The Tea-Planter's Daughter Read online

  The Tea-Planter’s Daughter

  SARA BANERJI

  For Ranjit

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter 1

  Julia stood astride two worlds and, by breathing in so deeply that her nostrils quivered, could smell the taste of both of them: the plains of India, glittering with villages and dirty rivers, and the smell of home up here, in the South India hills, where the wind was wet with rain. The hills here were humped and seemed, on this saturated night, as black and menacing as the wild elephants that lived in them.

  A thousand years ago a piece of the hill upon which Julia stood had gone tumbling down on to the plains below, and left a gap as if a god had taken a bite out of the mountain range. Only from this straddling gap could Julia Clockhouse see the hills and plains by a turn of her head. Down there somewhere, as big as a betel nut by now probably, lay the fallen chunk.

  It was nearly midnight, and she could see the lights of her bungalow, dim because it was lit only with candles and paraffin lamps. The light from the bungalow windows appeared to flicker from here because a gigantic tree was being twirled and twisted by the storm. The roaring of water sometimes drowned the sound of people calling her, their voices small and strained, unconvincing, as though they thought they ought to call because it was her birthday but did not really care if she heard or not … Julia, Julia, Missie, Missie, Madam, Madam.

  A wild goose had once flown here when Julia had been a child. It had come crashing out of the sky as she had watched it, one moment a white bird that sometimes loved Julia, winging free into forever, and a moment later smashing against the rocks into a jelly of broken flesh. “You can tell your daddy to get you another goose,” they had said. As though they had told her, “You can tell your daddy to get you another soul.”

  Julia had waited all these years for something to happen. For some sign. For some higher authority to tell her what it was that lived in her. For God to offer her a medicine to cure her of the devil, as Kuts Chatterjee, the company doctor, had cured her of measles with a spoon slopping scarlet and saying, “Now be a good girl, gulp it down. Ayah will give you a sweetie afterwards to take the taste away …”

  The tree that grew beside her bungalow bowed, thrashing the clay-tiled roof then soaring, straining its roots until it was almost torn from the ground. The goose had struggled like this after its wings had been clipped. Because of the noise of the storm the guests would be unaware of the flagellating foliage. Julia braced her mind, feeling it creak in time with the limbs of the tree that, with one more twist, might send a rock the size of a house crashing through her rafters. The birthday guests, senses numbed with gins and kissing, would vanish under the stone, blotted out in a brief splash of scarlet. Then Julia too would be free to soar to freedom.

  Twelve hours ago Julia had seen a yogi sitting at her gate, and because of that had understood how to become free. She had been riding the gelding Markandaya when the idea came to her. Wild elephants wading through bushes reminded her of the time she had sent little copper elephants racing across her father’s mantelpiece, so that he had shivered, and stopped loving her.

  She was twenty-five today, and in the morning she had sat on the back of Markandaya while he had cringed against the falling water, his tail clamped tight to his quarters, water rivering down his thighs. But Julia Clockhouse had not noticed the wet because she had looked into the eyes of a holy man called horse who was goose-free. She had understood then that she was never going to understand.

  The wind blew her nostrils wide. She opened her mouth, and felt the hard breath of it push into her throat. She unbuttoned her dress, and pulled the cloth away from her skin, letting the wind rage wetly over her whole body, and she laughed aloud into the roaring of the night.

  Behind the bungalow the hillside quivered like the flanks of a thrashed pony, bundling boulders, like ammunition, ready to blot out the gin drinkers.

  In the morning she had ridden her husband Ben’s horse through the monsoon because he had not come home in time for her birthday.

  Ben was the Senior Manager of a group of tea estates in a South Indian valley called Arnaivarlai. Julia had waited up for him for hours on the previous night, certain that he would come. Her heart had jumped with hope sometimes at a sound that turned out to be only a tractor carrying a load of plucked tea back to the factory, and jumped with panic once because she heard the trumpeting of a wild elephant somewhere out there in the dark and feared that Ben might be driving along the road and encounter it.

  Sometimes the rain would beat heavily on the roof tiles of her bungalow for hours, but even then she would think she could hear the sound of a car, although she knew really that no ears could hear a thing over the clamour of such a storm. The rain would stop, and there would be a ticking silence as the great drips fell off the trees. Then, moments later, would begin again.

  Last night the servants had gone home one by one until at last there was no one left in the bungalow except Kali, the bearer who had the name of a Hindu goddess. And Julia, awake and waiting.

  “He won’t come tonight now, Missie Baba,” Kali had told her. “If he is at Cochin so late he won’t even think to come on the road up, with elephants about and the monsoon so strong. He is sleeping in the Malabar Hotel probably, and will come in the morning. Go to bed now, Missie.” He could talk to her like this because he had known her since she was a little girl, for he had been her parents’ servant too.

  “You go to sleep, Kali. I am waiting,” she had told him firmly.

  “Tomorrow is the big birthday party, and we all should be having rest to get the strength for it,” moaned Kali. “But how can I leave you sitting here alone?”

