“How much can they eat?” Lorraine was fascinated. “Their stomachs must only be the size of my thumbnail. How much can they possibly eat?”
The word went out. More chipkalies arrived, each trying to get closer to the light and a better feed. Fights erupted, tails were lost to the water below and it was only a matter of seconds before a body followed.
“Ugg!” exclaimed Lily, theatrically screwing up her face and shivering with distaste. She didn’t have the stomach for the sight of a flabby, white underbelly of a lizard as it floated away to its fate, followed by another and then yet another.
“You know there’s a hierarchy among animals,” said my mother. “You’ve just witnessed the food chain. That’s all.”
Not to be easily shut down, Lily chose a joke at my expense, enunciating slowly and clearly, “No one will eat Lucy. She tastes terrible.” There was always time for sibling banter.
Living alongside the wildlife was a normal part of our lives. Most of the time we stayed in our environment and they stayed in theirs. Occasionally the boundaries crossed, as it did the time a snake came to our fowl-run looking for lunch.
It was an October afternoon, a euphoric time after the monsoons when the air is washed clean and the vegetation is fat and succulent. After months of drooping, struggling to stay alive, the plant life is sprightly, alert, ready to enjoy the next phase of living. The reptile life is also on the move, looking for a jolly good feed.
At eight years old Lorraine was deemed responsible enough to supervise her sisters’ daily game of Treasure Hunt. She had shepherded us towards the fowl run to look for errant eggs that might have escaped the morning collection. As Lily and I skipped alongside her our incessant chatter was silenced by agitated hens, evidence something was amiss. Stopping short in our tracks we looked to Lorraine for leadership and found indecision. She was torn between curiosity and fear.
Curiosity won. We crept forward on high alert and found frightened hens clustered together in a tight knot in a far corner of their run, pressed hard against the wire enclosure, making it bulge outwards.
The reason was obvious. The snake had nowhere to hide as it lay half in and half out of the henhouse. The burnished pattern of its skin reflected the declining sunlight so it resembled the lush pile of the dining room carpet. I wanted to stroke it.
I didn’t.
Turning as one, without discussion but with mental consensus and following instructions that had been drummed into us for as long as I could remember, we bolted back towards the security of our home.
“Snake!” We squeaked and shrieked in fifty different sharps and flats so our mother was left with no doubt that immediate action was required. Taking charge as she always did, she wasted no time in loading the rifle and setting forth alone to do what had to be done.
Later that evening she explained. Looking for food the snake had made good use of a hole in the wire enclosure of the henhouse, had slithered in for a quick feed and then hit bad luck on its exit journey. A hole in a fence that was big enough to accommodate its head and body would not expand to fit a lump that had once been a hen.
Snakes cannot move backwards so the python was trapped with its head on one side of the enclosure and most of its body on the other. In twisting and rolling to free itself, the poor creature had broken its spine and entrapped itself further. The rifle saved the reptile from being roasted alive by the sun the following day.
The incident was merely part of our everyday lives so we thought no more about it. It never occurred to us to wonder about the disposal of the dead snake though we knew it had to happen immediately or overnight the stink would attract blowflies, maggots and other carrion. There is no smell worse than the smell of a dead snake. But these were actions in the back story of our lives and didn’t concern us. Lorraine, Lily and I danced on to the next day without a backward glance.
Until twenty years later.
Twenty years filled with growing-up experiences; twenty years, time enough for a mundane event to become a forgotten memory. It was twenty years later that I was wondering through the Burrens when I was reminded of that snake and at the same time discovered a fundamental truth about human nature.
The sun is higher in the sky now and it’s burning my shoulders through a gap in the canopy. My companion notices my discomfort and silently shifts along the bench indicating that I should move too.
“It’s hotter than it is in winter in Kanpur,” I tell him, but extraneous thoughts soon vanish. I’m enslaved by the emotional release of talking.
