Authors: Meira Chand
Straight-backed chairs had been set in a semicircle about an armchair. To Sati, the waiting seats filled the room with expectation. Perhaps nothing would happen. Perhaps the spirits that came to her would refuse to appear at such a debased summoning. For that was what this seance was, debased. These depressing thoughts were unalleviated by Demonteguy pacing about considering the placement of the chairs and the number of candles to be lit. His profession was opportunity, and this had now spread to include Sati herself.
‘Do not be nervous. I have shown you how to do it.’ Demonteguy bent and took her hand. She looked down at the bony red knuckles gripping her flesh and immediately drew back.
‘The room looks well enough,’ Rita said, breasts spilling
generously
over her dress. She clung to her husband’s arm, laughing up into his face, anxious to erase the afternoon’s unpleasantness in Black Town. He patted her hand absentmindedly, his attention on the event ahead, but then found a moment to feast his eyes on the succulence trembling so near him. His eyes in the candlelight were bright as a rat’s behind his long nose. He exchanged a lecherous glance with his wife; she giggled and looked away. Demonteguy returned to the arrangements.
‘Everything is in the details. Word flies around quickly here in Calcutta. Failure with our first enterprise could end a profitable game.’ He assessed the room. ‘A seance does not demand too much illumination. Perhaps we do not need so many candles.’
‘Snuff some out before we start. How will guests enter the house in darkness?’ Rita admonished.
‘The effect of a sudden darkening of the room will be most dramatic.’ Satisfaction spread over Demonteguy’s face as he pictured the moment.
A bangle snapped between Sati’s fingers, the fragments falling into her lap. She stared at the bits of broken glass and the bead of blood on her wrist. Perhaps this was an omen; perhaps she too would crack in the midst of one of her attacks. This was the word used by Demonteguy to describe the sudden melting of her mind and the entry of personalities who jostled to be heard.
In the beginning these presences had been vague, refusing to clearly reveal themselves. Then Durga had appeared. Now Sati had only to turn her head to see Durga watching from the shadows of foliage or the rafters of a room. She sensed her moving on the edge of time, always drifting near her. When Durga approached, a wildness burned up her spine, pulling her into a darkness from which she remembered nothing. Her stepfather’s use of the word
attack
implied some violence, but there was nothing of that in what happened to her. There was only the opening of a door and the entering of immensity. Upon her return to mundane life, her soul seemed to cling to her body by no more than a fragile thread. If it snapped, she would float into a limitless world and never return to reality. Like the strands of a cobweb blown free on the wind.
She returned her attention to the empty chairs with an effort. Their shapely gilt legs resembled Demonteguy’s shins of silken hose. Excitement continued to spark between her mother and her stepfather. Their voices were high with tension as they moved about the room in a ballet of anxiety. Yet more candles were lit and then snuffed out, a pillow was placed upon the armchair where Sati was to sit. A small table with three upturned coloured glasses stood before the chair.
On his last visit to France, Fabian Demonteguy had attended a seance in Paris. He wished the performance in his home to
correspond to that event. He had produced three tumblers of blue, red and yellow glass, and spent much time instructing Sati. People were to ask her questions, she was to tell what she saw in the glasses. In the blue glass, for example, she might see the sky, a journey upon the sea or a catastrophic event. Blue was easy to remember: sea, sky or the occult clouds of mystery. The red glass could show blood, disease, a fiery accident, but mostly blood. There was no problem with the amount of gore, Demonteguy advised. People liked blood, became riveted to it, and would always come back for more. The yellow glass could represent anything she wished according to the question. A woman in a yellow dress, a golden bird, the festering juices of an ailment … She must let her mind play upon the questions, let her imagination soar. If something real entered her mind, so much the better. If not, she must invent it.
Demonteguy had sat himself down before the three glasses to guide her in the matter. They had acted out the seance many times. Under his tutelage her prophecies, in desperation, spiralled to baroque proportions. All the while she had been conscious of Durga beside her, full of sarcastic snarl. Yet in spite of seeing her in the midst of more than one attack, Demonteguy refused to realise her visitor was real and would not be contained in a few coloured glasses. Afterwards, he told her, there would be a collection of money. People would give according to their fear or satisfaction. If they felt neither emotion, nothing would persuade them to open their purse strings.
