Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction) Read online

  The building of the Nansera airfield predated the building of the Shiraz by several years and for a while Smiths had prospered. Half-an-hour by air from Ranpur to Nansera and then an hour’s chug in the airport ’bus from the Nansera valley up into the Pankot Hills had made the old hill station an attractive proposition for people who found an all night train journey and a six hour one back a high price to pay for a weekend in more invigorating air. The ’bus had used Smith’s as its pick-up and put-down point and the airline had set its office up in Smith’s compound–a useful concession which had now been transferred to the Shiraz; and unfairly, Mr Bhoolabhoy felt, the fact that the Shiraz now existed, all five storeys of it, attracted more people up than ever before: people in government, in commerce, the idle rich, the busy executives, and now even film stars and directors from the Ranpur Excelsior Talkie Company who had recently shot part of a movie in Pankot and booked the entire top floor of this modern monstrosity.

  The presence of movie stars had caused excitement among simple people who hung round hoping for a sight of them and followed their vans and trucks to the location where they were shooting exteriors even though this was way over on the other side of East Hill. Often they had had their trek for nothing because the heroine was a girl given to temperaments and sometimes locked herself into her suite at the Shiraz for the whole day and admitted only her personal entourage, her publicity manager and the gossip columnists.

  By the time she got over her temperament the hero was likely to be having one too. There was no shooting for days at a time. The owner of the film company then came up from Ranpur and threatened everyone with proceedings for breach of contract, upon which the director, a young man who was into realism, also had a temperament and declared the location useless. Everyone packed up and went home.

  . . .

  Tusker and Mr Bhoolabhoy had laughed about this only last Monday night, and he was smiling now, recalling it, when Minnie appeared at the office window, holding her hand out. She had come for the Letter. He indicated the paper still in the typewriter and held up four fingers to indicate four more minutes. It was now 8.30.

  Five minutes later, unable to delay longer, he took the letter into Mrs Bhoolabhoy. Five minutes later still he was back in his office, inserting new sheets of paper to rewrite the letter to Lila’s taste. It now began, “Dear Colonel Smalley,” instead of “my Dear Colonel Smalley.” It was to end not “Yours very Sincerely, Lila Bhoolabhoy,” but “Yours faithfully, L. Bhoolabhoy, Prop.” In between, its three friendly and apologetic paragraphs had to be cut to one curt one. Mr Bhoolabhoy had to type the new version several times before he was satisfied that she might approve it. By ten past nine the final curt version was finished.

  He took it to Mrs Bhoolabhoy. After she’d read it she held out her hand. He gave her his Parker 61, then helped to prop her up to sign.

  “I will take it across now, Lila.”

  “Minnie will take it. Call her.”

  He did so. He put the letter in its envelope. When Minnie came in Mrs Bhoolabhoy grabbed the letter and gave it to Minnie herself. “To Colonel Smalley. Immediate.”

  Minnie said nothing but took the letter. Mr Bhoolabhoy made to follow her out but was commanded to stay. “You may massage the back of my neck,” Mrs Bhoolabhoy said. For five minutes he performed this vaguely erotic task. Things were just getting interesting for him when she said, “Enough. Now go back to the office to be on hand to deal with Colonel Smalley if and when he comes.”

  . . .

  As he left Lila’s room Mr Pandey was coming out of No. 7 armed with his brief-case and his breakfast, a single glass of orange juice which he always drank over at the little hut where Indian Airways had once kept an office. Mr Bhoolabhoy followed him as far as the verandah, watched him cross the compound and settle himself, and kept alert for the sound of the transistor. He heard a crackle or two, but nothing more disturbing so remained where he was, his hand on the back of the chair Tusker usually sat in on Monday evenings.

  “Always,” he thought, “I have the mucky end of the stick. But then I am only part of the fixtures and fittings.” These, undoubtedly, had all depreciated in value. The stucco on the walls of the hotel was peeling, the compound had been let go. Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s priorities had never been those of her predecessor, old Mr Pillai, Mr Bhoolabhoy’s first employer. Her business affairs remained a mystery to him. Mr Pandey knew far more about them than he did. He glared across the compound at the little babu and wondered not for the first time to what extent Mr Pandey enjoyed more than Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s confidence.

