by Sara Banerji
Again Julia was troubled with that white flickering, as though someone walked ahead of her.
Kali thought he heard his cow call as he served dessert. He dropped a dozen lemon flips in long-stemmed glasses as he ran for her.
“It’s a shame,” said the guests, as they slipped about on broken wine stems and flip slops, “that a well-trained servant like that should have taken to drink in the end.”
“It happens to us all,” said the older managers, filling their own glasses because there was no servant to help them. The wives found the sweepers sleeping on the dog verandah, and chivvied them into coming with swabs and buckets to clear away the mess before someone got hurt.
“Your Senior Manager seems to have an extraordinary idea of hospitality,” the Rani said. “Now even the wife seems to have vanished.”
Nana, who had drunk a bit too much, became very aggressive towards the Rani and several times alluded to “you people” in quite a derogatory and derisive way.
“Why are you cross, darling?” asked Doris. “You are always grumbling about the Clockhouses yourself!”
“That’s different,” flashed Nana. “She is an outsider. She has no right!”
They all looked round for Julia, and no one, except perhaps Dick Sallinger, could remember when they had last seen her. And Dick was not going to tell.
“Did anyone even tell Julia about the phone call saying that Ben was OK?” But no one could remember if Julia had been told or not, or even if she had been present at the time of the call.
“It’s a good party. Just enjoy yourself, dear,” Doris said to the Rani. “Have another drink! Boy! Bring a drink for Madam!” No boy came running because Kali was out in the night searching for Pallpapatti, Babuchi was shivering under a heavy blanket in the grip of fever, and the lesser servants were much too frightened even to show their faces. The ayah’s nephew had come in once in response to urgent bell ringings. And at the sight of him the madams and the masters had all started blowing him up.
“Your apron is filthy! How dare you show yourself like that!” and, “What has taken you so long? Didn’t you hear us ring? Apparently all you fellows have slacked off entirely because the Master is away!”
They asked him to bring ice, and sodas, and gins and tonics, and chipolatas on sticks. He had never heard of any of these things. He backed hastily out of the room, and darted back into the kitchen determined to run back to his house rather than face the terrifying madams and masters again.
“What did they want?” mumbled the shuddering Babuchi. The lad shrugged, and lit a beedi.
He was halfway through his smoke when the bell rang again. In a single stride the lad sprang on to the back verandah, where the cook’s matey, Peryamal the syce and the two sweepers were already cowering.
From inside the kitchen came the sound of the bell ringing and ringing, but no one went at all.
“We will just have to look after ourselves,” said the madams and the masters. Someone put on the gramophone, and someone else rolled back the Mirzapur carpet. Nana went off into a wild tango with Muriel’s husband, Gerry, so Dick Sallinger surreptitiously took hold of Muriel and led her on to the front verandah where he held her tightly and they danced very slowly. Sometimes he would press his lips to her ear and whisper, “Oh you lovely little chickabiddy, you! Oh you lovely little chickabiddy!” in a rather mechanical sort of way.
Amanda, who had hoped to get Muriel for her own partner, danced round and round by herself humming under her breath a different tune to the one on the gramophone, and muddling the other dancers. Two old bachelors from the far end of the district leant against the bamboo bar and swapped exaggerated figures of their tea field yields while they topped up each other’s whiskys. Doris’s husband Harry sat on the sofa and closed his eyes, greatly relieved that Ben Clockhouse was not here. Harry suffered from sore feet, and from a constant fear that Ben would discover this weakness and sack him. For a tea planter that is unable to walk round his estate is no use at all. If Ben had been there Harry would have had to stagger round the dance floor on his aching toes, and pretend he was enjoying it. Eventually Harry fell fast asleep and snored loudly in spite of the loud music and the shouts and laughs of the dancers. Lorraine kept telling her husband, “We really ought to go! It’s not going to do your career any good at all if the Clockhouses come back and find the bungalow in a state like this!” and Jim kept saying, “Do shut up! Why do you have to spoil all my fun! I was just starting to enjoy myself.” as he went round the room with Bobo Chatterjee in his arms. Jim did not dance, he simply ran swiftly from wall to wall. Bobo, clutching her sari, giggling, struggling to keep upright, said, “It’s lucky my husband is a doctor, for I’m sure we’re going to need him quite soon when one or the other of us breaks a leg.”
