JAMILA GAVIN

When I am asked if the Surya trilogy is autobiographical, the answer is yes and no. Yes, that I couldn’t have written it had I not been born in India into the period leading up to the Second World War, independence and partition; yes, that as a child I lived both in a palace the Punjab and in a drab flat in a war-damaged London street; yes, that music, sea voyages, schools, friends were all part of my rich Anglo-Indian experience. But no – in any accurate sense to do with the plot or events described in the books. Everything I experienced simply became material with which I could overlay a complete fantasy. As a child can turn a table into a house or two chairs into a train, I turned my life into a fiction in which any resemblance to characters living or dead is purely coincidental – as they say in the movies.

With gratitude to my parents for their memories;

much love to Arthur, and to Geoff and Miriam for their endless support.

First published in Great Britain 1992 by Methuen Children’s Books

This edition published 2018 by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 1992 Jamila Gavin

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2018

ISBN 978 1 4052 9174 3

Ebook ISBN 978 1 4052 9278 8

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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‘The Body is the chariot,

Reason is the charioteer,

Mind is the reins.

The Horses are the five senses,

Their paths the objects of sense.

So the one whose chariot is driven by Reason

And holds the reins of his Mind,

Reaches the end of the journey.’

The Upanishads

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication and Copyright

Epigraph

PART ONE: Swift and Shining

ONE: The White Road

TWO: Dora

THREE: The Birth

FOUR: The Swing

FIVE: Govind

SIX: The Snake

SEVEN: The Lake

EIGHT: Goodbye

PART TWO: Fire

NINE: Fire

TEN: Flight

ELEVEN: Into the Midnight Hour

TWELVE: The Edge of the World

THIRTEEN: The Ship

FOURTEEN: Changing

FIFTEEN: A House on the Heath

SIXTEEN: An Address in Whitechapel

SEVENTEEN: The Meeting

EIGHTEEN: A Sound from the Past

NINETEEN: Unwillingly to School

TWENTY: A Man in a Riley

PART THREE: Just as in the Wheel

TWENTY-ONE: Finding Out

TWENTY-TWO: Missing

TWENTY-THREE: Have You Ever Been Lonely?

TWENTY-FOUR: On the Run

TWENTY-FIVE: Deep and Dreamless Streets

Q & A with Jamila Gavin

Map

The Wheel of Surya: Fascinating Fact File

Back series promotional page

PART ONE

Swift and Shining

‘Swift and shining is the great God Surya,

Maker of light,

Illuminator of the universe;

Traversing the heavens in his twelve-wheeled chariot,

With flying sparks and seven horses.

Creating day

Ensuring birth

With the rays of his all-seeing sun.’

The Rig-Veda

ONE

The White Road

‘Jhoti! That little brat of yours is stealing Ajit’s tin! If you don’t come right now and sort it out, her bottom will feel the back of my hand!’

A woman’s voice screeched harshly across the yard. It penetrated the inner courtyard where Jhoti crouched outside the kitchen door, grinding spices on a block of ribbed stone. She had been at her job an hour or more so her arms ached and her fingers were all red with rolling and mixing the spices into a paste.

She jerked back on her haunches and sprang to her feet; too quickly, for as the blood drained from her face and a sharp pain jabbed through her stomach, she swayed with dizziness and had to lean up against the wall. She should remember that she was pregnant and not make these swift movements; but she was so used to reacting instantly to the sound of her sister-in-law Kalwant’s voice, that it had become a reflex action. So she only paused long enough for the dizziness to pass and the pain to subside, before she hurried across the courtyard and out into the compound beyond.

An ancient, knuckly, pepul tree spread a twisting shade beneath its broad, dark green leaves. Here, the infants, those that is who were too young even to herd goats or follow the buffalo, tumbled and played under the baleful eyes of the male village elders, who sat smoking on their string beds, or sipping tea and playing cards at an old wooden table.

Usually there was no need to interfere. Even infants can sort out their own problems if left to it. But today, as Kalwant was passing by on her way to fetch water from the well, she had noticed her son, Ajit, struggling to gain possession of a tin from Jhoti’s daughter, Marvinder.

‘It’s mine!’ raged Ajit. ‘I found it.’

‘It’s mine!’ insisted Marvinder. ‘Ma gave it me.’

When Ajit saw his mother, he fought harder, shouting, ‘Ma! Marvinder’s trying to take my tin away.’

‘No, I’m not!’ screamed Marvinder. ‘You took it from me. It’s mine, I tell you,’ and she tugged even more fiercely.

However, determined that no snip of a girl would get the better of her son, Kalwant yelled for Jhoti.

As Jhoti hurried into view, Kalwant pointed accusingly, and shrieked, ‘Do you see?’ as Marvinder now had Ajit flat on his back and was sitting astride his chest. ‘That child of yours is a little snake! Look how she attacks my son! Stop her at once, or I’ll . . .’

Jhoti turned hesitatingly towards the battling children. Marvinder was winning. She held the tin grimly between her fingers while Ajit kicked and punched in his efforts to regain it.

Jhoti knew it was Marvinder’s tin. It was a Bournville chocolate tin which she had retrieved from the Chadwicks’ rubbish tip. When Marvinder saw her mother, she cried indignantly, ‘Ma, Ma! Ajit says this tin is his. But it’s mine, isn’t it? You gave it me! He’s trying to steal it!’

‘Did you hear that?’ Kalwant’s voice peaked with self-justified outrage. ‘Did you hear?’ she appealed to the world at large. ‘Marvinder is calling my son a thief ! This is too much!’ She plonked down her water vessels and with threatening hand outstretched, she strode towards the children.

Jhoti broke into a clumsy sprint, but could not reach her daughter before Kalwant snatched her up, tipped her upside down and began slapping her bare bottom for all she was worth. Marvinder’s screams echoed round the compound. The old men paused in their gossiping, turned round and frowned. The other children froze their actions and stared in awe.

‘Stop it, stop it!’ begged Jhoti, crying herself. ‘She’s only a baby. Leave her alone!’ She grabbed her daughter’s head and managed to clasp her under the shoulders. For a moment, it looked as Marvinder would be torn limb from limb as the two warring mothers tugged at each end of her.

Then another voice rang out from within the low, flat-roofed dwelling. It was a voice cracked with age, but authoritative. ‘For goodness sake!’ Madanjit Kaur berated them. ‘Can’t an old woman get any peace around here?’

Mother-in-law shuffled out. Her unmade grey hair hung loosely down her back. She stood surveying the scene with hands on hips, her narrow, black eyes glaring vehemently. The baggy folds of her pyjamas beneath the full, green cotton tunic, could not disguise her powerful, stocky figure, or the strength of will with which she presided over her domain.

‘Yes, Jhoti! I know it’s you.’ She wagged an accusing finger. ‘No good dropping your head in that shamefaced way. There’s been nothing but trouble from you ever since you entered this household, and it’s not as though you came with much dowry either. How could we tell, when we arranged this marriage, that you had been so badly brought up? And now we see you doing the same with your own child, wilful and disobedient girl! Arreh Baba ! I guessed as much as soon as I laid eyes on you, but no one would listen to me. The old man is too fond of a pretty face, that’s the trouble! You all are!’ She aimed her recriminations at the old men, but they just shrugged and turned away bending closer over their cards, not wishing to be drawn into any womanish disputes.

‘Get on back to your tasks, Jhoti, and take your brat with you!’ she commanded.

Kalwant smirked, and dropped Marvinder’s legs which she had been clutching all this time. Jhoti staggered as the full weight of her daughter swung against her body.

Marvinder’s sobs pierced the air. ‘Ma, Ma! It’s my tin. You know it is!’

Kalwant, under the full protection of Mother-in-law’s gaze, reached out and extricated the tin from Marvinder’s grip. ‘There you are, my precious,’ she held it out to her son. ‘Now it’s yours again!’

Ajit snatched it gleefully and ran round proudly displaying it like a trophy. Marvinder’s mouth opened wider as a protesting wail gathered in her throat, but Jhoti hastily stuffed the end of her veil into the child’s mouth, and heaving her up on to her hip, ran from the scene.

‘Hush, darling!’ she entreated. ‘Or Grandmother will have us both beaten. I’ll find you another tin, I promise.’

Only when she reached the privacy of the inner courtyard, did she set her child down on the ground. Then she unstuffed the veil from her daughter’s mouth and wiped away the tears from both their faces.

‘Come and help me finish grinding the spices. You like that, don’t you?’ she whispered, hugging and kissing her.

Marvinder nodded, weeping quietly now as her mother held her tightly. ‘Oh, darling baby,’ Jhoti whispered, ‘who else would I have to love, if I didn’t have you?’

Living as she did with her husband Govind’s family, Jhoti was at the very bottom of the pecking order. Not only was Govind the youngest of three sons, but he was always away. She had met him for the first time when he had come home for their marriage, and then a week later, he had gone again; back to Amritsar. In due course they sent him word to say that she was pregnant, and he said he would come home in time for the birth. But Jhoti gave birth earlier than expected, and when he heard it was a girl, he didn’t hurry back. It was another two months before he saw his daughter. But at least Jhoti had been in her own home then. She stayed as long as she dared, relishing in the affection which her mother and sisters lavished on her. How they cared for her and her baby; each day her mother would come with oils and massage her belly, her limbs and her feet; her sisters washed and combed out her hair, rubbed and oiled her scalp and then talked and joked and laughed for hours with her, taking it in turns to rock the infant.

When she finally returned to her in-laws, she wondered if the pain of homesickness would ever pass; and in the evening, when all the chores were done, when the men got tipsy on home-brewed rice wine, and the women welded themselves into tight little gossipy knots from which Jhoti was usually excluded, Jhoti would soothe her baby to sleep, then slip away and walk through the dark fields, and climb the steep dyke to the narrow, straight-as-a-die, long white road; turning her face towards home, she looked and looked until the gleaming road disappeared over the dark horizon.

Jhoti’s life began on that long, white road. Only six miles further down to the south, she had been born in another small farming village. A village so simple, that a casual eye would barely have distinguished it from the well-ploughed earth and the dappled shade of eucalyptus trees.

