East of the Sun (50 page)

“Glad that we can all spend Christmas together…” but his arm had tightened around her and he spun her around.

“No,” he said. “Not like that. I’ve had this feeling about you, for days and days now, that you’ve been so alone and I can’t bear it anymore.”

“Don’t.” She put her hand over his mouth, felt the softness of his lips. “Wait till we get to the hut,” she said, “and I’ll tell you what I can.”

Their footsteps had quickened and when they came to a small slatted bridge, he took her hand and helped her over it. On the other side, there was a shrine with candles burning inside it, set up underneath a twisted oak tree. There was a plate filled with oranges and pieces of fruit in front of it, which the squirrels had half eaten. Behind the shrine was a grass clearing, and a white wooden summerhouse.

“Quick.” He pulled her inside and when she shut the door behind him, she felt her blood leap.

The hut, which smelled pleasantly of cedar and incense, was simple and bare. There was a desk in the middle of the room with a pad of paper on it and some pencils, a charpoy with some faded cushions, a set of cricket stumps propped up against the wall.

“It belongs to one of the masters,” Frank explained. “He’s on holiday; Tor says we’re safe here.”

When he lit the oil lamp, turning the wick down low, she saw his long brown fingers, the blond brown hairs on his forearms and shivered again. She’d never felt so out of control, so alive.

“Sit down,” he said. “With me.” He pulled her down beside him on the charpoy under the window.

“I’ve been so worried about you,” he whispered. “It nearly killed me. I—”

He put his hands under her hair and kissed her—a long slow kiss that felt like a claiming. When she came up for air,
her shoe had fallen off and every cell in her body felt alive and singing. It was terrifying.

He put his head quietly beside hers, a moment of submission to everything most feared, most wanted.

“Stop,” he said suddenly. “Talk to me first. What happened in Simla?”

She took a deep breath and began by telling him about the trunk—trying to make a story of it at first.

“I mean, really, it was almost a joke—a few sodden bits of clothes, my father’s false teeth. And when I think how long I’d put off seeing it.”

She told him about seeing their old family house again—Hari had taken her on their way to the railway station. How irrelevant it had looked standing in the mist, all neglected and forlorn with the woods around it, and most of the veranda gnawed away by damp. She didn’t tell him about the swing, hanging uselessly by one rope and with a bird’s nest inside, the swing where she and Josie had spent hours and hours together, or their upstairs bedroom with the old-fashioned wallpaper, birds and trees and fruit, torn now and discolored, but still visible from the garden. Two trees had fallen down over the garden path; outside the house all the gutters were either broken or clogged with dark leaves.

And that was it. No ancient retainers had rushed out to tell her stories from her past, no neighbors who remembered them, no further clues, just the dense forest closing in on a borrowed house, as if that had been its purpose all along.

She told him how, on her last day, Mrs. Waghorn had taken her to the Sanjauli cemetery where they were buried, and she’d seen all three of them for the first time, laid out in a row. It was peaceful there. The wind in the pines made a shushing sound like gentle waves, the sky a pearly white. She’d weeded the graves and put the flowers into a vase she’d brought and filled with water from the stream that ran nearby.

Someone had misspelled her mother’s name on the gravestone and called Josie Josephine, which nobody ever had as far as she could remember.

He listened to this intently, his green eyes trained on her. When his hand tightened on hers, she felt heat rise in her and was not ashamed.

“So,” he said when she had finished, “maybe in the end it was a good thing; maybe it helped to set your mind at rest, somewhat,” he’d added uncertainly.

He looked so anxiously protective when he said that, she knew this was a turning point. One part of her brain was telling her,
People keep things hidden from each other all the time: the soothing lie could be told, no one need ever be the wiser,
but another part of her recognized that if she fudged this, some door would be slammed inside her forever.

She looked at him. “My mother took her own life.”

Mrs. Waghorn had added more details before they’d parted, and now, it was a great comfort to tell him as simply and fully as she could. “When I was nine or ten years old, she got malaria. She recovered, but apparently got very homesick and low in spirits. When I think of it now, she must have been reeling from Josie’s death and then my father’s. I’d never really thought of it like that before.

“She rode a horse up to a hut on the ridge, half a mile north of Wildflower Hall—a beautiful place where you can see the Himalayas, and also the two rivers. She used to go up there sketching. I’d ridden up there with her myself a couple of times. In springtime you could see the most incredible flowers: celandine, and March marigold, tiny dwarf cyclamen, wild strawberries. She’d left a note saying how much she’d loved us all, but that her life was no longer bearable. ‘Sustainable’ was the word she’d actually used. She must have stayed on the side of the mountain until she’d frozen to death. She’d left a couple of hay nets for the horse, so it would have something to eat
until somebody found her.” That somebody, Viva had thought about this later, could just as easily have been a tiger or a vulture as a man. They were after all in India.

