Clara had been brought up a Buddhist but after sitting in on the weekly mass that was held in our house, she decided to convert to Catholicism. Her religion was largely self-taught so, according to her, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, near India; he was dark-skinned, not white; and his miracles were performed not only in the Holy Land but also in India during his many visits there. Before every meal, she would thank Jesus for the food he’d sent, and she’d thank him for India. Our nighttime prayers were endless. With the zeal of the convert, she insisted we stayed on our knees till we had asked for blessings to be bestowed on everyone we knew and countless people we hadn’t even met: all the animals and trees and children everywhere, as well as the tiger under the bed, which, according to her stories, Jesus had tamed. I drank it in through my pores. Clara was the be-all and end-all, the centre of my universe.
I only saw my mother for an hour every day. At four o’clock on the dot I would be taken, freshly washed and brushed and straightened out, for an hour in her presence. She had trained as a Montessori teacher and would test the techniques on me. She drew red, blue, green and yellow balloons to try and teach me the English words for those colours, since as a toddler I spoke only Hindi. She’d play counting games, or ask me to do drawings or make towers of coloured blocks.
I was slightly in awe of this beautiful, elegantly dressed woman, with her strings of pearls and immaculately curled hair, and would always strive to please but I never felt any warmth from her. I always got the sense that I was merely tolerated, as she tolerated the heat or the smell of elephant dung. At five o’clock she would glance at Clara, who would scoop me up into her arms and take me back to the nursery for tea. There were no kisses and hugs from Mother, but Clara smothered me in so much love that I never felt I was going short.
My father was an even more distant figure, often out playing polo or riding around the plantation supervising the workers, either on his bicycle or on horseback. I barely knew him as a toddler, but there’s one clear memory that sticks in my mind from those days. It must have been June, because the heat was overpowering, the air felt electric with pressure and we could see huge blue-grey monsoon rain clouds bulging on the horizon. Small boys chanted a song to make the rain come: ‘Jhuma, jhuma, rusta bhurra cadah.’ I repeated it after them: ‘Jhuma, jhuma, rusta bhurra cadah,’ and Clara chuckled at my childish pronunciation of the Hindi words. Their incantations worked, though, because as we walked back from the bazaar that morning, the skies broke open with a loud cracking sound and huge drops of rain began to plop onto our bare arms. It was the kind of rain that soaks you in an instant. Droplets fell from my fringe onto my nose, and the hems of my dungarees soaked up water from the muddy puddles underfoot.
‘Ay, ay, ay,’ Clara shrieked. ‘Hurry up, Adeline-baba. Juldee, juldee.’ I was fascinated by the rivulets of water turning into gushing streams in the road and wanted to stand watching, but Clara shooed me along.
All of a sudden, we heard the sound of horse’s hooves clattering behind us and there was my stern, handsome father twinkling down at me.
‘I’ll give her a ride home,’ he told Clara. She lifted me up so that he could catch me in his arms and sit me on the saddle in front of him and then, with a flick of the reins and a click of his heels, we were cantering off down the road. I peered under his arm at the fast-disappearing figure of my lovely ayah, her wet sari clinging to her curves, and I quietly asked Jesus to protect her from the great white streaks of lightning and cracks of thunder in the distance. I didn’t like being separated from her. It felt safer when she was around.
Our house was a massive bungalow set on stilts in the heart of the tea gardens, and from an early age I knew the land was full of danger. Earthquakes rocked the building some nights and big chunks of plaster would fall out of the corners of the room. Clara would grab me and rush out of the shaking house and we’d have to make up our beds on the ground outside till the tremors subsided. I hardly slept a wink on those nights, terrified by the sounds of all the animals roaming around the fields. There were tigers and jackals and hyenas out there, and the hyenas were the worst because of the eerie howling sound they made, which echoed through the black skies. Even safely wrapped up in my own bed indoors, I’d shiver at the unearthly noise and I used to dread the coming of night when they emerged from their dens to hunt.
Darkness fell quickly in India. There was no in-between, no dusk or twilight. The sun disappeared as if God had turned off a light switch and from broad daylight it became hauntingly dark night-time. If Clara hadn’t been at the end of my bed, I don’t know what I’d have done. But she was. She was always there.
Daytime was frightening as well, with the overhanging trees and dense tea bushes and the big shadows underneath our house where snakes could lurk. We children who lived on the plantation were all tutored in what to do if we saw a snake: back away from it slowly then fetch a grown-up. Half a dozen men would come running, armed with sticks and spades, and what a kerfuffle there would be as they jabbed at it, then leapt back yelling as it hissed and coiled and sprang at them, flicking its tongue in the air, until finally it was dispatched, headless.
I was also scared of the big lizards that scurried up the walls of the house and onto the ceiling. They’d sit there silently, their eyes winking, and then the suction under their feet would give way and they’d fall to the floor beside me with a loud plop that made me jump and scream. Clara told me they wouldn’t hurt me, that they were more scared of me than I was of them, but I worried about them getting tangled in my hair, or running up my trouser leg, and I found them terrifying as they sped around on their oversized, long-toed feet.
I was also warned to stay away from the elephants that worked on the plantation, driven by mahouts who sat on their heads and kicked their heels to get them moving. They were sad-eyed creatures, those elephants, plodding wearily along with the baskets of tea leaves fastened to their backs, as if there was no joy in their day, only duty. I would have liked to pat their trunks and gaze into their sad eyes, but Clara had told me about people being killed when elephants stampeded, or even just stepped backwards suddenly, so I gave them a wide berth.
The animals that were most often found near the house were cows, the holy creatures that couldn’t be shooed away for religious reasons. Even though we weren’t Hindu, lots of the servants were so we had to respect their beliefs. The cows used to shelter in the shade beneath the house and use our patio as a lavatory, and the awful smell of dung permeated up to the house and in through the windows, more pungent in the heat, until one of the sweepers was sent outside to the unenviable task of cleaning it up.
I was curious about the peddlers and beggars and itinerant poor who kept arriving at our kitchen door begging for scraps or trying to sell their gaudy wares, and I liked to peer out and watch them. I especially liked the snake charmers with their pipes and baskets, but if my father was there he would always tell them ‘No, not today, thank you very much’ and send them on their way. I was warned to be careful after one man stretched his hand through the window while I was eating breakfast and stole a box of Rice Krispies from right under my nose. He had a very long beard, wore a dirty topee on his head and smelled like old vegetables. I watched him running off with the box of cereal dangling between his legs in his dhoti before I yelled for Clara.
‘You must always tell somebody if you see that one hanging around,’ she said, shaking her fist at his disappearing shape. ‘He’s no good.’
From then on I kept a close eye out for this Gunga Din. I didn’t know how to tell the good people from the bad ones, though, and I used to like watching when my mother went out to give handfuls of cornflakes and Rice Krispies to the young boys who sat at the bungalow gates. She kept them specially for poor children because they were nutritious, didn’t need cooking and were easy to divide