The Impressionist (2 page)

‘Looks like rain, what?’

They both peer up at the sky. As if in response, a fat drop of water lands on Forrester’s face.

Fire and water. Earth and air. Meditate on these oppositions and reconcile them. Collapse them in on themselves, send them spiralling down a tunnel of blackness to re-emerge whole, one with the all, mere aspects of the great unity of things whose name is God. Thought can travel on in this manner, from part to whole, smooth as the touch of the masseur’s oiled hands in the hammam. Amrita wishes she could carry on thinking for ever. That would be true sweetness! But she is only a woman, and for ever will not be granted her. In the absence of infinity, she will settle for spinning out what time she has, teasing it into a fine thread.

Inside the palanquin it is hot and close, the smells of food and stale sweat and rosewater mingling with another smell, sharp and bitter. Once again Amrita’s hand reaches out for the little sandalwood box of pills. She watches the hand as she would a snake sliding across a flagstone floor, with detachment and an edge of revulsion. Yes, it is her hand, but only for now, only for a while. Amrita knows that she is not her body. This crab-like object, fiddling with box and key and pellets of sticky black resin, belongs to her only as does a shawl or a piece of jewellery.

A bump. They have stopped. Outside there are voices. Amrita rejoices. At nineteen years old, this is will be her last journey, and any delay is cause for celebration. She swallows another opium pellet, tasting the bitter resin on her tongue.

*

As it does every year, the wind has blown steadily out of the south-west, rolling its cargo of doughy air across the plain to slap hard against the mountains. For days, weeks, the air has funnelled upwards, cooling as it rises, spinning vast towers of condensation over the peaks. Now these hanging gardens of cloud have ripened to the point where they can no longer maintain themselves.

So, the rain.

It falls first over the mountains, an unimaginable shock of water. Caught in the open, herdsmen and woodcutters pull their shawls over their heads and run for shelter. Then in a chain reaction, cloud speaking to cloud, the rain rolls over the foothills, dousing fires, battering on roofs, bringing smiles to the faces of the people who run outside to greet it, the water for which they have been waiting so long.

Finally it comes to the desert. As it starts to fall, Forrester listens to the grubby brahmin’s chit-chat, and hears himself tetchily agreeing that now would be a good time and here a good place to camp. Perhaps this Moti Lal is offended by his brusqueness, but Forrester can’t worry about that. His eyes are fixed on the palanquin, the grumpy maid fussing around its embroidered curtain. Its occupant has not even ventured a peek outside. He wonders if she is ill, or very old.

Soon the rain is falling steadily, swollen droplets splashing into the dust like little bombs. Camels fidget and grumble as they are hobbled. Servants run around unpacking bags. Moti Lal keeps up a steady stream of conversation as Forrester dismounts and unsaddles his horse. Moti Lal is not the master here, oh no, just a trusted family retainer. It has fallen to him, the duty of escorting the young mistress to her uncle’s house in Agra. Most unusual, of course, but there are extenuating circumstances.

Extenuating circumstances? What is the bloody fool on about? Forrester asks where they have come from, and the man names a small town at least two hundred miles west of where they stand.

‘And you have walked all the way?’

‘Yes, sir. The young mistress says walk only,’

‘Why on earth didn’t you go by rail? Agra is hundreds of miles from here.’

‘Unfortunately train is out of the question. Such are extenuating circumstances, you see.’

Forrester does not see, but at the moment he is far more concerned with erecting his tent before the rain worsens. It seems to be getting stronger by the second. Moti Lal puts up his umbrella and stands over the Englishman as he bashes in pegs, just close enough to get in his way without actually offering any shelter. Forrester curses under his breath, while all the time the thought circulates in his head: so she is a young woman.

