Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction) Read online

  As usual there were several idle people clustered round the base of the memorial, among them the Englishman whose long matted red hair reached to his shoulders. He had been in and out of Pankot long enough now for no one to take much notice of him. He had no shoes. His only possessions were a canvas bag, a pair of torn trousers and a blanket – all as filthy as himself.

  “Seen our English Hippie?” Tusker had asked Lucy shortly before his illness.

  “I’ve seen a hippie.”

  “That’s what I asked.”

  “He can’t be English.”

  “He is. I spoke to him.”

  “Spoke to him?”

  “Why not? Tipped him a rupee too. He gave me a lovely smile. The sort that says, Sucker! Comes from Liverpool. He’s into what he calls mudditoyshun.”

  Sometimes, out of curiosity, if the hippie was there, and came begging at the coffee shop, Ibrahim threw him a few paise. The strange young man was adept at catching them in mid-air but never seemed to resent scrabbling in the dust for those he muffed. Today he just sat with his back to the memorial, either asleep or drugged to the eyeballs.

  “Management is back,” the cook at Smith’s told him when he called in to pass the time of day, to delay his arrival back at the silent Lodge. “Ah,” Ibrahim said, and presently returned home. But it was still a day of silence. She waved him away when he ventured near her escritoire. Tusker Sahib was still busy with the library book. Bloxsaw was now too exhausted to care whether he was taken notice of or not. The creature hated the walks with the same sulky passion it whined to be taken on them. Hysterical when locked in anywhere it lost all initiative when free. He had never known a dog so intent on getting in sack-time. It had now collapsed on the verandah panting like a pack-dog that had been harnessed to a sledge and driven through a blizzard. It would probably sulk for the rest of the day, like its master and mistress.

  . . .

  Mr Bhoolabhoy did not come over to see his old friend who had been ill until after dinner when perhaps he hoped Tusker would be in bed. But Tusker wasn’t. He was in the living-room still annotating the library book. The deed-box was on his chairside table. Memsahib sat opposite, her spectacles on the end of her nose, knitting one of the awful pullovers which Sahib grumbled about having to wear. Since Memsahib took months to knit a pullover, and knitted it in full view of Tusker Sahib, Ibrahim never understood why it wasn’t until he got it for Christmas that he complained about the pattern and colours.

  Ibrahim was in the kitchen preparing the trays for bed-cocoa when he heard Mr Bhoolabhoy arrive. He held his breath, waiting for the storm which he was supposed to have averted by tipping Memsahib off that the Manager was back. But the storm never came. “Have a drink, old Billy-Boy,” he heard Tusker say. “When did you get back then? Had a gay old time in jolly Ranpur did you? Ibrahim!”

  He went in. They were all re-settling in chairs. He was told to bring glasses, beer, gin and lime juice.

  “And some biscuits, Ibrahim,” Memsahib said in her gentlest manner, as if they had been having a lovely companionable day.

  “Oh, I’m fine, now,” Tusker was saying to Mr Bhoolabhoy.

  While he busied himself preparing the tray he paused every so often, anticipating the moment when the subject of the garden could no longer be ignored.

  “Where are those drinks, then?” Tusker shouted.

  “Coming, Sahib.”

  He took the tray in, poured what he was ordered and handed the glasses round. Billy-Boy was describing the new hotel in Ranpur, and the Go-Go-Inn. Tusker was smiling, smiling. Between his chair and Mr Bhoolabhoy’s was the chairside table with the deed box still on it. Memsahib asked him whether he had been to the pictures and if so what had they been showing.

  Extraordinary. Ibrahim returned to the kitchen and then pottered about from kitchen to bedroom, turning back the sheets, ensuring there were no old towels in the bathroom that should be in the dhobi basket. He dragged the work out for as long as possible, longing for the moment when the word mali was mentioned. He would have to pretend to Memsahib that he had not known Mr Bhoolabhoy was back, if she was cross with him in the morning and accused him of being the cause of the row that would surely begin at any moment.

  He retired to the verandah. But there was no row. At ten o’clock Mr Bhoolabhoy said goodnight, they waved him off and then told Ibrahim he could lock up. They went into the bedroom. He locked up, cleared the glasses and then sat out on the rear verandah waiting for Minnie to give some sign of life.

