by Louise Allen
Anusha expected to be hurried off out of sight, but the headman was speaking to Nick as he led him towards the largest hut.
‘You will drink opium?’ Nick turned to her.
It was a traditional welcome in the villages, she knew that, although she had never been offered it. ‘You use opium?’ she asked.
‘Smoke it, do you mean?’ He looked at her and grimaced as though at an unpleasant memory. ‘I have done. I think in my time I must have tried everything that this land offers that is supposed to lead to forgetfulness. But, no, I do not smoke it now—the dreams it gives lead nowhere. Like this it is harmless. The most it will do is ease your tiredness and your bruises a little.’
They sat down cross-legged on a straw mat opposite the headman, flanked by two men who looked enough like him to be his sons. With the studied care of a ritual he placed a dark-brown substance into a small cloth funnel on a stand, then poured in water. As it drained through into a boat-shaped wooden vessel below, one of the others poured it into the cloth funnel on the other side of the stand. It took some time, the careful pouring and collection, re-pouring… Anusha began to feel light-headed. Perhaps that was part of it, part of the process to relax the weary guest.
Finally the old man seemed satisfied. He poured a little of the liquid over the little metal Shiva lingam in the centre of the stand, then cupped his right hand, filled it and extended it to Nick. Nick bent forwards and sucked the liquid directly from the side of the wrinkled palm.
The man gestured to him and Nick held out his own right hand, cupped to receive a trickle of the liquid, then turned to her. ‘Drink.’
Anusha bent forwards as he had done and touched her mouth to the side of his palm below his little finger. Under her lips the flesh was warm, yielding; the touch seemed sensual and intimate. A gesture of trust.
‘Suck,’ he murmured, so she did, swallowing the bitter liquid, his hand tipping so that her lips moved against his palm. Her tongue came out, just the tip to catch the final drop, and she looked up and saw his eyes, dark and fixed on her face. Slowly, she leaned back, her gaze still locked with his.
The headman coughed. Nick turned, bowed his head. ‘Dhanyvad.’ Anusha bowed too, echoing the thanks. ‘Go now,’ he murmured. ‘The women are here for you.’
*
Anusha woke, disorientated and stiff, on a thin mattress of quilted cotton. Ropes creaked under her as she shifted and her nostrils were filled with the smells of cooking, of cattle, of dried-dung fires.
They were in a village, she recalled as she sat up and looked around her, squinting into the shadowy boundaries of the round hut.
‘You are awake?’ The soft voice behind sounded wary. Anusha twisted around and smiled at the elderly woman standing just inside the door. She must seem strange and shocking to her, a woman in youth’s clothing.
‘Yes. I slept well.’ The woman came further in and, from the quantity of bangles and the size of her nose ring, Anusha realised she must be one of the headman’s wives. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, you are very kind.’
The woman made a gesture with her hands—hospitality to travellers was expected. ‘Where are your woman’s clothes?’ she asked.
‘I have none. I had to leave them behind.’
‘This man, this angrezi who speaks like us, he is your lover?’ The woman sat down on the end of the charpoy, wariness replaced by lively curiosity.
‘No! I mean, he is my escort. My bodyguard to take me to my father. There is a man who would marry me by force and I…my father does not want him to wed me.’ It hurt her pride to use her father as an excuse, but it was an explanation that would make sense to the other woman.
‘Ah. My name is Vahini. What is yours?’
Anusha thought of lying. But what was the point? ‘Anusha. And he is Herriard sahib.’
There was whispering outside. ‘Come, then. Our visitor is awake,’ Vahini called and the hut was filled with a dozen women of all ages, all staring. ‘This is Anusha and she has no women’s clothes and she flees from a bad man to her father.’ There was much sympathetic muttering.
‘I could not carry clothes, I had to run away very quickly,’ Anusha explained.
That provoked tutting and shaking of heads. Then one of the younger women stood up. ‘She is of my size. It is not right that she is with a man and has to dress as a youth.’
