Daughters of India

by Jill McGivering

  ‘Goodness, I rather think she doesn’t know!’

  Lady Lyons leant across to Isabel to explain. ‘I’m afraid a hanging is scheduled, Mrs Whyte. A sad case.’

  ‘Sad?’ Mrs Allen sounded tart. ‘He’s a subversive, isn’t he?’

  Lady Lyons shrugged. ‘Poorly educated, apparently. My husband was inclined to be lenient in the first instance and granted him ticket of leave status. Then he stabbed a man to death. All rather unpleasant. He has a daughter who’ll be left high and dry.’

  Isabel sat quietly, listening. She had heard whispers in the bazaar of an execution. This, she assumed, was it. She pushed away her plate of cake.

  ‘Your husband took such a special interest in the case.’ Mrs Copeland craned forward.

  ‘A special interest?’ She looked to Lady Lyons.

  ‘Your husband passed sentence on the accused last month, Mrs Whyte, when my husband was in Calcutta. Never a pleasant duty. The death penalty was really the only option.’ She paused, reading Isabel’s face. ‘Perhaps that’s why he didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Isabel wasn’t surprised that Jonathan hadn’t talked to her about the execution. They seldom talked about anything.

  Lady Lyons lifted her hand for more hot water to freshen the teapot. ‘It is all rather gruesome, I know. But do come along. It’s a chance to see inside the jail, at least. There may not be another for a while.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t miss it.’ Mrs Copeland. ‘It’s the first for simply an age. But, Lady Lyons, what is the correct attire?’

  On the morning of the hanging, the air was taut with tension. As Isabel sat over breakfast, the voices of passers-by, drifting up from the jungle paths below, seemed subdued. Only the birds stayed shrill and raucous.

  Jonathan was in the office. She would make her own way to the jail later in the morning, along with Lady Lyons and the other ladies.

  The Cellular Jail loomed high and forbidding. As they gathered outside the main entrance gates, flanked by a pair of rounded towers, the ladies gossiped and murmured in low voices. Only Isabel stood in silence. She looked up at the blank face of stone stretching above them in three storeys.

  An Anglo-Indian guard, a tall, jolly fellow, came out to greet them and ushered them through the vast doors. One security gate after another was unlocked, then locked behind them as they progressed towards the centre.

  The ladies peppered the guard with questions and he answered with a sing-song lilt.

  ‘Many of the prisoners are choosing to come,’ he said. ‘Better to serve short spell here and then settle as a ticket of leave than be spending all of their lives in Calcutta or Delhi prison, nah?’

  He pointed out the structure of the building as they continued down a dismal corridor towards a square of light. ‘There are seven wings, with the clock tower at their centre. We’ll see that presently. Think of it as a wheel with many spokes.’

  The ladies fanned themselves.

  He went on: ‘The cellular plan is from our American friends. Every prisoner, confined in his cell, is having a window but those windows are so carefully angled that no man can see or communicate with another.’

  They emerged, blinking, into a triangular open area, a wedge of land between two of the building’s stretching arms of cells. It was bright with sunlight, which was broken only by the reaching shadow of the clock tower.

  At the far end, a wooden platform and gallows had been erected. Rows of chairs were lined up in front. Isabel stopped. The stream of ladies flowed past her and chose their seats. The heat fell heavily. She looked up at the dark sockets of windows all around her, running the length of the prison blocks. She felt the eyes of unseen men, locked in the darkness within.

  A bear of a man with old-fashioned whiskers appeared from a far door. The chief commissioner, Sir Philip Lyons. He crossed the courtyard to greet the ladies as if he were striding through a country estate. After a few minutes, he nodded to Isabel, then came back to greet her.

  ‘All rather grim, isn’t it?’ He read her expression at once. ‘Needs must.’

  Behind him, a cluster of fellow Englishmen emerged and crossed to join them, Jonathan amongst them. He took her arm and escorted her to a place in the front row, then settled beside her.

  ‘Chin up.’ He patted her gloved hand. ‘I shouldn’t look if I were you.’

  The prison walls pressed in around her. The area was sheltered from the breeze and the heat squeezed out every drop of life. They waited. Isabel’s moist hands grasped each other in her gloves.

