by Sara Banerji
Halfway through the dry weather all the little fruit fell off followed by the leaves. By the monsoon everyone could see that the tree was dead. The two old gardeners nodded with satisfaction, and Gwen wondered if they had killed it to prove their point. But Edward said, “It is as I told you earlier. Death took all those months to reach the tips. This is what has happened to our daughter’s mind. It was damaged on the day of the fall but the effects have taken all these years to manifest themselves.”
After it became clear that Julia was not of normal intelligence Edward used to tell the managers in the men’s bar, “My poor child was dropped on the head you know, and I have had to give her special teaching.”
Later he said that if it had not been for him the child would never have learnt anything. The fact that she spoke at all, was, according to Edward, entirely due to the years of careful teaching he had given her.
After a while even Gwen forgot that once her daughter had been a genius, and talked about Julia as “the poor little thing”. Gwen made occasional and spasmodic efforts to stimulate Julia’s intelligence, without success, and in the end both parents accepted the fact that the child was subnormal, and planned ways in which the humiliation and inconvenience could be minimised.
The second ayah, who had taken over after Mini Ayah was sacked, was very suggestible and from the moment Gwen told her of the baby’s unfortunate accident scanned every aspect of the child, on whose body and in whose behaviour she regularly found unusual features. She would run screaming through the bungalow to Gwen. “Madam! Eh, Madam! She has a look in her eyes that is very strange. I think she has got a little demon inside her now …”
Gwen would sigh, try to keep on applying paint as though unaffected by the ayah’s cries and the prospect of her only child being infected with a demon.
“Her eyes went all crossy, and she let out a huge belch, Madam. A sure sign!” trembled the ayah. “You come. You come quick Madam, or I can’t take any responsibility!”
Sighing with reluctance Gwen would put down her beloved brushes, and tramp regretfully in the wake of the hysterical nurse.
“Wind,” she would tell the ayah wearily.
“Madam, Madam, she has a small dark mark the shape of a skull at the base of her neck!”
“Chocolate,” said Gwen wiping it off with her paint rag. This sent the ayah into new shrieks of panic.
“Madam, Madam, now she is turning green!”
“That is not green,” said Gwen, who, though by nature a patient woman, was now becoming irritable. “That is Winsor and Newton’s ultramarine.”
In spite of her learning difficulties, Julia was sent to a convent school at a nearby hill station, but after only half a year she was sent home again.
The reason given for her rejection was that she was too delicate for boarding school. And in fact she had fainted once when a wild goose flew over the playing field. The episode had occurred during an interschool hockey match. Julia was not at all good at games, and had been given quite a humble fielding position. But at the moment of her collapse the ball had been speeding towards her and because of her indisposition her school had lost the match.
Apart from her disinterest in team games Julia was not an ideal pupil. The nuns found her hard, if not impossible to educate. She did not seem to want to learn. Or at least she did not want to learn the things they tried to teach her. But even with this problem they might have kept her for was not her father the Senior Manager of a big group of tea estates?
But when Reverend Mother was told that the child was spreading heresies among the other children, she decided to risk the wrath of Edward Buxton rather than allow her other charges to be contaminated.
Apparently Julia had told the other children that after she died she would come back to earth again in another body. She had added, “I was other things before, as well. I can remember being a wild goose. I can still get the feel of the wind in my ears, clouds brushing my body, water over my webbed feet …”
“But what about Heaven?” one of the children asked. “How can you get into Heaven if you’re always flying round the earth as a goose?”
“Heaven is here inside me,” said Julia, touching the very middle of herself, the part which if she had been a wheel would have been the hub. “I take it with me everywhere I go!” She had not been told yet that the thing in her was not Heaven at all, but something very bad indeed. Nearer Hell in fact.
“Oh!” cried the other children, aghast at such profanity. “That’s your tummy button, Julia Buxton. How can God and Jesus and Mary and all the angels fit into your tummy button?” And they all shouted with laughter, and pointed at her until she went very white and nearly got into one of the rages that frightened even the biggest of them.
