East of the Sun (37 page)

The baby’s head had a fuzz of blond hair on top of it, soft as chicken feathers. His skin was mottled from the furious exertions of the night before, his eyes looked weary and knowing as Rose flopped him under her chin.

Then Laila put the baby on her breast. How funny it felt, but she loved the snuffling sounds he made. She had never felt so tired or so necessary.

“Sleep, memsahib,” Laila said softly when the baby fell asleep on her breast. When she turned down the lights and straightened Rose’s blanket, Rose had the most incredible urge to kiss her good night, but she didn’t, because she knew that if she had, Laila would probably have had to wash for about four days to purify herself. Indians didn’t like to be kissed, at least not by memsahibs.

“Thank you, Laila,” she said instead. “I can never thank you enough.”

Laila put the palms of her hands together. She bowed her head. She smiled at her, a smile of sweetness and understanding that seemed to convey an equal joy, a delight that she’d been there, too.

At ten o’clock that night Jack went into the bedroom where
Rose and the baby were asleep. He lifted up the oil lamp he was carrying and in its glow saw his son first as a tiny heap of clothes, a shroud. Creeping closer, he saw that the baby had a garland of marigolds around its neck, and it was so red, like an old colonel with high blood pressure or a very ripe tomato. Rose looked pale lying beside him, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

“Darling.” Jack put out his hand. “Darling.” He touched the baby’s hair softly, and then Rose’s hair, still damp with sweat. He saw its minute fingers, like the pale tubers of a small plant, flex over the bedclothes.

When she woke up, he was standing in his sweaty jodhpurs, crying so hard he couldn’t speak. She used the corner of her nightdress to dry his eyes, and then he kissed her.

“He’s beautiful,” he said at last.

She put her hands over his lips, and smiled at him radiantly.

“Yes,” she whispered, holding their baby toward him. “The most beautiful thing.”

Jack couldn’t find his pajamas, so he got into bed in his underwear and lay down beside them.

“The doctor will come soon,” he whispered. “He’s on his way now. There was a small landslide on the road, it’s cleared now. I can’t believe how brave you’ve been.”

They lay in the dark holding hands. The baby lay on top of them, a sleeping Buddha.

“I have a son,” he said out of the dark. “I don’t deserve him.”

He could feel his son’s head against his arm. The soft silk of his hair.

Rose squeezed his fingers. “You do,” she said.

V
iva was playing tennis with her best friend, Eleanor, when the nun came to tell her that her mother had died. Sister Patricia, a raw-boned Irish girl, had beckoned her off the court; they’d walked back down the path toward the school, and all Viva could remember now was how hard she’d had to concentrate not to put her feet on the cracks in the crazy paving. And how blank she’d felt inside—a muffling feeling like snow.

It was months before she had properly cried, and that was just before the Christmas holidays, which, it had been agreed, she would spend with a distant cousin of her mother’s who lived near Norwich. The cousin, a tall pinched-looking woman who looked nothing like her mother, had taken her out to tea, once, in a nearby hotel to finalize arrangements. Over lukewarm tea and stale scones, she’d made it clear to Viva that this was quite an imposition, that she’d hardly known her parents. “They spent all their time in India,” she’d said reproachfully. “They said they loved it there.” As if dying had been an act of carelessness on their part.

Viva had thought little of it—she didn’t think much at all about her insides in those days—but two days before they broke up, the school had taken a group of girls to a pantomime in Chester. Viva, sitting in the darkened theater with a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, had been enjoying herself, until the prince sat on a tinseled tree and sang to Snow White “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Her father’s favorite song. Viva had to leave the theater with a cross, postulant nun who’d been enjoying this rare treat. The nun had loaned her a used handkerchief and watched her, standing under the Christmas lights outside Brown’s department store, heaving and sobbing and pretending to look at the mannequins in the windows, until she’d collected herself sufficiently to join her own group again.

Everyone had thought it kinder to ignore this outburst, and on the way home in the bus, she felt so ashamed that she’d told herself that this must never happen again. That the world would set traps and that she must from now on avoid them, and that the best way to avoid them was to hang on to the frozen feeling that had, up until now, kept her safe. It was songs and soppiness she should beware of.

This by-now-ingrained training persuaded her to feel glad after Frank left, relieved he’d gone, glad that he had not tried to contact her again. Daisy had told her in a casual aside that she’d heard that he had gone to work in Lahore and what a fascinating project that sounded. Blackwater fever was the most ghastly business and the quicker they could find a cure for it, the better.

He had not called to say good-bye, which was good, too.

