Книга - Teatime for the Firefly
Teatime for the Firefly
Shona Patel
TEATIME FOR THE FIREFLYLayla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independently-minded by her eccentric Anglophile grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb—a man betrothed to another. All were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined—if not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.Layla’s life as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world’s finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labor and British efficiency. Fascinated by this curious culture of whiskey-soaked ex-pat adventurers who seem fazed by neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialize, and the peculiar servants she now finds under her charge.But navigating the hazards of tea-garden society will hardly be her biggest challenge. For even Layla’s remote home is not safe from the incendiary change sweeping India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial world is at a tipping point as tectonic political shifts rock the tea industry, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that threatens their very lives.
My name is Layla and I was born under an unlucky star.
For a young girl growing up in India, this is bad news. But everything began to change for me one spring day in 1943, when three unconnected incidents, like tiny droplets on a lily leaf, tipped and rolled into one. It was that tiny shift in the cosmos, I believe, that tipped us together—me and Manik Deb.
Layla Roy has defied the fates.
Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb—a man betrothed to another. All were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined—if not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.
Layla’s life as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world’s finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labor and British efficiency. Fascinated by this culture of whiskey-soaked expats who seem fazed by neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialize, and the peculiar servants she now finds under her charge.
But navigating the tea-garden set will hardly be her biggest challenge. Layla’s remote home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial society is at a tipping point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that threatens their very lives.
Teatime for the Firefly
Shona Patel
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To the pioneer tea planters of Assam, “the iron men in wooden ships,” who gave their lives to grow the finest tea in the world.
And to the memory of my parents, Leela and Paresh Nag.
Contents
Epigraph (#u3cde71ff-5a91-598f-83f6-78997893218b)
Chapter 1 (#u023e81c1-f3ed-5a29-8dc9-181ee77cd6d3)
Chapter 2 (#uecf4656e-f627-5bf1-b39e-8c52fb952ff3)
Chapter 3 (#u05103128-baa0-5308-9cd1-f5bb2b2d449c)
Chapter 4 (#u13ead423-b374-5353-a1f4-d5a74589a0dc)
Chapter 5 (#u5b89badb-1ec3-5599-9e4c-8b503614f437)
Chapter 6 (#u4d99cc9b-bf09-54d6-9a22-e6dc50193d50)
Chapter 7 (#u3323255e-5c38-5f7e-a744-eb94f55b45e1)
Chapter 8 (#ud5e99304-8881-54d9-a468-6b03d3ee9cad)
Chapter 9 (#ue7c8d424-e40c-5f67-83a3-ebd1c3aacd88)
Chapter 10 (#ud2b607dc-f026-51da-be85-a0128649a643)
Chapter 11 (#ueab0b623-9fdf-56f6-9649-b659a5f5ca0b)
Chapter 12 (#ua6b133b0-530d-5d5a-a20b-a25187f4f3fc)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author's Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
EPIGRAPH
“Early in the day it was whispered that we should set sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end.”
CHAPTER 1
My name is Layla and I was born under an unlucky star. The time and place of my birth makes me a Manglik. For a young girl growing up in India in the 1940s, this is bad news. The planet Mars is predominant in my Hindu horoscope and this angry red planet makes people rebellious and militant by nature. Everyone knows I am astrologically doomed and fated never to marry. Marriages in our society are arranged by astrology and nobody wants a warlike bride. Women are meant to be the needle that stitches families together, not the scissors that cut.
But everything began to change for me on April 7, 1943.
Three things happened that day: Boris Ivanov, the famous Russian novelist, slipped on a tuberose at the grand opening ceremony of a new school, fell and broke his leg; a baby crow fell out of its nest in the mango tree; and I, Layla Roy, aged seventeen, fell in love with Manik Deb.
The incidents may have remained unconnected, like three tiny droplets on a lily leaf. But the leaf tipped and the drops rolled into one. It was a tiny shift in the cosmos, I believe, that tipped us together—Boris Ivanov, the baby crow, Manik Deb and me.
It was the inauguration day of the new school: a rainy-sunshine day, I remember well, delicate and ephemeral—the kind locals here in Assam call “jackal wedding days.” I am not sure where the saying comes from, or whether it means good luck or bad, or perhaps a little bit of both. It would seem as though the sky could not decide whether to bless or bemoan the occasion—quite ironic, if you think about it, because that is exactly how some people felt about the new English girls’ school opening in our town.
The demonstrators, on the other hand, were pretty much set in their views. They gathered outside the school gates in their patriotic white clothes, carrying banners with misspelled English slogans like: INDIA FOR INDANS and STOP ENGLIS EDUCATON NOW.
Earlier that morning, my grandfather, Dadamoshai, the founder of the girls’ school, had chased the demonstrators down the road with his large, formidable umbrella. They had scattered like cockroaches and sought refuge behind the holy banyan tree.
“Retarded donkeys! Imbeciles!” Dadamoshai yelled, shaking his umbrella at the sky. “Learn to spell before you go around demonstrating your nitwit ideas!”
Dadamoshai was an advocate of English education, and nothing irked him more than the massacre of the English language. The demonstrators knew better than to challenge him. They were just rabble-rousers anyway, stuffed with half-baked ideas by local politicians who knew what to rail against, but not what to fight for. Nobody wanted to butt heads with Dadamoshai. He had once been the most powerful District Judge in the state of Assam. With his mane of flowing hair, his long sure stride and deep oratorical voice, he was an imposing figure in our town, and people respectfully stepped aside when they saw him coming. To most people he was known simply as the Rai Bahadur, an honorary title bestowed on him by the British for his service to the crown. There was even a road named after him: the Rai Bahadur Road. It’s a very famous road in our town and anybody can direct you there, yet it appears unnamed on municipal maps because it does not lead to any place and dead-ends in a river over which there is no bridge. The Rai Bahadur Road is just that: a beginning and an end unto itself.
* * *
When I arrived at the school that morning, the demonstrators were a sorry lot. It had rained some more and the cheap ink from their banners had run, staining their white clothes. What was even sadder was that somebody had tried to hand-correct the spellings with a blue fountain pen. Somewhere down the line, they had simply lost heart. They sat listlessly on their haunches and smoked cigarettes while their limp banners flopped against the wall.
One of them nudged the other when he saw me coming. I heard him say, “It’s her, look—the Rai Bahadur’s granddaughter!”
I must have rekindled their patriotism because they grabbed their banners and blocked my entrance to the school. “No English! India for Indians! No English!” they shouted.
I was wondering how to get past them when I remembered something Dadamoshai once told me: Use your mind, Layla—it is the most powerful weapon you have. I continued to walk toward them and pointed my mind like a sword. It worked: they parted to let me through. The gate shut behind me, and I continued down the graveled driveway to the new school building. It was an L-shaped structure, freshly whitewashed, with a large unpaved playground and three tamarind trees. Piles of construction debris lay pushed to one side.
The voices of young girls chirruped on the veranda. Students aged nine or ten sat cross-legged on the floor, stringing together garlands of marigold and tuberose to decorate the stage for the inauguration ceremony.
“Layla!” Miss Rose called out from a classroom as I walked past. I peeked through the door. Rose Cabral was sitting at the teacher’s desk, sorting through a pile of printed programs. There was a large world map tacked to the back wall and the room smelled overwhelmingly of varnish. Miss Rose, as she was called, was a young Anglo-Indian teacher with chestnut brown hair and pink cat’s-eye glasses with diamond accents. The small fry of the school swooned with adoration for her and wanted to lick her like a lollipop.
Miss Rose was about to say something when she sneezed daintily. “Oh dear,” she said, wiping her nose on a pink handkerchief edged with tatting lace. “I don’t know if it’s the varnish or this fickle weather. Layla, oh my! How you have grown! What a lovely young woman you are. Are you still being privately tutored by Miss Thompson, dear?”
“No, not any longer, Miss Rose,” I said. “I passed my matriculation last year.”
“So you must be all ready to get married now, eh? Suitors will be lining up outside your door.”
“Oh no—no, I don’t plan to get married,” I said quickly. “I want to become a teacher, actually.” I did not tell Miss Rose that marriage was not in my cards. It would be hard to explain to her why being born under a certain ill-fated star could negate your chances of finding a husband.
A tiny, round-shouldered girl with thick braids appeared in the doorway, pigeon-toed and fidgeting.
“Yes, what is it, Malika?” Miss Rose said.
“Miss...miss...”
“Speak up, child.”
“We have no more white flowers, Miss Rose.”
“The tuberose? I thought we had plenty. All right, I am coming.” Miss Rose sighed, bunching up her papers. “I better go and see what’s going on. Oh, Layla, there’s a packet of rice powder for you lying on the secretary’s desk in the principal’s office. I suppose you know what it is for?”
“It’s for the alpana I am painting in the entryway,” I said. Miss Rose looked blank, so I explained. “You know, the white designs—” I made curlicue shapes in the air “—the kind you see painted on the floor at Indian weddings and religious ceremonies?”
“Ah yes. They are so intricate. Boris Ivanov will like that. He loves Indian art. I hope you have brought your brushes or whatever you need, Layla. We don’t have anything here, you know.”
“I don’t need any brushes,” I said. “I just use my fingers and a cotton swab. I have that. Miss Rose, is my grandfather still here?”
“The Rai Bahadur left for the courthouse an hour ago. He said to tell you he will be home for lunch. Boris Ivanov’s train is running three hours late. Let me know if you need anything, Layla. I am here all afternoon.”
* * *
It was close to lunchtime when I got the alpana done, so instead of going to the library as I had planned, I went home. Dadamoshai’s house was a fifteen-minute walk from the school. I passed the holy banyan tree and saw that the protestors had abandoned their wilted banners behind it. The tree was over two hundred years old, massive and gnarled, with thick roots that hung down from the branches like the dreadlocks of demons. In its hollowed root base was a collection of faded gods surrounded by tired marigold garlands. I walked past the stench of the fish market, the idling rickshaws at the bus stand and the three crooked tea stalls that supported one another like drunken brothers, till I came to a four-way crossing where I turned right on to the Rai Bahadur Road.
It was an impressive road, man-made and purposeful: not like the fickle pathways in town, that changed directions with the rain and got bullied by groundcover. The road to my grandfather’s house was wide and tree-lined, with Gulmohor Flame Trees planted at regular intervals: exactly thirty feet apart. Their leafy branches crisscrossed overhead to form a magnificent latticed archway. On summer days the road was flecked with gold, and spring breezes showered down a torrent of vermilion petals that swirled and trembled in the dust like wounded butterflies. Rice fields on either side intersected in quilted patches of green to fade into the shimmering haze of the bamboo grove. Up ahead, the river winked over the tall embankment where fishing nets lay drying on bamboo poles silhouetted against the noonday sun.
I adjusted my eyes. Was that a man standing under the mango tree by our front gate? It was indeed. Even at that distance, I could tell he was a foreigner, just by his stance. His legs planted wide, shoulders thrown back, he had that ease of body some foreigners have. I was curious. What was he doing? His hands were folded together and he was gazing up at the branches with what appeared to be deep piety. Oddly enough, it looked as though the foreigner was praying to the mango tree!
The man heard me coming and glanced briefly in my direction. He must have expected me to walk on by, but when I stopped at our gate, he looked at me curiously. He was a disconcertingly attractive man in a poetic kind of way, with long, finger-raked hair and dark and steady eyes behind black-framed glasses. A slow smile wavered and tugged at the corners of his mouth.
When I saw what he was holding in his cupped hands, I realized I had misjudged his piety. It was a baby crow.
“Do you live in the Rai Bahadur’s house?” he asked pleasantly. He spoke impeccable Bengali, with no trace of a foreign accent. I figured he must be an Indian who probably lived abroad.
“Yes,” I said.
The man was obviously unschooled in the nuances of our society, because he stared at me candidly with none of the calculated deference and awkwardness of Indian men. I could feel my ears burning.
The crow chick struggled feebly in his hand. It stretched out a scrawny neck and opened its yellow-rimmed beak, exposing a pink, diamond-shaped mouth. It was bald except for a light gray fuzz over the top of its head. Its blue eyelids stretched gossamer thin over yet unopened eyes.
“We have a displaced youngster,” the man said, glancing at the chick. “Any idea what kind of bird this is?”
“It’s a baby crow,” I replied, marveling how gently he held the tiny creature. It had nodded off to sleep, resting its yellow beak against his thumb. He had nicely shaped fingernails, I noticed.
I pointed up at the branches. “There’s a nest up that mango tree.”
He was not looking at the tree, but at my hand. “What’s that?” he asked suddenly.
“Where?” I jerked back my hand and saw I had traces of the white rice paste still ringed around my fingernails. “Oh,” I said, curling my fingers into a ball, “that’s...that’s just from the alpana decoration I was doing at the school.”
“Are you related to the Rai Bahadur?”
“He is my grandfather.”
“Is this the famous English girls’ school everybody is talking about? What is the special occasion?”
“Today is the grand opening,” I said. “A Russian dignitary is coming to cut the ribbon.”
“Boris Ivanov?” he asked.
I stared at him. “How did you know?”
“There are not many Russians floating around this tiny town in Assam, are there? I happen to be well acquainted with Ivanov.”
I wanted to ask more, but refrained.
He tilted his head, squinting up at the branches, then pushed his sliding glasses back up his nose with his arm. The chick woke up with a sharp cheep that startled us both. “Ah, I see the nest. Maybe I should try and put this little fellow back,” he said.
“You are going to climb the mango tree?” I asked a little incredulously. The man looked too civilized to climb trees. His shirt was too white and he wore city shoes.
“It looks easy enough.” He looked up and down the branches as though he was calculating his foothold. He grinned suddenly, a deep crease softening the side of his face. “If I fall, you can laugh and tell all your friends.”
I had no friends, but I did not tell him that.
“There’s not much point, really.” I hesitated, wondering how I was going to say this without sounding too heartless. “You see, this is very common. Baby crows get pushed out of that nest every year by...” I moved closer to the tree, shaded my eyes and looked up, then gestured him over. “See that other chick? Stand right where I am standing. Can you see it?”
We were standing so close his shirtsleeve brushed my arm. I could smell the starch mingled with faint sweat and a hint of tobacco. My head reeled slightly.
He tilted his head. “Ah yes, I see the sibling,” he said.
“That’s not a sibling—it’s a baby koel.”
His face drew a blank.
“The Indian cuckoo. Don’t you know anything about koels?”
“I am afraid not,” he said, looking bemused. “But I beg to be educated. Before that, I need to put our friend down someplace. I am getting rather tired of holding him.” He looked around, then walked over to the garden wall and set the baby crow down on the ground. It belly-waddled into a shady patch and stretched out its scrawny neck, cheeping plaintively.
I was about to speak when a cloud broke open and a sheet of golden rain shimmered down. We both hurried under the mango tree. There we were all huddled cozily together—the man, the chick and me.
A cycle rickshaw clattered down the road. It was fat Mrs. Ghosh, squeezed in among baskets and bundles, on her way home from the fish market. She looked at us curiously, her eyes bulging slightly, perhaps wondering to herself: Am I seeing things? Is that the Rai Bahadur’s granddaughter with a young man under the mango tree? This was going to be big news, I could tell, because everybody in town knew that the Rai Bahadur’s granddaughter avoided the opposite sex like a Hindu avoids beef.
The cloud passed and the sun winked back and I hurried out from under the tree. To cover up my embarrassment, I launched into an involved lecture on the nesting habits of koels and crows.
“The koel, or Indian cuckoo, is a brood parasite,” I said. “A bird that lays its egg in the nest of another. Like that crow’s nest up there.” I pointed upward with my right hand and then, remembering my dirty fingernails, switched to my left hand. “See how sturdy the nest is? Crows are really clever engineers. They pick the perfect intersections of branches and build the nest with strong twigs. They live in that same nest for years and years.”
“Are their marriages as stable as their nests?” The man winked, teasing me. “Do they last as long?”
“That...that I don’t know,” I said, twisting the end of my sari. I wished he would not look at me like that.
“I am only teasing you. Oh, please go on.”
I took a deep breath and tried to collect myself. “The koel is a genetically aggressive bird. When it hatches, it pushes the baby crows out from the nest, eats voraciously and becomes big and strong. Then it flies off singing into the trees. The poor crows are so baffled.”
The man smiled as he pushed around a pebble with the toe of his shoe. He wore nicely polished brown shoes of expensive leather with small, diamond-shaped, pinpricked patterns.
“And what do the koels do, having shamelessly foisted their offspring onto another?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.
“Ah, koels are very romantic birds,” I said. “They sing and flirt in flowering branches all summer long, with not a care in the world.”
“How irresponsible!”