Later one of the children told the sister who taught them religion, “Julia Buxton says she can feel Heaven moving around inside her, and that sometimes it tickles!”
The nun made a hasty sign of the cross, and ran to report the matter to Reverend Mother.
“This is blasphemy,” said Reverend Mother. “Of course we cannot allow it to go on!”
Reverend Mother became even more alarmed when she was confronted with the child’s white-faced certainty.
“I know because I can remember. I can remember quite a lot of different bodies, too,” Julia said firmly, facing the nun with her jaw tight. “Every time I come back I am getting nearer to being absolutely good. But I am a long way from it yet …”
“You certainly are,” said the nun coldly. She couldn’t stand this sort of arrogance. “And if you are interested at all in goodness I suggest you begin by believing what the Holy Sisters teach you, instead of listening to a lot of gossip from Hindu servants.” Reverend Mother had been much troubled in the past by children who had come to school with muddled notions picked up from Hindu bearers and ayahs, but had never had one as obdurate as this one. “I give you one week to reconsider your opinions, Julia Buxton. And if you persist in these wicked ideas then I’m afraid I will have to tell your father to remove you from our school. Say ten Hail Marys daily to give you strength. And go down on your knees now, Julia Buxton, and ask God for His forgiveness for disbelieving His holy word.”
Julia stood, her fists clenched, blood drained from her face, stared back at the angry nun. The nun tried to push Julia down, pressing her hand on the top of the child’s head. But Julia kept her legs tight, as she was to do in later years when her husband tried to love her. In the end the nun turned on her heel and went furiously off along the corridor to write a letter to Julia’s father. “… too delicate, not up to the rigours …” That sort of thing.
To Gwen’s relief, after Julia came home Edward took over the child’s education, allowing Gwen to get on with her painting. It was Edward who answered all those unanswerable questions like, “Where does grass come from?” “How many feathers are on a goose?” Whenever Gwen tried to answer one of these pointless questions it would promptly bring on another. “Has Goose’s beloved got a thousand feathers too?” But Edward did not seem to mind.
“The child’s got a really good brain!” he would tell Gwen. “What can those idiotic nuns have been up to? If she worked for my company I’d give that Reverend Mother the sack!”
Between four and six each evening, through the closed door of his office, could be heard the murmured questions of the impressed parent, and the triumphant answers of the gifted child. Until something happened.
After this episode, which no one in the household really understood, Julia stopped learning, and developed insomnia. At night she would lie stiffly in bed with her eyes open for hours, and not sleep even though Ayah patted her on the back and sang to her.
“It is as if she is waiting for someone,” said Ayah to Gwen Buxton.
The goose had been bought for the Christmas lunch. It had sat, slumped and morose, in a pumpkin-shaped basket that was so low that the bird was unable to raise its head, and defied the combined efforts of the gardener and the sweeper to mak
e it fat.
Every time the ayah’s attention was diverted Julia would go to the back of the bungalow, to the part where nice children were not allowed because there the drains ran with sour rice water, the gardener slept off his arrack hangover, and the servants ate rice with their hands from banana leaves. Here, huge hunched Goosie, crammed in a basket, mourned her many losses.
Julia bent to squint with one eye into the crevices in the basket, sometimes making out the stirring of soiled feathers, sometimes webbed feet parched with dry waiting, sometimes the tremor of the down-drawn orange membrane shuttering out the horrors of incarceration and imminent destruction.
“Pity,” said the tiny Julia. This was her first word. She must have picked up the word from the tribal servants, for it was in their tongue that she said it.
“Of course that’s not what she said!” her father, Edward Buxton, maintained fiercely to his wife Gwen. “They don’t even have such a word in their language.”
“The matey told me,” murmured Gwen. “Missie said the word for ‘Pity’.”
