He rattled on, making arrangements for their lives. She stood in a daze, looking out at the sunlight across the lawn, the blue and green shimmer of the peacock’s feathers. How odd, the way everything solid could shift and change in a moment. Rahul had been her friend, her brother, a man she trusted with her life. Now he was in prison. And soon she would become Isabel Whyte, Mrs Whyte, a new bride starting a new life in the Andaman Islands.
Chapter Nine
Asha
Asha was summoned to the house to meet with Sanjay-Sahib at nine o’clock. She plaited her hair and covered it with a light dupatta, pushed her feet into sandals.
The houseboy led her down the familiar passageway to Sahib’s room at the front of the house. It was locked during the day, one of the few places she was not allowed to clean. Now the houseboy tapped on the door and opened it to her.
The room was deep with shadows. A lamp cast a pool on a polished wooden table near the centre of the room and it swirled with cigarette smoke and dancing dust. The table was strewn with books and papers and a chair was pushed away as if Sanjay-ji had recently risen from his work.
‘Don’t be afraid.’
She jumped. The shadows shifted and he moved out from behind a high-backed chair in a far corner. His eyes glinted in the half-light.
‘You wanted to see me, sahib.’
He smiled. ‘I often see you, Asha, running about your business. I hear you are good in English and history and mathematics also. That’s unusual for a girl.’
He pulled forward a chair for her and sat in the armchair that his uncle had once used. ‘Now, will you drink chai?’ He gestured to a stool on the far side of the chair. A tray had been set out there with a chai pot and two cups and a plate of Cook’s samosas.
She perched on the edge of the chair as he poured the ready-made chai. His arms were thick and knotted with muscle. He wore a cotton shirt with a lunghi. How strange it was that they lived so close together, on the same piece of land, yet saw each other so rarely.
He handed her a cup of chai. ‘I called you little sister once. Do you remember? You were only a child then. Now you’re a young woman.’
She looked down into her cup. The air above it rocked with rising steam. A skin made wrinkles on the boiled milk.
‘I am very grateful to you, sahib, for a place to live and for food and’ – she faltered – ‘everything.’
He sipped his chai and she did the same. The chai was thick and sweet in her mouth. He had his uncle’s straight nose and sturdy body and the same ability to change a room just by being present in it. He set down his cup, opened a cigarette case by his chair, drew out a cigarette and lit it. The smoke billowed from him in soft, sweet waves.
He seemed lost in thought, smoking and looking up into the darkness above her. She looked round the room. His uncle’s glass ashtray sat on the mantelpiece. A book lay beside it with a pair of spectacles on top. An old-fashioned book, leather-bound.
‘My uncle’s. They sent me his things from prison.’ He seemed to read everything in her face. ‘The night before they hanged him, he sat up late, reading that book. A volume of Tagore’s poems. You know Tagore?’
She shook her head.
‘Our greatest writer. A fine Bengali.’ He paused, looking at the mantelpiece. ‘Those are my uncle’s spectacles. I keep them in view when I work.’
‘My baba called him a great man.’
He nodded. ‘He would be sad to see us now. Our friend Rahul suffers terribly in prison. And his family suffers, also.’ He sighed. ‘Your schooldays are almost over, Asha. You must be, what, fourteen, fifteen, is it? So tell me, what do you want?’
She blinked. No one had ever asked her such a question.
‘I could arrange a decent marriage and fix a dowry for you. No? What about teaching in a school? You have brains, Asha.’
She sat very still. Her mouth dried and her hands shook round the warm bowl of her cup. She opened her mouth to speak, closed it again.
His eyes rested on her face. ‘What, Asha?’
She filled her lungs and heard her voice, high with nerves, say: ‘I want to go to him. To my baba. On that island.’
His eyes widened. He didn’t laugh and she took heart and continued.
‘I know it’s dangerous. But he’s my baba. He’s all I have in this world. It’s my duty to care for him. Can you help me go there, sahib?’