Rain drips through the ceiling and lands in her lap, darkening red silk with circles of black. Amrita turns her face upwards and sticks out her tongue. The rain sounds heavy. Outside it is dark, and perhaps, though she is not sure, she feels cold. To ward off the feeling she imagines heat, calling up memories of walking on the roof of her father’s haveli in summertime. Vividly she senses the burning air on her arms and face. She hears the thud of carpets being beaten and the swish of brooms as the maids sweep sand from the floors. But heat leads on to thoughts of her father, of walking round the pyre as the priest throws on ghee to make it flame, and she recoils back to the dark and cold. Drops of water land on her forehead, on one cheek, on her tongue. Soon the rain is pouring through in a constant stream. The soaked curtains start to flap limply against her side. The wind is rising, and still no one has come for her. No one has even told her what is happening. With no mother or father she is mistress now. If only she could gather the energy to assert herself.

Amrita unlocks her box, shielding it from the water. She is to be delivered to her uncle, and that will be an end. He writes that he has already found her a husband. At least, said the old women, she will arrive with a good dowry. So much better off than other girls. She should thank God.

Within half an hour the dust has turned to mud. Despite his tent, Forrester is drenched. He clambers to the top of a hill and looks out over the desert, scored by a fingerprint whorl of valleys and ridges. There is no shelter. As the wind tugs at his topi and forked lightning divides the sky into fleeting segments, he is struck by the thought that perhaps he has been a fool. His red-brown world has turned grey, solid curtains of water obscuring the horizon. Here he is, out in the middle of it, not a tree in sight. He is the tallest thing in this barren landscape, and he feels exposed. Looking back down at his tent, set at the bottom of a deep gully, he wonders how long the storm will last. The Indians are still struggling to put up their own shelters, fumbling with rope and pegs. Amazingly, the palanquin is still where they discarded it. If he had not been told otherwise, he would have sworn the thing must be empty.

Before long, a trickle of muddy water is flowing through the gully, separating Forrester’s army tent from the Indians’ contraptions of tarpaulin and bamboo. A fire is out of the question, and so the bearers are huddled together forlornly, squatting on their haunches like a gaggle of bidi-smoking birds. Moti Lal climbs the ridge to engage Forrester in another pointless conversation, then follows him back down the hill and crouches at the door of the tent. Finally Forrester is forced to give in and talk.

‘So who exactly is your mistress?’

Moti Lal’s face darkens.

She was always ungovernable, even before her mother died. Her father took no notice of her, whether she was good or bad, too busy weighing out coin to bother about the world outside his cloth-bound ledgers. The servants would come and report to him in the counting house, saying that the girl had thrown a cup at the porter, that she refused food, that she had been seen speaking to Bikaneri tribeswomen by the Cremation Gate. In the mornings her maid would find sand when she was combing her hair, as if she had spent the night out in the desert.

She was bringing shame on the family, and if the master chose to ignore it, the job of curbing her fell to his head clerk. At first Moti Lal used words. Then, when he found a cake of sticky black resin in her jewellery box, he dragged her into the courtyard and beat her with a carved stick kept for scaring away monkeys. She was locked in her room for three days. Distracted, as he was finalizing a land deal, the master asked who was weeping in his house. Told it was Amrita, he seemed surprised. Does she want for something, he asked.

As soon as the bolt was drawn, she disappeared, returning with a wild look in her eye and garbled talk of trees and rushing water. Moti Lal could never find who brought the drug to her, and gradually she lost interest in everything else. She took to her bed, and stopped speaking. It was as if she had withdrawn to another world. He had to shake her and slap her face before she understood the news about her father.

His killer had left a length of wire wrapped tightly around his neck. The body had been found lying on a rubbish heap outside the town walls, the soles of its feet turned up at the sky like two pale fish. No one seemed surprised. Moneylenders are not popular people. Do you understand, Moti Lal shouted at her. Now you are completely alone.

Now the flood is coming. The earth will be drowned, but, like Manu the first man, Amrita will float on the ocean and be saved. She cups her hands and sees a little fish flip and curl in the rainwater. She will show it compassion because it is the Lord come to her as a sign, and though she is cold to the bone, the little horned fish means that she will survive.

They do not come to get her. The water saturates the palanquin, soaking the curtains and the cushions, running over the wooden frame in a constant stream. Amrita has no shawl, and the thin sari plastered over her skin offers no protection. She does not expect them to come. Moti Lal hates her and wants her dead. Why should he help her? She should move, but it will make no difference. The flood is imminent, and when it comes it will lift her up and sweep all of them away.

