She couldn’t speak. Her breath stuck in her throat, choking her as surely as if his hand were on her neck.
‘Someone is talking. He must be stopped. Will you come with me, now?’
She thought of Sanjay, of his courage as he faced death, and forced her head to nod.
‘Good.’ He dropped his bidi to the ground and crushed it into the dirt with the toe of his boot. He tipped back his chin. ‘You say you have guts? Show me.’
He had a way of moving quickly and quietly through the slum, drawing her behind him through shadows and down narrow passages. She hurried to keep pace. If her sandal struck a stone or caught a clod of loose earth, he turned and frowned. It was late in the night now and few lamps burnt. Doorsteps, where men liked to sit in the evening to smoke and drink country-made toddy, were deserted.
They reached a distant quarter of the slum, an older, settled area where families were well established and the shacks more elaborate. He slowed his pace. Her ears throbbed with listening to the silence and the low fragments of sound buried in it: the murmur of lovers’ voices, the distant mewling of a baby, the scream of a wildcat.
He lifted his hand and motioned her forward and pointed. A wooden door, set in a neat frame. A faint line of light showed in the cracks along its edge. He put his lips to her ear.
‘Knock. See if he’s alone. If not, bring him out into the darkness to speak to you.’
He drew something from his lunghi. A fragment of light caught it as it moved. A sharp-edged knife. He stepped to one side and flattened himself into the shadows beside the closed door.
For a moment, her feet didn’t move. She steadied her breathing. Sanjay, she thought. Give me strength. Help me honour your name. She crept forward, raised her knuckles to the wood and tapped. Silence. All she could hear was her own blood roaring in her ears. She found the strength to tap again, more loudly. A pause. Cautious steps inside. A low voice.
‘Kon hai? Who is it?’
She put her mouth to the crack. The wood was rough against her lips and tasted of tar. ‘A friend.’
A bolt scraped back. The door opened an inch. A searching eye. ‘Who?’
‘Asha. The schoolteacher.’
He adjusted wire-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of his nose. She recognised him. A tall, thin man who came often to their meetings.
‘My wife is sleeping,’ he whispered.
She put her finger to her lips, then beckoned. He looked puzzled, gave a final glance back over his shoulder, then stepped into the alleyway, pulling the door closed behind him.
Anil pounced at once. His hand seized the man’s head from behind, tilting it back and stopping his mouth. At the same instant, in a single movement, he plunged his knife into the man’s chest. The eyes, fixed on Asha and magnified by the spectacles, crooked now across his nose, widened in surprise, then horror. He seemed unable to understand, to calculate how Asha, this young woman, stood, separate, before him while a knife pierced his ribs.
Anil, calm and sure, withdrew the knife and struck him a second time, slightly higher. A low gurgle sounded from the first wound as the knife came out, a ghastly sighing of the heart, followed by a spurt of blood. A dark fountain pumped through his white dhoti and flew out across the ground. Asha moved her feet out of its path. The man’s eyes rolled until he stared glassily at the sky. He hung limply now in Anil’s arms. His spectacles slipped and fell to the ground, bouncing, then settling on their side for his wife to find for him, one final time.
Anil eased the body to the ground and pulled out the knife. He wiped it with care on the man’s clothing until it gleamed clean, then pushed it back into his lunghi.
He raised his eyebrows to Asha and gave a half-smile and, in it, she read: see, we are bound together now, are we not?
He has done this before, she thought. Many times. It means nothing to him.
He pointed behind her, back down the alley, and, finding her feet suddenly able to move again, she started to run from him, from the dead man, from the unknown wife, back through the darkness, past innocently sleeping families, to her own shack and her own family and her own bed where she lay, eyes staring, body shaking, terrified, until the first watery light bled in through the cracks and the aunties, grumbling, started to stir around her, shaking off their sleep and rousing themselves to fetch water and light the cooking fire for chai to start another day.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Isabel
Isabel wandered across the lawn, cigarette in hand. A bird hopped ahead of her.
