by Sara Banerji
‘Now you see I could have married you, don’t you?’ she said as Yudhishthira gently took the creature from her, prising open her fingers.
When he let the cockroach go it flew off with a clattering of wings that was quite unlike any sort of flying she had ever imagined.
She felt dizzy for a while. ‘Oh, of course it’s not the silly cockroach. It’s the heat probably.’
‘I will stay with you for ever now, Yudhishthira,’ she said later, as they sat on the verandah, cross-legged before new banana leaves, while Baba spooned raw sugar paste on toasted chuppaties.
‘What about your children?’ he laughed, as though she was only making words, and did not really mean it. ‘What about your husband?’
‘As you have given up God for me, I will gladly give them up for you,’ said Hermione. Because of saying that she had a devil crouching in the dark ready to bite her with teeth of guilt in the years ahead.
He looked at her for a long time and said at last, ‘I will tell you everything I feel about you, Hermione, and please, dearest, for the rest of your life, you should never forget it.’
‘For the rest of my life! That’s a long time.’ She was still young then, not able to imagine what it would be like to have only five, ten or twenty years of increasing deterioration left. She felt triumphant, hopeful, certain of happiness from that moment on.
Yudhishthira leant forward and caught her hands. ‘Now, listen to me,’ he ordered sternly.
‘I am listening,’ Hermione settled back and let the darling voice run through her being as though she were the mud body of the goddess Durga on the day of her Puja when the River Jamuna was dissolving her.
‘I have never loved any woman except you,’ he said. ‘I have made love with no one, kissed and embraced no other, and never will.’ He was silent for a moment and the only sounds were those of Nature.
When she left Yudhishthira, the mist was floating like blue gauze on the rice fields and almost hid the people wading, buried to the waist. Little cows with bells and large dry buffaloes were already being led along the roads, and as Hermione headed back over the rutted roads, manoeuvring round fallen trees. She blew her horn almost constantly to warn dozy schoolchildren, men trotting under headloads, women hauling water jars and babies on their hips, and her happiness came spilling out so that she sang aloud.
She knew now that Yudhishthira had rejected her in Calcutta not because he did not love her but because he had thought that Hugh would give her greater happiness. He had thought she was an English lady who would need English delights: dances, clothes from a dressmaker, a motor car, visits to England, expensive food. Only after she had embraced the cockroach had he understood that she did not need such things.
Yudhishthira had given her his own body so that she might be cured of regret and numbness. He had sacrificed his honour by making love to a woman who was married to someone else, and had allowed her to experience ecstasy.
Back home she packed the barest minimum. From now on she would wear only the clothes of a village woman. All her dresses, jewels and comfort things were for another woman of another life. She left Hugh and the boys a letter explaining as best she could, though she knew that they would never understand. She returned to Ampukur by train, for the car belonged to Hugh.
Sometimes, in the years that followed, she would try and pretend she’d only imagined Baba saying, ‘He is no longer here.’
She’d found the cow still standing there waiting for its basket feed, the dung fire glowing and Baba’s wife was bent over, sweeping.
‘He gave us the house. It is my house,’ said Baba. ‘It is all mine now.’
‘How will I find him?’ she cried in a voice so harsh that even the cow winced in a jingle of bells.
Baba shrugged, and said almost indifferently, ‘He is gone. He said he is not coming back here.’
So she went into the village. Sighs. Shrugs. ‘Who knows where a yogi goes? Perhaps he has progressed to his next incarnation.’
It was Durga Puja. She had to wait as the eight-foot-high mud goddess, decorated with flowers and tinsel jewels, was carried shoulder high through the village, accompanied by a dancing crowd. They bore the deity to the river, where water flickered with the double glow of oil lamps and their river reflections, and men blew mouthfuls of petrol over the liquid surface in arcs of fire. Women ululated as the image was immersed.
After a while out of the black water emerged the tufts of Durga’s hair and the pinkness of her rosy cheeks. And all the time, dark shapes, some of which were the bodies of people whose families did not have enough money to cremate them, came humping down and banged against the prows of happy boats thronging the river to rejoice in Durga’s reunion with her river husband.
