Belonging

by Umi Sinha

  5th June 1894

  Today I had a letter from Father to say that Kishan Lal has died. I have not seen either of them for more than a year. Father said he went peacefully. ‘I was at his bedside and he remembered you at the end and asked me to give his regards to chotta sahib. I shall feel his absence greatly; he was with me for more than thirty years.’

  Father is eighty-four, too old to live alone without someone he trusts. I have asked him to come to us. He and Rebecca have always got on well, and he will be company for her when I go back to work and also another a pair of eyes for me. I cannot, of course, tell him the truth, but he knows she is highly strung. And he will be a match for her mother for, even at his age, he is a man who commands respect.

  19th October 1894

  I am a father. Our daughter was born five days ago in the early hours of the morning – a small but healthy baby with a thatch of dark hair.

  She was born in the hospital at Patna, as Rebecca developed a fever a few days before her birth and had to be rushed to hospital. The midwife brought her out to me, tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes. I took the stiff little bundle in my arms and looked into her face. Her delicate skin had a yellowish tinge and her eyes were closed; she looked self-contained and peaceful, like a tiny Buddha, perfect and complete in herself.

  It should have been the happiest moment of my life but all I could feel was depression at the thought of the world she is being born into: a world in which the prejudices and judgements of others may distort and twist all that potential. I pictured Rebecca as an innocent baby and felt like weeping when I thought what life has done to her. For a moment I wanted to hand the child back, to refuse the responsibility for this precious, fragile life. I wonder if this is how my mother felt as she held me in her arms.

  The midwife was watching me. ‘She takes after you,’ she said, in a meaningful tone, but when I smiled at her she looked away.

  I went in to see Rebecca. She was lying with her face to the wall and would not look at me. The midwife tried to place the baby in her arms but she kept them clamped to her body. The doctor beckoned me outside. He was a young man recently come from England. He appeared uncomfortable and, like the midwife, avoided my eyes. ‘Your wife seems to be suffering from a delusion that the baby isn’t hers,’ he said. ‘It does sometimes happen that women don’t take to motherhood. It may improve with time.’

  ‘Did something happen to upset her?’

  He said reluctantly, ‘When we delivered the baby we noticed there was a large mark like a bruise on her lower back. The midwife said it was a sign that the child has Asian blood. I remembered reading about it in medical school – it’s called a Mongolian blue spot. I’m afraid your wife overheard the conversation and it disturbed her. We assumed…’ He hesitated.

  ‘Assumed…?’

  ‘That she would have known.’

  I stared at him for a few moments before I realised they thought that I had deceived Rebecca about my origins. I wanted to punch him, but what would it have achieved?

  When we got home I put the baby in Father’s arms and he looked down at her and smiled and said, ‘She has your mother’s eyes.’

  One part of me was glad, another sorry that she should carry anything of our history. I would like to free her of it all – of that grinding weight that bears down on us and pushes our lives in directions we never dreamt of.

  Lila

  Yesterday, the doorbell rang as I was coming down to breakfast. I opened the door and the postman handed me a letter. As I took it, I felt that mixture of dread and excitement that I always feel these days when I see my name on a letter. No one writes to me except Barbara. The letter was stamped and postmarked in England and addressed in a hand I didn’t recognise. I tore it open. Inside was another envelope, addressed to me in Jagjit’s father’s hand.

  I went so white that the postman made me sit down in the hallway and went round to the kitchen to ask Enid to bring me some water. Hearing her fussing over me, Mrs. Beauchamp came out. ‘What is it, my dear? Not bad news, I hope?’

  ‘From his father.’ My lips felt as clumsy as they had when I first started speaking again.

  ‘Do you want me to stay with you while you read it?’

  I nodded, took a deep breath and tore open the letter.

  20th April 1919

  Dear daughter,

  I am sending this with the son of my friend who is going to England, so I can be sure it will reach you. I am happy to give you good news. Jagjit is alive and is at home with us.

  I burst into tears.

  Mrs. Beauchamp put her arms around me. ‘My dear, I am so sorry.’

  I pushed her away. ‘He’s alive.’

  ‘Alive? But my dear, how wonderful!’

  ‘That is good news, Miss,’ Enid said beaming. She always liked Jagjit.

  ‘It is real, isn’t it? The letter… it’s not a dream?’

  ‘No, my dear, it’s not a dream.’ Mrs. Beauchamp smiled.

  ‘Do you want me to pinch you, miss?’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, Enid,’ Mrs. Beauchamp said. ‘Why don’t you take the letter upstairs and read it quietly, Lila? I’ll send a telegram to Simon. He’ll be so relieved.’

  I went upstairs to my room and stood looking out at the slope of the Downs. It seemed right that the bluebells should be in flower – I could see clumps of them along the fence.

  Jagjit was in a camp very far in the desert. After the war, they were left without food. He and the other men walked for many days. My son was lucky to be found by some kind British officers in a Jeep who were looking for their men. They kept him in hospital in Aden for two months but he was too sick to tell them his name. He is still very weak and has many bad dreams and is much disturbed in his mind. The doctors say he will get better but he is very much changed. When I met him at Karachi I did not know him.

