Chapter Two
The house in which Nadine had been born was as drenched as the rest of the world, but the shutters were tightly closed against the wetness outside, sealing the humid heat within.
Excess water gurgled along culverts and into storage tanks. The high walls enveloped a household untroubled by famine or deluge.
The soles of her sopping-wet stockings left a watery trail all the way from the front door to her bedroom.
Myla, the housekeeper, left the job of pounding spices in the kitchen and shadowed Nadine’s progress, dipping to pick up the clothes as she discarded them. With each dip a mist of cinnamon and other spices drifted from her clothes.
‘I want a bath,’ said Nadine, her chest tight, her head aching with the weight of unanswered questions. ‘A very hot bath.’
Myla eyed her warily.
‘A chill,’ she said once she’d chewed over the facts and reached a conclusion. ‘You are getting a chill. A bath would be good. I will see to it.’
The water was hot and simmering with the perfume of violet-scented bath salts.
The pain in Nadine’s chest persisted and her face was wet with tears. Sinking herself deeper into the water, she closed her eyes, conjuring up Cecilia’s superior expression. Gossip had been the lifeblood of the cantonment since the first memsahib had placed her booted foot on Indian soil.
Almost young women now, the girls she’d gone to school with were feeling their feet, their superiority and class snobbery. She was different and they’d decided she did not belong.
Back in her room, dressing gown wrapped tightly around her, head swathed in a soft towel, she looked at the photograph sitting on top of the chest of drawers. It had a black frame and had sat there for as long as she could remember. This, according to her father, was her long-deceased mother. Every night Shanti had bid her say a prayer for this woman.
The woman’s hair was shingled and she was looking coyly over her shoulder. Nadine eyed her speculatively. Never before had she searched so diligently for some facial feature confirming this was her mother.
The contrast was striking. Shanti had been bright and colourful. The black-and-white photograph showed a stranger, a woman she had never known yet was expected to venerate, to remember as someone special. She couldn’t do that now. Cecilia had sown the seeds of doubt and they would not go away.
Quickly, without giving herself time to think, she prised the brass fixings from the back of the frame. They were stiff, but though her fingernail broke, she persevered, slid the photo out, turned it over and read the faded inscription.
To my darling Freddie… sorry for turning you down, but until we meet again, much love from your darling Gertrude Unwin. Look after your little girl. No matter her mother’s origins, she didn’t ask to be born.
June 1926
Nadine felt as though her blood had turned to ice: ‘Your little girl’ had to be her. The reference to her not asking to be born cut the deepest. She read the words again, each one slicing into her heart, stabbing at her mind. The words were unchanged; had she expected them to be different? In time she might live with what Cecilia had said, but this… this meant her whole childhood had been a lie.
In her mind she went back over all the birthdays she’d ever had. Leaving the photograph out of its frame, she brushed her hair numbly and dressed automatically, not really caring whether her clothes matched or not.
‘You will eat with your father?’ Myla asked her later when she was sitting out on the veranda, staring towards the double gates at the end of the drive.
She asked her again. ‘Will you eat now or later?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
Nadine’s eyes remained fixed on the gate. The photograph lay face down in her lap, her palms flat on top of it.
At the sound of a car horn the gate wallah came out of his little hut at the side, sprinting across the patch of dusty grass to swing both gates wide open.
The air was fresh with the scent of raindrops hanging on blossoms and the sound of monkeys chattering in the trees.
The last rays of sunset flashed on the chromium headlights of her father’s car. Due to his height and his turban, the chauffeur sat hunched over the wheel, his shoulders tight against his ears.
She stepped in front of her father.
‘I need to talk to you.’
A slimly built man with sharp eyes and quick movements, he looked disgruntled at being confronted the moment he got out of his car.
‘And what could possibly be so important that you have to waylay me before I’m even through my front door?’
She felt the heat of him as he passed by.
Behind her back she held the photograph with both hands. ‘Father, I want to speak to you.’
‘And I want to speak to you.’ His voice was a flat monotone and her stomach curdled.
‘Good,’ she said, more resolutely than she felt.
Myla held the door open for them to enter.
‘The school sent me a note.’ He shook his head as he passed his hat, his briefcase and his walking cane to the houseboy. ‘This will not do!’ He made a hissing sound through his teeth when he was angry; he was doing it now.
‘The dancing, or lighting Shanti’s funeral pyre?’
His expression froze. She had caught him off guard.
She pressed on regardless, knowing he would get angry but for once in her life not caring if he did.
‘I want to know about my mother.’ She brought the disassembled photograph out from behind her back. ‘Not this woman in the picture. I want to know why you didn’t tell me who she really was. I want to know who I am, Father. I want you to confirm to me that Shanti was my mother.’
The red veins that had started to scar the tip of her father’s nose intensified. Feathers well and truly ruffled, he glanced around him.
‘Not here,’ he said, his hand landing on her shoulder. Gently but firmly he pushed her in the direction of his study. ‘Not in front of the servants!’
His study was a shrine to masculinity and the unflinching belief that the British Empire would last for a thousand years.
