XI.
On one of these nights of unrest outside and swelling anxiety inside, when she cannot sleep, Miss Gilby writes a short note to her brother, asking him for any information he might be able to glean from his wide range of acquaintances on Ruth Fairweather, but avoids mentioning what is happening in Bengal; chances are, he has a far greater, if removed, familiarity with these developments. She writes a longer letter to Violet apprising her of everything – Bimala’s infidelity, her own growing interest in Indian birds, the tension caused by Mr Banerjea’s presence in ‘Dighi Bari’, the village poised on the knife edge of communal riots. By the time she finishes, the dawn chorus has begun. She puts on her riding attire and decides to take Pakshiraj out without waking up the saees: a long ride, she thinks, will blow the cobwebs away from the increasingly dark and cluttered corners of her mind.
She reaches the paddy fields and directs Pakshiraj towards the Tulsi river, now a thin, bright ribbon in the winter, with large stretches of sandflats and wet riverbed around it crisscrossed by meandering, silvery threads of water. The morning breaks all pale gold and orange and before long settles into the white light of day. She has become a stranger in a family of strangers. The only person with whom she can converse is so busy and harried that she hasn’t seen him for weeks, except that brief meeting in the verandah; even at a time like this, his natural courtesy reminded him, first and foremost, to be solicitous of her welfare and safety. The very thought makes Miss Gilby’s eyes sting with tears. How noble and unselfish, how manly; such men are forever doomed to bear the slings and arrows of fortune with silent patience and grace. The haggard look, those lacklustre eyes, which were wont to shine with gentleness and warmth – could they be not only for the fires raging in his village? Could he have an inkling of what is going on between his wife and his closest friend, no, no friend, but a viper, right inside his very house? Does he know the full story? Has he let Bimala know that he knows? Or does he know and suffer in silence, like King Arthur in the tale by Malory? Miss Gilby had been taken by surprise when she had reached the end of the story to find out that the aged King had known of his wife Guinevere’s adulterous relationship with Sir Lancelot for long but had kept quiet in the interest of the unity of the Round Table. A sudden memory gives this view the seal of certainty in Miss Gilby’s mind: she remembers the anguished whisper of Mr Roy Chowdhury – I cannot send my friend away, Miss Gilby, I cannot – when she had asked him why he didn’t arrange for Mr Banerjea to leave Nawabgunj and go away to Rungpoor, something he had been meaning to do for a long time.
Or was it some native code of honour, of loyalty to friends, which she doesn’t comprehend at all, some time-honoured custom sanctioned by centuries of practice by people of this unreadable nation? So preoccupied is she with these unwholesome thoughts that she misses the track looping back to the village. She stops for a while to reorient herself and instead of turning back, presses forward and then turns right at a field; she is sure if she continues down that road it will take her downriver to the village.
She is not wrong. A few minutes later she notices a few men and has a mild sensation of relief that she is nearing Nawabgunj. She reaches the rail tracks, crosses it and continues south: she must be somewhere in between Nawabgunj and its north-neighbouring village, the name of which she cannot remember. The place looks slightly more inhabited than the open country through which she had been riding earlier. She gets off her horse and decides to walk to the nearest gathering of people and ask for directions.
Suddenly her back is hit by something hard and heavy. She turns around, letting go of Pakshiraj’s reins. There are four men a few yards behind her. Two of them have lathis in their hand and one of them is bending down to pick up another stone. Miss Gilby is so sure that a stone has been hurled at her in mistake or by accident that she advances towards them to complain and ask them to be more careful. Before she has taken half a dozen steps, the young man who had been picking up a broken brick flings it at her, his arm moving back and then forward in a sweeping arc. It misses Miss Gilby narrowly but she is no longer left in doubt that she is their target; she is also certain they have been following her for some time. Pakshiraj takes fright at the flung brick and runs away across the field, neighing. Miss Gilby cannot mount him and gallop away to safety or to the nearest police station – she is left to face them alone.
