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Bimala says nothing then she whispers to her husband. Mr Roy Chowdhury nods enthusiastically, says something back, but Bimala seems to react to it with even greater withdrawal.

Mr Roy Chowdhury asks Miss Gilby, ‘Bimala wants to serve you some sweets that she has made herself. She wants me to ask you if you will have some.’

Miss Gilby immediately seizes her opportunity. ‘Yes, of course, I will be delighted. But on one condition.’ She pauses. Bimala looks up expectantly. Good, thinks Miss Gilby, she’s understood every single word.

She speaks slowly and clearly, ‘I will be very happy to eat the sweets you have prepared, Bimala, but only if you ask me directly, not through your husband.’

Mr Roy Chowdhury is pleasantly surprised by this move. He looks at the Englishwoman with admiration.

The silence in the room is expectant. Mr Roy Chowdhury turns to his wife and asks gently, in English, ‘Did you hear that? Aren’t you going to ask her, Bimala?’

Bimala has her hands clasped tightly as if in desperate prayer. She whispers something to her husband and before he can say anything, she gets up and runs out of the room, a flurry of swishing sari and tinkling bangles and anklets.

Mr Roy Chowdhury breaks the surprised silence by chuckling out loud. Miss Gilby joins in too. He says, ‘It’s all a bit new for her. It’s been only a year that she has stepped out of the andarmahal.

‘Please don’t apologize, I understand how terrifying it must be for her. Where did she disappear?’

‘I think she’s gone to get you tea. I’ll be surprised if she comes back. She’ll probably send one of the servants.’

She smiles in acknowledgement. They sit talking for a while — he asks her if she is comfortable, if she needs anything, apologizes for any oversight on his part — he’s unfailingly gentle and courteous.

From the sound of footsteps outside, they know that Bimala isn’t the one who is approaching the room; there is no music from her bangles and anklets, but instead the gentle tremor of crockery and cutlery being transported carefully on a tray. A servant appears at the threshold. Mr Roy Chowdhury says something, he enters, puts the huge tea tray down on the table between them and departs.

‘Good, tea’s arrived. Now, Miss Gilby, how do you take your tea?’

There is a great deal of china on the plate, all white, and the teapot is covered in a cosy that has been beautifully embroidered with a motif of songbirds and creepers and roses. Miss Gilby is certain it is Bimala’s handiwork, a special object to be taken out for a special occasion, or maybe even made for this one. The tray is laden with small dishes containing about six varieties of sweets, four of each.

‘Goodness,’ Miss Gilby exclaims, ‘is this all her work? There’s just far too much of it for two. Won’t she be joining us?’

‘I doubt very much. But you must try one of each, at the very least. Otherwise, she’ll think you don’t like her.’ He can’t help smiling when he says this.

Miss Gilby laughs: she is not wound up inside any more. As she watches Mr Roy Chowdhury pour tea, there is once again the sound of footfall outside and, along with it, the jingle of bangles, the rustling of cloth. It stops suddenly. Expecting Bimala, both Mr Roy Chowdhury and Miss Gilby look up. There is a long pause but no one enters. They look at each other and exchange a conspiratorial smile.

‘I think she wants to hear what you think of her sweets. Or what the two of us have planned for her,’ Mr Roy Chowdhury whispers.

Miss Gilby whispers too, ‘Does she know that we know?’

Mr Roy Chowdhury raises his voice and calls out to her. Instantly, there is a sound of hasty retreat, footsteps, rustling, tinkling, all fading down to the interior of the house. Mr Roy Chowdhury and Miss Gilby fall about laughing as if they’ve been the ones caught playing children’s games.

