Sixty Lights (13 page)

HOW OFTEN
,
IN
what small or gifted or implausible moments, do we replay what our parents knew, or did? How often do we feel – in another generation – what they imagined was sequestered in their own private skin? In its prismatic quality Bombay Harbour resembled Sydney Harbour, and Lucy could not have known that she experienced arrival as her mother did: with just the same arousal of spirit, with the same quickening of the heart, like a small fish leaping.

Lucy and William stood on the deck together as they entered Bombay Harbour. It was March and the light and heat were fierce. Lucy donned her sunhat and pulled down the veil to make a circle of semi-shade; William staunchly squinted into the sun and stood at attention. Around the ship moved dhows and fishing vessels of various types, with men in dhotis leaning on rudders or attending tattered sails; and beyond them were larger boats – merchant ships, a gunship, any number of imperial craft claiming the harbour. Lucy could see sailors of many nations and a group of Englishmen in uniform. There were numerous islands, it seemed, and the water was a magnificent indigo blue, a blue she would later, indelibly, associate with the Hindu god Krishna. On Victoria Dock carts and servants were obediently lining up; the men had red turbans and tight jackets and looked stifled in the heat. There were
women in burqas and saris, and small boys carrying round metal panniers of food. At one end of the dock was a gilded tent, and there, roped off, Lucy could glimpse European women waiting together in a huddle, fanning their hot faces. Mixed-up syllables of women's words floated over the water. The air was aromatic: spiced food, cow dung, camphor, jasmine, and the sea air blowing up from Nariman Point, circulating in a briny whisk around the bay. Lucy breathed deeply: she wanted her body to fill entirely with all that her senses had given her. Through her veil the edge of India flared into existence.

At the side of the dock, Isaac Newton patiently waited. Lucy had worn, as instructed, a plum-coloured dress, so that he could easily distinguish her in the crowd, but in fact she was the only woman travelling alone and was thus clearly visible. She and William parted company with the briefest of words, and Lucy felt then the pang every mistress has felt – of returning a husband to his waiting family and standing apart, self-contained, without a touch or a kiss. She moved down the unsteady gangplank, clutching at the rope railing and fighting a powerful sensation of vertigo. Below her a gentleman, rather old-looking and moustacheless, waved shyly from a distance.

Isaac Newton was at least twenty years older than his daguerreotype suggested, but he was immediately solicitous and anxious to appear kind. Lucy raised her veil and inspected him obliquely: he looked like a man, she concluded, who was tired of life. His face was creased and his expression worn. He moved with an air of exhaustion and unconcern and looked at the world, off-centredly, through horn-rimmed glasses. To the left of her circle of vision Lucy could see William Crowley greet his family: he had a pretty plump wife and four lookalike daughters, as well as a huge entourage of attendants, servants, drivers and porters. He kissed his wife on the cheek, addressed his young children without bending down, and
began at once barking orders about his voluminous luggage. His manner was brusque and rude, and he did not, not once, glance in Lucy's direction. He had already forgotten her.

“Just one piece of luggage?” Isaac Newton enquired.

Lucy saw that he had knobbly, arthritic-looking hands. He seemed to tremble.

For both of them matters practical made their meeting easier. Lucy was excited, but tired. She felt queasy in the heat and unsure of how to respond to this gentleman beside her. William's voice rose up; he was shouting at someone. His face looked sneering, granite-hard and unfamiliar. Isaac took Lucy by the elbow and guided her to a painted yellow carriage. She was pleased to subside into its shade and its hollow seclusion.

If she remembers little of that first ride away from the dock, it is perhaps because she was preoccupied with her departed lover and because there were too many new visions to absorb. Isaac sat stiffly opposite, peering over his glasses, silent, openly curious, and Lucy looked out the window to avoid his gaze. She knew at once that this world had a denser pigmentation: colours were brighter, more strident, and more adhesive to their objects. After Australia, Lucy had considered England a pale and etiolated nation, full of slightly pinched and death-white faces; but India surely outshone Australia; its palette was that from which others derived. In the streets there were rickshaws, push-trolleys and horse-drawn tongas, as well as pedestrians, traders, beggars, holy men, shoppers, bullocks, fleet children who ran shouting alongside their carriage; and all bore colour remarkably, as if they met the tough specifications of another order of being.

