The Peacock Spring (26 page)

‘You won’t need any,’ and, when she blinked, ‘What do you think those women wear under their skirts?’ teased Ravi.

‘Can I have a handkerchief?’

‘Poor people don’t. You hold your nostrils delicately with your finger and thumb and blow. You may bring a comb.’

‘And my purse?’

‘Certainly not. I will get you a small waist bag for tucking into your skirt – a batwa – it will hold a few rupee notes; the rest you will give to me.’

It had been a wonderful feeling of lightness for Una to walk out of her bedroom in Shiraz Road leaving everything behind; it was more wonderful to feel her body bare under the skirt, and the
bodice, her midriff open to the sun, the only weight, Hal’s bangles sliding up and down her arms and the earrings Ravi put in her ears. What a blessing we had them pierced, thought Una. The
veil protected her head and neck, she could hide in its folds, and it was comfortable to have her hair plaited back; she scarcely felt the chappals on her feet. Ravi’s trunk held some of his
books and his poems – ‘I could not leave them behind,’ – and Una tied a toothbrush and comb in her bundle. ‘Could I have a cup? I don’t like station
ones.’

‘You mustn’t fuss. At the station I will buy a surahi.’ Una had seen the long-necked pitchers, earthenware to keep the water cool. ‘You can drink from that.’

‘I should spill it.’

‘Wait. This will do.’ On the desk Hem had a small brass tumbler to hold his pens and pencils. Ravi emptied them out and they rolled across the desk, some on to the floor. ‘It
is believable,’ said Ravi, ‘that you could carry a cup like that.’

Their laughter seemed still to be in the room as Hem looked at the scattered pencils, his best pen on the floor. He saw the towel tossed in the corner, the black-stained sink, while the jar with
the squirrel and his dissection slab were pushed out of the way. It gave a feeling of rejection, almost of insult. Then Hem’s gaze came to the disarranged bed, the dinted pillow; on the floor
under the bed lay Una’s hibiscus flower.

Hem picked it up but his usually steady hand was shaking. He carried the flower to the window and found he was weeping.

‘Don’t pick your way like that.’ Ravi said it hardly moving his lips.

‘The platform’s filthy,’ Una whispered back.

‘You are supposed to be accustomed. Don’t notice the filth. Walk.’ Walk – on spat-out betel-chewers’ stains, spat phlegm, banana skins, orange skins, peanut shells;
goat dirt; runnels where people had urinated against the walls. Walk, avoiding circles where a family had camped and was cooking on a brazier, or where a mat or bedding had been laid down. Una was
jostled by coolies in crimson tunics shouting to make a way as they carried baggage on their heads; by humbler passengers carrying bedrolls, baskets, tin trunks like Ravi’s, or babies lolling
on their hips, or wicker crates of hens on their heads. She dodged tea sellers, Coca-Cola sellers, wheeled stalls of hot spicy food, fruit sellers, and edged round barrow stalls selling newspapers,
toys and, always, peacock-feather fans. The railway officials should have looked smart only that they left their brass buttons undone and the drill of their white uniform was dirty.
‘Here,’ said Ravi in Hindi, stopping at a carriage in which a bench was empty under a window where the corridor divided it from the cubicle compartment inside.

‘It is in the passageway,’ whispered Una. ‘Everyone will brush past us there.’

‘It’s the only empty space.’ Second class would have been more comfortable but Ravi had said, ‘If we are missed, in third class we shall be ants among ants.’ Now
Una saw how true that was: the cubicle was crowded to bursting and, ‘Quick!’ said Ravi, hoisting her up the train’s high step. He put the bundle and his trunk beside her to keep
his place. ‘I will go and buy water and some food.’

As the train pulled out and Una saw the shanty slums along the track, huts contrived of sacking, palm leaves, old sheets of corrugated iron, straw or woven thatch, some standing on wet ground
with glimpses of reeking gullies, stagnant water tanks, in the same city as spacious Shiraz Road, she remembered that the last time she had been on a train, on the way to Agra, she had felt shamed
in her luxury with Edward in the air-conditioned coach, separated as carefully as if she were behind glass, as in fact she was. ‘Sensible people would be grateful to live in Shiraz Road, be
able to travel in air conditioning,’ Hem had said when Una voiced her guilt.

‘Not Ravi, nor I. We should rather be with the “have-nots” than the “haves”.’

