The room was silent. BUY BRITISH – Jemubahi had seen the posters the day of his arrival in England, and it had struck him that if he’d yelled BUY INDIAN in the streets of India, he would be clapped into jail. And all the way back in 1930, when Jemubhai was still a child, Gandhi had marched from Sabarmati ashram to Dandi where, at the ocean’s maw, he had performed the subversive activity of harvesting salt.
" – Where will that get him? Phtoo! His heart may be in the right place but his brain has fallen out of his head" – Jemu’s father had said although the jails were full of Gandhi’s supporters. On the SS Strathnaver, the sea spray had come flying at Jemubhai and dried in taunting dots of salt upon his face and arms… It did seem ridiculous to tax it…
"If one was not committed to the current administration, sir, there would be no question of appearing here today."
Lastly, who was his favorite writer?
A bit nervously for he had none, he replied that one was fond of Sir Walter Scott.
"What have you read?"
"All the printed works, sir."
"Can you recite one of your favorite poems for us?" asked a professor of social anthropology.
Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best
By the time they stood for the ICS, most of the candidates had crisp-ironed their speech, but Jemubhai had barely opened his mouth for whole years and his English still had the rhythm and the form of Gujerati.
But ere he alighted at Netherby gate
The bride had consented, the gallant came late:
For a laggard in love and a dastard in war
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar…
When he looked up, he saw they were all chuckling.
While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,
And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume…
The judge shook himself. "Damn fool," he said out loud, pushed his chair back, stood up, brought his fork and knife down in devastating judgment upon himself and left the table. His strength, that mental steel, was weakening. His memory seemed triggered by the tiniest thing – Gyan’s unease, his reciting that absurd poem… Soon all the judge had worked so hard to separate would soften and envelop him in its nightmare, and the barrier between this life and eternity would in the end, no doubt, be just another such failing construct.
Mutt followed him to his room. As he sat brooding, she leaned against him with the ease that children have when leaning against their parents.
"I am sorry," said Sai, hot with shame. "It’s impossible to tell how my grandfather will behave."
Gyan didn’t appear to hear her.
"Sorry," said Sai again, mortified, but again he didn’t appear to have heard. For the first time his eyes rested directly upon her as if he were eating her alive in an orgy of the imagination – aha! At last the proof.
The cook cleared away the dirty dishes and shut the quarter cup of leftover peas into the cupboard. The cupboard looked like a coop, with its wire netting around a wooden frame and its four feet standing in bowls of water to deter ants and other vermin. He topped the water in these bowls from one of the buckets placed under the leaks, emptied the other buckets out of the window, and returned them to their appointed spots.
He made up the bed in an extra room, which was actually filled with rubbish but contained a bed placed in the very center, and he fixed pale virginal candles into saucers for Sai and Gyan to take to their rooms. "Your bed is ready for you, masterji," he said and sniffed:
Was there a strange atmosphere in the room?
But Sai and Gyan seemed immersed in the newspapers again, and he confused their sense of ripening anticipation with his own, because that morning, two letters from Biju had arrived in the post. They were lying under an empty tuna fish tin by his bed, saved for the end of the day, and all evening he’d been savoring the thought of them. He rolled up his pants and departed with an umbrella as it had begun to pour again.
In the drawing room, sitting with the newspapers, Sai and Gyan were left alone, quite alone, for the first time.
Kiki De Costa’s recipe column: marvels with potatoes. Tasty treat with meat. Noodles with doodles and doodles of sauce and oodles and oodles of cheese.
Fleur Hussein’s beauty tips.
The handsome baldy competition at the Calcutta Gymkhana Club had given out prizes to Mr. Sunshine, Mr. Moonshine, and Mr. Will Shine.
Their eyes read on industriously, but their thoughts didn’t cleave to such discipline, and finally Gyan, unable to bear this any longer, this tightrope tension between them, put down his paper with a crashing sound, turned abruptly toward her, and blurted:
"Do you put oil in your hair?"
"No," she said, startled. "I never do."
After a bit of silence, "Why?" she asked. Was there something wrong with her hair?
"I can’t hear you – the rain is so loud," he said, moving closer. "What?"
"Why?"
"It looks so shiny I thought you might."
"No."
"It looks very soft," he observed. "Do you wash it with shampoo?"
"Yes."
"What kind?"
"Sunsilk."
Oh, the unbearable intimacy of brand names, the boldness of the questions.
"What soap?" Lux.
"Beauty bar of the film stars?"
But they were too scared to laugh.
More silence.
"You?"
"Whatever is in the house. It doesn’t matter for boys."
He couldn’t admit that his mother bought the homemade brown soap that was sold in large rectangles in the market, blocks sliced off and sold cheap.
The questions grew worse: "Let me see your hands. They are so small."
"Are they?"
"Yes." He held his own out by hers. "See?"
Fingers. Nails.
"Hm. What long fingers. Little nails. But look, you bite them."
He weighed her hand.
"Light as a sparrow. The bones must be hollow."
These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the de-liberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.
Rainy season beetles flew by in many colors. From each hole in the floor came a mouse as if tailored for size, tiny mice from the tiny holes, big mice from big holes, and the termites came teeming forth from the furniture, so many of them that when you looked, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, all seemed to be wobbling.
But Gyan did not see them. His gaze itself was a mouse; it disappeared into the belladonna sleeve of Sai’s kimono and spotted her elbow.
"A sharp point," he commented. "You could do some harm with that."
Arms they measured and legs. Catching sight of her foot – Let me see.
He took off his own shoe and then the threadbare sock of which he immediately felt ashamed and which he bundled into his pocket. They examined the nakedness side by side of those little tubers in the semidark.
Her eyes, he noted, were extraordinarily glamorous: huge, wet, full of theater, capturing all the light in the room.
But he couldn’t bring himself to mention them; it was easier to stick to what moved him less, to a more scientific approach.
With the palm of his hand, he cupped her head…
"Is it flat or is it curved?"
With an unsteady finger, he embarked on the arch of an eyebrow…
Oh, he could not believe his bravery; it drove him on and wouldn’t heed the fear that called him back; he was brave despite himself. His finger moved down her nose.