All these thoughts were spiraling and somersaulting in my head when someone ran up behind me and made me jump.
“Miss Kit. Miss Kit.” It was Neeta Chacko, breathless and agitated.
“Please, I beg you to help me. They have caught my boy Pavitran. They have taken him to the police station and beaten him severely there, and now he is in the jail on Tower Road. They came to our house this morning.”
“Neeta!” She’d seemed so petrified the last time I saw her, I’d assumed her plan was to scuttle back into hiding. Now she was gray with fear and trembling.
“What did he do?”
“They say he torched the Home. I know he didn’t. They are definitely making him a scarecrow.”
“A scarecrow?”
“A scapegoat.”
She looked on the point of collapse. I led her to a bench and we sat down together. Raffie, worn out with teething problems, fell asleep in his pram.
Neeta resumed her story. “Husband says to leave my son there, but if we do, he will die. He is a harmless boy who loves his animals, his family.”
“Who says he did it?”
Neeta shook her head violently; she either couldn’t or didn’t want to say.
“I know he didn’t do it, Miss Kit.”
She was crying properly now, and in between gasps and sighs, the whole story tumbled out. She said she knew he didn’t do it because the boy had had one of his spells that week, and they always left him very weak.
“What do you mean by spells?” I asked her.
Glancing around her, she said the dread word, “Epilepsy,” a condition I knew from Maya was sometimes mistaken here for possession by evil spirits.
“My husband tied him to the bed afterwards. I didn’t want him to do this, but he says we must and I obeyed him.”
Neeta looked at me then and put both hands together in prayer. “Please help me, Madam. I have no one else to go to, and I need money to get him out of the prison. I’ll pay you back. I’ll go away again after that.”
I looked at her, and then at Raffie, who was stirring again. I opened my bag and collected the few rupees I had there.
“This is all I’ve got,” I said, handing them to her. “I’ll ask my husband later, when he comes home. We’ll do what we can, but we’re not rich people.”
She snatched at my handful of notes. “I’m going there now,” she said. “If you come with me, it would help. They will see an Englishwoman and be ashamed of their wickedness.”
I doubted this very much, and seeing I was under suspicion, I didn’t want to go. But after dropping Raffie off at home, I tagged along with her.
* * *
The jail on Tower Street was a twenty-minute walk from our house, a large gray two-storied building with barred windows and crumbling plaster. Looking up from the rubbish-strewn garden in front of it, I saw the glint of eyes peering down at me from behind barred windows. The reception area, a dungeon of a room, was lit by a naked bulb. It was hot and stank of urine.
A large, frowning man was sitting in a kind of cage to the left of the entrance. I saw Neeta disappear into the cage, heard her sobs and pleading. Five minutes or so later she came out again, ashen-faced but with a shaky smile.
“It’s done,” she said. She patted her empty purse. “It was mistaken identity.” Or maybe, she admitted later, his illness frightened them.
I heard footsteps disappear down a dark corridor, the clank of a door, a man shouting. When Pavitran came out, unshaven and blinking, he flung himself at his mother and hugged her hard, mumbling and crying. He was so happy, and so was she. When he looked up I saw he had a swollen eye, and a small cut over his right eye, but otherwise seemed fine. Neeta said he had had another epileptic seizure in jail: his trousers were wet in front and he looked bewildered.
During the interminable paperwork and rubber stamping that followed, the boy looked on placidly like a large, well-trained domestic animal and held his mother’s hand. Two hours after we had arrived, we were in the streets again in the merciless flat light of midday. Neeta beamed and told me, “God is good.” I was not so sure. She told me never to tell anyone what I had witnessed that morning in the jail.
* * *
But I did tell Anto that night about Neeta’s son and my worries about Dr. A. and her vague threats to me. It did not go well.
“I don’t want you to go back to that place when it opens again,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. If you won’t do it for me, do it for Raffie’s sake.”
“I don’t want to stay away,” I said. “I can just see you abandoning your work at the first sign of trouble.”
“I’m not talking about me. You’re my wife.”
He didn’t even bother to keep his voice down, as on and on the argument raged, and we were back where we were at Trivandrum during the monsoon, like two angry strangers who had collided in a freak accident.
“Do one thing for me, if not for you,” he said, holding my hand when we had both calmed down. “Take a holiday with your mother. Go and see your father. You know that’s what you want to do, really, and if you don’t, you may regret it forever.”
“A holiday!” I said. “Hardly.” His words had made me feel instantly tearful, and I didn’t want to cry. “It’s true I do think about him, a lot.” I was childishly grateful for his hand in mine. “But what if it’s not true? What if he’s not there?”
Anto stroked my hair. “I think it’s genuine: Amma told me Glory had hysterics when you were taken to the hospital. She thought you’d died.”
“She didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, she wouldn’t, would she?” he said. “She’s Glory, but what if she’s changed? What if she really wants to do this for you?”
I hadn’t properly considered this. I’d thought for so long that my job was to protect her.
- CHAPTER 44 -
September 27, 1950.
I marked the date we left for Ooty in my diary, thinking if we did find him, I’d want to remember it, and then I wrote, “Fat Hope” and underlined it twice, just to keep myself straight.
