An Unrestored Woman (19 page)

*   *   *

I make rice and dal. I set out a plate. I am quiet so as not to wake her. These days I have trouble sleeping, even during the hottest part of the afternoon. My thoughts wander through mango orchards, under the shade of their wide leathery leaves, and I think of the red woolen shawl. I think of how when I find it I will spread it under them. And how I will lie down in its jasmine-scented softness and close my eyes and fall into a deep and restful sleep. The deepest and most restful I have ever known. How I will dream again of waterfalls. And how I will wake, and Arya will smile. And no mango—in all of that orchard or in all the orchards of the world—will rival the sweetness of that smile.

For now I wander out toward Arun's. It's midday. The previous night's lorries have gone. New ones will stop here tonight. Everyone is asleep. There's no wind. I can almost hear the desert breathe. The rise and fall of its bosom. I can only walk in the shade and even then—even with the new chappals Arya bought for me—my feet burn from the heat of the sand. I settle against the side of the latrines, in an alcove protected from the sun.

I haven't eaten in two days. I haven't had a drop of water in over one. The sky above me twirls and spins. It is red and green and lilac and splinters like sparrows. I shut my eyes against its beauty.

I know the road to Mirpur Khas goes on for another hundred miles, and beyond that is Karachi, and beyond even that is the Arabian Sea. In Jaisalmer, they'd said, Go, they've made a new country for you. But all I can see is sand. And the only borders I know are the ones between our hearts.

I want to be hungry again. I want to arrive again at Arun's, like we did all those weeks ago. I want to be just as hungry, just as thirsty. I want to look into his indifferent face and I want him to ask again, “Anything?”

And this time I will step forward. Me. Not Arya. And this time, I will say, “Anything, except her.”

The alcove too is now filled with light. My eyes blur with heat and tears. I see Arya, though how could it be? She's asleep. And yet she's bending over me and asking, over and over again, “Why? Why are you sitting here?” And then she draws her hand toward me and cries, “You're burning up, you fool. You're raging with fever. Come inside.”

But I catch her arm. It's smooth and cool like alabaster. I want to cry into it, I want it to carry me, but instead I say, “Don't you hear them?”

She tugs. “Come inside.”

“Don't you?”

“Hear what?”

I tilt my head toward the sky. “The ducks, of course.”

She listens for a moment. Her eyes brim with tears, or maybe mine do. She lifts my chin as I'd once lifted hers. “Yes,” she says finally, almost in a whisper. “Yes. I hear them.”

 

T
HE
M
EMSAHIB

Before Arun opened his restaurant on Gadra Road—the road that led to Mirpur Khas—he was a sweeper and general coolie at the Palace Hotel in Jaipur. And before that—from the ages of nineteen to twenty-one—he was a servant at the home of British Army colonel Francis Chilcott on the colonel's estate outside of Lucknow. And about the time before that, that distant childhood of his, Arun remembered nothing. The colonel had a fussy wife, Arun thought, though he rarely saw her. Most days she stayed firmly secluded in the shadowy parts of the house, ringing the servants only when she wanted her jug of Pimm's refreshed in the summer, or more woolen blankets in the winter. She was gone for months at a time, jumping right quick at any opportunity to board a ship for England. The colonel had a grown son, Dicky, who'd joined the Indian Civil Service, and was home only on leave. He was jovial, arrogant, rarely acknowledged the servants with more than a wave of his hand, and the last time he'd been home he'd tripped over Arun as he'd been cleaning the floor with a wet rag; Dicky had looked down at the kneeling Arun, both of them twenty years old, and had said, with a great and buoyant voice, “What a marvelous posture for you people. Really, you were quite made for it.” The colonel had a daughter too, whose name was Lavinia, and it was Lavinia—beautiful, maddening Lavinia—who snuck nightly, still, into Arun's dreams, and hovered like death around his days.

