by Moni Mohsin
The wall above the sideboard was hung with black-and-white photographs. They were mostly taken at the racecourses of Bombay, Delhi, Lahore and Karachi, and featured Thomas Rambridge, a barrel-chested, bow-legged man in a pith helmet and jodhpurs, holding the reins of handsome thoroughbreds. In one photograph, Mrs Rambridge also made an appearance. She clutched a crocodile handbag and looked out at the world with the small, wary eyes she had bequeathed to Hester.
The November evening was chilly, and a log fire crackled in the grate. Even through the closed windows, guests could hear the distant yowl of jackals. Bridgebad House sat in the middle of Hester Bullock’s estate of some nine thousand acres. As the crow flew, it was four miles from Sabzbagh but, embalmed in a different age, it was a world away.
When guests drove down the avenue of jamun trees leading up to the house, they felt as if they were travelling back to the heyday of the Raj. Rose-covered pergolas, grass tennis courts, the elegant, columned portico, the massive presence of the house itself – all hinted at a life of affluence and certainty.
Yet the plaster on the portico was falling away in chunks. The tennis court was overgrown with weeds, and the bedrooms on the first floor of the house were shuttered and shrouded in dustsheets. Once the focus of many a jolly party – tennis weekends, race dances and duck shoots, for which Lahore’s gymkhana crowd would motor down in open-topped cars – the house now echoed only to Hester’s imperious ‘koi hais.’
Around a dining table that could seat eighteen, tonight six people were gathered for dinner. Two silver candlesticks stood on either side of a murky crystal bowl of narcissi. A bearer in a limp turban and a white brass-buttoned Nehru jacket shuffled barefoot around the table serving the guests thick beige soup from a silver tureen.
‘Ah, mulligatawny soup,’ boomed Colonel Butt. He was in his mid-forties and had black patent-leather hair and an imposing chin. Dressed in a blazer, with a silk cravat tucked into the collar of his cream shirt, he looked urbane and at ease. It had taken him at least twenty minutes of fiddling in front of his mirror to get the folds of the cravat just so. But Colonel Butt was a dogged man. It had given him great pleasure eventually to impose his will on the slippery silk. He’d checked himself in the flyblown mirror in Hester’s entrance hall and been gratified to see that the cravat looked just right – not too rigid, not too contrived, in fact, almost effortless in its fluid grace. Effortlessness was a virtue the colonel coveted, since almost everything in his life had come to him with great effort.
He poured himself a third ladle of soup. ‘I haven’t had decent mulligatawny soup since my posting to Karachi four years ago. Still, mustn’t complain. Colewallah cantt is not without its charms.’
‘Such as?’ Hester raised her peppery eyebrows. Hester was a tall, thickset woman in her early sixties with no neck and several chins. She had short grey hair, cut with little regard for fashion or fancy, small, shrewd eyes and pink cheeks mapped by a fine network of thread veins. Her only concessions to vanity were a smear of orange lipstick and a diamond brooch pinned to her prow-like bosom.
‘Oh, fresh air, fireflies, buffalo milk by the bucketful, peas, tomatoes and whatnots from the garden. You should ask my wife. This is her department.’
Mrs Butt, a sparrow-like woman with sharp features and a shrill voice, looked up from her soup.
‘Yes, yes, lots of vegetables. Peas and cabbages and carrots, and snakes and bats also, but schooling is the real problem, isn’t it, Mrs Azeem?’
‘For children, vegetables or bats?’ asked Fareeda, smiling.
‘What? Oh no, I meant the children. Hamad is thirteen and Huma baby ten, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve left them in Pindi with my mother-in-law – my own mother passed away seven years ago – but it’s so far. I’ve been here only three weeks, and already I’m missing them too much. We were lucky before with postings in Pindi, Kharian and Karachi – all towns with schools.’
Fareeda nodded. ‘During term time our girls stay with my mother in Lahore, which, luckily, is a bit nearer than Pindi.’
‘How often do you visit them?’
‘Whenever I want. In fact, I may go tomorrow for the day to see my elder daughter.’
‘Hai, see, so lucky! I can only go twice a month. So, where in Lahore does your mother live?’
‘Gulberg.’
‘Where in Gulberg?’
Fareeda raised her eyebrows. Noticing the gesture from across the table, the colonel cut in. ‘I hardly think it’s appropriate to grill Mrs Azeem.’