*
Already there were sounds of arrival before the house. The night vibrated beyond the door, like a scuffling animal preparing to break in. Strange voices instructed palanquin bearers and made enquiries of the
chowkidar.
Disembodied sounds floated to Sati. Then footsteps and the sudden appearance of a strange face cracking open her world.
Although, in the end, the crowd was not large, the room seemed unbearably full. Breath, voices, heat and candle flames beat their separate wings about her. Sat’s head began to hurt. Demonteguy
greeted his guests with fawning smiles. His paunch fell forward against his waistcoat buttons each time he affected a bow. Beside her husband Rita went stiffly through the motions of welcome, as instructed by Demonteguy, concentrating on her part. If she failed to maintain the proper White Town demeanour things would be hard for her. In the silence of the night Demonteguy would remember the eyes of other men upon her and demand an unusual selection of conjugal rights.
All this was unknown to Sati. She only saw her mother and Demonteguy make extravagant welcome at the door. Wine was passed around, the glasses shaking on a tray held by an ancient bearer. Candles blazed upon cut glass, wine cradled like blood in the bowls. She drew back in her chair. A play was enacted before her. There was much strutting and nodding and the clear stream of talk. There were the long, colourful tails of parrot-coloured skirts, the matted fuzz of wigs and the loop of powdered curls. The unfamiliar European faces, chiselled as marble, whiskered like cats, raw-skinned or slack as cloth, seemed all to be made of the same floury dough she had once seen a baker kneading. These people were like the almonds her grandmother soaked and divested of their tough brown skins, to lay naked upon a plate.
Gradually the room filled up. The great skirts of the women billowed over stiff hoops. Some rearrangement of chairs was needed to allow them space to sit. The candlelight flickered upon lace ruffles, the silver buttons of a waistcoat, the moist and expectant eyes. It nestled in the hollows of bones, changing shapes, contorting features. People spoke in low voices, as if there had been a death. Women exchanged words behind their fans, eyes resting upon Sati, blowing her backwards down a tunnel to view her from a distance. She touched the gold amulet at her neck threaded upon a black string. Her stepfather had urged her to change it for a string of pearls, but she had refused. For once her mother had supported her, knowing the importance of the object. Within its tiny case, rolled up tight, was an invocation to the Goddess.
One by one the White Town people seated themselves before her. How would she see into their
ferenghi
souls? These people by their absence of colour appeared as disembodied as a company of ghosts. She thought of Pagal, the albino, made freakish in Black Town by his alabaster skin. He hid from the sun, as did these people. His pink rabbity eyes, bleached lashes and hair were also to be found upon the
ferenghi.
Would they claim the albino as their own if he went to live with them? It seemed suddenly confusing. The dark mass of Black Town rose up in her mind then as powerfully embodied, anchored by their colour to the warm, dung-smelling earth.
To calm herself, Sati thought of her grandmother banished by Demonteguy to the back veranda. She imagined her sitting in a soft fleshy heap, the tyre of her midriff bulging out between her breasts and hips like stuffing from a patty. She saw as well her thin plait of hair gleaming in the candlelight, its grey beginnings and hennaed end saturated with musty oil. Each night Sati was required to oil it, each night she slept beside her grandmother, lulled to sleep by the greasy aroma. There was no way to connect old Jaya to this room. Sati wished to run to her, to return to the safety of the thatched hut that until now they had shared. She touched the talisman at her neck again and knew the Goddess would keep her safe. On the veranda, her grandmother must also be turning her prayer beads, imploring the divinity’s protection.
Sati was suddenly conscious of a disturbance in the room, like a breeze across a field of wheat. A rustle of comments too low to unravel greeted the arrival of the Governor’s wife. Emily Drake nodded to people and received a stiff return. There appeared to be a separateness about her in the crowded room. Her hair, drawn back into untidy loops, was pinned about her crown and had been left unpowdered. The décolletage so favoured by Rita Demonteguy was not for Emily Drake. She wore a modest lace-edged neckerchief, crossed over at the waist. Her thin face had the worn and polished look of stones from the river distressed by strong currents. She
settled nervously on a chair beside Lady Russell and stared at Sati, who returned her gaze.