He put his arms around her. He stroked her hair.

“I had no idea,” she told him, wild-eyed. “I’d been so angry with her for so long. I’d blamed her for everything, and almost everything I said about her was a complete lie. You were right to tell me to go back.”

“Don’t you think most people make their parents up?” he said. “When you’re a child, you’re not really ever interested in them, and later, if you talk to them at all, you have all the wrong conversations. Oh, my love.”

He leaned over and wiped away the tears on her face.

“You don’t have to say it all tonight if it’s going to hurt you,” he said. “Let it come out bit by bit.”

And she had a spacious sense that this was right. There would be time to talk, and, at last, she could tell the truth. Later, in her room, stunned and wide awake, she thought of something else along these lines: that if you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth to—shell and egg. People like Frank, and Rose and Tor. And that these people held the essence of you inside them, just as Mrs. Waghorn had held the essence of her mother inside her. The rest would be conversations with people that ended when night fell, or the dinner party ended.

“Come here,” he said when she’d finished. He put his arms around her and rocked her.

“But the point is,” she told him fiercely, “no one can ever really say why she did it. We want a simple explanation and what if there isn’t one? What if all you can say is sometimes awful things happen to the best people? I think it’s better to throw up your hands than try and square everything up.”

“Do you want me to tell Tor and Rose for you?” he asked.
“They were so worried about you in Simla, they had a sense something like this might happen.”

“How did they know?” She was genuinely amazed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Friends are another mystery.”

“Not yet,” she said, all this emotion had made her feel momentarily giddy and off center. “I want to show you something first. Look.”

She tipped the blue woman into the palm of his hand where it lay between his lifeline and his thumb.

“Something else I didn’t know about her: she was a sculptor. She made this.”

And later, she realized this was another kind of turning point between them, that if he’d flipped the little figure over and said something polite and automatic, she wouldn’t have been able to stand there feeling such pride, such a strong sense that she could hold her head up high.

He turned it over, his brown-blond hair forming for a moment a screen between her and the blue woman.

And she could tell by the way he was looking at it that he understood, and that as far as anyone is really safe in this world, she would be safe in his hands.

S
he and Frank had walked back together through the darkness, his lamp glancing off the poplar trees, the shrine, the silver band of the river. Holding hands all the way, they’d taken the red dirt road back to Tor’s house for supper. He’d stopped near the wooden bridge and pulled her behind a jasmine bush for a long, slow kiss that, even when she thought of it now, made her go weak at the knees.

She knew that for the rest of her life when she smelled jasmine, she would think of him: his arms around her, the smell of his hair, the way the kisses had changed tempo—gentle at first and then so passionate they’d had to stop, breathless and laughing and amazed.

He said he had never felt anything remotely like this before. She said she felt the same and then felt tears run down the sides of her face.

When they reached the house it was blazing with Christmas lights. What with the lights and the music wafting out, it looked like a mad little pleasure craft against the dense darkness of the trees all around them.

They ate dinner in the small dining room where Tor and Rose had lit candles and set the table with flowers. With her friends all around her, a glass of champagne in her hand and Frank beside her in the candlelight, she’d felt so full of life she could have died.

And what was strange was that she understood something, even then: that the almost electrical charge of that moment would be part of her for the rest of her life. It would be there for her, not always of course, but something you could look back on and believe in. Something she could know about herself—she’d felt the terrifying power of love.

Dinner—roast chicken, rice, champagne, and afterward a dish of lemon fluff—had gone on for hours. There was so much to celebrate, and eventually, they wound up the gramophone and danced barefooted on the veranda. They danced the varsity rag, and then sang “Good-bye England, Hello Bombay,” then Tor cracked open a bottle of crème de menthe, and tried to teach Toby to tango like Valentino in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
When baby Fred woke up he was carried into the dining room by his ayah. They put a Christmas hat on him that the sun had half faded, and even though he was still half asleep, they’d made him chuckle, which was never hard to do. He was a jolly Bob, and when she’d looked at Frank she’d known with certainty that sooner or later they would have children.

Three weeks later, she moved with Frank into a flat in Colaba. The small three-roomed flat cost one hundred rupees, about ten pounds, a month to rent. It had a wide half-glassed balcony on the front of it from where you could glimpse, if you stood up and leaned to the right, the sea, the boats, and the misty outlines of Elephanta Island.