She was taken to her new home along this same road, aged thirteen, a child bride. Every time she came and stood on the edge of the road, she remembered that day; remembered the train of bullock carts, all festooned with garlands of flowers and overburdened with too many wedding guests. How flamboyant the men had looked; her father, her uncles, her cousins and brothers, like peacocks with their turbans of turquoise and blue and green and vivid pink. Then there were the women, glittering like tinsel. How they loved weddings. What an opportunity to get out their finery; their thick, chunky jewellery, their satin kurta pyjamas, their tinselly veils glittering with silver and golden threads, so dazzling the eye that they looked as if they might burst into flames in the heat of the sun.

They had chosen the pure white bullocks to pull the carts. Usually, the bullocks would have been pulling a plough, or winding a dreary path round and round and round a well, all day, drawing water to irrigate the fields. But that day was her wedding day, and their thick white skins had been lavishly painted with rich colours, to defy the brown summer arid landscape, and their horns, like arched spears, were wrapped in gold.

Later, the men sang at the tops of their voices and whipped the lean haunches of these silent beasts. Whipped them till they galloped down the road towards her husband’s home. Too fast, too fast! Jhoti had wept inside. Were they in such a hurry to wrench her from her mother and her sisters? Were they in such a hurry to hand her over to a stranger, whose mother must now become her mother, and whose brothers and sisters must become more to her than her own siblings?

Only her younger sister seemed to notice the tears in her eyes. She leaned closer to her and squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t cry, Jhoti,’ she pleaded, almost crying herself. ‘Don’t cry, Didi, dear elder sister, or else the charcoal round your eyes will run, and you will ruin your beautiful bride’s face. Don’t be sad. We’ll come and see you.’

But Jhoti knew they wouldn’t; knew they couldn’t. She would go home to them once, for the birth of her first child, for that was the custom; but life was hard; too hard for the luxury of family visits. No, from now on, her life must be Govind’s life; his mother and father must become her parents, his brothers and sisters, her brothers and sisters.

During the wedding ceremony, she had had the sensation of separating from her body, and like a ghostly stranger found herself looking on at her own marriage.

Was that really her? That slight figure, dressed all in crimson, so that all she surveyed was through a crimson glow? And the man next to her, his head bowed so low that his face was buried from sight in his garland of golden marigolds; who was he? Oh, she knew his name: Govind Singh, they had told her. The youngest of three sons of a farmer whom most people considered quite wealthy. Of course, being the youngest, he wouldn’t inherit much, which was probably why they didn’t mind the fact that he had married beneath him. But who was he really? What was he like? After all, he was only sixteen, barely older than her eldest brother.

She had heard some talk. People said he could read and write like a scholar. That’s why he went away to the city of Amritsar. A local English teacher, Harold Chadwick had discovered the boy’s aptitude for learning. He persuaded Govind’s father to allow his son to continue his education after primary school, rather than move on to the land to work, as would have been expected. Mr Chadwick flattered Mr Chet Singh on having produced a son with brains; a son who could be a clerk or a teacher or even a lawyer!

Mr Chet Singh was impressed, but possibly more relieved that perhaps he need not sub-divide the family land to take account of his youngest son. If Govind took up his share, too, the plot would be barely sufficient to produce a living.

Sitting cross-legged on a carpet surrounded by all the wedding guests, she had tried to look sideways at Govind’s face, but somehow, she couldn’t make out his features between the low rim of his turban, and his face down in the marigolds.

This man – this boy – was to be more important to her than her father. Her father, who owned her, would give her away, and she would belong instead to this stranger.

As Jhoti stared down the road towards home, the tears fell again as she remembered how they placed the garland around her neck; how, as the hoarse chanting of prayers rose higher and higher, her father pulled her to her feet, and taking the end of Govind’s scarf had tied it to the end of her veil. Thus joined together, she was led four times round the priest and his sacred book. She had wanted to cry out, ‘Oh, Father! Are you glad? Is this what you’ve been waiting for since the day I was born? Just waiting to give me away, to get me off your hands? Do you feel liberated? Is your burden lessened? If it is, then I shall feel comforted.’

How red everything was, red as the first drops of blood which had fallen from her body. Then she knew that her childhood was over; that the next blood to fall from her body would be on the bridal bed, and the old women would be sure to come and take note, and then they would click their tongues with satisfaction as they announced that her honour was upheld and the bride had indeed been a virgin.

For the next seven days, Jhoti had had all the attention of a new bride. People had come to visit; to scrutinise her; form an opinion about her. They had examined her dowry and her gifts, assessed her jewellery and held up her sarees to see whether they were of silk and how many were shot with gold thread. They had pinched her cheeks and admired her beauty, but none of it was for her sake. She was being looked over as Govind’s property, and whatever compliments were showered on her, they were for his benefit, not hers.

Soon he would be leaving for college in Amritsar, then she would become a nobody; only with him was she a somebody. On the day of his departure, Jhoti stood by helplessly, while Mother-in-law took over. She stormed about the place, handing out orders, packing his clothes, assembling his food for the journey and, deliberately, it seemed to Jhoti, ignoring her attempts to help, brushing her aside as if she were a useless infant.

And 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 was at this point that Dora’s father could contain himself no longer. Already red in the face from mounting irritation, he exploded 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 again. She scooped up soil with her newly acquired tin and poured it into the bottom half of a broken clay water pot which she had found near the village pond.

‘This is for Ma, this is for Pa, this is for Ajit, this is for Chachaji . . .’ she went on listing all the members of her extended family. Every now and then she glanced across to a door of a side room, where her mother was the subject of quite unaccustomed attention. Women had been going in and out all morning looking worried. Even fierce Grandmother had an air of concern about her.

Marvinder felt confused and afraid. She had never before been kept away from her mother and every now and then, she heard her mother give a shuddering cry which struck Marvinder to the heart with terror.

‘Aloo, okra, brinjal ho,

Chaaval, Channa, Pani Lo.’

She repeated the rhyme over and over like a magic spell as she dug and dug into the earth.

One of her aunts suddenly emerged from the room, pushing back the broken bamboo blind, allowing Marvinder a snatched glimpse inside. Jhoti was lying on a bed, her head thrust back, her hands gripping the edges of the thin mattress on which she lay. The heat of the day and the struggle of childbirth brought the perspiration pouring out of her body and, as one aunt wiped her brow and mopped up the moisture which trickled in rivulets down her face, another had a goblet of water, and holding her like a child, held the rim to her lips so that she could drink and drink.

‘Aunty, Aunty! I want my ma!’ cried Marvinder, leaping to her feet. ‘Can I go in now?’ She clutched at the tunic of an aunt who had emerged from the room. She was one of the younger ones, Shireen. She could be kind some times, and when she had a few moments between jobs, would often become girlish and run out to join the children in their games.

‘No, baba,’ said Shireen gently, and she picked up Marvinder and lodged her on her hip. She affectionately smoothed back a straggle of hair which had fallen across her eyes. ‘You must be patient. Your ma is soon going to give you a brother or maybe a sister and if you get in the way, it will make it all the harder for us to help her. Do you understand?’ Marvinder nodded silently and Shireen put her down again near her precious tin and broken clay pot. ‘Play now. I have to go and find Basant,’ she said urgently, and set off running.

Some older children who were just coming in from school heard Shireen, and couldn’t resist coming to tease Marvinder.

‘Is Basant coming to see to your mother? Oh dear. Basant is a witch, didn’t you know?’

Marvinder looked up at them with large, terrified eyes.

‘A witch?’ she exclaimed with a shudder. ‘What do witches do? Will she hurt my mother?’

‘Witches come out at night and go round looking for people so that they can suck their blood,’ said one child sticking out his fingers at Marvinder, as if they were claws.

‘Witches cast spells on babies about to be born so that the baby comes out with two heads, or with a devil’s tail or sometimes with horns, and the babies are witches too, and suck their mother’s blood. Whooo . . .’ and the child lunged towards Marvinder making sucking noises with his lips.

Marvinder backed away with horror. ‘Will Basant do that to my ma? Will she do that to my baby?’

‘Oh yes!’ chorused the children malevolently. ‘Just you wait and see. Your baby will be a monster. A green monster with snakes round its neck, and goat’s feet and a tongue dripping with blood like Kali,’ and they all rushed at Marvinder with their tongues sticking out and their arms outstretched as if to tear her to pieces.

Marvinder broke into desperate screams and began running.

Sobbing and gasping, she ran and ran until she reached the road. She wanted to go to the Chadwicks’ bungalow and find Maliki. Perhaps Maliki could save her mother from the witch.

In the distance, a cyclist was coming towards her, his shape shimmering out of the heat haze. Like some strange bird, with blue turbaned head, white shirt puffed up with the wind, and thin, cotton trousers flapping to the sides, he came closer and closer.

Marvinder hardly saw him what with the tears in her eyes, and her concentration on running. He passed her. Stopped and looked back. ‘Marvi?’ the man cried.

Marvinder didn’t stop running. ‘Hey, Marvi . . . Marvinder! Stop! It’s me, your father.’ He whirled his bike round and pedalled a few turns to catch up with her, then jumping off, he dropped his bike to the ground and lunged out to grab the child.

At first Marvinder struggled and screamed. ‘Let me go, let me go! I must rush to Maliki and tell her that a witch is going to put a spell on my mother and turn my baby into a monster.’ She wriggled violently, trying to free herself.

Govind knelt down on the dusty road so that he was at eye level with his daughter and gripping her chin in one hand, turned her face towards his. ‘Marvi, look at me. Who am I?’

Marvinder looked at him, blinking through her tears.

‘Who am I, Marvi?’ he asked again as she quietened slightly.

He slackened his grip on her face and with a thumb, wiped away a tear from her cheek.

‘Papaji ?’ she asked with amazement. Marvinder recognised her father, although he was home so little. Until now, he hadn’t taken much notice of her and he was more like a stranger.

She looked into his pale, almond eyes, she touched his cheek in recognition. She was too young to note how her father’s face had changed. He was no longer a boy; callow, broken-voiced and a mixture of shyness and insensitivity; now, his voice had deepened, the skin of his face toughened, and his hair had grown sufficiently for his beard to be bound up under his chin.

