The Sunlight on the Garden (23 page)

I feel an overwhelming sadness. I also once again feel that ineluctable tiredness that makes every movement – even the pushing back of the drawer – a superhuman effort. With a sigh I fall on to her bed. As children in India, sharing a room, we would often creep into each other's beds. This bed is unforgivingly hard and the one pillow feels as if it were stuffed with straw. It is on this bed that the American woman – Mrs Bird, Bard, Baird, I cannot remember – must have found her. But surprisingly the thought of her lifeless body lying there does not fill me with horror or revulsion. It is even comforting, though I can smell carbolic and can also still smell that sour-sweet urine stench.

I put a hand to my forehead. I shut my eyes. When one is very old, as I am, reality and dreams blur into each other. Simultaneously one sleeps and one is awake, as though one were two people. The present becomes a feather-light dream, the past an oppressive reality …

… The first thing that I noticed was the shoes. Clearly they had once been elegant. But now their former white was scratched, scuffed and discoloured in patches, and each was trodden down at the heel. One shoelace was white but a length of twine did service for the other. The reason that I saw the shoes before I saw the face of the man who was wearing them was that I was squatting in the dust as I wound up the model aeroplane that my father and mother had recently given me for my eighth birthday. The task involved rotating the propeller of the flimsy, balsa-wood biplane between thumb and forefinger until the elastic was taut. When I had completed the task, I jumped to my feet, plane in hand, and launched it out over the garden. My mother and the owner of the shoes both broke off their conversation, and my twin sister, Maria, who had been squatting beside me, intently watching what I had been doing, jumped to her feet. We all gazed skywards and then raised our hands to shield our eyes against the glare. I felt an intense, transient joy as the small, indomitable object moved erratically across the yellow-brown lawn and then spiralled down into a rose-bed choked with weeds.

Sharing my joy, Maria clapped her hands.

My mother turned back to the man.

His present name was Joseph, but once it had been Rasipuram, he was later to tell us. He had become Joseph when he had been converted to Christianity at a Lucknow mission school. At the age of eleven he had been admitted to the school not merely as a pupil but also to work as a part-time kitchen hand in lieu of the fees that neither he nor his family could pay. He had arrived at our house, hundreds of miles from Lucknow, and now he was looking for work. My father was also a missionary, and a member of his congregation had told Joseph that our cook had returned to his Himalayan village because of the illness of his wife and that we were looking for another cook. It was this job that Joseph wanted.

My sister, always eager to be my acolyte, raced off to fetch the model plane. I now stood behind the man, listening to what passed between him and my mother. When I had looked up from the white shoes, I had felt an immediate attraction, I do not know why. Short, mahogany-skinned and muscular, he was dressed in tattered khaki trousers and grubby white shirt. His hair, reaching to his shoulders, was ebony and shiny in the sunlight. The line of the jaw was strong. Later, when he finally turned away, his errand successfully accomplished, I saw the square face, with a puckered scar on the forehead, a nose that was all but flat, and soft, dark eyes.

After all her years in India, my mother still spoke only rudimentary Hindi. The man's English – because of the time that he had spent at the mission school, he said – was far, far better. It was therefore in English that they talked while I – and later my sister, the aeroplane cupped in both her hands as though it were a bird – listened.

‘Have you any experience as a cook?'

‘Oh, yes, lady. I was assistant to cook at other mission. I learn everything from him.'

‘The sahib is fussy about his food. He isn't easy to please. About what he eats, I mean.' So ascetic in all other respects, my father was a constant, almost neurotic complainer about the meals served to him. Of all the luxuries of his previous life in England, good food remained the only one now important to him.

‘I am sure I can please the sahib. I can learn.'

