by Sara Banerji
‘I gave you your whole life,’ he cried wildly. ‘It was me that gave Hugh to you: Edward, Rupert, Daniel. If I had not walked away you would have had none of them.’
‘How do you know of them?’ asked Hermione, her tone numb.
‘I have always been watching you,’ said Yudhishthira as though he were God. ‘I have always been ready if you needed me. I was glad that your life was so beautiful because I thought of it as my gift to you.’
Hermione, because she did not know what to say, looked down and said nothing.
‘Unity,’ said Yudhishthira.
‘What?’ Hermione said as though the name had alarmed her.
‘She does not know I am her father.’
‘I am going now, this moment,’ shouted Rosie. ‘If you do not come I leave without you. You can return Mrs Crombie to Calcutta, Dr Das. She is your responsibility now.’
‘I have financed my daughter and her family to leave India and go to Africa,’ said Yudhishthira.
Father and daughter, each with their great hooped profiles, their passion for perfection, their compassion for the universe.
‘I thought that now that you are …,’ He paused as though trying to find the right word, and ended suddenly on ‘alone …,’ There fell a short silence, while Yudhishthira waited. At last he said, ‘My heart is breaking, Hermione.’
‘Oh,’ she said rising, and gripping the verandah balustrade.
The hallucination asked, ‘Do you wish to return to Calcutta with her then?’ and Hermione, prepared now, armed, said, ‘Of course,’ her tone cool.
Yudhishthira said, ‘I wonder if we shall ever see each other again.’
‘Oh, do come and stay sometime,’ gushed Hermione. ‘I am doing wonderful things with the garden. I have a new gardener. He is quite splendid.’
‘I will help you back to the car, then,’ said the dream.
‘Please do not bother,’ said Hermione. ‘I will make my own way,’ She turned and looked back just once on her way to the car. Yudhishthira had turned his head towards the approaching storm and Hermione saw that his profile was unchanged by time.
Then, without looking back again, she walked unsteadily to the revving car.
‘Ah, thank God, Hermione! What the hell have you been holding us up for, chatting when we are in such danger,’ gasped Rosie, and then to the driver, ‘Jao! Jao!’
They did not go very far.
The river water had weakened the grip of a large mango tree’s roots, and it came crashing down on them, narrowly missing the bonnet of the car and completely blocking the road just as they were going out of the gates.
‘Bring people to chop,’ sobbed Rosie. ‘I will pay.’
She began to wave handfuls of notes through the car window. In moments men carrying axes began to arrive running from the nearby houses.
‘Jaldi, jaldi, chop, chop,’ yelled Rosie out of the window, while the water rose, and the villagers, spurred on by the sight of Rosie’s money, laughingly slammed into the obstructing trunk.
Once Hermione closed her eyes but opened them again quickly because she saw Lalia looking at her out of the dark of death, pleading, hoping one last hope. But even with her eyes open she knew that she was dreaming because she could see, against a Bengal sky illuminated by the approaching cyclone, the tall figure of Yudhishthira. Each time she looked at him, the dream raised his hand in a gesture part wave, part blessing, and the lightning flashed outlines in his hair.
After a long time Hermione opened the car door and when she stepped on to the ground, the water came up to her ankles.
Through the fog of her nightmare she heard Rosie’s voice dimly cry, ‘Get back in, Hermione. They’ve moved the tree.’
Ignoring it, she began to wade, groping blindly in the way her mother had done in the early years of her senility.
‘Come back, Hermione,’ cried Rosie with despair in her voice and, leaning out, tried to grab Hermione by her sleeve.
‘Will you kindly remove your hand from my arm,’ Hermione commanded in her grandest tone.
It began to rain suddenly, the released water crashing so deafeningly that it drowned the sound of Rosie’s voice. Through the veil of thundering rain, leaps of lightning arched, so that Yudhishthira became haloed. But Hermione knew that even if she could not see it, another light was there, a cool shell of luminosity that was always protecting him.