A rustle. Something stirred the bushes. Her eyes drifted idly over the rhododendrons, then the line of mango trees. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
In the past week, all the talk was of Japanese advances in Burma. The newspapers said little but she heard the gossip in The Club. Our boys in Burma, the wives whispered. The Japanese are bombing them. There are constant raids.
Some made secret plans to ship their belongings and tried to secure a passage Home. No one spoke of it openly but the anxiety was clear. It seemed almost inevitable that if Burma fell, a Japanese invasion of India would follow.
Isabel drew on her cigarette. The bird hopped onto the soil and pecked. It was already three o’clock. No sign of Rahul. She’d had Cook bake a cake, prepare scones and sandwiches. A feast, she thought. Now she roamed restlessly round the garden, smoking, feeling a fool.
Only a month ago, her father had laughed when she’d expressed concern about Tom and others fighting in Burma.
‘Why would the Japanese bother up there?’ he’d said. ‘It’s jungle.’
Now, though, since the fall of Hong Kong, then of Singapore, he laughed less. He came home late at night and spoke little. India was preparing to defend itself, that was clear. The London newspapers focused on the war in the Middle East. The chance of external support in India’s battle with Japan seemed low.
Voices drifted across the drive from the gate. She stopped to listen. The chowkidar scraped back the bolt and opened the gate. She dropped her cigarette, ground it into the grass with the toe of her shoe and went with a quick step to meet her guests.
‘I’m so pleased. I wasn’t sure you’d come.’
Rahul stood uneasily on the drive, holding a boy of about ten years by the shoulders. Abhishek. Last time she saw him, he was a wide-eyed toddler. Now he had grown into a lean youth, all bones and joints. His eyes were sharp with suspicion as he regarded her. A Western-style shirt was buttoned over his lunghi. The pattern was faded with repeated washing and it strained across his chest. His hair was slick with oil. He didn’t want to come, she thought. His father dragged him here. I may be the first Britisher he’s actually met.
She raised her hands in namaste to greet the boy and said in Hindustani: ‘Welcome, Abhishek. When I last saw you, you were a child only. Now you are almost a man.’
The boy stared. His father poked him between the shoulder blades until he raised his hands in namaste.
‘Can you ride a horse?’
He hesitated, then nodded.
‘Nonsense.’ Rahul gave the boy a light cuff about the ear. ‘He climbed on the tonga-wallah’s horse, maybe. That’s all. Or did you hitch a ride on a water buffalo?’
‘Well, the syce will saddle my horse for you, if you like. Gypsy. She needs exercising.’ She paused. ‘The syce will help.’
The boy tilted his head back to read his father’s face. Rahul didn’t respond.
‘Only if you like.’ Isabel herded them into motion along the drive. The bungalow, looming, suddenly looked impossibly grand. The tended pots and the manicured, watered lawn seemed lush, compared to the arid landscape outside the compound.
Her voice chattered on. ‘I thought we’d have a picnic on the lawn first and call it tea. Cook’s cut some sandwiches and baked a sponge cake. Do you like cake, Abhishek?’
She spread a picnic blanket on the grass and called to Cook. He and Abdul carried out trays of food. The two servants glanced at Rahul as they set the plates on the grass
but didn’t greet him. Abhishek hung to one side. As Cook straightened up to leave, his eyes ranged over the boy with a stern, disapproving look.
‘Was it dreadful in prison?’
She spoke in a low voice, almost afraid to ask. Rahul pulled at the loose skin round his fingernails. For a moment, she thought he hadn’t heard, then he sighed.
‘It was a long time ago.’
She put a hand on his arm. ‘I tried to get you out, you do know that? I went everywhere.’ She hesitated, remembering, and drew on her cigarette. He disapproved, she sensed it. Indian women didn’t smoke, it wasn’t considered decent. After tea, she had taken him on a tour of the garden and pointed out the rhododendron bushes with their dry, hollowed centres where they’d made dens as children.
Now they sat halfway up the old magnolia tree, resting against the trunk, looking over the empty lawn below. Abhishek was with the syce, being led on Gypsy in endless rounds of the paddock.
‘I’m sorry Sangeeta couldn’t come.’
