Coromandel Sea Change

by Rumer Godden

  ‘For missies to tie on end of pigtail, very pretty.’

  To Mary the temple was interesting and, Yes, clever, thought Mary, its outside walls and floors tessellated with broken pieces of china, countless pieces. The temple’s gods were two big Western jointed dolls with eyes that opened and shut. They were dressed in gaudy muslin and tinsel and wreathed with paper flowers. ‘Priest puts them to bed every night, morning gets them up. Hindu worship,’ said Samuel with contempt but Mary saw that in front of them was a low table with offerings of sweets and flowers. A woman came to pray; on the brass tray she put a little powdered sugar and with her thumb she made on it the pattern of the sun for luck.

  She looked up at Mary and smiled.

  A sound like a murmur began to run through the bazaar: it grew louder and, with it, music and the ululation of a conch blown in jubilation. A lorry was coming down the road, heralded by motorcyclists, carrying between each pair of them long scarves of green, yellow and white. One held aloft on a pole a poster like a banner – the poster of ‘The Three Wise Cows’, as Mary had begun to call them.

  She had seen them last night in the grove when Krishnan had shown a copy to her, three stylised cows, bells hung round their necks – clearly they were cherished – lying at peace among equally stylised flowers and looking out at the people with wise kind eyes. ‘Is the script Telegu?’ Mary had asked.

  ‘Yes. Telegu script is decorative for posters. It goes oodle, oodle, oodle.’ It certainly looked it.

  ‘You speak Telegu?’

  ‘I speak everything,’ Krishnan had said. ‘As required – Tamil, Telegu, Hindi, English, French, even a little Russian.’

  ‘Don’t boast,’ Mary had said in pretended severity. Then ‘Why did you choose cows?’

  ‘Because they symbolise me,’ and, as she had looked puzzled, he had said like Dr Coomaraswamy, ‘Symbols are crucially important in an Indian election. Every party has one. You must remember that most of the men and women in Konak cannot read so that written names and slogans mean nothing to them and, when they come to vote, how can they tell which is the candidate they want? Only if the symbol is at once identifiable. You have heard Padmina Retty had an umbrella, signifying “shelter”. Well, we put an end to that. Now she has a star, which is not very wise for voters. Our third candidate, Gopal Rau, has a flower . . . so . . . “The star,” they’ll say, “might be Padmina . . .” yet equally the flower might be Padmina but my cows . . . There is no one,’ said Krishnan, ‘in towns or villages, near or far, who does not know the story of Krishna, the cowherds who adopted him, the gopis, so, as soon as they see my cows, three for prosperity, “Ah!” they will say, “That’s Krishnan,” and, notice, under the cows there is a flute.’

  Now, in the bazaar, Mary heard it.

  All the people began to look, pressing nearer. Shopkeepers stood up on their stalls; small boys wriggled through the crowd to the front; other urchins ran to meet the sound. The murmuring was loud now and grew to a shout as the lorry came close and paused. On a throne Krishnan was sitting – How his legs will ache tonight, thought Mary. The blue-black of his skin shone – with sweat? she wondered. Or oil? – against the pandal’s bright green leaves that fluttered as the lorry drove. It was the first time Mary had seen Krishnan in daylight and, with a shock, saw, even with the make-up, the Vishnu horseshoe shape in white on his forehead, eyes outlined in black, reddened lips, how beautiful he was. Not handsome or good-looking, beautiful, thought Mary.

  Dr Coomaraswamy, sweating and stout, stood on the tailboard of the lorry bellowing through a microphone; when he paused, out of breath, Indian music invisibly played while behind the lorry followed jeeps and cars, one behind the other, overflowing with young men and women who immediately jumped down and came through the crowd to give out small pictures of the god Krishna. Sharma, in his flowing white, stood on the roof of the lorry’s cab. A man beside Mary gave a shout, ‘Ayyo.’ The crowd took it up. ‘Ayyo, ayyo-yo. Jai, Krishna. Jai, Krishna.’

  Krishnan’s eyes looked. Has he seen me? wondered Mary. She hoped he had.

  Everyone was shouting now. Dr Coomaraswamy put down his microphone, he could not be heard, but Sharma’s conch sounded over the noise. Still Krishnan did not move except to raise his hand, palm towards the people, fingers pointing upwards in benediction, blessing them while he smiled his extraordinary sweet smile.

  The lorry passed on, Dr Coomaraswamy talking again through his microphone in a strident torrent of words. The jeeps crowded after and after them, bicycles, bullock carts, the bullocks being urged on, the driver whacking them and twisting their tails so that Mary hid her eyes. ‘Miss Baba, better you come home,’ Samuel said in her ear.

