Coromandel Sea Change

by Rumer Godden

  ‘I meant the British papers.’

  ‘My dear boy, to the average Britisher, if they know where it is at all, Konak is a little patch, perhaps the size of a postage stamp on the map of India and about as interesting.’

  ‘Not if there’s something unusual. This chap Ajax seems to be able to make anything unusual.’

  ‘It is unusual, one can’t gainsay that.’

  ‘She is dressed up. They may not know it is Mary.’

  ‘In this blasted country everyone knows everything. ‘No.’ Blaise set his teeth. ‘This time Mary has gone over the edge.’

  ‘Many people are bewitched on their first encounter with India.’ Lady Fisher tried to be soothing. ‘Bewitched or repelled.’

  ‘I’d far rather she was repelled.’

  ‘Still, if you’re wise you’ll take no notice.’

  ‘Notice!’ Blaise had exploded again. ‘She’s my wife.’

  ‘Blaise have you thought’, said Lady Fisher, ‘that the effect of this could be the reverse of scandal? If Krishnan Bhanj wins— ’

  ‘He can’t win, surely?’

  ‘Suppose he does, wouldn’t it be a commendation – what Dr Coomaraswamy would call a feather – for a rising young diplomat to have a wife with such understanding of Indian affairs, so percipient that she personally backed this election and went campaigning?’

  Blaise looked at her dumbfounded, shook his head bewildered and left.

  Mr Menzies was again going through the newspapers and Sir John deliberately voiced what he had said to Lady Fisher. ‘I’m surprised that a journalist of your reputation should take such an interest in what, after all, is not a big or important election.’

  Mr Menzies looked up. ‘To me all elections are important.’ There was a distinct swagger. ‘Not because of the politics. They’re not really my game.’

  ‘Game?’ asked Sir John. ‘In India they are vitally serious.’

  ‘Exactly. That is why, in my case, it’s not the politics, it’s the politicians at election times. They are so beautifully vulnerable.’ Mr Menzies chortled.

  ‘For your filthy column?’ Sir John managed to keep his voice pleasant.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mr Menzies said with delight.

  ‘So? I don’t think you’ll find much in the way of titillation in Padmina Retty, or poor old Gopal Rau – or Krishnan Bhanj.’

  Sir John added Krishnan deliberately and kept his voice mild.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Mr Menzies, highly pleased. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘John,’ Auntie Sanni called from her swing couch where she had come to sit quietly before going on with the day’s round – ‘I like to take this time to consider my guests’, she had told Mary, ‘and their needs.’ This morning the needs were troubling her and, ‘John, have you time to come and talk a little?’

  ‘All the time in the world.’

  ‘For the first week in years,’ said Auntie Sanni, ‘I’m troubled, very troubled, about my guests – some of them.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Obviously, Olga Manning.’

  ‘With reason,’ said Sir John.

  ‘Someone must help her,’ and Auntie Sanni looked at him, the sea-green blue eyes as trustful as a trusting child’s. ‘You will, John.’ It was not a question; it was a fact.

  ‘If I can. I’ll try and talk to her when she comes back from Calcutta – if she comes back.’

  ‘She owes me money, so she will.’ Auntie Sanni said it with certainty. ‘Then there’s Kuku.’

  ‘She is meant to be a help not a worry.’

  Auntie Sanni smiled. ‘I know – and she is a help, she works hard but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘When she left St Perpetua’s she was sweet. Now she’s so knowing. We haven’t done her any good, and I foresee pain. She hasn’t a chance, and I can’t give her one, not of the kind she would thank me for.’

  ‘I hope you’re wrong. Who besides? Mary?’

  ‘No. Mary can look after herself.’

  ‘Which is why you like her!’

  ‘She is likeable,’ was as far as Auntie Sanni would go. ‘No, John, it’s the young man, Mr Browne.’ Sir John noticed he was still Mr Browne. ‘Oh, John, why can’t we all be born with wit?’ She looked far across the sea, sparkling in the morning, an increasing frown on her face. ‘John, I’m afraid. Mary doesn’t know, doesn’t dream . . . This isn’t England or even Europe. It’s such a violent place.’

  Sir John got up, went to the railing and looked down at the out-bungalow, whistling as he pondered. Suddenly he broke off. ‘That young fool!’

  Two men in bathing shorts were strolling along the beach. ‘He’s talking to Menzies,’ said Sir John.

  ‘No! Oh, no,’ said Auntie Sanni.

