He turned and looked her over. ‘You still live here?’
She didn’t answer. He must have seen that food was missing, that the pans in the kitchen were used.
‘You are going to school? Every day?’
She nodded. It was comforting to be at school, and besides, she needed the meals.
‘You can sleep inside if you like. There’s no one here.’
Her shoulders relaxed a little. He wasn’t angry, then.
‘I’d rather sleep outside.’ When her baba came home, that’s where he’d look for her.
‘As you like.’ He pulled out a chair and sat down, swinging himself round to face her. ‘You know what’s happened?’
He sighed. He pulled out a cigarette case and lit another cigarette. He looked older than ever, smoking in Sahib’s room.
‘Sahib is fighting against the Britishers. Did you know that?’
She shook her head. She was glad. The Britishers disgraced her baba, that’s what Rahul said.
‘He is fighting for the freedom of our people. To drive the Britishers away and let us take control of our own land again. That’s why he threw that bomb. That’s why he and his men stayed to face the police-wallahs when they came. Do you see? They could have run away but they chose to stay. To fight them in their own courts.’
She considered. ‘Where’s my baba?’
He blew out a trail of smoke. ‘In prison. Your baba and many of the other—’
She blurted out: ‘But he didn’t do anything. He never took that money.’
Sanjay shook his head. ‘It’s not about the money. Listen. It’s about the bomb.’
She said: ‘But all he wants is to work and look after me.’
Sanjay turned his eyes to the floor.
She went on: ‘You must tell them. He isn’t strong. And what about me?’
Silence. The world seemed to stop. How could they lock away her baba? He was a good man, an innocent man, she knew that. ‘I’ll tell them myself if you won’t. He’s just the sweeper-wallah. That’s not a crime.’
Sanjay shook his head slowly and sadly. ‘Your baba ran messages between Sahib and his friends. He knew everything.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s done now. They’re sending them away, far away, to an island.’
‘An island?’ She stared.
‘You should be proud, Asha.’ He craned forward. ‘Things are much worse for Sahib. They want to hang him.’
‘What island?’
‘The Andamans. Far from here.’ He seemed to read her confusion. ‘The Sisters didn’t teach you that, did they?’ He snorted. ‘The Britishers are sending their most dangerous prisoners there, the murderers and the freedom fighters also.’
Asha’s legs became weak. She imagined her poor baba in chains, forced onto a ship and taken far away, to a dark and distant shore. She sank to the floor. The edge of the rug was laced with dust and strands of stray cotton.
‘How can I get there?’
Sanjay shook his head. ‘You can’t, little sister. You’re a clever girl. Maybe one day you can help your baba and help the revolution also. But now you need to keep safe and to learn.’
She made a lattice of her fingers and pressed them against her face. She clamped her mouth tightly shut and concentrated on making her breaths long and even.
His voice sounded softer. ‘Soon I will come to live here. Sahib wants it so. I will carry on the fight in his good name. And you, Asha, you can live here as long as you like. You can go to school as your baba wanted. I will provide for you. Ye thik hai? That’s fine?’
She sat on the wooden floor and looked through the web of her hands at the patterns on the rug. No, it was not fine. Nothing was fine. She didn’t want to help the revolution. She just wanted her baba back.
For several years, she carried on with her schooling and studied hard. The Crows no longer beat the backs of her legs. After school, she cleaned inside Sanjay Sahib’s house and helped the new cook in return for meals.
In the darkness, different men crept to and from the house through the garden. She watched them from the shack as they scurried, their eyes cast down.
Only Sanjay-ji used the front entrance, as his uncle had done. When she caught glimpses of him, broad-shouldered and grave-faced, it was hard to remember the youth who once lounged, idle, on the grass. One of the few who stopped by the shack on occasion and showed her kindness was Rahul, Sanjay’s friend, that same boy who fed her cocoa as a baby. When he married, she made a friend of his wife, Sangeeta, a girl only a few years older than her, and when their son came, Abhishek, she went along after school some days and helped to mind him.
