by Sharon Maas
She finished her letter, signed and folded it, and was just about to put it in the envelope when an afterthought struck her. Quickly she unfolded it and wrote, on the final page beneath the signature, 'PS is there such a thing as a lady-doctor? Do they have them in England? Do you think I could become one in England, after we are married?’
Even before she could expect a reply she wrote again, and again. Four letters had been sped to England when, finally, David's reply to the first one came, addressed to her personally at her father's home.
He described to her, in minute detail, the horrid English weather. He told her he missed Fairwinds, and her, in that order. He was thinking of entering the Navy, like his father. He wrote a few non-committal paragraphs on Mr Gandhi. He made no reference to coming home, or to their marriage, or elopement. It seemed he had forgotten her, except as a childhood friend. She did not write again.
It was not wounded pride. It was the acceptance that David's mind was, obviously, occupied. That, for now, love was beyond him. Savitri was not one to force; hers was the strength of waiting, waiting in knowledge, waiting in the wisdom of what is real and indestructible, waiting in the bedrock of love.
21
Chapter Twenty-one
Nat
London, 1963
Nat was met at Heathrow by Henry's son Adam and his wife Sheila. Though Doctor had several relatives living in London, it had not been convenient for Nat to stay with any of them and Adam, who had known Doctor since he was a boy, was happy to take Nat into the bosom of his family, and so was his wife.
They let Nat sleep out his jet-lag and then Sheila took him shopping, because his Indian wardrobe was atrocious.
'If you're not with-it the girls will tease you, Nat. You can't possibly wear those tight shiny trousers! Really, they’re almost pedal-pushers! And those pointy shoes! My goodness! Not in London in this day and age!'
There was money. Nat had always known there was money, enough to support his father and himself in India, and buy medicines and teak saplings, repair roofs for the villagers, for Armaclare College, and now to support Nat in England as Adam and Sheila's paying guest, and to buy him a suitable wardrobe, books and whatever else he might need in the coming years, and, of course to pay his University fees. Nat never asked where the money came from. He only knew: there was money.
Sheila and Adam lived in a pretty, semi-detached house in Croydon. Both were secondary school teachers and from the first day they went out of their way to make Nat feel at home. They showed him all the London sights. They took him to the obligatory
Museums; he saw the Changing of the Guard, fed the pigeons at Trafalgar Square, tried fish and chips (and was violently sick afterwards, having never ever eaten fish before), learned to use the Underground, and was desperately, heart-wrenchingly homesick. He felt he was living in a world out of joint, part of a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were scattered far and wide, irretrievable, that all that was precious and whole was lost for ever. His mind was an upturned rubbish bin. He missed his father, and the villagers: the shining dark eyes in black Dravidian faces. The turbulent flapping of crows' wings, silver stars scattered over the black nights, the full yellow moon rising over the hill. But his father had thrown him in at the deep end, and he had to swim.
In early August Nina and Jule came home from their school camping holiday in the South of France. Nina and Jule were Adam and Sheila's twin daughters: fifteen, freckled, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, long-legged, freckle-faced, gawky and identical. They made no secret of the fact that they just adored Nat; he’s ever so sweet, they giggled to their friends over the phone, in Nat's hearing: so innocent, so shy, and s-o-o-o handsome, just fabulous, and they were absolutely sure he was a virgin.
'Don't take any notice of them, Nat dear,' said Sheila, 'they're just silly girls and they're trying to take the mickey out of you. Don't let them.'
This, when Nina and Jule stole all of Nat's underwear, replaced it with their own, and locked themselves in the bathroom where for the best part of an hour piercing shrieks of laughter and shrill bursts of giggles emerged. All of a sudden the bathroom door flew open and the girls raced out and down the carpeted stairs dressed in nothing but Nat's underpants, two long white streaks of almost-naked flesh pushing past Nat and Sheila in the hall. They leaped up on to the dining-room table, and, holding on to the oversized underpants at the waist, wriggled and writhed there, screaming, ‘Let’s twist again, Like we did last summer!' into their fists before streaking back upstairs and collapsing on the bathroom floor in a chortling, squirming, screeching heap of adolescence.
