Monsoon Summer (7 page)

“Could you hold this for me?” I loaded the tray with the dirty cups and cutlery Anto had used earlier in the day.

Bull's-eye, I thought. You wait on him, you horrible man—he's worth two of you.

A small, sweet victory, which I feared could not last.

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CHAPTER 8
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O
ne day he would struggle to even remember the name of the pretty girl at Wickam Farm, or the Bird Room, or the barn. He would shut down this part of his life just as he had shut down India on the ship coming here, or at least managed to cram it into some back room in his mind.

But right now: the crunch of loose floorboards above him, Kit's faint tread on the stairs, the clink of her bottles in the bathroom, the rustle of her dress coming off. To corral his mind, he got out the box from under his bed and laid out letters and photographs of his family on the eiderdown and switched on the lamp.

His long-ago family: Appan, his father; Amma, his mother; Mariamma, his sister; and his grandmother, Ponnamma. The women who pinched his cheeks, fed him delicious meals, tucked him in bed at night, loved him up until they suddenly sent him away. He tried never to be melodramatic about this, tried to believe Father Damian's suggestion that it might have been the making of him.

And underneath, more photographs, splayed like a deck of cards, the extended family groups: hundreds of vaguely remembered ghosts from Christmases, christenings, Onam festivals, weddings. He studied them with the expression of a man studying for an exam he was bound to fail. He picked up a faded snapshot of his father. Studious, bespectacled, grave, Appan stood a few feet away to the right of a group of young Englishmen. A photo taken, as his father had told him many times, on the greatest day of his life:
his graduation from Lincoln's Inn, where he was called to the bar. Appan, wearing the dark Savile Row he still wears, stood skinny, scared-looking on some grand-looking steps, holding a piece of rolled-up cardboard.

Anto's face clouded as he remembered his father: the handsome, authoritative face at the end of the table. The family ringmaster who could change the emotional temperature of a room simply by walking in. His father's car, a Bullnose Morris, one of the few in the district. Appan leaving for an important court case in Pondicherry, conker-colored briefcase bulging with grown-up mysteries, shaking his hand in the hall as he went to an overseas conference. “Look after your mother.”

His hungry desire to keep his father's love with good results, good cricket innings, good behavior felt like a source of weakness now. When he fell below Appan's high standards, he saw disgust on his father's face. “You're on the seventh stair, my friend,” before the cane came out of the top drawer of his desk.

When Anto first arrived in England, it was a freezing September. No sun for days on end, gray skies, gray streets, and he'd wondered if this was the eighth stair: a place where you could die from unhappiness. This abandonment from home felt so unexpected, so complete that it almost destroyed the balance of his mind. Being happy, being loved, he now saw, had been the worst preparation possible for a life in which nobody knew him. Not a single soul in England.

His mother sent letters to Downside. Ordinary things: Pathrose cooking prawns and okra in the kitchen, the cricket match with the whole of the Thekkeden family on the lawn with, she'd written, “an Anto-sized hole in the fieldings.”

The letters, in her impeccable handwriting, faint tang of jasmine oil on the envelopes, had in his first term almost destroyed him.

Before the other boys came, he'd snatched them from the basket in the refectory, where milk and biscuits were served, taken them
to his room braced for the exquisite misery of remembering. It was only later that their lurid envelopes had become an embarrassment.

Now, in the lamplight, he squinted at a picture of her when young. Both of them were in the garden at Mangalath, near the small wooden summerhouse, where she tended her orchids. She was dressed simply in the plain white cotton chatta and mundu she wore at home. Her dark eyes were staring at the camera with a look that was both distant and scrutinizing. He was sitting on a tricycle at her feet, his expression pure and trusting as he looked up at her. She was his entire world.

Any moment now she would give up her camera face (she'd always loathed having her picture taken), she'd scoop him up murmuring, “My little pot of gold.” Her only son, after years of trying. He can hear her in the kitchen now, barking orders to the servants, clinking the battered saucepans. The spices prickling his nostrils.

Did she truly love Appan? He wondered now. It wasn't the kind of question the sixteen-year-old he left behind would ask. He turned the photo over. Mangalath. Anto. Three years old.

