The Game

Chapter Four

After Port Said, the Suez Canal sucked us in. As the shadows grew long we drifted down its narrow length, exchanging impassive gazes with the goats, camels, and robed humans that inhabited its sandy banks. I sat on the upper deck with a couple of the oranges we had picked up in Port Said, reading the tattered copy of Kim I had discovered in the ship’s library, rediscovering the pleasures of a classic tale with unexpected depths. The story sparkled as I remembered it, the orphan boy free to attach himself to Afghan horse-trader and wandering holy man alike, learning the Jewel Game from the enigmatic Lurgan Sahib, meeting the Babu with his clumsy surface concealing his deep committed competence. I sighed when I finished it, and dutifully returned it to the shelves between Chesterton and Wodehouse. I perused the library’s other offerings, but its contents proved considerably less informative than the armload of books I had raided from Holmes’ shelves, and I went back to them.

I was slowly putting together a picture of India in my mind, the size and immense variety in land and people, its hugely complicated caste system, based originally on the distinction between Brahmin/priest, Kshatriya/warrior, Vaisya/artisan, and Sudra/menial. The lowest of these was called “Untouchable,” but in truth, it sounded as if no one was allowed to touch anyone else, for fear the other might be of a lower caste and hence ritually unclean. And since the original four castes had splintered into thousands—as well as having Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs, Christians, and a hundred others thrown into the mix—I thought the population must spend most of its energy sorting out where it stood on the ladder.

I read for hours, absorbing India’s long history of conquest and re-conquest, from Alexander to Victoria; the Moghul influence on the country, long and ongoing; the East India Company’s rule so violently cut short by the 1857 Mutiny; the subsequent authority of the British government, ruling directly those portions of the country not under the command of their native rulers. The Empire in 1924: a bit worn around the edges, perhaps, but still strong.

The night was desert-cool and brilliant, and Holmes and I settled beneath the crisp crescent of moon and sat until long after midnight, wrapped in our thoughts and memories. The next day the canal spat us out into the Red Sea, and the younger Goodhearts rejoined us, transformed into old Egypt hands by nineteen hours inland, clothed in a variety of peculiar garments including topees (they no longer used the outsider’s term “pith helmet”) of a shape unknown outside the souks of Cairo, constructed of some vegetable matter (pith, one presumes) that sagged as the weather warmed.

Which it did as we continued south. Cabin trunks went down to the hold in exchange for those marked “Wanted on Voyage,” and the shipboard community traded its English hats for rigid solar topees, casting off a few of its inhibitions along with the woollens. Wanton conversation broke out all over the ship, as formerly aloof ladies unbent so far as to offer comments on the weather and rigid-spined gentlemen exchanged opinions on cricket and horse-racing. The men’s dark serge suits changed to pale drill or linen (or, for the hopelessly flamboyant merchants known as box-wallahs, tussore silk) and male dinner-wear began to take on variations of the tropics, with white jackets or trousers but, oddly, never both. Women’s arms appeared even during the day- time, and some of the more daring members played short-skirted games of tennis on the top deck in the early mornings, until all the balls had vanished into the sea, after which they changed to the more controllable badminton. Decks sprouted awnings, making it more difficult to find a patch of sun, and beds were made up there at night—men on one side, of course, ladies on the other. The exercise equipment in the stifling shipboard gym went unused after mid-morning, and vigorous deck games were replaced by the more sedate shovel-board and quoits. Holmes and I spent the mornings in our rooms, palming coins, renewing our juggling skills, repeating and refining common phrases in my new tongue, until we were driven out by the mid-day heat. In the open, even in our less attractive chosen corners, magic tricks were set aside in favour of bilingual conversation and the relief of books. I was still working my way through The Mahabharata when a familiar shape plopped down beside me where I sat in the shade of a large crate.

“There you are!” Sunny exclaimed. “What on earth are you reading?”

I showed her the book, half irritated at the interruption, but also glad for it. An unrelieved diet of Holmes, Hindi, and Hindu mythology surely couldn’t be good for one.

“Good heavens, look at those names!” she said. “I can’t even pronounce half of them. What is this, anyway?”

“The great Indian Hindu epic, the battle between their great gods and demons, the founding of the people.”

“I think I’d rather read one of Mama’s Ethel Dells,” she said, handing it back to me.

“At this point, I think I might as well.”

She sat for a rare moment of stillness, studying the distant shore. “Isn’t the Suez Canal just the superest thing? Tommy says it saves weeks and weeks of sailing all around Africa, with storms and all. You English were so clever to have built it.”

It was slightly startling to be given personal credit for the project, and I felt an obligation to set her—and Tommy—straight. “Actually, the canal was here long before England was even a country. Ramses the Second was the first Egyptian to begin it, although it wasn’t completed until the days of Darius, about twenty-four hundred years ago. Not that it’s been open all that time. The silt blocks it, and a couple of times it was deliberately filled in for defence purposes, but we can hardly be given credit for thinking of the thing. Anyone who looked at a rudimentary map would be tempted to get out the shovels.”

“Well!” she exclaimed. “I never. And Tommy said . . . But aren’t you clever, to know these things? I should have gone to school, university I mean, but somehow it just never seemed to come up.”

“It’s not too late.”

“I suppose,” she said dubiously, but we both knew she never would. She spent perhaps thirty seconds mourning her lack of education, then held out one arm alongside mine, which was growing darker by the day. (For, whatever our disguises might be in the weeks ahead, I doubted that pale-skinned English lady would be one of them.)

“When Mama notices how brown you’re going, don’t be surprised if she has ten fits. Whenever she finds me sitting in the sun, she gives me a lecture about wrinkles until I put on my topee.”

“Topees make me feel as if I’m speaking inside a bucket,” I said.

She giggled. “Does your mother nag you, too, or does that stop as soon as you’re married?”

“My mother’s dead,” I told her.

Her expressive face crumpled. “Oh, I am so sorry. How stupid of me, I didn’t—”

I interrupted before she burst into tears. “Don’t worry, it’s been a very long time. So tell me, have you decided to be a Kewpie doll or a harem dancer?”

The fancy-dress ball was to be the following night, and the ship quivered with the thrill of anticipation, the ship’s tailors working round the clock, sworn to secrecy. Holmes and I planned on taking advantage of the evening’s empty cabins to begin juggling clubs. Wooden belaying pins when dropped make quite a noise.

My distraction worked. Sunny clapped her hands and leant towards me as if there might be spies lurking on the other side of the crate to ask, “Have you ever been to the cabarets in Berlin?”

I reared back to stare at the child, speechless. A Berlin night-club was not a thing I’d have thought Sunny’s mother would have allowed her daughter within a mile of.

“Er, yes.”

“Well, I haven’t seen one” (Thank goodness for small mercies, I thought.) “but Tommy told me about one girl who dances on stage with a big snake. And that made me think about the snake charmers in India, and, voila!”

“Where are you going to get a snake?” I asked. Did snakes perhaps not come under the P. & O.’s pet- exclusion clause?

“Not a real snake, silly!” Sunny’s eyes danced. “I’m having the durzi make up a snake for me—durzi’s what they call tailors in India—and I’ll wear it around my shoulders. And I have a dress that matches its skin. Won’t that be fun?”

I thought that it might be more fun than she was prepared for, considering the number of young men on board. “It sounds . . . exotic. But, Sunny? Perhaps you shouldn’t mention Berlin in relation to the costume. Those night-clubs might be considered somewhat . . . risque for a girl your age.”