“You know where the slaves are sold.”
Again the almost invisible nod.
“Half a year ago did anyone come by asking where they could buy a slave?”
There was a slight hesitation, then. “No, sahiba, no one asks.”
Maliha stood and left the coins on the stool. As she turned back Sumangala bent down and touched her feet. The action caught Maliha by surprise; she expected it from a child but not a woman so much older. She laid her hand on the woman’s head and muttered a blessing.
Maliha was the last out the door. She paused. Sumangala was wringing her hands, Maliha waited.
“Sahiba, do not beat me.”
“I won’t.”
“Half a year gone, a high-caste woman came asking.”
“Was she young?”
“No, sahiba, she was older than I.”
“Thank you.”
Amita pulled the door tight behind them and they picked their way back up the alley. They finally reached the main street with the sun almost touching the tops of the taller buildings across the river.
“Did you learn anything?” asked Françoise.
“She knew about the slaves and someone who came asking,” said Maliha. “But I think she’s been paid not to say anything?”
“By whom?”
“Doesn’t matter for now.”
“So this dead girl was one of the temple prostitutes?”
“That is not likely since she was not native.” There was a thought nagging at the back of Maliha’s mind, but it refused to form into a coherent idea. Well, it would come in time.
They made their way back to the carriage. The crowds around the carriage had gone; there were just a few hangers on, mostly children.
“Where is the man to drive the carriage?” One of them shouted as Maliha climbed into the driving position.
“I do not need a man to take me,” Maliha replied in a pleasant tone. She could have driven off immediately but decided to give them a show. She pumped the lever that forced puffs of coal dust into the furnace. It roared into life and smoke billowed from the stack. It would take a few minutes to return to full heat.
I do not need a man. She thought of Valentine then glanced across at Françoise: perhaps she should take a woman instead. Although her only previous experience of a woman’s love had involved Temperance Williams trying to kill her. Well, not entirely the only experience; she had, after all, attended a girls’ boarding school for seven years. But while such things happened there, they had not involved Maliha.
She shook herself and put on her cap and goggles.
Françoise laid her hand on Maliha’s arm. “I wonder, Maliha, if you would not mind, perhaps we could go a little slower?”
Maliha frowned, then remembered Valentine said she frowned too much. So she smiled instead. “I’m sorry. I do like to go fast. It’s almost like flying.”
“I found it somewhat discomforting, I’m afraid.”
“We’re not in a hurry.”
She engaged the gearing and as the carriage moved forward she turned the wheel hard to the right to bring the nose round. She disengaged the drive quickly when she realised there was a bicycle in the way, leaning against the temple wall.
“A man could move that bicycle,” she called out to the boy. He grinned, went over and pushed it further along the wall. There was barely an inch of space between the carriage and the building as she pulled it round. She waved at the boy and accelerated away.
“It would be a blessing if they were to put in gears to allow motion in either direction,” commented Maliha. She had to put in a very deliberate effort not to drive as fast as she was able.
* * *
Maliha drove through the French quarter. It resembled pictures she had seen of the south coast of France. The buildings were large and looked out on to the Bay of Bengal, filled with fishing vessels and seagulls wheeling overhead in their thousands. They passed the great Victorian lighthouse built eighty years before that had become almost redundant when the ships took to the sky. Now it was used by the sky-pilots as a marker.
Françoise guided Maliha along smaller tracks off the coast road, past residences built on an increasingly grander scale. She drove the carriage up the driveway of one impressive construction and stopped in front. “You live with your parents?”
“My cousin, he has a trading company.”
“And you’re here to spread the word of God.”
Françoise laughed. “Something like that.”
“You don’t understand India. She is old and has seen religions come and go. She doesn’t mind if you want to come and talk about yours, she will smile politely and listen with half an ear. But she will not change.”
The woman let out a sigh. “It is as I feared.”
“When will you be visiting with my aunt again?”
“We did not have a date, with the wedding everything was in uproar and uncertain.”
Maliha nodded. “Perhaps you could send her a letter and ask to meet tomorrow after lunch.”
Françoise eyed her suspiciously. “And you would like to accompany me?”
“I will be properly purified and as fit for company as I am ever considered to be.”
“À bientôt, Mam’selle Anderson.”
“Au revoir, Mam’selle Greaux.”
Maliha found herself smiling as she turned the puffing carriage towards home. She had not had a female friend of her own age for many years.
Her grandparents did not greet her or ask for her when she arrived so she headed out the back of the house and, guided by Amita, made her way to the gardener’s shed.
The light was on and she pushed open the door. The dhai was feeding the child. Maliha felt a wave of embarrassment wash over her. She looked away and then looked back. Why should she feel awkward? The child lived because of her—and Françoise—it had a roof over its head. Even if it was a shed it was more than most had. And it was because of her. The giving of sustenance to a child was natural. Why should she not witness it? One day she might do the same.
