Teatime for the Firefly

by Shona Patel

  “The koel, or Indian cuckoo, is a brood parasite,” I said. “A bird that lays its egg in the nest of another. Like that crow’s nest up there.” I pointed upward with my right hand and then, remembering my dirty fingernails, switched to my left hand. “See how sturdy the nest is? Crows are really clever engineers. They pick the perfect intersections of branches and build the nest with strong twigs. They live in that same nest for years and years.”

  “Are their marriages as stable as their nests?” The man winked, teasing me. “Do they last as long?”

  “That...that I don’t know,” I said, twisting the end of my sari. I wished he would not look at me like that.

  “I am only teasing you. Oh, please go on.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to collect myself. “The koel is a genetically aggressive bird. When it hatches, it pushes the baby crows out from the nest, eats voraciously and becomes big and strong. Then it flies off singing into the trees. The poor crows are so baffled.”

  The man smiled as he pushed around a pebble with the toe of his shoe. He wore nicely polished brown shoes of expensive leather with small, diamond-shaped, pinpricked patterns.

  “And what do the koels do, having shamelessly foisted their offspring onto another?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

  “Ah, koels are very romantic birds,” I said. “They sing and flirt in flowering branches all summer long, with not a care in the world.”

  “How irresponsible!”

  “Well, it depends how you look at it,” I said, watching him carefully. “Koels sing and bring joy to the whole world. In some ways they serve a greater good, don’t you think? And getting the crows to raise their chicks is actually quite brilliant.”

  “How is that?” he asked, looking at me curiously.

  “Well, not all creatures are cut out for domesticity. Some make better parents than others. The chick grows up to be healthy and independent. In many ways, the koels are giving their offspring the best shot at life.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” he said thoughtfully.

  He sighed and turned his attention to the baby crow. It lay completely still, breathing laboriously, its flaccid belly distended to one side, beak slightly open. He squatted down and nudged it gently with his forefinger. The chick struggled feebly, opened its mouth and uttered a tiny cheep.

  “It’s still alive,” he said dispassionately. “So what do you suggest we do? We can’t just leave it here to die, can we?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the cat’s lunch.”

  He looked at me in a playful sort of way. “Please don’t say you are always so cruel,” he said softly.

  I turned and looked out at the distant rice fields, where a flock of white cranes was circling to land. “I used to try and save baby crows all the time when I was a child,” I said. “But Dadamoshai said I was interfering with nature. He thinks we need more songbirds and fewer scavengers.”

  The man stood up and dusted his hands, and then smiled broadly. “I just realized we’ve had a long and involved discussion and I don’t even know your name!”

  “Layla.”

  “Lay-la,” he repeated softly, stretching out my name like a caress. “I’m Manik Deb. Big admirer of the Rai Bahadur. Actually, I just dropped by the house and left him a note on the coffee table. Will you please see he gets it?”

  “I will do that.”

  “Goodbye, Layla,” Manik said. “And thank you for the lesson on ornithology. It was most enlightening.”

  With that, he turned and walked off down the road toward the river. A thin sheet of golden rain followed Manik Deb, but he did not turn around to see it chasing behind him.

  On the veranda coffee table there was a crushed cigarette stub and a used matchstick in the turtle-shaped brass ashtray. Tucked under the ashtray was a note folded in half, written on the bottom portion of a letterhead that Manik Deb had borrowed from Dadamoshai’s desk. The note was addressed to my grandfather, penned in an elegant, slanted hand:

  7th April 1943

  Dear Rai Bahadur,

  I took a chance and dropped by. I am trying to contact Boris Ivanov and I understand that he is staying with you. Could you please tell him that I would like to meet with him? He knows where to get in touch with me.

  Sincerely,

  Manik Deb

  I took the folded note and placed it on my grandfather’s desk on top of his daily mail. That way he would see it first thing when he got home.

  * * *

  Later that day, at lunch, I watched my grandfather carefully as he sat across from me. Had he read the note? Who was Manik Deb?

