Monsoon Summer (34 page)

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CHAPTER 47
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H
e phoned again that night but Glory refused to answer. She breakfasted alone and, as our train chuntered back down through the hills, she pretended to be asleep.

When he'd phoned again shortly before we left, I was put in to bat to tell him she was not available, and William (how could I call him my father?) said after a number of wordless sighs and gasps, “I have a message for her, and it is this. She did nothing wrong. She was”—I heard him gasp—“a fine person who was jilted by a weak and wicked man.”

But she hadn't asked me a thing, and I, in the midst of my own hurt and confusion, was afraid to broach anything. As the train moved south, what I felt, watching her sleeping beside me, was a complicated mixture of sorrow and hurt.

It was agony to picture her, aged eighteen, innocent and full of hope, standing in the vestry, a bunch of canna lilies in her arms. When the Colonel arrives, she bends her slender neck towards him. She is listening to the news. Oh, it's unbearable to think of her enduring so much pain, and it explains so much: her rootlessness, her prickliness, the important outer armor of good shoes and manicures. “You can always tell a lady by her hands.”
Her fundamental inability to find a path in life that she could believe in wholeheartedly. She'd never truly felt safe or at home anywhere, and now it was probably too late.

“So what did you think of him?” she said, when the train was
approaching Coonor. “He is a perfect shit, isn't he?” Only the second time, as far as I can remember, that she'd sworn in front of me.

“I'm glad I know” was all I could come up with for now. And then, “He was full of regrets. He said you were beautiful, that he was older than you, that he should have known better.” She gasped and pulled in her mouth like a person with no teeth. She always hated crying in front of me.

“He wanted to see you.”

A tear cut a line through her powder. “Well, he can't,” she said, a picture of childlike defiance as she dabbed her eyes. “Can he? He should have thought of that a long time ago.” When she fell asleep again, hunched against the window, I imagined the waiting congregation, their shuffles and concerned murmurs, faces craning around to look for her as the minutes ticked by. Had she sped away in a taxi? I wondered. Or been taken to the Colonel's to take her dress off and sit in her underwear on some strange bed wondering about the rest of her life?

* * *

When she woke with a cough, I gave her some of her favorite Fox's Glacier Mints from my handbag. In general, she disapproved of eating in public, but now she sucked one quite happily, beside me. In my mind, I saw her in pigtails at the orphanage in Orissa for half-caste girls.

“We didn't do too badly on our own, did we?” she said, after she'd swallowed her sweet discreetly.

“No,” I said, “not badly at all.” And then, because I meant it, “I'm so sorry about what happened. It was brave of you to let me know.” I wanted to hold her hand, but that would have felt false.

“He said . . .” I watched her face anxiously; this felt like inching along a precipice. “He would really like . . .”

“Don't say a thing else. Please. No.” She was interrupted by another coughing fit. “I don't want to know,” she said when it was finished.

* * *

When our train arrived at Mettapalayam, Anto was standing on the platform waiting. Raffie was in his arms, smiling his reckless three-tooth smile, stretching his podgy arms towards me, giving his grandma a kiss. The kiss seemed to perk my mother up. In the car on the way to Mangalath, where there was a family party, Raffie sat in the back on my mother's lap. She gave him one of her mints and allowed him to rearrange all the things in that normally sacred place, her handbag, even seemed to enjoy it, though she seemed worryingly tired.

Amma came down the path to meet us. She took my mother's hand and led her into the house. “You look dead on your feet, Glory,” she said. “Take forty winks before lunch.” My mother turned around, shot me a look of wild accusation. “Does she know?” she whispered.

I shook my head. “No.” Anto had been primed to tell her we were simply having a little holiday, but Lordy, I was weary of all these secrets.

I was surprised this time how glad I was to be back at Mangalath. Its familiar smells of furniture polish, cardamom, lemongrass felt like another solidly comforting presence. It was not rented, it would not be snatched away but would go on generation after generation being tended to like a demanding but much-loved relative, a little faded maybe, still beautiful.

* * *

In the upstairs room that Amma now called “the Glory room,” I helped my mother into bed and put the cough mixture Amma gave me on the table beside her. As I straightened her sheet, I heard voices in the rooms below and felt the unfathomable comfort of knowing there were other human creatures around me, and that they would help with sympathy and respect. For this family, hospi
tality was an opportunity to show love, whatever your private feelings or passing irritations might be. It went beyond good manners or strict codes of conduct, and I appreciated it fully, maybe for the first time.

