by Sara Banerji
Julia was given such large doses of areca nut that it had put a stop to the soul stirrings for several days. After the areca nut Julia’s soul stirrings had been activated again by the flying of a goose. It was her pet, and was always trying to escape.
“Perhaps,” said Kali, “she is trying to get back to her beloved mate far away.”
The white goose strode upwards with such thunderous glory that Julia felt her throat tighten as though she was about to cry and there arose a sensation in the bottom of her stomach that was so intense she lost consciousness.
Later the servants told her that, on sitting up again she had cried out, “Take me with you! Oh take me with you!”
The doctor was sent for. “A slight epileptic fit,” said Kuts. “We’ll give her a sedative and she should have plenty of rest.”
Edward was furious. “Of course she hasn’t got epilepsy. No one in my family has epilepsy. Has anyone in yours got it, Gwen?”
Julia had fainted like this at school, so that in the end they had sent her home, and there too it had been a flying goose that had sent her whirling.
“Get your head between your knees,” said the nun. And through the roaring and blood-red light in her eyes she had heard the sister ask the children, “Now girls, hands up who knows why you must get a dizzy person’s head lower than their knees?”
Kuts Chatterjee had told Gwen, “At least she should wear some kind of a bonnet in the strong sun, though I suggest you leave her at home with Ayah when you go out for a day’s painting, Mrs Buxton.”
But it was not the heat that made the wild roaring come.
“If a goose flies over me I can feel its wing beats in my heart. They say something, but I can’t hear it very well.” She had tried to find ways of explaining. “It is as if the goose is attached to something inside me. I can feel it tugging …”
Gwen said to Kuts Chatterjee, “I wonder if the servants could have given her something indigestible. They eat such peculiar things,” but told her husband later, “Perhaps she is very susceptible to beauty. Perhaps that is the trouble.”
“Whoever heard of someone fainting because they saw something beautiful,” snorted Edward.
“Ramakrishna, the Indian philosopher, did,” Gwen told him. “When he was a child he saw white egrets flying over the green paddy field, and fainted in ecstasy.”
“Indian philosopher!” Edward said contemptuously. “Anyway,” he went on, “beauty makes a person happy, not ill.”
“How do you know what beauty does, or how it affects people?” Gwen spoke a little hotly, feeling this to be her subject. She would not presume to offer opinions on how to manufacture B.O.P. Fannings or motivate Tamil labourers. “I don’t ever remember you being affected by beauty,” she said.
Edward gazed at her amazed. “But my whole life has been dedicated to beauty!” he announced dramatically. “Just look around you, woman!” He gestured toward the glass cases filled with stuffed birds posed among shells and artificial flowers. “I have given hours of my time,” he said, “and suffered enormous discomfort— even danger — to collect these.” He felt deeply hurt at his wife’s lack of understanding.
“They are all dead, Edward. How can a dead thing be beautiful? You criticise the tribals when they kill birds!”
“But surely you can distinguish between a bird roasted and eaten in a day, and one artistically arranged in a glass case and preserved for years … for ever even!”
Chapter 6
After three sips of gin Julia felt the thing inside her lie down again like a beaten dog. She sighed, and felt sad as though a beloved friend was going away. Kali, peeping at her through a chink in the door, saw a tear run down her cheek, and thought she was crying because the master had not come.
“What is this thing that wakes up in me?” she had asked Kali once, many years earlier. “It feels like a good thing, and I think that if I ever let it stay awake I will feel perfectly happy, and will be able to solve everything. But they all tell me it’s bad, and I am afraid of it now!”
The old man told her, keeping his voice down in case her father should hear, “I think it is Kundalini, Missie Baba.”
“What is that?” She had felt a jump of fear, not having heard of this disease.
“Kundalini is inside the spine of everybody. It goes right from your head to your left toe, but because it is so thin even the doctor can’t see it. For most people it is asleep but yogis are always trying to wake their Kundalini up, because when it is awake you become …” He paused, searching for the right word. At last he said, “Perfect.”
Julia frowned, so that Kali saw that she did not understand him at all.
“If Kundalini wakes up, Missie Baba, you can do anything, you can go anywhere, you will have no sorrow, you will do no wrong … Perhaps because you were dropped on the head as a baby this has woken up the Kundalini just a little bit.”
“You mean it is a good thing?” asked Julia, bewildered. “Is that what you mean, Kali?”
“If it makes you happy it must be a good thing,” said Kali firmly. “For how can happiness be bad?”
But later her mother said to her, “I mean it wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t keep telling your father this illness makes you happy. Happiness comes from things outside you: money, a good marriage, a beautiful house, the sense of achievement when you have managed to capture some evasive light in oils. Happiness doesn’t come from inside! All your father wants of you, dear, is for you to be a normal child. He gets angry at all this … this oddness … and then I can’t …” She paused, and gazed at Julia for a while. She gave a little sigh and said, “I can’t get on with my painting.”
