Of Marriageable Age (43 page)

'Sahib daktah
going, coming, my not knowing,' she said. 'Big wattah coming, daktah boy taking, boy sick, boy no taking meals, boy…'

She didn't know the word for
dead
so she made the gesture for dead, head lolling to one side and tongue hanging out and eyes staring, and then she began to wail, loud and penetrating, and then she said, 'No fire making,
sahib
, no cooking, no taking meals, wattah coming, coming, coming!'

Henry turned to Nat. 'Some boy's dead, Nat, I think it must be her son. Doctor must be looking into that… I'd better go and find him. Are you coming?'

Nat nodded, still speechless. Where's Dad? Where's the dead boy? Where will they burn him? What will they do with the body? And a silent horror spread through his body and he could only look at Henry out of this horror and nod, yes, he was coming.

They left their luggage there and waded through the rain to Henry's house next door, and that too was filled with wet sleeping whimpering children and comforting mothers. They plunged into the darkness, having no goal in mind except the village, but the village was deserted.

Dad, Dad, where are you?
wept Nat's heart,
What are you doing with the dead boy?

Henry's sober, calm voice cut into Nat's horror. 'Let's try the schoolhouse,' he said. 'That's the only other building that could possibly have survived this.' So they plunged through the water, following the beam of Henry's torch, and found the schoolhouse, under water, filled with Indians, and Doctor was there, spreading tree branches over the floor, and other men were helping him, one holding a kerosene lamp, another whittling at the branches with a cutlass, the others piling up the sticks to range out of the water in a sort of a platform.

Doctor had aged. He wore huge wellingtons, which he had bought in Madras once after a monsoon — but no monsoon had ever been as bad as this — large enough to cover the metal-and-leather contraption that held the wooden foot to his stump. Once, many years ago, Nat had asked Doctor what had happened to his foot, if he'd been born that way or if he'd had an accident. Doctor had only replied, 'Singapore. The war. Japanese.' And Nat knew the subject was closed, like every other subject dealing with the past. Like the portrait of the woman in their home. ‘Who is she, Dad?’ he’d asked, and Doctor had only said, ‘a very dear old friend,’ and his face had closed up and Nat had known the subject was taboo.

The past was a closed book. The orphanage, Gopal Uncle, Doctor's own family, Doctor's entire past, all was kept locked behind a wall of silence, while Doctor attended to the present. Only the present counted; the past was gone and done with, its only purpose was to produce the present, and a person's duty was to deal appropriately with that present, which in turn would give way to a future which did not, in itself, exist, because when the future arrived that, too, would be the present, to be dealt with appropriately. That was the Indian perspective, and Doctor was through and through Indian. For him only the
here and now
with its problems and challenges mattered — only the rain and the floods and the water was real, and the platform of branches and twigs they were making.

Doctor looked up when Henry and Nat entered, and far from falling into Nat's arms he only said, 'Oh, there you are, I was wondering when you'd turn up. Did you buy plastic sheets in Madras?' without stopping for an instant in his piling up of twigs and branches.

'Yes, I've got them here,' said Henry, opening the canvas bag he'd brought along and pulling out a folded wad of crackling plastic.

He unfolded it and Doctor said, 'That corner's finished, spread it over the wood,' which Henry did, forming a knobbly plastic bed of sorts.

'We've got the women and children in my house and yours, Henry; I suppose you've seen that. This here is for the men and this is where we'll be sleeping too for the next couple of days — or weeks — till the floods recede. A bit uncomfortable maybe but we'll manage. Nat, look, you can help Anand over there, try to get it a bit thicker. The biggest problem is food; we've been doing the cooking at my place, but we've used up most of the supplies in the village. We're down to nothing but rice now; we've been sending someone to Town occasionally but everything there's used up too, no vegetables, no chillis, nothing. And if this keeps up we'll have a cholera outbreak. The children are the worst off. One little boy died today; it was tragic, the mother's in a state but what can one do? I tried to save him but… well, he's gone.'

'Where's — where's the body?' Nat could hardly mouth the words but somehow the question wormed at him, as if, of all the problems in the world, the problem of how to dispose of a body when all the world is water was the very worst.

