East of the Sun (22 page)

Twice already, Jack, dressed in full uniform with miniature medals, had clanked off in his spurs for regimental dinners at the mess where, according to the indulgent gossip from the
mems, boys behaved like boys. She’d heard the gup about a pony being brought in to jump a sofa at four o’clock in the morning. Jack had told her how he’d broken his wrist last year during a midnight steeplechase.

And again, these tales conjured up another, wilder version of Jack unknown to her yet, or only partly glimpsed, when he staggered home after mess nights, half-tight and smelling of brandy and usually wanting to make love. The last time he’d done this was awful: he’d gone all red-faced and blustery and hadn’t even bothered to take off his shirt.

“Relax, relax, relax, let me have at you,” he’d said angrily and intently, and for some reason this cry had reminded her of his urgent bellows of “Leave it! Leave it!” on the polo pitch when he wanted to score the goal. So horrible, so embarrassing—she’d hated every minute of it.

“He’s late.” Rose was looking at the clock above the dining room table, trying not to mind about the acrid smells coming from the oven, or the fact that the candle had just shed its waxy load over the polished candlesticks.
Where was Mrs. Pludd when one needed her?
she thought, trying to jolly herself into a better mood, because she’d put the pie in miles too early and had to turn the oven off and on twice since seven-thirty.

She moved into the sitting room and sat in the armchair nearest the front door. She’d put on a pale peach print floaty dress, something feminine, she’d reasoned, to offset the new hair, and her prettiest pearl earrings—they’d been inherited from her grandmother, a famous beauty with the same fine skin as Rose—a dab of Devonshire violets behind her ears. And now she sat feeling foolish and alone, an actress with no audience. She kicked off the silk shoes that she and Mummy had bought that day in London. The sight of them brought a pang. How childish that girl seemed to her now that she drank
whiskey and slept every night with a man and knew about five different kinds of pudding.

When the car door slammed at a quarter to nine, she leaped to her feet. Jack walked in smelling of alcohol. When he looked at her hair again he winced—or was she imagining this?—as if to tell her in code that he still minded and she was not forgiven.

“Hello, darling,” she said in the same sensible voice her mother used when her father was fractious. “Would you like a drink before supper? It’s steak and kidney pie.”

“No, thanks,” he said, “I’m very hungry.” He looked toward the smoke billowing out of the kitchen.

Rose was trembling as she drew the curtains on the blackness of the night and lit an oil lamp. Earlier, she’d tried to make their dining room look special, which wasn’t easy with its rush matting and mismatched furniture. She’d got Shukla to polish the cutlery and put the last three sprays of bougainvillea in a vase on the table.

Jack picked up the vase. “D’you mind if I move these?” he said. “The smell puts me off my food.”

Well, bougainvillea didn’t smell but never mind.

“Not at all,” she said serenely. “Put them on the sideboard.”

Then Dinesh, proud as a show pony, burst from the kitchen holding the steak and kidney pie; he was thrilled to be serving Jack’s favorite dish.

Shukla, too shy to meet their eyes, scuttled in carrying the vegetables. The spinach had disappeared into algae like pools of slime.

“Shall we start?” There was an explosion of crumbs as Rose plunged her knife into the pie. Sawing through the crust, she talked brightly and emptily for a while about what fun it had
been seeing Tor and how she’d like to have her to come and stay and that maybe they could all go hunting.

“Well, ask her then,” Jack said without any particular enthusiasm. She knew for sure now that he didn’t like Tor much, and to be fair to Jack, although she didn’t much feel like it at this moment, Tor did ham it up a bit in front of him—teasing him too much and becoming a little artificial and loud—but then you had to know Tor to realize that this was what she did when she felt shy or out of her depth.

“I’m sure we can find her a horse.”
If we have to,
he may as well have added.

There was another scattering of crumbs as he put his knife into his pie.

They chewed in silence for a while. Rose was humiliated: the pie was so disgusting—the meat high, the gravy full of white lumps where the flour had been carelessly stirred.

Jack took a sip of wine and looked away from her. The servants stood at the kitchen door waiting for his reaction. She put her knife and fork down with a bang.

“Don’t eat it, Jack,” she said. “It’s absolutely revolting.”

She felt a huge tear roll down her cheek. He kept on eating.

“It’s edible,” he said. “Just.”

“It’s vile. Please would you send the servants to bed?” She stared at the tablecloth and more tears fell. It was torture to her being seen like this.

