Teatime for the Firefly (29 page)

The main problem was the size of the pit: it had been miscalculated. It was three feet too short in length, so when the rhino fell in, it got stuck halfway. The sheer weight of its body broke the rhino’s neck and it died. It was a gruesome sight. The Forest Department led by Sircar came to assess the case. By the time they got there, crows had pecked out the rhino’s eyes. At long last, Sircar had his revenge. He immediately filed a report that Jimmy O’Connor had willfully shot and killed the rhino and stuck it in the pit to make it look like an accident. Sircar identified the rhino’s empty eye sockets as bullet holes. The next thing we heard was the Mariani police had slapped criminal charges on Jimmy, who now had to appear in state court.

My thoughts were interrupted by a dull thudding from under the floorboard. I peered over the side of my bed, listening. Was it a snake? The plywood was nailed to the floor and I prayed it would not come loose. It was unnerving. Manik murmured in his sleep and folded over, leaving me room to stretch out. Pillowing my head on crossed arms, I returned to Jimmy’s dilemma.

So even though it was unlucky Tuesday and things had gone terribly wrong, nobody imagined any sensible judge would believe Sircar’s ridiculous report. The “bullet holes” were obviously eye sockets. The rhino had died as a result of an accident. There was no malicious intent or cover-up. The case should have been dismissed with a fine. But this is not what happened, thanks to Jimmy O’Connor, who decided to go on one of his legendary benders.

Jimmy appeared in court completely drunk. He yelled at the Indian judge using unpardonable language and was held in contempt of court, dismissed and asked to reappear. Meanwhile, the rhino carcass rotted in the plantation, creating an unholy stink. It was unlawful to remove the body because the case was now under criminal investigation. Meanwhile, Jimmy O’Connor simply disappeared. It was rumored he was holed up in some Khasi village, steeped to his gills in rice toddy. Work at Dega Tea Estate came to a crashing halt. Crowds descended from all over to see the rotting rhino. The Fertility Hill miscreants wandered around the tea garden and pilfered from the factory, and things began to get completely out of hand.

There were two more hearings, and both times Jimmy O’Connor appeared drunk and in worse shape. At the last hearing he showed up with his Magnum rifle and threatened to blow up the court. Things started to snowball and before we knew it the unthinkable happened: Jimmy O’Connor, the General Manager of Dega Tea Estate and one of the most respected and senior tea planters in Assam, was slapped with a ten-year sentence in an Indian jail—an unimaginable predicament for a white man. He had boxed himself in so tightly nobody could get him out. The rhino case typified the complexities of intercultural relations of our time. It was an indication of the subtle shift of power taking place in Indian politics. Tea companies no longer had the influence to bail their planters out.

I sat up in bed. I had an idea. I would write to Dadamoshai and tell him the facts of this case. Who knew, maybe he could help.

* * *

It must have been close to 1:00 a.m. when I finished my letter to Dadamoshai. I turned off the kerosene lantern and let my eyes adjust to the moonlight before groping my way back to the guest bedroom. I stood at the door and was about to enter when I felt every hair freeze on my scalp. There was a man standing by the window on my side of the bed. I could see him clearly. He was tall and thin, with a long sorrowful face and lank hair that fell over his eyes. He just stood there without moving, turned slightly toward the bathroom door to his left. I was not sure if he had noticed me as I stood in the shadows, clutching my nightie to my chest and choking back a scream. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I remember Manik mumbling in his sleep and turning over. The man scarcely looked in his direction. He then turned and walked through the open door into the bathroom.

I ran inside the bedroom and threw myself on the bed.

“Manik! Manik!” I whispered hoarsely. I shook him violently. “Get up! GET UP! There’s a man in the room!” I was trembling uncontrollably.

I shook him again. He sat up in bed, and I immediately clamped my hand over his mouth.

“There’s a man in the room,” I whispered in his ear. “He’s in the bathroom.”

Before I could stop him, Manik grabbed the flashlight from the bed table, swung his legs off the bed and with all the stupidity in the world, marched right into the bathroom wearing nothing but his underwear.
This is it
, I thought.
I have a dead husband.

“There’s nobody here, Layla,” he called. I heard him open and close the laundry bin in the bathroom. “Are you sure?”

