A young woman swept the water off the veranda floor. She was no more than twenty years old at most. She had on a green saree and a yellow blouse, with a string of purple flowers in her hair. The silver anklets that she wore sounded as she moved. Only a week ago Matthew had hired her to replace the old woman who had left. I eyed her speculatively as I walked up the steps. I inquired if she was done with my room. A look of confusion came into her large eyes. She spoke to me in Telugu, which I didn’t understand. With a sudden movement she dropped the broom and rushed past me and up the stairs. I followed her. She was standing next to my bed. Then all at once she unwrapped her saree from her body and shed her blouse. She had golden taut skin, a delicate beauty of feature, and a fullness of breast and hip. Her hands covered her crotch. She looked down at her toes.
I stood still, trying to gain control over myself. My heart was beating wildly; my mouth was dry and my palms wet. Then I clapped my hands together to catch her attention, gestured that she should dress once more, and leave. She smiled and wrapped her saree around her body and put on her blouse. I plucked some coins from my trouser pocket and gave them to her. She put them inside her blouse, between her breasts and bending low she touched my feet before she ran out of the room. I went straight to the study cobwebbed with spiders and sat down at the desk. I opened the safe in which I secured, not money or anything precious, but a handsome timepiece, a box of cigars, a bottle of Spanish Sack, some papers of importance, and an old sketchbook I had got in a second-hand shop in the by-lanes of London Docks. I looked through the sketchbook. I gazed voyeuristically at the drawings of nude English women, touching them, scratching them, smelling them. They smelled of Englishness. Or old paper. Or of the spit of all those who had thumbed these pages before me. Loneliness crept into me. I had devised a method to defeat the aloneness.
That night, beneath flashes of lightning, I ran to the woods all the way to the chakka tree by the lake. I shed all my clothes in a great hurry and dived into the water. I swam ferociously until I was spent and then placing my hands on the bank I hauled my body out of the water. I walked to the chakka tree and rubbed my taut body against its trunk. With eyes closed, I clutched the voluptuous fruit in my hands, rubbed my cheek on its porcupine skin. I kissed the clefts in the bark and inhaled its aphrodisiac smell deep into my armpits and groin. I imagined the tree to be imbued with a surfeit of passion; I thrust myself against the tree, slick with sweat and swollen with desire, uttering obscenities in a language the tree couldn’t understand. And then I gasped in pleasure. With a sharp stone I marked the tree with a ‘GG’, as lovers are wont to do. I then put my clothes on, patted the tree with a co-conspirator’s caress and walked away.
***
At early dawn I stood on the docks looking up at the swarm of people on the East India Company ship’s deck. It wasn’t easy for the hundreds of people to disembark from a ship that had sailed the rough seas for many months. I watched the moving eddy of people and cargo as they snaked to the shore. Then I saw Elizabeth and called out her name.
Elizabeth turned, and then hastened past the seamen, luggage, agents and sunscorched porters into my waiting arms. I disengaged myself from her embrace to look at her. The gown she had worn was an unflattering shade of brown, much like dried earth. An equally drab cloak was draped around her shoulders. The ginger ringlets that had escaped from under her bonnet were untidy and rather sweaty. She looked terribly pale as compared to the velvety dark-skinned women of the land I had got used to seeing.
Back at Victoria Villa I took Elizabeth for a brief stroll around the garden and then I took her inside. She ran from room to room, exclaiming how wonderful everything looked, how pretty the mirror-frame was, how glad she was to have come, and then she disappeared into my study at the back. She took her bonnet off, and her hair, almost the colour of the local earth, swirled around her shoulders. She surveyed my table burdened with books and a hotchpotch of things: a box of cigars, snuff jars, fountain pens, papers and whatnot. Then she noticed the bale of cinnamon-brown silk with parrots and lotuses that Chotoo had brought home. It was evident from the expression on her face that she liked what she saw. She darted out of the room and up the stairs to continue her inspection of the house. She stopped at the door of a small room which resembled a construction site. She turned to look at me; she was smiling and I smiled back.
‘I am building a dressing room here, princess,’ I said. ‘The backyard privy is not too convenient.’
‘Then why did you build it?’
‘I didn’t think you would come.’
Elizabeth reached up and ruffled my hair. Her blouse fell open to reveal large white breasts. ‘Well, I am here.’
‘And thank heavens for that! I have ordered a chamber pot, washstand and a portable tin bath. They should arrive when the Company’s ship calls at this port.’
‘That will take months, Georgie.’
‘It’s worth the wait, don’t you think? Will you stay?’
She leant towards me and kissed me on my cheek. ‘I must say, I quite fancy your Victoria Villa,’ she said.
***
The cinnamon-brown silk painted with lotuses and parrots had been stitched into a gown with trimmings of silver gauze on the skirt and ribbons that matched at the waist; it fitted Elizabeth very well. She wore it often, more so because I liked her in it, although it was most unsuitable for the local weather, which Elizabeth had not yet become habituated to. It had been five long months since she had arrived in Machilipatnam.
