Teatime for the Firefly

by Shona Patel

  “Why didn’t someone wake me up?” I asked.

  “They were talking to Doctor Hughes. Your auntie has gone home to change. She will come back in an hour, she said.”

  I felt a small stab of worry. “Nurse, is something wrong? I have not felt the baby move since my water broke.”

  “Hush, dear. Baby is ready to come out. Doctor Hughes will be here in a few minutes to talk to you.”

  Just then Doctor Hughes walked in, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves. He was a tall, handsome English doctor, who looked like a faded movie star. “Well, well,” he said. “Let’s see what’s going on here. So, how do you feel, Mrs. Deb?”

  “The same,” I said.

  He examined me and said something to Nurse Maria. She looked at her watch and scribbled on a clipboard.

  “I am afraid we will have to pull this little monkey out,” said Doctor Hughes. “I have to do a Cesarean, Mrs. Deb. The good thing is you won’t feel a thing. The bad thing is you will take a little longer to heal.”

  “Can we please wait for my aunt to arrive?”

  “I am afraid I can’t risk that,” said Doctor Hughes, pulling off his gloves. “Your aunt will be upset, and I am going to get the short end of the stick from her. She wanted to stay, but I told her we still had time. But looking at you now, I don’t think we should delay the operation any further.”

  He turned to Nurse Maria. “Prepare OT. Doctor Harrison to assist.”

  He patted my arm. “Try and relax now. When you wake up, you will have a brand-new baby.”

  * * *

  “Layla, Layla, wake up, maiyya.” Mima shook me gently. “Don’t you want to see your baby girl?”

  “A perfect little angel, she is,” said Nurse Maria as she propped up my pillows and helped me sit up. I felt dull and heavy but there was no pain. It must be the medication, I thought.

  A tiny bundle was placed in my arms. The baby’s face was a fiery red. A plume of black hair shot out from the top of her head like the tail of a comet. Her eyes were squeezed shut and the tiny pink fingers of one hand opened and closed like a delicate sea anemone.

  “I wonder what color her eyes are,” I said, feeling a little strange holding the minuscule creature.

  “They are dark brown, like Manik’s,” said Mima. She gently tickled the baby’s cheek. The baby turned her face toward the finger and opened a pink gummy mouth. “Little Jonaki is hungry.”

  “Do you like the name Jonaki, Mima?”

  “Of course I do. After all, I chose it, didn’t I?”

  “I thought it was Manik...”

  “Stop! That man is always trying to take credit for everything. Little Jonaki knows it was her Boro-mima who named her.”

  “Has Manik got the news?”

  “Yes, Calcutta Head Office sent word.”

  “I wonder what his reaction was. He always wanted a daughter.”

  “He said, ‘So what, who cares,’” quipped Dadamoshai, coming into the room. “Layla, what do you think of the name Jonaki for the baby?”

  Mima looked at him sternly. “Dada, I came up with that name a long time ago.”

  “Why,” said Dadamoshai, round-eyed with surprise, “I was the one who thought of the name. In fact, when we were talking on our way home from the station—”

  “I suggested Jonaki—” said Mima fiercely.

  I caught the twinkle in Dadamoshai’s eyes. He was teasing Mima of course. I had told him about Manik’s letter, and he liked the name. Between the time Mima got off the train and arrived at the hospital she was firmly convinced, the baby’s name was her idea. Who dared to argue with that?

  I smiled at them and said softly to little Jonaki, “It is your daddy who named you, baby. You are every bit his little girl.”

  Jonaki. Firefly.

  The baby gave a tiny little shudder and opened her eyes. She gazed at me peacefully with the fathomless wisdom of an old soul. The whites of her eyes were a silvery-blue, the pupils dilated and shining. How I wished her father could touch those tiny dimpled fingers and feel the velvet of her cheek against his own. She was the tiniest, brightest little thing in the universe, only my heart cried out silently because Manik was not there.

  * * *

  A week passed and there was still no word from Manik. This was getting worrying. Dadamoshai used the courthouse to make a trunk call to the Jardines Head Office in Calcutta. He came home with some disturbing news. I was giving Jonaki an oil massage before her bath when he walked into my room.

