Daughters of India

by Jill McGivering

  He gazed up at her. His eyes were red.

  ‘Were you spying on me?’

  He shook his head. His knuckles shone white where he clasped his hands together.

  ‘What are you doing here so late?’

  ‘Sahib. Waiting.’

  She shook her head. ‘Go to bed.’

  He didn’t move. She reached down a hand to him. He stared for a moment, then stumbled to his feet and slunk from the room without a word. His bare feet made soft slaps as he descended the staircase.

  She turned out the lamp and stood in the darkness in silence for a while, the Bible in her hand, listening to the murmur of jungle noises drifting in from outside, and thinking about the nature of the man she had married.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The sky was heavy with cloud. The brick walls of the prison were dark with shadow. Isabel followed Edward through a series of locked gates into a waiting room where a guard checked their names against entries in his ledger.

  Edward and the guard carried in the boxes of Bibles and set them on the floor. The Bible for Sanjay Krishna bulged in her handbag and she held it on her lap. If she were searched, she would simply say that it was her own.

  A sudden banging made her turn to the window. Pellets of rain struck the courtyard, raising clouds of dust, which turned quickly to mud as the water gathered, spread across the hard ground, then sank finally into the earth. At once, the smell of the air changed, becoming lush and fertile with wet foliage.

  Edward’s face was tense. ‘You’re sure you want to do this?’

  ‘Of course.’ She rested her hand for a moment on the linen sleeve of his jacket, then turned silently back to the drama of the crashing rain.

  An Anglo-Indian gentleman, dressed formally in a cotton suit with a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, appeared on the threshold to greet them. He shook Edward by the hand and bowed his head to Isabel as he introduced himself as one of the senior warders.

  ‘I’m afraid we will not be permitting you direct access to the prisoners,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are understanding. Current situation is most tense.’

  Edward nodded.

  ‘Please be following me. I am showing you how to offer up the Good Book without entering the cell. Conversing with these men is not permitted.’

  Two guards shouldered the boxes of Bibles and followed as they hurried through the rain across one courtyard to another, pausing while successive gates were unlocked and rebolted after them. Isabel kept her handbag close.

  They crossed a further courtyard in the shadow of the central bell tower. Isabel looked round. It was the dismal yard where the hanging took place, now sodden with falling rain.

  The warder pressed them through a wooden door to the mouth of a corridor. He stopped at the first cell.

  ‘These are opening, see?’ He demonstrated the wooden panel on the door, which could be unlatched from the outside to give access to a small hatch. ‘In this way, we are giving eatables and suchlike to the prisoner.’

  ‘May I see?’

  The Anglo-Indian guard motioned her forward with a gracious wave of his hand.

  She put her eye to the spyhole in the wood. It took her a moment to adjust to the dim interior. A figure lay motionless on his cot, his face turned to the wall.

  Edward said calmly: ‘Shall we begin?’

  He drew out a pile of Bibles from the nearest box and placed the first in the hatch. He closed the panel, then bowed his head. His lips moved in private prayer.

  Gradually they fell into a steady rhythm. Isabel stepped forward to each door first, peered through the peephole to glimpse the prisoner beyond, and opened the hatch. Edward, stooping, passed her a Bible to insert, then stood for a moment of prayer before they moved on. Most of the prisoners lay on their cots. Occasionally one, hearing the scrape of the hatch, called out, either with a plea or with abuse. Isabel took her cue from Edward whose movements were steady and methodical. He gave each wretched man, noisy or silent, sleeping or waking, the same prayer.

  They completed the corridors that made up the wing and the Anglo-Indian guard led them across a covered inner courtyard to the next. He wrinkled his nose as they mounted the steps to the top storey.

  ‘Revolutionaries.’ He nodded down the bare corridor. Rainwater splashed off the rail along the walkway and cascaded in meandering streams down the brick walls. ‘Too late for their souls.’

  Edward smiled. ‘Let’s try, anyway.’

  He shrugged and stood to one side to allow them to approach the first door. Isabel put her eye to the peephole. The man lying on the cot looked barely alive. His hair was matted and his face dirty with a ragged growth of beard.