  A single bell, high in the clock tower, began to toll. A solemn incantation. As they watched, a wooden door opened at the base of the tower and a clutch of men shuffled out. Port Blair’s Anglican priest and a Hindu holy man were amongst the party and their mouths moved in prayer.

  The condemned man was half-hidden by the burly Anglo-Indian guards who surrounded him. He was a slight, elderly figure, his head bent forward and his back buckled. His legs were shackled by chains and his hands, in front of him, bound with rope. He wore a Western-style prison uniform of trousers and shirt in dun, faded by too many washes. His eyes fixed on his bare, bound feet as the guards propelled him up the rough wooden steps to the gallows.

  Isabel lowered her face to stare at her gloves. Jonathan had clenched his own hands on his knees and his knuckles bled white. To her right, Sir Philip Lyons got to his feet and delivered the legal words of condemnation. He had a resonant voice and his words rolled around the open triangle of ground and rose to the windows above. Somewhere beyond in the jungle, a bird started to call, a high, rising caw that pierced the air.

  Moments later, a colossal bang. Isabel jumped. Her head jerked up. The trapdoor stood open. The prisoner hung suspended in the vacancy. His legs twisted and kicked. As he grew still, his body seemed to turn, spinning on its rope. A dark patch of liquid appeared at his groin and the stain spread down the inside leg of his trousers. The yard vibrated with tension and time itself seemed suspended.

  Then, in an incoming wave of movement, the spectators around her were suddenly on their feet, turning their backs already on the platform, moving to greet friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Prison officers, hurrying forward, ushered the ladies away from their chairs and towards a door in the far building. Tea, someone said. Do join us.

  Isabel stood in silence in the anteroom as the party around her jostled for tea and biscuits and the general mood lightened.

  Mrs Copeland held a sugar-coated shortbread biscuit.

  ‘You simply must try one.’ She sprayed golden crumbs. ‘Delicious.’

  One of the assistant commissioners made a feeble attempt to tell an amusing story about a botched hanging and the ladies within earshot laughed too quickly to reassure him that they weren’t taking offence.

  Jonathan appeared, a young, ginger-haired fellow at his side. ‘Darling, you haven’t met Barnes, have you? Terrible chap. Beats me hollow at golf.’

  The young man laughed. ‘Oh come on, Whyte.’

  ‘He’s the assistant commissioner here. So better be decent or he may not let us out.’

  Mrs Copeland pressed in at her side, eager to overhear.

  ‘Aren’t you somewhat of a newcomer, Mr Barnes?’

  ‘Fairly new, madam.’ He smiled. ‘I arrived two months ago.’

  ‘I thought so.’ She gave a satisfied nod.

  Jonathan put in: ‘Anyway, he wondered if the ladies would care to view a cell?’

  ‘May we?’ Mrs Allen appeared from nowhere. ‘How thrilling.’

  Mr Barnes led the small party of women down a succession of short corridors, then stopped in front of a closed cell door. Isabel trailed a step or two behind. The ladies pressed forward round the door and jostled to look through the spyhole.

  Eventually the rush subsided and Isabel stepped forward. It took her a moment to adjust to the darkness on the far side of the door. The cell beyond was cramped and bare. The only light was a trail of weak sunshine, which entered from a small,
high window. The walls were whitewashed and gleamed in the low light.

  She started. A hunched figure sat on a ragged cot. An elderly man, thin and prison-pale, his hair already silver. A blanket lay beside him. A bucket sat in the far corner, under the window. The air escaping from the spyhole carried excrement and stale breath. She stepped back abruptly. She couldn’t tell if he knew she was there, whether he sensed her looking.

  The other ladies were already moving on. Their voices echoed down the corridor.

  ‘Who’s the most dreaded prisoner here?’

  Someone giggled. ‘What a question!’

  Mr Barnes lifted his hand. ‘We have eighty-seven murderers at present, madam. Many of them took more than one life. Others committed crimes so repugnant I wouldn’t dream of describing them.’

  He paused, feeling his command of their silence.

  ‘But most of these men can and will be rehabilitated. A few years on a work-gang and they have every hope of being granted a ticket of leave.’

  The ladies nodded.

