The Tea-Planter's Daughter

by Sara Banerji

  “The Rani is waiting,” said Kali.

  “Show her in,” said Julia Clockhouse.

  The Rani entered, her hands graciously outstretched towards Julia who struggled, but seemed unable to get out of her chair. For some reason all the strength had gone out of Julia’s legs.

  “It is so kind of you to have invited my son and me to your party, Mrs Clockhouse,” the Rani said.

  Behind the Rani Kali was mouthing some word which seemed like “Doris Madam”. Julia could not make head nor tail of it.

  “I have come to accept the invitation personally,” said the Rani. “Apparently it was lost in the post, and has only just reached us, so there is no time to post our acceptance.” She smiled, and said, “I know I could have sent the bearer with a chit, but there was a little break in the rain and I felt like a walk …” She looked round the bungalow in a way that made Julia, even with her mind so muddled, think that there was another reason for the Rani’s visit besides the one she gave.

  Julia told Kali to bring coffee for two.

  “But this is tea time,” protested Kali.

  “Coffee!” snapped Julia, though she did not care either way really.

  “Yes, Madam,” said Kali, expressing in his withdrawal his dignified disapproval.

  The Rani folded her midnight-blue chiffon sari under her, and sank gracefully into the arm chair. “My son and I would haved liked to have invited you and Mr Clockhouse in return,” she said, tinkling her only jewel, a heavy gold and diamond studded bracelet, “but unfortunately this bungalow into which my son has been put is not in fit condition for entertaining …” She looked significantly round Julia’s sitting room again.

  Julia felt she was beginning to understand who this lady was. Ben had told Julia that the new assistant was Indian. This must be his mother.

  “We are too busy anyway,” Julia said.

  The Rani frowned. After a slightly shocked pause she said, “There are several leaks in his bedroom, you know.”

  Kali came in with the coffee and put it on the peg table with the slightest bang.

  Julia leant forwards and looked at the Rani a little unsteadily. The Rani smiled, and wiped the tips of her fingers with a tiny handkerchief.

  “Would you care for cream in your coffee?” asked Julia at last.

  “Oh, black!” The Rani spoke as though the question irritated her. She went on, “But this house is no joke. My son is suffering. He is not used to discomfort. He is not used to living in such dampness.”

  “All the British boys lived there without complaint,” said Julia.

  “Well, of course they would,” said the Rani heavily emphasising the word “they” as though she alluded to a separate species.

  “A Marie biscuit?” enquired Julia.

  The Rani did not answer this, and there fell quite a long silence during which the Rani seemed to be thinking of something else altogether. She ignored the proffered plate of imported biscuits. Then the Rani said suddenly, “Do you have children Mrs Clockhouse? If so you will understand the feelings of a mother. A mother cannot bear to think of her beloved ones suffering …”

  The goose had been Julia’s beloved one, and it had suffered. After Edward clipped its wings it lost its desire for food and became sad and dirty. It had suffered too the time the jackal had caught it. Julia had been sitting in this same chair when she had heard the sound of captured poultry. Racing to the window, knocking over furniture as she went, she saw a jackal haul her bird over the lawn. Its head was held high as it dragged the goose over the Kikuyu grass. Julia beat on the window with her fists and shouted, trying to alarm the jackal into dropping her pet. But the jackal ignored her and in a few moments reached the hibiscus bushes at the bottom of the garden. He thrust his body through the bushes at the moment the servants appeared round the side of the house beating the ground with bamboo sticks.

  Julia tried to still her mind and make it cause the jackal to lose its hold as all this shouting and beating was failing to do. But though inside her there was a slight stirring the thing would not wake up, and the jackal vanished from sight into the tea field.

  The cries of the goose became distant as the predator made his way under the heavy cover of the tea.