  Julia had poured herself another gin, and had not answered.

  After she had woken in the morning she lay looking out on to the hills, and wondered if Ben was even now driving through them towards her. The thought that he might not be made her feel afraid. In fact the thought that he might not come back at all had flashed through her mind once during her restless night, and it was only the knowledge of his pleasure and pride in being Senior Manager of this district made her sure that he would return.

  At about six the light in the valley began to dim. For a moment Julia thought that day was receding into night again and sat up alarmed, for time retreating would not have been more odd than some of the things that had happened to her in bed. But this time it was only a black cloud covering the newly-risen sun. She lay back on the pillow almost disappointed because it was not yesterday.

  At seven there was a tinkling and then Kali knocked, and came in with the morning tea. His smile was wide, but nervous, as though he, like she, expected almost anything of Julia in bed. He put the tray on the bedside table. The tiny shells strung round the net cover of the milk jug to hold it down gave one last tinkle.

  “Many birthday happinesses, Missie,” the old man told her, just as he had always done on her birthday when she was a child. She saw that he had put a little posy of zinnias from the garden on to the tray because it was her birthday. Tears stung her eyes. For the last six years it had been her husband Ben who had wished her on her birthda
y morning, and she was reminded again of the fact that he was not here.

  “He will come, Missie darling,” Kali whispered, as he turned the handle of the teapot so that she could easily reach it, then he put her cup on to its saucer. “See, I have put you a little pink banana from the garden!” The banana lay tight and fat like an unopened birthday parcel on the plate, and tears filled Julia’s eyes again.

  “I am grateful, Kali. I really am. I am sorry about everything!” she said softly.

  “There is nothing to sorry, Missie,” the old man said cheerfully. “We have known you since child!” Although these two sentences did not seem to be connected Julia knew what he meant.

  Kali had put Dettol on Julia’s knees when she had fallen down aged three. He had tied her loose tooth with a long string to the door handle, then slammed the door whisking out the tooth with a shot of blood, when Julia was seven. He had comforted her with loving murmurs when her pet goose had died, and had whispered, “Never mind, Missie. One day you will be able to understand the song of Hamsa,” when she had emerged shaking from her father’s study after another fruitless reading lesson. Kali had cried when Julia had been sent to school, and laughed aloud when she had come home forever, and married Ben Clockhouse.

  “Tell the syce I will ride Markandaya after breakfast,” Julia said, sitting up and starting to pour.

  “Oh, Missie, no!” Kali, who was halfway to the door, turned and stared at her, alarmed.

  Julia frowned. “You can’t say ‘no’ to me!” she announced. “Tell him.”

  “But Missie, it’s the monsoon, and the roads are slippery.”

  “Tell him,” said Julia loudly, and turned the teapot spout a little towards the white pillowcase.

  “Master will be angry.” Kali gave a tiny shudder. Julia allowed a splash or two of the strong tea to fall on to the linen. Kali stared at the new brown spots with despair in his eyes.

  “Tell him,” said Julia Clockhouse.

  “Yes, Missie.” Kali’s voice was small and he went out of the room with shoulders hunched, like a man defeated.

  After he had gone Julia lay down again, purposely putting her cheek to the wet patch where she had spilled the tea.

  “I long,” she said to no one. “I long and long and long …” It would have been nice if Ben came back soon, and if things between them were once again as they had been in the early days of their marriage, in the days before Julia pressed her legs tightly together and refused to allow him to love her. But there was something else she longed for, and, although she could not quite put a name to it, it was connected with the way she was to Kali. But she did not think she would be able to treat Kali in any other way unless she became a different person, and so she realised that she would go on longing for ever. For whoever heard of someone becoming a different person?

  Leaning on her elbow she poured tea into the cup, splashed in the milk carelessly, so that the tray cloth, embroidered with violets by missionary nuns and given to her and Ben as a wedding present, became stained as well as the pillow. Then she added five spoons of sugar. She never took sugar in her tea, and neither did her husband, but Kali always persisted in putting the sugar bowl on the morning tea tray.

  “Please don’t bring it,” she used to tell him in the early days of their marriage. “There is no need, as we neither of us use it, and it clutters up the tray.”

  “I must, because it is the proper thing for the sugar to be there,” he had told her firmly. But she knew really that it was because her father, Edward Buxton, had taken sugar in his tea. Kali, in spite of the fact that it was Ben Clockhouse who had paid his wages for the past six years, still considered himself Edward Buxton’s bearer.

  Leaving the sugared tea to get cold on the tray, she lay back on the pillow and listened. A bird began to sing, whistling like a boy, hoarse, a bit tuneless, and with a boy’s careless joy fulness. Ever since Julia could remember she had loved to hear the song of the whistling schoolboy, and even today its cry soothed her, as though it knew she was waiting and waiting for a sound and was trying to fill the gap. But there was no sound of a car coming up the road from the plains into the valley.