  Dadamoshai took his mealtimes very seriously. He always sat very prim and straight at the dining table, as if he was a distinguished guest at the Queen’s formal banquet. Most days he and I ate alone. We sat across from each other at the long, mahogany dining table designed for twelve. All the formal dining chairs were gone except four. The others lay scattered about in the veranda, marked with tea stains, their rich brocade fading in the sun. My grandfather had a constant stream of visitors whom he received mostly in the veranda, and it was often that we ran out of chairs.

  Dadamoshai had just bathed and smelled of bittersweet neem soap. His usual flyaway hair was neatly combed back from his tall forehead, the comb marks visible like a rake pulled through snow. He was dressed in his home clothes: a crisp white kurta and checkered lungi, a pair of rustic clogs on his feet. His Gandhi-style glasses lay folded neatly by his plate. His bushy brows were furrowed as he deboned a piece of hilsa fish on his plate with the concentration of a microsurgeon. Unlike Indians who ate rice with their fingers, Dadamoshai always used a fork and spoon, a habit he had picked up from his England days. The dexterity with which he removed minuscule bones from Bengali curried fish without ever using his fingers was a feat worth watching.

  “A man came by to see you this morning, Dadamoshai,” I said nonchalantly, but I was overdoing it, I could tell. I helped myself to the rice and clattered noisily with the serving spoon.

  Dadamoshai did not reply. I wondered if he had heard me.

  “Ah yes,” he said finally, “Manik Deb. Rhodes Scholar from Oxford and—” he paused to tap a hair-thin fish bone with his fork to the rim of his plate “—Bimal Sen’s future son-in-law.”

  “He’s Kona’s...fiancé?” I was incredulous.

  “Yes,” said Dadamoshai, banging the saltshaker on the dining table. The salt had clumped with the humidity. He shook his head. “That Bimal Sen should think of educating his daughter instead of palming her off onto a husband. With money, you can buy an educated son-in-law, even a brilliant one like Manik Deb, but the fact remains, your daughter’s head is going to remain empty as a green coconut.”

  I was feeling very disconcerted. Bimal Sen was the richest man in town. The family lived four houses down from us, in an ostentatious strawberry-pink mansion rumored to have three kitchens, four verandas with curving balustrades and a walled-in courtyard with half a dozen peacocks strutting in the yard. The Sens were a business family, very traditional and conservative. Kona was rarely seen alone in public. Her mother, Mrs. Sen, was built like a river barge and towed her daughter around like a tiny dinghy. I remembered Kona vaguely as a moonfaced girl with downcast eyes. I knew she had been engaged to be married since she was a child. It was an arranged match between the two families, but I had not expected her to marry the likes of Manik Deb. It was like pairing a stallion with a cow.

  “Is he Bengali?” I finally asked. Had I known Manik Deb was Kona’s fiancé, I would have avoided talking to him, let alone engaged in silly banter about koels and crows. My face flushed at the memory.

  “Oh yes. He is a Sylheti like us,” Dadamoshai said. “The Debs are a well-known family of Barisal. Landowners. I knew Manik’s father from my Cambridge days. We passed our bar at the Lincoln�
��s Inn together.”

  Barisal was Dadamoshai’s ancestral village in Sylhet, East Bengal, across the big Padma River. The Sylhetis were evicted from their homeland in 1917. Once displaced, they became river people. Like the water hyacinth, their roots never touched the ground, but grew instead toward one another. Wherever they settled, they were a close-knit community. You could tell they were river people just by the way they called out to one another. It could be just across the fence in someone’s backyard, but their voices carried that lonely sound that spanned vast waters. It was the voice of displacement and loss, the voice that sought to connect with a brother from a lost homeland—and the voice that led Dadamoshai to connect with Manik Deb’s father in England.

  “A most extraordinary young man, this Manik Deb,” Dadamoshai was saying, helping himself to some rice.

  “How so?” I asked. My appetite was gone, but my stomach gnawed with questions.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what makes Manik Deb—like you say—so extraordinary?” I tried to feign noninterest, but my voice squeaked with curiosity. I absentmindedly shaped a hole in the mound of rice on my plate.