This was the island where the caves were full of what Tor called “socking great” sixth-century carvings of the Hindu gods
Shiva and Parvati. Colossal, magnificent, they showed the gods making love and playing dice, quarreling and laughing. In the center of the cave there was a gigantic and exuberant stone phallus, which confirmed, without shame, that this is it: life, and where we come from. It was given a wide berth by guides with parties known to include delicate English women.

Reaching the caves took several journeys: water had to be crossed, a mountain climbed, and a cave entered. It was no easy matter, but they’d been there twice already, taking a picnic lunch, which they ate on the island. In the first flush of love, she adored making him food. She’d iron for him, kissing the collars, ridiculously in love.

During the hot days, as she sat on her own veranda, shaded by a bamboo blind, Viva often glanced across the sparkling water and toward the island. Typing and looking, typing and looking, imagining the island, the harbor, the boats coming and going.

Finishing the book had almost been a condition of her marriage. She’d come back from Amritsar certain most of her notes had been destroyed. He said she must try again.

A few days later, when she’d gone back to work at the home, she found a pile of crumpled notes in her washstand drawer, and it turned out that Daisy had kept another chunk of the torn and defaced pages in an envelope just in case she could ever face them again.

When the children heard their stories had been revived, they got excited about the book all over again and began drawing pictures for it and writing poems. They’d helped her stick the notes together, and filled in any gaps. Once they’d started, the job had not been huge.

And it was here, on April 12, 1930, that she typed the full stop that ended her book.
Tales from the Tamarind: Ten Bombay Children Tell Their Stories.

Frank, who was back working shifts at the Gokuldas Te
jpal Hospital until his new research project began, was in their bedroom when she typed the last full stop. She stood up to ease the crick in her back. She took the pages in her arms and hugged them to herself for a moment, and then she walked into their room, put the book on the bedside table and got into bed with him.

“It’s done,” she said. “I’ve finished.”

“Good,” he said. He took her in his arms and held her tight. “Good,” he said again.

There were tears in his eyes and in hers. He’d known all along how important this would be.

And lying there in the crook of his arm, she felt how much lighter she’d become in the last few months. Really, it was incredible. Like a great big stone lifted off her chest. So much had changed.

Frank was on the early shift the next morning. She got up with him at five-thirty in the morning and made him scrambled eggs on toast. After he’d eaten, they sat together on the balcony drinking coffee and watched the fishing boats coming in with their night’s catch. And beyond them, just breasting the line of the horizon, they could see another P&O liner on its way to India. They came only twice a month now. Watching the scattered lights come into focus, she remembered standing with her group: Tor and Rose, Frank and Guy. Poor Nigel, the young civil servant who’d read them the “Ithaka” poem, had gone—he’d taken his life in Chittagong during the rainy season just as he’d predicted he might. “Oh de painin’, oh de pain,” they’d sung to tease him.

She remembered their uncertain hymns, the wheezing harmonium, the childlike paleness of Rose’s face, and poor old Guy—hard to imagine him square-bashing in England now.

“I’ve got some strong paper in my desk,” said Frank. They’d
been talking about the safest way to send her book back to London. “I’ll help you wrap it and if you like, we can drop it off at Thomas Cook later.”

“Yes,” she said. She felt a fizzing elation, a drunken feeling of relief at having finished the book. He’d seen what she needed, she hadn’t. When you’re used to looking after yourself, you don’t always get it right.

Three weeks after that, they were married in the Bombay Registry Office. The churches were all booked up that weekend, which was fine with them since neither of them was formally religious anyway. They’d decided to hold the reception at the children’s home at Tamarind Street, which was still, by a miracle, open, although the authorities were threatening to close it in June of that year.

On the morning of the wedding, half dreaming, half awake, she experienced the old familiar corkscrewing pain: it was her wedding day, Josie and her parents should have been there, but the moment came and went more calmly now. What she’d come to understand, what India had helped her see, was that mourning was no crime. It wasn’t her feeling all boo-hoo sorry for herself, or being disgustingly self-engrossed, it was what you had to do to go on.

And she knew that for the whole of the rest of her life, there would be moments—today for instance, or when her children were born, or when something trivial came up that she longed to tell them about—when she would have to love them and leave them over and over again.

Three people came to the registry office: Daisy, wearing a new purple hat and sensible shoes, and Tor and Toby, who’d taken the train down from Amritsar because the old Talbot had finally died and they were too poor to replace it. Tor was the first person Viva saw as they stepped out of the tonga. Tor
jumped up and down on the spot when she first saw her. When she hugged her, she whispered in her ear that she and Toby were having a baby in October.

