“But Chaver, dear—”
“Death’s a fact. Isn’t it, old chap?” Across the table, the eight-year-old boy, pale still despite the heat of a mighty sun, nodded. “That’s right,” said the man. “My God, Evelyn. He’s got to get used to it. He’ll see it all round him in this place.”
“Yes,” said Evelyn, and she touched her napkin to her lips.
“What was I saying?” the man she had called Chaver asked them. When they could not or would not tell him, he shook out his paper, somewhat late as it always was up here, and began to read, dismissing them.
That evening, as the stars were lit across the sky and grasshoppers whirred in the bushes, a woman came up the garden’s impeccable path, between the orange trees, and halted by the rhododendron under the veranda. Dark as the dusk, making no movement, she stood there for some while, until the doors of the dining room were opened. Then the thick amber lamplight fell on her and there was shouting.
“What in God’s name is all this noise?” demanded Chaver Finlay, striding up to the doors in his punctilious dinner jacket.
“A beggar woman,” said the house servant who had shouted. “I tell her, she must go.”
The man looked. He saw the woman by the ghostly rhododendron tree, in the light a creature of darkness, which folded its hands and bowed to him, and said in perfect English, “Lord, I seek shelter. I lost my home in the rains, and all I possess. I have been wandering a great time.” She was clad, he saw, in a piece of filthy sackcloth, probably come on at the wayside. Under the rag, she appeared supple and beautiful. Her hair was plaited into a black snake-tail that fell behind her. Her face was a fine one, with a delicately rimmed Asiatic mouth, the nose somewhat long but slenderly shaped, her eyes large and wide-spaced. On her wide low forehead, suggestive of intelligence and calm, there was no mark of caste. Nor did she have any jewelry, even to a glass bangle or a silver stud in the nostril.
“Well,” said Chaver Finlay, who was rather fascinated by these women. “Well. Go to the kitchen. Tell them I said you get food. And see if Asha can’t find you something to wear.”
“The Lord is very kind.”
He liked, the man, to be called “lord,” as they so often called him, in their own tongue or his. Tall and well-made, deeply tanned, hair and eyes black as the hair and eyes of any native, he found himself now, as often, stimulated by the contact of this world, so unlike his beginnings, so appealing to his spirit—or what he took to be his spirit. His work, which had to do with local government, was dry and uninspiring. He saw little connection between the work and the people, who continually intrigued him, that the work was ideally meant to serve.
Sitting at dinner, too, he compared Evelyn irresistibly and without quite knowing he did so, to the indigenous womanhood. Alas, poor Evelyn. How utterly unlike. Unlike to such an extent that it was almost a joke, Thin, but without any of the angular, heroic grace of the village woman. Fair, and suffering for her fairness, burned a dreadful pink that was not becoming, even when heavily powdered. The alien sun was not kind to Evelyn. It seemed to have bled out the color of her eyes which once, in a cooler clime, had enchanted him for two whole months. And the boy … the boy seemed set to go the same way. “Eat up your meat, David,” the man said absently. Milksop. Could he have bred a milksop? Little and thin and pale, if not yet burnt. The blue eyes were so rarely raised to meet his father’s, the father did not quite remember how they looked. Of course, Evelyn had spent a lot of time with the boy, and there were no other boys nearby for him to play with, to get some sense and some backbone thumped into him. Except the native children. But that was out of the question.
When the meal was over, the servant brought the decanter and glass and a box of cigarettes. Applying the lighter deftly, the servant said, “That woman is outside. She wishes to come in and speak to the Sahib, but I have said—”
“Whatever you said, go and tell her she may.”
Evelyn lifted her sandy eyebrows. She got a word of explanation, before the vagabond entered.
Finlay had a desire to draw in a great breath of pleasure at her apparition. Asha had obviously given of her best, an outfit of singing green and saffron, which the stranger wore as if it were her own. Even the black, black hair had been oiled before rebraiding and the oil’s somber perfume seemed to glow inside his nostrils like the whiskey on his palate.
She gave him again the obeisance, her eyes unlowered, huge black coals with all the lamplight held in them in two little golden beads.
