The Sleeping Dictionary (24 page)

“What’s this?” he raised my hands to his nose.

“Cardamom. Good evening, sir. My name is Pamela.” From underneath my lashes, I judged him to be somewhere in his forties. He had likely been in India twenty years or more.

“Of course, I’ve heard of you. Highest virgin price paid in Khargpur since Natty.” He inhaled my hands again. “So what do they have you doing, working the kitchen? You smell like that pudding. What do you call it in Hindustani?”

“Kheer,” I replied, my heart thumping at the gamble I’d taken. “Sir, I hear you enjoy a feast, so I prepared one for you.”

“Where?”

“It is invisible!” I said, turning my head so he could bring his mouth to my neck and discover the smell and taste of fennel seed. As he undressed me, he found it all: the cloves inside the bend of my elbow, the turmeric on my shoulders, the saffron paste that tipped my breasts.

When I’d sprinkled some parts of my body with spices, I’d hoped to distract the Taster enough that he wouldn’t put any of his own smelly food on me. And as I lay passively, letting him taste the hills and plains of my body, it did seem that he’d forgotten about his tiffin boxes.

The Taster was excited, groaning his guesses of the various spices. Privately, I thought that his endurance—or rather, the muscular ability of his lips and tongue—was astonishing. Nothing that Natty had said prepared me for how invasive and disturbing this was. I had thought
that by choosing the spices, I’d feel like I was in control; but I wasn’t. It was time to take a fantasy trip somewhere else, so I told myself the touch was nothing, that one day, there would be no more men like Chief Howard and Mr. Abernathy with their oddities and perversions; they’d be gone from India, because the freedom fighters would get out of jail and fight them to the death. And I’d help them all I could by telling them the men’s names, the weapons they carried on their persons, and the days they came regularly to Rose Villa and could be easily surprised.

But my thoughts were not enough to change anything. And it was my bad fortune that I had intrigued the Taster so much that he decided not to go back to Natty. At first, I was surprised that she minded so much, but she didn’t like being shown up, and she was missing the income. To hurt me, Natty played little tricks to show Mummy I wasn’t a good worker. It wasn’t the case, for I now had a faithful group of about ten gentlemen who were likely to book in advance. It was my almost-English accent and the other language I’d learned of physical deception: making parts of my body rigid, and other parts tremble and quake, as if what these men were doing was as pleasurable for me as it was for them. These talents were almost eliminating my need to compete against the other girls in the downstairs parlors and ensured my savings’ growth. I hoped to have enough saved in ten months to escape the life and perhaps enroll myself in a school somewhere, to complete my education and even take the Cambridge examinations that were needed to become a teacher. I could not think that Pankaj would ever accept me, given what had happened at Rose Villa; but at least I could make myself anew.

This was the only thing I was sure of: my ability to make money. Love and lust were other matters. What continued to surprise me, as the months continued, was how different the man’s and woman’s experiences were. The men all seemed to enjoy themselves very much. Yet I shared none of the excitement in my flesh or mind, and, in fact, there were still occasions that intercourse hurt like daggers, and I would beg
Mummy to let me off the rest of the night so I would be comfortable enough to work the following day. Mummy didn’t like it but acquiesced because she did not want to lose multiple days of income from me.

Those few nights that I took leave felt like paradise. If I didn’t have something from the bookshop, I’d drop into one of the empty parlors, take a book, and vanish upstairs. It was interesting how many books in the English language had been written about fallen young women:
Clarissa, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
,
Fanny Hill.
I was the only one who liked these books; the others preferred film and celebrity magazines, or anything about film or fashion in the Calcutta newspapers.

Their annoying habit of cutting out photographs and adverts forced me to rise early to read the entire newspaper before it was cut to pieces. Those days, the news pages were full of a so-called German Problem—something nobody in the house really understood. I had not heard talk of it among the Indian Army officers in the parlor at Rose Villa, so one evening, I decided to ask the Taster as we’d finished and he was sitting up with pillows behind his back, eating a real beef dinner off a tray.

“There will be war here in India before Europe.” He spoke while still chewing. “There are too many rabble-rousers in India these days, with the meetings and processions and nonsense.”

I wasn’t satisfied with the answer, so I said, “How could there really be a war here? Indians have no arms to use.”

“Of course they do. The bandits who attack the wealthy jamidars in the countryside steal arms from their treasuries or enough money to buy arms easily on the black market. The prisons are full of thieves.”

“How do guns reach the black market?” I asked. One day, I would use this information; I was sure of it.

“They’re brought by the crooked native constables, of course, reporting a gun broken or lost—you can’t trust anyone.” He stretched one monstrous hand to grip me under the sheets. “Ah, here’s a fine black market! What is inside?”