  It was the coconut water that woke Mary out of her trance.

  ‘Where have I been?’

  ‘Only four hours on that damned lorry.’ Kuku had collapsed on the sand.

  To Mary it had seemed like five minutes. Now the lorry and its following jeeps and cars had pulled off the dust road into a small oasis of trees in the midst of what had seemed to be a desert wasteland without villages. There were no people, only birds: cranes, wading in a stagnant pool, small wild brown birds she recognised as partridges wandering in coteries, mynahs and, of course, crows. Mats were being spread. ‘You must rest and eat,’ Dr Coomaraswamy told Mary. ‘Drink a little, not too much,’ and Sharma had sent a boy shinning up a coconut palm – there seemed to be innumerable small boys. Some had ridden on the car roofs or hung on to their backs. Mary tried not to think of the abominable Kanu.

  The boy up the palm tree threw the nuts down to the ground where Sharma took the tops off them with a panga, splitting each so skilfully that none of the water was lost. ‘Drink. You must drink,’ Dr Coomaraswamy told Mary again as she sat; she still seemed dazed.

  ‘It has been too much for her,’ said Mr Srinivasan but Krishnan took the nut and held it to her lips. Even here he could not speak. ‘In India even the trees have ears,’ Dr Coomaraswamy would have told her but Krishnan’s eyes commanded her; she felt the rough wood of the nut edge, the coolness of the water, as, obediently, she drank.

  It was Krishnan, too, who had lifted her down from the lorry; Kuku had had to jump only helped by Sharma’s hand. Now she stood up to wring out her sari. ‘My God! The sweat. You’ll have to get me fresh clothes.’

  ‘They will dry in the sun,’ Sharma soothed her.

  Mary, oddly enough, was untouched, her sari still fresh, and, never, thought Dr Coomaraswamy, had he seen anything as shining as her grey eyes. He was unused to light eyes; his ideal was for brown eyes, lustrous, deeply lashed – Not like Uma’s he thought with a pang of guilt, though Uma, when she was young, had been handsome. Kuku’s eyes were black, small and, he had to admit, malicious. Then why am I so much seduced? He did not know but now, ‘This blue-grey,’ he murmured to Mr Srinivasan, ‘we do not have this colour of eyes in India, sometimes violet or green but not this.’ Mary Browne’s eyes today were like diamonds, he thought, brilliant in a way that alarmed him. Has she fever? and, ‘Eat a little,’ he urged her. ‘See we will bring food to you. Then, on this mat, you must stretch out and sleep!’

  Krishnan himself had had to be helped off the lorry; now two of the young men were pummelling him and rubbing his legs. ‘He has been im-mo-bile all those hours.’ Mr Srinivasan hopped like an agitated bird. ‘How can he keep it up?’

  Krishnan did say one word. ‘Chūp.’ Then, while Mary watched, he clasped his hands behind his neck, using his elbows to support him until he stood on the crown of his head, his feet high in the air, his powerful body erect as a pillar, ‘So that the blood can run the other way,’ Dr Coomaraswamy explained to Mary, ‘which is good for the body – and the brain.’

  ‘I could not have done those hours on the lorry without yoga,’ Krishnan told Mary afterwards as he stretched, bent, leapt, ran.

  Food was brought on banana leaves for Kuku and Mary to eat in the
Indian way with their fingers and apart from the men, ‘Usually after the men,’ Kuku said with acerbity, ‘with their left-overs,’ but Mary found it restful – no fuss with talk or plates, knives, forks, spoons. The food was hot and good; it had travelled in aluminium pans that fitted together into a carrier, the bottom pan filled with live coals. There were rice, curry, spicy little koftas of prawns, puris, vegetables but Mary only nibbled. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed,’ she could have said. Soon she lay down and was asleep.

  Dr Coomaraswamy had to wake her. It was the first time he had seen an Englishwoman asleep. He looked at the shadow her eyelashes made on her cheeks; the skin below them was . . . like petals, he thought – why did Mary Browne continually make him think of flowers? It’s because she’s so young, he thought – and pure. He hesitated to touch her.

  Kuku laughed as she watched. ‘Go on, wake her with a kiss.’

  Dr Coomaraswamy was shocked. To him Mary, like Krishnan, was in a different category – she was Blaise Browne’s wife but Dr Coomaraswamy felt she belonged to Krishnan, he did not know how or why but he had seen Krishnan not only look at her and give her the especially tender smile he gave to most women and children – ‘and to a little goat or a squirrel,’ the Doctor had to say – but he, Dr Coomaraswamy, had seen that wink. The wink immediately put her on a level he could not reach.

