He pulled a face. ‘Like this, like that, madam.’
‘Not good?’ She nibbled at the sweets.
He glanced at Jonathan before he answered. ‘These protests. So many hartals, also. No sugar, no ghee, no customers. Everything becomes closed.’
Jonathan said: ‘If you really want to stay open, ask for police protection. The strikes would soon stop.’
Rahul shook his head. ‘It’s not so easy.’
Isabel said: ‘I don’t know why they have them. They seem to hurt the poor most of all.’
Rahul looked down into his chai. Isabel reached to take the baby from Sangeeta and set him on her lap. He reached for her hair.
‘He’s grown so much, Rahul.’
Sangeeta scolded the boy and tried to prise his fingers from Isabel’s fringe as Rahul muttered: ‘I’m sorry, madam.’
‘You should be proud. Look at that grip.’
Isabel tickled him and he squealed. She looked over, laughing. Jonathan stared at the ground, one hand holding a cup of untouched chai while the other pulled in a vague way at his earlobe. He looked large and clumsy and out of place.
By the time she and Jonathan left, the afternoon light was yellowing, made hazy by the smoke from cooking fires. The tonga nosed its way through a surge of traffic. Ahead, shopkeepers rushed to erect wooden shutters over their stalls. Mothers, heads and faces covered, rounded up children from the street and herded them home.
‘Is there a protest?’
‘Looks like it.’ Jonathan sat with his shoulder turned to her.
She reached over to him. ‘Look, I just thought you’d enjoy meeting them, that’s all.’
He shrugged, didn’t look round.
She added: ‘They’re lovely people.’
Bicycles and carts hurried past. She tapped the tonga-wallah on the shoulder and told him to hurry.
Jonathan said in a tight voice: ‘I must say, I’m surprised. It’s not safe.’
She didn’t reply. The tonga-wallah slapped his switch across the haunches of the bony horse and goaded it into a half-hearted trot.
‘That baby wasn’t clean,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you might catch.’
The roadside began to look deserted. In place of the usual bustle, only a stray child in the gutter, a dog nosing through rubbish, then trotting on, a hawker pushing his barrow back home, head bowed under the weight. The quietness struck her as unnatural. Then, in the silence, something stirred. The echo of a distant noise. She strained to listen. A pulse of male voices, ghostly at first, then steadily growing. Chanting.
She faced him and raised her hand. ‘Listen.’
The voices grew louder.
‘It’s coming from the bustee.’
Jonathan looked anxious. ‘Tell the driver to get a move on, would you?’
Isabel focused on the chanting. The words weren’t distinct – the noise seemed to bounce off the clouds – but the tone was clear. It had the vehemence of a battle cry and it was moving rapidly towards them. She tried to think. They could turn off the main thoroughfare and enter the labyrinth of back lanes in the hope of avoiding the protest but it would be slow going. Or they could press on and try to get out of the area before the marchers appeared.
They emerged into a broad crossroads and the swelling sound burst suddenly all around them. The intersection, normally a clutter of vehicles and pedestrians, was deserted.
‘Look!’ Isabel pointed down the street that ran perpendicular to their own. A dark swarm of men flowed towards them, fists striking the air, voices strident.
Jonathan leant forward and struck the tonga-wallah on the shoulder. ‘Don’t just sit there! Go!’
The tonga-wallah brought his switch down on the horse’s back but even as the carriage lurched forward, figures detached themselves from the crowd of marchers and came running at full tilt down the street towards them, shouting and waving their arms. The horse, startled by the sting of the whip and the shouting, tossed its head and screamed. The first men were almost upon them. They were young, faces red and moist with sweaty excitement, waving staves and metal knives, which flashed in the fading sunlight.
Isabel jumped down from the carriage and ran to grab hold of the horse’s bridle. Its eyes rolled white in its large head, its mouth flecked with foam and spittle where it gnawed at the bit.
‘Hush, boy. Quiet now.’ She hung onto the bridle as the head shook, almost lifting her off the ground. The eyes fixed on her, then veered away in terror. The switch struck its flank and the horse shot forward a few paces, dragging Isabel with it. Hooves stamped and crashed as the horse danced at her feet. She clung on and reached an arm round its neck, trying to soothe it. ‘Hush, beauty. It’s alright.’
