Daughters of India

by Jill McGivering

  ‘Tell me, brother. Is there news from that place?’

  Her father shrugged. ‘How can there be news? Every man is kept apart from the others.’

  Amit pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with his forefinger. ‘Perhaps that is the worst punishment of all, nah?’ He paused, studying the patch of bare ground in front of him. ‘Well, I have news. About Sanjay Krishna. You knew him a little, I think, in Delhi, when he was still a young man? Sahib’s nephew.’

  He leant in and lowered his voice, speaking man to man. Asha, stirring the chai, strained to listen.

  ‘He’s here, locked up in that same jail. Had you heard?’

  Her baba didn’t raise his eyes. Asha’s spoon scraped against the bottom of the pot as she stirred, stirred, stirred the swirling chai. Sanjay Krishna here, a prisoner? Since when? Amit should have told her also. Just because she was a girl, no one talked politics with her. But this, she should have known.

  Amit continued: ‘Not long after your good daughter left Delhi, he led a protest. Our people filled the streets, calling for their rights, and were brutally suppressed by the police and the army even. There were martyrs that day and many men were arrested, including Krishna-ji.’

  There was a long pause. Asha poured the boiling chai into clay cups and kept her face hidden. Her hand trembled and the ground turned dark where she spilt dribbles of chai. She saw Sanjay Krishna’s kind smile as she handed the men their cups.

  Her father set his cup, untouched, on the ground. A fly landed on the rim and he made no move to wave it away. ‘You come here to talk to me about politics? Don’t you see what pain it has brought me and my family? I’m a simple man. All I wanted was to feed my daughter, to protect her and find her a good husband. Now we both are ruined. For what?’

  Amit paused and seemed to consider for a few moments before he replied. ‘The Britishers did this to you. Blame them, not us.’ He kept his tone level and soft. ‘You have friends here. We all have suffered. We will help you and your daughter, as a friend should.’

  Her father hunched his shoulders.

  Amit continued: ‘You have many blessings, ji. You have freedom. You have a roof and food to eat. You have a daughter, a good girl.’

  ‘What makes you an expert on my daughter?’

  Amit looked down at the clay cup in his hands. ‘I don’t want to quarrel with you.’

  ‘Maybe I want to quarrel with you.’

  Amit didn’t answer. The air sat heavily between the three of them. Asha was afraid to break the silence. Finally she picked up one of the sweets, broke off a corner and offered it to her father. ‘Try a little, Baba. Please.’

  He raised his arm and knocked the sweet from her hand. ‘I want nothing from this man.’ His face was contorted with anger as he confronted Amit. ‘I didn’t invite you here.’

  ‘Baba, please, we only have this home because of—’

  ‘You took advantage of my daughter, didn’t you? You knew I was helpless to protect her.’

  Amit blinked behind his spectacles. ‘No, brother. Not like that. I took care of her only. I swear to you.’

  ‘Took care of her?’ Her baba tried to get to his feet. His cheeks were red with anger.

  ‘It’s true, Baba. He protected me.’ She reached for his hand and he swatted her away. ‘Why do you say such a thing?’

  Amit got to his feet, his hands spread before him. ‘Your baba is right. This is his home. I came without invitation.’

  ‘But we’re grateful to you.’ She looked, stricken, from the calm face to the other, full of fury. ‘Aren’t we, Baba? Tell him.’

  Amit turned to leave. As he retreated, her baba reached for the parcel of sweets and threw them after him. They burst into pieces as they hit the ground, the silver tops tarnished by dust, the sugar broken into crumbs for the ants and birds to eat.

  After that, her baba barely left the shelter. On mornings when she could persuade him, Asha drew him down the narrow lanes to the waterfront where they sat in silence, side by side, on the low walls, watching the fishermen unloading their catch and gazing out across the turquoise sea towards the invisible Indian mainland.

  Sometimes he scolded her. ‘What place is this for a decent girl? An island filled with thieves and murderers. You should never have come here. Did I tell you to leave Delhi? Did I?’