  ‘These are the men on hunger strike?’

  The guard snorted. ‘When they get really hungry, they’ll eat.’

  Edward didn’t meet her eye as he handed her the Bible. They moved on down the corridor. Similar scenes, one after another, of debilitated men who lay in dirtied clothing on their cots, sleeping or too listless to raise their heads. The cells were rank with the smell of unwashed bodies.

  They had almost completed the length of the corridor when Isabel put her eye to a door and saw Sanjay Krishna. She started. He lay on his back on a cot under a threadbare blanket. His arms were at his sides. His hair was plastered around his temples and his cheeks had an unhealthy feverish sheen. His eyes were closed. His posture and his utter stillness gave him the look of a stone tomb effigy.

  Edward handed her a Bible.

  ‘This man looks ill.’

  The guard blew out his cheeks. ‘He is most dangerous of all. And cunning also.’

  As he turned his head to tell Edward more about his most notorious prisoner, Isabel rounded her shoulders, drew the concealed Bible from her bag with a shaking hand and slipped it into the hatch. She pushed the spare Bible into her bag, then made a show of pulling out her handkerchief and dabbing her forehead.

  ‘Is it the heat, madam?’

  ‘It is hot.’ The rain had stopped as quickly as it started and the sunshine was turning the puddles in the courtyards into rising waves of humidity. ‘But let’s carry on.’

  They moved to the next cell. The doctored Bible, with its concealed letter, sat in its hatch. She didn’t know if Sanjay Krishna had the will or indeed the strength to retrieve it and, even if he did, if he would search it well enough to find the letter folded inside its cover.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Asha

  Isabel Madam and the Britisher sat alone together on the balcony, talking and drinking alcohol. It was the same every night. Cook and Singh and even shopkeepers in the bazaar gossiped. Where was Sahib, they asked, while his wife entertained another man alone? It was not correct.

  Asha sat cross-legged on her sleeping mat in the servants’ quarters, listening hard. Behind the partition, Cook snored in a low growl. Outside, a pig snuffled along the wall, nosing at the swill, which Bimal scattered each evening. Asha pinched her cheeks to keep herself awake.

  Finally footsteps sounded. Sahib was back. A few moments later, the voices from the balcony trailed off, then fell silent. A shadow passed the window. Bimal crossed silently to the stairs that led to the upper storey and to Sahib. She waited until all was quiet, then got to her feet, reached for her bundle and crept to the door. It took her a moment to adjust to the bright moonlight outside. Silver sparkled on the branches of trees. The moss underfoot was cool and doughy.

  A twig cracked. She stood rigid, listening for movement. Nothing. All she could hear was the steady wash of waves on the distant shore and her own heartbeat.

  She crept down the side of the building into the shadows. The old chowkidar sat hunched on his stool, head nodding on his chest. His rusty gun was jammed upright in his arms and he leant on it as he dozed. She took a final glance back at the house. A single line of light showed below the curtain in Sahib’s bedroom. She waited until she was clear of the house, then began to run.

  The restaurant made a solid blo
t in the darkness, surrounded by a fug of spilt toddy fumes and stale cigarettes. She hung back, watching until a shadow moved, there by the tree. A man stepped forward and the light caught his profile. Amit. He put his finger to his lips, then turned and she followed him without a word down a narrow track into the jungle interior.

  Amit drew her further and further away from the harbour, skirting silent villages, setting stray dogs barking, startling rats and hunting foxes. She was hurrying through an endless dream of pacing feet and close, fetid plants and trees, the air lightened only by the salted breeze, which whipped now and then from the sea. Above them, always, loomed the slopes of Mount Harriet, thick with forests of coconut palms and bamboo.

  Her eyes started to close, even as she walked. Her head drooped. All her thoughts were of rest, of tumbling down on the ground in this hollow or that bank and giving herself up to sleep.