‘I cannot ride as a woman,’ Anusha protested as the speaker left the hut.
‘But when you are not travelling, then he should look on you as a woman,’ one of the others said. ‘If he looks at all. It is only fitting. Padma will have something.’
When Padma returned, her arms were full of cloth. ‘You must wear this tonight,’ she said, shaking out a deep-blue kurta, lehenga and red trousers. There were sandals as well, and a gauzy red veil and a long blue scarf.
Anusha looked at their faces. They were poor. These were probably Padma’s best clothes out of very few, perhaps they were her wedding clothes. She had no gift to reciprocate with, only gem stones, and they were of no use to villagers miles from anywhere and who would probably be cheated if they tried to sell them.
‘That is very kind and these are beautiful,’ she said as she ran her hand over the intricate metallic embroidery around the hems. ‘When I reach my father’s house I will have them returned to you with a gift from my heart in thanks.’
‘Then we will bring water and you may wash,’
Vahini announced, her words sending some of the younger women scurrying out. ‘And you can tell us all about yourself. How many years do you have?’
Washing and changing was obviously going to be a public performance. Anusha put a brave face on it—to be clean she was prepared to answer any number of questions.
*
The women gathered together around the cooking hearths, the firelight flickering across their faces, gleaming off nose rings, bangles and the flash of a smile. Behind, in one of the huts, a child whimpered in its sleep and someone got up to go to it. Others moved back and forth, bringing water, chopping vegetables, carrying food to the men who sat before the headman’s hut.
She felt soothed and yet also emotional. The way these women lived was so distant from her own mother’s privileged, cultured life, but they had gathered her to them like a long-lost daughter. It had been like talking to Mata again. They had asked about her suitors, told her about marriage settlements for the younger women, laughed about their husbands, teased her gently about Nick.
Paravi was a good friend and yet she could not talk to her as she had to her mother. And of course, these women, kind and motherly as they were, were not the same. Mata had died a year ago of a sudden fever. One day she had been there, strong, intelligent, passionate. The next, gone. In the last few hours before she had sunk into unconsciousness, she had held Anusha’s hand, her speech rambling and faint.
‘Love, Anusha,’ she had muttered. ‘It is life. It is the only thing. Even if it breaks your heart. Love…’
Sometimes love sounded wonderful, worth pain, worth loss. And sometimes it seemed too dangerous, too much of a risk. Oh, Mata, I wish you were here to talk to.
Anusha found her vision was blurred, blinked to clear it and realised she was looking at Nick, sitting cross-legged on a mat beside the headman at the centre of the male group. They were all smoking thin black cheroots that she suspected had come from his saddlebags and discussing something with much animation, but also careful attention so that each gave his opinion.
Nick said something, straight-faced, and there was a gale of laughter, echoed by the boys who were hiding behind the hut, watching their elders. Someone called out to them and they ran off.
At last the food was laid out, the cheroots stubbed into the dust and the men began to eat. Only then did the women gather round their own fire and begin their meal. Careful of her borrowed clothes, Anusha sat where she could watch Nick from beneath the hem of her veil as she lifted it to eat. He was so at ease, so relaxed, that it was hard to remember
that he was one of the Company, a foreign soldier and the ally of the father who had rejected her.
‘He is a fine man, that one,’ someone said, low-voiced, and the women moved their heads in the sinuous shake of agreement that the angrezi never seemed to master. Except Nick—he could do it, she realised. ‘He moves like one of us,’ the woman added as if reading her mind. ‘He is a warrior.’
‘Yes,’ Anusha agreed. ‘He is a brave and skilful fighter.’ And a wise one, she thought, recalling the way he had eluded the maharaja’s troops.
‘Perhaps your father would give you to him,’ another voice suggested. ‘He would make you fine sons.’
‘No!’
Nick looked up, unerringly at her, even though she was veiled and he could not know what she was wearing. Shaken, Anusha dropped the hem of her veil, her breath suddenly tight in her chest.
