by Alys Conran
It is Mrs Burrows who asks me. We are clearing up at the town hall, after one of her pageants. I am stacking chairs, and she is clipping off the old dead flowers from the displays we have had made up. Things have been quiet recently, on the Independence front, and we are all beginning to hope for a return to normality after the war.
‘The missionaries who taught at St Mary’s have gone Home,’ she says.
St Mary’s is the church’s mission school, which takes in little brown children and teaches them the rudiments of English and mathematics. They’ve done a fine job at turning out little Indian parodies of us for donkey’s years.
‘Really?’ I’m surprised. They always seemed such a determined lot. Dogged in pursuit of Indian souls.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Quite suddenly. The church has called them back to England as the war’s likely to get worse.’ She stands back to observe the flower display she’s been pruning, frowns at it.
Things must be very bad.
‘So,’ she says, lifting the scissors to a wilting flowerhead, ‘they’re short a schoolmistress, several actually, and we wondered if you might …’
‘Me?’ I put my stack of chairs down, in surprise.
‘You’ve taught before,’ she says, reasonably, turning to me now.
Have I? That soft schoolteacher and this hardened lady are an ocean and a world apart.
‘They’ll provide materials. Slates and pencils and secondhand books from StThomas’s, and you can teach them English.’
‘English?’
‘Yes, they have great need of it.’
‘What for?’
‘Commerce, advancement …’
‘Independence?’
‘For god’s sake, Evelyn. There’s no need to be so bitter.’
She picks up two vases and carries them back to the sill, perfectly arranged, undying.
‘Will you do it?’ Her heels clipping against the parquet floor.
Walking towards the classroom on my first day, the blood throbs in my ears. The whole undertaking seems fantastical. That I should teach, and they might learn. It is only an hour, I say to myself, only an hour this first day.
I open the door. They’re sitting on the floor in neat rows. The crackle of their chatter falls silent as I walk in. Their faces turn upwards like so many brown daisies. They’re afraid. A cane is hung on the wall, at the ready. And perhaps I will be more that kind of teacher now.
‘Stand,’ I say. And they stand.
‘The alphabet,’ I say. And we begin together, our ABCs. After an hour of quiet copying and slow, accented reading aloud, we are done for today. They file out of the classroom, like shuffling corpses, but then break into a run. Glad to be away from me.
In the doorway I stand. My heart is too big.
The anticipation I feel, before the next lesson, seems dangerous. I try to keep it in its place, by meticulous housekeeping, but it won’t stay. Somewhere I am coming alive again, and it terrifies me, thrills me and breaks me. Every bent head in my classroom is hers, each face focused in concentration, each set of dreamy eyes catching at a bird as it flits past the window, each high, piping voice is hers and hers and hers, and all this too late. I am very fierce with the children. I treat them as soldiers.
It is to be short-lived. The next day they come, with a date for court. It is to be public very shortly. I try to prepare myself, contract a lawyer. But I have no heart to fight it. For what if it was Magda who killed him? What if I should incriminate her? The thought of it sinks in me like a cold stone.
Within just two weeks, the crown’s officers come round, and say that the case has been completely dropped. I am no longer a suspect.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘Your daughter has given a statement,’ they say. My heart stops. Oh, Magda.
‘She says it was her friend. She saw him go into the house immediately before.’ The officer is blasé.
‘Her friend?’
‘Raja?’ He reads the name from his notebook.
I stare at him.
‘She didn’t seem to know where the family had gone,’ he said. ‘They left Kharagpur after the incident.’
The incident.
I think of Aashi, his mother who I called a bitch.
I owe them quite a debt.
I’m silent.
‘We’ll keep looking for him,’ he says. ‘But there are so many people on the move these days.’ He means the Mohammedans who have begun to relocate to the east.
That night I fall asleep on my bed fully clothed and wake under a thin sheet, placed over me by one of the servants.
Anwar brings in eggs, but I am unable to eat; for I think of her, Aashi, and her small son whose right to milk we stole.
I can’t work out if Magda would be safer here, with all these freedom fighters about, or in Britain, so close to the Führer. Then we hear that some of the ships bringing the children of the Raj back to India are torpedoed, and the children returned to land in pieces, and it is clear that it must be me, not her, who will travel.
It’s impossible to book a passage home for several weeks, for there are so few ships going because of the war. Father writes to say I should not come anyway. But I must see Magda. I must be with her. Then the passage I do book is cancelled. The next available is in a few months’ time. India’s fronds are all around me, tendrils gripping my shoulders, my ribs, my hips. My chest is heavy with catarrh that does not shift. Letters get through only occasionally, and then with half their thoughts blacked out by the censors. The blacked-out portions are like words you struggle to recall, places that remain shadowy in your memory, people whose faces only vaguely ring a bell. They make Home seem further still, and more impossible. It seems no part of me is now able to reach that place in Bay’s Mouth where she, Mother, and Father, will one day sit with me again, around one table, and where I will not be cruel to the children I teach.
Finally, one day, as they are reciting their alphabet, fear in their eyes, I find the room is beginning to swirl. I wake up with one of the other teachers holding something sharp-smelling to my nose. Anwar takes me home and I take to my bed.
