The Sandalwood Tree (5 page)

Authors: Elle Newmark

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I
heated water on the old cooker, opened a can of sweetened condensed milk, and gave Billy a handful of pistachios to nibble while the tea brewed. He held a nut to Spike’s miniature muzzle and made chewing sounds. I poured a splash of tea into Billy’s cup, filled it to the brim with thick sweet milk, and we sat at the table sipping and munching while a bamboo wind chime on the verandah clapped in the breeze. I noticed that yesterday’s garbage was gone and realized that Rashmi must have arrived to find the house empty, perhaps done a few chores, taken the garbage and left. There had been so much emotion and so little time the night before I had not sent a message to the village. But having told no one of our departure meant that Habib would arrive as usual in the late afternoon to prepare dinner. With this strange arrangement of having a kitchen attached to the house, and the even stranger penchant we had for eating in the same room where he cooked, it was uncomfortable for Habib to be around unless he was working.

After breakfast, Billy played rickshaw on the shady verandah, carting Spike around in his red Flyer wagon, weaving between potted plants and faded wicker chairs. Now and then he shouted,
“Cheerio!” or “Namaste!” to a passing monkey. I called out, “Don’t touch the monkeys,” and he answered, “I knooow.” His piping voice made me smile as I returned our household cash to the tea tin and unpacked, tucking Billy’s cotton undies back into drawers and hanging his little shirts in his almirah.

I ran a fond hand over my lemon silk sari, once again imagining myself floating around a faculty cocktail party, the returned expat, holding forth on Hindu temples, painted elephants, and colorful customs. I blessed James Walker for saving me from having to leave too soon as I slipped the old letters back under my bras and panties, enjoying a sense of danger averted. Martin would calm down in a few days.

After getting up at dawn, the hurried snack before leaving, and then the tense hour at the grimy train station, Billy was drooping by tiffin. He usually loved to wait by the front door for the tiffin-wallah, lumbering along, his bullock cart heaped with deliveries. The tiffin basket was like a treasure trove for Billy. He would open the stacked steel compartments, never sure what to expect, shouting, “Oooh, raita! Oooh, chickpeas! Oooh, pakoras! Oooh, lychees!” He whooped with delight when tiffin included pihirini, a light pudding scented with cardamom and sprinkled with ground pistachios. But that day, he almost fell asleep over his pihirini, so I carried him to bed, drew the mosquito netting around him, and closed the blue shutters. After I switched on the slow overhead fan, Billy flipped on to his side and tucked his hands under his cheek, falling into untroubled sleep with a swiftness that adults can only wish for. I reached into the netting to loop a fine blond curl around my finger and kissed it before creeping out of the room.

In my bedroom, I took the packet of old letters from my drawer and stared at them. There were only four, but they spanned many months and if those women were close enough to call each other sisters, there should be more. I laid them on my dresser and marched into the kitchen to search for another loose brick. I ran my hands
over the wall, pushing against the mortared seams, but the wall appeared to be as snug and tight as the day it was built. I expanded my search to other walls in the house, tapping and listening.

The plaster walls descended to high wooden baseboards and a plank floor that glowed with a patina acquired from a century of wax and wear. I ran a butter knife behind wooden moldings and unzipped the cushion covers on the old brocade chair with wooden arms. One of the chair arms looked as if a small animal had gnawed it—tiny teeth marks that reminded me of the teething marks Billy made on his crib railing. Those marks made me wonder about rats, but I had never seen any droppings.

The old bungalow had high ceilings and exposed beams, but the Victorian furniture made it feel more English than Indian. I had hung jewel-toned sari fabric for curtains: emerald in the living room, sapphire in the bedrooms, and topaz in the kitchen. In Billy’s room, I hung a string of orange- and purple-sequined camels under his mosquito netting, and in the living room, I replaced the old mantel clock with a jade sculpture of the elephant god, Ganesh, with his ears flared out wide and trunk raised high. Ganesh is the god of good luck, remover of obstacles, and I figured it couldn’t hurt. In the dining room, on the mahogany dining table, I kept wild red poppies in an old pewter water pitcher, a study in contrast.

The only furniture we had brought with us was a phonograph, our cherrywood Stromberg-Carlson, sitting on a table in the living room next to a stack of vinyl records that I had packed with fanatical care. Since Martin’s ability to play was another casualty of war, the lack of a piano was a small mercy—it would have stood there like a rebuke—but I enjoyed a bit of music in the evening while Martin lost himself in
Crime and Punishment
. I liked playing the phonograph, the way I liked cleaning my little house, and teaching English to village children and taking photos; I liked anything that distracted me from the detritus of my marriage.