“She's asleep,” I whispered when Anto walked in. He wiped my eyes, and when he put his arms around me, it felt like a transfusion of blood. We looked down at her together. Her face was waxy; her breath came in uneven sips.

“She's dying, isn't she?” I said it out loud for the first time when we were out of earshot.

“We'll take care of her,” he said. “It could take months, she's a tough old girl.” He was crying too.

“I hope you missed me,” I said, when we'd stopped.

“Like mad,” he said. “Raffie's not as much fun as you are. We were like two crusty old bachelors.”

“I haven't been much fun recently,” I said.

“You've had your reasons.” He looked guarded.

“Talking of which, any news from the Home while I was away? Did Dr. A. try and contact me?”

“Kittykutty,” he said. “Let's think about one thing at a time today. Your mother isn't well. You've just come home. Come here instead.”

He led me into a dim and shuttered guest room at the other end of the hall. He locked the door, unbuttoned my blouse, and we lay down on the bed, and it was done at a speed that made us both gasp. A moment of pure animal comfort, deeper than any words he could have said.

“That's the best thing that's happened to me for days,” I told him when I was buttoning up my blouse again. I was smelling him, oh delicious! cinnamon and sweat, all of it.

“So how was Ooty?” he asked, propped up on one arm, serious again.

“Necessary,” I said at last.

“That sounds bad.”

“Not all bad,” I said. “I'll tell you all about it when we get to our house. Unless my ma seems too ill to travel. In which case, I'll stay here for a few days.”

“Good plan,” he said. And then in his Barkis-is-willing voice, to make me laugh: “My life. My old darling.” He sighed. “Sorry I have to go back to work. I have a paper to prepare before Wednesday. Dr. Sastry wants funding for a larger program on epidemics.”

“It's all right,” I whispered, and meant it. “As long as I know you're here.”

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CHAPTER 48
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L
unch felt comfortingly normal: Ponnamma banging on in a loud voice about how it was impossible to make a proper pilau without dribbling saffron-soaked milk over the rice and then slow cooking it, Amma snapping this was plainly nonsense, that she, Amma, had been serving chicken pilaus for years without saffron milk and no one had complained. Raffie was sitting on Mariamma's lap having his toes tickled. Appan, home from trying a homicide case in Bombay that had kept him up for three days and three nights, looked done in.

Amma pushed bowls of salad, date chutney, and pappadams towards me. “Eat up.”

When I'd finished, Appan asked me gently, “How is your Mummy faring?”

“Exhausted,” I said. “It was a long journey.”

Appan blundered on, “But a nice holiday, hey?” Happy shrieks from Raffie interrupted our conversation. Mariamma was counting his toes: “
Onneh, randeh, mooneh, naaleh, unche
.”

When Raffie's head began to droop, I lifted him out of Mariamma's arms and was about to take him upstairs when Amma stopped me. “Walk with me in the garden,” she said. “Your Mummy's asleep. Mariamma will take care of Raffie.”

We went down the path towards the summerhouse, dry leaves rustling under our feet, a small lizard dashing for safety. “That husband of mine never rests,” Amma said as we passed Appan's bent
head in his office. “My boys work too hard. By the way, he needs to speak to you later in his office. Do you know why?”

“No.” I felt a flicker of anxiety.

“Something to do with your work, I think, he wouldn't say.” She picked a dead insect off my blouse. “Sometimes he fusses.” Her face was as impassive as a smooth pond.

To the right of us, two farmhands were cutting down a large bunch of small green bananas. They stopped working as we passed, heads bowed in respect. When we stopped at a raised bed of earth behind the summerhouse, Amma pointed to two shriveled orchids, freshly planted in coconut shells.

“Appan brought me two new invalids from Delhi: the brassia and the cymbidium. He'd kept them in his suitcase for two days, completely forgot them. He is so absentminded, but sweet of him to try,” she added hastily. Didn't do to criticize husband in front of daughter-in-law. “Orchids aren't like other flowers.” Amma prodded the soil gently with her forefinger. “They have both man and woman inside them and make their own babies, and they're all different.

