by Shobha Rao
“Shall we have Mr. Reed over, dear? Tomorrow, for tea?” Mrs. Chilcott said.
Lavinia yawned.
Arun’s mother—who was the Chilcott’s longtime cook and housemaid—came in carrying a tray with a bottle of port and four glasses. She set it down soundlessly on the center table. Then she glanced at Arun. He was watching Lavinia, the way her fingers wrapped delicately around the glass, the white of her skin like polished marble against the bloodred port. Earlier, in a moment of terrifying breathlessness, he’d caught a glimpse of a sliver of her bony knee as she’d folded her legs under her dressing gown.
“It’s settled then,” Mrs. Chilcott said. “I’ll have Arun take a message over in the morning.”
Lavinia sighed. “I wish my green silk were ready.”
“The dressmaker said not for another week.”
“The dressmaker,” Dicky roared. “Why, you already have enough to fill Westminster Abbey. Besides, old Quince would propose to you if you had on a burlap sack.”
Lavinia smiled, took a sip of her port, and looked at Arun. It was the first time she’d looked at him. Her eyes, in the lamplight, were the green-gray of the Gomti on a clear day. Her face was the shape and color of a peeled almond. “Fetch me a sandwich, won’t you? Something light. Cucumber, I think.”
“Why, Lavinia,” Mrs. Chilcott broke in, “you’ve just had your dinner.”
“Leave her be, Georgette,” Colonel Chilcott said. “The poor girl’s traveled halfway across this country.”
Lavinia sank back into the cushions of her chair and said, “Traveling does make one…” She trailed off when she noticed Arun watching her; she smiled at him, teasingly, as if she already knew he was in love with her, and she said, “Hungry.” Then she raised a pretty eyebrow and said, “Don’t you think?”
When Arun got to the kitchen his mother was putting away the dishes from dinner. He spoke in Hindi, trembling. “Chota memsahib wants a sandwich, ma.”
His mother—old now, left by her husband when her children were still young, with two daughters she’d not seen since she got them married years ago, one in Kanpur and the other in Meerut, and having worked every day without fail for the past eighteen years—breathed deeply. She shook her head. “That girl,” she said.
Arun grew angry. “Stop complaining,” he said. “She’s traveled half the country. It’ll take two minutes.”
His mother put down the knife she’d taken out to slice the cucumber. She was a head shorter than Arun and bent, her hair had gone completely gray, but for one instant—just that one last instant—she stood tall. “No, my son,” she said. “She’ll take more than that.”
* * *
Arun delivered the message to Mr. Reed’s butler the next morning. He considered crumpling it up and throwing it into the gutter but that was foolish; they’d realize immediately that he was at fault. Instead he settled for slipping the note into his kurta bottom and rubbing it against his genitals. By the time he returned, preparations for the tea were well under way. His mother was busy in the kitchen. The other servants were cleaning and sweeping and polishing every surface in the house, even the upstairs, where Mr. Reed was unlikely to go. Mrs. Chilcott was buried deep in her curtained room, hoping for an afternoon nap. Dicky and the colonel had gone to the club after lunch, promising Mrs. Chilcott again and again that they wouldn’t be late for tea. And Lavinia was in her room. What was she doing? Arun wondered. He walked slowly by her door every few minutes, hoping to catch some sound or maybe even a glimpse. He was sure to take with him a candlestick or a dust cloth or a broom, in case he was caught out. He needn’t have worried: the upstairs was eerily quiet. Mrs. Chilcott must have fallen asleep, and as for Lavinia, he was rewarded only once when, as he passed by her door, the linen yellow dress lay in a heap outside of it, presumably for the laundress. Arun looked up and down the hushed hallway, picked up the dress, and sniffed it. And there! There was that lingering smell of dusk, and railway dust, and coal, the soaring Himalayas, and just there, along the underarms, her true scent: pungent, animal, and so fugitive that he raised it to his mouth and sucked on it.
