Belonging

by Umi Sinha

  I went to my room and changed quickly, scrubbing the dye off my face and hands as best I could before going back into the drawing room. I entered the corridor just as Roland emerged from Rebecca’s room, still straightening his uniform jacket. He looked startled to see me, but recovered quickly and said he had been paying a sick call on Rebecca, who was in bed with one of her headaches. I should have smashed my fist into his face – I am stronger now than I used to be and well trained in hand-to-hand fighting – but maybe the years of pretending to be someone I am not has become a habit, for instead I stood there making polite conversation until he took his leave.

  Zainab, of course, must know. Nothing happens in this house without her knowledge, but I learnt long ago that, except when it comes to Lila’s welfare, her first allegiance is always to Rebecca. I have said nothing to Rebecca herself, because I know it would achieve nothing, but I wonder how long this has been going on. Was it right from the beginning? Did he agree to watch her for me, knowing all the time that he intended to seduce her? Has she held a candle for him all those years? Was even the short time when we seemed to be happy a lie?

  I cannot blame her for taking from him what I was no longer prepared to give, for I have not spent a night with her since Lila’s birth, despite knowing that her whole sense of herself depends on her ability to attract desire. Perhaps it was cruel of me to marry her and then deprive her of the only thing that gives her a sense of worth; I thought of myself as her rescuer but all I seem to have done is transfer her to a prison with stronger bars.

  What really hurts is Roland’s betrayal – that he should have pretended once again to be my friend, offered to care for Rebecca and my child, and then taken advantage of my trust and hospitality. And yet I have always known what he is like, known that he has no respect for marriage, and that deceit and secrecy just add spice to his adventuring.

  29th March 1907

  I have been feeling very low since I discovered what a fool I have been. The knowledge that everyone in the house – all the servants and, of course, Zainab – must have known what was going on and were sniggering behind my back has been humiliating, and for the first time I have some sense of what Rebecca must have suffered all these years. You would think that might have made me more patient, but yesterday when she came to me with some trivial complaint about Zainab as she so often does, and begged me to dismiss her, I lost my temper and told her that I was sick of her lies and pretence and if she felt people were untrustworthy it was because she herself was incapable of honesty.

  I suggested that she stitch into one of her precious embroideries the motto ‘The Truth Shall Make You Free’, then told her it was time that she faced the truth, however unpleasant, that Zainab is her mother. I was just passing on to Roland when she began to scream at me and call me a liar, accusing me of being in league with her enemies, and then she became hysterical and threw herself on the floor and had a fit, with her teeth chattering and her limbs jerking.

  Zainab came and took her away and dosed her with laudanum. She said nothing to me but I truly believe that if she could poison me and get away with it she would do it without a second thought. Fortunately Lila was out on her pony, although she has witnessed plenty of her mother’s hysterical outbursts over the years.

  30th March 1907

  Last night Rebecca came to my room while I was sleeping. I woke, already aroused, to find her in bed beside me, using all her seductive wiles, and for a moment I was tempted to succumb – it has been a long time since I have been with a woman – but then the thought struck me that she must use the same tricks with Roland and I pushed her off.

  She became hysterical again and screamed at me that she hated me, and tried to scratch my face with her nails. She was screaming so loudly that Zainab came. Between us we got her back to her room where Zainab quieted her, I suspect with more laudanum.

  I went into Lila’s room to see if she had woken. She was sitting up in bed and I sat down beside her and said, ‘Don’t worry, darling. Mother has one of her headaches.’ She nodded, though I could tell she didn’t believe me. She is twelve now and too old to swallow these excuses. I realise it is time to get her away from here. I have telegraphed Aunt Mina to ask if she will have her. I am loath to send her away, remembering how I hated it myself, but I am afraid of what witnessing these scenes will do to her.

  I read to her for a while, then she played with my lucky Sussex stone and asked me to tell her again how I had got it. I told her my mother put it round my neck when I was born but I have never told her more – it is too sad a story for a child. I thought again of Father, trying to protect me, and how I resented him for sending me away. I will miss her dreadfully, but I know she will be safer in England. In any case, it is only a matter of time before I shall have to return myself.

  It seems that Zainab was right about Rebecca, as she always is. Since I told her the truth about her mother she has been paler than ever, and as still as if she is turning to marble. I fear I have pushed her too far and that I must now seek treatment for her. They tell me there are doctors in London who have produced remarkable cures for hysteria, and they may even be able to wean her off the laudanum. But the thought of breaking the news to her and, if I am honest, the thought of returning to England and finding an ordinary job in some city office, both fill me with dread.

  9th July 1907

  Gavin McLean is dead. Colonel Anderson summoned me today and told me that he was stabbed in the bazaar last night. He asked me if I had any idea how he might have been betrayed. Something in the way he asked suggested that he suspected it had something to do with me. I said no, and we went through the names of all the Indians and Gurkhas who work with us, but there was no obvious suspect.

  When I got home I went to my study and discovered that the drawer in which I keep the duplicate copies of my reports has been broken into. It must have taken considerable force and been done before my return, for I have not had occasion to open it since I got back.