He put his cigarette to his lips and drew on it. The tip glowed red, then faded again to black. He let out a long, slow stream of smoke. All this time, his eyes never left her face.
‘Are you sure?’
She nodded. She felt lifted by a tide of hope that she might again see her baba, however hard the journey.
‘I’ll make enquiries.’ He gave her a half-nod. His mood seemed to shift as he reached a decision. He got to his feet. She hurried to set down her cup on the table and jump up too.
‘Thank you, sahib. May the gods bless and protect you.’
As she crossed to the door, he said in a low voice that was little more than a murmur: ‘You are a good girl, Asha, and clever. Maybe you can help us there also.’
In a matter of weeks, he made all the arrangements: first the hot, dusty train journey down to Calcutta where one of his associates rescued her from the crowded railway station, then her four-day passage on the SS Maharajah out to Port Blair.
As they sailed into port on the final day, she dared to leave the safety of her cheap berth and go up onto the deck to join the passengers gathering along the rail. She had been afraid to see these islands across Kali Pane, Black Water, which people mentioned with hushed voices. Now she was surprised by their beauty.
The sea, which had tossed and scurried against the ship for the last two days, was suddenly calm, reflecting a clear sky with a deep, shimmering blue. A low mist hung about the islands and it was hard, as they first approached, to tell the difference between land and cloud. The ship slid forwards through still water.
Fringes of sandy beach emerged from the mist, followed by a cluster of square stone buildings that defined the waterfront. Behind the port, the red rooftops of smart houses clustered together as they climbed up from the shore. She narrowed her eyes to squint into the bright light. Beyond the houses, some distance from the port and rising out of a thick grove of coconut palms, stood a vast circular building of red stone. A tower stood at its centre and a series of low buildings radiated out from this tower at regular intervals, the double-storeyed spokes of a giant wheel.
‘You know what that is?’ A young man, beside her at the rail, saw her staring.
She didn’t answer him.
‘The Cellular Jail. Packed full of murderers and madmen.’ He laughed, hoping to scare her. ‘You better lock your door, at night, Missy, in case they come creeping.’
She shook her head. ‘My baba’s there,’ she said. ‘He’ll be out soon.’
‘Maybe.’ He pulled a face. ‘Maybe not.’
Above the jail, the mountain rose steeply. Even when they were close enough to lay anchor, its summit stayed hidden in cloud.
‘All coral reef down there.’ The young man pointed at the shallows. ‘One wrong move and we’d be cut to pieces.’
She hung over the rail as the first passengers were handed down into rowing boats and peered through the clear water at patterns of dark rock, far below, and darting shoals of fish whose sudden movements made shifting shadows on the sand below.
Now that the ship was motionless, heavy, thick heat descended. It was different from the heat she had always known. It had a richer, silkier texture, so moist that it licked her face and pressed itself between her fingers. Smells engulfed her. The sharp salt of spray and dock and the pervasive stink of rotting fish. Richly scented flowers and lush vegetation reaching from the land underpinned by the soft sweetness of woodsmoke. She gripped the warm wooden rail with both hands, closed her eyes and tried to steady herself. My baba is there, she told herself. I will wait for him.
She climbed
the harbour steps from the rowing boat and stepped out onto the quayside into a cacophony of shouts and sounds. The waterside was bustling with working men, unloading baskets of flapping fish, bowed down by the weight of wooden cases, scurrying along on errands. Some men had skin so dark it was almost black. Some towered above her. Others were short and squat in stature with light skin and wide, flattened features. The whole scene stank of salt and rotting fish and kerosene. The light, glancing off the water, was dizzying.
Off to one side, a group of men in drab cotton trousers, their muscles flexing across bare chests as they laboured, wielded picks as they dug out a battered section of sea wall, ripe for repair. They worked with steady concentration but there was a deadness in their movements, which made her take a few steps towards them to look. A foreman walked up and down alongside them, shouting commands. It was only when they moved forward with a uniform swinging of legs, which reminded her of a creeping caterpillar, that the chains linking their ankles, each man fastened to the next, clanked and jangled.