Rahul shrugged. ‘We’re expecting another child. May the gods make him another son!’
Isabel stared. ‘That’s wonderful, Rahul. When?’
‘A few more months only.’
‘You sound worried.’ She considered. ‘Isn’t Sangeeta strong?’
He blew out his cheeks. ‘Not that. The situation is poor, that’s all. So much of hunger. So much of joblessness.’ He paused, gave her a quick sideways look and added quietly: ‘So much of politics.’
‘How’s the mithai shop?’
He looked away. ‘I’m a derzi now.’
‘A tailor?’ She stared. ‘Is it a good living?’
He spread his fingers and rocked his hand. ‘Not so much. I’m buying silk. Beautiful silk, very fine quality. I was wondering, perhaps—’ He turned to her, embarrassed.
‘I’d love to see it. What will you make?’
He shook his head. ‘Whatsoever people are buying.’
‘We’ll organise a tea.’ She nodded, overly enthusiastic in her eagerness to help. ‘My mother knows everyone. Her friends send parcels back to England, you see. You can’t get a thing there now. The government takes all the silk for parachutes and whatnot. You’ll have plenty of orders.’
He looked again at his hands. ‘You’re very kind. I don’t know …’
She shoved him with her shoulder. ‘Just say yes, won’t you? You’d be doing me a favour.’
They sat in silence for a while. From the tree, they looked across at the tops of the boundary walls and the monkeys climbing there. New babies clung upside down from their mothers’ stomachs or perched on backs as the adults went about their business. How many generations of monkeys there must have been, she thought, since they were children. She’d missed them desperately when her parents sent her Home to live with the Misses Ellison. She had missed Rahul too.
‘I used to think I was really Indian, you know,’ she said. ‘That you and I were brother and sister. I used to ask God every evening when I said my prayers. If I were really good, please could I be a Chaudhary? That’s why I tried so hard to learn Hindustani.
‘One day, I thought, I’d be eating supper with you, just as we used to, and no one would come to fetch me. I’d somehow be Indian and stay with you for ever.’
He looked at her in astonishment for a moment, then turned away. ‘You wouldn’t want it now.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ She bit her lip. The afternoon light was thickening and where it caught the fresh buds on the magnolia tree, they gleamed.
‘They’re ancient, you know. Magnolia trees. Go back millions of years. I was so pleased. This one always looked so gnarled. I imagined it here long before we came along, with dinosaurs sniffing its branches.’ She pulled herself up to stand on the branch where they were sitting. ‘Do you think we could still do it? Get to the very top.’
He shrugged. ‘We’re not children.’
‘But you do remember?’ She looked up into the branches at the sharp criss-cross sticks of light striking the wood, the leaves. ‘It’s another world, up there, that’s what you said. Look that way, back towards the house, and we could see hundreds of years into the past. And there’ – she pointed ahead across the garden – ‘into the future.’ She looked down at him. He hung his head, his eyes on his hands. ‘You haven’t forgotten?’
When he lifted his head, his eyes were sad. ‘Perhaps better not to know the future.’
Her surge of excitement evaporated at once. She sat beside him on the branch and let her legs dangle. ‘I’m sorry. It’s seeing you again, after all this time. It brings back so many memories.’
Rahul faced away from her towards the low outbuilding where his family had once lived. It was bigger now, enlarged in the last decade to accommodate Abdul’s growing family. Even so, the wooden roofs looked tiny from above. A fraction the size of the stables on the other side of the bungalow.
She thought of the smoky darkness inside, pierced by shafts of weak sunlight. And Rahul’s mother: the strength in her brown arms as she washed, swept, cooked. Cook Chaudhary was never there. He was working in the cookhouse, kneading loaves or making pies or icing fancies for afternoon tea.
Her thoughts ran on. ‘I know I was just a girl but life seemed easier then. No war. No hunger.’
‘There’s always been hunger. For common people.’
Abhishek appeared, down on the lawn. He picked out a dead stick from the back of the flower bed and started to thrash the bushes.