“Well, it depends how you look at it,” I said, watching him carefully. “Koels sing and bring joy to the whole world. In some ways they serve a greater good, don’t you think? And getting the crows to raise their chicks is actually quite brilliant.”
“How is that?” he asked, looking at me curiously.
“Well, not all creatures are cut out for domesticity. Some make better parents than others. The chick grows up to be healthy and independent. In many ways, the koels are giving their offspring the best shot at life.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” he said thoughtfully.
He sighed and turned his attention to the baby crow. It lay completely still, breathing laboriously, its flaccid belly distended to one side, beak slightly open. He squatted down and nudged it gently with his forefinger. The chick struggled feebly, opened its mouth and uttered a tiny cheep.
“It’s still alive,” he said dispassionately. “So what do you suggest we do? We can’t just leave it here to die, can we?”
I shrugged. “It’s the cat’s lunch.”
He looked at me in a playful sort of way. “Please don’t say you are always so cruel,” he said softly.
I turned and looked out at the distant rice fields, where a flock of white cranes was circling to land. “I used to try and save baby crows all the time when I was a child,” I said. “But Dadamoshai said I was interfering with nature. He thinks we need more songbirds and fewer scavengers.”
The man stood up and dusted his hands, and then smiled broadly. “I just realized we’ve had a long and involved discussion and I don’t even know your name!”
“Layla.”
“Lay-la,” he repeated softly, stretching out my name like a caress. “I’m Manik Deb. Big admirer of the Rai Bahadur. Actually, I just dropped by the house and left him a note on the coffee table. Will you please see he gets it?”
“I will do that.”
“Goodbye, Layla,” Manik said. “And thank you for the lesson on ornithology. It was most enlightening.”
With that, he turned and walked off down the road toward the river. A thin sheet of golden rain followed Manik Deb, but he did not turn around to see it chasing behind him.
On the veranda coffee table there was a crushed cigarette stub and a used matchstick in the turtle-shaped brass ashtray. Tucked under the ashtray was a note folded in half, written on the bottom portion of a letterhead that Manik Deb had borrowed from Dadamoshai’s desk. The note was addressed to my grandfather, penned in an elegant, slanted hand:
7th April 1943
Dear Rai Bahadur,
I took a chance and dropped by. I am trying to contact Boris Ivanov and I understand that he is staying with you. Could you please tell him that I would like to meet with him? He knows where to get in touch with me.
Sincerely,
Manik Deb
I took the folded note and placed it on my grandfather’s desk on top of his daily mail. That way he would see it first thing when he got home.
* * *
Later that day, at lunch, I watched my grandfather carefully as he sat across from me. Had he read the note? Who was Manik Deb?
Dadamoshai took his mealtimes very seriously. He always sat very prim and straight at the dining table, as if he was a distinguished guest at the Queen’s formal banquet. Most days he and I ate alone. We sat across from each other at the long, mahogany dining table designed for twelve. All the formal dining chairs were gone except four. The others lay scattered about in the veranda, marked with tea stains, their rich brocade fading in the sun. My grandfather had a constant stream of visitors whom he received mostly in the veranda, and it was often that we ran out of chairs.
Dadamoshai had just bathed and smelled of bittersweet neem soap. His usual flyaway hair was neatly combed back from his tall forehead, the comb marks visible like a rake pulled through snow. He was dressed in his home clothes: a crisp white kurta and checkered lungi, a pair of rustic clogs on his feet. His Gandhi-style glasses lay folded neatly by his plate. His bushy brows were furrowed as he deboned a piece of hilsa fish on his plate with the concentration of a microsurgeon. Unlike Indians who ate rice with their fingers, Dadamoshai always used a fork and spoon, a habit he had picked up from his England days. The dexterity with which he removed minuscule bones from Bengali curried fish without ever using his fingers was a feat worth watching.
“A man came by to see you this morning, Dadamoshai,” I said nonchalantly, but I was overdoing it, I could tell. I helped myself to the rice and clattered noisily with the serving spoon.
Dadamoshai did not reply. I wondered if he had heard me.
“Ah yes,” he said finally, “Manik Deb. Rhodes Scholar from Oxford and—” he paused to tap a hair-thin fish bone with his fork to the rim of his plate “—Bimal Sen’s future son-in-law.”
“He’s Kona’s...fiancé?” I was incredulous.
“Yes,” said Dadamoshai, banging the saltshaker on the dining table. The salt had clumped with the humidity. He shook his head. “That Bimal Sen should think of educating his daughter instead of palming her off onto a husband. With money, you can buy an educated son-in-law, even a brilliant one like Manik Deb, but the fact remains, your daughter’s head is going to remain empty as a green coconut.”
I was feeling very disconcerted. Bimal Sen was the richest man in town. The family lived four houses down from us, in an ostentatious strawberry-pink mansion rumored to have three kitchens, four verandas with curving balustrades and a walled-in courtyard with half a dozen peacocks strutting in the yard. The Sens were a business family, very traditional and conservative. Kona was rarely seen alone in public. Her mother, Mrs. Sen, was built like a river barge and towed her daughter around like a tiny dinghy. I remembered Kona vaguely as a moonfaced girl with downcast eyes. I knew she had been engaged to be married since she was a child. It was an arranged match between the two families, but I had not expected her to marry the likes of Manik Deb. It was like pairing a stallion with a cow.
“Is he Bengali?” I finally asked. Had I known Manik Deb was Kona’s fiancé, I would have avoided talking to him, let alone engaged in silly banter about koels and crows. My face flushed at the memory.
“Oh yes. He is a Sylheti like us,” Dadamoshai said. “The Debs are a well-known family of Barisal. Landowners. I knew Manik’s father from my Cambridge days. We passed our bar at the Lincoln’s Inn together.”
Barisal was Dadamoshai’s ancestral village in Sylhet, East Bengal, across the big Padma River. The Sylhetis were evicted from their homeland in 1917. Once displaced, they became river people. Like the water hyacinth, their roots never touched the ground, but grew instead toward one another. Wherever they settled, they were a close-knit community. You could tell they were river people just by the way they called out to one another. It could be just across the fence in someone’s backyard, but their voices carried that lonely sound that spanned vast waters. It was the voice of displacement and loss, the voice that sought to connect with a brother from a lost homeland—and the voice that led Dadamoshai to connect with Manik Deb’s father in England.
“A most extraordinary young man, this Manik Deb,” Dadamoshai was saying, helping himself to some rice.
“How so?” I asked. My appetite was gone, but my stomach gnawed with questions.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what makes Manik Deb—like you say—so extraordinary?” I tried to feign noninterest, but my voice squeaked with curiosity. I absentmindedly shaped a hole in the mound of rice on my plate.
“He has an incisive, analytical mind, for one thing. Manik Deb has joined the civil service. His is the kind of brains we need for our new India.”
Chaya, our housekeeper, had just entered the dining room with a bowl of curds. She was a slim woman with soft brown eyes and a disfiguring burn scar that fused the skin on the right side of her face like smooth molten wax. It was an acid burn. When Chaya was sixteen, she had fallen in love with a Muslim man. The Hindu villagers killed her lover, and then flung acid on her face to mark her as a social outcast. Dadamoshai had rescued Chaya from a violent mob and taken her into his custody. What followed was a lengthy and controversial court case. Several people went to jail.
Dadamoshai turned to address her. “Chaya, Boris Sahib will be having dinner with us tonight. Please remember to serve the good rice and prepare everything with less spice.”
With that, Dadamoshai launched on a long discussion of menu items suitable for Boris Ivanov’s meal, and Manik Deb was left floating, a bright pennant in the distant field of my memory.
CHAPTER 2
On the day of the school inauguration, Boris Ivanov donned a magnificent Indian kurta made of the finest Assamese Mooga silk, custom tailored to fit his six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound Bolshevik frame. He gave a rousing speech, and just as he was walking across the stage in his fancy mirror-work nagra slippers—which any Indian will tell you are notorious for their lack of traction—he inadvertently stepped on a fallen tuberose. His foot made a swiping arc up to the ceiling and the nagra took off like a flying duck. Boris Ivanov yelped out something that sounded suspiciously like “BLOOD!” I later understood he had yelled “Blyad!”—a Russian expletive—before landing with a thundering crash that sent quakes through the room. A horrified groan went up in the audience; small children shrieked, and in the middle of it all, I saw fat Mrs. Ghosh roll her eyes heavenward and whisper to her neighbor that this was allokhi—a very bad omen indeed. Just as well Dadamoshai did not hear her, because he would have flattened her out for good. My grandfather had very low tolerance for “village talk.”
Boris Ivanov was forced to change his itinerary. He had planned to leave for Calcutta the next day to visit Rabindranath Tagore’s famous experimental school in Santineketan. Instead, with his leg cast in plaster, he moved into Dadamoshai’s house as our guest and stayed with us for three whole weeks.
He accepted his fate cheerfully and slipped into our life with barely a ripple. He was a big, bushy man, bearded and baritone, who spent long hours reading and writing on the veranda with his plastered leg lying on the cane ottoman like a fallen tree trunk. Most afternoons he dozed in the plantation chair with the house cat draped over his stomach, his snores riffling the afternoon. He woke up to drink copious amounts of tea with four heaped spoons of sugar in each cup, blissfully unaware that it was wartime and sugar was in short supply. He spent the rest of the evening contemplating the universe.
The veranda was the most pleasant room in our house—open and airy, with soft filtered light creeping through the jasmine vines. Dadamoshai’s big desk sat in one corner against the wall. On it were his piles of papers weighted down with river rocks and conch shells. His blue fountain pen sat snugly in its stand, right next to the chipped inkwell and a well-used blotter. There was a calendar with bird pictures on the wall, busy with notes and scribbles on the dated squares.
A door from the veranda led to Dadamoshai’s study. It was packed from top to toe with books of all kinds: art, philosophy, religion, poetry and all the great works of literature. Here The Communist Manifesto leaned comfortably on Homer’s Odyssey, and the Bhagavad Gita was wedged in by Translations from the Koran. Just as comfortably inside Dadamoshai’s head lived his thoughts and ideas—separate skeins interwoven with the gentlest compassion and wisdom to form his rich philosophy and outlook on life.
Boris Ivanov was writing a treatise titled Freedom and Responsibility, a rather obtuse and philosophical work full of difficult arguments. He spent long hours debating ideas with Dadamoshai on the veranda. India was on the cusp of her independence after more than two hundred years of British rule. A great renaissance was sweeping through our nation and many social and educational reforms were under way.
Many people considered Dadamoshai a great scholar and independent thinker, but others saw him as a blatant anglophile and called him an English bootlicker. He was unabashedly Western in his dress and liberal in his thoughts. He lived frugally and thought deeply. He did not take siestas in the afternoon and cursed fluently in seven languages.
Dadamoshai believed that women were not given a fair chance in our society, largely due to their lack of education. Why were Indian boys sent to study at the finest universities abroad, he argued, while girls were treated like some flotsam washing in with the river tide?
Traditionalists accused Dadamoshai of rocking the social order and luring women away from their jobs as homemakers. What good would it do for women to bury their heads in math and science? Or, for that matter, to go around spouting Shakespeare? Pots and pans would grow cold in the kitchen and neglected children would run around the streets like pariah dogs.
In many ways, Dadamoshai saw me as the poster child for the modern Indian woman. He gave me the finest education and taught me to speak my mind. I was free to forge my own destiny. Sometimes I struggled to stay grounded like a lone river rock in a swirl of social pressures. But in truth, this was the only option I had.
* * *
Miss Thompson, my private English tutor, lived in a small primrose cottage behind the Sacred Heart Convent. A spry woman with animated eyes, she had about her a brisk energy that made you sit up and pull in your stomach. Her father, Reginald Thompson, the former District Magistrate of Assam, was Dadamoshai’s predecessor and mentor. Dadamoshai had seen Miss Thompson grow up as a young girl.
I was Miss Thompson’s first Indian student. Ever since I was seven, I took a rickshaw to her house three days a week. After my lessons, I would walk over to Dadamoshai’s office in the old courthouse where I’d sit and do my homework, surrounded by the clatter of typewriters and the smell of carbon paper until it was time for us both to come home.
Miss Thompson was a stickler for pronunciation. She made sure I enunciated each word with bell-like clarity with the stress on the right syllable. I learned to say what, where and why accompanied by a small whoosh of breath I could feel on the palm of my hand held six inches from my face. It was Miss Thompson who instilled in me my love for literature. She encouraged me to plumb the depths of Greek tragedy, savor the fullness of Shakespeare, the lyrical beauty of Shelley. As I grew older, I saw less and less of her, until our meetings became just the occasional social visit. She had more Indian students now, she said, thanks to Dadamoshai’s flourishing girls’ school.
I decided to drop by and see her. She was usually home on Tuesday mornings, I knew. I arrived to find a rickshaw parked outside her gate and an elderly servant woman sitting on the porch. Miss Thompson must be with a student, I imagined. Young girls were never sent out unchaperoned in our society. Dadamoshai, on the other hand, always insisted I go everywhere alone. This raised a few eyebrows in our town. I was about to turn around and walk away when Martha, Miss Thompson’s Anglo-Indian housekeeper of sixty years, called out to me from the kitchen window. She said Miss Thompson was indeed with a new student, but asked me to wait as the lesson was almost over.
I sat on the sofa in the drawing room. Through the slatted green shutters a guava tree waved its branch and somewhere a crow cawed mournfully. Nothing changed in Miss Thompson’s house. Everything was exactly where it was the very first day I walked in ten years ago. The small upright piano with a tapestry-cushioned pivot stool, the glass-door walnut curio cabinet with its fine collection of Dresden figurines I knew so well, the scattering of peg tables topped with doilies of tatting lace. On the wall were faded sepia photographs of Reginald Thompson in his dark court robes, his pretty, fragile wife who’d died young and Miss Thompson and her sister as young girls riding ponies.
Voices trickled in through the closed door of the study. I heard a timid, female voice say something inaudible, followed by Miss Thompson.
“Breeze. Lengthen the e please and note the ‘zee’ sound. It is not j. It’s z. Zzzz. Make a buzzing sound with your lips. Like a bee. Breezzzze. Breezzzze.”
“Bre-eej,” the girl repeated hesitantly.
I could just see Miss Thompson tapping the wooden ruler softly against her palm, a gesture she made to encourage her students, but it only intimidated her Indian girls, who saw the ruler as a symbol of corporal punishment.
“Breeze,” Miss Thompson said patiently. “Try it one more time.”
“Brij,” said the girl.
“That, dear child, is j like in bridge. You know a bridge, don’t you? The letter d coupled with a g has a j sound. Bridge. Badge. Badger.”
Badger! My heart went out to the poor girl. How many Indian children were familiar with a badger? A mongoose, yes, but a badger? I only happened to know what a badger was because, thanks to Miss Thompson, I had read The Wind in the Willows as a child. British pronunciation was completely illogical, I had concluded a long time ago. I remember arguing with Dadamoshai why were schedule and school pronounced differently. If schedule was pronounced shedule should not school be pronounced shoole? Dadamoshai said I had an intelligent argument there, but there was really no logic—besides, the British were not the most practical-minded people in the world. Americans were much more sensible that way: they said skedule.
There was silence in the next room, then a rustle of papers. I heard Miss Thompson say, “Never mind, dear. I think we’ve practiced enough for today. Now, no need to fret about this. It will come. Pronunciation is just practice. After all, your mother tongue is very different, isn’t it? I understand the letter z doesn’t even exist in your language, so how are you expected to say it?”
A chair scraped back. “Thank you, Miss Toomson,” a high girlish voice replied.
There were footsteps, and Miss Thompson held the door open. “You are most welcome, Konica,” she said. “I’ll see you next Tuesday.”
I had expected a small child to walk out of the study; instead it was a grown woman dressed in an expensive pink sari with gold bangles on her wrists, her hair oiled and fashioned into a formal bun. She looked strangely out of place in Miss Thompson’s modest English home.
“Oh, Layla! What a lovely surprise,” cried Miss Thompson, seeing me. The girl looked up and our eyes met. “I will be with you in just a minute, dear. Let me just see Konica to the door.”
Konica? Kona Sen!
Kona’s bangles chinked softly as she walked by with mincing steps. Her eyes stayed on the floor the entire time; she did not glance up even once as she passed by me sitting on the sofa.
I must have looked pale and in need of fortification, because Miss Thompson said, “You look exhausted, dear. Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we? Martha, some tea, please!” she called toward the kitchen then turned to me. “That was Konica Sen. She lives on Rai Bahadur Road, same as you. You must know each other?”
“I don’t think we’ve actually been introduced,” I said vaguely. “I’ve seen her around of course.”
“Her father came to see me. Mr. Sen is anxious Konica improves her spoken English. She is getting married soon, you know. The boy is Indian but has lived in England all his life. He walks and talks just like an Englishman, Mr. Sen said. The young man has joined the civil service in Calcutta. Konica will live there after they are married. Her father is worried she won’t be able to mix in her husband’s social circles if she cannot speak English.”