‘Work-gang.’
She turned. A boy stood at her side. His clothes were faded with overwashing and his hair made clumps on the top of his head.
‘It’s not so bad. They live in barracks. Better than prison. They don’t let the politicals out, though. Too afraid they’ll leg it.’
‘Politicals?’
‘Freedom fighters. Like your baba.’ He gave her a knowing look, too old for his age, which seemed barely nine or ten. ‘I’m Rajiv.’
She looked him up and down. ‘I’m Asha.’
‘I know. Amit-ji sent me. Come on.’
He took her bag from her hand and led her off through the bustle along cobbled streets, which steadily climbed first past warehouses and offices, then shops and restaurants and finally between large houses, raised on stilts. The sun grew hotter and the air more humid as they left behind the breeze from the sea and became surrounded by the fierce closeness of jungle. The wheeling seagulls gave way to darting green-winged birds and red-beaked parrots.
When they had walked for almost an hour, he led her at last down a narrow lane between poorer houses, some barely more roomy than the shacks she had left behind in the Delhi bustee, and through a small restaurant. It was a wooden structure, open to the street. A woven straw roof was supported by solid struts. Rickety tables and chairs spilt out into the lane, then reached back into the shaded darkness of the interior. The men sitting there over chai and pakoras, bidis glowing in their hands, raised their heads as she passed between them. She tensed her shoulders and looked fixedly at her sandals as they crossed the floor.
The boy led her through to the back. The yard was chaotic with cooking. Steam shimmered over pots of boiling daal and subzi. A boy, a year or two older than her guide, ran back and forth between them, fetching, seasoning and stirring. On the far side of it all, sitting under a spreading frangipani tree, sat a lean man. A stiff ledger lay open on his knee and his lips moved silently as he totted up figures and entered them in a series of columns.
The boy stopped in front of him and dropped her bag on the ground with a smack. They waited. He was a sinewy man with a bald patch spreading into his crown. He wore thin-rimmed spectacles which slipped down his nose each time he bent forward to enter a fresh number and which he pushed back repeatedly with his forefinger in an automatic gesture. When he finally raised his head, his eyes were large and solemn.
‘Flour is costly. It eats our profits like a beetle. What to do?’
She considered, then looked down at Rajiv. ‘What does your mama give you with your daal and subzi?’
He shrugged. ‘Rice porridge.’
She said to the man. ‘Then serve more rice, fewer rotis.’
‘But people like rotis.’
She shrugged. ‘Then they must pay more for them.’
He looked at her for some time and the eyes behind his spectacles were thoughtful.
‘I am Amit-ji.’ He looked down at her bag. ‘You have something for me?’
She found the sealed envelope that Sanjay Krishna had handed her when she left and watched as he drew out the paper, unfolded it with methodical care and read it over. ‘You read and write?’
She nodded. ‘Hindi and English also.’
‘Good.’ He nodded. ‘Bring a chair and sit beside me. Rajiv will bring you food and when you have eaten, you can rest.’
She hesitated, conscious of the men all around her.
‘You’re safe here, Asha. Krishna-Sahib and I are old friends. I will help you.’
It was a world peopled by men and it took her time to find her place in it.
When Amit-ji’s restaurant was busy, she worked in the back, chopping and cooking alongside their cook and washing the dirty pots and plates in a pail. The young boys called her Didi, big sister, and protected her as if she were family.
Late in the evening, after the restaurant had closed and the shutters fastened, men knocked softly and crept through to the yard at the back where they gathered under the frangipani tree to talk with Amit in low voices. She came to know their faces and their stories also. They had all been prisoners themselves who, after serving many years, had been released as tickets of leave. They had the right to settle here and to farm or fish or set up a private business like any other citizen but they were barred from leaving the island to return to the homes of their birth and the relatives waiting there.