In the end Jim ran so fast that he shot right through the glass French doors, cut himself rather badly, and had to be stuck all over with sticky plaster that Doris found in the Clockhouses’ medicine cupboard.
“I told you so!” said Lorraine, and went off to search for sweepers to wipe up the blood.
The Rani said, “It’s quite hard for me to enjoy myself when I think of my son out there in the rain,” but all the same waltzed graciously round the room with each of the men in turn and accepted several brandies because that was the only imported liquor in the house. “I am extremely allergic to any kind of Indian drinks,” she told the solicitous young men who served her. “My son has probably inherited this weakness. There are so many things in India to which I am sensitive. Yet I am perfectly all right in Paris.
“Paris is wonderful!” she cried, patting a place on the sofa for someone to come and sit and listen to her. “That is the one thing I like about London. It is so near to Paris that you can just jump on to a plane and fly over for a show and a meal!”
Muriel was suddenly forced to thrust Dick Sallinger aside and rush out on to the lawn to be sick. She was brought back inside and washed and patted and consoled. Then Doris told her, “You had better go home and go to bed darling! All this dancing and drinking won’t do the baby any good at all!” and this was the moment that Muriel discovered that she was pregnant.
Amanda’s husband Bertie was fast asleep in Ben Clockhouse’s planter’s chair, where he had been almost since the party began. He led a pleasant, but tiring life. He loved Amanda but found all the passion being her husband required was exhausting, especially after a day of walking round the estate.
At one in the morning the guests grew hungry, and forced Babuchi to come out from under his blanket and cut them sandwiches.
“You can lie down again as soon as you have made them, poor fellow,” said Doris, who in Babuchi’s opinion was the only madam worth anything in the whole district. “I will pass them round.”
But Babuchi’s own Madam was not to be seen anywhere. Some of the guests even began to be a little worried about her by this time, and to look in the bedrooms, try the bathroom doors and wonder if it was or wasn’t Julia Clockhouse locked in there.
The trouble was there were so many rooms in the Senior Manager’s bungalow of Arnaivarlai. Julia Clockhouse could have easily gone to bed without anyone noticing it.
“What did you think of our Julia?” Amanda asked the Rani. “A strange little creature, isn’t she?”
The Rani said nothing. She did not like to say bad things about individuals, especially ones who might be influential in her son’s advancement. She stared into the torrenting night, and summoned up the picture of a cobbled white frock, crooked lipstick, hair like sopping jute, and shuddered slightly.
Chapter 17
Julia climbed to where her goose had dropped years before.
She had carried it up here, hiding its wings, barely pinioned, lugging the great bird secretly so that her father would not know that it could fly.
Through blurred eyes she had squinted as the goose opened and closed its wings, getting up the courage to take flight.
She had not understood that the bird�
�s reluctance to fly, its toppling weakness, the way it gasped and hung its head were due to the fact that it was sick.
“Come on, come on, don’t be afraid!” she had urged the creature, feeling almost scorn because a few years of flightlessness had reduced it to cowardice. She had hoped for better things from one who had flown around Heaven.
“If angels got like this after staying on earth for a bit what would become of the rest of us?” she asked the bird sharply, imitating Ayah’s tone. “After all we have to walk about for seventy years and are expected to fly as soon as we get into Heaven. If you can’t fly after only a year or two how can any people ever become angels?
“Look! Your home!” she told the goose, taking its head in her hands and stretching it out on the end of the neck, showing it the sky. “You live there,” she reminded it. There was a touch of envy mingled with the contempt, as she reminded the bird of its superiority. The bird drew down its orange membrane, and tried not to look.
