Writing on Skin

by Sara Banerji

  Hermione had almost reached India when the peaceful life of the Waswar expatriates was disturbed by extremists trying to overthrow the government. Things became so dangerous that the British Government decided to fly all British women and children home immediately, the men remaining for the moment to protect their own and their companies’ interests. David, who had previously been desperate to go back to England, decided to stay with his father.

  Anne wailed and begged, but David was adamant. ‘I can’t understand it,’ she wept. ‘Anyone would think you don’t want to come and live with me. Anyone would think, my darling boy, that you don’t love me.’

  David shuddered and considered that even spending the whole of his holidays without his friends was preferable to being cooped up with his mother in England. Also, he was starting to relish the idea of he and his father sharing an adventure in a dangerous country.

  Chapter Ten

  India met Hermione in the face like a plate of warm and spicy soup. She stared around her, unready, unable to remember if it had always been like this.

  There was a thin and threadbare atmosphere to everything, from the people struggling to find their luggage to the very cases themselves: black tin decorated with chipped and gaudy peacocks, bulging cotton bundles stained with hand prints, cracking cardboard lashed together with string. And everywhere, piercing the senses, the quite unacceptable smell of urine.

  If Hugh had been there Hermione would have begged him to forgive her for everything.

  ‘You were right. This is all wrong,’ she would tell him. She had only been in India an hour and already she hankered for the smell of English earth and the call of blackbirds. She was seized with a craving for the sound of motorbikes in the lane. She compared Slug’s thick Doc Martens clad feet to the skinny naked ones of the ancient man struggling under the load of her luggage.

  In the taxi to her hotel she did not dare to look in case she saw the beggars’ exposed ulcers or the crows slurping up bloodstained phlegm. But though she longed to think that all this was different, that India had not been like this twenty years ago, she knew that it was she who had changed. As if in a rattled kaleidoscope, her mother’s genes had been shaken to the top of Hermione’s consciousness, and it was now her turn to creep squeamishly through filth and minginess.

  She had not told Unity she was coming. It had even passed through her mind as she’d left England not to see her child at all, for this was to be Hermione’s own India and she did not want even Unity to intrude upon it.

  Now as she got out of the taxi to be bathed again in the almost breathless thickness of the stifling air, she craved for Unity, thought that only she would make sense of these new and miserable perceptions, wished frantically that Unity, or some other friendly familiar person was waiting to greet her in the small hotel that the taxi driver, after looking her up and down evaluatingly, had deemed her worthy of.

  But there was no such person. She lay in the unfamiliar bed, and could not sleep until nearly dawn and then it seemed that as soon as she dropped off, Delhi woke.

  When the outside clamour became so great there seemed no point in lying in bed any more, she went over to the window.

  Grimy pavement bundles from the night before were rising to reveal themselves as gatekeepers, taxi drivers, rickshaw wallahs. They stretched, scratched, hoiked, poured water over their half-naked bodies from the pavement taps, hitched up their lungis and squatted, with their bums out, to shit.

  A lorry appeared and thirty or so beggars tumbled out and took up crippled postures at street corners.

  This is India, thought Hermione, shivering.

  Men emerged from rickety buildings and began to hurry along the pavement hugging their briefcases. Children strapped to satchels were chivvied down dark stairs by the voices of their mothers. Other children, education-free, scrambled out of crevices like cockroaches and offered their services, ready to polish shoes, sell laces, catch taxis, carry shopping. Emaciated servants blew on dung braziers before carrying them inside to cook their employers’ breakfasts.

  ‘I am no longer part of India. I have nothing to do here, and no one knows me,’ said Hermione aloud to herself.

  When she went down into the street she became submerged in a gust of entrepreneurial children, taxi-catchers, shoeshine babies, beggar ladies, crippled rascals: ‘Me Memsahib.’ ‘Nomamampapa.’ ‘You like nice necklace? Only ten paisa.’ ‘Come sit in my rickshaw.’

  Her toes were captured by the shoe brush, her wrists by the bracelet seller, her nostrils by the fruit merchant, though no yogi healer assailed her.

