The bey looked at her and smiled. ‘What is so amusing, Hadjana?’
‘I was considering jumping in with the bullocks and having a bath.’
‘There will be no need for that. I will send one of the men to tell the headman we are here. He will know already, one of the peasants would have told him. It is a courtesy. Ayesha can go with him and bring back water for you to have a bath.’
He spoke to the bearers and they began to unpack the tents, pitching them in the shade of a tall feathery tamarind tree and placing bedding inside with mosquito nets draped from the centre pole. Ayesha returned with two pots of water which she emptied into a tin bath in Winifred’s tent, and brought her soap and a towel. She stood there waiting, until Winifred dismissed her. She did not want the girl to see her naked. She felt cooler once she had bathed and put on a clean vest and bloomers, then she lay down to rest. She was tired. It had been a long walk and she had had little sleep the night before. The rest house where they had stayed in Delhi had been infested with fleas. She had been badly bitten.
She woke later to find Ayesha bending over her. The tin tub had disappeared. ‘Mem-sahib, the bey has asked me to call you. They are waiting. The bey sahib said to change into Western dress.’
Winifred rose, conscious that she was wearing only her underwear. She took her corsets out of her suitcase and wrapped them around herself, noticing the look of astonishment on Ayesha’s face, especially when Winifred asked her to pull the laces tight at the back. The girl watched as she fastened stockings onto the suspenders and pulled a petticoat over her head. Before Winifred could stop her Ayesha knelt and, lifting Winifred’s feet one at a time, put on her shoes. Ayesha held out the white linen skirt and Winifred stepped into it. She rubbed some vanishing cream into her face and then powdered her nose, studying her reflection in a small hand mirror before putting on her jacket and pith helmet. As she stood there she wondered what the village headman would make of her. She felt as if she had acquired new strength, as if she was wearing some sort of armour.
She stepped out of the tent and the bey placed his right hand on his forehead and bowed. ‘Ah, Hadjana, they will think you are the Raj Queen.’ He went to his tent and returned with the gold-topped walking stick. ‘Your sceptre, Your Majesty.’
With the bey and Dr John, Winifred began to walk across the fields. A pair of bullocks was harnessed to a plough. They were progressing in slow circles around the field. The farmer stopped his team and stared at the visitors. Winifred was conscious of sari-clad women bending over in a field who straightened up and stared. A group of young boys followed as Winifred and the men moved towards the large hut where the headman was waiting. Winifred looked back and saw that the children were imitating her walk. She began to laugh and they laughed back and began to move closer.
The bey explained to the headman that they had come to minister to the sick in his village and would like to stay a few days. The man looked at Winifred and said something which the bey translated as ‘He thought you had come to collect taxes.’ He began to laugh and Winifred joined in.
They sat outside, with Winifred’s chair being placed apart from the men. She watched as a drink was prepared. The headman poured some into his cupped hand and the bey drank. The process was repeated with the headman drinking from the bey’s hands.
‘It is an opium drink. Now we have been accepted and can begin to work,’ Dr John told her.
It was not long before the patients arrived. Groups of men wandered in, talking among themselves, staring with frank curiosity at Winifred, until hundreds were gathered. Among them were old men bent double who could not walk unaided. Some were covered in sores and others were carried in litters or on the backs of their sons.
Winifred wilted in the heat, watching as Dr John moved among the men, trying to separate those who needed medical attention. She was thirsty and the whalebone in her corsets was pinching into her flesh. She wondered how much longer she would have to sit there sweltering, being ignored by the men as if she had become invisible, like the women she had come to help.
She knew the women were somewhere. She had seen them mixing cow dung with straw, patting it into little flat cakes to be dried in the sun. It was the only fuel they had for cooking. In another field young girls had been scrabbling in the dirt with baskets on their hips. At first she thought they must be gathering stones until the bey said, ‘They’re gleaning grain that has fallen out of the sheaves during the harvest. Once the monsoon brings the spring rain the fields will turn to mud. Often the gleanings are all a poor family has.’
Suddenly Winifred felt angry. She stood and, walking over to the headman, banged her stick on the ground. ‘I have come a long way to see the women. Where are they?’
The headman stared at her open-mouthed. She could see the black stains on his lips and inside his mouth from chewing betel nut. He spoke to one of his men who ran to where the bey was standing with John da Silva. The men turned and stared at her. She was still standing, her hand clenching the gold top of the stick which was planted firmly on the ground, her face set in angry lines.
The bey moved swiftly towards her. ‘Are you not well, Hadjana?’ and put his hand under her elbow. I will ask Ayesha to escort you back to the tent where you can rest.’
‘I do not need to rest. I have come to the villages to help the women. This is what you told me.’ She waved her hands towards the men, many of whom were sitting in the shade laughing and talking among themselves. ‘They are treating this as a holiday.’ She thought back to Oodnadatta where the men sat around at night smoking the narghile beside the fire, while the women remained inside their huts. All her pent-up rage burst from her. ‘This is not a village fete where the men enjoy themselves while the women work. I came to meet the women. Where are they?’
‘They will come presently,’ the headman told the bey. ‘They cannot come where the men are. Their husbands would not like it.’