Now, with a sigh, he picked up his mother's latest letter. It was dated February, 1948, postmarked Fort Cochin.

My dearest boy,

I'm sending the pictures taken with my new box Brownie. Sorry to have sliced the head off your father several times. He was the one who gave me the camera for Christmas—not too grateful of me. We had fifty-four family at Mangalath on Christmas Eve but, as usual, missed you badly. I don't know what I did in a previous life to have suffered without you for so many years, but now I hope it will make sense to me.

Appan is so proud of you, says the new India needs people like you to show people we can strive and thrive without the British. So I'm proud of you too and the sacrifices you've made. One day, I hope you will be a great man in our community.

I wish I could send you the fresh pineapple we had for breakfast; I know there is still very severe rationing there for you. All I can send is a mother's love and prayers. Your father, up to his neck in a new case, will write separately and send money for your fare. My love to you,

Amma

P.S. Today, Vidya came with her mother; she asked to see a photo of you, sends hers to you. She says you are handsome!

The sly aside saying the big thing was typical of his mother. The girl in the carefully tinted photograph is slender and shy in what looks like a new sari. She is the daughter of his mother's best friend, beautiful, as his mother has not failed to point out in three of her previous letters. Did Anto remember meeting her when he was a little boy? Answer—not really, or if he did, only vaguely as a shy pair of big brown eyes behind her mother's skirts. It was Anu, her mother, he remembered: the head patter, and bringer of homemade sweets enticingly wrapped in tissue papers, and once a new cricket bat.

This letter, that he'd read anxiously several times, gave Anto a tightness in his scalp, as if parts of his brain were shutting down. He was being netted and hauled in, and yet, during the long lonely years of exile, he'd ached for them, wept for them, looked forward to the security of being married to a nice girl, back safely in the bosom of his family again.

Now he lay facedown on the pillow as if to smother his confusion and panic. He didn't feel Indian anymore, that was the nub of it. During the long years of his exile, he'd got used to freedoms that his family would disapprove of. Going off to the cinema on your own when you felt like it. Having conversations with women who weren't discreetly chaperoned. The one-night stand with the WAAF, a huge and daring adventure before the shame set in; wear
ing Western clothes—he had no intention of wearing a mundi again, for him it would feel like fancy dress.

But his most pressing problem now was Kit, sleeping above him in what felt like almost indecent proximity. Up there now, sleeping, breathing, so close it felt like agony, for more than anything else, he wanted to kiss her again.

A rattle from upstairs—her curtains being pulled. Earlier she'd worn her hair up in a messy bun, stuck a pencil through it while she was working, but now he imagined it tumbling down.

He tried to joke himself out of it. “My God, Miss Smith, you're beautiful,” because nothing about her had escaped his attention: the curve of her jawline, her dark eyes, her long neck bent over her work, the dark waterfall of her hair, her flashing smile when he made her laugh.

She was brushing her hair now. She was cleaning her teeth.

“Oh, for God's sake.” He looked up frozen and afraid. “Stop it, you stupid bastard. Go to sleep.”

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CHAPTER 9
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C
learly alarmed at what had passed between us, Anto went back to working in the Bird Room in the early mornings. When we met in the dining room, I saw that he looked exhausted, and he would not meet my eye. I kept on working, talking, pretending not to care, but I couldn't stop thinking about him: the satin feel of his cheek, the softness of his lips on mine.

The memory kept me awake, and sometimes, when I crept out of the house at night to see if he was awake too, the light was still on in his window, and hearing my own breath, I felt myself in the position of a suicide trying to talk myself down from the edge.

I wanted him. My body was racing ahead of my brain like a naughty child, frightening me because everything about it was wrong. He was due to return to India in a matter of months. He would marry a girl there, or so Daisy had said, chosen by his parents, and it went without saying that my mother would be horrified.

But when in early April I got a letter from Saint Andrew's saying my course had to be further postponed until the next academic year—more problems with the roof—I was not disappointed.

My mother hugged me when she read the letter. “It's just like old times,” she said, and from long habit I returned her fond look, but my feelings were far more complicated and secretive than I let on. What I wanted most was to speak properly to Anto again and not get caught.