My body is beleaguered by feverish thoughts.
After that I give up all thought of teaching. My vocation has slipped away from me again. Of course it has.
I take to my bed after lunch each day, and sometimes don’t emerge again until the evening.
Finally, the news comes: I am to travel on the fifteenth of next month. Home.
My body, in these liminal times, is drastically weakened, and I am frequently feverish. When I think of my parents’ small house in Bay’s Mouth, I cannot imagine what choreography of my parts could possibly make me fit back in.
Every day I spend a portion of the morning and afternoon in bed. I can eat only boiled rice. I am like their darling Gandhi, who they say languishes in a jail, fasting. I grow thinner, in parts, but other parts of me seem to swell. My ankles. My wrists. My body tries to change shape to fit into its new cast.
Magda’s last letter tells me little news of her life, only that she has been studying independently: the chemical elements. How they blend and splice. How you can take salt from rock by submerging it and then drawing dirt from sodium chloride over a flame. That is very much what is hoped for by some fanatics for India; that the rock salt of this country might be dissolved, and then heated; so that some part of it, Mohammedan or Hindu, can rise neatly and be separated from the rest.
That’s how it should happen they say, in an orderly fashion, but it isn’t what I see. Last week one of the others stole Anwar’s wages and though Anwar has always been the senior servant, he seemed to want no redress, and begged me not to make a scene over it. It is because he is a Mohammedan. There is talk of riots in Calcutta. Everyone has lost their composure. The women walk around in an undignified kerfuffle, whispering, ‘We must leave.’
I have lost my composure too. Everything has taken on a strange yellow colour, and smells do not relate correctly to their source
s. Rice, for example, smells peculiarly bitter. It is difficult to breathe. But I must pack.
Stopping for breath as I move things between my chest and my suitcase, I have a coughing fit which ends in blood.
I am one of the late ones. Our leaving, the leaving of the Raj, is executed with strict supervision by the Company, and every official I speak to seems to think I have been a little remiss in not leaving India sooner. Husbands, it seems, sent their wives home long ago. I had no one to send me, and have been languishing with my servants in our big house.
I am told there are quotas now, and so I cannot take most of the furniture. Mr Burrows is ingenious however, and instructs for most of ours to be made into packing cases so that I may keep them. Thus it is dismantled, the pieces of wood all over the sitting room, like strewn bones. At the end of our journey, the bones will be reassembled into furniture, and Home will be constructed piece by piece from the dismantled skeletons of Indian trees.
Though what I am to do with such paraphernalia at Home I don’t know. Burrows says not to worry about booking a place on the usual passage for the great square cases made from our dressing tables and wardrobes, for he’ll have it all put on a freight ship in a few weeks’ time.
‘Far cheaper, though far less salubrious for your furniture, and there may be some salt damage.’ When people mention salt in India, the Raj shudders, because, ultimately, it seems that salt is what brought it to its knees.
‘Still. We’ll all need to watch our pennies now, Evelyn. What costs almost nothing in India will be an arm and a leg at home.’ Burrows looks positively gloomy at that thought. He’s one of the few who plan to stay, hoping against hope that there is a future for him here, when, quite plainly, there is not. Despite the years of dreaming of it, we are all poorly made now, for Home. We are somehow baggy and of poor design. False. I feel I should ask the deft joiners who come to remake the furniture as packing cases to remake me also. Like the furniture, I am to be taken apart, to be put back together at the other end.
I take just one servant for the journey to Bombay. Anwar, of course. He seems not himself. His hands shake as he drives, and twice I have to ask him to slow down. He was told to bring only one small bag and nothing of value because he will be coming back, but when he walked from the house to the car I could hear jangling and his clothing seemed lumpy. I feel he is also bidding Kharagpur his final farewell. We drive all the way to Bombay. The trains, even the private ones, are unsafe.
As we drive, we see reams of them, men and women, badly clothed, dragging their feet along the road towards Calcutta, clutching their emaciated children. It’s like something from the Bible.
‘Why don’t they have any food?’ I ask Anwar after a long silence.
‘The rice …’ Anwar says, and trails off. He is watching them too, a shocked expression on his face. ‘So bad. So bad,’ he mutters. And something about Allah, which has always been forbidden in our house.
The car comes to a halt. There is something on the road. It is a bundle of rags. Why doesn’t Anwar just drive over it?
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he says to me, and opens his car door to get out. Several children are instantly at the door, their small, scabbed hands begging for food, money, voices like chirruping birds saying ‘rice’, ‘food’, and ‘please’.
‘Anwar!’ I shout. I am afraid. Their hunger seeps through the open door.
But Anwar is lifting the bundle. He lifts it tenderly, and by the way he carries it, I see that it is a dead thing. Anwar walks to the side of the road, and bends to set it down, gently, in the dust. It is not as heavy as a grown one. It is not as big as an adult.
When Anwar sits again in the car, and the engine begins again, he is not the same reliable Anwar. His shoulders tremble with the engine.
We are silent the rest of the way.
At the port, there is a dining room, and scones.
When they call us to board, I take leave of him.
