Belonging (2 page)

It’s strange how a whole life can be changed in an instant. A dozen years later, I’m still haunted by that moment when I might have reached down and touched Father’s head as he passed below me. If he’d known I was there, or if I’d jumped down then, instead of staying to see the tablecloth, and followed him to his study, I believe he would not have done what he did.

That night, Afzal Khan took me to a neighbour’s house and left me there. I had never spent a night apart from Ayah before and cried and begged for her to be sent to me, but she didn’t come.

I stayed there for a few days until it was arranged that I would be sent to England to live with my great-aunt Wilhelmina. A Mrs Twomey, who was travelling to Tilbury with her daughter, would take me with her. Afzal Khan and Ayah both came to say goodbye. Out of his uniform and starched turban Afzal Khan looked smaller and older; he wept and repeated,
‘Khuda hafiz, khuda hafiz,’
invoking Allah’s protection. Ayah looked older too, her eyes red and swollen from weeping; she kissed my hands and cheeks and held my
face and called me her sweet baby. I pleaded with her to come with me but she shook her head. Even before I asked I knew she would never leave Mother, but as the carriage drove away I looked back and saw her wailing and throwing dust over her head.

At Karachi I stood on the ship beside Mrs. Twomey and Jane and watched the crowds of people who had come to see their loved ones depart. The Indians screamed and wept; the English, including Mr. Twomey in his solar topee, waved their handkerchiefs. Streamers of marigolds and gardenias stretched from hands on deck down to the quay. As the boat pulled away, Indian passengers threw garlands from the deck into the triangle of water between the ship and the dock. I watched as they were caught up in the wake and bobbed away.

For the first week I ate and slept in a daze, convinced that I would wake to find myself back in our bungalow with Father calling, ‘Hurry up, slowcoach! Ram Das is waiting with the pony,’ and I would know it had all been a nightmare. I was sharing a cabin with Mrs. Twomey’s daughter Jane, who was seven, and one morning I opened my eyes to find her already up and playing with her doll, Jemima. As I lay listening to her, the cabin solidified around me: the sun through the porthole was lying in a band across the panelling, illuminating the lines and colours of the wood grain; I could hear Jane singing to her doll, and feel the ship rolling under me, and I knew it was true. It had really happened: Father was gone and I would never, ever see him again. My life stretched out ahead of me, an endless succession of empty days, and I leant out of my bunk and was sick on the floor.

When I felt well enough I went out on deck to the point of the bow. It was a rough stormy day with lashing winds, mountainous waves and spray blowing horizontally across
the deck. There was no one else about. I stood there and screamed until my throat and stomach hurt and my eyes and nose were raw from the tears and the wind, and when I finally stopped screaming I found I had lost my voice and I was glad because there was no one I wanted to speak to and nothing I wanted to say.

Everyone on board knew about Father; Mrs. Twomey had told them. I had seen her standing in groups of people talking in her high-pitched excitable way. I saw the looks of pity and curiosity directed at me and I hated them all. They sat at table dressed in their finery amidst the mirrors and chandeliers and polished wood and gleaming brass; their mouths opened and closed, food went in and words came out, and their laughter was mocking and ugly.

The only place I felt comfortable was standing at the bow, alone with the blue sea and sky that stretched all the way to the horizon. The emptiness came right into me. I stood there hour after hour watching the bow slice through the smooth skin of water, peeling it back to curl away behind us in a froth of foam. The wash of the wake swept my head as clean as the inside of an eggshell. I wanted it to go on forever.

The first thing my great-aunt Wilhemina said when she met me off the boat was, ‘You may call me Aunt Mina and I shall call you Lilian. As for India and the past, we shall never speak of either again.’

I had opened my mouth to greet her but I looked up into her cloudy brown eyes and closed it again.

I stared out the window as we drove to her house. It was the middle of August and everything was unfamiliar: the sun was a hazy glow behind a pale grey sky, there were drab people walking along empty streets, and no colours or smells. Even
the sounds were tinny and unreal. And I was cold – colder than I had ever been, although they told me it was summer.

High Elms, Aunt Mina’s square white Georgian house, lies in a small Sussex village in a fold of the South Downs. Behind the house the land slopes sharply up to the top of Devil’s Dyke, from where it is said one can see four counties and, on a clear day, the shadowy hump of the Isle of Wight. In front of the house, stretching as far as the rolling North Downs that ring the horizon, lies the shadowy blue Weald with its patchwork of fields and woods that Constable called the ‘grandest view in the world’. But I was in no mood to appreciate it then.

Inside the large house I felt stifled by the thick muffling curtains and soft carpets, the heavy dark furniture and brooding silence. In India, my window had always stood open at night, and the voices of the servants, their laughter and quarrels, and the smell of their cooking, drifted in on the warm night air. Here, my room was on the first floor at one end of a long corridor and the rest of the floor was empty except for Aunt Mina’s room at the other end. My window looked north over the Weald, though the view was blocked by the elms that gave the house its name. In the day I stood at my window listening to the silence and sometimes, if I listened carefully, I could hear a distant vibration – always the same, a soundless voice repeating the same phrase over and over, but no matter how hard I strained I could not make out the words. At night no sounds came up from below and the silence was so profound that I imagined that everyone had died and that I would wake up in the morning and find myself alone.

