by Sara Banerji
“Delivering some private papers for the SM,” Dick would tell his wife. One day Nana was sure to complain to Ben Clockhouse about her husband being sent so often on missions of this sort. “No one else’s husband has to go,” he would imagine her saying. The idea that one day she would betray him made his little jaunts all the more exciting, and also gave him the excuse to betray her. He had revenge on her in advance, so to speak, for the fact that she was one day going to betray him.
“Well, what are all these private papers, anyway?” she would ask Dick. “I’ve never known anything like the number of private papers this company seems to send to Cochin.” Dick would tell her darkly, “Please do not mention them to anyone. If the SM knew that I had told you about them I would probably lose my job …”
“You haven’t told me anything about them!” Nana would retort. Then Dick would put his arm round her waist, hug her, and say, “Come on old girl, give Dicky Wicky a kissy wissy then,” which always made her giggle.
Dick felt a great sense of resentment for Ben Clockhouse, and considered that if it had not been for the fact that he was married to Nana, and so unable to marry Julia Buxton, he, Dick Sallinger, would have been the next general manager. Dick had probably been the first man to flirt with Julia; might well have been the first man to make her laugh.
“Oh, Dick, uncle!” she would say, laughing so much her face would go quite pink, “You are so silly!” And he would smack her on the bottom, and tell her, “Mustn’t be cheeky to uncles!”
Dick had always thought he was to be the next SM. It was on that understanding that he had agreed to accept the post of manager on his own tea estate. Poor Nana had even measured up the windows of the big bungalow for curtains. When Edward had his stroke, and began to consider retiring Nana had booked the tailor for stitching the big bungalow chair-covers. Edward had hung on for several years although one of his arms was paralysed. But Dick and Nana lived in hope. Then suddenly little Julia was Big Memsahib, and not Nana Sallinger at all. It was almost too terrible to be endured. If Dick had known how to earn his living in any other way he would have resigned, and gone even back to the awfulness of England. But twenty-three years of tea planting and no other training at all did not qualify him to do anything else.
Julia picked up the lemons herself in the end, rushing out into the rain wearing only a small towel which became drenched through in a few minutes, and plunging her hands again and again into the prickly tree until her arms were bleeding from the scratches.
Babuchi had his back to her when she came into the kitchen with the fruit, his lungi tucked up to show muscular calves, as he stirred something on the stove.
“Make lemon flip Babuchi!” Julia shouted. “Not chocolate soufflé, but lemon flip for my birthday party.”
Babuchi stirred, and murmured, “Master said chocolate soufflé.”
Julia flung the lemons at him. One struck him on the back splashing whatever it was he stirred in the saucepan, and another crashed through the little window, shattering the glass. A flurry of violent weather heavy with grit and leaves rushed into the kitchen hurling Ganapati’s marigold garland to the floor, and stinging out the god’s delicate joss stick smoulder in a moment. Babuchi turned and stared at Julia, a long red splash like blood across his cheek, while lemons bounced all over the kitchen floor.
“Did you hear me?” Julia said loudly.
Babuchi wiped his face slowly with his apron and said, “You spoiled my tomato sauce, Missie. Why do you do such things?” Then he called out, “Munyandi! Eh, Munyandi!”
There was a shuffling sound outside and, rubbing his eyes as though he had just woken from a sleep, the cook’s matey came in. Babuchi pointed to the fallen lemons. “Pick them up,” he said.
“Well, will you make lemon flip then?”
“What you have to go and bring a hundred for, madam?” mumbled Babuchi. “One dozen would have been enough.”
Julia smiled. She knew that Babuchi would make the flip.
After she had left the kitchen Babuchi looked towards the holy picture and said, “It is your fault. You did not stop her.” He did not bend to retrieve Ganapati’s garland, or replace his joss stick.
The servants huddled round the kitchen stove, drank lemon-grass tea and palm sugar from hollow sections of banana tree trunks.