Work was what mattered now. Now at night, long after the children had gone to bed, she would sit at her desk near the window. She would listen for a while to the gurglings of the ancient plumbing, to the owls still hooting in the trees outside or a child calling out in its sleep. And then she would write, often until the early hours of the morning, these children’s sto
ries. Children who were often described as plucky and resilient, as she herself had been once, but who mostly had learned not to step on the cracks.

The book was harder to write than she thought it would be. Although Daisy had several times tried to warn her against such lazy thinking, somewhere at the back of her mind she had always imagined that living at the Tamarind must, for many of these children, be an amazing treat, a glimpse into a style of life most of them had only dreamed of. Now she saw that this view was both sentimental and arrogant. Some, it was true, were grateful for the food and the bed; others felt uneasy at this living between two worlds. They missed the rich, broiling, rough-and-tumble life of the slums; they worried that other people in the streets outside might think they had become “rice Christians” and were selling their souls for a hot meal; a couple of the boys told her flatly and defiantly that they may be here for the time being but they were first and foremost Gandhiji’s boys.

But whatever they said, she was determined to record it faithfully and bit by bit, day by day, the sheets were piling up on her desk. Daisy had already shown some of the stories to a friend of hers at Macmillan, the publishers, who’d said if she could produce more chapters of this quality, they might be interested.

She was now so concentrated on this work, so determined to do it and do it well, that when she opened the
Pioneer Mail
and saw the announcement that Captain Jack Chandler’s wife, Rose, had had a baby boy, Frederick, she’d felt surprised and shocked at herself for feeling…well, what was it? When she tried to chase down the feeling, she wasn’t sure. To say she was jealous was putting it too crudely, but certainly powerful and dismaying emotions had been stirred. By nipping the Frank business in the bud and concentrating on her book she had hoped to find a cleaner, harder version of herself, and in
some ways this had worked. Long hours of concentration had brought a kind of quiet joy, a feeling of being emptied and made full by her own efforts. But sometimes, particularly when she was on the margins of sleep where everything is allowed, she felt his arms around her again, the terrible intimacy of his kisses, all the things that had shaken her to the core and made her feel so frightened.

She immediately wrote a note to congratulate Rose, and sent a pretty shawl, made by one of the girls at the school. She went back to work, for there was still an enormous amount to be done on the book before she felt confident to show it to the publishers. September passed in this way and then October, and then what passed for winter in Bombay, bringing clear, warm, sunny days and sudden sunsets, and the occasional nights when the wind swept down from the Himalayas and across the Deccan Plains and you put an extra blanket on the bed.

At the beginning of November, all the children started to get excited because the full moon would soon be in Kartika, and that meant their biggest festival of all had come: the Festival of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. Held on the darkest night of the year, it marked the arrival of winter, the return of the Hindu divinities, Sita and Ram, a time for celebrating light over the forces of darkness.

For weeks now, lessons had been interrupted by local tradesmen calling in to ask for donations to help build
pandals,
the huge floats that would soon be transporting gods down the streets of Byculla. The dormitory above Viva’s head had vibrated with the feet of children scrubbing their rooms from top to bottom, whitewashing walls, and then making their own statue of Durga—a towering edifice of tinsel, paper, and lights—that Viva had been called upstairs several times to admire and advise on.

Fireworks, set off early, stopped them sleeping, and outside the school gates, on the corner of Jasmine and Main Street, sweet vendors were sitting selling traditional milk-based Diwali sweets like
barfis
and
laddus
, and making delicious fresh
jelabis
on their charcoal stoves.

On Tuesday, November 3, the night before the festival was to open, Vijay as Lord Ram had rushed around, cardboard sword in hand; Chinna, an orphan girl from Bandra, had played Sita.

While they were all clapping, Daisy had put her head around the door and asked Viva, Mrs. Bowden, and Vaibhavi, an Indian social worker, to come to her room.

“I know how tremendously busy you all are,” she apologized when they were crammed into her small office, “and I don’t think we need get too steamed up about this, but something happened here yesterday that I can’t in all conscience keep to myself.”

She got up and moved a few books from the bookshelf.

“As most of you know, this is the safe. Not much coin in it, alas, but some important documents about the home. Two days ago, when I came to work, it had been broken into. Whoever it was took my address book and some lists of the children and left a rather impertinent note.

“Now, I don’t want to spoil the children’s fun tonight,” Daisy had taken off her glasses and was polishing them carefully, “and after the fireworks I shall be having my Diwali party as usual, to which you are all of course cordially invited, but be aware perhaps of the need for some caution.”

“What are you saying?” asked Mrs. Bowden, who liked things black and white and who had already made it plain she wouldn’t be going to the party.