‘You will come back, won’t you? I mean it, about the silk.’ She stubbed out the butt of her cigarette against the bark and started to lower herself to the bough beneath. Once she reached it, she looked back at him. ‘I mean, all the things Baba Satya said, about hating the British. You don’t hate me, do you?’
He didn’t answer.
She filled the silence, afraid of what he might say: ‘Everything’s changing so quickly. I feel as if the world’s spinning out of control. You know? What with the struggle against the British and the war.’ She paused. ‘It will end, I know that. But when? And what sort of world will we be left with afterwards? I shall miss India so much. You can’t imagine. If we are forced to leave.’
He sat in silence, an odd expression on his face.
‘And who’ll be climbing the tree then?’ She started to climb down. ‘Abhishek, perhaps. With his little brother.’
Chapter Forty
The following week, one of Sarah’s servants ran to the bungalow with a letter. Abdul brought it out to the verandah where Isabel was lunching alone.
She took it, nodded, waited for him to withdraw, then finally opened it.
The writing on the envelope was in Sarah’s hand. Her note was short.
Izzy, This just came in a letter from Tom. Seems they’re on the move again. Our last may not reach them. Yrs S
Isabel’s hands shook as she opened the second sheet to see Edward’s hand. His writing was unmistakeable but she saw at once that it was rushed, in comparison with the neat lettering of his earlier note. The edges of the paper were brittle and peppered with specks of dirt. The letter was dated almost two weeks ago.
February 21, 1942
Dear Mrs Whyte,
There is great uncertainty here. I cannot say more.
I have lost many men in recent days. Good men. I write the same tired words of condolence to parents and wives and sweethearts and wonder what they think of me, as they read such poor phrases.
Bateman is one of those lost. I wrote of him before. A kind lad. He wanted so much to see his newborn son. Now his young wife is a widow and little James is without a father.
The aide has come. I must hurry. How can a letter find its way through all this chaos to Delhi and to your hands? I must have faith.
I stare now at the page and struggle to know how much to say. I have little time to try. My darling Isabel. May I call you that? Can you forgive me? It may be the last chance I have in this world to speak tenderly to you.
You cannot know ho
w I curse myself for all the wasted years, when I might have written, when I might have come in search of you and did not. Please understand, it was never lack of love, never that. It was fear, pure and simple. Fear of damaging your reputation more than I already had. Fear, as the years passed, that you had forgotten me, that you had married another.
Pray for me. Know how much I love you. May God be with you.
Edward Johnston
She sat very still. The letter was limp in her hands. He had loved her, then, all this time. The loneliness of the last eight years, the heaviness of each day, pressed in on her. They were fools. Utter fools. Both of them.
Her hands started to shake. He was gone. Disappeared into the jungle. Even if she wrote now, it would never reach him. She let out a cry, bit down on her lip to silence herself. He would never know.
The letter slipped from her hand to the wooden floor. Her fingers raked through her hair, grasped it in clumps as she rocked back and forth. Her lips whitened where she clamped them together between her teeth.
By the time Abdul came out onto the verandah to clear away the dishes, her face was again composed.
‘Cook will be angry.’ Abdul looked dismayed. ‘Isabel Madam has eaten nothing.’
‘Never mind, Abdul. Tell him I have a headache.’
She got to her feet with care and withdrew to her room where she hid Edward’s letter at the back of a drawer. For the rest of the day, she lay on her bed, clinging to the comfort of a pillow, her face pressed into its softness.
Several days later, Isabel’s father left for the office without his tiffin. Normally Abdul would be sent but the main government offices were under curfew and he would find it difficult to penetrate the cordon. So Isabel, glad to make herself useful, set off by bicycle with the tiffin carrier and a box of Cook’s sponge fancies strapped in her basket.
It was the end of the first week in March and already, although it was only ten o’clock in the morning, the heat swelled and gathered. The sky above was yellow with dust and hard sunshine. She stopped to tie a scarf round her hair to protect it as her wheels sent up clouds of fine, dry grit along the road, parching her mouth and throat. As she cycled on, her shirt and slacks stuck to her skin.
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