Monsoon Summer (37 page)

Subradra, fatter than ever, yelped with joy at the sight of us. She took us into her hut, plied us with tea and sticky pastries and some livid-pink barfi that reminded me of calamine lotion.

The pride with which Subadra produced her certificate from the Moonstone was touching, and when Saraswati got out her notebook and started to question her, Subadra said, “I've delivered more than twenty babies since the Moonstone training and
have definitely changed in my practice. I follow the hygienic wash between the babies, and I use sterile equipment to cut the cord.”

The scissors, swabs, needles we'd given her were kept in a jam jar on the shelf and were obviously unused.

“We want you to use them all the time,” I told her. “If they get old, we will give you more.” She looked at me dubiously as if I might snatch them away. “I like them new,” she said.

“So what are you using instead?”

She produced a battered knife, a pair of scissors, a pot of herbs. “But I boil everything in water between women now to keep them sweet and clean.” At the end of our visit, Subadra said to us, “It was good, our time with you. We still talk about it. We taught you our ways, but we learned too.”

Subadra's words reminded me of the basic goodness in so many of the women we'd met: it lay underneath like an underground river, a kindness deeper than race or nationality. I didn't bother sharing this thought with Saraswati the realist; she might have teased me, and anyway, as Cyclops lurched along the track going home, she was complaining: “Some of these women will go on exactly as they always did, with the rusty knife and with all the ignorance of poverty. They shut their minds.” But then she did concede that Subadra was, at least, boiling water now, and very disapproving of another midwife who made girls lie in their own filth for days.

Our truck was passing through a small village where four half-naked boys were washing at the village pump. They ran alongside us, shouting and laughing, jumped on our running board, and waved vigorously through the window.

I saw Saraswati flinch as she looked at them, and then she waved. “Silly boys,” she said softly and closed her eyes.

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CHAPTER 52
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“D
on't take this cancer lark too seriously” was mother's breezy message to me, when she broke the news. The doctor had confirmed lung cancer, but she was desperately keen for me to see it as a temporary irritation: another rabbit on the road. But a childlike terror, a darkness was rushing down the track towards me, and I was no good at this game anymore. Don't leave me,
I wanted to say to her. Not now. Stay with me. How powerless we all are in the end.

Since Glory was so ill, Amma had suggested I come to Mangalath for a few weeks to be with her, and on my first afternoon back, Glory and I lay on either side of her bed in the cool, restful, high-ceilinged room that she liked so much. We watched a small lizard dart across the ceiling. “Sweet little fellow,” she murmured.

Her face was all bones and eyes now and deathly pale. I wanted to hold it in my mind forever. Her teeth looked larger in her head. But there was beauty there, and nobility, and a kind of grace under pressure which I admired, and when my fear subsided, I had odd moments of seeing what was so obvious in the end: I loved her and always would.

“When did you know she was this ill?” I asked Amma one afternoon when my mother was asleep. Amma put a plate of perfectly sliced mango on the bedside table, next to a coffee served in Glory's special cup—the green-and-white Royal Worcestershire.

“We were out in the garden walking,” Amma told me in a breathless whisper. “Glory refused the walking stick that made her look
like an old granny. I was looking for one of my chickens. When I turned, she was in a heap underneath the flame of the forest tree.

“When she woke up, she said, ‘I'm a clumsy clot and a damned nuisance.' Then she said, ‘Don't tell Kit.' I said, ‘Why not, she is your daughter?'” Amma's eyes widened with shock. “ ‘It's her duty to help and she will be happy to do so.'” Amma touched my hand but I still heard a hint of challenge.

I was aware that Amma was upset. It seemed to me she'd grown fond of Glory in the way of two horses put in field together who will either kick each other to smithereens or eventually sniff and accept each other and become glad of each other's company. I'd eavesdropped on their minor skirmishes on the best way to clean a Persian rug or where scent was best placed (Glory: pulse of your wrist. Amma: folds of your clothes). They appreciated high standards in each other, the many small and unremarked acts it took to create a house of real beauty for other people to carelessly enjoy. One afternoon when we were sitting together, Amma looked at my mother, who was asleep, and said, “Your mother and I are both at the lonely end of life. Children mostly gone, husbands busy or dead. It's easy to think, What am I for?”

I was about to protest but she added quickly, “Don't say anything. I'll always love my little rascal but I don't know him anymore. He's very Western.”