One evening I returned late from the factory and found Elizabeth in tears. I saw the expression on her face. She was as lonely as me. Sniffing loudly she blew her nose. I pulled her up from the chair. Hand in hand we walked out of the house to the lake at the back, as we were accustomed to do now and then when the day had been hot and stifling. The chakka tree cast shadows on the water and its leaves rustled in the light breeze. Elizabeth sat under the tree. A peculiar odour laced the air and she closed her eyes and collapsed on the ground and began to moan. The mushroomy scent of the earth infused with the aphrodisiac smell of the chakka fruit went to my head that night. It seemed to affect the moon, too, as it wandered out of the trees and cast its light on Elizabeth’s face. A gust of wind tossed up her ruffled skirt. The moon moved hastily to illuminate her thighs, plump and white and waiting. The wind grew innumerable hands; a pair cupped her breasts, another kneaded her thighs, pressing upward until she parted her legs and the whiff of something quite else tickled my nostrils. I stroked her breasts, the furrows of her flesh, and her body arched in pleasure. When I heard her whisper my name in halfsleep I fell upon her flesh and consumed her. When our lovemaking came to its end, the moon moved away and it was dark all over again.
***
Real terror filled me when Elizabeth swooned in my arms; she was four months pregnant. Her temperature was high and her sweat-covered body shook violently. A glazed look came to her eyes and she withdrew into silence.
I did not know exactly what I should prepare for when Matthew told me that a mysterious sickness had come to many villages. Several people had fallen ill in the town, and some had died. I sent for a doctor from Madras at once. By the time he arrived Elizabeth was worse. She retched all day, her vomit sticky with mucus and blood. Her skin had crinkled like old parchment. Her eyes were wide and childlike with pain and distress, and she shuddered spasmodically with fever. The doctor was afraid Elizabeth’s illness was none other than malaria, and was more fearful because she was pregnant and the disease could affect the child. He asked me to feed her well. She was anaemic and needed strength to fight the illness.
I fed her dried fruit, meat, rice and rotis softened in milk. Elizabeth could not eat much anyway, what with the knot of pain in her stomach and her increased weakness. When she looked at me her bulbous eyes failed to recognise me. Tears of fear filled my eyes. I was afraid she was going to die and I would carry the guilt all my life.
Elizabeth opened her very blue eyes and seemed to recognise me; I touched her forehead and found the fever high. For three long weeks Elizabeth was asleep or unconscious, dead silent or delirious. But when she came to, after those weeks, she was as well as ever, her fever gone, the shakes gone, the sweat had evaporated and brightness came back in her eyes. She looked up from her bed, caressed her abdomen and smiled, ‘My poor Jane, I hope she’s well.’
‘It could be John, you know,’ I laughed. My relief showed in my smile.
But Jane it was for Elizabeth. She made me get fabric from the factory and had it stitched into frocks of different sizes: Jane – 2 months. Jane – 6 months. Jane – 1 year. Jane – 2 years... And I got baby boy clothes all the way from England. I was sure her Jane was going to be my John.
I had ordered a sackfull of pyrethrum seeds from Africa. They arrived when the next ship called at the port some months later. I had the seeds sown in the fields between Victoria Dyes and Victoria Villa. Soon the patches of land were covered with short feathery plants clinging to the ground. Some of them had white and yellow flower heads that resembled daisies and emitted a rancid smell. Mosquitoes were drawn to these flowers, but the smell choked the breath out of them.
I built a shed not far from the Victoria Dyes factory and enrolled jobless workers to work in it. They ground the pyrethrum leaves to paste, its seeds to powders, flowers to essence, and roots to dust. They squeezed the dust and powders into pellets that could be burnt, mixed petroleum jelly with the paste, and soaked the essences in oil. The packets for these creams, powders and pellets were branded with the face of Queen Victoria and called Queens Repellent. They repelled the fiercest of mosquitoes and Queens became a household name in Machilipatnam.
I knew what I had to do. I set out to build a centre for malaria research: George Gibbs Institute.
***
It had been pouring throughout the month, although it wasn’t the monsoon season. It was a curst ill fortune, this early rain. Suddenly, in the middle of a sodden April, Elizabeth gave birth to her baby. I breathed comfortably as the midwife lifted my child in my arms. I savoured the smells of the newborn – all milk and honey, and better than that, the pinkness of its skin. I walked to the window. Wild flowers of many colours grew in the garden below and the chakka tree outside rustled in the wind. A slight, delicate chill in the early morning air sharpened the fragrances of flowers and fruit. Somewhere off in the woods at the back a dog barked. I gazed at Gibbs Road skirting the house. This was the road I had walked down for years, troubled and alone. Now I had Elizabeth and the child in my arms. ‘John, oh my little John.’
‘Jane, it’s Jane,’ Elizabeth said, her voice weak.
‘You are mistaken, Liz,’ I said. ‘It’s John,’
‘It’s not John, silly, it’s Jane,’ Elizabeth cried.
‘It’s John,’ I said firmly.
