Waiting for the Monsoon (22 page)

After a wait of six and a half years, during which they filled in an endless number of forms and sent letters to the municipality, the state, and even the minister, all of which remained unanswered, the men have started work on a sewer system — something which her father refers to as “becoming part of modern India.”

She didn't tell him that she paid the contractor under the table. Charlotte has had her fill of lugging buckets of water to the big house, not to mention the pumps that stall and the leaking vats up in the attic.

She hears heavy footsteps in the hall, and her door flies open.

“They've started!” Victor announces. He is standing at the door with his pyjama top open, his muscular chest revealed. He is well rested and brimming with energy.

Charlotte herself, by contrast, has not slept well. At supper the previous evening he informed her that he has had enough of retirement and that after the monsoon, when the land is green again and the flower beds are in bloom, he will be leaving. When she asked him where he was planning to settle, he replied, “England.” “You're going to England!” She was astonished. He has always said that he didn't intend to breathe his last in that dank land of bacon and grey peas. “No,” he thundered. “I'm going to stretch my legs! Walk from Rampur to London and back.” And then, pointing out the window, he said, “But I'm not leaving until the sewer system is finished.”

“I'll make sure everything's up and running by the time you get back,” Charlotte says with a smile.

He laughs so hard that the workmen at the bottom of the hill hear him and look up, trying to identify the sound.

“Out of the question. That trench will be finished by next week.”

He stalks off, taking huge strides. She always knows where her father is in the enormous house, since everything he does makes noise. In the past she didn't really notice, but as he got older, she guesses, he felt a greater need to make his presence known. Through his footsteps, his voice, his opinions, his ideas. Charlotte looks at him. His gait is clearly that of a military man.
He'll make it to London
, she thinks to herself,
and without a hitch, too
. And then a sudden wave of frustration comes over her; she thinks about all the years in Rampur. Year after year her desire to go to college, get a job, and start a new life has been dismissed by her father. But there might yet be hope for her, now that Father has travel plans of his own.

Nine years before, Charlotte met a charming German engineer, but Victor made the man's life impossible by criticizing every single thing he did. After a year of daily fault-­finding and nitpicking, even Charlotte could find no redeeming feature in the man and finally broke off their engagement. Several years later, an Irish teacher whose idealism had brought him to India met the same fate as the German engineer. After that, the possibility of romance was banished to the furthest corners of her mind. She concluded that the man for her simply did not exist, and that she would probably never have children. That was something she found very hard to accept, and only the piano was capable of mitigating her disappointment. Now she watches as her father walks down the driveway, head held high and back ramrod straight. She gets up, straightening her own back, and in that split second, she makes her decision:
I'm leaving, too!

The sky begins to turn orange, her father greets the men at the gate, and the new butler with the unpronounceable name appears from nowhere bearing a tray with cups of tea. The men talk, drink, and gesture. Her father's voice can be heard above all the others. One man, presumably the foreman, listens with a doubtful expression on his face, and then shakes his head. Victor points to the hole at his feet and then to the great house. Suddenly all the men are looking at her. She feels naked in her lace nightdress, and quickly steps away from the open window.

“A month! The man claims it'll take them a month to dig the trench! And then they'll still have to lay the pipes! We won't be able to reach the front door by car for months, and all that time the weeds will be choking the driveway. I could have finished the job in a morning with a couple of men from my battalion! A month! Do you know what that costs? A month! And he calls himself a contractor! An unprofessional tinkerer, that's what he is. A month for a simple trench! The ground's too hard, he says. Why not rent a machine? They're in use all over the civilized world these days! Not him . . . says he'll make do with his men, a bunch of weaklings and pansies in bare feet. How do you drive a shovel into the ground with your bare feet? Will you tell me that?”

Charlotte is familiar with his tirades: if she doesn't stop him, he'll go on for hours. She says, “Maybe you ought to tell them that it would be easier if they were wearing shoes.”

