And, of course, that crimson spatter is going to spell trouble. Blood on the back seat can only mean one thing, when there’s a wife who’s still a virgin. Even more so when there’s a chauffeur with lustful tendencies he’s tamping down like a firework. Stephen finds that giveaway blood on the back seat of the car on a sunny summer’s evening, and he leaps to conclusions that are regrettably correct. Hands are raised, voices are raised, tempers are raised. Six months later, he and Radhika will leave for Malaya in a welter of tearful apologies and unspoken resentments.
‘You’ve ruined my game,’ Mary says. ‘You’ve ruined the magic.’
And so he has. Mary’s been trying to start again, to rewrite history and hope it turns out better this time. But the problem with history is that it gets its own way, somehow or other. And now, thanks to Rajan, Mary’s right back where she started with two miserable parents and a little brother who can’t speak. Or perhaps not quite where she started, because from now on she’ll know to keep a tight grip on her stories. Dead daughters and absent granddaughters and speechless schoolteachers notwithstanding, Mary’s going to fight history every step of the way.
9. Saturday, 8 a.m.
‘Your schoolteacher was born without a tongue? How on earth did she teach?’
It’s Sangeeta, latching on to the least important part of yesterday. She’s comforting to talk to, but the longer the conversation goes on, the stranger I feel. Her Canadian accent, a radio playing Madonna in the background, even the muffled sounds from the tennis courts outside her apartment. It’s all familiar, but it doesn’t fit into now. It’s like something I’ve seen in a movie. I settle back onto the old cotton sofa where I used to read comic books, and prop the telephone receiver against my shoulder.
‘She wrote on the board. Threw chalk, if we were talking. It wasn’t really a problem, she was just Mother Agnes. Anyway,’ I add, ‘she doesn’t teach now. She does charity.’
‘Oh yes, you said.’ Sangeeta opens one of the Cokes she’s always drinking. I can hear the hiss and snap of the chilled can. ‘The left-alones or something?’
‘Left-behinds. Fallen women, I guess you’d call them. A lot of them were girls who never got to go back to school when everything reopened at the end of the war. Or girls who got raped, or took up with Japanese soldiers.’
Disgraces, in other words. Sangeeta – who prides herself on being a bit of a disgrace too – clicks her tongue.
‘Those poor women.’
Sangeeta sympathizes most easily with victims, with frail and fragile women a safe distance away. But men can be left-behinds too, though it’s harder to explain. Sons who never got over the war, perhaps, or fathers who didn’t even try. They’re not a lost generation, because lost implies finding, lost implies the possibility of a happy ending. The left-behinds, on the other hand, have been completely erased. Out here, people will look you in the eye and say loudly they never had a daughter, never had a son, no father at all. A neighbour, perhaps, or a cousin – they’ll unbend so far as to admit one of them might have disappeared, but they’ll keep their howling behind closed doors. Grief strolls undercover in Pahang.
‘So anyway, tell me about this Tom guy. You knew him when you were a kid?’
She’s most interested in Tom, of course. He’s real, with his beginnings all nicely explicable. He doesn’t need a history lesson to be understood.
‘Best thing you could do,’ she’d said roundly when I told her I’d had sex with him. But I’m not so sure. In Canada it might be fine to replace Deepak straight away – Sangeeta’s own boyfriends come in such quick succession that occasionally they’ve overlapped – but not here. Things don’t move slower here, whatever Sangeeta thinks. Virtue, for example, goes quicker than you can think.
‘Do you think it’ll go anywhere with you guys?’
I don’t know, I tell her, staring at a chik-chak scampering across the wall. This conversation’s hard work for us both. So many good intentions, but none of them quite getting across.
‘Still, it’s great to hear your grandmother’s doing good,’ Sangeeta says cheerfully. ‘She’s being discharged tomorrow, right?’
‘I hope so,’ I say. ‘I left a message with the university in KL. I said I’d be there on Tuesday at least, maybe Monday.’
She laughs. ‘You’re neurotic about that job. Like that postdoc – Peter? From last year here, the one who barely left his office. I kept finding him asleep under his desk at 4 a.m. surrounded by McDonald’s wrappers.’
I do remember, though quite what Sangeeta was doing in Peter’s office at 4 a.m. herself was never explained. She’s the kind for assignations, for secret meetings with unsuitable men, and I’ve half-suspected she might have been under the desk with Peter and the cheeseburgers herself.
When we talk about her instead, the scratchiness between us dies down. This is something we have words for, at least. Sangeeta’s had a paper accepted; she’s got another one planned. She’s had an argument with her current boyfriend, something complicated about a sports game that ended with Sangeeta going off to a bar with the entire losing side. ‘He said I could at least have picked the winners!’ she complains, and laughs in lovely, clean lines. She tells me about an outside world humming with hockey matches and love matches and when she rings off,
