Waiting for the Monsoon (9 page)

“Not at first. But it did later on.”

“And now?”

His whole body aches. His heart is beating a mile a minute. He closes his eyes and feels her finger glide across his hand. She must stop.

TINY DROPS APPEAR
over his dark eyebrows. His lips open ever so slightly. Charlotte sees how his nostrils quiver. Her forefinger moves across his arm. Is this what Mrs. Blackburn was protecting her against all those years? This delicious sensation? Charlotte is no longer thinking about school, or her father, or Rampur, or sleep, or tomorrow. For the first time in ten years she is happy.

CHARLOTTE HAD BEEN
planning to hail a rickshaw for the Tuesday-morning meeting, since thanks to the sale of her china service, she finally had cash on hand. But when she saw the electricity bill, she'd grabbed her bike and decided that she would have to economize even more.

Behind her someone honked. Without looking around, she raised her hand. The driver did not pass and continued to honk his horn. Charlotte's hair clung to her forehead, and when she looked over her shoulder, it interfered with her view of the traffic behind her. That morning the thermometer had hit forty-seven degrees, and the air was like treacle. The driver in the car behind her continued to honk, and Charlotte stopped.

The wife of Nikhil Nair beckoned to her. Charlotte leaned her bicycle against a tree and walked over to the car. The door opened.

“Jump in!” came the order from inside the air-conditioned car.

Charlotte entered the cool interior.

“Akhilesh, go lock the bike,” said the woman in her pink trouser suit to her chauffeur.

“Please, ma'am, the key.” He reached out his hand to Charlotte.

At the club she always parked the Raleigh near the entrance, and at home in the shed. “The bike doesn't have a lock,” she said.

“Then I needn't have bothered to stop,” muttered the buxom lady.

“Is there something wrong?” Charlotte inquired, revelling in the cool of the car interior.

The wife of Nikhil Nair rolled her eyes dramatically and waved her hands to reinforce her story. “You know that the nail specialist was going to arrange everything. Well, the man never called back. It appears that he's arriving this week. We figured that since it's going to benefit all of us, the shed next to the tennis court at the club would be a good place, seeing that the old workplace has already been rented out to a bookbinder, but now the secretary says that the shed is to be used to house the books, since the library is going to be refurbished in the next few weeks, in connection with the fete, since there will be important guests there, and he says that in honour of your father the library must be preserved in a proper state for the sake of future generations. The Karapiets' extra room in the servants' quarters is occupied because they've just taken on a cook with five children. Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon calling around. Time is getting short. He's already on his way here, and we still don't have anything, so we thought that — since you have so much space — you might have room for him.” Panting, the woman put her hands to her bosom.

“Room for whom?”

“For the tailor.”

“In my house?”

“Not in the house, of course, but there must be servants' quarters?” The wife of Nikhil Nair, and everyone else, knew that except for Hema, Charlotte no longer had any personnel, while in the past there must have been at least forty servants, many of whom lived on the premises. The wife of Nikhil Nair saw the hesitation on Charlotte's face and said, “Of course, he'll be paying rent.”

Charlotte wanted to ask how much he would be paying. But because she knew that was what the wife of Nikhil Nair wanted to hear, she replied that she would think about it. She stepped out of the car and into the suffocating heat.

IT HAD ALREADY
occurred to Charlotte that taking in lodgers was an honourable way of making money, but after the fiasco with the couple from Kerala who were schoolteachers, she hadn't tried it again. Of course, two teachers who were constantly at each other's throats was not the same thing as a tailor. Charlotte thought back to the evening when she drove by the workplace of the old
darzi
around eleven o'clock at night. She had remembered that she had a length of cotton in the car, and when she saw a light burning, she stopped and knocked on the door, assuming that he was still at work. A little girl opened the door, and behind her a whole family was lying asleep on the floor. Sanat jumped to his feet when he heard her voice, and with a smile he took the piece of material from her.

“I make beautiful dress, ma'am,” he had said, “round neck — sleeves short?”

