by Sara Banerji
The phone rang as she stood shaking on the porch, its shrillness dimmed by the loud laughter and crockery clattering from indoors and the wind screaming in the phone wires outside.
Someone answered. Kuts Chatterjee’s rich voice. “Hang on while I arrange protection … What? Who? Oh my God? Killed? Oh my God? Yes, her birthday party … No, no one knew … Oh my God …” The drunkenness had completely gone from his voice by now.
Julia heard it all. She had known that Ben was dead all along really. She had only deceived herself when she had kept looking with hope into the road all day. She had known he would not come. Julia Clockhouse killed everything she loved, and it was only to be expected that Ben would die because of her as well. When the jackal had died with her goose in its jaws Julia had supposed that her power would only harm those who had wronged her. When her father’s arm became paralysed Julia had thought that her vengeance on him had been justified because he had clipped the wings of her goose. But the goose herself had died because of Julia. Her father had said so.
“Why do you torment her like that!” Gwen had cried, while Julia lay back in bed shaking and ashen. And her father had retorted, “It’s high time she learnt to face facts! She has spent too long living in this absurd world of fantasy and illusion. Time she discovers what the real world is like and learns to take responsibility for her actions.”
Well, he had taken responsibility for his action in clipping the goose’s wings. Julia had reduced her father to a hobbling sad cripple because of that. And later she had thought that it might have been his fault the goose had died, really. It would not have caught a disease if it had not suffered so much despair at being unable to fly.
“This is not reality,” Gwen had tried to protest. “How many children are accused of infecting their pets, and then throwing them to their death?”
But Edward only said, “I loathed the stinking creature anyway! Get her a canary or something that can be kept under control!”
Julia had thought she hated her father then. Now she wondered if that feeling she had had for him had really been hatred. Why had she lain in bed, stiffly awake, night after night, waiting for him to come and forgive her if she hated him? She stood panting on the porch, the tobacco smell of Dick Sallinger clinging to her, remembering those long nights, when she would hear her father’s voice along the corridor, would hear his footstep on the tiles, would wait for him to bend over her and kiss her, but he never came! Perhaps, thought Julia, that was why she had taken away the use of his arm. Perhaps it was for that that she had punished him, and not for clipping the goose at all. She absorbed the idea with a feeling of shock. The memory of Dick’s kisses still prickled against her mouth and brought back a memory. Her father had kissed her like that once. She had woken in the middle of the night to find him standing in her room, a great dark shadow, blotting out the moonlight. She had got a shock at first, and had been going to scream, taking him for a ghost or a rhinoceros, but he had laid a quick warning hand on her lips. Then he had bent over her and kissed her on her mouth with such a huge soft passion that Julia, who was about seven, had felt alarmed and had tried to wiggle out from under him. She remembered that he had passed his tongue again and again over the salty, rather jelly-textured flesh of her gums in which her milk teeth had been set. They had become loose and Kali had whisked them out a few days earlier.
Julia’s father had caressed her whole body, running his hands up and down over her skin under her nightgown, stroking her between her legs although this embarrassed her and she tried to keep her thighs together.
“I am your father,” he had whispered into her neck. “It doesn’t matter if it is your father.” So she had relaxed her legs a little.
Next day at breakfast he had seemed embarrassed and had tried to avoid her eyes. When Gwen went over to the sideboard to serve herself scrambled eggs Edward had murmured under his breath to Julia, “Please don’t mention anything about last night to your mother.”
Gwen had come back with her plate, sat down, and said to Edward, “What did you say? I heard you whisper something to Julia!”
“I told her not to fiddle with her knife,” said Edward.
Julia remembered her bewilderment at this. Her father had not even mentioned a knife. She nearly blurted this out, but quickly held her tongue, feeling herself to be involved in some incomprehensible conspiracy. In the end she had felt so confused that she came to the conclusion that she had imagined the whole episode, and it went out of her mind altogether. She had never given the matter another thought till Dick Sallinger kissed her. Now suddenly the idea came to Julia that her father had behaved like that because he had loved her. It was not hatred but love that had made him fear her.
Kuts was hearing someone on the other end of the line say “Ben has been killed. Ben is dead. He died on the day of his wife’s twenty-fifth birthday,” thought Julia and she decided not to be there for the drunken condolences. The guests would gather round her saying things like, “Ask your daddy to get you another one …” No, of course they wouldn’t say that! Even though everybody knew that Edward Buxton had arranged for Julia to marry Ben Clockhouse no one would actually say it! You could say, “Your daddy will get you another goose,” but no one would dream of saying, “Oh, don’t cry about Ben, Julia. Your daddy will get you another husband!” even though they probably really thought it. Any way Julia’s daddy was dead, and wasn’t in a position to get husbands for anybody.
Julia could hear the guests getting silent, the giggles ceasing, footsteps shuffling as they gathered round the phone. Kuts was bellowing because the line was so bad, and because of the woollen hat to protect his head from shocks. “Yes, yes, I will be waiting at the hospital when the car arrives …” Julia, who had been about to vanish into the night, paused. Kuts would not be going to the hospital if Ben was dead. But Kuts shattered her hopes at once by saying, “I see. But anyway let us be thankful that the driver is still alive. Where there is life there is hope …” Oh, so it was only Ben’s driver who had survived. She stepped out into the rain. She felt nothing at all, unless it was that it was her duty to get rid of people like herself.
