It remains in no doubt to Miss Gilby why this man is one of the leaders of the swadeshi movement: he certainly appears to have been born to such things. He seems to be whipping them up into a fervour of swadeshi activity, spreading his message of the boycott of English goods, carrying everyone into the vortex of protest against the unjust division of Bengal. Mr Banerjea is a creature of fire and wind, working together in a dance of fury; for an unsettling moment she sees a childhood illustration of the prophet Elijah in his chariot of fire. Miss Gilby feels like a traitor, sitting and listening to him, but she would be hard-pressed to answer which party she felt she was betraying.
When the speech is over, there is a long moment of silence, in which the radiance and intensity of the blaze the crowd has been exposed to are registered and assimilated, before it breaks into applause, yet more fervid shouts of bande mataram, a general clambering and stampede to reach out and touch the speaker who has now acquired in almost everyone’s minds the status of a demigod. The orange boys appear delirious and possessed as they move around the crowd, fists balled, arms raised, shouting their mantra. The flock of pigeons, which had settled peacefully along the edges of the roof, perhaps also mesmerized like the humans gathered below, have their spell broken and flutter up in a group. Their departure too sounds like clapping hands. Miss Gilby turns sideways to find all the women in the balcony dabbing at their eyes with the aanchol of their saris.
Bimala seems distracted and restless but Miss Gilby does not rule out the possibility that she may be attributing to her charge her own feelings of a sudden and inexplicable diffusion of focus and concentration. Bimala makes three mistakes in the very first two bars of ‘Roaming in the gloaming’, an unusual thing because she knows the piece so well. She ignores the metronome, too, resulting in Miss Gilby having to stop singing and remind her, indulgently the first few times, and then rather sharply, that her innovative tempi are doing no favours either to the piano or to the spirit of the tune. Bimala sulks for a while and tries to concentrate but it seems that they might have to write off music lessons for the day.
Miss Gilby tries a different tack. ‘Why don’t we leave music for another day, Bimala, when you’ve practised some more?’
Bimala jumps at the bait. ‘Yes, Miss Gilby. Can I sew for a bit and we can talk and practise Conversation?’
‘All right, then. What are you embroidering?’ Miss Gilby hopes this form of subtle and covert correction has the right effect on Bimala.
Bimala picks up her embroidery: it is a very large piece of blinding white cloth, with the area to be worked on picked out and stretched like the skin of a drum by the frame, showing the beginnings of Bengali letters in blue.
‘Banglaar pakhi,’ Miss Gilby reads, much to the visible delight of Bimala. ‘The birds of Bengal.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Bimala nods excitedly and unravels more of the cloth lying in folds and soft heaps on the sofa, trailing on the floor. ‘I make a bedspread with the different birds of Bengal all over it. Yes?’
Only two birds have been embroidered on to that pristine field of white but they are creatures that could set a cat stalking. Miss Gilby’s heart leaps when she sees them — a sparrow in shades of brown and ash and fawn, its eye a dark bead, its legs the colour of dun, dried leaves, and a kingfisher in its blue blaze, the beak a miracle of poised coral red. They are a rapture of finger and thread and needle: who would have thought such a miracle to be possible from those ordinary objects of commonplace life?
Bimala notes Miss Gilby’s pleasure and admiration in her sharp intake of breath. ‘You like this?’ she asks, somewhat redundantly.
‘Yes, very, very much. It’s so. .’ she searches for a word, ‘so. . lifelike, so real. Did you have a model to work from, a picture or a drawing or something of the kind?’
‘Yes, yes, I get it now.’ She puts down the spilling cloth, frees herself from its clinging folds and runs out of the room. In a few minutes, she is back, bearing a giant book, which she passes to Miss Gilby.
The Birds of the North-Eastern and East Gangetic Plain by a Ruth A. Fairweather. 1902. Published in London. The brief note about the author says that after twenty years in Bengal, Orissa and the foothills of the north-eastern arm of the mighty Himalayan range, she is now a resident of Almora where she is at work on a companion volume on North Indian birds. The name doesn’t ring a bell but there aren’t very many Englishwomen in this vast country who have scientific interests and write about Indian birds; surely someone Miss Gilby knows must know her.
As she turns the pages, Miss Gilby cannot make up her mind whether Ruth Fairweather is an artist first and then a scientist, or the other way around. Page after page of luminous plumage, limpid, waterdark eyes; the birds look ready to fly out in a flash of colour and escape from their papery imprisonment to the green and gold outside where they truly belong. Miss Gilby is so hypnotized that she doesn’t know how much time has elapsed before she turns her attention on to Bimala who seems to be lost in a daydream.
Miss Gilby gives a slight cough. ‘They’re extraordinary,’ she manages to say at last.
‘My husband gives it. . no, no. . gave, gave it to me, no?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘He knows I like birds very much. So I sew this for him,’ Bimala says, and giggles nervously, not sure whether that homophonic assonance was quite correct or not.
‘That is very nice of you. You are a wonderful artist yourself.’
Bimala smiles shyly and starts picking up her embroidery. Miss Gilby tries to get her to talk more; she asks Bimala, ‘Why don’t you tell me what the fiery Mr Banerjea’s speech last week was all about?’
A hectic flush races up Bimala’s face and reaches her hairline. She drops her embroidery and makes a great show of picking it up, then gets down on to the floor to look for a lost needle. As the search progresses, a touch excessive and theatrical, Miss Gilby infers from the sudden blush that Mr Banerjea and Bimala, against all prevailing custom and social rules, have been introduced to each other by Mr Roy Chowdhury; the revolutionary must be the first man she has met apart from her husband and she hasn’t quite got over the novelty, the sheer transgressiveness of the situation.
When the little charade is over and Bimala settles down again, having failed to find the missing needle but otherwise composed as before, Miss Gilby repeats her question. ‘I could not follow a lot of Mr Banerjea’s speech in the courtyard. I thought he was speaking a very chaste and purified Bengali. What was he saying? I could gather it was about swadeshi but not very much more.’
Bimala looks straight at Miss Gilby, holds her gaze and says, with utmost seriousness, even awe, ‘He speaks about Bengal as the mother goddess.’