‘You say that on full bellies!’ Hem had been angry and Una thought she saw a glimpse of what he must have been as a student, a passionate hothead. Was it Hem, she wondered, who had
led Ravi into what she had fathomed as his mysterious ‘trouble’? ‘What do you know of India?’ asked Hem. ‘You have seen Delhi, beautiful exhilarating Delhi,’ and
he mocked, ‘city of fountains and flowers.’

‘I have seen the Old City.’

‘As a curio. Suppose you had to live in one of those “interesting” alleys where the houses vomit garbage and the gutters are choked with faeces.’

‘Don’t,’ Una shrank.

‘Don’t! But they are. That’s why Indian backstreets are a hotbed of flies and disease. When you have no water to wash with, or you wash with too little, you pass on dysentery.
How would you like that?’

‘I wouldn’t, but . . .’ Una stumbled, ‘I love the Indian simplicity, and they don’t grab.’

Hem began to laugh. ‘My little Una! Don’t you know we are the best in the world at “grab” – also at graft? Don’t you see that you fool Westerners, boys and
girls, are trying to live as Indians are trying not to live?’

‘Hem, don’t be crosspatch,’ said Ravi, who was bored but, ‘Where is the sense,’ Hem had stormed, ‘if you have been given brains and the luck to be trained to
use them, why don’t you try to do something that will truly help – serve like Una’s father?’

‘Like Edward?’ Una had been dazed.

‘Yes, he and his kind.’

‘In all this – panoply?’

‘The panoply is not his.’ That, Una knew, was true, ‘and it is a pinch in the ocean,’ said Hem. ‘It doesn’t matter. What do you think they do with their
brains and time and money?’

‘Buy brown diamonds – you don’t know everything,’ Una could have said but would not give Edward away. Instead, ‘This “serving”, I suppose, is why you
have started all over again in medical school,’ she had asked.

‘That is my business.’ Hem had been suddenly gruff.

‘I still don’t want to have what other people haven’t.’

‘A lofty wish,’ Hem had mocked, and before three hours had passed in the train it began to feel far too lofty.

It was partly the smell coming out of the carriage: of food; of biris; of bodies pressed too tightly together; dust, fumes from the engine – sitting close to the window Una caught those;
of cess from the latrine at the end of the coach. ‘I couldn’t go in there,’ she said when need arose.

‘You must,’ said Ravi, ‘or to the women’s latrine at the next station, but that will be as bad.’

‘There’s only a place for your feet – no pan – I can’t squat down.’

‘Other women do.’

Una came back, pale, clammy. ‘Ravi, there’s . . . no paper.’

‘What did you expect? There’s a tap and your hands.’

‘Ouh!’

‘Wait. I’ll find you a piece of newspaper.’

As the train had started to rock across the plain, twilight fell and melancholy had settled on Una – a sadness that was to come on her at twilight for years; ‘cow-dust time’
Ravi had told her it was called in Bengal and here, too, in the north, cattle were being driven home to villages in the fields that lay along the track. The cattle raised humble clouds of dust; she
could see the twinkling of lights among the trees, smoke going up from fires where the evening meal was cooking. Cattle, men, children were going home and Una, curled on the narrow wooden seat
beside the window, knew she had no home; nor, by choice, had Ravi. His hut in Shiraz Road was an expedient, as much as Edward’s great house was for Edward. Will we, Ravi and I, ever have a
home, Una had thought? It suddenly seemed unlikely and the hut in Kulu a dream; this train, hurting and rocking them along, was taking them – where?

It was better at the stations, when it slid into a babel and swarm of life. Leaning from her window, Una watched the people and the barrows pushing along the train; she wished she had a
palm-leaf fan, but would not ask Ravi. He took her tumbler and brought her some tea; she had thought she could not drink it, but it was unexpectedly good and took the stale taste of Edward’s
wedding champagne out of her mouth. It was amazing, too, what a comfort to her was Hem’s small brass tumbler; it lessened the feeling of forlornness, but why should she feel forlorn when she
was with Ravi? Una sat up straight, smiled, but the loneliness came back and, as night came down and she saw the train as a tiny lit caterpillar crawling across the plain, an infinitesimal dare to
the uncaring stars above, the loneliness, the sense of abandonment grew. Una slid her fingers into Ravi’s hand but he would not hold them; it was too bold for an Indian wife.

Una knew she was terribly tired, yet she could not sleep. It was partly the food that kept her awake: the samosas Ravi had bought in a cup of dried leaves sewn together, were spicier, hotter
than any she had tasted, the chapattis heavier and the little pot of rabbri – milk and sugar simmered in pannikins to a thick cream – rich and sickly. ‘Couldn’t you get any
fruit?’ she whispered longingly, but, ‘Don’t fuss,’ said Ravi.