My brain was still unscrambling from the shock of seeing Kona. Did she recognize me? It was hard to tell because Kona’s face was expressionless, like a boiled egg. It did not give out much.
“To tell you the truth, I would have never taken on a new student her age,” Miss Thompson continued. “It’s an uphill task to teach spoken English to someone who comes from such a traditional Indian family. Learning to speak a language, as you know, calls for a lot of oral practice. Nobody in Konica’s family speaks English. Even her father can barely get by.”
“Ah, here we are...thank you, Martha,” she said as Martha, old and bent, hobbled in to set the tea tray down. Turning to me, Miss Thompson added, “I know Konica is having an arranged marriage, but I don’t understand why Mr. Sen would get his daughter married to someone she can’t even talk to.”
“He does speak good Bengali, you know—”
“Her fiancé does? Oh, so you know this young man, Layla?”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I mean he probably speaks Bengali. If he is an Indian educated abroad, I am sure he is bilingual. Most of them are.”
“I hope so for Konica’s sake. The poor girl. Her father said to give her plenty of homework. ‘Mastering a foreign language is not a matter of homework, Mr. Sen,’ I told him. It’s a matter of practice.”
“She can practice her English with her fiancé, I suppose,” I said. Just thinking about Manik and Kona cozying up together triggered a stab of jealousy.
“I suppose so, dear. I am not sure how often they meet or how much they talk to each other, really. It’s all very formal, this arranged marriage. More between the two families, really.” Miss Thompson paused thoughtfully. Suddenly her face lit up and she clapped her hands. “Why, I just got me a grand idea! Why don’t you help her, Layla? She can practice speaking English with you. You are both the same age—I am sure you will find plenty to talk about. How very fortunate you are neighbors! May I suggest this to Konica’s father, if you don’t mind?”
“Yes, of course,” I said numbly. What else could I say?
Miss Thompson looked very pleased. “So that settles it, then,” she said. “Now tell me about yourself. The Rai Bahadur says you want to become a teacher? Marvelous! I am so proud of you, Layla. You were born to follow in your grandfather’s footsteps. I know he is counting on you to take over his school someday. You will do a brilliant job.”
“I hope so,” I said absently. All I could think of was how Kona had chinked past me with her musical bangles and the faint scent of jasmine that trailed softly behind her.
Of course, I knew I would never hear from Kona or her father, but how could I ever explain that to Miss Thompson? Although the Sens lived just a few doors down from us, our families always avoided each other. Dadamoshai was openly contemptuous of Mr. Sen’s narrow-minded politics, and the Sens probably thought my grandfather a loose cannon and disapproved of how he was raising me. They were both ideologically different—in fact, polar opposites.
Dadamoshai had plenty of inherited wealth but gave it all away to charity and chose to live like a monk. Mr. Sen, on the other hand, came from a trader class and had risen from frugal means to become the richest man in town. The joke in town was that he had built an entire mansion with bricks he pilfered from a construction site during his constitutional walks. This, of course, was just a manner of speaking, but he was known to be an unscrupulous businessman who accumulated his wealth slyly and at the expense of others.
But at the very heart of the matter the fact remained that I was an inauspicious child. Bad luck was viewed as something contagious in our society. It was believed one person’s luck rubbed off onto another. This was the reason why I was never invited to social functions like weddings and births. At funerals, on the other hand, I was always welcome.
Miss Thompson continued to puzzle over why her “grand idea” never took root. She mentioned that Kona’s father said he would practice speaking English with his daughter if that was what was required. Miss Thompson did not have the heart to tell him it would do no good. Mr. Sen’s own English was pretty dismal, she said, but she did not want to offend the poor man, so she let it pass.
Perhaps the best way I could have explained it to Miss Thompson was this way: Kona and I were like two separate rivers flowing side by side, but our geographies were so vastly different it was certain we would never meet. Hers was a course, smooth and predictable, leading straight to the ocean, while mine was uncharted and unknown, only to be determined by the invisible landscape of my destiny.
* * *
Sister Cecilia, the chinless nun with bristling whiskers and an ashen complexion to match her habit, was in charge of a small library of the Sacred Heart Convent. She beamed seeing me, hopeful perhaps, I was leaning toward the fold. Unmarried and educated, I was, after all, a perfect fit for the convent. Why else would I be at her library every Tuesday to immerse myself in Bible studies? Little did Sister Cecilia know I would have headed for the same bookshelf by the window had it contained books on amoebic dysentery. Besides, my aspirations were far from holy.
The Sacred Heart Convent stood opposite Miss Thompson’s house. The shelf filled with books on Bible studies was by the window from where I could get a clear view of Miss Thompson’s front gate and see Kona every week. I only caught a brief glimpse of her as she emerged from the house and stepped into the rickshaw. I noticed how she waited demurely for the rickshaw to be brought up to her. How she stepped up daintily on the floorboard, arranged her sari pleats nicely and sat with her hands folded primly on her lap. I tried to see her through Manik’s eyes. She was very feminine and walked on delicate feet, I decided. I imagined she had beautiful, long hair, luxurious even, when left open. Maybe Manik liked demure women with long hair, delicate feet and gold bangles that chinked softly, and a soft voice that chinked softly, too. Not someone brisk and angular, full of inflamed opinions and sharp of speech. Which man liked an argumentative woman? It was grating and unfeminine. I began to steadily loathe myself.
I peeked over the top of The Book of Job I was holding. Sister Cecilia caught my eye and gave me an encouraging smile. I closed the book and slid it back into the empty slot on the shelf.
“Thank you,” I said to Sister Cecilia as I walked toward the door.
“See you again soon,” she called back in a cracked old voice. “God bless you, my child.”
I wondered what Sister Cecilia would say if she found out my real reason for coming to the library? She would be terribly disillusioned, no doubt. Not only was I pretending to be holy, I was secretly coveting a man who was formally betrothed to another. But thankfully, Sister Cecelia would never find out, because I, Layla Roy, was the self-proclaimed mistress of deceit.
CHAPTER 3
I returned home one evening and from the garden path I could hear voices on the veranda. My heart took a tumble, for there he was—Manik Deb. I felt instant panic. For some reason, Manik Deb could trigger a flight response in me faster than a house fire.
Boris Ivanov, Dadamoshai and Manik were engaged in animated discussion. I tiptoed past the jasmine vines, crept into the house through the back door in the kitchen and went straight to my bedroom.
My bedroom window opened out onto the veranda, and I had a clear view of Manik Deb through a slit in the curtain. I fingered a small tear in the fabric as I watched him. I admired the contours of his face and the easy way he inhabited his body. It was a trait common in animals, I thought, that unconscious intimacy with self, an unconditional acceptance of gristle and bone. His thumb absently stroked his lower lip as he listened.
“What our patriotic brothers don’t understand,” Dadamoshai was saying, “is that I am advocating English as the official language simply because it is the most practical solution. India has twenty-one different languages and each of those has several dialects. We are a culturally diverse people—Indians are not of a feather and we are not going to flock together. It’s like trying to get twenty-one different species of birds to talk to one another. Besides, who is to say which language is the best for our country? Some have proposed Hindi. The Bengalis are insulted because they believe their language is superior. The South Indians are ready to go to war. South Indian languages, as you know, are completely alien from all other Indian language. Can you teach a blue jay to coo like a mourning dove? You tell me.”
Manik laughed softly. He leaned forward to tap the ash from his cigarette. Tap, tap. One, two. He paused deliberately between each tap, as though he was thinking. “So you suggest we all become parrots and learn a different foreign language altogether. English, in this case,” he said.
Then Boris Ivanov’s voice rumbled like water running down a deep gorge. “The esteemed Rai Bahadur believes that the English language will, how do you say this...” He shrugged expressively, before turning to Dadamoshai to break off into Russian.
“Put India on a global platform. Connect us with the bigger world,” Dadamoshai said.
“Sounds sensible,” said Manik Deb. “So who is opposing English education?”
“So-called patriots. Morons,” said Dadamoshai. “It’s easy to be a rabble-rouser instead of coming up with a concrete solution. Our donkey leaders have no clue what they want.”
“Could be just bad timing,” said Manik. “It’s hard to advocate English when our country is hell-bent on throwing the British out.”
“They are throwing the baby out with the dishwater, are they not?” Boris Ivanov said.
Boris Ivanov meant bathwater, but he was right. Zealots seemed to forget that the British had done plenty of good for India. They built roads, railways and set up a solid administrative and judicial system. They exemplified discipline and accountability. But with the “Quit India” movement in full force and patriotic sentiments running high, anything and everything British was being rejected.
“Let’s not mix politics with education,” said Dadamoshai. “They are separate issues. I want India to be free just as much as anybody else, but I also want our country to survive as a democracy. I want India to have a sure footing in the world. I am proposing the English language as a conduit, not as an endorsement of British politics.”
Teacups tinkled down the hallway. Chaya entered the veranda and set down the tea tray on the table.
“Velikolepno!” Boris Ivanov cried, rubbing his hands with gleeful anticipation. “I cannot get enough of this Indian tea.”
“Think about it—none of us would be here, had it not been for Assam tea,” said Dadamoshai.
“What do you mean?” Manik asked. “What does Assam tea have to do with anything we are talking about?”
“Ah! You know it was tea that put Assam on the world map, don’t you?” said Dadamoshai, stirring his cup. “It’s quite a remarkable story.”
* * *
Not so long ago Silchar was just a small fishing village, with its slow, winding river, paddy fields and sleepy bamboo groves. It all changed, however, in 1905, when the British made it the seat of central government for three major counties in Assam. Before that, the British had hardly turned an eyeball for Assam.
“Assam is India’s most neglected and backward state,” said Dadamoshai. “It is disaster-prone and inaccessible. We have devastating floods every year. You can see why the houses are built on bamboo stilts and have boats stored on the roofs.”
“It does rain an awful lot here. More than England, it seems,” said Manik.
“Oh, much more—Assam gets triple the amount of rain compared to England,” said Dadamoshai. “And England is considered a rainy country. Sometimes there seems to be more water than land in Assam. Rivers spring up overnight and change courses all the time.”
“Also big earthquicks happening here,” added Boris Ivanov, shaking his massive fists at the sky. “One time, so much—shake, shake, shake—I think the world is end today.”
I smiled, remembering. Several years ago Boris Ivanov was on one of his visits when the tremors struck one sleepy afternoon. He got so disoriented he fell right out of the plantation chair and was jittery for days. Earthquakes were common in our state. Assam straddled a major seismic fault, and throughout the year mild tremors rocked Assamese babies to sleep in their bamboo cribs.
When I turned back to the conversation, Dadamoshai was talking about the Ahoms—the rice farmers who lived in the silt-rich valley of the Bhramaputra.
“They are a simple, pastoral people,” said Dadamoshai, “of Sino-Burmese descent. All they want to do is chew their betel nut, drink rice wine and live life lahe-lahe.”
“What’s lahe-lahe?” Manik asked, tapping his unlit cigarette.
“Slowly-slowly,” said Dadamoshai. “This lazy mentality of the Assamese has kept them in the dark ages while the rest of India has marched on. Of course opium has a lot to do with the lahe-lahe.”
But it seemed the Ahoms were not left alone to enjoy their salubrious lives. They were constantly harassed by marauding tribes who thundered across the Burmese border to ransack and pillage their villages, carrying off every slant-eyed, honey-skinned woman they could lay their hands on. All they left behind were toothless widows.
“I am not surprised,” said Manik. “Assamese women are delicate beauties. They remind me of orchids.”
I felt a pinch of jealousy. No wonder he likes Kona, I thought. She was dainty and feminine—like an orchid.
“The Ahom kings tried their best to fight off the Burmese invaders but they did not have the might or the mettle,” Dadamoshai continued. “Out of sheer desperation they appealed to the British for help.”
“But you say before the English are having no interest in Assam—” Boris Ivanov began.
Dadamoshai held up his hand. “Aha! But now suddenly the British were interested—oh, very interested in Assam.”
At any other given time the plea for help might have rolled right off the sola topees of our colonial leaders, but recent developments had piqued British interest in Assam. It was the discovery of tea. And this was not just any old tea—the most exquisite tea in the world had been found growing wild in the mist-laden hills of the Bhramaputra Valley. This accidental discovery smacked of commercial gain, so the British made a bargain with the Ahom kings: they offered protection against the Burmese invaders in return for developing a tea industry in Assam.
“I still don’t see what you, the Rai Bahadur, have to do with the tea industry,” Manik said.
“Let me explain,” said Dadamoshai.
The British needed to set up a central government to manage its affairs in Assam. They picked Silchar, a town strategically located close to the tea-growing belt. But when they looked to employ Indian staff to man their government offices, they discovered Assam had a surplus of rice farmers and toothless widows but not a single educated Indian to be found in the entire rain-drenched valley.
“But all was not lost,” Dadamoshai said, “because just a stone’s throw across the Padma River there was a rich pool of qualified Indians—the Sylhetis of East Pakistan, many of whom were educated in universities abroad.” He looked at Manik. “People like your father and I. We were lured to Assam with nice salaries and fancy titles to work for His Majesty’s service. So here we are in Silchar—all because of Assam tea.”
Dadamoshai did not mention his real reason for accepting the post as District Magistrate of Assam. He had shrewdly figured his dream to promote English as the medium of instruction in schools was in perfect alignment with colonial interests in India. As the powerful District Magistrate he would have the clout to make it all happen. But India’s struggle for independence skewed everything the wrong way. Dadamoshai had anticipated a shift in loyalties, but he had not counted on the blinkered view of our politicians or their narrow personal agendas. Before long he faced a tall embankment of opposition and found himself separated by an ideological divide that no amount of reason or common sense could ever hope to bridge. And he was left on the sidelines, an angry old man shaking his umbrella at the sky.
* * *
Darkness had fallen. Drums throbbed in the fishing village across the river. Manik Deb stirred in his chair. “Fascinating,” he said. “Funny how little I know about my own country. I have been gone for too long.”
“Did you do your earlier schooling in England, as well, before Oxford?” Dadamoshai asked.
“Yes. I went to Harrow. My father’s younger brother paid for my education. He lives in England—married an English lady, my aunt Veronica. They practically raised me.”
“I knew your father well in Cambridge,” said Dadamoshai. “You may not know this, but at one time we were both in love with the same English girl, the beautiful red-haired Estelle Lovelace.”
Manik laughed. “So what happened? Neither of you married her, obviously.”
“We both came back to India to marry good Indian girls,” Dadamoshai said. “Like you are doing.”
Manik fidgeted in his chair. “So you had an arranged marriage?”
“No, I fell in love with my wife, Maya. She...she died very young.”
Boris Ivanov came to life with a noisy harrumph. He had been listening quietly to the conversation.
“When I first saw the Rai Bahadur’s wife—” Boris Ivanov gave a big flowery wave “—Maya was a famous beauty. Layla, the Rai Bahadur’s granddaughter, looks just like her.”
I straightened at hearing my name.
“So who arranged your marriage?” asked Dadamoshai, changing the subject. He still had a hard time talking about my grandmother, I could tell.
“My oldest brother,” said Manik. His voice was taut. “He became the patriarchal head of our family after my father died. My marriage was arranged seven years ago. I was sixteen, too young to understand. I am committed now. If I break my engagement, my brother tells me I will ruin our family’s name. Sometimes I feel like I am bound hand and foot by pygmies.”
Manik ground his cigarette into the ashtray, sighed and then got to his feet. “This has been a delightful evening, but I must take my leave.”
“Wait,” said Dadamoshai. He grabbed a small flashlight from the coffee table and shook it awake. “Here, take this. Battery is low but it’s better than nothing. The road toward the river gets a little treacherous.”
“Oh, I will be just fine,” said Manik.
“No, no, I insist,” said Dadamoshai, pushing the flashlight into Manik’s hand. “I enjoyed talking to you. And please do drop by again.”
I shifted my feet. I had been so engrossed in watching Manik Deb, I had fingered the small tear in the curtain to a walnut-size hole. But I was unable to pull myself away from the window. Just looking at him gave me immense pleasure. It was like watching a sunset: arresting, mesmerizing even, but distant and, ultimately, unattainable.
CHAPTER 4
Boris Ivanov left for Calcutta, and Manik Deb continued to come by to visit with Dadamoshai, often stopping on his way to the Sens’ house. They seemed to resonate on many levels and enjoyed talking to each other. He always sat on the same cane chair, the one with the defective leg. He skewed it a little to one side, facing the jasmine trellis, and lounged deep in the cushions, stretching his long legs past the coffee table. He dominated the floor space easily, as if it was his to occupy and own. He smoked constantly, lighting cigarettes with quick, easy strikes of his match, tilting his head back sharply to inhale. I noticed he had changed brands, downgrading from the fine English Dunhill cigarettes to Simla, an Indian brand. He had been in India for six weeks now.