  ‘But to my mind, the most dreaded, as you put it, are the terrorists. Many are murderers and bomb-makers and thieves and they are difficult to reform. You see why? Because death means nothing to them. They see themselves as martyrs, willing to die for their cause.’

  The tour came to an end and the ladies, sated now, walked back through the succession of security gates to the main entrance. Outside, in the bright sunlight, tonga and taxi-wallahs lay across front seats, bare feet sticking out, dozing in the heat as they waited.

  The ladies, chattering and laughing as if they had emerged from a party, clustered round the vehicles and began to climb into them, in twos and threes. Only Isabel hung back.

  ‘Lunch?’ Mrs Copeland, crammed into the back of a tonga, raised a hand. ‘We’re gathering at The Club.’

  Isabel shook her head. She stood by Mr Barnes as, one by one, the tongas and taxis shook themselves into motion and bumped off down the jungle track.

  Silence crept in. Off to one side, a movement caught her eye. A horse, attached to an idling cart, pulled at long, lush grass. Beside it, a young Indian girl, all in white, stood under the trees. She looked across at them with hard eyes.

  Isabel frowned. She’d seen her before but struggled to remember where. ‘Who’s that?’

  Mr Barnes lowered his voice. ‘The daughter.’ He cleared his throat. ‘She’s waiting for his effects.’

  Isabel looked at the cart. ‘And for the body.’

  He nodded, embarrassed. As she crossed to the girl, his voice followed her: ‘I wouldn’t advise, really.’

  The girl glared at Isabel as she approached. Her fury is all that’s keeping her together, Isabel thought, looking at the flushed cheeks.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Isabel addressed her in Hindustani. ‘It’s a terrible sorrow to lose a father.’

  The girl’s eyes flashed. ‘You people killed him. He was a poor man only, a good man.’

  Isabel nodded. A memory stirred. Rahul and Sangeeta’s courtyard. That’s where she had seen the girl, younger then, but just as hostile.

  ‘You know my friend in Delhi, Rahul Chaudhary, and his wife, Sangeeta. I saw you there.’

  The girl scowled.

  Isabel put out her hand and touched her shoulder. ‘I can help you, Asha,’ she said. ‘If you’ll let me.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Asha

  ‘Thank the gods for good fortune.’

  Her baba was no more. How dare he speak of good fortune?

  ‘Don’t look like that.’ Cook tapped the rim of his mixing bowl with the wooden spoon in his hand and pointed it at her. ‘You’re safe here, aren’t you? And well fed? Be grateful.’

  Cook was the kindest of the servants. Singh, Sahib’s bearer, seemed to think himself too grand to speak to her and issued orders in a clipped voice, looking at some vacant patch of air above her head as he spoke, as if he were a sahib himself.

  As for the mali, she tried to keep her distance from him. His body was strong but his mind was peculiar. When she spoke to him, he didn’t reply and when she passed him in the porch or garden, where he knelt pruning and weeding, his eyes shadowed her. It wasn’t respectful.

  The only other servant was the houseboy, a half-Burmese even younger than she was. He was afraid of his own footsteps.

  She sat at the far end of the kitchen table and picked at scraps of discarded pastry littered there.

  ‘What would my poor baba say? Servant to the very Britisher who ordered his death.’ Her voice caught. She needed to speak often of her baba, to keep him alive, here in this kitchen with its sugary air and spicy smells. ‘I never expected this.’

  Cook sniffed. ‘What did you expect, then?’

  He carried on mixing his pudding. Flour rose in soft flurries and settled along the rim of the bowl and the scrubbed tabletop. Milk was there and butter but no spices.

  ‘Why always so tasteless?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s what they like.’

  Cook wasn’t a freedom fighter. No one in the household was, Amit said. They must be murderers. She looked now at Cook as he stooped over his bowl, beating up the mixture until it turned from yellow to white. The muscles in his spoon-wielding arm rose in ridges. A light perspiration moistened his forehead and nose and his lips moved as he muttered to himself. Who had he killed? His wife, maybe. It was hard to imagine. But then her baba became a murderer and he was not a bad man and that too was hard to explain.

