For Leonora
Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.
Rabindranath Tagore
Contents
Darjeeling, India, February 2000
Prologue
One year later
London, July 2011
1
2
3
4
5
Jaipur, India, 1911
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Astbury Hall, 2011
16
17
18
19
20
England, 1917
21
22
23
24
25
26
Astbury Hall, July 2011
27
28
29
Donald February 1919
30
31
32
33
34
Astbury Hall, July 2011
35
Anahita 1920
36
37
38
39
40
41
Astbury Hall, July 2011
42
43
The Cottage by the Brook, August 1922
44
Astbury Hall, July 2011
45
46
47
48
49
Epilogue
India, 1957
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Darjeeling, India, February 2000
Prologue
Anahita
I am a hundred years old today. Not only have I managed to survive a century, but I’ve also seen in a new millennium.
As the dawn breaks and the sun begins to rise over Mount Kanchenjunga beyond my window, I lie on my pillows and smile to myself at the utter ridiculousness of the thought. If I were a piece of furniture, an elegant chair for example, I would be labelled an antique. I would be polished, restored and proudly put on show as a thing of beauty. Sadly, that isn’t the case with my human frame, which has not mellowed like a fine piece of mahogany over its lifetime. Instead, my body has deteriorated into a sagging hessian sack containing a collection of bones.
Any ‘beauty’ in me that might be deemed valuable lies hidden deep inside. It is the wisdom of one hundred years lived on this earth, and a heart that has beaten a steady accompaniment to every conceivable human emotion and behaviour.
One hundred years ago, to this very day, my parents, in the manner of all Indians, consulted an astrologer to tell them about the future of their newborn baby girl. I believe I still have the soothsayer’s predictions for my life amongst the few possessions of my mother that I’ve kept. I remember them saying that I was to be long-lived, but in 1900, I realise, my parents assumed this meant that, with the gods’ blessing, I would survive into my fifties.
I hear a gentle tap on my door. It is Keva, my faithful maid, armed with a tray of English Breakfast tea and a small jug of cold milk. Tea taken the English way is a habit I’ve never managed to break, even though I’ve lived in India – not to mention Darjeeling – for the past seventy-eight years.
I don’t answer Keva’s knock, preferring on this special morning to be alone with my thoughts a while longer. Undoubtedly Keva will wish to talk through the events of the day, will be eager to get me up, washed and dressed before my family begins to arrive.
As the sun begins to burn off the clouds covering the snowcapped mountains, I search the blue sky for the answer I’ve pleaded with the heavens to give me every morning of the past seventy-eight years.
Today, please, I beg the gods, for I have known in each hour that has ticked by since I last saw my child that he still breathes somewhere on this planet. If he had died, I would have known the moment it happened, as I have for all those in my life whom I’ve loved, when they have passed over.
Tears fill my eyes and I turn my head to the nightstand by my bed to study the one photograph I have of him, a cherubic two-year-old sitting smiling on my knee. It was given to me by my friend, Indira, along with his death certificate a few weeks after I’d been informed of my son’s death.
A lifetime ago, I think. The truth is, my son is now an old man too. He will celebrate his eighty-first birthday in October of this year. But even with my powers of imagination, it’s impossible for me to see him as such.
I turn my head determinedly away from my son’s image, knowing that today I deserve to enjoy the celebration my family has planned for me. But somehow, on all these occasions, when I see my other child and her children, and her children’s children, the absence of my son only feeds the pain in my heart, reminding me he has always been missing.
Of course, they believe, and always have, that my son died seventy-eight years ago.
‘Maaji, see, you even have his death certificate! Leave him to his rest,’ my daughter, Muna, would say with a sigh. ‘Enjoy the family you have living.’
After all these years, I understand Muna becomes frustrated with me. And she is of course right to. She wants to be enough, just her alone. But a lost child is something that can never be replaced in a mother’s heart.
And for today, my daughter will have her way. I will sit in my chair and enjoy watching the dynasty I have spawned. I won’t bore them with my stories of India’s history. When they arrive in their fast Western jeeps, with their children playing on their battery-operated gadgets, I will not remind them how Indira and I climbed the steep hills around Darjeeling on horseback, that electricity and running water in any home were once rare, or of my voracious reading of any tattered book I could get my hands on. The young are irritated by stories of the past; they wish to live only in the present, just as I did when I was their age.
I can imagine that most of my family are not looking forward to flying halfway across India to visit their great-grandmother on her hundredth birthday, but perhaps I’m being hard on them. I’ve thought a great deal in the past few years about why the young seem to be uncomfortable when they’re with the old; they could learn so many things they need to know from us. And I’ve decided that their discomfort stems from the fact that, in our fragile physical presence, they become aware of what the future holds for them. They can only see, in their full glow of strength and beauty, how eventually they will be diminished one day too. They don’t know what they will gain.
