The Sandalwood Tree (10 page)

At seven every morning, Khalid delivers chota hazri to Felicity & me in our bedrooms. I take only toast & tea, but I would enjoy a serving of kedgeree if I could face the prospect, first thing in the morning, of fish & eggs prepared in that squalid shed. In spite of Hakim’s satisfaction with his domain, I hope
to persuade Felicity to build a proper kitchen. I believe it is the only thing lacking to make this place perfect. I marvel at my own lack of fear in this place steeped in strange sights & smells & customs. Every day is a new adventure, a new revelation, & I have acquired a taste for embracing the unknown. My life has achieved new dimensions & I feel richer for it. Apparently English roses & roast beef are not necessary for my happiness
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July 1856

The monsoons are supposed to commence on June 15th, & on that day everyone looks at the sky full of expectation & shorn of patience. After months of punkahs, & hot winds, & dust coating the trees, it is necessary to define the exact limit of one’s endurance; after June 15th it is simply not possible to go on enduring. So when the sun marched across the sky on June 15th without winking, we broke
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Felicity & I lay about the bungalow in a stupour, servants failed to appear when called, & one of our ponies dropped dead. By the following week, rickshaw-wallahs refused all fares until sunset, the water bearer constantly drenched the grass tatties & then himself to little effect, & I woke irritable in the night & rose stealthily to shake the sleeping punkah-wallah
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The dry earth split, heat lightning crackled in the sky, & the sandalwood tree hung limp & grey under a coating of powder from the road. Crows hopped about with beaks agape, & evil odours from the river wafted up to us. Sealing wax melted, books curled up in protest, & always the punkah stopped in the night. Day after day the sun set in an angry red glow, & the natives wondered how they had offended Lakshmi. Finally, on June 28th, clouds gathered over the mountains & everyone stared but dared not speak. The first rain roared down like a solid wall of water, & Felicity & I ran outside to dance barefoot in the downpour. Farmers dropped to their knees in the mud to give thanks
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It stopped, abruptly, & the air was so heavy it felt like breathing through wet cotton. But when sunshine broke through, the landscape sparkled as though newly washed, & the sandalwood tree echoed with birdsong. The sodden earth steamed gently until new clouds gathered sulkily over the mountains, & the monsoon resumed with renewed strength
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It has rained for a week without stopping, & pernicious green mould creeps over paper, cloth & leather. Fishtail insects feed on my books, & the house grows a pelt. White ants devour the bamboo matting whilst stink beetles, caterpillars & centipedes invade the house. Some of the insects fascinate us with their delicate beauty: moths with diaphanous green wings, blood-red flies & wooly caterpillars with orange stripes. We have begun a collection of oddities in jars
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At night the moon peeks through the clouds & glimmers in pools of rainwater, twinkling like a field of fallen stars around the verandah. We fall asleep to the croaking of frogs & the patter of rain on the thatch roof
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August 1856

Yesterday morning I heard Felicity coughing in her room, but she insisted it was nothing. I have heard of consumptives who enjoy a respite only to be stricken again months or even years later, but she assures me she feels fine. Fortunately, I brought along a goodly supply of pulmonic wafers, which seemed to help during her last illness. I was also required to bring tremendous quantities of quinine, ipecac, Eno powder, iodine, castor oil, mercurial salts & tartar emetic. Mother simply could not stop talking about cholera, blackwater fever, typhoid, dysentery & malaria. She would be tragically aggrieved if I were to perish unmarried. I felt tempted to tell her that according to Fanny Parks all one needed to cure anything was a big black ball of opium in a hubble-bubble, but I did not want to discourage her from sending me to India
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In the afternoon, we bought odds & ends from an itinerant box-wallah who came to the door clad only in a turban & loincloth, carrying a large tin box on his head. He spread his wares on the verandah & we bought lead pencils, carbolic soap, hill honey & ribbons. I almost bought a toothbrush, but Felicity warned me that these were always second-hand, pilfered from the rubbish or the home of another sahib. We shall continue to use neem twigs to polish our teeth, & I am beginning to enjoy the sharp, bitter taste. Felicity bought a pair of Persian morning slippers—plum velvet with gold embroidery—whose turned-up toes delighted her
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August 1856