A warrior, brave and skilful. A handsome man, despite his unfamiliar looks and those uncanny green eyes. A kind man, for all his imperious orders. A man who showed respect equally to a raja and a humble villager. It felt like the bars of a lock sliding into place, each with a click in her brain. You learned early to pick locks in the zanana to find treasures and secrets. Was Nick Herriard a treasure, one that she wanted to hold, to possess?
‘He does not want a wife,’ she replied. It cannot be him. Which was a good thing, for however much she might desire that man—and the ache low in her belly and the tingling that went through her when he touched her told her that she did desire him—she feared him also.
He would deliver her to her father and then he would watch her like her father’s hunting hound, alert for any attempt to escape, for she had been foolish enough to let him glimpse her hopes and dreams. If she was foolish enough to fall in love with him, then she would make herself as vulnerable as her mother had done, for this man was so like her father: strong, independent, arrogant in his self-confidence. If he wanted something, he would go after it, if he no longer wanted it, then no sentiment would stop him rejecting it.
But even if he did desire her his duty to her father would keep him from acting on it. It cannot be him, she repeated to herself and shivered a little at the loneliness that crept upon her. She would be trapped in the alien world of the angrezi, amongst people who knew that her mother had not been married to her father and who would despise her for it, amongst people who expected her to wear those horrible clothes and follow their alien ways and she would never be free. Never belong.
The food was eaten, the dishes cleared. Anusha tried to help and was pressed back into her place, a guest. It would never have occurred to her to so much as hand a plate to a maid in the palace. Now she saw the thin, work-worn hands of the women who shared their food with her and felt ashamed to be waited on. ‘Please, let me do something.’
The woman nearest her smiled and went into her hut, came out with the fretful baby in her arms and offered it to Anusha. She cradled it cautiously and clucked her tongue at it. The small face wrinkled up, prepared to wail, then the child thought better of it and stared instead. Anusha stared back, then stroked its cheek with one finger. It wriggled its hand free of the wrappings and curled minute fingers around hers.
She began to croon to it, rocking it back and forth, soothed by the warm weight in her arms. All too soon its mother returned, smiling, and took her sleeping baby back to lay it in the hut and a pang went through her. Freedom and no husband meant no children, no baby of her own to cradle, no tiny hand curling trustfully into hers. Heat pricked at the back of her eyes and Anusha took a deep, shuddering breath. Where had that come from, that fierce desire for a child? Honesty gave her the answer—it had come with her awareness of Nick, her desire for him. Their children would be tall, golden-skinned, pale-eyed, brown-haired. They would be hostages to fortune, she reminded herself. Just as she had been.
The rhythm of drumbeats had her starting up, tense and ready to run, before she realised that it was the patter of hand drums from amidst the circle of men. Anusha relaxed back and the drumbeats settled into a pattern, a tala of sixteen beats. The other men began to clap on the correct beats: one, five, thirteen with a wave of the hand on the empty beat, nine.
The women shifted round in their places to watch, clapping too, and one of the men got up and began to dance, his bare feet slapping on the hard earth, his body twisting and swaying. Another man stood, then two more and the drumming became stronger as another musician joined in. Anusha realised it was Nick, his hands moving over the taut skins of the tabla as though he had known this music from birth.
‘Come,’ Vahini said. The women rose and began to dance too, out of sight of the men, their skirts whirling out into multi-coloured bells as they spun round. Anusha did not need a second invitation. Her lingering aches and pains, the tinge of melancholy over the baby, the unsettling desire for Nick—all vanished in the familiar intoxication of dance.
She looked up as she joined crossed hands with the woman opposite her, whirling round in the centre of the circle of clapping dancers. She leaned back and the stars spun above her in the deep-blue velvet of the heavens and the smoke curled up and somewhere, out beyond the village, a jackal howled, infinitely lonely.
The beat of the drums became her pulse—the pulse of desire and the need to dance for Nick, a thing she must not do, a thing only fit for a courtesan or a nautch-girl.
