Belonging

by Umi Sinha

  I notice I am delaying writing the words, as though putting them down in ink will make them real. Rebecca’s miscarriages were not an accident – that is what he told me. My wife has been aborting her babies… has killed five of our children with cold-blooded deliberation.

  I did not believe him at first and accused him of maliciously spreading rumours; I even threatened to sue him for defamation of character. I almost began to think Rebecca was right about people persecuting her. I know that he, like most people, has never liked her, but I could tell that he was sorry for me. He told me he had suspected it with the previous miscarriage but this time he found evidence of it. When he showed me the piece of twig that local women apparently use to procure an abortion I was nearly sick. I knew at once who was behind it, for there is only one person close enough to her to have helped her, and without whose knowledge she could not have done it.

  I don’t know what to do. In her present condition I dare not upset her, and yet I cannot allow her to destroy this child like all the others. Why did I not reject her advances? And yet part of me is angry, angry enough to be glad she is pregnant, and vindictive enough to take pleasure in the fact that I will force her to carry this child to term whether she wants it or not.

  29th March 1894

  Last night I dreamt that I was in one of those strange gardens she embroiders so exquisitely. It was like the Garden of Eden, except that baby hands and feet were growing from the tree branches in place of fruit, opening and closing their fat little fingers like sea anemones. The plants at my feet had plump pink lips growing in place of flowers, all opening wide and quivering, as though they were screaming. The air was filled with the sound of it: short bursts of high-pitched screaming, stopping and starting like a chorus of crickets. Things were scuttling along the ground by my feet, and when I looked closer I saw that they were eyeballs moving along on their spider-leg lashes. I came to an apple tree. There was the stench of over-ripe fruit in the air and as I approached it the tree came to life and a twiglike arm reached out to me, holding an apple streaked purple, yellow and sickly green. My fingers sank into it and I realised it was rotten. I turned it in my hand and realised it was the back part of a baby’s decaying foot and threw it from me in horror. The screaming got louder and louder and the ground began to move under me. I woke to find Rebecca shaking me by the shoulder and calling my name.

  I shrank back, then got up and went out on to the verandah to get away from her. The skin on my neck and back was crawling. She followed me and began to stroke my shoulders and I flinched away.

  ‘Go to bed.’ I could not even bring myself to say her name.

  ‘You’re angry with me,’ she said, in that hurt child voice that usually awakens my compassion, but all I felt was rage and disgust. She put her hand out to me and I stepped away.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  She turned away, miserable. I will have to tell her I know, but I feared that if I spoke to her then I would become violent. If I am honest, I intended to punish her, to make her suffer. I know that her greatest fear is of being ostracised, and it is a result she always provokes in the end – a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the terrible things I have discovered is that there is pleasure in tormenting someone who seems to invite it.

  This morning her ayah – that bitch of a woman, Zainab – came to see me. She said in an accusing voice, ‘How can you be so cruel to her when she is carrying your child?’

  I was so suffused with rage that my teeth were chattering. I got her by the wrist and dragged her into the front garden away from the house and the servants.

  ‘How dare you say that to me? Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing, you and your… your… precious girl?’

  Her face went white.

  ‘Yes, I know it all. The doctor told me yesterday. Why did you do it? All those babies… my children… murdered!’

  She put her hands to her cheeks in pretend shock. ‘What are you saying, sahib?’

  Her playacting turned my rage to ice. I said coldly, ‘The doctor told me what he found. How many times? Were they all done deliberately?’

  She did not reply.

  I told her she was dismissed, that she must leave my house today and that she would get no pension from me. Nor would she ever see Rebecca again. ‘Think yourself lucky that I’m not handing you over to the police. If you were tried for this you would be hanged.’

  This afternoon she came to me and broke down. She fell to her knees and clutched my feet and begged me not to send her away. ‘She’s all I’ve got. She is my life,’ she kept saying.

  ‘And my children were mine,’ I retorted, trying to back away, but she followed me on her knees.

  ‘She did not mean to hurt you, sahib. She was afraid…’

  ‘Afraid of what? Tell me why she wanted to murder our children… and why you helped her.’

  And then she said something that astonished me. ‘They say that you can tell when a baby is born if it has Indian blood. She was afraid the baby would look Indian.’

  I stared at her. ‘But why on earth should she think…? Do you mean she thinks that I…?’

  ‘No, sahib. Not that.’ And then she said something I found almost as hard to credit as the doctor’s story – she told me that she is not Rebecca’s ayah at all, but her mother!

  This is her story. According to her, Ramsay had a preference for little girls and bought her virginity and exclusive rights to her when she was twelve. She was then being trained as a courtesan in Lucknow by a woman to whom her brother had sold her after their parents died. Ramsay fell in love with her and bought her out. He took her as his bibi, but when she became pregnant she insisted on marriage and he agreed, to keep her happy. They lied about her age; she was just fourteen.

  ‘He still loved me then,’ she said bitterly.

