Daisy's Long Road Home. Merryn Allingham

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       CHAPTER 3

       Bombay and Jasirapur, early April 1948

      It was hot, scorchingly hot. After ten years, Daisy had forgotten the intensity of an Indian summer. She walked along the quayside to the waiting car, feeling herself wilt beneath the sun’s glare and her limbs drain of energy. But it wasn’t the heat that was bothering her most. It was memory. Again. Memory that was sharp and painful and minted afresh. She’d guessed this moment would be difficult but she hadn’t foreseen just how difficult. It was as though she were once more living through that long ago April day. She felt it all: bewilderment as she’d waited in the noisy reception, the one she could see now, just over her shoulder; her nervous smoothing of the silk dress for which she’d saved so hard but which the heat had crumpled to a rag; the sick uncertainty when the man she was to marry was nowhere to be seen. And then out into the crowd. The sheer overpowering energy of India, its people, its colours, its smells, met for the first time. Above all, the memory of Anish Rana. He had been the one who’d accompanied her to church, delivered her to a drunken bridegroom. This morning there was to be no church and no wedding. Instead a slow carriage drive, sandwiched between Mike and Grayson, through Bombay’s congested streets to the Victoria railway station.

      The journey to Jasirapur took as long as before and was almost as tiresome, the train bumping its way across a sprawling landscape on rails laid down when Victoria was Empress of India. But bump though the train might, travelling was not as uncomfortable as ten years earlier. This time first class meant a little more luxury. There were sleeping bunks and a courteous attendant who brought them food and drink, and bowls of water to wash with. It was badly needed, for heat was still the enemy. The sun hung huge and golden in the sky, burning through the dusty haze to broil the plain beneath, and, despite thick linen blinds, it permeated every crevice of the compartment. Handles on doors soon grew too hot to touch and the studded leather benches turned slimy beneath damp limbs.

      Once again, the train stopped at every small station to allow the waiting crowds to clamber aboard, a noisy hustle accompanying every halt they made. Despite the clamour, and despite the heat and the dust, she felt sufficiently relaxed to fall asleep on her narrow bunk during the night’s darkest hours. She was grateful to have the compartment to herself. It was impossible to keep from remembering but there was a solace in travelling alone for much of the journey. Occasionally, her companions would put their heads around the door, once or twice they drank tea with her, but otherwise she was left in peace.

      And it was a kind of peace, she realised. The future might still be uncertain, but it was an uncertainty she could accept, a lifetime away from the wrenching hesitancy of her last journey to Jasirapur. This time there was no need to watch covertly a new husband’s expression or examine every word she said before she spoke it. No need, in fact, to placate the man she had married but hardly recognised from their courtship in London. How callous Gerald had been. It was only now that she saw the depth of his unkindness. She’d been so desperate to fit in, desperate to please him and not do or say the wrong thing. Of course, she’d failed on every count. It was never going to be any other way. The odds were stacked against her from the very beginning.

      But this time, when an hour after dawn Grayson helped her down from the train at Marwar Junction—the station’s sign was still crooked, she saw—she found she could walk to the waiting jeep with an untroubled heart. There was no man to tangle with her thoughts. Gerald was long dead and Grayson had kept the promise he’d made on that fleeting visit to Brighton. Not a word of marriage had come from him, not even a suggestion that he’d ever been her lover. The journey had brought them closer but closer as friends—three friends, in fact—bound together by their Indian adventure.

      Though it was barely six o’clock in the morning, the sun was already burning a path through the platform’s paving, its heat piercing the thin soles of her shoes. Creased and weary from the journey, she climbed gratefully into the stuffy jeep. In a few minutes, luggage had been loaded and directions given.

      ‘Let’s hope the house isn’t too far. This heat is appalling.’ Mike mopped a dripping forehead. ‘I’m in desperate need of a shower.’

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