* * *

My mother hovered between life and death for five days. On the fourth day, when I set her special cup on the bedside table, she opened her eyes and said, “Oh, you angel. Nothing nicer than the smell of coffee in the morning.” I watched her take a sip, saw the almost transparent thinness of her hands, the blue-and-white veins that stood out as if in a medical drawing. At nights her cough rattled the house.

“It's nearly nighttime, Ma,” I whispered. Through a gap in the
shutters the sky was streaked with turquoise and pink stripes; a cockerel was crowing.

She drained her cup, dabbed her lips delicately with a white napkin, and fell back on the pillow. Her breathing, irregular and hoarse, was a tremendous effort now.

“Lie beside me.” She patted the empty space beside her. While she slept, I thought of all the ways I'd found to criticize her: for my lack of a father, for the way she'd despised my job, for the constant moving, the advice—that had increasing seemed so trivial—about keeping men happy, or looking smart, or being posh.

I understood better now that the clothes, the right notepaper, the jokes had been her weapons of war in a world which had treated her badly. I could see her life distinct and separate from mine. I pictured the high-spirited misfit she must have been at the orphanage, and later, the glamour-puss at some government ball: coiffed, amusing, a little bit acid, a challenge. Or later still, when life had really left its mark on her, on her own, in a café in London, husbandless, penniless, scanning the Situations Vacant. Me beside her. With no family and no home, no wonder she'd needed, or felt she needed, every mask she could find in order to survive, and I'd despised her for them.

“A rupee for your thoughts, darling,” came a faint voice from the pillow. She'd been watching me, as she had for years, anxiously gauging my state of mind.

“Not worth it,” I said. Pity was the last thing she would want now. “Only that I . . .” But she was back, as she would put it, in the arms of Morpheus, and while she slept, I wanted her forgiveness.

* * *

The next day, she took a turn for the worse: breath labored and harsh; narrow ribs jerking when she coughed; red toenails clenching, unclenching. Conscious, she grimaced, sweated, sometimes roared with pain, or maybe frustration, but my God, she clung on.

At sundown, the family priest, Father Christopher, came and read a prayer.

“Dear God, you love me too much to let me suffer unless it be for my good. Therefore, oh Lord, I trust myself to you; do with me as you please. In sickness and in health, I wish to love you always.”

I watched Glory's face while he read this, half expecting a skeptical eye to open and her to say, If this is your idea of God's love, forget it. But she was too ill for quips.

She was never alone. The doctor came with medicines, and we sat beside her hour after hour. Anto, and Mariamma and Amma, and Appan when he was at home, even Ponnamma took her turn, bringing some wobbly sewing with her and saying with the cheerful heartlessness of the old, “How long can she go on for now? Taking her time, isn't she?” Glory enjoyed this sort of tactlessness, laughed about it with me when she had the breath.

Raffie ran in from time to time to show her things: his train, a teddy bear. He told her what he was doing. He wasn't scared, or didn't seem to be. But one day she was coughing fit to bust as we left the room, and he held my hand as we walked downstairs, and he explained to me in his sensible voice, “Grandma Glory is very old now,” and glanced at me anxiously, just as she always had, to see if I understood and if I minded.

And then—it was a Sunday morning—she suddenly said, without opening her eyes, “There's no one there,” with a note of horror in her voice as if she'd already been to the other side and found it not her cup of tea at all. I missed not being able to laugh about this too.

Around four, I heard the crunch of a car drawing up on the gravel outside, the squeak of brakes. I went to the window, looked out, and froze. It was my father. He was walking slowly towards the house with Amma by his side.

It's all too late, I thought, watching his pottery gait up the path. And you're too old. That's all I felt: not glad, not relieved. I was
guarding her now as fiercely as a mother guards a baby, worried that the shock of seeing him might finish her off.

When he came in, he went straight to the bed, put a gnarled hand on her forehead, and gave a queer sound, somewhere between a sob and a groan. It was awful.

“Glory,” he said, “it's me. It's William,” and then, in the same cracked voice, “I love you, Glory, that's what I've come to say. I love you and I'm so terribly sorry.”

His eyes were streaming, so I gave him my handkerchief. Amma turned away from him. I could see she was praying.

“I'll leave you to it,” Amma said. She squeezed my hand. “I'll explain later.”

When she was gone, I said, “What are you doing here? Please don't do that.” He was making a bubbling sound.

“I'm sorry—I'm so sorry,” he said, his eyes trained on her. “I couldn't not—you see . . .” His mouth kept opening and shutting without any sound coming out, and when he took her hand, it took all my willpower not to snatch it away. “She wrote to me. She asked me to come. I couldn't let her down again.” He sat beside her on the bed and put his head against hers, two shrunken and collapsed puppets almost unbearable to look at.