Jack stood up and sighed heavily. He walked to the kitchen door. “
Jao! Jaldi,
Durgabai, and Dinesh, memsahib and I want to be alone.”

When the door was closed, he sat down beside her.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I’m behaving like a perfect fool.” She gave a whoop of misery and wiped her eyes on her napkin.

“Whatever is the matter, Rose?”

“You hate my hair, don’t you?” she cried out bitterly.

“Well,” he looked dumbstruck, “since you ask, no, I don’t like it much, but for God’s sake, Rose, don’t ever cry in front of servants like that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He stood up and walked toward the window. She looked at his back, suppressing an urge to shout that of course it wasn’t just her stupid hair.

Her chair scraped as she got up. “I think I’ll go to bed if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I think you should.”

“I don’t normally behave like this,” she said at the door.

“Good,” he said, without a smile, before she closed it.

Crying, she discovered that night, this sort of comfortless, adult crying, made your eyes swell and gave you a ravenous thirst.

But just before dawn, when she’d all but convinced herself the marriage was a disaster, he’d come to her from the spare room where he’d been sleeping. He got into their bed, put his arms around her and muttered, “Oh, my poor Rose, please don’t.”

Which had made it worse. She’d said with a spluttering laugh, “You must think you’ve married a madwoman.” She’d put her hot cheek against his chest, and hugged him blindly.

“But this
is
different.” His voice boomed out from his chest. “It’s hard. I do forget that.”

She wanted him to keep holding her like this. It was all she wanted. But then she felt him lift her nightdress and stroke the inside of her thighs and do all the other things that still made her feel so embarrassed.

“Don’t fight me, Rose,” he said. “Let me—”

And for the first time, she felt a definite something, not the overwhelming thing she’d dreamed of—the absence of which
had so disappointed her on her honeymoon—but a glimpse of some animal comforts being given and received, something better than words.

“Now, stop that, you silly creature,” he’d teased her afterward. “That’s quite enough of that.”

“I never cry,” she’d reassured him again. “Ask Tor.”

“I will, next time I see her.” He’d stroked her breasts.

And they’d slept for the first time in each other’s arms.

W
hen Frank phoned Viva to say that he was back in Bombay and wanted to come and see her, Viva didn’t answer at first.

“Frank from the ship,” he prompted her. “Do you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you,” she said. She was smiling and felt a flush of heat.

“I’d like to come and see you and talk to you about Guy Glover.” Frank sounded guarded. “Something’s cropped up that I think you should know about.”

“Oh no, not Guy,” she said. “What’s he done now?” She heard him breathe down the phone, a kind of sigh.

“I’ll tell you when I see you, but don’t be alarmed.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I try never to think of him.” There was a thump at the other end as if he was about to hang up.

“How are you, Frank?” she said. “Where are you living? Did you manage to find a job?” Why was she sounding so formal, almost as if she was interviewing him, when in fact she
was grinning because it was good to hear his voice again even though he sounded a little strange himself?

“I’ve been doing some research up north,” he said. “We’ve been running clinics out in the country near Lahore, mostly with children, but our grants ended so I’m back in Bombay for a few months. I’m at the Gokuldas Tejpal Hospital.”

“Where’s that?”

“Not far from the Cruickshank Road. How about you?” The brisk tone in his voice had softened.

“I’m very well, thank you.” She’d made up her mind not to tell anyone about how awful those first few weeks had been—the closest she’d ever felt to a nervous collapse. “It was hard at first, but now I’m working at a children’s home and I’m writing a bit and I have my own room in Byculla—nothing fancy but mine.

“Does Guy know my telephone number?” she said, when he didn’t respond to this. “Has something happened I should know about?”

“Not for discussion over the phone.” Frank’s voice had lowered almost to a whisper. “Can I come and see you? What time do you get back from work?”

She worked out quickly how long it would take her after work to wash, to dress, to do her hair, and look presentable and then was annoyed with herself. What on earth did it matter what she looked like?

“I’m busy tonight,” she said. “How about tomorrow?”

He said tomorrow was fine.

She gave him her address and he rang off. When she took her hand away from the phone her fingers were wetly imprinted on it, like a starfish in the sand.

After she’d spoken to him she stood and looked at her room, trying to see it through his eyes. When she’d first arrived, less
than a month ago, she’d thought the tiny room horrible, even frightening, a true sign that she had come down in the world and would probably go down further.

