by Sara Banerji
They would set off with the shivering official on his trembling mare leading the way, Edward on Narada following and towering over the inspector.
The inspection was made with the unfortunate inspector hunched and clinging to his mount, with the great stallion’s face a foot from the mare’s tail. If the inspector was brave enough, or foolhardy enough to look behind him, he would be confronted with the entire range of Narada’s teeth and Narada’s upper lip curled up like a plump and quilted roller blind above them, indicating total and ecstatic sexual aspiration. And behind the awful face of the aroused stallion would be its rider’s, teeth bared too, in a grin. And as they travelled, fast, always much too fast for the poor inspector, Narada would let out sudden pig-like squeals, and sometimes his forelegs would rise from the ground, so that for a moment the horrified inspector would be certain he was going to have to share his saddle with two great hooves like iron-clad tree trunks.
“Next year the inspection must be made by jeep or at least on a motor bike!” the inspectors would whimper, once safely back at Edward’s office, and with two feet on the ground again. And they would hobble over to a chair groaning, and wipe the red dust off their faces.
“The roads are quite unsuitable for motor vehicles!” Edward would say with a triumphant smile.
“Then I suggest you make them suitable!” the inspectors would snap, but cringe a bit when Edward roared, “I will not waste precious company funds on frivolities!”
The inspectors either had to return to Madras and pretend that they had discovered that all was well in Arnaivarlai, or admit that, due to the method of transport through the district, they had been unable to concentrate on the state of the tea or fertiliser dosages.
No tea estate inspector had ever been known to come to inspect Arnaivarlai twice, but apparently there was a ready supply of Madras officials, who, not knowing about Narada, were ready and eager to spend a few days in the cool hill station. “Trout fishing,” the previous year’s inspector would urge if there was any reluctance. Or, “Ronnie bagged a sambar up there last year.”
Edward rode the marvellous stallion round the district for twelve years, and in all that time was not thrown once, though there was not another rider in the district that could have remained on the animal’s back for a minute. Harry, Doris’s husband, had once said when he was certain of not being overheard (for tea planter Buxton was almost as violent as his horse) that the only reason Narada never threw him was because he could not. Edward’s great corpulence did not allow the four hooves to rise very high up off the ground.
Markandaya, Ben Clockhouse’s horse, was the son of Narada, though a creature of a very different temperament, or Ben would not have considered accepting him however alarmed he had been by Edward. When Edward offered the horse to Ben he said, “Called after a pair of bloody yogis, the pair of them. Why the devil they had to name a perfectly good couple of horses after Hindu yogis I will never know. But you’ll have to keep the name. Can’t change a horse’s name or it brings bad luck.”
At the time Ben, who had not wanted the horse at all anyway and did not care much what it was called, had only sighed.
The conversation had taken place on the day Edward offered Ben the hand of his daughter in marriage. Looking back Ben had been unable to understand exactly what had occurred. It had all happened so fast, and it seemed to Ben that in a moment he had been promoted from tea estate manager to assistant senior manager, and had become engaged to Edward Buxton’s only child.
“And you can have the gelding, Markandaya, as well,” Edward had added casually. “He’s not a patch on his glorious father. But he’ll do for you!”
Ben had felt a hot and angry patch flare up on either cheek, but when Edward strummed on the table with his fingers, and scowled under a brow so black and dark that his eyes were nearly lost in it, Ben had not found the courage to say, “I don’t want your horse, Mr Buxton.” Anyway these words might easily have lost Ben the job of Senior Manager of the Arnaivarlai Tea Company. Ben said nothing. His trouble was that the company gave a horse allowance or a motor bike allowance, and Ben would have much rather gone round the district on a bike.
Later Julia’s artistic mother said to Ben, “Edward tells me you are to marry Julia. Aren’t you a little old for her? And will you find her, well, intelligent enough … if you know what I mean?”
