Breakfast with the Nikolides Read online

  (‘Because the Germans are coming.’)

  (‘Oh. Have they come? Will they kill us?’)

  (‘Of course not’ – hastily.)

  (‘Then why didn’t we stay where we were?’)

  Emily’s face was green-white, and she had on her new winter coat, black-and-white check; its smartness was all crumpled by her sleepy sitting. So was Binnie’s … Now in the night it seemed to Louise that she had dragged them in those coats across the world, by sea and by land and by road, by Europe and Africa and Asia – to safety. Safety. Was it safety?… It must be, cried Louise. I am so tired, she said. If only the drums would stop beating I would go to sleep. But – if I go to sleep I shall dream … She lay on her side and listened to the drums and presently she went to sleep and presently she did begin to dream.

  The last house on the New Road along the river the coolie lines fires were still burning, with the men squatting round them to smoke and talk and play cards on a mat spread out on the ground. They would burn till long past midnight. In the Hostels the Superintendent had made a perfunctory round and the lights in the windows went out one by one. The staff quarters were silent long ago. On verandahs were the shapes of beds under mosquito-nets, and in handy places, on porch steps, beside the kitchens, the servants carried out their beds or their bedding to sleep in the cool. Some lay simply on the ground with quilts wrapped round their heads and looked like bodies wrapped in shrouds, and others lay on the steps or the shelves of the verandah rails; the watchman stood his lantern in the middle of the drive to keep watch by itself and fell into profound slumber standing up against a wall.

  Mahomed Shah put his hurricane lantern inside his door, where it turned his room into a cave of deep soft yellow light. The room was a hut beside the gate, so small that he could not stand up in it, and he could touch from wall to wall without stretching his arms. It had a floor of beaten dried mud, a few pots and lotas, and an earthenware pitcher of water in the corner and a shelf with a broken mirror and a comb. He kept his clothes in a tin trunk painted with roses that usually stood under the bed, but tonight he had carried the bed outside. The walls were plastered with pictures from the European papers, Post and Bystander and Illustrated London News; in the night it was singularly inviting.

  He sat down on his bed and took off his twisted soldier’s turban with its falling end and pointed centre cap and placed it whole on the end; he leant his lathee against the head and drew up his legs, dropping off his wooden pattens that stayed on because they had a peg to hold between the toes. He sat for a few moments staring into the garden where the moon was advancing up the sky, and then he lay down and went to sleep.

  The last house on the New Road along the river belonged to Narayan Das, the new young veterinary surgeon. It lay outside the limits of the Amorra Electric Company, and in the night it was lit by oil lamps; each room was filled with a soft bubble of light, the same refulgence that Shah’s hut walls had. The garden of the house was only half made, but it had been the garden of an old pavilion on the river, and the light fell from the windows across a square of grass where a pillar had fallen down and was slowly crumbling away. Now it made a seat with a flowering creeper growing over it. Narayan’s young wife, Shila, stood beside it and listened to his footsteps going away from her down the road with his friend Anil.

  She had waited up for him; he had sent her to bed but she waited up, listening to the voices talking and rising, talking and falling in the next room.

  Tarala, the maidservant, had come in and sat on her heels on the ground beside her. Tarala was an old widow crone; her face was dark and wrinkled out of all coherence, she had a rag of grey hair on the top of her head and was dressed in a meagre dun-white piece of cotton. She appeared quite garrulous and senseless, but she had two senses left, a sense of scandal and a sense of enjoyment, and occasionally she would delve down into some other former mind and produce a gentle brand of wisdom. She began to press Shila’s feet, squeezing them in her hands, pulling out the toes.

  ‘The dinner was beautiful, Ma,’ said Tarala.

  ‘Yes,’ said Shila.

  ‘Anil Babu said it was beautiful.’ She lifted an eyelid to see Shila’s answer to this but Shila kept even her foot still in the old woman’s hands.

  ‘It was a pity Narayan Babu did not eat the jilipis – they are his favourite sweets.’

  ‘He never knows what he eats when he is talking,’ said Shila bitterly.

