Waiting for the Monsoon (3 page)

“General! You're here already?” the butler stammers, surprised that he didn't hear him coming.

“With my hands still covered in blood!” Victor booms. “What's the meaning of all those poles? Is this how you protect my son?” He laughs heartily and turns to his wife. “Your troops would appear to be more competent than mine, Tilly.”

Mathilda glances uneasily at the group of dark-skinned men and women holding their sticks, relieved that her husband has returned just in time. But why are all the servants suddenly carrying poles? She clutches her newborn baby tightly to her breast.

Victor pushes the lid of the chest aside and says, “Have any of you ever seen an electric lawnmower before?”

~~~

THE GENERAL IS
standing at the top of the stairs. The toes of his boots extend over the edge of the top stair. At the bottom, Sita is holding the howling infant in her arms. Next to him stands his wife, Mathilda. Charlotte, who spent all afternoon playing with Sita and her dolls, slips noiselessly over to her mother's side and searches for her hand, which she holds hidden in her skirts. Excruciatingly slowly, her father's white-gloved hand goes up. He points his swagger stick at the outer door, where the butler is standing with an umbrella. Everyone stares at the motionless stick. The only sounds are the crying of the baby and, in the background, the monotonous strokes of the sweepers' brooms in the salon.

“But,
sarkar
 . . .” The words issue haltingly from Sita's mouth as she gently caresses the wailing baby. “
Chota-sahib
is so little.”

The swagger stick seems to grow larger. Sita, in her faded sari, walks hesitantly toward the large grey pram with its hood and lace trim, all the while comforting little Donald with her caresses. The baby stops crying. The young woman, still a girl herself, transfers the baby to her other arm. Charlotte's sigh of relief is audible. She knows that Sita will protect her little brother, as she has always protected her. Outside there is a loud thunderclap and the sky breaks open. The baby starts to cry again. Charlotte finds her mother's hand and squeezes it hard. There is no response.

The swagger stick motions briefly in the direction of the pram and then points again to the outer door. Sita puts the baby in the pram. He starts to cry even harder. She goes to pick him up again, but a sound from the top of the stairs stops her. The butler opens the outer door. The rain pelts down on the tiles. Sita rocks the pram gently back and forth, in the hope that the cries will subside, but the opposite is the case when a flash of lightning illuminates the hall, followed by a deafening peal of thunder. For the second time, Sita slowly pushes the pram with the screaming baby outside. As the first raindrops hit the hood, she stops.

“The middle of the lawn,” orders the general.

The girl cautiously pushes the carriage down the stairs. She tries to cushion the jolt at each stair, as she used to do with Charlotte, but the child's cries grow even louder. Once on the path, she looks back. Behind her the door is already closed. In despair, she walks onto the grass; the rain is pounding down with tremendous force. She slides the baby as far under the hood as possible, so that he doesn't become soaked, but on the inside the sound of the rain must be deafening. In front of the salon window stands the broad figure of the general, who has just returned from a mission during which he made short work of a group of Indian protesters whom he regarded as mutinous slaves. Sita stops in the middle of the lawn. She bends over the pram and tries to quiet the baby. She knows that she must now leave him alone, otherwise the general will come storming outside and she will lose her job. She caresses the child once more and pulls the sheet over him as best she can. The lashing rain continues unabated. She walks away, leaving the pram in the middle of the lawn. Out of sight of the window, she crouches down near a bush full of winter roses. She hears the cries over the peals of thunder.

Charlotte runs back to the nursery. Looking out the window, she sees Sita sitting next to the bush, not far from the lonely pram, ready to jump up at any moment. “Don't cry, don't cry,” she whispers to her baby brother. “If you go on crying, he'll leave you out there for hours, just like he did with me.”

ALL THE WOMEN
gazed in bewilderment at the secretary of the New Rampur Club. No one said a word. Only once before had he walked into their midst unannounced, after Mr. Chatterjee — the owner of two fashionable ladies' apparel shops in the town centre, but a poor tennis player — hit the ball straight through the windowpane of the “Ladies Club.” Now the secretary was standing before them again, wiping his brow, while the women stared at him. The ceiling fans were going at full speed.

