The House of Blue Mangoes (48 page)

Madaswamy set the tray down on the table. Again from experience, and emulation (for which guest at Mrs Stevenson’s teas had not experimented with their own versions of the ceremony?), Mrs Wilkins knew that all three teapots would have been warmed to just the right temperature by placing them in bowls of hot water. She knew exactly what each teapot was used for as well – the terracotta one for the strong Glenclare teas, the porcelain one for the lighter tea from Watson, and the Worcester one for Mrs Stevenson’s favourite FTGFOP which was grown in one of the highest Darjeeling gardens. Among the world’s finest teas, it was composed entirely of the golden tips that gave it its name. A friend of Mrs Stevenson in Bengal sent her a regular supply.

Another servant had followed Madaswamy with a tray on which a single china pitcher rested. Again from experience, Gloria Wilkins knew that the water had been plucked from the stove just as it had started simmering (if it had been allowed to boil, it would have gone flat) and had been instantly transported to the veranda.

Mrs Stevenson asked, ‘Tea, my dear?’

‘Glenclare for me, Matilda,’ Mrs Wilkins said, and Mrs Stevenson gave her a brief smile and carefully spooned two teaspoons of tea from the terracotta caddy into the terracotta teapot. A minute for the tea’s aroma to be released and then the servant with the hot water was at hand and she poured the water into the teapot.

‘I think I’ll have some Darjeeling myself,’ Mrs Stevenson said, and her friend thought: At least there are some constant things in this world. Mrs Stevenson hadn’t changed that line in a decade. A third servant had materialized in the meantime bearing an identical pitcher of hot water. Mrs Stevenson filled the Worcester teapot with two teaspoons of tea, then poured the water over it, shut the lid and sat back.

The two ladies did not speak for the time it took for the tea to brew. Mrs Wilkins stared with great fascination at the Worcester teapot as if she could look within to the fine cracks ingrained through long exposure to tannin that gave the teapot its own distinctive flavour. Every connoisseur knew that you never washed out a teapot, you merely rinsed it and left it to dry in the open air or in the boiler room during the monsoon. The minutes passed and the five people on the veranda were as still as in a frieze. Then Mrs Stevenson asked, ‘Milk or lemon?’

Only two people whom Gloria Wilkins knew had asked for lemon and they hadn’t lasted long on the estates. She was permitted a drop of milk, and a single level teaspoon of sugar. Mrs Stevenson belonged to the school of tea drinkers that believed the milk should be poured into the cup before the tea is decanted. She now poured the milk, and then gently added the strong honey-coloured tea. Mrs Wilkins helped herself to sugar, and then Mrs Stevenson poured her own tea, the colour of evening sunlight. Nothing marred its perfection, not milk, not sugar.

The butler scooped up the tray once the ladies had taken up their saucers, and the three servants left the veranda in a stately procession. They would mysteriously reappear when Mrs Stevenson or one of her guests wanted a second cup, for the tea was freshly brewed every time. Mrs Wilkins smiled to herself when she recalled one marathon session where Madaswamy and his entourage had come and gone seventeen times. It was a well-embedded part of the Matilda Stevenson legend.

After they had sipped their tea in complete silence for a while, savouring the taste, the colour of the light, the flowers, they began chatting once more. Mrs Wilkins thought her friend looked a bit strained but it was always hard to tell with Mrs Stevenson. And she would never dare ask. If Matilda wanted to tell her what was on her mind, she would do so, in her own time.

Both ladies were in their early fifties, but there the similarity ended. Mrs Stevenson was thickish with middle age but was neither plump nor fat. She was tall, and her quite elaborate hairdo made her look even taller. But it was her face – ridged, seamed, even cross-hatched, each wrinkle earned at great cost from worry, battle or inclement weather – that lent her distinction. It was said that once you were able to interpret the patterns into which the wrinkles in Mrs Stevenson’s face arranged themselves you could tell in advance what was in store for you. Mrs Wilkins was short, plump and distinctly unthreatening. Large-lipped, with big cow-brown eyes, thirty years earlier she had been the object of many planters’ fantasies. Four children had given her a comfortable motherly air. Although neither of them would have thought of it that way, Mrs Wilkins was the ideal foil for her friend. She did whatever Mrs Stevenson wanted at the shortest possible notice, and brought great patience and unmatched listening skills as well as gossip to the relationship. In return for all these, she was granted the privilege of being Matilda Stevenson’s closest friend and had the right to call her by her Christian name, the only person in the entire district, apart from her husband, now allowed to do so.