Nat's lips twitched and he shook his head indulgently.
'It's all right, Sheila, they don't bother me. I'll get even,' he said.
And when the girls slammed the bathroom door again and hooted, 'We're going to have a bath now, Nat, just knock if you want to join us,' he was ready.
'I'm fine, thanks,' he called in return. 'But I'll take you up on that another time,' whereupon a double scream of mirth forced him to cover his ears and make a face at Sheila, who laughed and retired to watch the television.
While the girls were having their bath Nat proceeded to decorate their room with underwear. He carefully laid out their little lacy bras and panties over their chairs, their desks, their beds, their window sills; he tacked them to the walls, he hung them over their books and from the shelves, he dressed their teddy bears in them, he placed them across their pillows and pulled them over the lamps. For some reason, the girls sobered up after that. In fact, they turned almost shy. But Nat had seen the light.
One thing about girls he had known back home: whether a girl was a peasant or a Bannerji princess, the aura of chastity surrounded her like an inviolable sweet-scented armour, an integral part of her secret inner world, to be one day presented as a precious gift to her bridegroom.
But for Nina, and Jule, and the hundreds of girls Nat was about to discover, chastity was a joke, a kicked-off relic of childhood. These girls had no secrets, or if they had, they did not know it. Their gift to Nat came unconditionally, and its name was freedom. They had one thing to teach Nat: enjoyment.
22
Chapter Twenty-two
Saroj
Georgetown, 1964
Ma brought her supper in her room, a luxury only afforded those children who were too sick to leave their beds. This time she wasn't physically sick, but Ma surely could see the fever burning up her soul. She picked at her food. She wasn't hungry, but wasting food in their house came second only to murder and Ma had not brought much, just a chapatti and a few spoons of potato curry. She ate slowly, thinking of how to say what had to be said. Ma moved around the room as she ate, drawing the curtains, tidying up the dresser, folding some sheets. As she mopped up the last stains of curry with the chapatti Ma came and sat on the edge of her bed, a hairbrush in her hand. She began to brush Saroj's wild hair with her accustomed vigour, occasionally stopping to attack the knots that had nudged themselves in during sleep.
'Ma, I don't want to marry yet. I don't want to marry ever!'
'You need not marry yet, Saroj. You should have trusted me, dear, and spoken to me about your fears. I'm sorry; I neglected you. I should have paid more attention to the signs… paid more attention to you. I've been a little preoccupied lately, I should have known, and then this could have been prevented.'
'But Baba said . . . !'
'Baba said, Baba said! Don't you know yet that men are full of words that mean nothing? The silence of a woman is a thousand times weightier. You must learn to trust silence. To load it with truth, and to wait. A woman cannot survive by physical violence, by biting and jumping from towers: on that level men are always mightier, and women will always lose such unequal battles. Women must be quiet, and cunning. Men possess blatant power, but the power of a woman is latent, secret, and more potent by far. It must be tapped like an underground stream, and your trust in it must be absolute. Why did you not come to me with your despair? Do you think I would ha
ve let you marry in such a state? If I had known I would have helped you, and he could not have done a thing. If the mother does not consent, how can a wedding take place? You will marry, when the right time comes, the husband who is your destiny. Not this one.'
Her eyes twinkled and her lips twitched in a girlish smile of complicity. She had never spoken so much in all Saroj's life, except for her stories.
'Ma: I don't want to marry at all! Not this Ghosh boy nor any boy Baba chooses and not anybody, never.'
Ma was silent. Saroj's hair was now brushed clean, knot-free and silky; with the side of the brush Ma parted it right down the middle, laid down the brush on the bedside table, and picked up half of the hair, the hair on her side of the bed, in her two hands, dividing it expertly into three equal strands with strong, calm fingers.
'And if you should love someone?'
Her fingers and the strands of hair flicked back and forth, the plait growing out of her hands, and as it grew she moved backwards on the bed.
'Love! What is love! There's no such thing!'