Jonathan jumped out of the carriage and ran to join her. He pulled at her hands, trying to prise them off the bridle.
‘Get back in the carriage.’
Isabel shook her head. ‘Leave me. I know horses.’
The horse was pawing and stamping but showing signs of quietening. She hugged its neck, patted it, whispered repeatedly in its turning ear: ‘Quiet now, boy. Hush now.’
Jonathan tensed at her side. The first men reached them, hot-blooded youngsters. A rank smell hung around them of toddy and ghee. Isabel turned and spoke politely in Hindustani.
‘We’re having trouble with the horse. Don’t frighten him.’
One of the young men jeered. The shouting crowd advanced behind them. Their words grew clearer: Jai Hindustan Ki! Inquilab Zindabad! Beside her, Jonathan squared up.
‘You’ve no quarrel with the horse, I hope.’ She made herself laugh. ‘He’s a very Indian horse.’
One of the men shouted: ‘Yes, under the yoke. Like all of us.’
More men were upon them now, flowing round the carriage to form a ragged, fast-growing crowd. The men waved their staves, inching closer.
Isabel kept close to the horse’s head, one arm round its neck, the other on the bridle, touching its face.
‘We’ll get out of your way.’
She eased the horse forward, step by step, dragging the tonga behind. The tonga-wallah sat terrified on his seat.
The horse cried and reared. Isabel found herself jerked upwards, then dumped on the ground with a thud beside the pounding hooves. She scrambled to her feet.
‘Who threw that?’ Jonathan confronted the crowd, his face drained of colour.
Isabel hadn’t seen the stone but she understood.
‘How dare you?’ Jonathan was shaking. ‘You bloody idiots.’
A stout man, wearing only a lunghi, his bare torso showing the muscular chest and arms of a day labourer, pressed forward from the crowd and, in a sudden flash of fist, punched Jonathan in the face. The man’s teeth, stained red with betel juice, grinned. Jonathan fell backwards with a bang onto his back and sprawled, winded, on the ground. He lay for a moment, too dazed to move. Isabel stood over him, trying to shield him from the advancing men to one side and the flailing hooves on the other.
‘Leave him alone.’ Her voice sounded shrill. ‘Stop it!’
From somewhere in the crowd, a male voice rang out.
‘Esse mat karo! Don’t!’
Heads swivelled. A tall, broad-shouldered man stepped forward. His clothes were clean and neatly pressed and his face was clean-shaven. He had an air of command and addressed Isabel in English. ‘Take him. Go.’
She put her hands under Jonathan’s arms and helped him to his feet. Blood oozed from his nose.
He struggled to stand and glared at his assailant. ‘Don’t think you’ll get away with this.’
Isabel tried to turn him, to push him ahead of her up into the carriage. The tonga-wallah shouted at his horse and fell again to whipping its flanks. Finally it stirred and moved.
Jonathan twisted round from the seat. ‘You won’t win, you know that. You think you can run this country? I’d like to see you try.’
The carriage gathered speed and drew them at last away from the crossroads and out
into the deserted street. The horse, pouring its fear into its legs, reached for a gallop and the carriage swayed and creaked behind it.
Isabel looked back at the assembled men, staring after them with menace, and, in the centre, the silent figure of their leader who had intervened to save them.
Chapter Four
‘Darling, what on earth were you thinking?’
Isabel’s mother dipped a cotton flannel into a basin of water, squeezed it out and handed it across to Isabel. Jonathan sat on the settee. His nose was swollen and cut across the bridge.
‘But why were you down there? I thought you were lunching at The Grand.’
‘We did.’ Isabel held the flannel against the cut. ‘Does that hurt?’
‘Your father sent a chit. They may have to call out the army. There’s hundreds of them. On the rampage.’ Her mother poured iodine onto a cotton swab and dabbed at the scrapes on Jonathan’s hands.
Isabel said: ‘It was all my fault. I sent the poor tonga-wallah in quite the wrong direction.’