As the distance between her and the assailants decreases, she recognizes two of the young men. She used to see them often in the market square; they smiled and wished this exotic foreigner in their village ‘Good morning, memsa’ab’, ‘Good evening, memsa’ab’ every time they saw her. This is some terrible mistake, she thinks; if only she can talk to the two familiar men, everything will be all right. They will understand and go away to summon help. The men exchange a couple of words, another stone is thrown. This hits her forehead and she sinks down on to the muddy field on her knees, clutching her head in pain and shock. A warm trickle gets into her left eye, blinding it momentarily. She didn’t know that her own blood could blind and sting her eyes.
The men gain in on her and before she has had a chance to look up, or hold out her hand in fragile defence, in protest, the lathi blows fall on her thickly, with a dull thwacking sound against her layers of clothing. She cowers and covers her head, cringing and squirming in the mud. She cannot see anything except moving feet, dark, dirty, shod in rubber sandals. She cries out in pain, in the vain hope that someone can hear her. And just as suddenly they had arrived, they disappear, running off across the field, shouting bande mataram, bande mataram. We hail thee, mother goddess. After that, Miss Gilby doesn’t remember anything.
TWELVE
Zafar says, ‘I’ll be back in half an hour. Just a quick drink at the bar. Let’s see what he wants. You stay here, OK? I’ll be back soon.’
Ritwik nods and watches him leave. An unexpected telephone call from one of his clients, he said; surprising that he should have come to the hotel within half an hour of the call, requesting to see Zafar, rather than let it wait until tomorrow. Must be something urgent, Zafar had said, although he added that he had no idea what it could be.
Ritwik counts one hundred, careful to space the numbers out equally, not rushing them, especially towards the end, and then leaps out of the sofa and goes to the table on which Zafar’s briefcase, papers, laptop, filofax all lie in crowded confusion. There is no point in looking at the computer; he doesn’t have a clue what to do with it, where to look. Besides, he might do something, in his ignorance, which will make it obvious that he has been snooping.
The filofax gives nothing away. There are a lot more entries in Arabic than he expected but then he forgets most of the time that Zafar is Arab. The English entries do not yield up their secrets either. Some names are followed by what appears to be clearly a name for a company or an institution: John Grimble, Fender Care Naval Solutions; Jonathan Pacitto, AgustaWestland; Al Lilley, Accuracy International; Randeep Modi, William Cook Defence; Simon Newton, LM UKIS Ltd. Ordinary names, ordinary addresses, ordinary phone numbers, all unrevealing and silent. He puts back the filofax exactly where he picked it up from and looks through the papers, first gingerly, turning up corners and edges, then more boldly, lifting them up, leafing through them. Latest newsletter from British Aerospace Ltd. A thick tome: SBAC Chain Directory. Society of British Aerospace Companies. A folded printout, like a giant compressed Japanese fan, of the SBAC ‘Members’ Capability Matrix’. It is a beautiful thing, with randomly positioned red and blue dots and, here and there, ticks, an Arab character or two, a ‘yes’, a few crosses, dispersed across the unfolding concertina. Donna Tartt, The Secret History. His attention is held by the spanking-new hardback: the blurb intrigues him and he makes a mental note to buy it, now that he can afford such luxuries. Zafar has dog-eared the page to mark the point where he has stopped reading. There is an official-looking letter from the Defence Manufacturers’ Association talking of strategic consultancies, cost-related improved efficiency, a fo
rthcoming calendar of events, invitation to members’ meetings. Ritwik has to read each sentence a few times over to understand the purpose and meaning behind the unfamiliar jargon. By the time he reaches the invitation to the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition, he is so bored – and a tiny bit guilty about intruding shamelessly like this – that he is ready to take a catnap. Something in the invitation letter catches his eye and he reads it carefully to pin it down. In a minute he has it – both the date and the word ‘Gloucestershire’. 13–15 May, Lydney, Gloucestershire. Today is the 12th.
A solid find at last, the secret of Zafar’s disappearance to Gloucestershire, but it comes as an anticlimax and the boredom floods back in again. The ringing phone makes him start: he cannot make up his mind whether to pick it up, whether he should, and by the time he has decided not to, it stops. A minute later, it rings again; he picks it up. It is Zafar.