The shelves lining the room groaned with the weight of books on Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes, and the Illustrated History of the British Empire and Dominions. The gilded spines of Source of the White Nile, Cape Town Revisited and The Life and Battles of Lord Horatio Nelson gleamed like battle honours.
Normally he presided over his study from behind the desk. This evening he was unnerved which in turn made him restless. Knuckles jammed onto his hips, head bowed, he paced the room. She could see the bristles of whitish hair stiff and upright at the nape of his neck.
‘This is simply not good enough, Nadine. Not good enough at all!’
Her anger intensified. He had totally ignored what she’d asked him, treating her as he’d always treated her, like a child who should be kept at arm’s length.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘I am greatly displeased.’ He took the note from the school out of the inside pocket of his coat and threw it onto the desk.
‘Who am I?’
He frowned. ‘What sort of a damned question is that? The answer is obvious.’
‘You’re my father.’
He cleared his throat before answering. ‘Yes.’ She sensed his disquiet.
‘Did you hear me just now? I asked you about my mother.’
Despite the dimness of the room, she saw beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. He waved his hand dismissively as though he were considering swatting a fly.
‘She died when you were born.’
‘This photograph is not my mother!’
‘You’ve broken it.’
‘No. I took it apart after I lit the fire beneath the woman who loved me as no other.’
‘You have no respect for your mother,’ he said, totally ignoring what she’d said as his face turned red.
‘Oh, yes, I do. I have the greatest respect for my real mother. But this
isn’t her.’ She pulled the photograph from the frame and waved it. ‘Gertrude? 1926? Father, surely you know I was born in 1924. So if she didn’t die when I was born, she must have left me. And if that wasn’t the case either, then I must draw the conclusion that she was not my mother, and if that is so, then who was? I’ve read what Gertrude wrote, that despite my mother’s origins I did not ask to be born and that you should look after me. Shanti was my mother, wasn’t she! Shanti was my mother and all this time you’ve been too ashamed to admit it.’
‘Now look here, my girl…’ His expression eddied between guilt and anger. Suddenly, the anger overcame him. ‘I am your father! That’s all that matters and you will obey me!’ His arm shot forward, his finger level with her face.
Despite her determination to stand her ground, she took a step back and he immediately seized the advantage.
‘You WILL act like a young lady! You WILL respect your mother’s memory.’
What little fear she felt melted away, replaced by a cold indifference to whatever he chose to do.
Her voice was low, as hushed as the evening breeze. Her face, her whole being was sombre.
‘This is indeed a day for respecting my mother’s memory, for on this day her ashes were scattered on the Ganges.’ She placed her palms together in the manner of a Hindu and bowed over her steepled fingers. She left him there, knowing he was staring after her totally lost for words.
* * *
Twilight was sliding into darkness and still Roland Burton sat at his desk, staring at Gertrude’s photograph. She’d hated India, refused to marry him and gone back to ‘the old country’ as swiftly as she could acquire a place on the SS Uganda. She’d died in a car crash shortly after the photograph was taken, racing around with some titled chinless wonder from Berkshire. That was when he’d moved Nadine and her mother into the house. Obviously he wished to preserve the facade of being an upright British gentleman and he’d wished his daughter not to be regarded as anything less than British. He’d told everyone that her mother, Gertrude, was dead. In fact her mother was very much alive at the time and serving as her ayah – her nurse.
Shanti had been the dancer, the devadasi, he’d seen at a maharajah’s party and immediately fallen in love with her.
Gertrude had let him down. That was all he could think of; Gertrude had let him down.
‘Sweaty lechers and shrivelled-up old prunes, darling. Not for me, I’m afraid. I don’t want to shrivel up with them. God, no wonder there are so many half-castes about! Though with those soft grey eyes your daughter is pretty, I must admit, and hardly a shade darker than either of us. You’ll have no problem passing her off as full-blooded British, though I must admit Anglos are beautiful, don’t you think?’
He’d understood her feelings. She was true-blue British through and through, from the right family, with the right amount of money and just enough education to get by.
‘I can’t blame you for being besotted with your little dancer. A young man, out here, with all this temptation.’
The memory of that last night when he’d tried to explain things was as vivid now after fifteen years as after fifteen weeks.
‘You have to understand, Gertrude. I was out here alone. Shanti was my comfort woman. I cared nothing for her. She was just a little something to warm my bed.’
‘And your daughter?’
To some extent it was at Gertrude’s prompting that he’d taken the child in and raised her. He’d insisted that the English way was the right way for Nadine to be brought up and to do that, Shanti must relinquish all rights to the child. He, in turn, passed himself off as a widower.
Perhaps out of love for him as much as for the child, Shanti had agreed. However, he had discovered she had not kept all her promises. He’d seen them together, dancing in the garden, and had felt uneasy, perhaps a little guilty. Breaking them up was the best thing he could do for his daughter. If she was to succeed in life, she must be uncontaminated by her Indian roots and be presented as a British girl, just like Gertrude. The world was her oyster, as long as her pedigree was untainted by foreign blood.
Keep calm. No confrontations. That, he decided, would be for the best.