She really wanted a square neck and long sleeves, but she had nodded and gone home. That evening she walked through all the unused rooms in their spacious house and decided to take in lodgers.

But the idea of a tailor coming to live and work on her property simply did not suit her. It would mean that all the women in the club would come to her house for fittings, and naturally they'd all stay for a cup of tea. The last thing she wanted was all those inquisitive female eyes in her house. There was already enough gossip about her — and besides, she had just sold her Wedgwood cups.

SHE PARKED HER
bicycle near the entrance to the club. All her brooding about the tailor had almost made her forget about the oppressive heat, but when she saw the wife of Nikhil Nair standing near the entrance with a hopeful expression on her face, the heat engulfed her like an oppressive blanket.

“Everyone thinks it's a wonderful idea!” called out the wife of Nikhil Nair.

She didn't know where the other women had come from, but she was suddenly surrounded. The wife of Ajay Karapiet clapped her hands and called her their knight in shining armour. The widow Singh smiled at her encouragingly. The wife of Alok Nath, the goldsmith, pressed the length of material she had bought for a new dress into Charlotte's hands, as if she were the tailor, and the wife of Adeeb Tata said that her Paris dress had to be shortened. The women were all talking at once. The enormous sense of relief was palpable. Charlotte, by contrast, broke out in a cold sweat. She had to put a stop to this. She had to explain that this was not what she wanted, that she was too busy, that her house was not suitable, that the servants' quarters were home to scorpions and snakes and close to collapse, and that there was no way she could house a poor tailor.

She was ushered inside as if she was a hero. Someone handed her a glass of cold, sparkling lemonade and a homemade biscuit. The women gave themselves over to speculation about when he would arrive: one person said today, another thought it would be tomorrow, but it was clear to everyone that he could not be far away.

CHARLOTTE IS COLD
.
She wears two pairs of pyjama pants to bed, one over the other, and a heavy woollen sweater. That's not allowed during the day, so she puts on an extra woollen shirt under her school uniform and wears a pair of tights.

The cold didn't seem to bother her friend Iris, who often forgot to put on a coat.

“There's snow in the air,” says Iris.

Charlotte looks up at the steely skies and shivers. “I don't see any snow.”

“You can't see it, but you can smell it.”

She sniffs. It smells the way it always smells: like coal-fired heaters and the pine trees next to the school. Smells she associates with her first six months in England, when almost no one talked to her and she spent entire afternoons alone in the library, reading. Now that she and Iris are friends, school isn't that bad. The two of them make fun of the gym teacher's nose and Miss Brands, who teaches handicrafts and always has spots on her skirt. “I've never seen snow,” she says.

“Don't they have snow in India?”

“There's lots of snow in the Himalayas, sometimes fifteen metres deep, but I've never been there. India is a very big country.”

“Snow is nothing but frozen water.”

“Does it hurt?”

Iris laughs. “Only when you fall on your backside.”

The two girls walk down the path leading to Albert Hall, where Mrs. Blackburn is going to read the Christmas story to the children in the lower grades. Charlotte's gaze keeps returning to the sky. It reminds her of the period just before the monsoon, when the clouds hang lower and lower and the sky turns a darker shade of grey.

The girls are already seated on benches around an empty chair in the middle of a room with a high ceiling. On the walls there are paintings of old men, and a fire is burning in the fireplace. Everyone's chattering away and the smell of freshly baked biscuits hangs in the air. Charlotte and Iris find a spot near the windows. Outside, the first flakes start to fall: on the path, on the grass. Then there are more of them, and they're larger. It's magical. The trees in the field are gradually covered by a blanket of snow, and the huge Victorian school building on the opposite side of the road disappears from sight.

“Isn't it beautiful?” Charlotte whispers.

Iris smiles.