“I have come only to thank you,” she said.
Finlay lounged a fraction. “But you’d thank me more if you could stay.”
She said nothing, and the other woman in the room gave a quick sharp rustle, like something in undergrowth. Finlay did not look at either of them. He refilled his glass.
“I assume you’d like to, because you told me you lost everything in the flood. Even your … Mother, would it have been?” There was a silence. When he looked up again, the dark ghost shook her head slowly. “It’s just,” he said, “an old woman was found about half a mile down the road, dead in the mud. Without clothing. The body was badly decomposed,” Evelyn made a verbal noise this time, “and rather curiously—but of course, the kites had got there, too, by then—” Evelyn’s noise was louder. “I merely thought, two strangers in these parts might have been traveling together.”
“No, lord.”
Finlay smiled, basking in that word.
“Well then, if we kept you, what could you do?”
“Really,” said Evelyn. “I don’t think—”
“Now, now,” he said, all velvet, “we can’t turn the homeless away, can we?” And she became once more dumb, only a pity it wasn’t permanent. His dark ghost meanwhile had turned her eyes aside. She had fixed them, those lenses of coal and gold, on his son. Ah, yes. The surest way to the father’s good graces, through his male offspring. As for David, he looked quite mesmerized, the little brute. “My son,” said Chaver Finlay to the woman, “is something of a dunce. At languages, particularly. Our dialects round here fox him, don’t they, old chap? On the other hand, your English is excellent, and I heard you exchanging words with my man, out there, in a splendid version of local lingo. Perhaps you might be helpful in this way. Do you think you could teach the boy something?” (And I’m sure you could teach him a great deal. Only he’s a touch young for that. I, though … ) He only felt Evelyn on this occasion, her loud protests were mute, a sort of vibration. Evelyn did not like the new schoolteacher. But David did. His small pallid face was full of expectation. And Chaver liked her a lot.
“If you wish,” she said, “I will try.” She went on looking at David, and then slowly she smiled at him. Chaver Finlay would have preferred to have that smile himself, instead of its being wasted on the brat. But never mind. She would smile at the man soon enough. He offered her board and lodging now, and a small sum in annas, which she accepted as if it neither insulted nor amazed her, nor mattered, part of the Eastern Act, as he sometimes termed it.
“Come up to the house after breakfast, about nine o’clock. All right? My wife will see David’s in proper order for you. What are we to call you?”
That brought her eyes back to him. She regarded him for some moments, as if considering. Why, she’s inventing a name for herself, he thought. Are you that notorious, my beauty? And he resolved to check this tomorrow in the official offices, which was an oddly exciting idea, and would make a nice change from memoranda on irrigation and outbreaks of fever.
Then she said the name, and he missed it and had to ask her to repeat what she had said, as if testing her.
“Agnini,” she told him, with no trace of reluctance.
“Oh,” he said, teasingly, “then will you keep lightning from striking the house, O daughter of Fire? That should be worth a pa’i or so more.”
II
He was a lonely child, lonely not so much for companionship as for peace. His mother was alternately irritated by him, or fussin
g him, calling him “Davy” when they were alone together, a strange intimacy he had come to find repellent. But then, she also referred to his father as “Daddy.” He was afraid of his father, of course. Mostly, these feelings were instinctive. Only when he had got out on to the withered lawn, able to lie hidden in a bush and watch a bird or small animal, or just the sky, did he discover quietness. Sometimes, taken up for a ride on his father’s horse (terrified), he had noticed the native children herding cattle, fighting or playing in the floury dust. They seemed as unlike himself as the free things which darted through the trees. Although he had left it less than a year before, he was forgetting Europe. The spot it occupied in his memory was a sort of sheet of whiteness, foggy, like an English winter sky. His mother sheltered him from this other sky as if it would hurt him, as, sure enough, once or twice it had hurt her, making her very sick so he was frightened and cried. “For heaven’s sake, David, don’t snivel!” his father said. The big tanned hand had caught itself back from a hard slap. It was clearly wrong to thrash one’s son for concern at his mother’s health. Punishment was reserved for deserving causes, failure at lessons, or lies to cover such failures or others that promised trouble. David was not a clever liar. He was not clever at anything. He had never asked as yet, What am I? Where do I fit in this unwieldy, unfriendly scheme of things? But because he did not seem cut out for life, obscurely he blamed himself. Everyone else managed. The fault must be in him.
