Flowers in the Blood (8 page)

“I don't want to go.”

Nani was thoughtful. Then she spoke with deliberate pauses. “Benu has always tried to do . . . what is . . . correct. He is . . . confused, as you are . . . and your grandfather and I are.” Pain lashed her brow. She must have known that he had burned her daughter's possessions and had been attempting to wipe away his association with her family. She must have known how the Raymonds were perceived by the Sassoons and the rest of the Jewish community. Even so, she struggled to leave me with healing words. “Try to be . . . kind to him.”

I was furious. “But, Nani—”

She cut me off. “He is your father and he . . . cares for you.”

Before I left, she gave me a few lessons, but these I completed in less than a week, and soon was left with time on my hands. There was little to do, no babies to amuse. The workmen's progress was of interest for but a few moments a day. Otherwise I stayed at the far end of the house attempting to read my mother's books. Laboriously I copied from the first chapter of
Lorna Doone:

Here by the time I was twelve years old, I had risen into the upper school, and could make bold with Eutropius and Caesar—by aid of an English version—and as much as six lines of Ovid. Some even said that I might before manhood, rise almost to the third form, being of a persevering nature; albeit, by full consent of all (except my mother), thick-headed.

As I replaced my pen, wondering what it might be like to attend a real school, my father walked into the room and studied my penmanship from behind my chair.

“Why are you doing this?”

I did not look up. “I am going to school.”

“Who gave you this to write?”

“My teacher.”

“Your Nani?”

“No, my teacher.”

Despite his attempt to speak genially, his tone became exasperated. “I do not recall hiring a teacher.”

“I teach myself.” I tried to concentrate on the next line: “But that would have been, as I now perceive, an ambition beyond—”

He lifted the pen from my grasp. “When we return, I will find you a proper school. Would you like that?”

I still had not looked at him. “After we return?”

“From our journey on. the Ganga.”

My head spun around. His lips were pressed tightly; his eyes were clear, purposeful. Where would an argument get me? Besides, I was more than ready to be released from the boredom of the house.

“May I bring some books?”

“A few.”

“And my paints?”

“If you wish. Now, go upstairs to Yali. She is preparing your clothing. After you tell her what else to pack, we are going to your grandparents' for a final visit.” He grimaced as he saw the effect of his news. Large droplets skimmed my round cheeks, bounced off my chin, and puddled on my blouse.

“Dinah, please . . .” He scrambled for his handkerchief and tried to dab at the flow, not daring to hold me.

The crying brought relief. Suddenly my hostility toward him dissolved even though my bitterness did not disappear. It was as if it had been distilled into a fine elixir which I had bottled, corked, and left to be retasted at a later date.

My father's voice was muffled, but I think he said, “What have we done to you?”

 5 

 

T
he day after my seventh birthday, a new phase of my life began. As my father and I wheeled toward the wharf south of the Howrah Bridge, we left the confines of my little world behind and I saw—as if for the first time—the city of Calcutta. At that time it was the second-largest city in the British Empire— “What Calcutta thinks today, the rest of the world thinks tomorrow” was its prideful boast—and in those days, before the capital moved to New Delhi, it was the most European of Indian cities. I was to discover far more than this, though. I was on my way to the vast countryside that is the true heart of India.

A pang stabbed my chest as we passed the immense park called the Maidan—which means a flat, open space. I recalled Mama taking me to hear a band playing in the Eden Gardens section. She had danced me around in a circle, her body moving so sinuously that not only was I enthralled, but two British officers stood by utterly captivated. I saw them before she did, reached for her hand, and tried to follow her steps. She laughed at my clumsiness and turned around. The taller man caught her eye. She did not speak to him, but the intensity of their eye contact frightened me.

“Mama, don't,” I begged.

She turned back to the man, smiling conspiratorially at him. “Must do as she says.” Reluctantly she allowed me to pull her away from the imaginary harm.

I glanced at my father, who was smiling blithely next to me as we turned in the direction of Clive Street so that he could pick up some documents at his office. Soon we headed toward the waterfront.

At the wharf the British India Steam Navigation Company's steamer
Lord Bentinck
was waiting for us with a crew of beturbaned sailors standing by smartly. The craft was built like a wedding cake, with five decks, each smaller than the last, until the most diminutive, framed by intricate Indian latticework, crowned the top. Along the sides were two large paddle wheels painted yellow. My father had arranged for three cabins, one for himself, one for Yali and me, and a private sitting room where we could also take our meals.

