Monsoon Summer (18 page)

“I don't know,” I whispered back. Maya pinched her nose in thought. “Maybe she is worrying about the monsoon. It comes at the beginning of June. The streets do flood round here.”

“I don't know. “

“We must patch the holes in the roof to stop the drips.”

“And kill the rats: they've just had babies.”

“Beds for the vimmen?”

“Food and a cook.”

“A blackboard, somewhere for them to sit.”

We exchanged a look of terror. “But I think you're happy to be a proper midwife again?” Maya said, patting my arm, “Not a secretary.”

There were no words to tell her how terrified I felt, because she assumed that I, being English, was better trained, more
knowledgeable than she was. But even thinking about it brought that trapped-bird feeling in my chest again, as my mind tripped back to the baby inside the government-issue tin helmet, its lips turning blue as it gasped for breath. I knew I wanted to try again. I knew it would kill me to get it wrong again.

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CHAPTER 23
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A
fortnight later, Amma called me downstairs.

“Anto has written,” she said tonelessly. She pulled a letter from the folds of her skirt and handed it to me.

“It's open,” I said.

“Of course,” my mother-in-law replied. “He wrote it to all of us.” There was no mistaking the look of triumph in her eyes. The letter, postmarked Madras, was in a cheap brown envelope, the kind you buy in a bazaar with a red frill around its edges. I read it in front of her, trying to control my expression.

Dear Appan, Amma, Kit, and Mariamma,

My apologies for not letting you know sooner that I went for a few days to Madras to find out whether I could get immediate employment here. While here I was asked if I could volunteer to work at a refugee center (Chengalput) near Madras, where there was no functioning telephone line. I did not mean to be away for so long, or to stay here, and I hope I have not worried you all too much, but the need here was so great, it was hard to refuse. I shall come back on the Egmore-to-Quilon train and get a taxi to Trivandrum hopefully around Thursday the eighth. Will wire you exact times later. If convenient for Appan and Amma, perhaps Kit could come down with the driver to collect me at the station.

Loving son,

Anto

“Why has he had to go to Madras?” Amma asked me, her look turning spiteful. “What is he running away from?”

“I don't know,” I said. I didn't want to cry in front of her, but I was so confused that Anto hadn't even managed a postscript for me.

“Were you getting scared he wouldn't come home at all?” she added. Of course I was bloody well scared, I felt like saying, weren't you? We looked at each other.

“Because you hid it very bravely.” Amma smiled a strange, hard smile. Appan, she continued, had traveled for most of their married life, but when he was away, she'd stayed home, prayed, made sure the house was extra clean. I, on the other hand, rushed around like a mad thing caught up in my own work.

“Things have changed so much.” Amma tucked the letter into her blouse. “In my day it was considered disrespectful to even say your husband's name in mixed company.”

Upstairs, I closed the door, ripped off my dusty shirt, lay on the bed, and cried like a child. I was cut to the quick by Anto's curt letter and furious with him for writing to everyone and not to me. Fed up to the back teeth too with Amma and her wonderfully subtle talks about how a wife should behave.

When I heard the supper gong clang, I cleaned myself up, changed my blouse, and went downstairs. Outside, the night with its purple sky and brilliant stars was beautiful, but I was dark inside.

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CHAPTER 24
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O
n the train that took him south, Anto was buttonholed by a Mr. Patel, a cotton manufacturer from Lahore. His new friend, in a shiny tight suit and plumply sprawled over two seats, had noticed English shipping labels on Anto's suitcase. He'd opened an array of greasy packages and offered to share his lunch, and before Anto could decline, Patel had spoken for twenty minutes without drawing breath: the market for cotton was diabolical. Independence, the famine up north, Gandhi's assassination had put a spanner in everyone's works. He personally thought . . . and on and on, while Anto tried to control a mounting distress.