When he saw sinuous motion coming through the orange trees, he watched it surreptitiously. Since it is possible to be in love at any age, David was in love with the adult person who had named itself Agnini. And since he loved her, he was rather afraid of her, and afraid, intuitively, of being disappointed in her.
Evelyn, who had left him there after breakfast, had admonished her child in various ways. She herself did not want to confront the native woman. To Evelyn’s eyes, Agnini was equally ugly and a threat. Thus the white wife ran to organize a bridge afternoon, abandoning matters to the wishes of the husband now already gone off to the male world of work, and to his allotted governess. Over the cards, Evelyn was prepared to say, gaily, “Guess what, suddenly we have an ayah! Oh of course it’s silly, so we know whose notion it is, don’t we? Chaver’s. You know what he is.” And they did know what he was, too, some of them. The ladies of the area much admired Mr. Chaver Finlay, who, stray as he would, was still Evelyn’s lawful property. Not that he had strayed much with his own kind, she thought. No, it was elsewhere that Chaver’s black eyes turned, after the black-eyed foreign women of this other planet, India. The little boy looked up as Agnini’s cool shade fell upon him. “Greetings,” she said to him in Hindi. Pleased that he understood, he said in English, shyly, “Hallo.” And then Agnini laughed. Her teeth were as white as forgotten English snow. Entranced, David let her take his hand and lead him off the veranda, away to the shrubs and trees of the garden. Here, in his domain, which had long spelled release and relief, which he did not mind sharing with her since it seemed hers already, they sat down. In English, without preliminary, Agnini began to tell him a story. David listened, and as he listened he watched her. In the slanting sunlight she was like a shadow, and as she spoke she made lovely, luminous gesticulations with her hands and neck and head, swaying slightly like a flower on a stalk. Now and then, in the way of the story, she would say, “Attend, O Beloved.” And each time he would start very slightly, as if his mind had wandered, though it had not. It was grand to be told stories, though how it would help him master the ghastly chaos of another language he did not know.
“Attend, O Beloved,” Agnini said.
David attended.
His blue eyes were wide. These eyes were so far the only beauty he had, the only sign he might grow up into a handsome man, his mother’s lightness of complexion and his father’s coarse, effective looks, refined into something much better.
“‘Come,’ said the god,” said Agnini, “‘come, be valorous, and descend into the city of the wise and wicked ones. Who shall hurt thee there, seeing thou hast my protection? Thou shalt behold marvels. And maybe thou mayest recover what the shape-changer stole.’”
Evelyn, who had sneaked out after all, in spurious search of a dead rose bush, paused to eavesdrop. Useless, she thought with satisfaction. What good is it to sit there like a monkey and chatter at the boy in Hindi, when he can’t speak three words of it?
“Two weeks. She’s not teaching him anything. She simply lives off our fare, like a parasite. Like they all do, given a ha’p’orth of encouragement.”
“What does she do with him all day, then?” Finlay inquired lazily.
“She tells him fairy stories, I believe. Or rather, heathen myths. Only yesterday I heard him singing—howling is more like it—some perfectly grim sort of chant about Krishna, or Vishnu. Or somebody.”
“Oh? Singing it in English, do you mean?”
“No of course—” Evelyn paused, “not,” she added lamely. “Oh, it was in some dialect or other, but he’d learnt it off parrot fashion. He didn’t understand it, which was probably just as well. You know, dear, I’m very concerned about David’s religious—”
“Just a minute,” Finlay said. He got up from his desk, where Evelyn had disturbed him over a hunting journal and a pile of untouched paperwork lugged home for show from the offices. He walked past his wife, one and a quarter feet the taller, and went out on to the veranda. David, a small uncamouflaged white figure in his shirt and shorts, was pottering among the tamarisks. At his father’s shout, the boy jumped as if at a shot, and turned a frightened face toward the house. The man beckoned vigorously, and the child came quickly with the forced speed of total helpless unwillingness. When he had almost reached the steps Finlay barked at him: “Jaldi, bebkuf! Bhagio!”