In the event, my mother, herself an excellent cook, found him the aptest of pupils. He was also, unlike our previous cook, as obsessive as my mother about hygiene. About that previous cook my mother often told a story to illustrate how ‘impossible' (invariably her word when on the subject, a favourite of hers) Indian servants could be. At a dinner-party for the Governor, then on a visit to the city, and some prominent members of the English community, there had been an interminable wait for the main course, leg of lamb. My mother had eventually excused herself and hurried along to the kitchen. She had there found the cook squatting on the floor, with the bone of one of the two legs of lamb clasped between big toe and the one next to it as he struggled to carve the far too tough meat with a knife far too blunt. Slices were falling on to the grimy floor. My mother had hesitated and had then decided that, since there was no alternative, the lamb had better be served up to the guests.

With Joseph everything perishable would be stored away in the larder or the giant icebox, the flypapers would be constantly renewed, and stacks of dirty crockery no longer waited to be washed from one meal or even one day to another, as in the past. Joseph, my mother would often say, was a treasure.

My father, too, approved of rum. He could scramble eggs exactly as my father insisted on having them, neither too watery nor too dry, his puff pastry was miraculously light, and he always used boiling water to make the China (never Indian) tea of which my father drank so much. From time to time, seated at his desk while, hands clasped before him, Joseph stood respectfully in front of him, my father would start some religious conversation of a kind that my mother, if she was present, would soon find a way to terminate. Poor Joseph could find no such way. ‘I have been thinking of the Gaderene swine,' I heard my father begin on one occasion. On another it was: ‘Have you ever wondered when reading of the Prodigal Son …?' He was a genuinely religious and decent man, constantly tormented by the mysteries both of the Bible and of the faith that he painfully and persistently tried to derive from it. He was also an excellent doctor, with the natural flair for diagnosis essential for success in those days when scientific tests were far fewer and more fallible.

My mother assigned to Joseph what was no more than a mud hut in the servants' quarters. Instead of a door it had a curtain improvised from a tattered, gaudily striped green-and-orange bedspread, Indian in manufacture, that had once covered the bed of a nanny who had long since left us. There were two bungalows between ours – the one closest to the toy church, with its perfunctory gothic ornamentation and crooked spire – and the gate to the compound. In one of the other bungalows lived Dr Penrose, the grey, grim, childless head of the mission, inconsolable for the loss of his wife to typhoid, and in the other the young, recently married couple, the Roches, with the ready smiles and the Geordie accents, who had arrived only a few weeks before. The couple, along with my mother, conducted lessons in the little, airless hall behind the church.

The children of other English families with which we from time to time exchanged visits were forbidden by their parents to go near any servant quarters, theirs or anyone else's, much less to enter them. But, highly unusual for that era, our parents had no qualms about our doing so. They were a couple without any racial prejudice. My mother's severe judgements were directed impartially at white and brown alike, and my father made absolutely no differentiation of treatment between his many Indian patients and his few European or American ones.

However, both my parents retained the acute sense of class distinction imbued in them – my mother the daughter of a baronet with a small country estate, my father the son of a successful barrister – from their earliest years. Among their closest friends were a grand Indian couple who lived in a rambling house, not unlike some Victorian vicarage in a wealthy parish in England, called, despite its relatively modest size, ‘The Palace'. The man, who had been educated at Harrow and Oxford, would have been the maharajah of a small state if his grandfather had not abdicated on becoming a Christian. To Indians not of this sort of standing, my parents were always courteous and friendly; but their attitude remained essentially one of superiors to inferiors and patrons to protégés. Such people were never among their dinner guests, just as their equivalents would never have been their dinner guests back in England.

Maria and I had already been in the habit of visiting the servants' quarters even before Joseph's arrival. Now we went there frequently I used to feel an inexplicable excitement as, without declaring my presence before doing so, I jerked aside the old bedspread and entered, followed by Maria. Often, for want of a chair, Joseph would be squatting or reclining on the narrow, low bedstead, which, unlike our two beds, did not have springs but, instead, horizontal and vertical cords interwoven in a crisscross pattern. He always seemed to be happy to see us, putting down the book or newspaper that he had been reading and simultaneously screwing up his eyes and smiling up at us as his face caught the sunlight all at once introduced by my raising of the improvised curtain.