“This one,” she turned towards a pink-and-green orchid that trembled like a butterfly at her approach—“I spray twice a day; otherwise, she faints like a lady in a crinoline. This one,” she went on, picking up a gorgeous yellow flower stippled with pink, “was shriveled and sad when it first arrived. Now look at it. They all have different natures too. It took me a long time to understand that. This one likes the air, this one lots of feeding and the shade.”

“My mother's dying,” I said, “and I don't know what to do.”

“I know.” Amma put down the orchid and looked at me. “I'm sorry for this.”

“I'm frightened. I should be used to death after the war and everything, but I'm not.”

“Nothing prepares you for this,” she said. “But don't be frightened. We'll do everything we can to see Mummy goes quietly.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and, when I opened them again, saw a large bumblebee fly into the mouth of the yellow orchid and forage busily there.

“I'm glad you went to Ooty,” Amma said.

I took a step back—too raw to discuss it, particularly with Amma, who generally discouraged family holidays that weren't to do with visiting other Thekkedens.

“Why are you glad?” I said.

She looked up at me. “It was my idea. I was watching your Mummy from exactly this place a few weeks ago. She thought she was alone. She was walking like this.” Amma mimed someone hugging herself. “I said, ‘Come and talk to me.' She was very sad. We had a talk. She said at the end of it, ‘How can I make friends with my daughter again?'”

“She did?” I was trying not to sound too amazed.

Amma's head nodded from side to side. “She told me she'd been a hopeless mother. I told her we all felt that sometimes, and that sometimes I came out here and wished I was her.”

“Really!”

“Yes. She seems so free. I'm stuck here, very invisible sometimes.”

“You, invisible!” I said. “Never. You're home to a lot of people.”

Amma made the
tsskkk
sound she made when she was trying to be modest. “So, I asked her for more information about you.” Amma prodded the soil around the cymbidium. “Said you never talked about your family or your father or anything like that, and when she told me you knew nothing about him, I was shocked. When she told me he lived in Ooty, I felt worse. Family secrets are horrible.” She stopped prodding the plant and gave me a beady look.

“So, tell me. How was it there?”

“Awful,” I said. “I've never felt so confused in my life.”

“But at least you've seen him. That's a good thing, no?” She was looking at me dubiously.

“I don't know. Was it? She wouldn't see him at all, that was sad.”

“Why not?” Amma was shocked.

“I should let her tell her story . . . It explains a lot.”

I felt the old sense of shame when I said this, of being slightly substandard goods. Part of a scam.

Amma sighed deeply. Beyond her a heron was dipping his beak into the water.

“I was hard on you when you first came.” She didn't say this in a conciliatory way. In fact, having been kind about my mother, she let the same old thread of irritation return to her voice. “There were many things I didn't understand, and I was so nervous about Anto coming home.”

“With an English mongrel—I don't blame you.” We both smiled uneasily. “Plus our timing was not impeccable.”

“He was so like Raffie when he was young,” she said, both wistful and aggrieved.

“In what way?”

“He was jolly. He talked to me all the time.” She grimaced, then suddenly grabbed my watch.

“Oh, God. You're late for Appan. Run, run, don't upset him, and don't tell him we've had this conversation.”

* * *

Appan was sitting under his green lamp when I walked in, desk piled with manila folders. His high cheekbones popped out when he smiled at me and put a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose. “Sit down,” he said. “This won't take long.”

His sentences began in the usual soft and confiding purr. He was off the following day, he said, to represent a scoundrel in Bangalore who had been embezzling money from his employer. It was a complicated case but the important principle was to marshal what facts you had at your disposal and compress them in the simplest way possible.

“But I have something here,” he added, pulling out a folder, “that has caused me a few sleepless nights lately. It concerns you.”

I could feel my palms grow clammy and my heart thump. A clock struck slowly at the end of the room.

“Such a noisy thing.” Appan waited patiently for the chimes to stop. “I bought it in Hatton Garden years and years ago . . . So.” He pushed back his glasses, pulled out a sheet of fresh paper and sighed. “A letter came, while you are away, from my old friend Chief Medical Officer Kunju. He was the one who interviewed Anto when you first got back. He is a bigwig now in the new government, a pompous fellow who is trying to make a name for himself. A stickler for detail also.

