by Sara Banerji
Unity looked up and smiled so that her face became huge and lazy, as though her happiness was spreading over its edges. ‘You could get me more? You could, couldn’t you?’
‘Unity, the bazaar shut hours ago.’
‘In the morning,’ As the warmth of her smile deepened, Eshak felt that he could look right down into the depths of her dark brown eyes, and still see further.
‘I know why your mother called you “Unity”.’
‘Why?’ she laughed.
‘I see infinity in your eyes. And at the bottom of it …’
‘Infinity has no bottom. It can’t! It has to be infinite in all directions …’
‘That’s the paradox. Don’t interrupt. At its bottom is the start of everything. Unity. From which all of us and all of everything has fanned out, and I can see that creativity moving around down there.’
‘Ha,’ said Unity, depriving her husband of a cosmic experience.
‘But I can also see in your eyes a capacity for chaos. There might be a power cut tonight. Then what?’
‘Then we’ll cuddle,’ laughed Unity. ‘We’ll take Tammy and Ruth into bed with us and cuddle them as well.’
‘Oh, oh,’ sighed Eshak. ‘I thought you loved me.’ He leant back, lit a cigarette, gazed dreamily through the smoke, and thought that in spite of everything he still felt happy. Just. Then another idea occurred to him. He swung round on Unity. ‘Those are our sheets you’re painting on, aren’t they, Unity?’
‘The guest sheets,’ sighed Unity. ‘And we aren’t expecting anyone, so I thought it would be OK.’
‘The very ones my sister gave for our wedding present,’ cried Eshak. ‘Suppose she comes to stay? What’ll she say with the sheets all crisped over with wax like that? What are you doing anyway?’
‘Batik,’ murmured Unity, giving him a quick cautious glance under long lashes, guilty, but still prepared to brazen it out. ‘The parts I want to remain uncoloured I paint over with wax. Then dip in the dye. You build up, you have to work it out in advance. Marigolds in grass. The whole thing yellow. Paint out flower shapes and then dip in blue. See? The blue and yellow that remain have blended to become green
‘But those are white linen sheets from Peter Jones,’ wailed Eshak.
Unity was waving her hands around in her enthusiasm. ‘These Indian dyes are astonishing in their unpredictability. You mix a brown powder with a white salt, and get… crimson … or turquoise.’
But Eshak was still mourning the destruction of the spare-room sheets. ‘One of Rosie’s relatives might come and stay.’
Unity and Eshak had been working in a Bengali village since a devastating cyclone had made thousands homeless. But because of so many disasters afflicting the area, the village clinic, which was funded partly by the government but mostly by charity, had run out of money. Then, just when they were starting to get really worried, Unity met a lady called Rosie Ramsay at the Calcutta chemists where they got their medicine.
Rosie Ramsay owned a health clinic called Happy Health Home. Her clients, she said, were the richest people in town and she invited Unity and Eshak to work there, saying that in exchange she would raise donations from her clients for medical supplies for the village cholera victims.
Reluctantly, Unity, Eshak and their two daughters had moved into Rosie’s flat above the clinic. As Eshak pointed out, it was a sacrifice they had to make for the sake of their patients. Eshak and Unity continued to return to the village whenever they could get away, for in addition to their other work they had been treating people with eye disease, and had already restored sight to several.
Rosie Ramsay did not like them to go there, however, saying she feared her own clients might become infected with the diseases of the feckless poor. She was a huge lady whose loose silk clothes and tiny shoes gave the unsteady impression of a top-heavy doll. She had a pale soft skin that resembled uncooked pastry, she wore large amounts of heavy jewellery, and she smoked cigarettes constantly out of a carved ivory holder. Her hair varied in colour from week to week, ranging in shade between brassy orange and purplish maroon.
One of the conditions of living in the flat above the premises was that they put up her surplus guests.
‘There is a certain class of person in whose good books I need to stay for purposes of business good will, but whom I do not wish to accommodate in my own home,’ Rosie had explained.
