Lee
Miss Charlotte arrived the day Margaret died. At first no one realized Margaret was dead, and it wasn’t until the nurse came to wash her—she had already begun to do so—that she noticed her breathing had stopped. Then they disconnected all the tubes and covered Margaret with a sheet. Everyone was quite businesslike about it. The event had been expected. Evie and I too had been expecting it. Evie said we would leave in the evening.
But when Miss Charlotte came into the room, everything changed. Miss Charlotte embraced and kissed me and made my face wet with her tears. She got down on her knees by the side of Margaret’s bed and began to pray. Her lips moved, tears continued to flow down her face. Then the body on the bed was not only someone who had died and had been expected to die—but was Margaret! Margaret!
I remembered so much then, so many things. I saw Margaret looking at herself in the fitting-room mirror and hating herself in her bridesmaid’s dress. I thought of her mother and her sister Penny who hadn’t understood her and hadn’t wanted her to come here. All the same she had come and she had been happy because she had been truly in the process of finding herself. I admired and loved her and would not allow her to be dead. It couldn’t happen! How could it? She had only just begun and so much was left for her still. Perhaps in the end she wouldn’t have stayed here—she might have gone back, not as the same person but changed and probably stronger and better. Now she wouldn’t ever go back. I wished it had been possible to shake Margaret and say come on, get up, it’s all a mistake. It was a mistake. Yet Miss Charlotte was praying humbly and with her head bowed as if it was a mistake that could be accepted. Evie had also gone down on her knees. She wasn’t praying, but two polite tears made their way down her cheeks. She was watching me from the corner of her eye.
In India, because of the heat, dead bodies have to be disposed of quite quickly. The hospital authorities were hovering around a bit—and not without reason, for already a smell I didn’t like to identify was beginning to pervade the storeroom where we had spent so many days. The flies that had been living with us all those days had suddenly multiplied and they clustered together and buzzed over the bed. Miss Charlotte asked about a Christian cemetery. Bob and Raymond went to make arrangements, and Evie slipped out at the same time. I thought she had gone with them. Bob had blocks of ice sent in and these were placed around the bed in containers to preserve the body till everything was ready for its burial.
Miss Charlotte said we would have to wash Margaret. The basin of water and flannel the nurse had brought in to wash her when we thought she was still alive had remained, and Miss Charlotte said they would do. She pulled back the sheet. I was ready, even eager, to help her although I had never done anything like this before and felt quite helpless. Miss Charlotte was very gentle with me; she gave me instructions and was as kind and loving to me as to Margaret whose limbs she tenderly lifted to do what had to be done. It was not in the least morbid or unpleasant—quite on the contrary, there was something satisfying to me in being able to do this for Margaret. I know Miss Charlotte felt the same.
Evie came in and said, “They’re here now.”
“Who, dear?” asked Miss Charlotte. She was brushing Margaret’s hair and admiring it as she did so; she drew the brush slowly down those long strands. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said, smiling down at it. Margaret’s hair had always been her best feature and it was still as it had been—strong, fair, healthy, and alive.
Evie also admired it. She extended her hand to touch it. “Lovely,” she said; then she said again, “They’re here.”
“Who?” I asked this time.
She lowered her eyes and smiled sadly, as if wanting to spare us something.
“Who?” I asked, with suspicion now.
She made a gesture toward the half-open door. I went to see. There were some coolies standing out there, holding a plank. On the plank, neatly folded, was a red cloth and a strong coarse rope. I recognized all these things at once. I knew them from long ago—from that time when I had stood outside the house in the strange town and they had brought the girl’s body out. On a plank like this one, tied to it with ropes and covered with a red cloth. Sometimes I still wondered about that girl and whether she had been murdered or not.
Evie came out too. She said, “People have been very kind and helpful. The wood’s been bought and there’s a brahmin priest waiting for us.”
I said, “Margaret’s going to have a Christian burial. Raymond’s gone to arrange for it.”
