Dignity

by Alys Conran

  ‘What is a globe?’ he says. And so I take him inside to show him. We are in the drawing room with Daddy’s beautiful globe where all the countries are pictured and coloured so perfectly. I point it out to him.

  ‘This is where I am from,’ I tell him. ‘England.’

  He stares at the globe.

  ‘This is India,’ I say, pointing at it.

  ‘It is much bigger,’ he says proudly. And I have to nod. Because he is right.

  ‘When did you come here?’ he asks me.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘India.’

  ‘I was born here.’

  ‘When did you last go home?’

  I hesitate. I do not want to tell him that I have never been. Luckily, Anwar comes in right at that moment, and oh how he shouts and shouts at Raja to leave the house.

  ‘Indian boys are not allowed here,’ he shouts. And then he tells him something strange. ‘Don’t you know that she is untouchable?’ he says in Bengali, pointing at me. ‘Don’t you know that it will make you unclean to play with her?’

  ‘Bye bye, madam,’ says Raja, running out of the door. He grins at me on the way out.

  She is making lace when I ask her. She is making lace and so has to keep track of all the threads and the wooden pegs and the pins and I can’t even understand when I watch her doing it. It is like other things that are not for little girls. I sit and watch her and I don’t touch the pegs or the lace in case she taps my fingers away.

  ‘Mummy,’ I ask, ‘can we go Home?’

  ‘We will,’ she says. ‘When it’s time.’

  ‘But Mummy, aren’t you unhappy?’

  She stops moving the pins and the pegs. She sits very very still. I don’t know much but I do know that her answer is

  Yes.

  ‘Is it because of Daddy?’ Mummy is very very still. She is trying to shake her head for no but her head will not say it.

  ‘Is it because of Daddy and Aashi?’

  Mummy gets up from her chair, and all the lace and the pegs fall from her knees and she hits me so hard across the face that the next thing I see is the floor and then her heels leaving. Her heels are leaving.

  Mummy doesn’t see my bruise and all its colours. Mummy doesn’t stay to see what she has done. Mummy is gone for days. Every day Aashi and Anwar give me sweets. But it is Raja, it is my friend Raja who tells me: she is in hospital. And then I listen to the servants talking. Aashi and Anwar say it.

  Memsahib has lost the baby. She has lost the baby again.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  What a wonderful opportunity this magical InterNet provides to get in touch with old friends, former neighbours and fellow members of that simple, happy life in which we all partook during the years of the ‘RAJ’ – and all at the speed of light – when one learns how to use it!

  Kharagpur Diaspora website

  You, me, and my mum, we’re stacked one inside the other like matryoshka dolls. Or like the layers of an onion. You’re the mysterious, tiny one inside me, and outside us both, my mum, the outmost layer, all familiar things and Fairy liquid. She walks in her slippered feet around me, as I pad around their house, Dad’s house now, dusting, polishing, making everything just so, despite Dad not really speaking to me and sitting rigid at the kitchen table, waiting for me to leave. Or at least that’s what I think he’s doing.

  I’ve dusted the hallway, the lounge, polished each ornament on the mantlepiece, cleaned the glass on their wedding photo where Mum stands in her red and gold sari, glimmering, and Dad shines like a different person. I’ve polished the frames on my school photos too, where I’m shy and eager to please as ever. I make my way up the stairs, checking for cobwebs. Occasionally I stop, place my hand on you, and listen with my palm. Nothing. You’re all tidied away again, inside.

  The house isn’t as she would’ve liked it. Washing in piles, newspapers crowding the porch. I put everything back in its place. You back in my belly, Dad’s newspapers on the newspaper rack, his socks paired and laid in the sock drawer like babies in a big crib. Slowly the house is put back in Mum’s order.