Once he showed up wearing Indian clothes—a long white kurta and loose slacks—looking elegant and princely. Was he becoming more Indian? I wondered. Whatever the reason, it suited him well. The starched cotton was creased around his sleeves and hung gracefully on his long frame. He did not wear an undershirt, and the dark hairs of his chest bled through the thin fabric. Wearing traditional Indian clothes defined him as a Thinking Indian. It was the dress code of the intelligentsia. Patriotism was at a fever pitch in our country and recent political events had sparked a heated debate among intellectuals.
All over India people were deeply caught up in the current events of the day. The world was at war, and Bengal was in the throes of a devastating famine, but what worsened the catastrophe was a heartless and diabolical British policy of war.
The Japanese had inflicted a crushing defeat on British forces in Singapore and were threatening to invade Burma, one of the strongholds of the British Empire, which bordered Assam in India. In a desperate and shocking attempt to stall the enemy, the British employed the merciless “scorched earth” policy. They destroyed crops, dwellings, infrastructure and communications—anything to inconvenience the enemy from encroaching into India. This was done with total disregard for human life. The effect was widespread, the horror unspeakable. Millions died of starvation.
Educated Indians like Manik and Dadamoshai, normally staunch supporters of the British, were outraged and disillusioned beyond belief. It brought to glaring light the self-interest of colonial rule in India. There were agitations and uprisings all over the country.
“We need our independence more than ever now,” Manik said, “but there is so much divisiveness among our leaders. Their ideologies are poles apart. On one hand, we have the followers of Gandhi touting nonviolence. On the other hand, militant leaders like Netaji are brandishing guns and conspiring with Hitler to overthrow the British by force. As for the millions who are dying like flies as a result of this famine, do you think they care a fig for freedom? All they want is their next bowl of rice.”
“Our leaders are like rushes and reeds,” lamented Dadamoshai. “They will scatter to the winds if they cannot come together to be woven into something useful.”
“That’s Rumi, isn’t it? What you just quoted?”
“Yes. Jelaluddin Rumi. Sixteenth-century Persian mystic. Very wise man.”
Manik was exceptionally well-read, I discovered. I felt hopelessly conflicted when I thought of him. He seemed so intelligent and progressive, and yet he was not resisting a traditional old-fashioned arranged marriage. It had to be about the money, I concluded. Kona Sen would bring a substantial dowry, which made Manik Deb, for all his enlightened talk, a typical money-minded Indian male. I needed to find a reason to hate him, just so I would not feel so bad about him marrying Kona Sen.
My reverie was shattered when Dadamoshai called out to me from the veranda.
“Layla! Where are you?” he shouted in his booming voice.
I was so startled that my breath caught in my throat. I scrambled off the bed, straightened my sari, smoothed my hair and went out to the veranda.
Manik was sitting in his usual chair, about to light one of his perpetual cigarettes. He looked up at me as I came in, sat up a little straighter and smiled. My throat was dry, and I must have looked a little panicked, thanks to my guilty thoughts.
“Layla, there you are. Have a seat,” Dadamoshai said amiably, pushing the newspaper off the sofa and patting the cushion with the blue elephants next to him. “We were just talking about you.”
“Me?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, Manik Deb wants to know your opinion. Manik, do you want to explain why we need Layla’s input on this one?” Dadamoshai tented his fingers and waited with eager anticipation, as if he was about to enjoy the opera.
Manik leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs across the floor, leaving just three inches of space between his toe and mine. I quickly tucked away my feet and worried a piece of wicker on the armrest of the sofa.
“Layla, your grandfather and I were talking about the changing roles of women in society.” Manik paused to see if I was listening. “Well, we were wondering if our society is ready for the change. Are we ahead of our time?”
“Why do you ask me?”
“Why not?” said Manik. “You are a bright young woman, well-read, well-bred and getting ready to conquer the world.”
The roots of my hair felt hot and I could feel my ears redden.
Nothing intelligent came to my mind. I pulled a sliver of wicker from the ratty old armrest and curled it into a small ball between my fingers. I uncurled the ball and curled it again. I looked up.
He was watching me as he tapped his unlit cigarette on the arm of the chair. I realized both he and Dadamoshai were waiting for my pearls of wisdom. There were none forthcoming. My head was empty except for Manik Deb floating inside like a trapped balloon. Suddenly I felt uncontrollably crabby.
“What does Kona say?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. I immediately felt like biting my tongue off. Oh, God! What a faux pas. I was talking of his fiancée as though we were bosom buddies.
“Who? Oh, Konica.” He looked startled, just for a moment. “Well, I never thought of asking her,” he added, looking vaguely uncomfortable.
I don’t know what got into me then—whether it was my nervousness, embarrassment, awkwardness or what—but once I got started, my tongue just took off. “Well, you should ask her, then. She is going to be your wife, you know.” I sounded unflatteringly shrill. “Or maybe it does not matter. Kona must be delighted to marry a civil officer, and anxious to boss around servants and have lots of children.” I staggered under the avalanche of my own words and felt sick to my stomach.
Manik’s eyes popped slightly; his mouth fell open. He did not look very attractive, I noted with satisfaction. He recovered quickly enough, though.
“Well, Layla, don’t you want to marry a civil officer, boss around servants and have lots of children, too? Is that not every woman’s dream?” Did I detect a hint of sarcasm in his voice? I could not be sure.
I took a deep breath. I realized this conversation had gone seriously off track and wandered into a dingy and suspicious neighborhood. I felt disgusted with myself.
“You did not answer my question,” Manik said softly.
“Which was?” I had lost the thread of the conversation. I recalled only my embarrassment at blurting out things I should not have.
“What do you want to do with your life, Layla?”
I watched a dragonfly settle on a dry twig on the jasmine trellis. Its wings quivered slightly, catching a small rainbow of light. What did I want to do with my life? Suddenly I was not so sure anymore.
“I want to do good for the world,” I said, hoping to sound noble and intelligent, but sounding more like a charity nun. “I don’t think I was ever meant to marry, or to have any children,” I added a little hesitantly. To my dismay, my voice broke. I quickly gathered my emotions. “I would really like to help other women...to carry on Dadamoshai’s work.”
“You will be a great asset to the Rai Bahadur,” Manik said. “Careful, though, some nice young man does not come along and make you change your mind. That would indeed be a serious loss to womankind.” He smiled like an imp.
“Oh, Layla is a very determined young woman!” piped in Dadamoshai. He looked at me gently and reached out to push back a strand of hair from my face. “She has made up her mind. Where would one find a man good enough for her, anyway? Most young fellows these days are duffers.”
Manik tapped open his matchbox, but then changed his mind. He put the cigarette back in the pack, pushed back his chair and stood up. He was suddenly very serious.
“Duty calls.” He tilted his head toward Kona’s house, looking resigned. “I am expected for dinner.”
Dadamoshai and I walked with him to the porch. I hated to see him go.
“Wait!” I said. I lifted my hand to tug his shirtsleeve, and then jerked it back. I felt reckless and out of control.
“Yes?” Manik’s hands were in his pockets. He leaned back, looking at me curiously, his eyebrows slightly arched.
“You never told me what you think about women’s education, and how it might change society,” I said.
I needed to hear it for myself. I had to know Manik Deb was a typical Indian man, a blatant hypocrite. That way I could put him away, once and for all, like a shoe that looked good but did not fit.
Manik leaned back on the balcony railing and tapped out a cigarette from his pack, lighting it in his cupped palm. He tilted his head back and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. I noticed a small shaving nick on his chin. I wanted to touch it. He was so close. Again I was embarrassed by my thoughts. I watched the smoke curl from his nose.
His eyes tightened thoughtfully. “Every human being should have the right to choose,” he said. “I don’t think women have a choice in our society.”
I was stunned. Why, he sounded exactly like Dadamoshai!
“For that matter,” Manik continued, “I don’t think men have much of a choice, either. We are pigeonholed by social expectations, but society is more forgiving toward men. Think of it—an unmarried man is a bachelor, and he is eligible till his dying day, but an unmarried woman...well, she becomes a seed pumpkin.”
A seed pumpkin: the only pumpkin left in the patch. That was what our society called spinsters. Was Manik Deb calling me a seed pumpkin? But I had no need to worry.
“Unless, of course, she is Layla,” he said, smiling down at me. “You see, Layla, you can have anything you want in the world. You are no flotsam drifting with the tide. You are making choices for yourself and that is enviable. Not many of us have that luxury.”
“It’s funny,” I said, feeling a burst of joy for no earthly reason at all. “And here I thought you were a very traditional man with stereotypical views.”
“What made you think I was so typical?” Manik looked surprised and puzzled.
“You were educated abroad and are going into the civil service, for one. That’s typical for most educated, upper-class Indians, and...” I paused, hesitating.
“And I am having an arranged marriage?” He took the words right out of my mouth. “I think I understand what you are saying.”
I had not meant it to sound so crass.
Manik glanced at his watch and quickly stubbed out his cigarette. “Which reminds me it is getting awfully late. You have no idea how terrified I am of my future mother-in-law.”
I stood there with Dadamoshai on the porch stairs and watched Manik Deb walk away. In my heart there was a small, sad feeling as though I was missing the last train going someplace mysterious and wonderful.
CHAPTER 5
That summer I got to know Manik Deb. Those premonsoon evenings are etched in my mind in the melancholy strokes of an aching heart. Knowing that he could never be mine was, in a way, my release. Gone was the need to impress him with my wit and intelligence. I was free to slip into a more natural version of myself. We became friends. But despite the pleasant evenings we spent together, I was always aware of a wistful sadness that floated softly in the dregs of my being.
Sometimes our talks on the veranda carried on late into the evening, and Dadamoshai would excuse himself and retire to his room. Left by ourselves, we often talked about books and authors: Tolstoy, Tagore and Dostoevsky. In all our times alone, never once did Manik overstep his boundaries as a guest in my grandfather’s house. He made no untoward advances. He was always polite, interested and attentive—the impeccable guest.
On our last day together, Manik stayed almost until dinnertime. He would be leaving for Calcutta the next day. The monsoons were heavy in the air, the stillness of the evening hanging in dense folds around us. We sat in silence absorbing the faint sounds that penetrated the quiet: the small tinkling of a prayer bell, the bark of a faraway dog. A shaft of light fell sharply across Manik’s face. It hid his eyes but illuminated his chin and mouth. He looked poetic and thoughtful. The tall areca palms rustled with the approaching storm. Lightning whipped the distant sky, and thunder pealed across the dark river.
The BBC news from my grandfather’s radio wafted through the waving curtains of the living room. Winston Churchill’s strident voice came on the air:
“Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war....”
His voice faded out with the weak transmission, and then burst into clarity.
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, this was their finest hour.”
The news ended with “God Save the King.” Then the dulcet notes of a popular wartime song about the white cliffs of Dover trickled out to the veranda.
How strange, I thought to myself. This was the first time I was hearing popular English music play on my grandfather’s radio. He usually switched the radio off after the news.
“Vera Lynn,” murmured Manik softly. “What a magnificent voice. Do you listen to Western music, Layla?”
“I listen to Western classical mostly,” I replied. “Dadamoshai has quite a collection of Russian and German composers.”
“There is something I have wanted to ask you,” said Manik. “How did both your parents die?”
I was not surprised he had heard about my parents. He must have thought it odd that I lived with Dadamoshai and not with my mother and father.
“My father was a freedom fighter. He died in the Cellular Jail.”
“In the Andaman Islands? Is this the same notorious Cellular Jail where they hanged political prisoners?”
“Yes.”
I did not tell him I had heard that political prisoners were not only hanged in the gallows there, they were sometimes tied to cannons and blown up. The British meted harsh punishments when it came to political dissenters.
“Have you heard about the Chittagong armory raid?” I asked.
“Oh yes. A famous guerrilla movement in the ’30s, was it not? To overthrow the British? It was led by a schoolmaster, I believe.”
“That’s right. My father was a revolutionary in that movement. He was captured and hanged.”
“And your mother? I know women fighters played a big role in that uprising.”
“My mother...” I hesitated, because I had never shared this with anyone before. “My mother drowned. In a lily pond. She killed herself.”
I have a photo of my parents and me, taken when I was about a year old, just before my father was captured and exiled to the Andaman Islands. The faded sepia image shows a thin man with fiery eyes seated on a straight-backed chair in what appears to be a courtyard, with a chicken pecking in the background. Next to him stands my mother, frail and taut. She is wearing a plain-bordered sari and old-fashioned blouse with sleeves up to the elbow. Her arms are crossed over her chest; her eyes are naked and staring, a quiet desperation lurking in their depths. By then she was already lost to the world.
Another song was playing on the radio now by the same singer. It was a sentimental love song presented in a slow caressing style. The singer’s voice trembled with heartbreak as she expressed the unbearable sorrow of parting with her lover. It got me right in the gut.
My face was hidden in the shadows, but Manik must have sensed my tears because he reached into his kurta pocket and fished out a clean white handkerchief, which he offered me across the coffee table. He did not try to touch my hand or say anything. In the dark, I tucked the handkerchief under the cushion of the sofa. I never gave it back to him. We both sat quietly till the song ended and the plaintive strains of the orchestra faded, followed by nine hollow strokes from the pendulum clock that echoed in the hallway.
Manik leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette. He still had not said a word. I choked back a lump in my throat, thinking: This is our last time together. The next time I see him, he will be a married man, belonging to another.
“Let me go and find Dadamoshai,” I said, dashing inside the house. In the dark passageway, I hastily wiped off my tears. Dadamoshai was nowhere to be found. Chaya said he had gone to the neighbor’s house to borrow a newspaper.
I returned to the veranda feeling more composed. “Dadamoshai’s gone out, but he’ll be back any minute. Do you want to wait?” I said, hoping to buy a few extra minutes. “I am sure he would like to say goodbye.”
“I am running terribly late, Layla,” Manik said, getting to his feet. “Please thank the Rai Bahadur for all his kindness and tell him I will write from Calcutta, will you?”
“Of course.”
We stood together awkwardly under the porch as we said our goodbyes. I watched a rain beetle dash itself on the naked lightbulb with a tiny ting, then spin in dizzy circles on the floor. I was about to turn and walk back into the house when Manik did something unexpected: he reached out and brushed his fingertips lightly across my cheek. It was a fleeting gesture, a butterfly’s caress.
“Lay-la...” He breathed my name with such tenderness that it trembled in the air between us.
Then he simply turned around and walked away, while my heart quietly broke, the pieces scattering like petals on the gentle night breeze.
CHAPTER 6
Soon after I was born, my mother began to unravel. Her descent into madness was slow and surreptitious. It began with a slackening of the mind, a stray thread, a small tug in the wrong direction. She complained that the Small People in her head kept her awake at nights. She pulled at her lovely waist-length hair till her scalp bled. The Small People scrabbled in her eardrums and pulled her nose, turning it inside out like a foot sock, right into her brain. This drove her even more insane, because every time she sneezed she imagined that bits of her brain blew out into her handkerchief. By the time I was two years old, my mother had sneezed most of her brain out of her head. She became empty and hollow, a green coconut devoid of substance.
When I was three years old, my mother, on the advice of a Holy Man, decided to marry me off to a banana tree. This act was not the outcome of sheer lunacy alone, but a very antiquated ritual in our society: marrying off a bad-luck child to an object, traditionally a banana tree, was believed to “cancel out” one’s negative horoscope.
One overcast morning in June, my mother dressed me like a traditional Bengali bride in a red sari with a gold veil, put kohl around my eyes, dotted my forehead with sandalwood paste and lined my tiny feet with alta, the red paste worn by brides. She carried me to the grove by the lily pond and tied me by my veil to a banana tree. She blew a conch, broke open a coconut, chanted prayers and sprinkled holy water, and left me there. A slanted drizzle fell straight through the afternoon. I was bitten by red ants and caught a death of a cold. I was discovered in the early evening by a neighbor.
My mother was also found at dusk, floating in the lily pond, facedown in the water. Her skin was waxy and cold, her lips blue, and her eyes had turned dull as mud. Her delicate hands bobbed by her side like the wings of dead birds. She had been dead several hours.
After my mother died, I was cared for by my maternal grandparents for a while and then I moved in with my great-aunt, Mitra Mashi, whom I called Mima.
Mima was a great big woman who wore her sari a whole foot off the ground, the tail end tucked into her waistband like a sumo wrestler. She was an earthy woman who laughed easily and was given to manly backslapping that made the elders cringe.