With the weather already hot, I also liked having a ceiling fan
in every room. Before electricity, colonials had servants who did nothing but sit in a corner and pull a cord to wave long reed or cloth fans back and forth—punkah-wallahs. I could see the punkah rod still in place on the ceilings of every room and it made me think of those Egyptian paintings of slaves fanning the pharaoh with peacock feathers and palm fronds. But the Indian people weren’t slaves, and I wondered how they’d been persuaded to play such a menial role in their own country. I had an idea that their acquiescence had to do with the way they had quietly survived waves of invaders by bending rather than breaking. The Aryans, the Turks, the Portuguese, the Moghuls, and the British had all swept through their subcontinent, and yet India remained Indian. They kept their heads down and outlasted everyone.

When Gandhi started his Quit India campaign, Indian landowners, zamindars, started buying up British bungalows. Our zamindar was a Sikh who bought the place fully furnished and rented it to foreigners by the month. He had a reputation as a clever man who had taken his family’s silk fortune and tripled it with his savvy business sense.

I walked from room to room tapping the walls, searching for traces of Felicity and Adela, and ended up on the verandah steps looking out at pine forests and green terraces carved into the Himalayan hillsides. In the distance, jagged white peaks rose, enormous and powerful and shrouded in clouds. Martin said that at higher elevations, clouds invaded people’s houses and children played with them. I loved that!

I could see why Simla had become the official summer capital of the Raj—ancient temples and bustling bazaars, the gentle chanting of pandits floating on apple-crisp air, red bougainvillea and vast cerulean skies. I watched a bony white cow nibble mimosas at our gate and felt every bit as safe as James Walker said we were.

Back inside, I checked behind marble-top side tables and the undersides of chairs; I knocked on the back panels of old oak cabinets
and searched for hidden compartments in the bedroom wardrobes. I even shook out an antique afghan, a throw crocheted in hot coral and cool turquoise shot through with gold. I found nothing, not even much dust. Rashmi must have swept up with her acacia branches while we were at the station.

Rashmi, blithe spirit, spoke a charming pidgin English, and Billy adored our small, round ayah. Her ruby nose pin flashed when she talked, she always included Spike in their games, and she sang to Billy while she brushed his blond curls. Every day, she brought Billy a slice of fresh coconut, hidden in the folds of her Himachali headscarf and slipped it to him behind my back. She would say, “Come,
beta,”
and they would disappear together. I didn’t mind him snacking on coconut, but I pretended not to know so they could have their secret ritual.

Rashmi helped me set up an informal school by convincing a few farmers that their children would benefit from learning English. I fashioned a makeshift classroom out of burlap and bamboo poles, making an awning under the spreading canopy of a venerable banyan tree in the village. One side of the tree had sent so many aerial roots into the ground that the original trunk was lost in a wall of secondary trunks. I found a used blackboard in the bazaar, which I nailed to the massive trunk, and Rashmi contributed a box of pink chalk. She stayed with Billy while I bicycled into the village to teach English vocabulary to eight barefoot children with serious dark eyes.

On the first day, the children filed under the awning and peered at the blackboard with suspicion. They sat on the ground, clustered close together, some holding hands, and stared up at me—the water-eyed foreign lady with fire-hair who wore slacks like a man and rode a bike. I moved among them under the sagging canopy, smiling and speaking softly.

That first day, they learned my name, and I learned theirs; next time, I started on the alphabet, and they dutifully parroted letters,
but I could see it was meaningless, so I drew pictures with the pink chalk while birds and monkeys chattered overhead. I drew generic pink trees and simple pink houses and rudimentary pink camels. The children repeated the words after me, nudging each other knowingly. I learned more than I taught, including the fact that those children did not know they lived in poverty. One-room huts without running water and two small meals a day were simply the way of things. They weren’t sure whether school was supposed to be work or play, and their earnest faces occasionally flashed incandescent smiles. They were all perfectly beautiful, with large black eyes and drooping lids and cheeks that glowed like burnished copper.

The sense of my expanding worldview seemed almost physical, like being stretched on a rack, and I welcomed it. I was grateful to Rashmi for letting me into a little corner of India.

After I had searched the entire house, I stood in the middle of my living room with my lips scrunched up to one side. More information about my Victorian ladies would have to come from the letters I already had, so I brought them out from under my panties, spread them over the kitchen table, and chose the letter with the greatest number of legible words.

From … … Ad … Winfield
… shire … England
September 1855

Dear Felicity
,

… last night … … a chinless little man …

… bored …

… a good cry …

… duty to yourself … … but your health …

… intrepid Fanny Parks … not consumptive …

… worry about you …

I blew on the bottom half and raised a small puff of dust, which exposed two more words. Encouraged, I fetched a pastry brush, and tickled away flecks of dirt. A couple more words emerged, and I held the paper up in a shaft of afternoon light.

… Mother … … utterly determined …

… Katie … … consolation …

The third letter provided a bit more:

October 1855

Dearest Felicity
,

… most terrible, most wonderful … … Mother …

… Katie & me … … Poor Katie …

… I do not know where …

… Calcutta …

… long hearty cry … … wrote Katie …

… so sudden & so bittersweet …

Tears course down … … even whilst a smile …