Marvinder clasped her arms round his neck and pleaded with him.

‘Pa, Shireen has gone to fetch Basant, the witch, and our baby will be born a monster and will suck Ma’s blood. How can we stop her?’

‘Who told you Basant was a witch?’ demanded Govind angrily.

‘The other children. They told me she makes babies to be born with two heads and goat’s feet . . . and . . .’

‘Stop, stop!’ shouted Pa. ‘If I catch hold of the children who told you that nonsense, I’ll give them such a thrashing . . .’ Marvinder started crying again.

‘Listen to me, Marvinder, Basant is no witch. She is the best healer in the world. You don’t know how many lives she has saved. There’s nothing Basant doesn’t know. She helps to bring babies into the world too. They say, if you want your baby to be born safely and alive, then get Basant. She’s the best midwife there is. She brought me into the world, and am I a monster?’ He pulled a face and growled fiercely into her neck making her burst out laughing. ‘That’s better,’ smiled Govind. ‘Now don’t let me hear you ever say a single bad word against her. Those children were just having fun making you scared, and I tell you, I’ll give them such a fright they’ll never be so cruel again.’

With that, Govind lifted Marvinder on to the crossbar of his bicycle. ‘Hold tight,’ he ordered, then turning round pushed off and headed for home as fast as he could.

When they left the road and swooped down the track to their village at a terrifying speed, Marvinder shut her eyes fearfully. She opened them again when, with squealing brakes, they came to a standstill, and she found that they were outside their home.

People began calling out at the sight of her father. ‘Eh! Look! Govind’s here! Govind’s come home.’

‘My son! How did you know when to return?’ cried his mother, excitedly pushing her way out of the labour room. Govind knelt on the ground and kissed his mother’s feet respectfully.

‘Quick, bring water for Govind,’ she ordered turning round to one of her daughters-in-law.

‘I knew Jhoti’s time was near and decided,’ Govind explained, getting to his feet and touching his head and heart in greeting. ‘Mr Chadwick sahib was visiting the school in Amritsar and he suggested I travel back with him. The memsahib, his wife, she too is very near her time. He has already taken her to their mission hospital.’

‘Humm,’ grunted his mother. ‘Well, they have their ways and we have ours. Shireen has gone for Basant. She should be here soon. I hope she hurries. Jhoti’s pains are coming very close now.’

Someone brought a pitcher of water. Govind held out his cupped hands while the woman poured. He tossed it first into his face and round his neck; she poured again and he wetted his arms up to his elbows, and finally, she poured again, several times over while he bent his mouth down to his hands and drank till he felt refreshed.

For a while, the attention was diverted from Jhoti as the women flocked round Govind, clucking and fussing; and it was Govind who said, ‘Come, come, enough of all this. How is my wife?’

‘She is doing well, brother,’ they assured him. ‘It will not be long now.’

When the women told Jhoti that her husband had arrived, she felt a sudden rush of tears to her eyes. Till then, she had maintained a reserved stance, never admitting to the intense discomfort she felt; nor sharing with anyone her puzzlement as to why her second confinement had been harder to bear than the first.

With the news that Govind was here, Jhoti gave a deep sigh of contentment. Suddenly she felt she could bear anything . . . if only . . . if only she could present him with a son.

It seemed an age before Shireen appeared, clutching Basant at the elbow and guiding her at a snail’s pace towards the house.

When Marvinder saw her, she shrank into her father.

‘Are you sure Basant isn’t a witch?’ she whispered. Basant looked in every way what she imagined a witch to be like, she was so bent and wizened; her skin hung on her thin arms like wrinkled brown paper and her fingers, which hooked round a staff, were like the scaly claws of chicken’s feet. Worst of all were her eyes. They stared ahead as if seeing all things, and yet, Marvinder shuddered; although they appeared to penetrate even into her very soul, they were the creamy, sightless eyes of the blind.

‘No, baba. Basant isn’t a witch. Just you wait and see. Soon we will have a baby; the finest baby the world has ever seen; a baby for you to take care of and be a good big sister. Will you do that, Marvinder?’ her father asked. ‘Will you protect your little one; make sure he never runs into any danger; guard him with your life? Do you promise?’

Marvinder returned his gaze. Her father looked so serious; as if what he had asked her was very important. It made her feel suddenly grown up.

‘Yes, Papaji, I promise.’

The day ended abruptly. The sun went down like a rapidly sinking ship and suddenly it was dark. Basant dismissed all the women. Now there were just she and Jhoti alone in the room. The only light came from a weak, kerosene lantern which hung on the verandah outside. Its useless beams barely struggled through the narrow iron-barred window, to cast pale stripes on the dung-smeared walls.

‘Could we have light in here?’ asked Jhoti fearfully.

‘What do we need light for?’ rasped the old blind woman.

She came towards Jhoti, her hands spread out in front of her. Jhoti shrank away, unable to control the repugnance she felt at being touched by such a creature. She stiffened with horror as the hands hovered over her face. She rolled her lips together, sealing her mouth so that no cry would escape her. The hands came down, down, steadily, without trembling. They enveloped her face. The fingers traced the outlines of her features; her brow, nose, eyes, cheeks, chin and jaw-line.

‘Here’s a pretty one to be sure,’ murmured Basant in a low voice. Her hands continued their exploration over her face, head, neck, chest, soothing and massaging as she worked her way down towards her abdomen. Her touch was the touch of a potter, working the clay, softening it, manipulating it, moulding it, with all the years of experience and craftsmanship pouring through her fingers and palms. She worked her hands over the young woman’s belly, pressing deeper this way and that to feel the shape of the baby inside.

‘Ah!’ she whispered. ‘That is why you feel discomfort. Your infant wants to greet the world with his bottom!’

By this time, all Jhoti’s resistence had dissolved away. She lay beneath the old woman’s hands, pliable, relaxed and completely trusting.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ murmured the old voice, ‘I will turn him round so that he can face the world like a man.’

‘He?’ asked Jhoti softly.

‘Perhaps,’ Basant chuckled. Then suddenly her movements became fierce. She kneaded into Jhoti’s belly, grunting with the effort as gradually she eased the infant round in the womb until its head faced the exit it must use to emerge into the world.

At last, Jhoti gave one cry and it was done.

‘Now we’ll have a better time of it,’ said Basant.

Jhoti slept. It was as if the baby quite enjoyed its new position and had changed its mind about being born. The contractions diminished to the softest of sensations, squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go.

Outside in the courtyard, Govind squatted, wide-eyed in vigil. Marvinder lay asleep, outstretched across his knees. He stroked her forehead. The glow from the nearby brazier outlined her high cheekbones and her straight nose; her long eyelashes seemed tipped with flame, fluttering rapidly from time to time as dreams enveloped her brain. He ran a finger along her lips and chin, yet hardly noticed her determined mouth, for all his senses were strained towards the room where Jhoti lay. Being a father made him feel important, especially if, he hardly dared pray, this new baby was a boy.

‘Madanjit Kaur! Shireen! Come now and give me a hand!’ The shadows tipped wildly as kerosene lamps were snatched up and hurried towards the room.

Govind lifted Marvinder into his arms and stood up, his eyes staring intently at the bamboo blind and the shadows passing back and forth within. Marvinder sighed sleepily and snuggled her face into his beard. ‘Papa, have we a new baby?’

‘Nearly, nearly,’ murmured Govind. A faint wind suddenly rattled the leaves of the tree like drumming fingers; it caught the scent of night flowers and filled the air with perfume. Marvinder, with her ear pressed against her father’s neck, heard a song welling up in his throat – but it barely escaped before a cry of joy splintered the silence of the night.

‘Govind! You have a son.’

FOUR

The Swing

Edith stood in the middle of her room. It was darkened by the blinds which had been drawn against the ferocious glare of the sun. Any light which managed to prise itself between the thinnest slit or a pinprick of a hole, scissored through the gloom, sharp, blinding and silver as mercury.

She had awoken from her afternoon sleep and, just from habit, waited for someone to come. But no one did.

She got out of bed and stood in her white petticoat. She stretched her arms and legs akimbo, as she would have done for ayah, who would then slip a cotton dress over her head, and buckle her open sandals on to her feet. But ayah didn’t come to attend to her.

She stood alone. Hearing but not listening to the faint sounds of babies coming from her parents’ room, and the low murmur of voices – her mother, father and ayah. All she was aware of was the persistent croo, croo, croo of the dove, whose never-ending, monotonous cry tightened her throat, she didn’t know why.

She pattered, barefooted from her bedroom, through the cool, intervening bathroom to her parents’ room. The door was partly ajar and she peered inside. Her mother was in bed, propped up by a mountain of white pillows to an upright position. Crooked into each arm was the small, bald head of an infant, each with its face turned into a breast and seeming to devour her mother with loud sucking noises, and pig-like grunts.

Ayah knelt at the side of the bed, massaging her mother’s feet, while Father fussed around, stroking his wife’s head, and administering sips of water to her.

Edith looked at them with hatred. No one had prepared her for this. She hadn’t got the words; she couldn’t identify or understand the emotions which gripped her body. She had been cut adrift and was floating away, but no one seemed to see her.

When her mother first came home from the hospital, Edith thought everything would be the same as before. She had tried to climb into bed with her each morning as usual, but there wasn’t room any more. These two little babies seemed to have everyone in their power. They had taken over her mother, father, and even ayah.

Before, there had always been someone to keep her company – from morning till night; but now, games were left unfinished and bedtime stories interrupted. Even at mealtimes, she could find herself abandoned to sit all alone in the dining room, at the long, dark, oak table, waited on by Arjun, who padded in and out with her meals, gentle but silent.

It was becoming apparent to her that nothing would ever be the same again.

She went out on to the verandah. Great clay pots hung along the length of the roof, overflowing with ferns and trailing ivy and casting intricate shadows like pencil etchings, over the grey stone.

Edith squinted into the sun and looked across the compound. In the distance, she could see her swing.

Someone else looked at the swing, too.

