Coromandel Sea Change

by Rumer Godden

  ‘Of course it’s morning. Olga.’

  ‘Who . . . who is it?’

  ‘Kuku. Kuku.’

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Promise,’ cried Kuku, ‘promise you won’t tell.’

  ‘Tell what?’

  ‘What you saw last night.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Yes. Blaise – Mr Browne – and me. Please, Olga. They’re all out there now. They can’t find Blaise and Mary is making a great fuss. Nobody knows but you. It all depends on you. Auntie Sanni would send me away.’

  ‘I don’t think she would.’ Olga Manning was struggling to be awake, to remember. ‘Not Auntie Sanni.’

  ‘She might. Hannah, Samuel, they’ll sneer. Always they have hated me. Olga, I was virgin. I am not a girl like that. Blaise was the first and I love him. Olga, don’t injure him or me. Give me your word. Promise you won’t tell.’

  ‘I promise I won’t tell. In any case, it’s not my concern, nothing to do with me. Now go away and let me sleep.’

  ‘I can’t drink brandy before breakfast.’ Mary said it with a tremulous laugh. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You are going to,’ said Lady Fisher.

  ‘I not understand English memsahibs,’ Thambi had told Auntie Sanni. ‘Miss Baba, she cry for donkey, no tear for husband.’

  Mary was too appalled to cry. ‘I told Blaise about the baby shark,’ she had said that over and over again. ‘I told him. I thought he had listened but he was so angry. Why was he so angry? I don’t understand. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.’

  ‘Mary, tell me something,’ said Lady Fisher. She had not attempted to hold Mary close as she would have liked to do or try to comfort her. ‘She would have cast me off,’ she told Sir John.

  ‘Tell me something,’ she said again to Mary, ‘did you promise Blaise you would not see Krishnan Bhanj again? Did you?’

  That arrested the frenzy. Mary looked at Lady Fisher in astonishment. ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t have. I promised Blaise I wouldn’t go near any of them – unless I was asked.’

  ‘You were asked?’

  ‘Of course. Krishnan asked me. I left you playing bridge. I hated you for playing bridge when poor Olga . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, but go on,’ said Lady Fisher.

  ‘There was a boy waiting on the path. He had a note, a piece of paper really, from Krishnan.’ Mary’s voice trembled. ‘It asked me to come and help him in the grove.’

  ‘But he was at Ghandara.’

  ‘He wasn’t. He was with the elephant.’

  ‘Elephant?’

  ‘Yes. We had to wash the paint off Birdie. It was imperative.’ In her distraction Mary quoted Krishnan to Lady Fisher’s bewilderment.

  ‘I don’t understand a word you are saying.’

  ‘No I don’t suppose you do, nobody does but it’s true. There’s to be no grand decorations in Krishnan’s procession so we had to wash the paint off the elephant. Krishnan couldn’t do it all so he asked me to help him and I went. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, but first I made the boy wait and wrote a note on the back of the paper – so Blaise knew where I was. The boy took it.’

  ‘No note came.’

  ‘I gave the boy a rupee.’

  ‘No note came . . .’ but light broke on Mary. ‘I see! Blaise thought I had broken my word. That’s why he was so angry but I did send the note, I did.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  Sir John had come on to the verandah. ‘I found this on the path.’ He had undone the crumpled ball of paper, wet and limp but decipherable. ‘For Blaise,’ read out Sir John, and, ‘ “You see, I have been asked.” ’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a slithering sound. To her surprise Mary slumped to the floor.

  ‘But what are they doing?’ That was Mary’s first frantic question.

  She had come round to find herself lying on her dressing-room bed with Hannah mopping her face with cold water, pouring more over her hands while Lady Fisher held her. Impatiently Mary shook her head but Hannah persisted. ‘Baba, lie still. In a moment better,’ and, strangely, Mary let her. Hannah dried her face and hands, sat her up and Sir John held the glass of brandy to her lips. ‘Not a word until you’ve drunk this . . .’

  Then, ‘Something. We must do something – at least try,’ begged Mary.

  ‘Look,’ said Sir John and took her to the verandah rail.

  The fishing boats had come back but not to the beach. Thambi and Moses had taken Patna Hall’s own motorboat out, ‘. . . and a battering they got as they went through the waves,’ said Sir John. Now the other boats had closed in to make a flotilla; through Sir John’s binoculars Mary could see Thambi conferring. Then, as the gazers on the verandah watched, the flotilla broke up, the boats going in different directions.