  “He has an incisive, analytical mind, for one thing. Manik Deb has joined the civil service. His is the kind of brains we need for our new India.”

  Chaya, our housekeeper, had just entered the dining room with a bowl of curds. She was a slim woman with soft brown eyes and a disfiguring burn scar that fused the skin on the right side of her face like smooth molten wax. It was an acid burn. When Chaya was sixteen, she had fallen in love with a Muslim man. The Hindu villagers killed her lover, and then flung acid on her face to mark her as a social outcast. Dadamoshai had rescued Chaya from a violent mob and taken her into his custody. What followed was a lengthy and controversial court case. Several people went to jail.

  Dadamoshai turned to address her. “Chaya, Boris Sahib will be having dinner with us tonight. Please remember to serve the good rice and prepare everything with less spice.”

  With that, Dadamoshai launched on a long discussion of menu items suitable for Boris Ivanov’s meal, and Manik Deb was left floating, a bright pennant in the distant field of my memory.

  CHAPTER 2

  On the day of the school inauguration, Boris Ivanov donned a magnificent Indian kurta made of the finest Assamese Mooga silk, custom tailored to fit his six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound Bolshevik frame. He gave a rousing speech, and just as he was walking across the stage in his fancy mirror-work nagra slippers—which any Indian will tell you are notorious for their lack of traction—he inadvertently stepped on a fallen tuberose. His foot made a swiping arc up to the ceiling and the nagra took off like a flying duck. Boris Ivanov yelped out something that sounded suspiciously like “BLOOD!” I later understood he had yelled “Blyad!”—a Russian expletive—before landing with a thundering crash that sent quakes through the room. A horrified groan went up in the audience; small children shrieked, and in the middle of it all, I saw fat Mrs. Ghosh roll her eyes heavenward and whisper to her neighbor that this was allokhi—a very bad omen indeed. Just as well Dadamoshai did not hear her, because he would have flattened her out for good. My grandfather had very low tolerance for “village talk.”

  Boris Ivanov was forced to change his itinerary. He had planned to leave for Calcutta the next day to visit Rabindranath Tagore’s famous experimental school in Santineketan. Instead, with his leg cast in plaster, he moved into Dadamoshai’s house as our guest and stayed with us for three whole weeks.

  He accepted his fate cheerfully and slipped into our life with barely a ripple. He was a big, bushy man, bearded and baritone, who spent long hours reading and writing on the veranda with his plastered leg lying on the cane ottoman like a fallen tree trunk. Most afternoons he dozed in the plantation chair with the house cat draped over his stomach, his snores riffling the afternoon. He woke up to drink copious amounts of tea with four heaped spoons of sugar in each cup, blissfully unaware that it was wartime and sugar was in short supply. He spent the rest of the evening contemplating the universe.

  The veranda was the most pleasant room in our house—open and airy, with soft filtered light creeping through the jasmine vines. Dadamoshai’s big desk sat in one corner against the wall. On it were his piles of papers weighted down with river rocks and conch shells. His blue fountain pen sat snugly in its stand, right next to the chipped inkwell and a well-used blotter. There was a calendar with bird pictures on the wall, busy with notes and scribbles on the dated squares.

  A door from the veranda led to Dadamoshai’s study. It was packed from top to toe with books of all kinds: art, philosophy, religion, poetry and all the great works of literature. Here The Communist Manifesto leaned comfortably on Homer’s Odyssey, and the Bhagavad Gita was wedged in by Translations from the Koran. Just as comfortably inside Dadamoshai’s head lived his thoughts and ideas—separate skeins interwoven with the gentlest compassion and wisdom to form his rich philosophy and outlook on life.

  Boris Ivanov was writing a treatise titled Freedom and Responsibility, a rather obtuse and philosophical work full of difficult arguments. He spent long hours debating ideas with Dadamoshai on the veranda. India was on the cusp of her independence after more than two hundred years of British rule. A great renaissance was sweeping through our nation and many social and educational reforms were under way.