“That snake was such a mundane part of our lives I never thought I’d meet it again – in Ireland, of all places.”
He looks enquiring.
I continue.
Leaning against the wooden barrier at the Cliffs of Moher I stared out over the Atlantic Ocean, secure in my anonymity as I blended in with other travellers. I was completely unaware that an elfin of coincidence that only happens to other people was about to happen to me. Out of the blue a hopelessly pseudo-Irish brogue broke my reverie with a banal greeting: “Lucy! What are you doing here?”
I froze. Unwilling to relinquish the catharsis of my solitude I continued to focus on the Aran Islands in the distance. With perseverance that bordered on insensitivity the stranger chatted on as though we were long lost friends. It took several moments before it registered that he knew my name and several more before it dawned on me that his familiarity was strangely familiar. I turned to face him and was knocked sideways.
My third cousin Fergus, who had left Kanpur when I was a tot, who I hardly remembered but with whom I shared a set of great-grandparents, had recognised there were no prospects for him in Kanpur and twenty years earlier had followed the example set by many of our cousins and migrated to a foreign country to realise his ambitions. It was sheer chance that he was at the Burrens at the same time as I, had recognised me because I’m the spitting image of my mother, and was now standing before me grinning from ear to ear.
“Come to lunch on Saturday,” he invited as the conversation progressed, smirking to tell me he was enjoying a private joke. “I’ve got something to show you.”
And there it was! It took a moment for me to remember the python. Shrivelled and withered with age it lay in its sealed glass case and for a moment I was transported back to another life, a different world. I’m not sure what my expression said as I stared at that snakeskin.
Fergus rushed to explain. “The servants wouldn’t touch a dead snake so your mother sent us a message asking for help. I knew I’d be leaving Kanpur in a few months, probably for good, so I wanted something fun to have from the old home. The Tannery in Jajmau did it for me.”
His words were commonplace but when I looked up at him I knew the meaning was so much more complex. The snake was a tangible part of his past, a connection to his boyhood years and the land of his birth. It was a link to his personal history.
At that moment I realised there is an inherent human need in each of us to know what went before us and how we are related to it and therefore to each other. It’s this knowledge that anchors us to our identity, to our sense of belonging to a family, a people, a place. It forms a platform on which we can build our confidence, our individuality, our uniqueness. Without it we are like a cork on the ocean, buffeted by the tide, with no affiliation to anything, going through the motions of living while part of our psyche is home to a black hole.
Such is the strength of that need to belong that Fergus, who’d left Kanpur when I was still a child, who’d lived through a life time of distracting experiences in a totally different environment, still recognised me, knew my spot on the family tree, owned the same stories I owned and had retained a snakeskin from that long-ago, idyllic October afternoon.
CHAPTER 3
SOPHISTICATED SECURITY SYSTEMS
I blink and St Thomas Church comes back into focus in front of me. I see the new whitewash on the facade of the brick building, the recently repaired chips and cracks of the front steps
and the polished pattern of the verandah floor. I know Midnight Mass will be celebrated to usher in the New Year and the church’s official birthday. I wonder if I can attend.
There’ll be crowds, I’m thinking. Will it be safe for a single woman to be out on her own at that hour of the night? Awareness of my own safety is second nature to me.
Living as we did, isolated from the local people by language, culture and custom, we were ever mindful of the hostility directed at us, which was both subtle and complicated. The majority of the population was lower working class, that is, the people who were slightly more prosperous than the servant class. Living in hovels without electricity or running water they were poor, and angry at the lack of prospects for a better life. Their numbers were augmented by the servant class, who lived multiple people to one room. If they were lucky.
To protect ourselves and our possessions all the windows of the house had thick built-in iron bars and all the doors had top and bottom bolts. My sisters and I were never without adult supervision. From a very young age we were regularly reminded of what happened to that Mortimer girl when she was silly enough to walk home alone at dusk after an evening movie. Added to that was the story about our cousin Dorothy. She had been bicycling down a deserted Albert Road after Morning Mass when two thugs lunged at her. Thankfully, luck was on her side when she was able to speed away on her modern bicycle. Her pursuers’ machines were rusty and well past their prime.
