The Impressionist (26 page)

Once he is outside on the street, he stands for a moment at the double doors of the church, under its flaking painted sign.

Some of the text is unreadable, obliterated by splotches of red and yellow dye, a remnant of last year’s Holi festival when Hindu revellers (all in a spirit of fun, of course) almost stormed the Mission. Robert retrieves something from his pocket – a wrist-watch with a brown leather strap. Furtively looking behind to check neither of the Macfarlanes has followed him out, he straps it to his wrist, breathes on the dial and polishes it on his trousers. Now he is ready, his outdoor identity complete. The young gentleman steps into his domain. Pretty Bobby, crown prince of that most notorious of all red light districts, the sewer of India: Falkland Road.

The Road is undergoing its evening transformation, from day chaos to night chaos. The change in rhythm is subtle, perhaps imperceptible to the outsider. The street vendors are still trudging up and down, selling ice-cold water, fruit, snacks and bidis. The handcarts and tongas and bicycles and impatient horn-honking black cars are still pushing and shoving their way through the sullen crowd, grinding slippery refuse into the dirt. The smell of stale fried onion and lamp-oil still floats over everything and, of course, the street’s star attractions, the girls on the steps and wooden balconies, are still screeching come-ons and insults to anyone who catches their eye. But as the light fails and the daytime heat lessens, the composition of people on the street is changing. The huddles of men at the paan-stalls become more intent, their conversations more freighted with secrets. Women, ordinary women, rare during daytime, have completely evaporated. Single walkers are hurrying along, not looking around, retreating to their houses to eat dinner and tell their wives about the events of the day. The Road now belongs to the groups of hand-holding boys who saunter slowly past the open doorways, their eyes bright with cheap toddy, the volume of their dirty jokes rising and falling with their proximity to the girls and the groups of scowling goondas who have gathered to lounge on the corner waiting for a fight or a fast rupee.

Robert walks out into it, weaving nimbly down the street with a city-dweller’s quick paces and half-glances to left and right. He does not know exactly where he is headed, does not need to know, because meaning and purpose will, as always, be delivered to him without too much thought or effort.

‘Bobby? Bobby!’

He waves up to Maria Francesca, sitting at the first-floor window of the Goa House with a new girl he does not recognize. She leans over the rickety railing, her big doughy breasts spilling out of her tight blouse.

‘Hello, Maria!’

‘Hello, Pretty! Good thing you come along now, yaar! One of the customers wants a bottle! You can run to the corner for us? Wait, I’ll throw the money down to you!’

She wraps some coins in a rag, twists a knot in it and drops it into his hands, like a sweetheart throwing a favour to her lover. Bobby catches it and makes in the direction of the liquor stall. The change, he will pocket.

Ten minutes later, smelling of Maria’s rum and rosewater thank you hug, he has another commission, this time from one of the more expensive houses. Mamma Paul’s Anglo-Indian girls have shown a young British merchant seaman too good a time, and now they need someone to take him safely back to his ship. Mamma presses a couple of coins into Bobby’s hand. Just so long as the man does not pass out in the street, or decide he was robbed and lead the police to her door.

‘And was he robbed?’ Bobby asks cheekily, looking at the slumped figure on the parlour floor. Mamma Paul makes as if to slap his face, and grimaces.

‘We think he’s called Norman, but we can’t really understand what he says.’

The sailor is so drunk he can barely stand. Once out on the street he decides he cannot remember where his ship is.

‘Its name? What is its name?’ Bobby asks him, staggering slightly under the man’s weight.

‘Who gives a toss, like? I certainly don’t.’

‘You will in the morning.’

This remark is unwise. The sailor looks belligerent, and makes an effort to stand unassisted.

‘You little bugger!’

Bobby lets go of him and he crashes heavily into a passer-by, setting in motion a brief and poorly coordinated fight. The journey continues in this way, and by the time the man has been deposited at the government dock in front of a likely looking vessel, Bobby’s wristwatch (a ‘present’ from another drunken sailor) shows a quarter to eight. Damn. He starts running. Mrs Macfarlane is a little more observant than her husband, and she is beginning to suspect that her servant’s acquaintance with the Mission’s neighbours is closer than it should be.

Since the evening he arrived on the Mission doorstep, asking whether he could work in return for food, Bobby has changed considerably. He was calling himself by another name then and claimed to be an English boy down on his luck. Elspeth Macfarlane did not believe him. It was plain he was a mongrel, some Tommy’s child who had grown up on the streets, but he was fine featured and his manners were good, so she fed him rice and dal in the parlour, and, in half an hour of watching him eat, persuaded herself she needed a servant. Hindu-fashion, she decided to name him after the full moon which was shining in through the window, and when he had cleaned his plate she told him he could stay.

As Chandra settled into the little room upstairs, she surprised herself by how keenly she felt the pleasure of a young man’s presence in her house. The clattering of his feet on the stairs, the sight of his thin forearms resting on the table as he read a book, even the musty smell of the dirty sheets he brought down for the dhobi could give her a pang, a sudden pressure-valve sensation of pain and love. Entirely inappropriate emotions, of course. Silly-woman thinking. This was not her son. Her sons were gone.

When he realized what she had done, her husband temporarily forgot the Christian virtue of charity and insisted the freeloading little wastrel be told to leave immediately. However, as years had passed since he had spoken directly to his wife, making his views known was not straightforward. Chandra stayed, and after a couple of months Andrew switched from furtively watching the boy over his ridiculous wall, to sending him on errands, lecturing him on points of morality, and finally teaching him Latin and history and English grammar.