  The rear verandah was blocked at one end by the wall of the bathroom and presently from there he heard a peculiar sound. An astonishing sound. He could hardly believe it. He must be mistaken. But within a few moments it was beyond dispute. The sound was coming through the little air-grille high up in the wall. The sound he heard was the sound of Colonel Sahib crying.

  “Oh, Tusker, Tusker,” Memsahib’s voice came drifting through. “What are you doing? What is the matter? You mustn’t be upset. But who is to speak if you do not speak and you oughtn’t to speak. What does it matter about a little bit of grass, my silly, silly, Tusker, what does it matter? What is grass? Forget grass. Billy-Boy will see that the grass is cut, I’m sure, and even if he doesn’t, who cares whether it is cut or not so long as it is not cut for both of us, and so long as we’re together?”

  “Oh, Lucy,” Tusker Sahib said, and Ibrahim got up and left.

  In the morning when she gave him the shopping list and a letter to post by airmail, she said, “I think we must mount Operation Mali. Malum?”

  “Malum, Colonel-Memsahib.”

  Chapter Four

  THE NEW mali’s name was Joseph and he was a Christian.

  “Orphan boy,” Mr Bhoolabhoy said. It was Mr Bhoolabhoy who had found him, a fact which potentially gave a touch of authenticity to the deception because when Tusker Sahib said to Mr Bhoolabhoy something like, “I see after all there’s a new mali” and Mr Bhoolabhoy agreed that there was he could add that his name was Joseph an orphan-boy from Ranpur whom he, Mr Bhoolabhoy, had found in pitiful circumstances, badly in need of some employment. The touch of authenticity was only potential because it depended on Tusker Sahib opening up a conversation about the new mali in that kind of way.

  But he didn’t. He didn’t open up a conversation at all, with anyone. One of the great disappointments of Operation Mali was that on the morning Joseph at last arrived and began to cut the grass at The Lodge, Tusker said nothing. He continued to say nothing. To him, mali seemed invisible. Which was patently ridiculous. Day after day, while Tusker sat on the verandah, Joseph slaved away at the grass in full view of the master of the house who was now busily engaged in writing in an exercise book. Even when the two were within speaking distance – Tusker on the verandah and Joseph kneeling in the bed of canna lilies just below, nothing was said.

  Memsahib said nothing either – either to mali or to Tusker about mali’s presence. When she and Ibrahim were alone she sometimes said things like, “Your mali is doing well,” or, “Your mali seems a nice quiet boy,” and then changed the subject. This was quite understandable to Ibrahim. In order to please Tusker she had had to deceive him and to cleanse her mind of this deception she was having to deceive herself by thinking day after day of Joseph as a boy with whom she had nothing to do, even though it was she who was going to foot the bill out of funds whose nature Ibrahim did not inquire into. (The housekeeping? Her appetite, never great, seemed less than ever. She now ate like a bird.)

  It was Tusker Sahib’s own kind of self-deception that puzzled and fascinated him. It was as though – after making all that fuss – he had decided to occupy a world in which neither the garden nor the mali existed.

  Otherwise the operation had so far worked out well. It had been mounted with the precision that Lucy brought to most of her activities, including knitting which however awful the final result she was prepared to spend hours over, unravelling row after row if she saw a slipped stitch or decided that the tension
was uneven.

  On the morning after Mr Bhoolabhoy’s evening visit, she disappeared for twenty minutes at an unusual hour and, returning, taking Ibrahim on one side, explained that she had executed her part of the arrangement by establishing with the manager that in the foreseeable future the Owner had no intention of replacing the mali and might even sack the blind, lame youth. He confirmed that, yes, Mrs Bhoolabhoy did seem to take the view that since last July she had been under no actual obligation to supply a mali, and that one could only await developments.

  “So the rest is now up to you. Last night, Ibrahim, Burra Sahib was very upset because Mr Bhoolabhoy did not even raise the subject of the garden. It’s a pity we did not know Mr Bhoolabhoy was back, otherwise I could have had a word with him before he came across. But it can’t be helped. I wish it could. I find these little plots and plans foreign to my nature, to my preference for the way of dealing with things. There was a time when we, when we, did not have to go in for such things, a time when as my poor father used to say—”

  “God rest father’s soul, Memsahib,” he said. He knew she was an English clergyman’s daughter.