“It is your fault!” Julia shouted as she shoved her way through the wind. “You make me want love and then forbid it me!” Perhaps it was to the god of the morning that she spoke.
She did not hear Kuts Chatterjee say, “Whatever he says I shall give Mr Clockhouse a thorough check-up as soon as he arrives. It must have been a most unpleasant episode. He should not be driving by himself even though he says he is only slightly hurt …” Someone spoke, and Kuts replied, “It is all very well to say there was no one else who knew how to drive! These excuses! After such an attack a person may be quite badly affected and not even know it! The shock numbs the sensitivities for a while.”
By now Julia was running through the rain with her own sensitivities numbed. She felt no cold, no sorrow, no pain. She was certain that Ben was dead, for she had never heard the second part of Kuts’ phone call.
Dick Sallinger, hastily arranged, came jovially into the crowded drawing room, announcing himself with cries of, “Who’s for a top up? Where’s the butler? Come on out of there, old man,” to Kali standing near the door. “Half your guests have got empty glasses.”
“The SM’s had a bit of a rough up on the way up the ghat,” Kuts told Dick. “The driver’s badly hurt.”
When Julia reached the gate she saw the yogi had gone. She was astonished to experience a gust of disappointment. She had ordered his removal, but had expected him to have enough strength to resist her.
She walked out of the gates wondering what she would have done if the yogi had still been there. Would she have told the old man that she had killed Ben too? How could the yogi have helped her anyway? How does a dumb yogi offer advice? But she did not need advice. She knew what she must do now. There is only one thing you can do when you have been responsible for your husband dying with coldness in his eyes.
Chapter 16
The sound of the storm was so great, the tree roaring over the roof of the Senior Manager’s bungalow so loud, that Julia never heard the sound for which she had listened all day. Ben Clockhouse coming home. He drove with shoulders hunched, exhaustion and hurt having doubled him over, while on the back seat of the car lay the driver, blood running from his nostrils. And on Ben’s lap lay the shattered birthday present for his wife.
The tea-plucking labourers enjoyed a comfortable relationship with the estate managers of Arnaivarlai. In many cases both managers and labourers had worked together for three generations. When it came to making a protest the labourers could not be persuaded to take action against the bosses, who, in spite of faults, were known, and often even loved. So the union leaders wishing to make a protest against low wages and leaky housing had hired unemployed men from the plains to do whatever was necessary.
Unfortunately, due to problems in communication, these demonstrators arrived too soon and struck too hard.
Ben Clockhouse and his driver, rounding the corner, were attacked and the windows shattered with flung boulders before they even knew the demonstration had begun.
The hired protesters pitted the body of the car with a thousand dents, and sent a heavy boulder shattering through the windscreen, where it struck the head of the driver. For two hours the demonstrators tried to set fire to the car, but because of the heavy rain could not strike a match.
It was due to the courage of a handful of tea estate labourers living nearby that Ben Clockhouse survived. He drove home, seven hours later, not knowing if the too quiet and heavily bleeding driver had been as lucky.
Julia had to reach the rim of the valley to be able to carry out her plan, something that could only be done by a person who moves elephants.
“I will show you,” she had said to Ben a week ago. And had sent the black clock given to him by his mother shattering to the floor. Ben had blinked from the table to his wife twelve feet away.
“I’m sorry. Oh, your mother’s clock!” she cried.
Ben shook his head, and wondered for the first time if the silly servants were not so silly after all. Then shook his head again, and said, “What on earth made that happen?”
Julia sent the little brass elephants shuddering slowly along the mantelpiece. They moved as though with reluctance, their brass feet clanking tinnily against the granite, while Ben stared, and the colour faded from his face. He shouted, as though Julia had made him suddenly angry, “Stop! Stop that at once!” The brass elephants tumbled over one another, and some fell on to the hearth.
“Of course I don’t believe it,” he told her fiercely, “but never do that again.”
Julia whispered, “Sorry,” and waited with a round mouth for him to forgive her.
“I watched you for years through the crack in the club nursery door,” she told him once. “I decided I was going to marry you then.” And he said, “I don’t believe you,” in a voice that was not at all angry.
“There is only one thing men want from girls, “Julia’s father had said when Julia had first been invited out by Ben. “Once they’ve got it there’s no reason for them to marry the girl. You explain that to her.”
“Yes,” said Gwen vaguely, as though she had not been listening.
But Ben had never asked Julia to give him anything until after they were married in the little church on one side of the valley that glared at the Hindu temple on the other.
“Do you remember how you laughed, all those years ago, when I brought you the sock I had darned for you?” Julia whispered to her new husband. “Now that we are married I will often be able to make you laugh!”
Ben had smiled and squeezed her hand.
All the managers’ wives had worn wide hats trimmed with ribbons for the wedding.
“Did they buy them specially for my wedding?” Julia had asked her mother.