Right from the start he’d decided not to become emotionally involved with the child conceived with his Punjabi mistress. Throughout her short life, he had avoided being alone with his daughter, keeping away from the house, staying at his club: a place of leather chairs and dark wooden walls where superior servants of the weakening Raj smoked amid silence and echoes of dead glories.
Apparently his lack of presence had largely gone unnoticed. He had not wished to become close to her, and she had never sought to become close to him.
* * *
Schooldays were coming to a close and Nadine was glad that they were. She’d never fitted in, viewed as slightly odd by fresh-faced girls who knew the far-off Mother Country far better than they did the one they lived in. Her dark hair and skin had set her apart. Only the odd contrast of her grey eyes had halted their insinuations of mixed blood, until Cecilia Renfrew had thrown comments around that she’d overheard from gossiping memsahibs. Some of the girls now went out of their way to avoid her, though not all.
Girls in brown uniforms had filed in and out of the Benares Academy for Young Ladies for over forty years. Most were destined to be wives either in this country or back home. Only a very few intended furthering their education and contemplating a career in ‘something useful’, such as becoming a secretary or doing a little nursing, though nothing too strenuous.
Someone asked Nadine whether she was going to England to continue studying. ‘Seeing as Cecilia may have scotched your chances on the marriage market.’
Nadine had bristled. ‘No. I’m going to study India – and the rest of the world if I get the chance.’
‘Oh! How odd,’ said the person who had asked. ‘Still, as long as you can afford it. Anyway, not everyone needs a man, do they?’
‘Will you get a job?’ someone else asked.
‘As what?’
Jennifer, a softly spoken girl who was as near to being her best friend as anyone, shrugged her narrow shoulders.
‘Nurse, secretary, teacher…’
Nadine shuddered. ‘Certainly not. What will you do?’
‘Marry an eligible man as quickly as possible. That’s what my parents hope for too. Have you considered marrying? I mean, I know some of the others think you’ve got no chance because of your pedigree, but let’s face it, you’re jolly pretty. Actually, the prettiest girl in the school.’
Nadine glanced at the slight sixteen-year-old. She had hips like a boy and the curve of her breasts barely disturbed the front of her blouse.
‘No. I won’t marry.’
‘I see. Of course, now there’s a war on you could do something in the military, I suppose – once you’re old enough, that is.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘So what will you do?’ persisted the girl, peering from beneath a floppy brown fringe as she awaited an answer.
Nadine eyed the sandstone yellow of the school building, the locked gates that kept the girls in and the world – an India viewed as decadent but tempting – firmly shut out.
Remember it was here that made you respectable young ladies, truly representative of all the British Empire stands for.
The school’s mantra, dogged and basically unthinking: Nadine grinned as a deliciously naughty thought crossed her mind.
‘I think I shall be a dancer.’
Jennifer gasped and clapped a hand across her mouth. ‘You wouldn’t!’
‘Why not?’ Nadine spoke deliberately loudly. ‘I’m going to be a dancer in the Hindu fashion. I’m going to twirl and twitch my hands and arms around all those exquisite temples – you know the ones I mean – those decorated with intertwining, naked bodies.’
Jennifer’s shocked expression fuelled Nadine’s urge to shock and unsettle. She raised her voice, determined everyone would hear.
�
�You know what they’re doing of course, don’t you? They’re having sex in every position possible. Some of the female carvings are sucking on the men’s…’
Nadine’s descriptions of the lewd statuary spread from girl to giggling girl.
‘MISS BURTON.’
Judging by her flame-coloured expression, Miss Clark looked about to explode.
Nadine didn’t care. Satchel tucked beneath her arm, she sauntered off, her hat swinging on a ribbon around her neck.
She half-turned, smiled and waved back to those gathered at the school gates. ‘Goodbye, Miss Clark. I’m off to dance seductively in a Hindu temple.’
Dumbstruck, and perhaps too embarrassed to do anything more, Miss Clark only thundered, ‘Girl! You’ll get sunstroke!’
Nadine turned round and poked out her tongue. ‘I don’t bloody care!’
‘MISS Burton!’
‘MISS Clark!’
She snatched at the slides and ribbons that kept her hair in tightly braided plaits. Let loose, it fell like a black cloud around her bare arms.
‘I’m going to get brown, even browner than I am now,’ she shouted. ‘And I’m going to flaunt my body and become a nautch dancer, Miss Clark. A devadasi. Just like my mother.’
Flinging her hat into the air gave her an immense sense of freedom; so did slinging her satchel to the ground and seeing its contents spill all over the road.
Miss Clark did not follow her. Neither did she shout in that bull-horn voice of hers. Disapproval creased her craggy face, but she looked smaller, less intimidating than she had ever been.
Chapter Three
The day was fine, the heavy scent of rose bushes brought out from a garden in Surrey mixing with the tang of spices and the metallic weight of scorched air.
Wearing a tight bodice and a flame-coloured sari, Nadine kept close to the house, picking her way over the grass verge. She knew she would not be welcomed inside as she was; which was precisely why she was dressed this way. She had no wish to participate in morning coffees, afternoon teas, or evening soirées. Isolation gave her a chance to think.
East of India Page 2