He couldn't stop thinking about Habi, the two-year-old orphan in bed nine at the Madras Refugee Centre where he'd spent the last three weeks. Habi weighed nine pounds; he'd been found in a rubbish tip close to the track where the Bombay express flew. Someone had flung him from the train before or during the massacre. Now he lay in his narrow cot, blank-eyed and with the turkey-loose dry skin typical of malnutrition. Above his head hung a sign: “My name is Habi, please pick me up,” because as the nurse had explained, when they'd first tried to hold him, “he didn't know how to put his arms around us. When he slept he used to clutch his own head.” Anto had been assigned Habi, visiting him twice a day and sometimes leaving a sugar ball on his pillow. The first time he'd touched the child's shoulder, he'd felt him wince, but ten days ago for the first time Habi had squeezed his hand. The nurses had counted this as
a great victory. “It's a big improvement,” one of them had said. “He won't die now.”

Habi had shown him in the starkest possible way what aloneness felt like, and by extension about Kit and how he'd been before he met her. Before her, it was normal for him to go to sleep hugging himself. He'd been so hidden, in spite of the superficial ease, and she'd coaxed him out, and now he seemed to be retreating again into some kind of emotional igloo, and it was desperately unfair to her. These thoughts were muddled up with a kind of anguish about Habi, who would be waiting for him that morning, for his touch, for his sugar ball, and he was on a train going south, once again whizzing between two worlds.

Guilty. He felt so guilty. The camp was run by one doctor, two nuns, and some volunteers; three doctors had died. At the height of the crisis they'd admitted seven hundred patients to fill three hundred beds, sometimes two or three to a bed.

“I'm telling you,” Kanchana, the woman doctor said, “it was like Scutari before your Florence Nightingale moved in.”

“Not my Florence Nightingale,” he'd said. “I'm Indian.”

“Oh, sorry,” she'd teased. “A very posh one, I'm thinking.”

In this place, the admission that he'd spent the whole of the war in England felt like something to hide. So did Kit. Everywhere he'd looked he'd seen glimpses of misery: a woman with a ravaged child at her breast, rags hanging out to dry, a dimly lit tent with four people staring out slack-jawed. Overnight, they'd lost everything.

At first he'd gone into a state of wary numbness that he recognized from the London wards, but once he'd adjusted, his time at the camp had passed in a dizzying round of examining, dosing, stitching, injecting, seeing patient after patient with stab wounds, dysentery, cholera, malnutrition, burns, pneumonia. The director of the camp had begged him to stay on, and he would have, but he had to get home, to a wife who couldn't possibly understand. Why
should she? He wouldn't have believed it had he not seen such horrors with his own eyes.

The train was moving through a tangle of electrical wires and weary shacks on the outskirts of a town whose name he could not read. Out in the open again, the brown dirt horizon blurred and dissolved like a dream, and the world looked liquid and insubstantial. His feet squelched in his shoes, and he had developed a stinging prickly heat rash on his back. He'd forgotten how unbearable the weeks leading up to the monsoon could be: last week, the glass had reached 110 degrees for four days straight. His romantic account of the monsoon to Kit now struck him as another deceit. No mention of the suffocating nights before the rains came, the dying birds, the athlete's foot, the bad temper. What a tour guide he'd turned out to be.

* * *

As the train steamed into the station at Trivandrum, he saw her standing near the chai stall on platform one. Some part of him had hoped to see her in Indian clothes, as a mark of change, but instead, she wore the blue dress he'd once loved. He could see the curve of her patrician nose under the brim of her hat. Her hands clasped together tightly. When she first turned towards him, she squinted, whether to protect her eyes from the sun or in distress, he couldn't tell.

He'd booked a room at the Ambassador Hotel, a peeling, two-story edifice on the seafront.

“Kit.” Aching, sweating, he sat beside her in the family car, close enough now to see the soft down on her cheek, the purple flashes in her brown eyes. He wanted to kiss her, but it was she who turned away, and said with a wary smile at the driver, “Chandy's come down to see his family.”