Mr. Reed arrived promptly at four, squawking his car horn. The servants were at attention. The sandwiches, cakes, and tea things were set out in the main hall, and Colonel Chilcott and Dicky were in the drawing room, reading The Times of India. By the time Mrs. Chilcott entered the drawing room, the three men were talking and joking about the Salt March. “Next thing you know they’ll be walking all the way to London,” Dicky said, laughing. Mrs. Chilcott settled into a wicker chair and told one of the servant girls to go and see if Miss Chilcott needed assistance. “The poor darling is so rightly famished, Mr. Reed,” she said. “Train journeys in this country are abominable compared to English trains, don’t you think?” They all nodded in agreement.
The harshness of the afternoon light dimmed, the tea was brought out, and Lavinia entered.
The men rose and each of them, including Arun, took a short intake of breath. She was ravishing: her chestnut hair was curled in a fashionable bob, she wore a simple yet elegant dress of silvery lilac, and her face—those Gomti eyes and moistened lips—shimmered in the last of the winter’s light. Her arms were bare, soft and beautiful, and the slight translucent sleeves of her dress, resting like butterfly’s wings against her shoulders, just hid them as they curved upward into her throat. And it was they—her shoulders—that Arun couldn’t take his eyes from.
Mr. Reed approached her, kissed her hand. Arun bristled. Tea was poured and after some pleasantries, Mr. Reed invited Dicky and Lavinia to a garden party at the club the following week. “That sounds lovely”—Lavinia breathed—“and my green dress will be ready.”
Colonel Chilcott had heard talk about a cricket match being organized, Dicky and Mr. Reed gave each other a look and said they didn’t know of it. A cool breeze flowed through the windows and Lavinia pouted and said, “Why aren’t we sitting on the veranda? It’s too stuffy in here.” Everyone was again in agreement and Arun was sent out to organize the tables and chairs. They shifted to the veranda, with the servants bringing the tea things and the colonel’s pipe and cigarettes for Mr. Reed and Dicky. Once they had settled, talk resumed about the changes at the country club, and changes in the weather, and the changes needed in India’s governance. But Arun heard none of it. He was concentrating with all his might on Lavinia’s shoulders. Their lithe and hidden curves. Waiting, waiting, for the wind to conspire and raise her sleeve, just enough so that only he would see, only he would grow hard, and she would reveal herself, shyly, only to him.
* * *
The winter’s deepening brought more garden parties for Mr. Reed and Dicky and Lavinia. All-day polo matches were organized at the country club, as well as a trip to a rest house on the outskirts of Mathura, and even an elephant race that held all the pomp and fanfare of the Royal Ascot. Mr. Reed, or Quincy, as the family began to call him, came and went almost daily. He and Dicky and Lavinia would stumble into the house arm in arm in arm, laughing and singing and boisterous, full of youth and all its merriments. Most often, unless he was addressed directly, Arun would leave the room as quickly as possible and race back to the servants’ quarters—where he and his mother shared a room—and sulk. A few times he cried. Once he broke a bell jar lantern in the main hall and blamed it on a stray bird.
At the end of January, Mr. Reed and Lavinia announced their engagement. It was a bright, clear day. It was warm enough that Dicky told Arun to bring them nimbu pani. They were gathered in the sitting room, and when Mr. Reed told them Lavinia had honored him by saying yes, the family broke into a loud cheer. “My dears,” Mrs. Chilcott said, “there’s so much to do. When will you marry? Summer is far too hot in this horrid place, perhaps the autumn?”
Mr. Reed glanced quickly at Dicky and then looked down. “We, Lavinia and I, we were thinking of March.”
“March?” Mrs. Chilcott said. “Did you hear that, Francis? There’s so much to buy. How will I ever get to E
ngland and back by March?”
The conversation went on and on in this way. It wasn’t until minutes later that Dicky noticed Arun standing very still. “Didn’t I tell you to bring us nimbu pani? What are you doing, standing there? Hard of hearing?”
