by Sara Banerji
“Oh! It’s morning! Didn’t you know that!” snapped Julia, irritated. She rounded her lips like a schoolmistress.
The boys whispered to each other, laughed suddenly, then one shouted out a word that sounded like “Ghost!” Then they scampered off quickly saying, “Good morning, good morning,” over and over in mocking voices.
Chapter 3
Julia watched them go with feelings of annoyance. She had grown accustomed to the tea-plucking women shrinking from her, the men backing away to the roadside and with folded hands, namaskaring God. She expected awe, and the fact that the boys did not cringe or quiver made her cross.
But her mind was taken off them a moment later. The two golden Labradors that had been lying at the horse’s feet suddenly leapt up and raced barking down the hillside. They had smelled a deer. Julia, peeping over the steep decline, caught sight of the wild creature standing quivering slightly among a group of wild rhododendrons. She whistled for the dogs but the whistle would not come properly, and the dogs either did not hear, or decided to pay no attention. The deer seemed to have laid some sort of cunning trail, for the dogs were zigzagging wildly among the wet tea bushes, and sometimes even did a complete circle. They emerged into Julia’s view at intervals, mouths open in excitement, letting out high yelps like puppies, and sometimes skidding on their haunches over the steep slopes and granite boulders. From her raised path Julia could see both the hunted and the hunters clearly, and laughed aloud suddenly when the deer, having peered around calmly, and apparently assured itself that the dogs would never find it, lowered its head and began to graze. It was so close to Julia that she could see the channels down its cheeks where the tears ran.
“Why do deer cry?” she had asked Kali once, when she had been a child.
“It is because God can’t cry,” he had told her. “The deer do the crying for God.”
“Why does God want to cry?” asked the child.
“With so much suffering in the world He would seem without heart if He did not,” Kali told her reasonably.
“Who would know if He never cried? Who would know if He only laughed at suffering?” demanded Julia.
“Ah.” Kali had smiled. “You ask very many questions, Missie Baba. Perhaps one day you will be the one to find the answers!”
The horse, that had been straining and dancing, stopped pulling suddenly and pricked his ears. He turned his gaze towards the grassy plain above the road and a quiver ran through his body.
“Has a goose walked over your grave?” asked Julia, running her palm down the gelding’s neck, trying to calm him. If the horse became really frightened he was capable of bolting all the way home. Julia would never manage to hold him, and on such wet roads he was quite likely to fall.
“It’s only a goose!” she whispered, and pressed her cheek to the horse’s shoulder. She had heard the phrase from her mother many years before, and, without being certain of its meaning, had been attracted by it. She had gone through a period of using it so often that her father had suddenly become angry and forbidden her ever to say it again. She had not said it since. Until this day when for some reason it sprang to her lips as the horse Markandaya stared up the hill to something as yet unseen by his rider, and shivered with horror.
“It’s all right, all right, “Julia told him, feeling her own body begin to tremble. The horse had his body strained like a bow so that she knew he was ready to bolt at the slightest change in the situation. She could still see nothing among the long grasses above and could hear nothing either because of the dogs. But she thought the horse might be sensing wild elephants.
Six months earlier she and Ben had seen two wild tuskers fighting in a tea field close to the patch of grassland into which the horse glared with such concentration. She and Ben had stood at the end of the garden and watched the creatures rip out the tea bushes and race towards each other with roots and earth dangling. They had fought for three days, screaming with a shrill and hysterical sound, unworthy of such dignified animals.
Ben had watched them with his jaw tight, and had said, “Disaster looms!” He had stroked back his hair with both palms, a gesture he always made when he was worried. Then he had fallen into a mood of despair, and had sat for a long time staring at the wall and ignoring Julia, who had tried to make him happy by pressing her cheek to his and begging him to come up the hillside with her to see an orchid she had found growing there.
“Shall I tell Kali to bring you some tea?” she had asked. “Would you like a Marie biscuit?”
But Ben had only mumbled, “Where is the money going to come from?” and, “How much do you think it’s going to cost to repair the damage those two blighters are doing?”
“I don’t know,” said Julia. And she had pressed her hand briefly against her throat and wondered if her father had taught her how much a tea field ravaged by a pair of wild tuskers costs to repair.
Julia wanted to see elephants today because it was her birthday. She did not want to see fighting tuskers, but calm ones in a herd with their babies. “A birthday present for me,” she said aloud, looking towards the rim of the valley, as though she made the request to someone there. And as though at once her wish had been granted, a tusker, five cows, and two young ones appeared abruptly out of a group of trees. An elephant-smelling breeze washed Julia’s face like concentrated cow. The horse, at the sight of the elephants, relaxed a little as though to say, “Oh, is that all it was!” Julia let the reins slacken, and settled back in the saddle to enjoy the sight of the six great animals and their two calves moving forwards and casually crushing a bunch of wild flowers with every step. They covered the ground fast, surging through the harsh grasses, tearing at them without pausing, thrusting a trunkful into their mouths, and heading purposefully for the jungled area on the other side. Behind her the Labradors still yelped in the wake of their deer, and Julia was glad. She did not want them to get wind of the wild herd on the plateau. The elephants would not have minded the dogs much but, if only a little irritated, were capable of flinging the pair of nuisances to their death with a single sweep of the trunk.