  At the hotel too, Mum had it all kept just so, making sure the girls hoovered deep, deep into every corner and wiped its skirtings until they were perfectly blank. She’d patrol the corridors, checking that every picture hung at the exact angle it should, inspecting the windows, making sure they’d been shined tirelessly with vinegar, that every bed was perfectly made. Her British Hotel was more a bastion of old glory than any other of the Bay’s Mouth hotels, or the fair rides, the pier, the tearooms, the Victoria Day Parade, or the other British fictions the tourists promenaded through, snapped pictures of, and wanted and wanted and wanted. ‘Tea’ at the British Hotel meant cucumber sandwiches, plum pudding and loose leaves in a teapot with a strainer. Dinner was roast beef, or lamb with mint sauce; pudding was always warm and always with custard. The Union Jack flew high from the parapet. Everything was British-made, or at least made in the Commonwealth – even the radios in the bedrooms, which were now pretty much antique. Mum refused point-blank to update them.

  ‘That’s what people are after,’ she said. ‘And that’s what they’ll get.’

  The British Hotel was the ‘real deal’, and so a perfectly executed lie. It was owned by an American chain.

  Still, Mum was absolutely dedicated to it. She’d not even think about coming home until she was completely knackered, slipping her shoes off her swollen feet and falling asleep on the sofa.

  For a long time, I found this whole obsession she had with Britishness pretty funny. Me and Leah used to laugh about it, specially at Mum’s story of how Granny and Grandpa had stood up for the first few years whenever ‘God Save the Queen’ played on the radio. Granny and Grandpa’d come to Bay’s Mouth thinking that the UK was everything the Raj in India had pretended to be. They were totally shocked when they met normal working people. Mum used to imitate them, saying in a strong Bengali accent, ‘Uncouth! They are so uncouth!’ But she felt their disappointment really. They were pretty unhappy when she married down. Compared to Mum, Dad was riff-raff. We’ve not seen much of her family, or his, over the years.

  The whole thing at the hotel was so well done that the BNP tried to book their conference there. It was almost funny. And then I realised they were going to let them come.

  ‘You can’t have those racist bastards here!’

  ‘They’re paying customers, Su,’ she said, looking worried for once. Mum was up for the whole cucumber sandwiches thing, but only in a hotel, not in politics.

  The company that owned the hotel turned them down in the end. But another political party did come, who were pretty much as fucked up. When the conference was on, I sat in the office behind reception and listened to them all filing through the foyer, talking in loud, satisfied voices, laughing. They had this confidence: that they were the normal ones. All their publicity talked about ‘The good people of this country’, by which they meant themselves, not me, and specially not Mum.

  Once they’d gone through the doors into the big function hall, and the sounds of their big, confident voices were muffled inside, I went through to the laundry room where all the sheets and towels are stacked in mini skyscrapers, each with their embroidered crown. From there you can look through the glass in the door into the hall. There was a guy on stage, giving a speech. His hands were making sharp shapes in the air; his body, in chinos and a summer shirt, was lit up bright against the purple PowerPoint behind him.

  ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture and, you know,’ he said, ‘the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and order, so much throughout the world, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be quite hostile to those coming in.’

  Applause. It all sounded so fucking reasonable, like being beaten up in slow motion.

  I went into the kitchen and spat into the perfect British gravy, stirred by Ravinda.<
br />
  ‘What’re you doing, Su?’ he asked me.

  ‘Adding flavour, Ra.’

  ‘Very good,’ he said, and started ladling it out onto the plates.

  Now, when you go in from the seaside, into Bay’s Mouth proper, there are anti-immigration slogans on the walls. They used to scrub any graffiti away within days, but now they don’t bother, and I have to walk past a load of it every day, to college.

  I always got pissed off about crap like this, in a way that Mum and Dad didn’t. It was like they didn’t really think they had a right to. It worried them, hurt them, but it didn’t make them rage.

  ‘You and your rights,’ says Mum in my head. ‘You and your sense of entitlement.’ She was proud though. ‘You stand your ground,’ she said once, when I came home worked up about something someone had said. ‘You’ve found your ground. Now keep standing.’

  I can feel it slipping away slowly beneath my feet.

  The reviews at the hotel nosedived as soon as Mum went off sick. I check them, sometimes, on TripAdvisor, like picking a scab. Not what it used to be. Standards have dropped severely. Not the place it was.