The infant set up a wail. ‘Take the child away,’ Elizabeth screamed. She refused to nurse her child. She was so distraught, and in the days to come her maternal milk dried up and her nipples cracked like parched earth. I handed little John to a wet nurse. The sight and sound of her pale child slurping at a brown bosom filled Elizabeth with such disgust that she locked herself in the spare room above and rarely ventured out of it except to go to the lake at the back of the house. Here she would sit for hours staring blankly at the water. Then when the moon came out Elizabeth returned home weary and spent. In the following months she became gaunt; she was unwashed and swaddled in filthy clothes. She stank of sweat and tears. Whenever I drew close to her I flinched from her stale breath.
Her eyes flickered redly as she screamed, ‘It’s your fault, it’s all your fault. Now look what you have done.’ Then, sobbing, she added, ‘Everything has gone wrong for me. Each day feels like years, and there are shadows all around. They follow me.’
I felt helpless. I also felt very tired. I felt annoyed by the situation I had created. I was filled with sudden dread when Elizabeth’s tears turned to laughter or her laughter to tears. What I feared most was when she sat still, quiet, inert, gone away in mind: gone out of her mind.
Matthew comforted me. The next day he arrived with a band of keeners; there were five of them. They knelt down in a circle around Elizabeth. They removed their ornaments one by one, and then the flowers in their hair. One of them took in a deep breath, and then she wailed. The others, slapping their chests with their hands and banging their heads on the ground, began to moan. Elizabeth sat in the chair, her hands covering her ears, her eyes vacant. Then she shut her eyes with certain finality.
It was over. OVER.
I suddenly felt that God was not on my side. I chose to forget that I hadn’t thought of Him in a while. Now to make amends I prayed to Him feverishly, morning, noon and night. I donated a large sum of money to repair and extend the old Shiva temple. I knew little about the habits of Gods – unaware that ignored they could condemn. The Gods had made up their minds.
Three months later when the East India Company steamship called at Machilipatnam Port, Elizabeth Gibbs, clutching a suitcase, disappeared into the aft compartment of the ship.
I stood on the dock that morning looking up at the sky. It was overcast and resembled an English sky.
I stopped here. I flipped the pages backward and read from the beginning when Georgie comes to Machilipatnam. Was it true what Patti had said: old things store old memories, and they seep into us and make us live others’ lives? I shut the ledger; I didn’t want to read any more. I didn’t want to know what happened to Georgie and his son after Elizabeth left them. I was afraid. So I bundled the ledger in an old cotton towel, round and round, and then put it away in my cupboard so that I would never need to read it again.
18
Rebecca had a secret: she was born in LA, and when she was three her mother left home and filed for divorce. Some months later she ran in front of a car just when the accident was waiting to happen. She died on the spot, divorceless. Rebecca’s father returned to Machilipatnam with her because he couldn’t bear to live in LA. Wifeless. Divorceless. When I asked Rebecca why her mother and father had wanted to divorce she said they didn’t see ‘Eye-to-Eye’. I wondered if Appa and Amma would get divorced. They weren’t Eye-to-Eye, Ear-to-Ear or Touch-to-Touch.
I looked up Divorce in the dictionary. Beside the ‘end of a marriage’, it also meant:
1. A complete separation or split.
2. To separate or distinguish something from something else.
There was a complete separation between Amma and me now. We were totally split. So not only could Amma divorce Appa, Amma could also divorce me. In fact, according to the dictionary, we were already separate: I was something else for Amma.
Sister Mary Edwards told us that we should learn to get along. She harnessed the support of God to convince us: God helps those who help themselves. Friendliness is Godliness. Love thy neighbour and God shall love thee, a
nd so on. Why did grownups forget to get along? I wished I knew, and then again I was glad I didn’t. Being a grownup was complicated. Being Amma was complicated.
The more she turned away from me, the more Tara came to me. She was an older sister after all; she had maternal instincts. Through summer, monsoon, after-monsoon and before-summer she was my constant companion: we were undivorced, except when Rebecca was around. Then we were separated. Temporarily. I kept them separate in my mind, Rebecca and Tara, concealed in two separate parts of it. Together they wouldn’t work; by instinct I knew this. Like Amma and Appa. Rebecca and Tara were my armour, a soothing balm to my confusion, and without them I ceased to function. There was Georgie Gibbs too, hidden in the deepest part of my mind. So I blundered through the days, weeks, of each month knowing they were there for me. Absolutely.
It was summer again. Rebecca met me in the market. The air was awash with the smells of fresh vegetables and fruits, stinking fish, chicken feathers, roasted peanuts and pungent chillies. Flies buzzed over sacks of brown jaggery. Amidst an orchestra of bickering, haggling, shouting, voices sweet and harsh, dogs barked, cats mewed, cows mooed, and rats squeaked as they darted one behind the other through gaps in the walls.
Ranga had opened his shop. He held out a rose to Rebecca. Free-of-Charge. It was a day-old rose. Rebecca took the flower from him and as we walked on she tore the petals off one by one.
‘He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. Helovesme.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Finding out whether he’ll love me or not,’ she said. ‘He loves me not. He loves me. He. Loves. Me. Lots. Look, he is going to lovemelots.’
IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE Page 17