  He tells me the reason our letters did not reach him was because when they left Kut he changed places with an old soldier who was wounded. He gave up his own place in the officers’ truck, as only officers were allowed to ride. He thought when they reached Baghdad he would be able to rejoin them, but instead they were forced to march for many hundreds of miles through the desert and the Turkish guards were very cruel. Many men fell down and were left behind to die.

  He tells me the British at Kut did not behave well to the Indians. Here too they have broken the promises they made when our sons went to fight in their war. The Rowlatt Act has upset many people, and you must have heard what happened in Amritsar one week ago, when soldiers fired bullets into a crowd of people who had gone there for the Baisakhi festival. There were many women and children in the crowd and some people jumped in a well to escape and were drowned. Some of them were from our village.

  Jagjit says he no longer wishes to work for the British. Instead he wants to use his knowledge of the law to help our people who have been put in prison by your government. He asks me to tell you that he will not return to England, and that it is not safe for you to come here.

  Daughter, I am sorry to tell you this news, but Jagjit is all I have left. You know that his brother Baljit was killed in France, and his mother also died in January without knowing that he was alive. Only Baljit’s wife and small boy are with me, and when I am gone there will be no one to care for them. I am an old man now and I want my son to settle down at home and marry a girl from our community. I am sure your family would also prefer you to marry a good English boy. I hope you will understand.

  Jagjit sends good wishes to your aunty and his friend Simon’s family and thanks you all for your many kindnesses to him.

  Respectfully, Purushottam Singh

  I stood holding the letter, reading and rereading it, my joy turning to bewilderment. How could he send me such a message? I thought of all the letters I written to him over the years, without ever getting a reply, even after I had been told he was probably dead. Did I mean nothing to him?

  I picked up Aunt Mina’s packet
and ran out of the room and down the stairs, passing Mrs. Beauchamp at the bottom. She turned as I rushed past. ‘I was just coming up. Is everything all right?’

  I tried to speak, but the fist-sized lump in my throat blocked the words.

  ‘Lila?’

  I pushed the letter into her hand and fled past her out of the door and round to the back. At the fence I caught my skirt on the brambles as I scrambled through the gap. I wrenched at it, and felt satisfaction as I heard the material rip.

  Back at High Elms, I walked past the cavernous downstairs rooms, neither home nor hospital now. The cream oil paint that covered the wallpaper was marked where electric wires had been ripped down, and with the scrapes of the beds and wheelchairs of those who had suffered and died there. I went up to my old room, which I had been allowed to keep when I was nursing there, and lay down on my bed. Muddled thoughts went through my head – thoughts of Father and India, of all the doubts and fears of the last few years. I saw that I had, without realising it, swung between two possible futures: Jagjit alive and myself married to him, or Jagjit dead and myself alone and grieving. I had never envisaged the possibility of Jagjit being alive and myself alone. Why did I never count?

  Grief turned to self-pity and resentment and I fanned the flames. I would not cry. I was tired of not knowing, of always being in the dark. It was time to find out.

  I shook the key out of Aunt Mina’s packet and went up to the attic.

  Henry

  Peshawar, Northwest Frontier, 18th December 1898

  Father died in October, shortly after Lila’s fourth birthday. Thinking of him has prompted me to start keeping a journal again, even if only temporarily. I have missed writing down my thoughts but have had little time for reflection, what with the demands of caring for Rebecca, an ageing father and a baby, as well as a new career.

  I resigned from the I.C.S. shortly after Lila’s birth. The world of the ‘Heaven-Born’, as it is satirically referred to, is an exclusive and snobbish one, and Rebecca’s nervous state, together with rumours that I had ‘a touch of the tar brush’, made us pariahs. Clubs refused to admit me on transparent pretexts and we were not invited anywhere, which made my position as a civil servant untenable. A magistrate needs to be respected, and if Indians know his peers do not respect him one can hardly expect them to do so.

  It was Gavin McLean, my old friend from school, who encouraged me to apply for the Political Service. They were looking for people to conduct a survey to establish the boundary of the Durand Line that had been agreed between us and the Amir of Afghanistan, and the fact that I had spoken Hindustani since childhood gave me an advantage. Gavin of course, being half-Chinese, and a superb linguist, can pass for a Gurkha, Tibetan or Central Asian when occasion demands.

  I was initially concerned about leaving the baby with Rebecca, for she continued, and continues to this day, to insist that Lila is not her baby but was substituted in the hospital. No amount of reasoning has been able to alter this conviction. I even named the baby ‘Lilian’ after Rebecca’s supposedly Irish mother, in the hope that this might placate her, but it has made no difference. Zainab and the servants immediately shortened it to ‘Lila’, a name I have always liked, and ‘Lila’ she has become to everyone but Rebecca, who rarely refers to her at all. I deeply regret that she will grow up, as I did, without the love of a mother, but Zainab dotes on her and lavishes on her all the love she has been unable to offer her own daughter. Right from the first, she took jealous possession of the baby, and as soon as she was fed her wet nurse was dismissed to the compound, and dismissed altogether as soon as Lila was weaned.