  I heard a rumour they’re thinking of selling it so someone can turn it into flats or student halls.

  Everywhere changes. Sitting down in my old room at Mum and Dad’s, taking a break from the cleaning, I search for Kharagpur, Magda’s town, on the web. At first I find nothing, just the website of a technical college, businesses, pictures of a sprawling industrial town in India, regular and busy. Then, three pages down, there it is. Kharagpur Reunited. Magda herself would never use the internet and I can’t quite believe that the Raj has made itself a place there either. But someone did. The web page is old, old. Hasn’t been updated for years. On the first page, a plaintive note with an elderly, fuddy-duddy style: Please can someone help me to sift material? There is far too much for me to manage with my failing health. And please will people not send present-day photographs. We want to remember Kharagpur as it was, in the days so dear to us.

  Not sprawling, industrial, real.

  Photographs of pageants and Christmas fairs, tennis matches, poodles all made up. Looking through the website’s like doing some kind of archaeology. There’s a feeling that I’m the only person to visit in a long while. Like some dilapidated old house with only me left haunting it. The site’s a relic, a record of somewhere more English than England, like Bay’s Mouth. Shared photographs, shared anecdotes that pale and pale up there on the web. A copy of a copy of a copy. How fucking sad it all is. I turn it off. It’s too close to the bone somehow. I get up with my rag to keep dusting.

  Once all the house is spic and span, I go through to the kitchen, to Mum’s shrine in the larder. At suppertime the goddesses had to have their meal before she’d sit down to her own. The little troupe of figures. She spruced them up every day, kept them as perfectly Hindu as she kept her hotel perfectly British – and didn’t see that as any kind of contradiction.

  We keep them now. They make a semi-circle on her little table in the larder. Lakshmi, Kali, Durga, Saraswati and the others, every one of them painted brightly by hand, sewn by hand, kept sari’d, bangled and bindi’d, painted, polished, garlanded with tiny garlands, powdered with spices and dyes, little bowls of petals set around them. I set out Mum’s puja tray, ring the tiny bell, light her diva lamp, spoon a tiny spoonful of sweet clean water from the small brass bowl over Saraswati’s feet, and mark her forehead with kum-kum. Mum would always mark her own forehead too, but I turn back to Dad, sitting at the table.

  He sits in his dressing gown almost motionless. He says nothing. Just looks at me wearily. His eyes have that dusky expression they had for so long after Mum.

  I turn away from him and put the kettle on.

  ‘I’m more than three months gone,’ I say, with my back turned to him.

  He says nothing.

  I turn around. ‘So I’m not getting rid of it.’

  Dad nods. He looks up, and he exhales.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea.

  The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft,

  George Gissing

  I am no longer Evelyn Roberts. I’m fully Mrs Benedict Worsal Compton, and she’s cold, she’s hard, and has no interests bar making lace and pretty things, gossiping of dress cuts and watching the season turn and heat so that she may uproot her garden in its big, elaborate pots and take it to the hills.

  When Magda asks me, on her sixth birthday, if she might have a flute to play, like an Indian boy she’s seen, Mrs Benedict Worsal Compton says no.

  Don’t be silly, she says. Don’t be a silly child, and she turns back to her work, knotting and knotting the lace until it’s as perfect as the lace made by those black women on the Suez Canal when I first made the passage over, back when there was love, and when I dreamed.

  There are no dreams now. My sleep is oddly blank, while around me India churns.

  ‘Aashi’s husband is coming this evening,’ says Benedict, not looking up from his paper.

  ‘Good heavens. Why?’

  ‘Because he’s moved up in rank, again. They keep having me promote him. He’s a bright chap. Trustworthy. They need to show willing.’

  ‘Willing?’

  ‘Willing for Indians of all castes to rise up through the ranks, gain in prestige.’ He stops, I think simply because he can’t be bothered to explain further. ‘It’ll come to nothing, of course,’ he says.

  ‘Of course,’ I chime, all a loyal wife.