Ben, inspired by the glories that lay ahead, had caught Mrs Buxton by the hand, and squeezing it, said, “Don’t worry about Julia, Mrs Buxton. I will care for her! I will make her happy!”
“Happy, yes. I suppose that is the important thing,” Gwen had said vaguely. Then her eyes had trailed away to where some guests were playing croquet silhouetted against the valley and a rosy setting sun.
“What a fine picture that would make,” she said. “I suppose you haven’t got a red or pink crayon on you by any chance?”
★
As Julia went into the garden she knew at once that Ben had not come back from the way the dogs did not rush into the bungalow barking. If Ben had been inside the dogs would not have lain out in the road but would have dashed up the drive disregarding Julia’s summons, ignoring her whistles and shouts as though they had gone deaf. They would try to rush past the sweepers polishing the hall. There would be cries from the men, yelps as the dogs greeted Ben, sounds of bare feet rushing as the men tried to stem the tide of wet and muddy tracks over the newly-cleaned passages. The dogs always knew if Ben was in or not. With people, thought Julia, you had to hear a shout. “Hello darling! I’m back!” Dogs needed nothing like that. They just knew. And today they just knew that Ben was not there. They allowed themselves to be caught by the sweepers, submitting meekly to having towels thrown over them, walking obediently if rather dismally on their chains to the back verandah to be hosed and scrubbed.
Julia, clothes dripping, making almost as much mess as the dogs would have, went muddily through the bungalow and into the kitchen and announced sternly, “There is a yogi at our gate!”
Kali smiled and nodded, and Babuchi stirred the soup with a hand that shivered slightly from his malaise. He did not look up.
“They say he is a thousand years old,” said Kali.
Babuchi grunted into the broth.
“He can’t sit there!” said Julia loudly.
“Madam, a yogi must sit, even if he is a thousand,” Babuchi said without turning from his stirring.
“He came here when you were a small child. He sat there at the gate then too,” said Kali hopefully. “At that time you liked him.” He paused, then added, “Although your father did not.”
Julia, ignoring this, said, “He told me he is Markandaya!”
“Oh, Madam!” Kali burst out. “You know this cannot be true for this yogi has no tongue.”
Julia was silent for a while, remembering.
She had been six and had tried to talk to the yogi, but the yogi had not answered her. Later Kali had told her that that was because the yogi had cut out his tongue with a piece of razor grass and offered it to God.
“Why should God want the yogi’s old tongue?” Julia had inquired. And Kali had answered, “Ah, who knows the ways of Gods? Or yogis?”
She nodded to herself. She remembered the yogi now, and felt surprised because that conversation with Kali must have taken place nineteen years ago yet the yogi looked exactly the same now as he had done then.
“He spoke,” said Julia firmly.
Peryamal, the syce, came in carrying the horse’s wet saddle blanket to be dried by the fire. He scowled because he was cross with the Missie.
Babuchi said to the syce, “It seems the yogi has the name of your horse. He said to Madam that his name is Markandaya.”
“He did not!” said Julia sharply.
Babuchi and Kali both relaxed and Kali said with a relieved little smile, “Ah, I am glad. We have misunderstood the Madam. For we all know that this yogi does not speak.”
“He said ‘I am Markandaya,’ not ‘My name is
Markandaya.’”
“But that is the same thing!” said Kali and Babuchi almost together.
“It is not the same thing at all!” cried Julia. She spoke hotly because this sort of inaccuracy annoyed her. She thought to herself how everyone around her was always so carelessly imprecise. She had suffered from this imprecision of others ever since she had been a child. There had been Ayah who had sworn that the barks of trees were brown when it was perfectly obvious that they were all shades of colour from green to purple. She had been exasperated, as a child, by the inaccurate way in which Kali cut the sandwiches, leaving tough stabs of brown here and there to mar the perfection of the bouncy white. But when she had complained to her mother, Gwen had told her it didn’t matter. That was like saying truth didn’t matter, thought Julia.
“Perhaps you are an artist inside,” Gwen had said once, hopeful, encouraged by this emphasis on accuracy. “Maybe it will come out one day.”