“Ah, the poor Missie,” said Kali.
“Kali has followed God for several years, and so his heart has become big,” Babuchi observed to the kitchen matey. “Now see what happens to a person who becomes a follower of God.” Babuchi spoke warningly, as though this enlarging of the heart was an unpleasant physical consequence of God-following, and to be avoided.
After Kali began to follow God he wore his hair in the style of a holy man, with all of the scalp shaved apart from one tuft at the back. This tuft was never cut, and the hair became quite long, so Kali needed an elastic band to keep it tidy. The tepid moistness of the monsoon quickly perished rubber, so Kali was forced to filch replacements rather often from the Master’s desk drawer. Ben, because of his exquisite tidiness, knew always exactly how many rubber bands he owned. He even knew how many of each size he had, and the regular disappearance of these precious objects kept him in a more or less permanent state of annoyance with his servants, although he never knew who the thief was, nor what the bands were being taken for.
“Since I wear my hair like this for the Lord’s sake,” said Kali, “I would have thought He would find me some way of procuring elastic bands without angering the Master.”
Ben got the blacksmith to fit a padlock to the drawer, and Kali, after that, had extreme difficulty in retrieving his bands. He had to hook them, like a man fishing, through a crack with one of his wife’s hair pins.
“Your religious attitudes have brought many troubles to us servants,” said Babuchi.
During that morning the rain sometimes paused, and once or twice the sun even shone weakly through the clouds, as though it had become worn out by the tremendous violence of the rain. The servants were now exhausted by Julia Clockhouse.
“She is always worse in the monsoon,” Babuchi whispered to his frightened matey. “Wait till the dry weather. She will be better then.” And he told Kali to serve Missie’s lunch. “She won’t be finished by the time the party guests come otherwise.”
Sometimes Julia looked into the road that was empty of the car of the returning Ben, or any other car. The road wove in and out of the high gorges, vanished behind tea-clad slopes, past the white throbbing tea factory, through the nursery where a thousand potted baby tea bushes waited for planting, over soft green clearings in which humped and dewlapped cattle grazed. The road ran behind the labourers’ quarters that were like horses’ stables set by Edward Buxton, for purposes of hygiene, in an apron of tar. Then it dropped into the bottom of the valley, crossed the river, snaking over the awesome swinging bridge. First-time visitors to the valley would cling to the car-door handles with white knuckles as they crossed this, not daring to look through the slats to the foaming white torrent thirty feet below. After that the road began to climb again, and entered the town in which all the buildings were a bit askew, and stood on bamboo legs to keep them out of the smelly drains. Here stood the Catholic church, and the Hindu temple, each upon its own personal hilltop. Even now, during lulls in the rain squalls, could be heard the ringing of bells from the rival religions.
The church bells had rung at Julia’s wedding, as she and Ben had come out into the sunshine smelling of incense and beeswax candles. All the managers’ wives had thrown twinkling confetti and petals of roses over her.
“I will look after you,” she whispered to Ben, wanting to catch hold of his hand, and feeling inexplicably shy, while the aunties threw and laughed, and snapped their cameras. “I will show you an orchid that looks like a white bird ready to fly. I would have darned your socks too, but you don’t often get holes. And I don’t think you like my darning style.”
Ben had taken her hand then, Julia remembe
red, and squeezed it, a little shy too, and he had whispered, “I can’t imagine any flower that could be prettier than you!”
Julia could hear the shrill sounds of Hindi love songs over loudspeakers, and the weekly bus was announcing its imminent departure with mournful honks. That meant, Julia knew, that it was half-past one. And still Ben had not come. And underlying all these sounds was the steady boom of the Instant Tea factory, Edward Buxton’s last venture before his departure for London.
He had invested a sizeable sum of his own money in it, and a month after Julia’s wedding her father sent a telegram from England to say that he and Gwen were coming to stay with Julia and Ben. There was, it seemed, some problem with his investment.
