1977 (27 page)

only quite a new major. How petty, to feel a thrill. How petty to get one’s own back for little

humiliations suffered. But I remember when he was quite a senior major how I sometimes

treated junior Mrs Majors.

“I’d learned the rules, Mr Turner. The rules of the club. I’d learned them for Tusker’s sake

and when they made him a Lieutenant-Colonel at the end of Nineteen forty-five I thought:

Perhaps the sun will come out again. But it didn’t. We didn’t even move out of Smith’s hotel.

We’d been billeted there from the day we arrived early in the war, two rooms, en-suite, the

same ones the Bhoolabhoys now occupy as bedrooms. We used one as a living-room and

the smaller as a bedroom. We didn’t move because Tusker wouldn’t. We could have moved

into a bungalow of our own several times, but Tusker wouldn’t. He said the hotel was

convenient for the
daftar
, which it was. He said it was cheaper living there than running your

own establishment—in those days he was very tight-fisted. In a way I respected this. I’d

been brought up to know the value of money, too. Now he’s tight-fisted again but that’s

because there’s no alternative. He spent money like water, lost money, gambled money,

made a fool of himself directly he left the army for commerce and we lived in Bombay. But

that’s another story. I mustn’t talk to you about it.

“We didn’t leave Smith’s until the whole British-India thing was coming to an end and

Tusker had agreed to stay on for a year or two. Rose Cottage was becoming vacant because

Mildred had gone home and Colonel Layton and Sarah and Susan were moving down to

Commandant House. We were offered it. For once I insisted. If we were going to stay after

practically every other British family had gone then I wanted for once in my life a proper

setting, Mr Turner. And for once Tusker didn’t resist. He only grumbled a bit. I thought that

was a good sign. I thought perhaps after all the sun would come out again, between us. But it

didn’t. Not really. Except once—and that paradoxically was after sunset.

“I remember the ceremony we had here in Pankot on Independence eve very clearly still,

the evening of August fourteen, Nineteen forty-seven, down there on the parade ground of

the Pankot Rifles. At sundown they beat the retreat. After that we dined at Flagstaff House.

Then we went back to the parade ground. It was quite chilly. We sat on stands put up for the

occasion. The whole place was floodlit. There was still one small British contingent on

station, a mixed bunch. They marched on last after all the Indian troops had marched on.

There was a band. That was a pretty scratch affair too, but they seemed inspired by the

occasion. They played all the traditional martial British music. Then there were some Indian

pipers, and a Scottish pipe-major. They played The Flowers of the Forest’. One by one all

the floodlights were put out leaving just the flagpole lit with the Union Jack flying from it.

Colonel Layton and the new Indian colonel stood at attention side by side. Then the band

played ‘Abide With Me’. They still play that, Mr Turner, when they beat the retreat in Delhi

on the eve of Republic Day.

“It was so moving that I began to cry. And Tusker put his hand in mine and kept it there,

all through the hymn and when we were standing all through God Save the King, and all

through that terrible, lovely moment when the Jack was hauled down inch by inch in utter,

utter silence. The only sounds you could hear were the jackals hunting in the hills and the

strange little rustles when a gust of wind sent papers and programmes scattering. There was

no sound otherwise until on the stroke of midnight the Indian flag began to go up, again

very slowly, and then the band began to play the new Indian national anthem and all the

crowds out there in the dark began to sing the words and when the flag was up there flying

and the anthem was finished you never heard such cheering and clapping. I couldn’t clap

because Tusker still had hold of my hand and didn’t let go until all the floodlights came on

again and the troops marched off to the sound of the band.”

BEFORE EASTER there was Holi, the Spring fertility festival of the Hindus whose lower

classes spent the day roaming the bazaar and throwing coloured powder over one another.

Sometimes they squirted coloured water although this was supposed to be illegal because it

ruined their clothes and they were poor people.

At Holi, the well-off usually stayed indoors to avoid getting spattered by gangs of

merrymakers. Some of them had friends in and played token Holi in their gardens, like the

Menektaras who each year held a Holi party in the garden of Rose Cottage. According to

Tusker this was no different from any other Menektara party except that as you arrived

Coocoo Menektara lightly smeared the men’s foreheads and dabbed the women’s wrists with

magenta-coloured powder. After that, while the Menektara children played Holi with greater

enthusiasm under the supervision of their ayah in a corner of the garden well out of reach of

the grown-ups in their nylon sarees and smart suits, it was—again according to Tusker -the

usual question of elbows bend at the bar and then round the mulberry bush of the buffets,

of which there were the necessary two (veg and non-veg).

The Menektaras’ Holi party was one Lucy looked forward to because it was in the open air

and she was able to wander in daylight round a garden once briefly hers and now restored by

the removal of Mildred Layton’s tennis court to a likeness of what it had been in old Mabel

Layton’s day, with beds stocked with the English hybrid tea roses which Colonel ‘Tiny’

Menektara (he was six feet tall) was so knowledgeable about.

Tiny Menektara was kind and attentive to her always, and between herself and Coocoo

there was this understanding which might be summed up as their mutual recognition of the

fact that while all colonels’ ladies (active or retired) were more or less equal some were less

or more equal than others. It depended upon which side you were looking at it from.

Coocoo’s flirtatious manner with Tusker caused Lucy no qualms. She saw behind it more

clearly than she could see behind Tusker’s flirtatious manner with Mrs Desai. When Coocoo

embraced Tusker it was obvious to Lucy that Coocoo was thinking : Yes, you’re nice, you

can be fun, you make us laugh, you’re always welcome, but you’re an Englishman so you

represent the defeated enemy.