  “The new manager is not going to join Aynakhal,” he said abruptly.

  “Holly Watson? What do you mean?”

  “The company found some serious corruption charges against him. He has been fired.”

  My heart was pounding. This was extremely bad news. “So who is going to take over Aynakhal?”

  “They don’t know yet, maiyya. The company is trying to sort that out.”

  Dadamoshai said it sounded as if Manik was expected to stay on as Acting Manager until Jardines figured out a new game plan. The new assistant, Desmond Williams, who was going to replace Larry, had arrived from England only to land in Calcutta in the middle of a deadly political riot. He was holed up in his hotel room, and Charlie was unable to fly him out to Aynakhal until the situation calmed down.

  It was just as well, I thought. A new assistant would be more of a headache than help to Manik, given the current situation in Aynakhal. New assistants took a while to adjust to a tea job. They had to be spoon-fed and mentored. Who was there now to show him the ropes? Manik had his hands full. Aynakhal at that moment was a headless entity, with one barely functioning arm and paralyzed feet. This was a very bad situation indeed.

  There was also news that the trouble in Mariani had escalated. The police station was attacked and several policemen lynched by the mob. The army had been called out, but was unable to get to Mariani because the Dargakona Bridge had been damaged by a pipe bomb.

  I looked away. The deep fear that was filling my body erupted in a silent howl. I looked down at Jonaki as she lay there, a tiny seashell curled on the white sheet. A tear rolled down my cheek and plopped on her little brown belly, where it trembled like a dewdrop. Jonaki looked up at me with her sweet, peaceful eyes, so bright and clear that I saw the sky from the open window reflected in them. They were Manik’s eyes looking back at me.

  The next day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in the Muslim village across the river. We were in the middle of dinner when the first flames licked up into the night sky. Soon long rows of houses lit up like a string of firecrackers and the entire village blistered and burned in a bloodred sky.

  None of us slept that night. A feathery dawn had broken over the river. Tattered smoke spiraled over the treetops from the still-burning village. Panic now swept through the Hindu section of the town on our side of the river. Everybody feared a deadly retaliation. Shop owners barricaded their doors, the fish market did not open and not even a pariah dog ventured out into the deserted streets.

  “Hai bhogoban!” Mima cried. “Such madness!” “Why did they have to attack the peaceful village? They were such simple fisherfolk who never troubled anybody. Now the Muslims will want an eye for an eye. Didn’t Gandhi say, if Hindus and Muslims each took an eye for an eye, the whole country would be blind?”

  I sat on the old plantation chair on our veranda as a fine silvery ash settled on the wooden armrests like a silent ghost. I was not thinking about what Gandhi said or the splintered politics of our country. I was thinking only of Manik. Suddenly he seemed so far away, so impossibly out of reach.

  The turgid silence of the ashen dawn was broken by the lonesome sound of a baul plucking his ektara as he traversed between two hate-torn worlds divided by a river with no bridge across it. He sang of man’s betrayal and sorrow. Only a baul could rise abov
e this madness, without judgment, powerless but unafraid.

  * * *

  Then the boats started coming across the river filled with half-dead, broken people; men with beaten bodies; women with vacant eyes; children with voiceless cries. They crawled across the rice fields, begged from door to door, sometimes with not even a rice bowl to beg with. One morning we found a small group huddled on our doorstep: an old man and a young mother with her two infant children.

  “Save us!” the old man cried, falling at Dadamoshai’s feet. “Oh, save us! Our house is burned, everything gone. All gone!” He raised his upturned hands to the sky. “Hai Allah have mercy!” he implored. I gasped when I recognized the ravaged face: the old man was none other than Jamina’s father!

  The woman covered the lower half of her face with the torn end of her sari. She stared straight ahead with unseeing eyes. A newborn infant, hardly a few months old, drooped listlessly on her shoulder and a small toddler clung to her legs. The woman’s name was Reza, we learned. She was Jamina’s brother’s wife. I recalled the menacing tattooed man with the sickle-shaped scar from Jamina’s wedding. Jamina’s brother had stormed out of the village vowing revenge on the Hindus. They feared he would never return.