It was Marvinder. She looked at it, hanging there, motionless in the still afternoon, dropping out of the pale, yellowy shadows of the lemon tree. She had gone with her mother to the Chadwick bungalow, so that Jhoti could show off her new son to Maliki. She had been sorting rice. She pushed a tray of it in front of Marvinder and begged her to pick it clean of stones, so that she could be free to admire the baby.

Marvinder squatted on the edge of the verandah where she could see the swing, and even as she picked and sifted and tossed the grains, she kept the swing in the corner of her eye.

‘So, Jhoti! Have you a name for your son, now?’ asked Maliki.

‘It was chosen yesterday!’ announced Jhoti proudly; and she described how they had all gone to the gurdwara, where the priest had opened the Guru Granth Sahib, their holiest book. He had opened it at random, as was the custom, and called out the first letter of the first hymn. ‘It was the letter J. The same initial as me!’

‘J!’ cried Maliki impatiently. ‘What did you call him?’

‘His name is Jaspal!’ Jhoti sighed with happiness.

When Marvinder was sure that she had picked out every single stone and husk from the rice, she casually eased herself off the verandah and stood for a while, just close by, picking up pebbles between her toes. Jhoti and Maliki took no notice of her and carried on gossiping.

But Marvinder’s eye was on the swing. It hung there from the tree, empty and inviting. Slowly, slowly, she drifted, imperceptibly towards the hibiscus hedge. No one called her back. Maliki had now taken the infant into her arms and was cooing over it with delight.

‘Seems you had a better time of it than the poor memsahib,’ said Maliki in a low voice. ‘She had twins, I tell you! And would you believe, the English doctor didn’t even know! What kind of doctor wouldn’t know a woman was having twins, I ask you? Wouldn’t Basant have known – blind and all that she is?’

‘How did you hear all this?’ asked Jhoti, shuffling closer on her haunches, and wide-eyed with curiosity.

‘Arjun heard the sahib telling someone. Memsahib was in the mission hospital. First one baby was born, and what a time she had of it, and they thought that was that. But then the nurse said, “Doctor! I think there’s another!” He didn’t believe her, can you imagine? “Don’t be silly,” he says. “There can’t be.”

‘But the memsahib went on pushing, and sure enough, out came another!’ Maliki rolled her eyes with perplexed disbelief at the stupidity of some people.

‘What did the doctor say?’ asked Jhoti.

‘The babies were lying in the womb one exactly behind the other, so when he felt her, he couldn’t tell that there were two! That’s what he said. What an excuse! I ask you!’

‘Were they both boys?’ asked Jhoti.

‘First one a girl, the second a boy,’ answered Maliki.

‘That sounds nice,’ murmured Jhoti. ‘Nice to enlarge your family all at once. What names did she give them?’

‘Oh some strange English names,’ laughed Maliki. ‘Grace – that’s the girl, and Ralph, the boy. I don’t know why those names!’ She shrugged. ‘I expect they will soon go to their church and have a naming ceremony too.’

Marvinder edged closer to the swing. She was only yards away from it now.

Suddenly, a figure came rushing out of the front of the bungalow. Edith Chadwick, all alone, ran across the garden and flung herself on to the swing. She looked sulky and cross. She proceeded to struggle and jerk, angrily tossing out her bare legs in a desperate attempt to get some momentum.

If Marvinder was disappointed at having her plan thwarted, she didn’t give the slightest hint of it. Indeed, she still continued her casual, indifferent progress closer and closer. Finally, when she was near enough to be noticed or ignored at will, she came to rest, squatting down in the shade and twisting the stems of hibiscus flowers into a nosegay. She watched Edith wriggling hopelessly as she tried to get the swing moving. Suddenly, their eyes met. This was the first time they had been close enough to acknowledge each other.

At first, Edith just scowled and continued her struggle and Marvinder edged a few inches closer without getting up. But then Edith caught her eye again. Marvinder tipped her head to one side, and with a questioning look on her face, mimed a push with her hand.

The silent message was received and understood. Edith, unsmiling, gave a curt nod. In a second, Marvinder had leapt to her feet and grasped the seat of the swing from behind. She dragged it back and back and back with all the strength of a mere four-year-old, then let go.

‘More, more!’ ordered Edith as she swooped away.

So Marvinder pushed and pushed till her arms ached. Edith would have let her push forever but, exhausted, Marvinder finally stopped and went back to twisting flowers by the hedge.

‘Are you going?’ asked Edith petulantly.

Marvinder shrugged a ‘maybe’.

‘Would you like a turn?’ asked Edith, instinctively bargaining to keep her new companion.

Marvinder looked at her with a big grin and ran over to the swing. But when Edith pushed her, she pushed with such ferocity that Marvinder began to feel afraid. She could feel the hands thudding into the small of her back. She could hear the hissing of her breath and the enraged grunt which accompanied each push of the swing. She wanted to get off.

‘Stop! I’ve had enough!’ cried Marvinder.

At first, Edith took no notice. She thrust the swing forward as hard as she could, sometimes tugging at the rope to make it twist and spin. Marvinder thought she would be flung off.

‘Stop! Please stop!’ Her voice rose in panic.

As if awoken from a dream, Edith stopped.

Marvinder dragged her feet on the ground to slow herself down, then jumped off. The two girls stared at each other, like strangers, unsure of themselves. Marvinder lowered her gaze. ‘I’m going back to my ma,’ she murmured, and walked away.

‘Goodbye then,’ said Edith coldly. She eased herself back on to the swing, and began her fruitless wriggling as she tried to get it going on her own.

Somewhere across the compound, the dove continued its soulless cooing. ‘Cru croo, cru croo, cru croo.’

FIVE

Govind

One day, Govind returned home unexpectedly. They already knew in the village that he had arrived. Someone had seen him getting off the train, and then another noticed that instead of coming straight home, he had first called in at the Chadwick bungalow. At last, when he did appear at his father’s door, it was, he said, with important news.

Everyone waited till evening, when his older brothers got home from the fields, the buffaloes had been milked and supper eaten.

Then they congregated round his father’s charpoy, which had been pulled out into the courtyard. The old man, Chet Singh, sat in the middle of the bed solemnly sucking on his hookah. Madanjit Kaur took up a position of importance, cross-legged on the top right-hand corner of the bed. Govind was made to sit at the foot, while his brothers and their wives squatted in a semicircle on the ground chewing betel nuts and waiting with curiosity.

Only Jhoti preferred to stand. Rocking Jaspal in her arms, she looked on from outside the circle. Her face had an anxious expression as if she dreaded what she might hear.

Marvinder watched them from the edge of the pond. She had been washing dishes; but although her hand automatically dipped into the little hollowed-out crater of charcoal ash, which she smeared and scoured round the metal plates and pans, her eyes were fixed on Govind’s unsmiling face.

What was he going to tell them?

Feverishly, she scooped up the water, sluicing the dishes clean, anxious to be finished so that she could creep nearer and listen.

‘I am going to England,’ she heard him say.

Marvinder didn’t know where England was, but judging by the consternation his words produced, she knew that it was somewhere extraordinary.

At first there was a babble of excited voices, while everyone talked at once. Jhoti stopped rocking her baby and looked dazed. Marvinder gathered up the clean dishes and carried them to the kitchen, her eyes hardly leaving her father’s face as she went. Then she came back and stood by her mother. ‘Ma!’ she whispered. ‘Where is England?’

‘It’s where the Chadwicks come from,’ Jhoti replied.

‘Mr Chadwick sahib always wanted me to go, you know,’ Govind continued. ‘I didn’t say anything before, because I didn’t want you thinking too much when it all depended on my getting a B. A. in law.’

‘B. A? What is B. A?’ asked one of his brothers.

‘A degree,’ replied Chet Singh, knowledgeably, although he wasn’t quite sure what that was.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ nodded Govind proudly. ‘I now have a B. A. from Punjab University. In fact, I came top in my year.’ He spread out his hands with triumph, but when he saw their blank faces, and knew that his family had no understanding at all of his achievement, he dropped them helplessly to his side.

‘Look! I have something to show you.’ He opened up his worn and battered attaché case, which had lain at his feet, and carefully drew out a large, framed photograph.

Everyone craned forward with fascination. No one in the family had ever been in a photograph before.

‘Govind, is that you, Govind?’ they cried in amazement.

Staring out of the picture, with a look of stiff importance, was Govind. His turban was neatly bound and his beard waxed and shaped into his jawline. Instead of white, cotton, Indian pyjamas and waistcoat, he wore a smart, western-style suit with shirt and tie, and flowing over the top was a black academic gown edged with ermine. In his hands, which he held prominently up to his chest, was a rolled-up scroll, tied with a ribbon.

He pointed triumphantly. ‘That’s my degree! With that, I will be able to get a good job and earn a lot of money,’ he said.

Madanjit Kaur couldn’t resist a regretful glance at Jhoti, as though she thought, Huh, we married Govind off too soon. A man with a B. A. might have got himself a much higher wife than her.

‘Then why do you need to go to England?’ asked his father.

Govind leant forward, his face flushed pink with enthusiasm. ‘You must know what’s going on in the country. You must know that very soon, in a year or two, we’re going to kick the Britishers out and we will be independent. Armritsar and Lahore are seething with it, I tell you. The whole of India is seething with it. There is even talk of new homelands. Perhaps we Sikhs will get the Punjab back as our homeland. This man Tara Singh – you should hear him! What ideas he has, I tell you. And then there is the Muslim League! It is talking about a new country for Muslims which they will call Pakistan. They march around shouting, “Pakistan Zindabad!” The Britishers send out troops to crush riots, and hundreds of people are in prison, but it’s no use. We’re going to throw them out!’

‘What kind of rubbish is all this?’ demanded old Chet Singh, frowning. ‘Is this what you have been learning in the cities with all your books and education? What use is a B. A. if you are going to tear the country apart?’

‘India was full of separate kingdoms once!’ retorted Govind. ‘It was just the British who forced us all into one piece just to suit themselves. Now we have to kick them out and do what’s best for us.’

‘I thought Mr Chadwick sahib was your friend and patron,’ cried a brother. ‘You speak as if he is your enemy.’