Was it odd to have fallen for him so quickly? Not to me, it
wasn't. Not really. I was dangerously ready for love after the war, and he was terribly handsome and impressively clever and he already made me laugh, and he called up a maternal feeling in me because he seemed both brave and lost. There was something else too: I wanted to be properly loved, in the high old way, by a man, a young man who would exorcise a nasty memory, because there was a time, before I was eighteen years old, when I was so wet behind the ears that I honestly thought you could get pregnant if you kissed a man.

One of my mother's employers, Mr. Frank Jolly, a Yorkshire optician, a widower, had put an end to that by gently sliding a hand down my school uniform in the car one day. I know it's usual for young girls to say they are appalled by such advances. I wasn't.

What I felt, at least initially with Frank Jolly, was experimental. He was not bad-looking, and fairly young. He started to pick me up from school, and at first his advances were mild enough to be called caresses. But then, one afternoon when my mother was at the pictures, I was shocked when a thing like a landed fish leapt out of his trousers.

We were in the sitting room, the curtains drawn, when he touched me, his face all jumbled and mottled, like a jigsaw gone wrong. He said I'd led him on to this and, as he laid me down on a towel on the sofa, said I must now go through with it else my mother would lose her job and there would be a scandal. And I believed him and went through with it and afterwards shouted and cried in the bath trying to wash him away.

When I tried to tell my mother later, she blamed me, or maybe she didn't but it felt like it. She said that it was not a bad thing to marry an older man who would do things for you, and that Mr. Jolly was an attractive man anyway, so what about settling down with him? I said, “What about my exams, my matric? My life?”

“Oh, don't be so serious,” she said. I didn't speak to her for three days after that, I felt so empty and pointless: a paper cup tumbling down a stream towards a future entirely out of my hands.

* * *

Anto had been waiting for ten days to hear whether his fifty-thousand-word PhD thesis had been passed when a letter with an Exeter College monogram on the envelope arrived. Daisy, who'd once played hockey for the county, snatched the envelope from the postman, raced across the yard with it, and pinged it on his desk.

He went so pale, she said, “Do you want me to open it?”

“No,” he said. He stared at it, his lips moving silently.

“Prepare for the worst and expect the best,” Daisy said.

He took the letter, touched the sandstone elephant, gave me a strange look, then closed his eyes. A few seconds later he said, “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Over his head, which was in his hands, Daisy and I exchanged a look. This was heartbreaking, horrible—all those hours and hours of burning the midnight oil.

“Anto, I'm so sorry,” I said. “You worked so hard.”

I wanted to stroke his hair, to find words of comfort that wouldn't sound too maddening.

He looked up at me out of his right eye, grinned, and said: “Doctor Doctor Anto Thekkeden, please, from now on. They liked my thesis.”

“You absolute fiend!” Daisy whacked his head with a roll of cardboard, and without thinking I hugged him, and if Daisy noticed the quick kiss Anto gave me, nothing was said.

“Now, Anto,” Daisy said, when we had quieted down, “we must definitely have a party; if we dig around the cellar, there might even be some champagne. We could invite some people from the village over too, to make it more fun.”

Anto was sitting at his desk again, staring ahead, in shock, I imagined, at the good news. His normal Indian way was to be very polite and to hate saying no to anything, but now he looked up and said, “What I'd most like is to go to the cinema in Oxford.”

“That sounds fun,” Daisy said. “We can have dinner afterwards
at the Cardamom. I'm going to suck up to him now,” she said to me with no attempt to quiet her tone. “He'll be a great asset to the Moonstone when we get him home.”

“Maybe.” He sounded guarded. I knew by now that Daisy's “Notes for Indian Midwives” worried him. We'd had a careful conversation about it the week before.

“She knows that Indians aren't exactly in love with the British at the moment,” I'd said.

“Well and good then,” he'd said softly. “I know she is a kind lady and that her intentions are good, but my fear is she is stepping into a snake pit. So much has changed since she was there.”

* * *

The Ritz on George Street had once been a church but was now a warm, smoky, exciting dungeon with a flaking plaster angel on the roof and the cinema organist hidden behind a faded red velvet curtain.