“Where will your bearer stay?” I asked after seeing the accommodations.

“Abdul will sleep on deck outside your door.”

This made sense to me, since a male servant had protected me every night since the murder.

With a child's eagerness, I surveyed the harbor scene. There were barges as broad as they were long, with bamboo cottages mounted on top. Flat boats with cargoes mounded high with hay drifted by. Slim craft with pointed prows leaned precariously in the direction the wind directed their colored lateens to fly. A file of boats kept to the center of the river, including Chinese junks with high curved poop decks and a huge triangular rudder thrust into the muddy current. Ships even larger than ours were berthed three and four deep along the shore, including many full-rigged, four-masted barks.

My father stood at the railing outside our cabin in quiet contemplation. Then he spoke in a voice of renewed confidence, perhaps because the matter was in the dispassionate realm of facts. “There are three Calcuttas,” he began. “The first is the winter capital of India, the second is the metropolis of the largest white population in Asia, and the third is the tightest-packed sardine tin outside of China.”

“Why do so many English people live here?”

“The city was founded by an Englishman when this”—his hand gestured to include the bustling panorama before us—”was but a stinking marsh.”

“When was that?”

“Almost two hundred years ago.”

“Who was he? Mr. Calcutta?”

My father roared. “His name was Job Charnock.”

“What does 'Calcutta' mean?” I asked cautiously, in case my father was tiring of questions.

“You know who the Indian goddess Kali is, don't you?”

I nodded. Yali had told me many Hindu myths, and no child could but be intrigued with Kali, the wife of Shiva. She appeared in her beneficent form as Parvati or in her terrifying form as Kali, the black one. I had often shivered at descriptions of her brandishing weapons, her long menacing tongue, her necklace of human skulls.

“And you know what a
ghat
is, don't you?”

“The steps along a riverbank.”

“So 'Kali-ghat'—or the stairway for the goddess Kali—is what this village on the Hooghly was called.”

“Oh!” The simplicity of the explanation delighted me. “Why ever did Mr. Charnock come here?”

“Well, Charnock came out as an agent of the East Indian Company. He found the site to be excellent because it was near the sea and on a mighty river that could handle large ships.”

“Like that one?” I pointed at the
Somali
from Liverpool.

“Yes, exactly.”

“It's the biggest in the harbor, isn't it?”

“Not only this harbor, it is the greatest British sailing ship.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “Over there is the broadest-beamed boat in the world. Twice she tore her own masts out because of the weight of her cargo.” As he went on telling me what he knew about the visiting craft, I became transfixed by their enormous gossamer webs of spars and tackles.

“See those coolies?”

I followed his nod to a procession of glistening laborers carrying coal baskets on their heads up the gangway of a freighter. “In India men are cheaper than using a mechanical lift.”

“Not in other places?”

“No, Dinah, at least not in England.”

“That must be why the boats come here,” I said, surprising my father. He started to touch me in praise, but fearing my recoil, caught himself and slipped his hand in his pocket.

“Where are the ships going?”

“I believe that one is being readied for Sumatra, the one across the way for Mombasa.”

“Sumatra . . . Mombasa . . .” As I began to wonder about the places I never knew existed, a whistle blew. Sailors clad only in
dhotis
— loincloths draped to form trousers—scurried along the wharf and up onto the decks to untie, throw, and coil ropes. There was much shouting and complaining. The ship groaned as it slipped away from its bollards. Then there was a bump and a crash as it unexpectedly slammed back against the wharf. Two sailors ran across the decks screaming curses at the deckhands below, who kicked their legs overboard and held the ship off so it would not bounce a second time, then swung themselves back on board as the gap widened beneath them. I clapped my hands at the successful acrobatics, not noticing that my father's arms had surrounded me.

 

Anticipation of the unknown muted the pain of departure.

“It is always easier to leave than to be left,” Papa said, expressing the thought for me.

“Is that why you go away so often?” I asked, but received no reply. At least his pink lips did not blanch in disapproval.