  They lived together as man and wife in Calcutta, where he worked as a manager for a tea company. It was the comment of an Englishwoman that the baby was so fair she could pass for a European that gave him the idea. When he was appointed manager of a new tea plantation in Assam, where no one knew him, he took the opportunity to change his story. He told Zainab that Rebecca, who was then two, would have a better chance in life if she was thought to be white, and that from now on she must pretend to be Rebecca’s ayah and say that her mother was dead.

  It was a preposterous story. Did she really think I was such an imbecile as to believe it? ‘But why should he do such a thing? And why would you accept it?’ I demanded.

  She shrugged. ‘He was tired of me. He always liked young girls. And what choice did I have? He told me that unless I agreed he would send me away and I would never see my daughter again.’ Her voice shook as she said it, and suddenly I remembered her panic that night when we had stood in the temple above the tank as Roland and Rebecca walked below. And something else: an image of a pair of sandalled feet near the base of a white pillar illuminated by moonlight. I looked down. Her feet were high-arched, with four long slim toes and one short one, like the feet on a Greek statue. I revisited that feeling of déjà vu I had when I first saw Rebecca’s feet on the day I proposed to her. How could I not have seen it sooner?

  Her story seems to explain much that has puzzled me about their relations. If it is true, then I have been party to a terrible injustice. I have even threatened Zainab, in almost the same words as Ramsay did, that I would separate her forever from her daughter.

  But is it really possible that Rebecca is ignorant that the woman is her mother? Zainab assures me that she is; that she herself, afraid of losing her daughter, agreed to do everything she could to make Rebecca forget.

  ‘I told her not to call me Mama and when she didn’t stop I would slap her, but still she persisted. One day when she kept on repeating it he shouted at me to pack my bags and go that evening, so I took her to the bathroom and I held her head under the water, and I told her I would stop only when she called me “ayah”. But she is stubborn, like him… she was choking and crying
but she would not say it… she would not…’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘But I continued until she fainted. Afterwards she got a fever and was so ill I thought she would die. The doctor said it was a brain fever, and when she got better she no longer called me mother. And from that day she stopped caring for me, only for her father. But I do not blame her for it. It was he… that sewer… may he spend eternity burning in Jehannum.’

  I have no idea what to make of this story. I do not trust her and yet she told it to me with such emotion that, despite myself, I could not help feeling moved. She has begged me to say nothing to Rebecca for fear of provoking another brain fever, for she says Rebecca has had several in her life. ‘At school, the other girls tormented her. They were so cruel that she became ill and had to be sent home. And you saw yourself how ill she was when that… that sewer Sutcliffe… abandoned her. I thought she was going to die then too.’

  ‘But I still don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Does she think I care about such things? That I would reject or abandon her? I have never given her the slightest cause to think so!’ On the contrary, it has always been she who expressed a dislike of Indians and behaved badly towards them. And yet it all makes sense: her greater ease with men who, blinded by her beauty, ask no awkward questions; her tearful outbursts when other women question her about her people; her fear of the servants, for they are the quickest to spot pretence and affectation. It occurs to me for the first time that our servants may well know what I have been so blind to, which may explain why she has never been able to assert her authority over them, and why Zainab has had to run the house. I know they do not like her either – I have heard them call her a ‘churail’ – but they fear her. (Ironic that a churail is a witch, the ghost of a woman who has died in childbirth.)

  It only occurred to me after our conversation that if the reason her mother gave for Rebecca’s actions is true – that she feared her babies might give away the fact that she has Indian blood – it must mean that she knows the truth. Is it possible that she can both know and not know? I have sometimes thought she seems almost like two different people; I still remember how loving she was in the early days of our marriage, and her kindness to Father.

  I do not know if Zainab has told her of our conversation, but her chastened behaviour seems to suggest it – or at least suggests that she has been advised to act repentant – for I no longer trust her, trust either of them.

  30th March 1894

  I spoke to the doctor today and he has advised me to wait for another month until the pregnancy is firmly established before withdrawing her laudanum. We have agreed that in the interim she will need to be watched at all times. I have applied for an immediate leave of absence on compassionate grounds for, repulsive as the thought is, it seems to me the only way to ensure the survival of this child is for me to act as her jailer. As a double surety, I have told Zainab that if Rebecca loses this child I will hand them both over to the police and the doctor will give evidence against them.

  2nd April 1894

  I realised this morning that I cannot continue to ignore Rebecca. I shall have to make some attempt to get her to confide in me. Although I am angry and disgusted, I also pity her, for – like a snake – she cannot help her nature, which has been twisted by the deceit practised on her since her infancy.

  This afternoon I invited her to come and sit on the verandah with me, for I could not bear to be alone with her in her darkened room. She came out and sat, her hands folded in her lap, with the same blank expression she wears when she is in the company of other women, and I suddenly saw that her composure is a mask, and that she is not relaxed at all but holding herself still with every muscle tensed, poised to ward off the attack she is always expecting.

  ‘It must be exhausting to be you,’ I said.