  A few minutes later, a speedboat from the coastguard station came into sight and soon was circling round them. ‘I should be on that,’ Mary cried. ‘Sir John, I ought to be looking. I must go out. I will.’

  ‘You would only be a hindrance,’ said Sir John. ‘You must trust them, Mary. No one knows this coast better than these men. If anyone can find Blaise they will.’

  ‘And if they can’t?’ Mary stared across the sea. ‘Give him back. Oh, please, give him back,’ she was pleading.

  ‘Mary, baba. Come with Hannah. You must change that dress, wash, eat. Many sahibs will be needing you,’ but, ‘Leave me alone,’ cried Mary. ‘Just for one minute, leave me alone.’ She tore herself from Hannah and ran down into the hall.

  ‘Let her go,’ said Sir John. ‘Samuel and I will see she doesn’t go down to the beach. Let her go.’ He followed her downstairs.

  ‘Sanni, is there any chance?’ Sir John asked as Auntie Sanni came to join him.

  ‘If there were, the fishing boats would have picked him up long ago – they went out first at midnight. The coastguards say there has been no other boat near.’ Auntie Sanni seemed heavier than ever.

  ‘Blaise was a strong swimmer.’

  ‘Even so, our strongest young men don’t go out alone into this sea, John, it is infested. If they find him,’ said Auntie Sanni, ‘God knows what they will find.’

  ‘Mrs Browne.’

  Mary spun round. She had gone into the hall. No one was there and holding on to the reception desk she had been trying to still her turmoil. Now she saw that a familiar small red car was drawn up under the portico.

  ‘Mr Menzies!’ Mary recoiled. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘But you will,’ Mr Menzies smiled. ‘I have come to bring you good news of your friend Krishnan Bhanj. He is your friend, isn’t he?’

  ‘I . . . I have been working for his party.’ Mary’s instinct told her to be cautious.

  ‘Very laudable,’ said Mr Menzies. ‘So you will be very glad. Voting began at dawn this morning. Konak is usually politically apathetic. Krishnan has roused it. I have never seen such a turnout. In my opinion Padmina Retty might as well pack up and go home.’

  ‘You mean Krishnan might win?’ Mary, off her guard, came nearer. ‘He will win?’

  ‘I believe overwhelmingly. There! At least that has made you happy,’ and Mary felt she had to say, ‘Thank you for coming to tell me.’

  ‘And now you tell me,’ said Mr Menzies. ‘Mrs Browne, when did you last see your husband?’

  Mary flinched but firmly shut her lips and turned to go.

  ‘You won’t tell me? I have just been to see Mrs Armstrong. She won’t tell me either. Pity. You ladies are making a mistake. If you won’t tell me, I shall have to make it up or rely on other people – as perhaps I have done already – perhaps someone who doesn’t like you so well. They are apt to distort. So am I.’ Mr Menzies laughed but he was serious. ‘Of course, this isn’t gossip, in which I specialise, yet it soon could be. You wouldn’t want this catastrophe— ’

  ‘It isn’t catastrophe— ’

  ‘Yet,’ he finished for her. ‘You wouldn’t want it turned into sensationalism, would you? Wouldn’t it
be better to talk to me? When did you last see your husband?’

  ‘He was – playing bridge.’

  ‘And where were you? That is the question, isn’t it?’

  Mary, unfailingly transparent, was looking round the hall this way and that, trying to escape but Mr Menzies came nearer.

  ‘Mrs Browne, tell me. I think your father is a well-to-do man, isn’t he? Very well to do.’

  ‘Rory?’ Mary could not think what Rory had to do with this. ‘I . . . suppose so.’

  ‘And the parents of poor Blaise . . . more than well to do. Wealthy?’

  ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

  ‘Well, you see,’ said Mr Menzies, ‘I know what happened later that night on the beach.’

  For a moment Mary looked at him wide-eyed, then she followed his glance to the portico and the red car and saw the now familiar curly black head, though the yellow shirt had been changed for a red one and, ‘I see,’ said Mary. ‘Kami!’

  ‘Kanu is an excellent small informer – and helps me in more ways than one.’

  You really are repulsive, thought Mary, with your horrible ribbon scruff hair and crab pink face and horrid plumpness.