He didn't see her for the first few months that he worked at the Chilcott home. She was at boarding school in Dharamsala, a place that the elite of the British Raj sent their daughters and that, as Colonel Chilcott complained to Mrs. Chilcott, “spoiled them worse than we do.” The first time Arun saw her, she arrived for her winter holidays in a flurry of rickshaws and trunks and hatboxes and foreign-looking packages, finally emerging from the Durant her father had sent to the train station, clad in a yellow linen dress that seemed to Arun as thin and pearlescent as onion peel. She hurried past him, so close that Arun noticed a fine layer of perspiration on the ridge of her collarbone, and dainty pink spots on her throat that had brightened like petals in the winter sun. She trailed behind her a dusky scent—equal parts musk and frangipani and the just-departed monsoon. In fact, he thought afterward, she was much like the monsoon: billowing, vast, and the greatest relief for a parched and anguished earth. He could've stayed enveloped in her scent for the rest of his life but he was immediately dispatched to draw Miss Chilcott's bath. “Daddy,” she was saying as he left the room, “why couldn't you send the car? That train was absolutely dreadful. The conductor was insolent
and
I saw an Indian sitting in first class. Just sitting there, Daddy.”

That night Arun pulled the overhead punkah—not so much for the breeze as to keep away the mosquitoes—while the family gathered in the sitting room. Dicky was there, as well as Mrs. Chilcott. The dark teak of the floor gleamed in the lantern light, the crickets sang with full-throated delight.

“Shall we have Mr. Reed over, dear? Tomorrow, for tea?” Mrs. Chilcott said.

Lavinia yawned.

Arun's mother—who was the Chilcott's longtime cook and housemaid—came in carrying a tray with a bottle of port and four glasses. She set it down soundlessly on the center table. Then she glanced at Arun. He was watching Lavinia, the way her fingers wrapped delicately around the glass, the white of her skin like polished marble against the bloodred port. Earlier, in a moment of terrifying breathlessness, he'd caught a glimpse of a sliver of her bony knee as she'd folded her legs under her dressing gown.

“It's settled then,” Mrs. Chilcott said. “I'll have Arun take a message over in the morning.”

Lavinia sighed. “I wish my green silk were ready.”

“The dressmaker said not for another week.”

“The dressmaker,” Dicky roared. “Why, you already have enough to fill Westminster Abbey. Besides, old Quince would propose to you if you had on a burlap sack.”

Lavinia smiled, took a sip of her port, and looked at Arun. It was the first time she'd looked at him. Her eyes, in the lamplight, were the green-gray of the Gomti on a clear day. Her face was the shape and color of a peeled almond. “Fetch me a sandwich, won't you? Something light. Cucumber, I think.”

“Why, Lavinia,” Mrs. Chilcott broke in, “you've just had your dinner.”

“Leave her be, Georgette,” Colonel Chilcott said. “The poor girl's traveled halfway across this country.”

Lavinia sank back into the cushions of her chair and said, “Traveling does make one…” She trailed off when she noticed Arun watching her; she smiled at him, teasingly, as if she already knew he was in love with her, and she said, “Hungry.” Then she raised a pretty eyebrow and said, “Don't you think?”

When Arun got to the kitchen his mother was putting away the dishes from dinner. He spoke in Hindi, trembling. “Chota memsahib wants a sandwich, ma.”

His mother—old now, left by her husband when her children were still young, with two daughters she'd not seen since she got them married years ago, one in Kanpur and the other in Meerut, and having worked every day without fail for the past eighteen years—breathed deeply. She shook her head. “That girl,” she said.

Arun grew angry. “Stop complaining,” he said. “She's traveled half the country. It'll take two minutes.”

His mother put down the knife she'd taken out to slice the cucumber. She was a head shorter than Arun and bent, her hair had gone completely gray, but for one instant—just that one last instant—she stood tall. “No, my son,” she said. “She'll take more than that.”

*   *   *

Arun delivered the message to Mr. Reed's butler the next morning. He considered crumpling it up and throwing it into the gutter but that was foolish; they'd realize immediately that he was at fault. Instead he settled for slipping the note into his kurta bottom and rubbing it against his genitals. By the time he returned, preparations for the tea were well under way. His mother was busy in the kitchen. The other servants were cleaning and sweeping and polishing every surface in the house, even the upstairs, where Mr. Reed was unlikely to go. Mrs. Chilcott was buried deep in her curtained room, hoping for an afternoon nap. Dicky and the colonel had gone to the club after lunch, promising Mrs. Chilcott again and again that they wouldn't be late for tea. And Lavinia was in her room. What was she doing? Arun wondered. He walked slowly by her door every few minutes, hoping to catch some sound or maybe even a glimpse. He was sure to take with him a candlestick or a dust cloth or a broom, in case he was caught out. He needn't have worried: the upstairs was eerily quiet. Mrs. Chilcott must have fallen asleep, and as for Lavinia, he was rewarded only once when, as he passed by her door, the linen yellow dress lay in a heap outside of it, presumably for the laundress. Arun looked up and down the hushed hallway, picked up the dress, and sniffed it. And there! There was that lingering smell of dusk, and railway dust, and coal, the soaring Himalayas, and just there, along the underarms, her true scent: pungent, animal, and so fugitive that he raised it to his mouth and sucked on it.

