‘I don’t think I’m cut out for a chairman, somehow. I’ll probably end up as general dog’s-body and mechanic, like Dominic. Do you think I can keep up a household like mine on that? At least until we convert them all into agricultural workers?’
They drove back to the house in the early evening in high content, and the light grew rose-coloured in the sky to westward. Patti and Priya and Lakshman were home before them from Kuttalam, and the servants were keeping watch on the dinner with one eye and the courtyard with the other, waiting for the last of the company to return before serving the meal.
During dinner Purushottam made a valiant effort to keep the conversation general, and defer to everything the girls had to say; but once the big table was cleared it was not long before the large-scale maps came out to cover it again, and the men gathered round with heads bent seriously together, tracing the fall of the land and the course of the meagre rivers, and marking out the possible immediate scope of the new farm.
‘You cannot farm this land by smallholding, and that is what people here are still trying to do. The result is debt everywhere at the first monsoon failure, or the first blight, because there are never any reserves. It can only be made effective on a large scale.’
‘And with a diversified economy.’
‘Exactly. And we are not dealing with a silt-fertilised soil like the deltas, where even on a big scale hand-labour pays off better than mechanical methods. We have less to lose and more to gain.’
They called in Lakshman to view the land they had surveyed during the day, and left the two girls to the newspapers and the radio. Patti watched the hands of the clock slip slowly past the hour of nine, and asked Purushottam resignedly: ‘Have you got a typewriter, by any chance? If you wouldn’t mind, I should like to write a letter home. What with all the trouble at Thekady, I haven’t written for a while, and they do rather tend to expect them every few days.’
He jumped up remorsefully from the table. ‘I’m so sorry, we’re neglecting you terribly. Yes, there’s a typewriter in the office, but it’s a huge old table machine. I could have them bring it up here for you…’
‘No, really, there’s no need, if I can borrow the office for an hour or so. I won’t disturb anything there. It’s just that there really hasn’t been a chance until now, and my mother is the worrying kind.’
‘Of course, if you’ll be comfortable enough there. It might be quieter for you, that’s true, it’s right across at the edge of the yard. I’ll come down with you.’
She protested that she would find it, but he came, all the same. Above the beaten earth of the lower yard the sky arched immense and full of stars, the darkest of blues, and yet so clear that it seemed to have a luminous quality of its own. The low white buildings gathered out of the air whatever light remained, and shone faintly lambent, hollow-eyed with deep windows and doorways, with here and there the murmur of voices and the spark of a lamp. The office, as he had said, was the most remote of all the buildings, even its windows turned away from the yard which all through the day was the centre of activity in the household. It was thick-walled and not very large, one wall stacked high with cupboards and filing cabinets, a big desk set near the window. Both it and the typewriter on it were littered with papers and folders.
‘You were in the middle of something. I’m sorry!’
‘No, I’m nearly straight now. When Mr Das Gupta gets here tomorrow morning I shall be ready for him.’ He swept up the scattered papers and moved them out of her way, and whipped the current sheet out of the machine in such a hurry that he tore it. She exclaimed in regret, and he laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I left it so hurriedly this morning that I should have had to do it again in any case, I’ve completely lost the thread. It isn’t more than a quarter of an hour’s work, I’ll do it early in the morning.’
‘A lot of money certainly makes a lot of work,’ she said, so gravely that there was no offence in it. ‘Don’t you ever want to drop the whole thing and just walk out?’
‘I never walked out on anything yet. You can’t abdicate your responsibilities, whatever they are.’
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘you can’t do that. Krishna was right.’
Purashottam shook up the cushion to make the typing chair a little higher for her, and looked round to make sure the light was adequate on the carriage. ‘My father hated figures so much – on paper, that is, he was clever enough with them in his head – that he made this office right away in the corner by the kitchen garden to be free from distractions while he struggled with them. I’ve had cause to be glad about that myself now. You’re sure you have everything you need? There are stamps here, do take whatever you want.’
He left her to it; and only a few paces from the door she heard him break into a light, fleet run, so eager was he to get back to the plans for his super-farm. She sat down at the desk, and fed a clean sheet of paper into the machine, and began to type her letter home.
By the time Priya and Dominic came to look for her, more than an hour later, she had finished not one letter, but two, and was just folding the second into its envelope.
‘One to my grandmother in Scotland, too. They’re both edited rather radically – I could hardly tell them we were so close to what happened in Thekady, could I, they’d be having fits! There,’ she said, thumping down the flap of the envelope, ‘that’s duty done for the next two or three days.’ And she reached into her big shoulder-bag, which was slung over the arm of the chair, for her own store of stamps. She was glad it was not Purushottam who had come to fetch her back to the house; he might have been hurt at seeing her use her own stamps when he had offered her his, and she would have been sorry to hurt him.
Six
« ^ »
They were up for breakfast at six, but Purushottam had been up for an hour and more by that time, first superintending the preparation of a supply of food for them to take with them, then re-typing the memorandum he had spoiled the previous day. He was a rapid but erratic typist, and by the time he was called to breakfast he had finished the job, and turned to arranging everything relevant in order, and tidying away everything irrelevant from sight. A quarter of an hour’s strenuous work after the Land-Rover had departed, and everything would be ready.
A dark-brown maidservant, too shy to speak, brought morning tea to Patti and Priya in their room. She drew the curtains, and there on the table beside Patti’s large bag were the two letters, ready stamped and labelled for air mail.
