to fathom, because we could not have been more different. In her starched uniform and cap she was all professionalism, and the other V.A.D.s were afraid of her, but out of uniform she was the most unconventional person I’d ever met, with her cropped dark hair, red lipstick and short skirts. She said she liked me because I wasn’t silly or squeamish, and just got on with the job. All of us were naïve and none of us was used to performing menial tasks, but some of the girls were so incapable that they were more of a hindrance than a help, and others became coy and giggly when having to deal with tasks like administering bedpans or helping with bed baths. Barbara had no patience with them; she herself was an Honourable, the daughter of a baronet, and had become a nurse before the war, despite the opposition of her family, who did not consider it a profession for ladies. Her fiancé, Ronald, was at the front.

  Less than a fortnight after Simon’s departure, plans were announced to transform the disused Royal Pavilion in Brighton into a hospital for Indian soldiers. Barbara was one of the sisters picked to work there, and she decided to take me with her. V.A.D.s were not wanted at the Indian hospital because all the manual work was done by Indian orderlies – the nurses were forbidden to touch the men – but Barbara thought my knowledge of Hindustani would come in useful.

  The preparations were extraordinary. Every effort was made to respect the different religious observances: there were separate water taps, separate cooking facilities, even separate operating theatres and orderlies for Hindus and Muslims. Hindu and Sikh temples were set up in tents in the grounds and arrangements were made for Muslims to be taken to worship at the mosque in Woking. The floors were covered in linoleum and rows of white-sheeted beds and screens created a hospital environment at ground level, while, above, the painted domes, palm tree pillars and magnificent chandeliers that gave the former royal palace its oriental feel remained. For men recovering consciousness, it was disorientating to find themselves in what seemed like an Eastern paradise, and they sometimes had to be reassured that they were not dead or hallucinating. But, for me, it was like coming home. Listening to the buzz of Hindustani took me back to my childhood, playing in the compound and listening to the servants gossiping as they worked. And hearing the Sikhs speaking Punjabi reminded me that it was the language Jagjit would speak at home, and made me eager to learn it.

  I enjoyed being with the men, helping them with the reading and writing of letters; I was grateful to Father who had taught me to read and write Hindustani. Gurmukhi – the Punjabi script – was beyond me, but I found Punjabi itself quite easy to pick up because of its similarity to Hindustani.

  The work I liked best was sitting with the dying. I have never seen a baby born but Barbara tells
me that witnessing the presence of a being where no being existed before is nothing less than a miracle. For me the moment of death was no less profound. Father used to tell me the story of how Savitri outwitted Yama, the Lord of Death, to save her young husband, who was fated to die. Savitri, the faithful wife, was the heroine of the story but I liked Lord Yama best, because he was compassionate enough to allow himself to be outwitted, knowing they would both come to him in the end.

  Having witnessed many deaths in the last years, it seems to me that it is not death itself that is terrible but the process of dying, and that is what haunts me about Father: that he died without comfort, with the sense that there was nothing left to live for. I cannot help feeling that I failed him by not providing him with a reason to live.

  Often as I sat with patients, talking, they would ask me about the war. They were puzzled. A young Jat soldier asked me once if it was true that the Kaiser, the King and the Tsar were related and, if so, why they were fighting. ‘It’s just like the Mahabharat,’ an older sepoy told him. ‘Cousins fighting each other.’

  Some were so awed by the magnitude of the destruction, the shells that obliterated whole villages and destroyed fertile fields, that they thought it must be the final battle of the last age, the Kali Yuga, when Shiva opens his third eye and the world is destroyed before being reborn. Used to fighting face to face, and giving respect to the enemy, they could not comprehend the honour in a war where men fired shells at men they had never seen, and in turn cowered in ditches while bombs rained down on them. But all remembered the enthusiasm with which they had been greeted by the French when they’d arrived in Marseilles. Women had come out to greet them with flowers. Some had even embraced and kissed them. And on the hospital train they had been nursed by Englishwomen who had changed dressings and administered bedpans. ‘They were not like memsahibs but angels,’ an old N.C.O. told me.

  And since they had arrived in England there had been more angels. As soon as the hospital opened, the ladies of the town descended bearing flowers, fruit and other gifts. The soldiers were invited home for tea, or taken for rides along the seafront. For most of them hospital was not a depressing place. They had spent the autumn and the first part of winter digging trenches in the pouring rain, while standing knee-deep in water; many had lost toes to frostbite and, to make matters worse, their winter uniforms had never arrived so they were still in their tropical uniforms, and would continue to be until the following spring. Remembering how cold I had been that first summer in England, even indoors, I could not imagine what the trenches in winter must be like for them. So to be in a warm, comfortable environment, with all their needs supplied, playing cards and dice, or standing on the balconies waving at people passing on the trams, who waved back, was an enjoyable experience.

  During that winter the Indians were involved in some of the heaviest fighting on the Western Front. As I later discovered, Jagjit and his brother were at Ypres, where almost half their regiment would be killed or wounded, but I learnt nothing of this from his letters, in which he addressed me with stilted formality, knowing his words would be read by his company commander.

  As the months passed I found myself increasingly reluctant to expose my own feelings and our letters became more and more like those of casual acquaintances.

  In March 1915, the Indians were involved in a huge battle at Neuve Chapelle and there were so many casualties that we ran out of beds; men were lying on stretchers on the floor. Unlike previous patients, who had been cleaned up and bandaged at casualty clearing stations or field hospitals, these soldiers had been put on the train straight from the battlefield, in muddy pus-soaked field dressings and stinking lice-ridden uniforms. The smell of gangrene hung in the air and the incinerators were struggling to keep up.

