The Luminist (9 page)

Crossing the walkway, she stood above the waves pulling against Eligius' dams. Mary saw her and ran down the planks. “ Is this what you call work?” she shouted. Ewen pulled up short at her tone.

Julia set her paper down. She watched implacably.

“ You' ve done nothing! If anything, the Colebrooks' home drowns in deeper water.”

Eligius waded to the gate and his second dam. His legs burned. His back felt as if it had been hollowed and filled with molten iron.

“ Mary,” Catherine said, “enough.”

“ Your memsahib is doubtless very angry – ”

He pulled the wood slats from the ground. The waters
rushed to the gate, now the low point in the yard. Their flow became a flood; the trapped rainfall thundered out, carving the ground alongside the road to Dimbola. It carried away weak vegetation. Even the slats of his dam were borne down the hillside towards the sea.

Ewen dangled his feet in the onrush, cackling delightedly as his legs disappeared to the knees in a froth of mud brown.

Eligius stood at the gate, watching the last of the rain depart. It only took moments for the yard to clear itself. A few pools remained in the aftermath, like mirrors atop the ruin of the Colebrooks' lawn. Ewen performed a mad dance through the heart of them, spraying mud and rain everywhere as Mary called out halfheartedly for him to stop. “Come on, then!” she yelled to Eligius. “ Do you want to dry off, or stay like that?”

He glanced worriedly at the memsa'ab. She stood by the cottage's ruin of a door, heedless of the mud overtaking her feet. Silently, she gestured for him to follow the maid.

Something in her eyes unsettled him. An incongruous returning hope.

He followed Mary to the rear of the main house. There he found himself inside a colonial home for the first time.

The entry they passed through led into a dank hallway lit only by a single shuddering gaslamp. Having no ventilation save the door, the hall was thick with noxious fumes that left the floor greasy with soot.

Mary led him past a room that smelled of lingering sickness. The fireplace was stacked with old wood and uncollected ash. There were books on the wall, their spines embossed with the lofty words of the Court.

The sight chilled him. Unbidden moments joined him in the dankness. His father, breathing life into old colonial laws. Bright roses spitting from gunmetal. Himself, in his father 's emptying eyes.

“ You're getting water all over the floor,” Mary snapped, “and who do you think cleaning it falls to?”

She took him to the scullery. He knew it immediately by the smell. Caked pots, buckets of rancid vegetables gone to oily black, meat on a butcher 's table, its marbled flesh infested with flies.

“Servants,” Mary said, “don't see the filth their betters live in. They don't smell their stench. Servants concern themselves only with what's to be done.”

She stacked a single cord of wood atop the iron grate in the scullery hearth, then packed it in with crisp dead palm fronds. Striking a match, she lit a fire and bade him to sit. “I've no place for you to wash, and you aren't about to walk through the house shod in mud. Let it dry and cake. That'll do for you.”

“ It is no different at home. I 'm used to it.”

“ No doubt.”

She left him. He stripped to his loin cloth and sat close to the fire. The wood was relatively young and green at its core. Its smoke was faintly pungent. The fire would last a bit longer.

He draped his clothes across a stone seat to dry. A sound made him spin, his hands swift to cover his immodesty. Ewen stood in the doorway, dripping wet from the storm. He was naked and carried two towels. Raising one, he rubbed his face frenziedly, then handed the second towel to Eligius.

Eligius peeled ribbons of mud from his skin as he dried himself. Like a sheet of woven silk, the towel was the softest thing to touch him since his mother's hand. How long ago that had been.

He stretched his sore muscles, willing the heat of the fire into them. The boy sat down next to him and aped his every move.

I should hate you, Eligius thought as he regarded the boy. I should stand at your gate and scream until you leave.

He wiggled his toes. The boy did as well, delighted with the game. They held their hands out, fingers spread, until the light glowed through their skin and the veins could be read like words. Smiling, the boy put his arms out to Eligius. He wanted to be held. To be lifted.

Eligius leaned close to the boy. “ No.”

