Monsoon Summer (10 page)

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PART TWO
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Cochin,

South India

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CHAPTER 12
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N
ew husband, new country, new climate, new mother-in-law, and whoopee! one hundred and seven new relatives all speaking a new language. When I opened my eyes in room four of the Malabar Hotel in Fort Cochin, I closed them again quickly. I lay in an elaborately carved rosewood bed, a dazzling light stabbing my eyes. The fan above me shifted air that smelled of the sea and old drains, and still feeling the sway and tilt of the sea in my blood, I longed to go back to that dreamy indeterminate place where it was just Anto and me on the ship together.

I could hear Anto splashing around in the vast antiquated bathroom next to our room. The concentrated energy with which he washed every part of his beautiful honey-colored body was a source of silent fascination to me. Ears, teeth, armpits, toes, nothing was missed, then the fierce scrubbing of the nails, the startling garglings when his tonsils got sluiced.

Once, during our early days on the ship, I'd called through the bathroom door, “You're worse than a girl.” The door had opened and he'd given me an odd, intimidating look, and I'd made a mental note not to joke about this again.

I looked at my watch. Nine o'clock and I was already slippery with sweat. A slender lizard dashed up the wall. From the bathroom: splash, gargle, throat clearing, the slap of a towel. We'd made love twice during the night, but now my brain was waking, fear was releasing like a drug in my veins.

We'd come alive on the ship. Released from home, from war, rationing, people, we'd made our tiny cabin a secret cave where, on some nights, we'd gone to a level of wildness and freedom with each other that left us both gasping, laughing, speechless, and a little afraid. And knowing in some secret cell of myself that we might never be this free again, I'd stored it all inside me: the hours lying in deck chairs on the top deck, dreaming between sea and sky; the flaming sunsets; the new cities; our small cabin on F deck with the salt-smelling sea racing by. Long, whispered conversations; fresh fruit, the new taste of mangos, bananas, melons; moonlit walks with the night skies so close and bursting with stars; cocktails in the Sunshine Bar.

We lived like kings and made no new friends on the ship. We only wanted us; now the thought of sharing Anto with dozens of inquisitive strangers made me pant with alarm.

It's an adventure, I tried to tell myself, but my insides were swirling. Now that we were back to some sort of reality, I found myself worrying about my mother again. After staying in a more or less permanent sulk since our wedding, she'd promised, in a special cracked voice, to come to Tilbury to see us off. On the day we left, she'd worn her tweed traveling suit and a beautiful silk scarf. The paleness of her makeup, the scarlet lipstick gave her face a startling, almost Oriental look—like a Kabuki actress in a play. She'd toyed with her food over breakfast and later, in the freezing hall, announced, “I'm not coming to the station with you. I'm too busy here.”

She'd flung me a look of wild accusation. “Thank you for ruining my life,” she might as well have added, and then she gathered herself up, pecked my cheek, and said in a stagy drawl, “So, the very best of British, darling,” possibly for the benefit of that old bat Ci Ci, who was peeping around the door, her eyes full of a kind of malicious glee at the horrors ahead for both of us.

“Don't forget to let me know how it goes,” my mother had con
tinued in the same vein, as if I'd planned nothing more than a trip to the dentist. “There's a pet.”

God, I was furious. “I will. Thank you, Mummy,” I said.

I knew my mother well enough to know she became more En­glish than the English when she was scared, but this was more than I could stand. She ignored Anto altogether, didn't even shake his hand, and at the moment when I needed her most, I hated her for playing to the gallery.

Ci Ci contrived an equally stagy farewell: “Darling honeybun, farewell,” she'd cried with more warmth that she'd ever showed me before. The clawlike hands she wrapped around my shoulders smelled of nicotine and her large ring nicked my cheek. She'd kissed me for the first time ever. “Give 'em hell,” she'd added, a remnant maybe from some cowboy film she'd watched.

