The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Monsoon Puddles

‘Can anyone find a corner to fill?’

My mother’s phrase, my mother’s voice, my mother’s hands stacking the plates. My mother’s phrase on her sister’s lips; twin voices, twin hands. My mother is gone, but Aunty Frances fills a corner. She says I can help her home with her dishes; she’ll run me back afterwards.

Dad says, ‘Wait until the end. You can’t leave halfway through.’

Aunty Frances mutters something under her nicotine breath. I don’t catch it, but I can almost see it — an acrid fog hanging on her lips. Dad turns away. He doesn’t smoke, and hates the stench which will cling to him, particles lingering on his skin and in his hair like tenacious burrs. He will change, he will wash; but still he will catch a waft, or he will think that others can.

She smuggles me out. She says a wake is no place for a child. In the passenger seat of her car, I stiffly embrace the precarious load teetering on my narrow lap, travelling anxiously with breakables rattling beneath my fingertips. When we reach her house, she takes these empties and leftovers from me and carries them less carefully inside. Her hallway smells like smouldering flowers. She puts the dishes down on the kitchen table. ‘Did you try these?’ she asks, pointing to a tray of sampled and abandoned savouries. I shake my head. She feeds me some. ‘Pakora. It’s Indian.’

She asks if my father ever talks about his trip to India.

I didn’t know he had been.

‘We went together,’ she explains. ‘We worked on the same magazine. I was a features writer.’ My father is a photographer. She takes my hand and tours me around her living room, showing off her colourful tapestries and carved wooden boxes and statues.

I ask her about the elephant man on her mantelpiece.

‘That’s Ganesha,’ she says, ‘remover of obstacles and patron of learning. His father, Shiva, was commanded to cut the head off the first thing he saw, which unfortunately was his own son. But then he saved Ganesha’s life by replacing his lost head with an elephant’s.’

I am appalled by this image of a father who listens to the voices compelling him to do such heinous things, and the bodged repair which maybe he hopes nobody will notice. Head? What head?

‘Would you like to try some Indian tea?’ she asks. She boils up milk with herbs and spices, and we drink the chai from small, hot glasses.

The train journey from Bombay to Surat takes about six hours. I sit on a hard bench, writing notes. Beside me is an Indian man who reads over my shoulder and stops me every now and again to correct my spelling of the names of the places we pass through. Beside him sits his mother who peels small oranges and includes me when she shares out the segments. Later, the son moves to the opposite bench to let his mother lie down, and she lies with her head on her shawl at the far end and her bare feet resting on my thigh.

John sits on another bench trying to explain to some men what he does for a living, with his very little Hindi and their very little English. He gestures taking photographs, and then gets out a copy of the magazine and shows them pictures of male models with his name beneath them. They pretend to misunderstand him, shaking their heads in refusal to believe that he is the man in the photograph.

The train rattles on for hours through the smells and sounds of many different stations, many different villages. When we stop, traders board with baskets of fruit and bread and pots of hot chai; and beggars with limbs as thin and knotty as their sticks; and a leper, who is beaten away by the policemen.

When my legs and backside become stiff and begin to ache, I stand up, placing the woman’s bare feet gently down on the bench. She tuts loudly. I inch through the standing passengers, all men, to the open doorway, and stand there cooling in the rush of fresh air. At each station, the breeze wilts and a rank smell leaks through the toilet door into the carriage, burning my nostrils.

I return to the bench where the woman is peeling more oranges. She holds a piece out to me, the juice dripping down her long, thin fingers and onto my white trousers.

When my father phones, I say to him, ‘Kemcho. Tamaru naam su che?’

‘I’m coming to pick you up,’ he says, and puts the phone down.

Again, in the car, I try this Gujarati greeting, these phrases my Aunty Frances has taught me: Hello. Whatisyourname? MarunaamJennyche. He doesn’t respond. From the back seat, I watch his eyes in the rear-view mirror, flicking back and forth and from side to side, from the road ahead to the road behind, to me, and away again. His eyes are brown with a sliver of amber; his lids are heavy; he looks sad even when he smiles. I don’t have his eyes; mine are blue like my mother’s and Aunty Frances’s. I ask, ‘Did mum ever go?’

‘Where?’

‘To India.’

‘No.’ He switches on the radio. The subject is closed.

I dream that night of Ganesha, who stands before me with his elephant’s head bearing down on his skinny body, its weight too great for his legs, which look like they might buckle. He plants his bare feet wide to keep his balance and fixes me with his elephant eyes, which are brown, with a chink of amber; the lids are heavy and make him look sad. And Shiva is begging Ganesha not to tell anybody what he has done.

We are in India for a couple of weeks to produce an article on a wedding in a village in Gujarat, a bus-ride north of Surat.

The bride’s name is Pritti. We capture her first in her daily routine before the wedding preparations start. Down by the river at dawn, John takes the photographs and I conduct an interview, while Pritti washes clothes, beating shirts so hard against the rocks that the buttons break off. She makes chappatis, rolling them and putting them out to dry on mats in the early sun, where they become pock-marked with the footprints of tiny birds which run through the dust and over the chappatis. Her brothers and sisters want to practise their English on us, but they only know how to ask our names, so conversations sound like Rumpelstiltskin riddles. In the evenings, we return to our guest house, where we eat and sleep to the sound of the cicadas, the helicopter beetles and the call to prayer.

The guest house is a family business managed by a middle-aged couple and their unmarried daughter, Sangita. Monkeys sit on the roof, watching our comings and goings. John and I have a bedroom each, and every morning Sangita brings us chai.