If only, she thought, the other travellers would put out the lights; if, for one minute, they would stop talking, or stop the transistor that whined so loudly they had to shout and shrill over
it. ‘You don’t understand,’ Ravi whispered. ‘You are so spoiled. To them, to travel is like a party.’ Some of them were pilgrims – one couple, Ravi told her, had
come from the delta of the Ganges, far away in Bengal. A pilgrimage, made perhaps once in a lifetime was for a holy day – and a holiday. ‘To them this train is a luxury. They might have
had to walk,’ but, I am too thin to sit all night on a hard wooden bench; my bones stick out, thought Una, yet many were thinner than she. ‘You have been fed on butter and sugar,’
they would have said. ‘Overfed.’ She had not their zest for life; ants or not, they brimmed with it and in the compartment the talk, chatter, laughter, repartee, eating and smoking went
on. Ravi, of course, was questioned and parried each fresh one with good humour, often bringing laughter, but it was most suitable that his small bride should be silent, shrouded in her veil, her
face resolutely turned to the window. Perhaps they were disappointed she did not steal glances at them from under her veil so that they could guess at her prettiness, or plainness; did not make sly
whisperings to Ravi to set them agog. ‘But the shy ones are often best,’ they would have said.

‘We go to pay our respect on our wedding to my grandmother,’ Ravi told them.

‘An exemplary young couple,’ said a portly Punjabi.

‘Yes, when you think of young people nowadays,’ said a large lady and, as she fought her way out of the compartment to go to the latrine, she bent and spoke kindly to Una who could
only shake her head. ‘Is she weeping?’

‘She has left her mother.’ Ravi said it with such mock seriousness that Una had to giggle. The woman saw her shoulders shaking. ‘Tut, tut. Poor batchi – she
is
weeping.’ She gave Una a motherly pat and when she came back passed out some sweets. ‘Eat . . . eat.’ Una hid them in her bundle.

Water melon . . . water melon. Pale green coolness dripping juice; the green became a flock of parakeets that flew into Una’s face, hard as the wooden toys sold on the platform barrows;
her head had knocked against the window – for a moment she had slept. At last the compartment was hushed, the transistor turned off. Bundled and huddled on one another the travellers slept
– a deep sleep of exhaustion. If only I could lie down, thought Una. I shall die if I don’t lie down. She had pretended her back ached so that she need not ride Mouse; its ache was
excruciating now. She thought of the second-class carriage Ravi had eschewed where at least they had padded seats. If only I could lie down.

In the early hours of the morning a family got out, leaving an empty bench. The other travellers did not stir but at once Ravi slipped in, lay down full length and was asleep. Ravi, without a
thought for me! When I’m so tired. I, sick with his child! Una could not believe it, but Hem would have laughed. ‘You will have to get used to the ways of the Indian male.’ At
least, though, Una was able to curl down on her bench and relieve her aching back.

It seemed hours after sunrise when they came to a station for breakfast. Ravi brought her tea and sweets. She was hungry but, ‘Sweets! Sweets for breakfast!’

‘That is our custom.’ He was in a huff. ‘To ask for toasts would be suspicious. Look, this is your favourite luddoo. I bought it especially for you,’ but Una was starting
to heave. ‘Take them away or I shall be sick.’

‘Sick! Sick! That’s what you say all the time.’ Ravi was tired too. ‘I am sick of you.’ Then he softened. ‘What
do
you want?’

‘Water melon,’ but now Una saw it out on the stalls it was buzzing with flies. ‘Not water melon. Oranges,’ and Ravi bought a few dried-up oranges. In a hand-machine on
the platform a boy was crushing sugar cane; Ravi took Hem’s tumbler and brought it back filled. It was a peace offering and, though the juice was unbearably sweet – and full of
dysentery germs, I expect, thought Una – she drank it.

As the morning went on the heat in the carriage grew burning. She could feel sweat running down her back from her hair. Would the dye run too? Then she saw that on the inside of her arms a rash
of bright red spots had come out; she thought, by the tingling, they were on her neck, too, down her back and under her hair. ‘Keep your arms in your veil,’ murmured Ravi. ‘The
rash shows you are English. My God, are you going to be ill?’

‘I think it’s only prickly heat.’ In the diary of William Hickey, one of his loves had died of prickly heat, but Una was learning the guiding principle of a good Indian wife,
self-effacement, and, ‘It’s nothing,’ she assured Ravi.