‘I thought you knew this city by now, darling. Honestly. You were lucky to escape with your lives. You must stay for dinner, Mr Whyte. Don’t protest. My husband can lend you a dinner jacket.’ She put the stopper back in the iodine bottle and set it on the tray. ‘I do wonder what’s happening to this country.’
Isabel gave Jonathan an uncertain glance. ‘Mr Whyte may have other plans, Mother.’
‘Of course he doesn’t. Anyway, they’re sure to impose a curfew. We’ll send word to The Grand and say you’re staying here tonight. Much more sensible.’
‘Well, you were a big hit with my mother.’
‘She’s a charming lady. Now I know where you get it from.’
‘Rot.’ Isabel tutted. ‘We couldn’t be less alike.’
They sat side by side on wicker loungers on the verandah and smoked. The night air was cool and thick with the scent of flowers. The light from the chowkidar’s hut flickered through the bushes at the far end of the drive. The grass sang with the screech of cicadas and low croaks of bullfrogs.
A rustle of paper as her mother, sitting behind them in the drawing room in a dim circle of light, turned a page of her magazine. Isabel was alert in the darkness to the low purr of her father’s approaching car but it had already turned ten o’clock and there was still no sign of him.
‘He’s at the office all night sometimes,’ she said. ‘My mother tries to hide it but she does worry.’
‘Goes with the territory, I suppose.’
‘I wonder what’s happening. The protest, I mean.’
Jonathan shrugged. ‘I’m sure your father can look after himself.’
Isabel stubbed out the end of her cigarette in the ashtray and reached for her sandals. ‘I should go inside and keep her company.’
‘Do you have to?’ Jonathan paused. She sensed that he was steadying his nerve. ‘One more smoke?’
He took two more cigarettes from his case, snapped it shut, lit them both from the remnants of his ebbing stub and handed one to her.
She drew on it, tilted her head back and blew the smoke upwards into the cloud of small flies hanging around their heads. They scattered, then slowly re-formed. She sensed the turn of his head as he watched her.
‘You’re extraordinary. You do realise that?’
‘Odd, more like.’
His teeth gleamed in the darkness as he smiled. ‘You’re amusing too. I like that. And courageous. I keep thinking of the way you leapt down from the carriage and handled that horse. You could’ve been killed.’
She smiled back. ‘I doubt it. It was rather a pathetic old horse really, wasn’t it?’
They fell silent for a moment. She stretched out her legs and sighed. When she drew the smoke into her lungs, it cleaned out the day’s tension.
‘Do you really want to stay out here?’
‘In India?’ She considered. ‘Of course. Not sure how I can manage it, though.’
He sat very still beside her, looking straight ahead into the darkness. ‘You could marry someone posted here.’
She blinked, suddenly tense.
‘If you don’t mind my asking, well, is there someone?’
‘No. Not, you know, so far …’
He exhaled heavily. She glanced sideways. It was too dark to read his expression.
Behind them, floorboards creaked as her mother moved about the room. A high-pitched clink as she poured herself a glass of iced tea from the jug.
Isabel put her hand squarely on the wicker arm of the chair and made to get up. ‘I really should go in. Do you mind?’
He jumped to his feet. ‘Of course. How thoughtless of me.’
‘It’s been quite a day.’
‘Hasn’t it?’ He hovered awkwardly. She felt him reaching for something unsaid and found herself waiting for him to find the words. Finally he said: ‘I haven’t offended you, have I? It’s been delightful. When I suggested luncheon, I never dreamt …’
She laughed. ‘It would go on all day? Neither did I. But I’m glad.’ She extinguished her cigarette.
As she lifted her hand from the ashtray, he reached forward in a swift single movement and took her fingers, lifted them to his mouth. His lips were warm against her skin. The sudden intrusion of a noise made her jump. It was the whine of the gates being scraped open. She pulled away her hand, embarrassed, and moved forward to stand against the verandah rail and peer into the night. The thin light of a bicycle lamp wavered past the chowkidar’s hut and turned down the drive towards the house, flashing snapshots of posts and bushes as it progressed.