*
The laughter of the women was clear over the drumbeats. One of them was singing, a song without words, to mark the raga, the melody, of the music. Nick glanced across, careful not to stare or cause offence, but they were hidden behind the huts, only their shadows, thrown by the firelight, danced against the walls.
Anusha was dancing with them—he heard her laugh and take up a snatch of the song. How he knew it was her voice he could not have said. He had never heard her sing, or, he realised with a shock, laugh out loud. But she was there, happy for a short while. She had never known poverty or simplicity like this before and yet she was at home here. Would she ever laugh like that after George had her turned into an English lady?
He almost missed a beat and caught himself, focused on the taut skin under his fingertips. She was an unmarried woman and her place was with her father, and then her husband. The Indian world she had known for twelve years was no longer safe for her.
Then why was there this nagging uncertainty at the back of his mind? He lost track and threw up a hand in apology as the dancer shot him a reproachful look. He was feeling sorry for the girl, that was all. She would settle soon enough with a husband and babies. Someone began to sing, a love song, yearning and sensual. Nick let his hands follow the new, subtle, rhythm running beneath the tala. The beat echoed his pulse, the pulse became a need, an uncomfortably insistent physical demand.
Damn the woman. She was doing nothing overt to tease him sexually—she was too inexperienced for that, whatever her theoretical knowledge, and yet he could feel her as though she sat next to him running those long cool fingers down his back, down his legs— With a cry from the singer the dance ended. Nick fought for control, thankful for the tabla in his lap, hiding his embarrassing state of arousal.
‘Aye!’ the man sitting next to him exclaimed. ‘You will dance now?’
‘No.’ Nick shook his head. ‘No, I cannot dance.’ What he wanted now was his bed, a flask of raki and oblivion, but he was not going to get it, he knew. It would be poor return for the villagers’ hospitality if he left now.
‘Sing, then,’ the man urged.
None of the songs he knew in Hindi were fit to be sung within women’s hearing—they were camp songs, marching songs. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will sing in English for you.’
That provoked a buzz of interest. Nick tapped out the tune on the little drum then,
Our ’prentice Tom may now refuse
To wipe his scoundrel master’s shoes,
For now he’s free to sing and play
Over the hills and far away…
Chapter Eight
&n
bsp; The queen commands and we’ll obey,
Over the hills and far away.
We all shall lead more happy lives
By getting rid of brats and wives
That scold and bawl both night and day
—over the hills and far away.
At dawn the words of the song still ran around Anusha’s head as she dressed in her riding gear and folded the borrowed clothes carefully into her pack.
So that was what Nick thought of wives and children, was it? She should have guessed, instead of feeling sorry for him that his wife was dead. Probably he had been grateful for the freedom, if he would but admit it.
As she came out of the hut he was whistling the same tune. Anusha marched over to the horses and dumped her pack at his feet. ‘Is that what the angrezi call music?’
‘Yes.’ He had washed his hair and it was still wet, clinging to his head in the sunlight as it dried patchily into fairness again. ‘What is the matter with you this morning? Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed or have you been drinking raki with your new friends all night and have a hangover?’
He was talking incomprehensible rubbish. What difference did it make what side of the bed she got out of? And what would she be hanging over?
‘Neither. And that is not proper music.’
‘It is soldiers’ music.’ Nick strapped the pack onto the saddle. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I have.’ She turned her back on him and frowned at the huts, the villagers going about their morning business. ‘This is a poor village.’
‘I am sorry I could not find you a better one, Princess.’
‘I do not mean that!’ Anusha swung round and stumbled over her own feet. Nick steadied her with a hand on each arm and raised an eyebrow in a particularly infuriating manner. ‘I mean that we have taken food they can ill afford.’
He nodded. ‘But we cannot refuse hospitality and I cannot give them the money I need to get you home.’
Home? Hardly, she thought. But there were aspects of it she could exploit. ‘I will have my father send them a cow in calf.’