  I summoned all the servants and questioned them. At first they denied any knowledge, but eventually Afzal Khan admitted that some men had visited the house while I was out riding. I asked why he had not mentioned them to me. He said that Zainab has forbidden the servants to gossip about Memsahib’s visitors. Of course they must all know about Roland and, through their grapevine, so must the whole cantonment. There must also have been talk about our estrangement and the fact that Rebecca has not emerged from her room for the last three months, but remains locked away, taking all her meals there and seeing no one except Zainab.

  I sent them away – all except Zainab – and demanded she tell me who these visitors were. It took the usual threats of taking Rebecca to England and leaving her behind to break her down, but I am past caring about decency. If Gavin is dead because of them, they have done more damage than anything I can do to either of them.

  It turns out that Rebecca has not just been taking the prescribed laudanum, which the doctor monitors, but has been buying opium on the side. The men who came have been supplying her for some time, and it seems to me likely that at least one is in the pay of the Russians or Chinese and has used her as a way of getting into the house.

  I went straight back to Colonel Anderson, told him what had happened, minimising Rebecca’s part in it, and offered my resignation, which he accepted. He advised me that I may be in danger myself and that it is perhaps time for me to return to England. In any case, he says the Great Game is nearly finished since we are now facing greater threats in Europe from Germany’s growing military might. A meeting has been arranged next month to work out the terms of the alliance between us and Russia, and it looks as though we will now agree to leave Tibet to China. Colonel Anderson was kind enough to add that I should not blame myself, and that Gavin’s death may not have been connected with his work but have been an attempt at robbery, but of course neither of us believed it. Pathans never forgive a slight or a betrayal, and over the years both Gavin and I have lied and deceived to get in
formation.

  As I was leaving, Anderson stopped me and said, ‘I think you should know that your wife is planning a special birthday party for your fiftieth birthday and has invited Jane and me.’ Jane is his pregnant daughter, who is staying with him while her husband is away. ‘She said it was to be a surprise, but I suspect you have had enough surprises to last you for some time.’

  12th July 1907

  There seems no choice now but to return to England, for I have nothing to keep me here. I have decided not to take Zainab with us. It may be cruel but I cannot forgive her part in this and Rebecca will better off without her. England will give her a fresh start. No one will know her history there and perhaps once away from her mother’s influence and from Roland there may even be a chance for us to reach some sort of understanding. Aunt Mina has replied, agreeing to take Lila, and I have arranged for her to go ahead of us as I do not wish her to witness the scenes that will no doubt ensue when I break the news to the two of them. Poor Lila – how I wish I had sent her out of this madhouse to England when she was born.

  I shall be fifty in a couple of days and all I can think of is what a mess I have made of my life. I thought I was saving Rebecca, but Roland always understood her better than I did. And, if not for my poor judgement, Gavin would still be alive. There were so many things that I should have seen. I understand now the poetic justice in Oedipus putting out his eyes to punish himself for his metaphorical blindness. If it were not for Lila, who has brought so much joy to my life, I could wish that I had died with my mother in the bibighar.

  Lila

  It is dawn when I finish reading my father’s diaries and grandmother’s letters. My eyes are gritty from lack of sleep. Outside my window I hear a blackbird singing and the rooks cawing in the tops of the elms.

  I leave the house and walk through the back garden to the fence, passing the bush where I used to bury the packed lunches Cook gave me before going up on to the Downs. I scramble up the hillside, my boots sliding on the muddy path. It takes me some time to find my childhood hideout. It is still there, only much smaller than I remember. I stoop and push my way through the scratchy gnarled twigs until I am safely inside, then I sit on the damp ground and howl, as I used to do when I first came here. I howl for Father, for the sadness of his belief that his love was not enough, for poor Uncle Gavin, for my grandmother and grandfather, for Aunt Mina, and even for Mother, but most of all for myself. And for the first time I feel it: the weight of the past bearing down on us, and see how, struggle as we might, we stand no chance of breaking our fetters, of making our own lives. And now I understand the real meaning of that saying, He punishes the children and their children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.

  It is mid-morning when, exhausted by my tears, I finally make my way back to the house. I wash my mud-streaked face and then sit down in front of the mirror. I look at my tangled hair and swollen eyes.

  Two lines run through my head:

  Beware! the root is wrapped about

  Your mother’s heart, your father’s bones

  They are from ‘The House of Eld’ and I understand them now. We carry our parents inside us, their blood in our veins, their voices in our heads. And from Mother, who I thought had given me nothing, a ‘touch of the tar brush’: my own personal fetter. If people knew, would they spit at me and call me names? If not to my face, then behind my back? Is this the shame that Mother felt when the girls at school tormented her? I understand now why it was easier for her to deny the truth, but I also see that that denial magnified the shame and fuelled her moods, her depressions, her headaches, and the belief that people were always talking about her and mocking her.

