The Towers of Silence Read online

  Barbie sighed, got up from the writing-table, opened the almirah and got out a suitcase. At Muzzafirabad she had succeeded a younger, brilliant, indeed heroic woman, and was conscious of her shortcomings even then. Among them was the tendency to make a ruling without first thinking out its consequences. After the Krishna episode she had taken away the blue crayons. And then the children had no way of colouring the sky.

  II

  When she arrived in Pankot at twelve minutes past 8 a.m. on October 2nd, Mrs Layton’s old servant Aziz was waiting at the station looking from one alighting European woman and another to the snapshot she had sent with her second letter as insurance against not being recognized immediately and being left until only she and some strange old man occupied the platform and there could be little doubt that each was waiting for the other. She had wished to appear efficient and thoughtful. She had also always had a horror of being stranded. She had just managed to restrain herself from sending two different snapshots by separate posts, realizing in time that these might both irritate Mrs Layton and confuse the servant.

  ‘Perhaps he would like to keep it,’ she said when Mrs Layton offered the snapshot back, complimenting her on the foresight which had eased Aziz of some of the burden of his responsibility. ‘He was so good with the bags and so helpful about the trunk.’

  The trunk, a metal one, was full of relics of her work in the mission schools. It had been her intention to leave it and the writing-table in Ranpur and to send for them later, if she were staying in Pankot. Thomas Aquinas had misunderstood and had the trunk loaded on to the van which preceded Barbie to the station. When she got there the van had gone and trunk, suitcases and cardboard boxes were already crammed into the coupé which Thomas Aquinas stood guard over. She was less worried about arriving in Pankot with the trunk than about leaving the writing-table behind now unaccompanied. There and then she wrote a note to Miss Jolley telling her what had happened and confirming that she would send for the writing-table at the first opportunity. She gave the note to Thomas, with a further five rupees to add to the fifty she had already given him as parting baksheesh.

  Mrs Layton’s servant, Aziz, had two tongas waiting in the concourse of Pankot station. Seeing the trunk he declared it too heavy for a tonga, took charge of it and left it in the ticket office for delivery by some mysterious agency he assured her he could command. He loaded one tonga with Barbie and her small hand baggage and the other with her suitcase, bedroll, cardboard boxes of odds and ends, and himself. He sat in the passenger seat gripping on to this paraphernalia and indicated that his tonga would lead the way.

  On the old two-wheeled horse tongas you rode with your back to horse and driver and watched the ground unravel beneath the footboard, back towards the place you had come from. Driving like this from the station, Barbie had an impression mainly of the rock face which brought the railway to a halt, then of a narrow metalled road with broad strips of kuttcha on either side, steep banks of rocky earth and overhanging trees. The road curved uphill, this way, that way. There was nothing much to see but after the plains the air at this altitude struck her as sweet and welcoming. In a while she felt the strain put on horse and tonga slacken, as if a crest had been reached. The tonga stopped. Twisting round to discover the reason she found the other tonga also halted and Aziz getting down.

  ‘Memsahib,’ he called, rather fiercely. ‘Pankot.’

  He spread one arm towards the panorama revealed on this side of the miniature mountain-pass. She got down to see it better and stood for quite a minute before saying aloud, ‘Praise God!’

  Down in Ranpur after the rains, in places where there were grass and trees, the green nature of these things re-asserted itself. Through so much of the year they showed dusty, parched and brown. But in the plains, after the wet, there was never any green like this. Here, all looked like rich and private pasture. Flocks of blackfaced sheep and long-haired goats, herded by sturdy skull-capped peasants, tinkled down a slope, making for the road down which the tongas would also go: a long straight road that led directly into the valley formed by three hills – on the crest of one of which Barbie was standing. The valley itself was under a thin blanket of morning mist. At its centre was a township: the bazaar, a triangular pattern of wooden buildings whose upper storeys, decorated in Indian hill-style with verandahs and ornamental roofs, were clearly visible above the vapour. Beyond the bazaar one hill rose to the left and another much more steeply to the right. She could tell it was to the right that the British had chosen to build. She could see the roofs of many bungalows and buildings, a golf-course and the spire of a church. On this side of the town she could make out the random pattern of army installations.

