Zemindar (77 page)

It was, however, the clearly heard and immediately recognized tones of their voices—each individual voice, carrying to me across time and the grave—that affected me most poignantly, and I turned my head in consternation from point to point, searching for the beings who uttered the words I had forgotten but now heard spoken.

‘I think we shall do very well in India!’ Oh, Emily, in the pride of life! She had such a light voice, like a child’s. And then the deeper tones of Mrs Wilkins, rather vulgar. ‘I’m a saving sort of a woman, and it will be there when you want it.’ ‘Come Polly, good Polly, say it after me, “Good girl, Connie, good girl!” ’ … . And Elvira’s customary squeak, ‘Oh lawks!’ Then I seemed to see a swirl of gauze above the shine of satin pyjamas in the smoke of the fire, and heard—I swear I heard it—the glassy tinkle of Moti’s innumerable bangles.

I shook my head, half laughing and half weeping at the lively memories of the dead that played about me so insistently, and took myself in hand. This would not do. I was edging myself into hysteria, and there was Pearl to think of. Soon she must be washed and fed and put to sleep. So consciously I shut my mind, forbidding all associations entrance, and tried for a few moments to live solely in my senses.

It was still hot and the reflected warmth of the courtyard walls beat down upon me. I made myself experience inch by inch the feel of warm air on my bare arms, neck and face. I licked my lips and tasted the salt sweat. My feet, encased in heavy shoes, were swollen and painful, and my dress, whose bodice stuck to my damp body like a plaster, dragged the slatternly folds of its dirty skirt in the dust. Smoke from the pyre of bedding filled my eyes, throat and nose, but the scent, I suddenly realized, was pleasanter by far than the air we normally breathed, and I gulped it in thankfully. The noise of the guns, unremitting as ever, I hardly heard, but when a flight of fruit bats passed across the murky sky, the slow clap of their leathern wings drew my eyes upwards.

Looking around me, I discovered that there were others beside myself in the courtyard I had thought deserted. A couple of women bent over a tiny fire built on the wide verandah, and in a corner three children played with a box on wheels, loading it with stones, then sending it crashing against the building to upset and lie, wheels spinning, on the summit of its load. Not far from them, a man with a bandage round his head and another on his leg lay propped against the plinth of the verandah, rifle by his side. He was asleep.

In the centre of the courtyard stood a tree. The upper branches had been shot away and, since none lay below it, I could guess that they had been gathered for fuel almost as they fell. The leaves had withered and most had fallen, killed by the drought perhaps, or more probably by the fumes of cordite and gunpowder, and the tree stood bare and broken, raising truncated limbs to the bloodshot sky. I could not make out from what remained what type of tree it was. Yet squirrels still inhabited it, the small grey squirrels that are an integral part of any Indian garden. Fascinated by this mercurial, chattering life sustained by the dying tree, I watched them flick their bushy tails over the three black fingermarks that Rama’s blessing had left on their neat little bodies, beady eyes bright, small claws twinkling up and down and along the branches, noisy and aggressive, screaming imprecations at imagined insults, then stopping suddenly to wash a face or scratch behind an ear with total concentration. They were alive. Each small body was filled with all the life it could hold or, for the moment, needed. Perhaps they were hungry, for who could spare them a crumb? But they knew no fear, no foreboding, no loss, no recognition of mortality. They did not even know they were alive—as I now knew I was alive.

And I
was
alive. Still alive.

My head ached, my eyes burned, my throat was scorched and my feet hurt. I was tired to a point beyond exhaustion. My clothes were adequate only to cover my nakedness. My body smelled and my hands were filthy. My hair, long unwashed and soggy with sweat, had not been combed in a day and a night. I hated the feeling of my own unkemptness and cringed at the picture I must present. I feared the present, saw no hope in the future, could not endure the thought of the past—but for all that I was alive.