‘What a shame about poor young Camellia!’ Mrs Wilkins said, gently setting her cup and saucer down.

‘What about Camellia?’ snapped Mrs Stevenson. Noting the other’s peevishness, Mrs Wilkins lapsed into silence, for Mrs Stevenson’s rages were legendary and Camellia Winston’s travails could wait.

The butler materialized on silent feet and cleared the cups and saucers with scarcely a whisper. Mrs Wilkins admired his skill with a detached air. Even Mrs Stevenson’s servants were the envy of the district.

‘What were you saying about Camellia?’ Mrs Stevenson said abruptly.

‘Oh, nothing. The poor dear was quite cut up about something that happened the other day.’

Mrs Stevenson continued to regard her friend steadily over the top of her spectacles. It was one of the mannerisms that she had diligently cultivated. It came in very useful at the club, or the more prestigious parties, when she had to cow some upstart or bore into silence. She mourned the passing of the lorgnette, perfect for the imperious stare and the silent put-down. But she managed. She had no intention of trying to put the amiable Gloria Wilkins down; it was just, well, perhaps she was just practising for Friday week.

Mrs Stevenson softened the steely look in her eye and favoured Gloria with a smile. ‘So, about Camellia?’ she said.

Mrs Wilkins didn’t need any further prompting. ‘Of course, dear,’ she said, ‘as I was saying, there she was, stepping out of Spencer’s, her arms piled high with shopping, you know how scarce things have become so you always stock up, and her driver had gone ahead to bring the car, when she bumped into an Indian man quite accidentally. He was most rude and said, “If memsahibs don’t look where they are going, they will soon find themselves gone.” Poor Camellia was so shocked at this impertinence, she didn’t know what to say. She told her husband, of course, but then she couldn’t describe the man, you never really notice Indians, do you now. All she could recall was that he wore one of those little white native hats . . .’

‘Yes, I know, a Gandhi hat. Absurd little hat, absurd little man.’

‘Oh, really, dear.’ Mrs Wilkins could see her story slipping away from her, but the steely look was back in Mrs Stevenson’s eye and she didn’t feel quite up to finishing it.

‘I’ll be running along then. Hope your party goes well.’

It was the worst thing she could have said. Barely repressing the irritation that flared up within her at the mention of the party she intended hosting for the Dorais ten days hence, Mrs Stevenson saw her friend to her car, and returned to the bungalow. What a stupid woman Gloria Wilkins is, she thought irritably. God knows how I’ve put up with her all these years!

78

Although Mrs Stevenson greatly valued her position as wife of the General Manager of Pulimed Tea Company, her unofficial position as queen of local society mattered even more. Neither had dropped into her lap, she thought grimly, as she watched Gloria Wilkins’s car disappear down the driveway, and she would defend her eminence with every power at her command.

Mrs Stevenson had come over on a P&O boat in 1925, a strapping, plain thirty-three-year-old from Brighton, fearful of being left on the shelf. She had this in common with most of the other British women who constituted the Fishing Fleet, as the shipfuls of women who travelled to India to make a good marriage were called. She had spent three months with a distant aunt in Madras, and was about to sail home to a life of spinsterdom when Major Stevenson asked her to dance at one of the endless tea dances in the city. It was hot and stuffy and the headache she had woken up with that morning threatened to overwhelm her. The Major was not exactly young, and had a gimpy leg, and after the first dance, Matilda was ready to go home. But he danced with her a second and then a third time, and with a mounting sense of relief she realized she would not be one of the Returned Empties, as the Fishing Fleet rejects were dubbed. When he proposed two days later, she accepted. She knew nothing about tea-planting, only that it ranked high enough in Raj society to provide Major Stevenson with greater cachet as a prospective husband. Tea-planters ranked somewhere below the ICS but were deemed superior to the box-wallahs, whom the upper classes looked down upon, ostensibly because they were in trade but probably also because they were rich.