Eshak and Unity had so far put up an octogenarian incontinent gentleman whose wife had once lost three stone at the clinic, a chain-smoking lady journalist, an unbelievably obese widow and a trio of constantly inebriated businessmen who had spent the day drinking Indian whisky straight from the bottle in their bedroom.
The clinic offered treatment for a variety of upper-class complaints, obesity being the main one. Huge bellies, bouncing thighs, drooping buttocks were massaged, walloped, starved and educated into shape. Five chins were biffed into one. And if none of this worked the superfluous parts were removed surgically, or dragged out with suction. It was, as the patients knew, delightful to get fat and agony to get thin.
‘Rosie said the lady coming to stay this week was thinking of leaving something in her will to the clinic,’ moaned Eshak.
Unity gazed at him for a few moments then asked softly, ‘What’s really the matter, Esh?’
Eshak stared down at his shoes, brought his toes together, so she could imagine him as a small boy again – owning up to a breakage to his mother. At last he looked up and told her, his voice suddenly harsh, ‘It’s the people in this clinic, Unity. They cringe from me when I go to treat them.’
Unity stared at him, and the blood began to drain from her face as understanding dawned. ‘They bloody what?’
Eshak sighed, and tried to look away from her, to avoid her gaze. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry. I know I shouldn’t have said anything. I did not want to upset you, for you love India so much. You want to help India, but sometimes I think that because of the way I am being treated I cannot bear its prejudiced inhabitants any more.’ He stood up, a grand and towering man, and stared out of the window. With his back to Unity so that she could not see his expression he said, ‘The rich people in this Calcutta clinic cannot see past my blackness.’
Once Unity had said, ‘It’s lucky you’re so dark, for if your skin was fair there would be so much of it that people would be dazzled when they looked on you.’ His blackness absorbed the light. ‘Krishna was black and he is adored in India,’ she had reassured him before they left England.
Eshak turned and looked at Unity and in his eyes was an expression she had not seen since the day she had first set eyes on him, aged nineteen. He had been striding along the King’s Road with the swinging dancing walk of Africa, not moving aside for anyone, and he’d had the same hard glitter in his eyes that day. Unity had thought him arrogant and only realized later, when she got to know him, that his expression was expectation of contempt.
‘It is worse here than England,’ he told her, looking away again as though he knew she had seen the pain in his eyes.
Unity came, stood beside him, and held his hand. The pair of them stared out of the barred window, across to where slums tumbled and the towers of the rich soared precariously into a dun-coloured sky.
The vultures roosting in a tree in the clinic garden sagged on its higher branches, their wings drooping under the growing sun’s heat, their naked throats glistening.
‘This morning one of those fat middle-aged ladies said it out loud,’ Eshak said quietly.
‘Said what?’ Her voice was soft.
‘She said, “I would prefer to be examined by another doctor”.’
‘But that’s not too bad.’
Eshak made a sound that could have been either groan or laugh. ‘I told her I was highly qualified. I am the best, I told her. You are in good hands, Madam.’
‘And?’
‘“That is the trouble,” she said. “I do not like to be touched by black hands. I’m sorry to be rude,” she said. “I’
m sure you’ll understand. It’s our culture, you see. We are not used to …”’
That evening the wealthy clients of the Happy Health Home were shocked and astonished when the door of the waiting room burst open and in its doorway stood a figure that for a moment might have been mistaken for the goddess Kali. Furious eyed, her hair wild, Unity began to shout at them.
Ladies pulled their saris tight across their shoulders as though for protection. Elderly women pressed their jewelled hands together and, with shoulders slightly hunched in supplication, listened as Unity roared.
‘Ungrateful beasts!’ she bellowed. ‘Buffaloes! The best surgeon in the world, and a man of such goodness that in spite of the fact that he could have worked in any hospital for a salary a hundred times as great Unity was always an exaggerator when aroused … ‘yet you insult his beautiful blackness with your filthy prejudices.’
The younger ladies glanced enquiringly at the old ones. The old ladies leant frowning for explanation to each other. The fat ladies wriggled in their chairs and wondered if this was the new cure for obesity.