Ewen's eyes went wide with shock.

Eligius dressed quickly and left the boy in the room. His clothes were warm and stiff. They crackled as he walked back down the hall. His day was at an end, and with it his station as the holder of poles, the ditch digger, the keeper of charades that the Colebrooks did not smell and did not invite ridicule from their fellow colonials. That their child did not view him as just another Indian to ride.

He followed the sounds of muted conversation to a dining room, where the family sat around a table picking at plates of the meat he'd seen in the scullery. It was enough that they brought their appetite for beef to Ceylon. That they consumed it heedless of its condition sickened him. Didn't Britishers have the wealth of empires at their disposal? Wasn't this sa'ab one of the chosen, charged with the colonials' stewardship of India? Yet they lived the lives of near -villagers.

“ Mother,” Julia said, finally looking up from her plate. Like the others, she ate as if she were a starving Peshwar.

Catherine set down her fork and its speared coal of meat.

“ My pay,” he said to Mary.

“ He's inquiring about the rupees,” Mary said. “ I 'll tell the boy that he may first return the extra food he secreted into his pockets. Does he think I 'm blind? Very little goes on in this house that I do not see.”

It was all he could do to stay quiet while Mary wrestled her words into Tamil. “The food is for my mother and sister,” Eligius told her. “ My sister especially. She is sicker every day. This is why I am here.”

Catherine stood at the sound of footsteps. “Charles. We' ve saved food for you. How goes your work?”

The man she called Charles put his hand on the back of a chair, steadying himself as he sat. Only then did he look up at the Indian boy before him. His face grew still as air before a storm. His hands trembled.

Eligius trembled as well. I remember you, he thought. Old lion.

His eyes were so like Ewen's that Eligius thought he might hold out his arms to be lifted.

Mary started to translate, but Charles interrupted. “ I understand, and so does he. The food or the rupees. It cannot be both. Or else how will he learn the value of honest labor?”

Julia began to protest. “ It's not fair, father. You agreed to – ”

“ Let it be food.”

He'd spoken in their English. “ In the time it takes me to bring rupees to market and buy the food, Gita might die. But I don't believe the food I have amounts to ten rupees. I shall take more. My family has seen too much loss.”

He stood and waited, and wondered if this god of theirs – sometimes a baby, sometimes a man who simply bled and died, like other men he'd known – would pull the world out from under him. It would be such a simple thing to do to a servant.

“There is something memorable about you,” Catherine said.

 

IN ALL, MARY gave him enough food to last into the next day. Some bread, some beli fruit, and some wrapped lamb battered in coconut milk and chick pea flour, a reasonable effort by her at kamargah. All covered in another of those wondrous cloths he'd dried off with. “ Your memsahib's got more that needs doing,” she told him at the gate. “There's the rest of the yard, and the harder chores, and of course her postings, which must go out daily. She's an irrepressible correspondent, that one.”

“ With Holland.”

“ Him. Others. Disciples and divines, the missionary always says. Her letters fly to and from Dimbola like these bloody insects.”

“ I will do all of these things for rupees, or for food.”

“ My, we're a cheeky one. I can see I'll wear myself out keeping you in line. The most important task lies with Holland House itself. The whole thing ought to have washed out to sea with the
mud, if you ask me. There's repairs to be done, and plenty of, if it's to be ready for his arrival. Now go home. No doubt she's watching and wondering what we're talking about. The wife of a director can see conspiracies in the blowing of leaves.”

He glanced back at the house, but saw nothing in the darkened windows. Dimbola was so still; it arose in him a childish contemplation that the day had been a dream.

 

THAT EVENING, CATHERINE braved the mud. She crossed the yard and closed herself up in the cottage to consider the day 's events. The boy could be provocative; Charles and Mary especially heated at the sound of his voice. To them he was surly and entitled. He withheld his appreciation of English to mock them or worse. Perhaps he'd think overnight on what this colonial family did not have, how it lagged others, and not return.