  ‘Still there are ways’, he was saying, ‘of keeping things out of the papers.’

  ‘Certainly there are.’ Sir John had appeared in the Hall. ‘Ways and means you probably have not taken into account but, Menzies,’ said Sir John, ‘Miss Sanni ordered you out of her hotel. Will you go or shall I have you put out?’

  ‘I have a reason to be here, Sir John.’

  ‘I am sure you have. In fact, I know you had a hand in this mischief, if tragedy or near tragedy can be called that. I hope it will rest on your conscience.’

  ‘My conscience is perfectly at ease, thank you, Sir John. I am a newsman and news is news.’

  ‘Not all news. We have a police injunction.’

  ‘Injunction!’

  ‘The police insist that nothing is released until the full facts are known. They are thinking of our Office and of Mr Browne’s family – which is more than you have done – also of Patna Hall which you will leave at once and take your scurrility with you.’

  ‘Sir John, did you say, “the police”?’

  He had brought Mary back to the verandah, holding her, trying to stop her quivering. ‘You and Hannah are the only people she would let touch her,’ Lady Fisher was to say and soon, ‘Sir John,’ Mary managed to whisper, ‘did you say the police?’

  ‘It has to be the police, Mary. Chief Inspector Anand has sent a message – he cannot leave Ghandara while the voting is on, he hasn’t that many men though he has sent to Madras. He asks that you, Mrs Manning – I mean Mrs Armstrong – and Kuku will come to him.’

  ‘Olga and Kuku?’ Mary was puzzled.

  ‘Also Thambi and the sweeper women who cleaned up the mess in the bungalow last night.’

  ‘Slippers’s mess?’

  ‘Yes, he fouled the floor.’

  ‘That was the smell and Blaise hit him, hit him with the heel of his shoe like he did before and it’s all my fault. Oh, I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.’ She was shuddering from head to foot.

  Sir John held her but Auntie Sanni had come out. ‘Stand up,’ said Auntie Sanni to Mary. ‘We have Kuku in hysterics. That’s enough. Go and get yourself ready and be of help.’

  ‘Oh, Aunt Sanni,’ Lady Fisher demurred but it acted like a charm. Mary stood erect, tossed back her hair, tried to give them a smile and obeyed.

  ‘That is my girl,’ said Auntie Sanni.

  Krishnan had told Mary that election days in India were joyous events but she had not known it would be like this. ‘It’s a mela – a fair,’ said Sir John. All along the roads on the way to Ghandara, men, women and children, in what they had as best clothes, had come on foot, singing. ‘All over Konak they have been out since dawn,’ said Sir John. They came, too, in bullock carts, the bullocks garlanded, the carts decorated with flowers and scraps of bright cloth. Lorries wearing jewellery and tassels swept by, while cars and jeeps, sent by the parties to ferry voters, had drapes in party colours, the blue of Padmina Retty, red for Gopal Rau, green, yellow, and white for Krishnan Bhanj. Bicycles were decorated too, as were the rickshaws; some of the rickshaws had loudspeakers.

  The square by Ghandara’s town hall was packed and, as in every town in the State, entertainers had come: men who danced on stilts, conjurors, puppet theatres – those whose puppets told the story of the God Krishna were especially popular, as were his storytellers. There were sweetmeat sellers; rival teahouses were free, paid for by their parties. ‘One bowl of tea or coffee with one biscuit only,’ Dr Coomaraswamy had specified, ‘and that will cost me a lakh of rupees.’ Toysellers came through the crowds carrying poles wound in straw, stuck with paper windmills in bright colours, paper dolls, long paper whistles which made piercing squeals.

  Coming from a side road, hooting as they inched through the crammed roads, the Patna Hall cars had to wait while the processions passed. Gopal Rau had decided not to process at all which, under the circumstances, was wise but they saw the tail end of Padmina Retty’s display: mounted soldiers in full dress, their lances fluttering pennants; foot soldiers wearing the dress of the Maharajah’s late army. Behind them Padmina rode, not in her famous white jeep but in the blue howdah of a decorated elephant much larger than Birdie. ‘They must have had to send away for that one,’ said Sir John. All round her marched her men in brocaded achkans, gauze turbans or English suits; her women helpers in glittering saris carried peacock feather fans. Behind them came brass bands blaring Indian and English music, new tunes and old favourites, the ‘Dambuster’s March’ and ‘Colonel Bogey’, while overhead circled her aeroplane, pulling a banner, bright blue with a star. The rear was brought up by horsemen and boys running almost between their hoofs.