He came into the bedroom, swung the flashlight around, switched it off and sat on the bed rubbing his eyes. He put his arms around me and drooped with sleep on my shoulder. I could not believe his apathy.

“Manik! He must be somewhere in the room.” I was almost crying.

“Come to bed, sweetheart. I will explain everything in the morning.”

“Explain
what
? I saw this man. With my own eyes.”

“It’s only Clive Robertson,” Manik said. “He’s nothing to worry about. He won’t harm you.”

Manik lay down. In five minutes he was snoring and fast asleep.

CHAPTER 27

Assam is no place for pretty boys. Planters are a scuffed, nicked lot, who live on the edge and survive by grit and guns. Tea jobs attract a certain kind of personality. You have to be drawn to it, rather like being an explorer.

It’s a grueling existence any way you look at it. Every summer planters bemoan their lot in life and question what they are doing in Assam. It’s only the memory of Assam’s winter playground that makes it all worthwhile. Winter in Assam is like the mild and pleasant spring in the British Isles. There is plenty of game hunting and adventure fishing for the avid outdoorsman. That’s the main reason why Brits were drawn to Assam in the first place. That and the chance to run away from the stoic, ordered world to which they are doomed.

When young tea-garden assistants return to the foggy shores of their homeland on furlough, they have become real men. They tell stories of Assam—so colorful, so outrageous, so exotic and wild that it leaves their fellow men gasping. Of course life in Assam is not quite so rosy. They don’t speak about the isolation, the uncertainty, the backbreaking work, the tyrant boss. The watertight contract companies make planters sign makes defecting from the job near impossible. It’s sink or swim. Only planters who survive Assam go on to become the legendary iron men in wooden ships.

What Clive Robertson was doing in Assam as a tea planter is anyone’s guess. He was a pale, sickly young man who aspired to become the curator of an art museum. Clive Robertson had no taste for blood sport, abhorred guns and preferred instead to sketch scenery and listen to Bach. Assam was not what he had expected. He had imagined an idyllic life of simple pleasures with fine dining, cerebral conversation and some light plantation-management duties thrown in. Instead, he found himself in a brutal environment, hobnobbing with a bunch of ruffians who rattled around in their dirty jeeps and shot every creature in sight. Planters poked fun at his tidy clothes and the effeminate way he waved his hands. His manager, Mr. Peterson, picked on him constantly. He felt hounded and humiliated. Yet Clive Robertson could not be sacked. He had important connections that guaranteed him sanctity. His uncle, John Robertson, was the Director of Jardines in London.

On the third of June, 1932, Clive Robertson, the twenty-six-year-old assistant of Aynakhal Tea Estate, came home at midnight from the Planters Club. It was the cusp of the monsoons, and dark clouds covered the sky, breaking occasionally to unveil a full and brilliant moon. He drank four pegs of Chivas Regal, sitting on his veranda in the dark surrounded by the sounds of the night. He then went to his bedroom, secured the door by pushing a heavy dresser against it, loaded his 12-bore shotgun, put the muzzle in his mouth and blew a bullet through his brain.

The
chowkidar
later said he had heard a sound, but thought it was thunder. That night the worst monsoon of the decade broke, bringing torrential rain that slashed through the open window of Clive Robertson’s bedroom as he lay dead in rivulets of blood. Nobody knew why Clive Robertson had taken his own life but many understood. The loneliness and desperation that many planters faced in those early days was legendary. Maybe he had nothing to live for and nowhere to go. This was not uncommon for young men of his time who came to Assam to become tea planters. Assam had a way of digging her creepers into a man’s soul. Many would become strangers unto themselves, and be doomed to wander forever the forgotten wastelands of their minds. Maybe Clive Robertson was one of them.

Clive Robertson chose to die on the rainiest day of the year. Giving him a proper burial posed the biggest headache of all. Even in fine weather, organizing a Christian burial in Assam had its challenges. The body had to be buried the same day, usually by afternoon, because the warm, humid weather caused it to decompose quickly. Telephones were nonexistent at the time, so a boy on a bicycle was sent to the neighboring gardens with a message imprinted on his wrist with indelible ink. Quite often, planters got the news too late because of bad roads and mishaps on the way.