“So, darling, off we go,” my mother said brightly, as we stood on the platform at Mettapalayam waiting for the seven-ten train: the same words she’d spoken with the same upward inflection at the beginning of so many trips, to so many jobs when I was young, as if to light the touch paper on some splendid adventure.
And the usual fudging about any difficulties involved, because Ootacamund turned out to be much farther away from Cochin than Glory had said. It had begun with a bone-crunching, boiling eight-hour drive to Mettupalayam to catch the Nilgiri Blue Mountain train. When we got to the station, Glory, wheezing and pale, sat with her head in her hands in the ladies’ waiting room, looking so ill my heart began to thump.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “We could just go home.”
“Don’t be stupid.” She gave me one of her famously frosty looks. “We’ve bought our tickets; we have to go.”
Our bright-blue train was tiny and narrow, like a toy train, with uncomfortably upright seats, but as we rose higher and higher, often at an agonizingly slow crawl, my mother seemed to revive. When she began to gasp out facts and figures about the sixteen tunnels we’d pass through, the nineteen bridges we’d cross, I remembered the endless games of I Spy we’d once played to distract me from friends I was leaving behind, or a cat I’d loved, a house, another fading scene.
It was stifling hot in our carriage; if you put your cheek against the window it stuck and burned. When she stopped talking suddenly and fell asleep, the journey took on a nightmarish quality for me: the darkness of the tunnels, the heat, my mother’s gargling cough, the screech and cries of the train, lurching views into the steep ravines. Everything was unstable and chaotic and hot as hell.
When we stopped for refreshments at a tiny hillside station, I ha
d to wake her. I felt a clutch of my heart looking down at her; she looked so dangerously breakable, all sharp angles and delicate surfaces. Her hands clasped her handbag for dear life.
On the station platform, almost buried in misty trees, we were served fruitcake and tea by a winsome turbaned man who called out to her, “Hello, Mrs. Shakespeare,” which made us laugh. I was hungry enough to eat one of the curries another merchant offered, but Glory begged me not too. “They’re riddled with germs.”
“I don’t think they are, Mamji,” I said to her, using my facetious name for her. “I find many Indians are fastidiously clean, far cleaner than the Brits.”
Back on the train again, she became more and more silent and more and more fidgety as the train rose higher and higher. She took her purse out of her bag and counted all the coins very slowly. She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out. She strained to look through the window out on the hills where a light rain was falling on a coffee plantation, so green it looked as if it were underwater. She looked at her shoes and examined them from several angles. After the silence had stretched to about an hour, I took her hand.
“All right, Mummy?”
“Fine,” she said, in an echo of her brave young voice. “This is rather fun, isn’t it?” I thought about this for a while, not daring to speak. Had she really said fun?
The train shrieked through another of its sixteen tunnels, and when it came out I said, “So . . . will you tell me more about him before I meet him?” as gently as I could. If there was to be an emotional outburst, I hoped for both our sakes it would be in private.
In the dark tunnel my mother’s face flickered, went out. “You’ll have to ask him yourself,” she said. “It was such a very long time ago.”
I could feel my veins go watery with alarm. I should never have come. More tea was served, this time on the train, delicious.
“Orange pekoe,” the chai seller told us proudly. “Special from here.”
“Your scar has healed nicely, darling,” my mother said, looking at my arm. “That was a very nasty do, wasn’t it?”
She sipped her tea.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, and forgive me but”—she placed her cup elegantly on her saucer—“if the subject of your job comes up between you and your father, it might be cleverer to say you don’t work.”
“Cleverer?”
“Wiser. Better.” Her tone implied she was talking to a halfwit.
“Why?”
“Do I really have to spell it out? If he’s got any money, he—”
“Oh, Glory! For God’s sake, no.” I was angry again. “Is that why we’re here?”
“Shush.” She looked around the carriage. In her world, there were spies everywhere. The old man sleeping opposite did not stir, and our other companions, a peaceful-looking Indian family, carried on handing out oily-looking snacks to each other.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “of course that’s not why we’re here, but there’s something else I must say too. Now don’t get angry, it has to be said that he will probably be put off by what you do. Birthing native women, it’s all very new. I’ve had to”—she brushed a crumb off her chest—“to like it or lump it, but other people,” she finished more firmly, “might see it differently. It will come as a shock to him.”
So we start with a lie, I thought bitterly, but did not say it. Another suspicion had grown during her speech. Had she even told him I was coming?
“Absolutely,” she said, when I asked her. “All the arrangements have been made, so don’t go on about it now, darling.” Her lips had started to crumble. “This is not easy for me either, you know.”
We were nearly there. I hardly dared talk now, so full up with a feeling I could neither name nor understand. Fear and longing, fury, a kind of breathless anticipation, a homesickness for something I’d never had. Through the carriage window, I saw plumes of mist hugging the trees, peaceful green fields that shimmered and disappeared.
“Look.” My mother raised a feeble hand at the church spire that suddenly appeared, an artificial lake, a row of bungalows, all misted in a faint drizzle. “Snooty Ooty,” Anto had joked, “frightfully like parts of Surrey.”