It is like sexual hunger, Lucy thought, to wish always to see things like this, to see more intensely, more zealously, more unrealistically. To wish everything into a state of stunning exaggeration.

Looking enchanted her. When did she first realise? That even one empty street held an aurora of light. That the delectable visibility of things was her aim and her vocation.

ISAAC LIVED IN
an area of Bombay known as Malabar Hill. It was a wealthy European enclave, full of spacious and sprawling colonial houses. His own, perched high, had an expansive view of the Arabian Sea. Banyan and tamarind trees surrounded the house and there was a sloping shady garden of tropical flowers. The shade was pure lapis lazuli, the shadows perfumed and cavernous.

Within the house were many artifacts Isaac had collected on his travels. Statuettes, wall hangings, embroideries, religious icons, musical instruments. By the front doorway there was a particularly beautiful limestone head of Buddha; he had a topknot and a small spot at the centre of his forehead, and he was smiling, with his two eyes softly closed.

“My cabinet of curiosities,” Isaac announced when they first entered the house. He was proud of his collection. He spoke, he said, Murathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Sidi and Urdu, and knew intimately the history and provenance of every object he possessed.

“I'm not really English any more,” he added, sounding pleased with himself. It was a peculiar introduction, as though issued in warning.

Servants appeared before them and lined up for inspection: there were three women and three men and a boy who looked
about twelve. All greeted Lucy by holding their palms together, in the neat shape of a temple. She felt honoured and nodded to each in turn. Isaac named only the oldest servant – Asok – a man with a red-henna beard and a stiff tall posture.

“My retainer,” he said, “for almost thirty years.” The young boy was a punkah-wallah: his job was to pull the cord of an overhead fan, shaped like a miniature curtain.

“And what is your name?” Lucy bent to ask.

The boy smiled shyly, said nothing, and quickly averted his eyes. He had smallpox scars on his cheeks and a look of discomfort. Later, as Lucy sat awkwardly with Isaac, drinking tea, she became aware of the thick frills of the punkah fan swishing softly above her. She could see that they were manipulated by a rope that stretched outside, to the verandah. The faint creaking of a pulley and the swish-swish sound ever after signified her unease with the orders of labour and leisure.

Swish-swish; swish-swish: a susurration in the air, a fan-sound amplified. It was like the unquiet and restless whisper of the dead.

Their sleeping quarters were separate and side by side. At night Lucy could hear Isaac washing, undressing and preparing for bed, and wondered at his body naked, at his body aroused, at what, after all, might yet happen between them. Sometimes she glimpsed him in stripes through a gap in the teak planks of the wall: he was slim and boyish, his body almost feminine, and he hummed to himself as he moved about his room. She could not imagine ever making love to this man. She could not, she reflected, imagine herself as his wife.

Yet Lucy tried hard to imagine this Isaac Newton. In the house his body became articulate and his manner easier; he relaxed in familiar clutter and among his extraordinary objects. With the servants he was distant, hieratic, but was given to
tender exclamations over small works of craft, and the pertinent quotation of lines of poetry. He had regard for cracks along the side of an old pot, but was uninterested in the lives of those who orbited around him. Altogether more complex than William Crowley, he was also, in some ways, much more remote, used to his own complete and solitary-seeming dominion. One day, not long after arrival in the house, Lucy startled him while he was busy combing his hair. He turned surprised and with a look of violation, holding the comb raised like a sword above his head. In the mirror it reduplicated; he was posed as a kind of oriental warrior. Lucy learned to keep her distance, to take her time.

Standing before the life-sized head of the Buddha, Lucy asked: “Why has he such long ears?”

“The elongated lobes”, Isaac answered, pleased at her question, “are a reminder of his life as a prince, when he wore pendant earrings. Before Enlightenment, that is. Before he became the Buddha.”

“And why are his eyes closed?” Lucy continued.