Mr. Reed arrived promptly at four, squawking his car horn. The servants were at attention. The sandwiches, cakes, and tea things were set out in the main hall, and Colonel Chilcott and Dicky were in the drawing room, reading
The Times of India
. By the time Mrs. Chilcott entered the drawing room, the three men were talking and joking about the Salt March. “Next thing you know they'll be walking all the way to London,” Dicky said, laughing. Mrs. Chilcott settled into a wicker chair and told one of the servant girls to go and see if Miss Chilcott needed assistance. “The poor darling is so rightly famished, Mr. Reed,” she said. “Train journeys in this country are abominable compared to English trains, don't you think?” They all nodded in agreement.

The harshness of the afternoon light dimmed, the tea was brought out, and Lavinia entered.

The men rose and each of them, including Arun, took a short intake of breath. She was ravishing: her chestnut hair was curled in a fashionable bob, she wore a simple yet elegant dress of silvery lilac, and her face—those Gomti eyes and moistened lips—shimmered in the last of the winter's light. Her arms were bare, soft and beautiful, and the slight translucent sleeves of her dress, resting like butterfly's wings against her shoulders, just hid them as they curved upward into her throat. And it was they—her shoulders—that Arun couldn't take his eyes from.

Mr. Reed approached her, kissed her hand. Arun bristled. Tea was poured and after some pleasantries, Mr. Reed invited Dicky and Lavinia to a garden party at the club the following week. “That sounds lovely”—Lavinia breathed—“
and
my green dress will be ready.”

Colonel Chilcott had heard talk about a cricket match being organized, Dicky and Mr. Reed gave each other a look and said they didn't know of it. A cool breeze flowed through the windows and Lavinia pouted and said, “Why aren't we sitting on the veranda? It's too stuffy in here.” Everyone was again in agreement and Arun was sent out to organize the tables and chairs. They shifted to the veranda, with the servants bringing the tea things and the colonel's pipe and cigarettes for Mr. Reed and Dicky. Once they had settled, talk resumed about the changes at the country club, and changes in the weather, and the changes needed in India's governance. But Arun heard none of it. He was concentrating with all his might on Lavinia's shoulders. Their lithe and hidden curves. Waiting, waiting, for the wind to conspire and raise her sleeve, just enough so that only he would see, only he would grow hard, and she would reveal herself, shyly, only to him.

*   *   *

The winter's deepening brought more garden parties for Mr. Reed and Dicky and Lavinia. All-day polo matches were organized at the country club, as well as a trip to a rest house on the outskirts of Mathura, and even an elephant race that held all the pomp and fanfare of the Royal Ascot. Mr. Reed, or Quincy, as the family began to call him, came and went almost daily. He and Dicky and Lavinia would stumble into the house arm in arm in arm, laughing and singing and boisterous, full of youth and all its merriments. Most often, unless he was addressed directly, Arun would leave the room as quickly as possible and race back to the servants' quarters—where he and his mother shared a room—and sulk. A few times he cried. Once he broke a bell jar lantern in the main hall and blamed it on a stray bird.

At the end of January, Mr. Reed and Lavinia announced their engagement. It was a bright, clear day. It was warm enough that Dicky told Arun to bring them nimbu pani. They were gathered in the sitting room, and when Mr. Reed told them Lavinia had honored him by saying yes, the family broke into a loud cheer. “My dears,” Mrs. Chilcott said, “there's so much to do. When will you marry? Summer is far too hot in this horrid place, perhaps the autumn?”

Mr. Reed glanced quickly at Dicky and then looked down. “We, Lavinia and I, we were thinking of March.”