“She can hear me,” he said. “She just squeezed my hand.” I looked at him. I looked at her.

Never turn strangers away from the door, lest you turn away angels. It's one of Amma's frequent expressions. Well, he was no angel, God knows, and there had been times since I'd met him that I'd wished him to rot in hell, but even I had to admit that though my mother's eyes were still shut, she had a strange inward look on her face that was different. I saw her fingers bend around his, the tense lines of her face relax into a look of safety, even contentment, as if she'd been returned to a time when his presence meant happiness.

When evening fell, the light through the window deepened
into a purplish black. Pathrose came in “to freshen up water for Mummy” and light the oil lamps that cast a glow. He left a whisky and soda for us both, and some sandwiches, biscuits, and cheese for the English visitor. We ate them in silence but for the pop of the lamp, her breathing between us. And this was strange too, and still painful to write: for the three hours we sat there, we were, for the first and last time, a family, and then it was over.

“Anto,” I said, when he walked in at three a.m., “this is my father.” William struggled to his feet, crumpled and red-eyed, trying to straighten his spine into what I can only assume was some remnant of military bearing.

Anto smiled at him. “I'm very glad to meet you, sir, but sorry it is under these circumstances. Glory,” he knelt down beside her. “It's Anto. I want to see how you are.” He turned her thin wrist, took her pulse, rested his hand on her forehead. “I hope you don't mind stepping outside for a moment.” His gaze came to rest on William, and then on me. “I need to do a further examination.”

I was about to write, “The performance was vintage Anto,” but this is the important point. It was not a performance, but a demonstration of everything I valued in my husband now: the kindness, the undramatic goodness, the competence. It would have been against his nature to hurt the feelings of this unexpected guest.

* * *

My mother died on the wave of one last spluttering sigh. No death rattle, and absurdly, I was glad about this, she would have hated one. Unladylike! It was over.

Amma and Mariamma came in with water and cloths and clean white burial clothes. They tied her jaw. When we washed her, I was shocked at how thin she'd become, her veins a road map inside her. We dressed her in the Christian Dior nighty she'd been saving, and followed the Nasrani custom of placing her dead body with her face
pointing towards the east and her feet towards the west, although Glory, I think, would have preferred it the other way around.

We lit a row of candles beside the carved cot, where I imagined dozens of Thekkedens must have been laid out. It's a funny word to use, but I felt at that moment almost euphoric with relief and gratitude. It was all done so quietly, so kindly, so naturally, with all the dignity that ritual bestows. No high-speed hospital dash, no drama, just this quiet slipping away in a place where she'd been loved.

As for my father, when the shock receded, I was so angry, I could have kicked him. See, she survived,
I wanted to tell him. She got over you. She lived her life. We didn't need you. He'd scuttled away soon afterwards.

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CHAPTER 53
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W
hen it was done, Amma took a pail of hot water into the bath house and spent forty minutes scrubbing herself from head to foot. Hair first, with the coconut oil soap she made herself, then face, nails, legs, arms with a soft brush. She cleaned her teeth with a twig, dressed herself in a clean chatta and mundu, and when she emerged, glowing and oiled, she rattled off a list of instructions to Pathrose on the removal of the bed and mattress and the purification of the house, which would take several days. Father Christopher would come that night to bless the house and sanctify it.

As she walked towards the summerhouse, she was hollow-legged with tiredness. The family had sat with Glory from three thirty until dawn, saying the rosary and singing hymns, drinking endless cups of black coffee and tea. Now the Christian part of her brain muttered prayers for Glory's safe departure; the pagan part rejoiced to be free of the heavy fug of the invalid rooms, the blanket bath, the bedpans until the next time, which would probably be Ponnamma.

“Ten days is a long time to hang on, Glory,” she murmured to the deceased. The arrival of the sad old husband had put them all under extra strain.

It was lovely out. An early shower of rain had scattered the path with the scented golden flowers of the champa tree, and death had charged the evening with significance. Tucking a flower in her hair, Amma wondered how many more years she had left. Her eyes
misted as she planned her own funeral—sobbing grandchildren, an inconsolable Mariamma and Appan—then the fantasy dissolved into darting concerns about food for Glory's funeral. The traditional meal—vegetables, rice gruel, a buttermilk curry, pappadams—was easy to make, but how many to ask? Who would be staying?

