Zemindar (6 page)

‘Our address,’ gulped Elvira, dabbing at her eyes and handing me an envelope. ‘It’s the regimental headquarters, and will find us wherever they send Papa.’

‘Thank you. I don’t know what else to say, but thank you! I do sincerely hope we will meet again, and I shall certainly always remember your kind offer.’

I backed towards the door, and left the cabin with Mrs Wilkins’s last words following me: ‘You deserve well, Miss Hewitt. God grant you only good!’

It was late afternoon when we eventually got ashore. The port of Calcutta was thronged with vessels and we dropped anchor in midstream among a multitude of ships from every nation: big three-masters from Holland, Portugal and distant China and a British man-o’-war towered over a jostling crowd of skiffs, bumboats, fishing-smacks and out-riggered canoes. We were all packed and ready to disembark long before the small boats came alongside to take us off, and crowded the rails inspecting the river traffic, marvelling at the opium ships, the tall tea-clippers, the neat small steam packets that were now used for coastal trade, and most of all at a large American vessel, ungainly and ugly, which Mr Roberts said was propelled by means of a steam-engine on its upper deck.

Despite our readiness and my impatience, we were the last of the passengers to leave the ship, Charles having decided to wait until a large tender that the Captain had ordered came to take us and our baggage ashore together, so that we would not have to await our possessions’ arrival on the dockside.

I was sorry to see the last of Mr Roberts, and hoped that he would indeed call on us as promised. The Wilkins ladies went ashore with the washed-out soldiers, Mrs Wilkins waving a pink-and-purple-striped parasol until they were obscured by the hull of another ship.

In spite of the bustle on deck as sailors readied the hatches for the unloading of cargo, and officers with lading bills passed busily too and fro making calculations with stubs of pencil and hailing each other for information, I felt curiously lonely and lost standing at the rail for the last time as the shadows grew long and the swift dusk descended. Our time aboard had been a little lifetime in itself, distinct from everything that had gone before and from everything that would follow. Soon it would have no more importance—as the promises of Mr Roberts and the Wilkinses would perhaps have no more importance. At that moment I doubted that we would ever see each other again. The tide of daily life would soon wash over the small indentations left by their personalities upon ours and ours upon theirs; in a matter of months we would find it difficult to remember their names, impossible to recall their faces and would have forgotten, most probably, even those things that most irritated and annoyed us in each other, and that had sometimes assumed such disproportionate significance during the confinement of the long voyage.

Emily, however, knew no such sentiments. She was assured, now that we had the tender to ourselves, of making her arrival in Calcutta a moment of some glory, and was concerned only with the set of her gown over her hoops and keeping her bonnet close over her ears so that her hair would not be disarranged. The Captain himself helped us into the tender and waved us away with every appearance of cordiality, a small attention much appreciated by Emily. I did not look back as we were carried through the shipping to shore.

We were met on the dock by Mr and Mrs Chalmers, a middle-aged couple, both stout, florid and smartly dressed, with whom we were to reside while in the city. Mr Chalmers was a business associate of my Uncle Hewitt’s (and therefore of Charles’s) and, while he and Charles remained behind to see to the conveyance of our baggage, Emily and I accompanied Mrs Chalmers to her carriage through a crowd of Calcutta citizens come to see the new arrivals, all dressed in their best, some promenading along the dirty dock, some seated in open carriages, but all alike unashamedly interested in the appearance of Emily and my less resplendent self. So much so, indeed, that I was grateful to be on my way at last, seated beside Mrs Chalmers on one seat, while Emily spread her skirts out elegantly on the other and rested one white-gloved hand on the knob of her long parasol with a truly patrician droop of the wrist.

However I soon forgot her nonsensical airs. The carriage was an open landau which enabled me to take in something of the city and its life as we passed through it, and I found myself pleased and surprised by the generally sophisticated appearance of it all. The streets were broad and clean and lined by fine trees, many of them in flower, while the houses, each set in its own large garden, were well-proportioned and imposing, though naturally of a very different style to anything known at home. It was the hour of the evening promenade and the residents were out riding or driving, many of the ladies elegantly dressed, and many of the men in fine military uniforms, with good horses under them and native grooms running at their horses’ tails.