  Tarala squeezed and pressed in silence for a minute, a cord with keys on it sliding up and down her forearms that were black and skinny as shin-bones. Then she said, ‘It’s natural, Ma, for a young man to see his friends.’

  ‘But not only one friend; and he is only a boy.’

  ‘Narayan Babu has many friends,’ said Tarala, pressing steadily. ‘Even the One-Eyed Sahib, Pool Sahib, is his friend. Naturally. He is a very clever man, though some of his ways I don’t understand,’ said Tarala. She, like Shila, had come from an orthodox home, but Shila had been to school and she was young; Tarala clung with obstinate ferocity to all the old customs and beliefs that Narayan condemned as superstition, and she continually combated his ungodliness with private rituals of her own. He would find a pole with a flag tied to it, outside the kitchen door, a marigold and a sprinkling of rice below it, or he would come back to see the courtyard washed over with the cow-dung he had forbidden her to use and, on the ground in front of the door, a fresh line of patterns that she had made with rice flour and the Ganges water; the mixture dried to a creamy white, and the patterns were pleasing, but it infuriated Narayan, and Tarala would silently rub it all out and do it again as soon as he had gone. ‘He is a clever young man,’ sighed Tarala. ‘With a man as clever as that you must expect foolishness, Ma.’ She stood, getting straight up from her heels in one movement in spite of her age. ‘Well, let God take care of the father,’ she said. ‘We must take care of the child. Come, let me put you to bed.’

  There was the sound of chairs pushed back and Narayan came through the door; his brows came together in quick annoyance when he saw them. ‘Shila, I told you to go to bed.’ Tarala could not get used to his calling his wife directly by her name. Shila, herself, could hardly force her tongue to use his, but she tried it now, hoping to please him.

  ‘It isn’t late. I waited for you – Indro.’

  She looked at him pleadingly. She had on a sari of fine blue gauze that almost hid, in its draperies, the present vase shape of her body; the light lay deeply in its folds, turning them deeper blue, her arms and neck were bare in a cut-away bodice edged with silver; the tinsel threads in the silver shone, her skin shone and her hair shone too, glossy blue-black in its coil, and on her forehead, between eyebrows shaped like crescent moons, she had painted a tiny scarlet mark, her tika mark that Narayan did not like her to wear.

  Narayan did not look at her. He said hastily, ‘Go to bed. I am walking home with Anil.’

  ‘But it’s late.’

  ‘It’s late. It isn’t late.’ He mocked her. ‘You are asleep. You don’t know what you say.’

  ‘I’m not asleep.’ Her voice burned with feeling, and then she dropped into a pleading whisper. ‘Don’t go. Stay with me. Just one night.’

  ‘Am I never to be free?’ Now he was angry. ‘Can I not have one friend or one thought to myself? Leave me alone.’

  It was she who was left alone. Neither of them counted Tarala. Shila followed him to the garden door and heard him and Anil go out by the gate in the wall; she heard the pedals of his bicycle ticking as he wheeled it beside Anil; they stopped outside in the road to light the lamp and she heard the match on the box, and then she heard them going away laughing, quite intimate laughter. The child inside her gave a convulsive leap. Did she move or did the child?

  The little garden was full of dim moonlight, it brimmed over the walls and above the trees; everything was clear in it, every blade and leaf and stem, dark on pale and pale on dark. She walked out in it, though the grass was wet and chill on her bar
e feet and Tarala would scold. The river was shining like an unearthly lake, its edges disappearing into mist, and it seemed to Shila to be running extra quietly. She listened to the footsteps going away along the road.

  In the distance Anil began to sing; his voice came back to her on the wind.

  ‘I hate him,’ whispered Shila.

  Anil was a student at the College. Its grounds were lit, too, by the moon as Anil and Narayan walked past the sleeping watchman and in at the gate. It was a Romeo and Juliet moon, and along the path, as separated as those lovers, moonflowers and sunflowers grew together, and though it was late in the year, there were still some flowers on the trees. The lawns unrolled to the verges of the tank, where the steps led down to the water; the water was still and pale and held a long reflection of the moon, and between the darkness of the leaves the sky showed in little brilliant spaces. Near the Hindu Students’ Hostel another tree was shaped like a weeping willow and had small scented flowers on its stems.