“Jee, Pitaji, mai bhagta hu—” said David, and broke into a trot. Then faltered and stopped dead.
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Chaver Finlay. He stood staring at his son, an evil grin splitting his face and revealing the unattractive teeth less strong than the rest of him. “What did you just say?”
“You—you told me to run, and I said I would—”
“In Hindi.”
“Y—yes. I—I think … so.”
“Don’t think so, you did. Accent quite decent, too. Well done,” said Finlay, delighted at it all. In Hindi once more, plus a heavy dose of the local dialect, he added to David, “And did she teach it thee?”
“Yes, father,” David said in English. It was a fact, he was never more uncertain than when his father seemed pleased by him. It happened so seldom.
And sure enough, Finlay scowled. “God damn you, boy! Answer as you’re supposed to.”
Evelyn shuddered at the blasphemies, retreating to the wall of the house. David replied again, rapidly, in the other words and syntax which were coming to seem quite familiar.
Chaver laughed. He turned on Evelyn, laughing in her face. “You see, Cold Comfort, our Aggi’s worth her weight in rupees. If she can get the little owl to learn something—my God. I’ll go over to their quarters and tell her she’s done a good job. By God, I will.”
Evelyn had continued to shrink away and had now shrunk right back into her husband’s study. She watched him stride off through the brassy film of late day and into the dark of the peepul trees that hid the servants’ dwellings from the bungalow.
The other side of those trees, almost instantly, he came on her who had named herself Agnini. She sat by a brown wall on a little faded mat of Asha’s, cleaning her hair in the old way, by rubbing it with rice, then combing it through and through. He stood and watched her, leaning on a tree and hidden from the house, feeling his own power course through him, his blood stirring in the broad light and open as it rarely did now in an airless night bedroom.
Although she had acknowledged him politely, Agnini continued with her task. He took this as a kind of flirting.
“I came to congratulate you,” he said at last. “We’d better give you a raise, Lady
of Fires. David starts to speak tolerable native talk.”
She nodded, a small bow, replied otherwise not at all. Finlay inhaled the scents of the earth and the tree, and the wholesome savage aroma of her hair with the rice rubbed through it. His investigations had offered no clue. There were no rumors of a female criminal at large in the area, or anywhere near it. Maybe they would come. Then he might say to her, Ah, Agnini-who-is-not. Now I know you. That game could be fun to play. For the moment he contented himself with, “But your husband, surely, must be pining for you.”
She did stop her combing then, looking at him stilly. It was an odd look, and he was not sure he cared for it. Presently she said something that did not really sound like Hindi, and which he could not understand.
He guessed. “Dead? Is he? But he’ll be back, won’t he? He’ll reincarnate, and fast, I’d think, to get with you again. Or are you a Mussulman woman, only one life and away to paradise? No, you’re not that. Thank God. The times I’ve come out on a fine evening and been confronted by a row of their men’s holy bums stuck up, faces at the other end to Mecca—”
Agnini rose. The movement was remarkable, like a dancer’s, yet even more fluid—the word mellifluous came to mind. Even to Chaver Finlay’s mind. Yes, flowing honey. But she had given him the obeisance, turned and gone in, flowingly stooping at the low doorway. Dismissed, the man stood and wondered, angry and tickled. Yes, yes, honey and fire, it would be a pleasure to have a rough wooing with this one, who seemed not to notice him as male flesh. And he had the sudden image of a darkness before him, redolent with the perfumes of night, and eyes and lips and strong hands on him holding him to insistent deeds of darkness, all awash with smoky hair and the elixir of a foreign skin.
III
“Is it dead?” asked David, staring at the little rumpled creature on the lawn.
“Yes. Oh, come away at once. I’ll send them to clear it. Don’t be so ghoulish, Davy.”
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 63