‘Look, I have to go somewhere. Something’s come up. You can stay here but I shall be back very late. Or I can get them to call a taxi for you to take you home.’
‘I think I should go home.’
‘OK, come down to reception in, say, twenty minutes? They’ll have a cab waiting for you.’
‘OK.’ He is expecting something else, a brief goodbye, a ‘see you later’, or ‘I’ll call you when I get back from Gloucestershire.’ Instead, there is the curt click of Zafar hanging up.
XII.
Montu enters the drawing room and announces that the car is ready and the boxes and trunks have been loaded. Mr Roy Chowdhury nods in acknowledgement and asks him to wait outside. His eyes are red-rimmed and small, he clasps his two hands together under his shawl to hide their stubborn shaking. Bimala hasn’t stopped crying for the last week; now that Miss Gilby is really going away forever, now that it is no longer a faint possibility in the dim future but in the here and now, and happening right under her eyes with the truculence and irreversible tyranny of the present tense, she is inconsolable. She has given away all her books on Indian birds to her. On the fly-leaf of each she has inscribed in her childish hand, using her characteristic rounded and perfectly formed English letters, TO MISS GILBY MY TEACHER, FRIEND AND COMPANION, WITH MY LOVE. And below that, in cursive, ‘Please do not go away.’ Miss Gilby hasn’t opened the books since the day she was given them.
The bandages around her head are still there, although now it is more of a bandage than heavy headgear. She still needs her stick to walk. She tries to get up; Mr Roy Chowdhury and Bimala are immediately at her side, trying to support her gently. She tries to concentrate on little, irrelevant things – the thin blue border of Bimala’s sari, the terracotta horses from Bankura, which sit in the four corners of the room, the silver-tipped end of her walking stick that belonged to Mr Roy Chowdhury’s brother. Her lips are pressed into a nearly invisible line. Judging by the copiousness of her weeping, Bimala is the one who needs support, she thinks.
She doesn’t remember if she has spoken to them at all this morning. She opens her mouth to console Bimala but she can’t think of anything appropriate to say, so she remains silent.
Montu toots the car horn. Shuffling and hobbling, she gets into the car, helped by Bimala and Mr Roy Chowdhury. The courtyard is a blizzard of circling pigeons: Bimala’s naw jaa is scattering grains from behind the blinds. Only an occasional arm, disembodied, reaches out and the palm opens to fling down some rice.
Mr Roy Chowdhury gets into the car as well; he has insisted on accompanying Miss Gilby all the way to Calcutta, despite her protests.
Over the last week, Miss Gilby, foreseeing this moment, has talked herself into not looking out of the car window. She sits beside Mr Roy Chowdhury and busies herself with the difficulty of sitting in the back in her current state, with rugs, with finding a place for her walking stick. In the periphery of her vision, Bimala reaches out a hand towards the separating glass.
She remembers Mr Roy Chowdhury’s voice breaking on his last words, ever, to her. ‘Miss Gilby, I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive us.’
THIRTEEN
The meshes of the afternoon draw him in. He lies on the sofa looking at the sky framed by the window. Eventually, darkness falls like the sound of dew. The blinking lights of the aeroplanes traverse the windowpanes and he sometimes moves his head slightly to let the lights describe a perfect diagonal in the square of glass. At other times, he positions his head to have a line of those lights bisect two opposite sides of the square. There are occasions when two or three planes at a time crisscross against the dark panel of the sky. The geometric possibilities become endless, a whole bagatelle of distant lights remotely controlled from the darkness of the sitting room. Sometimes, Ugo sits on the windowsill, keeping an eye out for things. All lives have an onward flow, a beginning leading to a middle leading to an end; only his seems to be a swirling eddy in someone else’s flow, destined to whirl round and round for a brief while till a change in current or wave pattern obliterates it. For that brief while, every day is today.
Ritwik discovers a tattered, termite-infested 1904 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book. He hesitates before showing it to Anne – who knows what tormenting history might jump out of this one like a particularly macabre jack-in-the-box – and leaves it lying on the kitchen table. After a day, Ritwik comments on it and Anne says, ‘Good god, that used to be my mother’s. Where on earth did you drag it out from?’ Her tone is pleased, surprised.
