East of the Sun (23 page)

The adults were sent to a local hospital where there was a temporary shelter; children who appeared to have no adults were to stay. Tin baths began to appear in the courtyard, some kerosene stoves were lit to warm up food.

“You’d better put that away and help us.” Clara had shut Viva’s ledger with a spiteful look and handed her an apron. “You’re in at the deep end now.”

A girl called Talika was plucked from the crowd of children cowering near the school’s iron gates. About seven years old, she was pitifully thin with huge brown eyes and matted hair and wore a floral dress several sizes too big for her. She had a label around her neck that read “
Hari kiti
”—help me.

When Talika prostrated herself before Viva, her small rag doll fell in the dirt beside her. And Viva, feeling the child’s matted little head butting her shoes, had felt so many different things. Sorrow for this pathetic scrap; anger at her plight; revulsion, for the child, who had a bad cold, had left a snail’s trail of snot across her stockings; and fear that she was the one now expected to do something about her.

A line of temporary cloth cubicles was swiftly erected in the courtyard. Daisy and Clara ran around putting tin baths in each and distributing bars of soap and towels.

Viva had led Talika behind one cubicle. Without brothers or sisters she’d never done anything like this before; both of them were embarrassed.

“Take this off.” She’d pointed toward the child’s muddy dress and the child had looked at her with huge appalled eyes, put her doll down on the cork matting and stepped out of her clothes. She shuddered as she stepped into the cold water, but soaped herself obediently all over, her little fingers working
busily but her eyes downcast. From the next-door cubicle she could hear that Daisy was already singing and laughing with her child; Viva felt frozen.

She’d poured water over the small head, repelled by the dirt that flowed out of Talika’s hair. She’d rubbed in the special carbolic soap Daisy had given them for head lice. Talika hadn’t cried at all, even when some of the soap ran into her eyes. She’d stood there, numb with shock. When she was dry, Joan came and gave the child a new dress and a new doll—the old one was taken away to be fumigated. She was taken to the dormitory on the first floor, which she would share with ten other girls for as long as it took for her to be either claimed or abandoned. They gave her a mattress and a cover, her own pencil.

At the end of that day, Viva had been standing near the gates, light-headed with shock and fatigue, when she’d seen Talika again. She’d been given a brush twice her size, and as she swept up leaves that had fallen from the tamarind tree in the courtyard, her expression was disciplined and grave. She had a job to do; she would do it well. And the thought that passed through Viva’s mind was,
Well, if she can hold her life together, so can I.

Frank was coming tonight, and as she walked to work that day she wondered why he’d sounded so serious, so different. It was perfectly possible, she thought, stepping off a cracked pavement and onto the street again, that Guy wasn’t the only thing he wanted to warn her about, he himself might have formed another attachment with some other woman in Lahore. Not that they’d ever had anything like an attachment themselves, she reminded herself, waving at the man in the chai shop who waved at her each morning. It was the Guy situation that had forced them into a curious openness, as if, during their vigils in Guy’s cabin, they’d been stranded together on a desert island.
This had led to the curious, maybe illusory feeling of knowing him and having been seen by him in some true way.

It was market day and the crowds on the street were starting to thicken. The man who had just passed her had two live chickens in his arms—she returned his smile. “Halloo,” he said, “missy girl!” On the next corner, one of the boys she’d met at the home broke into a jerky spontaneous dance when he saw her.

Frank. If he did turn up tonight, she decided, walking up the last block of pavement before Tamarind Street, she would have a drink with him, maybe supper, nothing else. William had written to her that week, a cool letter in his careful script, advising her strongly to come back to England after she’d picked up the trunk.

“I’m quite sure it’s what your parents would have wanted—I certainly cannot imagine they would want you gallivanting around India on your own.”

She shook her head silently when she thought about this: how dare he act as her parents’ puppet, when really his interest in her was mostly physical. When she thought about him—his black socks, his white legs, his tight smile as he levered himself into bed beside her—her soul writhed. What a hideous muddle the whole thing had become. She didn’t even blame him much anymore, the mistake was hers; loneliness was not love, and only now could she see how lost and unstable she’d been during that time. “It’ll never happen again,” she muttered as she walked.

By the time she got to the home, heat was rising off the pavement in tarmacky waves. It was Thursday, the day when the Tamarind opened its door to the locals, and a long line of patients waiting to see the doctor spilled onto the street. A young mother sat on the curb under a broken umbrella, her baby
splayed out on her lap like a pressed leaf. Beside her, a man fanned his wife who was propped against the railings. On and on it seemed to go, this shuffling line of people bringing with them all the diseases of the poor: worms and boils, TB, gastroenteritis, typhoid, cholera, even leprosy—all laid at the feet of two long-suffering volunteer doctors who examined patients behind curtained cubicles on the veranda.

Eight hours later, after bathing children and making beds and helping in the office, Viva walked home again through the pink dust of sunset. Frank. The thought of him had grown in her mind all day, but now, with her feet throbbing and her dress stuck to her back, she dreaded him coming too early. She needed time to wash, to sleep, to stop feeling so vulnerable.

She climbed the stairs, wearily hoping Mr. Jamshed wouldn’t pop out as he sometimes did, and insist she come in for a drink and “all kinds of chinwag.”

Normally at this time after a bath and a small meal, she put on her lamp and started to write, but tonight she lay on the bed, closed her eyes and found herself planning what she would wear to greet him. The red dress—too festive, too expectant of an event. Well then, the blue skirt and top—too boring. When she came to, she was cross. It didn’t matter what Frank liked, was her last thought before she went to sleep.

She sat up in bed when she heard the knock and looked toward her door. Behind the frosted glass she saw a dark silhouette bobbing. She put on a silk kimono and tried to put the lights on.