*
Thoughts tumbled about in Emily Drake’s head. Already she knew she should not have come, especially so soon after her confinement. At this time a woman did not cavort about town alone, certainly not at night and for so dubious a reason. Already she was fodder for tomorrow’s gossip. It was always a mistake to follow an impulse. There was hardly an occasion she could remember when good had come of such behaviour. And yet a compulsion beyond the normal had driven her to this room. She thought of her child asleep in his cradle and knew she was here for his safety. She had waited until her husband set out on his evening walk. He had announced he would leave the precincts of Fort William to visit Chief Magistrate Holwell. Immediately upon his departure she had summoned the palanquin bearers. As Fort William drew distant behind her, she noticed the swollen moon. She had stared up at the sky and that great bowl of feminine light had given her the strength to follow her impulse, irrational as it seemed. Her heart had been in a flutter. But for what? she wondered now. A half-caste girl from Black Town? She stared in surprise at Sati. The reality of the situation broke suddenly open, like a pod of ripe peas before her.
She had expected somebody older. What could this shrinking, sallow-skinned child impart of importance? It was madness to have come. Perhaps her mind was beginning to shred like worn linen, dissolving before the disparagement of the town. There was not a moment in the day when she was impervious to Calcutta’s taunts and disregard. She met Sati’s amber eyes and held them for a moment. To her surprise, something stilled within her, as if a secret passed between them. Her breath seemed to die in her throat. Emily Drake turned in agitation to Lady Russell, but she chewed on some aniseed to sweeten her breath. She sought the eye of Mr Dumbleton, but he scratched his head beneath his wig. The candles flickered no more than before; nothing appeared to have changed. Yet something
had moved within Emily Drake. She no longer knew why she had come, what urgency had impelled her. If she could, she would have departed. The wing of a passing moth brushed her face, the air stirred strangely about her.
*
Sati’s pulse beat faster, she gripped the frame of the stool in fear, for the performance was now upon her. She must blow soul into the faces of her audience. She prayed for Durga to come. Without Durga, nothing was possible. Already the room had quietened, every eye now settled upon her. Rita took her arm, her fingers hard in warning, and pushed Sati down into the armchair. The three coloured glasses stood waiting before her, moths clustered thickly about the candle flames. The shadows of their beating wings flickered on the walls. Suddenly, upon orders from Demonteguy, the servants extinguished most of the candles. Night fell dramatically upon the assembled crowd, a smell of burnt wicks filled the air.
Now that the room was almost dark, Sati saw that some fireflies had settled upon a wall. They glowed before her in three points of light above the head of the Governor’s wife. Below, in the dimness, Mrs Drake stared, her face drawn into shadowy valleys, the ridge of her nose and the plateau of her cheeks caught in a cross of light. Her eyes had a glassy appearance, anxious and severe.
Sati bent forward, covering her face with her hands. If she cut away the world before her, some strange force propelled her inwards. The momentum increased until she arrived before an inner door. There she floated into endlessness, suspended in a timeless world. There she was both found and lost. And it was there that Durga waited.
Slowly, then, she raised her head from her hands and leaned back in the chair. She was no longer part of the room. All she saw now were the fireflies, their fluorescence brightening then dimming, as if they breathed in unison with her, fuelled by her own throbbing pulse. And Durga had come after all, to guide her from one realm to another. Durga the bloody-minded, fierce as a warrior ready for
battle. Her predatory force filled the room. She stamped her foot and her wildness was a dance Sati must follow. Durga knew what to do, what must be said, where the dance would lead. Sati gave a sigh of relief and relinquished herself. All tension ebbed away. Durga settled into her veins, deep as instinct, liquid as knowledge dredged up from forgotten lives. Immediately her breath became shallow and her eyes stared fixedly. A murmur spread around the room at this strange transformation. Rita and Demonteguy exchanged a look of
satisfaction.