“Don't think I'm planning to furnish his men with shoes: I'm not the army.”

“No, I only meant that you could mention it to him. . . . Who knows, he might see something in the idea.”

“Well, I'm certainly not planning to pay a bunch of barefoot diggers for a whole month!”

The general puts on his favourite boots. He feels more affection for them, the boots, than for any human being. They know where he has been, where he says he's been but hasn't, the people he's obeyed and those he's humiliated, together with all those he has seduced, embraced, kicked, and trampled. Those are the boots he'll be wearing on his grand hiking tour. The boots he regards as his best friends.

At the bottom of the hill the men are working in their bare feet, shovelling the earth to one side of the driveway. They scrape and root around in the ground until the dirt is loose enough to remove. The retired soldier watches the men. He is seething inwardly, but he knows he has to contain himself. If he flies into a temper in the driveway of his own house, he won't get off as easily as he did before his retirement from the army. He slows his pace, takes a deep breath, and holds it in. Silently he counts to ten, very slowly, before exhaling. Again he holds his breath, and repeats the exercise. On the count of ten he reaches the end of the driveway, close to the hole in the ground. The workmen, who were served tea that morning, sense the tension and do not look up. They continue to dig. Their callused feet, with broken toenails, rest on the sharp gravel. One of them, a young man with a cloth wound around his head, hasn't noticed the arrival of the general and goes on singing. He gives a rendition of a popular film song in a high-pitched voice while rooting in the soil with his shovel. The general grabs the shovel from his hands, pushes him to one side, and takes his place in the row. He then inserts the shovel into the ground and bears down on it as hard as he can. He realizes at once that it's almost impossible to get the shovel into the ground in one go. He takes a deep breath, the sole of his foot poised. When he exhales, he generates power. The shovel plunges into the ground. Triumphantly, he tosses the shovelful of earth onto the pile. Again he stamps the shovel into the ground, this time deeper and more fiercely. And again and again. Beads of perspiration form on his forehead, and his arms begin to tremble slightly. His body creaks and strains: he's no longer used to physical labour. He refuses to acknowledge these sensations: all he wants to do is to dig his shovel into the earth, and to show those weaklings what real work is like. Gradually the men stop working. They stand there, watching the tall, elderly Englishman who that morning had seemed so distinguished and who was now carrying on like a madman. Again and again, he plunges the shovel into the ground, digging deeper and faster.

Then, as they wait for the next thrust of the shovel, he suddenly stops. “This is work,” he pants. “I'm an old geezer and long retired, so don't tell me you can't do it. You just don't feel like it. Why do you think this country isn't developing? Because there are too many gutless bastards like you around. Do you think we could have won the war in our bare feet?” He stamps his foot on the ground and continues his tirade.

Then a large truck appears at the bottom of the driveway and comes to a halt. It's full of pipes: long iron sewage pipes. There are four men seated on top of the pile. The driver honks his horn, and from his cabin he waves to the men in the driveway. During this interruption the general has temporarily lost the thread of the conversation, and now he glares at the driver. When he sees the men sitting on top of the pipes, he orders them to climb down. “Another truckload of layabouts! Don't you people understand that you're expected to work for the wages I'm paying you?”

One by one, the men jump down from the truck.

“And now I suppose you're going to tell me that it'll take a week to unload those pipes.” He was still holding the shovel. Then, before anyone sees what he is doing, he starts to cut through the ropes holding the iron pipes together. The driver shouts and everyone jumps backwards. As the general slices through the last rope, there's a creaking sound, but that is all. The general is disappointed. He was hoping that all the iron pipes would glide from the truck at the same time. It would have been a magnificent apotheosis to his bout of digging. He gives the pile a final whack and turns away. The labourers are dumbstruck. The pile begins to creak, and one of the pipes works itself free and starts to slide. The man with the cloth wound around his head does his best to pull Victor away from the truck, but Victor doesn't want to be pulled away. He wants to stride away from the truck in his combat boots.