‘I think we shall do very well in India,’ said Emily with some condescension, looking around her with deceptive coolness. ‘Only think how pleasant it will be when we have our own carriage and drive out with Charles beside us on a fine mount and a little black boy running along behind him!’

‘Very pleasant—except for the little black boy,’ I answered drily.

‘Oh la, Miss Hewitt,’ said Mrs Chalmers, ‘don’t waste pity on the boys! Believe me, they are much more content to run at a horse’s heels and earn a good wage than remain in their homes and starve!’

I said no more as I was still conscious of my ignorance of the country, but I noticed few natives in the part of the city through which we drove who gave any sign of poverty. They appeared self-respecting and well-mannered, pursuing their own avocations quietly and without any interest in their white fellow citizens. When I observed as much to Mrs Chalmers, saying I had thought to have seen many more of the native population on the streets, she told me that the Indians generally were not allowed on the streets during the promenade hours—only the rich ‘and they are nothing but merchants and money-lenders and such’, she added contemptuously, ‘though of course since the Nawab of Oudh took a house in Chowringhee and brought all his relations and friends with him, there have been a lot more of them around than there used to be in these parts.’ She sniffed disapprovingly.

‘The Nawab of Oudh?’ said Emily. ‘Does he live in Calcutta too?’

‘Yes indeed, and no credit to the city either! Came here after he was deposed, y’know, and lives in such style
and
at Government expense, that you’d never believe it! Mr Chalmers says he doesn’t know what the Governor General is about in allowing him to live in the greatest luxury, with all his family and his servants and officials about him, and even a menagerie, of which they say he is excessively fond—lions and tigers and so on—when all the world knows he is the most worthless creature living and well deserved to be knocked off his
gadhi
.’

‘
Gadhi
?’

‘Throne! Mr Chalmers says if poor Lord Dalhousie were still here, the Nawab would soon be cut down to size, but Lord Canning, the new man, y’know, is altogether a different sort of character. Too good. Too tolerant. It’s just as well the country is as peaceful and quiet as it is at the moment, Mr Chalmers says, because otherwise there’s no telling what might happen. As it is all Lord Canning has to do is to continue on the lines laid down by Lord Dalhousie, and long may it continue to be so.’

‘Oh, but poor creature! It must be terrible for a man who has been a king suddenly to find himself a no one,’ commiserated Emily. ‘Whatever did he do that was so dreadful?’

‘Well, it wasn’t only this Nawab. Oh, no! It was his father too, and his grandfather and I don’t know how many others before them. They were all a bad lot. Drink, don’t you see, and opium and extravagance and … debauchery. Of
every
kind! Why, this one even went through the streets of his own city playing his drums like a common
tamasa-wallah
—a strolling showman I suppose you would say—with all the population looking on, and never gave a thought to the running of his kingdom, which has fallen into the most dire state as a result of his neglect, so that now the Government has had to step in and take it over entirely to put things to right. And after all that, the Nawab is allowed to bring his menagerie to Calcutta with him!’

Mrs Chalmers sniffed in great dudgeon, and I thought I could detect even in her sniff an echo of the denunciations of her husband. I wondered idly whether I would ever be capable of taking on a man’s opinions merely because he was my husband? Perhaps, if he were very sensible and his opinions were really the expression of my own mind. But on the whole it was as well that I stood in small danger of matrimony.

‘Well, I suppose he’s very terrible as you say, but I had hoped that when we were in Lucknow we might see him, meet him perhaps too,’ said Emily. ‘But I suppose he sees no one now, and as he is not a king any longer it wouldn’t signify much anyway.’

‘Oh, kings are two-a-penny in this country,’ answered Mrs Chalmers, ‘and if you take my advice you will have nothing to do with any of ’em. Nasty, grabbing, vicious people on the whole, and I’d sooner put my feet under the mahogany of an English gentleman any time.’

‘I expect you are right. But it would have been nice to have told people at home that we had called on a king,’ said Emily with regret.

