“So superstitious, madam, and you’ve only been on our shores an hour … but then, so much that happens in India is unexplained. I will ask my guru about it.”
His face was dark and frowning now, as though the whole incident had taken on a new meaning, though Sara’s face showed only glowing relief.
“Well, then … now I feel absolutely she’ll be safe with you, because of your grandmother’s name.”
“My deepest thanks, madam.” His mood changed again and it was clear he was laughing at her.
“Wait! What does the name mean in English? I’ve forgotten.”
“It means love.”
There was a faint snort of derision from Charles, but Sara was thoughtful, and sad. The memory of the old man’s drowning came over her in a rush.
“Then someone must have loved her very much, to give her that name.”
She watched Sabran’s mouth compress, as though he was going to smile, but only his eyes gleamed as he waved his hypnotic ring before her eyes once more.
“I’ll look forward to your visit, madam; it’s not often we have such a charming addition to our barbaric shores.”
“But where do you live? You must give me your address.”
“Fitzroy knows where I am. Everyone knows my house, though some may pretend otherwise.” He gave Charles another derisive look.
“It’s ‘Sans Souci’, or, if you prefer the English, ‘Without Care’.
Then he was gone, the faint sound of his laughter echoing in the distance.
Chapter 4
An exhausted and uncomfortable silence descended upon the occupants of the carriage as they turned from the hot dusty chaos and noise of the port. Lady Palmer sat with her lips firmly compressed in a disapproving grimace, every now and then looking at Sara and snorting loudly, while Cynthia lay back under her parasol with her eyes closed, waving at her hot face with her tiny fan. Charles kept his gaze fixed ahead, seemingly unaware of Sara sitting by his side. She stole a quick glance at his averted face then slipped her fingers through his.
He started and stared at her, his face showing shocked surprise.
It was almost as if he had forgotten she was there.
They moved into a wide street bordered by centuries-old tamarind trees, their dark sinuous branches meeting overhead and intertwining to form a refuge from the heat of the relentless sun.
Civilisation in the form of English rule had asserted itself in the prosperous, mostly new buildings. They passed the High Court with its peculiar lighthouse built on top.
“That is where I hope to hold ultimate influence one day.”
Charles raised his chin high as they passed, and for a moment Sara thought he might even salute. She’d never really given his work as District Magistrate very much thought before, being so blinded by love she wouldn’t have cared how he earned his living, but now she saw how very important his work was to him. He was ambitious and, she realised with a sudden small tweak of clarity, he expected her to be ambitious too.
Pepper pot minarets adorned several other buildings, flashing in the morning sun and giving the town a cheerful feeling of domesticity and a sense of safety from the great wild expanse of India. Though, despite the monumental solidity of the buildings and the well-dressed Europeans going about their errands with their attendant servants, there was the strange ever-present feeling the grip was fragile, and it could all disappear in a heartbeat, as though a genie had transplanted a foreign world into an incompatible landscape. Even the colours of nature had an otherworldly air of unreality. It seemed impossible that such hues could exist outside of heaven, despite the fine layer of yellow dust reducing the landscape to a watercolour wash.
“I feel as though I’m in a tale from the Arabian Nights.” Sara squeezed his hand, forgetting to be shy in her happiness. “I didn’t realise it would be so beautiful.”
“Mount Road,” said Charles as they passed a wide thoroughfare leading west of the city. “Of course there was nothing here till we British came.” He waved his arms wide as though to embrace the whole street. It was as if he had built it himself.
“Yes, of course.” She frowned, trying to summon up a memory. The name was there somewhere in her cloudy past, though the road itself had changed so dramatically from the once dusty path she vaguely recalled from her childhood.
Her eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. There, in the far distance, shimmering through the dust, was a small hill. “St Thomas Mount,” Charles said, reading her thoughts.
“Oh, yes.” Sara remembered now. “Isn’t that where it was believed the saint was murdered after he had been sent by the Lord to convert India to Christianity?”