Edward slammed marmalade on to his toast till the crumbs flew, and kept the sort of silence that says more cross things than any words can do.
“I mean they must have some sort of concept of pity, surely,” said Gwen, buttering her toast calmly.
“Why should they? Have you seen what they do to birds?” burst out Edward. “Have you seen them roast a dozen wagtails threaded on a straw?”
Edward was a bird collector and owned one of the finest and biggest collections of stuffed birds in South India.
“Paradise flycatchers!” he said. “So seldom seen. I’ve only got one in my collection. I’ve seen three roasted on the end of a sharpened stick by your compassionate tribals.”
“I suppose it is possible for people to have compassion for creatures they kill. What do you think, Edward?”
Edward replied with a contemptuous snort.
“My farming uncle said he felt affection for his pigs.” Gwen spread a little marmalade on to her toast, and told Babuchi, bringing in fresh hot toast from the kitchen, “It set at last, I see.”
Babuchi tossed his head sharply, making his starched and fanned-out turban front shiver, and said, “Myjam always sets, Madam! Did you ever know a jam of mine that did not set?” His voice rose, was a little shrill as though Gwen had made some awful accusation against him.
“Tut!” snapped Edward, cracking his napkin, that was starched as hard as leather, against the table edge.
Babuchi flinched, drew himself smartly upright, and went quickly from the room. Even Babuchi was afraid of Edward Buxton.
The goose got fat in the end. After the danger of becoming the Buxtons’ Christmas lunch had passed, after it had been converted from food to friend, after it had been formally handed over to the gardener with the words, “Look after this for little Missie. The goose will be her pet from now on.”
Gwen told her friends, “How can you eat a bird of which your child has made the comment ‘Pity’?”
“Disgusting and dangerous,” was Edward’s verdict. “It comes rushing out at you in the dark. No wonder we can’t get proper servants and have to make do with these tribals. Decent servants won’t work here because they think this is a household of madness!”
But Gwen insisted Julia be allowed to keep her pet, protesting, “You are always saying she needs friends!”
“But not a damned goose!” cried Edward.
But the goose remained in the Buxton household, and Gwen felt relief because from now on the goose would occupy at least some of the child’s time.
“You go and feed the goosie, dear,” she would tell Julia, when the child came and leant against her kneejust as the artist was trying to get the finest of glittering lines on to her canvas. “Run along and talk to Goosie.” She was relieved no longer to have to dole out paint and paper to the child. Relieved to be spared the necessity of having, with her eyes still on her halfdone picture, to wipe paint from the child’s hands, lips, knees.
“Oh, dear, why do you have to put it all over you? Ayah! Ayah! Missie Baba is all covered in paint!”
“Even paint is preferable to goose shit!” said Edward. “The girl stinks of goose. Why couldn’t she have had a goldfish or something, like a normal child … You don’t get shit all over your clothes from a goldfish …”
Eventually Kali took the single servings from Babuchi’s hands through the hatch though Julia said she was not hungry.
When Kali went back into the kitchen he told the cook anxiously, “She is talking to herself.” First she had refused food and then she had talked to herself just before the things started moving. Babuchi clutched his brow and moaned. That last time had been terrible. Both old men remembered the ornaments showering from the mantelpiece, the cruet set leaping from the table and shattering on the tiled dining floor. Edward Buxton spread out his hands wide to catch the flowing tide of his possessions, and shouted, “Don’t be such bloody fools! Can’t you see this is an earthquake?”
In those days servants came readily to work in the Senior Manager’s bungalow, for word had not yet got round concerning the Missie’s oddness. These fellows fled yelling with terror all the way to their village and never returned. It had happened after Julia’s goose had died. Julia had stayed very still at first. So still that after a while the household stopped saying with relief, “Isn’t the Missie good these days!” and began to say “There is something wrong with the quiet of this Missie.”
“Get up,” said Gwen in a sharp voice, like someone trying to penetrate through layers of unconsciousness.