  The crests of the hills were forested. Apart from the receeding clunk of the sheep and goat bells there was a holy silence.

  ‘Rose Cottage kiddher hai?’ she asked Aziz.

  Again making the gesture with his fully extended right arm he answered in English, ‘There. On the other side of the big hill.’

  She looked in that direction and saw how beyond the hill more distant ranges marched towards a mountainous horizon. Was that snow or sunlight on the farthest peak? She sighed, content to have seen such a vision of beauty even if it was not to be her luck to live out her days in constant sight of it.

  Looking away from the panorama he had presented, as if it were in his gift, she found him watching her. She nodded her thanks and made her way back to the tonga with a forthright manly stride.

  It was on the long haul up the hill from the bazaar, going past the golf-course and the club, that she felt quite suddenly that she had passed Aziz’s test. ‘Memsahib, Pankot,’ he had said. Like a command. And she had looked and said, Praise God. Even if Aziz hadn’t heard, or had heard and hadn’t understood, the praise on her face must have been unmistakable.

  *

  The snapshot she told Mrs Layton Aziz might like to keep (and which she discovered later he had put in a little silver frame) probably still exists, may even be on display along with other items of iconography on the rough walls of a hut in the Pankot hills, in the distant mountain village Aziz came from. If so one wonders what his descendants make of it, if with the snapshot they have inherited knowledge of the white woman of whom it is a likeness: Baba Bachlev, who had much saman (luggage) and much batchit (talk), a holy woman from the missions who came to stay at the house with the garden full of roses.

  This snapshot (of which she had several copies because it was her favourite) showed the canal network of lines on her parchment skin. The iron-grey hair, cropped almost as short as a man’s but softened by attractive natural waves, gave an idea of sacrificial fortitude rather than of sexual ambivalence. Her costume, severely tailored, and made of hard-wearing cloth, did not disguise the rounded shape of her unclaimed breast.

  She wore dresses but favoured coats and skirts. With them she wore cream silk blouses or ones of plain white cotton. Always about her neck hung the thinnest of gold chains with a pendant cross, also gold. A present of eau-de-cologne on her birthday gave her twelve months of lasting pleasure as did Christmas gifts of fine lawn handkerchiefs on which to sprinkle it. With these annual endowments the voluptuous side of her nature was satisfied. Like everything else she owned, cologne and handkerchiefs were cherished, but the cologne, although eked out, was in daily use so that she was always pleasant to be near. She washed mightily and sang in her tub: not hymns, but old songs of the Music Hall era about love on a shoestring. Such songs had been her father’s favourites.

  ‘My father loved life,’ she told Mabel Layton during the period accepted by both of them as probationary. ‘I never heard him complain. But then there wasn’t any reason to. I mean he only had himself to blame, poor man. He gambled and drank. Champagne tastes and beer income, according to my mother. People said he could have been a clever lawyer but he never qualified. He didn’t have the education and could never have afforded to, but he worked for a firm of solicitors in High Holborn and they thought highly
of him. Well, they must have done because they had so many little things to overlook. Not, heaven forbid, that he was ever dishonest. But he was erratic and a great spendthrift.’

  She wanted to be sure that Mabel Layton knew the Batchelors had been very small lower-middle-class beer. In Rose Cottage there were photographs of Laytons, and of Mabel’s first husband and his family (it turned out she had been married and widowed twice) and all of them looked distinguished and well off, very pukka, the kind of people who belonged to the ruling class in India: the raj. Mabel, it was true, had let herself go, but in the manner that only people of her upbringing seemed capable of doing without losing prestige and an air of authority.