  “Management!”

  “Yes, Minnie, what is it?”

  Management, it seemed, had to go across at once to The Lodge to complain about the noise.

  “What noise?”

  “Smalley dog.”

  “I hear no dog.” He bent his head. He heard it then.

  According to her mistress, Minnie said, the dog had been locked in the garage again, either because Colonel and Mrs Smalley had disagreed once again about whose dog it was and which of them should take it for walkies or because Colonel Smalley was being spiteful as the result of the Letter.

  “You personally gave him the Letter?”

  Minnie said she had given it to their servant, Ibrahim.

  “But Colonel Smalley was in?”

  Yes. Minnie had seen him having breakfast on the front verandah of The Lodge.

  “And Mrs Smalley?”

  According to Ibrahim, the memsahib was at the hairdresser. Also according to Ibrahim there would be a row when memsahib got back because Tusker Sahib had just sacked him. He, Ibrahim, was once more no longer in the Smalleys’ employment. He had promised, though, to hand the Letter to Tusker Sahib before leaving, which meant right away because he had been told to get out at once and never come back. It was the fourth time in a year that he had been sacked by one or other of them; but this time Tusker Sahib had actually given him his month’s pay. Ibrahim was therefore packing his things so that he could station himself, bundle and all, outside the Shiraz, where Mrs Smalley would find him when she came out with her new blue hair and ask why he wasn’t at work. Colonel Memsahib (Minnie said) had gone to get new blue hair because she and Colonel Sahib were expecting a visitor any day.

  “An Englishman,” Minnie said, holding her elbows.

  Mr Bhoolabhoy stood up. “Then I must prepare a room.” The Smalleys had no spare bedroom at The Lodge. On the rare occasions they’d had a guest the guest stayed in the hotel.

  “Dog first,” Minnie said. “Room later.”

  “Damn the dog,” Mr Bhoolabhoy said but just then the distant howling took on a new and louder and despairing note. A shriek came from Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s room. Minnie hurried away. Mr Bhoolabhoy hesitated, then ran down the steps and made for The Lodge. Tusker’s wrath was more easily endured than Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s. And there was just the possibility that Ibrahim had not delivered the Letter into Tusker’s hands but left it in some perfectly rational but inconspicuous place where it would take time for Tusker to find it.

  But whether Ibrahim had handed it to Tusker personally or not before departing, sacked, it had certainly been found and opened. Mr Bhoolabhoy recognized it, without its envelope. Tusker lay in the middle of the bed of crimson canna lilies, the letter clutched in his right hand.

  Chapter Two

  TUSKER SMALLEY’S DEATH can be fixed as having occurred at approximately 9.30 a.m. rather than say twenty minutes later when the dog stopped whining and began to howl, causing Mrs Bhoolabhoy to shriek, because the dog, Bloxsaw (the Indian pronunciation of its real name, Blackshaw) was generally recognized as too stupid to be aware of the moment its master’s soul departed; and Dr Mitra, Tusker’s physician, pronounced the coronary as having been so massive as to have caused death at the moment of his fall.

  About twenty minutes before his fall, that is at about 9.10 a.m., Tusker had dragged Bloxsaw into the garage, locked him in, then told Ibrahim that he was dismissed and could c
lear out right away. He had paid him off. That was at 9.15.

  Ibrahim knew it was 9.15. Having taken his money he glanced at his watch to work out how much longer Lucy-Mem would be at the hairdresser and so how long it would be before the business of negotiating his reinstatement could begin. If it ever did. The paying off had been an ominous variation on the theme of getting the push.

  For another few minutes Ibrahim hung around, out of sight, anticipating a yelled complaint that the breakfast egg was off, but the only sound was the racket made by the dog using the garage door as a punch-bag. Presently Ibrahim went out by the back to look for the young mali (his trump card on this occasion). The mali was nowhere to be seen. Instead there had been Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s maid, Minnie, looking for him and now handing him a letter.