Soon it was too dark for me to see the squirrels in the ruined tree. The children were called indoors to eat and the wounded man hoisted himself to his feet with the aid of his rifle and limped away. One of the women on the verandah doused the little fire with a cup of water, while the other carried a pan of food into their room. A comparative silence fell with the darkness. Only the guns remained and I no longer heard them; for, sitting alone in the dark heat of that unhappy night, I formed a fierce determination to stay alive. It was more than a determination. It was a presentiment, a foreknowledge that I
would
survive. I could not have analysed how I arrived at this resolve, this certainty, but I remember hugging it to myself, exultant in the midst of grief and shock and loneliness. ‘I will live!’ I kept saying to myself, half as statement, half as resolution. ‘I will live! I will live!’ I would meet whatever came—sickness, injury, anguish. I would meet it and endure it and vanquish it. And I would live actively, meeting my days with open eyes and a pliable mind, in the knowledge that I was living the only life I would have to live. I would adopt no acceptable role of patient endurance; I would wear no admired mask of resigned suffering. Acceptance, I suddenly realized, was the virtue of the inert. But I was alive … and I would fight my life in order to live it.

Over the past weeks I had become an unwilling intimate of death. I had seen it come to the young and the old in horrible forms, had witnessed the dissolution of healthy bodies, and every nauseating breath I took reminded me of what lay in wait for my own tired bones and aching limbs should I succumb. But I would not succumb. I could not succumb.

For another voice I now remembered with the clarity of life spoke to me, with other words—words which forbade me the ease of death. As I remembered, I spoke them over softly to myself, knowing them to be a true memory and no fancied whisper from beyond the grave.

‘I will come to you—for you!’

His tone, as always, had been cool and unemotional. He had stated a matter of fact, and that fact I now believed in as surely as I had learned to believe in my own survival. He would come and I must be ready and waiting for him. That was why I must live, why I
would
live.

At last I stood up wearily to go indoors. The fire had fallen to a heap of white ashes and glowing sparks, all that was left of the earthly remnants of my cousin Emily.

Before I turned away from the fire and the night, I shut my eyes and prayed aloud, ‘Oh, God, please let him come as he said he would. Oh, God! Please let him come soon. Soon!’

The rains broke in earnest at last, and within hours the entrenchment had become a morass of mud and evil-smelling slush. While the rain fell, we could rejoice honestly in the sound of the solid drumming on the flat roof of the Gaol; even the sight of small runnels of water seeping over the lintel of our doorway and entering the kitchen was almost welcome. The smell, that had so distressed us, abated, and for a short time we were refreshed and invigorated by the downpour. But then, when it stopped, the sun came out in strength, the ground steamed and bodies streamed with perspiration in the sweltering heat.

This pattern was to repeat itself day after day for two and a half months. Nothing and no one was ever truly dry, whether because of the rain or the sweat that followed it. Charles had but two shirts to his back, and, though I did my best to keep one clean and dry, such was the dampness of the atmosphere that he often changed from a shirt that was dirty and wet to one that, though clean, was almost as wet as that he had discarded. Fever flourished then; rheumatism became rampant, and often men manning the guns shivered so with the ague they could not touch the port-fire to the breach. Anything left on the floor or hanging against a wall became green with mildew in a few hours. Our dark rooms were horrid with the pursy bodies of large black spiders; at night monsoon toads sat in the puddles and croaked in shattering unison; fat, armoured beetles hurled themselves into whatever little pools of lamplight still remained, and minute mango flies, silent and almost invisible, added their quota of stings to flesh already raw with mosquito bites.

The day following Emily’s death found Kate moving her possessions into our rooms. Two rooms, however small, were considered too much for one baby and a woman (for Charles was now expected to sleep at Fayrer’s post), and had she not done so I would have been afflicted with a stranger’s constant presence. The arrangement suited us both: we were company for each other, understood each other’s tempers pretty well, and I was glad to have Kate’s assistance in dealing with the baby. We both dissolved in laughter the first time we tried to wash Pearl’s small slippery body in the inadequate tin bowl. One childless widow and one spinster between them made a poor showing at motherhood. And the baby and I were a comfort to Kate, too, whose loss was so recent and who, I knew, grieved deeply, though in silence.

Of Charles we saw less than ever. Once a day he came to the Gaol for something to eat and hung dutifully over his daughter for a moment or so. But he had little to say to anyone, seemed relieved when he left us, and I knew was volunteering for every possible extra duty that would keep him at his post. In my heart I was grateful to be allowed to forget him for long passages of time. Toddy-Bob found time each day to milk the goat, whom we had named Cassandra, and often Mr Roberts dropped in to see how we were getting on. Occasionally Wallace Avery came too, but he was becoming increasingly incoherent and, selfishly, we were always glad to see him depart.

