The Far Pavilions (115 page)

Yet even knowing that – and had it been possible to refuse to go to Shushila which it was not – she would still have gone. Only someone deaf or stony-hearted could have remained unmoved by those harrowing screams, and Anjuli was neither. She had hurried to Shushila's side, and for the remainder of that agonizing labour it was to her hands that Shushila had clung; dragging at them until they were sore and bleeding and imploring her to call Geeta to stop the pains… poor Geeta who had supposedly broken her neck in a fall, over a year ago.

The new
dai
who had replaced Geeta was a capable and experienced woman, but she lacked her predecessor's skill with drugs. Moreover she had never before been required to deal with a patient who not only made no attempt to help herself, but did everything in her power to prevent anyone else from doing so.

The Senior Rani flung herself from side to side, shrieking and screaming with ear-splitting abandon and clawing wildly at the faces of those who strove to restrain her, and had it not been for the timely arrival of her half-sister she would, in the
dai
's opinion, have ended by doing herself a serious injury or going out of her mind. But the despised co-wife had succeeded where everyone else had failed, for though the screams continued they were less frequent, and presently the frantic girl was striving to bear down as the pains waxed and to relax when they waned, and the
dai
breathed again and began to hope that all might yet be well.

The day ebbed into evening and once again it was night; but few in the Women's Quarters were able to sleep, while those in the birth-chamber were unable even to snatch a mouthful of food. By now Shushila was exhausted, and her throat so sore and swollen that she could no longer scream but only lie still and moan. But she continued to cling to Anjuli's hands as though to a life-line, and Anjuli, aching with weariness, still bent above her, encouraging her, coaxing her to swallow spoonfuls of milk in which strengthening herbs had been brewed, or to sip a little spiced wine; soothing, petting and cajoling her as she had done so often in the past.

‘…and for a while – for a short while,’ said Anjuli, telling the story of that frenetic night, ‘it was as though she was a child again and we were friends once more, as in the old days; though even then I knew in my heart that this was not so, and that it would never be so again…’

Apart from Shushila's uninhibited and hysterical behaviour, there had been no major complications, and when at long last, just after midnight, the child was born, it came into the world very easily: a strong, healthy infant who bawled lustily and beat the air with tiny waving fists. But the
dai
's face paled as she lifted it, and the women who had pressed forward eagerly to witness the great moment drew back and were silent. For the child was not the longed-for son that the soothsayers had so confidently promised, but a daughter.

‘I saw Shushila's face when they told her,’ said Anjuli, ‘and I was afraid. Afraid as I have never been before: for myself… and for the babe also. For it was as though the dead had come back to life and it was Janoo-Rani who lay there: Janoo-Rani in one of her white rages, as cold and as deadly as a king cobra. I had never seen the resemblance before. But I saw it then. And I knew in that moment that no one in the room was safe. Myself least of all… Shushila would strike out like a tigress who has been robbed of its cubs – as she had struck twice before (yes, that too I knew now) when she had been disappointed of a child. But this time it would be worse: this time her rage and disappointment would be ten times greater, because she had carried this child for its full time and been assured that it must be a son, and having endured agony beyond anything she had ever dreamed of to give it birth, it was a daughter.’

Anjuli shuddered again and her voice sank to a whisper. ‘When they would have given the babe to her, she stared at it with hatred, and though she was hoarse from screaming and so weak that she could barely whisper, she summoned up breath to say: “An enemy has done this. It is not mine. Take it away and kill it! Then she turned her face from it and would not look at it again, though it was her own child, her first-born: bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh.I could not have believed that anyone… that any woman… But the
dai
said that it was often so with those who had endured a hard labour and were disappointed of a son. They would speak wildly, but it meant nothing; and when they were rested and had held their infants in their arms they came to love them tenderly. But but I knew my sister better than the
dai
did, and was even more afraid. It was then I think that I came near to hating her… yet how can one hate a child, even a cruel one? – and children can be far crueller than their elders because they do not truly understand -they only feel, and strike out, and do not see the end; and Shu-shu herself was little more than one. But I feared her… I feared her…’