  “— used to say, An Englishman’s word is as good as his bond because he is known throughout the world to be an honest man.”

  “Honest because British, Memsahib.”

  “Yes, Ibrahim. But that is all so long ago.”

  . . .

  Yes, Mr Bhoolabhoy had said, the sacked mali’s tools could be made available. He could even suggest a boy, able, willing if not very bright.

  A not very bright boy would be ideal, Ibrahim thought. Mr Bhoolabhoy explained about Joseph. He had found him asleep in the porch of St John’s Church one Sunday morning. The Christian community in Pankot, mostly Eurasians, but with some Indians, such as Francis Bhoolabhoy himself, had for some years now not been large enough to warrant a resident chaplain. Once a month the Reverend Stephen Ambedkar came up from St Lukes in Ranpur to conduct Sunday services and the day Mr Bhoolabhoy had found Joseph asleep in the porch had been such a Sunday.

  Mr Bhoolabhoy, a lay-preacher and churchwarden of Pankot’s old English C of E church took care to be there very early on the Reverend Stephen’s Sundays, so did Miss Susy Williams. Miss Williams, member of a Eurasian family once well-known in Pankot – its sole surviving member except for a much fairer-skinned and younger sister who had hooked a GI during the second world war and had last been heard of in Cincinnati – had not only inherited a talent for hairdressing from her mother who in the days of the raj had listed most of the memsahibs of Pankot among her clients, but also acquired a talent for music and flower-arrangement. She played the piano at St John’s (the organ had long ago seized up and there was no money for its repair) and also decorated the altar. On the Reverend Stephen’s Sundays she and Mr Bhoolabhoy arrived within half-an-hour of one another, Mr Bhoolabhoy first, because he had the keys, and Miss Williams just before 8 a.m. They both brought picnic breakfasts which they ate in the vestry.

  Finding Joseph asleep in the porch and having elicited the fact that he had come up from Ranpur in search of work, had no home, was hungry, and believed in the Lord Jesus, Mr Bhoolabhoy gave him a chapatti and a cup of tea from his thermos. Then he got on with his jobs. When Miss Williams turned up, laden with flowers, the boy had disappeared but Mr Bhoolabhoy found him later on his knees pulling grass away from one of the old hummocky overgrown graves, trying to tidy it up, to pay for his meal. Later he helped Miss Williams with the flowers, filling the vases with water and cutting the stalks. He said he had once done this for “the sisters” in Ranpur. Miss Williams was very pleased with him; but while her back was turned, doing the last vase, he disappeared again.

  Mr Bhoolabhoy had then gone down to Ranpur and it was not, he told Ibrahim, until this very morning, when he went up to St John’s to make sure that his fellow lay-preacher and assistant warden, Mr Thomas, the Eurasian manager of the New Electric Cinema, had kept things in order that he had met the boy again, that he found Joseph again, not asleep in the porch but on his knees once more, working on his sixth grave with an old pair of clippers which Mr Thomas had lent him.

  By now Mr Bhoolabhoy had learnt a little more about Joseph. The only sisters he knew of in Ranpur were those who ran the Samaritan Hospital, which was a nuthouse, and, calling there one day with a message from Mr Ambedkar who was high church enough to maintain an ecumenical relationship with Rome, he inquired of a boy called Joseph, fearing that he might be an escaped inmate. The sisters knew only that he had turned up one day and for a week or two in return for a meal and a bed made himself useful in the patch of garden and by cutting and arranging the flowers for the Reverend Mother’s desk. Then he had suddenly not been there. They learned nothing about his history which he himself seemed to have forgotten or decided was irrelevant. They had given him some new clothing as well as bed and board and a postcard of the Sacred Heart, the picture the Reverend Mother had once found him contemplating in her study.

  Simple but harmless, honest and willing, was how they had summed him up; and if Mr Bhoolabhoy ever saw him again he must be sure to tell him that the sisters remembered him and would welcome him back should he need shelter for a week or so. “A wandering child of God, with a passion for things that grow,” the Reverend Mother said as she and Mr Bhoolabhoy parted.

  Ibrahim thought Joseph sounded more ideal than ever.

  “Memsahib will want to know, what of pay?”