  It was impressive. ‘Very well done,’ said Sir John.

  ‘Horrendously well done,’ Dr Coomaraswamy had said.

  Then came a silence, all the more striking after the fanfare and tantara that had gone before, until an old and reverend priest with a white beard and saffron robe appeared on a white horse without saddle or bridle. The priest held up his hand for quiet. Even the rickshaws hushed as the ululation of a conch sounded and Krishnan’s procession came into sight.

  It was exactly as he had said with, after the deafening bands, that soft undulating ululation introducing the drums beating to keep time with the seductive melody of a flute piercing through the crowds – ‘Yes, dulcet,’ murmured Mary. Then came the disciples, young vigorous men barefoot in spotless white, their hair flowing, their hands held in namaskar.

  Behind them, on a lorry, bare and plain, Dr Coomaraswamy spoke through a microphone. ‘I cannot walk and speak,’ he had told Krishnan. ‘I am too aged. Besides, on the ground no one will hear me.’

  ‘All the better,’ said Sharma, the irrepressible.

  When the Doctor paused to draw breath, the young men sang.

  Then came a space in which another priest, young – ‘From Agni’s temple,’ Mary whispered – dressed in saffron, led a huge sacred bull, the cap on its hump worked in beads, its neck garlanded. It placidly chewed its cud as it walked, veering from side to side when the crowd offered it tidbits.

  Next walked the children, healthy pretty boys and girls. They drew ‘ahs’ and ‘aies’ from the people as the little girls scattered flower petals while the boys carried their kites and garlands. They too sang, their voices shrill:

  ‘Lord Krishna, Lord of All,

  We put you in your cradle.

  We bind you with a chain of gold,

  Your hands are red with henna.

  We gave you milk, we gave you kisses.

  Little Lord Krishna.’

  Last came Krishnan, magnificently tall, his skin oiled so that once again it shone but with its own darkness, still almost blue-black – Perhaps Krishna blue is intrinsic, thought Mary, and even in her misery that strange happiness swelled. He wo
re only a loincloth; the squirrel was on his shoulder as he led Birdie on a saffron-coloured rope, the elephant shining too with cleanliness, her trunk every now and then touching Krishnan. He did not look at the crowd, only straight forward as waves of reverence and, yes, love, thought Mary, came on all sides and a murmured, ‘Jai Krishnan. Jai Krishnan,’ then ‘Jai Shri Krishnan. Jai Shri Krishnan Hari.’ It swelled louder and louder as the crowd took it up. Behind him, which drew delighted laughter, three of the most good-looking girl disciples led the three cows of the Root and Flower symbol.

  For a moment Mary forgot the terrible present. ‘Jai Krishnan,’ she breathed. ‘Jai Shri Krishnan.’

  The crowds had surged around the bull so that the procession had to halt while the young men ran to persuade the people to move back. ‘No police. No force,’ Krishnan had laid down so that it took a little time. Meanwhile, the lorry was on a level with the first Patna Hall car which held Sir John and, in the back seat, Mary, Olga and Kuku – Thambi and the sweepers were behind. Dr Coomaraswamy, who was not sweltering in a suit – he had to wear national dress: ‘Though I am not habituated’ – saw that Kuku, nearest the window was weeping.

  Weeping! Immediately Dr Coomaraswamy was transported into a dream . . . ‘Uma, here is a girl in trouble’ – he did not know what trouble but never mind – ‘Let us take her into our home and befriend her. Always she has been treated as a nobody – we will set her on her feet. You, Uma, will teach her in your wonderful ways. I . . .’ He did not know quite what he would do but he saw a grateful Kuku, sweet, emollient, ‘I am so grateful, so grateful,’ and he would say, paternalistically, of course, ‘Kuku, come here.’ At that the dream broke. ‘For what’, Uma would, of course, ask, ‘are you befriending this girl? Tell me the truth.’ Dr Coomaraswamy had to admit he knew another truth. ‘I too am in love.’ He saw Kuku’s face illumined, softened as she had said that and he knew, no matter what her grief, there was no place in it for him. It was as well that the lorry was able to move a few paces. The cars succeeded in getting by and Kuku was borne away, as far as Dr Coomaraswamy was concerned, for ever.