Hugh was still on tour when Hermione got back and her letter still lay on the table where she had left it for him.
She unpacked her small suitcase while the servants watched her with expressions half of scorn and half relief. They would not now have to tell the sahib they had lost his wife.
‘Lost my wife!’ Hermione could imagine Hugh roaring. ‘You will go out into the streets and villages and search till you have found her, and not one paisa of your pay will you have till she is restored to me.’
A month later Hermione realized she was pregnant.
This time the child was dark. And female. Hermione called her ‘Unity’.
Unity was not sent away to school in England, as a girl was not the receptacle of Hugh’s aspirations. She cuddled and laughed and played with Hermione, and even learnt things from her: French cricket, making fudge, how to teach the dog to beg and a mynah to say, ‘Unity will never grow old.’
Chapter Twelve
When Unity was ten, Hermione received a letter from Baba telling her Yudhishthira was dead. Something died inside her, too, as though true happiness could never really be hers again and because of it she felt that India would always have sadness.
Wonders had not happened after the British left: people were still hungry, young men lacked jobs, children died needlessly.
Yudhishthira died on one of the days of Hermione’s life and she had not known, though she would have expected a heaving of the stars, an overturning of all the blood in her own body at the moment.
Was it when Hugh and I were laughing as we danced under the chandeliers of Government House? Or when our car got stuck in the Cal monsoon and he and I went home in separate rickshaws, a little drunk from the champagne party at the Club, and calling to each other, as the puller waded thigh deep through the flooded drains? Or was it the day I was buying cloth for Unity’s birthday dress from the same merchant my mother had bought my wedding material from? Was it when I was happy, or sad? Thinking of something else, or when I had all my thoughts on him?
Hermione wasn’t fifty when Yudhishthira died. Until then she had still been buoyant with youth and hope; she had seen her own and India’s sufferings as a general sees an army on the move – sore feet, empty bellies and blistered shoulders today, but glory tomorrow. She had been infected by Yudhishthira’s great cry of freedom for his country and the idea that everything would come right after the British had gone. Because she was so tightly bound to India she had imagined that when India’s desires were fulfilled her own would be as well.
After Baba’s letter, Hermione ceased to be an ardent yogi hunter though she wondered about Yudhishthira’s death, for the stilted note from Baba explained nothing.
It was Unity who provided the answer in the end. Hermione had a much closer relationship with her daughter than with her three sons. And when they went to live in England she would gather Unity into bed with her in the mornings, after Hugh had got up. The pair of them would lie side by side exchanging lines of poetry, or gently arguing the point of life, while blackbirds sang in the cedar tree.
‘It is the duty of everybody to prevent suffering,’ Unity, fourteen, maintained confidently.
It did not occur to Hermione to protest that a fourteen-year-old lacked t
he experience required for such an opinion. Instead she probed, ‘But don’t you think there might be something more than just the negation of suffering: a positive value or state to which we should strive?’ She wondered if it was possible to elicit from this child some of the wisdom of the father.
‘What state, Mother?’ Unity asked, tossing the ball back into Hermione’s court.
‘The Nirvana of Buddhism? The Samadhi of Hinduism?’ tried Hermione.
Unity sighed. ‘Well, I think I will just do the things that I see need doing straight in front of me. I don’t know about those others.’
And Hermione remembered something Yudhishthira had once said. ‘If you come into a dusty room and a broom is there, pick it up and sweep.’
‘Shall I tell you what I think about purpose?’ she asked when Unity was fifteen.
But the girl smiled and shook her head. ‘It will only muddle me, and I know what I have to do.’
‘What?’ cried Hermione, alarmed.
‘Be a doctor,’ said Unity. ‘Then I can at least cure some of the suffering.’
‘Oh, that is so hard. Especially for women,’ protested Hermione.
‘It’s all right, dearest, don’t get in a stew!’ laughed Unity. ‘I’m clever enough and I’m sure to qualify.’