  Mr Bhoolabhoy shrugged. He had never offered Joseph money. Mr Thomas had given him a few paise for running errands. Miss Williams had given him a rupee or two for painting the cane furniture in her bungalow. Food, shelter, convivial occupation – these were what interested Joseph and he seemed prepared to take them where he found them. He should not cost Mrs Smalley much, Mr Bhoolabhoy declared, and he was glad enough for the boy to have an opportunity, however temporary, and would be happy to pretend to Tusker Sahib that the boy was a member of the hotel staff, if that was what Memsahib wanted.

  “What about Madam?” Ibrahim inquired, tilting his head in the direction of the Hotel and its Owner.

  “Leave Madam to me,” Mr Bhoolabhoy replied, which struck Ibrahim as very funny. If he mentioned the business to Mrs Bhoolabhoy, though, perhaps she would find that funny – the thought of Tusker Sahib thinking she’d backed down when all the time he was paying for the mali himself. The idea of Mrs Bhoolabhoy being amused by anything wasn’t easy to entertain but if anything could amuse her this might.

  “I will speak to Memsahib right away then, Manager Sahib.”

  “Don’t you want to see the boy first? He’s in the churchyard. I’ll take you up.”

  “Memsahib first, boy second. There is no need for Manager-Sahib to trouble himself further, except over tools. If Memsahib likes the sound of the boy I will go to the church and speak to him.”

  Memsahib did like the sound of the boy but didn’t want to see him either. She said she relied on Ibrahim’s and Mr Bhoolabhoy’s judgment.

  “The question is, how much will he want?”

  “Memsahib will say the amount she can afford?”

  “The least amount he would work for. What do you think that might be?”

  He named a figure.

  “But Ibrahim, that is almost as much as the first boy you mentioned would probably want. You spoke of another who wasn’t so bright but was strong and willing and would be cheaper. How much cheaper would he be than this third boy you and Mr Bhoolabhoy recommend?”

  It was unwise to confuse an old lady.

  “This is the cheaper boy. Only I did not know when I first mentioned him that Mr Bhoolabhoy also took an interest in him.”

  “The most I can afford is five rupees less a month than you suggest he might want. If he works very well we might reconsider.”

  “And food, Memsahib.”

  “Initially you must see him fed, Ibrahim, but you won’t be out of pocket. The first thing is to get him. On trial. If he gives satisfaction then you may co
nfirm to him the wage offered and when your next pay day comes round I will give you what is necessary to pay him plus whatever seems fair as a little subsistence allowance.”

  . . .

  “Come,” Ibrahim said to Joseph. “Bhoolabhoy Sahib wishes to see you. There is a prospect.” And Joseph, as though summoned by a disciple had risen from the graveside and followed Ibrahim to Smith’s. Ibrahim was pleased with the look of him because it was a malleable look. At Smith’s Mr Bhoolabhoy opened the old mali’s shed and revealed to Joseph the treasures stored there. The boy stood at the entrance as though it were holy grotto. When he entered, urged by Mr Bhoolabhoy and Ibrahim to do so, he went first to the wooden shelves where old mali had left several pots of geranium cuttings which had died for want of attention. Or had they? The boy fingered one and finding a green bud amid the sear leaves muttered something to himself. Then he ran his hands over a pair of garden shears which were rusty. Finally he knelt and examined the old lawn mower which still had ropes attached where the grass box should have been, if it had ever had a grass box.

  “Come,” Ibrahim said again, and led Joseph and Mr Bhoolabhoy to the gap in the wall beyond which stretched the untended grass. Seeing that Tusker was esconced in the old wicker-chair on the verandah, asleep or not asleep, Ibrahim said, “Manager Sahib will show Joseph what is required?” Upon which Mr Bhoolabhoy led Joseph into The Lodge’s compound while Ibrahim stayed behind.

  They did not go near the verandah but if Tusker’s eyes were open he couldn’t have missed them. Bhoolabhoy Sahib stood in the middle of the lawn gesticulating. Joseph stood as if rapt, then knelt and touched the grass. Bhoolabhoy pointed at the bed of canna lilies but neither of them went near. Then they came back and Joseph went at once to the shed, untied the ropes and slowly pulled the machine out into the sunshine. After examining it he searched among the shelves in the hut, found a can of oil, some sandpaper, an old brush, a rusty worn-down knife. He cleaned the knife first and then began to clean the blades of the mower. All these actions were performed in silence.