  ‘Go on, kiss her. You like young women.’

  ‘Kuku, you are most lewd. I shall fine you fifty rupees.’

  ‘We misjudged Menzies,’ Blaise told the Fishers at lunch time. ‘Thought he was just a journalist who likes to make a mystery. Actually, he’s a sympathetic type.’

  ‘Type’s the right word for him.’ Sir John almost said it but stopped himself, only saying, ‘I hope you didn’t talk to him about Mary.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Blaise, Sir John was sure, lived by a code which laid down that one did not talk about one’s wife to other men. ‘Of course not, at least I hope not,’ and Blaise defended himself. ‘If I did a little, what’s the harm? He’s on holiday. Apparently he has a hell of a life in Delhi and in London. It seems that to write a newspaper gossip column means continual parties and pressures from people wanting to get into the news. He’s here for quiet. He’s taking me to Ghandara this afternoon so we can get a decent round of golf but the course wouldn’t be grass, would it?’

  ‘Sand,’ said Sir John. ‘For grass you would probably have to go to Madras. . . . Pity you couldn’t – out of the way,’ he wanted to add.

  ‘Why should Mary Browne?’ Kuku was asking. ‘Why should she sit when I have to stand?’

  ‘I’ll stand,’ said Mary. ‘Let Kuku sit.’

  ‘That is not the plan.’

  ‘She has stood for four hours.’

  ‘So she should at that price.’

  ‘Price?’ Mary was puzzled.

  ‘Do you think I would do this for nothing? Or do you call it love?’ sneered Kuku.

  ‘I don’t call it anything. I just want to do it.’

  ‘For love?’ Kuku insisted.

  Dr Coomaraswamy intervened. ‘It will not be long now,’ he soothed. ‘As we get towards evening it will be cooler, it will not seem so long.’

  ‘I like it long,’ said Mary.

  ‘This seems a roundabout way to get to Ghandara,’ Blaise said in the car.

  ‘So it is. I’m sorry. I must have taken the wrong turning. Hallo!’ said Mr Menzies. ‘Here they are!’

  ‘You promised.’ Blaise was furious.

  ‘I’m sorry but how was I to know where they would be?’

  Mr Menzies had to stop, the crowds round the lorry were so thick. He opened the sun-roof and stood on the seat. ‘Golly!’ he said. Reluctantly, Blaise stood up beside him.

  Surrounded by the surging mass of people the lorry looked small, the figures on it even smaller, but Blaise recognised Kuku, then looked from her to the smaller throne and, ‘Is that Mary?’ he asked dazed.

  ‘Cleverly disguised at any rate,’ Mr Menzies comforted him. ‘But yes, it undoubtedly is.’

  Kuku, Lakshmi, in her green and white patterned gold-edged sari, gold bodice, seemed to melt into the lorry’s decorations as did Krishnan, though his blue-blackness could be seen, while Mary, Radha, shone in all the wheaten fairness Mr Srinivasan had hoped.

  ‘Couldn’t be more conspicuous,’ Blaise agonised. ‘And she must be recognised as she’s the only Western person there.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have been the only one if you had gone with her,’ Mr Menzies pointed out.

  Blaise stared at him. ‘I? With that rabble?’

  Mr Menzies gave a soft whistle. ‘So you are at odds!’ He sounded amused. ‘I thought you were.’

  ‘Why?’ Blaise was cold, trying to fend him off.

  ‘From what I have seen. No one can say I am not interested in my fellow men – and women,’ said Mr Menzies sweetly. ‘Your wife is so transparently young.’

  ‘You make me sound like a child-stealer. It was she who wanted us to be married.’

  ‘And now she doesn’t.’

  ‘Who said so? Good God! We haven’t been married a month.’

  ‘That is quick.’ Unerringly, the insidious drops of poison fell. ‘But India does go to people’s heads and Mr Krishnan Bhanj knows very well how to make himself – shall we say – attractive?’

  ‘Don’t!’ Blaise cried out before he could stop himself, then tried to recover. ‘I don’t think I feel like playing golf. Would you be kind enough to drive me back to the hotel?’

  Kuku had seen Blaise at once and began to redrape her sari more gracefully, then waved the peacock fan Sharma had given her to help against the heat.