‘You have to apologize to him, the lot of you!’ yelled Unity.
‘Who? Who?’ they whispered, but saw from her rage that it would not do to ask.
‘Crawl on your knees before him,’ Unity shouted, getting carried away into impossible vistas: seeing all these jewel-decked, pendulous-bellied women crawling, ululating like grieving peasants, to embrace her husband’s feet.
From behind her Eshak’s voice whisked her out of the unlikely reverie.
‘For God’s sake, Unity!’
She did not turn to look at him for she knew that if she did she might break down and cry.
Her audience was rising now, gathering their handbags, looking beyond her to where Eshak hovered like a dark and dangerous shadow.
They had discussed only yesterday in the Tollygunge Club the ghastly things that happen when black men run amok. Well, so far it was only the English wife, but who knew what might happen next.
A small stiff white dog began to let out shrill cries.
‘There, there, Baby,’ said the creature’s owner, scooping it up, and holding the bulbous-eyed face close to her own, as though for comparison.
‘Yoop, yoop, yoop,’ went the little dog, watery eyes glaring out from among its mistresses several chins.
‘My wife is rather upset,’ said Eshak, talking over Unity’s leaping shoulders as she flung her arms around in jabbering rage. ‘Perhaps all you ladies would like to go home and come again tomorrow when she has grown calm.’
‘Come again, you say!’ shrieked one stately beauty. ‘I for one shall certainly not enter these doors again.’
Trying not to scuttle, trying to retain dignity, smoothing back their bouffant hairdos, straightening their diamond pendants, stroking their fashionable saris into pleats, ladies glared at Unity with terrified resentment as they sneaked past her for the door. It was clear that nothing would persuade them to stay after such insults.
But Unity sprang into their path and obstructed the departure. Turning to Eshak she asked, her voice shrill, ‘Which one, Esh? Which was the bloody bitch that said it?’
Because of the chronic problems with crossed Calcutta lines and faulty cables it was only after several attempts that the secretary managed to get through to Rosie Ramsay. She lived half a block away but drove everywhere, no matter how short her journey. ‘We foreigners cannot stand the dirt of Calcutta’s streets and the sordid behaviour of its citizens,’ she would proclaim.
Rosie reached the clinic at the secretary’s urgent telephonic summons, sprang from her chubby car in a hiss of costly silk and a clatter of ruby jewellery. It was only a week since her guru had advised her always to wear ruby, telling her, ‘This is your stone, Memsahib, and with this installed upon your skin you will never know bad luck again.’
By the time Rosie arrived she found many of her most profitable clients had already gone. Others were still rushing, stumbling, clambering out of her pristine premises, and as they departed shouting things like, ‘We shall sue. Oh yes! My husband will never let a happening like this lie.’
‘I beg you to forgive. This English woman must be suffering from a nervous attack. She shall be sacked, if not worse, I assure; so I beg you forgive,’ Rosie called desperately after them. The guru who had with such ill-found confidence recommended ruby was going to suffer for this, she vowed savagely, as the last limousine vanished from sight.
Unity was amazed at the vigour of Rosie’s attack.
‘But they insulted my husband,’ she tried to interrupt.
Unfortunately, the word ‘husband’ made Rosie Ramsay more furious than ever. She had a total distaste for the species, and she herself had only become comfortable after she had shed her third and final one.
Before this Rosie had suffered years of humble wife-hood, once with a drinker, once with a gambler, both of whom she’d outlived, and finally with an over-optimistic and gullible man who had allowed himself to be driven into a state of bankruptcy, then had died leaving his wife to cope with his debts. She changed house and name, though never really shaking off the fear that one day her debtors would discover her.
As far as Rosie was concerned Unity could not have offered a less persuasive reason for her disastrous outburst.
In a single moment of silence when Rosie’s mouth had become so filled with the spittle of fury that she could not talk at all, Unity further sealed her fate. ‘I should have thought you would have understood yourself. You being an Indian and having visited England must know a little of what it feels like to be discriminated against.’
