Teatime for the Firefly (21 page)

Then I heard the sound of the beating drums and shouts of a crowd. The laborers outside the bungalow jumped to their feet and pelted down the hill. All the servants ran down from the porch and out of the gates, leaving it yawning open. The sound grew louder. Now I could hear the blaring of the jeep’s horn keeping time with the drums. What a din! Then they came into view: Alasdair at the wheel of the jeep, Manik half-out of his seat brandishing his gun. They were both covered with marigold garlands and followed by a big cheering crowd, beating
dholas
with bamboo sticks and dancing on the road. The golden langurs followed them in the treetops, swinging from branch to branch, shrieking. The carcass of the leopard was tied to the front grille of the jeep. The poor animal’s mouth hung open, and its big head bobbed sickeningly as the vehicle bumped up the rutted road. Laborers whooped and hollered, and the whole procession came to a halt as the coolie women broke into a writhing snakelike dance, their hands looped around each other’s waists. Forgetting all protocol, the whole crowd rushed inside the bungalow gate to get a closer look at the leopard.

“Layla!” Manik yelled, galloping up the stairs. He was filthy, sweat-stained with brown smudges of what could only be dried blood on his clothes. His face was animated and he walked with a new swagger. There was a primitive, wild-eyed look about him. Alasdair, by contrast, hardly looked as though he had spent the night up a tree. A little rumpled maybe, but still clean.

“Aye, that was a crack shot, Layla. Your man got him,” Alasdair said.

“No, no, it was Alasdair,” Manik said. “At such close proximity, this should have been child’s play, but I hit it on the shoulder. The leopard would have bolted but for Alasdair, quick as a flash, shooting it on the side of its head and sending it crashing into the shrub.” He pulled me by the hand. “Come see the leopard, darling. We brought it to the bungalow to show you.”

“I...I’ve seen it,” I said, feeling a wave of nausea.

“It won’t bite, I promise,” said Manik. He turned to Alasdair. “I think she’s squeamish.”

“I can understand that, Manik,” said Alasdair. “A dead animal is not a pretty sight. Jamina is in tears every time I shoot something. But you must understand, Layla, this animal was dangerous. It had to be put down. It’s already taken four lives.”

“It’s an aging male,” Manik said. “We found two porcupine quills festering in its foot. No wonder it became a man-eater. It can no longer hunt.”

The relief of seeing Manik alive and well was finally settling on me. “Of course it had to be put down,” I agreed. “I am glad you got it. What are you going to do with the dead animal?”

“We will drop it off in the labor lines. The skin will be pegged with six-inch nails and treated with wood ash and alum before the hide is dry enough to send to the Calcutta taxidermist. The laborers eat the meat,” said Alasdair. He smiled. “I’ve never tried it.”

Manik turned to me. “I’m going to drop Alasdair off at Chulsa,” he said. “I may be late for breakfast, so go ahead and eat, darling.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. “I think I’ll grab a quick nap,” I said.

“I’ll come back and nap with you,” said Manik eagerly, giving me his new jungle-man look. “All through that long night, when I was up on the
machan
, all I could think of was...napping with my darling wife, right, Ally?”

“Aye,” said Alasdair, and he looked away with a shy and secretive smile.

* * *

I have to admit my sudden and precipitous sexual awakening turned me into a bit of a moon head. I did things I am too embarrassed to repeat, things no sensible person would dream of doing. I gazed at the clouds, laughed at butterflies and floated around the garden feeling giddily and powerfully beautiful. If that was not bad enough, I went around without my brassiere. Abandoning my underwear had little to do with my newfound lustiness—although that would not be far from the truth—but because the hornet sting made wearing the undergarment quite unbearable.

A strange thing had happened. The wound healed, but the scar morphed, puckered and bloated around the edges, and to my utter astonishment shaped itself into a perfectly formed four-petaled rose centered deep in my cleavage.

“Damn,” said Manik in wonderment, touching the “rose” lightly with his fingers, “it’s a pure work of art. It reminds me of a tribal tattoo.”