The sound of Dicky’s voice was as if someone had knocked him against the wall. Arun shook his head awkwardly, shuffled into the kitchen, and collapsed in a corner, weeping. His mother ran to him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Already his face was covered in tears. It was as though something had broken in him, as though something tucked behind the breastbone had shattered; something he had never even quite come to know, and had certainly never protected. His mother rushed to console him, not knowing what was wrong, and he managed to utter the words nimbu pani, and she understood only that much and left him, reluctantly, to prepare it.
That night he stumbled in the dark, unable to sleep. He walked around to the back of the house and looked out over the moonlit gardens. The damp shadows and pockets of blackness fit his mood. He drew blood when he pounded his fist against a stone bench. And the moon, what a traitorous moon: it was exactly the silver lilac of Lavinia’s dress. He was walking along the garden wall at the side of the house when he noticed a small light, probably only a single candle, coming from Dicky’s room. He was reading, Arun guessed, but then he heard voices. He crept along the wall and raised himself onto a ledge to see through the window. It was Mr. Reed and Dicky. They each had a drink in their hands, a whiskey maybe, and Dicky was walking around the room and Mr. Reed was sitting on the divan. Dicky was saying, “At the end of summer, I should say.”
“That far away?”
Dicky looked at Mr. Reed and then he crossed the room and sat down next to him. He rubbed Mr. Reed’s thigh and placed his drink on the floor, next to the divan. Arun stumbled backward. He stood still and out of the window came a small moan, and then another. Arun ran to his quarters. His mother was asleep. He looked at her: tiny, helpless, marked by the meanness of life. A life spent serving people who were no better than dogs, a life of being ordered around by them, cleaning up after them, being told to bring them fucking nimbu pani. And his poor sweet Lavinia, adrift in this sewage. She didn’t even know! And so it was that his mother’s sleeping, servile face gave him courage: he would get Lavinia alone, that’s what he would do.
* * *
He waited a week for the right opportunity. She had just returned from the club. Dicky and Mr. Reed were still there, and would be arriving shortly. The colonel and Mrs. Chilcott were in Delhi attending a dinner at the Viceroy’s House. She was in the drawing room. Arun entered it with sure strides, carrying a pot of tea and biscuits. He set it down in front of her. She was wearing a white blouse and a dark brown skirt. Her hair was done up with a satin bow. Though the sleeves of her blouse were long, Arun was able to make out the peak of her shoulder blade through the fabric. It was scintillating, the height of some great mountain pass.
“What is it? What are you looking at?”
She broke his reverie. Arun looked away but he realized he had to say it, how could he go on living without doing so? “I am—” he began, and then he fell silent.
She stared at him above her teacup. “Well, what is it?”
Arun heaved up his chest and concentrated on her shoulder. “I am … I am loving you, memsahib.”
He dared not look at her but he felt a silence, unbearable in its weight, fall over the room. And then she broke it; she laughed. Not for very long, and not even very heartily. “How quaint,” she said after a moment. “Now run along. Quincy and Dicky will be here soon and they’ll be famished. Tell your mother to set an extra plate.”
He turned to go but then he stopped. His eyes flashed. His body filled with something acrid. Searing. It was not that she’d been dismissive, it was not that she’d ordered him away, it was her laugh. So false, so unconvincing, so shabby; as if he were merely a child who’d done a little trick, and she only had to look up and feign amusement—and even then, not for very long—in order to satisfy him. He turned again and by now the rage was liquid, thicker than air. “Your Mr. Reed, memsahib, I must be telling you. He and Sahib Dicky—”
Her head shot up. “Don’t you think I know that, you fool?” she seethed. Her face flushed redder than he’d known possible.
“But your marriage?” he stammered.
At this she was silent. The color drained from her face and there settled into her eyes a gray, stony light. “He’s rich,” she said. “He could buy you. He could buy a hundred of you.”
“But, memsahib,” and here he reached out to touch her shoulder, the very tip, not really knowing what he was doing, only wanting to reach her in some way, to convey a thing he could not speak. But before he reached it she swatted his hand away. “How dare you,” she said. There seemed to be a slight struggle in her voice, the slightest hint of sorrow, but he knew it was for herself, not for him. “How dare you,” she said again.