Mima stories abound in the family. My favorite one is about the time she laughed so uproariously that she accidentally swallowed a stinkbug. Another time she thumped an old uncle enthusiastically on the back and made him swallow his dentures.
To Dadamoshai’s great delight and approval, Mima earned a master’s degree and fought her way up the teaching ladder to become the first female vice principal of the most prestigious boys’ school in Sylhet.
Mima created a mild scandal when she fell in love and married the science teacher, Robi Das, a pigeon-toed young man with a nervous stutter, who was small enough to tuck under her armpit like an evening purse. She surprised everyone even further by giving birth to a healthy baby girl at the ripe old age of thirty-eight. Her daughter’s name was Moon.
Although Moon was only six months older than me, she was technically my aunt, a fact she rubbed in with exasperating frequency. Moon and I existed in the same house like two prickly cacti in a pot, too close for comfort, our thorns occasionally poking each other.
Moon had a round face and corkscrew curls that stuck close to her head, a gap-toothed smile and coal-black, starry eyes with lashes so thick that they jammed back into her eyes when she tried to look through her binoculars.
Moon took her profession as an explorer very seriously. She carried her binoculars around like a doctor carries a stethoscope and viewed the whole world through them. She studied the grass, the clouds, the fence and even her own shadow.
People stared at us both because we were so different. I was an oddity in our town of brown-skinned, dark-eyed people. I had delicate bones; dark, straight hair; and enormous, smoky, gray-green eyes that reminded people of sad, impenetrable things like forest fires and river fog.
Mima, on the other hand, saw no difference. She hugged and spanked us both at the same time. Mima’s policy was if one child was naughty, the other one got spanked, as well. It was a preemptive measure, a disciplinary vaccination, to ensure the misdeed did not reoccur in any shape or form. The same applied to hugs: always a double shot.
Mima’s child rearing defied all logic, but she had no patience for logic. “Everybody mind your ways, otherwise there will be trouble for all,” she would hiss fiercely, her eyes narrowed. Even my uncle Robi was terrified. He sat tucked into the sofa like a tiny brown cushion and looked at us sadly through his fat, foggy glasses. He was sympathetic, but of no help.
I fitted easily into Mima’s boisterous household and all its bosomy comfort. My tragic childhood was all but forgotten. Bits of my past emerged at times, pieced together by gossip and a significant amount of embellishment thrown in by Moon. She was fed stories by their garrulous housemaid, Rekha, a wisp of a girl with gap teeth splayed out like the fingers of a hand, through which the gossip of the entire neighborhood flowed.
“Your mother was a madwoman and you are a Banana Bride,” Moon declared. We were both around six years old and playing in the backyard. “I wish I could marry a banana tree,” she added wistfully, and then with complete irrelevance, “but I have a doll that vomits and you don’t.”
I did not care about being a Banana Bride, but I badly wanted a vomiting doll.
“You can marry a banana tree anytime,” I said. “Why don’t you?”
Moon sniffed with scorn. “Don’t talk like a donkey. Azzifff you can marry whomever you like. Your parents have to propose for you.”
“Then ask your mother to propose for you.” Nobody would dare turn down Mima’s proposal, least of all a banana tree.
“I told her I wanted to marry a banana tree and she got very angry. She wanted to know who had told me things about you. I said, ‘Rekha told me everything.’ Then Ma went into the kitchen and screamed, ‘If I ever hear you talking to the children about any of this, I will throw you out like a dirty rat and you can go back to your village.’ Rekha was crying and begging. Then Ma turned and yelled at me, ‘I will throw you out, too, like a dirty rat, if you tell Layla anything.’” Moon looked at me ruefully, absentmindedly pulling on a corkscrew curl. “I am not supposed to talk to you, about the banana wedding, your crazy mother, or anything.”
Moon was so enthralled with my tragic childhood that our favorite pastime became to enact the macabre little drama in all its gory details. Our favorite character was my mother. We took turns playing her, tearing out our hair and sneezing our brains into a handkerchief. Nobody wanted to play Baby Layla the Banana Bride, because all she did was sit under the tree and cry. Instead we dressed up Moon’s vomiting doll in a red dishcloth and stuck her under the banana tree while we concentrated on elaborate wedding rituals, throwing rice and pretending to make conch sounds by blowing on a rock. The doll was then made to switch roles and become my mother. We sneaked out the plastic bucket from the bathroom and floated the doll facedown in the water. Moon and I became the professional mourners, throwing ourselves on the ground, beating our chests and wailing.
Then one day we got caught like two stricken cockroaches under a flashlight. Mima came looking for the bucket and found us wailing and saw the doll floating in the water. She knew exactly what was going on and gave us both the spankings of our lives. She said she would throw us both out of the house like dirty rats if she caught us playing the game again.
Many years later, I realized that all that role-playing must have been cathartic at some level, because my real-life tragedy had become woven through with imagination, a colorful fable to be accepted, elaborated upon and embraced, until—to the wonderment of it all—I could let my past go and fly free.
* * *
Moon and I spent our holidays in Dadamoshai’s house. Every summer, Mima’s family packed up and took the ferryboat across the Padma River from Sylhet to Silchar. Here we stayed for two lazy, sun-dappled months in paradise.
We loved Dadamoshai’s huge, dilapidated house with its creaky, lopsided gate leading into a big, rambling garden with its birdbath, sundial and sleepy snails that waved their feelers up and down the garden wall. It was a peaceful time. Mima became cuddly and warm and threw discipline to the winds. She got foot massages and snoozed on the veranda. Moon and I climbed the mango tree, demolished anthills, mothered baby crows and challenged Dadamoshai’s brain with obtuse and difficult questions.
One year, two crow chicks fell out of the nest in the mango tree. Moon and I adopted one each. Two days later, Moon woke up to find her chick dead. She burst into tears, shoved me hard against the wall and ran howling through the house, looking for Dadamoshai. She found him writing peacefully at his desk on the veranda.
Dadamoshai was the appointed mediator of squabbles. Unlike Mima, who would have either smacked or hugged us, depending on her mood, Dadamoshai listened to both sides and was always judicious.
In between angry sobs, Moon told him that her baby crow had died because of my bad luck.
Dadamoshai pushed up the glasses on his forehead and rubbed his eyes wearily.
“What is bad luck?” he asked innocently.
“When somebody dies because of somebody else.”
“Explain to me, please. I am too old to understand,” said Dadamoshai, looking round-eyed and befuddled. I was incredulous. Did he not know what bad luck was? Why, he sounded like a numskull.
Moon puffed with importance. She stood stoutly with her hands on her waist, looking like a mini Mima herself. “See, Layla is bad luck—everybody knows that, right?”
“Really?” Dadamoshai looked astounded, as if she had just told him the chicken had laid a square egg.
“Yes, yes.” Moon shook her curls. She was getting tired of our grandfather’s feeblemindedness. “Layla is very bad luck. Maximum bad luck,” she added for emphasis. Moon’s new favorite word was maximum. “Her father died because of her, her mother died because of her—let me see...who else? Oh, and now the baby crow died because of her. So see?”
“Whose baby crow died because of whom?” Dadamoshai asked.
“Mine, because of her.”
“But if she was the bad luck, would not her baby crow die instead of yours?”
Moon looked confused.
“Am I bad luck?” Dadamoshai asked her, looking timid and fearful, as though something was going to bite him.
“Ufff-ho! No, no, why should you be bad luck?” Moon retorted irritably. “Her! Her! She!” She pointed an accusing finger as I cowered behind Dadamoshai’s chair, feeling like a lowly insect. But Dadamoshai did not turn around to look at me.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Dadamoshai lamented sadly, shaking his head, “I think I am very bad luck, too. My wife died, you know, very young, and my daughter. My father died, too, and my mother died...a cat, also, some chickens, and so many cockroaches I can’t even count. But sometimes my clogs have a mind of their own and do very bad things.”
“Oh-ho, Dadamoshai! You are confusing anything with everything! Making a big kheechoori. Don’t worry—you are not bad luck. Layla is different.”
“How? I don’t understand.”
Moon sighed noisily. “Dadamoshai, you are too old. You don’t understand anything anymore,” she said and stuck out her lower lip, glowering at the floor.
“Okay, come here, you two,” Dadamoshai said, suddenly very alert and businesslike. He capped his pen with a smart click and closed his journal. He motioned us over to the sofa and scooped the sleeping cat off with the newspaper. “Sit down. I want to show you something.” He was tossing around a heavy glass paperweight in his hand. It had blue swirls and glass bubbles suspended inside. “See this paperweight?” he said. He held it up to the light with his thumb and forefinger. We could see the palm trees and sky through it. He positioned his hand above the coffee table and looked as if he was about to drop the paperweight on the glass.
“If I drop this and break the glass, is it good luck or bad luck?”
“Bad luck,” we said in unison.
“If I drop the paperweight, but catch it with the other hand before it breaks the glass, is it good luck or bad luck?” While he waited for our answer, Dadamoshai dropped the glass ball, which he caught expertly with his other hand, an inch before it hit the table. We gasped.
“Good luck or bad luck?” he repeated, looking at us both. His eyes were bright like a chipmunk as he tossed the orb around in his hand.
Moon and I looked at each other. “Good luck,” we agreed. “Because nothing got broke, thank God,” Moon added, crossing her heart. I followed suit. That was the new thing we had both learned watching a nun at the Sacred Heart Convent, where Dadamoshai had taken us for a charity sale. Crossing our hearts was high on our list of priorities. We crossed our hearts several times a day. Sometimes Moon substituted it for “touch wood” or “bless you” when a person sneezed, or “don’t mention it” when someone said “thank you.” She was a prolific heart-crosser.
“So tell me, who is making the luck happen?”
It was a trick question.
“You?” I ventured.
“Are you sure?” Dadamoshai pinned me with his magistrate’s eye, sharp as a pickax.
Moon skipped gingerly from one bare foot to another. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” she said ambiguously.
“Layla is right,” Dadamoshai said. “I am in control here. I am making luck happen. Now listen carefully, you two. All of us can create our own luck, good and bad. We cannot make luck happen for anyone else, understand? This simple truth of life is called Karma. Now I want both of you to go and think seriously about what I just said.”
We both walked off feeling slightly muddled.
The very next day, as if to prove Dadamoshai’s luck theory right, my baby crow died, as well. By then we were too confused about luck to know who or what to blame.
* * *
Later that night, Moon was asleep and I was tiptoeing to the bathroom when I heard the adults talking on the veranda. Both Mima and Dadamoshai were smoking cigars and enjoying a brandy, while Uncle Robi voiced his displeasure with tiny coughs of disapproval.
“She will get a hiding for this,” Mima said. “I have warned Moon. I can’t believe she said Layla is bad luck.”
“Don’t blame your daughter, Mitra,” Dadamoshai said. “Small towns do not let people forget their pasts. In Sylhet, Layla will always be the madwoman’s daughter, the bad-luck child. She will hear it until, sadly, she starts believing it herself. How will she survive? That girl will grow up to be a beauty. Have you noticed how people stare at her? Do you think you can prevent men from taking advantage of her? They will only mislead her, abuse her trust and marry someone else. I know the double standards of men in our society only too well, Mitra. I cannot bear to see anything bad happen to Layla...that child has been through too much already.”
A chair creaked as someone shifted their weight. My uncle coughed. He usually had nothing to add to conversations.
“Dada, what you say is true,” said Mima softly. “It makes me sad, really.” I heard her blow her nose. “I try my best to protect Layla, but I may not be doing enough. I don’t know what else to do.”
“I have been thinking about it,” Dadamoshai said slowly. “Layla is better off here in Silchar than in Sylhet. No one knows of her past here. People will talk and eventually find out. But I have clout in this town, and nobody will dare take liberties with her. She is safe with me. At the very least, I can make sure Layla gets a good education and learns to stand on her own feet.”
Mima laughed. “If anybody can give that child a future, it’s you, Dada. But how will you manage? A young girl needs a mother....”
“I have Chaya. She is a good-hearted, nurturing woman, and she will take care of Layla’s needs,” said Dadamoshai. “And I will be counting on you, Mitra. You have been a wonderful mother to Layla.”
Then, to my surprise, my uncle piped up. He was always so quiet that it was strange to hear his voice. “It will be for the best, Mitra,” he said, in his thin, raspy voice. “But I will miss Layla. She is like our own daughter.”
Mima sniffed. “I can’t imagine our family without her. And what about Moon? Those two fight like crickets, but they are good for each other.” Her voice broke.
“Think about it, Mitra,” Dadamoshai said softly. “Moon will marry someday and leave home, and what will become of Layla then?”
“Moon? Marry?” Mima gave a funny broken laugh. “I have no high hopes, Dada. As long as that child stands on her own feet and bulldozes her way through life, I am happy.”
“I want to take over Layla’s care—as soon as possible,” said Dadamoshai. “These are impressionable years. It will only get harder as she gets older.”
“But she is only seven years old, Dada!” Mima cried. “What am I going to tell Moon? She will be hysterical!”
“Tell her the truth.”
“I can’t do it, Dada.”
“Well, then,” said Dadamoshai, “I will tell her. There will be tantrums, no doubt.”
I could hardly contain my excitement. I crept back to the bedroom. The dim light from the veranda fell over Moon as she lay sleeping. She was sprawled sideways across the bed, her limbs akimbo, round fists balled up as if for a fight. I pushed her to one side to make room for myself and whispered into her ear, “Move over, sister. This is going to be my house and my bed from now on. The next time you visit, you will be my guest.”
She flailed her hands and swatted at me. I was suddenly overcome with love. I wrapped my arms and legs around her and kissed her cheek. For the first time, I realized how very much I loved Moon, and how terribly I would miss her once we were no longer together.
CHAPTER 7
Shortly after Manik left for Calcutta, the monsoon broke with a fury. It poured like the bottom had fallen from the sky. Rain splattered in buckets from rooftops, turning into turbulent streams that raked up mud and debris and furrowed down past our house. The river overflowed its banks. Small koi fish jumped in the paddy fields and ragged children vied with one another to catch them in broken bamboo baskets. The sky was a deep asphalt-gray. Clouds darkened after a pause, only to gather forces for another deluge. Occasionally a rainbow throbbed in the sky, and sometimes the evening ended with a poignant, cloud-filled sunset.
Dadamoshai’s desk on the veranda was covered up with tarp, his papers moved inside. The blue elephant cushions on the chairs were wet and smelled of mold. Disheveled sparrows perched, puffed and glum, on the jasmine trellis, lulled by the downpour. Almost overnight, moss inched up the garden wall, and brilliant orange fungi sprouted in cracks. A chorus of cacophonous frogs ribetted through the evening.
When the rains paused, the air was so dense it was hard to breathe. Gone were the sparkling fireflies. Mosquitoes came out in angry droves. They attacked like suicide bombers, whining into ears, biting arms and legs, between toes and in the most unscratchable places.
I stayed home, nursing a monstrous cold, drinking ginger tea and staring at the calendar, watching the days tick by. Only five and a half months remained before Manik’s wedding day.
After four days, the postman finally resumed his rounds. I saw him lean his bicycle on the front gate and walk up the garden path, sifting through the letters. There was a small package for me.
It was professionally wrapped in brown paper, tied neatly with white string and fastened with red lacquer seals. There was a return label that read The Oxford Book Suppliers Ltd. and a Calcutta address. I opened it quickly to find a slim volume of Tagore’s poems, Gitanjali. It was a beautiful handmade book, bound in red silk with a gold-patterned border. It reminded me of a wedding sari. I flipped it open to a page that held a bookmark. The bookmark was cream-colored, die-cut of nubbly handmade paper with a block-printed gold paisley motif. The name and address of the bookstore was printed below it. I read the poem on the marked page, my heart beating wildly.
Pluck this little flower and take it, delay not! I fear lest it droop and drop into the dust.
I may not find a place in thy garland, but honor it with a touch of pain from thy hand and pluck it. I fear lest the day end before I am aware, and the time of offering go by.
Inside the cover of the book, Manik had inscribed For you in an elegant scrawl that ran right across the page. It was signed with an M. Mysteriously obtuse, no names mentioned anywhere. Inside was a folded note.
Dear Layla,
I came across this book of Tagore’s poems and thought of you. Please accept this small gift as a remembrance of our talks together.
Manik
I could envision him scrawling across the page, the nib of his fountain pen catching slightly on the rough fibers of the handmade paper. Was it a coincidence that the bookmark had been on that particular page? Of course not! I chided myself. He was just a friend, nothing more. Yet what if...? Tiny tendrils of hope pushed through my brain.
That night I slept with the book and Manik’s handkerchief under my pillow. I had the strangest dream. Manik Deb was standing in a lily pond among the reeds and shaking out the pages of the silk-covered book. Hundreds of fireflies fell out into the water. They spun around in dizzy circles, sizzling like cumin seeds in hot oil before their lights extinguished one by one. At the far end of the pond, on the opposite bank I could see a small girl stretching out her thin arms toward him. “Look at me, Dada, I can fly!” she cried in a chirping voice. But Manik did not see or hear her. He just continued opening the pages of the book and releasing the fireflies.