It felt strangely erotic when he kissed it. The skin was raised and exquisitely sensitive.

I peered down my neck, feeling a little worried. “I hope there’s nothing wrong with it.” The scar had changed drastically.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not really.”

“I think Doctor Emmett should take a look at it.”

“Who is Doctor Emmett?”

“The district medical practitioner. He is an English doctor and he’ll be here on his hospital rounds tomorrow. I’ll tell him to pop by the bungalow.”

“No, no, please, Manik! I don’t want him to see me naked!”

Manik stared at me incredulously. “Don’t be ridiculous, Layla! He’s a doctor, for God’s sake.”

“Still.”

“Have you never been examined by a doctor before?”

“No, not like that.”

“Well, get over it. Doctor Emmett will come and see you tomorrow. He will be here late morning.”

“Maybe I can just describe the scar to him—that way I won’t have to take my clothes off?”

Manik glared at me. “Absolutely not,” he said sharply. “You will do as the doctor tells you. He needs to examine you. Do you understand?”

* * *

Doctor Emmett was an elderly man, with a thin, tired face, a receding hairline and kindly eyes behind half-moon glasses, which perched on the very edge of his nose. When he talked to me, he tilted his head back and squinted down his glasses with a faraway look, as if he was peering down a tunnel watching for a train.

One quick look at the bite and he told me I had nothing to worry about—it was only a keloid. A keloid, he explained, was a harmless skin scarification. It was the way certain types of skin tissue reacted and healed.

“Some tribes deliberately scar their bodies and rub in the juice of certain plants to form keloids. It is considered the ultimate beatification in tribal culture and marks the coming of age.”

I smiled to myself. The keloid “rose” had definitely marked the coming of age for me.

“Is there something I should do about it?” I asked, as I hooked my blouse back on.

“I would just let it be,” said Doctor Emmett, snapping shut his black leather satchel. “Unfortunately it is a permanent scar. A disfigurement or...enhancement, depends how you look at it.” He smiled, suddenly appearing a lot younger.

“The coolie women have the most interesting tattoos,” I said. “The designs must mean something.”

Doctor Emmett peered over his glasses and gave a wan smile. “I see quite a few tattoos, as you can imagine. Some in rather unusual places. In my twenty-five years as a tea doctor, I’ve learned a few things about Adivasi culture. The wife of the village sorcerer, I believe, does the job. The tattoo ink is made by burning black sesame seeds and mixing in oil before it is injected under the skin. For antiseptic, they use, of all things, diluted cow dung!”

“Cow dung!”
I exclaimed. “That would make an open wound even
more
septic, I would imagine!”

Doctor Emmett threw up his hands. “Beats me, but it seems to work,” he said. “Most tea-gardens coolies are from the low-caste tribes in Orissa. Girls get their first tattoos as early as seven. Some designs are the special marking of their tribe. You may have seen the three dots on the chin or the V-shaped tattoos in the corners of the eyes—
chiriya
, bird tattoos those are called. Then there are also magic symbols that are supposed to protect you from a specific type of harm like drowning, fire, snakebites. I once saw a man suffer a cobra bite with no negative effect. He had a serpentine tattoo on his arm. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of this hocus-pocus. As a man of science, it baffles me.”

I wondered what a four-petaled “rose” tattoo would protect me from. This absurd thought made me smile.

“You’re smiling,” said Doctor Emmett, looking at me curiously.

“No, no,” I said quickly, feeling my ears turn red. “Thank you for your visit, Doctor. I feel a lot more reassured now.”

He left me some antiseptic ointment to help with the irritation and advised me not to wear tight undergarments until it healed fully. Because of the thinness of the skin tissue, the wound area would be ultrasensitive to touch, he said, probably for the rest of my life.

CHAPTER 21

Soon enough, my moon-head phase waned, thank God. I hooked on my brassiere once again, tied my hair back into my old ponytail and decided to take a good hard look around me.