  The College perfectly matched the night – it might have been a palace in Verona; whitened by the moon, its whiteness had a milky lustre as if it had changed to marble, and in its arches and its pinnacles, its balconied verandahs and under its cupolas, were shadows of dim convolvulus blue.

  Narayan and Anil walked hand in hand along the path, not to the Hostel but along the lawns. Anil pulled Narayan forward; their figures moved in and out of the shadows that bordered the path, in under the trees, out into the moon again. Narayan had European clothes, but Anil’s loose white draperies moulded his thighs and flowed around him. He was still singing, not listening to the words, not even pronouncing them, singing and wandering with Narayan’s hand in his, feeling the moonlight, letting it eat into his skin.

  Narayan followed, willingly and unwillingly. Anil shared for him the overstudied graces of the night; Anil troubled him as the moon and the scent of the moonflowers troubled him, and the scent of the flowers on the weeping tree that blew into his nostrils with every stir of wind. He enjoyed them but they troubled him and he thought it would be better to be working or to be in bed. He was hot and he had a slight pain of indigestion that came from eating while he talked too much, and his feet in the wet grass were chill. He gave a sad little belch but Anil, singing louder, led him on.

  They stopped at the platform by the tank; it was empty, lit softly by the moonlight, so that its edges were indistinct and the canna flowers by it had no colours. It was forbidden to the students, but Anil stepped up on it now. ‘Teacher, teacher, do you see me?’ he sang.

  ‘Be quiet. We shall be heard. You should have been in an hour ago.’

  ‘Not I,’ said Anil. ‘I settled that long before. I go and come as I please.’

  ‘Not if you are reported to the Principal.’

  ‘I shall not be reported to the Principal.’

  ‘You have too much money,’ said Narayan, suddenly disagreeable. ‘You will get into trouble all the same, one of these days.’ He sounded as if he wanted it, and in that moment he did.

  He loved Anil, he was in love with Anil, but in some way he resented him …

  I can never see you quite properly, Anil, because you dazzle me. This is ridiculous when I am much older than you, but you dazzle me, Anil. You are something in yourself that has not touched my life before. How did we come to be friends? Really, I do not know. I remember the facts: I came to your rescue when the Police interrupted a meeting – a meeting of the Onward Movement, the Students’ League, the Social Reform; you were in all of them, it was any of them – and I interceded for you and undertook to see you to your room. I do not remember what made me do it and it does not explain how the friendship began, but as we walked to the Hostel, both of us silent, you a little sulky, we looked at one another; I talked to you, you answered me, and I think we have been talking ever since. We have not been friends for long, but everything that came before I knew you seems unsatisfactory to me now.

  I cannot forget you for a moment, when I am with you I cannot forget myself. I have crossed blood in me that makes me dark and thick and slightly squat; your stride is longer than mine, and your body is built so that you go forward strongly and gracefully; my hair grows close to my head like a Negro’s, but yours grows loose and most poetically. When you take my hand I see our wrists together and mine is heavy and dark-looking beside yours. Most of all I am conscious of your family. You are a Bengali Brahmin, the child of tradition that you trace back for twenty-seven generations; the son of a landowner, you will inherit land and wealth. You came to College because you inherit, too, your father’s idealistic notions; you came to feed an ideal, not because one day you must feed your mouth or starve. Now you are bored, probably you have forgotten what that particular ideal was; you forget so quickly. You would not stay here except that your father says you must get your B. Ag. degree. The class of student is not high, that is natural in an Agricultural College; young men prefer the Universities, they don’t like to dirty themselves with peasants’ work. You are bored, and that is why you talk to me.

  I stand in a street in the back streets of Calcutta. The street was like any other street in a big commercial city, it had houses far too tall and far too close together, it had noise and smells and its gutters were full of litter and garbage and stray dogs and cats and it was interesting because it was so diverse. A rich street is much the same all down its length, it betrays nothing, but a poor street betrays everything; you cannot be private in hot, small, bug-and-cockroach-infested rooms, so everyone is everyone else’s business and there is a kinship that is almost friendliness. I missed it when I was picked out of the garbage and taken to school – and that was done by the detestable British, my dear Anil; the Imperialistic British, who bothered to take up a gutter-boy and give him life.