  All that morning, ‘It is too early to say,’ Dr Coomaraswamy had told himself, ‘always you are too optimistic,’ as Uma had said over and over again ‘Always you are carried away, either despair or huzzahs,’ but the Doctor could not help seeing how, as the lorry approached, people stopped at once on the road; men shut their umbrellas in respect – it could be reverence; one or two prostrated themselves in the dust; women bent low as they peeped behind their saris.

  ‘I am not huzzahing.’ In his mind, Dr Coomaraswamy was telling Uma that. ‘But, my darling, I begin to think . . .’

  As Mary came up on the bungalow verandah on her way to wash and change for lunch, she saw Kuku coming out of Olga Manning’s rooms. ‘Just checking to see everything is clean,’ Kuku explained, but there was an elation about her that made Mary pause. As if that showed she was curious, Kuku came closer. ‘I was right,’ Kuku whispered, ‘she has a lover.’

  ‘She’s too old,’ was Mary’s instant young reaction, then remembered what Blaise had said of Olga’s desperation and, ‘How do you know?’ she felt compelled to ask.

  ‘Looking in her drawers, I found gentlemen’s handkerchiefs,’ said Kuku with relish. ‘Not only that, gold cufflinks, a gentleman’s gold watch.’

  ‘She is keeping them for someone.’ The whole of Mary was drawn together in repellance. ‘Why were you looking in someone else’s drawers? I have a good mind to tell Auntie Sanni,’ she said.

  At lunch time Mary found it strange to be in an almost empty dining room. Only she, Colonel McIndoe and Auntie Sanni were there. ‘Come over and join us,’ called Auntie Sanni.

  Mary enjoyed being with them; little was said except of quiet domestic things, which brought a feeling of well-being, of goodwill – towards everyone, thought Mary. It seemed, as with Krishnan, that if Auntie Sanni disliked anyone – Mary had fathomed she had a reserve towards Blaise – she managed to see beyond the dislike. I wish I could, thought Mary, but I can’t.

  ‘The stores have come from Spencer’s,’ Auntie Sanni was telling the Colonel. ‘Once a month,’ she explained to Mary, ‘stores of things one cannot get locally’ – Mary was charmed by the way she said ‘lo-cal-ly’ with a lilt up and down – ‘not in the village or Ghandara, come from a big shop in Madras. Samuel has unpacked them. Now Kuku and I must check them, make a list and put them away. Would you like to come and help?’

  Mary loved it; the stores seemed to bring an intimacy with Patna Hall that gave her an odd satisfaction. Why should it make her happy to call out to Auntie Sanni, ‘Twelve dozen tins of butter’? and, ‘I never knew butter could be tinned.’

  ‘Here we can only get ghee,’ said Kuku in contempt. ‘Butter made with buffalo milk and clarified so it is oily.’ She shuddered. ‘Horrid!’ Twelve dozen tins, that is a gross, thought Mary. The quantities were immense: ‘Two hundredweight of brown sugar, white sugar, caster sugar, icing sugar.’ Kuku’s voice became singsong too as she enumerated: ‘Tea, coffee, chocolate. Tinned apricots, prunes.’

  Strawberries came from Ootacamund, as did cheeses. Few wines. There was Golconda wine from Hyderabad, liqueurs from Sikkim.

  Auntie Sanni checked. Mustafa, the head waiter, Abdul, the next, put sacks, bottles, tins away in cupboards and on shelves. ‘Goodness,’ said Mary, ‘I never dreamed what it takes to run
a hotel. Kuku, I would like your job.’

  ‘Like my job?’ Kuku was amazed. That anyone should want to work when obviously they did not have to was beyond her. She was particularly out of love with her work at the moment because she knew, when the last tin or bottle had been checked and the store room securely locked, the keys would be given to Samuel. ‘I ought to have them,’ she said each time; each time Auntie Sanni seemed not to hear.

  When at last Mary went down to the bungalow she found that Blaise had come back from the Dawn Temple, plainly anything but exalted. He was asleep on the bed; camera and binoculars had been flung down, he had not taken off his shoes and, even in his sleep, his face was cross, over-pink with sunburn. Mary quietly changed into her swimming things, tiptoed out and was soon laughing and playing in the exhilaration of the waves, Moses and Somu each side of her. When they had finished, Mary beaten by the rollers – ‘all over’ she would have said – her hair dripping, Somu shyly produced a bracelet of shells threaded on a silk string. Each shell was different: brown speckled ones, pink fingernail-sized ones, almost transparent, brown ones curled into a miniscule horn and fragments of coral, apricot red. She tied the bracelet on while Moses and Thambi applauded. ‘I shall keep this for ever,’ said Mary, and Somu, when Thambi translated, blushed dark brown with pleasure.