Ritwik brews some tea and they sit at the kitchen table, gently browsing. He discovers a brown newspaper cutting between pages 72 and 73, in the section on soups. It says GLYCERINE – THE HOUSEHOLD FRIEND. There follow three short paragraphs on the uses of glycerine – making cake mixes richer, preventing crystallization of jam, as fabric softener.
‘Anne, there’s a recipe for mullagatawny soup on page 73. Do you think the cutting was to mark that? Did you cook it in India?’
Anne has no memory of the crumbling cutting.
‘Oh my god, calf’s head soup, sheep’s head soup, ox cheek soup. Ughh.’
Anne cackles at his squeamishness.
‘Anne, look, a “Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes”. Shall I make it for you tomorrow?’
On discovering that the first ingredient is an ox-cheek, they are helpless with laughter.
‘And, pray, what may the benevolent purpose be?’ Anne barely manages to say while dabbing at her eyes.
They ultimately settle on ‘Pea Soup (Green)’ – there are others: ‘Pea Soup (Yellow)’ and a ‘Pea Soup (Inexpensive)’ – and Ritwik spends a lot of time converting pints, pounds and quarts to more familiar measures.
‘I can’t taste anything or smell anything very much. Pea soups and mullagatawnies are all the same to me,’ Anne says.
The levity suddenly fades from the kitchen. ‘Do you ever have an appetite?’
‘No.’
The short, clear truth of her answer has a sobering effect on Ritwik.
‘You’ll find out that when you reach my age, you need very little to live on. That’s because you’re not really living, but waiting, which requires a lot less, I suppose.’
Ritwik reaches across the table to touch her nearly naked carpals. ‘As long as I’m here, you’re going to be eating,’ he says with enforced jollity. ‘I shall watch over your meals like a hawk. Pea soup it is tomorrow for supper.’
The packets of frozen petits pois sweat on the kitchen table, the spinach soaks in the sink, the lettuce is shredded, the stock is a murmuring simmer in a broken-handled pot at the back of the cooker. Anne has insisted on having the television on. Ritwik has had to concede on this one; she said it gave her company, as if his were not enough or up to the mark, he had pointed out, to which she had replied that the television gave company of such a different sort that they should have a different word for it altogether. Ritwik is brewing some tea in Anne’s old and chipped red teapot when she, in the middle of saying something about breadcrumbs to which Ritwik wasn’t paying much attention, asks him w
ith a bell-like clarity, ‘Did you throw out all my gin or have you hidden it somewhere? I suspect the latter. In that case, we could reach a compromise: I’ll let you keep your hiding place a secret and you let me have a bottle when I want. Rationing. By far the best solution.’
‘On one condition,’ he says. ‘You tell me where you got it from.’
‘No. Never reveal one’s sources. Rule one. You should know.’
‘What do you mean, I should know?’
No answer. Ritwik decides to spring his surprise, a pleasant one: he has discovered a stash of mouldy, curling, black-and-white photographs in the loft above his room, hidden away in the insulating material, while he was attempting to hide the bottles of gin. He had looked at all of them and realized, to his great delight, that they were photographs from Anne’s days in India. Or perhaps not, because he couldn’t identify Anne in any of the pictures, but it was undeniable that they were all taken in India while it was still under British rule. Maybe they belonged to someone else and Anne had forgotten all about them. He hopes that it will be a treat for her to rediscover these forgotten images.
He runs upstairs, brings them down and presents them to Anne. ‘Look what I found. I think I’ll agree to your deal if you tell me what they are. Let’s go through each picture. Are you in any of them?’ Ritwik is so excited, his recent wrongfooting so erased, that he babbles like a hyperactive child.
Anne takes one look at them and sits down on a chair. Ritwik pulls another one beside her and places the photographs between them on the table. He can hardly stop talking as he goes through the pile, passing them to Anne, one by one.
‘Look, are these in India? What funny clothes. Did Englishwomen only wear these gowns all the time? And hats? God, they’re so elaborate. And umbrellas, they always carry umbrellas.’
A Life Apart Page 34