Because Julia had had no experience of animal illness she did not suspect that there was something wrong in the way she had managed to lift the goose. She would never have been able to raise the huge fellow three inches from the ground unless it had been ill. As it was, Julia got her arms round the goose easily and held it over the gap. With a forwards thrust she let go.
Then Julia peeped waterily into the sky where the bird would soar.
But Goose had gone down, not up. The white had turned to dark in a moment. Plummeting through the atmosphere, past the tea and the tobacco, the coffee and the cactus, past the fields of sugar cane and the little huts, past paddy fields, temples, and milking goats, past the jungle where the tribals lived, fell the goose.
The falling goose twisted the necks of a hundred people sitting in, and clinging round, necklace-like, the descending bus. Goose vanished with a whistling sound of non-flying feathers into the distance. At the end Julia did not hear the plop as the goose burst like a ruby on the floor of India.
The servants had climbed down the steep rock face and brought back her body. Julia had reached out and lifted the head. The eyes were dull, and an ant walked over one. The neck had become like a long soft rope. The bird’s plumage was soiled where it was not spattered with blood.
“Its wing feathers are fully grown,” said Edward, who was an expert on birds, “and flying birds don’t just drop out of the sky. Get the vet to look at the corpse. The goose was probably sick.”
Julia had not been able to cry because of what was wrong with her eyes. She had woken a few days earlier with her eyelids stuck so tightly together that she had been able to see only red from light passing through the lids.
Ayah, on discovering that Julia could not see, had rushed screaming to Gwen crying, “It has happened! It has happened! The Missie has gone blind. I always knew that the knock on the head from that bad Mini Ayah would cause the Missie to lose all her senses in the end!”
Along the passages Ayah ran, with Gwen behind her.
“Oh, Madam quickly come, call a doctor, tell the Master, bring a priest, for I think she has been taken over for sure this time. Oh, Holy Jesus, save the poor child!”
“Conjunctivitis,” pronounced Kuts. “Nothing serious. Keep her out of the sun for a few days and wash the eyes with boracic. She should not read any books until the inflammation subsides.”
Kuts was relieved to be treating Julia for a normal childish complaint for a change, and added, “I hope from now on you will be calling me to treat her for tonsils, or a touch of flu, and no more of these devil diseases and evil spirit inhabitations. I’m sure if you got rid of that hysterical ayah the child would become more … uh … normal?” He ended on a note of fear, wondering if he had said too much.
But Gwen just replied, a little impatient, for she had been called away at a most crucial moment and aquamarine was crusting on her palette in the sun, “There’s no risk of her hurting her eyes with books, because she can’t read.”
The vet had lifted the head of dead Goose and said, “This goat … what to say … ghost?”
“Goose,” said Julia.
Then the vet had looked closely at Julia’s eyes, and asked, “Have you had some troubling with the eyeballs?”
Julia’s eyes were still very red, though the encrusting was getting less, and for the first time that morning she had managed to open her eyes without a boracic bathing.
“This pinkeye troubling that you have endure,” said the vet, “leads to Newcastle disease in the ghost and gunpig. In the man it is sore eye. In the ghost it is death. This bird has contracted the Newcastle disease from yourself, and has been unable to fly out of weakness. With such sickness wings can no longer hold body up in air.”
Julia looked at the corpse of her friend, and fell.
“She went of a white hue, Madam,” babbled the old vet as Gwen tried to pat life into Julia’s cheeks again.
Gwen said to Babuchi, “Please don’t mention this goose to the Missie any more. She forgets things quickly, and if you don’t talk about it there will be no more trouble.”
The household was relieved to see Julia wake, and make no mention of the goose.
Babuchi told the matey to take the body to the jungle and bury it deep, but the lad only pushed it into the sawdust behind the woodshed, and then had a long sleep. An hour later he appeared in the kitchen putting on a show of gasping and limping, and said, “Such a climb and that bird was heavy. Then I had a big job digging a hole because the ground was hard.”