“That’s all a lot of nonsense, of course.” Charles scoffed, “but the Indians believe it absolutely. They claim they have the remains of the Saint’s finger in the church.”
Sara smiled to herself as she remembered, with sudden clarity, her father taking her to the church built on the site of Saint Thomas’ martyrdom, and being shown the very cross he was believed to have clutched to his chest at the moment of his death. The cross itself was reputed to sweat blood at various intervals, but, tired out from watching and waiting for the phenomenon to occur, she had fainted dead away, very much impressing the pilgrims who had gathered there, claiming she had experienced a vision.
Though now, as she looked around her, Sara felt none of the influence of Christianity, despite the Protestant churches built by the British. The heat itself seemed designed for a religion based more in nature than anything conjured by man. Even the twisted primitive shapes of the trees seemed to reflect the animism of the Hindu religion. They spread their thick tendril-like branches into the air and snaked along the ground, forming little arbours decorated with scraps of silk and flowers housing small figures of Ganesh the Elephant god, and Hanuman, King of the monkeys, or Shiva himself, Lord of the Dance, despite his human form, adorned with the horror of his myriad snakelike arms.
Beneath this shaded canopy, the people of this underworld had set up their homes and businesses, little makeshift boxes containing whole worlds of domesticity and industry. Glimpses of humble home life passed them by. A child, standing naked beside his home of rusty tin and grey rags, as his mother sat squatting in the dust before him, her bracelets jingling as she scrubbed him from head to foot with soapy water, inches away from a stream of running stinking waste. A faded turquoise sari nailed to a tree lifted in the faint breeze to reveal a sleeping place for a group of small children, watched over by their grandmother as she made chapatti on a cooking fire burning in the corner.
Sara welcomed it all, despite feeling a little detached as she sat next to Charles in the woven cane landau, a relic from the beginning of the nineteenth century, pulled by a pair of small sturdy horses, her parasol raised against the already blazing morning sun. She was still reeling, with not only the unusual sensation of finding her land legs again after weeks at sea, but also the conflicting emotions of her dramatic encounters of the past hour. Then the climax in the form of Ravi Sabran as he’d swept away with the child on his hip, his servants running along behind, trying to keep up with his impatient step. It seemed as though more had happened in one short hour on Indian soil than all the years she’d spent in England.
She thought of Sabran’s parting words: “Sans Souci.” An almost frivolous name for a house but alluring too; she would visit there as soon as possible.
Every now and then she stole a glance at Charles’s averted face, not quite fully being able to believe she was actually with him at last.
Her mood darkened as she was all of a sudden overcome with a sharp twinge of anxiety. “Who is this man I have married? Do I still love him?”
A beam of sunlight broke through the intertwined overhead branches and illuminated the scene before her.
It was a festival day, and armloads of brilliantly coloured flowers were being made into garlands for temple offerings. A young girl of almost mythical beauty, draped in a cyclamen pink sari
, sat squatting in the bright dust by the side of the road, weaving garlands of marigold and tuberoses. As she worked she sang, her voice lilting and mysterious, seeming to intertwine with the movement of her deft fingers as she twisted the flowers into fragrant ropes.
Charles glanced at Sara and was overcome with the need to do something gallant. He called to stop the carriage, then he threw the girl a few rupees. She caught them deftly, then, choosing a garland of intensely perfumed white jasmine, she draped it around Sara’s neck. The girl raised her slender hands to her forehead in a joyous blessing. There was no sign in her eyes that she expected any other reward; the blessing was given freely, from the purity of her innocent heart. Charles felt it too and was moved to say, “She seems a decent little thing.”
Sara smiled, touched by his gesture. He cared for her after all, and everything would be all right.
Then, from the distance came the beating of drums, discordant and sinister, and the people hurried off the road to stare.