Night after night I had the same dream, which I still have sometimes. It is dark and I am back in Peshawar, walking up the drive to our bungalow. It lies quiet, its whitewashed walls
glimmering in the moonlight, punctuated by the shadowy rectangles of its windows and the open front door. I go inside and walk through the empty rooms. All the furniture is gone and I can feel sand, blown in from the desert, gritty under my feet. In my bedroom the windows stand open. The muslin curtains float upwards and the strong sweet smell of raat-ki-rani drifts into the room on the night air.

Hindus believe that when you cross the ocean – which they call the kala pani or black water – you lose your caste, and your caste defines your place in the world: where you belong and, ultimately, who you are. You become an outcast. My own experience, even though I am not a Hindu, tells me that this is true.

Today we went to the Club for lunch to celebrate my eleventh birthday. I was surprised because Father is nearly always sick on my birthday. When his native officers come to ask after him, Kishan Lal tells them he has malaria. Last year I asked Kishan Lal why it always happens and he said it’s because Father is thinking about ‘that time’, but he won’t say any more. He says it is better forgotten. Father must think so too, because he never talks about it, but I know that my mother died when I was born and that’s why Father hates my birthday and never speaks of her. I hate it too because I think about my mother dying and wonder if it was my fault, and the bad dream comes, and I don’t have a party because there are no other English boys my age here because they’ve all gone away to school in England. Mohan and Ali don’t care about birthdays anyway. They don’t even know when theirs are.

Mohan and Ali are my friends and their fathers are in my father’s regiment. Sometimes the regiment goes on manoeuvres and I go too. We sleep in tents and in the daytime Father marches and drills his men and they have mock battles and ambushes. This year Mohan’s father made us wooden
rifles and we practised crawling on our bellies and ambushing each other. We’ve decided we’re all going to be soldiers when we grow up, even though Mr. Mukherjee says I am too clever, but Father is clever and he’s a soldier. When we get bored with that we go fishing and hunting. In the evenings we watch the wrestling and then the sepoys sing songs and tell stories round the campfire. Father can still beat almost everyone at wrestling except Jemadar Dhubraj Ram, who is very big and strong, like Bhima in the
Mahabharat
. Mr. Mukherjee is telling me the story. He gave me this diary and says I must write in it every day.

While we were having lunch, Colonel Hewitt’s wife came up and wished me happy birthday and Father asked her to sit down, even though I know he doesn’t like her. She looked at me in that way that mems always do and asked Father if he didn’t think, now that I was eleven, that it was time for me to go to school in England. Father asked me what I thought and I said I wanted to stay here. I like Mr. Mukherjee and I like living with Father and Kishan Lal and being friends with Mohan and Ali. Then Mrs. Hewitt sniffed and made that camel face that Kishan Lal says mems make when they disapprove of something and said she and the other ladies had been talking and thought that my mother would have wished me to have a proper English education.

I thought Father would be angry but he just said he was grateful for her concern and he was quite satisfied with the arrangements he had made for my education. He told her that Mr. Mukherjee is one of the cleverest men he has ever met, that he speaks six languages, and that if I am going to live and work in India what I learn from him will be far more useful than anything I could learn at an English public school. Mrs. Hewitt went red and I hoped that she would go away,
but she said that she was surprised that Father should have such confidence in a native; surely he knew they could not be trusted, especially the clever ones. And then she leant over and said quietly,
‘Remember Cawnpore!’

I didn’t know what she meant so I looked at Father. His face had gone white and his scar was twitching, as it does when he’s angry, so that it jerks the corner of his eye and mouth together, but all he said was, ‘I suspect I have more reason to remember it than you have, Mrs. Hewitt.’ Mrs. Hewitt did look frightened then. She got up and said, ‘I beg your pardon, Colonel Langdon. I never meant… I am so sorry… I had forgotten… Of course I know…’ Then she looked at me and stopped talking and went away.

I asked Kishan Lal what happened at Cawnpore but all he did was shake his head and mutter something about the Devil’s wind.

I haven’t written in my diary for a week. As soon as we got home after my birthday lunch Father went to his room and Kishan Lal took him his medicine tray, and the next day he did not get up and Kishan Lal had to send to the Lines to say he was ill. I heard him tell Allahyar that he was expecting it. Father stayed in his room and I heard him shouting for more medicine, and when he did come out his eyes were red and he smelt of whisky. I know Kishan Lal worries but he doesn’t say anything except to tell me not to disturb Father, as though I don’t know that. On the night of my birthday I had that dream again in which I was shut in a dark hot place and couldn’t breathe, and I woke screaming but Father didn’t come.