When Unity was nineteen she and her boyfriend decided to visit India. ‘To help the poor there,’ Yudhishthira’s dark daughter explained.
Hermione and Hugh went to see the pair off at Heathrow and Hermione, who always tried not to interfere, was forced to protest, ‘You can’t travel round India in a black satin evening dress from Oxfam!’
Unity grinned and hitched the pack saddle covered in horse-hair that was her only luggage on to her shoulder. ‘Indians don’t like to look at women’s ankles, I remembered.’
Hermione groaned aloud, but knew there was no point in arguing. ‘Money?’ she asked. ‘Clean clothes?’ As if she hadn’t already done so a hundred times.
‘I’ll scrounge,’ Unity promised.
‘I absolutely forbid it. Stop her, Hugh,’ moaned Hermione uselessly. Only as they were saying goodbye did she tell Unity, ‘There was a yogi once.’ Suppose this wise child discovered a trace of her father. ‘I was at college with him. Good friend.’
‘Oh, Mum!’ Unity’s eyes sparkled at the expectation of romantic revelation so that Hermione, at once scared, started backing off. ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter. But his parents were involved in getting the British out of India. They died in prison actually.’
‘Oh, Mum …’ Unity’s eyes were round with concern and accusation.
‘Well, I just thought,’ Hermione, shrugging. ‘Some years ago I got a letter from his old servant saying Yudhishthira was dead and I thought you might be able to find out what happened.’
Unity suddenly hugged Hermione with understanding, two people sharing a secret. ‘You really hope he might not be dead after all, don’t you Mum? That the old servant was making a mistake, or was telling lies.’
‘It was a very blurry letter,’ murmured Hermione through blurry eyes.
The lanky tattered figure in a long clinging dress, man’s jersey, and saddle bag leaking last-minute socks and knickers, vanished in the wake of the gigantic African boyfriend with his waist-tickling dreadlocks, not to return until a year later, having spent most of the time underneath the Howrah bridge, helping doctors treat the illnesses of the poor who, huddled and hungry, lived among its arches.
‘Only one single postcard in the whole year, and I waited every day for a letter from you,’ was Hermione’s accusatory cry.
‘Sorry. I didn’t know,’ said Unity, brushing off guilt briskly. ‘I was busy. Well, anyway, I found out what happened to Yudhishthira.’
The name coming at her so suddenly made Hermione gasp and blink, then feel terrified that Unity had noticed.
‘I took a bus to Ampukur,’ said Unity, as though this was the most usual thing to do in the world. ‘Saw Baba. He looked like a currant, so shrivelled, small and black. Actually he was quite cross and grumpy and wouldn’t tell me much, but I did manage to get out of him that some landowners had beaten up Yudhishthira because he was trying to persuade them to give land to the peasants. Baba thought he’d been in hospital for a long time and then died, but that if I wanted the details I should see a man in Calcutta who was a relation of Yudhishthira’s, and who would tell me everything.’
‘Relation?’ breathed Hermione.
‘Yes. A cousin, I think.’
‘Yudhishthira had a cousin?’ thought Hermione, her mind mumbling over this new idea. She asked aloud, ‘Well, did you meet the cousin?’
Unity nodded. ‘He was staying in a hotel, and next morning was leaving by plane for the Middle East.’
Hermione felt a surge of excitement that after all this time she should have found a tiny tie with Yudhishthira even though it was only some distant relative. For ‘cousin’, she realized, need not in India mean any very close relationship.
Unity giggled. ‘He was nice, I liked him. He gave me about the only decent meal in my whole stay in India, asked me all sorts of questions. He even wanted to know about you because he said he’d heard a lot about you from Yudhishthira.’
Hermione experienced a stab of pain at the idea of Yudhishthira talking about her to his relation while she was having to keep the secret of him so tight against her chest that there was now a pain where it hid.
‘Is the cousin …’ she hesitated, and then finished in a rush, ‘a yogi too?’
‘Oh no,’ said Unity. ‘He’s a doctor. His name is Dr Das. Quite smart and rich. He wore a gold watch and good shoes. Not at all like a yogi. He told me that the local landowners had beaten Yudhishthira to death, that Baba had got an addled mind and that Yudhishthira hadn’t gone to hospital at all. He’d died on the spot.’