  Aashi, of course, is not invited. I am having to keep her apart from many things these days. My husband, who watches her overmuch, and Magda, who I daresay cares for her more than for her own mother. For Aashi is a desirable girl, smiling, kind, and quite pretty, in an Indian way. Magda has learned far too much Bengali from the girl, and produces its clipped syllables at any opportunity. It makes Benedict fume, and so we must rap her knuckles for it, which makes her cry.

  I want Aashi to leave, but Benedict is resistant.

  ‘She’s useful to have about,’ he says. And it is true. She mends clothes, and makes balms and perfumes better than any of the other servants. So I put up with her, at least for the moment. But there is no question of her coming to tea even if her husband does. It would be crossing a line.

  So I don’t go either. We are to leave the men to it and keep to our own quarters.

  I do spy Aashi’s husband through the window when he arrives. The young man lets himself through the gate, walks across the front lawn towards our front door, upright and intruding. And familiar.

  William.

  His incongruous name rings through my head. A small child with skin like china, holding up his copybook. William. And then this troubling, tall, brown man.

  He’s ringing the bell.

  His young wife is upstairs. She suckled my child.

  I close the curtains.

  An hour or so later, when they must be on cigars and drinks (Benedict keeps an immensely expensive supply of Cuban cigars, which seem to still be plentiful, despite the way everything is beginning to be rationed because of some kind of trouble with supply lines across Europe), I hear Benedict’s raised voice.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ he’s saying. ‘By god, are you threatening me?’

  I find myself tiptoeing down the corridor.

  The quieter tones of the man: ‘I was merely pointing out an aberration in the plan, sir. A possible unwanted consequence. One that might cost lives.’ His English is so perfect.

  ‘Don’t you think this has been taken into account?’ says Benedict. His voice is unusually high.

  ‘Evidently not, sir.’

  Silence. The clinking, cut-glass sound of the drinks cabinet. Benedict is pouring a whisky. It must be serious.

  ‘You know,’ he says quietly, after a long while, ‘that hydroelectric plant is, to me, essential. Aashi, meanwhile – well, she’s entirely exp
endable.’

  A silence.

  ‘In fact you both are,’ says Benedict, laughing. The sound of his clicking fingers. ‘Like that,’ he says, ‘you could be got rid of.’

  Silence. And then, quietly, the man’s voice.

  ‘Things are changing, sir,’ he says.

  Just then Anwar comes along, dusting the corridor. And I have to walk on, as if I’m merely chasing my tail around the house as usual.

  He is right, of course. Things are changing. There are, increasingly, Indians living in houses like ours, wearing clothes like mine, taking important office and holding grand parties. They hold their own, but have not the habit that we do, of imitation. They are an imitation of an imitation, and so rather watered down. Still, they do fairly well these days, and, as usual, want more.

  There have been several frightful protests. We hear of them, on the wireless, and presumably Benedict gets an army briefing, though he doesn’t share its contents with me – ostensibly out of disdain for my conversation, though I think what he feels for me is perhaps more spiteful than disdain. But I have heard of occasional violence, and the wireless does tend to reel off improbable statistics of the number of hungry living around us in Bengal. Improbable, or so I think, until the rationing begins and until I notice a distinct pallor in Anwar’s face.

  Anwar, bearer and head servant, is more spirited and far smarter than I first thought, and frequently runs rings around me, turning me out of the house ‘for spring cleaning’ if he is offended in any way by my tellings-off. Once I swear he nicked into my bicycle tyres with one of his sharp knives when I docked his pay for poor thrift because he procured at market only half of what he normally might for the same price in rupees. Benedict, I think, appreciates Anwar mainly for his ability to flatter him, but I secretly admire him his ways of turning the tables on his masters with such unshakeable elegance and poise.

  So it is a shock when, standing beside the fan, he faints. We have to bring him round by putting a pinch of curry to his nose.

  ‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ I ask him. ‘Tell me.’ For if he is sick we will need to know. Truthfully, there is also some genuine concern, for I have grown to respect him and his wayward manner, his clever methods of having his own back. He’s surprisingly intelligent.