by Glen Duncan
Kate comes out on to the rear veranda and finds Kalia down on his haunches, Brasso and yellow soft cloth in hand, meticulously cleaning the chrome on Uncle Cyril’s motorbike. There’s a stone-flagged patio adjoining the veranda, where the bike’s kept under an awning. The rest of the compound is monsoon mud slivered with sky-reflecting water as if a giant mirror has been flung down and smashed. It’ll be a big loss to Kalia when Kate’s gone. She hasn’t had the heart to tell him.
‘I saw you,’ she says. ‘This morning at the train station.’
Kalia looks up at her out of his broad face the colour of Cherry Blossom dark tan shoe polish. Knobs of light wing his cheekbones. His eyes are black, alert, with a slight Mongol slant. She remembers his shouting mouth revealing more teeth than she would have imagined. Jai Hind! Janetge ya Marenge! Before speaking he looks over his shoulder to check they’re alone. Their shared reflex is caution. ‘What will you do, miss?’ he asks, quietly.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘What would I do?’
Kalia looks down at the ground, blinks, revolves some conclusion he’s already drawn. ‘You could tell him,’ he says. Him. Cyril.
‘Why would I do that?’
Something’s wrong, she knows, there’s been a shift. She thinks back to the start of their friendship. On this same veranda one evening seven years ago she’d watched him quietly cleaning an earlier bike. Suddenly Uncle Cyril had appeared round the side of the bungalow, rushed up and kicked him in the back, and when he fell forward continued kicking him, saying, What do you think I am–fucking stupid? You simple black bastard, I can count, you know–throwing a handful of coins. How many fucking times? And she, Kate, unseen until that moment had said: ‘Stop it!’ startling Uncle Cyril, who for a split second cringed with a grimace that in spite of everything made her want to laugh. She nearly had laughed, he’d looked so idiotic. But he’d come up the steps and stood in front of her. It was the first time he’d been near her. She’d looked at her shoes in silence. He steals. Pause. Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s wrong to steal? Cyril had stood with his fists on his hips, white shirt cuffs rolled back. The words your mother stung; three days’ inchoate feeling since her arrival at his house shaped into resistance. My mother and my father said it’s wrong to steal, she’d said. Then raised her head to look at him. And it’s wrong to beat the servants. Cyril had looked away, made a strange movement of discomfort with his neck and jaw.
She kept imagining what it would feel like if he hit her, the hand drawn back and then the swipe. That gold pinkie ring would be a separate, additional pain. He was frowning, nostrils flared, mouth corners down. One of the Hindu gods had this expression; she couldn’t remember which. She was sure he was going to hit her. Between them it was as if a huge balloon was expanding; any second it would burst, any second…
But instead he’d turned to Kalia with the look transformed into one of amused disbelief. See the bleddy cheek, eh? As if the kicking had never happened. And I don’t have enough with you and that old bugger to look after already. Heh! Cyril shook his head, tutting. I ask you. Honestly I ask you, eh? He jogged down the three steps. Didn’t look back at her. Go on hurry up and finish that. And when Sumpath comes tell him there’s two more for dinner. I can’t hang around here all day. Someone’s got to earn the bleddy money in this house.
Since then Kalia has looked out for Kate, she for him. In torturous clandestine increments she’s taught him rudimentary reading and writing in English.
But there’s been a shift. Today. Now.
‘Why would I tell him?’ she asks again.
Now he can’t look at her. The rains have left sky-reflecting puddles. It’s a disturbing inversion, mirrored clouds moving across gashes in the ground.
‘Some of those people today,’ Kalia says, ‘they’re against you.’
‘Against me?’
‘Against your people. Anglos.’
Kate is amazed. All the time she’d watched the demonstration it had never occurred to her that anything could happen to her. The only moment of fear had been the guard’s hand on her arm and his voice in her ear. When she thinks of the scene now she sees it from above: the stream of wrangling bodies flowing round her, water round a stone.