'In a way you're right. What most people call love is only passion and it ebbs. But true love never ebbs.'
Saroj felt the tide of irritation rising within her, and pushed it back before it turned to exasperation. Ma was full of clichés, pat statements, reeled off as if learned from a book. What did she know about life? What could she know! But Saroj had to talk to her, desperate as she was, knowing that neither Ganesh nor Trixie could help her now. Ma was all she had, and she'd have to do.
'Look at Baba. How could any wife love him?'
Ma tied a piece of ribbon round the end of the finished plait, stood up and walked around to the other side of the bed to begin the second plait. Her hands in Saroj's hair, the rhythmic working of her fingers, the soft lashing back and forth of the silken strands brought a kind of comfort, a degree of calmness, into the girl's mind.
Ma said quietly, 'I do.'
'You don't! You can't! He's so awful! Ma, he's so cruel, he's such a monster!'
Something like naughtiness flashed into Ma's eyes.
'But it's the monsters who most need love! They need the strongest, rarest kind of love!' She paused. And then she continued.
'And anyway, he's not really a monster. Don't ever think that. Some things are only ugly on the outside. If you look below the surface you can see the truth. And in truth, Baba loves you very much; he loves us all. We are his whole world and without us he is nothing. But his mind has distorted the truth and that is why he appears such a monster. In truth he is not hateful. Only desperately unhappy. How can you hate anyone so unhappy?'
'Well, I hate him! I hate him with all my heart. I hate him with all my heart and soul and all my life and one day I want to hurt him the way he hurt me! I swear it, Ma, I do! I wish Baba were dead, dead, dead!' Saroj sobbed and flung herself against Ma's bosom. Ma's eyes grew moist and she took Saroj in her arms. Silently she rocked back and forth.
She said, 'Your hatred will destroy you, Saroj. Learn to rise above it. You are so like him: stubbornly courting feelings that eat you up inside. You've been resenting him since you were a tiny child and that's not healthy — you hurt yourself even more than you hurt him. You have made an image of your father and you go through life battling this image, and you will never see him as he really, truly is. You make an effigy of him inside your soul, and burn him up — but in fact you burn yourself as well. It hurts, Saroj, don't you see how hate hurts!'
'You always told us not to fear pain! That pain is good!'
'There are good pains, and bad pains. Do you know why I keep a sword in the puja room? It's to remind myself of the meaning of pain; to remind myself that there is something in me stronger than all pain. That's what I mean by good pain. Good pain is pain that forces you to rise beyond it — then you are stronger than suffering.
But your kind of pain, Saroj, self-afflicted pain, is the opposite. Hate is like a tiny weed growing in the mind: pluck it out at the roots, as you would the weed! But what you did is nourish it with attention — and now it's grown into such a tangle you're caught within it — it's strangling you. You're a prisoner of your own hatred. Can't you see?'
'No, Ma, it's Baba who's imprisoned me! It's he who locked me up in my room and locks me up in the house and wants to lock me up in marriage! It's Baba who's trying to plan my life for me and make me do things I can't, I just can't do! Why won't he let me do what I want!'
And what is it that you want? That you really want?'
Saroj lowered her eyes. Ma laid an arm around her shoulder, drawing her closer, and said, 'Child: you must talk to me. Tell me what is in your heart. Don't worry about the Ghosh boy and don't worry about your father. I will take care of that. But you must trust me, and talk to me.'
Saroj swallowed. She took a deep breath. And then it all came rushing out.
'Ma, Ganesh is going to England to study and I would like to do that myself. I want to finish school. Get my A Levels and then go to university. I want to go to England like Ganesh. I want to study law and then come back and change all the laws, so girls like me aren't forced into marriage. I know it's impossible but that's what I really want.'
So. It was out. She'd put the impossible into words. Ma would be shocked and brush it away and tell her to forget it because girls did not need an education, only boys, and it was just her hard luck being born a girl. She'd tell Saroj to accept her destiny, for the karma of a girl was to marry and have children. These were the facts Saroj had grown up with and even to think of an alternative was ludicrous. She couldn't think of a single Roy girl who hadn't married after leaving school. Not one. Not even the clever ones who shone at school. Not even the ones with Christian names and the ones who wore trousers. Not even the ones who went to work in a bank or an insurance agency for a few months before their weddings. Not even Balwant's wife. Sooner or later they dropped their jobs to marry.