And later that night we followed the usherette's torch towards the middle rows, and I sat down in the middle with Tudor on one side and Anto on the other. Flora, wearing a dress of stiff purple satin that crackled like fire, sat down on Tudor's other side.

The film,
To Each His Own,
was
about a girl who falls for a handsome pilot, has his baby, and then spends the rest of her life in mourning for him. Watching it in the dark, with Anto beside me, I felt almost unbearably excited, as if this shabby little cinema was charged with life and some promise of excitement that I felt in the pit of my stomach.

Halfway through the film, I dropped the box of Black Magic chocolates Daisy had given us. He and I sank to the floor to retrieve them, and when I looked at him and saw a flash of reflected light in his eyes, it was hard not to take his beautiful face between my hands and plead with him, for what I was not sure: I was so aroused, and so unhappy too, because earlier, when Tudor had asked him, “When are you going home?” he'd said one word: “Soon.”

“I hope you're not going to eat any of those.” Tudor frowned as Anto put one of the chocolates from the box into my mouth. When we sat down again, breathless and inclined to laugh, Anto held my hand, and I felt a high kind of joy that I'd never felt before.

When the film reached its tear-jerking conclusion, Flora and I dabbed at our eyes with handkerchiefs, and I found I was sweating, from my palms, my armpits, my forehead, as if I'd been through some intense ordeal.

Looking back, it was lucky that Wickam Farm had as many digestive groans and gurgles as an old person. The tepid radiators clicked like arthritic bones; the boiler in the basement occasionally roared as if in agony. We were lucky too that Ci Ci often drank herself to sleep, and it was my mother's habit to always make a fortress of whatever bedroom she happened to be in by bolting the door and sometimes stacking furniture against it.

Because he came to me that night. It was a beautiful night with the moon high and the stars bright outside my window. I still have no words to describe how inevitable it felt. He stood looking down, and when he took off his shirt, I saw what a perfect young specimen he was. Years of cricket at boarding school had hardened him, slatted moonlight fell in bars over his sloped shoulders and strong muscled legs, and I can honestly say I felt not one scintilla of shame about what happened next. As I reached out for him in the dark, what I felt was a kind of singing in my veins. I had no choice.

I was perfectly aware of what a mistake this would be, how disastrous the timing, and so on, but my body bounded towards his, and once we'd started to touch each other, we could not stop, and I was glad I wasn't a virgin, because I didn't want fear or pain to spoil anything.

I lay in the crook of his arm afterwards feeling both wicked and victorious. It felt so right and he smelled so good: sweet and cinnamony. His skin was soft. He stroked my hair. The moon fell very brightly on the Indian quilt. It was only when he reached over me to draw the curtain that I saw that he was crying.

“Anto, what?” I felt my scalp prickle with alarm. I wanted him to feel the same high joy that I felt.

He didn't answer, just turned and put his head in the pillow.

I was going to say something else when, across the corridor, I could hear the scrape of my mother's door opening, the creak of her foot on the floorboards. The whoosh of the lavatory chain a few seconds later, and then Ci Ci's rusty cough.

I froze until I heard the click of the door closing and took my hand away from his mouth. We laughed silently, a scared laugh.

“Don't be sad, Anto,” I whispered when I could breathe normally again. “It's been a perfect day,” meaning his triumph, the cinema, and now this.

“I know.” He gave a jagged sigh and said after a while, “I don't think I will ever feel this happy again.”

“Don't say that.” Now it was his turn to clap a hand over my mouth.

“Be careful,” he mouthed, and pointed towards my mother's room. Before he crept out the door, he got up on his elbow and studied me. He smoothed my hair back from my temples and kissed my forehead.

“I should never have done this,” he said a few seconds later. “It was wrong.”

“No,” I said. I was like a child not being allowed to eat a favorite sweet or pet a dangerous beast. “Don't say that.”

He sat up and turned his back to me.

“Stop,” he said as I reached out for him. “Please.”

“Why not?” I hardly heard him. What I felt most lying there in the half-light was fantastically, thrillingly alive. I kept my hand on his back and ignored his sigh. My mind was racing ahead. I could get a job in India. I could go alone if I wanted to.

God, how stupid I was.