Julia seemed not to hear.
Then after about ten days a wild goose flew over the bungalow. The child must have heard the wing beats from where she sat, for the servants saw her go out into the sunshine.
“She thinks it is her own bird returned from death,” Kali murmured with pity, as Julia raised up her arms, and began to scream, “I want to come too! Oh, wait for me!”
“It was at that moment that the things began flying,” Babuchi was to maintain firmly, years later. But Kali said they did not move until the Missie started running. Then she really had a wildness, going through the bungalow like the goddess for whom Kali was named.
Babuchi popped his eyes to the sliding-door squint hole at regular intervals, and told his matey, “If Missie doesn’t finish her lunch soon Kali will have to take it all away, and make the table ready for dinner.”
“Why doesn’t she eat?” asked the boy, astonished. He lived among people who were always a little hungry, who speedily shovelled with three fingers their sweet potato stews and wild spinach curries into their empty stomachs; who gulped down swiftly the rice beers and yoghurt mixtures served to them by their mothers before someone else in the family got hold of it. If they had left it alone for an hour as Julia Madam had done the hens and the little piglets would have been leaping up and snatching pieces off, even if the household children had not managed to get it.
“She must be very sick,” the boy said, for in his world only sick people were not hungry.
“Do you like mutton roast then, little man?” teased Babuchi, and twisted the boy’s ear. “You get those saucepans nice and clean, and you can have Missie Madam’s cooked meat. You can have her pudding too!” he added.
The boy’s mouth watered, and, several times, when Babuchi was not looking, he left off scouring the pots with sand on coconut string and tiptoed to the squint hole to look at Madam’s uneaten meal.
At last the servants removed, uneaten, the lunch of mutton roast, onion sauce, French fries, and string beans from the table.
Chapter 10
Two months earlier Ben Clockhouse had asked Kuts Chatterjee to give his wife a medical examination. Kuts had examined Julia with considerable trepidation. He had said, touching her belly with cautious fingers, “Now Julia, my dear girl, you just tell me if anything hurts. Just give a little yell if you like, since you seem to be so good at it.”
K
uts had been Julia’s parents’ doctor and had been called to see fifteen-year-old Julia when she had taken off all her clothes and walked round the bungalow naked.
Edward Buxton had phoned him.
“You’d better get round here at once, Kuts. My daughter has gone off her head. I’ve got her locked in her room at the moment.”
Kuts tried to explain that he was already engaged with another patient. Edward exploded with fury. “This,” he had bellowed, making the ancient rodlike receiver vibrate and the nurse duck with terror, “this is an emergency. Perhaps you do not understand, fellow, that the daughter of the Senior Manager has been parading her naked body in front of all the household servants …” In an aside to his wife which Kuts clearly heard Edward said, “I told the directors that an Indian doctor would be incapable of understanding the problems of Europeans. Perhaps they’ll listen to me next time,” then back into the receiver, “You will be here in twenty minutes, Doctor Chatterjee, if you know what’s good for you.” He slammed the receiver down.
Because of this single episode, and Kuts Chatterjee’s diagnosis of Julia on that occasion, the district had not, since then, had another Indian at management level. Edward Buxton had fought with such ferocity the suggestion that Indians be employed that the rather elderly and peace-loving directors just did not have the energy to insist. As the years passed all the company’s other properties gradually assimilated indigenous managers, and still Arnaivarlai remained entirely run by Westerners.
Ten years earlier, Kuts had examined Julia, and pronounced her perfectly healthy, sending Edward into such a towering rage that Kuts felt quite sure that he had lost his job.
Ten years later he examined her again, and came to the same conclusion.
“Really,” he said to Ben, “there doesn’t seem to be anything at all wrong with her.” He even felt a pinprick of terror as he said it, remembering the fury invoked by his previous diagnosis.
But Ben only said rather quickly, as though embarrassed, “Thought you might be able to give her some medicine, or something, you know, old chap.”