Winifred could feel her blood rising to her head. She had to restrain herself from raising her stick and striking the headman. Instead she allowed herself to be led away to a space in front of a cluster of mud huts, where a chair was placed for her under the shade of a large banyan tree. She watched as a small red hen, which had been having a dust bath, called to her chicks and they disappeared into the thicket of the tree.
Ayesha brought her a cup of tea and she drank it. Then she took off her helmet and let down her hair. Her corsets were still pinching her and she asked Ayesha to loosen the strings, conscious of eyes staring at her from between the colonnade of aerial roots that reached to the ground from the ancient tree. She wiped the sweat from her face and forehead, leaving red streaks of dust on her white handkerchief, and undid the top buttons of her jacket, tempted to remove it and sit there in her vest, knowing it was impossible. She had always been modest, as these women were.
She did not have long to wait before the women emerged from behind the tree. They came shyly at first and then, gaining confidence, gathered around her. Winifred looked at the vast crowd of women, barefoot, dressed in cotton saris, many wearing the family wealth in gold and silver necklets and nose studs. She smiled and held out her arms to the children who came and sat at her feet.
In that first day she learned to communicate with gestures and through Ayesha, who could speak Urdu, the language of these people. She separated out the women and children who needed medical attention, and sent Ayesha to fetch Dr John so that he could see to them, helping him bathe wounds, put drops in sore eyes and, hold children while their ears were examined. She forgot her exhaustion, forgot the heat, until the call came for evening prayers and Dr John closed his bag and told them he would continue the next day.
That night Winifred folded her white suit and, together with her corsets, packed it into her suitcase, resolving to wear her skirts and blouses with her helmet during the day, and to change into a sari in the evening. As soon as they had eaten she retired to write up the diary she kept in a large exercise book. She was surpr
ised at how happy she felt — as if she was doing something worthwhile for the first time in her life.
Winifred found that the villagers were friendly once they realised that she had come to help them. Always she was asked the same questions: ‘Do you have sons?’ She would watch as they smiled and nudged each other when Ayesha told them that she had two.
The other question was, ‘How old are you?’
She would answer truthfully, ‘Forty-seven,’ seeing the look of surprise on their faces.
‘They say you are very young and very strong,’ Dr John told her. ‘Most women are dead before they are thirty. Worn out with child-bearing or dying from some disease. It is the women who go without when food is short. Sometimes when the monsoon does not arrive there is famine and hundreds die.’
Wherever they went Dr John set up an open-air clinic with Winifred helping. Some faces bore the scars of smallpox, others of impending blindness because of cataracts, for which they could do nothing. Many had blackened teeth from chewing betel nut.
‘Why do they chew it?’ Winifred asked.
‘To ward off the pangs of hunger,’ replied Dr John.
She could understand, remembering how she had taken up smoking on the hadj because there was not enough food.
Most of the villagers had no idea of sanitation. Diarrhoea was rife among the babies. ‘There are many reasons why babies die,’ Dr John said as he bent over a sick girl who had been vomiting. She was naked. Flies were crawling over her face and mouth and he wiped her clean with a damp cloth. ‘The main reason is infected water. Cattle swim in the pond. The women do not realise it is necessary to boil it before drinking.’
He handed the child back to her mother. ‘Give her sips of boiled water,’ he said. ‘Come back again tomorrow.’
He soaped his hands and rinsed them in a basin of water. ‘That child is strong. She does not have a fever. I think she will live.’ Ayesha handed him a towel and he dried his hands. ‘Infant mortality is high in the villages. Often when the mother dies the baby dies too because there is no milk. Sometimes the mother-in-law will give it buffalo’s milk mixed with water If there is no milk the baby is given water in which millet has been soaked. Even if the baby could digest it, unless the water is boiled, the baby will die. Sometimes if the infant is a girl, it is allowed to die.’
He looked at Winifred. ‘You are shocked?’
‘It saddens me,’ she said. She thought about her two daughters. She had loved them equally with her sons. But then there had always been food. Perhaps if she had been born in an Indian village she would think differently.
John da Silva touched her on the arm. ‘Do not take it to heart. It is the way things are in India. It happens among the poor. Perhaps you could talk to the women about the care of children. You are a mother. They are more likely to listen to you.’
Winifred agreed and though the women listened politely as Ayesha translated, she did not think they believed her. They were doing things the way their grandmothers and mothers had taught them. ‘Babies have always died, that is the way things are,’ they said. Winifred did not mention the killing of the baby girls. She knew it must be true, otherwise John da Silva would not have mentioned it, but she did not know how to talk about it.
The villages were dirty, with great mounds of rubbish the haunts of dogs, rats and flies. People would go into the field to defecate and walk away leaving their stools uncovered.
‘Flies breed in excrement and carry diseases like cholera,’ John da Silva told the village elders. He showed them how to dig latrines that could be covered with soil and how to bury rubbish which would enrich the soil once it decayed, but it was hopeless. The next morning the day’s work would have been undone by wild pigs.
