East of the Sun (34 page)

“I understand.” She could feel the heat traveling from her neck to her cheeks. “I’m not a fool.”

And now the words tumbled out of Mr. Jamshed. “You are not a fool, and it pains me to say such harsh words to you, but I am so worried not just for you, but for the children’s home. You don’t know how the ordinary people around here look at you. They may be smiling but they’re completely confused. You have no family, no husband, no baby, no jewelry. What are you? Who are you? Believe me, madam, it’s horrible, to say such things to a stranger in our country, but I must.” He nodded his head stiffly and walked toward the door.

“May I say good-bye to Mrs. Jamshed, and to Dolly and Kaniz? You’ve all been so kind to me.”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. Daughters are home but I don’t want them to see you again.”

V
iva had heard of the phenomenon by which certain people—the feeble-minded, she’d always assumed—had only to be accused of a crime to feel themselves guilty of it. The next day, as she walked through the gates of the children’s home, she understood it: she felt as if she was carrying a bomb with her.

After Mr. Jamshed left, she’d spent over two hours pulling down the creepy photographs and putting them in the rubbish bin, and then packing up her room.

After that, she’d hardly slept at all, her mind whirling with thoughts of Guy and Frank (for she could not rid herself of the idea that her wild night in Ooty had somehow been instantly punished), and Daisy, and the home, and whether Mr. Jamshed might relent and let her stay.

Somehow she doubted it, and she had no idea yet where she would go next. In the normal run of things, Daisy would have offered her a bed, but Daisy would be upset to lose Dolly and Kaniz, her prize students. And what if Daisy believed the rumors about Viva’s immorality, what then? It was
possible that Daisy would never want to speak to her again, in which case it would be back to the YWCA, a dreadful thought.

She pushed open the elaborately carved gate at the front of the home. It was a relief to her to see how absolutely the same everything looked. The same dim and shuttered rooms that reminded her of a large and shabby dovecote, the same birds in the tamarind tree, and, across the courtyard, in the shade of the veranda, Mrs. Bowden was reading to her sewing class in the same broad Yorkshire accents from a book Viva recognized—
English Poetry for Indian Girls.

“
Little drops of water,
” the girls chanted back in their singsong voices.

“Little grains of sand,

Make a mighty ocean,

And the pleasant land.

Little deeds of kindness,

Little words of love,

Make our earth an Eden,

Like the heaven above.”

As Viva carried on walking across the courtyard, carrying her invisible bomb, the gardener, wearing the flat cap of a Muslim, was pushing around a few wet leaves with his broom. A row of patients sat on benches waiting quietly for the dispensary door to open at ten-fifteen.

Walking down the dim corridor toward Daisy’s office, she felt almost giddy with nervous tension. What if Daisy didn’t believe her about Guy and the photographs, the fake suicide or why Frank had suddenly turned up in Ooty? Even she could see how far-fetched the whole thing sounded.

She found Daisy in her office. She was sitting, a small solitary figure, behind a pile of letters, scratching away diligently
and fully concentrated. When she saw Viva, she gave a start, then stood up beaming.

“Oh, greetings! How nice to see you. Did you have the most wonderful time?” She’d stuck a pencil absentmindedly through her bun.

“I did, Daisy.” Viva had decided to grasp the nettle all at once. “But I’m afraid I have rotten news to tell you.”

Daisy listened carefully while Viva poured out her story, only punctuating the silence with a mild “Oh golly” and “Oh goodness me.”

“What a terrible shame if he stops Dolly and Kaniz coming to the university” was her first reaction. “They’re brilliant students and they love their work. But what about this other business with Guy?” A nervous rash had appeared in the V of Daisy’s frock, even though her face was serene. “Do you think he’ll carry on spreading rumors about us? That could be very serious.”

“Oh, Daisy.” Both of them jumped as the pencil fell from Daisy’s bun on the floor. “I am so, so sorry,” said Viva. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t come here.”

“No, that I can’t accept. That’s nonsense,” said Daisy briskly. “Mr. Jamshed is right—there are spies everywhere and none of the locals really know what to make of us: why should they? They’ve never seen women like us before.