  A phrase comes to my mind – there is a want of grit about them – and I see Simon snatching my book away before reading out, in a mocking voice, that passage about half-castes to taunt Jagjit and me. Mother certainly wanted grit. And wasn’t there something about the mixing of races bringing out the worst features of both? Is that why Mother was like she was? Or was it just the effect of living for so many years fearing the contempt of others for something she could not help?

  But why am I thinking like this? After all, no one need ever know the truth. What would be the point of telling them? And, as I think that, I catch my reflection in the mirror and for a moment Mother is looking back at me, and her eyes are saying, ‘See, you are more like me than you know,’ and I feel the root tangling round my heart.

  Up in the attic again, I hunt around among the shrouded shapes, raising clouds of dust. I found Aunt Mina’s desk fairly easily yesterday, covered with dustsheets, in a corner with the other furniture. But I have no idea where to look for the carpet bag. It is nearly two o’clock and I am faint with hunger before I find it, stuffed into a trunk with Father’s name stencilled on it in white paint. It must have been shipped to Aunt Mina from India, I suppose, after his death. Inside are some of his books and bronzes, including the statue of Shiva dancing the world into being in his ring of flames. Once again I see that dancing shadow, growing and shrinking on the wall behind Father’s desk, and taste again that metallic taste and feel Mother’s nails cutting into my shoulders as she smiled.

  I throw a cloth over it and continue to excavate. In a corner of the trunk my fingers encounter something soft and furry, like stiff velvet or carpet pile, and a memory comes – wiping cobwebs off my fingers. As I pull the carpet bag out, a cloud of dust comes with it. I turn my head, trying not to breathe it in. Can this really be the bag into which my grandmother placed my father as a baby?

  I release the brass catch and pull out a screwed-up bundle of yellowed cloth. I can see only the reverse, covered in a chaotic criss-cross of overlapping stitches in different colours, with knots and loose ends.

  Back in my bedroom I open the tablecloth and lay it out on my bed. The deep border consists of a repeating Tree of Life pattern covered with fruit and flowers. Only, when I look closer, I see that what I initially took for bunches of fruit are small fat hands and feet; the tulip-shaped flowers are really plump pink lips with protruding tongues; the daisy-shaped ones are eyeballs, caught in a net of red veins, and surrounded by long looping eyelashes.

  I raise my eyes to the centre of the cloth, which would have been revealed when the serving dishes and platters were cleared away. In the centre, the motto ‘THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE’ is repeated four times to form a circle. A swagged garland of pear-shaped sacs hangs from it, each containing a mangled foetus.

  The remaining space between that and the border is filled with what at first glance look like the temple carvings in a book that Simon once found in my great-grandfather’s study. It was inscribed: For H. Partridge, with best wishes from A. Langdon, Christmas 1856. After one glance I refused to look again; Jagjit took it from Simon’s hand and put it back on the shelf, coolly remarking that they were sacred carvings representing the uniting of the male and female principles.

  When I look closely at the couples on the tablecloth, I see that the male figures vary: some are fat, some thin, some dark-skinned, some light, some bearded, some turbaned. But the woman is always the same: she has black curly hair and odd eyes – one green and one blue. In some of the couplings she is small – child-sized – compared to the red-haired man with whom she is doing things that no child should be doing. In others she is a woman. One man appears again and again: tall, blond and blue-eyed, sometimes wearing, and sometimes holding in one hand, a blue and gold striped puggree, and flourishing a riding whip. Even Mother’s embroidery is not fine enough to make the man’s face recognisable but I recognise the hat, whose presence on the hall stand always told me that Uncle Roland was visiting.

  I wonder which bit was in front of Father. And then I see it – the woman is kneeling before a tall man with white hair and bright blue eyes. He wears a uniform jacket with colonel’s epaulettes, but no trousers; a thin red line of puckered backstitch runs from the corner of his eye to his mouth.

  Saliva spurts into my mo
uth. I remember Father’s frozen face as he raised his eyes from the tablecloth to Mother’s. Did he believe it? I can barely remember my grandfather, but I know he would never knowingly have betrayed Father. Did she make it up or did she take advantage of his confusion, his hope, that finally, finally, Cecily loved him as he wanted to be loved – as we all want to be loved? And, if so, did she do it out of pity, or for revenge, or because she was desperate to be loved herself?

  I roll the cloth up and stuff it back into the bag. When I lift the bag off the bed I see that it has left a sprinkling of fine brown powder on my bedcover.

  ‘You didn’t have enough wood on it,’ Simon says.

  It is afternoon. I am in the garden and he is looking over the fence from the path that runs along the bottom of the hill.

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in London.’

  ‘Mother telegraphed me twice. Once to say that Jagjit was alive but you were upset. Then again this morning – she was worried when you didn’t come home last night. She showed me the letter. I’ve brought food.’

  We stand watching the smouldering remains of the small bonfire. The flames have calmed me, burnt away the images, and now I feel cleansed standing in the open air. Today it is warm and muggy, with high silver-grey clouds drifting in a blue sky.

  ‘What were you burning anyway? Cloth?’ He pokes at the charred material with his stick, uncovering the blackened metal clasp of the carpet bag.