Although, at the age of eight, both of us were now avid readers, I was curiously uninterested in the books, usually written in English, that he would hold up to show us. But Maria would glance at them and sometimes even read a page or two. Many years later, when we were in our thirties, she told me that one of these books had been Carlyle's
Latter-Day Pamphlets
and another the first volume of
Das Kapital
in an English translation. Could that have been true? She had a gift not merely for causes but also for misremembering.

As soon as we had returned from school – to which an elderly orderly would take us and bring us back – we would often rush over to Joseph's quarters to see if he were there. By then my parents would have had their lunch and my mother, never my father, would be having what she called ‘a little he-down' Joseph would be free. Maria would sit on the bed beside him and I would squat on the mud floor. Later my mother would chide me ‘The seat of those shorts is filthy! What have you been doing?' Joseph told us that he had learned to play the recorder at the previous mission. He would now pick up the instrument set out, together with his few books, his turban and his pair of white shoes (given to him, he had by now told us, by one of the missionaries) on a page of
The Times of India
in one corner of his room. On it he would play to us. At the time there seemed to me nothing incongruous in hearing him play ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland' or ‘Greensleeves', two staples of his repertoire. I can never hear either of those tunes now without a mingled feeling of longing, sadness and bewilderment.

Something else that Joseph told us that he had learned at the previous mission was woodcarving. He would do this with a two-bladed penknife, working deftly and quickly on wood that he foraged from the trees in our compound. Sometimes we would ourselves bring him suitable pieces of wood The objects that he produced were usually animals – cats, dogs, bullocks, donkeys – crude and showing no particular skill but easily recognisable. At Christmas he produced some diminutive sheep and cattle for the crib that my mother would set up each year. Some of these objects he would present to us, some to other members of the mission or to friends of ours.

On the bed, Maria had a way of sitting extremely close to him. She would even lean against him, her face upturned as he talked or played to us. Occasionally he would put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her even closer. Then an expression of dreamily abstracted happiness would appear on her face, and she would shut her eyes, as if about to go to sleep. Even my parents might have disapproved of this proximity between their daughter and a servant. Our British and American neighbours would certainly have done so. But to me, at that age, it seemed in no way odd, much less an occasion for disapproval or alarm.

I rarely visited Joseph in the kitchen but Maria often did so. Soon she had become both his part-time assistant and his pupil. He instructed her in how to thicken gravy, make a
roux
, poach an egg, prepare vegetables. She could have learned all these things from our mother but she preferred to learn them only from him. Divinity fudge, always tricky, was a speciality of our mother. But it was from Joseph that Maria acquired a skill in making it that remained with her into old age. On the rare occasions when she came to stay with me, she would announce ‘I think I'm going to make you some divinity fudge' and my heart would then sink. She would leave the kitchen in a mess that affronted my natural tidiness, with the pan often burned. Worse, having loved the glistening mini-peaks of peppermint-flavoured sugar and white of egg as a child, I now hated an excessive sweetness that made my teeth ache.

Maria, unlike myself, had never been a docile child. But she always did precisely what Joseph told her. Once she said to me: ‘Oh, I do wish Joseph were younger!' ‘Why?' ‘Because then I could marry him when I grow up.' ‘Oh, that would be no good! He's so poor.' ‘I don't care.'

In March, as the temperature began to rise and rise and my mother and father debated whether she should or should not take us both up to Naini Tal, leaving him to suffer the hot weather on his own, Maria and I celebrated our joint ninth birthday. On both that day and the day before it Joseph would allow neither of us into his kitchen. He was preparing a surprise for us, he told us. We guessed what the surprise would be. It would be roast chicken with sage and onion stuffing, bread sauce, roast potatoes and tinned peas. Chicken was our favourite dish.