While we were dancing, he touched the salwar kameeze I was wearing. “I like you in that.”
I joked that there were whole days now when I forgot I was English.
“Mostly English,” he reminded me.
“Well, OK, three-quarters English, Mr. Pedant,” I said. “But it’s strange. Yesterday, I was in the market and about to buy myself a marigold-colored shawl, when I held it up to my face in the mirror and thought, Crikey, I’m white, this won’t do. It was the oddest feeling.”
“I used to feel like that when I was buying plus fours in Harrods,” he said. “I’d see this impertinent brown face in the mirror and think, Um, maybe not.”
“Liar!” I said. We were both a little drunk; we hadn’t had wine in the longest time. “You never bought plus fours in your life.”
When we got too sticky to dance, he said, “Let’s go down to the waterfront. I want to see our house lit up from the road and think, What lucky brutes own that palace?”
It was lovely down there: a crescent moon, colored lights bouncing on the sea; some stalls still open, selling fruit and vegetables and fish. Two fishermen waved at us as we passed, their faces reflecting the glow of their paraffin lamps.
As we sat in a little café watching this, I was intensely, almost painfully aware of him: the sheen of his hair, his arm resting on the table, his hands around a glass.
He took a bath when we got home. Mani had come in to fill it while we were out. We were like children with many new toys as we admired the claw-foot bath—six feet long with beautiful brass taps, another gift from Uncle Josekutty. I washed his back and later we lay in our new, west-facing bed and enjoyed each other as never before.
“That has never left us has it, KK?” Anto said, in sleepy satisfaction afterwards. KK. Kittykutty, Kitty darling.
“Can’t talk,” I said, “too happy, no brain.” I was lying in the crook of his arm, looking through the curtains at a sky bursting with stars.
“Not fishing, but do you mind it’s just us here?” I asked him sleepily, “Will you miss Mangalath?”
He took so long to answer, I thought he’d gone back to sleep.
“I couldn’t live like that again,” he said eventually and a little sadly. He stroked the inside of my arm. “Anyway,” he added as he stroked my breast, “with any luck, we’ll have company soon, won’t we?”
- CHAPTER 32 -
Breast: sthanam (singular) sthanamgal (plural). Womb: udaram/garba paatram. Stomach: vayar.
My Malayalam notebook was beginning to fill up, and I was growing in confidence, but when I returned to work, on the following Monday, Dr. A. was in such a stinking mood that I felt back to square one. Ten deliveries had, she said, made the previous week their busiest ever. The emergency midwife they’d had to call in from the Victoria Gosha Hospital had been expensive, and with three more training classes on the cards, “The Home is in the red.” I must write immediately to Daisy, she demanded, and see whether the Settlement ladies could tide us over. Without funds, the Home was, once again, on a knife edge.
This time I plucked up the courage to tell Dr. A. straight that I was sorry, but I didn’t think that would be possible without turning over the Moonstone books. Daisy had asked three times for accounts of money spent and I had not been given them, so I doubted there would be more money without them.
Dr. A.’s right nostril widened into an incipient sneer when I said this, and when she bundled me into her study and locked the door, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d slapped me as I’d seen her slap one or two of the nurses.
“You are forcing me to tell you a very unwelcome thing,” she said, in full finger-jabbing flow. “Something I have been keeping back in respect of staff morale, and in respect of gorement funding.”
“What is it?”
“Someone is taking money from the Home and I don’t know who.”
“That’s horrifying,” I said. “We must tell the police immediately. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I don’t want any gossip about this at the Home or to your family. It could ruin us, and we have so much good work to do.”
“Does Maya know?”
“Maya knows, of course.” She closed her dark eyes.
“I have to tell Daisy,” I said.
She gave a great shrug. “It will be a shock, so tell her also what great work we’re doing.”
“It will be more than a shock.” I found myself shaking with rage at the almost blasé look she was giving me. “She’s put hours and hours of work into fund-raising. You may think of her as a rich white woman. She’s not.”
“Listen!” She was glaring now too. “I have two hours sleep a night, trying to run this place, and I am doing everything I can to find the miscreant; tell her that.”
When I offered to help her find the thief and also the missing accounts, her scowl deepened. She told me to stop going on about the accounts, that she had far more important things on her mind. She would write to Daisy herself.
* * *
I didn’t believe her, and I wrote to Daisy that night telling her about my strange conversation with Dr. A. and asking for advice. Several weeks later I was relieved to see, on a brass tray in the hall, Daisy’s familiar slashing handwriting on pastel-blue Basildon Bond notepaper. Our letters must have crossed on the high seas, as hers answered none of my questions. Instead, it was uncharacteristically full of bad news. Without urgent and expensive repairs, Wickam Farm was on its last legs: high winds had blown most of the roof off the north barn, flooding the office; a ceiling in the main house had collapsed, narrowly missing Ci Ci’s bedroom.
“Also,” she wrote, “I’d been hearing a strange munching sound for ages but had no idea it was the deathwatch beetle. Did you know they have fierce little jaws; you can actually hear them?”