  Dr Coomaraswamy, for a moment released from his megaphone – the microphone had failed – followed her eyes. ‘Menzies, young Browne! You will not plume,’ he said furiously to Kuku. ‘You are here for the crowd. Also put that fan down or you will get nothing at all.’

  ‘It is I who have bought you for today,’ he wanted to cry, ‘so no tricks.’ The plain fact that Kuku liked Blaise inflamed his own longing. The bodice she wore showed the cleavage between her breasts; her sweat had stained the silk under her arms and, where the bodice ended, her midriff glistened with it; he could imagine the glistening between her thighs and delight carried him away. Besides, it was sweet to torment her. What fun, thought Dr Coomaraswamy, if I could whip Kuku. If I could have – is it a sjambok? – that long whip that hisses in the air as its lash comes down. He saw himself wielding it, then had to say, as Uma would have, ‘And how silly you would look,’ and ‘Stand up, girl,’ he shouted. ‘Smile!’ It was no use saying, ‘I’ll fine you,’ he knew he never would.

  Mary had not seen Blaise, she was too interested; in contrast to the morning when she had been entranced, everything now was vivid. As the lorry drove and stopped – stopped every few minutes, it seemed to her – she had never imagined such crowds or smelled them, the peculiar smell of an Indian crowd: not dirt, Indians are personally clean, but of sweat, the coconut oil men and women used on their bodies and hair and an intrinsic spicy yet musty smell of clothes washed too often and seldom properly dried; of the spat phlegm, cess and dust everywhere trodden in and, over it in the lorry, the strong heady scent of crushed flowers and the withering leaves of garlands.

  Dark hands reached out to touch her, voices and eyes pleaded; babies, their eyes rimmed with kohl, were held up to see and for her to see and bless. The voices chanted: ‘Jai Krishnan.’

  ‘Jai Krishnan.’

  ‘Jai Shri Krishnan.’

  ‘Jai Krishnan Hari.’

  Dr Coomaraswamy’s voice boomed on through the megaphone with words Mary could not understand. Mr Srinivasan took his place but his voice was reedy after the Doctor’s rounded mellifluent tones, ‘Which could coax a bee off a flower,’ Krishnan used to joke but, as if the bee had stung, It can’t coax Kuku, thought Dr Coomaraswamy.

  As soon as the megaphone paused, music and songs from the jeeps and cars took over,
<
br />   ‘O Krishnakumar, the one who steals butter,

  The one with red eyes,

  The one who brings bliss,

  O Krishna . . .’

  sung with drums, cymbals and the sound of the conch, though now, Mary noticed, it was not Sharma who blew it but a disciple called Ravi.

  Over it all was Krishnan enthroned, not moving only smiling, holding up that benevolent hand. I don’t care what anyone says, thought Mary, there is something mystical about this. Perhaps it comes from the people, their faith, yet it is through Krishnan.

  One outside moment did break through: towards late afternoon she became conscious that a red car, its sun-roof open, had drawn alongside the lorry with – on its back seat – a photographer, his camera pointing through the window, first directly at her, next at Krishnan; then, as the car drew a little away, it took in both of them. The driver was Mr Menzies and standing on the passenger seat beside him was Kanu, his eyeballs, as they rolled in excitement, showing white in his dark face as, with one hand in easy familiarity, he steadied himself on Mr Menzies’ shoulder. A moment Mary had put out of her mind came back, giving a feeling of dismay: that early morning, when she came through Patna Hall on the way to the gatehouse and had run up to the top verandah to look down on the beach to see if Blaise was still swimming, there, along the corridor, was Kanu again, sitting cross-legged on the floor outside a door. This time he was dressed in clean white shorts, a yellow shirt – silk, Mary had thought – a red flower jauntily behind his ear. As he gave her a salaam without getting up, which she knew was impertinent, she had seen on his wrist a new watch. The door was Mr Menzies’.

  Why should I have minded that? wondered Mary – and why should she, who hated tell-tales, have said to Samuel, who had come – solicitous as always – to see the lorry off, ‘Samuel, that boy Kanu is upstairs again.’

  ‘Kanu?’ and, ‘Ayyo,’ Samuel said with distaste. ‘Miss Baba, I will see to it.’

  Now as she saw the new watch gleam on the thin dark wrist, Mary did not like it. She did not like the camera either.

  ‘Mrs Browne,’ Dr Coomaraswamy whispered to prompt her. With a start of guilt, Mary went back to Krishnan’s afternoon.