‘She doesn’t mind. Anyways, what’s to mind?’ shrugged Mrs Butt. ‘I’m only asking, and that also because my mother’s family’s from Lahore. Otherwise, I have no interest.’
Fareeda gave Mrs Butt her mother’s address.
‘Is that the house with tall, tall mango trees in the back garden?’ squealed Mrs Butt. ‘Hai, Allah, my auntie’s house is just on its backside. As children we’d climb up the common wall and eye your green mangoes. Imagine! Your mother and my auntie have adjoining backsides.’
‘Who’d have thought that, eh?’ Hester guffawed. ‘Adjoining backsides, indeed.’
The colonel scowled at his wife. Mrs Butt looked puzzled. With a shrug, she applied herself to her soup.
Edward Seaton was the sixth guest at dinner. He was a mild-mannered elderly Englishman with thinning grey hair, pale blue eyes and a bow tie. He served Hester as a farm manager-cum-vet.
‘How is your project doing?’ he asked Tariq. ‘I believe you’ve received a grant from the British Development Association?’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Oh, the good old Imperial Club grapevine,’ said Mr Seaton. ‘Last week in Lahore, I ran into Davies, the BDA chap, at the Club. He was all praise for your project. He didn’t see why you shouldn’t get your grant.’
‘They hinted the same to me when they came to have a look, but I don’t want to count on it until I have the money in hand.’
‘Wise, but unnecessarily modest, if I may say so. That’s a fine programme you run, and it deserves every bit of help it can get.’
‘Excuse my ignorance, but what is your project, Tariq Sahib?’ enquired the colonel.
‘Oh, our Tariq here is a bit of a visionary,’ laughed Hester. ‘He’s set up a nice little garment factory in Sabzbagh. They stitch children’s clothes on electric machines. At first, Fareeda used to oversee the finish, but now your people more or less run it themselves, don’t they?’
‘That’s right, Hester,’ said Tariq. ‘With any luck we’ll be branching into knitwear soon.’
‘Is it very profitable?’ the colonel asked Tariq.
‘We run it as a cooperative. Everyone’s fully trained now, and they set and meet their own targets. I helped them find markets in Lahore, but now they’ve got their own contacts. It’s a small cottage industry, really, but they can go on to bigger things.’
‘And these young men, having acquired all this know-how, will be content to stay in their villages, or will they head for the towns?’ queried the colonel.
‘Young women. We train women. Our entire centre is run by and for women.’
‘Women? Why?’
‘Because it’s time they got to run something too. Don’t you think?’
‘They run their homes, don’t they?’ asked the colonel.
‘And what a thankless task that is!’ harrumphed Hester.
‘And unpaid,’ pointed out Fareeda.
‘Yes, but they have the satisfaction of raising their children,’ persisted the colonel.
‘And since it is women who raise children, isn’t it important to educate them too?’ asked Tariq.
‘Already it’s so hard to find good ayahs,’ Mrs Butt chipped in. ‘You educate these village girls, and they’ll turn up their noses at working in our homes.’
‘I hope so,’ said Tariq.
‘You hope so?’ shrieked Mrs Butt. ‘Then you are your own worst enemy.’
‘What Tariq means, I think, Mrs Butt,
’ Mr Seaton explained, ‘is that village girls should also have some freedom in deciding their future.’
‘They have too much freedom already, if you ask me,’ sniffed Mrs Butt. ‘The way they run around the fields and mix-up with men, I’ve never seen such fast behaviour in Karachi even. Why, only yesterday, I caught the girl who does our ironing …’
‘Youngsters will be youngsters,’ the colonel chided his wife. Turning to Tariq, he continued, ‘I’m all for idealism, Mr Azeem. God knows, I’m as idealistic and liberal as the next johnnie. It’s all very well to educate these simple girls and put fine ideas in their heads, but where are you going to find jobs for them in Sabzbagh? How many garment factories can you subsidize?’
‘Oh, come on, Colonel.’ Hester waved an impatient hand. ‘Those who can’t work in factories can become seamstresses and take in work. They’re not training rocket-scientists, you know.’
A flash of irritation crossed the colonel’s face. But, schooling his features into a bland smile, he said to Hester, ‘I hear your family has had a long association with Bridgebad, Mrs Bullock. How did they come to settle here?’