  Dadamoshai gave them shelter. It was risky harboring Muslims at that time, but who in his or her right mind ever dared to tell Dadamoshai what to do? After all, he harbored all kinds of people in full daylight: fallen Hindu women like Chaya, Russian communists like Boris Ivanov and even a bad-luck child like me. This confused people because nobody quite knew what he was about or whose side he was on.

  “Why should these people hide like thieves? What have they done?” Dadamoshai tapped his umbrella furiously on the floor. “Let me see who dares to come after them. They will have to cross this threshold over my dead body.”

  Jamina’s family slept on our veranda. I could hear them outside my bedroom window: the soft sucking sounds of a nursing child, the prattle of a toddler and sometimes late at night the muffled sounds of a woman crying.

  Late one night I woke up and lay in bed listening: there was another man’s voice on the veranda. I parted the curtains and saw the shadowed back of a stranger. Reza’s husband had secretly come to visit her. At daybreak, when I looked out again he was already gone.

  * * *

  The next day the postman arrived with a telegram.

  “It’s for you,” said Dadamoshai, handing it to me.

  Telegrams were either good news or bad news. I had a sinking feeling about this one. I opened the pink sheet with trembling hands.

  MANIK DEB INJURED STOP CONDITION SERIOUS STOP DETAILS TO FOLLOW

  STOP

  JAMES LOVELACE

  I passed the telegram to Mima, left the veranda silently and went to my room. I lay facedown on my bed and everything started shaking violently all around me. I finally broke and my tears came in great hacking waves. Through the dense wall of my sorrow, I heard a thin, monotonous wail—persistent and forlorn. It was the sound of my baby crying.

  * * *

  Nothing could have stopped me that day. No riot, no earthquake, no flood—not even my five-week-old baby daughter. I had to get to Manik somehow.

  The situation in Silchar had turned ugly. The violence had spread from the village to the town. There were reports of looting and killing. Very few vehicles plied the roads and gangs of young hoodlums had taken to the streets brandishing khurpis and sticks. There were rumors of mosques and temples being burned, women raped.

  I lay in bed thinking. The only way I could get to Manik was to take the passenger train from Silchar to Mariani. From Mariani I would have to figure out a way to get to Aynakhal. I would just have to take it one step at a time.

  I knew Jonaki would be safe with Mima and Dadamoshai, safer here than any other place I could think of. I would ask Reza to be her wet nurse. How ironic, I thought, a Muslim woman breast-feeding a Hindu child when all around us Muslims and Hindus were killing each other.

  I told Dadamoshai and Mima my plans.

  “But how, Layla-ma?” Mima cried. “Please have some sense. This is complete madness. Do you have any idea how risky it is? Nobody is going by train anywhere. They are full of goondas. I don’t even know if the trains are running properly. God only knows how long it will take you to get to Mariani, if you get there at all. You will get killed, Layla. You will get raped. A young woman like you, on a train alone. Please have sense, maiyya. You are a mother now...you have a child to think of.” She turned to Dadamoshai in panic. “Dada, stop her. We can’t let her go like this!”

  Dadamoshai was silent.

  “Manik is seriously hurt, Mima. How can I sit here and do nothing?” I said quietly. “All I ask is you take care of Jonaki. Reza will breast-feed her while I am gone. I have already spoken to her.”

  “Layla-ma, I know you are upset, but please try to think clearly,” Mima pleaded. “The situation in Mariani is terrible. Terrible. Even if you reach Mariani, how will you get to Aynakhal from there? It is what—fifteen miles?”

  “I have not thought that far, Mima.”

  “Dada, how can you remain quiet? Why are you not saying anything?” Mima wailed.

  “When do you plan to go, maiyya?” asked Dadamoshai.

  “I want to leave immediately. On the next train, if possible. I know there is one that leaves tonight at seven-fifteen from Silchar station.”

  “I am going with Layla,” Dadamoshai announced.

  “No, Dadamoshai!” I said sharply. “I am doing this alone. You must stay here. I know people in this house will be safe only if you are here.”