  She hung her head and sat quietly beside him, her hand resting on his thin arm, and waited until the storm passed.

  In the afternoons, she went to the restaurant to scour the pots and pans and help Cook prepare food. Now her baba came with her. He sat alone, shoulders hunched, at a rickety table in the shadowy interior and smoked one bidi after another. Most customers sat facing the light and bustle of the lane. Only her baba sat with his back to the outside world, peering through the gloom towards the back of the restaurant and the yard where she worked. At first, Rajiv took him chai and plates of snacks but he refused everything. When she finished work, he pulled himself to his feet and walked back with her in silence, his hand on her shoulder.

  Amit observed the way her father followed and watched her.

  ‘It is hard for a bird to be locked inside a cage,’ he said. ‘Captivity breaks his spirit. But finally, the bird becomes accustomed. Then, even when the cage door is opened wide, it doesn’t dare to leave. It sits, comforted by the bars that confine it and afraid to fly.’

  She shook her head. ‘My baba isn’t a bird.’

  Amit put his head on one side. ‘Maybe not. But once a man has his freedom taken from him, it may take a long time to learn to be free again.’

  In the evenings, after she served her father his food, she sat with her body pressed against his and tried to make him talk.

  ‘Tell me about Mama.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You do, Baba.’ She waited but nothing came. ‘Tell the story about how you named me.’

  He shrugged. ‘What story? Is there a story?’

  ‘You know. You and Mama waited so many years for a child and finally I came and you called me Asha. Hope.’

  He shook his head and looked down at his fingers, bent now and misshapen.

  ‘There is no hope. Hope died.’

  In the night, he continued to cry out and she had to shake him to bring him back to her from whatever fearful place he visited in his dreams.

  One afternoon, she sat in the shade of the frangipani tree cleaning and chopping a mountain of bhindi for Cook, dumping the discarded ends into a pail for the pigs and goats. Her baba watched her from his seat inside the restaurant, visible only by the glow of his cheap cigarette. Amit sat nearby, his ledger open on his knee, raising his spectacles to the top of his nose as he calculated his sums.

  ‘I have a letter for you, little sister.’

  She looked up. Never in her life had she received a letter. Amit had his head bowed over his book. She was unsure if he had really spoken and if it was indeed to her.

  ‘Don’t turn to me.’ Amit’s voice was soft. ‘Your baba is watching.’

  She focused her eyes back on her hands and the soft vegetable rhythm of pluck and chop.

  ‘I’ll leave it when I go.’

  The fingers of bhindi swam in front of her eyes. She had to wipe off her forehead with her sleeve and blink hard before she could carry on chopping. When Amit got to his feet half an hour later and took his accounts inside, she pretended to have an ache in her neck and stretched it out by massaging her shoulder, glancing over as she did so at the chair where Amit had sat. A newspaper lay under it.

  She worked on with unsteady hands through the piles of vegetables in their pots, bhindi first, then beans, then cauliflower. When she had finished, she got to her feet, stretched, picked up the pail and crossed to dump the discarded ends into the trough there. As she came back, she pretended to stop and peer at something on the ground and, turning her back on the restaurant and her baba’s watchful eyes, bent to pick at the dirt. With her foot, she kicked the newspaper. The paper conceal
ed inside was cheap and thin and she swept it into her pail in a single movement, then carried it away.

  All the way home, her baba’s hand heavy on her shoulder, every scrunch and crinkle of the paper in her pocket terrorised her but he seemed to hear nothing.

  All night, she thought about the letter. She could imagine one person who might write a letter to her and she was afraid to read it in case she was disappointed.

  The next morning, she went to the fields as usual in the grey half-light before dawn to do her business in private. In the silence there, broken only by the morning song of the birds, she opened up the paper and read.