  She looked up and saw Blaise, awake now, watching them from the verandah. She waved, showing her arm with the bracelet. ‘Look,’ she called, ‘a present from the sea,’ but Blaise had gone into the bedroom.

  ‘You don’t want to get familiar with those chaps,’ he told Mary when she followed him. ‘They might misunderstand.’

  ‘Misunderstand what?’

  ‘I believe that part of the tourist attractions in foreign countries are the, shall we call them, “attentions of the locals”?’

  ‘You mean fucking?’

  ‘That’s not a word I would use – and I wish you wouldn’t – but yes, it’s supposed to be part of the adventure, even for the elderly, or especially the elderly, women.’

  ‘In a group like Professor Aaron’s?’ Mary did not believe it for a moment. ‘Mrs van den Mar. Professor Webster. Dear Mrs Glover. Dr Lovat.’ Mary laughed. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Blaise. ‘That Miss – is it Pritt?’

  ‘Miss Pritt is in love with India, not Indians.’ You spoil things, she wanted to say, then saw that, fortunately now, for her Blaise could not spoil anything. You don’t disturb me one iota, thought Mary. These are my friends.

  ‘. . . This is the news.’ It was the middle of dinner and Auntie Sanni looked up and frowned but the voice went on. ‘The Government has taken measures to bring relief to the effects of the Gamjam drought . . . Tons of grain, rice, fodder and medical supplies are being flown in . . . Troops have been sent in to reinforce police in quelling the outbreak of riots and violence in Sri Kakylam. The two boys found dead in the village of Palangaon have been identified as Pradeep and Bimal, twin sons of Birendranath Hazarika, a local landowner. Police are treating it as a case of murder.’

  ‘In the trial of the Englishman, Colin Armstrong, charged with fraud, embezzlement and trafficking in drugs, Mr Justice Rajan has today begun his summing up and hopes to finish it tomorrow.

  ‘In Konak, the candidate of the fancifully named Root and Flower Party, Mr Krishnan Bhanj, has been touring the state today. It is said that his strange vow of silence is arousing great interest in towns and villages; his symbol of the three wise cows is everywhere, while the people flock to see him.’

  ‘ “I am not afraid,” his chief opponent, Mrs Padmina Retty says. She has a new symbol – the defeated umbrella has disappeared – it is now a star. “My star is rising, not setting,” she laughed. “The people of Konak are my people. They look to me. They will not let me lose. I shall win.” ’

  ‘And she Well may.’ Dr Coomaraswamy was Gloomaraswamy again. ‘She is the mother figure, so potent in India.’

  ‘Mother is very dangerous,’ Mr Srinivasan, too, was in gloom. ‘We must talk very ser-i-ous-ly to Krishnan.’

  Professor Webster’s lecture was to begin at nine o’clock.

  ‘Dear, are you coming to join us?’ kind Mrs Glover asked Mary.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t. Auntie Sanni is going to introduce me to the cook.’

  ‘The cook?’ Mrs Glover’s expression plainly said, ‘A cook, when you could listen to Professor Webster!’ while Miss Pritt said gravely, ‘My dear, Professor Webster is world famous as a lecturer. It’s a privilege to hear her.’

  ‘I – I promised,’ Mary stammered, and escaped. She had noticed that Auntie Sanni did not come on the verandah after dinner for coffee. ‘No, it’s my time then to see Alfredo, our cook. We plan the menus and orders for the next day.’

  ‘I thought Kuku . . .’

  ‘Kuku is not capable,’ Auntie Sanni said shortly. ‘She thinks she knows better.’ It was the nearest thing to condemnation Mary had heard her say. Then she asked, ‘But would you like to come sometime and listen?’ Now Mary caught her just as she was going, like a ship in full sail, into her office.

  Every evening when he had finished cooking, Alfredo from Goa left the kitchen to his underlings; he would come back later to see that it was spotless. He bathed, changed into a clean white tunic and trousers, a black waistcoat with red spots, a silver watch chain and a silver turnip watch far bigger than Dr Coomaraswamy’s. In the cookhouse it was kept on a shelf in its case with a steady ticking; in all Alfredo’s now ten years at Patna Hall it had never lost time. With his lists he presented himself to Auntie Sanni.