‘The village wealth is in their trades,’ the bey said, ‘skills handed down from father to son. The man who makes the farm tools, the potter, the silversmith, the blacksmith, the trader who goes to the cities to sell the produce.’ Winifred was being shown around the village and had stopped to admire some huge pots. ‘They are to hold grain,’ she was told. ‘They also serve as boats when the gods send too much rain and the rivers burst their banks.’
She watched the women weaving grey cloth on small looms and saw the men colouring the fabric, using red ochre, plants and flowers, thumping down printing blocks carved in intricate designs before spreading the finished cloth to dry. The colours reminded her of the desert around Oodnadatta. She wondered if she would ever see it again. She had been so long on the road that she had lost track of time.
28
MOTHER OF SONS
THEY TRAVELLED A LONG WAY from Delhi, heading for the foothills of the Himalayas towards the Khyber Pass, the gateway to Afghanistan. The bey had hired eight bullock waggons and their drivers. Though the wooden carts had no springs, it was easier than walking and they began to advance more rapidly. Winifred had bought a black umbrella at a village bazaar and was glad of the extra shade. She wore a riding skirt and white blouse with a pith helmet during the day, changing into a sari after her bath. Her gold-topped stick had been put away with the white linen suit, although the bey had said, ‘Later, when we go forward on foot, you will be glad of your stick to help you climb the hills or kill a snake.’
Winifred was relieved when they left the plains and reached the upper courses of the rivers. The heat, the exposure to sickness and the plight of the villagers had sapped her strength. Life in India was too fragile. Here the country changed. It was more sparsely populated. Mud huts climbed up hills from the river channels. There were great old trees for shade, and mango groves in flower, the air fragrant with their sweet perfume. The land was terraced and every available space bore signs of cultivation, with small plots of potatoes, pumpkin, cucumber, tobacco, lemons, limes and mulberries.
They pitched their tents among the trees. Away from the villages on the river plains the nights were quieter. As Winifred lay awake she would listen to the voices of the bearers speaking in some dialect she did not understand, the air heavy with smoke from the fire that burned all night to keep tigers at bay. Even though tigers fed on antelope and other small game, there was always the chance that one might wander into the camp and attack. Sometimes she woke to hear the howl of a wolf and for a moment imagined herself back in the Australian bush, listening to the call of the dingo. It was then she would reach under her pillow to feel the revolver she kept there, wondering what she would do if she woke one night to smell the breath of a tiger and see its green eyes glowing in the dark.
Once the terrain was no longer suitable for bullock carts they were exchanged for yaks, which they rode. Among the men who looked after the beasts was Harish, who spoke English and whom Winifred discovered had served with the British on the North-West Frontier. There was a child with the men and he looked about the same age as Rhamat, who had turned eight. She was surprised to hear the child was eleven and already earning his own living. His name was Amir and she watched him build a bamboo cage in which he placed a little bird like a starling that he had snared while they rested at midday.
The sight of the bird in the cage upset her. ‘Ask him how he would like to be locked up,’ she said to Harish. She saw him speak to the child, who looked at her with surprise and then said something to the older man.
‘It is for his sister,’ Harish told Winifred. ‘She is in purdah now that she is old enough to be married. She lives behind the curtain. She will only leave the house when she is taken to her husband’s house. The bird will keep her company until her father can afford a dowry.’
Winifred was silent, wondering if his sister was like a young girl she had seen in one of the villages. A small boy had come up to Winifred and tugged at her sari. She and Ayesha had followed him to a mud hut where his mother was bending over an open fire, stirring a cooking pot. The hut was filled with smoke which made them cough and their eyes water. The mother stood when she saw Winifred and pulled open a ragged hessian curtain. Behind it a young girl was lying on a pile of bags. Wini
fred stepped forward and shuddered when the woman pulled aside the child’s sari to reveal a hideous sore on her neck.
Winifred had sent Ayesha to call Dr John, knowing it would be difficult because the women were in purdah. When the doctor sought permission from the father to examine the child, he refused, saying, ‘It is the will of Allah that she should suffer.’ No amount of pleading on the part of Winifred could make him change his mind. She found it hard to accept, sure that Allah was merciful and would not have inflicted such pain on an innocent young girl. It worried her to think that men had such power over women.
She had her revenge in a village where she was called on to become judge and jury. The headman had asked the bey to give his opinion on a dispute between a man and his wife. When he heard the nature of the grievance he convened a court and asked Winifred to dress in her white outfit and hear the case.
The wife was led into the court. She was a pitiful sight, barefooted and dressed in rags, so stooped that her head almost touched the ground. A chair was brought and the old woman was seated, her head lolling, her face criss-crossed with lines. Winifred saw that she was almost blind. Her health was broken and her husband had divorced her and taken a younger wife, a girl of sixteen from a poor family. He had turned his first wife out and refused to feed her. The village had disowned her and she had nowhere to go and was living on scraps she found in the rubbish heap.
‘Has your wife borne children?’ Winifred asked the man.
He glared at her, his eyes fierce under a dark-green turban. Though he had a long grey beard his back was straight and he looked years younger than his wife. The interpreter repeated her question and the old man nodded.
‘How many?’
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