A procession was moving towards them, the mass transforming into men dancing as though in a trance, kicking up the yellow dust of the road, convulsing their bodies in wild almost obscene movements, their eyes wide and crazed.
They carried a bier shaded by curtains and decorated with marigolds, but when the breeze shifted and the drapery briefly parted, a corpse could be seen, frozen by rigor mortis into an almost demure sitting position, though with one shrivelled and blackened foot sticking straight out into the open air of the living.
As the procession moved closer the grotesque shrunken head could be seen, bound in a white turban hung with cheap paste rubies, jerking in time to the beat of the music and the dancing feet of his bearers, the mouth set in a grim smile, as though enjoying its final macabre journey to the funeral pyre.
Cynthia’s hand flew to her nose. Over her handkerchief her eyes showed an expression of deep horror, though Sara was struck by how quickly her own feelings of revulsion evaporated. There were no lingering feelings of sadness; the death was accepted as inevitable, and faced head-on as a natural part of life. She shuddered as she remembered the funeral of her aunt, the icy rain pouring into the muddy grave, and the despairing empty sound of the clods of earth as they fell onto the lid of the coffin.
At that moment Charles took her arm and held it close within his own. He smiled at her. “All right, are you? Not too horrible.”
“No … somehow it seems more preferable than a tightly sealed grave.”
He looked at her oddly. “Of course, but I don’t think it would be the thing for us English to follow the same course. A little undignified, don’t you think?”
She gave a small laugh, thinking he was joking, though when she examined his expression she could see he was deadly serious.
The respectable stone buildings of the town were almost left behind now, and the ramshackle small buildings and rich temples of the Indian population clung closer together, a mixture of homes and businesses, the alleyways now mere burrows, leading to a seductive mix of shops selling spices heaped high in multicoloured cones, to brothels where young girls sat on embroidered cushions in open windows, their childish forms burdened with cheap gold jewellery and bright cotton saris, their haunted eyes painted with wide black streaks of kohl in an attempt to make them more alluring to the passing trade.
Cynthia suddenly let out a shriek of horror as a holy man, almost naked except for his long matted hair hanging almost down to his feet, and smeared from head to toe in a grey ash, threw himself before the carriage to beg for alms. It was impossible not to notice his long limp penis, covered like the rest of his body with grey dust and half hidden with the cotton rag hanging from the man’s waist. It was the first man Sara had seen naked and she could barely drag her eyes away from the lower half of his body.
She gave Charles a hasty curious look, then turned away, uselessly rearranging the gloves on her lap to cover her fears. It seemed so strange that because of a ceremony performed in England over a year ago, she would now have to share this man’s bed and do whatever intimate things married people did together. She wondered how on earth she would be able to go through with it and wondered if he would insist she sleep with him in his bed that very night.
“Move on, Shakur, you fool! What do you think you’re playing at?”
It was obvious Charles was as embarrassed as she was and was hiding it with anger, though she couldn’t help thinking it would be better to laugh instead.
Shakur flicked the reins but the horses refused to budge, prolonging the discomfort of everyone.
“Forgive me, sir; this fellow wants money, then he will go away.”
Charles hurriedly threw the man a coin. “I’m sorry, ladies,” he mumbled, blushing.
The Sadu followed behind, torturing them once more with his nakedness, blessing them all fervently and often, as Lady Palmer tried to shoo him away while holding her other hand over her daughter’s eyes.
Sara now found it difficult not to laugh and was almost bent over, trying to suppress her giggles.
The shock from the sight of her first naked male body had receded almost indecently fast, and her interest was taken by fresh scenes of life as it swarmed around the barely moving carriage.
Small herds of cattle, their horns painted bright colours and interwoven with flowers, stood in caramel-coloured unhurried clumps in the middle of the road. The carriage was forced to stop as a newly born calf struggled into the world on the road before them.