When we fancy an outing we ride through the village. Felicity has had the durzi—that’s what one calls the tailor—fashion ingenious riding skirts that are split up the middle so that we can ride astride rather than sidesaddle. It felt quite improper at first, but I’m used to it now & cannot help but smile at the scandal we would cause if either of our mothers saw us riding thus. It would seem we enjoy being wicked women
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In the village, we meander in the small bazaar where merchants sit on the ground in front of their open stalls smoking a hookah whilst they await customers. Sometimes we buy small roasted gourds stuffed with fennel & browned onions or hot vegetable fritters that leave their leaf cones slick with grease
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Felicity takes these opportunities to deliver lentils & Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup to a small orphanage run by Scottish missionaries. Last week, on our way to the orphanage, we saw a woman set a naked toddler down in the dirt directly in our path. We called to the woman as she ran off, but she did not look back. We watched the little one cry weakly until she fell over in an unnatural sleep. Felicity dismounted & went to her, & I watched her face darken as she examined the child’s distended stomach. Felicity said her mother probably could not feed her & left her here for us. We brought the child to the orphanage
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Felicity says the children become “rice Christians,” willing to pray to whichever god you like for a meal. But she has no quarrel with the missionaries, saying, “Better Jesus & a full belly than the slave market. A four-year-old girl is worth two horses in Peshawar.” I’m sure she’s right, still I wonder how I’d feel if a group of Indians came to England to make Hindoos or Mohammedans of us
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She brings the children sugarcane, which they peel with their teeth & chew to a pulp, leaving their faces & hands smeared & sticky. I have seen Felicity kiss children with crusty eyes & scabby legs. Sometimes she gathers a few waifs under a pipal tree in the mission compound to teach them a word or two of English, which everyone finds quite jolly
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I fear she will contract some loathsome disease, but she says she was born
here & is immune. Once, when I glanced uneasily around the bare, dusty compound full of scruffy children, she touched my arm gently & said, “No judgement. Only joy.”

“Not judgement,” I answered. “Caution.”

“Adela, dearest. In India, one can be full of life at noon & buried before dinner. If I must choose between joy & caution, I choose joy.” With that she swooped up a mangy, half-naked child & danced away singing that silly American ditty “Camptown Ladies,” with a tattered band of urchins clamouring happily after her
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September 1856

Hallelujah! She has agreed to build a proper kitchen. Hakim mutters & sulks in his fetid hut, as bewildered at the idea of cooking inside the house as my mother might be at keeping oxen in the bedroom. In a foreign kitchen not entirely his own, he cannot be sure a pigeon mightn’t be killed or even, Allah forbid, the odd pork chop find a way in. When he threatened to quit, Felicity agreed to leave his cookhouse standing, assuring him the new kitchen would only be for our amusement. At this he was slightly mollified, but he eyed us with suspicion, fearing the new arrangement might reduce his income. If we begin buying our own foodstuffs, he will lose the customary commission he takes at the market stalls. I suspect that Hakim cooks nothing better than his books
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Coolies arrive daily with loads of brick & timber, & we have sent to Calcutta for a beautiful modern cooker
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September 1856

