The Wheel of Surya. Jamila Gavin

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СКАЧАТЬ with ‘rubbish!’ and retreated into the garden to light up his pipe.

      Later, when Harold had returned to London, Dora’s mother had come into her room that night, and sat by her bed.

      ‘Dora darling,’ she had said in the soft, anxious voice which had become her hallmark over the years, ‘Dora, your father and I, well, we don’t really consider this young man to be very suitable for you. I mean . . . he is a bit . . . immature. One of these idealists. A socialist too, I wouldn’t be surprised. We, er . . . really can’t allow you to throw yourself away on a man like that.’ She gazed pleadingly into her daughter’s eyes silently begging her not to rebel or make life difficult.

      Dora was indeed full of doubts, but for different reasons. It was not at all what she had planned. She had wanted first of all to experience the independence of having her own profession and income: then, in her own time, when she felt ready, to marry some nice steady respectable man – a banker maybe, or even a vicar. She imagined herself leading a small town life, accompanying local singers or instrumentalists in a purely amateur way; perhaps giving little soirees in their comfortably off suburban home, and gaining some kind of minor fame as a talented and much sought after hostess in the locality.

      When Harold was offered a teaching job in India and asked her to go with him, she refused, and for a while, did everything she could to dismiss him from her life. Harold, always the eternal optimist, declared that he was sure she would come round to the notion of marrying him one of these days, but in the meantime, he would go on ahead. ‘I’m sure we’re right for each other,’ he said. ‘Perhaps when I’m established out there and have found us a home, you’ll come and join me in India!’ Then he was gone.

      Without Harold, the world suddenly seemed a greyer place. The pavements were harder and the weather bleaker. Nothing seemed to matter the way it did. Dora trudged on with her training; became a teacher and tried to merge into the provincial life of her small town. Her parents hoped she would marry ‘that nice young doctor,’ but neither the nice young doctor, who did indeed propose, nor the other suitable bachelors in the district, with their respectable jobs and comfortable houses, were able to quell a choking feeling of loss.

      Harold wrote often. He had been sent to teach in a tiny rural village in the Punjab called Deri. He was learning the language and was full of idealism about bringing education to the villagers and persuading them to send their children to school, before putting them to work on the land. He wrote in particular about a boy called Govind.

      ‘Govind is just the son of an illiterate peasant farmer, but he is one of the most intelligent boys I’ve ever come across anywhere. I’m sure I can help him go far. I wish you would come out here and see for yourself, Dora. I could do with you by my side. I could do with your good sense to talk over my day, to discuss and make plans. Most of all, I could do with a good accompanist. I get tired of the sound of a solo violin, and God knows what these people make of it. I can get hold of a piano, you know . . .’

      ‘Get hold of a piano,’ Dora wrote back at last. ‘I’m coming!’

      Now, standing here, thousands of miles away on an Indian verandah Dora smiled, remembering her incredulity and joy.

      As she relished her own happiness, she wondered about Jhoti swooping up and down on Harold’s garden swing. She began to feel linked to her in some peculiar way. While she and Harold were being married in All Souls Church, Jhoti was having an arranged marriage to Govind in her village down the road. When Dora became pregnant, Govind told Harold that his wife, too, was expecting a baby. They both produced girls, although Harold remarked, ‘I don’t think Govind will be half so pleased with a daughter as I am.’

      Suddenly, feeling both amazed, yet strangely perturbed, Dora realised that she and Jhoti were both pregnant again at the same time. She watched the young girl as she stopped swinging, heaved Marvinder off her lap and stood up, smoothing out her tunic.

      She curved her hands round her stomach and, for the first time in her life, felt that she wasn’t entirely in control of her own destiny. Her happiness gave way to melancholy.

      As Jhoti and Marvinder moved slowly round the back of the bungalow and out of sight, Dora felt two arms clasp her round her knees.

      ‘Mummy. Swing. Let’s go on Daddy’s swing.’ Little golden-haired Edith, still tousled with her afternoon’s sleep looked up at her with demanding blue eyes.

      ‘No, baby.’ The ayah came and extricated her. ‘Leave Mummy. I’ll swing you.’

      ‘That’s all right, Shanta. I’ll do it.’ She took Edith’s hand and jumped her down the verandah steps. They walked, the two of them, along the winding path, between the carefully created geometrical flower beds which Harold had carved out of the red earth.

      Suddenly Dora was gripped by an overwhelming sense of helplessness; a feeling of plunging downwards as in a bad dream, without power, without knowing where and how and if she would land. She stopped in her tracks as Edith ran on to the swing. She felt afraid. If after all, one had no power; if there was no such thing as free will, that everyone was simply part of some divine purpose, then how could she control anything? How could she protect her child or plan for the future? Perhaps nothing she did amounted to anything, because it was all pre-ordained anyway.

      The ayah squatted on the verandah watching her. Dora felt uncomfortable. What was she thinking? Did she mind serving this white foreign woman, who had the audacity to come and claim ownership of this land; who expected to be in command and who claimed superiority in all things just because of an accident of birth?

      Suddenly, rarely, Dora was overcome with homesickness. ‘England.’ She spoke the word out loud. She turned her eyes westwards, beyond the compound gate, over the long, white road, on and on over the fields of mustard seed aflame with yellow flowers, till her eye settled on the simple, rounded oblong shape of the Hindu temple. The sun was halfway down the sky, and by nightfall would set just behind the temple.

      Impatient with waiting to be pushed on the swing, Edith came running. ‘Come on, Mummy. Push me. Come on.’ She tugged her mother’s arm.

      ‘Edith,’ Dora said, picking up her child. ‘Do you see that temple far away over there, where the sun is beginning to drop through the sky?’

      Edith nodded, putting her thumb in her mouth.

      ‘If you could go over there, and keep on going west, do you know where you would come to?’

      Edith shook her head, mystified by her mother’s strange mood.

      ‘Edith, you would come to England. England is over there, and one day, I’ll take you.’

      ‘Swing, Mummy, swing me!’ Edith wriggled out of her arms and forced her mother to put her down.

      Unsure how to quell this sudden sense of desolation, Dora took a few moments to fight back her tears. Then with a bright shout, she called out, ‘Hold tight now! I’m coming to push you!’

THREE

       The Birth

       ‘Aloo, okra, baigan ho,

       Chaaval, Channa, Bhoona lo.’

      Marvinder sat in the earth repeating her rhyme over and over СКАЧАТЬ