“Wait a second.” She fumbled with a candle. “Power cut.” They were always having them.

“Viva.” His voice was muffled behind the glass.

“Frank, wait.”

When she opened the door, he was standing in the yellow light of an oil lamp Mr. Jamshed had put on the stairs. He was thinner than she remembered, less boyish, but with the same shock of butterscotch-colored hair, the same smile.

“I’m late,” he said. “There was an emergency at the hospital and no one could cover for me.”

He was staring at her as if he couldn’t quite believe she was there.

“Can I come in?” he said.

“Give me a moment.” She clutched her kimono around her. “I fell asleep. I—”

She hated the thought that he would take her state of undress as some sort of sign. “Oh, wait a second.”

She closed the door on him and flew around in the shadows, bumping into her bed as she put on her red dress. She stuck a silver comb in her hair and lit two more candles.

“Right,” she said, opening the door again, “you can come in now; it’s a frightful mess, I’m afraid.”

He stood at the door as if reluctant to come in. She could feel his eyes taking stock of everything: the charpoy, the typewriter, the picture Talika had made her that hung on the wall above her worktable.

“Don’t you lock your door?” he said.

“Sometimes, not always. My landlord has a bolt on the front door.”

When he looked unconvinced, it annoyed her. Her room had nothing to do with him.

“D’you have many blackouts?”

“All the time,” she said. “But Mr. Jamshed says now the weather is hotter, the rats that eat the electric cables will start to die. It sounds far-fetched. Is it true?”

She was talking too much. Blathering.

“Could be.” The way he bunched up his mouth and pretended to think about this made her think he was feeling shy,
too, and for some reason this irritated her. The old ease between them had gone, and she wasn’t sure yet whether she wanted to get it back.

The flickering lights made the atmosphere between them seem hectic, unstable, and when they went out again entirely, it was a relief. “I can’t think in the dark,” he said. “Let me take you out to dinner.”

It was a warm night in Jasmine Street, squares of yellow light fell from the higgledy-piggledy houses on either side of them, and the streets were full of robed people walking slowly home as the bazaars closed for the night. A few street girls, all gaudy jewels and huge painted eyes, hung around on the street corner.

“If you don’t mind walking for ten minutes,” she said, “there’s a place called Moustafa’s a few streets away. He makes the best
pani puri
in Bombay.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. He smiled at her almost bashfully, much of the cocky self-assurance of the ship seemed to have gone.

On the next corner, a group of men sat in a café playing checkers in a fug of smoke. When one of them turned to look at her, she felt Frank’s grip tighten on her arm.

“Do you walk alone here?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m not frightened.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“What’s the point of being frightened about things you can’t control?” she said.
When the worst has already happened,
she thought to herself. “And anyway, I can’t believe how kind most people are here,” she said out loud. “They put us to shame.”

“You’re on your own,” he said, “don’t take too much for granted.”

This remark annoyed her. He had no right to talk to her
like that, she thought, walking two steps ahead of him now toward the restaurant. She was tired of men pretending to be solicitous—William had done this—when what they were really doing was throwing their weight around, or wanting other things.

“Look,” he said when he caught her up, “I’m worried and you will understand when I tell you why. Has Guy Glover tried to contact you?”

“No.” She stopped under a lamppost gauzy with flying insects. “But Rose wrote to tell me that she and Tor bumped into him at the Bombay Yacht Club. I think he said something about paying back the money he owed me.”

Frank turned to her.

“Don’t take it,” he said quickly.

She looked at him. “Why not? I worked for it. He owes it to me. And he can probably afford it—Rose said he’s working as a photographer now on the talkies.”

“Don’t take it,” he warned her again. “Promise me you won’t. If you need money, I’ll lend it to you or you can ask your parents.”

“I don’t have parents,” she said. “They died years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, her usual glib response.

“I know it’s not,” he said, but she’d made him look sad. He was about to say something else, but she stopped him. “We’re here,” she said. “This is Moustafa’s.”

She’d grown to like Moustafa’s café, with its scuffed tables and old chairs and curling pictures of the Acropolis. Its owner was an unshaven Greek, a warm, humorous man, dressed this night in a long Kashmiri tunic. He beamed at them, brought them a bottle of wine, polishing the glasses carefully with his cloth before he poured. He brought olives and nuts and
mezze.

“If you ever wanted to tell me about your family, I’d feel glad you felt you could,” Frank said when they were alone again.

“Thank you,” she said. She was sorry she’d made him look so wary. “But there really is nothing more to say.” She remembered with a sickening jolt the time when she had told William everything, and what had happened afterward. Her clothes on his floor, his suit neatly hung, the false sincerity.

“Tell me about Guy,” she said. “I thought that was why we were here.”

Frank was silent for a while. “All right,” he said at last, “I’ll tell you what I know.”

He waited while she sipped her wine.

“Guy’s parents threw him out last month—I think they were starting to get frightened of him. His mother wrote to me, a pathetic letter, and a sort of apology in a way. She said they’d had no idea about the state he was in. After he left, she started tidying his room and found all sorts of odd things: diagrams, diaries. She said there was quite a bit about you in them—something about a dark avenging angel.”

“Oh God!” She felt a kind of weary distaste. “What does that mean? Is he mad?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been reading up on the literature about mental states since I met Guy because he interested me. The voices he heard and so forth. There is this new thing called schizophrenia, a chap named Freud has been writing about it. It means split mind. Before, all the treatment for people like this assumed they were either depraved or wicked, but they’re starting to think it might be a proper sort of disease of the mind. All this may be rot of course, he may simply be a chameleon, but the point is, well, I don’t want to scare you, but I think he could be dangerous either way. The man he beat up on the ship was not a pretty sight.”