The house, called ‘Dighi Bari’, or ‘Lake House’ — although there is no lake near it, just a big pond with dark, unfathomable water and wet, green woods ringing most of its circumference — is big, not half as big as the palace of the Nawab of Motibagh, but capacious enough for it to be recognized as a local zamindar’s house: three storeys, painted a buttery yellow, in a regular quadrilateral shape, enclosing a large, brick-paved central courtyard. All the rooms in the house open out on to this courtyard. The rooms facing east look out on to a garden, big and rambling, which leads ultimately to a track to the village, about half a mile away: this is the designated ‘front’ of the house. Miss Gilby has her quarters in this section of the house (East Wing, she calls it) on the top storey. Mr Roy Chowdhury must have told the malee about the English love of gardens, so he has dutifully brought up dozens of pots of plants and flowers and arranged them on the verandah outside her rooms. There are canna, zinnia, dahlia, rose, even petunia and snapdragon, a couple of ficus plants, a flowering jasmine, which he has lovingly trailed around the iron railings. He comes to water the plants every morning, bows low when he sees the memsahib, so incongruous in this house, so conspicuous in this village, which has hardly ever seen a white face.

While this back verandah with the plants, which is also a running corridor linking all the rooms on that floor, looks out on to the courtyard below, she notices that half of the first floor — the two sides on the floor directly below hers — situated to the westfacing back of the house, which should open east to the courtyard, have wooden shutters and stained glass running their entire length, from the floor to the ceiling. The other side of the rooms in that ‘West Wing’ presumably has a view of the woods that nestle the dark pond that gives the house its name. This is the andarmahal, the secluded area of the house where the women live and, until recently, Bimala did too. She hasn’t been invited to see that area; it’s not that she has been told to stay off, but just that that section of the house hasn’t featured in any conversation so far. The open area of that floor is Mr Roy Chowdhury and Bimala’s quarters, while the ground floor is given over to a study, the living room, three offices, a ‘meeting room’ for conducting business, and a smaller library.

It is in the living room that Miss Gilby gives piano lessons to Bimala and conducts most of the English lessons as well. A few lessons have occasionally taken place in Miss Gilby’s study upstairs — she knows Bimala is quite curious to see how a memsahib might appoint her living space — and it is very likely that they are going to take place in that more intimate room with increasing frequency. One thing Miss Gilby knows for certain is that the passage from stilted, shy formality to an apparently easy companionship in Indian societies is swift, but whether she will be let in to that intimacy is another question. She will have to wait and see.

The first lesson is in the living room. Miss Gilby has requested Mr Roy Chowdhury not to accompany his wife to the lessons: the urge towards dependence on her husband would be too much and, consequently, learning would become a protracted business. He has thought the idea very commendable.

Very shortly after one of these lessons, as soon as Bimala departs and Miss Gilby starts to clear up a little, she notices that Bimala has left behind her exercise book, her textbooks, her pencils, everything she needs for her homework, on the table at which they have been working. She gathers them up quickly, in a swift swoop of her hands, and runs out after Bimala. She sees her bright yellow sari disappearing through a door leading to the andarmahal. In her haste, she forgets social rules, what’s out of bounds and what’s not; she rushes down the stairs, books and pencils in hand, and reaches the floor below. Across from the landing, there is a big wooden door, with coloured glass filling up the space between the top of the doorframe and the ceiling. She knocks on the door then pushes it open and enters. There are three or four low wooden chowkees on the white mosaic floor. It is much darker here than in Miss Gilby’s open verandah, but the grass-green and red panes in the glass section above the dark brown painted wooden shutters throw fuzzy gules of coloured light on the white mosaic here and there. A servant is sitting in a corner, cutting vegetables and potatoes on a bonti. Seeing Miss Gilby she gasps, shrilly, immediately draws her aanchol over her face, runs around one of the corners and disappears. Miss Gilby suddenly stops in her tracks, realizing what she has done. Before she can turn around to go, a woman appears around the corner of the verandah. She wears white, unrelieved, impeccable white cotton, draped around her in a shapeless roll; her head is shaved, her face drawn and pale, there are dark circles under her eyes. She takes one glance at Miss Gilby, shrieks and runs away. A gramophone is playing in one of the rooms, its hissy, scratchy, high-pitched sound almost totally distorting the song it plays. Or perhaps the song itself is tremulous and wobbly. It stops abruptly and, as if to time it together, Bimala makes an appearance, clearly with the maidservant and the shaven-headed woman hiding behind her, but around the corner, against the wall and invisible. Bimala too stops, as if confronted with a mirage whose truth she cannot immediately gauge.