The exhausted
dai
had given Shushila a strong sleeping draught, and as soon as it had taken effect the other women had crept away to spread the dire news to the waiting Zenana, while a trembling and reluctant eunuch had left to inform the sick Rana that he had become the father of yet another daughter. Anjuli had stayed for a while to allow the
dai
to get some rest, and had returned to her own rooms before Shushila awakened; and it was then that she had written that letter to Gobind, imploring his help for Shushila, and begging him to use his influence with the Rana to see if a nurse, an
Angrezi
one, could be sent for immediately to take charge of the mother and child. ‘I thought that if perhaps one of them could be brought to Bhithor, she might be able to cure Shushila of her hate and her rages, which were in some way a sickness, and to persuade her that no one was to blame for the sex of the child; least of all the child itself.’

Gobind had received that letter, but no European woman had been summoned to Bhithor; and in any case, admitted Anjuli, there would not have been time. The Zenana was full of rumours and those that came to her ears confirmed her worst fears: Shushila had not repeated her wild outburst against the child, but she still refused to see it, explaining her refusal by saying that the infant was so frail and sickly that it could not possibly live for more than a few days at most, and she dared not face further pain and grief by becoming deeply attached to a child that must shortly be reft from her.

But at least a dozen women had been present when the child was born, and all had seen it and heard its first cries. Nevertheless, the rumour that it was a frail and sickly infant who was not expected to live was repeated so often that even those who had good reason to know otherwise began to believe it; and soon there were few in Bhithor who had not heard that the poor Rani, having been disappointed of a son, must now suffer the added grief of losing her daughter.

‘I do not know how it died,’ said Anjuli. ‘Perhaps they let it starve to death. Though being a strong child that might have taken too long, so they may have chosen a quicker way… I can only hope so. But no matter whose hand did the work, it was done by Shushila's orders. And then – then the day after the child's body was carried to the burning-ground, three more of her women and the
dai
also fell ill and were taken away from the Zenana in
dhoolis
– for fear, it was said, that the sickness might spread. Later it was rumoured that all four died, though that may not have been true. At least they did not return again to the Women's Quarters; and when it became known that the ailing Rana had suffered a relapse, they were forgotten in all the turmoil and anxiety that followed, because at such a time who could trouble themselves to inquire what had happened to a few unimportant Zenana women?’

Shushila, who had recovered very quickly from her ordeal, flatly refused to believe that her husband's illness could not be cured. Her faith in her uncle's Hakim remained unshaken and she insisted that the relapse was no more than a temporary set-back, and that another month would see the Rana on his feet again and completely recovered: it was unthinkable that this should not be so. In the meantime she turned her attention to repairing the ravages of pregnancy and parturition, and regaining the slenderness that had previously delighted him, so that when he was well again he would think her as beautiful as ever – and have no eyes and no thoughts for anyone else.

Not until the very end could she be brought to believe that he was dying, and when finally she was forced to believe it, she tried to go to him so that she might hold him in her arms and shield him with her own body from this enemy that threatened him. She would fight Death itself for his sake – and she had fought with teeth and nails against those who had prevented her from running to his bedside. Her fury and despair had been so terrible to see that her women had fled from her and hidden themselves in the furthest and darkest rooms of the Zenana, while the eunuchs listening outside her door shook their heads and muttered that she was deranged and should be put under restraint. But when the first frenzy of grief had spent itself she shut herself away in her apartment to pray, refusing to eat or drink or to allow anyone to approach her.

It must have been during this time that she made up her mind to die a suttee, and also what she intended to do about her half-sister. For when the news was brought to her that her husband was dead, her plans had been made. She had apparently sent at once for the Diwan, and speaking to him in the presence of the chief eunuch and the woman Promila Devi (who had been at pains to describe that interview to Anjuli) had informed him that she intended to die on her husband's pyre.