‘Oh,’ said Hermione with a dry throat, and felt an easing of her soul because now she knew. ‘Have you got Doctor Das’ address?’ she asked faintly. She would write to this man, share Yudhishthira with him.
‘Mother, I told you; he was leaving next morning. He didn’t know where he’d be staying.’
‘Did you give him our address?’
‘Ours? No. Why?’
Hermione hungered after that cousin for years, but there was no way of tracing him. Only once after that did she get a glimmer of hope. She was being hauled through the estate of Hugh’s old schoolfriend, Bunty Lewis, by Percy the Great Dane, and was amazed and excited to see a bungalow called Ampukur in one of the little cul-de-sacs that had once been Bunty’s front paddock.
Her hand trembled as she rang the bell, not knowing who might come to open it, almost hearing in the approaching footsteps the tinkle of a yogi’s bell or the clatter of his beads. Foolishly she almost felt that in this unlikely place Yudhishthira might be found not to have died after all.
A young woman holding a baby opened to Hermione.
‘You must have been there too!’ Hermione cried, her voice strained with the effort of holding down Percy who had seen a cat beyond.
The woman winced with dismay at the sight of the struggling Great Dane, wearily shifted her baby on her hip, and stared at Hermione blankly for a moment. Then she said, ‘Oh, the name of the bungalow? Am-pukker? The chap we bought it from called it that.’
‘Where is he?’ asked Hermione wildly, meaning, ‘Who is he?’
The girl shrugged vaguely. ‘Some old fellow. He used to live in India, but he was put into a home. We’re going to change the name. It sounds rude.’ She spoke as though too tired for longer sentences.
Careful that Hugh should not discover her search, with the same cunning she had used for yogi watching Hermione managed to locate the home and visited it accompanied by Percy.
‘Sorry darling, you can’t bring that big dog in here. Mud on the floors you know. And most of our inmates are frail. He’s a lovely fellow, though, isn’t he.’ Matron gave Percy a kindly pat on the head. ‘Tie him up in the porch.’
Per
cy roared, howled and shook the porch while Hermione was discovering that the old man who might just have known Yudhishthira had died three weeks before.
‘He was only in his nice new bungalow for two weeks, poor old chap, then he got his stroke.’
No, no one had the least idea why he had called his bungalow after a village in India. No, he had no family that they knew of. No one had come to the funeral. No one had come to see him in the home. There was no one Hermione could question.
She walked home, Percy plodding instead of rushing as though he sensed her mood. Hermione felt despair all the deeper because she had found a trail to follow, but it had led nowhere.
Chapter Thirteen
When Hermione reached her cheap hotel in Delhi on her way to find a healing yogi for Lalia she nearly wept at the thought that Yudhishthira was nowhere in India.
Yudhishthira’s daughter was in India though. Unity was living in a Calcutta flat with her husband, Eshak, and at that moment she was telling him, ‘We should have gone to live in Africa.’
‘You’d have been beautiful in Africa,’ said Eshak.
‘I am here,’ said Unity. She was bent over some cloth, painting it with the wax of melted candles, the tip of her tongue often showing as she concentrated on the work. She was an ophthalmic surgeon, so trained in precision. Sometimes she sewed the lenses of eyes with stitches so small that they could only be seen under a magnifying glass.
Eshak watched her, half his mind wondering if she meant what she seemed to mean: that even in India she was beautiful. Or merely stating the obvious: she was here. That was, thought Eshak, the thing about Unity. She did not think like other people. She did not do things like other people either.
Breaking away from his happy scrutiny he objected, ‘You’ve melted down the only candles we’ve got left. What if there’s a power cut?’
There were always power cuts, although the clinic in which they both worked was in the heart of Calcutta. They could not rely on anything, not water, not gas, not any sort of fuel. At least there was an electricity generator though. At the village clinic where they also worked whenever they could, the pair of them often had to operate by the power of candles and torches.