  Many people considered Dadamoshai a great scholar and independent thinker, but others saw him as a blatant anglophile and called him an English bootlicker. He was unabashedly Western in his dress and liberal in his thoughts. He lived frugally and thought deeply. He did not take siestas in the afternoon and cursed fluently in seven languages.

  Dadamoshai believed that women were not given a fair chance in our society, largely due to their lack of education. Why were Indian boys sent to study at the finest universities abroad, he argued, while girls were treated like some flotsam washing in with the river tide?

  Traditionalists accused Dadamoshai of rocking the social order and luring women away from their jobs as homemakers. What good would it do for women to bury their heads in math and science? Or, for that matter, to go around spouting Shakespeare? Pots and pans would grow cold in the kitchen and neglected children would run around the streets like pariah dogs.

  In many ways, Dadamoshai saw me as the poster child for the modern Indian woman. He gave me the finest education and taught me to speak my mind. I was free to forge my own destiny. Sometimes I struggled to stay grounded like a lone river rock in a swirl of social pressures. But in truth, this was the only option I had.

  * * *

  Miss Thompson, my private English tutor, lived in a small primrose cottage behind the Sacred Heart Convent. A spry woman with animated eyes, she had about her a brisk energy that made you sit up and pull in your stomach. Her father, Reginald Thompson, the former District Magistrate of Assam, was Dadamoshai’s predecessor and mentor. Dadamoshai had seen Miss Thompson grow up as a young girl.

  I was Miss Thompson’s first Indian student. Ever since I was seven, I took a rickshaw to her house three days a week. After my lessons, I would walk over to Dadamoshai’s office in the old courthouse where I’d sit and do my homework, surrounded by the clatter of typewriters and the smell of carbon paper until it was time for us both to come home.

  Miss Thompson was a stickler for pronunciation. She made sure I enunciated each word with bell-like clarity with the stress on the right syllable. I learned to say what, where and why accompanied by a small whoosh of breath I could feel on the palm of my hand held six inches from my face. It was Miss Thompson who instilled in me my love for literature. She encouraged me to plumb the depths of Greek tragedy, savor the fullness of Shakespeare, the lyrical beauty of Shelley. As I grew older, I saw less and less of her, until our meetings became just the occasional social visit. She had more Indian students now, she said, thanks to Dadamoshai’s f
lourishing girls’ school.

  I decided to drop by and see her. She was usually home on Tuesday mornings, I knew. I arrived to find a rickshaw parked outside her gate and an elderly servant woman sitting on the porch. Miss Thompson must be with a student, I imagined. Young girls were never sent out unchaperoned in our society. Dadamoshai, on the other hand, always insisted I go everywhere alone. This raised a few eyebrows in our town. I was about to turn around and walk away when Martha, Miss Thompson’s Anglo-Indian housekeeper of sixty years, called out to me from the kitchen window. She said Miss Thompson was indeed with a new student, but asked me to wait as the lesson was almost over.

  I sat on the sofa in the drawing room. Through the slatted green shutters a guava tree waved its branch and somewhere a crow cawed mournfully. Nothing changed in Miss Thompson’s house. Everything was exactly where it was the very first day I walked in ten years ago. The small upright piano with a tapestry-cushioned pivot stool, the glass-door walnut curio cabinet with its fine collection of Dresden figurines I knew so well, the scattering of peg tables topped with doilies of tatting lace. On the wall were faded sepia photographs of Reginald Thompson in his dark court robes, his pretty, fragile wife who’d died young and Miss Thompson and her sister as young girls riding ponies.

  Voices trickled in through the closed door of the study. I heard a timid, female voice say something inaudible, followed by Miss Thompson.

  “Breeze. Lengthen the e please and note the ‘zee’ sound. It is not j. It’s z. Zzzz. Make a buzzing sound with your lips. Like a bee. Breezzzze. Breezzzze.”

  “Bre-eej,” the girl repeated hesitantly.

  I could just see Miss Thompson tapping the wooden ruler softly against her palm, a gesture she made to encourage her students, but it only intimidated her Indian girls, who saw the ruler as a symbol of corporal punishment.