So tea-garden folks just took care of their dead the best way they could. The factory carpenter was ordered to build a coffin of green teak, still oozing sap, which made it atrociously heavy. The Factory Assistant supervised the digging of the grave, usually in some remote corner of the plantation, and a few planters stood around with bowed heads with their
sola topees
in their hands as the body was lowered to the ground. There were no prayers, no priests, no eulogies, and barely a tear shed for the departed.

Hundreds of scattered graves dot tea plantations in Assam. Most of the dead were abysmally young, in their twenties and thirties, killed by disease, drowning, wild animals or self-inflicted wounds. The company then followed official procedures and sent a telegram to the family notifying them of the person’s death. A few months later all the belongings would be stuffed into tea chests and shipped back home.

The week Clive Robertson died the rains did not abate for a single minute. It poured in torrents and turned Aynakhal into a rolling, lurching river. Where and how could one begin to even
think
of digging a grave? Finally, four laborers held a tarp, while another four dug and scooped out buckets of muddy water that kept rapidly filling the grave. When Clive Robertson’s teak coffin was lowered, it looked as if he was being lowered into a bathtub of muddy water. Several weeks later when the rains let up, Clive Robertson’s coffin had floated up from the ground. It was found by a woodcutter, a quarter mile out in the jungle and bumped up against a log. The coffin was open and the body was missing.

Manik had never encountered Clive Robertson. Potloo saw him all the time and said the ghost knocked on his watchman’s hut calling out
“Koi hai?”
—
who’s there?
—in a gruff terrifying voice on moonlit nights. This was Potloo’s legitimate excuse for staying stoned. Halua and Kalua had encountered him, as well, and I had most definitely seen him with my own two eyes.

“Ignore him, darling,” said Manik. He was lacing up his canvas boots, sitting on the bed of the guest room. “Just treat him like a useless servant who hangs around and won’t go away.”

Ghosts were no joking matter, as far as I was concerned. I told Manik that.

“Well, what do you want me to do? I can’t shoot him. I can’t sack him. Every tea-garden bungalow has a resident ghost, if you must know. The Dega
burrabungalow
has a violent ghost that tried to strangle the VA one time. Jimmy O’Connor got an awful garden report that year, because of that.”

It sounded as if Jimmy O’Connor could shoot rogue elephants with his powerful Magnum rifle but he was no match for a bungalow ghost.

“Ask Larry about the one at his bungalow. That ghost is a troublesome one. It steals whiskey and harasses the women. That’s the other reason why his wife, Janice, ran off. It seems the men have no problems cohabiting with ghosts, but the women fuss a lot.”

“The ghost has something to do with this room,” I said, looking around.

“Well, if you have to know, this is the room where Clive Robertson shot himself,” Manik said. He pointed his boot at the hole on the floor. “Maybe he comes up through that hole at night. You better watch out because he’ll grab your feet when you step down from the bed!”

“That’s not funny, Manik. I want to move back into our old bedroom.”

“Just wait another week, darling, and the roof work should be done. I will send the factory carpenter to do a better job patching up this hole in the meantime. Now that you have Clive Robertson in your head, you are going to start imagining all sorts of things. Can you get the sweeper to clear out the hole today? I want to make sure we are not boarding up any snakes. There will be a big stink otherwise.”

“There is something down there,” I said. “I told you I sometimes hear noises at night.”

“Well, make sure the sweeper fishes it out, whatever it is. I’ll send the carpenter first thing in the afternoon.”

* * *

That morning, the sweeper was prodding under the floorboards with a long stick when he hit upon a solid object. He pulled out a scuffed brown leather suitcase with rusty clasps. Inside was a brown leather diary, the pages filled with tiny writing, and several unopened letters addressed to a Miss Edith Blount in Sussex, England. They were all stamped Return to Sender. Wrapped in a powder-blue silk scarf were two photographs: a studio portrait of a young, dark-haired woman and another of a couple standing on a rocky beach. The woman was laughing as she clutched a flyaway scarf. Her other hand rested on Clive Robertson’s arm.

I opened the last page of the diary and read:

The sky is waiting to open.

Edith my love, I leave you now.

I was born with no purpose. I leave with no regret.

In these jungles do memories perish.

In these jungles I will remain.