Our few visitors were almost the only break in the routine of our day. Mrs Bonner, indeed, would have been very willing to spend the best part of her waking hours informing us of her past grandeurs as the ‘First Lady’ of her husband’s station, but we soon learned that it was very easy to dampen her social enthusiasm by complaining of some slight indisposition, preferably of the baby’s, since Pearl could not be asked suspicious questions. The word ‘contagion’ bore an even more terrifying connotation in Mrs Bonner’s mind than did ‘pandy’. For the rest, with too little work to do and too many hours to do it in, the irritation born of boredom was difficult to control, and it was always with relief that, as soon as the sun set, we ate our meal and made our sketchy preparations for bed.

There was no more oil for the lantern and our few candles were too precious to be wasted; they must be kept for a crisis, or perhaps a celebration, for day by day we hoped to hear of the approach of the relief. Then one day we realized gratefully that Mr Roberts’s estimate of our food stores must have been wrong. We had been besieged for a full three weeks and there was no indication that we were running out of supplies.

On the morning of the 20th of July we awoke to absolute quiet and the strange knowledge that for several hours we had slept undisturbed by gunfire. Charles took advantage of the fact to come in for breakfast; he said the pandies had not fired a gun since midnight. It was not known what had deflected their attention from us, and a few hopeful souls considered that they might have got wind of a force coming to our aid and withdrawn to meet it. I put some of the previous night’s
chapattis
on the table for Charles and a jug of warmed-up tea, but before we could start eating, the familiar shout of ‘Stand to your arms!’ caused him to raise his eyebrows resignedly, shrug, shoulder his rifle and go out without haste or alarm.

Everything remained quiet, however, while Kate and I swallowed our unappetising meal and for some time afterwards. Then Toddy-Bob arrived to milk the goat. From the studied innocence of his expression, I knew he was somehow breaching discipline—no doubt there were strict orders for every man to remain at his post during this abnormal quiet—but the milk was vital to Pearl, so I made no comment but poured him out the last of the tea and gave him a few
chapattis
to pass on to Charles. It would take Toddy out of his way, but I was anxious that Charles should eat. Toddy had just trotted off with his odd bowlegged run, when the entire room rocked, and a roar, submerged but deafening, filled the air.

A moment of complete silence followed as the garrison reacted to the shattering blast. Then there were frenzied shouts of: ‘A mine! A mine!’ ‘By God, we’ve been breached!’ ‘Stand to your arms! To arms!’ Women along the Gaol verandah shrieked and cried out for their husbands, and men, heedless of everything but the desperate urgency of the moment, ran headlong for their posts. I rushed out on to the verandah.

A great cloud of dust-filled smoke was billowing up over the river side of the entrenchment. Just as I gained the verandah steps, searching for someone who would pause long enough to answer my anguished questions, the great guns of the Redan Battery which overlooked the river belched into action. A few seconds more and I was coughing and spluttering as the dense yellow smoke engulfed me, and above the guns came the terrifying, open-throated roar as the invisible pandies surged into the charge, yelling their war-cry of
‘Din! Din! Din!’
in answer to the bugle’s shrill exhortation to battle.

I retreated to the kitchen, none the wiser as to what had actually happened, and found Kate, chalk-white and trembling as she knelt, saying her rosary, the blue beads held to her lips with shaking fingers.

‘This is the end, woman dear,’ she whispered with closed eyes, pausing in her ‘Hail Marys’ as I entered. ‘This must be the end. I had prayed that it wouldn’t be this way for you … oh, I had prayed!’

By now I was sufficiently versed in the ‘arts’ of war to know that if our defences had been breached by the mine and the assault that must follow succeeded we would not see the sunset.

For a moment I could not but share in Kate’s uncharacteristic certainty of our doom, for in the name of holy common sense how could our men, decimated as they were by casualties and sickness and weakened by fatigue and hunger, hope to stand out against even a moderate-numbered but determined force? The long silence, that grateful quiet to which we had wakened, had been no more than a final respite before the end. In my mind I saw the fatal gap in our ridiculous stockade, saw the pandies bring up their guns, their elephants and their cavalry, then the assault force swarm through the breach and overcome the defenders. And then—what then? Then it would be our turn. My stomach lurched in fear, my hands grew cold and my mouth was so dry I could not speak. There would be a carnage then, a dreadful letting of blood, a massacre! I would be part of it, and Kate and oh, God, no—Pearl.