  Am I grateful? I need not be so very; the British have a passion for alteration. I was educated at the Slane Memorial Scottish School for Orphan Boys; they had my mind and my body for seven years, and for seven years I learnt to keep my heart shut away in darkness and starvation. Perhaps that is why it grows such extravagant one-sided branches now I have let it out; I am shamed by it and think I shall put it away again.

  Till now I have avoided any kind of friendliness and kept to acquaintance; only this last year since I came here, married to Shila, I seem to be learning friendship – I have even a beginning of friendship with Mr Pool – and through friendship I have learnt to love you, Anil; but you make me feel the marks of that street more than ever; they are on me, I shall never lose them, they are the only caste-marks I shall ever know … And he thought again of Anil’s father …

  What would your father think if he saw us together? I know quite well. I make you describe your father to me over and over again, his stateliness, his rigid orthodoxy; and we laugh at him, but for me it is like pricking at a wound. I have no father. I see your father, as you have told me, on the terrace of your house above the fields; he sits on his bed, his feet drawn up, his shawl hanging in fresh cream folds, his hands and his feet still. He would look at me and his eyes would see at once what kind of a fellow I am and then he would turn his eyes away and not be interested to look at me again, in spite of anything you could tell him. He has retired from the city never to go there again; he hopes, when you have grown wiser and older, to leave his possessions and his family in your hands and retire completely from the world. He holds minutely to the ideal of non-contamination, even a shadow in the street would defile him. Well, it is easy for him; the fields and the land all about him are his, he is the lord of the land and the house where his family and his son’s family live, where his son’s sons’ families shall live. His is the tradition and the heritage of Brahma. It is in him and in you; even if you laugh and are lazy, you cannot deny it.

  And I? I am of the city garbage, raised on its litter; my emancipation and position make me accepted here, they allowed me to marry Shila; but if you took me to your home I should contaminate your house. Your young wife and your cousins’ wives might peep and st
are, but your old aunts, the uncles’ wives, would take one look through the curtain and say to your sisters, ‘Wherever has Dada picked up such a person?’ And they would have my shadow cleaned from the house wherever it had fallen …

  Narayan sighed and sat down on the balustrade behind Anil. Too many shadows had fallen on him; he was soiled, impure for life; and now everything he had most desired and striven for seemed to him far removed from truth …

  I have been wrong all this time. I have been going in the wrong direction; all this force and striving, this breaking away and smashing down of obstacles, has been wrong – is still wrong. I should have left it alone. I wish I had left it alone; but what else could I do? I had to make myself, and make myself strong. Now I want to go back, behind that street, behind my birth, accepting them, go back to the only mother I have, to India herself … He could not say more than that; an inarticulate longing filled him with humbleness and passion, so that he trembled, and in that moment he was happy, with a happiness that came from a sudden rightness of the balance in himself, as if he had touched truth … I am, he said, this is myself – and immediately from habit he began to think of himself and his grievances and difficulties, and his ambitious discontent swamped and put out that glimmer of light that was anyhow small as one of the wicks burning in a little saucer of butter that they sold in the temples … What was I thinking of? What do I want? And his mind cried angrily, but still silently: Really, it is impossible for me to be friends with you, Anil.

  And yet – and yet … To move about the garden as we do tonight, to talk a little madly and to laugh, to wander in the light and the darkness with the scents and the still shadows, to laugh and to talk a little nonsense, to hold your hand, Anil, and swing it lightly – why should I not do this? It is nothing if not a waste of time, I am getting nothing for it – and yet … You sit turned away, Anil, looking into the water; I see your shoulder, thin in its fine white muslin shirt; I see the line of your cheek, thin too, but softly young and dark, and I see the darkness of your hair. I see you but I don’t know what thoughts you are thinking, I only know that I could never think them and if you told them to me they would cause surprise and perhaps excitement in my mind. The things you think of and say are often quite absurd and childish, but they are pristine and curiously complete and they make my profoundest efforts clumsy and like a boy’s. I don’t know what you are thinking … And aloud he said, ‘What are you thinking, Anil?’