“Are you sure?” The query was launched suddenly from a corner of the room.

The secretary nodded. He was surprised by the identity of the speaker, seeing that the wife of Alok Nath, the goldsmith, invariably spoke in an inaudible whisper because she thought it sounded aristocratic.

“What?” said the widow Singh, who was sitting next to the wife of Alok Nath and was awakened by the unexpected sound of a voice next to her.

“That's impossible! Quite impossible! On my way to the club I dropped off a very expensive length of pink Chinese silk.” The corpulent wife of Nikhil Nair, district director of the Eastern Indian Mining Company, was on her feet, glowering at the secretary. “He walked out to the car with me to get the material, and there was nothing wrong with the man.”

The secretary then turned to the wife of Ajay Karapiet, who ran the town's biggest hotel as well as two cinemas. “Your husband just called. He told me that your daughter went to the workplace with a piece of brocade and that just as she was about to hand it to him, his eyes began to roll and he slowly collapsed, without making a sound.”

“With the brocade in his hand?” shrilled the wife of Ajay Karapiet.

“I have no idea,” said the secretary. “Your husband didn't say anything about that.”

“I brought him a length of material, too,” said the woman who was married to a coconut oil manufacturer.

They were all talking at once. In the previous weeks each of them had delivered a length of cloth to Sanat the
darzi
, one more costly than the other. Only Charlotte and the wife of Adeeb Tata, the local landowner and a distant relative of the immensely wealthy Ratan Tata, had not given the tailor their material — the wife of Adeeb Tata because she had already bought a dress in Paris, and Charlotte because she didn't have any fabric yet.

“He said I could pick up my dress the day after tomorrow. It still has to be embroidered.”

“Does anyone know if he has a successor?”

“What am I supposed to do now?”

Many of these women wore a dress or a
salwar kameez
, in contrast to the ladies of the Wednesday-morning group, who wore saris. The garments, all made by Sanat, were indistinguishable from one another. This was not surprising, since they were all based on the same pattern. The only difference was that some had long sleeves, others short, and the neck was either square or round. That is why the embroidery, the buttons, and the lace were so important: together with the material itself, it was the details that made all the difference. The bicentennial of the club was coming up soon and it was going to be celebrated in style. Small wonder that the ladies had gone to such pains to find an exceptional piece of fabric. Charlotte had heard that some of them went all the way to New Delhi or Bombay to ensure exclusivity. It was obvious that this group of middle-aged women would like nothing better than to set off en masse to the workplace of the recently deceased tailor in order to check on the safety of their fabric. However, that would not be appropriate. They would have to wait until after the cremation and the subsequent farewell rituals. Their concern that the costly fabrics were in danger of mysteriously disappearing or shrinking in size was not entirely unfounded. The wife of Nikhil Nair suggested they post a guard at the door, but the other women felt that the family of the tailor might interpret that as a motion of non-confidence. The wife of the goldsmith knew the wife of the tailor's cousin, and she could ask him to keep an eye on things, but the wife of the builder who had submitted the proposal to renovate the club reported that in his youth the tailor's assistant had been involved with the police. The wife of the police commissioner knew nothing about that but promised she would ask her husband to look into it. The widow Singh had dropped off again, and was snoring softly.

The nail specialist was still standing in front of the group holding a plastic hand on which each finger displayed a different nail problem. But he was already surreptitiously sliding the carrying case closer with his foot. The fan turning rapidly above his head no longer provided cool air, and he wanted to go home. He surveyed the flushed faces of the women. They couldn't get enough of the discussion about the deceased tailor and the problem of what they would wear to the party. Although he had hundreds of tips for festive nails, he could not get his audience to listen. His gaze came to rest on the only European woman in the group, and he wondered how she had become a member of a club for Indian ladies. There were almost no British citizens left in his country, which had shaken off the yoke of the Raj several decades ago. Her dress was just as unappealing as those of the other women, except that hers bore a Scottish tartan pattern while all the others had opted for a floral or botanical design. Clearly the late tailor was no great talent when it came to the design and fabrication of women's clothing.