How can they begin to see inside us? Understand how their souls will grow, their impetuousness be tamed and their selfish thoughts be dimmed by the experiences of so many years?
But I accept that this is nature, in all its glorious complexity. I have ceased to question it.
When Keva knocks at the door for a second time, I admit her. As she talks at me in fast Hindi, I sip my tea and run over the names of my four grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. At a hundred years old, one wants to at least prove that one’s mind is still in full working order.
The four grandchildren my daughter gave me have each gone on to become successful and loving parents themselves. They flourished in the new world that independence from the British brought to India, and their children have taken the mantle even further. At least six of them, from what I recall, have started their own businesses or are in a professional trade. Selfishly, I wish that one of my extended offspring had taken an interest in medicine, had followed after me, but I realise that I can’t have everything.
As Keva helps me into the bathroom to wash, I consider that my fa
mily have had a mixture of luck, brains and family connections on their side. And that my beloved India has probably another century to go before the millions who still starve on her streets gain some modicum of their basic human needs. I have done my best to help over the years, but I realise my efforts are a mere ripple in the ocean against a roaring tide of poverty and deprivation.
Sitting patiently whilst Keva dresses me in my new sari – a birthday present from Muna, my daughter – I decide I won’t think these maudlin thoughts today. I’ve attempted where I can to improve those lives that have brushed against mine, and I must be content with that.
‘You look beautiful, Madam Chavan.’
As I look at my reflection in the mirror, I know that she is lying, but I love her for it. My fingers reach for the pearls that have sat around my neck for nearly eighty years. In my will, I have left them to Muna.
‘Your daughter arrives at eleven o’clock, and the rest of the family will be here an hour later. Where shall I put you until they come?’
I smile at her, feeling much like a mahogany chair. ‘You may put me in the window. I want to look at my mountains,’ I say. She helps me up, steers me gently to the armchair and sits me down.
‘Can I bring you anything else, Madam?’
‘No. You go now to the kitchen and make sure that cook of ours has the lunch menu under control.’
‘Yes, Madam.’ She moves my bell from the nightstand to the table at my side and quietly leaves the room.
I turn my face into the sunlight, which is starting to stream through the big picture windows of my hilltop bungalow. As I bask in it like a cat, I remember the friends who have already passed over and won’t be joining me today for my celebration. Indira, my most beloved friend, died over fifteen years ago. I confess that was one of the few moments in my life when I have broken down and wept uncontrollably. Even my devoted daughter could not match the love and friendship Indira showed me. Self-absorbed and flighty until the moment she died, Indira was there when I needed her most.
I look across to the writing bureau which sits in the alcove opposite me, and can’t help but think about what is concealed inside its locked drawer. It is a letter, and it runs over three hundred pages. It is written to my beloved son and tells the story of my life from the beginning. As the years passed, I began to worry that I would forget the details, that they would become blurred and grainy in my mind, like the reel of a silent black-and-white film. If, as I believe to this day, my son is alive and if he were ever returned to me, I wanted to be able to present him with the story of his mother and her enduring love for her lost child. And the reasons why she had had to leave him behind . . .
I began to write it when I was in middle age, believing then that I might be taken at any time. There it has sat for nearly fifty years, untouched and unread, because he never came to find me, and I still haven’t found him.
Not even my daughter knows the story of my life before she arrived on the planet. Sometimes I feel guilty for never revealing the truth to her. But I believe it is enough that she has known my love when her brother was denied it.
I glance at the bureau, viewing in my mind’s eye the yellowing pile of paper inside it. And I ask the gods to guide me. When I die, as surely I must soon, I would be horrified for it to fall into the wrong hands. I ponder for a few seconds on whether I should light a fire and ask Keva to place the papers onto it. But no, I shake my head instinctively. I can never bring myself to do that, just in case I do find him. There is still hope. After all, I’ve lived to a hundred; I may live to a hundred and ten.
But whom to entrust it to, in the meantime, just in case . . . ?
I mentally scan my family members, taking them in generations. At each name, I listen for guidance. And it’s on the name of one of my great-grandsons that I pause.
Ari Malik, the eldest child of my eldest grandson, Vivek. I chuckle slightly as the shiver runs up my spine – the signal I’ve had from those above who understand so much more than I ever can. Ari, the only member of my extended family to be blessed with blue eyes. Other than my beloved lost child.
I concentrate hard to bring to mind his details; with eleven great-grandchildren, I comfort myself, a person half my age would struggle to remember. And besides, they are spread out all over India these days, and I rarely see them.
Vivek, Ari’s father, has been the most financially successful of my grandchildren. He was always clever, if a little dull. He is an engineer and has earned enough to provide his wife and three children with a very comfortable life. If my memory serves me, Ari was educated in England. He was always a bright little thing, though quite what he’s been doing since he left school escapes me. Today, I decide, I will find out. I will watch him. And I’m sure I’ll know whether my current instinct is correct.