  ‘They broke him in that prison. My baba.’ Pick, pick at the crumbs on the table. ‘He wasn’t right in the head when he came out. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

  Cook nodded. She had told him this many times before. He was being patient with her, she sensed that. Her baba came to her in a dream, just that night, her old baba, gentle and kind, as he was in days past, in Delhi. When she woke, she wept and all that happened broke over her with fresh grief. Now, hours later, he still hung around her, in the fading whispers of the dream.

  Bimal, the shadow of a houseboy, slid into the kitchen.

  ‘Is Madam back?’ Cook, now spooning the mixture into a pastry case, spoke without lifting his eyes from the floury table.

  Bimal nodded. He raised his eyes for a moment and Asha saw how red they were. He cried in corners. More than once, Asha heard Cook and Singh speaking about it. No houseboy stays long in this house, Cook said. Singh, seeing her listening, told Cook to hush.

  Now Cook said: ‘Where’s she been today?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Bimal looked embarrassed.

  ‘She was in the native bazaar yesterday.’ Cook spoke into his pie dish. ‘All alone.’

  Asha thought of Madam’s trousers, their hems often crusty with salt and sand when she came back from one of her walks.

  ‘No normal memsahib goes there.’ Cook lifted the pastry top and settled it over the pie. His movements were deft. ‘She hardly bothers whether it’s fish or mutton at dinner. The other day she said to me: why don’t you decide?’ He pursed his lips. ‘It isn’t natural.’

  Cook trimmed the pastry edge with a sharp knife and a long line of scrap unwound onto the table. ‘Love matches are hatched by two blind people. Much better Sahib’s parents arranged a bride.’

  One of the staff bells jangled. Cook turned to Asha: ‘That’s her. Off you go.’

  Asha got to her feet, smoothed down her dupatta and headed for the staircase that led to the upper storey.

  ‘Don’t look so miserable,’ Cook called after her. ‘Madam blessed you, giving you this job. Thank the gods.’

  Isabel Madam sat in a planter with a book open on her knee. Her eyes had a distant look. She looked up as Asha appeared in the doorway and smiled.

  ‘Asha, would you run an errand? I need a few things.’

  Asha hurried to leave the house. She chose the goods quickly and ran along to the restaurant to see Amit. He was sleeping upstairs, the boys said, so she settled in the shade to wait. Metal pots and spoons clanged.


  A trace of her baba seemed to linger here and, however horrid her final memory of him, it was still a comfort. That was where she last saw him alive, there, just inside the restaurant. He slumped to the floor and crouched in a daze, his hands covering his eyes. His shoulders shook and there was blood on his fingers and he wouldn’t let her wipe them clean. Then the police came.

  The next time she saw him was outside the jail when they brought his body to her, wrapped in cheap cloth, and she took it to the temple ground for cremation. A pyre of dried sticks stood ready in the clearing. Amit was there and the boy, Rajiv, and others from the restaurant. They lowered her poor baba on a bier and settled him in a level place amongst the staves and branches. The Sadhu, his face daubed with ash, began to chant. Her baba had no son, no male relative at all, to light the funeral pyre. It was left to her only.

  ‘Asha?’

  Amit stood in front of her, blocking the light. She dried off her eyes and nose with her dupatta and steadied her breathing. He sat down beside her in the dirt and patted her shoulder.

  ‘You got my message?’ He looked drowsy. He rolled a bidi and lit it and the soft smoke curled round them both. ‘He wants to see you.’

  Her body felt suddenly awkward to her, her limbs outsized. She sat stock-still and waited, not trusting herself to speak.

  ‘You know who I mean?’ He turned solemn eyes on her and she hid her face.

  ‘Krishna-ji?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Your half day is Sunday, nah? In the afternoon, go to the jail and ask for my friend. He’s a guard there.’ He fished in his pocket for a slip of paper and pressed it into her hand. ‘See, I’ve written his name. Tell him you’ve brought samosas from Amit’s restaurant. He’ll allow you a few minutes at his door.’

  Asha hesitated. The thought of facing Sanjay Krishna made her feel ashamed. ‘Does he know I work for Britishers now? For the man who sent my own baba to die?’

  Amit reached forward and put his hand on her arm. His fingers were warm and comforting and his breath carried the smell of cigarettes.