  “Much trouble,” she said, nodding at the envelope.

  “Good,” Ibrahim said. He told her he’d been sacked. She covered the lower part of her face, grinning with him, sharing the comedy of life. Then she went. He took the letter to Tusker Sahib at once, prepared for anything from a shied tea-cup to a friendly smile. The Sahib had always been unpredictable, more so since his illness, but it was always better to be sacked by him than by Memsahib. Once Memsahib had sacked him she had a way of not looking, not listening, not seeing him for days as though the mere fact of her having told him to go had caused him to disappear. All his longest periods of technical unemployment stemmed from notice given by Colonel Memsahib. The Sahib, although sometimes threatening violence, was a soft touch by comparison. With Memsahib the war tended to be one of attrition, not confrontation. Even when she was on his side against Tusker Sahib he dealt with her cautiously.

  “A letter, Sahib,” he announced. “Just now come.”

  “I told you to get out!” the Sahib shouted. “You’ve got your money, so go, now. Ek dam.”

  “From Management,” Ibrahim said, putting the letter on the breakfast table. “Shall not trouble household further. Only performing last duty. The world collapses around one’s head. So it is written. Salaam Aleikum.”

  He retired into the bungalow and waited, listening for the sound of the envelope being torn open out there on the verandah. He guessed what the letter was about. In the servants’ quarters both at Smith’s and the Shiraz the subject of the future of The Lodge and of Smith’s itself had been discussed for weeks; and news – from conversations overheard of plans made by the consortium of businessmen who owned the Shiraz to buy up Smith’s and “redevelop” – swapped for news of what was known or guessed about Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s latest successes in playing one of these businessmen off against the other with a view it was supposed to being invited to join the consortium herself.

  Apart from the Shiraz, the consortium owned a new hotel in Ranpur, one in Mayapore, and another down in Mirat (The Mirat Lake-Palace Hotel). They also owned a small chain of restaurants called the Go-Go-Inns which specialized in Punjabi food. All the businessmen concerned in these enterprises had come from the Western Punjab in 1947 when it became part of Pakistan at the time of Independence and Partition, and had arrived in India penniless, they said. Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s first husband was believed to have come from there, having “lost his all” in the riots between Muslims and Hindus. It was agreed by the servants both at Smith’s and the Shiraz that you could hardly find a Western Punjabi, once destitute, nowadays not making a packet. “Bloody immigrants,” Ibrahim sometimes called them.

  Ibrahim did not hear the sound of the envelope being opened. Bloxsaw was now yelping as well as punching the garage door. What he did hear was a shout, “The bitch! The bloody bitch!” and the scrape of Tusker’s wicker-chair as he rose, no doubt to go and sort Mrs Bhoolabhoy out.

  Ibrahim smiled. Since he had been dismissed it was no concern of his that the Sahib leaving by the front and himself by the back meant the bungalow would now be unattended. He went to the servants’ quarters in the rear compound and found the young mali trying to repair the leak in the old water-can.

  “Leave that,” he said. “We are dismissed. One out, all out.”

  “When shall we be reinstated?”

  The mali had been employed for only a few weeks. But he knew the score. Ibrahim had briefed him.

  “This time perhaps never. Come. Help me pack a few things then pack a few things yourself to make it look good.”

  “I also should pack?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where shall we go?”

  “To the Shiraz.”

  “We seek employment at the Shiraz?”

  “No. We shall take up positions near main entrance to accost Memsahib when she comes out.”

  Mali put the watering-can aside but remained squatting on his hunkers. His brown eyes darkened with the effort of concentrating.

  “Ibrahim,” he said. “Why when you are pushed am I also pushed?”

  “I have explained it before. There is no time to explain it again now.”

  “What of pay?”

  “What of it? Did I say I was sacking you? You are still in my employ, at least until end of the month. Speak of pay then, not before.”

  “If we are pushed, what of shelter, what of food?”

  “Given push, not pushed. If you hope to go foreign you must learn pukka English. Stop asking questions and get on with it. Allah will provide.”