‘Why are they against Anglos?’ she asks. It’s a shock to her, to think that she, by virtue of belonging to a group, is caught up in…what? She doesn’t understand. Outside the aura between herself and Uncle Cyril everything is a faint noise. Now, apparently, strangers are against her.
‘Because you’re like them,’ Kalia says. ‘The British.’
For a few moments they fall silent, Kalia applying the Brasso in soft whorls, Kate staring out across the water-logged compound. The dark bulk of cloud from the last downpour is separating into curdy masses. Low sun lights their edges with rose and gold, to Kate a bad-tempered beauty, two elements forced together. Because you’re like the British. Suddenly she feels tired.
‘Miss?’ Kalia says.
She looks down at him.
‘I am not against you,’ he says.
At dusk (Cyril’s gone up to the Institute for billiards but there’s no knowing when he’ll be back) Kate sits with her grandfather on the front veranda. The garden is a thirty-foot lawn surrounded by bougainvillea and plantains. Two banyans make humid tents of shade either side of the gateposts. The gravel path to the road glistens in the half-light.
‘So?’ she asks him. This is the umpteenth time she’s tackled him about signing the Silvers wedding letter, her passport to freedom.
The old man smokes for a few moments in silence. Unequivocally old, now, Kate thinks. This last seven years he’s made the transition, looks out at the world as if struggling to see through rain. Superficially he’s the same, the bluster, the broad comedy, the rant; superficially the strength’s still there. But she knows something’s gone. Between them there’s an understanding too painful to speak of, that the circle of his protection, such as it ever was, has shrunk. If you don’t like the bleddy arrangement, Dad, Cyril had said, you know what you can do, don’t you? Kate had been eavesdropping from the kitchen. Of late the old man doesn’t look her in the eye. She understands: he knows, and can’t bear that he knows. Can’t bear that he’s more bothered about himself, the roof over his head, fags, a whisky in the afternoon, a brown ale with dinner. Or rather he can bear it, is bearing it, is living daily with the reality of his own weakness. Between him and destitution there’s only…there’s only the arrangement, and If you don’t like the bleddy arrangement, Dad…He’d had money once, apparently, but squandered it. All his life more money had come to replace what was spent. Then, suddenly, he was old and broke.
‘I dunno what you expect me to do,’ he says. While Kate’s been staring out into the garden’s gathering dark he’s finished one cigarette and rolled another.
‘Nothing, Grandpa,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to do anything, just sign the letter and keep up the pretence that I’m at school. He won’t know any different.’ It’s usual for her to stay in school during the short holidays. There are always a few dozen girls whose families live too far away or who won’t have them at home unless they have to. The Leftbehinds, they call themselves, cold-comfortingly, through the long hours when the shadows revolve and the school’s rooms echo. ‘It’ll be the same as always as far as he’s concerned.’ Money for the ticket will have to come from her grandfather, somehow. ‘I’ve already written the letter,’ she says. ‘You just have to sign it. I’ll be back in time for the start of term. He won’t know anything. Please.’
The old man lights his roll-up from a matchbook. The flame-light in the cup of his knuckly hands illuminates his face, the big-pored nose and squinting eyes. He’s had a haircut and shave this morning. The loose skin of his neck is flecked with missed silver bristles. The young boy of himself is visible in the shape of his head. He’s been in India since he was seventeen. You could whore and drink and gamble and make money and still be a little raja. And when you wanted a wif
e, you could go and fetch one from the orphanage. He’s outlived the wives, two of them. There won’t be a third. He’s surrendered to aloneness. That’s what these sad hours on the veranda concede.
‘You could ask Aunty Sellie to pay for my ticket,’ Kate says.
The last of the light is going. The scent of next door’s jasmine finds its way to the porch, strong for a few moments, then passes. Evenings here are rich with transient whiffs: goat, dogshit, orange blossom, coffee, someone’s paprika’d roast lamb. Kate feels the mention of Sellie doing its work. The old man uncrosses his ankles, then crosses them again. She worries she’s taken the wrong tack. He’s guilty, yes, but you’ve got to know how and when to nudge. History’s trickled out these seven years: he’d been against her mother’s marriage; there was a fight. Her mother left Bhusawal. Since then the other daughter, Sellie, has been the favourite, has been given whatever he’s had to give. Which these days is nothing but the burden of himself, his potential dependence if anything happens to Cyril.