At night, she slept with her baba’s spare cotton lunghi under her head and sometimes she dreamt of him. Once they were in their old home in the village and he sat across the room from her, a blurred shape in the smoky half-light. When she tried to call to him, no sound came. When she tried to reach for him, her limbs were too heavy to move. Once he came to her in chains, pale as milk, and begged her to save him and she woke crying in the empty shack. She hid her face in the folds of the lunghi but it had already lost his scent.
Chapter Eight
Isabel
Jonathan’s overnight stay stretched into a second, then a third day as the curfew persisted. He returned to The Grand only once, to settle his bill and retrieve his belongings. By the third day, Isabel wondered if his occupation of the spare bedroom was permanent.
Her father barely left the office. When he finally came home, late at night, his eyes hooded and his skin grey, Jonathan poured him Scotch and lit him a cigar. Isabel fell asleep in bed listening to the convivial murmur of their voices from the dining room or the verandah, punctuated by occasional bursts of her father’s laughter.
During the day, her mother was artificially cheerful. She shooed them off on early-morning rides, south from Delhi, away from the trouble. After luncheon each day, she dragged them to teas or tennis at The Club and, in the evening, dinner parties. Jonathan made a polite escort, his manners impeccable. He charmed her mother and her friends and they doted on him. And always, Isabel sensed him watching her.
‘Isabel Madam!’
Tap, tap on her door. Outside, night was beginning to dissolve into day. She peered at the clock. A little after five.
Tap, tap. ‘Madam!’
‘What is it?’ She pushed her feet into her slippers and reached for her dressing gown.
‘Very sorry.’ Abdul, the houseboy, opened the door a crack and peered in. ‘Indian lady asking at the gate.’ His face was creased with disapproval. ‘I told her: Madam is not seeing you. It is too early.’ He hesitated. ‘She is poor only. Crying, also.’
‘Did she give a name?’
‘Sangeeta, wife of Rahul Chaudhary. She is saying like this.’
‘Bring her up to the house. I’ll see her in the dining room. And fetch us chai, will you?’
Abdul didn’t move.
‘Well, go on.’
She padded to her bathroom to wash. The face in the mirror was blurry with sleep.
Sangeeta stood by the dining-room window, her hands fastened together, looking blankly towards the lawns. When she turned to Isabel, her face showed the dirt streaks of crying.
‘What is it?’ Isabel, speaking in Hindustani, thought first of Abhishek, their son.
‘Madam. Rahul is gone.’
‘Gone?’
She prostrated herself at Isabel’s feet. Her hands, metal bangles jangling at her wrists, grasped Isabel’s slippers. Isabel reached down, took the young woman’s hands in her own and drew her upright.
‘Sit. Have some chai.’
‘He’s good man. Innocent.’ Sangeeta’s thin shoulders shook.
‘Of course he is.’ Isabel steered her to a chair and made her sit. She poured tea, served with the milk separately in the English style, added a heaped spoonful of sugar and set the cup and saucer in front of her. It sent waving tendrils of steam into the air. Sangeeta’s breathing was ragged.
&n
bsp; ‘Now tell me. What happened?’
‘It was late. The curfew was on but he went to buy cigarettes only. At the chai stall. I waited and waited the whole night and still he didn’t come.’
She dried her eyes with the tail of her sari. Isabel sat quietly, waiting.
‘An hour ago, Manju, our neighbour, he came to the house. Rahul was taken, he said. By police. They came with lathis and took so many men, Rahul too.’ Her voice cracked.
Isabel rose from her chair and crouched beside her. ‘We’ll get him home, Sangeeta. Don’t worry.’ She rubbed the heaving shoulders with slow, solid strokes. ‘You did right to come.’
Slowly her sobbing quietened. Isabel took the cup of tea and held it to her lips. Her teeth juddered against the fine china rim.
‘Your neighbour, did he know where they took them?’
She shook her head. Her eyes were miserable. ‘He’s a good man, madam. You are knowing.’ She grabbed at Isabel’s hand where it held the cup and set the tea sloshing. Her fingernails made half-moons where they dug into Isabel’s palm. ‘Please, madam. Please help us.’