The question was what to do with the suitcase. Manik thought it should be shipped off to Calcutta Head Office, but chances were, he added, it would just languish there because too many years had passed since Clive Robertson’s death and nobody had the time to dig up old records and ship it back to England. Nobody cared. I felt the suitcase contained secrets that Clive Robertson did not want to share. It bothered me to think of strangers prying into the life of this very private and sensitive man.

“I will have to report finding the suitcase to Mr. McIntyre,” Manik concluded.

“You don’t have to do that. Nobody really needs to know we found it,” I said.

Manik threw up his hands. “So what do you propose we do with it?”

“Bury it or burn it,” I suggested.

Manik contemplated that for a moment. “Well, it would certainly save Mr. McIntyre a lot of headache. To document the suitcase he will need to fill out paperwork, list its contents, get it shipped, maybe even make a police report. A big waste of time, if you ask me, all probably for nothing. There is nothing of monetary value inside that suitcase anyway.”

“Didn’t you tell me there was a grave site in the woods marked with his name? Maybe we could bury the suitcase there. Where is this grave?” I asked.

“On the way down to the Aynakhal Lake. We can take a walk down there, if you like. It’s a good three-mile trek through the forest. Let’s have a picnic. I’ve been wanting to take you to the lake. It’s a very pretty spot.”

* * *

The picnic turned out to be a family outing. It looked as though Halua, the
paniwalla
and the
mali
were going to accompany us. A lunch basket was packed; a large thermos, rolled-up mats, camping stools and an inordinate amount of paraphernalia piled up on the veranda.

The way to the lake was through the back gate in the
malibari
, past the servant quarters behind the bungalow. The
mali
led the way carrying a shovel over his shoulder and a long curved
Khoorpi
knife with which he whacked the undergrowth to clear our path. The
paniwalla
boy came next, piled to capacity, like a beast of burden, which made him even more cross-eyed. Halua had put the entire load on his skinny shoulders, including Clive Robertson’s suitcase, which nobody wanted to touch because it belonged to a ghost. Halua followed next, holding the picnic basket daintily over his arm like an old granny. Manik and I rounded up the party.

Manik whistled “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and carried his rifle slung over his shoulder. Seeing our approach, a troop of golden langur set up a deadly din. They shrieked and followed us, crashing from branch to branch. We walked past a large pile of elephant dung, fibrous and disintegrating. A week old, Manik said.

“Look at that butterfly, Manik!” It was the most enormous butterfly I had ever seen. It circled the treetop, flying on powerful wings.

Manik shielded his eyes, looking up. “That’s not a butterfly,” he said. “That’s a cardinal bat. It’s a magnificent creature and very rare. You don’t usually see them this time of the day.”

We found Clive Robertson’s grave overgrown with creepers. I sat on a log as the
mali
dug a hole beside the grave marker and we lowered the suitcase into the ground. I thought sadly of the mysterious young man who had died such a lonely death so far away from home. I said a quick prayer for him and we continued on our way.

The forest cleared and suddenly the lake was before us, full of lilies and shimmering with dragonflies on radiant wings. But a cold hand clamped over my heart. It was surreal. I looked at the lilies and the tall waving reeds and there was no mistaking it: this was the lily pond of my dreams. Visions of Manik, the fireflies and the floating face of my dead mother came into my mind. I gave an involuntary shudder.

“I know, it’s very creepy,” Manik said. He thought I was reacting to an engorged leech on his calf. He plucked it off. “Here, watch this,” he said, as he tossed the leech into the water. There was a silver flash as a giant fish jumped up to gobble it up.

“Ooh, it’s hot,” said Manik, peeling off his shirt.

The servants had already set up camp. A tarp was strung across the low tree branches, mats laid down, two pillows, two towels, a thermos of chilled water. Yet the three men were nowhere to be seen.

“Where did they go?” I asked, looking around.

“Oh, they’re somewhere around, having their own picnic, I suppose. They keep out of sight but they are within earshot.” Manik was pulling off his pants.

“What are you doing?”

“Going for a swim, of course.” Manik was down to his underwear. “Aren’t you coming?”

“No, Manik!” I waved my hands in panic at the reeds. “Not here.” The visions of him being dragged down by the lily stems flashed through my mind. “No, Manik, please no.” I clutched at his arm.

Manik looked at me curiously. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I had a bad dream, about this lake—”

“Layla, please don’t be ridiculous. I swim here all the time.”

“Isn’t it...dangerous?”