  There was no car, and she knew that it was perfectly unreasonable to expect there to be one, since it took four hours to do the hundred miles from Cochin up into the hills and it was hardly likely that Ben would have got up at two in the morning to travel home, even for the sake of his wife’s birthday. She started doing sums. He will get up at about seven. He was always an early riser, so he would certainly not be later than that. Then he will have a hotel breakfast. He would surely not leave without having breakfast, even if it was his wife’s birthday! So that would bring it to about eight. She realised she could not possibly expect him before half-past twelve.

  “Plenty of time to ride Markandaya, and have him back in the stable before the Master comes!” she shouted aloud, although she knew that Kali was well out of earshot. By now he would be at the other end of the huge bungalow, laying the table for breakfast. He would probably be putting a dish of lemon marmalade on the mahogany dining table that had once been her father’s. Or perhaps rolling butter with iced wooden pats. Or he might be cutting her a slice of papaya from the fruit he had bought in the bazaar earlier.

  “But I won’t eat it!” she shouted out again. “I won’t have anything to eat until he comes!” She knew Kali could not hear her, and wondered who she was talking to. “Myself,” she thought with alarm. That is a bad sign, she knew. Girls at the convent school had told her that talking to yourself was the first sign of madness. So, to ensure that it was to someone else she spoke, and not herself, she rang the bell, keeping her finger on the button for at least three minutes, until she heard the sound of Kali’s flying footsteps on the tiles, then his knock on the door. And then she said all over again the things she knew he had not heard because he had been getting breakfast ready. Adding, “Anyway, it’s my horse, just as much as his. Probably more mine, since my father gave it.”

  The rain burst down suddenly, hammering the corrugated iron roof with a tremendous sound, and blotting out all view of the valley in a moment. It was the sort of violent rain that bites chunks out of the hills and sends them slobbering down on to the road. Once Ben had been trapped between two mud mountains when he had been riding round to inspect the tea. He had had to wait for half a day before someone discovered him and sent labourers to dig a path wide enough for him and his horse to pass through.

  “There is no point in cooking meals for me until Master comes, Kali,” she told the servant.

  “Oh, Missie,” Kali tried to laugh. “In this place and in monsoon people can take many days to get up here sometimes! Suppose the road is blocked and can’t be opened for a week, then what will Missie do?” He talked lightly, but he felt alarmed. He knew Julia Missie, and knew what she was capable of. “Missie has got this nice party tonight,” he said soothingly, “so Missie must eat breakfast, and lunch as well.”

  Julia sat up and shrugged. “I don’t expect to enjoy it in the least anyway,” she said. “I would much rather not have had it …”

  “I will get Missie’s dress ironed beautifully,” soothed Kali. “I will call the dhobi and tell him to do Missie’s pretty dress really nicely for this party because all the ladies of Arnaivarlai will be looking at my Missie …”

  “If you like,” said Julia indifferently, and turned to stare down into the valley.

  “I remember so many many times this Madras plane being delayed, or even not coming at all,” Kali said in the crooning voice he had used when she had been a child. “He will come surely by nightfall, Missie.”

  When she had been little, and had come out of her father’s study, her face white, he had said in that same voice, “My father was the greatest man, yet could not read books.”

  “What did he do that was great?” Julia had asked.

  Kali breathed deeply, as though he searched for the right words with which to describe his father. “He was a good man. H
e brought all of us ten children up well.”

  “All fathers do that,” said Julia. “They have to.”

  Kali sighed, and remembered his mother waiting, waiting, her eyes on the road just as Julia Missie was looking today, and saying sometimes ten times a day, “I know he will come back. I just know he will.”

  “He walked away one day,” said Kali softly.

  Julia frowned. “But that isn’t good. That is horrible.”

  “For Hindus it is said that your life is divided into three parts. In the first you are child. In the second you are a householder. And in the third you give up everything and go into the forests …”

  “Why?”

  “Because God is in the forests. So the men leave their wives and their families and go searching for him.”

  “Then?” asked Julia.

  “Then I don’t know. He never came back.”

  After that Julia used to think of Kali’s father whom she imagined looked exactly like Kali. In her mind he walked through flower-festooned jungles with a big-bellied, black-bearded, heavy-eyebrowed God, whose hands were covered in black curls. In other words exactly like her father.

  “I have really enjoyed this conversation,” God, who looked like Edward Buxton, would say to Kali’s father who looked like Kali.

  Kali told Julia, “My father used to make statues of Saraswathi out of clay for the festivals. He was a very good artist, and these statues were most beautiful. He made other goddesses too, but most of all he made Saraswathi, who is, you know, the goddess of learning. After some years people began to come to our village to buy the statues, and my father in the end became well known even to people in Madras. Because of this he earned enough money to send all of us, both the sons and the daughters, for full-time schooling. My oldest brother had been about to go to further education, even. But after father went into the forest all that had to stop. After my father went we became very poor. My mother could hardly find the food for all of us to eat. I was lucky to get this job as servant with Mr Buxton.” Kali smiled and said, “Your father will not go into the forest. For that you can be glad.”