When it was time for the journey, Moti Lal had the haveli closed and the valuables packed into trunks which went on ahead with one of the servants. In the street, carts waited outside to take them to the railhead, three days’ journey by road. Shopkeepers sat by their scales and spat betel-juice into the gutter, pointing out to each other the possessions of the murdered Kashmiri broker: his carpets, his scales. The bullocks swished their tails and the drivers scratched themselves. Everything was ready. And the girl would not go.

Moti Lal beat her and she lay on the floor and said she would kill herself. Moti Lal beat her again, and told her he did not care if she lived or died, but he had given his word to her uncle that he would bring her to Agra to be married. She said she had no uncle in Agra and marriage meant nothing to her because soon she would be dead. Moti Lal beat her until his arm was sore. When her face had puffed up and a tooth had loosened in her jaw she said she would go, but not by train. Finally, he gave in.

Moti Lal gave in and now he has been walking for weeks across country, the sweat running off his balding pate, while inside her palanquin Amrita lies still and has visions. Every day as he slips his feet into his dusty chappals, he finds it more absurd. He is a trusted man, a man with a position and a certificate, and he is trudging across country like a beggar. Every day as he squats for his morning evacuation, a thought bubbles up in his mind – that her will is stronger than his. The girl does not care if she dies. It is as if she is taunting him.

So maybe she deserves to be left here, in the rain and the cold. If she dies of exposure, it will be God’s work. Then he can board the train and read a pamphlet and drink station chai out of a glass, knowing all this is behind him. He marvels that the slut, for all her stubbornness, will not even drag her carcass undercover where it is dry. The water is pouring down with a strength he has not seen before, tearing out of the sky like blood from an open wound.

All the world is in the past. Now there is nothing but a torrent of white water rushing down a mountain, and the future is contained in that water, suspended in it like the tree trunks and thick red mud it has swept off the hillside. The water moves at an extraordinary pace, propelled downwards as if by a great hand, and it rushes over the desert like an army, forced through narrow clefts in the earth until it arrives in the gully where Forrester kneels, wrestling a loose tent peg back into the slack wet ground. He looks up, and it appears in front of him, a huge white wall.

‘Oh God –’ he begins, giving it a name. Then he is engulfed.

The palanquin smashes like a child’s toy, and Amrita smiles as the night explodes into a vast rush, the force she has longed for since she can first remember. Camels bray and strain at their hobbles, turning end over end in the water as they try desperately to free themselves. Men and bags are sucked down, barrelling along in the flood. For an instant Moti Lal keeps hold of his umbrella, standing bolt upright in roiling foam with a looks-like-rain expression on his face. Then he is swept under, and the umbrella goes skating off across the swell. As his lungs fill with water, he thinks with irritation about the expense of replacing it. Then, one more bead flicked across the abacus, one more column of figures completed with a stroke of the pen, he drowns. All the world is in the past.

This should be everything. Yet small miracles are woven into the pattern of every large event. Forrester finds himself snagged on something. White water screams round his chest but leaves his head clear, his mouth and nose free to breathe. When small hands clasp his wrists and help him up out of the flood, he ceases to understand what is happening to him. His consciousness is entirely adrift.

He scrambles up a slope and falls to his hands and knees, still reflexively gulping for breath. Gradually he realizes that he is somewhere dry and dark, and stands up. The mouth of a cave. Again, the touch of fingers. He recoils, then collects himself and allows his wrist to be grasped. The hand guides him further in. He kneels down a second time, not entirely trusting his legs to follow orders. He tries to breathe more slowly. It is no good. When a fire flickers into existence, he is convinced that he has died.

The native mother goddess stands before him in the firelight, elemental and ferocious. Her body is smeared with mud. A wild tangle of hair hangs over her face. She is entirely naked. Kneeling, he flushes and averts his eyes, awed by the black-tipped breasts, the curve of the belly, the small tight mat of pubic hair. So much more real than the girls who populate his wakeful nights in the mountains. Those are picture-postcard girls, flimsy as lace. They peep back over parasols, milk white and rosy-cheeked, asking oh will you not come into the garden my dear.