Sometimes these men came to her and asked her to write letters to their fathers and brothers back home. They dictated simple messages, begging for news of their relatives, the land, the cattle. Some called on their wives and children to journey out to the islands to join them and share their new life here, if they were willing. Most, it seemed, were not. The men ended their messages by saying how well they were doing in their new lives on the island and how the gods blessed them here. She saw their drawn faces and knew it was a big lie but they asked her to write it and so she did.
At night, she slept in a crawl space above the main body of the restaurant. She lay against the warm wood of the eaves, listening to the snores and shuffles of Amit, the cook and the two boys as they slept near her. She fell asleep thinking of the circular brick building, which loomed over them on the mountainside and of her poor baba, locked inside. He had no idea that she had travelled all this distance to be close to him. She had no idea, as those first weeks passed, whether she would ever see him alive again.
Chapter Ten
Isabel
The sail to Port Blair took four days. On the first morning, Isabel stood at the steamer’s stern and, looking back over the receding watery churn and swooping seagulls, said a silent goodbye to her parents and to the mainland as it shrank to a thinning band before vanishing altogether.
She looked down at her hand on the warm wooden rail. The sun sparkled on her rings, the plain gold beside the diamond solitaire, mounted by a Punjabi jeweller in Old Delhi. She had to concentrate to bring Jonathan’s face to mind. The few days before their hasty wedding passed in a blur of organisation. Jonathan had rushed back to the Andamans immediately afterwards, leaving her to take her time in packing up her belongings and following. Now, as she contemplated their reunion weeks later, it was hard to feel married at all.
She tore herself away from the stern and walked the length of the steamer to the bow, facing forward into open waters. Here the mood of the sea seemed very different. The wind rose and the waves undulated ahead in unravelling curtains of deep blue, flecked with gold threads of sunlight.
The SS Maharajah was a small, shabby steamer with cramped cabins along its upper deck. Isabel met the other passengers at lunch in the cramped first-class dining room where the captain, a middle-aged Scot, presided over a single table.
Several of the men were government employees, travelling to Port Blair on official business for the Forestry or Agricultural Departments, both of which were well-represented on the islands. A businessman was travelling out to visit the sawmills on Chatham Island and a Welshman said
he was going on holiday to visit a friend who owned a coconut plantation on the islands.
The only other woman was a timid lady of around sixty years old, with heavily powdered cheeks and sturdy brogues. She pecked the assembled company with sharp, anxious looks as she entered the dining room, then darted into a seat at Isabel’s side.
‘I feared I might be the only Englishwoman on board this dreadful ship.’ She set her handbag on her knee and drew off her gloves. ‘How do you do? Agnes Timberley. My sister is married to an officer in the Public Works Department in Port Blair. They settled out there such a long time ago, I’ve hardly seen her. So when Albert, my dear husband, passed away last year, I thought to myself: Agnes, this is your chance.’
Miss Timberley’s chatter forced Isabel to abandon the conversation on her left between the forestry officials and the captain and turn to her new companion.
‘I am sorry about your husband.’ Isabel gave a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m Mrs Whyte.’
‘Oh, I know, dear. Fancy choosing a husband in such a far-flung, dangerous place. You do know what they call these waters?’
Isabel shook her head.
‘Kali Pane. Black Water.’ She pursed her lips. ‘The Indians say they lose their caste if they cross it. Jolly well serves them right.’
Isabel didn’t reply. The waiter reached between them to fill their glasses with claret.
‘I don’t normally indulge.’ Mrs Timberley gave a nervous titter. ‘But it does settle the stomach.’
A second waiter offered a platter of boiled beef. When she had served herself, Mrs Timberley added to Isabel in a whisper: ‘You do know the place teems with the most unsavoury types. Most of my sister’s servants are murderers. I shall certainly take care to lock my door at night. And I suggest you do the same.’
Isabel served herself beef and then vegetables and they waited for the gentlemen to catch up.
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