We were headed north along the Hooghly River, one of the dozens of branches of the most sacred of Indian rivers: the Ganga, or, as the English called it, the Ganges. On the outskirts of Calcutta many riparian settlements were clustered along the banks, but soon the villages came at wider intervals, and their inhabitants seemed more lethargic the farther upstream we chugged. Bathing and laundry ghats lined the river's edge. Temples with spires that looked like obelisks enchanted me. We glided past an industrial area that processed jute, then dignified houses in faded blues, pinks, grays, and yellows. At Chandernagore I waved to children running in front of a pink church with green shutters. At Chinsura we passed an octagonal Dutch church surrounded by sleeping sacred cows.

Abdul and Yali served our luncheon in our sitting room; then I was expected to nap, if only to give my father a respite from my incessant questions. When I joined him on the deck in time to witness the sunset, he greeted me with enthusiasm.

“You have brought pens and papers with you, haven't you, Dinah?” he asked, with what I took to be a hint of harshness in his voice.

“Oh, shouldn't I have?”

“Yes, yes.” He seemed distracted. “Since you seem to like schooling so much, I thought we could make this trip more educational.”

“I do like to study ...” I ventured warily.

“Good. Then tomorrow you shall begin a list. You shall try to discover the one hundred and eight names for the river we will soon join up with.”

“The Ganges ... the Ganga.”

“Right, those are two.” He waited. I loved the way his mouth turned up at the edges, almost in a smile, when he was not preoccupied with his own thoughts.

“Are there truly a hundred and eight?”

“Yes.”

“How shall I ever find them out?”

“Ask. Ask everyone you meet.”

“Do you know them?”

“Not all, but a few.”

“Tell me another.”

“Sindu-gamini
, or flowing into the ocean.”

“Sindu-gamini.”
I rolled the words on my tongue. “That's lovely. And another?”

“Sighra-ga
, swift-flowing.”

“Another!”

“If I tell you all of them, you will not have to find them for yourself.”

“One more,” I begged.

“All right.
Bhiti-hrt.”
He did not translate.

“What does it mean?”

He started to speak, but his voice cracked. The sun slipped behind a shining black herd of water buffalo on the western shore. Once again he tried. “It means ...” I followed his eyes to the current that turned milky under the churning paddle wheel. “The Hindus say it means carrying away fear.”

On a lower deck a plump musician in a shabby turban was strumming a tinny Bengali melody on a sitar—an Indian instrument with a bulbous body and spidery strings. The stars began to dot the purple canopy of sky. We stayed at the rail long after most of the other passengers had taken shelter inside, waiting, waiting, for the river to stand by its name.

 

Accompanying” us along the route were Englishmen and -women who had embarked at the capital to head up to their posts, to join family members, to visit friends. Native Indians also sailed with us, but on different decks. We were not supposed to mingle. In order to have the run of the ship, I told everyone I needed to accumulate more names of the Ganges for my list.

“Puta
, pure,” offered the pilot of the steamer.

“Sridhar
, holy,” stated a Brahmin pilgrim who embarked in Monghyr.

“Puny
, auspicious,” suggested a merchant from Ghoga.

The hours on the river flowed with a rhythm quite unlike any I had known on land. There were no set times for arrivals or departures from the riverbank ports. Tides and winds, the ritual bathing of the Hindu passengers and crew, the fancy of the captain, the exigency of a notable on board—any of these events could alter the plan—so it was wisest to have no expectations, to take each hour as it came.

Over the next ten days my list of names grew to include
Nandini
, for happiness,
Satya-sandha-priya
, meaning dear to the faithful, and
Atlanta
, or eternal, and then we arrived at our destination.

Patna—at least along the ghat—seemed somnolent compared with Calcutta, even though for centuries it had been one of the chief cities of an Indian empire. Sprawling along the southern bank of the Ganges, it was the loading point for the profitable plantation crops grown in the alluvial soil of the Ganges Plain.

My father sent Yali and his bearer to prepare the rooms the Sassoons kept in a large house off the maidan while he took me to visit the sights. To my surprise, I was lifted upon an elephant. My father scrambled up clumsily beside me in the
howdah.
We poked along through crowds of natives to a ninety-foot-tall beehive of a building.

“What temple is this?” I wondered.

“The
gola
—the storehouse that was built after a famine a hundred years ago. Mr. Hastings, who became the governor-general before India had viceroys, decided that if during the good years they stored the harvest in large granaries, there would be a surplus for the bad years, so he hired a man named Captain Garstin to build one.”

I peered inside an open door. “Why is it empty?”