  My greatest shame is that I have been complicit in the pretence that my daughter’s grandmother is a servant – a deception that she will surely one day reproach me with. But Zainab herself will never agree to tell Rebecca the truth, believing that being forced to accept it would make her worse. My argument – that it is not truth but lies and deception that feed suspicions and irrational fears – cuts no ice with her, but I cannot deny that she understands Rebecca better than I do.

  Despite Zainab’s care, I was concerned at the long absences, sometimes of several months, that my new career has entailed, but Father assured me he would take care of the household and for the most part it was a success. Rebecca respected and loved him and he was kind to her, while Lila adored being jogged up and down on his knee, playing at ‘horsies’, while using his beard as the reins. I knew he could not live forever – at eighty-eight he had reached a good age – but his death has hit me hard, for my admiration for him grew with every year. I always left the household in his charge with confidence, even when in the last year his wits began to wander and he imagined that I was his brother James and that Rebecca was Cecily. I believe there was a genuine affection between him and Rebecca. He had suffered from depression and guilt for so many years that I was grateful to her for providing him with some comfort and peace in his last years.

  After his death she suffered another of those ‘brain fevers’, and once again her head has been shorn. When I went in to see her after it was done, I was so moved I could scarcely speak. She looked as she did on the day I proposed to her, when she seemed to me the embodiment of everything a man could desire in a woman.

  2nd January 1899

  I have been in two minds what to do, unsure whether, without Father’s supervision, I can safely undertake the extended travel my work requires. Zainab assures me that all will be well. I have discussed with her the possibility of returning to England and seeking treatment for Rebecca, but she is against it. She is convinced it will reinforce Rebecca’s conviction that I intend to have her confined in an asylum. And Zainab’s own life would be even lonelier than it is here for, although the other servants dislike her, in England there would be no one who even speaks her language.

  I must admit it is a relief to remain here, for I love my work. The freedom of travel, the beauty of the mountains, and mingling with the fierce proud tribesmen of the Northwest Frontier is fulfilling in a way the I.C.S. never was. All that matters in the Political Service is how well one does one’s job, and I have been fortunate in having Gavin as my friend and mentor. He is the cleverest man I ever met, and well respected in the service despite his mixed origins.

  The game we play is a risky one, more like being a soldier – my original ambition – than a civil servant, though it requires more guile. Lord Curzon said earlier this year that the territories that lie between India and Russia are ‘pieces on a chessboard being played out for dominion of the world’. There is a real pleasure in using one’s wits and living on the edge of danger, but now that Father is gone I wonder if it is a game I should be playing. Like him, I no longer believe in our right to be here, and, if something were to happen to me, what would become of Lila, left in Rebecca’s care?

  I have been thinking for some time of making Aunt Mina her legal guardian in case of my death. I do not think this would present any great difficulty, for Rebecca has never shown the slightest interest in Lila, and I have on occasion suspected that she may even have tried to harm her. There have been a couple of injuries that happened in my absence that Zainab explained away as accidents, though I have noticed that she now takes care to keep Lila away from her mother.

  I have had another offer of help, too. Just before Christmas I bumped into Roland Sutcliffe here in Peshawar. His regiment is here at the request of the Amir to check the raids being made by the Waziris along the Frontier. We have not seen each other since I moved from Bhagalpur soon after our marriage, though we have exchanged the odd letter from time to time.

  I invited him to tea and he came and was a great success with Lila, who took to him immediately. Her presence helped to ease the tension, for Rebecca froze him out, despite all his efforts at gaiety and charm. He is a captain now, but still unmarried and, judging by his conversation when I meet him alone, not much changed. He has been over twice since then and each time Rebecca has thawed a little and Lila has greeted him like an
old friend. I suspect part of his appeal is that he too has a beard and allows her to climb on his knee and pull it, as Father did. He has offered to continue to visit in my absence and get a message to me if I am needed.

  I shall miss Lila when I go back to work. Over the last couple of months we have spent a lot of time together, riding into the country, often taking a picnic with us and staying out all day. And, each time I return home to be greeted with that dazzling smile that Father said she gets from my mother, I thank God again for that doctor who told me a truth it must have been unpleasant to disclose, and by doing so saved her life. For her existence has more than made up for every other disappointment in my life.

  27th March 1907

  It is eight years since I made the last entry in this journal. My life has been too busy to allow it. My work entails writing lengthy reports and since Father’s death I have tried to spend all my spare time with Lila. In recent years those dreams and depressions that used to plague me have recurred less frequently, but my recent discovery about Rebecca has revived them.

  Last week, when Gavin and I arrived back from a mission, we were intercepted by a messenger who had been sent to watch for our return. He warned us that the room we rent in the bazaar to change in and out of our disguises was being watched, so we decided to go straight home. I waited till the chowkidar had gone for his tea and then slipped in the gate. In the hall, I noticed Roland’s blue and gold striped puggree on the stand, but there was no sign of him on the verandah or in the drawing room. As I turned towards my room, I heard laughter coming from Rebecca’s bedroom. I wish now that I had gone in and confronted them, but I was aware of the need to change out of my disguise before the servants saw me.