  The servants, waist-high in tea bushes, thrust onwards, sticks upraised, impeded by twigs while the jackal, with the goose growing limp in his jaws, came out of the tea field at the top and began to run over the grassland. They would never get him now. Among the long grasses he was lost in a minute, with only the occasional vibration of blades even to hint at his whereabouts.

  “Don’t cry, Missie,” the servants said, tramping back into the bungalow. “You tell your daddy to buy you another goose.”

  Julia Clockhouse spent the rest of that day sitting in the chair by the window and staring at the place where she had last seen Goose.

  Gwen told her, “Now, darling, you mustn’t be silly! It was only poultry, and we have hens for dinner all the time!”

  In the evening the tribal servant arrived from his day off carrying the goose, which, though bitten deeply, was still alive. He had found the bird high on the grasslands, and lying beside it was the dead body of the jackal.

  “It is impossible to understand how this jackal has died,” said the servant. “There was no mark nor sign on his body at all.”

  Chapter 13

  When Ben still did not come Julia began to long to cancel the party and several times during the afternoon reached for the phone to put off the guests but changed her mind each time for fear of electric shocks on the chin. These were always a risk in stormy weather.

  Ben had several times requested that the directors replace the antiquated Arnaivarlai phones, but without success. Once an American staying with the Clockhouses had offered Ben the equivalent of fifty pounds for the SM bungalow phone, saying, “I love this goddamn thing.” He had stroked the fluted upright iron receiver and run his finger round the petal-shaped mouthpiece, and said, “I’ll give you a modern phone as a replacement too!” But of course, much as Ben longed to accept, without the appropriate connections the modern phone was useless to him.

  Kali refused to touch the phone when there was lightning, and even when the weather was calm wrapped his feet in tea towels and put a plastic shopping bag on his head before lifting the receiver.

  So when it rang during the violent storm on the afternoon of Julia’s birthday Julia thought it must be bad news of Ben. Only a real emergency would induce anyone from Arnaivarlai to use the phone during such a storm.

  Ben had rushed from the bungalow the previous morning.

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow!” Julia shouted after his departing car. “All those people are coming!”

  Just before the car turned round the bend on which the yogi now sat he shouted back, “Do you ever think of me?”

  “I do all the time Ben,” Julia whispered to the phone that now rattled, sparked and vibrated with spasmodic ringing generated by a man turning the handle at the exchange.

  Kali peeped round the door to the kitchen, gripping the wood firmly as though ready to cling on even if someone tried to prise him off and force him to touch the lethal instrument.

  Julia put the directory on the floor, stood on it, then pulled her sleeve until it covered her hand. Gingerly she lifted the receiver, holding it so that it did not touch any part of her face, and said, “Hello, Mrs Clockhouse here.”

  “The rain is gushing in. Simply gushing!” said a voice that Julia recognised as the Rani’s. “I simply must request you send some fellows to do repairs on the roof immediately, for my poor boy cannot be expected to live in such conditions —” A sharp crack of lightning coincided with a scream from the Rani.

  Julia replaced the receiver softly.

  “Madam, he will be sure to come,” said Kali gently.

  The night before last Ben had put his arms round Julia and said, “Make love with me, dear girl. I long for you.”

  Julia’s body stiffened, though her he
art whispered to her to take a risk. But at the touch of her husband’s hand she felt the parts of her start floating, and quickly she wrenched herself away from him.

  Ben got up in the morning, and Julia peeping under her hair saw his jaw was tight. He dressed telling her he was going to Madras. Urgent business he told her, his eyes looking away, his voice cold.

  But after he had gone out she went over to the window, and peeped from behind the curtain, watching as he got into the car. She thought she heard him call, “The horse and the job were not sufficient compensation.”

  Last summer when her mother had come to stay Julia had considered asking her, “What happens to women when men make love to them?”

  But Gwen, Julia knew, would only gaze at her vaguely, and try to translate the question into colour. Gwen’s mind, thought Julia, was on vermilions and vandyke browns, rose madder, and azure, so that she would hardly have been aware of the giant body of Edward Buxton on top of her.