Manik lived what I can only describe as a grandiose but ramshackle life. The household ran like a big creaky factory with lots of faulty parts. Besides the majordomos Halua, Kalua and Potloo, I counted thirteen servants in all. There was the
paniwalla
, or kitchen boy; not one but three
malis
to take care of the garden; a bent old lady who came to sweep the portico and cut the grass—by hand, using a curved scythe; a one-eyed janitor; a cowherd, which made no sense because we had no cows; a
bandookwalla
, whose job was to clean the guns and sometimes accompany Manik on shikar; a boiler boy, whose job was to attend to the coal-fed boiler room and make the hot water for our baths; and a young round-faced ayah, newly hired, who was supposed to be my personal attendant.

“What do I need an ayah for?” I asked Manik.

He shrugged. “All memsahibs have an ayah, so I got you one. She can help you put on your sari, comb your hair, massage your feet, tweak your toes—whatever you want.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“Then sack her,” he said.

“No,
you
sack her, since you got her in the first place.”

“How can I sack her, if
you
are her boss?”

I sighed at Manik’s facetiousness. It was impossible to talk sense to him sometimes.

On Wednesdays, the
dhobi
boy arrived with the clean laundry and took the dirty clothes to be washed. He was a rabbit-faced lad with big scared eyes and such an awful stutter that he could not speak a single sentence without collapsing into a babbling wreck. Halua’s yelling and the occasional box in the ear did not help as he tallied up the items in a moth-eaten notebook. Our clothes arrived after being bashed on river rocks, boiled in rice starch and baked in the sun. The folds of my saris crackled and popped open like crispy wafers, and in just two washes the bright summer colors faded to a bleak, wintry sadness.

Manik was shockingly lackadaisical about his dress. For morning
kamjari
, he rushed off wearing the first shirt and Bombay bloomers off the top of the pile in his wardrobe. As a result the top six items on his shelf got worn over and over again—they were old and shabby, while the bottom ones remained spanking new. It did not cross his mind to flip the pile over. Some days Manik even rushed off with mismatched socks. Thankfully, slipshod dressing raised no eyebrows on a plantation. An assistant could report for
kamjari
mismatched, sockless or even footless as far as Mr. McIntyre was concerned, but if the job he was assigned to was not up to snuff, forget the feet, because the assistant’s head was more likely to roll.

Manik had other appalling habits, as well. Most late afternoons when he came home from
kamjari
, he would leave his clothes strewn all over the house and expect Halua to pick up after him. Manik’s muddy boots would be lying helter-skelter at the top of the stairs, his socks flung on the veranda and his limp bush shirt draped over the backrest of the sofa in the living room. If you followed the trail of dirty clothes it would lead you right to the sweaty animal himself, who would be lying flat on his stomach under the fan in the bedroom, recuperating from his prickly heat. Manik would bemoan his pitiful life and bribe me to scratch his back and act peevish and demanding.

“You are missing a spot, wife. Left,
left
, a little more. Stop! Scratch right there. Ahhhh!”

“Manik, did you know Kalua is charging us for two dozen eggs every second day?”

“Damn scoundrel,” Manik mumbled dreamily into his pillow. “Scratch there...some more, darling, right there. Hmm...”

“He is robbing us blind. Don’t you want to do anything about it?”

“Who? Who is robbing us?” Manik did not sound alarmed at being robbed blind.

“Halua or Kalua. Maybe both.”

“I think YOU are robbing me. Hey, how many kisses are you charging me for this scratch? You are getting expensive.”

“
Uf-hoh!
Please be serious. Are you listening to me or no?” I gave his back a smack.

“Oww! I am thinking about it. Deeply, as we speak.”

“What do you want to do?”

“You are the memsahib. Stand them in a corner, shoot them. I don’t care.”

“Halua and Kalua have had a run of this place and here comes the new memsahib to curdle the milk,” I complained.

Manik snorted. “Don’t worry—the memsahib’s job is to curdle the milk. It’s time those two toed the line. I know what they are up to, but I am just too lazy to bother.”

“What am
I
supposed to do, Manik, if you are not bothered?”

“Try thinking like the big boss. Ask yourself, what would Mr. McIntyre do?”

“Well, you have not exactly been acting like Mr. McIntyre yourself all this time, have you?”

