Monsoon Summer Read online

  Now he lay facedown on the pillow as if to smother his confusion and panic. He didn’t feel Indian anymore, that was the nub of it. During the long years of his exile, he’d got used to freedoms that his family would disapprove of. Going off to the cinema on your own when you felt like it. Having conversations with women who weren’t discreetly chaperoned. The one-night stand with the WAAF, a huge and daring adventure before the shame set in; wearing Western clothes—he had no intention of wearing a mundi again, for him it would feel like fancy dress.

  But his most pressing problem now was Kit, sleeping above him in what felt like almost indecent proximity. Up there now, sleeping, breathing, so close it felt like agony, for more than anything else, he wanted to kiss her again.

  A rattle from upstairs—her curtains being pulled. Earlier she’d worn her hair up in a messy bun, stuck a pencil through it while she was working, but now he imagined it tumbling down.

  He tried to joke himself out of it. “My God, Miss Smith, you’re beautiful,” because nothing about her had escaped his attention: the curve of her jawline, her dark eyes, her long neck bent over her work, the dark waterfall of her hair, her flashing smile when he made her laugh.

  She was brushing her hair now. She was cleaning her teeth.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” He looked up frozen and afraid. “Stop it, you stupid bastard. Go to sleep.”

  - CHAPTER 9 -

  Clearly alarmed at what had passed between us, Anto went back to working in the Bird Room in the early mornings. When we met in the dining room, I saw that he looked exhausted, and he would not meet my eye. I kept on working, talking, pretending not to care, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him: the satin feel of his cheek, the softness of his lips on mine.

  The memory kept me awake, and sometimes, when I crept out of the house at night to see if he was awake too, the light was still on in his window, and hearing my own breath, I felt myself in the position of a suicide trying to talk myself down from the edge.

  I wanted him. My body was racing ahead of my brain like a naughty child, frightening me because everything about it was wrong. He was due to return to India in a matter of months. He would marry a girl there, or so Daisy had said, chosen by his parents, and it went without saying that my mother would be horrified.

  But when in early April I got a letter from Saint Andrew’s saying my course had to be further postponed until the next academic year—more problems with the roof—I was not disappointed.

  My mother hugged me when she read the letter. “It’s just like old times,” she said, and from long habit I returned her fond look, but my feelings were far more complicated and secretive than I let on. What I wanted most was to speak properly to Anto again and not get caught.

  Was it odd to have fallen for him so quickly? Not to me, it wasn’t. Not really. I was dangerously ready for love after the war, and he was terribly handsome and impressively clever and he already made me laugh, and he called up a maternal feeling in me because he seemed both brave and lost. There was something else too: I wanted to be properly loved, in the high old way, by a man, a young man who would exorcise a nasty memory, because there was a time, before I was eighteen years old, when I was so wet behind the ears that I honestly thought you could get pregnant if you kissed a man.

  One of my mother’s employers, Mr. Frank Jolly, a Yorkshire optician, a widower, had put an end to that by gently sliding a hand down my school uniform in the car one day. I know it’s usual for young girls to say they are appalled by such advances. I wasn’t.

  What I felt, at least initially with Frank Jolly, was experimental. He was not bad-looking, and fairly young. He started to pick me up from school, and at first his advances were mild enough to be called caresses. But then, one afternoon when my mother was at the pictures, I was shocked when a thing like a landed fish leapt out of his trousers.

  We were in the sitting room, the curtains drawn, when he touched me, his face all jumbled and mottled, like a jigsaw gone wrong. He said I’d led him on to this and, as he laid me down on a towel on the sofa, said I must now go through with it else my mother would lose her job and there would be a scandal. And I believed him and went through with it and afterwards shouted and cried in the bath trying to wash him away.

  When I tried to tell my mother later, she blamed me, or maybe she didn’t but it felt like it. She said that it was not a bad thing to marry an older man who would do things for you, and that Mr. Jolly was an attractive man anyway, so what about settling down with him? I said, “What about my exams, my matric? My life?”