  “Your mother and I have a very pure relationship,” Edward told Julia once, when she was twelve. He had taken her hand, stroked it softly, and had seemed on the edge of saying something important. Julia felt a burning pouring over her that could easily have been the devil’s entrance, and snatched her hand away. Her father’s touch always confused her. Ever since she had been very small and he had come to kiss her in bed she had found her feelings for his embrace conflicting. If she had tried to analyse what she felt she might have said “a mixture of shame, fear and longing.” These three do not go well together. The person who is filled with three such emotions has no idea what to do with any of them. One who has only fear, flees, one who only desires, embraces, and one who feels shame, shuns. But you can’t act in these three ways at once. Since she was not sure exactly what it was about her father’s touch that caused such conflict she was unable to explain her actions to him. Anyway he was not the sort of man on whom such explanations would have made any impression.

  Julia had thought that by marrying Ben Clockhouse, and staying in India, the only country she knew or understood, she would avoid having these unpleasant feelings any more. She had imagined that marriage to Ben would be a straightforward affair in which she would become a quite normal madam ordering meals, quarrelling with servants, weighing dogs’ meat, and meeting other madams in the club for games of tennis in the dry weather and bridge in the monsoon.

  As it had turned out Julia had ended up by doing none of these things for she found she was not cut out to be a proper madam. She was no good at tennis, could not make head or tail of the rules of bridge, and when she tried to order the servants they reminded her that she was only their little Missie that they had known since babyhood. She was even no good at weighing the dogs’ meat, though she tried hard to succeed at least at that. The dogs would sit and whine and cry with such intensity while she weighed that it reminded her of her own longing and she would fling them bits till the whole calculation was hopelessly muddled.

  Now her relationship with Ben had become as conflicted as that with her father. Once again she was filled with the sore sensations of longing for her husband’s love and fear that her soul would escape if she allowed it. She even felt shame at being someone that the devil was forever trying to enter. No wonder neither Ben nor Edward could feel affection for her. She was someone chosen by the devil.

  Although Julia was so often conflicted, her father hardly ever was. But he had been conflicted on the day he had hit her with the ruler because she could not read. On that day she had had the impression that he was filled with anger for her, and at the same time filled with desire.

  But on the whole he was not a complicated man, and considered that a person had only two choices. To do the wrong thing, or to do the right thing. And he who chose the wrong thing got smacked. Sometimes during Julia’s childhood there were episodes in which her father appeared to be choosing to do the wrong thing.

  “I can’t help it! I can’t help it!” he would say incoherently, when he came to say good night to her, and he would caress her very quickly and roughly while he stared at her in a terribly intense and urgent kind of way. But afterwards Julia would nearly always discover that it had been she and not her father who had done the bad thing. Her father would say angrily to her at breakfast, “The ayah will have to pin down your nightie if you can’t stop it rolling up when you are asleep! It’s disgusting! Suppose the servants came in!”

  On the day he tried to caress her when she was twelve she had pulled her hand away because she knew that it was not safe to leave it there. Once, years ago, when her father had loved her, she had cradled herself against him and felt perfectly secure and surrounded in his love. But since things had changed between them she had quite forgotten what it was like to hope for any safety from him or even to consider loving him back.

  Once he would have smacked her for pulling away her hand, called her insolent, but after the incident of the mantelpiece ornaments for some reason he no longer liked to lay a hand on her and only muttered, “Get out, you bad child!” in a voice that seemed to have a small sob in it, and turned back to his papers. Julia stood straight, and stared at him, but he did not look up. She left smiling, but Kali, who had been pretending to polish door knobs in the hall had murmured so softly that she only barely heard him as she passed, “Kali does not think Missie is bad.”

  Now it was happening just the same with Ben.

  Once Ben had come in while Julia was watching Babuchi churn the butter. The sound changed as the cream lump turned suddenly into clots that began to rush round in buttermilk.