The room was free, as Daisy had promised, and its location, above Mr. Jamshed’s shop on Jasmine Street, was central, but with its badly painted walls against which lizards darted at night, its one naked lightbulb, the thin rush matting, and the curtain with the gas cooker behind, it had reminded her of the meanest kind of London bedsit, only sticky and hot. On her first night here, she’d sat out on her tiny balcony smoking a cigarette and looking down on the nondescript street, wondering what madness had brought her here.

The next day, she’d scrubbed her room until it was spotless. She’d burned a stick of sandlewood incense to take the smell of old food away. She’d put her parents’ quilt on the bed; its squares of red, green, and purple silk lit up like stained glass when the sun rose, throwing patterns of light on the floor.

Daisy came on the second night with an embroidered cushion, a Persian poem, and a bunch of hyacinths in her hands.

When of thy worldly goods

Thou find thyself bereft,

And from the goodly store

Two loaves alone are left.

Sell one, and with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

Viva had framed the poem and hung it above her bed in a carved frame.

The following weekend, she and Daisy had gone to the Chor Bazaar—the Thieves’ Market—and bought cutlery and a kettle and a fine-looking chair that she’d recovered in an old Kashmiri shawl. She’d found an old blue and green enameled mirror, which she’d put above the sink. At last, the room felt like hers.

On her first night, Mr. Jamshed, a well-educated Parsee, who was large and jolly and noisy, had beckoned her impatiently over the threshold of the household as though she was some tardy prodigal daughter. He’d made her sit in a chair near his window so she could see his racing pigeons fly through peach-colored light and brought her chai to drink. He’d introduced her to his daughters, Dolly and Kaniz, beautiful confident girls who bobbed their hair and wore lipstick and evidently ran rings around their father. “They are very much for teasing me,” he’d told Viva, his eyes shining with pride and delight.

Mrs. Jamshed, plump and shy at first, had insisted she stay for dinner and they’d sat around a long table in the courtyard and piled her plate with a stuffed fish covered in a leaf, and rice and vegetables, and then, later, a sweet custard pudding, until she felt she would burst. It was Mrs. Jamshed who later introduced her to the Indian word
russa,
a way of cooking and serving food with love, and who warned her that unless she left some food on her plate she would go on and on being served in an Indian house until she felt like bursting.

That night, full and happy, she’d lain down in her new bed and looked at the stars shining through her scruffy curtains, and thought with shame of the hospitality she had so grudgingly meted out to anyone who’d turned up at Nevern Square, even wanting a cup of sugar. Particularly if she was writing. She squirmed to think what a frosty welcome the Jamsheds, so well educated and courtly in their manners, would receive in London, where few landladies would give them a bed. The kindness they’d shown had humbled her. She had so much to learn.

Her job at the Tamarind Home in Byculla began two days later. She’d taken the job with the quite cynical intention of earning
enough money to write, perhaps get some good stories, and then go up to Simla, and get what she now thought of as “that damned trunk.” It hadn’t worked out like that.

She got off the bus full of trepidation that first morning. The Tamarind Home, which looked dark and dilapidated from a distance, had once belonged to a wealthy flower merchant. Up close its elegant windows, half-eaten carvings, elaborate iron railings now rusting, showed a faded beauty in decline.

She’d been shown around its dark corridors and spartan dormitories by Joan, a cheerful Scottish midwife who said she was going upcountry soon to do a survey on village midwives and their mortality rates.

Joan told her they had room for fifteen to twenty girls here, and that they were mostly orphans, some abandoned at their gates and some found by a team of volunteers who went out three times a week in search of children who might need a temporary roof over their heads. A few boys were allowed in, but they preferred to keep the sexes apart. “Makes everybody’s life easier,” she said with a cheerful wink.

The home was open to Muslim and Hindu alike, and the aim was to eventually return children either to their families or to suitable homes.

“Don’t get the idea we’re doing them some great favor,” Joan said. “If they’re starving, they’re grateful for the food, but some hate being dependent on our charity, particularly the older ones. Some would actually prefer to stay in the meanest slum than come here.”

Joan said that Thursday was an open clinic day when the general public could come in and be seen to by a splendid team of volunteer doctors, some European, some Indian. Children who needed more specialist attention could be seen for free at the Pestonjee Hormusjee Cama Hospital for women and children, which was up the road.

It was clear from the peeling plaster on the walls and the
lack of furniture that the whole enterprise ran on a shoestring. What money the charity could raise was spent on clinics for sick children. While they were walking across the courtyard, a fluttering, cooing troop of small girls in brilliant saris suddenly landed beside them, touching Joan, and smiling and laughing at Viva. “They want to sing you a song,” Joan explained. When they’d burst into song, Viva thought,
You never see Europeans with their eyes this bright, their smiles so wide.
Poor they might be, but they burst with life.