He opens his mouth to say something, changes his mind. Takes another drag, exhales, clears his throat.
They sit for five, ten minutes. Kate keeps her mouth shut. There’s a volatile emotional chemistry at work in him that mustn’t be interfered with. It depresses her that she’s beginning to understand the way people tick, that the way they tick is guilt and shame and desire and fear, that these are the elements of the heart’s science. This knowledge trickles down from God in the dialogues. This is what people do with their freedom.
‘Where is the ruddy letter, then?’ the old man says at last.
It’s after ten o’clock. Kate’s in her room, packing. Her grandfather’s still out on the front veranda with his whisky and his smokes. The holiday, the ordeal, is almost over. Tomorrow school. A half-term to get through, then Lahore. Freedom. The city will show her a way. If the old man hasn’t signed by tomorrow she’ll forge the signature herself. She’s never been to Lahore, though the name’s familiar to her from childhood; her father’s job (chief boiler inspector on the NWR) took him there occasionally. She imagines the city as an undecided entity on whose mercy she must throw herself. Just give me a chance, she’s said to the cold God. Just one chance. That’s not much to ask, is it?
She’s had nothing in return. From Jesus and Mary, from the old cast of divine characters, yes, some nervy vague well-wishes–but from Him only the sustained icy stare.
‘Come here! Come here, you fucking…’ Uncle Cyril’s voice in the compound. The sounds of feet putch putching in the mud. ‘I give you a fucking roof over your head and this is how you repay me? Come here, you bleddy thieving wretch.’
Kate goes to the window and looks out. The veranda lamps show Kalia, with blood streaming from his head, down on one knee, one arm raised in defence. Uncle Cyril has a stick, a policeman’s lathi, and is lashing out with a ferocity that makes keeping his balance difficult. Twice he slips and nearly topples, flails for a moment, grabs Kalia’s sleeve, recovers. It would, with the slightest shift, look funny.
Hard to tell how long it lasts. Kate stands at the window watching in silence, arms clasped round the book of Renaissance paintings. Kalia is thin, no match for ropily muscled Uncle Cyril. (What about your mother and father? she’d asked the servant years ago. Father not known, miss, he’d said. Mother is dead here ten years. Sahib lets me stay and work. You’re an orphan, then, she’d said. Like me.) ‘You bleddy thieving sonofabitch! How dare you?’ When he’s angry Cyril’s face looks as if it’s testing a disgusting smell, open nostrils and baggily downturned mouth. Again, with a slight shift this could be funny; comedy villains pull this face when they’ve been outwitted. You change how you look at something and it becomes something else.
Kalia gets to his feet and tears himself free. Uncle Cyril, grasping after him, slips in the mud and goes down on to his knees. Kalia, backpedalling, reaches the shed at the bottom of the compound. (Kate remembers the first time she looked in there: thin mattress, spartan table, one chair, old tins and jars–Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup, Bird’s Custard Powder, Lyons Tea–filled with buttons, bottletops, screws, nails. Everything very neat and tidy. In more recent times other things have been added: old books she’s salvaged from school; newspaper cuttings; a picture of Gandhi in a wooden frame he hides under the mattress.) Kalia moves with a purpose, suddenly; he ducks into the shed and emerges, upright, holding a heavily rusted machete (this is new; she’s never seen this; he must have hidden it even from her) above his head. Uncle Cyril looks up, sees it, begins to say something–‘What? You raise your bleddy hand to—’ but is cut off by the noise–not a scream but a kind of roared gargle–from Kalia’s wide-open mouth. It’s the loudest noise she’s ever heard him make.