The Chalmerses’ house was set by the river, and its lawns and gardens led right down to the water. It was a typical
bungala
khoti
or Bengal house—a term which we English with our flair for etymological adaptation have turned into ‘bungalow’—a building of great height and extent, but comprising only one storey. A deep verandah surrounded it, and the rooms were dark, cavernous and bare, at least to eyes accustomed to the amount of ornament and bric-à-brac fashionable in recent years. The bedchamber to which I was conducted was the largest room I had ever seen, let alone occupied. Three tall doors led on to the verandah, and from it opened a dressing-room and a bathroom furnished with a tin bath and an enormous earthenware container full of cold water. This was full of mosquito larvae and other insects drawn up with the water from the well, something which caused Emily only a little more uneasiness than the prevalent Indian custom of taking a bath every day. She was sure so much subjection to tepid water would be bad for her health and complexion.

We were each supplied with an
ayah,
a sort of lady’s maid, while Charles found himself waited upon by a neatly turbanned and fiercely-moustachioed bearer. Thus amply were our creature comforts supplied by the hospitable Chalmers, and within a few days I had become accustomed to such strange matters as sleeping under a mosquito net, rising at dawn to walk along the river and returning to drink tea and eat fruit on the verandah, spending the greater part of the day in the dark and shuttered house to escape the heat, emerging only in the cool evenings to sit on a brick platform in the garden and watch the sudden and colourful sunsets.

Very thoughtfully the Chalmers had decided to allow the young Floods a few days’ rest before introducing them into the local society. Mr Chalmers would not even hear of Charles accompanying him to his office, which was the only justification we had for being in Calcutta, for at least a week. And certainly, once we had settled ourselves in our comfortable quarters, all three of us became aware of a sudden tiredness and lack of energy. No doubt the heat, the humidity and the change from the sea air all contributed to our inertia. But in a couple of days we were ourselves again and Emily began to fret at what she termed ‘this odious inactivity’. I must admit that I was almost equally irked by our inability to get out of the house and grounds and take a look at our new surroundings. It was, according to Mrs Chalmers, quite unheard of for an English lady to walk the roads, even in this residential area, unaccompanied—indeed, to walk at all. ‘This climate,’ she said, ‘precludes exercise for ladies during the hot weather.’ We did take a decorous stroll along the riverbank before
chota hazri
at dawn, but after that the long hot day lay before us bereft of interest or occupation. On the second evening Mrs Chalmers asked whether we would care for an airing in the landau, but with such obvious lack of encouragement that even the impetuous Emily did not take up the offer. ‘Well, perhaps it is better not,’ she said with relief, ‘the horses suffer as much as we humans in this heat, poor things, and if we go out after dark when it is coolest there are the insects, y’know, and anyway nothing can be seen!’

Mrs Chalmers spent a large part of the day dressed in a loose wrapper, lying on a
chaise-longue
reading novels and writing endless ‘chits’ to her friends, which were then conveyed to their destinations by one of the many servants. The house appeared to run itself. I never saw her plan a menu, make a laundry-list or so much as enter the kitchen quarters. I could not help recalling the active, useful life my aunt led in Mount Bellew, her intimate interest in every facet of housekeeping, her concern for each member of her household, and her many charities in the village. I had no doubt at all as to which mode of life I would prefer. I was able to fill my time quite adequately with needle-work and sorting the clothing which had accompanied us in our big trunks but which we had not needed on the voyage, but soon discovered that any mending, washing or ironing, even of delicate laces, was not my duty but that of the
ayahs
, the washerman or the tailor who sat cross-legged on the floor of the back verandah. It was pleasant to discover in my trunk a hoard of half a dozen books, all old favourites, for apart from Mrs Chalmers’s novels (which came from a lending library) the meagre bookshelves contained only works on accountancy, the principle and practice of commerce and the horse.

Emily’s interests and habits did not serve her well in solitude. Within a few days she was privately rebellious and openly glum. ‘Wretched woman,’ she said unkindly of her hostess, ‘can’t she see we’re bored and miserable? Couldn’t she even have a little dinner party so that we would see some new faces? She’s the laziest thing! Can you imagine Mama in a wrapper at
noon
!’