  Her bag was almost nabbed and only rescued in the nick of time by the observant doorman of her hotel. He threatened, clapped, subdued, like a farmer shooing predatory birds off his crops. Hermione was his crop. He must protect her.

  All that day Hermione hunted for the India she had once known, but though she had been born in this country, and her father’s family had lived here for three generations, everything around her seemed unfamiliar. She had been brought up in Delhi. This was the town of her childhood, a place she remembered with affection, and yet though nothing about India seemed to have changed, in another way everything was different.

  Her father had met her mother on one of his leaves to England, and had brought her back to Delhi as a young bride but Mrs Fielding had never liked India where she considered herself to be an unwilling exile.

  She had been appalled by almost everything she saw or heard or smelled, scurrying swiftly if she ever had to go out. She would dash from vehicle to shop or restaurant, skirts held high, a Vicks-scented handkerchief to her nostrils like the pomander of a citizen of plague-infested London, managing successfully to blot from her mind the horrid sights, sounds and smells she encountered in her brief sprints.

  After Hermione’s father got a post in Bengal, and the family went to live in Calcutta, Mrs Fielding confined herself and her daughter to the small area round Park Street and Chowringee that was kept fresh and smart for the British. She managed, at first, to avoid completely the seething rotting smelling dancing singing eating shitting spitting other India, but after the British left this eventually overwhelmed even Park Street and Chowringee like a spreading ulcer and the Collector’s wife spent the next thirty years in Calcutta seeing hardly anything apart from her home and the club.

  When Hermione was eighteen her father decided to send her to a Calcutta college in response to, or even as a punishment for, the way in which his daughter had begun to argue the wrongs she felt were being done by the British to the Indian people.

  At that time, and for a man in the Collector’s position, sending his daughter to an Indian college was a crazy piece of democratic eccentricity; but Hermione’s father was prone to sudden acts of what his wife thought of as madness, and which she never dared oppose too strongly because of the Collector’s state of health.

  ‘You can do a year there before going on to Oxford, it’ll be good for you to get to know the other side. Then you’ll understand India,’ he told Hermione, making the statement threateningly as though she was going to regret his decision. Softening his tone a little he had added, ‘The country is changing and will need people sympathetic towards it, and you can’t feel sympathy for those you don’t know.’

  Mrs Fielding was appalled. ‘She’ll catch nits!’

  ‘Hush!’ said Hermione’s father.

  ‘You will be careful, won’t you darling,’ implored Mrs Fielding as Hermione got into the rear seat of the car on her first day. ‘I’ll send Ramu with a tiffin carrier of hot lunch for you at midday, and you are to swear not to touch a mouthful of any of the filthy local food.’ She would have wrapped her daughter’s head in something to keep the nits off too if she could, as well as guarding her from catching parasites off the native food.

  ‘I swear,’ said Hermione, who had no sense of honour at all.

  The only non-Indian in the college, she felt all wrong when she entered the lecture room on her first morning. She was
too tall, a different shape, a different colour, and was the only person whose knees were visible. The girls all wore saris or baggy Punjabi trousers, and the boys long white cotton trousers as though they were just about to play cricket.

  At lunchtime Ramu arrived with a plate of roast mutton, and another of caramel custard, still piping hot, tastefully folded into a clean starched napkin. Carrying this, and feeling silly, Hermione accompanied the other students into a dark walled sticky café where sweating waiters in dirty lungis rushed among tight-packed trestle tables and a punka slowly paddled its way through a host of flies.

  ‘They make very good pakoora here,’ one of the students told her.

  ‘I will buy you one,’ cried another before she could answer.

  In a moment, while Hermione protested desperately, all the students were competing with each other to be the one to buy a crisp potato cutlet for the Collector’s daughter.

  ‘Let her pay, she’s ten times richer than the lot of you put together!’ called a voice.

  Hermione turned, scalding at the implication that she was scrounging.