  “Oh, don’t be so serious,” she said. I didn’t speak to her for three days after that, I felt so empty and pointless: a paper cup tumbling down a stream towards a future entirely out of my hands.

  * * *

  Anto had been waiting for ten days to hear whether his fifty-thousand-word PhD thesis had been passed when a letter with an Exeter College monogram on the envelope arrived. Daisy, who’d once played hockey for the county, snatched the envelope from the postman, raced across the yard with it, and pinged it on his desk.

  He went so pale, she said, “Do you want me to open it?”

  “No,” he said. He stared at it, his lips moving silently.

  “Prepare for the worst and expect the best,” Daisy said.

  He took the letter, touched the sandstone elephant, gave me a strange look, then closed his eyes. A few seconds later he said, “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Over his head, which was in his hands, Daisy and I exchanged a look. This was heartbreaking, horrible—all those hours and hours of burning the midnight oil.

  “Anto, I’m so sorry,” I said. “You worked so hard.”

  I wanted to stroke his hair, to find words of comfort that wouldn’t sound too maddening.

  He looked up at me out of his right eye, grinned, and said: “Doctor Doctor Anto Thekkeden, please, from now on. They liked my thesis.”

  “You absolute fiend!” Daisy whacked his head with a roll of cardboard, and without thinking I hugged him, and if Daisy noticed the quick kiss Anto gave me, nothing was said.

  “Now, Anto,” Daisy said, when we had quieted down, “we must definitely have a party; if we dig around the cellar, there might even be some champagne. We could invite some people from the village over too, to make it more fun.”

  Anto was sitting at his desk again, staring ahead, in shock, I imagined, at the good news. His normal Indian way was to be very polite and to hate saying no to anything, but now he looked up and said, “What I’d most like is to go to the cinema in Oxford.”

  “That sounds fun,” Daisy said. “We can have dinner afterwards at the Cardamom. I’m going to suck up to him now,” she said to me with no attempt to quiet her tone. “He’ll be a great asset to the Moonstone when we get him home.”

  “Maybe.” He sounded guarded. I knew by now that Daisy’s “Notes for Indian Midwives” worried him. We’d had a careful conversation about it the week before.

  “She knows that Indians aren’t exactly in love with the British at the moment,” I’d said.

  “Well and good then,” he’d said softly. “I know she is a kind lady and that her intentions are good, but my fear is she is stepping into a snake pit. So much has changed since she was there.”

  * * *

  The Ritz on George Street had once been a church but was now a warm, smoky, exciting dungeon with a flaking plaster angel on the roof and the cinema organist hidden behind a faded red velvet curtain.

  And later that night we followed the usherette’s torch towards the middle rows, and I sat down in the middle with Tudor on one side and Anto on the other. Flora, wearing a dress of stiff purple satin that crackled like fire, sat down on Tudor’s other side.

  The film, To Each His Own, was about a girl who falls for a handsome pilot, has his baby, and then spends the rest of her life in mourning for him. Watching it in the dark, with An
to beside me, I felt almost unbearably excited, as if this shabby little cinema was charged with life and some promise of excitement that I felt in the pit of my stomach.

  Halfway through the film, I dropped the box of Black Magic chocolates Daisy had given us. He and I sank to the floor to retrieve them, and when I looked at him and saw a flash of reflected light in his eyes, it was hard not to take his beautiful face between my hands and plead with him, for what I was not sure: I was so aroused, and so unhappy too, because earlier, when Tudor had asked him, “When are you going home?” he’d said one word: “Soon.”

  “I hope you’re not going to eat any of those.” Tudor frowned as Anto put one of the chocolates from the box into my mouth. When we sat down again, breathless and inclined to laugh, Anto held my hand, and I felt a high kind of joy that I’d never felt before.