  “Like that!” Julia had cried, pointing, as the clots slapped in the liquid. “It is something like that that happens to me …”

  “In the old days women had headaches. Your excuse is ridiculous,” Ben said. “Why not admit that I disgust you!”

  On the day of her birthday Julia went to the verandah for the hundredth time, staring into the mists, knowing that Ben could not be coming because the dogs had not heard him. But she only saw, in the moments when the mist lifted like a veil pulled back, the figure of the silent yogi at the gate. She pulled clothes from her cupboard, dragged a dress on wildly, standing in front of the mirror while her hair stood on end, ripping the dress off, letting it drop to the floor while she chose another one.

  She put lipsticks on and wiped them off again, dabbing scarlets and pinks, rose and mauve.

  Once there was a break in the rain, and a watery sun shone through a little. Wearing her crooked dress, and lipstick smudged she went down the drive, and stood before the yogi.

  He opened his eyes when she approached, and held up his hand, as though ordering her to wait. She stood, an idea prickling in her mind for a moment that he would know the answer, that this yogi who had walked round the world for a thousand years would know things unknown to anyone else.

  She could almost see the sunlight shine through the old man’s thin, white-nailed hands.

  “Why do you sit there?” she asked. “This is our gate, and I am having a party this evening. Guests will come.” The words sounded silly, guests trivial compared with this yogi’s dense quiet.

  Julia saw the corners of yogi’s mouth crease a little as though he was about to smile. There was a warmth in his milky eyes too, so that Julia really thought that in a moment he would burst out laughing. For a moment a brightness appeared to flow from the old man. Julia shook her head, feeling dazzled.

  The little walk seemed to exhaust her. She returned to the bungalow and, throwing herself on to the sofa, closed her eyes.

  “Perhaps she will sit quiet now,” said the servants, “so that we can get on with this party,” but they were disappointed. She sprang up quite soon and was on the move again.

  “I am going to the new assistant’s bungalow to see if that Rani is all right,” she said.

  “Madam was born in India,” sighed Babuchi. “But this has not made her Indian. No Indian person would rush about so. In fact I do not know anyone except Europeans who dash abou
t doing things so fast and excited.”

  Julia summoned up one of the company cars, and ordered the driver to take her to the new assistant’s bungalow.

  “He has a leak in his roof. The rain is coming in badly,” she said.

  There had always been a young man living in the bungalow up the hill ever since Julia could remember. Even Ben had once lived there.

  “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” he had asked years ago. It was the dry weather, and there had been a very loud cicada trilling in the corner of his garden. Whenever Julia heard a cicada after that she remembered that day. They had sat facing each other across a little round table in the garden, and Jesudasu the bearer, who had been quite old even then, had brought coffee and Marie biscuits. The milk jug had been covered with a circle of netting which Ben Clockhouse had lifted, and said to Jesudasu, “There is a hole in it. You know I don’t like things to be damaged. You know I hate disorder.”

  Roses smelled strongly and a turtle dove bubbled in the eucalyptus tree that breathed out incense.

  Julia tried to conceal with her fingers a rip and a green stain on her dress from her journey here through the tea bushes but Ben seemed not to notice. He smiled at her with eyes that were warm and sad at once, and said, “Would you care for a biscuit, young lady? It is so nice to see you.”

  She had not needed to pretend she was searching for the goose that day and that that was why she had come.

  “I could darn your socks for you,” she had breathed, and had peeped under the little iron table at Ben’s sandals from which protruded a pair of matching and totally unpotatoed socks. “If you ever get any holes, that is,” she added quickly, so that he would not think she implied any criticism of his present pair.

  “Thank you, Julia. That’s so kind of you,” Ben said. And amazingly he sent a sock a few weeks later, with a note attached saying, “Dear Mrs Buxton, I would especially like your little girl to darn this for me.”