“I plead guilty. I am a man of simple wants, darling. Love me, feed me and scratch my back in the right place. That’s all I ask.”

Aynakhal

12th March 1946

My dear Dadamoshai,

I hope you are keeping well.

I am writing to you drinking my tea here on the veranda. It is midmorning, beautiful with the flowers and new leaves on the trees. Earlier this morning there was a small flock of barking deer grazing on the lawn.

The hornet bite is healing nicely. The pain is under control and the doctor says I am fine, Dadamoshai. Please don’t worry.

Manik left early for work this morning. On Wednesdays he has to attend what they call “Bichar” at the office. It’s a sort of judicial proceeding, if you will. Once a week, managers have to listen to labor grievances and resolve disputes. Usually they are petty domestic issues—like someone running off with someone’s daughter or stealing someone’s cow. Alcohol and drug-related problems are common, too. Opium is a big problem here. There is a lot of illegal trafficking across the Burmese border. The coolies take opium, get sluggish and don’t want to work, and then the management has a problem on its hands.

The coolies call the manager their
Mai-Baap
—mother-father—and he is granted a godly status. The manager is seen as the giver, the taker, the protector and the savior. He is expected to be wise, and mete out fair justice. The childlike trust these simple people have in their manager is naive and quite touching. Mr. McIntyre is superb in labor management. He is attentive to each and every case, no matter how minor, and is always firm and fair. Manik says he has a lot to learn by just watching Mr. McIntyre.

There are no rules. Most managers simply use common sense to solve disputes. This does call for an astute understanding of human behavior and the ability to come up with ingenious solutions. I must give you this one example, Dadamoshai, because being a judge, I think you will appreciate the cleverness of Mr. McIntyre’s judgment in this case.

There was this coolie couple, husband and wife, who were seeking separation. There is nothing called “divorce” among coolie couples—they simply part ways—but in this case there was an acrimonious dispute over the distribution of pots and pans. Aside from cattle, pots and pans are the only asset these poor people have. This couple could not come to an amicable solution, and so they brought it up at the weekly Bichar.

And here is how Mr. McIntyre solved the dispute: he first asked the husband to divide up the utensils into two lots. Next, he told the wife she could choose the lot she wanted. So you can imagine the poor husband’s anguish deciding which pot to put in which pile! When I heard the story, I told Manik that is exactly how my Dadamoshai would have solved the problem.

Our bungalow is large and comfortable but sadly in need of repair. We have quite a retinue of servants whom I have to learn to manage. I don’t even know where to begin or what I am supposed to do. Every morning a small crowd gathers outside our bungalow gates. It is humbling to know they are there to see me. I am finally getting used to the idea of being on perpetual display. There is one curious woman I see every day in a green sari who lurks in the same spot. She dresses differently from the other coolie women, and I still have not figured out who she is.

I will send you some pictures soon. Manik has a Brownie camera that he will teach me to operate.

I miss you, Dadamoshai, and worry about you. Please keep well.

With my love to you,

Layla

Manik was a surprising lover. He could be intense and consuming and then with no warning at all turn into a rambunctious puppy. He was so curiously two-sided he reminded me of a beautiful heirloom shawl I had inherited from my grandmother. It was a rich black on the outside but woven with brilliant colors on the inside.

I came to understand and accept the decorum that was expected of us in public. There was no easy familiarity, no demonstration of affection and not even a tiny hint of the intimacy we shared in the bedroom. The stark contrast between our private and public life was titillating in a way and gave our very legitimate marriage the delicious intrigue of an illicit affair.

Not surprisingly, our meals got shorter, our siestas longer. Often we left our lunch barely touched and Kalua walked around with a glum face, worried perhaps his cooking was falling short. At other times we played childish pranks, buffeting poor Halua between us for our own amusement.

One day I acted as if I did not know Manik was home. Soon Halua came looking for me with a note.

Where is my Dundee cake?
Manik wrote.

I frowned reading the note and said to Halua, “Tell
Chotasahib
, no Dundee cake today, only sandwich.”