* * *
His humiliation was, of course, expected. But what he hadn’t anticipated was his anger. He could hardly breathe. For his love to be called quaint, to be swatted away like a fly, to not even be acknowledged. It was too much. He walked through the rooms and did his chores with a deep and disturbing stoicism. He spit in her teacup, he came into her underclothes, he squeezed a drop of blood from his finger into her mulligatawny soup.
His mother noticed his distress but could do nothing. “Why don’t you go visit your sisters,” she suggested.
“Why?” he asked. “So I can see their servants’ quarters?”
“It’s our lot in life.” His mother sighed.
“Shut your mouth. It’s no lot of mine.”
His mother was quiet for a moment and then she said, softly, “My son. Anger is a forest with no path.”
He smiled. “She will know me.”
“Who?” his mother asked. “Is this about chota memsahib?”
But he said nothing.
The true surprise came a week later when both Arun and his mother were dismissed. None of the Chilcott family was even home; they were told curtly by Mr. Chilcott’s butler to leave the grounds of the estate by nightfall. “Hai Ram. What will we do?” Arun’s mother wailed.
“Pack,” he said.
“But why?” she cried. “You did something to her. Did you do something to her?”
He left their room without a word. He walked along the Gomti for hours. They had a few rupees saved; he could leave his mother with one of his sisters and then look for work. He would find a job in Lucknow, close to Lavinia. Maybe even in the country club, where he could see her daily. What was he watching her for, he wondered, but the thought left him as soon as it had come. What did it matter? These days Arun’s thoughts, disturbing thoughts, thoughts that twisted into themselves and made no sense, he was able to shed as effortlessly as dead skin.
When he returned to their room, late in the evening, he was nearly joyous. His anger had found its source: his own weakness. The river had refreshed him, and Lavinia was his, his, his, and always would be. But when he opened the door to the room he found his mother lying on the ground. Their few clothes, some pots, and his bedding were spread around her. She was lying next to the hemp rope bed on which she slept. “Get up, Ma,” he said, “I have a plan.” She didn’t move. He took two steps, to the middle of the room, and realized her body was strangely still. Arun let out a cry and plunged to her side, but she was already dead.
* * *
Arun sat alone in the dark. The butler had come by earlier to ask for the key but he’d taken one look at his mother’s body on the floor and said, “You can stay till morning.” Otherwise, no one came or went. He sat motionless; thoughts scampered through his mind like rats. Nothing settled, nothing stayed still. Not until deep into the night when he finally lit the oil lantern. He adjusted the wick and placed it on the ground next to him, between him and his mother. And that’s when he saw it: that’s when he saw the spider.
When finally the spider began to crawl away, Arun watched it go and said, “Don’t go too far.” He waited till she’d reached her web, in a far corner under the bed, and then he too got up and left. By now it was morning, and flies had begun to gather around his mother’s body.
* * *
He returned a fortnight later. He knew where the opening was in the wall that surrounded the estate, and he only had to push aside a few overgrown bushes to find it. He also knew that Lavinia would be alone; Mrs. Chilcott had already left for England, the colonel had stayed on in Delhi, and Dicky and Mr. Reed never returned from the club before eight o’clock. It was now a little after two and lunch would’ve already been served; the servants would have retired to their quarters for the afternoon.
He found her in the sitting room, reading. She must have gone riding, he guessed, because she was wearing jodhpurs and a long-sleeved cotton blouse. The punkah above her head moved listlessly in the slight breeze, the windows were thrown open. The afternoon light made the room seem to sway, as if it were a cabin on a tall ship. He entered it noiselessly, crouched and careful on the wood floor. He had with him a large quantity of rope, a rag, and a knife, and this last he pushed against her temple and said, “Nothing doing, memsahib.” He then took the rag and stuffed it in her mouth and tied it behind her head. He told her to get up—the knife still grazing her skin—and pushed her out through the main hall and into the back garden, and then toward the servants’ quarters, into the room he and his mother had shared.