So in spite of herself Elspeth is unable to be too angry when Chandra arrives, out of breath and at least ten minutes late.

‘Where have you been?’ she says, gathering her things to take to Mrs Pereira’s.

‘I – I went for a walk. To the Apollo Bunder. To see the ships.’

‘You spend too much time there. Have you nothing more constructive to do? No studies? Your room is tidy?’

‘Yes, Ambaji. No. Yes. Nothing.’

‘We’ll be late for the meeting.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She shakes her head, and they leave for Mrs Pereira’s house.

As they walk Elspeth watches Chandra’s eyes take in the sights and sounds of Falkland Road. Several shopkeepers nod hello to him. The boy is such a chameleon. Everything he touches, he seems to absorb. When he arrived he was so gawky, so
foreign.
Now he has become part of the place. They are turning into Grant Road when she notices a wristwatch peeping out from beneath one of his neat white cuffs, and, not for the first time, is worried about him.

Mrs Pereira lives tucked away in a cramped compound off the Grant Road, a battered neem tree in the courtyard screening her dealings with the netherworld from prying eyes. The neighbours keep their children away from her door, in case they make too much noise and the old witch puts the evil eye on them. Sometimes the more intrepid ones come to her for advice, while others go elsewhere for rival charms to ward off those they believe she has put on them. Useless to explain that she is not a magician but a
scientist.
Useless to say it is not hocus-pocus but a message of hope. These days, rather than explain, she prefers to rise above the rumours. Her reputation has its conveniences, privacy among them, and this is a woman with higher things on her mind: in the secrecy of her green-draped parlour Mrs Pereira has conquered death.

Bobby follows Mrs Macfarlane up the stairs to the third storey and stands a pace behind her as she knocks on the door. The sound of singing filters underneath. Elspeth looks accusingly at him. The meeting has begun. They are late. There is the sound of a bolt being drawn and Mabel, Mrs Pereira’s daughter, ushers them in. Her mother, enormous, sallow, swathed in a washed-out yellow silk robe, is leading the participants in a harmonizing song. Waving her swollen fingers in the air like an orchestra conductor, she makes a sour face at the newcomers and beckons Elspeth into the circle. Bobby turns to go and wait outside, but to his surprise Elspeth looks at the hostess for permission, then motions for him to stay. She has never done this before. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, unconvinced that he wants to be part of the experiment.

The people singing around Mrs Pereira’s unvarnished table make a motley group. The tall middle-aged Englishman stands ramrod straight, his hands clasped formally behind his back, projecting the words like a prefect singing a school song. The dapper young Hindu next to him keeps fingering his starched collar. Quiet gaunt Mabel stands next to the Hindu boy, flicking longing glances at him out of the sunken troughs of her eyes. At her mother’s request she cranks the handle of a gramophone and they sing:

‘See the chain of angels brightly dancing

Bringing blessed peace to those on earth

Life and death are hand in hand advancing

Fear is banished, all is joy and mirth’

The other European woman does not appear to know the words. Her eyebrows, startled black arcs pencilled halfway up her forehead, are crinkled with concentration. She mouths what she can through her rouged lips, and, as if to indicate her willingness to participate fully, sways a little to the music. Bobby thinks he has seen her before, somewhere on the street. When the gramophone needle skips to the centre, Mrs Pereira lifts it off and places another heavy shellac disc on the turntable. Out of the brass horn a distant organ crackles into life, leading the group in a second song.

‘Bright spirits, wise spirits, show us the way

We seekers of knowledge who make darkness our day

Will lift up the veil and cast sadness away

For that mighty spirits we humbly do pray’

When they have sung four or five doggerel verses, Bobby following even less of it than the young white woman, Mrs Pereira puts the record back in its sleeve and, wheezing a little, settles her bulk into a wooden chair at the head of the table.

‘We are now in harmony. The atmosphere is positive. I bid welcome to the newcomers. Mademoiselle Garnier and –’

‘Chandra,’ says Mrs Macfarlane.

‘Chandra. Welcome. Please everybody, seat yourselves. Chandra, if you could come to my left. Mr Arbuthnot, to my right. Mabel next to Chandra. Then Mr Shivpuri, yes, that’s right. Mademoiselle Garnier between Mr Shivpuri and Mr Arbuthnot. Now Mabel, my dear, could you extinguish the light?’ The girl gets up and turns down the lamp on the sideboard, the flame dying inside its glass bell to leave the room in darkness. Someone coughs. Mademoiselle Gamier giggles nervously.

‘I must ask you first to join hands. Please spread flat on the table and press down. Do not hold hands, put your hands on top of one another. What we are about to do is very powerful, so I will remind you of the rules. If you do not follow them the consequences could be grave, especially for me, since I shall be receiving in my body the spirits of the dead. Please do not break the circle for any reason at all. Especially do not make any sudden movements, or light. I must emphasize this. Make no lights in this room.’

Mrs Pereira lingers over her vowels, stretching words out into long lilting flows which seem to lap around the table, at once soothing and perilous, like water running over a weir.

‘Keep your hands joined, and your feet please very firmly on the floor. The feet on the floor are most important, as together we are to be a battery, charging up with psychical energy. The feet on the floor will ground us to the earth. So keep them please. No crossed legs or lifting up. Very important. You may talk if you like but if any spirit addresses you through me I advise politeness. I don’t think we have any scoffers in this room, so I am sure we will make true contact, but politeness, politeness, politeness. Very important. And again, please to remember that there is great risk in this, and if you break the flow in any manner I am at risk of possession by a hostile spirit. Now I shall enter the trance, and call upon my spirit guides,’