I did sense a sort of panic beneath the jocular tone, but nothing prepared me for what came next.
“So, Kit, I am so sorry, but we’ve had to move all our boarders out for the duration, and I am in a quandary about your mother, who has had a very nasty bout of flu and who, I fear, can’t go on working for much longer in this climate.”
I almost stopped breathing when I read what came next.
“She is now planning a trip to India, with money she has been saving. I am not sure how you will feel about this, but the sun, to put it bluntly, may save her life. For God’s sake, Kit, don’t tell her I’ve warned you,” Daisy concluded. “You know how proud she is.”
Another letter, in a sealed envelope, lay inside Daisy’s, my name written on it in a beautiful italic script that I recognized immediately. But now the writing, taught to my mother by the Pondicherry nuns, had a slight tremor, as though penned during a minor earthquake.
Wickam Farm, May 5th
Dear Kit,
This letter is to let you know that I have come into a little windfall—the details later. I plan to use some of it to come out and see you and maybe look up a few old chums at the same time, and get some SUN. The weather’s vile here. I’ve been staying off and on at Wickam Farm, where we’ve had the usual dramas of burst pipes and, of course, the barn roof.
Daisy, who is getting more dotty by the year, tries to laugh at it all, but it’s no joke, particularly with three guests staying—Ci Ci, plus Flora again after a broken engagement.
I hear from Daisy that you’re doing well and are up to good works and tip my hat in your general direction. I’ve had flu but it was too cold to stay in bed as Daisy demanded. If she writes making a fuss about it—ignore. More news later when I hear from you.
Your mother,
Glory
I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh or cry when I read this. Not a dickey bird from her since I left home: no reply to any of my letters, no messages via Daisy, no telegrams. A big fat nothing, and now this odd missive, so blasé and pecul
iar-sounding that I wondered if Ci Ci hadn’t helped her write it, making her sound more like a person wanting to be asked to a cocktail party than a mother who had told her daughter she was dead to her.
But I knew too she was always at her most peculiar and unreal when she was ill, for the simple reason that she hated me to see her like that.
I stood in shock, the letter in my hand. She was coming and the timing felt cruel because in spite of my anxieties about the Moonstone, I was learning all the time, and things were finally settling down between Anto and myself. He was loving his job, very busy with a research paper, and it was wicked of me to confess this, but being dead to her had become, in itself, a kind of freedom.
My mind raced about for the rest of the day. How had she financed her trip to India? I wondered in sudden panic, knowing her predilection for helping herself to “treats” from other people’s houses. Shoes and scarves, the odd pilfered belt were one thing, but a windfall big enough to blow you to India sounded unlikely. Dear God, I hoped it hadn’t come from Daisy, who could least afford it. And what if this flu of hers was something more serious? And round and round it went.
* * *
“I’m terrified,” I told Anto at dusk that night, when we’d joined the slow, peaceful crowd that strolled down the waterfront most evenings. The sun, melting like a fat peach, would soon flop over the horizon, and the evening breezes were soft and silky, except now I could imagine only too well my mother walking with us, paying attention to all the wrong things: the broken drain near the park with a few evil-smelling fish heads stuck in the grilles, the skinny dogs, the beggars. She’d be remembering why she hated India—its mess, its muddle, its Indianness—in the first place, and she’d be restless, wondering where all the amusing people were. Much as I’d resist it, I knew I’d feel her confusion too and feel responsible for her, because, damn it, I still wanted to make things right for her.
When we sat down on a bench to talk, Anto put his hand next to mine.
“This is the first chance we’ve had to be properly together,” I moaned. “And I’m quite sure she’ll hate it and make us miserable.”
He didn’t answer for a while.
“Make us miserable,” I repeated, thinking he may not have heard.
“Come on, Kit.” My husband looked at me almost in surprise. “She’s your mother. You have the power to make her happy.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
I looked at him suspiciously in case he was teasing me, but he wasn’t. His face, colored by the setting sun, looked weary after a long day at the hospital, weary and infinitely precious to me.
“Now I feel like a heel,” I said, relieved he was taking it so well. “It’s just such bad timing, and I’ve never heard her say a good word about India—ghastly place,” I said in her voice.
“You’re making her sound like Margaret Rutherford, who never said anything horrid about anyone,” he said, doing his Madame Arcati.
The small boy who ran up and down the seafront every night with his arm full of bangles was delighted by our laughing and joined in with a loud cackle.
“Anto,” I warned him when we’d stopped, “I’m not laughing inside. I’m terrified, and I wish I wasn’t. There’s just so much about her I don’t know.”
- CHAPTER 33 -
On the front of our calendar at home, there was a beaming lady in an orange sari floating down the Ganges and advertising Horlick’s. And when I looked at her (Horlick’s is good for you!) I went cold inside. Now there were only three weeks until my mother would heave into view aboard the Strathdene from Bombay. Our brief little idyll was over, and I felt like a selfish bitch for minding, but I did.