The calf rose, still crumpled from the womb, the umbilical cord trailing in the dust as its mother gently nudged it to stand, a picture of placid maternal devotion in the commotion around them. Sara and Cynthia looked at each other in a rare moment of genuine connection. For both of them it was the first time they had witnessed birth.
They crawled slowly past the gates of a huge temple where crowds had gathered to wait their turn to seek an audience with the Brahmin priests, ready to pay a rupee or two for a puja, a blessing, to further their chances of success in love or luck.
These men, the highest of all the castes, were mostly plump and well-kept like the spoilt concubines of rich men. They idled on the steps of the temple, gossiping and laughing, their bodies wrapped in robes of pure white cloth, their fat shiny necks ringed by garlands of marigolds.
Lines of the crippled and deformed had taken up their positions in front of the entrance to capture the pity of the crowd as they passed. Sara reeled back with a sickening lurch to her stomach at the sight of a deformity that surely could never have been created by nature alone. A young man, his legs and arms bent in a grotesque shape, sat patiently on a wooden trolley he propelled with a stick, his beautiful saint-like head being the only feature of his body not defiled.
“For God’s sake, give him some money,” Sara gasped. Charles, too, was moved by this special horror to hastily feel in his pocket and throw the coins blindly in the direction of the boy. Sara looked back to see the other less deformed pick up the coins to place them in the boy’s faded cotton sack he wore around his neck. Even amongst the desperate they recognised the dishonour of stealing from such an unfortunate being.
They followed the seafront now, and the high grey stone walls of Fort St George, topped with the English flag flying from the battlements loomed ahead, clinging to the water’s edge and protected on the south side by a wide muddy river. They passed through the outskirts of a settlement of dense streets and warehouses, built up against the fort walls and giving the area the look of an Arabian Souk. There was something vaguely familiar about the place, and Sara broke out in a gentle smile. The memory must have been a happy one.
The population had become more diverse, and Muslim families had set up businesses alongside Chinese, Hindus, Tamils and Parsees. Veiled women and Europeans squeezed up against each other in the narrow laneways and shopped and bartered loudly in foreign tongues.
Sara heard snatches of French and Spanish as they passed, and once, as two men stood aside to let the carriage pass, she h
eard softly but distinctly, “Cochons Anglais!” The words were uttered with such ferocity she blanched and looked back to see one of the men bow at her in an insulting, mocking way.
“That’s Blacktown!” Lady Palmer gave a haughty toss of her head. “And most appropriately named. We try to pretend this place doesn’t exist, though I suppose it’s a necessary evil. Catholics and Muslims and God knows what else!”
Sara thought it wise not to respond by keeping her face averted, and only turned when Lady Palmer poked her on the arm with the end of her parasol and pointed to a group of pretty painted houses facing the river.
“That very vulgar house with the bright green shutters belongs to the McKenzies, an Anglo-Indian family. We don’t socialise with them.” She placed extra emphasis on ‘them’.
Sara gave Lady Palmer an enquiring look, but the woman shuddered, raising her hand at once to dispel any further questions.
“When you see them, you’ll understand. The mother and daughter are very black. Even though the father was a Scot, dead now, mercifully, the mother is Indian, and as ugly as a gnome. You may see them in the street, but it is best to ignore them if they attempt to speak to you. The girl in particular is most annoyingly present in English society, despite all efforts to discourage her.”
Sara made a mental note to be sure not to snub them if she did somehow meet the marooned family in question, while her dislike of Lady Palmer rose to new heights.
Sara scanned the scene before her with fresh interest. Each house they passed might perhaps have been the home she’d lived in as a child, though none of them provoked even a hint of recognition. The house she remembered had a wide veranda with tall white columns and stood in a lush garden. None of the houses she passed were large enough, and gardens were almost non-existent in such a crowded place. It seemed an impossible task.
They’d come at last to the high stone walls of Fort St George and stopped at the southern-most entrance. A sentry saluted and raised the boom gate to allow them to pass.
The Jasmine Wife Page 6