But Victor is too slow. The blow knocks him to the ground, face down, as though a grenade has just exploded behind him. The first pipe hits his calves. It is as if all the power in his legs has been obliterated. His knees hit the ground and he feels them break. The next pipe falls on the one before, breaking his shins. With a thundering roar, the entire load begins to slide off the truck bed. One by one, the pipes land on the general's legs. He feels his feet and ankles shatter. Inside his boots, all his bones are reduced to splinters. Only the leather holds the flesh together. Now the pipes fall onto his back. The men are screaming. They throw their shovels in front of the pipes, trying to stop the onslaught. But the iron pipes continue to come crashing down, like the finale of a breathtaking piece of music.

In the midst of the music, Victor hears the sound of Japanese bullets all around him. They don't hit him: he knows he's invulnerable. The war is over and he's made it out of the jungle alive. On foot. Wearing his boots. He is walking along the river, and his feet feel wet. Blood gushes over the top at every step. He founders in the mud. The sumpy bottom makes it impossible for him to take another step. He lies there, face down. Then he realizes that he's lying on the ground, with his face on the rocks. The drum roll ceases; one final high tone echoes. Then everything goes dark and still.

The driver mutters, “The pipes weren't for here.”

THE BELT COMES
down again and again, leaving red welts on his back. In the chapel the boys' choir is singing, their voices high and fragile. Together with the brothers of the St. Thomas congregation, the churchgoers are celebrating Easter. Most of them are descendants of the bastard offspring of English soldiers who, after getting an Indian beauty pregnant, left the mother-to-be behind. Brother Francis hopes no one misses him. He's standing in the shower room, stripped to the waist, and he is chastising himself with his belt. His dream, and the reason he learned Hindi, was to do good work ministering to the poorest of the poor, as a respectable missionary brother. That dream has collapsed. A week ago Joseph, the boy he rescued from the clutches of the tyrannical tailor, disappeared, and it is his fault. He's sure of that.

This morning, when it was his turn to go forward in prayer, he lost his place. Father Prior looked at him questioningly. He desperately searched his missal for the right words, but the sentence was gone. The letters kept spinning around, and the abbot finally had to assign the reading to his neighbour. Later that same day, when they all walked in procession to the chapel, he chose a spot at the end of a row of brothers kneeling at the communion rail. His thoughts turned to Joseph, as they did every second that he was not distracted by more edifying thoughts. Where could he be? The boy hadn't returned to the tailor, that much was clear, since Francis had gone by that morning. Had he run away with the non-believer Abbas? Abbas who wasn't afraid of anything or anyone; he had become the prior's special conversion project.
Please, God, let them keep their hands off him
, he prayed. He felt his member swelling and through his habit he saw a bulge appear next to the wooden cross. He stole away from the altar rail and went to the shower room. There he had untied the rope around his waist, hung the wooden cross on a nail, let his habit slip from his shoulders, and begun to lash himself.

“
RUN, MUKKA
”
yells
Abbas. “Run!”

They duck into an alley and then make a right through a small gateway. They can hear the policeman panting behind them. They shoot down another alleyway, where a woman is on her knees doing the wash. They slip between two houses, and suddenly Abbas pulls Madan behind a wall. A rat streaks past. Abbas puts his finger to his lips. Madan holds his breath and presses his arms tight against his body. They hear the sound of the policeman's boots as he goes clumping past and disappears into the distance. Abbas smiles and holds up his hand. Madan takes the apple from his pocket and hands it to Abbas.

“Way to go, Dummy.” Abbas gives him a slap on the shoulder. Not a hard slap, but one that expressed appreciation.

It is a very large, bright red apple. They retreat farther behind the wall, where no one can see them. In the corner, the rat reappears and looks at the two boys. Abbas bites into the apple hungrily and then gives it to Madan. They take turns until even the core disappears into their stomachs. The stem is the only thing they throw away.