“It is very bad to have happiness also,” Ayah had told Julia. “Only with suffering will you get into Heaven. It is for suffering we are put on this earth and if you go and have all your happiness here and now there won’t be any left for Heaven. Already your soul is feeling discomfort with all this happiness which is why it is doing this wriggling about.”
Julia had spent hours slapping and pinching herself after that for Ayah was the absolute authority on Heaven. Ayah, like one third of the people at the south end of India, was a Christian. She had told Julia that the Kerala Christians had been converted by the apostle, Doubting Thomas.
“These names of Mary and John and Joseph,” she said, “were ours a thousand years before Christianity came to Britain.” And Ayah would make the sign of the cross with a proud defiance.
Julia became progressively more confused about her situation until, having begun with giving Ayah a simple account of finding a hole in the eiderdown she reached a stage where she could not tell what was happening to herself at all, and even tried asking, “How many people can a person be?”
“One,” Kali had assured her. “For you see, Missie, there is only One, and we are all part of that One.”
“Two, you and your soul,” said Ayah. “And you not forget that, Missie. For every time you do bad things the soul gets dirty and Jesus cries.”
“Thousands,” said her father dourly. “You can never be sure of anyone. They are only putting on a show, a thousand faces.”
“Half, really,” said her mother dreamily, “unless you are an artist of course. No one is a complete person unless they are an artist.”
“Ten!” said Babuchi, slapping sliced tomato on to the sandwich bread. “From the way people eat in this house I would say ten, surely!”
The goose flew white and hard, so that she should have hit the sky with a clang, but there was only silence at the moment of impact. Then she vanished, and never seemed to come searching for a way of getting back into her body.
“But that is her body, up there in the sky!” Kali would tell the child, who used to bend over and rootle in the henhouse for the soulless goose body. Kali would point upwards, to where the bird flew. “That is the goose, all of her!” he said.
But even Kali saying this did not stop the child from running over to the poultry house again and aga
in, and peering into the sour dark. Julia was never able to believe that there was only old straw in there.
When the guests had gone home from her parents’ parties there would always be unfinished drinks all over the room, balanced on the corner of Gwen’s piano and dripping into the strings, in rows on the pink granite mantelpiece, and toppling on the arms of chairs. Some would have the stubs of cigarettes floating in them, or even little bits of short eats — potato straws, cocktail sausages, or bitten-into vol-au-vents.
The smell of the after-party room always fascinated and repelled Julia when she was a child. Stale smoke from cigarettes and eucalyptus logs mingled with the stench of alcohol. The people themselves left behind their own smell so strongly that Julia, experiencing it for the first time, had looked up to the ceiling wondering if a guest had gone home and left his most important part, his soul, hovering up there.
Once, as the goodbyes and staggery embraces were being made in the passage, and the guests hunted among their coats’ many apertures, trying to discover the right one to put their arms in, an auntie had been dragged out of the sitting room and towards her car. Her arms had been limp, but her legs had flailed.
“She has left her soul behind!” Julia wanted to shout. “That is why she won’t go! That is why you have to carry her!” But she had not dared say anything. She had lain in bed pretending to sleep, squeezing her eyes shut in case her father should come in. She wondered if you could send a soul on in a parcel in the morning. She wondered if the old postman who ran delivering the letters from bungalow to bungalow, from office to office, would object to carrying a soul wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string. What sort of paper, wondered Julia, would go round a soul, and would the soul wiggle, all tied up like that?
But no soul had ever been left behind after a party, and later on, when Julia was older, someone told her that the smell was perfume and passion mixed.
The lady with the flailing ankles had suffered from both when she arrived, and they had dribbled away from her in the course of the evening, until in the end she had become quite low, and had said things like, “What are we here for?” and, “What is the purpose of the human race?” over and over. Her eyes and her hair became very dull until by the end of the evening she became as dim as the goose after her pinions were clipped.
The leftover drinks were frothy and sour and Julia, raising one after another to her face, was forced quickly to put them down again, overpowered by their violence. Until she found the pink one. Holding it to the window Julia had looked through it and had seen stars shine in the rosy concoction. The first sip was more like a swig as she forced it down like a medicine that would do her good in direct proportion to the horribleness of its taste.
The excited soul that was not in the least tired had rushed back into Julia’s body like a child sent to bed too early, and when the fun was still going on. But after a sip or two of the pink gin Julia became strung together like a necklace and felt with relief that she had control over all the various parts of her body once more.
“I mean, you can’t go through life scattered all over the room, can you?” she said.
But sometimes the experiences would overwhelm her so suddenly, and fill her with such delight, that she did not have time to take remedial action. And sometimes her experiences were of such an original variety that she did not recognise them as part of the forbidden happiness. Once when she was fifteen she said, rashly, to Ayah, “This morning I became absolutely still inside. You could have lit a candle inside my mind and it would not have flickered.”
“Oh, my God!” screamed Ayah and the words were a prayer. She made a fervent sign of the cross, and on the first opportunity announced to Master that Missie was not at all cured after all, in spite of the areca nut.
Edward called Julia to his study. “This is the joy of Satan,” he told her.