Daisy stood apart and watched us, warily and sadly. She knew the limits of her own embracing hospitality. And it was Daisy who drove us to the railway station, the back seat of the Morris stacked high with our luggage, and the boot jammed with medical supplies for the charity, labeled Not Wanted on Voyage. Two large tea chests had gone ahead of us.

The fields were frozen on either side of us, and the sky without color. Daisy broke the silence. “She'll miss you, Kit, I know she will.”

“Do you think she'll write?” I was too shaken to say much.

“I don't know, but I'll keep you informed, I promise.”

For that moment, I wished Anto wasn't with us in the car, because I'd kept the silly idea in my mind that my mother would crack before she left, and hug me, or give me some kind of blessing, maybe even some more information about my father, because although this trip wasn't like dying, it felt like a point where you wanted to get things straight in your mind. But he was there, looking pensively out of the window, thinking his own thoughts.

During our brief courtship, I was aware that although we'd
thought each other soul mates and talked about many things both small and large—books we liked, films, the war, the life we wanted to live—he'd asked me very little about my background. When I'd raised the subject, knowing he must want to know something, I told him my father had died during the Great War, but I wasn't absolutely sure because my mother didn't like talking about it. He hadn't pressed me for details, and the death of loved ones was such a commonplace since the war, I'd accepted his reticence as tact and been grateful for it.

And later, when I'd tried to take another run at it and be more open, something had always stopped me: a cringe of shame, a sense of guilt, a feeling that my admission might lessen me in Anto's eyes by making him feel he'd been sold a pup, a half-breed at that.

It felt like a long trip to the station. I wiped away a line of condensation from the car window, Anto still silent, and I stared at frozen fields, at ponies with breath like plumes of smoke being fed hay. I thought, Now you're a married woman, you must stop thinking about your parents, because your mind could whirl on this particular hamster wheel forever and it's quite possible you will never know the truth. I took my glove off and put my hand down on the leather seat hoping Anto would hold it, but he was not a natural hand holder.

* * *

Three waiters leapt forward with bowls of fruit and offers of tea or coffee as we walked into the Malabar's cavernous dining room for breakfast. A strange embarrassment came over us because neither of us had stayed in a hotel before, and in between the clinking of our cutlery, I could hear myself making stilted conversation about the furniture (massive, ugly), the fruit (tiny, delicious bananas), and the heat, which was, even this early in the morning, a startling ninety-two degrees.

I was hungry but didn't want to eat too much. Between us we
now had a grand total of one hundred and twenty-three pounds. He'd counted the notes out on our mattress that morning, and I was aware that if I hadn't been there, he would have already been enfolded in the bosom of an ecstatic family and spared the expense of this.

He ordered eggs and bacon for me and something called an appam, a kind of thin, flat pancake, for himself. He wrote the words carefully on a napkin as if for a child.

“Is it lovely to eat that thing again?” I watched him tear it into bite-sized pieces with practiced hands and dip it into what he told me was coconut chutney.

“Yes,” he said. In the awkward silence that followed, I looked around the dining room. Four other Indian couples sat, half-secreted behind the palms or wooden posts. They were absolutely silent; all I could hear was the scrapings of their spoons, their gulps as they drank chai, and the bleak thought came: I wonder if he'll stop talking to me now.

After breakfast, he said we should stroll down to Cochin Harbor and make sure the tea chests had been taken off the ship. After that, we would find a bank, open an account, and change our one hundred and twenty-three pounds into rupees, and I could feel my spirits lightening, as if this anxious in-between day needed a proper job to do to give it shape.

“I'll show you around the old town too.” He smiled the sudden, thrilled smile that made me fall in love with him in the first place, the smile that made his eyes light up, a seam of green and tortoiseshell, and the dimples that made him look about ten again. “And then shall we have lunch, and go back to bed . . .”

He did his Groucho Marx suggestive eyebrows, and I laughed and longed to kiss him but remembered, in the nick of time, not to: on the ship coming out, he'd warned me that in India it wasn't done for a man and a woman to hold hands in public. Not even married people.