  When the film reached its tear-jerking conclusion, Flora and I dabbed at our eyes with handkerchiefs, and I found I was sweating, from my palms, my armpits, my forehead, as if I’d been through some intense ordeal.

  Looking back, it was lucky that Wickam Farm had as many digestive groans and gurgles as an old person. The tepid radiators clicked like arthritic bones; the boiler in the basement occasionally roared as if in agony. We were lucky too that Ci Ci often drank herself to sleep, and it was my mother’s habit to always make a fortress of whatever bedroom she happened to be in by bolting the door and sometimes stacking furniture against it.

  Because he came to me that night. It was a beautiful night with the moon high and the stars bright outside my window. I still have no words to describe how inevitable it felt. He stood looking down, and when he took off his shirt, I saw what a perfect young specimen he was. Years of cricket at boarding school had hardened him, slatted moonlight fell in bars over his sloped shoulders and strong muscled legs, and I can honestly say I felt not one scintilla of shame about what happened next. As I reached out for him in the dark, what I felt was a kind of singing in my veins. I had no choice.

  I was perfectly aware of what a mistake this would be, how disastrous the timing, and so on, but my body bounded towards his, and once we’d started to touch each other, we could not stop, and I was glad I wasn’t a virgin, because I didn’t want fear or pain to spoil anything.

  I lay in the crook of his arm afterwards feeling both wicked and victorious. It felt so right and he smelled so good: sweet and cinnamony. His skin was soft. He stroked my hair. The moon fell very brightly on the Indian quilt. It was only when he reached over me to draw the curtain that I saw that he was crying.

  “Anto, what?” I felt my scalp prickle with alarm. I wanted him to feel the same high joy that I felt.

  He didn’t answer, just turned and put his head in the pillow.

  I was going to say something else when, across the corridor, I could hear the scrape of my mother’s door opening, the creak of her foot on the floorboards. The whoosh of the lavatory chain a few seconds later, and then Ci Ci’s rusty cough.

  I froze until I heard the click of the door closing and took my hand away from his mouth. We laughed silently, a scared laugh.

  “Don’t be sad, Anto,” I whispered when I could breathe normally again. “It’s been a perfect day,” meaning his triumph, the cinema, and now this.

  “I know.” He gave a jagged sigh and said after a while, “I don’t think I will ever feel this happy again.”

  “Don’t say that.” Now it was his turn to clap a hand over my mouth.

  “Be careful,” he mouthed, and pointed towards my mother’s room. Before he crept out the door, he got up on his elbow and studied me. He smoothed my hair back from my temples and kissed my forehead.

  “I should never have done this,” he said a few seconds later. “It was wrong.”

  “No,” I said. I was like a child not being allowed to eat a favorite sweet or pet a dangerous beast. “Don’t say that.”

  He sat up and turned his back to me.

  “Stop,” he said as I reached out for him. “Please.”

  “Why not?” I hardly heard him. What I felt most lying there in the half-light was fantastically, thrillingly alive. I kept my hand on his back and ignored his sigh. My mind was racing ahead. I could get a job in India. I could go alone if I wanted to.

  God, how stupid I was.

  - CHAPTER 10 -

  We didn’t stop. For the next few months we lived by day like dutiful workers and by night like pagans. He’d creep into my room after lights out, and in the dark we made love with a sweetness and abandon I’d never felt before, or we’d talk in low whispers for hours about our lives so far and our families, almost anything but our future, because everything seemed heightened and either impossibly happy or desperately sad.

  Our time was running out; he was going home. The actual date set was November 16. His mother was disappointed because he’d miss the festival of Onam. He’d showed me her letter, as if to make it real for both of us. When I asked what the festival was like, he said, “It’s something to look forward to, like bonfire night, or Christmas. We play games, have big feasts.” And again, I noticed how his voice sounded warmer and slightly buttery when he spoke of India, how the word fire became a soft purr. It frightened me.

  “I thought your family were Catholics,” I said, wanting to make them sound more normal.