The noise of the rain also drowned, minutes later, the sound of Rosie’s car disappearing down the road.
The water had reached Hermione’s knees by the time she reached the house. Yudhishthira came down the steps to meet her and, stepping into the water, slowly opened his arms and waited.
The rain smashed against her head and the water bathed her legs, and Hermione remembered the goddess Durga being immersed, staining the water the colour of her cheeks, melting in the river until she became united with her husband.
And she felt that the loss and sorrow that had been written on her own skin would now be washed away, so that when she emerged she would be as unwritten on as Yudhishthira.
‘Baba told me you were dead,’ she said.
‘Everybody thought I was,’ said Yudhishthira. ‘There was a meeting, you see, in which I spoke out for the peasants. I said the landlords should give them land. Men employed by the landowners came up on to the rostrum to beat me into silence. A fight broke out among the peasants who were trying to defend me. I am told I lay unconscious and was thought to be dead, though I remember nothing. I woke in hospital later, and saw my death reported in the newspaper. I suddenly saw the way to help you stop searching for me, so I adopted the name of Dr Das, left Ampukur and changed my life style. If you thought I was dead, I reasoned, you would at last be able to enjoy happiness with Hugh.’
‘You said truth was precious.’
‘I know. I lied,’ Yudhishthira spoke as though truth was a jewel, and he was giving it to Hermione.
He was silent for a moment then said, ‘In the newspaper that morning in hospital I also read that seven people were killed because of my inflammatory speech. That was my third sin, and my worst.’
‘What were the other two sins?’ asked Hermione, though she thought she knew.
‘Making it possible for you to love me when I had nothing to offer you. Making love to the wife of another man. But it was because of those deaths that I ceased to be a yogi, for how can a yogi have the deaths of seven people on his soul? I left India for a while also, for I had harmed her instead of healing her. I went to the Middle East.’
‘Now you are back,’ said Hermione.
‘I am giving myself another chance,’ smiled Yudhishthira, drawing her to him and pressing her body against his.
‘Isn’t it too late?’ she said, her voice a little muffled by the silk of his kurta. ‘We have grown old.’
Yudhishthira laughed, and his voice was perfectly young. ‘To think that you have not understood after all this time that there is no such thing as old,’ he said.
Leaning against him, his arms wrapped round her to ward off the rain, she told him, ‘All my luggage is in Rosie’s car. I have nothing else but what I’m wearing.’
‘Red suits you,’ whispered Yudhishthira, and his voice was not entirely drowned by the sound of the approaching cyclone.
A Note on the Author
Sara Banerji was born in 1932 in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in England. One of her ancestors is Henry Fielding, the 18th century author who wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
In 1939, when Banerji was 7, World War II began, and she was evacuated to various large and old country mansions. Her father, Basil Mostyn, fought in the war.
After the war was over, Banerji emigrated with her family to Southern Rhodesia. The family lived in a single mud rondavel with no electricity or running water.
Banerji later travelled all around Europe, visiting various places. She worked as an au pair and also attended art school in Austria. She has also worked as an artist, and has held exh
ibitions of her oil paintings in India. She also taught riding whilst in India, and has been a jockey. She is also a sculptress, and has previously been a waitress.
Banerji worked in a coffee bar in Oxford, where she met her future husband, Ranjit Banerji, who was an undergraduate from India. He was a customer in the coffee bar. They married and moved to India, where they lived for seventeen years. Banerji attempted to run a dairy farm, which was defeated by monsoons and heavy seasons of rain.
Discover books by Sara Banerji published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/SaraBanerji
Absolute Hush
Cobweb Walking
Shining Agnes
The Tea-Planter’s Daughter
The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel
Writing on Skin
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1993 by Doubleday
a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd
Copyright © 1993 Sara Banerji
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ISBN 9781448208456
eISBN: 9781448208449
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