‘No, no! He is my friend. He is a friend of India. That’s why he wants me to go to England. I will go to an English university, just for a year. He says that I must learn the ways of the Britishers, so that when they leave, people like me will be able to take over all the jobs and help to run the country.’

The photograph was being passed round and intensely scrutinised.

‘Eh! Govind bhai ! What a handsome man you are in this photo. You look like a proper sahib.’

Govind sighed. No one in his family seemed to comprehend what he was saying.

‘There have been marches and demonstrations all over India,’ he continued. ‘I’ve been on some of them myself. I’ve seen Gandhiji, and I tell you, that man walks round like a villager, wears nothing but a dhoti and is thin as a begger, yet he talks to all the high-ups. He’s even talked to the king over in England. Would you believe it?’ Govind’s voice cracked with excitement. ‘There are big things happening. Just you wait and see.’

‘You look very high up yourself,’ cried Kalwant looking closely at the photograph. ‘You should talk to the king, too.’

Jhoti had sunk back into the darkness. Her heart was heavy as lead. After Jaspal was born, Govind had told her, that once he got his degree he would get a job and money, and be able to afford to bring her and the children to Amritsar. The thought of having her own home, away from the petty tyrannies she suffered here, had sustained her through all the misery of separation from him. But now?

‘Ma?’ Marvinder looked up at her anxiously, and gripped her hand. ‘Is it bad, Ma? Shouldn’t papa go to England?’

‘And what about Jhoti?’ Madanjit’s voice broke in. She sounded harsh in the soft evening. ‘We have all these extra mouths to feed, what with Marvinder and now Jaspal too. They must pay their way. Be prepared to work – eh?’ She looked round resentfully at them. ‘All this sneaking away to see her friend Maliki over at the Chadwicks’ bungalow, we’ll have no more of that.’

‘Wait a minute, Ma,’ Govind restrained her gently. ‘You are too hard on Jhoti. Anyway, Mr Chadwick has a proposition. He wants Jhoti to come and work at his bungalow. Memsahib needs extra help, what with having twins and all.’

‘The memsahib already has an ayah,’ snorted Madanjit Kaur, pursing her lips disapprovingly. ‘What does she want of a chit of a girl like Jhoti, eh? Besides, Jhoti’s got her own babies.’

‘Their ayah is old,’ said Govind. ‘You know – that Hindu woman, Shanta. She’s not too well either. Suffers from rheumatism. The Chadwicks won’t get rid of her because she’s a widow and has no son to care for her. Her daughters are married and moved far away. Sahib is content to keep her on so long as a younger woman comes in to help.’

Chet Singh puffed the hookah and passed it to Govind. Then he observed, ‘It sounds like a good job and it would be a welcome addition to the family income.’

‘Huh!’ exclaimed Madanjit Kaur. ‘It’s a good job all right. Too good for Jhoti. They would do better to take on Kalwant or Narinder,’ she gestured towards her two other daughters-in-law. ‘They are older and more experienced. Or even your sister, Shireen, would be better.’

‘It’s Jhoti they want,’ insisted Govind. ‘They feel responsible for her. It’s due to them that I’m going to England and leaving her.’

‘Do you think we wouldn’t take care of her?’ protested his mother. ‘Has she ever complained? Ever lacked for anything? You should tell them, Govind.’

‘Yes, tell them. I am a better person for the job. More experienced, and anyway, my children are older than Jhoti’s, so I am freer. You should recommend me,’ Kalwant insisted.

‘I tell you, it’s Jhoti they want,’ repeated Govind. ‘Language is no problem. She’ll learn. She’s not so stupid. Anyway, they speak good Punjabi. I want her to go, if you have no objection. After all, it gets her off your hands.’

Jhoti clenched her fist and closed her eyes. If Govind must go away, then she desired to work at the Chadwicks’ more than anything else. ‘Please!’ she almost cried out loud. She opened her eyes and found herself looking straight at Chet Singh. He winked at her, an old, grey, whiskery wink, then took back the hookah for a long puff.

‘Let her go,’ he said at last. ‘I have no objection. If she’s no good, they’ll soon find out, then we can offer them Kalwant or Narinder.’

‘It seems all wrong to me,’ muttered Mother-in-law, ‘but I suppose a pretty face gets to go places in this household.’ She gave her husband a sneering glance.

‘Well, Jhoti,’ she turned to her. ‘You needn’t think it lets you off your duties here, or that working in the sahib’s bungalow gives you any special privileges,’ she warned.

‘Yes,’ agreed Kalwant, ‘and I hope you don’t start putting on airs and graces either. Just remember your place in this household.’

Jhoti bowed her head, and drew her veil across her face.

‘The matter is settled!’ cried Chet Singh, waving his hand dismissively. ‘Now leave me in peace to smoke and play cards. Will you join us, Govind?’ he asked slapping his youngest son on the back.

Marvinder asked again, ‘Ma, where is England? Is it very far away? Farther than Amritsar?’

Jhoti took her daughter’s hand and wandered down to the edge of the pond. A new moon was reflected sharp and silver in the still, flat water. It looked like a farmer’s sickle floating there, almost solid enough to pick up. She wiped her eyes with the end of her veil and coughed to clear the sobs from her throat.

‘Do you see this water?’ she asked softly.

Marvinder nodded, leaning her body into her mother’s thigh.

‘Imagine this water stretching out bigger and bigger and bigger, so that whichever way you looked you wouldn’t see land. Do you remember that story about Manu? How God sent a flood and washed away all the land? Manu had to build a boat, and he floated and floated for years and years until one day, he came to land again? Do you remember that, Marvi?’

Marvinder said, ‘Yes, yes! Was that land England?’

‘No, but your pa, he will go to the edge of the ocean, almost as big as that flood. He will get on a boat, and he will sail and sail for days and days. The land will disappear and then they will be all alone with nothing but the sea. And then, at last, after a very long time, they will see birds flying and wood drifting and seaweed floating on the water, and they will know that they are near. Then one day someone will shout, “Land Ahoy!” and they will see a long, cold grey line of shore between sea and sky and that will be England.’

‘How do you know all this, Ma? Have you been there?’

Jhoti laughed. ‘Of course not. But there was an old man in my village who got taken away to the sea and put on a ship, and he went across the big ocean to Africa, and sailed all round the world. He was away so many years that when he came back, no one recognised him. Not even his wife. He used to tell us all about the sea.’

‘Will that happen to my pa? Will he go away for so long that we won’t know him when he comes back?’

‘If it’s only for a year . . .’ Jhoti’s voice faltered, ‘then you’ll know him.’

It was late when Govind finally came to bed. Jhoti awoke, but said nothing as she lay watching him undress by the last, low light of the kerosene lantern hanging just outside the window. She stared at him, his arms circulating around his head as he unravelled his turban. He was still a stranger. His shadow rose like a giant up the wall and bent across the ceiling above her head. Suddenly, the lantern flickered and went out. Instantly, it was as if Govind, too, was extinguished.

That night Marvinder had a dream. She dreamt that she was walking with her father down the long, white road. On and on they walked, till suddenly, they found their feet were being submerged. The land all around was disappearing beneath a vast expanse of water. The water rose higher and higher, and she thought they would all drown, but suddenly, a big ship came sailing up. Govind clambered on board, but when Marvinder reached out her hand, he turned his back, and didn’t seem to hear her calls. The boat began to sail away.

‘Pa, Pa, Pa! Take me too! Save me!’ she screamed, as the water rose up her chest and now was lapping over her face. But the boat sailed on, and he never even looked back.

‘Wake up, Marvi! Wake up!’ Jhoti was bending over her. ‘You’re having a bad dream.’ She hugged the child closely. Somewhere in the darkness, Jaspal began crying, and Govind grunted crossly at having his sleep disturbed.

‘Pa will never come back,’ said Marvinder after a while, then she rolled over and went back to sleep.

SIX

The Snake

After Govind had departed for England, his degree photograph was placed on a ledge next to a faded bazaar portrait of the Sikh spiritual leader, Guru Nanak, and regularly draped with garlands of flowers. Each day, Jhoti, Marvinder and Jaspal sent up a little prayer to Guru Nanak, and asked God to protect their father and send him safely home again.

Govind didn’t write often. Anyway, Shireen was the only member of the family who could read, and that at a simple level because she had only attended school till she was nine years old. He wrote more fully to Harold Chadwick, and Harold would then bring Jhoti up to date with Govind’s progress.

Friends of the Chadwicks had found digs for Govind in a part of London called Whitechapel, the sahib told her. He had one room with a sink and a cooker in it and was learning to look after himself. He had started his courses at the university and was coping well, but hated the food.

‘He’ll have to learn to cook!’ joked Harold, trying to bring a smile to Jhoti’s sad face.

But it only bewildered Jhoti to imagine her husband grinding spices or kneading chapatti flour, and she became convinced that he would starve. She would stand silently while Harold read parts from her husband’s letters, waiting for something that she could understand, some sign that he missed her and his children; that he looked forward to coming home. But there was nothing like that in any of the letters. He wrote of things she knew nothing about and countries she had never heard of, such as Germany, France and Poland.

There’s talk of war in Europe,’ wrote Govind. The fascists often come marching round this area. They’re a tough bunch, I tell you. Behave like thugs half the time. I get off the streets when they’re around. Anyone that’s a Jew or a foreigner, they beat them up! You wouldn’t believe it!’

Harold frowned and looked worried at those words. ‘That doesn’t sound like the England I know,’ he murmured sadly. ‘They can’t have another war. It’s not possible,’ he wrung his hands with despair. ‘Yet fascism seems to be everywhere, and this man, Hitler . . . how is he to be dealt with?’

For a moment, he was lost in his own thoughts, then he turned back to Jhoti with a reassuring smile.

‘And you, Jhoti. What shall I tell Govind about you?’ he asked.

‘Tell him his son is well; he is beginning to walk and most of his milk teeth have come through. Marvinder is getting tall, and now she’s been put in charge of the buffaloes. She herds them out to the fields each morning, and brings them in for milking at dusk. Tell him that his parents are both in good health, as are his brothers and sisters.’