Edward had, in fact, in his disabled condition, found England even more unpleasant than he had expected, and could hardly wait to be back in his old kingdom, waited on by his servants. It was winter in England and the very best season in this South Indian hill district.
“What will it be like when he comes?” Julia had said to her new husband, and Ben, without answering, had shuddered slightly. Julia had smiled a slight tight smile and said, “I would rather he was dead than spoiled our happiness.”
Gwen Buxton had accompanied her husband, planning to capture in oils the golden lights and long shades that had eluded her during the twenty-eight years of her husband’s tea-planting career, and might, she sometimes feared, elude her forever.
There had been a row on the first evening. Edward had become angry at the way the chops had been cooked, saying that they were underdone, and had rung the bell summoning the cook. It was probably an automatic reaction. After all this had been his house, his cook, his bell, until one month ago.
Julia had said to her father, her voice icy, “How dare you! Have you forgotten this is my house now?” while Ben had shrunk back a bit into his chair, and Gwen had said hopefully, “Now come on, you two. Don’t quarrel now!”
“How dare you speak to me like that!” Edward raged. “Have you forgotten that it was only because of me that you are married to this fellow!” He flapped his napkin contemptuously in Ben’s direction. “The fellow wouldn’t have touched you with a barge pole if I hadn’t bribed him with the job … and the horse! You would have remained a spinster for the rest of your life if I had not paid the twit to take you off my hands!”
Julia went white. She stood up, and pointed a shaking finger at her father. “I hope you will die for what you said! Like I made your arm stop moving because you took away the wings of my goose.” And she went out of the room, her food untouched.
Edward looked apologetically round and said, “She’s a bit batty. But you don’t have to pay any attention to it. I never did!” Then he roared at Babuchi, who had just come into the dining room, “How many times have I told you to cook the meat properly? You get worms on the brain with this raw stuffl”
That night, perhaps because he had got into such a temper over the chops, Edward had another stroke and died the next day.
Edward’s one-time kingdom vanished in a whirl of mist, blotting out everything beyond the dark azaleas and a giant poinsettia at the end of the garden.
In the corridors the sweepers cleaned the floors again, skating up and down rubbing in a red mixture of wild beeswax, brick dust, and pig blood, Edward Buxton’s floor polish recipe.
“Missie, please to come for lunch!” urged Kali for about the fifth time. But Julia did not stir. She gazed out into the mists, and felt sure that Ben would come very soon.
Smells of cooking began to come steaming out of the tiny broken kitchen window as Babuchi cooked the dinner party. It was going to be mutton ribs with fresh coriander and cape gooseberry.
“What is this food?” Kuts Chatterjee had once asked Ben Clockhouse. When Ben had told him it was curry Kuts had let out a snorting laugh that said much more than words. That was when Ben had first become SM. Now Ben’s guests ate the mutton stew politely, and managers had been known, when their yields were low, to accept a second helping.
But at the beginning and before Ben had demonstrated his short temper, the managers of Arnaivarlai had teased him about this meal, unique yet indistinguishable from the one Ben had served at his first party after becoming SM.
“Where did you get the recipe, old chap?” Dick Sallinger had asked, laying down his fork halfway through. Ben told him it was recipe one of a cookery book entitled Dinner Party Receipts for a South Indian Hill Station, by a Lady Resident.
Ben had intended Babuchi to work his way through the thirty recipes one by one but unfortunately just after Babuchi had laboriously and painfully learnt to cook this “mutton curry” the book had disappeared. There were some unkind people who said that it was Babuchi himself who had caused the book to vanish, the cook not wishing to expose himself to further exhausting instruction.
In a brief gap in the cloud Julia saw the yogi. The unseen air around him was still, like water in an ancient grotto.