Evie was patient and silent. The coolies also stood there patiently waiting. They wore the usual tattered coolie clothes but they were sturdier than the usual coolies. One of them was very short—almost a dwarf—but he had strongly developed shoulders and stood there on legs that were somewhat bandy as if from heavy weights pressing down on them.
“You can tell them to go away,” I said and began to turn back into the room. Evie held me. She said, “You know she would have wanted it.”
I freed myself from her and rejoined Miss Charlotte. Margaret was ready now and she looked so nice with her eyes shut and her hands folded and wearing a white nightdress. She reminded me of those sculptured figures you see on stone tombs in some cathedral or a village church. Sometimes these figures are of the person who is buried inside the tomb but sometimes they are of angels that have come to take care of his soul. Margaret reminded me of both, of angel and of peaceful dead.
Evie followed me inside and said again, “She’d have wanted it.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Hindus are burned, not buried.”
Miss Charlotte, who had been looking at Margaret, now looked at Evie. So did I. Evie said, “She was a Hindu.” She was speaking aggressively now and as if she were fighting us. “Becoming a Hindu is not like becoming a Christian. You don’t have to take formal baptism or anything but freely assent to the Truth within you.”
Miss Charlotte said, “We must think of her family too.”
“What family? She didn’t have a family. He was her family.”
“Who’s he, dear?”
“Swamiji.”
I made a wild, sweeping gesture to drive away the flies that were settling on Margaret’s face. I was furious—really furious—yes, with the flies, but beyond them with other things too.
“You know it’s true,” Evie said to me. “The relationship with the guru is the highest there can be and it cancels out all the others. Margaret accepted that and so did you. Didn’t you?” she said and she tried to look into my eyes in the hypnotic way he always did.
I turned away, shouting, “Don’t speak about him!” I was full of bitterness and rage. It was he who had brought us here to this room. I detested him and not only him but everything connected with him, all the roads that had led us to him—literally those roads: the trains and buses we had traveled on, the makeshift places where we had slept crowded in together with deformed, diseased people, the water we had drunk, the food we had eaten at wayside stalls, putting it into our mouths without giving a thought to what hands had touched it! And squatting in filthy places that no one was low enough to clean so that excrement festered in the heat, feeding up flies. Those very same flies that were now settling on Margaret’s dead face. Again I raised my hand and brandished it to chase them away. I told Evie, “You can go back to him right now if you like. You don’t have to wait for the funeral.”
Miss Charlotte was again on her knees by the side of the bed. It was a relief to me to join her and also to join her in the prayers she was saying out loud. I stumbled a bit behind her because I was not sure of the words; but I liked to say them. I didn’t want to think of anything else but them, and only to keep on kneeling there till Raymond came back to say it was time to take Margaret away.
Raymond Writes to His Mother
“. . . Maupur was a civil station but it can never have been an important one. I suspect it was the sort of place where civilians who weren’t doing too well were sent to be out of th
e way. They must have lived very lonely lives out here, cut off from the rest of the population and dependent only on one another for company. There were probably just two or three of them, like the magistrate and the superintendent of police and a doctor if they were lucky. They had houses just outside the city limits, the usual kind of Anglo-Indian bungalows, dark solid structures with a lot of outhouses. I don’t know why they always give me such a gloomy feeling. I think of English people locked up inside these cavernous windowless rooms and battling from in there against heat and disease and all the other things. But of course that’s all over now and the houses have been requisitioned by the municipality and cut up into municipal offices.
“The station was never big enough to have a church of its own but it does have a British cemetery. It’s just behind the bungalows on a rocky incline full of big stones wedged into the soil. There aren’t very many graves—about two dozen perhaps—and they are irregularly placed up and down the incline and of rather haphazard shapes, and some of them have sunk into the ground so that they are practically indistinguishable from the stones. This makes them look very old but in fact none of them goes further back than the 1880’s and there are a few from the 1920’s and ‘30’s. As always in India, at least half are of children. Where the cause of death is given, it’s usually cholera or smallpox. But there is one army officer—Captain William John Douglas—who ‘succumbed to injuries sustained at the hand of a native assassin,’ and a young woman, Emily Jane Dove, who died in childbirth.