‘But you, Jhoti?’ said Harold, kindly. ‘What shall I tell him about you?’

‘I am well, too,’ answered Jhoti simply.

‘Is it wise to let your child mix with the servants?’ Miss Alcott was visiting Dora about the forthcoming church bazaar. They sat on the verandah sipping tea. She stared disapprovingly at Edith and Marvinder playing at house beneath the low branches of the temple tree.

‘Isn’t it time she was at a school?’

Dora repressed a sigh of annoyance, and said politely, ‘Harold and I decided that we would educate her ourselves for a little while longer. The world is such an unsettled place at the moment, we felt loath to part with her. I mean, England is out of the question now that there’s talk of war.’

‘There may not be a war. Chamberlain seems determined to find a compromise of some sorts,’ said Miss Alcott.

‘But India, too, is in so much turmoil,’ sighed Dora. ‘They want independence, and oh! I can understand it. We have no right to be here. But I’m worried. Only Gandhi’s stopping them from all-out rebellion.’ As she spoke, Dora frowned and her mind seemed to wander away from her guest. Then abruptly, she returned. ‘Anyway,’ she said firmly, ‘Edith’s too young for boarding school.’

‘I think you’re being far too sentimental,’ Miss Alcott stated frankly. Her position as sister and secretary to the Reverend Cyril Alcott, vicar of All Souls and her advanced middle age, obviously made her feel entitled to speak her mind when and where she pleased, especially to the lower orders, which included people such as Dora Chadwick, the young wife of a mere schoolmaster.

‘You don’t want your child getting too familiar with the natives. It can lead to problems later on. I’ve seen it happen. People must know their place in life, and if you don’t mind my saying, I believe it’s idealists like you, with a misguided desire to promote equality, who have helped to fuel these disgraceful aspirations among the Indians. Independence, my foot. How can they rule themselves, I mean look at them. The vast majority haven’t progressed since the invention of the wheel.’

She looked pointedly towards the road, along which a bullock cart laden with sugar cane creaked and laboured its way towards the town.

‘And if we did leave, you know what would happen? They’d be at each other’s throats. I mean they are already. There’s no love lost between Muslim and Hindu. There was trouble in the town just the other night, and Superintendent Lincoln had to go and sort it out.’

Dora said nothing and nodded in a polite if non-committal sort of way.

Miss Alcott heaved a weighty sigh and shifted herself in the cane chair, It was hot, and her flowery cotton dress was sticking to her skin. ‘Then of course there’s the Sikhs. If you ask me, I think they’re the worst of the lot. They’ll go for both their throats. If we leave India, they will all fall upon each other like hyenas and tear the place apart. It would be a tragedy, an absolute tragedy.’

She got up and straightened out her damp skirt. ‘If you’ll take my advice, I think you should consider sending Edith to somewhere like Auckland House School for Girls in Simla. It’s as good a place as you’ll get in this country. They have a kindergarten section. She would soon get used to being away from home. She needs proper friends; girls of her own kind, not servants’ children. And if you don’t mind my saying, I wish you would take more part in our affairs. You keep yourself too much to yourself. People notice, you know. Why don’t you come along to the Mothers’ Union or the Women’s Institute; the club is doing a Gilbert and Sullivan this autumn. You and Harold should get involved. I hear you’re a pianist. We’re going to need a pianist. Shall I tell Major Pocock? He’s producing it.’

‘I’m not sure,’ replied Dora, reluctantly. ‘I’ll think about it, and let him know myself.’

Miss Alcock shrugged. ‘Please yourself,’ she said through pursed lips.

She went over to her bicycle, which was leaning against the verandah steps, and put on her topee.

‘Hey you! Girl!’ She hailed Marvinder who turned automatically at the commanding voice. ‘Open the gate!’

Marvinder, who had Jaspal on her hip, began to hurry up the drive, but Edith overtook her calling out, ‘I’ll go!’

Frowning, Miss Alcott pedalled through on to the road. ‘Thank you, Edith,’ she said primly, ‘but I think you should have let the girl open the gate.’

‘Oh, but I like opening gates,’ cried Edith. ‘Come on, Marvi!’ she called. ‘Come and swing!’

‘She’s turning into a heathen, there’s no doubt about it, poor child,’ muttered Miss Alcott as she cycled away. ‘I must ask Cyril to intervene.’

It came from under the toy cupboard, the snake. Edith saw its eyes first of all, like bright beads, glinting in the dusty darkness. Then as it ventured further into the room, its head swayed from side to side, like a scout examining the lie of the land. Every now and then, its tongue flashed from its mouth like lightning.

The lizard on the wall froze, still as an ornament, and even the sunlight, falling in warm dappled patches across the carpet, seemed to cool.

Edith watched it from her rocking horse. She only paused for a moment with surprise, her mouth opening instinctively to exclaim, but shutting it again without a sound.

Ayah had got her ready for church. Like a passive doll, Edith had allowed herself to be dressed in her hated pink frock with the white smocking across the chest; had allowed her feet to be imprisoned in white socks, and the white, leather shoes with a fold-over strap which buttoned and pinched.

Now she sat on the rocking horse while old Shanta brushed her hair. It was one of the ayah’s favourite tasks. She loved trapping the long, golden tresses in the bristles and lifting it outwards, like a river, a river which then became a cataract, streaming down as she gradually released it from the brush.

When Edith briefly stopped rocking, Shanta was pleased. It gave her a chance to thrust the brush close to the scalp and pull through the tangles which had gathered in the night. But then Edith casually resumed her motion, her eyes never leaving the snake, as it edged its way along the fringe of the carpet, head reaching forwards, then that slight pause, while the rest of its body caught up in a swift S.

The playpen stood in the middle of the carpet. Jhoti had just bathed and changed the twins. They rolled around like little buddhas, chubby arms and legs flailing among the teddies and wooden bricks. Ralph saw it first; chortled with delight at the undulating patterns on its scaly back; reached out a hand through the wooden bars of the playpen, longing to grasp its writhing body.

Edith went on rocking. She didn’t say a word, though her eye was fixed on the snake.

At the sight of Ralph’s hand, the creature halted. It lifted its narrow head, its tongue flickering with curiosity. Edith stopped rocking a second time. In the pause, Ayah took the comb and rapidly divided her hair with a parting and began plaiting with deft fingers.

The room, the lizard, the older sister stopped breathing. How long is a moment? Then somewhere in the universe, a god blinked and life started again. The snake moved on, sliding away towards the watery coolness of the bathroom beyond. Ralph withdrew his hand, disappointed, and Edith went on rocking.

Edith always accompanied her parents to church. They cycled the mile down the road, Edith riding in front of her father on the crossbar. He in his smart, light brown suit with topee on head, and Dora in some suitable, long-sleeved cotton frock, with one hand alternating between keeping her billowing skirts in check or hanging on to her white, panama hat.

Now that Jhoti helped Ayah to look after the twins, Marvinder was given charge of Jaspal for long periods of time. It was rare to see Marvinder without Jaspal growing out of her hip like a second torso. On Sundays, she too made her way to the church. It was by a different route, across the fields and through the mango groves. Today she went as usual, picking her way among the gravestones, round the back of the tall, grey walls of the stone church to the east door. Here, old Ram Singh crouched like a gnome, toothless and rheumatic that he was, and pumped air through the bellows into the organ, while Mr Austin, the organist, produced music which made the wooden floors vibrate.

Often, Marvinder folded her veil, put it on the ground and laid Jaspal on it so that she was free to have a go at pumping the organ. Ram Singh didn’t mind. It gave him a break to have a smoke. Just so long as she pumped evenly and didn’t jerk the bellows.

‘O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope of years to come,’

Marvinder sang along with the congregation. She knew the words without knowing the meaning, and she loved the shudder of the organ when Mr Austin used his feet and produced the loud, deep vibrating chords for the last verse.

When at last it was time for the sermon, Edith was always allowed to flee the tedium of sitting through the Reverend Alcott’s droning voice. Her leather shoes would echo with relief down the stone aisle as she hastened out in search of Marvinder. They would play hide and seek among the graves, sometimes their laughter reached the older members of the congregation who looked accusingly at Dora. Or the girls would simply wander about looking with awe at the kindly, stone faces of guardian angels, and trace their fingers over the inlaid words on the headstones.

That Sunday, the Sunday of 3 September 1939, Mr Austin was playing the hymn, ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall’. When it ended, there was the usual pause, while people closed their hymn books and shuffled themselves into some kind of comfortable position for the sermon. Marvinder waited for Edith to come out, but she didn’t appear. Getting impatient, she left Jaspal lying on her veil near Ram Singh, and crept up to the organ loft. Noiselessly, she peered down through the balustrade at the congregation all splashed in different colours with reflections from the stained glass windows.

The vicar was speaking in a solemn voice, but somehow, today it seemed different. Everybody had their eyes on him, even Edith. No one fidgeted or dozed; no one’s eyes wandered around the church. Then suddenly, they all knelt down with bowed heads and clasped hands and began to pray. Someone hurried up into the organ loft and among anxious whispers, Mr Austin flicked through the hymn book looking for a change of hymn. Then when the vicar had stopped speaking, they all sang ‘Abide with me’, in a very slow, sad way.

Marvinder went back into the churchyard and waited. At last, the service was over, but when everyone emerged from the church, they came out silently. No one was talking. The vicar stood as usual at the door, shaking hands, but no one smiled.

Edith emerged holding her mother’s hand. She looked ill at ease. On seeing Marvinder she detached herself and ran over to her.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Marvinder. ‘Why is nobody talking?’

‘We are at war,’ said Edith. ‘The vicar told us. He got a telegram right in the middle of the service.’

That evening, Dora didn’t leave it to Jhoti and the ayah to put the children to bed. Dora was filled with a terrible dread. She wanted to clasp all her children round her. If she had only known of one sure, safe place in the world to escape to, she would have gathered them all up and run. As it was, she fought down her panic by helping to undress them, finding excuses to clasp them in her arms and smother them with kisses.

Jhoti was going to and fro between the kitchen and the bathroom carrying big kettles of hot water for their baths. Suddenly, she gave a fearful shriek. They heard the crash of a kettle, and Jhoti ran out in terror. ‘Sāp, Memsahib! Sāp !’