Invitations to dances & amateur theatricals come from Simla with assurances that there will be six men to every woman. Thus far we have begged off, but we did accept an invitation to tea with Felicity’s mother. Apparently she wanted, at long last, to meet her daughter’s companion & perhaps to verify whether Mrs Crawley’s undoubtedly alarming report was entirely accurate. Felicity thought it best to put her at ease so that she might leave us in peace
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We wore demure dresses & crinolines, which smelled of camphor from
disuse, & hired a tonga to take us to the Ladies’ Club in Simla, where we took a room for the night
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Simla is an oddly distorted version of an English village set in an Indian landscape—prim, half-timbered cottages amidst Himalayan pines & terraced hills, misty blue mountains, & the smell of dung fires rising up from the labyrinthine native quarter below. It is built around a wide centre street known as the Mall, one of the few semi-flat stretches in the area, & along the Mall one finds scores of English shops with pots of red geraniums at their doors, a proper hotel with good mahogany bedsteads & Peliti’s tearoom, where one drinks cream tea from fine china cups. It seems as if someone had lifted a whole English village—house by house, shop by shop, custom by custom—& transplanted the whole lot in the Himalayas. The Mall is full of Britons in tongas & rickshaws, but no Indians apart from servants. There are signs that read, “No Indians or dogs.” Memsahibs in bustles sip tea at outdoor cafés, & small white children in miniature pith helmets romp about freely. There are none over the age of six or seven, at which time they are sent to England, as was Felicity
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Looking up, one sees Christ Church high on the ridge, an edifice, which, with its soaring spires & magnificent stained glass, would not seem out of place anywhere in England. Looking down, one sees long flights of crooked stone steps leading into the native quarter, a dark warren of cramped streets crowded with tiny shops & stalls & temples
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About two miles from the Mall one comes to Annandale, the spot for cricket & polo. On weekends, genteel crowds sit in folding chairs to watch men wheel ponies in tight turns amid triumphant yelps & pounding hooves
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We met Lady Chadwick & others in her circle—they call themselves the Exiles—at Peliti’s. As the burra memsahib of the group, Lady Chadwick sat at the head of a linen-covered table set with heavy silver & fresh flowers; she ordered the servants about with imperious flicks of her wrists. Felicity was uncommonly quiet, but she looked charming in a high-collared, slightly outdated pink taffeta she bought at Swan & Edgar. We even carried parasols
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But I fear our disguise was inadequate to fool the memsahibs in their wide-brimmed topees & starched dresses. They could smell the camphor on
us, & they already regarded Felicity as an incorrigible woman of inexplicable tendencies. I, of course, am guilty by association. Although polite, they spoke around us about polo & cricket & the fashions in their six-month-old catalogues. They did, however, ask us when we might return to Calcutta for the season & we skirted the question with a trumped-up story about a sick servant. Lady Chadwick & her friends will leave next month
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We were relieved to return to our jungli little bungalow. That evening, Felicity wrapped herself in her favourite lavender sari, & we sat on the verandah with our shoes off, listening to doves coo & watching a breeze stir the sandalwood tree. Easy talk dwindled as the moon rose, & we put our feet up whilst we smoked Felicity’s pretty brass hookah with the carved ebony mouthpiece
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September 1856

Some evenings we light a lamp & take our needlework to the verandah, crocheting or embroidering decorative pillow casings. The indigenous designs are flamboyantly beautiful & I am quite pleased with a coral & turquoise afghan I have crocheted. Hot colours shot through with gold. I used yarn made from the hair of baby mountain goats from Kashmir, soft & voluptuous & dyed in vibrant hues appropriate to this lush place
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Felicity is utterly content here, with her sketching, her charity work, her pony & her hookah, but I feel increasingly off balance. For one thing, I miss Katie & wonder daily what became of her. I have sent letters to Cook, but have had no reply. When I return to England—for this is no place for an Englishwoman to grow old—I will look for her. Even if she were not already on my mind, the sensuality of this place would remind me of her. Men glisten with perspiration, women sway along in gossamer veils, & the lush landscape burgeons, wild & fleshy. Even religion here seems fraught with eroticism—Hindoo carvings of dancing girls & carefree fornicators, & Mohammedans making one think constantly of sex by keeping women sequestered in purdah behind the high walls of the zenana
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I have given up my corset & crinolines & must say it has been a revelation. At first I felt soft & naked & even a bit slovenly without my corset
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but the ease of movement & the joy of taking a deep breath without strain soon put vanity in perspective. The crinolines always struck me as a silly nuisance & I was instantly happy to be rid of them. So I go about in simple cotton dresses & minimal underwear, but I have not gone so far as to wear a sari—yet—& I simply cannot walk about without shoes, even indoors. The great variety of creepy crawlies discourage me, but I admit my leather boots are a bit much for the climate. I compromise with native slippers woven of jute
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As for India, the novelty is wearing off & my thirst for adventure is waning as well. Even as it becomes more familiar I sense that this place is too big, too old, & too confusing for me ever to feel that I belong. It’s like trying to grab hold of a single image in a kaleidoscope whilst it changes
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