And later, in their room on the third floor, they stood awkwardly opposite each other. She put her hand on his hair, and said, “You've
lost weight.” When she touched his hip bones, he pulled away involuntarily.

“What's the matter?” she said.

“I don't know,” he said, bewildered by his flash of antagonism. Five minutes ago, he'd longed to take her to bed; now he felt anger at her easy assumption that she could touch him whenever she felt like it. He moved towards the window and lit a cigarette.

“It's very good of you to drive all this way,” he said.

“Don't be silly, it's what we planned.” She looked confused. “I haven't seen you for three and a half weeks. I was starting to think you would never come home.”

“Well,”—he tried to smile back—“I'm here now.”

“Yes,” she said after a long silence. “You're here now.” She shot him a look of pure exasperation. Her voice heated up. “And that's all, is it? No explanation needed about where you've been or, I don't know, a job, or where we're going next?”

He'd never seen her so angry.

“Oh, Kit.” He sat down heavily on the bed. “Do you think I could possibly have a bath first and something to eat? Would that be too much?”

“No, Anto, naturally, it's whatever you want.” She sat down on the opposite side of the bed and pinched her nose.

“Can I talk about it later?”

“Fine.”

“Kit, give me a moment.”

“Whatever you want.” She breathed out noisily. “I'm sure it would be fine with you if I took off for weeks and didn't let you know.”

“Please, Kit.” He tried to take her hand. “I'm sorry. I'm so tired. Was it terribly hot on the way down?”

“Oh really, Anto.” The ghost of a smile as she glanced at him. “ ‘Was it terribly hot on the way down?' You sound like the King.”

“Christ, I hope not,” he said with sudden savagery. He stubbed out his cigarette and threw it out the window.

“Anto,” her voice was tight and as airless as the day. “What in God's name is going on?”

Through the window he could see purplish clouds gathering at the edge of the horizon. The monsoon would be here in a matter of days, and he had a sudden wild wish that it would swamp them all.

“Do you want to stay?” he asked. “Here I mean.”

“Of course I do.” Her voice faltered. “Isn't this our holiday?”

He gazed at her, lost and miserable. Was it a trick of light or time, that the glow he'd once felt in her presence had gone? The Wickam Farm memories—the long whispered conversations, the childish jokes over whose turn it was to have their toes on the hot water bottle, the dream version of India he'd laid out—felt like pure self-indulgence.

He hated this room too: the sagging bed with its stained mosquito net, the uncarpeted tiles, had been all he could afford, a miserable place for what he'd once promised would be a proper honeymoon.

“Kit, I'm sorry but I want to go home,” he said. “The monsoon won't come for a couple of days, we still have time.”

“What home?” She lifted her chin and stared at him defiantly. “Mangalath? Oh, so that's our permanent home now, is it? Thanks for letting me know.”

“I'll need money for our own house, Kit, a proper job.”

“I thought getting a job was the point of your going away. Would it be too forward for me to ask about that?”

“I'm sorry, Kit, I'll explain later. It's complicated.” He had a sudden irrational longing for Downside, the neat line of beds, the company of men, the suppression of violent emotion.

“And I'm sorry too.” She pointed her finger at him without words for a moment. “Because the other thing—the other thing is . . .” Her eyes were flashing, her blue dress patched with sweat. “The other thing is, I have my own work to do, and this may be my only chance for a holiday for a long time, so if you want to go home, you carry on; I'll join you later under my own steam because I'm not
going to simply, meekly,”—she was running out of words—“trot home after you . . . like a . . . like an Indian wife.”

“What do you mean ‘like an Indian wife,' Kit?”

As the air between them grew electric and thrilling; he felt a loosening inside him. If she wasn't prepared to hold back, neither was he.

“Well, the waiting, for one thing; the giving up any sense of yourself, the not taking decisions, the being told what to do, the boredom of it all.” Her smile was bright, sarcastic.