  The hut where Ibrahim slept lay behind the corrugated iron garage which was a comparatively new construction. As a bungalow The Lodge had always been diminutive, the servants’ quarters correspondingly so: six or seven men, women and boys had once had accommodation here, just sufficient for a modest bachelor establishment in the days of the raj. Then, there had been several huts and a cookhouse. Only the hut in which Ibrahim slept remained in good repair. The others had fallen into ruin and of the cookhouse there was nothing left except a few blackened bricks. No one had used it to cook for the occupants of The Lodge since the time Smith’s annexed it. A modern kitchen of sorts had subsequently been installed inside The Lodge but this was seldom put to major use because – breakfasts and buffet parties apart – the Smalleys usually ate in the main hotel dining-room or had Ibrahim bring trays over.

  Tusker Sahib occasionally had crazes for going to the market and bringing back fresh food which he made a hash of, burning the potatoes, over-spicing the stew. Ibrahim was prepared to make tea, toast, cook eggs, squeeze fruit juice, pour from the packets of cornflakes, oversee the stocking of the refrigerator with butter and milk, and in winter have a go at making the morning porridge which kept his master’s and mistress’s old bones warm. If either was ill he could and did turn his hand to anything in the line of nursing and commissariat. Years younger than both he felt for them what an indulgent, often exasperated but affectionate parent might feel for demanding and unreasonable children whom it was more sensible to appease than cross.

  He had spoiled them both three months before when Tusker Sahib had been taken seriously ill for the first time in his seventy-odd years, and Dr Mitra had ordered him to bed, either in the hospital or at home, preferably the hospital. “Bugger hospital,” Tusker had shouted. “Come to that, bugger bed. Ibrahim’ll look after me, so will Lucy if she can get her arse off the chair.”

  One of the pleasures of working for Tusker Sahib was the further insight it gave him into the fascinating flexibility and poetry of the English language. Since his youth in Mirat, since his boyhood even, it had never failed to stun him with its elegance. Only those few months in Finsbury Park, London N, had caused him any disquiet. The language had sounded different, there. But the place was stiff with Greeks.

  For days after Tusker’s confinement to bed he had gone round muttering, “Bugger bed, and get your arse off the chair.” For days, too, he and Lucy-Mem separately or together shopped for the ingredients of the good nourishing-broth which would keep Tusker’s strength up without overheating his blood. Separately or together they had slaved over the rarely used electric oven at The Lodge that was either not hot enough or too hot, somehow not in e
ither their separate or combined competence, a regular djinn of a stove, one moment exhaling smoke and flames and at the next as cold as Akbar’s tomb; while in the bedroom or on the verandah Tusker Sahib lay either incomprehensibly docile – like a man (Ibrahim thought) who knew he’d left it too late to go to Mecca or, at other times, pronouncing anathema, against the broth, his wife, Ibrahim, Dr Mitra, and the Shiraz whose tall shadow darkened The Lodge’s garden in the mornings until the sun got high enough for the five-storeys to emit heat rather than cast shadow, and cut The Lodge off from the cool breeze that sometimes came at midday in the warm weather. Chiefly, though, Tusker pronounced anathema against Mrs Bhoolabhoy whose chief mali was supposed to tend The Lodge’s garden as well as the kitchen-garden and the ragged flower pots in the hotel’s own compound. Ibrahim belonged to Tusker and Lucy; but the mali and the sweeper had always been Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s responsibility, their services paid for in the rent.

  Throughout Tusker’s illness the old mali hadn’t worked at The Lodge. The grass began to need cutting. The canna lilies began to wilt. The jungle was advancing.

  “What does Mrs Bhoolabhoy think I am?” Tusker cried one day. “A sleeping beauty? What’s she going to do? Wake me in a hundred years’ time after hacking her way through her own bloody thickets? Who does she think she is? Prince bloody Charming? Just wait till Billy-Boy gets back. I’ll have both their guts for garters.”

  “What is Sahib saying?” Ibrahim asked Colonel Memsahib.

  “Nothing. It is only his delirium,” Lucy replied. “But we must do something about the mali. The state of the garden is beginning to retard Colonel Sahib’s recovery.”