The Wheel of Surya. Jamila Gavin

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СКАЧАТЬ when they heaved Govind’s rusting trunk on to the bullock cart, she watched as they fussed and kissed him and showered him with freshly strung garlands still wet with dew, and only then, just before he climbed into the cart, did he seek her out. He came towards her, awkwardly, without meeting her eye. She knelt and kissed his feet. When she rose to her feet, her head stayed bowed and she backed away. Their bodies stayed formally apart, still strangers. ‘Be a good daughter to my mother and father,’ he murmured. Then he was gone.

      The road looked white, even in the pre-dawn darkness. When the bullock cart had come to take Govind to the railway station, it was glaringly white; dazzlingly white. Jhoti had stood a long while, watching and watching until the bullock cart, carrying her husband away, had diminished to a speck. Then a rough voice had yelled, ‘Hey, Jhoti! Come now, girl! You can’t stand there pining all day. There’s work to be done; spices to be ground; rice to be sifted.’ Her mother-in-law summoned her to the kitchen.

      That was three years ago, yet even now as she stared down the long white, gleaming road it still seemed to beckon her home and her heart ached. Pregnant again at last, for the second time, she worked her hands over her swollen belly as if trying to mould the embryo inside her. ‘Please be a boy,’ she murmured, ‘be my son.’ Perhaps then, she would attain some status in the family and gain some respect and affection from Govind.

      All around her from the height of the dyke road, Jhoti could see the glows of charcoal fires like low stars, flickering through the trees. She could hear the faint drone of voices, and the smell of tobacco colliding with the scent of jasmine flowers.

      And reaching her ears, as if radiated outwards on the steady beam of electricity which lit up the sky at the mission bungalow, came the sounds of a violin and piano. The English sahib and his memsahib were making their nightly music.

      Mozart soared through the darkness like a strange spirit bird.

      Tomorrow, Jhoti thought, she must go over to the Chadwick bungalow and try and find another tin for Marvinder.

      She forced her memories back into the inner recesses of the mind and like a ghost, wandered, unseen, back to her home. She splashed herself quietly, at the courtyard pump, then crept into the kitchen. That’s where she and Marvinder had a space in a corner on the floor for sleeping, except when Govind came home. Then they were allowed their own room off the verandah. Feeling her way in the pitch darkness, she knelt down beside the mattress on the floor where her daughter lay. The child didn’t even stir, as Jhoti eased herself under the thin sheet, and drew the little girl into her arms; then she too fell deeply asleep.

TWO

       Dora

      Dora Chadwick had got to know Jhoti by sight. She had often noticed the girl slipping discreetly up the side of the compound and disappearing round the back to the servants’ quarters. At first it had annoyed her, and she’d called Arjun, the bearer and asked him about her.

      ‘Who’s that girl who hangs around here from time to time? Is she anything to do with us?’

      Arjun clicked his tongue with irritation. ‘That’s Jhoti, Memsahib, Govind’s wife. She’s always hanging round here. I’ll get rid of her.’

      ‘No, no! Don’t.’ Dora restrained him. ‘I was just curious. She doesn’t bother me at all, and if she’s Govind’s wife, well of course I don’t mind her coming here. I just wondered!’

      ‘She’s friendly with the cook’s wife, Maliki,’ Arjun told her. ‘She comes for gossip and company. They say she’s not too happy what with Govind being away, they treat her badly. But I’m always telling her to clear off.’

      ‘I don’t mind,’ said Dora, ‘so long as she doesn’t interfere with the servants’ work, so leave her be.’

      ‘As you wish, Memsahib,’ Arjun shrugged, as if disappointed that he couldn’t go and make a display of pulling rank.

      She watched Jhoti now as she meandered along lazily, clinging to the shade of the hibiscus hedge, while her little girl selected pebbles from the ground with microscopic precision and added them to the collection loading down her veil. Such a quaint doll-like child, Dora thought, and about the same age as her own little Edith; but where Jhoti’s child had a hard, thin sparse brown body, already worked and shaped like a piece of carved wood, Edith was soft and plump and white and golden, looking vulnerable and breakable; two more different children could not be imagined.

      The two figures, mother and daughter, moved like patterns of light, almost strobing, as they passed in and out of the yellowy shade of lemon trees. Suddenly, Jhoti noticed a swing made of rope and a plank of wood, hanging loosely from one of the branches. Harold Chadwick had rigged it up only yesterday for Edith. Her body suddenly animated, and clasping Marvinder on her knee, Jhoti jumped on the swing and pushed away, urging it up and up, her head tossed back in ecstasy and the child’s laughter pealing through the still afternoon.

      ‘Why on earth did Govind have to go and get married so soon?’ Dora sighed with frustration. The two of them were still just children. It was ridiculous.

      Harold, of course had minded for other reasons. Govind was his protégé, a symbol of everything Harold believed in for India, and he was afraid at first, that marriage would mean the end of all his ambitions for the boy.

      Harold had found his home in India. Originally, he had gone over to visit an uncle of his who was a tea planter. ‘Just for a break,’ he’d said. ‘See the world before I get trapped for ever in some job in the city.’ But somehow, India struck a deep chord. He travelled it from one end to another, and found it hard to leave. The experience had been almost spiritual. He could only describe it as a feeling of having found his true home. He knew he must return; that this was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life, and he came back to England only so that he could qualify as a teacher and pursue that one goal.

      It was at the teacher training college in London, that he and Dora met. They both loved music; she a pianist and he a violinist. They often played together and, of course, went to as many concerts as their meagre student funds allowed.

      Dora was intending to go back to the Midlands from where she came originally. Like a good middle-class young woman, she would take a respectable teacher’s job until a suitable husband came along, and then she would join the ranks of housewives and give birth to more good little middle-class children. But then Harold asked her to marry him, and for a while she went into a state of total confusion and indecision. She found herself loving a man whose plans didn’t in the least fit in with her own.

      Of course, she went back home to discuss it with her parents. They were not at all pleased with the proposition. The idea of her going to India to live and make a home there seemed foolhardy, risky; had she considered the consequences for their children, if they had any? There would be the separation, for of course, nobody kept their children in India beyond infancy, but sent them back to boarding schools, doomed, in many cases, not to see them for years at a time.

      Worst of all was when they actually met Harold. It was his enthusiasm which really galled them. The way his eyes shone when he talked about the people of India; their wisdom, the customs, the beauty, the poverty, the hardship, and his absolute belief that one day, this ‘noble’ people would rule themselves. ‘After all,’ he reminded Dora’s parents, ‘Indians were one of the most civilised and cultured people on earth at a time when we Britons were running around in woad.’

      It СКАЧАТЬ