‘None of this “Mrs Bullock” nonsense. I’m Hester.’
The colonel inclined his head as if acknowledging a salute from a captain.
‘Well, Daddy came out here in the early twenties after the Great War.’ Hester dabbed her mouth with a napkin, smudging orange lipstick over the corners of her lips. ‘The government had just laid out this irrigation network – the canal dividing my land from Tariq’s here is part of it, as I’m sure you know. Edgar Cole, a senior officer in the administration, was the brain behind the irrigation scheme. He named this particular district after himself. “Old King Cole”, Daddy used to call him. But there was one small problem. There was nobody to farm it.’
Tariq cleared his throat. ‘Correction, Hester …’
‘Sorry. There were a few people, like Tariq’s family, who’ve lived in these parts, for what, a few hundred years now? But the ordinary man in the field, the kammi, didn’t know how to farm.’
‘It wasn’t as if they didn’t know, Hester …’
‘Oh, all right. There hadn’t been the opportunity, with water so scarce. So the government invited white families to settle, farm and kick – or shall we say mould? – the kammis into shape. Is that better, Tariq?’ She threw him a mischievous smile.
‘Daddy took nine thousand acres on lease – oh, yes, it’s leased – and was given a charter to breed mules for the army. He built this house, named the estate Bridgebad, imported bloodstock from Ireland and got on with breeding horses. Of course, he also reared mules, but it was for its racers that Bridgebad became famous. By the mid thirties he was selling to maharajas all over India.
‘By then, other white settlers had also arrived in the area. There were the Hays of Haypore, near Colewallah town, and James Russell had a nice little holding fifteen miles from here. Of course the O’Brians were across the canal, and there was that odd bird, Ferguson, who went native and wore dhotis. But, apart from Ferguson, who died last year, the others went off in dribs and drabs after Independence.’
‘What happened to the rest of your family?’
‘Poor old Toby got mixed up with a money-grubbing Eurasian girl in Srinagar. Daddy hit the roof and threw him out. So he went off to live in Goa with his chee-chee girl. Within a year he’d died of dysentery. My parents died in a car crash in ’45. Henry was killed in the war in Burma.’
Hester drained her glass and replaced it with a thud on the table.
‘I inherited Bridgebad. My late husband’s family had been in and out of India for a hundred years. He felt at home here. Horses were still selling. Farm was making a tidy profit. Even when the others started packing up after ’47, we thought we’d take our chances here. My husband, as Tariq will tell you, passed away ten years ago, while shooting duck on Bridge-bad Lake. As for me, well, I’m the last of the Mohicans. No children. When I drop, you can plant me under the narcissi in the front lawn.’ Hester picked up a silver bell and rang it furiously.
‘Koi hai? Hayat? There you are. We’ve finished the soup.’
‘Yes, memsahib.’ The bearer removed the soup plates.
Hayat returned bearing aloft a steaming silver platter. It was piled high with lamb chops, lamb kidneys, calves’ liver, a quail or two, and chicken legs covered with a muddy brown sauce. The meat was hemmed in by a continuous ridge of stiff mashed potatoes, pinched into little peaks by thick fingers that had left their imprints on the mash.
‘Meex grill,’ Hayat announced solemnly.
‘How is Laila doing? I hope fully recovered from the typhoid?’ Mr Seaton enquired of Fareeda.
‘Oh, yes, thank you.’ Fareeda helped herself to a chicken breast. ‘She’s fine now, but she tires quite easily. I haven’t sent her back to school yet, because the winter holidays are almost here. In fact, what with all this sabre-rattling with India, I thought I ought to bring Sara here as well. I can’t help thinking she’ll be safer here than in Lahore.’
‘Hurry, man, hurry. We haven’t got all night.’ Hester clapped her hands at Hayat. ‘What’s this about sabre-rattling? You think there’s going to be war with India, Tariq?’
The possibility of a third war with India had grown ever more real as political events had unfolded disastrously over the previous year in East Pakistan, or Bengal, as it had been known before Independence. A national election almost a year ago had yielded an East Pakistani majority. Tired of being treated as a colony of its physically larger but less populous western wing, the Bengalis had voted as one for a fellow Bengali, Sheikh Mujeeb-ur-Rehman. West Pakistan had not accepted the results.