‘Darling, there isn’t a great deal I can do. I’ve rather a lot on today.’
Her father helped himself to the covered dishes of eggs and sausages on the sideboard and sat to eat a hurried breakfast. A cardboard file lay open by his plate. Thin, typed sheets of overnight reports spilt across the linen. His bearer had arrived early and waited now in the porch.
‘He’s Cook Chaudhary’s son. You must remember Rahul. I used to play with him all the time.’
Her father looked up, surprised. ‘With the cook’s boy?’
Isabel set down her coffee cup. Her father turned his attention back to his papers. He began to frown.
‘Isn’t there someone you could call? There must be.’
He turned a page, then cut into a sausage and chewed as he read on. Abdul appeared in the doorway with a fresh pot of coffee and leant over to fill his master’s cup.
Isabel thought of Sangeeta, sitting with Cook in the kitchen, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast, waiting for news.
‘I can vouch for him.’ Her father didn’t look up. He looked lost in his work. She raised her voice. ‘So could you.’
He lifted his eyes at last. ‘It isn’t just government property they destroyed. Restaurants. Shops. Businesses. Poor, hard-working fellows are ruined. For what?’ He shook his head. ‘And these are the chaps who want to run this country? It beggars belief.’
She reached over and put her hand on the file. The papers were brittle and crinkled under her palm. ‘What about Rahul?’
He shook his head and sighed. ‘That’s police business, Isabel.’
‘They’re counting on us. His wife says—’
‘Wives say all sorts of things, darling.’ Her father pulled his file free. He speared a final fork of sausage and egg and chewed as he shuffled the papers together. ‘You have no idea what your mother would come out with, if she thought it would save my skin.’ He scraped back his chair and got to his feet, drank down a mouthful of coffee as he rose. ‘Are there children? Give her food from the kitchen. Tell Cook I authorised it.’
He dried his lips on his napkin. His breakfast lay in front of him, half-eaten, a pool of egg yolk congealing across the plate. He picked up his papers, kissed her on the forehead and marched out.
She sat alone at the breakfast table, looking out of the French windows across the verandah at the garden beyond. The mali trundled his wheelbarrow along the gravel path. Birds descended to the lawn from the surrounding trees and hopped from one clump of grass to another.
‘Morning.’ Jonathan, hearty and cheerful, his hair damp from his wash. He took a plate and lifted the covers on the breakfast dishes, then settled himself at the far side of the table and finally looked across at her. ‘You’re pale as a ghost.’
He reached across the table and put his hand on hers. He looked more caring than she’d imagined possible. For a moment, she thought she might cry.
He said: ‘Is something wrong?’
Jonathan chatted easily to the officer on duty in the dour, cavernous entrance hall of Delhi’s main police headquarters. The young constable led Jonathan and Isabel up a sweeping flight of stairs. The cheap flooring and echoing corridors reminded her of a hospital.
‘Hargreaves!’
Jonathan raised his hand to greet his friend through the half-open door to his office. It was spacious, with an enormous desk at one end and, at the other, a set of easy chairs gathered round a glass-topped coffee table. Patterned rugs in red and gold were strewn across the wooden flooring. The walls were decorated with large framed pictures of Indian game and a ceremonial sword.
‘How’ve you been, Whyte?’
Isabel hung back as the two men shook hands. They had come to India as part of the same IAS intake.
‘Miss Winthorpe, what a pleasure!’ Hargreaves was pink and hearty. ‘Do take a pew.’
They settled in the government-issue chairs.
‘Mr Gandhi is behaving a little better, by all accounts.’ Hargreaves gave Jonathan a knowing look. ‘Finally.’
‘No more hunger strikes?’ Jonathan shook his head. ‘I must say, I thought we’d lost him last time.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Hargreaves turned to Isabel. ‘Only joking, of course.’