At lunch, eaten at trestle tables in the courtyard with the children, she was introduced to Clara, an Irish nurse who was large and pale and freckled and struck her as being a bit of a sourpuss. She slapped the dhal onto plates, and while the children tucked in, said in a resentful aside that she’d worked in another orphanage in Bombay and “sure, this place is the Ritz compared to that.”

Joan explained how some Indian orphanages were terrifying places where children got severely beaten or the girls sold off to old men. “It’s taken us a long time to gain the trust of the local people. We always have to be very, very careful, don’t we, Clara?” but Clara had refused to smile. She’d given Viva a funny look as if to say, “You don’t fit in here,” and every time, in the days to come, that Viva was put on a shift with Clara she felt like an apprentice misfit and very self-conscious in the part.

What
was
she doing here? She wasn’t a nurse, she wasn’t a charity worker, she wasn’t even sure she liked children very much. What she mostly felt in those early days was a sense of being on the run, mainly from herself.

Things changed. On her second day, Clara took her to see the row of children waiting to be assessed by the visiting doctor. The children stood behind locked gates, barefoot and ragged,
one or two of them had looked at her with a wild desperation in their eyes. They’d salaamed her, made small chewing gestures with their mouths, tried to touch her through the railings. Every single one of them seemed to be saying “Help me.”

One of the girls broke into a wild torrent of words to Clara. “Her mother died a few months ago,” Clara explained to Viva. “She’s walked here from a village seventy-five miles away. Her father is dead, too, and her relatives don’t want her.”

And Viva had felt a shaming, a husking of the soul—the task of helping seemed so overwhelming and she was trained for nothing.

They gave her easy things to do at first. Joan told her to sit at a table in the courtyard and when the children arrived she, with the help of a local woman who worked as an interpreter, recorded their names in a large leather ledger. She noted the date they came in, their address, if any, and who assessed them, what drugs they were to have and whether the doctor wanted them back. They hardly ever did.

There were never enough doctors to go around. Joan, Clara, and occasionally Daisy did what they could with limited medical supplies and referred really sick cases to the hospital.

On her first day at this job, halfway through the morning, the wonderfully reassuring Daisy Barker had bounced through the gates, completely at home here and followed by a line of chirping little girls who fought to bring her a glass of water. She sat down beside Viva. “Surviving?” she’d asked.

“I’m fine,” Viva had said, but she’d felt shaken to the core.

For that morning, a crowd of pleading children had become individuals. She’d met Rahim, an intense, angry-looking Muslim boy, pockmarked and lean, whose father had been doused in petrol and fatally burned in what Clara thought was a gangland dispute. Rahim had wanted to leave his six-year-old sister
while he went away and tried to make some money. He could no longer feed her: she’d been ill with flu and he was frightened to keep her with him on the streets. When they parted, the boy had touched his sister gently on the arm; she’d watched his thin child’s body walk back down the street before it disappeared into the crowd.

“Couldn’t he have stayed, too?” she’d asked Joan.

“He was ashamed,” she had answered. “He wants to get her out as soon as he can.”

She’d met Sumati, aged twelve. After her mother had died of tuberculosis, she’d tried to support a family of four younger brothers and sisters by taking rags from a rubbish dump, but was now worn out.

Around lunchtime an explosion of noisy boys, naked except for loincloths, had run in on their tough bare feet—for the home also ran a lunchtime soup kitchen, mostly staffed by local women. Most of the boys slept rough, Daisy explained, in cardboard boxes near the railway line. They walked for miles each day to have this one small bowl of rice and dhal and piece of fruit, and to use the cold tap in the courtyard to clean their teeth with their fingers and wash themselves, which they did with great thoroughness and modesty. Daisy said they thought themselves the luckiest fellows alive to be allowed to do this.

“It makes you think, doesn’t it?” she said. It certainly did.

“You know, one day,” Daisy said before she left, “you might write more than their names in a book. You could write their stories.”

On the Monday of her second week there, things changed again. Fat Joan, breathless and scarlet in the face from running across the courtyard, came with news that “all hell had broken loose” in a nearby slum behind the cotton factory.

A water pipe had burst, twenty had already been drowned. Half an hour later a stream of slum dwellers arrived on foot, in rickshaws, in old taxis, in carts, plastered in a foul-looking mud; many crying and pleading for help.