Which made her think of Valentine and that put a dent in her good humour.
The baby was tiny yet a perfectly formed human being. Her hands and toes exact miniatures of her mother’s. Her skin was as dark as her mother’s but her eyes, closed now, had an oriental look. She sucked rhythmically but seemed to be slowing down. After a few moments she stopped completely.
The dhai pulled the baby gently away from her breast and covered herself. She wrapped the baby tightly and then offered her up to Maliha.
Maliha felt awkward; by default the child was hers. But she did not know what to do. If she had stayed in India, there would always have been children of different ages to look after, to see, to play with. If she had been full Indian.
Seeing Maliha’s uncertainty the dhai stood up and brought the child to her. Maliha found herself wrapping her left arm under the little girl and taking the weight of the head. She put her other arm around the girl and stared down at the face.
She did not understand when she found she was crying and her tears fell on to the baby’s wrapping.
* * *
Later she lay in her bed. The window was open with the screen pulled down. In the silence of the night she could hear the waves breaking steadily on the beach. She reached up and touched her cheek where her tears over the baby had dried.
There was so much loss in the world, things ripped away in life that it was hard to understand how anyone could continue to live. She had grown up knowing that life was not fair but did that mean it always had to be pain? She wondered what Valentine was doing and the thought occurred to her that perhaps she should not have driven him away quite so completely.
And it was thinking of him that she fell asleep.
iii
“The commissioner himself said he did not mind me investigating this case.” Maliha found herself in the unusual position of almost pleading with the man.
“I am very sorry, mam’selle,
my findings are confidential.”
Maliha cursed her luck, to find one man in the French bureaucracy who had principles and kept to them. And for it to be the only one with whom she really needed to talk.
“Over what period of time do you think she was being whipped?”
Dr Gimbert was thin and in his sixties, but still active. His body may have aged but his mind had not. “I am not willing to discuss it with you.”
“I think it was six months but no more than once or twice per month.”
“Mam’selle Anderson, you are trying my patience.” He placed his medical bag on the table and gathered up papers into a folder. “I have visits to make.”
“I saved her baby’s life. The child has no name, and no family. When she is grown and asks who her real mother was, what shall I say, monsieur? Shall I say that I was unable to discover the truth because a doctor would not discuss the matter?”
The doctor paused, the folder half way into the bag. “I do not believe there is much I can tell you.”
“My estimate of the beatings is correct?”
“I think perhaps a little longer, and more frequent, but yes.”
“And whoever did the beating was careful.”
He looked up at her. “Careful?”
“They wanted to hurt her, but not do permanent damage. Perhaps a follower of de Sade?”
“What would a young thing like you know of such matters?”
Maliha sat down in the hard-backed chair on the opposite side of his desk. “I am very well read, Dr Gimbert. But I can assure you my interest in it is purely academic.”
Following her hint, he sat down and moved his bag to the side so it did not come between them.
She continued. “You agree that would fit the damage done to her?”
He nodded as if unable to commit himself in spoken words.
“And she was well fed?”
“She was not suffering from any form of malnutrition, but my examination of her joints indicated that she was probably underfed for most of her life.”
“I did not see any lash marks on her belly.”
He shook his head.
“What do you think was used to strike her?”
“Oh, almost certainly bamboo cane; the indications were quite clear.”
Maliha sat back, deliberately, and placed her hands in her lap, and the doctor followed suit, relaxing as he did so. “But there are other, older injuries?”
“You are very observant,” he said. “Those older injuries are of a completely different nature. A combination of cuts and burns, which I estimate would have been received in the month before the whipping began. They are overlaid by the flaying marks but none of them are on top of any whipping scar.” He paused.
“There was something wrong with her left ankle.”
He nodded. “It had been broken and not reset properly.”
Maliha looked down at her hands so that he was not too embarrassed by her next question. “The cuts and burns, they were of a sexual nature?”
She could imagine the look on his face but she continued to examine her hands.
“While they were present across her body, there was a concentration on her genitalia.”
There was a long silence. Maliha stood up and went to the window. The doctor’s office looked out on to a narrow well rising the height of the building, intended to allow light and air into a set of offices. There was another office directly across from his that seemed to be an examination room. The bottom of the well was dark with shadow but there was a hint of green, probably mosses and ferns.
“How common is slavery here in French India, doctor?” she said at last.
“It’s illegal.”
She hesitated in exactly the way that the old Maliha would not. She had always imagined that age and experience would add to her certainty. She found quite the opposite to be true.
The doctor saved her from having to say anything further. “But I believe it continues, underground, of course.”
A sex trade, thought Maliha, as it had always been.
“Have you been able to determine the nature of the poison she used?”