“I know a very good tailor,” he said suddenly.

It was a while before the message got through to the women, but then they began bombarding him with questions. Where did the man live? Was he expensive? Had he ever worked with Chinese silk before? Did he have more than one pattern? What was his family background? Did he have his own sewing machine? When could he start? etc.

“I've never met him myself,” the nail specialist stammered.

There was a collective sigh of disappointment.

“But my first cousin on my father's side says he's an absolute master.” The man looked at the group of women in their tent dresses. “He has several different patterns and apparently he's not expensive. But . . .” Here he hesitated.

“What's the matter?” the women wanted to know.

“He'll only come if he really wants to.”

“If he wants to,” sneered the wife of Nikhil Nair.

“He's . . . well . . . different from other
darzis
.”

“Like the fashion designers in Paris,” cooed the wife of Adeeb Tata, who liked to remind the other ladies that she'd seen more of the world than they had.

“Yes, perhaps something like that,” the nail man said as he put the artificial hand back in its case.

PANTING AND DAMP
with perspiration, Charlotte parked the bicycle in the shed. The piercing rays of the sun streamed through the holes in the roof. She resolved to move the Lloyds and her bicycle into the music room as soon as the monsoon began. She seldom went in there now that the piano was gone. She shuffled off to the house, where the heat that had plagued her the entire morning was even more intense, and saw to her relief that Hema had closed the upper windows in the nursery. In the distance, the siren began to wail. And again her heart skipped a beat. She looked around to see if there was smoke anywhere, but the sky was clear and cloudless.

Inside, the heat had not been tempered by the closed shutters, curtains, windows, and doors. Charlotte turned on a lamp, set the fan on “high,” and lay down on the sofa positioned beneath it. Her legs throbbed and her feet were swollen. She wished that Hema was there: he would have brought her a bucket of cold water. But the butler had gone to the town centre to shop, since she could no longer buy on credit in the neighbourhood stores. She looked at the sideboard filled with the Wedgwood china service, which had been a wedding present. A month ago, there had been a dealer prepared to buy it, but the price he quoted was ridiculously low. In the end he left with only the silver soup spoon, one of her parents' wedding gifts.

Charlotte rose from the sofa, trudged up the stairs to the bathroom, and filled the tub with a layer of water. She began to relax when her feet reached the cool water. She looked at her veined feet in the old cast iron tub. They bore clear traces of wear and tear. Her big toe toyed with the black string attached to the plug. She remembered that when Donald was little he insisted on pulling it out because he thought the string was some kind of animal. He was afraid of snakes and spiders and insects as well. It had been a long time since she'd heard from him. Her last letter, written at Christmastime, had elicited only a beautiful card with New Year's greetings, but no news. Was he still having problems with his back? And did his wife still suffer from kidney stones? The photo of his daughter, taken years ago on a trip to Disney World, was downstairs on the mantelpiece. Charlotte seldom looked at it. Old photographs made her feel sad.

The front doorbell sounded. She withdrew her feet from the water and without drying them walked into the hallway, down the stairs. When she opened the door, she was momentarily blinded by the glare of the sun, and it was a while before she could see the man standing in front of her.

“Mrs. Bridgwater?” he asked in a nasal voice.

Charlotte nodded.

“Will you sign here?”

Absently, Charlotte signed her name, and the man left without saying another word. He gunned the engine as he drove off, scattering pebbles in all directions.

She tore open the envelope, even though she was already aware of the contents. The only thing she didn't know was the exact amount. She put on her glasses, glanced at the figure under the line, and with a sigh placed the letter in the dresser drawer with the other bills. She closed the drawer, but then opened it again, fishing around until she found the business card. She walked over to the telephone next to the dresser and dialled a number. Someone answered immediately. Charlotte's first impulse was to hang up, but instead she said in a low voice, “This is Mrs. Bridgwater.”