  Through the tobacco smoke and the steam she saw a young Indian man with long eyes, a high narrow nose, ears that seemed to be pressed against his tall head, and nostrils that quivered like an alert wild animal’s.

  His looks confused Hermione because although he had the narrow features of an Aryan his skin was a dense Dravidian dark. She was further confused, and to her shame irritated, by the way in which he seemed to be unawed by her. It was as though she had begun to take unearned reverence as her due.

  The young man held her gaze calmly, neither embarrassed nor insolent, but merely looking under long hooded eyelids, as though he found her neither glorious nor threatening.

  Hermione took some deep breaths and when she felt confident her voice would be steady she said, ‘I don’t believe we have met,’ as though she had not heard, or had decided to ignore his remark. Her tone was gracious, the kind used by her father when speaking to some recalcitrant Indian prince who needed putting in his place.

  The student did not respond for a moment, but leant forward scrutinizing her in a way that made Hermione begin to feel the initiative was slipping from her.

  Then he said, ‘I am Yudhishthira.’

  She had, until now, only known the name from the character in the Mahabharata. The Pandava called Yudhishthira had been the son of Dharma, Duty, who diced away his kingdom, his brothers and Draupadi, the wife they shared.

  Yudhishthira smiled suddenly and for a moment, although six feet of peopled floor separated them, Hermione felt alone with him, caught in his gaze. Like antagonists preparing for battle, each was aware of the other’s efforts at obtaining dominance, and determined not to give ground.

  There was no warmth in Yudhishthira’s smile, and for some odd reason Hermione was impressed and excited by his hostility, which she knew was directed not only at herself, but also at the whole of her family, class, race and even religion.

  She came from a family that had lived in India too long to discount the country’s customs or beliefs. The things Indians did and felt were, to Hermione, different but not inferior to the things her people did. They were two separate cultures that coexisted with an amiable respect but until meeting Yudhishthira she had never got to know anyone from this counter-culture on equal terms. Her fellow students should have met her so, but had, out of awe, been incapable of it. Yudhishthira was not awed.

  A few days later he suddenly invited Hermione to take lunch in a café with him.

  She hesitated before agreeing as panic rose in her.

  Yudhishthira, understanding her expression, said, ‘You won’t come I know! You’ll think it dirty!’

  Hermione recognized the invitation as a challenge, knew he expected her to humiliate herself either by refusing to come at all, or accepting and betraying her distaste. And she said, ‘Yes, I’ll come. Thank you,’ very quickly before she could change her mind.

  The two of them sat awkwardly facing each other at a wooden trestle table while the cook pressed parathas between his palms and a little boy thrust sugar cane through the mangle so that the juice gushed through a halo of flies into a clay pot.

  As they waited for their food a rat appeared cautiously on the café’s threshold. After a moment’s pause it stepped daintily over and was about to set off up the central aisle when Hermione caught sight of it.

  As disgust froze her throat and cramped her stomach, she felt Yudhishthira’s eyes watch her appraisingly. Keeping her horror-anticipating feet tinglingly on the floor, she turned from the sauntering rat to look into her companion’s face. Horror and fear were thrust out suddenly by a burst of anger at the realization that he had cornered her into being betrayed by her own body. A scream, even trembling, she could suppress by the rigid bracing of her limbs, but she was unable to prevent the blood withdrawing from her cheeks. Her anger increased as she thought she saw contempt twitch the corners of his mouth.

  He said, ‘Just a rat. But I don’t expect you get many of those where you come from.’

  At the far end of the café a pink concrete effigy of the elephant god Ganesh pranced, marigold garlands round his tusks, while before him stood an offering of a brass plate of sweets, puffed rice and bits of coconut. He was the god of shopkeepers and he protected profits.

  The boy waiter approached laden with plates and glasses and nearly tripped on the rat as it plodded its way towards the celestial feast. Looking round to see what Hermione was staring at, then nodding his head in the direction of the god, he said, ‘It lives there.’

  The last tip of the rat’s tail disappeared round the back of the effigy as he put smoky glasses of sugarcane juice before his customers.