  She looked at me. In the shadow of the verandah the disparity between her eyes was less marked and once again I marvelled at her beauty, but it no longer moves me. Nor am I any longer taken in by her promise of light and warmth, a promise I know from experience is hollow, as hollow as she is when the show is over and she sinks back into herself: an empty bucket being lowered into a cold, dark well.

  She did not reply and I could tell she was going over my words suspiciously, weighing them to assess any threat they might hold.

  ‘I don’t want to torment you. I just want to understand,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you remember about your childhood. The truth.’

  She looked down at her hands and began to talk, obediently, like a child doing what it is told. She told me about her childhood, the hill station where she grew up, all the usual stuff she has told Father and me over the years about how close she and her father were, how he doted on her and adored her. I must have made a movement of impatience because she glanced at me and added quickly, ‘But that was when I was little.’

  ‘Tell me about later.’

  She hesitated and then said, ‘I had one friend there – the daughter of one of the women who worked on the tea estate. I called her Ungoo. We played together although Ayah didn’t like it – she said I would pick up “jungli” habits – but I used to sneak outside in the afternoon when she was sleeping and meet Ungoo at the edge of the garden.’

  Her voice was dreamy. I wondered how much of what she was telling me was the truth and how much a fantasy.

  ‘Our games were quite innocent at first, but then, when we were about nine or ten, Ungoo started doing things that she said were secret – things that I mustn’t tell anybody. Things she said men did to women.’ She glanced at me as though expecting some reaction but I kept my face blank.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then I would go back before Ayah woke and slip back into bed and pretend I’d been there all the time. And then one afternoon Ayah found us and saw what we were doing. She was angry and she told Father and he sent me away to boarding school.’

  ‘Tell me about school.’

  ‘I hated it there. The other girls were horrible to me. I didn’t know anything about books or fashion or famous people or any of the things they talked about and they made fun of me and called me names, said I was “country-born” and ignorant. They called me a witch because my eyes were different colours. And it got worse and worse. They accused me of doing things I hadn’t done – things like stealing their trinkets and putting nasty things in their beds. They even hid some of their things in my box so it looked as though I had stolen them. When they asked about my people and I said that my mother was Irish, they made fun of me. One of them said I was lying. Then they started singing every time I entered a room… they pretended they were just singing to themselves so the teachers wouldn’t know, but I knew it was meant for me.’

  She sang in a soft breathy voice:

  ‘There’s a dear little plant that grows on our isle.

  ’Twas St Patrick himself that sure set it;

  and the sun on his labour with pleasure did smile,

  and with dew from his eye often wet it.

  It shines thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake and the mireland,

  And he called it the dear little shamrock of Ireland;

  That dear little shamrock, the sweet little shamrock,

  The dear little, sweet little shamrock of Ireland.’

  Her mouth twisted. I watched her, mesmerised. I find it hard to understand now how I could have been so caught in her spell that I did not perceive how mad she is.

  ‘It got worse and worse. They told dreadful lies…’ Tears gathered on her lower lashes and, unmoved, I watched them tremble there. ‘No one would sit next to me at table or in class. They stole my books and hid them or spilt ink on my homework so I got into trouble with the teachers. Then one day someone put broken glass in the face cream of the girl who teased me the most, and it scarred her face. They said that it was me, that someone had seen me with the jar, so the school sent me home. Ayah was angry with me. She didn’t believe me – she’s always been against me – but I was glad to be home with Daddy. I thought he would be pleased t
o see me, but he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t read me stories any more, or even come to my room to say goodnight. He said I was too old for all that and he was ashamed of me. And then I got ill.

  ‘When I was better I went looking for Ungoo… It was the monsoon and I went to the plantation where her mother worked and she was there, planting tea. I didn’t realise it was her at first – she was wearing one of those palm leaf shelters they use to keep the rain off – and then she stood up and she had a baby strapped to her back and… it was horrible! The baby had blue eyes!’ Her voice broke. ‘And then some months later another of the girls had a baby and someone complained to the company… so we came down to the plains and Daddy got a job with the steamboat company.’

  The story fits more or less with what Zainab told me, and the tales I’ve heard about Ramsay, but she recited it so flatly that it seemed like a story she had heard or read rather than experienced. And yet I can see no reason for her to invent it. But there is still no admission that she knows, or suspects, the truth about her own birth. I am tempted to tell her, but it would do no good. She would simply add me to her list of persecutors.

  When I told her that I have taken three months’ leave to take care of her, she smiled, but her eyes were those of a trapped animal.

  14th May 1894

  Rebecca has been off the laudanum now for three weeks and is suffering dreadfully. Her skin has turned grey, she sweats and shivers and begs us to give her ‘just one drop’. It is pitiful to listen to, but the doctor insists we must not weaken, as if she is still taking it in her sixth month it could cause a premature birth. Zainab stays with her day and night. I believe she would give in, if she dared, for she cannot bear to watch Rebecca suffer. I am concerned about what will happen when I return to work for I have used almost all my long leave and will need to go back at the end of June.