Mrs. Blackburn walks into the room with a large book under her arm. The girls stop chattering and get to their feet. When the headmistress sits down, the girls follow suit. The teacher places her hands on the book and looks at her pupils, one by one. She smiles, but her fingers are drumming on the book. The girls are as still as mice. Again Charlotte's gaze wanders to the window. She is witnessing a miracle, one that's totally new to her. It's more magical than the fireworks during Diwali, and more exciting than the Holi festival of colours. Behind her, a buzz of activity is audible as a cook wearing a starched apron comes in with a steaming pitcher and begins to fill the beakers. Mrs. Blackburn puts her purse on her lap and begins to search for something inside.

“They're not here,” says the headmistress.

“What?” asks the cook.

“My glasses.” Then she looks at the girls opposite her, who try to avoid eye contact.

Outside, it's bitterly cold. Inside, the room is filled with the aroma of hot chocolate.

Iris sees the longing in her friend's eyes and gives her a nudge. “Do you want to go?”

Charlotte nods dreamily.

The girl sitting next to Charlotte notices and she starts nodding, too.

“You?” asks a classmate with her hair in a bun, sitting on the other side of the girl.

“Does she want to go?” her neighbour, a girl with a ponytail, asks the girl with the bun.

“No, not me. She's the one,” says Charlotte's neighbour.

“Ma'am! Charlotte wants to go!” calls out the girl with the ponytail.

Charlotte hasn't the faintest idea what the question is or why everyone is pointing at her.

The headmistress comes over to Charlotte. “I'm glad you're willing to go. Just run over to my house and ask the housekeeper for my reading glasses. I left them lying on the hall table.” She holds up a monocle, and then turns to the rest of the class. “I'll make do with this, for the time being.”

The girls laugh.

Charlotte is standing on the doorstep in front of the huge old door and she stretches out her hand. The snowflakes fall onto her palm and immediately melt. She licks up droplets of water. It tastes like ordinary water. She puts out her hand again, higher this time. The flakes on her hand melt, but those on the sleeve of her grey coat don't. She inhales the air. The lantern illuminates the entrance, but the path in front of Albert Hall is invisible.

Cautiously she places one foot on the virgin snow. She can feel the cobblestones underneath the layer of white. One step at a time, she follows the hedge in the direction of the school building. She can just make out the contours. The night seems brighter than usual. The flakes that blow into her face feel cool and wet. She sticks out her tongue and tries to catch them. They blow into her eyes and stick to her eyebrows. She keeps walking, occasionally looking back to see what's happening to her footsteps. The hedge is no longer there, and she has no idea whether she is still on the path. The headmistress's house is on the road behind the sports field. Since she can no longer distinguish the path, Charlotte decides that she might as well take the shortcut over the hill and along the park until she gets to the tennis courts. She is struck by how quiet it is. There's no one outdoors and the only sound is the crunch of snow under her feet.

She starts up the hill. She almost loses her footing with every step. She didn't expect it to be so slippery. She has to use her hands to make any headway. The snow is cold, but that's the only way she can continue climbing.

At the top of the hill there's a strong, cold wind, and flakes of snow blow straight into her face. Her hands and feet are ice cold. Charlotte remembers the story about her grandmother, whose feet were frozen during a snowstorm, and who died without anyone shedding a tear for her. Would the girls in her class cry if they found her dead in the snow? Iris would, she hoped. But she wasn't sure about the others. Provided they were able to find her, that is. She sees that the snow has now covered everything. She wishes she had the big clock with her, just like her grandmother. Then she could hide inside it, to get out of the snow.

Charlotte starts down the hill; she falls, slides, scrambles up, stuffs her hands into her pockets, but has to take them out again to get back on her feet. She can't see a thing. The world around her is white and black at the same time. The other girls are drinking hot chocolate and listening to the story of Mary and Joseph in the stable. Charlotte has no idea where she is and doesn't know whether to go right or left, forward or backward. She'd like to find a spot and stay there, but the thought of her grandmother's blackened frozen feet and her death, propels her onward. She peers ahead, but the snow that blows into her eyes is piercing.