Halua went back with the message. Soon he was back with another note from Manik.

Let’s make sandwich
, the note read.

“Ask
Chotasahib
, what sandwich?” I said, sneaking a grin behind Halua’s back as he scurried back to Manik.

Finally Halua returned looking very worried. The note read,
Do you want a PISH-PASH?

I gave a noisy sigh and said, “All right, all right, tell
Chotasahib
I’m coming.” Then I took my own sweet time before casually sauntering past the bedroom. I peeped in and feigned surprise to see Manik lying on the bed. “Oh,
there
you are, and I was looking all over the bungalow for you!”

“Like hell you were,” Manik growled. “You are going to get a spanking for this.”

* * *

Halua and Kalua always needed money. They lurked around shifty-eyed, fidgeting. As soon as my back was turned they whispered furtively into Manik’s ear. Manik would absentmindedly rummage in the bedside drawer and give them handfuls of cash. Nothing was kept under lock and key, and loose change lay in crumpled stacks and piles all over the house. The next time you looked it would be gone.

By the end of the month, after paying his club bills and the
Kiyah
bill for his groceries, Manik would be scraping the bottom of the drawer for small change. Kalua, I suspected, ran a thriving chicken and egg business in our own backyard to feed his poultry-hungry boss. With Manik’s generous patronage it had undoubtedly grown into a cluckable fortune.

One thing became increasingly clear: Hal, Kal and Pots—as we now called them—were symbiotically linked to Manik, like the remora pilot fish to the shark. They stuck together and looked out for each other’s interests. I, on the other hand, was the new parrot fish trying to swim along, pretending to be a part of this happy entourage. Most of the time they ganged up on me—even Manik, in his own crooked way.

It was a well-known fact that when a young tea planter enticed a wife to his jungle lair—a major feat in itself—there was much at stake to keep her there. Bungalow servants knew their boss would quickly forget the times when he had been a helpless babe at their mercy. After all, who cleaned him up and put him to bed when he staggered home on whiskey-sodden club nights? Who covered up for the seedy companions he sometimes dragged home? Who cajoled the young master awake on cold
kamjari
mornings with hot cups of tea to save him from the wrath of the tyrant
Burrasahib
?

Soon enough, the new memsahib would get a whiff of the nefarious activities and embark on a holy mission to reform her man. The first order of the day was to sack the existing servants, the ones who were in cahoots with her husband and knew more than they should. That way it blotted out all evidence of his bachelor past. A fresh batch of menials were installed and trained to higher standards. It was a memsahib prerogative.

Yet, when I complained about Hal, Kal or Pots to Manik, he grew increasingly tenderhearted and acted as if I was trying to drown a batch of helpless puppies. Manik was not too concerned about the
malis
,
paniwalla
and other riffraff, but for the three primary remoras, he made impassioned pleas.

Frankly, their inefficiency did not bother me as much as the blatant thievery. I had no aspirations to be the lady of the manor, if you could call our ramshackle bungalow that, but I was aware of certain expectations for a memsahib. I was the first Indian wife in a very colonial tea culture. I would be under intense scrutiny. If I acted gauche and incompetent, it would only confirm the suspicion that “natives” were not up to par. Someday Manik would be the General Manager or
Burrasahib
, and I would be the
Burramemsahib
. I would have to learn the ropes of this new lifestyle.

* * *

Kalua appeared one morning with the pencil tucked behind his ear and a mangled
khata
notebook that looked as if it had been coughed up by a water buffalo. On the cover of the notebook was a faded sketch of Laxmi,
the goddess of wealth, sitting atop a lotus and dispensing gold coins. Laxmi
had indeed showered her fortune on Kalua. This notebook was where he wrote his shopping list for the
Kiyah
store. The
Kiyah
, I learned, was the local grocer, the only shop located inside the tea plantation that stocked basic supplies like rice, lentils, sugar and flour: mostly poor quality, weevil-ridden items, exorbitantly priced. The
Kiyah
was also a moneylender of sorts for the laborers, who were often up to their ears in debt, having drunk away their Friday pay.