  They discussed food as two connoisseurs. For luncheon Alfredo suggested fish kebabs.

  ‘Fish kebabs?’ Mary was surprised.

  ‘Yes, any kind of firm fish, made into cubes, marinated with ground onion, yoghurt and spices, then threaded on skewers and grilled. Very good,’ said Auntie Sanni.

  ‘Then, as some sahibs liking English food,’ said Alfredo, ‘young roast lamb, new potatoes and brinjals.’

  Auntie Sanni rejected the brinjals. Peas would be better.

  ‘What are brinjals?’ asked Mary, as she continuously asked ‘What are . . . ?’

  ‘Missy taste tomorrow.’ Alfredo smiled. Missy, Miss Baba, not even Miss Sahib, none of them calls me Memsahib, thought Mary, a little startled.

  Dinner was to be carrot and orange soup – again, something of which she had not heard. ‘It is delicious,’ and Auntie Sanni laughed seeing her doubtful face. ‘Refreshing and light, which it needs to be because we are having tandoori chicken.’

  ‘Tandoori?’

  ‘Tandoor means an oven, a large long earthenware pot which is buried in clay and earth – fortunately we have one. We put charcoal inside and when it is red hot the coals are raked out; the chicken, spiced and ready, is put inside and sealed and it cooks with an un-im-ag-in-able taste.’ Auntie Sanni sounded almost rhapsodical. ‘People try and cook it as a barbecue or on a spit. Of course, it is not the same! And we shall finish’, she told Alfredo, ‘with lemon curd tart . . . as an alternative, peppermint ice-cream.’

  ‘I’m going to have both,’ said Mary.

  When the menus were settled, to Mary’s surprise, Auntie Sanni opened the bag she always carried and counted out notes, notes for a hundred rupees not the usual twenties, tens, fives and ones. ‘Do you give Alfredo money every night?’

  ‘Every night,’ said Auntie Sanni. ‘He has to shop in the bazaar, here and in Ghandara, and must pay cash. In the morning he will give me his account. Then there will be a great argument, eh, Alfredo?’ Alfredo smiled and nodded. ‘He himself will have bargained and so he has to have his “tea money” – the little extra on everything where he has cheated me, but not too much,’ said Auntie Sanni in pretended severity. ‘He understands and I understand.’

  ‘How nice!’ said Mary.

  ‘Would you like to see the baskets of what he will bring?’

  ‘Oh, I would.’

  ‘Yo
u will have to get up early.’

  ‘I will’ – again there was that happiness. Is it, Mary asked herself as she went back to the verandah, because all this is something I haven’t known anything about, making other people happy and comfortable? Then that was lost as, Soon, somehow, I will see Krishnan again, thought Mary. We might – we might swim, but she could not go until Blaise was asleep and Blaise was playing bridge with the Fishers and Colonel McIndoe, their four heads bent over the green baize of the table Kuku had set up. The cards gleamed in the electric light.

  ‘Two hearts.’

  ‘Three no trumps.’

  ‘Four clubs . . .’

  Bridge! thought Mary, while outside the night waited, the waves sounding on the beach, the moon, bigger now, shedding light on sea, sand and on the trees in the grove. Is Krishnan waiting there? wondered Mary.

  She knew, of course, he was not waiting for her – no one could be more self-contained – but, ‘Krishnan, Krishnan,’ all of Mary sent that call out silently over the verandah rails, to the sea, the sky and the grove until, ‘What are you looking at?’ Blaise asked from the table.

  ‘I was wondering where Slippers was.’

  ‘Mary’s like Titania,’ said Sir John.

  ‘Titania?’ asked Blaise, momentarily puzzled.

  ‘Methinks I am enamoured of an ass!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, John.’ Lady Fisher spoke with unwonted asperity. ‘She’s simply sorry for that poor donkey. I do not understand how Auntie Sanni let him get like that.’

  ‘He belonged to the washerman.’ Mary had learned that from Hannah. ‘He has never been broken. When they tried to make him carry the washing, he kicked and bolted so the washerman let him go wild. By the time Auntie Sanni knew, his hoofs were like that because no one could get near enough to cut them. I shall have them cut one day,’ said Mary with certainty.

  Lady Fisher looked at her over the cards.

  The lecture was over. Professor Aaron and the ladies came out on the verandah – ‘For the cool air,’ called Mrs Glover – but, seeing the bridge players, they hushed their voices as they collected around the bar for a goodnight drink and soft discussion. Professor Webster came to Auntie Sanni.