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” said Gwen, who had worn a straw hat through which the sun flickered making a thousand lacy patterns on her cheek. “I expect they had them all along.”
Julia imagined hats trimmed with ribbon nestling among camphor-scented tissue paper in the almirahs and wardrobes of the district.
Sometimes as she struggled on upwards she thought she saw a white-dressed figure move ahead, and wondered if it was the yogi who had been sitting at her gate that morning. But though she hurried she never caught up with it, and was never really sure whether there was really anyone there, or whether she just imagined it.
She stumbled against the dark car stranded on the roadside before she saw it, and let out a yelp of shock before she realised it was not an elephant. She peered inside, and after a long while her eyes made out someone sleeping. It was the new assistant who did not like dogs. She was reminded of her own dogs tied up at home. They would have loved this midnight walk. They were probably straining on their chains now, crying to be let out, the only ones, perhaps, in the Senior Manager’s bungalow aware that the mistress had gone out.
Julia opened the car door, and the boy awoke, and began stretching long and lazily like a child. His shoulders were up to his ears, his knuckles against his cheeks, his mouth screwed up into a smiling grimace, his hair on end.
“I’m really sorry about your birthday party,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound at all sorry. “My white achkan would have been ruined if I had walked through the rain in it.”
“They came to get you in a car,” said Julia strictly.
He smiled. “I didn’t like the look of them! I can’t stand all that drink and smoking.”
“Oh! Can’t you!” Julia spoke hotly, as though she was being criticised.
He went on unperturbed, “I am considering being a sanyasi, you see, and that sort of party would not have been suitable.” A meat patty with a bite out of it lay beside him on the seat, but the gin and tonic seemed untouched.
Julia sat in the driver’s seat and stared through the wind-screen. After a while she said, “I don’t know what a sanyasi is.
“It is the name in North India for a man who walks in search of God,” he said. “I don’t know what they call them here.”
“Would you like that?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I am not sure.”
Julia did not turn, but could hear the crackle of starched clothes, the sound of stretched limbs, as the boy yawned again. “But you’ve got to do something,” he said, “haven’t you.”
This last sounded so exactly like a question that Julia answered it with another. “Do you?” It was something she badly wanted to know, though she did not really think that an eighteen-year-old potential sanyasi could give her the answer.
She turned and looked at him. “I am thinking of just stopping. Of doing nothing. I am thinking of stopping everything. Including the party.” She laughed. “A real cleanup.”
He leant his arms on the seat, and rested his face on them, looking at her earnestly.
“Are you a seeker?” he asked at last. “You have the eyes of a seeker.”
Julia shrugged. “There is nothing to seek,” she said.
“My dear!” he cried as though he was twenty years older than her instead of seven years younger, “My dear, there is! There is freedom!”
Julia said rather irrelevantly, “I had a pet goose who was always longing for freedom. She never got it though. She fell over the edge of Arnaivarlai and died.”
Jaswant was thoughtful for a while, then said, “I am considering walking away in search of God.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Why not?” He spoke petulantly, like a boy who is accustomed to doing what he wants always. “Why can’t I?”
“Well, you work here. You are an assistant tea planter. You have to get permission from my husband even to leave the district for a single night. You can’t just walk away looking for … for …” She stumbled for the word but that which lodged inside her would not let her say it.
After a while she said, “Considering you won’t even take a little
walk through the rain in case you dirty your white achkan, I don’t rate very highly your chances of becoming a what —”
“Sanyasi. But you’re right of course.” Jaswant pulled his white coat off, opened the car window, and threw it out into the road.
“That’s just a ridiculous thing to do!” said Julia, as though scolding a bad child.
“Do I seem more like a sanyasi now?” he asked, throwing open his arms. He wore a fine silk embroidered shirt. The buttons, Julia thought, were probably rubies set in gold.
“I’m going.” Julia threw open the car door, letting in a flurry of sopping leaves and twigs. The wind hit her full in the face, moist and clean, and no longer with rain in it. Jaswant called after her, “If you like I will come with you. We can become sanyasis together.”
Julia struggled on upwards, heading for the rim of the green spoon, from which you could see the plains. It was past midnight now, and peasants down there did not have money for lights, so there would only be an infinity of flat darkness to look on. From the spoon’s rim Julia would be able to turn and look at the world of her childhood. The only world, really, that she had ever known, for though she had been on a leave or two to England, that place had never seemed real to her.
At parties she had heard women of her own age talk about jobs and European holidays, boyfriends and bosses, and had suspected they enjoyed some kind of freedom she would never know. She had listened to managers and their wives discussing concrete aproning, and up and over doors, and, without understanding what they were talking about, knew that English freedoms were beyond her reach.
She would go up now, and crush the frivolous freedoms conceived from gins and mutton patties that were sustained in England. The boulders set rolling by the uprooted tree would crush Julia’s bungalow as though it was being pinched out by the thumb of God. Though the night was inky black Julia Clockhouse knew that the roots must be rising. The wild elephants that she had seen in the morning had already felt the ground begin to squirm under their great leathery feet, and were striding away towards firm ground lower down the valley.
