East of the Sun (26 page)

In the event he had forced out some stiff words of congrat
ulations and gone out for a drink in the mess, bathing himself in the company of men, almost desperate at the thought of having to go home again and play the game of happy father when he hated telling lies.

“What’s this?” Rose swooped forward suddenly and picked up the letter that fell from his dressing-gown pocket as he reached out for a cigarette.

“Don’t read it,” he’d almost shouted. “It’s mine.”

“What is it?” He saw fear growing like a fire in her eyes. “Jack, tell me.
Tell me.
What is it?”

He looked at her and thought,
I can’t do this to her. Not like my father did. She doesn’t deserve it.

“Read it then.” He sat there like a cowering dog while she sat down again and read the letter.

“Who is this?” Rose said in a trembling voice. “I don’t understand.”

It felt like the moment when you throw yourself off a high cliff into a dark place where the sea may not be deep enough.

“Her name is Sunita. She lives in Bombay now. She was my lover.”

“Your lover?” Her voice was raised; her eyes looked wild. “Was, or is?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Is she Indian?”

“Yes.”

“A native.”

“Yes, but an educated one. Her father is a barrister.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must love her. If you didn’t love her you’d just say no.”

She got up; the lizards darted away. Her blond hair mussed from sleep looked childlike, but the look in her eye was so strange that he thought for one muddled moment that she
might thwack him one around the face. In some ways he might have preferred it that way, but instead she gave him a look of such pain and confusion that he wanted to howl like a dog. What a worthless shit he was.

“Do you love her?” she’d asked again.

“Sahib,” both of them were so far gone they hadn’t noticed the soft knock on the door. “Everything all right?” Durgabai kept her eyes carefully averted from her mistress, standing stricken and half naked and staring wildly at her husband.

“
Haan,
Durgabai,” he’d said. “The memsahib
sir me dard hai
” (The memsahib has a headache). “She’s all right though,
dhanyavad
” (thank you).

“I hate you for doing this,” Rose said when the door was closed again. “For having this secret, and not telling me, for letting me think I was getting everything wrong. Why in God’s name did you let me come?”

She held her hand protectively over her belly as if to cover the baby’s growing ears.

“I’m sorry, Rose.”

She brushed the apology aside. “Will you see her again?”

“No—anyway, the regiment’s still on alert for Bannu.”

“Is that the only reason?”

He’d never seen her more furious and he shrank from it. “No.”

“It had better bloody well not be.”

The small part of him that wasn’t frozen in shock admired the graceful way she held herself as she left the room. There was dignity in that straight young back, a refusal to sag and collapse.

It was only later, through the thin walls of the spare room, that he heard her being sick, and then the stifled moans of pain. He’d never hated himself more.

I
t was late morning at the children’s home and Viva was sitting under the tamarind tree in the middle of the courtyard, cutting up bits of tissue paper for the kites they were making. From where she sat, Viva could hear the hubble bubble of children’s voices, talking in a bewildering variety of languages: Hindi, Marathi, English, for some, snatches of Tamil and Gujarati thrown in, all mixed with the croaky sounds of the pigeons that lived under the eaves of the home.

And through all this cut the fluting tones of Daisy, who was talking to them while they worked.

“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it,” she was saying, “how few grown-up people ever really stop and look up at the sky—we scuttle around full of worries, like insects. The only ones who look up to the sky on a regular basis are madmen or children or…Can you finish this sentence, Neeta?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Neeta, a shy girl with anxious eyes.

“Kite flyers.” Suday, the fat boy, wanted them to know that he’d had his own kite before.

“And what does looking up teach us?”

“That the sky is blue,” Neeta rallied.

“Good, Neeta. And when we look up, it widens our horizons. We see what a little speck we are in the universe, so insignificant, and we all take ourselves so seriously, but in the sky, there are no boundaries. No differences of caste—careful with that glue, Suday—or religion or race. It teaches you, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ A man named Shakespeare wrote that.”

Viva felt a peculiar sort of pain watching the children listening so intently. What kind of heaven and earth would they find?

Next, Daisy outlined the plans for the day: when the kites were finished, Viva would take them down to Chowpatty Beach to fly them. At this news, some of the children turned to look at Viva with huge wondering eyes; some of them had never seen the sea before. They made her feel like a magician, a conjurer.

Viva glanced at Talika. She sat at the end of the bench, completely absorbed, small hands busily working the scissors, dark eyelashes cast down, skinny little legs waving above the ground. No one would have recognized the pathetic scrap Viva had bathed a few months ago, but she was still frail-looking and much too thin.

“Watch me, watch
me,
Wiwaji,” said Talu, a tall, thin boy with a pronounced limp. None of them could say her name properly. They either called her Madam Sahib, the Bombay version of memsahib, or Miss Wiwa, or sometimes, as a term of endearment, Wiwaji. One or two of the younger ones called her Mabap (you are my mother and my father), a compliment that never failed to wring her heart.