She tells John that it is not proper for him to visit the bride at home on the eve of her wedding. We agree that I will go alone to document the wedding party preparations, while John goes off to take contextual pictures, landscapes, whatever takes his eye. I eat with the bride and her family, and return to the guest house late. John is not in his room. I fall asleep, and by the time I wake the next morning, John is already out and about.

I return to Pritti’s house. Everybody is busy dressing and decorating the bride. One of her sisters paints my hands with cold dots of henna paste, making concentric circles on each palm, and a flower in the middle, painting bangles around my wrists and rings around my fingers.

I am expecting to see John at the wedding, but he is not there. I take some pictures on my own camera and wait for him to arrive, but he doesn’t come. He misses the wedding and the day of celebration which follows it. I collect a roll of thirty-six snaps with people’s heads and feet chopped off or with my thumb half over the lens. I forget the flash in a dim room or face the sun, which scorches out the image. My record of the occasion is skewed and blurry.

When I finally catch up with John, he makes a few lame excuses. He says we can tell the magazine that I or he took the pictures while he was ill.

As it happens, John is not ill at all, not once. It is me who goes down with terrible diarrhoea and vomiting the day after the celebrations. I stay at home feeling wretched, sleeping and sweating and washing, watching my orange henna patterns fade.

John goes out every morning to get bottles of water and Thums Up! cola for me before going to work. Each evening I ask him for the day’s stories; whether there are interviews I need to do to accompany his pictures; whether he has written down all the subjects’ names. In response, he is vague; he says he has photographed nothing worthwhile that day but will go out again the next day.

On the third day of my illness I am feeling a little better and a little bored. In the afternoon, I get up and go to John’s room. He is still out, but while I wait for him to return, I sit down to look at the Polaroids spread out on his bed. I am expecting to see pictures of the village and its surroundings, the market and the shrines, the main road and its traffic. I am surprised and puzzled to find myself looking at dozens of pictures of Sangita down by the river, stained orange by the sunrise.

When I talk about going to India, Dad says, ‘Bloody Frances.’ He says I am too young, and that I don’t have the money. This is true when I am fourteen with a paper-round, but not when I am eighteen and working, with Aunty Frances topping up my fund for my nineteenth birthday. ‘Bloody Frances,’ he says. He thought I had forgotten all about it, that I had left India behind. Still he tries to put me off, to find reasons for me not to go. ‘You’ll get ill,’ he says. ‘Frances was very ill when she was there.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘she told me. But you weren’t.’

He looks startled.

There are more than a hundred photographs of Sangita altogether. Beneath the stack of pictures of her looking fresh and shy in the morning sunshine there is another collection. In these, her sari is a little dishevelled, her hair is a little tousled, her face is a little flushed, and her smile is a little secret.

I confront John when he comes home. He is embarrassed and defensive.

‘How could you?’ I ask. ‘What about Linda? Does Sangita know you’re married?’

‘Yes, she knows,’ he says.

‘And what are you planning on doing? What are you going to tell Linda?’

‘Linda doesn’t need to know,’ he says.

I turn away.

On the day we leave, while we are waiting to catch the bus back to Surat, I see Sangita running through the village in an orange sari, scattering the dust and the chickens. She catches up with us and holds John’s hands and face and tells him he must stay.

I stand at a distance, turned away, angry with both of them. John makes excuses and promises, all the while squinting into the distance, looking for the bus, which eventually comes. As it pulls away we stare back at Sangita who stands horribly alone, shrinking in the dust, becoming a puddle of orange in the distance as we travel away along the bumpy road.

Neither of us tells Linda, although she notices that he does not like to talk about India, and perhaps she notices how I have cooled towards my brother-in-law. She suggests to me that his illness was a particularly bad experience for him.

‘Poor John,’ I say.

She says she hopes that he wasn’t too difficult a patient.

‘Not at all,’ I say.

In the monsoon season, the river swells and stays fat for months, lurking at the edge of the village, watched and monitored and speculated about, and then it shrinks again, leaving behind puddles and the debris of the flood.

I pack long skirts, loose trousers, long-sleeved tops, a hat, sunscreen, mosquito repellent, malaria tablets. I have my ticket, visa, money, and an address.

I travel in December, when England’s winter is wet and grey, and India’s is orange. I make the journey Frances has described to me, flying at dawn into Bombay. The roads are already swollen with traffic — black and yellow taxis and auto-rickshaws weaving between lorries and bicycles and camels with carts. The air is thick with the honking of horns and the ringing of bells, and nonchalant cows potter across four rough lanes of traffic, playing lazy chicken.

I catch a train to Surat, breaking up my journey with tea and fruit, and in Surat I catch a bus, a boneshaker which deposits me on a dusty roadside at the end of the afternoon.

Approaching the village is like approaching Neverland or Oz, a place which only exists in stories. There is the river which will flood in the summer. And there is the guest house with grey monkeys loitering on the roof as if they were no more exotic than pigeons.

The girl at the desk is on the phone. I wait. She is about my age, I think. Behind her, a door opens into a back room, where a middle-aged woman sits in front of a glassless window, with the shutters wide open and the early evening sunlight dancing around her. Her eyes are closed. The girl behind the desk puts down the phone. She lifts her head, raising her heavy eyelids and looking at me with eyes which are dark brown with a sliver of amber.

‘What is your name?’ she asks, searching for my answer in her ledger.

In the back room, the melting sun drips warm orange puddles into the dozing woman’s lap, and the folds of her sari ripple as she stirs.