  “They’re Catholics but they’re Indian too,” he said. “They are Nasranis, who got their faith from Saint Thomas the Apostle in the first century.” When I asked what most did for a living, he said now most of the men were lawyers or bankers or doctors; before that they’d had coconut plantations or traded rice or tea.

  These snippets of information, delivered in his public school voice, thrilled me, of course. My Indian with green eyes. My Spanish Grandee. My exotic lover. Oh God!

  “What does Travancore look like?” I asked one night. I liked saying its exotic name, and I was feeling fuzzy and contented after making love.

  “That I remember? Lie still, voman. I am giving you a geography lesson,” he said in the mock Indian voice he’d amused the boys at school with.

  “My country has three mighty rivers.” He drew his hand down my breast and rested in on my ribs.

  “Beside them are lush paddy fields and palm groves.” His finger traveled down slowly from under my chin to my belly and made me shiver.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “I’m not. I’m not. Lie still. No talking in class.”

  “The dark shadows here are the Southern ghats.”

  “What’s a ghat when it’s at home?”

  “Hush. I’ll tell you later. Don’t laugh, you’ll be tested on this.”

  “The Western ghats.” He circled my right breast.

  “Anto, Lord, you’re the corniest creature on earth.”

  “And here,” in a Pathé News voice, “is the source.” He ran his hands down my belly, and I was pulling his hair and stifling a laugh when the door opened and my mother burst in, so angry she’d forgotten she had her hairnet on. She stood in the doorway, breathing heavily, eyes going like searchlights across our naked bodies, the rumpled bed, the candle we’d lit in the saucer the better to admire our flickering bodies in.

  I pressed my face into the pillow, my heart thumping like a generator, and then turned to look at her.

  “May I ask,” she said after a deathly pause and in her smallest and most terrible voice, “what you’re doing in my daughter’s bed?”

  She remembered her hair net and shot me a look of pure rage as she snatched it off.

  Anto sat up and pulled the blanket around him. “Mrs. Smallwood.” His voice, subdued and low, seemed to come from a great distance. “I am so terribly sorry for this, and it is not how I planned to say it, but I love your daughter, I have prospects now and was hoping to ask, with your permission, to marry her.”

  If he could have clicked his heels under the s
heets, he would have. The air went very still around us, we were waxworks in a tableau. I closed my eyes, not sure whether to be aghast or delighted. It was such a strange way to hear your proposal but, in the ticktocking moments that followed, I found, to my surprise, I was smiling inside.

  And even stupid enough to think she might be pleased, Anto being a proper doctor now, her being half Indian. The silence lengthened.

  “You stupid bastard,” she said at last, the first time I had ever heard her swear in public. “I could have you arrested for this.”

  “Don’t you dare talk to him like that,” I said. “He’s done nothing wrong, and I love him too.”

  “Oh, love.” She snatched at her hair in frustration. “That’s a joke?”

  “Maybe for you.” I sat up ready for a fight. “What do you know about that? I don’t even know my father.” My mouth was so stiff with rage I could barely speak.

  “Well, that’s just as well,” she said. “Because if he knew about this, he’d get a gun and shoot him.”

  “Oh, so he’s risen from the dead, has he?” I said, coldly sarcastic. “Last thing I heard was he’d succumbed to a fever in Hyderabad.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said vaguely, which made me even angrier.

  “So where is he?” My voice rose. “Where is he?”

  It wasn’t even a conscious effort to knock her off track, just the way my mind worked, like a blindly flying bird, when it was most disoriented.

  Somehow, during all this, and the exchange of words that followed, Anto managed to get dressed. He stepped out of the shadows, wearing his shirt and trousers again.

  “Kit,” he said in a stern voice, “stop it. This is not a discussion for now, and your mother is right to be worried for you. We’ve all had a shock. We should all go to bed, unless”—he turned to my mother—“you would like me to go to Miss Barker and explain all this to her now.”