Periodically there was reference to the British Commander-in-Chief’s young daughter, who was abducted at knifepoint from a place that was later nicknamed Scandal Point. No detail was even mentioned; it was considered too gruesome and corrupting for young ears. But the implication of assault and gang rapes hung in the air, exerting the power of its threat over us.
The police and justice systems were overloaded, underpaid and corrupt, no protection at all. Constant vigilance was our only option. It was a way of life that we took for granted.
Against this background sometimes innocent events took on menacing proportions, like the time an intruder climbed down the skylight rope in the drawing room. Waiting on the front verandah for my father to return home for lunch my mother was teaching Lorraine cross-stitch embroidery while Lily and I played with our paper dolls cut out from the English Woman and Home magazine when, without warning, the radio in the drawing room behind us sprang to life.
“Who’s there?”
The alarm in my mother’s voice frightened us and we all looked up. As the sound continued, my mother dropped her sewing and making a gesture for us to follow her, raced down the three steps that led to the porch where we huddled together, rigid with fear, knowing there was no one around to come to our assistance.
The static continued, sometimes at full volume, sometimes as background blur. Accompanying it was a strange, staccato chit-chit-chit that told us someone was definitely in the drawing room. We knew it wasn’t the servants, because they had left for the siesta hours.
We stood for an eternity that was a few seconds before my mother acted. Inching forwards she reached the doorway and stopped transfixed until, with a squeaky voice called for the gardener: “Mali, mali aurjha yah,” prompting Lorraine, Lily and I to dash forward to her.
A brown-face monkey had used a skylight as an entry point, slid down the cord and was perched on the upright radio. He had grasped the receiver button and switched on the radio. Fascinated by the sounds, he twisted the knob back and forth, changing the volume, all the while happily chattering to himself.
My mother’s voice, and perhaps the sight of a primate bigger than himself, frightened the monkey. He swung onto the skylight cord to retrace his steps but in doing so activated the pulley that slammed the skylight shut, thereby closing off his escape route.
Jabbering angrily, the monkey clambered onto the picture rail almost five metres above the floor. Grabbing hold of it, he dangled mid-air as he looked over his shoulder to fling abuse at us. A moment later he jumped down to run along the top of the upright piano and, with an elegant, effortless leap, landed on the pelmet above the door of our private rooms. Directly opposite us, from a distance of about thirteen metres, he looked down, while we, grouped around the front door, gazed up.
Three curtains protected the inner sanctum: a short one at the drawing-room door, a floor-length one between the two rooms and another short curtain at the entrance to my mother’s rooms. There was a real danger the monkey would dart down and disappear through these layers to be lost in the inner maze – forever!
“Get the mali!” A sharp tone conveyed urgency to Lorraine to get help from the gardener.
But we were rooted to the spot by a spectacular display. Continuing his circuit around the room, the monkey dropped onto the granite mantelpiece above the fireplace, found he couldn’t get purchase on its highly polished surface so spat vituperative gibberish at us as he skidded across it. With more ambition than sense he sprang towards the door leading to the dining room and latched onto the silken damask curtain in the doorway. Slipping downwards he screeched in high-pitched fury as the curtain oscillated under his weight.
As soon as he landed, the monkey turned tail, hissed feverishly at us, sped towards the fireplace and jumped into the grate.
In a masterpiece of anticlimax, he disappeared up the chimney.
For many years afterwards, the local people talked in awe about this unusual, solitary, sooty monkey that roamed the neighbourhood, shunned by its troop, living a lonely, friendless existence. Never had such an animal been seen before and never would be again.
That evening on my father’s return from his mills our parents discussed the incident.