His open mouth and surprising teeth (the upper row slopes outward; it’s why with his lips closed he always looks as if he’s trying not to grin) remind her again of the demonstration, all the mouths shouting, the policemen’s whacking out, the confusion of slipping bodies. Gandhi’s in jail again, her grandfather had said not long ago, flinging down a Times of India. Good, Uncle Cyril said. This time they should let the bugger starve himself to death. Very little of it meant anything to Kate. The world was out there, people furiously angry. Because you’re like them, the British. She thinks of the time in the bazaar, two Tommies with their English girls, arms linked. They’d made fun of her. Can you tell us, darling, where we can get the best chutney in town? She hadn’t understood at first, had begun to say she didn’t know because the servants did the shopping, but they’d interrupted–Your name’s not Mary is it, by any chance? Then she got it: Chutney Mary. The girls’ laughter tinkled from their dark-lipsticked mouths. As they were walking away one said to the other: You’ve got to watch these little cheechees, Emily. They’ll steal a chap from right under your nose!
Kalia walks towards Uncle Cyril like an automaton, gargling, machete held aloft. She thinks, if he kills him now, if he kills him now brings it down on his head like that breaks it smashes his head then I won’t have to I won’t have to but they’ll catch him and they’ll know and they’ll put him in jail or shoot him say he was trying to run. Uncle Cyril at first puts on a look of superior disgust, puffs his chest out, raises his chin as if he knows Kalia won’t touch him–but at the last second flinches and ducks away, starts backing towards the house. Kalia follows him for four or five paces, then stops and falls silent. The two men look at each other, then Kalia looks away, as if he’s lost interest in what was only a mildly amusing distraction.
‘You dare?’ Uncle Cyril asks quietly.
Kalia, with a kind of boredom or disgust, throws the machete blade-first at the ground, where it sticks in the mud for a moment then falls flat on to its side. He turns and, without saying anything, walks putch putch putch out of the compound.
Uncle Cyril stands bent for a few moments, hands gripping knees, breathing heavily, staring at the machete. Kate draws back from the window, so that if he turns he won’t see her.
She knows her grandfather’s in the house so there’s a limit to her fear when, an hour or so later, Uncle Cyril comes to her room. She’s sitting on the bed with the book of paintings open on her lap. Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo’s The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, in which, despite being shot full of arrows by six archers at point-blank range, the saint looks merely bored. She gets to her feet as soon as her uncle enters the room.
‘Finished packing, then?’
If you’re on the bed you get up and away from it. You get to your feet. There are these minute adjustments you can make, for what little good they do.
‘I’m on earlies tomorrow so I won’t see you when you go,’ Cyril says, yawning, massaging his left shoulder with his right hand. This is the demeanour, someone sleepily or with his mind elsewhere discharging a duty to which he’s indifferent. ‘So I’ll wish you now.’
She says nothing, holds the book against her chest, arms crossed over it. He moves towards her, as always looking everywhere but at her. Her bo
dy sends its one fierce signal: no, no, no, no. She stands absolutely still. Her grandfather, not looking in, passes the open door with an empty tumbler in his hand, says, croakily, ‘Kalia?’ and disappears. He’s only framed there for a moment, but she registers his craggy profile, waistcoat, braces dangling. A tall man starting to stoop, as if death is a low doorway to be got under.
‘Well, have a good trip, then.’
When Cyril tries to kiss her she turns her face away, feels his lips and stubble on her cheek. He puts his hands on her hips, pulls her towards him. The hard book bumps between them. He leans again and she leans back, away, thinking in spite of the disgust that this is like the woman’s melodramatic dip in the tango. It’s wearying to be able to think this. He locks one arm round her waist and with the other tries to wrestle the book from her grip. She can feel him pressing against her. The crime your body commits against you is not letting you leave it. Confinement is absolute. Whether you like it or not the flesh continues to report sensations: hands on you; breath on your face; knot of hard heat there. It all happens as it always does, in silence, him smiling with what looks like indulgent humour, the grown-up benignly tolerating the child’s little show of will. The book falls to the floor and he laughs, giddily, as if this is a lark to both of them. She closes her eyes, goes rigid. He never says anything when it gets to this. He can’t speak, she knows, because language will take him out of the state in which it’s possible for him to behave like this, will return him to the world and shame.