  Barbie’s first view of her was of an elderly shapeless woman wearing muddy grey slacks, an orange cotton blouse whose sleeves and collar had been ripped out to afford more freedom and expose more to the sun the brown, freckled and wrinkled arms, neck and shoulders. An ancient straw hat with a frayed brim shaded her face. She had seemed unwillingly distracted from the job she was doing: grubbing out weeds from one of the rose beds, a task she performed without gloves, kneeling on the grass on an old rubber hot-water bottle stuffed (as Barbie discovered later) with discarded much-darned cotton stockings. She did not look up until Barbie, obeying Aziz’s gesture of permission and invitation, approached to within a few feet of her and cast shadow on the busy work-roughened hands.

  She was in the garden every day of the year, she said. The mali usually did only the heaviest work of digging and keeping the grass cut, and even then under Mrs Layton’s supervision. In the wet season she would go gum-booted and sou’westered and macintoshed in search of a job that needed doing. The heavier downpours would drive her in to the verandahs, but these were vivid with shrubs and creepers: azaleas, bougainvillaea and wistaria – and flowers such as geranium and nasturtium. All needed constant attention.

  Seeing the garden at Rose Cottage Barbie realized she had always longed for one. She was ashamed of her ignorance of the names and natures of plants.

  Built in the old Anglo-Indian style, Rose Cottage was a large rectangular structure with cream stucco walls and colonnaded verandahs at front, back and sides. There were two main bedrooms and a third which was called the little spare. There were a dining-room and a living-room. Central to the rooms was a square entrance hall which had been panelled in the ‘twenties by its former owner. On the panelling Mabel had hung a variety of brass and copper trays. On either side of the doorway into the sitting-room stood a rosewood table with a crystal bowl of flowers – usually roses, as on the day of Barbie’s arrival. These could be cut from the bushes almost continually from February to November.

  Barbie’s bedroom was to the right of the hall and Mrs Layton’s to the left. Both had windows on to the front verandah and french doors on to the verandahs at the sides. Barbie’s room connected to the little spare through a shared bathroom. Mabel Layton had a bathroom of her own. Her bedroom connected to the dining-room which, like the living-room, had views on to the back verandah. Dining- and living-room also interconnected. In all but the cold weather these doors were left open to give extra air. Behind the dining-room lay the kitchen and storeroom. Here Aziz had a bed made up. The general servants’ quarters were reached by a path from the kitchen but were screened from the garden by a hedge.

  Mabel Layton said she hoped Barbie would not mind being looked after mainly by Aziz. She had never cared for personal maids and in recent years had done without one entirely. Aziz, she said, was as competent to look after a wardrobe as any woman. The mali’s wife came into the house to collect soiled household and personal linen and could attend to Barbie if that was what she preferred. Barbie said she was used to being looked after by male servants and had every confidence in Aziz. It seemed that Aziz cooked too. After her first meal, lunch, she no longer wondered why Mrs Layton, who appeared far better off than Barbie had expected, depended so much on him. The food was simple but exquisitely prepared and served.

  ‘So long as I have Aziz and a mali to do the rough work in the garden,’ Mabel Layton said, ‘I don’t much care to be bothered about servants. I leave Aziz to hire and fire whom he will. That way we get along perfectly. And he’s been with me since my second husband died, which makes it twenty-two years next month. I’m not sure how old he is but James took him on in Ranpur the month before he was ill and Aziz seemed quite elderly then.’

  Barbie’s holiday was originally agreed as one of three weeks’ duration. During the first few days there were quite a number of casual visitors and Barbie assumed that she was being submitted by Mabel Layton to the test of selected friends’ approval.

  She made a careful note of names and apprehended that they were in all probability names with which any woman who deserved to live at Rose Cottage should have been familiar. Mrs Paynton, Mrs Fosdick, Mrs Trehearne: these were the most formidable. Their husbands were probably all generals or colonels at least. Mabel Layton was herself what Anglo-Indian society called Army: Army by her first husband, Civil by her second and Army again by her second husband’s son, her stepson, no less a person than the commanding officer of the 1st Pankot Rifles which Barbie had heard enough about to know was a very distinguished regiment indeed, particularly in the eyes of Pankot people. She was spared a meeting with Colonel Layton and his wife and the two daughters who had just returned from school in England, because they were all down in Ranpur. She was sure that the younger Mrs Layton would also be formidable, the daughters hard and self-assured.