It took the elephants less than five minutes to cross the plateau and vanish into the jungle, and by the time they were out of sight the dogs had given up their deer chase, and rejoined Julia and her horse. They threw themselves on to the road and panted loudly.
“Come on! Don’t lie there!” shouted Julia, taking up the reins. She had become suddenly filled with confidence and wild exhilaration as though the sight of the elephants had been a sign. She pressed her heels into the horse’s sides and he was off down the road in a moment. At once the dogs threw off their exhaustion, and were racing ahead. Julia leant forwards, pressing her face to Markandaya’s neck, getting her mouth filled with the sharp hair of his mane, knowing, now that she had seen the elephants, no tractor would come up the hill towards them and that no matter how slippery it was the gelding would keep his footing. She shouted aloud into the hot brown horsehair, her voice hardly heard over the rattling of hooves and the thumping of the first drops of the next downpour. “After all, it’s my birthday!” she yelled. “Everything has to go right on my birthday.”
While Julia was out the servants cleaned the bungalow for the party. The sweepers had tied rice sacks on to their feet with bits of string, and they skated over the floors until the red tiles shone. The water boy, who was Julia’s old ayah’s nephew, scrubbed and cleaned at baths and basins with a bit of coconut string in a vain attempt to remove the orange rust stains caused by the iron-rich water. Meanwhile Kali rushed from room to room flapping his duster over every bit of furniture in sight, arranging magazines, shouting out to now one then another servant, “Clean this” and, “Move this”. In the garden the small boy, now returned from his dash to the club, polished the big brass gong, unable to resist, when he thought no one could hear him, gently thumping it with his knuckle, and shivering with delight at the soft vibrating boom it made.
“You are making a good job of it, little
man,” Kali called out to him encouragingly as he passed. The child was a member of one of the original valley tribes and had only recently come to work in the bungalow. He had never done housework before, and had had to be shown everything. Kali and Babuchi both still laughed as they remembered the day they had shown the boy how to pull out a drawer from a chest of drawers. The boy had been greatly impressed with the design and had murmured, “I wonder why everyone does not have one!”
“Well, everyone does these days except the tribal people of Arnaivarlai,” Kali had said to Babuchi later. Even Kali had a small one that had been made by his cousin the carpenter. It stood in the living quarters of his two-roomed hut at the end of the garden. But at the time he had only said to the boy, “You work hard and you will get a chest of your own one day.” Now the little boy scrubbed and scoured at the gong until Kali feared he might remove the brass altogether and had to tell the child that he had done a perfect job on it, and should go and help Babuchi scour the saucepans.
Babuchi was not feeling well that day, and lay back in a rocking chair, his newspaper over his face, groaning pitifully.
“If Clockhouse Master was here,” he told Kali, “I would say to him to cancel the party, for I feel so bad I do not think I can cook it.”
Kali tried to brace him up, and even sent the ayah’s nephew to peel the potatoes, saying, “For once we will let the baths stay red.”
The nephew was pleased to be allowed to abandon his task. He had always disliked de-rusting the bath because it was such a hopeless task. No matter how hard you scoured you could not remove the stains. The bath had been ground right through to the iron in places, and still there were red stains.
In the old days Gwen, Julia’s mother, would come back from England bringing English creams and powders which, she said, she had been told would remove any amount of red staining.
Kali had felt quite proud, although he had said nothing, when these English powders failed to shift the strong red of the valley. It confirmed his opinion that the valley was the best place in the world in spite of the monsoons, wild animals and remote situation.
“You could at least chop an onion,” moaned Babuchi to the syce, who waited for Julia on the kitchen porch. But Peryamal only sniffed. Chopping onions was not at all a syce’s work.
Then they all heard the sound of the horse’s hooves, and Kali began to urge everyone on to speedier efforts for he knew that once Clockhouse Missie returned it would not be such an easy job to get the house done.
As they came up to the bungalow Julia saw a man sitting outside the gates. The horse saw him too and came to a snorting halt. The man wore only a lungi, with his chest bare, and he sat cross-legged on the ground. Round his neck he wore some pale brown beads and by his side stood a wooden bowl. His eyes were closed. His spine was as straight as a gum tree. His body did not move at all, not even his ribs stirred. His chest, which should have been swelling and sinking gently as the air came in and out, was as still as the granite rocks on the hillside behind him. Markandaya, the horse, puffed because he had just been galloping, and the two Labradors lay on the ground in the road and panted noisily, water dripping from their tongues. And, pouring over their golden coats and washing away the white sweat from the shoulders of Markandaya, torrented the rain. It rushed over Julia spilling into her eyes, trickling saltily into her mouth, and gushed over the half-naked body of the yogi. Thrashed by water the yogi sat, his feet on his thighs in the position called lotus, haloed in quiet; unbreathing, unseeing, unhearing.