It was different, she supposed, for the new generations of English and Indians who met

and made friends with one another; but however friendly you were with Indians of your own

generation, the generation that had experienced all the passions and prejudices, there was

somehow in that relationship a distant and diminishing but not yet dead echo of the sound

of the tocsin.

Coocoo Menektara’s Holi invitations came in the form of printed cards with a blank for the

date. The print said: “Coocoo and Tiny are playing Holi on..................at 12 Upper Club

Road. Please Come. RSVP.” This year Lucy left the card on Tusker’s table, having added in

pencil an? to it. It came back to her escritoire with a note: “Good-o!”

He was more generally amenable these days and had been since the day she went to the

club and had too many gin fizzes and hadn’t got home until six, expecting a scene. There

had been no scene. He’d merely asked, rather plaintively, if she’d had a good day. After her

bath she found him in the living-room reading
The Times of India
, drinking a glass of beer.

“I’ve ordered trays,” he said. “Billy-Boy sent a note over. He thinks he’s sickening for

something. Thought we shouldn’t risk the dining-room.”

“Very wise.”

She sat at her escritoire with a gin and lime juice and entered the day’s alarming expenditure

in her housekeeping book, and added a rupee or so to the actual cost; against the cost of

mali’s
next month’s wage. Dishonesty. Wretched dishonesty.

“Are you going to the flicks?” he asked when Ibrahim brought the trays and set the food

out on the table.

“Yes.”

“Anything worth seeing?”

She glanced at him. She wondered if he was about to suggest going with her. Her behaviour

today had shaken him. Before she could begin to feel properly contrite she said firmly, “No.

It’s a woman’s picture called
How to Murder your Wife
.”

A sense of other people’s humour had never been one of his strong points. In the days

before his personality change he’d had little sense of humour himself—at least none that he

shared with other people. It had developed subsequently, but in almost knockabout

pantomimic form. Other people’s jokes, if subtle, still failed to amuse him. He could be

deliberately obtuse about seeing their point but scathing if he made a subtle joke himself and

it took anyone time to appreciate it. In the main he had become a man roused most to

laughter by ribaldry, and by other people’s discomfiture, a man for whom perhaps the

supreme comedy of life would be the sight of someone actually slipping on a banana skin.

She thanked God he had never quite descended to the level of the practical joke. As it was,

Tusker being deliberately funny was invariably an embarrassment to her, particularly when

he seemed to be being funny at his own expense -making an exhibition of himself.

He did this at the Menektaras’ Holi party by leaving the adults and joining the children,

submitting first to their shyly thrown little handfuls of powder, then egging them on by

shying back, so that presently they showered him with blue, purple and crimson powder and

he returned to the adults covered from head to foot, his clothes caked, his eyes and teeth

gleaming through the mask of coloured dust like a miner coming up from a pit where the

devil’s rainbow had its source. And in this state he had threatened to embrace first Coocoo

and then Mrs Mitra.

“Well, he’s all right again,’ Dr Mitra said, guiding Lucy to the non-veg table. Having guided

her he stood back waiting until it was the men’s turn to follow the women and fill their

plates.

Long used to the demarcation of eating zones as between male and female at parties such

as this, Lucy still found it onerous, especially when everyone was sat on chairs formed into a

large circle—or rather two large circles, one for the men and one for the women—and you

were stuck with just two women to talk to, one on each side of you. Coocoo Menektara

spared her guests the boredom of the imprisoning circles but there were chairs dotted here

and there on the lawn for those who wanted them and these, random though they were,

were the focal point towards which the women were drawn—as much, Lucy thought, by the

tradition of segregation as by the wish to take the weight off their feet—and few of the

younger ones were ever capable of resistance, of invading the closed ranks of the standing

men. Indeed, the men’s apparent determination to eat by themselves was itself a powerful

dissuader.

Today, feeling her age, Lucy had sat down and then wished she hadn’t because the chair

she’d chosen and which she now couldn’t move from because Mrs Mitra and Mrs Srinivasan

joined her immediately she was settled, gave her an uninterrupted view of Tusker.

It was one she would have preferred to be spared. There he was, in the garden of the oldest

and most beautiful bungalow in Pankot, a gesticulating clown, coloured from head to foot

and giving a performance that was not so much attracting attention as forcing laughter from

the immaculately dressed and well-behaved Indians whom he was haranguing, or telling

some unseemly story to. Those on the fringe of the group were paying little attention but

watching for the moment when the last of the women left the buffets; then they strolled to

the tables and presently only Tiny Menektara remained, one hand behind his elegant upright

back, the other holding his merely sipped-at glass, his head sometimes nodding, at other

times thrown back in soundless laughter, while Tusker went on and on; about what Lucy

could not imagine but she hoped it was not about the recent war; she hoped he was not

being funny about the
war
; there was scarcely anyone in the garden who did not know of

someone whose son or husband had been killed in the fight with Pakistan over Bangladesh.

Tiny was now prompting Tusker to get some food and Tusker went with him but paused

on the way to put his empty glass on the bearer’s tray and take a full one.

Mrs Srinivasan and Mrs Mitra were talking about Mr Bhutto, the new prime minister of

Pakistan. “He’s only a grocer’s son,” Mrs Srinivasan was saying, “so what can you expect?