Rose couldn’t come. In her reply to Viva’s wedding invitation, she said she’d be on a ship on her way home then. Her father had died before Christmas. Her beloved father dead for six weeks before she’d even heard about it. Six weeks! She was mortified to think of her mother suffering on her own.

“I’m staying for a few months to help her pack up the house,” she wrote, “and to introduce her to Freddie.”

Jack, she added, would be staying on in India. She said he would try and come to the wedding.

“He won’t come,” Viva had said to Frank. “Bannu’s miles away and he’s always working.”

“You never know,” Frank had said. “He’ll be lonely without them.” Viva wasn’t sure about that.

But when Viva and Frank arrived for the reception at Tamarind Street, Jack was there. Thinner and older-looking, he stood apart from the cheering children and Tor and Toby, who were madly throwing confetti. When she waved at him, he touched his hat and raised his hand shyly, and she was glad to see him.

There was no time to talk. Talika, Suday, and a chattering, laughing group of children dragged her back up to her old room overlooking the tamarind tree. The girls dressed her in pale green, explaining that green was an auspicious color for a Bombay girl to be married in. They put green glass bangles around her wrists, took her Western shoes off, helped her bathe her feet and put a fine silver toe ring around her big toe. As they brushed her hair and darted and scampered around her, she felt that sense of physical lightness again. It was as though she and the children had been lifted up above the treetops; they were flying like kites or birds, like some pure physical expression of joy.

Down in the courtyard, the drums had started again, a flute. A fire had been lit in a brazier and placed in the middle of the paving stones.

Talika ran to the window. “They’re ready for you,” she said.

And Viva, looking at Talika, remembered the pathetic little scrap she’d bathed on her second day at the home. How the child, on the day her own tragedy struck, had struggled with a broom twice her size, determined to do something useful.

Talika’s eyes glowed as she held the corner of her sari. On their way downstairs she had to talk fast to tell her all her news. She told her how she’d performed the Shiva
puja
so Viva could find a good husband, how she’d drawn a picture for her and hoped it might go in the book. And Viva, looking into those eager, forward-looking eyes, saw in a jolting moment how much she owed this child, how much she’d taught her.

There was another surprise in the courtyard: Mr. Jamshed, plumper than ever and wearing an embroidered tunic, stepped forward and handed her flowers and a box of Turkish delight. Behind him was Mrs. Jamshed holding a dish of some elaborate-looking rice and Dolly and Kaniz, hair freshly shingled and looking as though they’d stepped from the pages of
Vogue
magazine in their silk dresses and smartly buttoned shoes. They were grinning their heads off.

For reasons she would probably never fully understand, they’d forgiven her. More than forgiven her. Daisy explained that Mrs. Jamshed had got up early to help supervise the cooking of a special feast for them: a fish curry served on glistening banana leaves, all kinds of
pakwans,
desserts,
modak,
and dumplings with coconut, all laid out on long tables in the courtyard.

The feast took two hours, and after it, much giggling and jangling behind a thin rattan curtain, and then Talika had appeared resplendent in a tangerine sari.

She cleared her throat.

“Miss Wiwa, this is our special dance for you,” she’d announced, and with a stern glance toward the troop of little girls, they’d appeared. Each girl had worn a red, an amber, or an orange sari. The hundred little bells worn around their ankles had made a thrilling shivery sound you felt in your spine as they’d walked around the perimeter of the tamarind tree, the boys sweeping the path before them. Musicians appeared: fat boy Suday, playing tabla, a trumpeter from Byculla. And then the music and dance had exploded, the girls stamping and twirling, their arms graceful as saplings in the wind. When the music stopped, Talika singing in her reedy voice had prompted Viva:

“Aaja Sajan, Aaja.

Aaja Sajan, Aaja.

Come to me my lover, come to me.

Come to me my lover, come to me.”

When Frank held her hand tightly, Viva knew he wanted to kiss her, but they held back, not wanting to shock the children. Barefoot, they’d walked around the sacred fire four times, praying for long life, harmony, peace, and love.

After the ceremony, Viva made a point of going over to speak to Jack, who was sitting on his own looking amused and watchful. But when she sat down beside him, she saw that what she’d taken to be English reserve was in fact an attempt to control some violent emotion. He was swallowing hard and clearing his throat. His big hands were wrestling with each other and he was sweating under the arms of his khaki shirt.

“Well done,” he said in a constricted voice. “First class.”

“I wish Rose could have been here,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be here without her.”