‘Mother!’
Her mother joined them on the verandah and the three of them strained to make out the dark figure cycling with a crunch over the gravel. He wobbled as he lifted a hand to greet them.
‘Gerard?’ Her mother disappeared inside. ‘Finally!’
Her father drew to a halt in front of the verandah, dismounted from the bicycle and climbed over to join them.
He shook hands with Jonathan. ‘Gerard Winthorpe. Sorry to miss dinner.’ His hair was slick with sweat and his cheeks shone ruddy in the low light. ‘Roadblocks. Borrowed Singh’s cycle.’
‘Jonathan Whyte. A difficult evening, sir?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Her father looked past them to the empty sitting room.
Isabel said: ‘She’s gone to rouse Cook. Are you hungry?’
Her father said to Jonathan: ‘How about a Scotch?’
They followed him inside and stood, watching, as her father poured drinks.
‘Cigar?’
Isabel tutted as he opened the box, picked out two cigars and gave one to Jonathan. ‘She’ll be annoyed if you don’t eat.’
‘Always in trouble. Been married thirty-three years. You’ll see.’
Jonathan already seemed accepted by her parents, even though they knew him even less than she did.
‘What’s the news, sir?’
Her father shook his head, handed Jonathan a Scotch and took a sip from his own. ‘The army’s out. The police did their best but it all turned rather nasty. Very unfortunate.’
Jonathan said: ‘Casualties?’
‘Three fatalities. There may be more. Dozens injured.’ He drank again. ‘Whatever game they think they’re playing, these people, they certainly know how to spread mayhem.’
Mrs Winthorpe bustled in. She looked at the unlit cigar in one of her husband’s hands and the drink in the other. ‘Darling, you must eat. Cook’s rustling something up. Don’t give me that look.’
Her father turned to Jonathan. ‘Come through and keep me company, at least. In the interests of marital harmony.’
The two men headed off to the dining room with their drinks. Beside Jonathan, her father looked suddenly old, his shoulders stooped.
Isabel’s mother put out a hand to hold her back. Once the men were out of earshot, she whispered: ‘Your father likes him.’
‘They’ve hardly exchanged two words.’
‘That�
��s not the point. Go to bed, Isabel. Leave them to talk.’
Isabel lay awake in bed for some time, listening to the murmur of male voices from the drawing room and, beyond her window, the languid movement of the trees in the night air. Something had changed and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. He had stirred something in her, a vague longing that she found hard to identify. She just sensed that when he left Delhi in a matter of days and sailed back to his life of adventure in the Andamans, she would feel herself more alone here. Her parents’ bungalow seemed suddenly old-fashioned and their social world narrow and confined.
Chapter Five
Asha
The far reaches of the room stayed black with shadow. Arrows of sunshine fell along one edge, pressing in between the mud patties that held the wall together. The shafts danced with dust and swirls of smoke. The room smelt of sour breath and spices and bodies. When hands pulled back the sacking across the doorway, as people came and went, the heat swam in and drowned them.
At night, she and Baba slept huddled together in a corner, hemmed in by uncles, aunties and cousins. If she fidgeted and grew restless, Baba grumbled, ‘Aram, Asha. Go to sleep.’ His arm across her was dead and still as he slept. Baba’s cousin, whom she called uncle, snored and sometimes an auntie also and Asha pressed her head in her baba’s side to shut out the noise.
Outside the bustee was hectic with tumbledown shacks. Makeshift houses filled every space. Greasy water ran in an open channel down the middle of the street and children did their business there, for anyone to see, and played there too and it stank so badly in the heat that her stomach turned. Rats swam in it, their black eyes and whiskered noses breaking the surface. They bit, if you bothered them. And dogs, foolish with big eyes, trotted and sniffed and some let you pet them but others snapped.
She didn’t have a brother or a sister or a mama even. But she had her baba and they were lucky to have a roof over their heads; her baba told her to thank the gods for it, others were worse off. Her uncle’s roof was already overstretched with his wife and the other uncle and auntie and eight children between them.
Daughters of India Page 4