Julia kept her gaze out of the window, eyes fixed on the distant hills from which clouds floated like banners. Since she had discovered that her father hated her she had not liked to look at him and she wished that he would not look at her. There was no way in which she could avoid meeting him when he insisted on her presence, but she found that if she stared away into the distance, and hardly even allowed his words to penetrate her hearing, the encounter took on a kind of unreality. She would try to fix her mind over there among the hills so that only her body stood stiffly and hideously here in her father’s study. She did not know why he had grown to hate her. It had come as a great surprise to her, because for years she had thought that, though her mother was somewhat indifferent, her father compensated for this with his exceptional fondness.
Nowadays in her father’s study she would have very much liked her spirit to rise out of her body, as it sometimes did during the night, and float off free. But after the encounters became unpleasant it did not happen. The floating only came when her mind and her body were perfectly at ease.
“Why don’t you speak to me?” her father demanded, cracking sharply through her thoughts. “Why do you never speak to me these days, in fact?”
Julia said nothing. Edward had to pinch his lips together to contain his growing anger. He knew that signs of anger would send the girl into an even deeper silence. Once when he had lost his temper with her she had not spoken a word for several weeks.
“Remember how when you were little we used to talk about everything?” he said wheedlingly.
Julia turned and looked at him, and there was caution in her eyes. She took a breath, was about to speak. Behind her a fierce sun shone. Her breasts that had only come into being a few weeks earlier were silhouetted through the thin stuff of her blouse. Edward saw that they, like her cheeks, were hazed with a little golden fur. His face suddenly became suffused in blood, heat rushed up into his head.
“Put proper clothes on!” he roared, slamming his palms down on the surface of his desk, and sending the pencils on to the floor in a tinkle of broken leads.
“Put some decent clothes on,” Edward shouted again. Julia gripped her hands together and, for a moment, did not move. Then she ran from the room.
After she had gone Edward closed his eyes, and tried to squeeze out of them the memory of those tiny budding breasts, soft and young and glowing with sunshine.
That was the day he ordered that Julia’s pet goose’s wings be clipped. “I am sick to death”, he said, “of having the servants of this household spend half their time hunting for the bloody goose. It has become an excuse for massive idleness.” Edward had supervised the clipping personally, standing at his open office window, and giving instructions. “Shorter, much shorter, fool! Only on one side, you idiot! The idea is to unbalance the creature, not convert it into a dodo.”
Throughout the process the goose had hissed, and tried unsuccessfully to peck the restraining arms of the gardener and the syce. These two had laughed and felt glad to see the goose grounded and humiliated, for they had both, on previous occasions, suffered painful attacks from her.
From another window Julia watched, her clenched fists hanging by her sides, her face white.
“You don’t worry about that,” Ayah said. “It doesn’t hurt her any more than it hurts you when I cut your nails.”
“I hope his arms will become paralysed, and stop working for him, like he has made Goose’s wings stop flying for her,” whispered Julia.
The goose became crooked and dishevelled after the clipping, and several times tried to take off but could not. Julia squatted by the bird’s side, and tried to balance her so that she could fly. She tried to support the bird with her mind as she had supported inanimate brass ornaments and the goose had risen a little, gasping, stretching out her neck, her eyes wild and staring with the effort. But in the end she had fallen back panting, and after a few times did not try any more. She became a waddling goose, and her feathers became soiled, and her droppings squalid.
“You don’t be sad, Missie,” Kali murmured. “Goosie doesn’t mind it.”
But Julia whispe
red so softly that he barely heard the words, “She would be better dead.”
The sky had blackened; it was heaving like a dog about to vomit. The silver oaks, set regularly to shade the tea, resembled pulled catapults, bent by the wind. Leaves were ripped off and sent swirling.
The storm seemed to be taking sobbing breaths like an angry person dragging in gasps of air. That was how cows breathed when it was a difficult birth, before the last contraction expelled the calf.
The bungalow windows began to throb as the wind got them, slamming vibratingly against the frames. And then they began to sway as well. Julia gripped the sofa arm, and peered through squinting, blurry eyes. She did not recollect having made the window move. She turned her gaze to the line of small brass elephants on the mantelpiece. She tried to sink her mind down enough to move them but, perhaps because of the gin, could not.
She had set them galloping twice, and it had frightened her father the first time. She had liked it when her father was afraid of her, and thought, as she had stood smiling tightly, that from this moment on she would probably not ever be afraid of him any more.
Once Ben had told Julia in the early days of their marriage, “Oh, your father was a terrifying man. I can quite understand you being scared of him. I was too scared to tell him I wanted a motor bike instead of Markandaya!”
“But I was not frightened of him at all when I was little,” Julia had said. “I couldn’t even understand why other people were. I could see the servants trembling, and I never knew why. Then suddenly he started hating me!”
Ben had held her face in the palms of his hands, and had said, “How could he have hated you? How could anyone?” and he had kissed her very softly on the forehead.
“He stopped loving me because of the brass elephants,” Julia said. “Before he discovered about my soul coming out he loved me. But when he found out about me, and about how the devil was in me instead of my soul all his loving went.”