  In fact she was puzzled why a woman like Mabel Layton should advertise accommodation and go to the length of vetting such an unlikely candidate as a retired teacher from the missions. She decided she could cope with the situation best by just being herself. Mabel Layton had really little of the burra mem in her at all although obviously she was one. But with the other women who called in for coffee Barbie felt exposed to a curiosity that was not wholly friendly.

  She admitted to having an indifferent head for bridge but no prejudice against gambling, in spite of the fact that her father lost more on the horses than he could afford from his wages as a solicitor’s managing clerk which meant that her mother had had to earn money herself by taking in dressmaking.

  ‘We lived in Camberwell,’ Barbie explained, ‘and it was a great treat going with her to big houses in Forest Hill and Dulwich. I helped her with the pins. She had an absolute horror of putting them in her mouth because of a story she’d heard of someone swallowing one and dying in agony. So I used to hold the pin-cushion. I called it the porcupine. It was filled with sand and absolutely bristled and was really awfully heavy, but it was covered in splendid purple velvet with seed-pearl edging and I used to stand there like a little altar boy, holding it up as high and as long as I possibly could. I can tell you it was tough on the arms but worth it because I was positively enchanted, I mean by watching my mother turn a length of silk or satin into a dress fit for a queen. I only hated it when she was doing mourning because then we both had to wear black and the houses we visited always smelt of stale flowers. And of course we knew we’d have to wait ages to be paid. Weddings were the big things. We got all sorts of perks.’

  After such expositions a little silence used to fall, like a minuscule drop of water from the roof of an underground cave into a pool a long way below, where it made more noise than the scale of the actual situation seemed to merit. And the situation was worsened by Mabel Layton remaining immobile and expressionless as though what she always appeared willing to listen to when she and Barbie were alone, even if slow or reluctant to comment on it, bored her when it was told in front of her friends. It was left to the visitors to respond, which they did in those little silences and in then recalling, as though suddenly reattuned to the realities of life, other obligations and appointments that took them away wearing airs of concentration. There was, after all, a war begun in Europe. At any moment the Empire might be at stake.

  ‘Come on, Batchelor,’ Barbie said on a morning she decided
there could be no future for her in Pankot at Rose Cottage, ‘chin up’. She went to her room because Mabel had gone back into the garden. She sat at the borrowed mahogany desk to write yet another letter on the beautiful engraved paper, supplies of which had been placed in a wooden rack for her convenience. There were as well supplies of the matching purple-lined envelopes with stamps fixed at the inland rate, a mark of hospitality that amounted to graciousness but suggested a limitation of it, there having been but twelve; a generous but perhaps significant calculation of four letters a week for three weeks being enough to meet the requirements of any reasonable visitor.

  But there were now only four stamped envelopes left which meant she had used two weeks’ supply in one. She was a prodigious letter writer. She believed in keeping up. She once estimated that she wrote upwards of a dozen for every one she received, but the proportion had since changed to her further disadvantage.

  ‘I know,’ she said, murmuring aloud, the morning having become unusually still, pregnant with the possibility of her immediate eviction, ‘that my own addiction to pen and paper is a form of indulgence. It’s also of course a form of praise, I mean praise for the fascination and diversity of life which if you notice it yourself is always nice to bring to someone else’s attention. I have written eight letters which means that there are now eight people who know things they didn’t know, for instance how beautiful Pankot is and that I have hopes of living here. They know that a Miss Jolley has taken over my job. They know that I am happy and comfortable and looking forward to taking things easy. They know about the ridiculous mistake made by Thomas Aquinas and about Aziz and how helpful he was, and that the trunk is still at the station. They do not know that I am slightly worried about the trunk and the table because it is as unfair to share one’s fears as it is right to share one’s hopes. I shall share my hopes now with someone else.’