If there had been even the smallest chance of Unity and Eshak ever gaining Rosie’s good will again, those words lost it.
‘How dare you suggest I am Indian!’ gobbled Rosie in a paroxysm of furious horror. She had spent half a lifetime cultivating her Englishness. ‘How dare you!’ she screamed.
Rosie had thought Unity’s husband must be a European too and had had a terrible shock when she’d met him and saw he was a kalo. She’d feared her clients would go elsewhere the moment they set eyes on this huge black man with hair standing round his head like a … like a devil’s halo. His eyelashes curled as though he wore wool on his lids, his lips were enormous and lined with pink; he spoke in a singsong accent and sometimes whistled or hissed. He joggled his body about in dancing poses or let out little shrill cries as part of his normal conversation. And on either cheek were three slanting blue-stained slashes which, Unity was later to tell her in some unguarded moment, were tattoo marks to indicate that his father, though born in Britain and employed as a porter in Portobello Road, was in fact of royal blood. ‘If his father had not been overthrown in a military coup Eshak would be king by now,’ Unity had said.
Rosie’s immediate impulse when they’d arrived at the flat, and she realized the awful truth about Eshak, had been to cancel the whole arrangement and give the huge donation raised from her clients to some other cause that would give her even more publicity. She visualized the headlines: ‘Rosie Ramsay’s generous gift to Mother Theresa.’ It might make the foreign press even. But she had said nothing for she had already sent out brochures, and put advertisements in all the papers, boasting of the fact that she now had on her staff doctors from England with high qualifications.
‘Please take two days off to settle in and get to know the place,’ Rosie had told Eshak and Unity with uncharacteristic generosity, and had used the period to indoctrinate her clients on the virtues of her new physician.
‘Because of the racism in the UK,’ she told the alarmed ladies, ‘it is ten times more difficult for a kalo to become qualified than a white. And once qualified the blacks do not get the promotions either. So this man is obviously of much greater quality than even his present high capacities would imply.’
Now she felt terribly let down. She had suffered, worried, and worked to get acceptance for the African doctor and his wife. But instead of being grateful, they had p
erhaps caused Rosie to be ruined.
‘I don’t know why you care about us getting sacked,’ Unity said to Eshak now. ‘You’re the one who always said you wanted to go to Africa. This is our chance.’
Eshak sighed. ‘There are a few problems, though, aren’t there?’
‘Problems?’ She turned away suddenly, as though unable to bear his scrutiny.
‘Money, Unity?’
‘Money,’ she said as though she thought this objection sounded petty and frivolous. As though they had no worries at all if that was the only problem.
‘We have spent everything on the clinic in the village. We haven’t enough for the fare to Africa.’
‘Oh,’ said Unity.
He added, ‘And we have no jobs in Africa, nor anywhere to live. Nor any savings while we set up a practice,’ He caught her in his arms then and hugged her wildly. ‘It’s my fault, not yours, darling. Don’t cry. I shouldn’t have told you. I shouldn’t have minded.’
Tammy and Ruth appeared in the doorway, and stopped amazed at the sight of their parents weeping as they hugged. It is an awful sight for children when they see their parents weep.
Tammy wailed in anguish.
‘Oh, come, come, ducky,’ soothed Unity when she understood. ‘Why are you both being so silly? Why are you up anyway? It’s hours past your bedtime.’ She struggled swiftly out of Eshak’s arms.
‘You weren’t really crying then?’ asked Ruth.
‘We just thought you were?’ asked Tammy.
‘Of course not,’ said Eshak sternly, standing up and pulling back his shoulders, tossing his head, stretching his lips into a smile. ‘Did you ever hear of anything so silly as a daddy crying?’
‘Never,’ agreed Tammy fervently.
‘Why’s your face wet then, Dad?’ asked Ruth.
It was at this moment, when Eshak and Unity had lost their jobs, were at any moment to be expelled from their accommodation, that Yudhishthira’s cousin whom Unity had met on her first visit to India after she’d left school, rang to say he wished to stay with them.