She had tried to teach Julia art. But the artist in Julia never came out, much to Gwen’s disappointment. Julia, pale and shaking, would shove her pencil across the page often piercing the paper, an eye on her mother, who tried to keep her patience. In the end Gwen would always snatch the paper away and say, “Oh, look, dear. Perhaps you’d better go and play in the garden. You’re making marks right through the paper and spoiling the table. Father will be cross!”
Years later Gwen’s daughter looked out of the small barred kitchen window, and wondered what it was her mother had wanted of her, wondered how her mother could have expected Julia to express an infinite range of colours with a lead pencil, and decided that it must have been because even Gwen, who painted so well, was prone to some sort of sloppiness when it came to accuracy.
Julia herself had expressed exactly what she had heard the yogi say. She would not have dreamt of doing otherwise. She was sure he had spoken, for she could still feel the vibration of his voice under her ribs. It made a kind of booming tingle which still seemed to linger there. All voices tended to linger a while in Julia’s system, but she had never known a voice to linger as long as this one.
“He said, ‘I am Markandaya’, and not ‘My name is Markandaya,’” she repeated firmly. “And he did speak. I know it. And I am never wrong about these things.”
“No, Missie,” Kali and Babuchi said in unison, and nodded.
Kali said suddenly, “You are shivering all over, Missie! You must not stay wearing those wet clothes.” He knew Julia. She would probably not change at all if someone did not tell her to. Quite likely if Clockhouse Master did not come home in time the Missie would be still wearing those wet and dirty clothes when the party guests arrived.
Julia recognised the look of determination in Kali’s eyes. She knew when he had to be obeyed.
She wandered to her room and began to pull off the clinging garments. As she did so she felt her soul stir. She felt a tickling ripple through her body as though the creature sleeping in her was stretching. She had experienced the stillness that surrounded the yogi, and it was waking the thing that slept in Julia.
There are people who yawn, then find their jaws have become locked. There they sit, mouths open, draughts tickling their larynxes and, if they have any, tonsils too. They are in agony, tears fill their eyes, but because so many parts of the crying mechanism are not functioning all they dare do is look at you through those hurting, watery eyes, and grunt. And there are those whose hips are not securely attached to their bodies, so that a short sprint plucks the legs away. They become as useless and limp as the legs of a celluloid doll when the elastic has lost its give. Julia Clockhouse had once had a doll like this. She had managed to keep its orange limbs more or less fixed against its body with knickers, but when these were removed the plastic thighs tumbled down, and dangled several inches below the torso.
Julia’s soul was like that. It came off in the way that lipstick did when you got drunk and kissed people who were not your husband at parties.
Sometimes when Julia woke in the morning she would find the soul all over the place, smudged on the ceiling even. Because of this Julia, like the yawners with dislocating jaws, or the runners whose hips fell out, had to be very careful.
It was Ayah Two who had alerted Julia to the fact that it was abnormal for a soul to seep out.
Julia had woken one morning to find her Self looking down at herself in bed. Julia’s consciousness had often risen and hung suspended under the ceiling and she assumed that this was perfectly normal human behaviour. She thought everyone had such experiences. She said to Ayah, “I could see a little hole in the bedspread when I looked at myself from the ceiling—” She got no further. Ayah, with her hands over her ears as though she feared the devil might enter through those two apertures, began screaming. She became quite hysterical, shoving Julia away from her, and rushing to Gwen, shouting as she dashed through the spacious corridors, “Madam! Madam! The devil has stolen Missie’s soul!”
Julia, who had been seven at the time, had been very shocked, so that her lips had gone white and she had found it hard to breathe. She sat up in her bed, trying to explore the inside of herself, and discover what form the devil, who now resided there, had taken. But since she had only herself with which to explore herself, which is something like trying to touch your finger with the same finger, she felt panic and confusion, and could not tell what the devil was like at all.