It was then that I woke up.
* * *
It is hard to describe the emotional turmoil I went through in the weeks that followed. I felt hopelessly conflicted. There was so much I wanted to believe and so much I dared not. A streak of guilt coursed through my mind every time I thought about Manik Deb. Our society was bound by unwritten rules and I had overstepped an invisible line. Accepting a gift of love poems from another woman’s fiancé was as illicit as being kissed. Yet it was deliciously arousing and I felt hopelessly drawn.
I could have brushed off Manik’s gesture, put the book on my shelf and gone on with my life. Yet I clung to it like my last, slim, red-and-gold hope on earth. I caressed the silk cover, kissed the long pen strokes of his inscription. I savored every poem and swelled with the cadence of the lines and felt irresistibly connected to the heart where it was coming from. I knew it was the poet and not Manik who wrote the words but I wanted desperately to believe otherwise. Those were strangely melded days where I floated in limbo, an outsider to the world around me, a firefly baffled by daylight.
CHAPTER 8
Finally the rains abated. The sky gathered her dark, voluminous skirts and swept over the Himalayas into Tibet, leaving behind a drizzle like a sprinkling of fairy dust. Life returned to normal.
The ground was rich and moist. The earth turned a shrill and noisy green, vibrant as a parrot. The evenings felt lighter now, and on some days there was a lilt of autumn in the air. A river breeze flitted through the house, suffusing rooms with the scent of jasmine. Dadamoshai resumed his writing on the veranda.
It was late afternoon and I was reading in my room when I heard an unfamiliar voice calling out a greeting on the veranda. I parted the curtains a crack. My heart skipped a beat when I saw it was Mr. Sen, Kona’s father. He was not a regular visitor to our house.
Mr. Sen was a portly, round-shouldered man, dressed traditionally in a white dhoti and a handwoven brown waistcoat over his long starched cotton shirt. His face was black and shiny as a plum. He had oily hair, bright, beady eyes and a neatly trimmed mustache over a small mouth that was pulled tight as a purse string. His small plump hands were weighted down with an array of auspicious gemstone rings—coral, tigereye, topaz—each promising some aspect of health or wealth to its wearer.
Dadamoshai was in the middle of his writing, and I could see he was distracted with a thought half strung across his brain. As usual, he looked like a preoccupied sage, surrounded by his books and papers, his snow-white hair unkempt, his glasses askew on his nose. He was barefoot, his worn wooden clogs undoubtedly lost somewhere under his desk.
“My dear Rai Sahib, I have been meaning to pay you a visit.” Mr. Sen leaned his umbrella against the post and held out his hands in an exaggerated gesture of effusiveness toward my grandfather.
“A pleasant surprise, Sen Babu, a pleasant surprise indeed!” Dadamoshai exclaimed, patting absentmindedly for the cap of his fountain pen under his papers and shuffling his foot under the desk to feel for his clogs. “Please, please, do have a seat.”
Mr. Sen gathered the pleats of his dhoti with care and perched on the edge of the sofa, like a plump sparrow on a windowsill. He watched with a beatific smile as my grandfather tried to get his bumbling act together. Despite all the cordiality between him and my grandfather, their relationship bordered on distaste. Mr. Sen’s visit was undoubtedly suspicious.
I strained my ears to listen to their conversation. Mr. Sen was talking about the preparations for Kona’s wedding. He dropped numbers here and there, pretending to bemoan the costs of things, but all the while seeking to impress Dadamoshai with how much money he was spending.
“You have no idea how much it costs to get a girl married these days. We are in the middle of wartime and every item is either in short supply or priced to make your hands bleed,” he lamented.
Dadamoshai was trying very hard to look engaged. “I must congratulate you, Sen Babu. You have indeed made a fine choice of a son-in-law in Manik Deb. He is an exceptional young man with a remarkable future ahead of him,” he said conversationally.
Mr. Sen’s eyes wandered off into the jasmine trellis. He suddenly looked morose and crestfallen. His mustache twitched, and he nibbled his lips nervously, looking amazingly like a rodent.
“Manik Deb...” He paused, as if recalling a painful toothache. “Manik Deb has let us all down badly. He has devastated his family name and mine. It is unforgivable what he has done.”
Dadamoshai sat up, surprised, his eyes bright with curiosity. “Goodness gracious, is something wrong?”
“More than wrong, Rai Bahadur, sir, more than wrong! The biggest calamity has befallen our family.” Mr. Sen wiped his brow with the tail end of his starched cotton dhoti. He leaned forward, took a grateful sip of tea from the cup Chaya had just set down and sighed deeply and sadly.
I pressed against the wall of my bedroom, almost fusing myself into the plaster, trying to get every word.
“Can you believe that this foolish fellow has given up his prestigious job in civil service and decided instead to become a tea planter!”
“A tea planter!” exclaimed Dadamoshai in wonderment, and with a twinge of awe.
“Yes, a tea planter.” Mr. Sen spat out the words distastefully like small eggshells he had just found in his omelet. “Imagine that! Who goes through a fine Oxford education with honors and distinctions to become, of all things, a tea planter?”
I could see Dadamoshai was highly amused. He threw back his head, let out a belly laugh and thumped the sofa cushion. Mr. Sen stiffened.
“Why does this amuse you, sir? Please explain yourself. I do not see the joke in this.”
Dadamoshai quickly composed himself. “Pardon me, Sen Babu. I did not mean to insult you,” he said apologetically. “But I do think it is rather bold and adventurous of the young man to deviate from the beaten path. I have heard tea jobs are very prestigious. It is rare for an Indian to be employed by a British company. They only hire Europeans, I know. I think you should be proud of your future son-in-law. It is a great honor for an Indian to be selected, really.”
“Honor? So that he can run around in the jungles with those debauched Englishmen? Rai Bahadur, sir, I have not been so deeply ashamed in my entire life! He has made a laughingstock of us all. Kona and her mother have not stopped crying since they got the news. All we received was one brief telegram, that’s all. ‘Change of career. Accepted job with Jardine Henley Co. as Assistant Manager in Aynakhal Tea Estate. Details to follow.’ What details? There has not been another squeak from Manik Deb. He has not replied to any letters from his family for the past month. He has simply vanished like a coward into the jungle.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A tea planter? Why would Manik want to do that, of all things?
“And that is not the worst part,” Mr. Sen was saying. “Manik Deb has signed a contract that does not allow him to marry for the first three years. It is the company rule. He did this without telling any of us. The shame of it all.”
“This may not be a bad thing,” Dadamoshai mused. “It will give Kona some time to mature before she marries. It is always advisable.”
“Mature, you say! Why, sir, my daughter will be a seed pumpkin by the time Manik Deb is ready to exchange garlands with her. How can I risk that?”
Mr. Sen nibbled his lips some more. Even from a distance, I saw glistening beads of sweat on his brow. “She has already waited seven years for this worthless fellow and spent all this time embroidering tablecloths! What is she to do for another three years? Embroider more tablecloths, you tell me?”
“Send her to school,” Dadamoshai suggested brightly. “An educated girl will make a fine companion for Manik Deb. He seems to enjoy intellectual conversations.”
“No, no, no, Rai Bahadur, sir, you are not getting the point!” Mr. Sen fanned himself furiously. “A girl of a marriageable age cannot be left on the shelf for too long. She will become like the suitcase left behind at a station where trains do not stop by anymore. Then I will have to pay even more money to get her married. I am beginning to doubt Manik Deb’s sanity. His tea-garden job has no future. Life in the plantations is very—what shall I say—different. There are only Europeans. I don’t know how my daughter will fit in. If only he could give us an explanation for his senseless decision. Which, my dear Rai Sahib, brings me to the reason why I have come to see you today. I need a favor from you.”
“Ah,” said Dadamoshai. He had probably suspected all along that his wily neighbor had an ulterior motive for dropping by.
“I know Manik Deb spent a lot of time in your company. He is a great admirer of your ideas, writings and such.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Did he by any chance talk to you about applying for a tea-plantation job?” Mr. Sen eyed my grandfather suspiciously, as if he was a coconspirator in Manik’s deceit.
“My goodness, he mentioned not a word of it to me,” said Dadamoshai, his eyes round and innocent as a child. “I am sure Manik has his reasons for making a career change. Have you tried to contact him?”
“Oh yes, we called the Jardine Henley Head Office in Calcutta several times. I finally spoke to one senior director. He was most cordial. When I told him I was calling from Silchar, he asked me if I knew you. His name is James Lovelace.”
“Oh yes, James Lovelace! Of course, I know him well.” Dadamoshai smiled broadly. “He is the brother of a very dear friend of mine. I heard James was in India, but I had no idea he worked for a tea company.”
“Well, James Lovelace is a big shot of Jardine Henley & Company. He is very impressed with your work in the field of education, and praised your intelligence, character, etcetera. And since you are such a dear friend of his brother’s in England...”
“Sister, actually,” Dadamoshai said a little dreamily.
Mr. Sen’s piggy eyes were quick to catch on. Ha! He seemed to be thinking, the sister—no doubt one of the Rai Bahadur’s sleazy English mistresses. But this was no time for moral judgments. He was on a crucial mission.
“Well, his sister, then...but maybe you could use your influence with James Lovelace to contact Manik Deb? We urgently need to speak to him. Manik’s older brother, who arranged this marriage, is very disturbed. He thinks he can convince Manik to change his mind before it is too late, which is why we have not postponed the date for the wedding.”
“That...I cannot promise,” said Dadamoshai evasively. He did not believe in arm-twisting someone in his or her career choice. “Maybe we should trust the young man’s decision. What I have seen of Manik tells me he is no run-of-the-mill fellow. The tea-plantation job may suit his adventurous spirit just fine.”
“But what about my daughter? Who knows what goes on in those tea gardens? I don’t know a single person who knows anything about the kind of life there, do you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. I have an English friend who visited his brother in a tea plantation here in Assam. What he described to me was most interesting.” Dadamoshai rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I also read the most fascinating book on the history of Assam tea. It’s a real eye-opener. You should read it, Sen Babu. It will give you a much better understanding.”
Mr. Sen twirled the coral ring around his finger forlornly. He picked up his cup, but it was empty.
“Another cup of tea, Sen Babu?”
“Yes, thank you, I would like that very much,” said Mr. Sen. He decided to change the subject. “So how is everything going with the English school project? James Lovelace was very keen to know the details, but unfortunately I did not have much information. I told him I would give you his telephone number and you would contact him.”
“The school project is most challenging, Sen Babu. We have an acute shortage of funds as you can understand. Perhaps you would consider making a small donation? We have sixty students and only two classrooms. How can the poor girls concentrate on their studies when they are sitting four or five to a bench butting elbows, with no place to write?”
Mr. Sen waved his hands as if brushing off a gnat. “My dear Rai Bahadur, whose fault is that? Young girls were not meant to go through such hardships. They should stay at home and prepare for marriage. The importance of cooking and sewing for girls should not be undermined. Besides, what are the girls going to do with all this education? It is a cart with no horse!”
I could see Dadamoshai stiffening. “Mr. Sen, is not dignity and self-confidence in a young woman worth anything? Our society treats women like they came floating down the Ganges. Should they not be given a choice in their future?”
When Dadamoshai got riled up, his eyebrows bristled. He leaned forward, tapping the coffee table with his forefinger. “Tell me, Mr. Sen, how is a woman supposed to fend for herself if things go wrong? Young girls are married off to men twice their age! We have too many child brides and too many young widows in our society, Mr. Sen, too many widows! And you know how our society treats widows.”
“Rai Bahadur, sir, I agree it is unfortunate if a young wife loses her husband, but at least she still has her in-laws. Who does a spinster have? No one. I still believe marriage is the best solution for girls. At least it grants them an honorable place in society.” Then he waved a heavy ringed hand dismissively in the air. “But forget all that, getting my daughter married will put me in the poorhouse. I will not have even one anna to spare. You cannot imagine the exorbitant price of rui fish these days. I was speaking to the fishmonger only yesterday...”
But I was not listening anymore. Something told me unseen forces were shaping my future in mysterious ways. I was getting pulled into the flow, not exactly as flotsam, but a buoyant, eager participant, fully trusting the tide. And who knew? Maybe with the right “breeje” I would catch a current and float right into Manik Deb’s life.
CHAPTER 9
Manik Deb had vanished from my life into a tea plantation, swallowed by the roiling, steamy jungles of Assam, a territory so remote and forbidden that it was deemed inaccessible to common man.
Nobody knew much about tea plantations. It was an esoteric, colonial world barricaded by a cultural divide, so far removed from the life in our teeming Indian subcontinent that it may as well have been several stratospheres away.
Now that one of our local boys had disappeared into this rarefied atmosphere, our small town tittered with gossip. The question on most people’s mind was, why? Why would Manik Deb throw away a good job, jeopardize a marriage alliance of seven years and strain relations with his family to become a tea planter? To what end? A tea planter’s job had little merit or security.
And what sort of life would his wife have? There were no temples, no cultural functions, no like-minded Indians to socialize with. Forget about the Europeans. They were a different ilk. They stuck to their own. With their promiscuous women in short skirts, shamelessly exposing their legs, their uncontrolled whiskey drinking and wild dancing in the clubs, how would an Indian boy fit into this society? But anybody could see, Manik Deb was hardly a typical Indian boy. In many ways he was more like them. Yet, cynics would argue, Manik Deb may have buffed his fur with fine English education and manners, but he could never change his spots. He was an Indian and would always be one. The Europeans looked down on the likes of him: he was coconut-brown on the outside and white on the inside. Manik Deb would never be accepted into a white man’s world.
I, more than anybody else, itched to know the answers. I kept my ears pricked for news and clutched at motes of information floating in the air around me. I decided to look for the book Dadamoshai was talking about. And there it was, in his library—a slim green volume on the history of Assam. It was a 1917 research publication and it had a whole section detailing the tea industry in Assam.
I could hardly contain my excitement. I raced through lunch that day so that I could curl up on the veranda sofa to devour its contents. It was a mine full of information. I had always been an obsessive fact finder. Dadamoshai said I had a researcher’s brain that allowed me to sift through mountains of material and distill information. This was true. I learned more about Assam tea in one rainy afternoon than all the heads of our entire town put together.
In the 1940s, an era of the fading Raj, tea plantations in India remained the last stronghold of the British Empire. Owned by Sterling companies, they produced the finest teas on earth. Assam tea was grown exclusively for export and shipped from the plantations directly to London to be sold at the Mincing Lane tea auction for exorbitant prices. From there it was distributed to the rest of Europe and the world.
I stopped my reading to think. People in India drank a lot of tea, too. It seemed pretty ordinary stuff. So where did our tea come from? Here we were right in the middle of Assam, so surely it was Assam tea?
I got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. I took down the container of loose tea and poked around the contents with my finger. It looked like fine granules, almost a powder. It smelled like tea. Nothing exceptional.
I decided to make myself a cup. I filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove. I leaned against the counter to continue reading in the dim light of the kitchen as I waited for the water to boil.
The next section was an eye-opener. Little wonder why we poor Indians never got a whiff of quality Assam tea. All the fine tea grown in the plantations, 100 percent, was shipped overseas. What was sold in the Indian market was the lowest grade, or what was commonly known as tea dust.
I closed the book, marking my page with a teaspoon. As I poured the tea through a strainer, I noticed it had a nice strong color and good aroma, but my newfound knowledge now told me I was drinking bottom-of-the-barrel quality. I would never have known that.
I carried my tea back to the veranda. The rain had stopped. The cat, all stealth and muscle, was creeping along the garden wall, stalking a sparrow, which was busy fluffing its feathers. The sun peeked through the parting clouds, and raindrops hung from the jasmine trellis like translucent pearls.
I returned to the sofa and stirred my tea as I read on.
The tea-growing belt in Assam was cradled in the fertile, silt-rich valley between two mighty rivers—the Surma and the Bhramaputra. The picturesque Khasi and Jaintia hills cut a green swath in between. This region was remote and largely unexplored. Tea plantations were located in far-flung areas, across bridgeless rivers, beyond the boundaries of any trodden path and in the middle of dense, malaria-infested rain forests surrounded by wild game and hostile head-hunting Naga tribes.
In 1823 an intrepid Scottish adventurer who went by the name of Robert Bruce tramped through the leech-infested jungles along the Assam-Burmese border, encountering unexpected mishaps and every manner of blight and misery along the way. He had barely recovered from a potentially lethal snakebite when he found himself spending a night up a tree, bone-rattled by a rogue elephant he had unwittingly enraged by misfiring his gun. As if that wasn’t enough, he was constantly being stalked by the hostile head-hunting Nagas, who lurked in the brush with their black-painted faces and poison-tipped spears.