“He wants to know . . .” Appan's lips moved silently as his pen moved down the paper. “One: Under whose authority you were working at the Matha Maria Moonstone Home for Expectant Mothers. Two: Who finances the Home? Are you a member of the British government? And he would like, in triplicate, a copy of your nursing certificate and subsequent midwifery certificate.

“Those things you can deal with easily, I'm sure.” Appan's pen stayed on the letter while he stared at me. “What follows is more serious: he says that on February seventh of this year, you helped to deliver a baby to a Mrs. Nair. The baby subsequently died, and the woman, who is a fully trained lawyer, a clever one at that, has launched a formal complaint with the government regarding”—Appan squinted to read the exact words—“substandard treatment received at the home. Dr. Kunju wants to know if it is correct that you were the midwife present and thus directly responsible.”

“Mrs. Nair? But she and the baby were healthy when they left us. Are you sure it was her?”

“Why would I make it up?” He glared at me.

I could hear a strange shrilling in my ears. “As a member of my family, naturally I can't represent you,” Appan's words rolled on, “and it may be nothing more than a warning shot across the bows, but now I have my own concerns. You see, I have been kept in the dark about your real work at the Home.” A note of steely authority
entered his voice, and for the first time he scowled. “No one actually told me you were a midwife. Not you, not Anto, not Amma. She told me something about missionaries, a charity that you went to see, a nun, a survey you were doing on local midwives. Why has everyone said these things to me if they weren't true?”

I took a deep breath and looked at him. When you married an Indian, I'd been told countless times, you married a whole family, and I was about, it seemed, to disgrace them all.

“Where shall I start?”

“Wherever you like.” A flash of anger in his voice.

“I am a fully qualified nurse. I did three years' training at Saint Thomas' Hospital in London. I worked there during the war, and then I studied midwifery at Saint Andrew's, also in London.”

“I was told you did charitable works.”

“I was told you wouldn't approve. That in your mind it would be a job for a lower-caste woman.”

“So are you ashamed of it?”

“Not at all. I'm proud of it. I should have told you that right at the beginning.”

He closed his eyes, thought for a while. “I knew about the nursing but not the rest. Does Anto know you're a midwife?”

“Of course.”

“This is a most unusual job in our family.” He scowled at me. “I've never heard of such a thing. But if you can give me the relevant certificates, that part of the investigation can be rubber-stamped and ended.” He began to rub his hair irritably.

“I can't,” I said at last, staring down at the desk. “Not exactly. I can give you my nursing certificate, but I'm not a fully qualified midwife and never pretended to be. I had to leave shortly before the end of my training.”

“Why?” his voice was sharp as a whip. I closed my eyes and felt my stomach fall away.

“A birth went badly wrong, while I was training . . . I wasn't sure
I could do it again. It happened in London, right at the end of the war, and then my mother got ill and I was called home.”

“So no chance to get back on the horse again, metaphorically speaking.” A faint smile from him. “Until this chance to practice on Indian babies?”

“That's completely unfair. They were short-staffed at the Moonstone. I was asked to help, and bit by bit my responsibilities increased. Nothing was hidden from Dr. Annakutty, the director of the Home, but it's possible she'll deny it now.”

Appan was writing busily. “And so you performed a delivery on Mrs. Nair, in spite of not being fully qualified.”

“She asked for me particularly. Dr. Annakutty was in the building at the time.”

“Did it not occur to you that Dr. Annakutty knew the dangers of helping such a woman if things should go wrong? A lawyer closely connected to the new government.”

“She is a fine and experienced obstetrician.”

“And she let you do it.” His expression was half-crazed, astounded by my naivety. “Because these facts, twisted, will sound like a classic case of colonial overconfidence.”

“Appan,” I appealed to him, “what do you think will happen?”

“I can't predict.” Appan closed the folder and looked at me. “Too much is changing at the moment, and I'm worried: I've met this woman once or twice in court. She is very sharp. My short-term plan is to telephone an old friend of mine, Suresh Patel, and see if he can represent you. He's a fairly decent lawyer. I must also forbid you to discuss any of this with any other person in this house: not Amma, not your mother, not Mariamma. They don't need to know.

“As for you,” his expression softened a little, “we must wait and pray.”