The Bengalis had rebelled. In retaliation, General Yahya Khan, the army chief and martial-law administrator, had launched a ferocious military crackdown. Mujib was arrested and taken to West Pakistan. His close associates had escaped to India, where they had formed a government in exile. A bitter civil war had raged for eight months now. Though the government imposed almost total censorship on news from Bengal, rumours of rape camps, of pillage and slaughter, had leaked out. Millions of East Pakistani refugees streamed into India.
Still smarting from the inconclusive war with Pakistan of 1965, India had been covertly training Bengali militants, the mukti bahini, to fight West Pakistani soldiers. Now it did so openly.
Separated from East Pakistan by a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory, West Pakistani lines of communication were stretched to the limit. The Eastern Command was isolated in Bengal, and the Bengalis and Indians were closing in. Morale in the Pakistani army had plummeted. Sceptics like Tariq, who did not believe the government’s propaganda of a successful military campaign, watched with concern.
‘I hope there isn’t going to be a war, Hester,’ said Tariq. ‘But I fear there will be. With all due respect to Colonel Butt, army action is not a panacea …’
‘Ours is a highly disciplined army, Tariq Sahib,’ the colonel cut in. ‘We are not some motley crew of irregulars that is going to run amok …’
‘But isn’t that what the soldiers are doing?’ Fareeda interrupted. ‘Running amok? What else would you call rape camps and torture chambers?’
‘You mustn’t believe everything you hear, madam.’ The colonel’s thin smile did not slip. ‘Particularly when it is reported by biased outsiders. You should have faith in your own people.’
‘Oh, but I do. I have complete faith in the Bengalis.’
‘Haw, you are Bengali?’ Mrs Butt yelped. ‘I was thinking you were Punjabi, like us.’
Fareeda ignored Mrs Butt’s outburst. The woman was clearly an idiot.
‘Touching though it is,’ scoffed the colonel, ‘your faith in the Bengalis is not reciprocated.’ The colonel addressed himself to Fareeda. ‘You let a mukti bahini thug in here tonight and he’ll slit your throat as you sleep. Our boys are risking their lives so that …’
‘Hester’s question was about the likelihood of war with India, Colo
nel,’ Mr Seaton reminded him softly. ‘What is the possibility of that?’
‘Zero, absolutely zero.’ The colonel jabbed the air with his knife. ‘Unless the Indians want a bloody nose. Oh, they’ll carry on aiding these wretched Bingos through the back door. But they won’t come out and fight like men. You needn’t worry about a war.’ He turned his sleek Brylcreemed head from Fareeda to Hester. ‘Life will continue here in Bridgebad just as it always has. That, I guarantee you.’
‘That’s the pity of it,’ said Hester. ‘Half the country plunged into a civil war, and here we are, carrying on as if nothing were amiss.’
‘Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be in the thick of it,’ muttered the colonel, fingering his cravat.
Fareeda decided she did not like the colonel’s cravat. The colours – crimson swirls on a sulphurous yellow background – were gaudy, and it was tied all wrong. Instead of lying unobtrusively against his throat, it thrust out of his collar like the bristling ruff of an enraged cockerel. And the blazer with those ghastly brassy buttons. So flashy.
Gazing at her husband across the table, Fareeda smiled. He was understated in a pale-blue sea-island cotton shirt and grey wool trousers. At his wrists gleamed the simple platinum cufflinks her parents had given him at their wedding. It occurred to her that Tariq had changed little since she had spotted him at a garden party fourteen years ago.
He’d been standing to one side, a tall, lanky man, with thick hair flopping over one eyebrow. Though he had laughed and chatted readily enough, she noticed that he was quite content to observe as well. Fareeda sensed that, like her, he was in the crowd though not of it. There were no loud brays of laughter, no backslapping, no elaborate display of bonhomie. He did not flit from person to person. He spoke to few people but concentrated fully on them when he did so. Fareeda strained to hear his quiet conversation.
His looks, Fareeda reflected now, had worn well. His thick hair was threaded with silver at the temples but still flopped boyishly over his right eye. While many of the lean, lithe youths she had known in Lahore were now portly figures, Tariq could fit comfortably into the cricketing whites he’d had at college. She observed his heaped plate. It was quite unfair how he never seemed to gain any weight. And he ate silently, unlike the colonel, who sawed and chomped his meat as if he were squatting by a fire in a neolithic cave.