'Well, what can you do?' Doctor shrugged. 'Can't bury it, can't burn it. Sent it to the morgue in Town but they refused it, can't deal with any more bodies; they've got basically the same problems as we have, only worse. Had quite a few electrocutions there; good thing the people here have no current or we'd have had that too. So I wrapped it up in an old blanket and plastic sheets and took it out a few miles and hid it in the branches of a tree. Won't be an aesthetic sight if this goes on much longer, and I suppose it's not a very reverent thing to do with a body, but what can you do? Poor little fellow, not even three. Name was Murugan. Bright little boy, Ravi's son. Remember Ravi, Nat? Ravi married an educated woman from the next village, prides herself on her English. They've got two more children and a baby girl.'

'Yes, we met them,' said Nat, and that was all he could say. Ravi's son. Just before he'd left for England Ravi had married; Nat had attended the wedding but the bride had kept her head lowered and so he'd not recognised her as the mother of the dead boy; and then Ravi had had children and one of them was dead, his body stuck up in a tree to rot…

'Where's Ravi?'

'Ravi's in Chetput; he's getting a proper training as a nurse at the hospital there. I sent him a year ago, promised to look after his family in the meantime. Things are growing here, Nat; we need qualified staff. Anand's not enough. When Ravi returns I'll send Kamaraj for training. Got a few girls in training, too. But we need another doctor, Nat… we need you…'

He stopped speaking,, then and looked up from his work, and Nat met his eyes just for an instant. That look and those last words hit home. The simple naked statement, telling the whole story in the choice of words: not
I
need you, but
we
need you. Not want, but need. No accusation, no moralisation, no condemnation, no verdict, not even the hint of a reproach. That was the worst. Had there been a reproach, Nat would have fought back… but this!

If it were possible to die of self-reproach, to suffocate from guilt, to drown in a deluge of shame, then Nat would have fallen over in that instant, and drowned.

37

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

SAROJ

Georgetown, 1969

B
Y THE TIME
Lucy Quentin came home Trixie's maternal instincts had taken over and she had roused herself into cooking supper for the whole family, of which Saroj was now an honorary member. Rummaging in the kitchen cupboards Trixie found an open packet of Chinese noodles, a tin of peas, a tin of corn, and half a bag of chick-peas.

'Chow-mein a la Trixie!' she announced. 'Shit, I should soak the channa for a few hours… never mind, I'll do it in the pressure cooker. Now, let me see, spices . . .'

She searched at the back of the spice cupboard. 'I thought we had some soya sauce left over — damn it, the bottle's empty. You think curry powder'd do as well? Let me see, salt, pepper . . .'

Saroj's mind wasn't much on cooking so she wandered off to make herself at home, heaving up her stuffed pillow-case and lugging it into Trixie's bedroom. This was cluttered with heaps of miscellaneous stuff on the floor, under the bed, and all available surfaces: piles of papers, old magazines, records, comics, photos, you name it. Her Archie comics, which she wasn't allowed to read — Lucy Quentin had few rules, but the ones she had, like no Archie comics and no Romance Picture Library, nothing woman-hostile, she upheld to the hilt — were all stuffed under the mattress, as Saroj knew. She pulled one out, leafed through it, chucked it away, picked up a
Teen
magazine, opened it at a page with an article called
How to Know If He'll Kiss and Tell
and chucked that away too.

She wanted to unpack, just to make certain that this was, finally and definitely, her new home, but unpacking was impossible for the wardrobes were stuffed with Trixie's things, and there wasn't a free shelf to be found. She'd have to wait till Trixie made room for her.

The telephone rang.

'Would you get that, Saroj? I'm just in the middle of stir-frying this stuff !' Trixie called, so Saroj lifted up the receiver unsuspectingly.

'Hello?'

'Saroj!
There you are! I've been —'

She slammed down the receiver with such clumsy force that she missed the hook and the whole phone gave a twisted leap and clattered to the floor.

'What the hell was that!' cried Trixie, rushing from the kitchen waving a wooden spoon.

'Ma!' Saroj said, and plonked herself down on the tattered Morris chair next to the telephone table. Her knees had turned to jelly, her heart raced and her hands were so icy she shoved them under her armpits and clamped them there with her arms.

'Huh! What d'you think? Of course she knows you're here. Sooner or later she'll come to get you so you'd better get yourself armed and ready for battle.'