Every one of them had a husband before she was twenty. Every one of them had a baby before she was twenty-one. Marriage was their ordained lot in life and they all knew it and there was no exception. And why should Saroj, Deodat Roy's daughter, the strictest and most conservative Roy of the lot, be any different? But she had spoken the words. It was heresy, but she had spoken them.
Ma was so silent she pulled away to look into her face, which was as inscrutable as ever. You could never read Ma's thoughts. She stood up now and walked to one of the windows and pushed out the jalousie on its stick to let the moonlight into the room. She opened the second jalousie. Then she walked to the dresser and lit a candle and came back to sit on the side of the bed and took Saroj's hand. The flickering flame cast grotesque shadows on the wall; they looked like witches, Ma and Saroj, leaning in towards each other. Ma's hand was cool, her touch like silk. Saroj's hand lay limp in hers, and she stroked the back of it with light, feathery fingers.
And then Ma laughed. Not a loud laugh, for Ma was never loud. A round, happy, bell-like chuckle, and she turned to Saroj, and in the flickering candlelight her eyes were bright and expressive, the inscrutability gone, and Ma was like an open book, inviting Saroj to read its pages.
'That's what I wanted too,' Ma said.
Saroj hadn't heard right. 'What, Ma? What did you want?'
'I wanted to finish school and go to university. I wanted to be a doctor.'
'You wanted to be a doctor, Ma? You?'
It was like hearing the moon say it wanted to be the sun. Saroj couldn't believe her ears. But Ma nodded. She had opened wide the book of her past, and shown Saroj a single page. Before she could close that page Saroj said hurriedly, 'What happened, Ma? Did you go to university?'
'No. My parents wouldn't let me. It wasn't the done thing. They forced me into marriage. I was seventeen. Old, for an Indian girl. Time to marry.' Reluctantly she spoke, eager to close the book, but one tiny crack was still open.
'And what happened then, Ma? Tell me!'
'My first husband died. And then I came here and married you
r father.'
Bang. It was over. The book banged shut and locked with a key. Ma seemed suddenly in a hurry.
'You should try to get some sleep now, dear!' she said, and stroked Saroj's hair away from her face, leaned over and kissed her.
'Ma . . .'
Ma spoke hurriedly now, and in a whisper, conspiringly. This was just for the two of them and the words were the most beautiful in all the world.
'Listen, dear. I spoke to Miss Dewer. She says you have been very lazy this past year but you have a brilliant mind and if you work hard you can win the British Guiana Scholarship. If that's what you want I will help you. But you must trust me implicitly. You must stop worrying about the future, and simply trust. Come, sleep.'
Saroj slipped down into the bed as Ma pulled up the sheet to cover her. Ma kissed her again. She walked over to the dresser and blew out the candles and in the ghostly moonlight that filtered in through the open windows Saroj saw her glide over to the gallery door, an evanescent spirit forever out of reach. In the doorway she paused.
'I'm not going to lock you in, dear. That's all over now.' Then she was gone. But her words rang on in Saroj's mind.
The British Guiana Scholarship! Awarded each year to the boy and the girl with the best A Level results in the whole country! The very thought of winning it made her dizzy But then, why not? Indeed, why not? If even the strict and hard-to-please Miss Dewer believed in her, why shouldn't she believe in herself?
Saroj smiled herself to sleep. Ma was on her side. Anything, anything in the world could happen. Because Ma's words were well chosen and carried all the weight of truth, and truth, Ma said, was more weighty than the universe. As children they had believed that anything Ma said would automatically come to pass, simply because she had said it. And because they believed it, that was the way it had always been. Ma had been their private prophetess. By the mere fact of speaking she brought forth events. Saroj felt herself transported back into the safe predictable world of childhood.