  The wounded had started coming in the night before and, no matter how fast we shifted them, more kept coming. Most of us were well into a double shift, and it looked as though we would be there all night again, taking short breaks when we could no longer go on.

  Having no set role, that day I was working as a general dogsbody, carrying cups of tea to the exhausted surgeons who gulped them down between operations, ferrying instruments from the operating theatres to be sterilised, carrying buckets of discarded body parts to the sluice room, and doing anything that no one else was available for. Towards the end of the second day, when things began to settle a little, I was helping the orderlies to sort through piles of uniforms to decide which were worth repairing and which were fit only for the incinerator, when I picked up a uniform jacket which was so soaked in blood that whoever was wearing it must almost certainly have died of blood loss. It seemed astonishing that he’d survived long enough to be put on the train for England, and I was laying it on the pile for incineration when something fell on to the floor with a clink. I looked down and my stomach lurched as I saw a knobbly pendant on a cord, covered with dried blood. I picked it up and my fingers recognised the shape before my eyes did. It was Father’s lucky Sussex stone.

  Henry

  29th June 1882

  I have been at Father’s for almost ten days now. The rains started two days after I arrived here and it has been raining ever since. The noise on the corrugated roof is deafening but I find it strangely soothing – it is one of the sounds of my childhood. The scent of the night-flowering raat-ki-rani drifts into my room and last night I woke and thought myself back in my childhood bed and remembered the bibi’s cool hands on my fevered forehead.

  Yesterday I screwed up my courage and raised the subject of my mother again.

  Father sighed. ‘You must know what happened, Henry. Everyone knows what happened at Cawnpore in ’57. You must have learnt about it at Haileybury, surely?’

  ‘So you’re saying that my mother died at Cawnpore? That it wasn’t my fault?’

  He looked astonished. ‘Your fault? How could it be? Did you really think that?’

  I shrugged.

  He stared at me for a moment then looked away, out into the darkness and the rain, and I thought he was going to retreat into himself and shut me out, as he has done so many times before, but instead he said, ‘I suppose you have a right to know, and you are old enough now to understand. But it’s a long story.’

  ‘I have plenty of time, Father.’

  He sighed. ‘The truth is, your mother shouldn’t have been here at all. She was supposed to return to England when we discovered she was pregnant, but things escalated before I had time to take her to Calcutta. When it was clear there was going to be trouble, I arranged for her to travel with my brother’s family but then Louisa – my brother James’ wife – refused to go, and Cecily decided it was her duty to stay. She got it into her head that her mother, who had died recently, would have wanted her to. Our marriage had not been easy and she was trying to be fair, to do what was right for me, but sometimes our best intentions lead to the worst consequences. I should never have allowed it, of course, but I was afraid if she returned to England I would lose her, and you. It was selfish of me, but I don’t think any of us expected the barrel to explode the way it did. And then it was too late: we were trapped. It was my fault, my selfishness. I should never have let her stay… let any of them stay.’

  ‘So what exactly happened?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Wheeler had built an entrenchment in Cawnpore. You must have learnt something about this at Haileybury…’

  And of course he is right. I have known what happened at Cawnpore for years. It was hardly possible to avoid learning of it in England, for everyone who has relatives in India lives in fear of a recurrence. I have read Mowbray Thomson’s and Fitchett’s accounts, both of which came out while I was at school, but I did not know that my mother or I were part of that story. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘The James Langdon in the Roll of Honour. He was your brother.’

  He nodded. ‘We were all there together – your mother, pregnant with you, and James and his wife Louisa and their three children…’ His voice thickened and he c
leared his throat. ‘Suffice to say it was unimaginably terrible, and through it all your mother was remarkably brave. She was very afraid, as anyone would be, especially in her condition, but she behaved with great courage, helping Louisa with the children and even volunteering to work in the makeshift hospital until it burnt down. It was very distressing – there were hideous injuries from the round shot and wounds got infected and we had very few medical facilities even before fire destroyed the hospital. The screams of the sick and wounded were dreadful to hear… I was concerned that in her condition she would find it too upsetting, but she coped admirably. In the end it was Louisa who fell apart… after James and…’ He paused and covered his eyes with his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Henry. Even after all this time I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘What were you doing during all this?’ I was trying to distract him but it sounded almost accusing. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’

  He gulped his whisky. ‘I was serving under the commanding officer of a British regiment, a Captain Moore. He was junior to me but I had no men of my own to command – Wheeler had thrown all the native troops, except a few trusted officers, out of the entrenchment. My men were completely loyal, as would be proved later, but by then Wheeler didn’t trust any of them. It was a mistake that sealed our fate, because it turned even those who were loyal against us and allowed the Magazine and Treasury to fall into Nana Saheb’s hands.’

  He took a breath.

  ‘It’s hard to describe… unimaginably hellish. It’s astonishing that we held out as long as we did. Any competent army could have taken us in a day, but of course they had no leadership… The entrenchment walls were so low that they provided no cover at all. We were effectively out in the open, in the blazing sun at the hottest time of year, and under constant fire, day and night. We didn’t even have access to water: the well was targeted by snipers even in the dark; they could hear the splash of the bucket and the creak of the rope. Those who volunteered to get water did so at the risk of their lives. We got used to drinking water with blood in it, and by the end all there was to eat was handfuls of gram flour mixed into a paste with a little water. When the hospital barracks caught fire, there was no time to evacuate the wounded and all our medical supplies were destroyed. It meant bullets could no longer be extracted and even the slightest wound was a sentence of death.