“Also, dear Mr. Gandhi may preach nonviolence, but what he’s done is to show poor people and women, who have been incredibly downtrodden up until now, that they can make a difference. So there’s anger at the British, the anger of poverty, and anger at our educating their women. In a sense we’re stuck inside two revolutions and sooner or later, the whole boiling lot will explode, and, of course, when people like your man Guy start spreading rumors, it doesn’t help matters. But don’t imagine for one moment he’s the cause of it.”

“So what can we do about him?” said Viva.

“Good question. You can’t arrest someone for setting their coat on fire.”

“But he broke into my room.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think the police should be told.”

“Maybe.” Daisy hesitated. “But if we do that, we open another can of worms. The police, you see, have already been under pressure from certain hotheads in the new Congress to try and close us down. So far we’ve resisted.”

“What about our people, what do they think?”

Daisy fiddled with her papers. “The last time a government official came here, he admitted we were doing fine work but thought we should close down; he said that they could no longer guarantee us protection. That was before you came. Perhaps I should have told you.”

The two women looked at each other.

“When I told the staff and children, they all wept and begged us not to go. It was horrible and heartbreaking. These children, Viva, have nothing. I’m not saying they all want to be here, they don’t, but if we leave them, they die or end up on the streets. Someone has to understand this.”

Daisy had taken off her glasses. There was a long silence between them.

“I’m so sorry, Daisy,” Viva said at last. “You’ve worked so terribly hard here.”

Daisy’s eyes, naked without her glasses, looked old for a moment, and scared.

“I need the children as much as they need me,” she said quietly. “That’s the truth. But onwards.” The glasses went on again. “Let’s get back to the horns of this particular dilemma. Do you think that this Guy Glover person will strike again, or was this a silly prank?”

“I don’t know,” said Viva. “I wish I did, but I do know that I’d hate to be the one who closed this place down.”

At the sound of Guy’s name, a whole series of contradictory thoughts passed through Viva’s mind: yes, she was frightened of him, and yes, if he was genuinely mad she should feel sorry for him, but what she mostly felt was rage, pure and simple. How dare this feeble-minded little poseur wreak such havoc? So he’d had a miserable time at boarding school in England, so what? He’d never gone hungry as the children at the home had, or worked himself to the bone as Daisy did to get them fed and educated. And there were others things, too, much harder to admit. The fact was, he’d detonated a bomb inside her. She’d flung herself at Frank on that night in Ooty like a madwoman or a wild animal. After two days’ reflection, what must
he
think of her now?

She sat for a while. She could hear a saucepan being banged, and then, from the courtyard, children shouting nursery rhymes: “
Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”

“I don’t want to go to the police, Daisy,” she said. “There’s too much to lose.”

“Are you sure?” The nervous rash had spread up to Daisy’s chin. “I don’t want you to be in any danger.”

“Quite sure,” she said. “I think he’s made his showy gesture, and now he’ll go home.”

“Positive?”

“Positive.” Then they smiled at each other as if they’d understood that some lies were worth telling.

Eight days after this conversation, Viva moved into a new room on the first floor of the children’s home. It was bare as a nun’s cell when she arrived: an iron bed, a scuffed wardrobe, and a temporary desk—a wide plank placed on two packing cases—the sum total of its furniture. She liked it this way. It looked like a place for work, even for penance, and she was
drawing in on herself again. When she got up from her desk and opened the battered shutters, she could see the feathery foliage of the tamarind tree. Daisy had told her that in northern India the shade of this tree was thought to be sacred to Krishna, the god who personified idealized love. That Krishna had sat underneath a tamarind tree when separated from his loved one, Radha, and experienced the fierce delight of her spirit entering him.

But Talika had told her a much bleaker tale. She said the tree was haunted. She’d shown her how the leaves folded in on themselves at night and that many ghosts lived there. Everybody knew that.

Each morning now, she heard the mournful sound of the conch shell blowing from the courtyard outside, the murmur of children’s voices from the dormitory above, and occasionally the muffled tinkle of a bell as some of them performed their morning
pujas.