Mrs Stevenson soon discovered that the esteem that tea-planters were held in did not immediately confer upon them the sort of lifestyle you would have expected. When she had first arrived in Pulimed it was a dismal place. The dirt roads were impassable during the monsoon, which effectively cut the estates off from the rest of the world twice a year. The planters lived in miserable little shacks that were dark and musty. The unhygienic living conditions combined with malaria and periodic epidemics of plague and typhus regularly interred the British, especially women and young children, in the graveyard behind the little Pulimed chapel. The dreary, depressing weather required an astonishing degree of fortitude on the part of manager and worker alike. It was not unknown for a planter to kill himself and his family during an especially prolonged monsoon; Mrs Stevenson herself could remember two families who had succumbed during her time here. Drink often provided the only succour and many of the early planters, both men and women, were alcoholics.

Fortunately, the place had grown civilized quite rapidly. As the industry prospered, more acreage came under tea and the forbidding forests were rolled back. The roads improved and the bungalows grew more imposing. Their own situation was improving as well. Mrs Stevenson appeared to have brought her husband luck, for within a year of her arrival at Pulimed, one of the company’s senior Superintendents took early retirement and Edward got his job. They moved into a comfortable bungalow on Karadi Estate.

There were other welcome developments in the tea district. The Pulimed Club opened in 1932. Lavish gardens and tennis courts were laid out, virtually one to a bungalow. The social life of the planters blossomed. There were tennis parties and picnics, costume balls and tea dances at the club. As tea-planting became more alluring, the pedigree of the planter improved. The occasional public-school boy was taken on and the rough-and-ready frontiersmen of an earlier era began to disappear.

Mrs Stevenson saw her opportunity. The couple were childless, and she had always fretted to herself that she didn’t feel fulfilled enough. The rising gentrification of the district gave her a project she could devote herself to. Unlike the great stations of Madras and Bombay or even the bigger mofussil towns, Pulimed didn’t have high-ranking ICS officials. The British Resident made only the occasional foray into the hills. And there was no army regiment with its Blue Books and rigidly defined conventions, precedence and other minutiae of social behaviour. So the opportunity to make up a set of rules to govern Pulimed society existed. Mrs Stevenson, with a couple of other planters’ wives, soon became the social arbiters of the district. Then Mrs Hogg died, Mrs Buchan’s husband was transferred to the Nilgiris, Edward received another promotion and Mrs Stevenson came into her own. She was forty-two years old. From then on, her word was law.

Not enough has been said about the role of the memsahib in India. Dozens of books have been written about the British men who first subjugated, then ruled, and finally lost India, but accounts of the white woman have been limited to a few autobiographies and a baker’s dozen of cookery books and Raj memorabilia. This is a shame because, at the risk of over-simplification, it would probably be correct to say that these daughters of Birmingham grocers and Cheltenham school-teachers played a not inconsiderable role in the departure of the British from India.

It was all a matter of attitude. For the first hundred or so years of his time in India, the white man was variously a trader, schemer, warrior and buccaneer. By the time Queen Victoria, Her Most Benevolent Majesty, accepted the homage of her Indian subjects, all three hundred and seventy-two million of them, the British had quite forgotten what they had originally come to the subcontinent for – i.e., plunder and the rapid generation of wealth. Now, in the grip of the imperial impulse, they believed they were ordained to rule a quarter of the world, and bring a civilizing influence to bear on the heathen.

By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the idea of Empire, even to the British, was fraying around the edges. Two wars had sapped their strength, the new generation didn’t thrill to trumpets and bugles, and America was well on its way to dominating the world. The British had tried their best, but they would be gone soon from India just like every invader who had preceded them, leaving behind a few monuments – in their case, some excellent examples of Victorian architecture, the English language, the railways, a parliamentary form of democracy, a system of administration . . .

The Empire would probably have lingered a little longer, notwithstanding the best efforts of the nationalists, if Englishwomen hadn’t begun appearing in India in large numbers. In the early years, the British had managed to achieve a fairly equitable relationship with Indians. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, this phase had begun to fade. The advent of muscular forms of Christianity coupled with imperfectly understood Darwinism equated colour and ‘paganism’ with inferiority. From that point onwards, matters deteriorated. The Englishman abroad, consciously or subconsciously, began to subscribe to the philosophy that the subject peoples (especially in the tropics) were a lesser breed; their civilizations were trashed and British culture was exalted above all others.