Robert Bruce was beginning to regret this whole mission. He was harried and at the end of his tether when he spied a thin curl of blue smoke spiraling over the treetops. He approached warily, gun drawn, and came across a tribal settlement deep in the forest.
He’d feared his intrusion would provoke hostility, and was surprised to find the gnomelike natives were a cheerful and friendly lot. They were the Burmese Singpo tribe, undoubtedly the sweetest, most benign people on earth! The Singpos welcomed him and escorted him with the beating of tom-toms to their moonfaced, lotus-eyed chief, who went by the grand name of Bessagaum Ningrual.
Bruce was seated on an elevated platform, fanned by palm fronds and offered a swig of steaming brew from a bamboo cup. Not wanting to offend his host, he took a few hesitant sips of this strange concoction. To his amazement, he felt immediately relaxed and all his cares and woes floated away. After downing the last drop, Bruce was so invigorated that he wanted to scale a tree and shout at the sky. What was this strange drink? He was told it was Cha, a beverage made by steeping the tender leaves of an unknown plant in boiling water. The plant grew wild in the forest, and when he was taken to see it, he found it was the size of a poplar tree and had deep green serrated leaves and pale waxy flowers.
Robert Bruce could not get over the remarkable rejuvenating properties of Cha. As he bade farewell to his friendly hosts, he carried the seeds of the plant in his pocket and turned them over to the Botanical Society in Calcutta for research and development. The plant was subsequently named the Camellia assamica. Research showed that when this plant was pruned tight like a privet hedge it flushed with a profusion of tender leaf tips. These tips, handpicked and processed, yielded the finest tea in the world.
I was familiar with the camellia bush. It was a common flowering plant in Assam. Till then I had no idea it was the same plant that yielded Assam tea. In fact, we had a camellia bush growing right by the garden wall. I wondered if the leaves smelled anything like tea.
Outside in the garden, the air was fresh and moist after the rains. The cat had nabbed the bird. It licked its paws and rubbed its whiskers and looked at me with baleful yellow eyes. All that remained of the poor sparrow were a few feathers and a bit of bloodied wing.
The camellia bush in our garden was heavy with pink blossoms. The flower was larger than a primrose and similar in shape, and just as delicate and pretty. I picked a leaf and crushed it between my fingers. Strange, it hardly had any tea smell at all.
A beautiful mottled green-and-gold snail inched up the mossy garden wall. It moved ponderously, pausing to sense its way with large striped feelers. Not like our impetuous friend, Manik Deb, I thought, who plunges into the unknown and goes crashing off into the jungles. A little snail-like caution might have done him good. I was beginning to agree with the townsfolk: he did sound like a lunatic.
I returned to the veranda and picked up the book again.
It seemed the discovery of Assam tea in India could not have come at a more crucial time. Tea drinking was the rage in Victorian England, and the demand for fine teas had spread like fire all across Europe. The fad was started by the fashionable Duchess of Bedford in England, who experienced what she described as a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoons. It was she who popularized the tradition of high tea as an afternoon pick-me-up, and tea parties developed into a dainty ritual and became a fashionable pastime among the ladies of the court.
The only tea available in England back then was imported from China. As demands for the beverage skyrocketed all over Europe, the Chinese raised their prices and arm-twisted the British, holding them hostage. To counter this, the British resorted to subterfuge. They stole Chinese tea seedlings and smuggled them across the border through Burma into India and tried to secretly grow Chinese tea in Assam. Although the climate and topography in Assam was almost identical to China, the plant did poorly and the experiment failed.
It was about this very time when Robert Bruce stumbled upon the Camellia assamica after being befriended by the Singpo Chief, Bessagaum Ningrual. One can only surmise how elated the British must have been with this momentous discovery. To find the best tea growing wild and free in their own colonial backyard! Better still, the indigenous Camellia assamica was far superior to the Chinese variety. Growing tea in India opened up immense lucrative possibilities for the colonial empire and promised to augment the royal coffers significantly.
But sobriety soon set in. Discovering the plant was one thing; setting up an organized tea industry in Assam was another.
Assam could be brutal and unforgiving. The climate was a curse, the food unpalatable and the natives baffling. Assam received an astounding one hundred inches of rain per annum. Roads got washed away and bridges rotted to their demise. The most grueling part of tea-plantation life was the isolation and loneliness. The only way to keep the young men there was to make them sign a company contract. Planters were not allowed to marry for three years so that they could concentrate on their job without distraction and, more specifically, female whining. It was believed that women were the root cause of men quitting their jobs.
Many young Europeans fell victim to accident and disease, never to see the shores of their homeland again. Some took their own lives in desperation. There are hundreds of moss-covered graves scattered across tea plantations in Assam, mostly in wooded areas, tangled in vegetation and overrun by creepers. Many are unmarked but some have carved inscriptions that speak of the short, precarious lives of these young men in Assam.
For mysterious reasons, Manik Deb had disappeared into this uncertain and little-known world. I was suddenly filled with despair. Would I ever see him again? He seemed to have faded into the ether, beyond reach. What if something happened to him?
I closed the book. All I wanted to know was—why? Why had he just upped and gone?
Little did I know, I would soon find out. And I would hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
* * *
The letter was addressed to me in a familiar slanted hand. Just the sight of it made my heart flutter. I went to my room and shut the door. I turned the letter over. No return address. The smudged stamp of the post office read MARIANI. It was from Manik.
Aynakhal T.E.
17th September 1943
Dear Layla,
I take the liberty of writing directly to you. I hope you forgive my audacity. You are the only person I feel will not judge me too harshly. Maybe you will take pity on a lonely tea planter and write back. I only dare to hope.
I have not written a single letter since I have been in Aynakhal, which is almost three months. I feel a strange sense of disconnect with the outside world.
Before this job, I had little idea of life in the tea plantations. I was aware tea gardens in Assam are located in remote areas, but Aynakhal Tea Estate seems to be in the godforsaken nowhere.
All hints of civilization disappear by the time we cross the Dargakona Bridge, which is sixty miles east of Silchar. We enter the forestland and it takes another two-hour drive over dirt roads (if they can be called such) to get to the outreaches of Aynakhal. The last stretch is little more than an overgrown jungle track. It is common to see elephants cross the road. Plenty of sambar, barking deer and wild pigs, too. Once, late at night on our way back from the Planters Club, we saw a leopard.
We have had a spate of heavy rain, rather untimely for this time of the year. Puddles all over the jungle roads. Mud butterflies congregate by the hundreds. You don’t notice them until you come right up to them. Their wings are the most brilliant cerulean-blue you can imagine. The flock takes off like a shimmering silk scarf when we drive past. I have never seen anything quite so magical.
Jardine Henley (the British company that owns Aynakhal plus six other tea estates in the Mariani district) provides us with company jeeps to get around. They are used army vehicles, four-wheel drive. Without them we could get nowhere. Actually, there is no place to go except to the Planters Club on Monday nights and visits to other gardens. I am still trying to get used to the isolation here but I can’t say I am unhappy.
Most evenings I go hunting with Alasdair Carruthers. He is a Scottish fellow and Assistant Manager at Chulsa Tea Estate, the neighboring garden just cross the Koilapani River. He is a crack shot and is teaching yours truly the rudiments of shikar. I must admit he has me hooked. We have an excellent selection of wild game and plenty of opportunity to practice. It’s Greener Pigeon season. Good eating bird. I bought myself a blunderbuss (an old 12-bore Belgium shotgun), which, to my exasperation, seems to jam at the most inopportune moments. But this is the best that I can afford right now.
I hope you enjoy the small book of Tagore’s poems I picked up for you in Calcutta. I have fond memories of our time together.
Best wishes,
Manik Deb
I lay in bed imagining Manik tramping through a jungle armed with his blunderbuss—a rusty old musket, in my imagination. The thickets rustled with dangerous game and flocks of greener pigeons took to the skies. I felt his keen sense of excitement and heard the joy in his voice. Manik Deb did not sound like a coward hiding in the jungle: he sounded like a koel set free.
CHAPTER 10
That October I started training as an assistant teacher under Miss Rose in Dadamoshai’s school. In the afternoons I gave private tuition to students at home. One day just as the girls were getting ready to leave, I saw an army type of jeep pull up and park under the mango tree outside our gate. A European gentleman unlatched the gate and held it open gallantly like a doorman as the three little girls giggled past him. He then closed the gate and walked toward the house.
He was a stocky man with a craggy weathered face and the kindest blue eyes.
“Is this number eight Rai Bahadur Road?” he asked with a shy smile. He spoke in a rich brogue.
“Yes,” I said, wondering who he was.
“I have a letter for Layla Roy from Manik Deb in Aynakhal,” said the man. “My name is Alasdair Carruthers.”
Alasdair Carruthers, Manik’s hunting partner!
The letter had a postage stamp. Alasdair explained that Manik had asked him to post the letter in Silchar, but it was quicker for him to drop it off. He saw Rai Bahadur Road on the address and realized it was the very same road he took to go to the village across the river—which was where he was headed.
The village across the river, how very odd, I thought. No white person ever went there. It was a rather desperate section of the town, inhabited by poor Muslim fishermen and accessible only by boat. I wondered if Alasdair knew that.
Apparently he did.
“Somebody will come by boat to meet me on this bank,” he said. “This fine road looks like it was designed for a bridge, y’ken, but it stops abruptly at the river. I have always wondered about it.”
“There were plans for a bridge. It just never got built,” I said. “Would you care for a cup of tea, Mr. Carruthers?”
“Aye, that would be lovely, thank you.” There was so much I wanted to ask him. He had breathed the same air as Manik Deb!
But Alasdair spoke in generalities when it came to Manik Deb, describing him in his brogue as a “guid chap” who had a keen nose for shikar and was shaping up to be a fine planter. Aynakhal, he said, was one of Jardine Henley’s most profitable and premium tea gardens in the Mariani district.
“You will be the Chotamemsahib of Aynakhal,” said Alasdair.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The assistant’s wife is called the Chotamemsahib, y’ken. Manik is counting the days when he can be married to you.”
“Well...” This was terribly awkward and I wondered how to put it. “I am not Manik’s fiancée. We are just friends.”
“But he told me he was engaged...?”
“He still is, as far as I know.”
“I beg your pardon—I do apologize!” Alasdair exclaimed, flustered. “Manik never told me a thing. Of course he didn’t expect me to meet you in person. He only asked me to drop off the letter at the post office.”
“That’s quite understandable,” I said and decided to change the subject. “Please tell me more about the tea gardens.”
The term tea gardens, I realized, was misleading. They were not small tea farms as I had fondly imagined, but large-scale, sophisticated plantations, averaging 600 to 3,000 acres, some with over 1,500 residents, most of whom were coolies, or tea pluckers. Besides the tea-growing area itself, each plantation was a fully self-contained entity. It had its own tea-processing factory, forestland, rice fields, water and power supply, brickworks, housing and medical facilities. They were like mini townships and run like autonomous entities under the helm of the General Manager. Assam, I learned, had over 700 tea gardens dotting the river valley and most of them were located far beyond the reaches of civilization.
“Strange why such a large-scale industry was set up in such inhospitable terrain,” I mused.
“Aye,” said Alasdair. “It is not quite so incomprehensible, if you think about it.” He was stuffing sprigs of tobacco from a round, flat tin into the bowl of his curved Dunhill pipe. “You see, the tea plant, this particular variety, is very fussy. It will not grow anywhere else.”
Alasdair explained that the shy and reclusive Camellia assamica grew where it wanted, not where it was planted. Any attempts to relocate the plant outside its natural habitat caused it to wilt and die. Even transporting the seeds affected germination. This plant simply refused to budge.
“So, if tea could not be brought to civilization, civilization had to be brought to tea. The mountain to Muhammad, so to speak, aye?” Alasdair said. There was something utterly likable about Alasdair: he had the well-worn solidity and comfort of aged mahogany. “We British want to shape everything in the world to fit us, don’t we? Aye, but only a fool tries to tame Assam. The harder we try to change the land, the more it will change us. Assam has untamed the white man and made junglees out of us.”
Did I detect a hint of cynicism? Alasdair Carruthers was a curious man. I had never heard anyone speak so disparagingly of his own kind.
“What made you become a tea planter?” I asked.
Alasdair shot me a glance. He flicked open a gold lighter and drew in the flame to his pipe. Then he clipped the lighter shut. I noticed a crested emblem of a C etched on top.
“It’s a long story,” he said, pulling thoughtfully on his pipe. “Some would say I ran away.”
“From what?”
“Tyranny.” Alasdair smiled deeply and his eyes crinkled. He did not elaborate.
The more Alasdair talked about tea planters, I got the impression that “running away” to join tea plantations was more the norm than the exception. Planters were an odd medley of characters, and many sounded as though they were absconding from something or the other: Brits ran away from the gloomy weather of their homeland, soldiers ran away to forget their war demons, Alasdair was running away from tyranny and Manik from his arranged marriage. Tea gardens were the perfect place to shut out the world, and ferreting somebody out of those malaria-ridden jungles was as difficult as extricating a flea from a warthog.
Manik Deb was a canny fellow. He knew what he was doing.
* * *
After Alasdair left I tore open Manik’s letter.
Aynakhal T.E.
14th October 1943 6:15 a.m.
Dear Layla,
I must have read your letter a hundred times!
As you can see, our postal service is not the most reliable. It took your letter twenty-seven days to get here. I had given up all hope of hearing from you!
I am replying immediately as I want to send this letter through Alasdair Carruthers. He is going to Silchar today and will post it in town so you should get it tomorrow.
I am sitting on a log in Division 3 of our tea plantation writing to you. I am on kamjari duty, which is the field inspection we assistants have to do every morning (we are expected to be at our designated sections by 5:45 a.m. come rain or shine). Today my job is to supervise the pruning of bushes of Division 3.
We have a small crisis here. A cow got stuck in the cattle trap last night. (You may not know what a cattle trap is? They are railing separators over culverts at the entrance to the tea-growing areas, mostly to keep domestic cattle out.) The cow had fallen in and broken both front legs. It took eight laborers to haul it out with ropes. What a job! All that kicking and bellowing and people shouting! They managed to push it onto the grassy bank on the side of the road. The poor creature is not going to survive, and we need to put it out of its misery, but that is not as simple as it sounds.
The laborers won’t kill the cow because they are Hindu. Willfully killing a holy animal according to their beliefs will bring bad luck. We management can’t do it either because if we shoot it, we risk a labor riot. This is a typical example of the peculiar problems we management have to deal with almost on a daily basis. Never a dull moment in Aynakhal.
From where I write I can hear the poor creature bellowing nonstop. I am keeping an eye out for our General Manager, Mr. McIntyre, who may show up here anytime. He is our slave-driving boss. There will be hell to pay if he catches me sitting on a log writing letters to a girl when we have a half-dead cow on our hands. Section 3 is under my jurisdiction and I am expected to troubleshoot any petty problem without involving him, be it a labor brawl, a cow with broken legs, snakebite or what have you. I am hoping Larry Baker, the other assistant, shows up soon. He may have a better solution to this bovine problem. He is a smart fellow and has been longer in tea than I have.
Enough about tea. (Oops, a raindrop ran the ink on this page—wait a minute, I need to get to a shelter....) Okay, now I am in the seedbari—which is the covered planting nursery. I am surrounded by hundreds of pots with tiny tea seedlings under a thatched roof. It has begun to drizzle slightly.
I just saw a single-seater British fighter aircraft pass overhead. A Spitfire, I think it was. It flew precariously low, rattling the malibari, and I could clearly see the face of pilot wearing his goggles. He was busy looking down at the cow. There have been quite a few plane crashes around here. Several years ago, I’m told, a wreckage was found in the thick jungle bordering Aynakhal and Chulsa. The Aynakhal assistant (Larry’s predecessor) made the coolies drag out the massive propeller and load it onto a garden truck and bring it to his bungalow, where it still graces the front garden as a lawn ornament.
I have to end for now, because I hear Larry’s motorcycle. This cow problem is hanging over my head. Mr. McIntyre will be here in 10 minutes. He is always on the dot of time.
My very best to you.
Manik
Alasdair mentioned he would be passing by our house again later that evening and if I liked he could carry a letter back for Manik from me. I penned a quick reply and a week later there was another letter from Manik.
Aynakhal T.E.
18th October 1943
Dear Layla,
I am so pleased you chose to send a reply back with Alasdair. Imagine my surprise when he told me he had met you! I must have driven him crazy with my questions!