‘Snake!’ Dora went white with horror. ‘Harold! Harold!’

Edith climbed on to the rocking horse. Her face was blank and cold as marble.

Jhoti had flung the kettle of near boiling water at the snake and helped to stun it, so when Harold and Arjun came rushing in, it didn’t take long to club it to death and fling its body outside into the dust.

Later when Dora examined it, to satisfy herself that it would no longer be of any danger, she suddenly felt remorse and foreboding. Why had they killed it? Why had they allowed mindless panic to destroy such a beautiful creature?

She wandered back into the nursery and checked each of her twins.

Then Dora went into the smaller annexe off the nursery, where Edith now slept. As she peered at her daughter through the mosquito net, she was shocked to find her lying awake. Edith stared at her unblinking. Her gaze was so fixed, so emotionless, that at first she thought she must be asleep, even though her eyes were open.

‘Edith?’ she whispered.

Edith stared at her a second or two longer, then without replying to her mother, rolled over and slept.

Jhoti stood in the darkness of the verandah and breathed deeply. The pungent smells of jasmine, lilies and lemons hung in the air. Marvinder crouched, dozing nearby, her head lolling against Jaspal, who was clasped in her arms. She clambered to her feet and came to her mother.

‘Ma?’ she whispered. ‘Was the snake dangerous?’

‘It was a cobra. Cobras can kill,’ answered Jhoti.

Marvinder shuddered and drew closer to her mother.

‘Shall we go home now, Ma?’ she asked.

‘In a moment,’ murmured Jhoti. She could see the light come on in the drawing room. Harold and Dora entered. His arm was round her shoulder as if to comfort her. Then he took out his violin, while Dora went to the piano. This was how they always ended their day, and Jhoti liked this last invisible link with them.

Each evening, she would squat outside on the verandah, with Jaspal suckling at her breast, and Marvinder playing hopscotch on the flagstones, and listen to Harold and Dora making music together. It was like a religious ritual, and Jhoti found it strangely comforting.

She watched their blurred shapes through the wire-meshed windows and listened to sounds she would never know were Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart. Even Marvinder, fidgeting around her mother, eventually became still, sometimes huddling into Jhoti to watch and listen, and sometimes even pretending that she was playing the violin too. She copied the way Harold held the instrument under his chin with his left hand, and drew the bow up and down with his right.

At last, Arjun would enter the room quietly and wait to be noticed. Then he would announce that their dinner was ready to be served. Wrapping her veil around Jaspal, and tugging Marvinder’s hand, Jhoti would at last go back home along the white road.

That night, as they walked back home, there was a long, low rumble coming from the road. Had it been in monsoon, they would have thought it was thunder. But it was September, and the rumble went on longer than any roll of thunder.

From that day on, often in the night, they would hear the rumbling sound, and it was a long time before anyone knew they were army trucks moving troops. Some to go to the ports to board ships for Europe, others to go to the border areas for fear of invasion.

For no one in her village did the fact that the world was at war mean anything. Nothing interrupted their routine. There were still the fields to tend and the buffaloes to milk. It would have been possible for no one to even know, except that one day a letter came from Govind.

‘As soon as war was declared, all the students went and joined up. I too have joined up and will be sent from England to meet up with a Punjab regiment in France. We are all very excited and keen to see action. You would be proud to see me in my uniform. Of course, it means I will not complete my university course until after the war.’

Jhoti and Marvinder listened in silence to Harold reading out the letter. When he had finished he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Jhoti. It looks as though you won’t be seeing your husband for quite a while yet.’

‘I knew papa would not come back,’ said Marvinder.

SEVEN

The Lake

Beyond the church, through a deeply shaded area of mango trees, crumbling slowly away under monsoon rain and relentless sun, invaded by the predatory embrace of weeds and vines and twisting roots of ivy, was the rajah’s palace. It was Marvinder who had first told Edith about it.

‘Doesn’t look much like a palace to me,’ Edith complained. She thought all palaces would be like the ones in her book of fairy tales; palaces with tall narrow turrets, marble domes and slanting roofs of gold with arrow slitted windows. But when they clambered through the tangle of vegetation and reached the vast sweep of grey stone verandah, she was impressed.

The building rose like a huge mouldering wedding cake, supported on great, fluted stone pillars and rising tier upon tier, terrace upon terrace until finally it culminated in a flat roof, fifty, eighty, a hundred feet up, hemmed in by stone balustrades and fierce parapets.

Edith fell silent. She was overawed, even afraid. It was so wild, so defiant. If silk-turbanned rajahs and bejewelled queens had ever looked out of those blank windows, or stood on the roofs to watch the sun go down, all trace of them had been smothered. Wherever there was a chink, a crack, a space between pillar and roof, step and verandah, wall and ceiling, a plant, a tendril, a cluster of grasses had seeded itself; long trailing weeds and brilliant flowers, cascaded precipitously; saplings reached out like new-born foals on long dangly legs, with twigs and leaves sprouting and spreading out and out into unimpeded space.

By day, pigeons and sparrows and kites and crows flew in and out of the rooms and roofs; bees, hornets and wasps built their own vast palaces of honey which hung like huge nets from the alcoves. But by night, the palace became the domain of bats and owls, stray dogs and roaming hyenas. Snakes slithered out across the cool stone and a myriad of brilliant insects swarmed in and out of their hidden kingdoms.

At first, Edith hadn’t wanted to stay long. It frightened her, and she had turned haughtily, remarking that it wasn’t her idea of a palace. But that was years ago. Now she was older, nearly ten. She had been at boarding school for almost two years and had become hardened.

The absence from home was long. Six months without a break, without seeing her mother and father. She blamed the twins. If it hadn’t been for them, the war wouldn’t have broken out in Europe, then they would have all gone back to England; they would have lived together in a house and gone to day schools. But the day war broke out was the day the snake nearly bit Ralph, and somehow she linked the two events with her despatch to boarding school. The twins required so much attention and hard work. Edith thought of them as leeches, sucking away at their mother. Even now, although they were six years old, she never saw her mother without a twin draped round her legs, or clinging to her neck, making demands, ensuring that there was no time for Edith.

At first she cried every night in her school dorm and wrote letters to her parents begging them to take her home. She thought that she would die of homesickness; thought that the lump of pain would never stop choking her, but then one morning, she woke up. The pain was gone, but it was as if a stone had replaced her heart and she had simply stopped feeling.

It was the same when she came home for the holidays. They met her off the train, her mother and father, each with a twin in hand. She felt hatred and stiffened when they kissed her. How annoying, then, that the twins adored her. Ralph and Grace followed her round everywhere, and called her Edie! And because Jaspal called his elder sister, Didi, as is the custom, the twins also called Marvinder, Didi. They loved the two sounds being so close. ‘Edie and Didi!’ they chanted, until it drove Edith mad.

One day, Edith remembered the palace and she whispered to Marvinder, ‘Let’s run away and hide from the twins. Let’s go to the palace.’

Marvinder was a little troubled at leaving the twins. They had been put partially in her charge, while Jhoti helped Dora Chadwick prepare the house for a party that night, though Jhoti or Dora was always popping out to check that all was well.

‘Do you think we should?’ Marvinder asked. ‘We were supposed to keep an eye on the twins.’

‘We always have to look after the twins,’ wailed Edith. ‘I’m fed up. I want to play my own game. I want to go to the palace and play kings and queens. We can take dressing-up clothes. My mother has some lovely sarees and we can take cushions to sit on.’

‘How will we take it all there?’ asked Marvinder, getting swept away with the idea, despite herself.

‘We’ll take a bike. We’ll take Arjun’s bike. We’ll put the cushions and sarees in the front basket. I’ll cycle. I’ve ridden his bike before, and you can ride to the palace on the back seat.’

‘What palace?’ demanded Ralph, whose sharp ears caught the last part of Edith’s sentence.

‘Mind your own business,’ retorted Edith rudely.

‘Can we play whatever it is you’re playing?’ demanded Grace looking very interested.

‘Yes, you can play, if you can find your own dressing-up things,’ declared Edith, with a sudden cunning flash of inspiration.

‘Come on, Ralph, Edie says we can play too!” squealed Grace, tugging her twin into the bungalow.

‘Quick, Marvi!’ hissed Edith. ‘You get Arjun’s bike, and I’ll get the sarees and cushions. Let’s get away before the twins come back.’

Edith flew into the house.

By the time the twins emerged with armfuls of drapes and dressing-up clothes, Edith and Marvinder were a wobbly speck in the distance.

Their high-pitched voices called out in dismay. ‘Edie! Didi! Wait for us!’ But Edith pedalled away with fierce determination. Only Marvinder, sitting side-saddle on the back seat, turned her head uneasily, to watch Ralph and Grace rushing up to the gate, waving frantically. Then she saw their arms drop to their sides and their bundles of dressing-up clothes tumble to the ground as she and Edith dwindled from sight.

‘Hey! Ralph!’ Jaspal’s head appeared, peering over the wall as if he were a giant. When the twins saw him, they shrieked with amusement and went rushing over.

‘How did you make yourself so tall?’ asked Grace.

Jaspal grinned mysteriously. ‘I ate magic beans and grew in the night.’

Ralph and Grace were already climbing the small tree which grew up against the wall, and soon they were high enough to look over the other side.

‘Jaspal’s standing on his buffalo!’ chortled Ralph, who saw him first.

‘Let me see, let me see!’ urged Grace, pushing herself up the branch.

Jaspal laughed. He was in charge of this buffalo and he loved her. He named her ‘Rani’. He always took her to the fields each morning where she spent the day pulling up water from the well to irrigate the fields; then after school, he would bring her back to let her cool off in the pond near the village.

‘Where’s Didi?’ he asked the twins.

‘They’ve gone without us,’ scowled Ralph. ‘They’ve gone somewhere to dress up.’

‘To a palace, Edith said they were going to a palace!’ insisted Grace.

‘That’s what she said, but she probably made it up. Edith makes up things all the time,’ muttered Ralph. There isn’t a real palace here.’