“The soil is so hard and rocky that we had to employ several men to dig it and by the time they were ready it was evening. I’ve tried to describe these Indian evenings to you before, but I don’t think I shall ever succeed. Perhaps one has to live through an Indian day really to appreciate the evening that follows it. I’m afraid Margaret’s coffin was rather rough, it was really only a box nailed together by a local carpenter with Bob standing over him to make him hurry up. All through the funeral the birds were flying about in the rather hectic way they do in the evening just before descending into their nests. They were mostly sparrows, indistinguishable from our English sparrows and chirping away in the same silly cheerful way. They kept making me think of the garden at home. The light fading away in the sky and leaving it very soft and with a moist quality in it also reminded me of home. There were a few hardy though stunted trees growing on that mound, and one of them was covered with a fuzz of young leaves that were a very delicate green except where the last remains of the sun shone through them and made them gold. Miss Charlotte spoke the burial service. She has a clear high voice like those voices you hear in church singing above the organ.
“Mother—I’m sorry—I’ve changed my mind again. I don’t want to meet you in Italy or anywhere else. I want to come home. We’ll take our trip some other time—truly, I promise—but just now I want to be at home in Hazelhurst. I’ve asked Miss Charlotte to come and stay with us for a while. I know how much you’ll like her and she you. I’ve spoken to her a lot about Hazelhurst. Last night after the funeral I was telling her about everything—our walks, the pond and the almshouses and Mrs. Teddington’s tea shop—and she said she felt she knew the place already and loved it as I do.
“This morning while I was packing Gopi came in. You remember, I’ve mentioned Gopi to you before, he’s the boy who’s come on some of my trips, and he’s here in Maupur too. We’ve become quite good friends although lately, ever since we’ve come to Maupur—”
Here Raymond broke off. There was no point in writing this to his mother. It would be of no interest to her, since she had not been kept up on the progress of their friendship. She didn’t know Gopi and so didn’t know how he had changed and how this change disturbed Raymond. Gopi had sat on the edge of the big double bed and watched Raymond put his clothes into his suitcase. Raymond liked packing: he folded everything beautifully and then placed each garment carefully in position and smoothed it with his hands. Gopi watched him in amusement and after a while he laughed out loud and asked, “You know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think you would be a very nice wife for some lucky man.”
Raymond could never do anything about his blushes, but he went on stoically packing. “Yes,” Gopi said, “sometimes you are just like a woman. Look how neat you are and tidy! I am sure you can cook very well too. . . . Show me that. Why haven’t I seen it before?”
He held out his hand for the pajamas Raymond was putting into his suitcase. Gopi unfolded them critically, felt the material, held them up against himself. Raymond had seen him do this so often with clothes, but whereas once Gopi had been gleeful—full of joy and excitement—now his hand and eye were coolly critical. Evidently the pajamas passed his appraisal, for he said, rather casually, “Can I have them?”
“Of course,” Raymond said, keeping his eyes lowered.
“Thanks,” Gopi said; then, as if wanting to give Raymond some pleasure in return, he showed him the studs on his kurta: “Have you seen these? She gave them to me. Do you know what they are?”
Raymond gave a fleeting glance. “Rubies, I think.”
“Do you like the way they’re set? They are very old. They belonged to her great-uncle. You can’t get workmanship like this nowadays. What’s the matter? Don’t you like them? Then why aren’t you looking?” He seemed really hurt not to have his new acquisition admired.
Raymond looked up from his packing—not at Gopi’s ruby studs but at Gopi himself. He said, “What about your wedding?” Of course he knew that Gopi would scowl and turn away but he persisted. “Don’t you think you ought to go back now? I think you ought.”