“Monkeys carry rabies,” he explained to his young daughters, “so Mummy had to be careful. She didn’t want to frighten the animal so that it bit one of you. She also knows the local people worship a god that takes the appearance of a monkey, so out of respect for their beliefs she didn’t want to shoot the animal.”
My mother’s tart voice interjected. “I also didn’t want to cause a riot. I saw enough killings during Partition, I don’t want to see any more or inflict them on my children.” She was referring to the massacres during the India–Pakistan partition of the previous decade.
Addressing us directly, she continued. “You know you have to be careful so you are not kidnapped and bad men hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”
Our chorus of assent appeared to satisfy her but at the time we had no understanding of the white slave trade. We just knew our physical safety was at stake.
Not all threatening events had a tame ending so we needed a security system to help protect us. Electronic surveillance being far too futuristic for Kanpur at that time, we had to resort to creative strategies.
The Indian parrot’s role was to guard the front of the house as she had a bird’s eye view of the driveway from her cage in the verandah.
Screeeeeeech, Screeeeeeech, Screeeeeeech! echoed through the front rooms, splitting eardrums and prompting my mother to say, “There’s someone on the front drive. Stay close to me while I see who it is.” After leading an entourage of children and dogs to the drawing room window she’d look through protective bars and check out the intruder.
“Pretty Polly, pretty dear all the way from Cashmere,” and my mother knew it was one of our regular fruit vendors on the front porch.
“Que Sera Sera.” The joyous song had my mother singing along with the parrot. “That’s Lorraine home from school. Let’s go and greet her.” And Lily and I would fly out to meet our elder sister.
One way or another, no one could creep up without Mitzi announcing their presence. Her plumage was emerald green complemented by a vivid red beak and long tail feathers that she was often silly enough to extend beyond the bars of her cage.
“Don’t pull her tail!” Exasperation showed in my mother’s voice. “How would you like it if someone pulled your hair?” But it was Mitzi who knew the best method to stop me. Betraying a public house background and getti
ng her gender confused, she’d recite:
“Polly’s sick
Call the doctor. Quick, quick, QUICK!
Hang the doctor, call the cook
Polly wants his pint of beer.”
A gaggle of geese were our other watchdogs. “Hiss,” said the old gander flapping wings that could do wicked damage. “You haven’t fed me. I’ll tell Mummy!” And sure enough, a dispatch would intuit my mother’s whereabouts and complain in such a forceful manner that even I had to capitulate.
Every February between five to seven eggs were “set” and six weeks later we’d have fluffy yellow goslings. February was also the month when hawks appeared high in the heavens. Compared to the geese, we were easy targets.
“Aaaaagh!” I yelled as a hawk silently swooped and my paratha became its lunch.
The geese never lost a gosling. The hawks weren’t silly enough to take on a reigning gander.
We relied on the geese. At the back of all our minds was the legend of those birds that saved Rome from the Gauls. Accordingly, the goose run had been built next to our bedroom with their entrance outside our bathroom door. Being territorial and aggressive, the geese objected whenever anyone went past. The old gander would raise its ugly head, raise Cain and lead his harem out to attack. It would take a brave man to take on the geese.
We also had three dogs. Tina the miniature dachshund was my mother’s faithful companion who followed her everywhere. Buckley-the-bitsa was the happy, feel-good one with an overworked tail and we loved him dearly. Reg, the last of our trio, was an adoptee when friends migrated to Australia. He was aloof, not given to showing affection and had no affiliations with anyone.
“There’s something wrong with that mangy-looking dog.” My father’s lip curled with contempt. “He never barks, just sleeps in the sun all day and slinks around in that disgustingly cowed manner as though he’s ill treated.”
All three dogs slept in the house at night. Tina’s bed was an old wooden crate in my mother’s dressing room. Buckley was chained to the grate in the dining room and Reg was meant to be in the fan room. The idea was that dogs, parrot and geese were dotted around the house to alert us to any intrusion.
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