‘Goodbye, Anwar,’ I say, and am about to turn without ceremony, but I stop. I face him, and, for perhaps the first time, I look him full in the face. ‘Good luck,’ I say, my voice newly small against this India.
We are suddenly very heavy.
When our ship is moving away from land, moving out steamily into the jewel sea on its cerulean journey, I turn back to watch the people milling on the dock. Anwar is there, in his white kurta.
He stands, unacknowledged and grey-haired, his back rounded, a small bag of possessions at his feet. When I close my eyes against it, he remains there, standing, his hands empty.
The cabin boy I am assigned is looking at me with trepidation, for I am beginning to fade, my legs uncertain, and a weight here, at my chest.
‘Take it in,’ I snap at him, motioning to my case. ‘Just take it in and put it on my bed.’
It is to be only three weeks. Three weeks and a world until Home.
That I should fit back in, ever. The thought of seeing them again, my mother, my father. My body weakens against the impossibility. I think of her, with strange terror: Helen.
Who should I be? Who should I be now at Home?
My body is uncertain.
I sit, for hours on end in my cabin, sipping the bad tea brought by the boy, whose name I cannot ask, whose eyes I cannot look into. I am so hot I am cold, and so cold that I burn. My body is restless and unrested, has forgotten to abide by ordinary hours. I am sleepless, I am heavy and yet live-wired. I only go outside late at night, when there is no one else, to watch, through the cold sear of my fever, the slow cold play of the moon on the water, and the steam rising from the ship into the night as if it were a fevered body on ice as it slowly homes.
I think, each night, of Aashi.
When I return to my cabin, tonight, I take out my writing paper. I pen a confession, which I leave sealed, only to be opened in the event that they find Raja. The words done, I sleep.
It is the night, or the morning, and I have awoken coughing. I’ve dreamed of Benedict. His cruel hands. My lungs are aflood, their own ocean between me and Home. He smothers Home away into deep water. In the depths of my dream, Helen, sinking into the dark.
I awake again, and the sheets are wet with my sweat. Shadows move in and out of the cabin. Shadows dream across the walls.
I awake, surrounded by language.
I awake.
‘Open the window. Let her breathe some fresh air.’
Volcanic coughing. India is breaking.
I awake.
Aashi singing.
O troupe of little vagrants of the world leave your footprints in my words.
I awake.
Through the window, the sound of something carrying across the sea? Church bells? A blackbird. Nightingale. Oh smell of heather, oh clover. Oh the milk smell of my baby’s soft hair.
I awake.
I awake.
I awake.
Chapter Forty-Two
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.
It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.
Irish proverb
When I go to Magda on the Tuesday, she’s in a bloody state, and mumbling to herself. I try to bring her round with tea. Eventually I give her a gentle slap across the cheek. That works, or I think it does.
‘Impudence!’ she says, looking at me furiously. And then, ‘Is it you? Is it you, Aashi?’
‘No, Magda. It’s Susheela. It’s me.’
But she doesn’t seem to know me. She’s crying, I think, her head in her hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry, Aashi, oh Aashi.’
I sit with her, the house big and empty around us.
‘It’s not Aashi,’ I say again, ‘it’s Susheela.’ I reach out and squeeze her hand, feeling totally abandoned.
I’ll have to phone the office.
She stops crying, and looks at me. Through the mist of her grey eyes, something’s surfacing.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Don’t call it in. I’ll be all right. Just get me s
ome sweet tea.’
When I come in with it, she tells me.
‘I betrayed him,’ she says. ‘I betrayed Raja.’
When she’s done with the long ache of telling it all, she sits back and her eyes close. I wheel her to the lift, and from there to the bedroom. She works with me silently to make the dangerous move between the chair and the bed.
Two days later, she’s sitting up in bed, her hair in curlers, and I’m folding away her things, and telling her about Dad’s debts.
‘What was he thinking!’
A pale light comes in through the net curtains and seeps across her bed, an echo of the changing seasons outside.
‘He wanted Mum to live, that’s all,’ I say. ‘That can drive you pretty crazy.’
She nods quietly. ‘What’s he going to do?’
‘He’s staying with us,’ I tell her, shaking out her nightdress before folding it in three.
‘Good lord, but have you space?’
I shrug.
‘Have you space?’ she asks again.
‘Not really!’ I try to laugh.
‘What a mess,’ she says, like everyone else lately.
Then she’s quiet. Tired again. Or thinking.
The next day I call in to the office to get my rota, hoping that they’ll have given me lots of shifts. We need the money. But I’m so bloody exhausted I can barely drag my body in there. On the rota I see that Magda isn’t down for the next week. My chest goes tight.
‘What happened?’ I ask Glenda, who’s tapping away at her computer. ‘Did she get sick again?’
Glenda keeps typing.
‘Where is she, what ward?’
‘Nothing like that,’ she says, finally looking up. ‘Her friend’s coming up this week and she asked for some time alone with her. Says the friend’s a nurse so she can take care of her for a day or two. Her friend has to sign something for us to say so, mind.’ She snorts at the ridiculousness of it. Over her shoulder I see she’s on Facebook, a chat open on the right of the screen.