She was right. Sooner or later Saroj would have to face the consequences of her flight. Till now she'd only looked forward to liberty, to revenge, to a new life free of restraints. What Ma and Baba would do to get her back she hadn't considered. But in fact, she now realised, they must have been after her all afternoon.

She'd spent the time from lunchtime till Trixie's return in the hammock slung under Trixie's house. Though mentally and physically exhausted, her mind was still in a whirl and as she lay there unable to sleep she'd heard the telephone ringing upstairs, faintly, as through a mist. After that she'd fallen asleep, the hammock swaying in the gentle breeze seeking its way between the pillared houses of Bel Air. Now she knew for certain that the ringing had been Ma, searching for her. She'd have to think; and she'd need help. She longed for Lucy Quentin.

Saroj followed Trixie back into the kitchen and found her shoving the finished chow-mein in a Pyrex dish under the grill. She'd changed the recipe to chow-mein with grilled cheese. Trixie's idea of a gourmet meal was anything topped with grilled cheese, and though Saroj wasn't much of a cook herself, certain sensibilities had automatically rubbed off from Ma. She promised herself to take over kitchen duties as soon as tact allowed. Might as well begin now: the kitchen was a mess because in Trixie's unlimited creativity food was free to overflow and settle where it wanted, in or out of bowls and dishes, on, under or above the surfaces.

Saroj gathered up the dirty dishes and carried them to the sink and was just about to wash them but Trixie said, 'Don't bother with that, girl, Doreen comes in the morning to clean. You can deck the table if you want something to do,' so Saroj did that, and she'd just laid down the last fork when Lucy Quentin walked in.

'Oh, hello, Saroj,' she said, as if Saroj came to supper every day.

Trixie made her entrance with the Pyrex dish enclosed in a nest of kitchen towels held aloft. 'Mum, guess what!' She lowered the dish to the table and it slid from her hands and slithered right across the polished wooden surface and would have continued across the room if Lucy Quentin had not pushed her body up to the table's edge and stopped its onward flight. A yellow liquid sloshed up out of the dish, leaving a dark stain with little black spots on her immaculate, emerald-green figure-hugging dress.

'You clumsy oaf !' Lucy Quentin cried out. 'How many times do I have to tell you…' She hurried into the kitchen, returning with a wet rag, rubbing at the stain.

'This will never come out, I'll have to take it off and soak it; no, it's no good.' She disappeared again, this time to her room. Trixie looked at Saroj and shrugged, hiding her giggle behind her hand. Saroj was terrified. This was no way to begin her first evening of freedom, the evening in which so many matters had to be discussed with Lucy Quentin and which therefore promised to be long and difficult. She found a straw mat in the sideboard drawer, placed the hot chow-mein dish with the bundled kitchen towels on it, and slid it to the centre of the table, cursing Trixie for her carelessness and throwing her a look of steely reproach. Trixie responded by sticking out her long lobster-red tongue.

Lucy reappeared after a few minutes in a loose, ankle-length robe in a bright floral African print.

They all pulled out chairs around the table. Lucy Quentin turned to Saroj, smiling, shook out her napkin and said, 'So, dear, to what do we owe the honour of your visit? Oh my goodness, what happened to your
hair?'

Before Saroj could open her mouth Trixie burst out again with, 'Mum, guess what, she's run away from home and she's come to stay with us!'

Lucy Quentin raised her eyebrows and the appraising look she gave Saroj seemed, to a mind hungry for approval, to award her two or three points of estimation.

'Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later,' Lucy Quentin said, and plunged a serving spoon into the browned crust of cheese topping the chow-mein. It cracked down the middle, the two halves rising on either side of the spoon like brown and yellow mottled butterfly wings and splattering yellow liquid over the table.

'Trixie, what kind of mess is this?' Lucy Quentin ladled out a soggy spoonful and sniffed at it before emptying it back into the dish. 'No thanks.' She pushed the dish towards Saroj in disdain.

'You haven't even tried it yet!' Trixie sounded so genuinely disappointed that Saroj served herself a good plateful and smiled at her, determined to praise it no matter how it tasted
. It's the love with which a dish is cooked that flavours it,
Ma always said.