And then she stopped and deliberately emptied her mind. “Take a breath,” her father used to tell her when she got too whizzy. “Chew some air.”

She looked around her slowly. The garden was always at its most beautiful before the sun set: an intense, luminous underwater that lit up the jagged fringe of palm trees, the flowers, the silver flash of the cove, light that would deepen and fade before darkness descended. Close to the summerhouse, she bent down to the dancing girl orchid, touched its leaves. The sprinkle of purple spots at its tip was as sweet and delicate as the freckles on a child's nose. She was prodding the soil around it, at peace for the first time that day, when she heard a low rasping sound coming from the shed, and then a long drawn-out howl. She picked up a spade, ready to throw it at the pye-dogs who came regularly to scavenge, and, peering through the window, saw William Villiers sitting on the bench, his arms clasped tightly around him. He was rocking and sobbing with the abandon of a child.

She stood frozen for a few moments, spade in her hand. For a man like this to be caught crying would be worse than being seen on the potty. Appan, who'd spent years observing the English with the kind of anxious love a collie feels for its master, had told her once about stiff upper lips, and she'd laughed, thinking it was a phrase he'd made up. She took another step forward, touched the pane of glass with her hand, and listened intently. When the sobs dwindled into a long drawn out “oooohhhhh” of despair, she gave a big sigh, straightened her shoulders, and pushed the door open.

“Mr. Villiers, I'm here also.” She put down the spade as if a bit of shed tidying was all she planned to do.

“Oh Lord!” He looked up, dotty-looking in his surprise. His mouth began to work violently, like that of a child determined not to cry. “Oh God.” He pulled a spotted handkerchief out of his pocket, buried his face in it. “Sorry,” he said in a muffled voice. “Can't go home like this.”

She touched his arm. “Don't dash off,” she said quietly. “Take your time. We'll be saying prayers for her soul tonight.”

“I shouldn't have come,” he said. “It's made everything worse.”

“It was what Glory wanted,” Amma said.

“For herself? For the girl?”

“I don't know.”

This was true. During the long night when Glory had raged incoherently about this man, she had told Amma that he should come, that she needed to tell him things, and Amma had indulged her. As for Kit? God knows: she'd played her cards very close to her chest regarding this father of hers.

“Over there was Glory's gin and tonic spot.” She pointed at a bench near the water. She picked up his sodden handkerchief and handed it back to him. “She liked looking at the water and the trees.”

He stood up, shifting the ripe smell of distress and pipe tobacco towards her.

“Such a shock, you know.” He fumbled the handkerchief into his pocket. “Didn't see her for years, decades, and then all this.”

“I understand,” she said, although the messiness of it appalled her. To give him time to start breathing normally again, she offered to show him her orchid garden.

“These are my invalids.” She led him to her row of flowers planted in coconut shells. “My husband brings them from all over India. They take awhile to find their feet. This one,” she said, pointing to the orchid tree, glowing against the darkening sky, “is a miracle worker. Stems are used for leprosy, or ulcers, paste from leaves for headaches. You can also eat it as a vegetable.

“And this is my dancing girl,” she said at the next plant. “Glory loved her. She was a wreck when she came from Bangalore, now look at her—eight new buds on the stem.”

William knelt down obediently with a great cracking of knees and touched the flower. As he did so, his regimental signet ring flashed and fell into the earth. “Damn thing doesn't fit me,” he said, as she passed it back. “I'm bound to lose it one day.” He shoved it in his pocket and sat back on his heels looking at the garden with a bemused expression. “I never thought she'd come back,” he said.

“No way of contacting her?” Amma said with a lemony look. This was going too far.

“I tried. Wrote for years. Never got a reply. Only from her friend, Miss Barker.” She heard the clicking in his throat. “Sorry,” he wheezed at last. He was at it again, helpless before an unstoppered tide of grief. “Sorry.”

She waited until he could talk again. “What would you like to do now?” she said gently.

“I want to go home,” he said. “My driver's waiting in the village.”

“Will you come back?”

“I don't think so.” He looked down at his brogues; they were covered in dust. “There are a few . . . complications.”

“I know.” Glory had told her about the wife in Ooty. “But not even to see Kit?” She looked at him directly. “Your grandchild?”

“I don't know.” There was question in his eyes, and an apology. “Do you think I should?”

“That's for you to decide.” She smiled her practiced smile, thinking, What an absolute bloody fool—another phrase that Appan had taught her. Be a man, find out for yourself.