One of my new freedoms I particularly relished was my daily commute from Rose Street to the Moonstone. I liked the feeling of sun on my arms and saying good morning to the knife sharpener who sat outside the hardware shop on the corner, then to Murali on the next corner, the fruit seller who loved to instruct me on what to eat and how to cook it, and who sometimes chased me down the street with a ripe mango or a passion fruit, shouting, “Madam, your ladyship, stop! Special treat for you.” The mangos tasted of roses, of honey and summer.
I liked the view from the seafront; the ships from China and Europe and Africa, laden with cedar and spices and oil; the sight of the Chinese nets rising and falling like prehistoric creatures against the sky. I liked saying hello to the old lady who cooked for the fishermen who now waved and beamed at me toothlessly when I passed.
Mind you, I was still sometimes an object of curiosity, and occasionally followed by overzealous traders who were irritating rather than frightening, so I didn’t worry much that morning when I noticed three young men who seemed to be walking with deliberate casualness behind me. When I stepped from the curb into the road, I could hear the flip, flap, flop of their sandals.
When I stopped at a small kiosk on the corner of Fort Street to buy some of the sweets Anto likes, one of the boys stopped too. He was wearing a cheap shirt and had a thin mustache and an odd affectless stare as if he were looking straight through me.
“Take care of yourself, Mrs. Queen,” was all he said, yet it sent a brief spasm of fear through me.
But one of the bonuses of working at the Moonstone was that the work was so intense, as soon as I’d stepped over the pile of dusty sandals in the doorway, I’d forgotten all about it.
We had five soon-to-be-delivered mothers on the wards, and eight new midwives in training. That morning, as I put on my overall, I could hear them singing with a fervor and a joy that was humbling.
Dr. A. had encouraged dancing in the group, and when I walked into the room, I saw our new group of trainees, their arms waving luxuriously above their heads, worn hennaed feet moving for nothing but pleasure. I knew by now that Achamma—eyes ecstatically closed, wheeling, stamping—usually slept on the floor of a cramped hut shared with ten other people in a nearby fishing village. When she wasn’t delivering babies she did backbreaking work in paddy fields. Rama, from Quilon, now making beautiful sinuous movements with her wrists and fingers, had produced five children in rapid succession. Watching them dance was like seeing their secret selves come to life, and it always moved me.
This morning, after a tiffin of soft rice idlis and coconut chutney, the question posed was “What was your quickest delivery ever?”
“Two minutes from waters breaking,” answered Rama, who had delivered hundreds of babies. “Slowest, three and a half days.”
Low sympathetic moans at this.
“Did you take her to hospital?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Doctors jump on you there.”
Raucous laughter from some, timid shushings from Rama, who seems wary of upsetting me—the English memsahib taking notes.
“Be serious now.” Maya gave them her stern look through the horn-rimmed glasses. “Mother has been in labor now for over twenty-four hours: what will you do?”
Rama said, “I would put ginger in her chai. I would get her up and walking. I would observe her vital signs, by taking pulses.” (Some of the midwives follow the ayurvedic principle that the human being has seventy-seven pulse points, all of them vital to health.)
This worry about hospitals cropped up again and again and was probably why Dr. A. estimates ninety-nine percent of all births in India are home births.
A short but violent debate on contraception followed.
Madhavi, whose nose ring made her look like a stubborn old bull, listed some on her fingers: a stone placed in the vagina, sponges, and for many women, anal sex. Achamma pipes up that she thinks contraception is fine for some city people, but she doesn’t feel country people need it.
A furious discussion then took place, lots of finger-pointing and flashing eyes. In the lunch break, Maya filled me in. Achamma was, she said, talking codswallop of course,
but contraception is “a big blank” for many of these women.
“What was making them so angry earlier?” I asked.
“Abortions,” she said. “In country areas, many midwives have to do them, and some are very primitive: sticks in the womb, stones, poisonous concoctions. We must stop them,” she said simply. “Bad for their conscience, worse for the mothers.”
* * *
After class, Maya and I flopped in the dispensary room and drank chai together. When she took off her glasses and polished them, I saw large blue circles under her eyes.
“You look tired, Maya,” I said. “Is everything all right at home?”
“Yes, thank you, ma’am,” she replied politely. She hardly ever called me ma’am nowadays.
“My son has not been well, but he is getting better.”
“Does he still drop you off in the morning?”
“No, ma’am.” She looked at the floor.
“How do you get to work?”
“Boat and bus and walk.”
“But isn’t it miles away?” I had only the foggiest memory of the village where Maya lived. “Couldn’t we ask for some extra money from the kitty to get you here?”
“No.” She was always nervous about rocking the boat. For her, being singled out for education, for training had already been a magic carpet ride powered by Dr. A. “Don’t do that. If I lose this job, I have nothing.”
She closed her eyes; she didn’t want to talk anymore. I took our two cups to the sink. I was getting water from the old Ascot heater when I looked up and saw, from the corner of my eye, the backs of two young males scrambling over the wall that separates our land from the alleyway that leads to the street.
My shout was heard by Dr. A. She came rushing in with the night watchman, who bared his teeth convincingly.
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