“I’m cutting out my peacock’s tail,” said Talu.

“I am seeing a dead rat’s tail,” said Suday, the joker, picking it up and whirling it about his head, and when Talika laughed it was a peal of child’s laughter.

She got up from the table with her half-finished kite. “Mine is a bird,” she said, releasing its string. “Watch me.”

She kicked off her sandals and started to dance, stamping her feet in precise little patterns on the ground, her kite a swirl of color above her head. Twirling, prancing, she closed her eyes and began to sing in a reedy child’s voice, her throat vibrating. She was powerful in those few moments, enchanted and enchanting, lost in her dance; nobody could take their eyes off her. Viva hardly noticed that Daisy had sat down beside her.

“Well, somebody looks as if she’s feeling better,” she said as Talika’s sari whirled.

“Wasn’t that wonderful?” said Viva. “Where on earth did she learn to sing like that?”

“Actually, Viva, I meant you,” said Daisy. “You look much happier than when you first came here.”

The tail of Talika’s kite had gotten trapped in the branches of the tamarind tree, and Viva jumped up to retrieve it.

“I do like it here, Daisy,” she said when she sat down again. “And I don’t like children very much, or at least I didn’t think I did.”

“Well, you hide it very well,” Daisy teased. “But can I give a word of warning? It’s lovely to see a child dancing like that so free and unself-conscious, but even here we have to be so careful. There are spies everywhere at the moment, and if they saw something like that, one of them might go and tell the locals that we’re training the girls here to be temple prostitutes.”

“Is that a joke?”

“No, I wish it was. It happened last year. People don’t always understand what we do. Why should they?”

“Good Lord.” Viva had heard stories like this before, but mistrusted them—it seemed such a coward’s game to read danger into everything. “That was so innocent. I hate the thought of stopping it.”

“I know. One hates to see such a thing twisted, but there we are, we don’t live in a perfect world.

“A few months ago, one of the older boys was taken in by
the local
havildar
, the police constable, and questioned about Eve-teasing—that’s what they call bothering women, you know…” Daisy was getting flustered. “You know, trying to seize young girls when they don’t want to be seized, or pinching their…you know, bosoms. It was a trumped-up charge, but there was nothing we could do about it, short of closing the home.

“And my second piece of advice,” Daisy put a gentle hand on her arm, “is don’t overdo it. Last year, half our staff went down like flies; this year we’re insisting on time off. Didn’t you say when you first came that you planned to go north and see your parents’ old house?”

“Did I?” Viva could feel herself stiffening. “I don’t remember saying that.”

“Oh sorry.” Daisy’s eyes blinked behind her glasses. “I thought you did.” They exchanged a strange look. “Well, here’s another suggestion. This heat will drive us all mad before the rains come, so if you feel like a week off, my friends run a delightful boardinghouse in Ootacamund—it’s a perfect quiet place to write and it’s not expensive—I’d be happy to pay for you if you’re short of coin.”

“How kind you are,” said Viva, “but it’s funny, I almost feel I can’t leave at the moment.”

“It gets you like that at first,” Daisy said. “For the first time in your life, you’re not thinking about yourself. That’s such a relief, don’t you find?”

When Viva looked up, Daisy was innocently pinning the tail on a kite and did not meet her eye.

“Did you know,” she said, “that the first kites were flown in the fourteenth century in Greece to test the sight of a blind prince? I’ve got an excellent book on them if you’d like to borrow it—the religious symbolism is quite fascinating.”

“I would,” said Viva, and then, “Daisy, do you think I’m any more self-absorbed than anyone else?”

Daisy looked at her steadily through her thick glasses and said, after a lengthy silence, “Self-absorbed, on second thought, is unfair, you are always watching and you
are
curious, I like that about you; self-protective might be a better word. You’re very reserved about yourself, or maybe you keep that for your writing.” Daisy was teasing again.

“Maybe I do.” Viva didn’t want to feel hurt, but she was. Sometimes she just got so tired of being accused of keeping secrets she didn’t understand herself.

Over lunch she brooded about why she was still so neurotically private about her past and her parents. There was no disgrace about their passing.

People did suddenly die in India, it was a fact of life, the graveyards were stuffed with them. To make some special mystery out of it was to behave like those children who believe they are the secret and illegitimate heirs of kings or princesses, because they can’t bear the thought of being ordinary.

If the details had been scarce—Father killed in a raid on the railway line by bandits, Mother dying a few months later (of a broken heart, she’d been told by the nuns)—it was probably for no other reason than nobody in England knew her parents that well. Her parents had been exiles for years, out of touch with family and friends. When the first flurry of caring was over, she’d fallen through a kind of net, a familiar circumstance to many people who decide to make their lives away from home. That was the price you paid.