  Little Sister,

  How is your good self? How is your dear baba? I hear news that he is free at last and I thank the gods for this great, good happiness. I am a prisoner here also, these last months, but in body only. My heart and soul are free. I do not know what fate lies ahead of me but I send many blessings to you. I pray that you may do good in this world. May you continue the fight for your people’s freedom.

  SK.

  On the back, he had written a few more lines. For a moment, she thought: he wrote a poem for me. Then she saw the name at the bottom – R. Tagore – and remembered the book of poems that his uncle had read the night before he died.

  I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish – no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

  Her face flushed as she imagined him sitting in a cell and writing this secret letter for her. His hands, warm on the pen, on the paper, his kind face bent over his work. She sat in the dewy field for as long as she dared, staring down at the paper in her hands, filled with hopeless longing for this man who was so much more than she could ever dream of becoming and yet called her his little sister.

  One afternoon, as she carried piles of washed dishes from the yard to Cook in the restaurant, one of Amit’s friends, a fellow ticket of leave, came slinking over to speak to her. He was a light-skinned man from the north who laboured with his father as a tenant farmer before getting into a brawl, being convicted of murder and sent to the Andamans.

  Now he was middle-aged, his back crooked after years of prison work. He made a rough living by hauling panniers for the fishermen when their catches came ashore and heaving boxes of goods in and out of the godowns whenever a ship docked.

  He had an awkward manner. Amit had brought him to her months earlier with a request to write a letter to his brother about their inheritance after their father’s death. He dictated his letter without looking her in the eye. Now he stuttered and stared down at his long hairy toes, which poked out of his chappals. He pulled a paper from his lunghi.

  ‘Amit gave me a letter,’ he said. ‘Maybe it is a reply at last from my brother. Could you read it?’

  She wiped off her hands on her dupatta and he handed her the paper. It was crumpled and dotted with grease stains as if he had been carrying it with him for some days.

  The letter was scrawled in bad English. His brother, no doubt also unable to read or write, must have paid a street-corner letter-writer. She spread it out on her lap and tried to decipher the words. The language was old-fashioned and full of mistakes. The man hunched forward, his brow knitted.

  ‘Is there some dispute between you? About cattle?’ She tried to remember the content of the letter she had written on his behalf all those weeks earlier.

  ‘Our father died.’ The man knotted his meaty fingers. ‘Now my brother and his wife have the house and goats and water buffaloes and everything. I want my share.’

  She used the tip of her finger to trace over the words, one by one, her lips moving silently. The light suddenly vanished. She looked up. Her baba stood in the doorway, his arms loose at his side.

  ‘What’s that?’

  His expression was hidden by shadows but his voice was menacing.

  ‘It’s alright, Baba. It’s a letter from this man’s brother only. I’m reading it for him.’

  Her baba shoved the man out of the way and snatched the paper from her hands. He stared at it, blind to the written words. ‘What does it say? Tell me.’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m just trying to see, Baba. It’s private. About their family business.’

  Her father turned on the man. ‘Who are you, anyway? Why are you bothering my daughter?’

  She reached for him, set her hand on his shoulder. ‘Please, Baba.’

  The man shoved her father in the back. ‘Mind your manners. I’ve done nothing.’

  Her father crumpled the paper into a ball in his hand and threw it onto the floor. Asha bent to pick it up. As she did, fist cracked on bone and her baba knocked into her, staggering, his hand to his jaw. Father and daughter clutched at each other as they battled to stay upright.

  The man laughed. His feet were planted squarely and his face hard.

  ‘Go home, old man. You’re making a fool of yourself.’

  Her father put her aside and lunged at the man, flying through the air with a howl of rage, teeth bared, fists pounding. The sheer force of his body knocked the younger man backwards and they locked together, arms pumping, hands flailing to find purchase.

  ‘Stop it!’ Asha tried to dance round them, to seize her baba’s arm. ‘Stop!’

  The turning, grappling men flung her off and she fell, skidding across the wet floor.