He sat for a long time looking at the floor. “Kit, have I ever told you to give up your job? Have I? So bloody unfair . . . so . . .” He was too angry to form proper words. “You've been allowed to work,” he burst out at last. “All I asked was for you to stay at Mangalath while I was away.”

“ ‘Allowed to work,' ” she repeated. “Lucky old me!”

He put his head in his hands. He wanted to hit her. “What a lot of rot,” he said eventually. “Really. Complete and utter poppycock.” He shook his head. “But since we're talking about it now, how long do you intend to stay there?”

“As long as I can.” Her voice was hard and defiant. “I promised Daisy, and I haven't told you this yet, but quite a few of the things that the Oxford ladies sent out have gone missing. I need to get to the bottom of it.”

“You're heading into murky waters, Kit.” He wiped his sweating face with a handkerchief. “I advise you to stay out of it.”

“Really, thanks for the advice.”

“These are violent times,” he continued in a low voice. “The Home is a controversial place. If things are disappearing, men are almost certainly involved. They will definitely have weapons: guns, knives, lathes, boxes of matches, whatever they can lay their hands on.”

“Anto,” she repeated, “the Home's reopening, the midwives are coming.”

He blew out air, chewed the inside of his lip. A gust of wind
rattled the window. Black cumulus cloud was tumbling and turning in the sky. When he turned and looked at her again, he said, “So is Mangalath that bad? Is there absolutely nothing you like about being here, apart from your work?”

“Nothing.” She put her face in her hands. “Actually, not a thing, now I come to think about it,” she said in a muffled voice. Eventually, he heard her jagged sigh. She lifted her tear-stained face, went to the basin in the corner of the room, ran some rust-stained water, and splashed her face.

“Kit.” He handed her a towel. “This is a terrible time to argue. Before the monsoon—everybody does it.”

She dried her face and looked at him. There was a long silence. “You're right,” she said in a small, expressionless voice. “Let's not.” And after a considering pause, “But it's not just the monsoon. Mangalath is beautiful, the children so sweet, but I would have died of boredom in the last month if it hadn't been for work. The work you seem to want me to give up now.”

“Unfair, Kit.” He walked towards her and took her hand. “Definitely below the belt. All I'm asking is for you to make the family important.”

“Compared to what?” She sounded very weary.

“To work, or to children, when we have them.”

“Anto.” Her voice softened. “We can do both, but not if you keep running away and writing your blasted communal letters.”

“Come here.” He stretched out his arms towards her. “Please.”

“Anto,” she said as she put her arms around him, “was it awful in the camp? I haven't asked you a thing.”

“Not awful for me. I could get out.”

She smoothed his hair and wiped his face. “Let's stay,” she said gently. “Let's talk.”

“Later,” he said. “Not now.” He hated the idea of crying in front of her.

There was a high, round window above her head shaped like a
ship's porthole. Outside he saw dark-purple clouds growing darker, a bird flying across the sky.

“We won't have much choice soon.” He swallowed and hugged her tight. “Monsoon is coming, madam.” His Indian voice. “Act of God now, and by the way,” he added drily, “when you talked earlier about going home under your own steam, what steam were you planning: magic carpet, the jet stream? Who owns the car?”

“Don't make a joke of it, Anto. I still hate you.”

“I know.” He tightened his arms around her. “Poor me.” He felt oddly revitalized by the purity of her anger, as if he were coming out of an anesthetic. “Kiss me.” He held her hair in a bunch behind her head.

She took his face between her hands. “Why should I?”

“Because you love me, because you're beautiful, because you smell beautiful.” He touched her hair. “Is it rose water?”

“Yes,” she said in a muffled voice. “Don't try and get round me. So hot,” she murmured. “Feel my dress.” It had stuck to her back like glue. She took him by the hand and led him into the old-­fashioned bathroom at the end of their room. It had a red oxide floor and a large pot of water in the corner. A pane of colored glass set in the ceiling flung jeweled patterns on the floor. Her dress made a sucking sound as he drew it over her head.