When at the age of eighteen she’d been old enough to take an interest in them, she’d felt a sudden desperation to find somebody, anybody, who could talk to her about them without seeming shifty or impatient. Which, of course, was where William had fitted in. What a gift he’d seemed at first, not only the executor of her parents’ will, but so handsome, so articulate—
he was a leading barrister after all—compassionate; he’d taken plenty of time with her. Dinners, long walks, evenings over a bottle of wine at his bachelor flat in the Inner Temple.

He’d known them very well, he’d told her on their first meeting. Same quad as her father at Cambridge, stayed with them once in Kashmir before she was born.

He remembered Josie, so red, so funny-looking as a baby—they’d called her “the Nawab” because of the imperious way she’d reclined on her charpoy drinking her bottle. The night he told her about Josie was the night he’d dried her tears, gently, gently, given her a little sip of wine, taken her to bed.

And then, much later, she’d made the big mistake of asking him about Mother.

She and William had been going up in the lift to his flat, when she’d said out of the blue, “Did Mummy have a weak heart when you knew her?” This was the story she’d been told by one of the nuns.

He had turned, she remembered all this as though it were yesterday, and said coldly, “I was her executor, not her physician.” And then, as the lift clanked upstairs to the neat bedroom—where later he would fold his suit, put his collar studs into a box before his cold but expert kisses—he said, “What’s it really got to do with you in the end?” as though she was being nosy about some chance acquaintance.

It made her cringe, even now, to think of how meekly she’d accepted this rebuke. He had a nasty tongue and he knew how to use it, and by the end it seemed to her that she’d become so wary of him, so watchful, so feebly pliant that she’d handed over part of her own tongue as well as half her brain to him.

When she got up to shake some crumbs off her lap, Talika ran up to her and mocked the seriousness of her expression by jut
ting out her own small chin, and pretending to laugh and cry at the same time.

“Wiwaji,” she said, “don’t look so sad. The sun is shining and we’re going to the sea.”

Chowpatty Beach was surprisingly empty when Talika, Suday, Talu, Neeta, and Viva poured off the bus later that afternoon. A few old men were sitting on the wall gazing out to sea, doing nothing but chewing air. There was a scattering of families in the distance walking slowly down the beach, a desperately thin pony walked up and down giving rides, and underneath a stunted tree, an ancient old yogi, wrinkled and in a loincloth, contorted his body in a way designed to attract maximum attention from passersby.

Talika and Neeta hung back at first, grabbing “Miss Wiwa” by the arm, their eyes big as saucers. “Ram, Ram, hello, hello,” Talika said at first in an awed voice as if the ocean would speak back, and then to Viva, “Will it hurt me?” A few minutes later, they had their shoes off and were on the sand squealing with delight. Suday, the fat boy, puffed up with pride—he’d seen the sea before, nothing new to him—strutted for a while, kite in hand, before putting it down carefully under a stone, and encouraging the others to paddle. As the girls picked up the hems of their saris and dipped toes into the sea, the sun shone through the fabric, making them light up like flowers. How sweet they were, full of delicate wonder—they reminded Viva of young deer going down to the water to drink.

All the children struggled to get their kites airborne at first. The air was brothy and warm and there simply wasn’t enough wind. Talika’s flopped instantly into the water, and had to be rescued and dried out. But then Suday got Neeta to walk twenty feet or so downwind with his line while he held the kite and then, at a shout from him, it was launched into the
sky, where it hung on the wind, bridled, rose and spun, making all the children cheer and shout out, as it sank and then soared off again into the vast blue sky. “I’m flying,” fat little Suday shouted as he ran flat-footed, “I’m flying.”

After an hour everyone got hungry. They spread cotton sheets on the sand underneath a beach umbrella. The boys went off to buy puffed rice and
chana bhaturas,
the Bombay treats, from a little stall on the beach. Back came some freshly made potato and pea samosas, too, piping hot in paper cones, as well as some sticky-looking
barfi.
The food was laid out on the sheet on the sand and they sat in a circle around it, wriggling like eels with barely suppressed excitement.

There was a time when this little picnic would have stood for everything Viva feared about India: so many diseases—typhoid, jaundice, dysentery—could make an appearance in this innocent treat, but, today, surrounded by small hands darting in and out, she forgot to worry about it.

While they were eating, Talika clung to her side like a limpet. She took a tiny piece of food and chewed it very carefully, her doll sitting beside her.

“Have some more.” Viva offered her one of the sticky biscuits that she knew the child loved.

Talika shook her head.

“Do you feel ill?”

“No,” she said, but after they had eaten, when Viva shook out the cotton sheet and spread it on the sand, she lay down immediately with her doll and closed her eyes.