Jamina’s father lives in the fishing village by the river, next to your house. I had no idea Alasdair had gone to see him. He said it made more sense to drop off the letter than to post it. He was very surprised to find you at home. I had not told him about you, so I am not surprised he thought you were my fiancée. I understand that caused some awkwardness between you two. I do apologize.
Now to answer your very valid questions. I am actually very glad you asked. Most people are itching to know, but dread the answers. It is as if I contracted some terrible disease and they fear the prognosis.
To get back to the point, yes, I gave up the civil-service job. Why? Because Layla Roy did not want to marry a government officer! Of course I am joking! The simple reason is the government job looked bureaucratic and boring. In a single word: soulless.
I actually applied to Jardine Henley on a whim, curious to see what the tea job was all about. An English friend of mine in Calcutta told me that Sterling Tea Companies were opening up managerial positions for the first time to Indians. I went for the interview and to my surprise I was offered the Assistant Manager job in Aynakhal Tea Estate. The Assistant Manager position is the lowliest rung of the managerial ladder.
They asked me some very strange questions at the interview. The first one was, if I had plans to get married in the next three years. I don’t think I even batted an eye when I answered, “No.” Many people would call me a blatant liar. Suddenly it was clear as day—I was not ready to get married. I saw this job as my survival. I need to buy some time to think things through more clearly.
The rest of my interview was equally odd. The Directors showed little interest in my academic achievements. They were excited to learn I played tennis and rugby. They asked if I liked to hunt, fish or play bridge. It felt more like an interview for a country club. Then came two of the strangest questions of all: Do you drink, and are you a vegetarian?
I answered “occasionally” to the first and “no” to the second. I later found that drinking is high on their list of credentials and being a vegetarian, an immediate disqualification. I figure what they really want to know is if I have the Westernized mind-set to fit into the tea culture. Everything else about the job can be taught.
Now that I am here, I understand this much better. Tea life is still very colonial. Social clubs, hunting, sporting events, formal dinner parties and so on. It is a whole different lifestyle, and I can see why most Indians would have a hard time adjusting.
But I digress: I don’t want to sound like I am avoiding your questions. So back to your very stern interrogation. (Your questions make me far more nervous than theirs....)
Yes, I gave up the government job. My family still acts like I committed murder. They are shocked and enraged beyond belief. I have not written to anyone or been home since I telegrammed them. I am waiting for the dust to settle before I face the firing squad—not something I am looking forward to.
Question number two, albeit a more delicate one regarding Kona. Yes, she is upset. Her family is upset. The whole world is upset. I have not written or seen them, either. Kona’s father had not bargained for his daughter marrying a junior tea planter and living in obscurity in the jungles. She was groomed for a cushy life in the city.
Everyone thinks I am throwing my future away, but strangely I have no regrets. I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. I think it is the freedom to choose that I love the best.
I hope you will not think less of me for making what many may consider a poor decision. Sometimes there are reasons only the heart understands.
Yours truly,
Manik
Any sensible person would agree that throwing away the civil-service job was nothing short of impaired judgment on Manik’s part. What was more disconcerting, Manik had accepted the tea job “on a whim” without having a clue of what it entailed. As for signing the contract agreeing not to get married for three years...three years! Did he expect Kona to wait for him? I could sympathize with Manik when he said he felt he was being pressured into marriage and understand him needing more time to think, but his whole handling of the situation with the families was nothing short of dishonorable. I could never imagine Dadamoshai, for one, doing something so cowardly. But I found myself dismissing his shortcomings for my own selfish reason: receiving his letters made me so deliriously happy, nothing else really mattered.
CHAPTER 11
Manik and I continued to exchange letters over the next several months. The weather ceased to matter and I had only two kinds of days. Good Days and Waiting Days. April arrived and a subdued dhola drumbeat pulsed through the bamboo grooves. It was Rangoli Bihu, the spring harvest festival—the most joyous time in Assam, typically celebrated with a whole week of reveling and feasting. But that year the festivities were low-key because a thread of tension was running through our town.
In a surprise move, the Japanese Imperial Army had infiltrated India through Assam. They inched past the sawtooth mountains into Manipur and headed straight for the small Naga town of Dimapur, just northeast of Silchar. The invasion came on the heels of Britain’s crushing defeat in Singapore and its faltering hold on other colonies around the globe. It was a tactical move by the Japanese to overthrow the British in India. Dimapur was the hub of the Assam-Bengal railway, the only lifeline of food and military supplies for British troops stationed in Burma. If the Japanese captured Dimapur it would have devastating consequences for British troops and the British Empire and most likely tip the balance of power.
Suddenly Assam was no longer inviolable. The lights in Dadamoshai’s house stayed on all night as community leaders gathered on our veranda to discuss the Japanese situation. It was 2:00 a.m. and cups of tea remained untouched, dark rings forming on the inside rim. I sat quietly hidden in the shadows of the jasmine trellis, listening to the elders talk.
“New regiments have been deployed from South India,” said Amrat Singh, the Police Chief. He was an imposing man with a fine turban and beard, who still looked dapper at that unearthly hour. “The convoys are traveling night and day. But it will still take another ten days to reach Guahati. Meanwhile, the Japanese are advancing fast. Three divisions are marching toward Assam—over 80,000 Japanese soldiers, I am told.”
“I hear they have already blocked off the road between Kohima and Dimapur—is that true?” asked Dadamoshai. The crease lines on his forehead had deepened. He suddenly looked very old.
“So I hear,” Amrat Singh said. “We get news of the Japanese movements from a guerrilla force patrolling the Naga Hills. They keep the generals updated on the enemy’s advance.”
“The Naga Hills! That is the most treacherous jungle,” exclaimed Dadamoshai. “I can’t imagine British soldiers surviving those grueling conditions.”
“They are being assisted by the Nagas,” said the Forest Officer. “The Nagas, as you can imagine, are the only people capable of navigating that mountainous terrain. Also being a strong and hardy people, they run up and down as stretcher bearers. The soldiers are cutting their way through using machetes and taking extra doses of Benzedrine to stay awake. Grueling, as you say.”
I sat in the dark trying to imagine the British soldiers holed up in the rainy jungles with the Naga headhunters. I hoped to God they had ample food. The Nagas were known to be cannibals. They were a ferocious tribe who wore bushy loincloths and embellished their shields and earrings with the hair and bones of slain enemies. But the Nagas were also known to be an intensely loyal and moral people and they hated the “Japani.”
“Hundreds of Nagas have also joined the regular British Army in Kohima. People are coming together from all walks of life to stop the Japanese invasion. Even the tea planters—many planters have left their gardens to join the regiments.”
“Tea planters!” I exclaimed, unable to contain myself.
All heads turned toward the dark corner where I was sitting.
“Who was that?” asked Amrat Singh, squinting in my direction.
“Oh, just Layla,” said my grandfather dryly, “listening quietly as usual. Of late, Layla has a growing interest in the tea industry. I found one of my books in her room.”
I squirmed. “It’s a very interesting...history,” I muttered vaguely.
“I agree,” said Amrat Singh. “It’s fascinating. Many Assam tea planters are ex-army men, you know, from the First World War. So it is only natural that they rejoin British forces in this hour of need. I dread to think what will happen if Assam falls to the Japanese.”
Was Manik going off to war? I wondered. It sounded risky enough living with leopards and elephants in Aynakhal; then to march off to fight the Japanese with a bunch of Naga headhunters and armed with a blunderbuss that misfired sounded like suicide. I wanted to ask more about the tea planters and their involvement in the Japanese invasion, but Dadamoshai had smelled a rat and I did not want to draw any more attention to myself. So I excused myself quietly and went to my room.
* * *
As it transpired, the British allied forces defeated the Japanese only miles before they reached Dimapur. It was a precarious win. The colonial power teetered dangerously, only to upright itself in the end. Crushed and depleted, the Japanese Army crawled back over the border through Burma, thousands of Japanese soldiers dropping like flies along the way.
The news of the British victory came on a glittering spring morning. It was a beautiful jackal wedding day. A visible sigh of relief went through our town. The farmers came out with their dhola drums and pepa flutes and Assamese youth danced with abandon in the rice fields. Storekeepers threw open their shutters, dusted shelves and played cinema songs on their radios. The fish market reopened and rickshaws honked bulb horns and plied the red dirt roads carrying fat ladies with their shopping baskets. The Gulmohor trees on Rai Bahadur Road showered down blossoms and even the koels sang sweetly among the branches.
* * *
Aynakhal T.E.
30th May, 1944 2:45 a.m.
Dear Layla,
I am up at an unearthly hour, as you can see. The dryer in the factory broke down and I have been up all night battling with the mechanics to get it working again. Production got backed up. The leaf plucked today (and we are talking about 200 kilos of our best leaf of the season) has to be processed within six hours to avoid spoilage, so there was major tension until we got it running again. I probably went through half a bottle of whiskey and two packs of cigarettes.
We are in the middle of the second flush plucking season, the premium crop yield of the year, and we cannot miss a single cycle. The bushes plucked today will be ready to be plucked again five days from now. The sections are rotated. Tea grows at a furious rate this time of the year and Larry and I are kept on our toes to make sure the plucking schedules tie in with the factory production. The factory runs round the clock this time of the year.
Mr. McIntyre, our boss, is a legendary tea planter. Army man, brutal disciplinarian. Tea is very much a hands-on job and a good General Manager can make all the difference. Much as I grumble I am lucky to be learning from the best. There is so much to learn about tea growing and tea processing—I am not sure if I will pick it all up in one lifetime.
It’s difficult to sleep now, knowing I have to be up in a few hours, so here I am sitting on my veranda writing to you. I just got the night chowkidar to make me a cup of tea. It is almost dawn.
I just reread your letter. I guess I forgot to explain who Jamina is. She is Alasdair’s “Old Party”—OP as they are called in tea circles. In other words, his concubine or “kept woman.” Jamina used to be a common prostitute, till Alasdair took her under his wing. They seem to be quite compatible. She is a simple Bangladeshi woman, very shy. Unfortunately the tea crowd ostracizes her.
Alasdair is another story. He is quite an enigma. You will hardly believe this, but he is of royal blood. Alasdair is the direct descendant of Scottish nobility and the Earl of Carruthers. He is the only living heir to the Carruthers land and title. And here he is a tea planter hiding away in the jungles of Assam with Jamina. I suspect he is running away. His obligations make him claustrophobic. I can empathize with that.
I should try and get an hour of sleep at least. Tomorrow is another hellish day. I can’t wait for club night, Monday. I am getting to be an excellent bridge player.
Yours,
Manik
Manik’s letters came fast and furious. He wrote at least once a week, sometimes twice. His letters always arrived in a square, blue envelope, addressed to me in his elegant hand. The y of my name dipped flamboyantly as if doing a curtsy.
I devoured his letters from end to end, and then reread them slowly in private. I loved the flowing lines of his blue fountain pen. I dwelled on the curve of each stroke, the way he stretched his T’s across the word, the impatient dots of his i’s that flew in tiny bird shapes ahead of the letter. He had the most exquisite penmanship I had ever seen. Whenever his letter arrived, my stomach fluttered with butterflies and my mind floated like a brilliant scarf over my everyday reality.
Often his letters would smell faintly of tobacco. Once he enclosed a serrated tea leaf and another time the waxy petals of a camellia flower, satiny brown and smooth as a baby’s skin.
I kept his letters hidden under my mattress, where they formed guilty bumps that disturbed my sleep. Chaya was my coconspirator. She intercepted Manik’s letters before the mail got to Dadamoshai’s desk and put them under my pillow. She never asked any questions.
I was not sure what Dadamoshai would have to say about our alliance. Manik was still formally engaged to another woman. There were dos and don’ts in our society. I was secretly writing to another woman’s fiancé, and no matter how platonic our letters, there was something improper about the exchange. I was torn by the complicity of the act. Sometimes my guilt bled through the thin fabric of my deceit—a dark telltale stain, spreading for the whole world to see. But there was no turning back. I simply did not have the power or the will.
CHAPTER 12
News of Kona Sen’s broken engagement sent a tremor through our small town. Rickshaws clogged the narrow roads as garrulous housewives stopped each other on the way to the fish market to exchange gossip. Their mustard greens wilted and their fish spoiled, but these were but small woes compared to the misfortunes of the Sen family.
An outrage, they said, shaking their heads. The poor girl, after waiting so many years for that worthless cad! What will happen to her now? She was getting past her prime. She could easily become a seed pumpkin.
Toothless dames sat on four-poster beds, suffused by the scent of cloves and mothballs. They rolled acacia nuts into betel leaves and clucked sadly about the waywardness of youth. The big mistake parents make, they reminded one another, is to send their boys to study abroad in the first place. So many temptations! Who is to blame when the boys make poor choices? Look what happened to the District Commissioner’s son—untarnished ancestry, fine lineage and everything, and what does he do? Marry an English waitress—a common peasant girl with man-size hands and ankles thick as tree trunks! The son is a qualified doctor. He should know better! Who will feel sorry for him when his wife runs off with one of her own kind?
Maybe Mr. Sen with all his money could still find someone for Kona. Marrying Manik Deb would have been a grave mistake. He had no sense of family honor. And who did he think he was, pretending to be an Englishman? He would expect his poor wife to wear small skirts, drink and behave in unbecoming ways. Oh yes, Kona Sen was better off without Manik Deb, that was for sure.
My tongue burned with the secret. From Manik’s letters I did not once get the impression he was a misfit. Rather, he seemed to have slipped into the tea lifestyle easily and quickly, without a wrinkle. As for Kona’s problems, I’m ashamed to say, it was hard for me to feel sorry for her. When I heard of their broken engagement the first thing I felt was a tiny shoot of joy followed by zero qualms. Kona’s plight was the last thing on my mind. I was now dwelling on the fragile possibility of my future with Manik Deb.
* * *
Just as well I did not waste my guilt because fortune soon smiled on Kona Sen. Through an obscure but lucky family connection, Kona’s father found a rich landlord’s son as a replacement groom and—oh, miracles—the horses were switched smoothly in midstream. Even luckier, the wedding date did not have to be changed; the caterer’s order did not have to be canceled. Even the print shop agreed to reprint the cards at half price. They waived the extra charge for a rush order and in a fit of generosity threw in some glitter for free.
Mr. Sen was a happy man. Manik Deb may have taken the starch out of him temporarily, but now he was back to his old form. He smiled broadly as he went door to door, personally delivering the wedding cards. He expounded the merits of his new son-in-law and left behind a trail of gold dust that glittered as brightly as his optimism.
Rumors floated in the fish market that Kona’s wedding was going to be the grandest occasion the town had ever seen. Despite the wartime rationing and shortages, nothing would be compromised. The shenai maestro—no less than the grand Ustad Palit himself—would be arriving from Calcutta with his entourage of musicians. An elevated two-story platform was being constructed for their performance. A twelve-course feast was planned. The very best rui fish, famous for its size and flavor, was being shipped in from across the Padma River. Guests would have their own silver finger bowls with scented rose water to wash their fingers. As for the mouth-freshening paan served at the end of the meal, it would be coated in real gold leaf.
Nobody talked about Manik Deb. He was the fallen son, the tainted seed. He had gone from being the most eligible bachelor in town to a nonentity. For the townsfolk, Manik Deb had ceased to exist.
* * *
Shortly after the broken engagement, I received a letter from Manik Deb. I expected it to be filled with his thoughts on what had happened, or more wistfully, his declarations of love for me. It was neither. It was all about a leopard hunt.
How odd. Surely he knew his own marriage had been called off? Why was there no mention of it in his letter? I decided to bring it up.
Aynakhal T.E.
10th October 1944
Dear Layla,
You make me laugh! Of course I know my own wedding has been called off! As for how I received the news, it was a telegram. Short and sweet.
You offered me your condolences. All I can say is that you are a terrible liar! In all honesty, I am happy, and I suspect you are, too. Don’t deny it! My biggest relief comes from knowing that Kona has found a more deserving husband. In all sincerity I wish her well. If my decision to take up this job had negatively affected her future, I can’t say I could have lived the rest of my life guilt free.
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- Жанр: Историческая литература, Книги о войне, Современная зарубежная литература
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 420 стр. 1 иллюстрация
- ISBN: 9781472074218
- Дата выхода книги: 27 декабря 2018
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
TEATIME FOR THE FIREFLYLayla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independently-minded by her eccentric Anglophile grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb—a man betrothed to another. All were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined—if not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.Layla’s life as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world’s finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labor and British efficiency. Fascinated by this curious culture of whiskey-soaked ex-pat adventurers who seem fazed by neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialize, and the peculiar servants she now finds under her charge.But navigating the hazards of tea-garden society will hardly be her biggest challenge. For even Layla’s remote home is not safe from the incendiary change sweeping India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial world is at a tipping point as tectonic political shifts rock the tea industry, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that threatens their very lives.
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