Julia Clockhouse had managed, over the years, through care and vigilance, to live with her disability, so that by the time she was twenty-five she had become skilful at keeping herself in one, and had even discovered an antidote against the dribbling away of what, according to most of the people around her, was the only item of importance in her whole system.
Chapter 5
Julia pulled on some dry clothes, and went into the drawing room. Kali was dusting there and he looked at her approvingly. She pulled up a string that hung round her neck and opened the drinks cupboard with the key on the end.
At once Kali’s expression became anxious. “It is nearly lunch, Missie. Quite soon the clear soup will be on the table,” he said. He spoke quickly as though alarmed.
She smiled at the old man, and said, “Come on, Kali! Memsahibs always get drunk before lunch! Anyway it’s not lunchtime yet. It’s only a quarter to one. You go now. You can finish in here later …”
She was right, of course, thought Kali, as he trudged, worried, to the kitchen. It was a perfectly normal thing for a madam to have a drink before lunch. In fact in his time Kali had seen madams who had lots of drinks before lunch. But they were not Julia Missie.
Julia splashed the angostura bitters into a glass and swirled it around until the interior was coated with pink and the perfume stung her nostrils. She added a lot of gin and held the concoction up to the light watching the layers of pink and alcohol shimmer a little like heat haze as they blended. Then she sat back in the sofa and took the first curative sip.
She had drunk her first gin when she was fifteen, swallowing down leftovers from her father’s parties, after she discovered gin cured her of the devil. Before that her body would be in her bed during those parties but she would hear the sounds of slightly drunken babble from various parts of her room, because, for some reason, the sound of the parties always seemed to make her soul rise and float free, as it had nearly done today.
She would steer the drifting part of her so as to hear what the guests were saying, while, below her, her body lay still and sleeping on the bed. Sometimes her consciousness would flip from one to the other, from the inert body to the floating soul. One moment she would be straining after the shining spectral thing floating near the ceiling and a moment later be looking dizzily down.
An aunt and an uncle who were not married to each other, but to other people, came in when she was floating in this way once. They had looked down at her body in the bed but presumably could not see her soaring.
“There is nothing so innocent as a child sleeping,” they had whispered, and giggled and tottere
d and caught each other by the elbow. They had never imagined for a moment that there was more of Julia overhead than in the bed when they kissed each other passionately. The uncle had tried to thrust his hands into the auntie’s clothes, and the auntie had pulled away, looking nervously at the body of Julia. The uncle had said, “The child’s fast asleep. She won’t know a thing!”
Julia had tried to cry out, “I am here, not there!” or, “I am there and here too, and can see you and hear you,” for she had never seen uncles and aunties behave in such a way. But her jaw was jammed and no words came out.
The sensation of being out of her body, with the soul floating, was a lovely one, and for years, until Julia learnt that it was bad, she had looked forward to the experience, and even done things that brought it on, like looking at birds soaring up into the sky. But after she learnt that it was a bad thing, she began to take gin to cure it.
She had tried to describe it to her father. “It is so beautiful,” she had whispered. “Like being part of the whole universe. It makes me tickle all over.”
Her father’s reaction had been totally unexpected. He had turned upon her a furious glare and rung the bell for Ayah. As she was led from the room she heard her father grunt, “She must have caught worms from that bloody cook again …” Then she saw him wipe the pencil she had been using with his handkerchief.
In her effort to get people to understand during lunch that day she said suddenly, “That feeling I told you about! It makes me happy!”
There had fallen an instant silence from her father’s goat-crunching teeth. Gwen began to wave her hands silently, signalling Julia to say no more.
Later Julia asked Kali, “Does it make you feel happy to have worms, Kali?”
“No, no, Missie,” the old man assured her. “They get in there and eat all your food, and give you a tummy ache.”
Kuts Chatterjee had told the alarmed parents, “There is a possibility of threadworm infecting the bowel of young children finding their way into the anus, and other regions, where they can activate sensual feelings. Yes, it is not uncommon.”