  ‘Tomorrow shall we meet again? I’ll show you aspects of Calcutta you have never seen before,’ Yudhishthira told her when they parted. ‘There is a lot that is exciting and beautiful about this city, you know.’

  ‘I nearly had a heart attack,’ Hermione’s mother said that evening. ‘This is so dreadful that your poor father will probably have to give up his career to escape the shame.’

  The butler, buying steaks in New Market, had seen Hermione at the roadside café.

  ‘What have I done?’ wailed Hermione, ready to lie as much as was necessary if it saved the situation. ‘Why do you believe the damned servant instead of asking me!’

  ‘Because you would have lied to me.’ Mrs Fielding knew her daughter. ‘Being seen eating filth publicly with a native! How could you do it?’

  Quivering with a mixture of fears, Hermione tried to hold her ground. ‘You said my own great-grandfather was Indian.’

  But her mother had become hardened by what she perceived as impending disaster and neither rose to nor contradicted Hermione’s words. Old Indian genes were of no significance in this present crisis. It had only been a supposition, and anyway it was not her side of the family.

  ‘I was rewarding him with a coffee for carrying my books,’ Hermione cried. ‘I hardly know him. I don’t even like him.’ She had embarked on her long career of treachery.

  A few weeks later it was the half-term vacation, and telling her mother she was booked on a free holiday project organized by the college, Hermione met Yudhishthira and the pair explored Calcutta together.

  For days they wandered through the smells of flowers, frying and urine. They laughed at puppet shows and shuddered at snake charmers. They immersed themselves in filth and dancing, colour and despair, witnessed the prudery of respectability and the naked bodies of holy men. They were stirred together in a loud kaleidoscope of activity and cacophony of sound. Tabla and shehnai strummed with the rhythm of their hearts. They drank tea flavoured with cardamums in New Market, consumed coffee and sponge cakes at Fleurys. They stood by fruit stalls to eat sweet green langra mangoes tasting of aniseed, and by street braziers to eat jellabies straight out of the sizzling oil.

  Hermione, recognizing problems and wanting them solved had already presented Yud
hishthira to her parents.

  She’d felt doubtful when he’d arrived wearing a kurta and dhoti instead of a jacket and tie. But her slight anxiety was overwhelmed by delight because the cream silk looked so superb against the dark glossiness of his skin.

  ‘You should always wear that,’ she said, not realizing that her words were prophetic.

  He looked very tall and straight as though nervousness had drawn him upwards as he followed her up the marble steps of her parents’ home.

  Her father was very polite, extended his hand graciously, asked Yudhishthira to be seated, said it was always a pleasure to meet Hermione’s college friends, acting as though she was constantly bringing people home.

  The visitor did not respond warmly, only holding out a limp hand to be shaken before sitting grimly.

  Mrs Fielding was excessively gushing, talking to Yudhishthira in a loud slow careful voice as though he had a slight mental handicap or reduced hearing. She pattered back and forth offering too many choices of too many things. ‘Sherry? Or perhaps you don’t drink alcohol. It is against your religion? I could ask the bearer to make you some tea if you would like. We brought a very nice Flowery Orange Pekoe back from Darjeeling. Or a cool lime juice? Nimbu Pani?’ She repeated the last sentence in Hindi for increased comprehension. ‘Or perhaps you would like some Indian sweets. I could send the bearer to the bazaar to buy some. There is a fairly clean shop just along the road, he tells me.’

  ‘Mother!’ Hermione cried loudly. ‘Yudhishthira is going to be a doctor. He is the cleverest in our class. Much cleverer than me.’

  Mrs Fielding smiled kindly, murmured, ‘I’m sure he is, dear,’ pretending to believe the impossible, that an Indian could be cleverer than the Collector’s daughter. Actually, although she did her best not to show it, she’d been most terribly alarmed at her daughter’s joyful expression and shining eyes as she’d introduced the dark-skinned native. If she had known that this was the same boy the butler had seen Hermione dining with, her alarm would have been terror.