“Because”, Isaac said patiently, “he doesn't need to see. He doesn't need to see what you and I see.”

This was to be their principal form of communication: Lucy's ignorant questions, Isaac's learned responses. She pondered what might be known without being seen. She pondered the way the body carries small signatures of its former selves. Small telltale markings.

Lucy's life entered a period of containment and suspension. She trailed around the house, feeling ill-at-ease and hypocritical. On every shelf and in every corner there were exquisite Indian objects, still, secretive things, silent and precious, but Lucy longed for chatter and touch and human communion. The servants retreated as she drew near and Isaac spent whole
days alone in his study, translating, apparently, a government document. (“My civilising purpose”, he called his work.) Lucy marvelled that he had learned so many languages but seemed without fellow feeling for the people who spoke them: whenever he commented on the “natives”, as he called them, he was invariably critical. Neither spoke of the pretext of her visit, nor of her uncle, Neville, nor of how they should get to know each other. Isaac lived in a kind of distended time; his sense of duration, Lucy was sure, was entirely different to hers. Time stretched in an endless repetition of the tinkle of brass bells to summon chai, or to take tiffin, or to have some small ministration performed by the gentle brown hands he resolutely, stubbornly, failed to appreciate. Isaac lived a life of physical inactivity: he barely moved from his desk and was set there, in a kind of tortoiseshell light from the shadow of leaves cast on a damp tatty screen, an immobile, self-satisfied emblem of privilege. His shape above the desk was a human comma: everything about him
paused.

At length it was her body, her woman's body, that altered irrevocably the relations between them. That gave Lucy back to herself with affirmation and delight.

At first she was somewhat alarmed and fearful. Lucy had learned from the women in the factory the symptoms of pregnancy so when she felt nausea in the morning she knew at once that a child was forming in her unmarried womb. As she retched into a basin held by a woman she would later know as Bashanti, she could see in the eyes of the servant that everyone else in the household, everyone but Isaac, also knew what indisposed her and what wracked her body every morning. In her sour mouth potential lies began to shape; she rehearsed shrewd alibis and exonerations – pirates perhaps, or sailors, had attacked her – but knew that in the end she would tell the truth. The women at the factory had also discussed the
means of disposing of pregnancy – hot gin, violent exercise, crawling upstairs backwards – but Lucy felt that this state had been given to her out of a passion she could not wish undone or revoked. She would greet her pregnancy in a rapture of confident serenity. She would live, she resolved, wholly and indivisibly, not splitting herself off from any category of experience.

At nights, in the room Isaac Newton had set aside for her, filled with large-bloomed cut flowers and lacy Madras curtains, behind which swam a square of moonlit Arabian sea, Lucy thought principally of William Crowley. It was not only the pleasure of congress she imagined – his weight pressing into her, his gasps, and her own – but she remembered a particular, almost fugitive, moment after their lovemaking, a moment of dressing. She had noticed the vulnerable area at the back of his thighs – it was a pale screen of skin, petal-looking in texture – and it seemed a testimony of the most intimate lover's knowledge. He was not the uniformed, confident, hale-and-hearty fellow, but a man who carried, as it were, the flag of his own childhood. And though she knew now of his definitive meanness and duplicity, she wanted to preserve him thus, in continuity with this quality of unremarked softness. She was, even now, even with him returned irretrievably to his prestigious family, conscious that his beguiling physical beauty inhered in just such contradictions.

Lucy and Isaac were having dinner, separated by a row of tallow candles set in ceramic figures. Above, on the ceiling, Lucy could see lizards the colour of human skin and with peculiar little hands, hanging upside down, their thin necks arched. They made odd tongue-clicking sounds, like an old woman, disapproving. Halfway through her reverie, Isaac leaned across the table.

“You have something to tell me, I believe?”

Lucy caught his gaze and saw that it was blurry and elegiac; Isaac adjusted his eyeglasses in a self-conscious gesture.

“How did you know?”

“My servant, Asok. I would have preferred to hear it from you.”

Lucy was silent. Isaac waited for a few seconds before going on.