With that settled, and feeling calmer now that a solution to my dilemma is perhaps at hand, I close my eyes and allow myself to doze.
‘Where is he?!’ Samina Malik whispered to her husband. ‘He swore to me that he wouldn’t be late for this,’ she added, as she surveyed the other, fully present members of Anahita’s extended family. They were clustered around the old lady in the elegant drawing room of her bungalow, plying her with presents and compliments.
‘Don’t panic, Samina,’ Vivek comforted his wife, ‘our son will be here.’
‘Ari said he’d meet us at the station so we could come up the hill together as a family at ten o’clock . . . I swear, Vivek, that boy has no respect for his family, I—’
‘Hush, pyari, he’s a busy young man, and a good boy, too.’
‘You think so?’ asked Samina. ‘I’m not so sure. Every time I call his apartment, a different female voice answers. You know what Mumbai is like; full of Bollywood hussies and sharks,’ she whispered, not wishing any other member of the family to overhear their conversation.
‘Yes, and our son is twenty-five years old now and running his own business. He can take care of himself,’ Vivek replied.
‘The staff are waiting for him to arrive so they can bring in the champagne and make the toast. Keva is concerned your grandmother will become too tired if we leave it much longer.’ Samina sighed. ‘If Ari’s not here in the next ten minutes, I’ll tell them to continue without him.’
‘I told you, there will be no need for you to do that,’ Vivek said, smiling broadly as Ari, his favourite son, entered the room. ‘Your mother was in a panic, as always,’ he told Ari, smiling as he clasped his son in a warm embrace.
‘You promised to be there at the station. We waited an hour! Where were you?’ Samina frowned at her handsome son but, as always, she knew it was a losing battle against the tide of his charm.
‘Ma, forgive me.’ Ari gave his mother a winning smile and took her hands in his. ‘I was delayed, and I did try to call your cellphone. But, as usual, it was switched off.’
Ari and his father shared a smirk. Samina’s inability to use her cellphone was a family joke.
‘Anyway, I’m here now,’ he said, looking around at the rest of his clan. ‘Did I miss anything?’
‘No, and your great-grandmother has been so busy greeting the rest of her family, let’s hope she hasn’t noticed your late arrival,’ replied Vivek.
Ari turned and looked through the crowd of his own blood to the matriarch whose genes had spun invisible threads down through the generations. As he did so, he saw her bright, inquisitive eyes pinned on him.
‘Ari! You have thought to join us at last.’ She smiled. ‘Come and kiss your great-grandmother.’
‘She may be a hundred today, but your grandmother misses nothing,’ Samina whispered to Vivek.
As Anahita opened her frail arms to Ari, the crowd of relations parted and all eyes in the room turned to him. Ari walked towards her and knelt in front of her, showing his respect with a deep pranaam and waiting for her blessing.
‘Nani,’ he greeted her using the affectionate pet name that all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren addressed her
by. ‘Forgive me for being late. It’s a long journey from Mumbai,’ he explained.
As he looked up, he could see her eyes boring into him in the peculiar way they always did, as if she were assessing his soul.
‘No matter,’ she said as her shrunken, childlike fingers touched his cheek with the light brush of a butterfly wing. ‘Although –’ she lowered her voice to a whisper so only he could hear – ‘I always find it useful to check I have set my alarm to the correct time the night before.’ She gave him a surreptitious wink, then indicated that he was to stand. ‘You and I will speak later. I can see Keva is eager to start the proceedings.’
‘Yes, Nani, of course,’ said Ari, feeling a blush rising to his cheeks as he stood. ‘Happy birthday.’
As he walked back towards his parents, Ari wondered just how his great-grandmother could have known the exact reason why he was late today.
The day progressed as planned, with Vivek, as the eldest of Anahita’s grandchildren, making a moving speech about her remarkable life. As the champagne flowed, tongues loosened and the peculiar tension of a family gathered together after too long apart began to ease. The naturally competitive edge of the siblings blurred as they re-established their places in the family hierarchy, and the younger cousins lost their shyness and found common ground.
‘Look at your son!’ commented Muna, Anahita’s daughter, to Vivek. ‘His girl cousins are swooning all over him. It will be time for him to think of marriage soon,’ she added.
‘I doubt that’s how he sees it,’ grumbled Samina to her mother-in-law. ‘These days, young men seem to play the field into their thirties.’
‘You will not arrange anything for him, then?’ enquired Muna.
‘We will, of course, but I doubt he’ll agree.’ Vivek sighed. ‘Ari is of a new generation, the master of his own universe. He has his business and travels the world. Times have changed, Ma, and Samina and I must allow our children some choice in picking their husbands and wives.’
‘Really?’ Muna raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s very modern of you, Vivek. After all, you two haven’t done so badly together.’
‘Yes, Ma,’ agreed Vivek, taking his wife’s hand. ‘You made a good choice for me.’ He smiled.
The Midnight Rose Page 1