A uniformed conductor ran through the train. “Ootacamund, Ootacamund. Train stops here.”
“Don’t rush off.” Glory closed her eyes and panted lightly. “I’m a little bit breathless. I hope the old lungs can take this altitude.”
- CHAPTER 45 -
The Hotel Victoria was a modest mock-Tudor house at the end of a steep drive. When we got there, I asked for separate rooms and told Glory I’d pay for them out of money I’d earned. An unpleasant dig, I suppose, at her earlier idea of using me as a sort of bargaining chip here, but the truth was I didn’t trust myself to share a room with her: we were too vulnerable, too combustible.
My room, small, whitewashed, clean, had a pretty mother-of-pearl chair and a plain white bed. Nothing fancy, we couldn’t afford it, and not in what my mother said was the posh part of town.
When the rain stopped, I looked through my window at terraces of shabby little houses, cows, small gardens. The steep hills, the mist around the trees, gave me a strange feeling of vertigo as if I were dangling between one life and another.
There was a Bible, a carafe of water, a copy of the membership rules of the Ooty golf club left by a previous tenant on my bedside table. I put a photo of Anto and Raffie on top of the Bible, stared at them for a while. They at least felt solid and real: not a place that could be changed at whim, neither a destination nor a hope, but a reality like my lungs or my breath.
I could hear my mother next door: the clink of her glass, the trickle of water from a tap, the twang of bedsprings as she sat down. Her cough. I knew her habits so well: the miniature storm of activity in which she laid out her clothes at night: “Hang them quickly before they wrinkle, no matter how tired you are.” The splashing of her face, “at least fifteen times, to remove every bit of dirt.” The eye mask that never worked in the fight against insomnia. The All-Bran for breakfast, “just a smidgen of milk.” Cries of “Gin and it!” at six o’clock.
As I child I had watched these rituals with the deepest fascination: the way she put her earrings on, sliced her bacon, closed her handbag with her beautifully manicured nails. And still she exerted an electrical pull, deeper than words, the circuit fixed during hundreds and thousands of moments shared, habits observed; the kindnesses, cruelties, disappointments added up whether I wanted them to or not.
And tomorrow—my stomach clenched at the very thought of it—I’d meet my father. Or so she said.
* * *
“He said he’d be here at four,” my mother remarked before we went to bed, in the same offhand voice she might use to confirm, let’s say, a hair appointment. She was sitting in the visitors’ room of the Victoria clutching the key to her room.
“Does that suit you? I’ve been casing the joint,” she said, without waiting for an answer. “I think this will be the best room to meet him in.”
This damp parlor on the ground floor had, with its unlit fire and mismatched chairs, all the atmosphere of a dentist’s waiting room. I’d imagined we’d be going to his house and said so. I was frightened of making a fool of myself in a public place, but I didn’t tell her this.
“Oh, we can’t do that, he’s married. Didn’t I tell you? I’m sure I did,” my mother said, as if announcing some minor change of plan.
“No, you didn’t, actually. That might have been a helpful little clue for me.” I was so angry I could have struck her. The careless way she flung information that I had to snatch and scrabble for, like a refugee with a food parcel.
“Look, Mummy, I think I’m going to turn in early,” I said. I didn’t trust myself to stay. “I’ll have something sent to my room. Big day tomorrow.”
“Kit!” A kind of wail. A plea for sympathy and un
derstanding as we looked into each other’s eyes. “Don’t.”
Meaning what? Don’t fuss about minor details? Don’t hate me? Don’t spoil this perfectly ordinary day? A nicer daughter might have amended, but I love her anyway, before she turned her lights out, but on that night I hated her: her muddles, her lies, her attempts to be grand, her refusal to ever be straight with me.
* * *
Cough cough, clink, clink. Around three p.m. on the next day, I could hear my mother putting her “face” on: the fierce stare in the mirror, then cream, powder, lipstick, scent, several changes of wardrobe, if she had the breath for it now.
My legs felt weak as I put on my stockings, washed my face, combed my hair, buttoned my second-best green dress. From time to time, I stared through the crack in the curtains and saw the hills he’d be driving through now. A solid knot of fear grew in my stomach, and then—hard to describe it since it had never happened to me before—the knot of fear started to uncoil like a living creature, and I only just made it to the sink, where I vomited. No doubt about it, I was terrified, and there was still an hour to wait.
* * *
It was cold in the visitors’ room by the time I got down. Cold enough for your breath to show, and damp: it had rained off and on all morning. There were not enough logs in the brass bucket to keep the fire burning brightly.
When I walked in, my father, a gaunt, hunched figure, was sitting near the fire. When he saw me, he rose from his chair with a great deal of difficulty. I had imagined him as a much younger man, someone tall and handsome, let’s say like Ronald Coleman, with a mustache and mellifluous speaking voice. This man looked old for his sixty-five years—age being the one bit of information my mother had vouchsafed. He was wearing a worn tweed jacket and a too-big shirt that made his throat look shriveled and gizzardy. He had thick white hair, green-brown eyes, same color as mine. So peculiar: my father in the same room as me, both of us staring and trembling a little like dogs about to start a fight.
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