‘Oh yes there is,’ said Jaspal. ‘I know where there’s a big palace. It is Ranjit Singh’s old palace. He was a famous king of the Punjab, my grandfather told me. No one lives there now – except ghosts, they say!’

‘Where, Jaspal, where?’ they exclaimed with delighted terror. ‘Take us to it.’

‘If you ride on top of the buffalo, I’ll lead you across the fields. It’s quicker that way, and there’s the palace lake there where I can let Rani cool off. It’s full of fish. We could go fishing!’

‘Come on, let’s go!’ yelled Ralph enthusiastically.

‘Can we really ride Rani?’ begged Grace.

Jaspal nodded with delight. ‘Of course! Her back is broad enough for ten children!’ He reached up a hand. ‘Come, you can jump down from there. It’s easy.’

Jaspal helped the twins on to the wall, then bringing his buffalo close, till its great bulging sides leaned into the wall, he helped each twin to slide on to the beast’s back.

‘Eh, Jaspal!’ Jhoti called her son from the verandah. She had just glimpsed the buffalo carrying the two English children on its back. They looked like little golden gods, with their blond sun-bleached hair streaming in the wind, and their honey-coloured arms and legs contrasting starkly against the animal’s thick, dusty black skin.

‘Where are you going?’ she called.

Dora came out to look too. She knew she should order them back, but when she called out their names, and they looked round at her with such joy in their faces, all she could yell was, ‘Be careful, my darlings! And Jaspal, don’t be away too long, will you!’

Jaspal walked to the side, so upright and proud to be in charge, his hair tied up in a topknot, his legs, which emerged from beneath a pair of grubby white shorts, as thin and knobbly as the stick he was carrying to guide the buffalo. He waved and shouted, ‘Back soon!’

Jhoti and Dora stood for a long while gazing after the buffalo with the children plodding across the fields, before finally going back inside to continue laying the dining-table.

The palace looked even wilder than ever. Edith gave a shudder and almost wished they had after all brought the twins with them. It seemed so lonely and so quiet. She would have suggested going to get them, or changing their plan and doing something else, but Marvinder had already pulled out a saree and draped it round herself.

‘Now, I’m a queen!’ she cried strutting up the verandah steps.

She swept the glittering material round her. It was turquoise and gold and when she let it billow out as she ran up and down, she looked like a wonderful peacock. Suddenly, she paused briefly in a great dark doorway. ‘Let’s go inside!’ she said, and without waiting for an answer disappeared into the black chasm.

‘Marvinder!’ Edith rushed up the steps in a panic. ‘Don’t go away.’ She hesitated for a second in the doorway. She could see nothing inside but an impenetrable darkness.

‘Marvinder?’ Her voice had dropped to a whisper. There was no reply. She stepped a half step forward. ‘Marvi! Answer me!’ she demanded, hoarsely. She heard a stiffled giggle. Edith moved forward more boldly. She couldn’t see anything at first, and then slowly, her eyes began to adjust and she saw that trickles of green light revealed a huge empty room.

‘Marvinder!’ she called out loud. Her voice echoed, and there was a rush of wings as a disturbed pigeon flapped past her face and swooped through the door, making her scream.

‘Edith, come up here!’ Marvinder’s voice came from somewhere above her head.

Edith looked slowly round, and then she saw the opening in the far wall and the start of some stone steps. The steps were narrow and twisting with no rail to hold on to, and the treads were worn, as if thousands of feet had climbed up and down and up and down, gradually hollowing out the stone. She put one foot into the first indentation, then the next and the next, as steadily she climbed upwards.

A shock of brilliant daylight greeted her eyes at the top. She had emerged on to the first terrace. It was like stepping out on to the deck of a ship, for the whole palace seemed to be floating in a great green ocean of foliage which trembled and undulated all around.

‘Edith! Look at me!’ Marvi’s voice came from inside the enormous room which extended almost the full length of the terrace. Edith dashed in through the large rectangle of a door.

It was a wonderful room, which must once have been furnished with huge silken cushions, magnificent rugs, embroidered hangings, low, intricately-carved ebony tables on which stood brass lampstands and ivory boxes inlaid with precious stones; a room whose walls must have been hung with the skins of tiger, leopard and cheetah and the antlers of deer decorating the doorways. A room fit for a king, a hunter, a proud ruler, a warrior, where princes and princesses rustled by in fabulous silken clothes and brilliant turbans; a room with space enough for eye-flashing dancers to whirl and stamp, and musicians with sitars and tamboura to hypnotise the night with passionate ragas, while tabla drums beat their audience into a frenzy.

Edith sensed it, though the room was stripped as bare as a rock. It was as though some strange spell had been cast over the palace; the carpets had been turned into dry, dead leaves, which tumbled lazily across the dusty, stone floors; the silken cushions had become lumps of stone; the only trophies on the walls were the lizards which streaked like lightning from one diagonal to another, only to stop suddenly, utterly motionless, as if playing some game of statues. And the kings and queens? The princes and princesses? Where had they gone? Had they turned into the shiny-backed beetles which scuttled in corners? Or the long-legged spiders which spun their own web of curtain across the windows? Or were they the ghosts the people whispered about, who emerged sometimes to reinhabit their chambers and walk the verandahs and terraces?

‘Look at me!’ said Marvinder softly. She sat at the far end of the room on a slightly raised stone dias. She sat cross-legged with her turquoise saree swirled all around her. The sunlight caught the silver and gold threads and made them glisten. She looked like a queen.

They began to play; almost silently, almost as if they, too, were under a spell. They laid out the cushions and draped themselves in sarees and veils; they moved around making royal gestures, and began to wander up and up through the palace, till finally they reached the roof.

At this height they were level with the tops of trees and looked out over the landscape around them. They felt like gods. There was the church and the graveyard; there was the long white road, running like a shimmering thread, on and on, past Marvinder’s village, on and on until it would have reached her mother’s home village, except that it disappeared over the horizon.

‘I can see my house!’ screamed Edith gleefully.

When they crossed the roof to look out over the other side, an avenue of sky ran between the great spreading boughs of eucalyptus and mango and neem trees; it took the eye all the way down to a shining lake which Edith never knew existed.

‘Look! Oh look!’

‘That is the rajah’s lake,’ said Marvinder. ‘It’s where he used to fish. My uncles go there often.’

The lake was surrounded by wild undergrowth, which made the waters look dark green. In the middle of the lake was a small island with a landing stage for mooring a boat, and a cupola, which jutted out like a stone umbrella under which a king might sit and fish through a hot afternoon.

Beyond the lake on the other side, the jungle had been kept at bay by the farmers, whose fields of wheat and mustard came right up to the boundary. Across one of these fields, Jaspal and his buffalo came into view carrying Ralph and Grace on its back.

Edith leapt up and down with excitement, screaming at them. ‘Ralph! Grace! Look! Over here! Oh, please look, you two!’

Marvinder, too, waved and yelled at the top of her voice. ‘Jaspal! Jaspal bhai! ’

But somehow the three of them didn’t seem to hear. Perhaps they were too intent on the boat. Jaspal helped Ralph and Grace to slide off the buffalo’s back and while the children ran their fingers over the battered, wooden sides of the boat, the buffalo ambled down to the water’s edge and immersed its great body in the mud and weeds.

The boat was already very close to the water so when a slight breeze ruffled the surface, the stern bobbed gently as tiny waves lapped around it. All it took was a push and it was afloat.

Edith and Marvinder watched, at first still waving and shouting in their efforts to get the children’s attention; then they fell silent mesmerised by the scene, which slowly unfolded like a piece of mime.

Ralph pointed to the island in the middle of the lake. Grace and Jaspal looked and nodded enthusiastically. Grace climbed into the boat and awkwardly crawled over the centre seats to the stern. She didn’t notice the loose planks or the holes in the sides. Ralph and Jaspal, still on land, put their hands to the prow and began to push. The boat wobbled and they could see Grace laughing. She put her hand to her mouth as if to stiffle anxious squeals.

The boys pushed and heaved, their arms extended to the full, out in front, their legs stretched behind as they put the full weight of their bodies into the push to get the boat away from the shore. At last, with a final heave, the boat slid away with the boys plunging into the water after it.

‘Oh, what fun! what fun!’ cried Edith, clapping her hands despite herself. ‘Look at them trying to get into the boat!’

The boys were both balanced on their tummies tipping and rocking as they pulled themselves aboard.

Marvinder didn’t speak.

Ralph found an oar and wriggled it out from under the seat. There seemed to be only one. He began to plunge it into the water. Meanwhile, Jaspal and Grace were using their hands to paddle the boat along.

Slowly, slowly, the boat began to drift further and further from the shore, whether by the exertions of the children or by a faint wind which caught the craft in its grip and tugged it out towards the centre of the lake.

The same wind suddenly sent a heap of dead leaves scurrying and rattling across the palace roof, and made the girls’ sarees billow out like sails. A flock of green parrots exploded into the sky with a wild screech. If only they could have leapt as easily into space from the parapets and flown down to the lake side. If only their sarees could have turned into wings and given them the power of flight. Instead, they stood, helpless and rooted.

It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. They saw the terror of the children as the boat began to fill with water. The children used their hands, frantically trying to scoop out the water. It was all so fast. Suddenly, the three children were up to their waists in the water, then their chests and then . . .

Edith was aware of a whimpering at her side. Marvinder’s fingers were clawing at her saree and she began to run, first away then back to the balustrade, then away, then back. Her whimpers became fierce screams, squeezed out of her body in short gasps. Then suddenly she was gone. Edith was hardly aware of it, for Edith just stood as if she had become one of the hard, grey, immobile palace stones; inactive; doomed, as these stones had been doomed to be a dumb, passive witness; to see but never to forget.

They looked so small, so insignificant, struggling there in the water. Their splashes were no bigger than a dog might make as it swims after a stick. Then suddenly, there was nothing except a blank expanse of water. No boat, no children.

Edith gave a deep sigh as if she were eternally weary. She turned away, and wrapping her saree tightly round her body wandered down like a sleepwalker to the grand chamber. Edith lay down on a cushion, her head on another and closed her eyes.

She slept.

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