  Sweat poured down her father’s flushed face as they struggled. His opponent was heavier-set and stronger. Her thin father hung like a vine round a stout branch, tossed back and forth by the man’s blows to his face, his chest. He clung on, his own fists hammering with frantic energy. All the anguish, the humiliation, the pain that had festered inside him seemed to burst to the surface and surged now into his juddering arms.

  The man grasped her father’s hair and smashed his head backwards against the wall. Asha screamed. Blood, massing on her father’s skull, made a thickly spreading stain on the plaster. Her father’s hand groped in empty air, blind fingers reaching. She ran at the man and tried to pull him off. As he turned to knock her away, her father shifted his weight and his groping hand closed on a cooking knife, shining there on the counter beside her.

  She screamed: ‘No, Baba!’

  His fingertips strained to turn it, to grasp the handle and twist the blade inwards. The man lifted her father’s head and banged it again against the wall. A moment later, the man let out a cry, the shriek of a wounded animal. The handle of the knife stuck out from between his shoulder blades, deeply embedded. His grip loosened. Asha’s father kicked him away, panting, as the man, clawing behind at his own back, crashed to the ground. His eyes rolled, then became sightless and still. Asha’s father slumped to the ground beside him, his head bowed to his chest. Asha’s rushing blood filled her ears. Silence pressed down on them all, more painful than the screams.

  ‘Take him home.’ Amit stood in the doorway, his face pale. She didn’t know how long he had been there or how much he had witnessed.

  ‘He started it. He hit my baba. It was self-defence.’

  Amit didn’t reply.

  Her father groaned and put his hands to the floor, trying to get to his feet. Asha ran to help him. ‘We must hide him. Please.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’ Amit shook his head. ‘Wherever you rush now, they will find him.’ He looked at her with slow sadness. ‘Perhaps, after all, this is what your baba wants.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Isabel

  After six months, Isabel felt initiated into the elite circle of expatriate ladies who played tennis at The Club, then sat over lunch there, who hosted afternoon teas or who, outside the typhoon season, led weekend bathing picnics to the more familiar island’s coves.

  When she could, she spent time alone. In Delhi, she always read her father’s daily newspaper. Here, news was harder to come by and she felt increasingly out of touch with events both in London and in Delhi. Instead, she turned to the books in Jonathan’s small, humidity-stained library. It was dominated by scientific volu
mes about agriculture and tropical soils. She read them all. The books she found most interesting were those about the native people of the Andamans, the Nicobarese and Jarawa, primitive people whose lives and habits intrigued her.

  She disappeared for long, rambling walks down to the waterfront or through the bazaar and the densely populated Indian quarter that surrounded it. The constant assault of the sing-song cries of hawkers, the bustling women in brightly coloured saris with baskets of mangoes and coconuts and fresh fish on their arms, the smells of garlic and chilli, of frying onions and daal, of unwashed bodies crowded unpleasantly close, it all conspired to remind her powerfully of parts of Delhi and her old life there.

  Gradually she made the acquaintance of shopkeepers and their wives who were startled by her fluency in Hindustani. She took them small gifts of food and sat with them over chai, hearing nostalgic tales of the towns and villages they left far behind on the Indian mainland and the troubled histories that set them adrift in the Bay of Bengal.

  Wherever she found herself, whether reading on the balcony at home or roaming the poorer districts close to the shoreline, the Cellular Jail always loomed, a forbidding presence on the hillside. Its dark arms reached out to her, waiting for its time to come. Finally, it came.

  Mrs Copeland was the first to make reference to the hanging, during a ladies’ tea at The Club.

  ‘It’s simply awful to ask,’ she said, looking round, ‘but what are people intending to wear?’

  Mrs Allen tittered. ‘What a question!’

  ‘But it’s a serious matter.’ Mrs Copeland shook her head, all apologies. ‘I mean, is one required to be in mourning?’

  ‘You’ve never met the chap! At least, I sincerely hope not.’

  ‘Well, quite.’

  Isabel looked from one powdered face to the other, failing to understand.

  ‘Mrs Whyte! You are planning to attend, surely?’