This visit to a kitchen, and a true Bengali kitchen, not one in an Anglo-Indian household run by a memsahib and staffed by Indian servants, is going to be a novel experience for Miss Gilby. She is not sure her heart is wholly in this business but it is Bimala’s wish and she is, all said and done, curious to know how a native woman runs her household and her servants. Do the servants pull the wool over her eyes as well? Do they steal? Are they recalcitrant at times? Miss Gilby is eager to pick up any useful tips that might, in the future, enable her to get more value from her servants, more peace of mind with them.
The servants have been warned weeks in advance of a visit by a memsahib to their domain. Bimala has asked them not to giggle, stare, or worry that the kitchen is going to be polluted by the presence of a Christian. When Bimala and Miss Gilby enter the kitchen, the three women working inside immediately pull up their aanchol and cover their heads: the movement is so fast and instinctive, it could be almost involuntary. They turn away, refusing to look, and stare at the stone floor, crushed by shyness. Bimala gives out orders in such rapid Bengali that Miss Gilby is left searching for an isolated word or two whose meaning she might understand and thereby make some sense of what she has said.
Bimala turns to Miss Gilby. ‘We will make something special. A Bengali special food. You will see?’
‘Yes, of course, but what is it?’
‘You will see,’ Bimala repeats mysteriously. One of the women goes to a corner of the kitchen and carries a bucket to the centre. She pulls out a giant fish from it. It is still thrashing, overpowering the woman in whose hands it cannot be contained. It slips out of her small hands and lands on the stone floor with a wet thud, flailing around in that dry, alien world, starved of its own element. An excited chatter breaks out among the servants while Bimala, excited too, moves away a few feet from the beating fish and asks for someone to get hold of it. Two of the servants come forward — one grasps the head, the other the tail — gabbling away constantly. The captured fish still convulses, struggling to get free. Bimala says to Miss Gilby, ‘This is rui, a favourite Bengali fish.’
The third servant gets out a bonti, an enormous sharp curved blade, like a broad, flattened question mark, attached to a wooden stand at right angles, and sets it down on the floor. Bimala shouts out something; everybody is talking all at once, very loudly. The servant with the bonti grabs hold of the fish with difficulty — Bimala, standing well away from the centre, shouts again, ‘Carefully, carefully’ — while another servant fetches her some ash with which she smears her hand while letting go of the fish momentarily, then catches it firmly by its head and neck, leaving the torso and the tail to lash about vigorously all over again. Holding the bonti down with her right foot and the fish with both hands she sets its head against the blade and with rapid sawing motions severs it from the rest of the body. A loud cheer goes up, there is blood on her hands and on the floor, Bimala says, ‘The head is for you, Miss Gilby. It is our special dish.’ She turns around just in time to catch Miss Gilby falling in a faint.
FIVE
He bumps into Sarah two days later in the main quad. They are both on their way to the library and stand around awkwardly for the brief pause of a couple of pulse beats and say ‘hello’ to each other as if they have been set up by mutual friends at a party, both primed beforehand that they are going to be introduced to a potential date. Then Sarah’s social sparkle gleams in into this unease; she starts talking, easily first, and then it builds up to a scatterfire, an excess of things and words that try to keep something at bay with their dense shield.
‘. . and there are times I think is it really worth it, this whole business of being made to hang on, and then he smiles at me in that way he has and my knees turn to jelly. .’
Ritwik has been so nervous about this encounter with Sarah that all he has looked for is a telling sign of their new knowledge but she is not going to give him any. Why, he wonders. Principle? The rule of confidentiality and anonymity? He hasn’t paid the slightest attention to what she has been saying and suddenly it dawns on him that she is confiding in him about her long-standing problems with Richard, her commitment-phobic boyfriend who has been stringing her along for nearly two years now. The whole college seemed to know about it; Sarah’s closest friends thought she should end it immediately.
‘. . sometimes aye, sometimes nay, I’m so confused, but Ritwik, you mustn’t think he’s bad or anything, it’s just that I’m his first important relationship and these are all teething problems, they’ll settle down soonish, but sometimes I doubt whether he’s in love with me as much as I’m with him. And he’s so clever. .’
This gives Ritwik a hook. He grabs it. ‘What does he work on?’
‘He’s doing a DPhil on Wittgenstein. He’s very bright. He’s now thinking of applying to the US for post-doctoral stuff and I can’t help feeling that he’s just trying to escape from me, you know, avoiding doing the dirty deed of dumping me and letting it happen the “long-distance relationship petering out” sort of way. God, it makes me so angry sometimes, this cowardice. .’
Ritwik cuts in, ‘Sarah, you might be misreading or misinterpreting. I don’t know Richard, so obviously I can’t say anything useful, and you know your situation best, but have you thought that some people might be like that — noncommittal, hedging their bets all the time, leaving all doors open. It doesn’t mean they love any less.’
He is talking drivel now, platitudes of received wisdom, but it is the only way he can staunch Sarah’s flow. This flood of words, standing in the middle of the main quad, is the only way they both have of acknowledging their knowledge. He is grateful to her for this torrent and now that he has launched himself into it as well, he knows there could have been no better way.
She smiles at his psychobabble, or it could have been a smile of complicity, receiving him into her strategy; from that moment on it becomes what it should have been from the very beginning — an effortless conversation between two friends.
‘But Ritwik, what am I to do?’ she wails.
‘You have to make up your mind firmly about what you want, whether you want a man who’ll give you all that’s conventionally associated with being in love, whatever that means, or someone with whom you’re able to negotiate something different.’ He gags internally at this shopworn counsellor-talk. Where did I get all this into my head?
‘Yes, I know all that’ — she waves an impatient arm in dismissal — ‘but, but what if I’m not happy with negotiating? Why do we need to negotiate? Why can’t we fall into an easy love rather than have this business of having to negotiate?’
Ritwik can tell she is getting more and more despondent by the minute; her face is flushed and warm now. He wants to scoop her up in his arms and tell her it is going to be all right, tell her she can lean on him always, but the moment passes.