‘Well, good luck!’ said Dominic, and went on to join his companions.
On the way down the forest serpentines on the eastern side of the range they made a brief halt below the forestry bungalow, so that Larry could get his slides of the Siva stele among the trees. The light was clear and brilliant, the conditions perfect; and now that they were clear of the lingering shadow of the tragedy at Thekady they were all recovering their spirits and beginning to look forward again instead of back. Only Patti was rather quiet; still slightly dopey after her sedatives, she admitted, and perhaps also anxious to make it clear, since she had more or less extorted this invitation, that she intended to be as unobtrusive and as little trouble as possible.
The fruit-stall was there in its usual place below, lavish as a harvest festival. Only the sadhu was missing; there was no one sitting beside the lingam in the shade of the trees, and not even a flattened patch in the grass to show he had ever been there.
Five
« ^ »
They halted for lunch on a strip of sand beside a stream, just off the road, where they had a patch of shade from a clump of young coconut palms, and a wonderful view of the distant, convoluted blue heights of the Western Ghats, out of which they had come, and which, under a variety of local names and shapes, accompany the southbound road almost to the Cape. And in the afternoon they passed through Sattur, and remembered Mahendralal Bakhle, whose disputed lands lay somewhere in the neighbourhood. From Koilpatti they soon turned right, at Dominic’s somewhat hesitant direction, into a minor road, white as flour, climbing gently between paddy fields greener than emeralds, and tall palmyra palms, with the half-veiled blue complexities of the hills endlessly changing shape before them. And by the first downward swoop of evening they reached Malaikuppam.
It lay on a gentle slope, facing south-east, and the rice here had become a different strain, a hill-rice, the upland crop almost golden in colour, and in one field being cut. Groves of trees framed the village as they approached it. There was a pond on one side, and two boys were splashing along its edges, minding the water- buffaloes that wallowed in its coolness with their blue-black hides gleaming and their patient, placid faces as near expressing happiness as they would ever be. In one place they saw tobacco growing, its huge leaves shading from pale green to yellow, its stems five feet tall. It did not look rich country, but neither did it appear depressed or poverty-stricken; and yet life in rural India is commonly lived on a knife-edge of debt and destitution, and they all knew it.
There were women just gathered at their evening chore of drawing water from a big, stone-rimmed well on the dusty village square. One of the girls stood aloft on the four-foot-high rim, outlined against a sky turning to orange and gold, and the others handed up their brass pots to her to fill. Poised with thin brown toes gripping the stone, she dipped and raised the brimming pots, her anklets and bangles gleaming, and all her gestures were pure and graceful and economical, a lesson in movement. Larry halted the Land-Rover, and all the dark female faces turned to stare at them in candid curiosity, and laugh aloud in frank appreciation of their oddness and incongruity. It was a disconcerting experience which all the foreigners among them had suffered several times before. But when Lakshman leaned out and asked for guidance in fluent Tamil, the nearest woman approached willingly and cheerfully, and pointed them the way. Higher than the village. A little way uphill, and they would see the gates.
They saw the wall first, lofty and white, capped with crude red tiles, and it went on almost as far as they could see. Then they came to the gates, wrought iron gates that stood wide on a short, dusty drive and a broad central court, round which the various buildings of the household were grouped somewhat haphazardly, many of them having been added at different times. Everything was low, one-storeyed and white, and shaded with overhanging eaves; and the first buildings they passed were clearly the dwellings of farm-servants and household retainers, of whom there seemed to be a great many. Then there were buildings that appeared to be barns and store-rooms, all space around the broad open area of trodden earth that gave place, a little higher, to a paved court. The end of the vista was filled in by a wide terrace, with steps leading up to it, and crowned by a long, low, single-storey house, white-walled and red-tiled, a little like a ranch-house but for the strong batter of the walls and the shaping of the roofs. Over the tiles the ornamental bushes and fruit trees of a garden peered, and beyond was a grove of forest trees looking over the boundary wall.
‘Riches without ostentation,’ Patti said critically. ‘I sort of knew it would be like this. At least it doesn’t look English. Have you ever been in the Nilgiris, and seen all those dreadfully unsuitable houses that look like something left over from Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and are all called “Waverley” or “Rosemount” or “The Cedars”? You wonder whether you’ve slipped through a crack in space and time, and ended up somewhere quite different. At least this
‘I was once invited to a Women’s Institute meeting,’ Priya said unexpectedly, ‘in Bangalore.’ Everyone turned, even at this vital and anxious moment of arrival, to gape at her in astonishment, the statement came so startlingly, not in itself, but from her. ‘I didn’t go,’ she said demurely, ‘I had an extra duty. I was nursing there then. But I would have gone, if I’d been free.’
‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ Patti said, gratified. ‘You know when the real imperial rot set in? When the British memsahibs arrived! The men were quite willing to learn the ropes and go quietly and discreetly native, and no one would have been any the worse for it. But once the wives were let in, and the families, and the damned establishment, it was all over. Everything had to conform to the home life of our dear queen, and everybody stopped learning anything about the home life of the native Indian, and profiting by it. It didn’t matter any more, it was just something to be brought into line. Which of course it never was. Thank God! You can’t just run around the world trying to teach other people respectability, when what that really means is respect for an Anglican doll in a crinoline!’ She caught Dominic’s eye, dwelling upon her consideringly as Larry brought the Land-Rover to a halt close to the terrace steps. ‘Yes, you’re right, I’m talking too much because I’m nervous. I invited myself here. I know it.’
‘You talked a blue streak of truth there,’ Dominic said honestly. ‘I wouldn’t worry about your rights and titles. This sort of caravansarai absorbs visitors wholesale. Come on, let’s go and find the host.’
They clambered out, shaking the dust out of their clothes self-consciously. Lakshman withdrew into the background here; this was no duty of his. It was Dominic who led the way up the staircase to the terrace, and crossed to the open door under the wide eaves.
And suddenly, none of them ever quite knew how, there was a young man standing under the lintel, waiting formally to welcome them. They had heard nothing; he moved gently and fastidiously, after the manner of his race and the code of his aristocratic line. But he had heard the Land-Rover arrive, and needed no other summons, being the punctilious host he was. Probably he had been listening for their engine for an hour and more, whatever he had been doing in the meantime. He stood quite still in the doorway of his house to welcome his guests, the least pretentious figure in the world, and the gravest, a slim, neatly-moulded young man in thin grey flannels and an open-necked white shirt, with short-cropped black hair that waved slightly on his temples, and a spark of something remote and touching, hope of companionship, recollection of gaiety, faith in the possibility of friendship, something intimately connected with England and the English, in his large, proud, aloof and lonely dark eyes.