  Just as numbness started to steal over her, the path veered to the right and they began a steep descent. The air changed, carrying freshness and the sting of salt. Sea opened up below, a sudden expanse of shimmering water, flecked with foam where the waves unrolled on a narrow shore. Amit looked back, made sure of her, then twisted sideways, climbing down a sheer hillside with his body almost turned to the cliff and his hands spread to feel for tree roots, plant stems and rocks.

  She was panting by the time she reached the shore and flecked with spray. The wind, whipping across the water, was chill. Amit stood in the shallows by a fishing boat. Two men, standing knee-deep in the waves, steadied the keel as Amit turned back, reached out a hand to guide her through the water towards them.

  She set both hands on the warm wood of the boat and peered inside. A barrel and a crate were stowed, one at each end. A man lay along the bottom, wrapped round in a long, threadbare blanket. He stirred a little, then settled.

  ‘Is he hurt?’

  Amit nodded. ‘His leg. Shot. Our doctor friend tended him but you must keep it clean. He needs to lie low for a while, to eat and drink and recover his strength.’ Amit gave her a keen look. ‘Are you sure, little sister?’

  She threw her bundle into the prow. The men, watching her wordlessly, held the boat steady while she pulled herself up and, with Amit’s help, climbed in. She opened the flap of the blanket for a sight of Sanjay Krishna’s pale, hot face, then settled herself on the planks and lifted his head and shoulders into her lap.

  ‘Where will they take us?’

  ‘Far into the islands.’ Amit lifted his hand in signal to the fishermen who started to push the boat deeper into the sea, setting it rocking as the waves took it. Amit’s voice, dispersing rapidly in the wind, whispered after them: ‘May the gods bless and protect you.’

  The fishermen clambered into the boat, splattering her with seawater. They were swarthy, thickset men who stole glances at her, then looked quickly away. They began to row, grunting and straining as the boat creaked into motion. Her ears filled with the whipping wind and the rhythmical lap of water against wood.

  She reached into her bundle and put a flask of water to Krishna-ji’s lips. He drank a little, let the rest dribble from his mouth. His eyes stayed closed. She wet the end of her dupatta and washed with care his eyes, his forehead, his cheeks, his neck. His face was all pockets and hollows.

  She put her lips to Krishna-ji’s ear and whispered. ‘See how well I care for you, ji.’

  She fell to rocking him, her body bending backwards and forwards with the same motion as the steadily rowing men, and watched South Andaman Island shrink until it became no more than a black smudge disappearing at last into the water.

  Chapter Twenty

  Isabel

  She dreaded Edward’s departure. When his final day came, she refused engagements in the hope that they might spend his last hours together before he sailed in the evening.

  She was sitting on the balcony with him over afternoon tea when Singh appeared in the doorway. His face was tight with disapproval.

  ‘She is gone, madam.’

  ‘Who’s gone?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘Asha?’ Isabel considered. It was true. She hadn’t seen her all morning.

  ‘Cook says food is missing also.’ Singh’s frown deepened. ‘Mutton, fruits, sugar and flour. Stolen.’

  When Singh left the room, Isabel stared at the piece of cake on her plate, suddenly without appetite.

  Edward said: ‘You gave her a chance. That’s all you could do.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Isabel finished her tea. The cup clinked against the saucer as she set it down again.

  Edward said: ‘You’re really upset, aren’t you?’

  ‘I thought we were, well, friends.’ Isabel lifted her napkin and set it beside her plate. ‘Anyway, we mustn’t let it spoil your last day.’

  He nodded. ‘She may reappear.’

  Later, as the light mellowed, Isabel followed Edward from room to room as he retrieved his belongings and packed. His silence had never seemed so impenetrable.

  ‘Are you looking forward to going back?’

  He bent to run an eye along the books he’d bought in Port Blair, choosing which to take and which to leave.

  ‘It’ll be a relief to be back at work, I suppose. Sleep in your own bed.’

  ‘I don’t have a bed, exactly.’ He spoke without turning to her.

  She knew she would stare at the clock in the days ahead and wonder what he was doing just then, where exactly he was, and find it impossible to imagine. Car Nicobar seemed a world away from Port Blair.