I shifted away, laughing as if it were a game. I’d already served
him once; I didn’t want to again, especially with him in the midst of a beef dinner.

“But why are you asking, my little morsel?” he persisted playfully. “Are you thinking of picking me off?”

“Oh, no, sir,” I lied. “Then I would be too lonely. Won’t you tell me that funny story again—the one about eating the Christmas pudding all by yourself when you were young?”

“Only if you’ll play the Christmas pudding.”

MR. ABERNATHY HAD been talking about Indians hitting the English; but in the
Statesman
newspaper I read later that spring, I saw an article about Calcutta boys throwing stones at the police. All of them had been dragged out of their homes later that evening, thrashed, and thrown in prison. Their lawyer was pleading that the wrong boys had been wrongly arrested as all named parties were reportedly in school at the time of the attack. And when I saw the lawyer’s name, my stomach quaked, for his name was Pankaj Bandopadhyay, Esquire.

Pankaj must have joined his father’s practice—and how exciting that he managed to practice law in the area of nationalism, which had been his earliest wish! If Bidushi could have known that Pankaj was well and working in politics, she would have been pleased. I wondered if he had married; for it had been almost a year since Bidushi’s death. For some reason, I hoped that he had not. But if he had married—and, in time, had a daughter—maybe I could be her teacher. Then I could fulfill my promise to Bidushi to watch over him.

NOW I HAD a personal motivation for getting the day’s newspaper before anyone else: to find any mention of Pankaj and his important work. I had Premlata bring it with my bed tea, so nobody was awake
to witness my tears when I read that he’d lost the students’ case. This was a travesty; still, I was convinced that he would keep on with his important work. As 1936 turned to 1937, he defended many people charged with sedition and civil unrest; only about a quarter resulted in acquittal, which did not surprise me any longer. And then, suddenly, Pankaj’s name was not in the paper as pleader, but defendant.

Calcutta, February 10, 1937. Bijoy Ganguly and Pankaj Bandopadhyay face sentencing today on charges of propaganda, libel, and inciting civil unrest. Mr. Bandopadhyay had represented Mr. Ganguly as a pro bono client until the latter was arrested earlier this week. Calcutta police say Mr. Bandopadhyay knowingly paid for the printing of a Bengali pamphlet designed to incite public unrest regarding the case. The pamphlets were recovered by Calcutta police at Bandopadhyay’s Ballygunge residence. Police are also charging Mr. Ganguly for making false statements about maltreatment by the Calcutta police.

I was very upset about the situation, but I thought the girls would laugh at me if they knew I secretly loved a Calcutta intellectual. So I privately kept watching the papers until, one morning, I saw the verdict. Pankaj received a sentence of two years, and Bijoy three, at the Port Blair prison in the Andaman Islands, a small colony a thousand miles off Bengal’s coast.

It would have been hard enough if Pankaj were sent to Mr. Abernathy’s nearby jail, Hijli. But the high-security prison nicknamed “Black Water” was considered to be a far worse place. Originally created after the 1857 mutiny for the confinement of incorrigible Indians, the prisoners today were almost all Bengali freedom fighters kept in solitary confinement. There were rumors of polluted water, very little or rotten food, flogging, force-feeding, and other cruelties. But nobody knew for certain, because the prisoners could not be visited by anyone. If someone died in the Andamans, any excuse could be made by the prison officials. No one would know the truth.

CHAPTER

13

JEOPARDY:
 . . . 2. A position in a game, undertaking, etc. in which the chances of winning and losing hang in the balance . . .

—
Oxford English Dictionary
, Vol. 5, 1933

O
n her deathbed, Bidushi had requested that I take care of Pankaj, that I always ensure he was well. Nothing I’d said or done that wretched day at Lockwood School had helped him through her loss, and my inability to reach Calcutta had prevented me from doing anything that might have kept him from his court troubles. My Princess would have died another death to know her beloved was in prison.

This knowledge of how I’d failed both Pankaj and Bidushi—the only ones whom I’d become close to after losing my family—tore me apart. I wrote him one heartfelt letter, and then another, in an envelope marked with his name and
Port Blair Prison, the Andamans
. But each time I went to drop a letter in the postbox, I changed my mind. I didn’t know if prisoners would be given letters, and even if they could receive mail, why would he want to learn what I had become?
He would certainly be insulted to hear from a prostitute. He should never know that the literary voice he’d once adored was now crying with false ecstasy to all kinds of bad men. So I didn’t mail the letters but tore them into tiny pieces, and then stopped writing altogether.