Isabel looked from one face to the other. Hargreaves was much the same age as Jonathan but already showed signs of a receding hairline and a paunch. Jonathan, physically fitter, was the more handsome of the two.
‘They’re fools to give in.’ Hargreaves blew out his cheeks. ‘I’d force-feed the man. Anyway, he’s off round villages nowadays, which suits us very well.’ He paused. ‘Plenty of others to keep us busy.’
A constable brought in a tray of tea and salty biscuits.
‘Now, this Chaudhary fellow,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Winthorpes have known him since he was a boy. His wife’s begging for help and Miss Winthorpe here doesn’t know where to turn.’
Hargreaves brought over a cardboard file from his desk, untied the string around it and looked over several sheets of thin paper, pockmarked with type.
‘It’s not good. He was right there in the crowd when it attacked the police. Two constables saw him throw rocks.’
‘Rahul?’ Isabel craned forward to see the sheet.
Hargreaves gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘It’s all here in black and white.’
Isabel turned to Jonathan. ‘He only went for cigarettes.’
Hargreaves laced his fingers together and slowly cracked his knuckles.
‘He appeared before the judge this morning. Guilty on a string of counts. Looking at several years, I’d say.’ He closed the file and retied the string. ‘He should have thought about his wife before he got mixed up in this.’
Before Isabel could protest, Jonathan cut in.
‘Speaking of wives, how’s the lovely Dorothy? And how old is James now?’
The men chatted about family life as she sat stiffly between them, her eyes on the paper file in Hargreaves’ hand which seemed already to have sealed Rahul’s fate.
That afternoon, she and Jonathan sat together on the verandah. It was a beautiful winter’s day, bright and warm. The mali was on his knees at a flower bed. His trowel scraped a rhythm from the rocky soil.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for trying.’
She got to her feet and leant against the rail to look out across the garden. A peacock trailed its furled tail across the lawn. She and Rahul made secret dens in those rhodendenron bushes, climbed those trees. She tried to imagine him in a prison cell.
‘I’m sorry I can’t do more.’
She turned. Jonathan sat quietly, watching her.
‘I can’t bear to see you sad.’ He got to his feet, stood close at her side, reached for her hand. She let him squeeze her fingers between his own. She felt adrift and his grip was firm.
‘I so want to take care of you, Isabel.’
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br /> She bristled. ‘I’m not a child.’
‘Of course you’re not. Of course.’ He shook his head, broke into a smile. ‘That’s what I love about you. You’re strong and brave.’
She looked down at their joined hands. He said love. Her fingers, in his, were suddenly tense. Before she could think what to say, he sank down onto one knee, there on the verandah, still clasping her hand.
‘You will marry me, won’t you?’ He made it sound as if they’d already spoken of it. ‘I love you, Isabel. I think I always have, from the first moment I came striding into the drawing room in Kettlewell and saw you curled there on the window seat, so self-contained, so serious as you pored over your book.’
She tried to laugh. ‘I don’t believe that for a minute.’
‘It’s true.’ He pressed her hand to his lips. ‘Being horrid was the only way I could get your attention. Anyway, that’s a long time ago.’
She couldn’t look at him. Her eyes were caught by a shifting shadow in the sitting room. Her mother, at the window, bent over an arrangement of flowers and fiddled with the stems.
‘You’ll love the Andamans,’ Jonathan was saying. ‘And we won’t be there for ever. We can stay in India as long as you like. You’ll never be cold again, darling. You will take me, won’t you?’
She dared to glance at his face. His eyes were imploring and full of longing.
She heard herself say: ‘Of course I will.’
He pulled himself up to stand beside her, his body firm and warm, tipped back her chin and kissed her. His mouth was dry with nerves and his lips half-closed as if he weren’t sure of her response. I suppose that’s it, then, she thought. I’m going to marry Jonathan Whyte.
‘We could get married quickly, here in Delhi.’ He seemed breathless. ‘You don’t mind if it’s a bit rushed, do you? I’ve made some enquiries. I’ll have to go back soon, you see, to Port Blair.’
Daughters of India Page 7