* * *

The sun was eye-piercingly bright as we walked, an hour later, towards the Fort Cochin seafront. An old beggar lay half-naked under a tree, his eyes covered in flies, and the smell of old fish rose periodically from the rubbish-strewn drains.

Anto had the look of an eager boy as he picked up speed and rushed towards the dazzling sea, where more ships were coming in, and when we reached the water's edge, I heard him groan and saw him pass his hand over his face.

“Beautiful,” I heard him murmur in a dazed voice. I didn't know what to say. The palm trees, the aquamarine sea, the cloudless blue sky, all looked to me like stage scenery to which the smell of fish and bad drains had been added.

“It hasn't changed a bit,” he said softly, sadly.

“I always think a place will change if I'm not there.” I could hear myself babbling nervously as we walked further down the seafront, when what I really wanted to do was to hug him, to say, “How wonderful—you're home,” or some such, but I felt uncomfortably surplus to requirements. Not Wanted on Voyage, because there was nothing here that spoke to me, not yet.

“My father had his law offices over there,” he said, when we'd got to the end of a stretch of cracked concrete. “Just behind the English Club, there.” He pointed towards an elegant building set back from the seafront and surrounded by lawns. I looked over the hedge at the well-ordered building, with its potted plants and fine shrubs. Now the green, orange, and white flags of the new India fluttered from the veranda.

“Look at it.” Anto seemed stunned. “We thought it the height of elegance when we were children. My brother and I sat in the car while my father had fierce games of chess with his old pal, Hugo Bateman, his English barrister hero. My father usually won. We were proud of that.”

“A nice place to come and play,” was all I could think of.

“Not really.” Anto was squinting at one of the placards, arranged on the veranda, “My father couldn't even enter the club without Mr. Bateman's permission. That was always made clear to us.” He gave a curious lopsided grin.

“What do they say. The signs?”

“Um . . . let me see . . . Malayalam may not come instantly,” he said, a playful mimic again, “Ur . . . well, sorry for this, madam, but ‘Quit India' . . . and ‘India is ours again,' but you, my beautiful Lady Sahib are not to take it personally please. You're my wife,” he added softly, “you are most welcome. Do you like it so far?”

“Yes,” I said, my smile quick and insincere. “Of course I do.” We were passing a group of very old women squatting on their haunches in front of piles of fish laid out on burlap sacking. They stared at me.

“Those,” he told me. “These are the famous Chinese fishing nets.” He pointed towards two skinny old men performing what looked like a lithe and practiced dance as they hauled up large stones and pulleys, followed by a net full of gleaming, jumping fish.

“Our physics master from Ignatius College once brought us here to watch them,” Anto told me. “He said that these nets were ‘a little miracle of design.' A brilliant use of energy and counterbalancing weights. When the stone goes down, the nets go up. No stony, no fishy.”

I smiled at him. I liked the way he knew how things worked, his good memory for certain facts and solid things. It felt masculine to me, another kind of counterbalancing weight.

Next, while we were walking around a drain that oozed what looked like oily manure, he told me that India had once led the world in modern sanitation, that its drains, chutes, cesspits, and clever devices for moving rubbish out of town would be the envy of the modern world today.

He was warming to his theme when he glanced at me and, see
ing my expression, said, “Good pillow talk, hey?” and we burst out laughing, and I was relieved, even for one brief moment, to have my old, clever, funny Anto back again.

On our way back to the hotel, we passed a large Indian family, eight or ten people, padding slowly and companionably down the seafront. The two men, dressed in Western suits, and their wives in violently colored saris of the brightest apricots and pinks and lime greens, their arms covered in bangles.

“Most women here don't wear the sari,” Anto explained to me, pointing to another woman in a plain white long skirt and blouse. “They wear that: the chatta and mundu—quite boring by comparison.”

The gaggle of children who followed them walked backwards to stare at me: the white woman in the white dress with the white hat on.

When one of children—a cheeky-looking boy—muttered something that made the men laugh, a strange little line of poetry (one of my mother's favorites) wafted into my mind.

Oh why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

Missing so much and so much?

O fat white woman whom nobody loves.