“Only this,” said Daisy. “Point one: be careful with your personal possessions. Point two: follow the rules about head counts when you take the children out on the streets. Diwali is
a very exciting time, and although most of the locals are wonderful, not everyone likes what we do here. That’s all.”

She gave them her toothy, reassuring grin. Nobody looked alarmed as they left her office. It was easy to feel that not too much in the world could go wrong if Daisy was around.

The children insisted that Viva dress up for Diwali. At five o’clock that afternoon, as she put on her red silk dress, she could already hear drums beginning to beat in the streets outside, the cracked sounds of horns, shouting and laughter, and from above her head, the vibrations of children’s feet running faster and faster in their excitement.

A few moments later, there was a knock on her door. Talika stood there dressed up in her new finery: a peach-colored sari, her skinny arms covered in glass bracelets, kohl around her eyes, her small ears weighted down with gold hooped earrings. She looked so proud and shy and radiant that Viva longed to hug her, but she kept her distance. A few weeks ago, when Viva had asked her if she missed her mother’s hugs, Talika had said stoutly, “My mother never hugged me. She came back from work in her factory and she was too tired.” Another cat that walked alone.

Behind Talika was little Savit, the boy with the badly burned leg. He was wearing a brand-new kurta and had a gold crown on his head. Neeta behind him wore a purple sari with a small tiara set with jewels and fake rubies and pearls that hung over her forehead.

“How do I look?” Savit asked her.

“You look wonderful,” she said. “Like Lord Ram himself.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, and shuffled his little wasted leg. This was almost more excitement than he could bear.

An hour later, when Viva stepped out into the streets with her little charges, they were watching her face and when she
gasped, they laughed and clapped their hands. The dingy shop fronts and collapsed verandas of the street had been transformed into an explosion of lights that shone as bright as the stars above them. Every stall, every conveyance, every inch that could be lit was ablaze; windows were filled with clusters of candles, skinny trees were garlanded and glowed like Christmas trees against the sky, and crowds of people, dressed to the nines and dripping with jewels, greeted one another in the street.

She wandered with the children for a while between stalls sagging under the weight of sticky sweets, carrot halva, and almond cakes. Savit was having trouble with his cardboard crown but refused to take it off. As he limped along beside her through the crush of bodies, he explained in a breathless shout that Uma Ooma, goddess of light, had come.

“She brings light into our darkness,” he said.

She heard drums, a discordant trumpet, and then above the swaying heads of the crowd came a lopsided
pandal
with a gorgeously decorated goddess inside it, garlanded with magnolia flowers and surrounded by roses and jasmine petals.

A man holding a fat toddler on his shoulders obliterated Savit’s view for a moment. The boy stood patiently waiting.

Now Talika was tugging at her sleeves. “Mamji, Mamji,” she said. She often called her mother when she was excited. “Lakshmi comes tonight.”

Lakshmi was the goddess of wealth. Viva knew already that tonight every single door in Byculla would be open so she would come and spread her munificence around. And then the fireworks: Catherine wheels spitting like fat in the orange night air, and then banging rockets, staining the faces of her charges with blue and yellow and pink light, and making the huge crowd gasp with delight.

Two weeks ago, when local traders had begun pestering people to donate to the Diwali fund, ringing the bell at the
gate of the home, interrupting lessons, asking for money for fireworks, Viva had complained to Daisy that it seemed an awful waste letting all that money go up in smoke. Now she saw that she was wrong.

Here was the heart of the matter: tonight, on the darkest night of the year, in one of the poorest countries on earth hope was being celebrated. And she was part of it, standing there, gaping, humbled by their undefeated joy, their faith that things would get better.

“Isn’t this fun?” Daisy had appeared at her side, a piece of tinsel hanging from her hat. “I hope you’re planning to come to my party later?”

“Try and stop me, Daisy,” she’d said, grinning. After weeks of hard work she suddenly felt lit up and ready to enjoy herself.

It was midnight by the time the street celebrations started to die down and she’d got the children to bed and stepped out into the street again. Small crowds were drifting home through the haze of multicolored smoke from the spent fireworks. A pie dog wandered around picking up scraps underneath a trestle table.

Stepping from the curb, she heard the ping of a bell and then the whirl of wheels, the soft touch of a hand on her arm.

“Madam sahib.” A wiry little man with one eye cloudy like a sugared almond pointed inside his rickshaw. “Miss Barker sent for you. Get in, please.”

He set off, his skinny legs pumping up and down, and she, tired from the evening, settled back against the shabby seat and dozed for a while. When she woke, she pulled back the canvas flap that separated her from the road and saw that they were bumping down a narrow dirty street with washing hanging on either side.