The doctor opened a drawer in his desk and withdrew a small glass bottle. He placed it on the table. Maliha squatted down and examined it in the light from the window. It was about four inches tall. The base and body resembled the bulb of a flowering plant while the opening looked like petals. The glass was thick and cut in an Italian style. The inside of the neck had been ground to provide a tight join with the missing stopper.
Maliha picked it up in her left hand. It was lead crystal so heavier than it appeared. She lifted it to her nose and using her right hand she wafted air from the neck to her nose. She frowned and then stared down inside; there was the merest trace of a green stain clinging to the bottom.
“Cyanide?”
“Apparently.”
Maliha returned the bottle to the table. “It looks like a perfume bottle.”
“That’s what I thought, perhaps Italian?”
Maliha retrieved her reticule and made her goodbyes.
* * *
Her grandmother had been right about one thing, thought Maliha as she pulled the white cotton sari closer about her body, trying to cover as much skin as possible: A well-advertised purification was the correct approach. After delivering a baby from a dead woman’s womb the taint she had received so publicly made her virtually outcast. The only way she could counteract such notoriety was with an equally visible bath.
The entire family had been summoned to the banks of the river that, by popular choice, contained the highest proportion of the Kaveri River in the delta.
Renuka was also to receive the priest’s cleansing since it was her wedding that had been interrupted. Balaji and his immediate family were not there having made their own arrangements.
All the other wedding guests had also been invited with the likelihood that the entire gathering would end up in the water for a mass blessing just to ensure they were not affected by the terrible events of the wedding.
“And that,” said Grandmother, “is how you deal with these things. We pay the temple, anyone who thought bad of us gets a blessing for free, and we will provide food and a little music.
“Besides,” she continued, “we need this public so the parents of eligible bachelors will still call.”
At which Maliha had growled to herself and made her exit.
As it was the middle of the day, there were not as many of the original guests as there might have been. But the total number of people lining the road that ran along the bank of the river exceeded those that were officially invited. No one avoided a chance at a free blessing and lunch.
But it was Maliha who went first. The tide was in. The chosen location was sheltered by a promontory pushing out into the main flow. The beach here was pebbles and they pressed into Maliha’s feet as she walked barefoot down to the edge of the water where small waves lapped.
The priest was a relatively young man. His long hair was tied back. He wore a white dhoti and was already standing out in the water waiting for her. Maliha pushed ahead. At every step the water rose up her legs, then past her hips. When she reached the priest the water had reached her ribs. She smiled at his theatrics. He must be standing on a rock because he was much higher in the water.
Maliha was fluent in English, French, and Hindi but the priest was quoting passages of Sanskrit that she could not follow, though the occasional name of a god or goddess came through.
The priest got to the blessing itself. He placed his hand on her head and pressed her down. She allowed herself to sink below the salty water, taking a deep breath as she went. It was unlikely much of the actual river water reached the banks; most of it flowed down the middle of the channel, while sea water flowed up the sides.
But it was what people believed that mattered. Besides, who was she to claim that a goddess couldn’t also be in the sea water part of the river?
The priest’s hand s
tayed on her head, holding her completely submerged. It seemed to go on for a long time. When the pressure released from her head, she pushed herself up to the surface. Her ears were full of water and at first she thought the noise she heard was the distant rumble of an engine. Then the sounds became clearer and it was a chant.
She wiped her eyes with her fingers and turned. A group of onlookers, younger ones, had moved to the edge of the water and were chanting Durga Maa—the name of the goddess of victory and vengeance. In the middle of the group, through the water dripping from her, she could make out Renuka.
And then the priest gave her a final blessing in the name of Durga Maa and a cheer went up. Maliha could make out the scowl on her grandmother’s face, deeper than she had ever seen before. Maliha sighed. She doubted many women would want an avatar of vengeance as a daughter-in-law considering most mother-in-laws treated their sons’ wives as little better than slaves.
Perhaps something good would come of this after all.
iv
Françoise waited at the window of an upstairs lounge. The view looked out on the front of the house, and the driveway. She had not gone to the ceremony. She knew of it but had not received an invitation. Attending uninvited was not something that crossed her mind.
She was aware that her upbringing had been sheltered in some ways. She had lived in Dijon with her mother in her parents’ home. She had received an education appropriate to the female offspring of a successful businessman, which is to say arts and proper devotions to the Holy Mother and, apart from her one secret, she tried to do the right thing.
She was a good daughter of the Republic, except she read romances. She justified these to herself because most were in English and it was important to practise her English as often as she could. It was not the relationships in the books that thrilled her, it was the locations.
Some of those romances, particularly the English ones, took place far from the shores of France, or even England, in the far-flung parts of their Empire. She liked the ones set in India best of all where the stories usually revolved around a young English woman who would fall for some exotic Indian prince, but there would always be the good English soldier who would be the ultimate prize. She always imagined herself in the role of the soldier because she found the women so ineffectual.
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