I told Mr. Mukherjee today that I have written in my diary. I was afraid he would ask to see it because I don’t want him to see what I wrote about Father, and that I haven’t been writing every day, but he said a diary is private and that I don’t have to show it to anyone.

Today he told me more of the story of the
Mahabharat
. It was a great war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, who were cousins. There were a hundred Kauravas and only five Pandavas and I said that was silly because obviously the Kauravas would win. But he said the Pandavas were cleverer than the Kauravas, and anyway there are millions of Indians and only a few British and yet we still manage to rule the whole country. I asked how we do and he said it was like when the Romans ruled Britain. In those days Britain was made up of small, separate tribal kingdoms and the people were disunited, but the Romans were disciplined and had good government and administration and built roads, just like we build railways. He said that one day Indians would want their country back and then we would all have to go home, as the Romans did. I said India was my home and I didn’t want to go back to England. He said if all the English felt like me then we would fight. I said I would never fight with Ali and Mohan and he said that one could never tell – the Pandavas thought that too and then they had to fight their own cousins. I asked him why they did and so he told me the story and read me the bit where Arjuna, who was one of the five Pandava brothers, saw his teacher, and his cousins, and their uncle, the kind old blind king who had raised him and his brothers, facing him on the battlefield. Then Arjuna started crying and asked his charioteer, who was really the god Krishna in disguise, how he could fight and kill his own relatives and teacher, to whom he owed so much. And Krishna said this:

I recited it to Father last night when he got home from the Lines. I wanted to ask him if he ever had to fight and kill people he liked, and if that’s why he gets so sad, or whether it’s just about Mother, but I didn’t dare.

It has rained heavily nearly every day for the last two months and there has been nothing to do except lessons and reading, and nothing to write about. Mr. Mukherjee made me write a précis of all the Scott novels that I’ve read, which took ages, because I’ve nearly read them all, so I didn’t want to write any more. My favourite one is
Ivanhoe
because I like the fighting but if I were Ivanhoe I would marry Rebecca, not Rowena. He seems to like her better, but Mr. Mukherjee says he can’t
marry her because she’s a Jewess, and when I asked why he said I am too young to understand. We are reading
Great Expectations
now and I like it, though I don’t like Estella at all because she’s so mean to Pip.

Yesterday something peculiar happened. Father called me into his study. I don’t usually go in his study because he doesn’t like to be disturbed, so I knew it must be important. I like it in there; it’s dark and cool and smells of leather. There are shelves and shelves of books, and bronze and marble statues of the Indian gods. My favourite is Shiva, dancing in a ring of fire.

Mr. Mukherjee says Shiva danced the world into being. Before that there was nothing, but when he danced his energy started everything moving and time began and matter was created. It’s the movement that makes everything look solid but really it isn’t. It’s an illusion, which means it looks real but it isn’t. The Sanskrit word for it is ‘lila’, which means ‘sport’ or ‘play’. It’s a girl’s name too. Shiva is the Creator, but also the Destroyer, and when he opens his third eye the illusion will dissolve and the world will end. Mr. Mukherjee says Hindus believe that this is the last age of our earth – the Kali Yuga – when the world will be destroyed and everything will be burned to ashes.

I asked Father about it but he wasn’t listening. He told me that he has been thinking about what Mrs. Hewitt and the mems said: that I am growing up and that it’s time for me to get to know my English relatives, although there is only one – my aunt Wilhelmina. He said that her father has died and she is all alone and he has written to ask her if she would like to come and live with us.

I asked him if Aunt Wilhelmina was his sister and he looked at me as though I was stupid and said, ‘Mina is your mother’s sister. Her twin sister. Surely you knew that?’ I was so surprised when he mentioned my mother that I couldn’t think of anything to say, even though there were lots of things I wanted to know. He said that Aunt Mina is a sensible woman who will be able to teach me about manners and clothes and how to behave in polite company, which he is not able to teach me, being just a rough soldier. I thought she sounded like a mem, but then I remembered that she and my mother were twins.

I was afraid he’d be angry but I really wanted to know so I asked if she looks like my mother but he just said he hasn’t seen her for many years. He still didn’t seem upset so I asked him what my mother’s name was. He looked shocked and said, ‘Surely you must know that! Her name was Cecily.’ I wanted to say, ‘How could I know when you never told me?’ but his scar twitched and I didn’t dare.

I thought about my mother in bed last night. I couldn’t really think about her before because I didn’t know anything about her, but now I can imagine her. Father was fair when he was younger, Kishan Lal says, and he has very blue eyes, but my hair and eyes are dark. She must have been dark, then, like Rebecca in
Ivanhoe
, and like me. I am like her – like my mother. Cecily is a pretty name. I wonder if it’s my fault that she died and whether Father blames me. All I have of hers is a small pebble with a hole through it that I wear on a cord around my neck. Kishan Lal told me once that it had belonged to her and was some kind of magic charm. He said it kept me safe and that it was God’s will that I survived. I asked what he meant but he wouldn’t tell me.