She busied herself with tucking Julia's portrait in the cottage alcove – Julia had shown scant interest in it – and examining her failures under the light of the crossing moon, but she could not stop thinking about the boy. Strange, that they 'd first encountered each other when neither knew the other 's name, and now this. A cleared path. His footfalls in Dimbola. The shadow she'd seen at Court, emerged from a bloody day to life.

She found the Court image among the faded moments that she'd tried and failed to hold. It was nothing but a stain on paper to anyone else's eyes. Little more than dust. Yet she could find everything in its murk. The ampitheatrical lobby of the East India Court, the elusive, glimmering light, the boy's silhouette, prone and quivering in the streaming sun. His gray shadow across the marble floor like a spill of ash.

She drove a nail into the cottage wall and hung the paper from it. A rainwashed inference of structure and a boy, now with a name. Eligius.

The Night, Moving

THE CLOUDS PARTED JUST ENOUGH TO LAY A SLIVER OF moonlight across Eligius' path, easing his way. It was late when he reached his hut. His mother and Gita were both asleep on his mat. For a moment he thought his mother had fallen into sleep clutching a dead child. Then Gita's distended belly filled and fell, and he could breathe again.

He set the food on his mother 's altar. Tiny seeds covered the altar top amidst a fine, pungent powder. Ajwain; his mother had been grinding it to medicate Gita's bowels.

He felt foolish and impotent. The man of the house, whether he wished it or not, and he'd failed to do as he was asked. Food was fine enough, but what did it matter to a child who could no longer keep it down?

“ Know that I 'm here, Eligius.”

Chandrak came from Sudarma's room. He was half dressed. The withered root of his leg quivered until he shifted his weight off of it. His hair was tousled, his shoulders rouged with scratches. The scars across his left side formed craters atop his skin. Sudar - ma's scent, cardamom and citrus, radiated from him.

“ I present myself to you with respect for you and your father,” Chandrak said. “ Your mother and sister need two different sorts of men. Let us each be men for them, you and I. Or would you rather she beg in the streets of Varanasi with the widows? Wake up and speak to him, Sudarma. I'll dress, and then Eligius will talk of his day.”

“This can't be,” Eligius whispered to his mother as Chandrak withdrew to Sudarma's room. “This is Swaran Shourie's home. You have no right.”

“Swaran is dead, meri beta.”

She ignited a thin reed of incense and plunged it into a cup, releasing a veil of sweet smoke that washed the hut clean of musk and sweat. “ From the time you were born, I ' ve had a vision of you. You're somewhere else. Somewhere beautiful, watching the lights the way you do. Now I see that I was never supposed to have the men others have.”

“ Make him leave.”

“ Sometime I hope you'll tell me what you see in the light that holds you the way it does. I think you wouldn't get so lost if you had a father. I think I wouldn't worry if I had a husband. Ay, my child, don't despise me for wanting. We all hate what we turn into. You may still. You won't be alone. I see women staring at their babies as if they were strangers. Men watch the sea and wish they didn't have to return home. Your father and I thought that we'd escape the worst of this life. But days drift over us. I've done things I never thought I'd do.”

Chandrak came out wearing a clean shirt and pants. “Come with me to the fires, Eligius.”

“Go with him.” Sudarma watched from the doorway as Eligius followed Chandrak into the street.

Chandrak stepped between banyans. He left the road behind. “Come. This way.”

“ But the fires. And the soldiers. It's past curfew.”

“ We'll make our own fire.”

He followed Chandrak to a clearing hewn from causarina and breadfruit. There were two other men waiting silently. He didn't recognize them.

“ You brought food only,” Chandrak said. “ What about money?”

“I had to choose. Gita starves – ”

“Tell me about them.”

“ I don't understand. Who are these men?”

“ What did you see of their house? What do they have?”

“ I won't go back.” The sound of his own voice disgusted him. A child's plea. “Every minute I 'm there, I 'm shamed. I 'll work in the fields. You have no right to be in my home with my mother.”