‘We are at war,’ said Edith. ‘The vicar told us. He got a telegram right in the middle of the service.’
That evening, Dora didn’t leave it to Jhoti and the ayah to put the children to bed. Dora was filled with a terrible dread. She wanted to clasp all her children round her. If she had only known of one sure, safe place in the world to escape to, she would have gathered them all up and run. As it was, she fought down her panic by helping to undress them, finding excuses to clasp them in her arms and smother them with kisses.
Jhoti was going to and fro between the kitchen and the bathroom carrying big kettles of hot water for their baths. Suddenly, she gave a fearful shriek. They heard the crash of a kettle, and Jhoti ran out in terror. ‘Sāp, Memsahib! Sāp !’
‘Snake!’ Dora went white with horror. ‘Harold! Harold!’
Edith climbed on to the rocking horse. Her face was blank and cold as marble.
Jhoti had flung the kettle of near boiling water at the snake and helped to stun it, so when Harold and Arjun came rushing in, it didn’t take long to club it to death and fling its body outside into the dust.
Later when Dora examined it, to satisfy herself that it would no longer be of any danger, she suddenly felt remorse and foreboding. Why had they killed it? Why had they allowed mindless panic to destroy such a beautiful creature?
She wandered back into the nursery and checked each of her twins.
Then Dora went into the smaller annexe off the nursery, where Edith now slept. As she peered at her daughter through the mosquito net, she was shocked to find her lying awake. Edith stared at her unblinking. Her gaze was so fixed, so emotionless, that at first she thought she must be asleep, even though her eyes were open.
‘Edith?’ she whispered.
Edith stared at her a second or two longer, then without replying to her mother, rolled over and slept.
Jhoti stood in the darkness of the verandah and breathed deeply. The pungent smells of jasmine, lilies and lemons hung in the air. Marvinder crouched, dozing nearby, her head lolling against Jaspal, who was clasped in her arms. She clambered to her feet and came to her mother.
‘Ma?’ she whispered. ‘Was the snake dangerous?’
‘It was a cobra. Cobras can kill,’ answered Jhoti.
Marvinder shuddered and drew closer to her mother.
‘Shall we go home now, Ma?’ she asked.
‘In a moment,’ murmured Jhoti. She could see the light come on in the drawing room. Harold and Dora entered. His arm was round her shoulder as if to comfort her. Then he took out his violin, while Dora went to the piano. This was how they always ended their day, and Jhoti liked this last invisible link with them.
Each evening, she would squat outside on the verandah, with Jaspal suckling at her breast, and Marvinder playing hopscotch on the flagstones, and listen to Harold and Dora making music together. It was like a religious ritual, and Jhoti found it strangely comforting.
She watched their blurred shapes through the wire-meshed windows and listened to sounds she would never know were Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart. Even Marvinder, fidgeting around her mother, eventually became still, sometimes huddling into Jhoti to watch and listen, and sometimes even pretending that she was playing the violin too. She copied the way Harold held the instrument under his chin with his left hand, and drew the bow up and down with his right.
At last, Arjun would enter the room quietly and wait to be noticed. Then he would announce that their dinner was ready to be served. Wrapping her veil around Jaspal, and tugging Marvinder’s hand, Jhoti would at last go back home along the white road.
That night, as they walked back home, there was a long, low rumble coming from the road. Had it been in monsoon, they would have thought it was thunder. But it was September, and the rumble went on longer than any roll of thunder.
From that day on, often in the night, they would hear the rumbling sound, and it was a long time before anyone knew they were army trucks moving troops. Some to go to the ports to board ships for Europe, others to go to the border areas for fear of invasion.
For no one in her village did the fact that the world was at war mean anything. Nothing interrupted their routine. There were still the fields to tend and the buffaloes to milk. It would have been possible for no one to even know, except that one day a letter came from Govind.
‘As soon as war was declared, all the students went and joined up. I too have joined up and will be sent from England to meet up with a Punjab regiment in France. We are all very excited and keen to see action. You would be proud to see me in my uniform. Of course, it means I will not complete my university course until after the war.’
Jhoti and Marvinder listened in silence to Harold reading out the letter. When he had finished he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Jhoti. It looks as though you won’t be seeing your husband for quite a while yet.’
‘I knew papa would not come back,’ said Marvinder.
Beyond the church, through a deeply shaded area of mango trees, crumbling slowly away under monsoon rain and relentless sun, invaded by the predatory embrace of weeds and vines and twisting roots of ivy, was the rajah’s palace. It was Marvinder who had first told Edith about it.
‘Doesn’t look much like a palace to me,’ Edith complained. She thought all palaces would be like the ones in her book of fairy tales; palaces with tall narrow turrets, marble domes and slanting roofs of gold with arrow slitted windows. But when they clambered through the tangle of vegetation and reached the vast sweep of grey stone verandah, she was impressed.
The building rose like a huge mouldering wedding cake, supported on great, fluted stone pillars and rising tier upon tier, terrace upon terrace until finally it culminated in a flat roof, fifty, eighty, a hundred feet up, hemmed in by stone balustrades and fierce parapets.
Edith fell silent. She was overawed, even afraid. It was so wild, so defiant. If silk-turbanned rajahs and bejewelled queens had ever looked out of those blank windows, or stood on the roofs to watch the sun go down, all trace of them had been smothered. Wherever there was a chink, a crack, a space between pillar and roof, step and verandah, wall and ceiling, a plant, a tendril, a cluster of grasses had seeded itself; long trailing weeds and brilliant flowers, cascaded precipitously; saplings reached out like new-born foals on long dangly legs, with twigs and leaves sprouting and spreading out and out into unimpeded space.
By day, pigeons and sparrows and kites and crows flew in and out of the rooms and roofs; bees, hornets and wasps built their own vast palaces of honey which hung like huge nets from the alcoves. But by night, the palace became the domain of bats and owls, stray dogs and roaming hyenas. Snakes slithered out across the cool stone and a myriad of brilliant insects swarmed in and out of their hidden kingdoms.
At first, Edith hadn’t wanted to stay long. It frightened her, and she had turned haughtily, remarking that it wasn’t her idea of a palace. But that was years ago. Now she was older, nearly ten. She had been at boarding school for almost two years and had become hardened.
The absence from home was long. Six months without a break, without seeing her mother and father. She blamed the twins. If it hadn’t been for them, the war wouldn’t have broken out in Europe, then they would have all gone back to England; they would have lived together in a house and gone to day schools. But the day war broke out was the day the snake nearly bit Ralph, and somehow she linked the two events with her despatch to boarding school. The twins required so much attention and hard work. Edith thought of them as leeches, sucking away at their mother. Even now, although they were six years old, she never saw her mother without