After her conversation with Daisy, both of them had agreed on a new timetable for her. Four hours’ teaching in the morning, followed by lunch, and in the afternoon she was to write the children’s stories. A harrowing task, she could see that already. The day before, she’d spent two hours with Prem, a little Gujarati girl with sad eyes, who told her of the earthquake in her home town of Surat. How her whole family had been wiped out, how she’d been rescued by a kind lady who told her to call her auntie, how this auntie had brought her by train to Bombay and then made her work as a prostitute—the phrase she’d used with an unhappy smile was “good-time girl”—and how she had been beaten and used by all kinds of men before she ran away and came here.

At the end of this tale, two hours in the telling, Viva had offered to change her name in her story.

“No,” the girl had said. “This is the first time I have ever told this story to anyone. Put down the name of Prem to it.”

Tomorrow, two sisters who had walked from Dhulia on their own were coming to talk to her. These girls had run away when they’d been promised as child brides to two old and brutal men in their village. When they’d refused, they’d been beaten savagely by their parents.

“We are only village girls but we are changing,” the elder of the two, a proud-looking girl with a fierce nose, had told Viva. “We don’t deserve to be given away like a cow or a mare.”

A few days later, Viva was sitting at her desk typing like a whirlwind, determined to write up Prem’s notes before supper, when there was a soft knock on the door.

“Lady has come to see you, madam.” A shy little orphan called Seema put her head round the door. “Name is Victoria.”

Tor burst into her room and flung her arms around her.

“Viva,” she said, “I need to talk to you immediately. I’m in such a state I think I’m going mad!”

“Good Lord!” Viva looked up from her work with some reluctance. “What on earth’s going on?”

Tor flung off her hat, sat down on a chair, and let out a burst of air. “Do you have a drink?” she said. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Viva got up and poured her a glass of water.

“Begin at the beginning,” she said.

“Well,” started Tor, “do you remember that awful lunch at the Mallinsons’ when Geoffrey told us they might be leaving? Well, I thought he was joking, but it turned out to be true. After you left, Ci finished the entire bottle of champagne herself and then drank some more, and she basically hasn’t stopped drinking ever since. It’s been awful, Viva. She’s been
horrible to me for months really, but the other day we had the most appalling row.”

Tor drank half a glass of water quickly.

“What about?”

“Well, Ci had been to the club in the morning and she and Mrs. Percy Booth, one of her poisonous friends, had had a row about a coat that Ci said she’d lent her and wanted back—typical of Ci.

“Ci stormed out in the most tremendous huff, and when Mrs. P.B. phoned the following morning, Ci slammed the phone down on her. When it rang again, immediately, Pandit was told to take the message. After he’d taken it, Ci kept shouting at him, ‘What did she say? You’re to tell me
exactly
what she said. You won’t get into trouble.’ So then, poor Pandit thought for a bit, he went that sort of green color the natives go when they’re afraid, and said, ‘Mrs. Percy Booth says you’re a complete fool of a woman. Sorry, madam.’ Half an hour later, he was marched from the house between armed guards. He was crying. It was horribly unfair. I shouted at Ci, ‘How could you be so mean? You promised him he wouldn’t get into trouble.’ Then she looked at me—that awful sort of hooded falcon look she gets.

“‘Boring,’ she suddenly shouted. ‘Very,
very
boring,’ and then she said, ‘I gave him a week’s wages,’ as if somehow that excused everything.

“I almost hit her, Viva—I mean, I could feel it in my right arm. So then Ci slammed out of the room, hardly spoke to me for days, and had meals sent up on a tray to her room. Even Geoffrey couldn’t get her down; it’s been desperate.”

“But you’re leaving next week! How could she be so mean?” said Viva.

“No! But yes, that’s the point.” Tor was beaming. “Now comes the most unbelievable part. Do you remember that man Toby Williamson? He phoned while we were away to ask if I
was all right. I could hardly remember a thing about him, except that he was rather eccentric and badly dressed—it turned out he was wearing his father’s dinner jacket on the night we met—so he actually looked as if he was having a baby—Viva,
don’t laugh,
this is serious.