“Ah,” said Babuchi who had his suspicions, but could not find the energy to do anything about them.
“I think she has completely forgotten she ever had a pet goose,” said Gwen happily to Edward, as they sat out on the verandah drinking gin and tonic, and watching the sun go down. “She’s sitting on the sofa looking perfectly calm, as though she hadn’t a care in the world.”
It was only on the fourth day of Julia’s sitting that her parents began to wonder if something was wrong.
“Get up at once!” Edward told the child sharply. “Snap out of it this moment! What’s this lounging around and doing nothing all day? When I was your age I was up and down the hills all day adding to my bird collection. Get up and do something, girl!”
It stopped raining though the storm was taking great sobbing breaths like someone who had just run a heavy race. Julia sat on a wet stone. Sometimes, quite abruptly, the wind would drop, and a splashing quiet would fall. In one of these Julia heard Kali’s cow bellow. The sound seemed to come from nearby, and peering down the hillside she managed to make out the head and shoulders of the animal. A mud slip had half engulfed her, and with every movement the cow was becoming more tightly bogged. Julia, bending and peering through the steep drop of tea bushes, realised that the mud had run from under and round a single giant boulder which hung directly above the struggling cow. A few more turns from the cow, a few more rushes of mud from under the stone, and the huge thing would slowly topple over and crush the trapped cow. Julia could see the cow’s muzzle glistening muddily, but the animal, although she struggled, seemed to be unable to moo again.
Julia began to rush forwards to save the cow, her feet slithering, her hands reaching towards slippery branches and dripping bushes for balance. But though the cow seemed so near Julia knew it would take ages to get there. She would have to thrust her body through the waist-high clawing bushes as she scrambled downwards. She knew it might take her more than half an hour to reach the cow, and when she got there, even if the boulder had not dropped by then she knew she did not have the strength to drag the cow to freedom. She stopped, almost as muddy as the cow herself now, gasping, her breath coming in whispers of sorrow and fear and running … and also guiltiness. Because it was she who had used her mind to drag a tree up by its roots so that it loosened the hillside, and brought to the edge of tumbling a million-year-old granite boulder. Julia had set this boulder trembling on the hillside ready to crush the party guests and everything else inside her bungalow. And now i
nstead it was going to kill Kali’s Milky Butterfly. Julia let out a howl of anguish, and felt warm tears run down her face and mix with the cold rain there.
Now the whole hill seemed to Julia to be squirming, like someone with stiff feet about to move after a long long time, trying muscles experimentally before beginning to run in earnest.
Then Julia caught sight of Kali running along the road on the other side of the valley. She supposed he must be calling the cow, but waterfalls and thundering rain obliterated his voice. As it must have obliterated for him the sinking cow’s single moo. Julia began shouting to him, though she knew really that it was hopeless. She screamed, and her tiny voice sounded like a rustling in the face of the wind. Kali was running still, and the little white flutter she saw on his shoulder was, she knew, his tea towel.
The hill was falling fast now because of the giant tree roots thrashing back and forth beneath the ground. The boulder heaved. The cow, shrunk in its shadow, twisted and groaned, but she could not free herself. Then the boulder rolled slightly forward so that the whole flank of it protruded out of the hillside and rested above the head and shoulders of the cow like a roof. There was hardly any time left now. Kali was still racing along the road, and Julia knew his white gum shoes would be smacking the mud as he called the animal, his daughter. Sometimes he was lost from sight, and sometimes appeared again flickering through the trees on the other side of the valley.
Other stones started moving, bouncing, pausing, turning, sucking and slipping. And below them was the bungalow that must be mashed. And the little dying cow.
The big boulder over the cow moved again. In its progress it had ploughed a trench down the hillside that was so deep it would probably take a hundred years to fill again. The boulder tottered, keeping a fragile balance that might have been disturbed by a breath. The least wind flurry, Julia thought, would send it smashing on to Kali’s cow.