  He headed back to his bedroom with the books and she trailed after him. His hair was freshly cut. A line of white skin showed between his cropped hairline and his sunburnt neck. She had an urge to touch it, to feel the spikiness of the newly razored hair.

  ‘I shall miss you.’ She tried to keep her tone light. An hour or two and he would be gone. There were so many conversations she still wanted to have, questions she wanted to ask.

  He bent wordlessly over his trunk, lifting packets of cigarettes from a stockpile on the bed and pressing them into corners, then adding a layer of clothes. She lifted a bundle of shirts from his hands, smoothed and folded them more neatly before placing them flat in the trunk, one after another. She wondered where he would be when he lifted them out again.

  He reached past her for his washbag and began to fill it. His hands were so familiar to her. The long fingers, the tufts of dark hair below the knuckles. The silence stretched.

  ‘Have I said the wrong thing?’

  He gave her a snatched smile, then turned his eyes back to his shaving kit. ‘Is there a wrong thing?’

  ‘I hope not.’ She started, her hand at her mouth. Jonathan stood in the doorway. His face was hard with anger. ‘Jonathan! You made me jump.’

  She bent over the packing. She had no reason to feel guilty.

  ‘Singh says Asha’s run off. Had you heard?’ Her voice was falsely bright.

  Edward said. ‘You all right?’

  Jonathan hadn’t moved. She lifted her head to see. His cheeks were flushed, his hands in tight balls at his sides. She held her breath.

  He said: ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

  His eyes were on Edward. She didn’t understand. She didn’t recognise this man who quivered with rage. Edward set the shaving kit slowly on the bed.

  ‘I should report the pair of you. Her, I can understand. She doesn’t know any better. But you, Johnston.’

  His fists rose and for a moment he looked about to strike. He paced across the room and stood with his back to the room, gazing out through the bedroom window.

  Edward said softly: ‘What?’

  ‘You set me up. The pair of you.’ His tone was quieter now and all the more frightening for its calm. ‘How could you be such a fool?’

  ‘It’s nothing like that, Jonathan. Nothing.’

  She had the sense that she was witnessing a scene between the two of them in which she had no voice, no part.

  Jonathan pulled a paper from his
jacket pocket and handed it to Edward. Her letter to Sanjay Krishna. She recognised it at once although it was crumpled now and stained. Edward unfolded it, bent his head and began to read.

  Isabel sat down with a bump on the bed.

  ‘Did you help him escape?’

  ‘Escape?’ The room dappled with specks of light.

  ‘But how did she send it?’ Edward spoke as if to himself. His eyes rose and searched Jonathan’s face. Finally, he nodded and said softly: ‘In a Bible.’

  Jonathan’s lips were thin lines. ‘She used you. That’s the sort of woman she is.’

  ‘Edward, no! It wasn’t like that.’ She felt invisible to them both.

  Edward said: ‘I swear to you on my life, on my faith, Whyte. I had no idea.’

  The two men stared at each other. Jonathan looked suddenly limp with exhaustion.

  Edward said: ‘Who gave you this?’

  Jonathan shrugged. ‘Barnes, the assistant commissioner. We’re pals.’

  ‘What will he do?’

  Jonathan blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will he keep quiet, if you ask him?’

  Jonathan rubbed his hand across his forehead. ‘Dear God, what a mess.’

  ‘And Krishna, he’s really gone?’

  ‘Last night. They’re searching. He must have had help. One of the guards, maybe.’

  Edward moved to Jonathan’s side and took his arm, steered him out of the room.

  ‘Keep her name out of it. No one need know.’ Their footsteps sounded along the passageway, entered the sitting room. A moment later, the clink of a glass stopper, a drink being poured.

  ‘They’ll find him. If he heads into the jungle, he won’t last long.’ Edward’s voice was calm. ‘As for this, destroy it. It’s foolishness, that’s all. Ask Barnes to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘It’ll ruin me.’

  ‘It needn’t.’ A pause. Isabel, sitting on the bed, strained to hear.

  A soft rustle of paper. Then the rasp of a match being struck. The acrid smell of sulphur, then flame.