  Mima ignored me. “Layla-ma, please, listen to me,” she said. “You just had a Cesarean operation and your body has not even healed. If you ask any doctor, they will forbid you to travel. You are seriously risking your health, maiyya.”

  “She will go whether you like it or not, Mima,” said Dadamoshai. “There is no point trying to talk her out of it. I know Layla. Once she has made up her mind, you can’t change it.”

  “Hai bhogoban!” Mima wailed. She covered her face with both her hands and howled like a child. I stared at her in shock; I had never seen Mima cry. Mima could be angry, belligerent, outraged, upset and indignant, but Mima crying! I could hardly bear to look at her. After a while she dried her eyes with the end of her sari. “You must take chili powder in your purse, Layla-ma,” she said, “and by God, you are going to need it this time.”

  * * *

  Amrat Singh, the Police Chief, offered to drive us to the station in his jeep with armed guards. On the way he tried to talk me out of what he called my “suicide mission.”

  “Layla, please think about this carefully,” he said. “I want you to fully understand the gravity of the Mariani situation. The CRP was sent there. You know what the CRP is, don’t you? It’s the special paramilitary police force used for dire insurgencies. We heard even the CRP could not enter Mariani. There is complete anarchy there. Now there is talk about the army being deployed. The army! Do you see how serious the situation is? As yet, we have no count of the total number of people killed.”

  I did not say anything.

  “The mobs have infiltrated several tea gardens near Mariani,” Amrat Singh continued. “Most planters have left with their families. The unmanned tea plantations have fallen into the hands of goondas. Only a few planters remain. The Irishman involved in that rhino case is one of them who has stayed back. The crowds are afraid of a white man with a gun. What I don’t understand is why Manik did not leave the tea garden when he had the chance.”

  Manik did indeed have the opportunity to leave Aynakhal, but it was not something he would ever do. The responsibilities of a Mai-Baap had been deeply ingrained in him by his ex-boss, Mr. McIntyre. Manik would argue Mr. McIntyre would never abandon the tea garden during a crisis, nor would someone like Jimmy
O’Connor. If a manager gave up control of a garden, chaos would reign and the damage would be irreparable. The delicate politics of labor management in a tea garden was not easily explainable to an outsider so I did not even try.

  * * *

  The Assam-Bengal passenger train pulled into the platform at Silchar station. The station was deserted except for the policemen and Dadamoshai. The train was running empty.

  Dadamoshai stood forlornly on the platform holding his umbrella, unable to speak a word.

  “Please leave, Dadamoshai,” I said softly. “I don’t want anybody to see me getting on this train.” I lightly touched his fingers and slipped quickly inside a bogie. It was filthy. A number of bluebottle flies had entered through the open window and buzzed over the dirty leaf plates with remnants of rotting food under the seats. All I carried with me was a small cloth bag, with some dry food packed by Chaya and a water bottle. I was dressed in an old sari; I covered my head and did not wear a single piece of jewelry or carry a purse. I switched off all the lights and huddled in a corner of the seat. The compartments had no doors. If anybody glanced inside, hopefully they would not see me and go away. I kept window shades pulled down, but left a four-inch gap at the bottom through which I could see a slice of the platform. It was stale and stuffy inside the train, making it difficult to breathe.

  The train gave a series of metallic squeaks as it pulled forward. I saw the moving concrete and occasionally a pair of feet, sometimes a bundle lying on the platform. Then it gathered speed—the silver rails snaked together and parted, growing farther and farther apart. Soon we were in the open countryside speeding through purple-green rice fields deepened by the fading twilight.

  The rhythmic rocking of the carriage invited sleep, but I was sharply and acutely alert. A few small stations rattled by, washes of concrete with amber pools of light. They looked deserted. Then the dark night swallowed us as the train steamed toward Mariani.

  Small bits of gray ash floated in through the crack in the window. I could smell burning. We passed by a crowd of ragged villagers holding burning torches. They ran alongside the speeding train trying to clamber aboard. I caught a glimpse of a blood-soaked child in a woman’s arms. Then everything washed away into the night.