“Baby Jesus will punish you for lying,” Ayah used to say when Julia claimed to have seen things unseen. Gwen said, “That’s a contradiction in terms. If it’s unseen then you can’t see it. Otherwise the word ‘seen’ is without meaning. And please dear, for all our peace, don’t go telling your father you can see the hole in the sky where your goose flew yesterday.” Gwen sighed, and thought it a pity that the girl wasted her time seeing things that couldn’t be seen, when the world was so full of things that could, and should be got down on to canvas. “Perhaps she is suffering from artistic dyslexia,” she told her husband.
Julia found Kali polishing silver candlesticks, his wrinkled face and grey eyebrows glowing out of embossed roses and ivy leaves.
“Why is the yogi still there, Kali?” she demanded.
Kali breathed ha ha ha into the silver with his mouth open so that the breath came from deep inside him. He peered into the silver, gave it another little rub with his duster, and smiled. His white teeth grinned back at him fiendishly, bent on a barley bossing.
“Why? Answer me this minute!” said Julia sharply. “You forget I am the mistress here.”
Kali said slowly, “What is Master going to say when he comes home and finds all these things broken?”
“Then see that the yogi is removed from there,” said Julia.
Kali sighed, and told her, “He is very old.”
“How old?”
“A thousand years at least,” Kali said.
Julia frowned doubtfully.
“The yogi,” Kali went on, “has seen many things. And because he is so holy God has given him power. If you have him sent away he might take some revenge on you …”
“What could he do to me?” Julia said scoffingly.
“In our village,” Kali said, “a woman disturbed the yogi while he was at his meditation, and he sliced off all her hair, so that for the rest of her life she went round bald as a coconut.”
Julia laughed, but put her hand to her head all the same.
“You need not be upset about the master,” Kali told her gently. “In the monsoon time trains and planes are often late.”
“I’m not upset. Not in the least,” Julia assured him, “Why should you think I am upset?”
“Because I have known you since baby, Missie.”
Chapter 9
Things got so bad that in the end Babuchi sent his nephew to fetch Julia’s old ayah, who had looked after Julia from the day that Mini Ayah had been sacked for dropping the child. Babuchi knew it would be quite a long time before he could expect Ayah to arrive, because the village was a couple of miles away, and Ayah would walk slowly because she had been ill. But the servants could not think of what else to do, and longed to hand over the responsibility of Julia Missie to somebody else.
By two Ben had still not come. She who sometimes could see things that were not there went and looked again and again into the white mist and could not see him at all. She leant so far over the verandah rail that she almost fell clockfirst on to the geraniums that grew like
bushes in the dry dead soil under the eaves.
This was the very spot on which Mini Ayah had dropped her twenty-four years earlier. Mini Ayah had been sacked almost before they had had time to retrieve the child from among the harsh-smelling flowers. Julia had, according to her father, changed her personality from that moment, though he always remained undecided as to whether it was the shock of the descent or the impact of the fall that had done the damage. Gwen at first used to say, “But even when she was seven, dear, you told everyone that she was a genius.”
“Sometimes a tea bush will produce quite a convincing flush six months after it has been cut through,” said Edward.
“I should hope there is some difference between our child and a tea bush,” murmured Gwen.
Shortly after this conversation Gwen was given a convincing demonstration of what Edward meant. She ordered the gardeners to move an avocado pear tree into a position where it would be more visible from the bungalow. The old men argued that the tree would die, but Gwen insisted, putting down their reluctance to laziness.
“You see,” said Gwen triumphant, when the tree, several months later, budded all over with little fruit. She was passionately fond of avocado pears, and would say, “What is the good of living in India if I can’t eat three avocado pears in a row, all on my own?” as though there was no other point in India apart from the eating and the contemplation of avocado pears. It was the beauty of their round green shadows as much as their rich flesh that captivated Gwen. With delight she contemplated their dimpled fertility, the pure cavity of the globular nut, the velvety curd. To have a dish of these most perfect fruit before her and capture them forever in arylamide yellow and phthalo blue was her greatest delight.