Gopi had got up off the bed. He went and stood with his back to Raymond and admired a picture on the wall. This showed a very plump couple on a sofa. They were in amorous pose though fully clothed in silk and green brocade. In the background was a tall vase filled with arum lilies. “It’s beautiful,” Gopi said.
“It’s perfectly horrible.”
Gopi said, “You don’t understand anything. It’s historical. It’s Shahjehan and Mumtaz Mahal.”
Raymond suppressed a cry of irritation. Then he said, “You told me you would just stay a short while and then go back.”
“I like this room better than mine. When you’ve gone, I will ask them to change over.”
“You said you’d leave at the same time I did.”
“Oh, Raymond,” Gopi said very sweetly, “I wish you weren’t going. I shall miss you very much.”
And he looked at him as sweetly as he spoke. Gopi was a very handsome man now. He had filled out somewhat and, though still slender, he seemed broader, more manly. The ruby studs on his kurta were open in a studiedly casual way, revealing his olive skin matted with hair in which nestled the end of a fine gold chain he wore around his neck.
“I’d have stayed for your wedding,” Raymond said stubbornly.
Gopi made a patient, gentle gesture with his hand. He sat down on the velvet bedspread again. He said, “It is fate.”
“Whose fate? What are you talking about?”
“My fate. Your fate. We meet and then we part.”
“Yes but what about your wedding?”
“That’s fate too.”
“It’s not, you know,” Raymond said energetically. “There’s nothing to stop you from taking a train and going back and getting married and going into the sugar business. Nothing at all, so you needn’t sigh like that.”
“I thought you were a sensitive person, Raymond. Come here. Sit near me.” When Raymond did so, he affectionately straightened his collar. Raymond sat bolt upright and frowning. “Why are you cross with me, Raymond? I don’t like it. I’m so fond of you. I think we shall always be friends. Even when you go away, we shall write to one another. I’m not very good at writing letters but I shall try for your sake.”
His voice as he spoke became softer and softer. Raymond felt as if it were stifling him. The overfurnished red room and the soft velvet bedspread on which t
hey were sitting also had a very stifling effect. Raymond cleared his throat rather brusquely. “You won’t write. You’ll mean to for a while but you’ll keep putting it off and in the end you’ll just let it slide.”
Gopi laughed: “I’m very lazy, everyone knows it. But I shall try, I promise. And I shall certainly be thinking of you—so much.”
“But I shall try not to think of you at all. How can I think of you,” he cried in reply to Gopi’s hurt look, “if I have to think of you here in this place? I don’t want to think of you like that. I can’t. It’s too awful.”
Raymond was shaking. He was tremendously upset. He didn’t know what to do. He felt like imploring Gopi, even getting down on his knees to do so or indulging in some other extravagant gesture. Gopi on the other hand remained very calm. He patted Raymond’s shoulder and smiled at him in a way that was both sad and understanding. He seemed much older than Raymond at that moment.
Raymond didn’t write any of this to his mother but tore the page off and continued on a new one.
“I forgot to tell you that Miss Charlotte has very kindly—and very efficiently—got rid of my flat in Delhi. She found someone to rent it and buy all my furniture, an American professor and his wife who’ve come to study (I think) Buddhism. They took the whole place over just as it was, including Shyam. Only there was some trouble with Shyam. I don’t know exactly what happened, but the upshot of it was he was sacked. He’s been after Miss Charlotte to find him another job and she has been trying, but as she also has jobs to find for her own old servants, I’m afraid she hasn’t succeeded. Shyam sent me a long, long letter—written for him I know by the letter-writer who sits outside the post office—all about the turpitude of the new American tenants and asking me to get him a job with the High Commission. But I can’t. I just can’t. Anyway, there’s no time. If there is anything you can think of that you want besides the shawl and the raw silk, please send a cable—care Intercontinental Hotel, New Delhi—because a letter may not reach me in time before I leave.”
Travelers Page 24