She would follow the bier on foot, but she would go alone. ‘The half-caste’ could not be permitted to defile the Rana's ashes by burning with him, for being no true wife it was not fitting that she should share the honour of becoming suttee. Other arrangements would be made for her…

Even the Diwan must have shuddered as he listened to those arrangements, but he had not opposed them, possibly because his failure to have ‘the half-caste's’ marriage contract repudiated and the woman herself sent back dowerless to her home still rankled, and that if he thought of her at all it was with enmity and resentment, and anger at his own defeat. At all events he had agreed to everything that the Senior Rani had decreed, before hurrying away to consult with the priests and his fellow councillors as to the funeral arrangements. When he had gone, Shushila sent for her half-sister.

Anjuli had not seen her sister since the night of the child's birth, or had any message from her. And when the summons came she imagined that she had been called because Shu-shu was frantic with grief and terror, and desperately in need of support. She did not believe that there would be any talk of suttee, for Ashok had told her that the Raj did not permit the burning of widows and that there was now a law forbidding it. So there was no need for Shushila to fear that she would be forced to die on her husband's pyre. ‘But this time I did not go to her willingly,’ said Anjuli.

Until recently she had been able to believe, or had made herself believe, that Shushila was innocent of much that had been imputed to her; but now she knew better – not only with her head but in her heart. Yet she could not refuse the summons. She had expected to find the new-made widow weeping and distraught, her hair and clothing torn and her women wailing about her. But there had been no sound from the Senior Rani's apartments, and when she entered there was only one person there: a small erect figure that for a moment she did not even recognize…

‘I would not have believed that she could look like that. Ugly, and evil – and
cruel.
Cruel beyond words. Even Janoo-Rani had never looked like that, for Janoo had been beautiful and this woman was not. Nor did it seem possible that she could ever have been beautiful – or young. She looked at me with a face of stone and asked me how I dared come into her presence showing no signs of grief. For in this too I had sinned: it was intolerable to her that I should escape the agony of grief that was tearing at her own heart…

‘She said… she told me… she told me everything: how she had hated me from the moment she fell in love with her husband, because I too was his wife and she could not endure the thought of it; that she had had me starved and imprisoned to make me pay for that crime, and also in order that I might look old and ugly so that if by chance the Rana should remember my existence, he would turn from me in disgust: that she had ordered the killing of my two serving-maids, and of old Geeta… She threw it all in my face as though each word was a blow, and as though it eased her own pain to see me suffer – and how could I
not
suffer? When – when she had finished she told me that she had resolved to become suttee, and that the last thing I would ever see would be the flames uniting her body with her husband's, because she had given orders that when I had seen it my eyes were to be put out with hot irons, and afterwards – afterwards I would be taken back to the Zenana to spend the rest of my life in darkness – as a drudge.

‘I – I tried to reason with her. To plead with her. I went on my knees to her and begged her in the name of all that lay between us – the years… the tie of blood and the affection we had had for each other in the past, the love – but at that she laughed, and summoning the eunuchs, had me dragged away…’

Her voice failed on the last word, and in the silence that followed Ash became aware once more of the sound of the sea and all the many small ship noises; and that the cabin smelled strongly of hot lamp oil and the fried
puris
that had been served with the evening meal and that there was still a lingering odour of stale cigar-smoke to remind him that this had been Red's cabin for many years. But up on the deck it would be cool and the stars were once again familiar ones, for the skies of the south had been left behind – and with them Bhithor and its harsh stony hills, and all that had happened there.

It was over – finished.
Khutam hogia!
Shushila was dead, and all that remained to show that she had ever lived was the print of her small hand on the Suttee Gate of the Rung Mahal. Sarji, Gobind and Manilal had gone; and Dagobaz too… They were all part of the past, and though he would not forget them, it would be best not to think of them too often until enough time had passed to allow him to do so calmly, and without pain.