The dogs, having got their breath back, moved towards the yogi, curious, noses quivering, sniffing him, the odd human who neither ran from them in terror, nor appeared to be going to fondle and praise them. The horse was more cautious. He stared at the yogi with eyes and nostrils rounded, ears pricked forwards, as though trying to capture every sound the yogi made. But the yogi made no sound. No sound at all. Julia leant over and saw that he sat on a small deerskin, that his wooden bowl was full of rainwater which overflowed steadily, that the soles of his bare feet were thick and horny as though he had done a lot of walking, and that water drops hit the beads round his throat then sprang away to fall into his navel, filling and overflowing that too, as though it was another begging bowl. The yogi’s skin was hazed with a multitude of very fine wrinkles, but was not goosefleshed at all although the rain was quite cold, and Julia, in spite of her recent exercise, had begun shivering. It was as though the yogi had left his body outside, sitting here in the rain, and had gone somewhere else. At first Julia had not dared to look at the yogi’s face, fearing he might suddenly open his eyes. But when he did not stir she became more confident, gradually beginning to examine his mouth which was only partly visible behind a white beard. The water ran in rivulets down the yogi’s beard, but while Julia had to keep wiping away the water on her face with her hands, the yogi’s hands, lying palm up on either knee, seemed perfectly relaxed as though the water was not tickling him at all. She raised her eyes a little higher and saw that his nostrils were wide like Markandaya’s after a hard gallop, although he did not seem to breathe. But Julia for a moment got the impression that all the air of the world was passing through the body of the yogi without his having to stir his lungs at all. She brought her gaze quickly up to the top of his head and saw that his hair was pure white, sopping wet, and rather thin so that the scalp was visible like the pink skin of a white horse. Then slowly and cautiously she turned her gaze to the yogi’s closed eyelids. Rain poured over them gathering in the lashes, hanging there, dripping on to his cheeks, joining the water in the white beard.
Then the eyelids of the yogi suddenly opened.
Julia got such a fright that she let out a little cry.
Impassive, the eyes of the yogi gazed at Julia, not curious as she had been. The dark eyes looked, yet it was impossible to say whether they saw anything or not. The yogi stared at Julia Clockhouse and Julia, dangling over the side of her husband’s horse, clinging with her fingers to the girth for balance, water running out of her hair, stared back through upside-down eyes, and whispered, “Oh, oh.” The horse Markandaya shuddered, and stared too, but the yogi kept his eyes on Julia’s face.
After what seemed a very long time Julia said, “Good morning …”
The yogi nodded with the mildest of movements.
As though some spell was broken Julia dragged herself back up into the saddle, suddenly able to move again, and shook her head like a dog, sending water spinning in a cloud around her.
She said, “I am Mrs Clockhouse, and this is my bungalow.”
There was a long pause during which the yogi stared at Julia with that curiously incurious gaze, then he said in a deep voice that seemed younger and stronger than his body, “I am Markandaya.”
Julia felt a sudden hot embarrassment flood her face, and she caught the horse’s wet mane in her fingers and fumbled with it. Then she hastily gathered up the reins, whistled to the dogs, and pressed her heels into the horse’s sides.
She heard the sound of Peryamal the syce running along the drive, the groan as the gates behind her opened. The syce took the horse by the bit, and, hunched against the rain under his grey blanket, led her silently to the front door.
Chapter 4
As Julia was led into her garden the sound of metal struck shrilly by metal sounded through the valley. This was the muster bell, a summons to the tea pluckers to bring the leaf they had picked to be weighed. The system had been installed by Julia’s father, Edward Buxton.
Edward had succeeded his father, Thomas, in the running of his tea estate. Although Thomas remained a manager for the rest of his career Edward was soon promoted to become the first Senior Manager in charge of the whole group of estates. When he took over he found the estates all starting and stopping work at different times, and some even expecting their labourers to work fewer hours than others. The first thing Edward did was to install the gong, and co-ordinate estate working hours.
Edward made many other improvements
to the district, and as well as making all the rules, personally ensured that they were kept. Woe betide any manager who had weeds growing among his tea bushes, unpainted granite road markers, labourers’ cows grazing on the tea slopes, or any kind of messiness in the labourers’ quarters. And Edward classed as messiness such things as vegetable plots and flower beds. Edward, as will be seen from all this, was extremely keen on order. So the one thing that always astonished any newcomer to the district was the state of the roads. The ten tea estates and the immaculate managers’ bungalows were approached by roads that were as potholed and as weedy as possibly could be imagined. But nothing that Edward ever did was without reason, and his reason for such untidy roads was a horse called Narada.
Edward always went round his estates on this horse, which was such a powerful beast that anyone less strong than Edward would certainly have been killed riding it.
Once a year an inspector was sent from head office in Madras to check that all was well in Arnaivarlai. The impending arrival of this inspector always infuriated Edward, and in the days preceding it he would be snappy with his wife, shout at his servants, and not speak to Julia at all.
The Madras official dreaded these visits to Arnaivarlai even more than Edward.
For Edward always insisted that the inspection was done on horseback. The inspector would be given a lightly-made mare to ride, and any pleas that he could not ride would be totally ignored. The inspector would usually say, “You go first,” to Edward but he would never hear of it. “You are the guest on my estate. I insist you precede me!”
