Waiting for the Monsoon (8 page)

“How dare you!” bellowed a voice from above.

Charlotte looked up at her father, who stood at the top of the stairs in his uniform. Before she could say a word, the general called out, “Slut! You have sullied the reputation of the family!”

Charlotte awoke with a start from her dream, bathed in perspiration and tangled in the sheet. She freed herself and got out of bed. Going into the bathroom, she held her wrists under the faucet. The water streamed with force over her hands. Her nails were still scarlet. She looked into the mirror and saw her sweaty, sleep-worn features. She splashed water over her face and dried herself off. Walking across to the nursery in her bare feet, she stopped to listen. In the distance, crickets were chirping, but otherwise all was quiet. She went back to her room and lay down under the mosquito net. Above her head, the fan was still whirring. She lay still, with her eyes open. Very slowly a tear formed, rolled down her cheek, and dropped onto her pillow. It was absorbed by the pillowcase, which had already survived a thousand washings.

ALL AROUND HER
,
people are hugging and kissing one another, shedding tears of joy or sadness. Her eyes dart from left to right. Where is her father? Or has he sent someone else, someone who won't recognize her? Her little blue hat is askew and she's hot. After ten years in England, she is no longer used to the oppressive heat. She wipes her forehead and adjusts her hat. She is standing next to her trunk. Men with red cloths wrapped around their heads walk back and forth, balancing suitcases and crates on their heads. She's already sent three of them away. Charlotte has no idea where to have her suitcase taken. She has only one address in India and that is her parental home in Rampur, a two-day trip. She listens to the characteristically accented English, which she hasn't heard for so many years, and watches the affirming nodding of heads. Nearby stands an English soldier, a captain, whose uniform inspires confidence. Could he have been sent by her father? She catches his eye and smiles somewhat awkwardly. The handsome captain looks down and blushes.

There is almost no one else left on the quay but Charlotte and the captain. The former boarding school girl walks over to the officer.

“Have they forgotten you, too?”

The man smiles shyly.

“Me, too.”

They stand side by side, without speaking. The last of the lading is tackled from the ship, divided up, and loaded onto handcarts.

“Do you know Bombay?”

“I've been here once, but that was before the war,” are the first words spoken by the man, who is older than Charlotte.

“Me, too. When I had to leave,” Charlotte says softly. The memory of the last time she saw her mother appears clearly in her mind. The waving hand, the handkerchief, her slight figure. “I'll write every week!” she had called out. But there were no more monthly letters. Six months later she received a letter from her father announcing that her mother had died suddenly. “I was in England,” she says. “At boarding school. I wanted to go back, but my father thought it would be better for me to spend the whole war in England.”

The man nods. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers her one. She looks around somewhat nervously and takes a cigarette from the pack. He gives her a light. Charlotte breathes in the smoke.

They smoke in silence and watch as the last handcar rolls down the quay. The doors of an enormous shed are closed with a chain and padlock. A barefoot boy walks by with a crate of carrots on his head, singing as he goes. In the distance a ship's horn sounds, and overhead a flock of twittering birds flies by. It's the first cigarette she has smoked since leaving England. She hopes that she'll never have to return to that country, where it rained constantly, the houses were cold and dark, and no one ever laughed.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes, a bit,” Charlotte says. She skipped breakfast because she was so excited to be back in India at last. She picks up her suitcase and says, “But I think I ought to go by the shipping office first. Otherwise, when my father gets here, he won't know where I am.”

Behind the counter sits a greying man in thick glasses, surrounded by thousands of fat folders full of yellowed pages. “Put a note on the bulletin board,” he says, pointing to a large notice board near the entrance. It is already plastered with messages from lost travellers and those who came to meet them. Charlotte adds her message to the others.

THEY WALK ALONGSIDE
one another. The captain, who has a slight limp, carries her suitcase. He's afraid to look at her, and vice versa. She notices that he is missing a little finger, but outside of that she finds him quite attractive. He has dark eyes, a straight nose, and a cleft chin like Cary Grant. She's aware of a delicate scent she has never smelled on a man before. Not that she's had much opportunity to compare men's scents at boarding school: the regime was too strict, except perhaps for the long, lonely school vacations.

The summer before, she roamed the grounds of the school alone, which is how she met Perry, the gardener's son. He taught her to smoke and to ride a bicycle, until she took a fall and skinned her knee. Mrs. Blackburn, the principal, didn't believe her story about stumbling over a curb, and forbade her to leave the school grounds. But Perry knew a lot more places within the boundaries of the school grounds than Mrs. Blackburn, and smoking a cigarette together became part of their daily routine. Until the gardener caught his son giving Charlotte kissing lessons. He was afraid of getting the sack, and sent the boy off to stay with an uncle fifty kilometres away. The rest of the vacation was just as lonely and monotonous as all the others for the past nine years. During the day she read, or hit balls against the wall of the school. In the evening she ate alone in the deathly still dining hall, beneath an enormous painting of Queen Victoria. Charlotte had never really understood why she couldn't spend a month or so in India, or stay with an aunt or uncle in England, but her father had written to tell her that he had no relatives in Great Britain, and that her mother's sister wanted nothing more to do with the family after her mother died of black water fever. Charlotte did try to contact the aunt in Glasgow, but the operator told her the number did not exist, and that no one else was registered under that name.

“Shall we have something to eat here?” the captain says, pointing to a rather sober establishment on a corner.

“As long as there aren't any portraits of Queen Victoria, I'm not bothered.”

“The last few years there have been fewer paintings of the royal family around,” the captain says in a serious tone.

She's beautiful, he thinks, with her long hair. Her eyes twinkle, her lips are perfect, and her laugh is bell-like. She looks around her as if everything is new to her, and she has a question or a remark about everything she sees.

“I've missed India,” Charlotte says, as she helps herself to lamb curry and rice.

“Yes, a lot has changed,” the captain observes as he fills their glasses with cold water.

“According to my father, everything has remained the same.”

“What does your father do for a living?”

“The same as you, he's in the army. He's just been promoted to lieutenant colonel. And what do you do?”

“I'm a surgeon.” He toys with his food. He isn't hungry. “When war broke out, I was called up,” his voice softens, “like most of the British men here. They made me a captain immediately because I'm a doctor. I was sent to Burma.” He looks out the window, absently stirring the curry with his fork.

“That was when your leg . . . ?” she says softly.

The captain nods his head, and his gaze wanders back to the window. He doesn't see the horse and cart passing. A man with a handcart shouts something to a mate, a hawker tries to peddle his flowers, and in the distance a tram goes by. He doesn't see any of this. “The war was cruel,” he says, his voice almost inaudible.

“My name is Charlotte,” she says.

He starts, then straightens up. Putting out his hand, he says, “My name is Peter. Peter Harris.”

THEY WALK BACK
to the harbour together. At the entrance to the shipping office, they look at each other, and then quickly look away again. The office is closed. Charlotte knocks, but there's no sign of life inside. She looks through the window and tries to make out whether her note is still hanging on the notice board.

“Do you suppose he found it?” She straightens her hat. “If he was here, that is . . .”

Again the captain carries the suitcase with all her belongings.
Where am I supposed to go?
she thinks. Donald is still at boarding school in the north of England and Mother is dead. Charlotte realizes that she has no idea what her father looks like. Perhaps he was there that morning but they didn't recognize each other. Every year, at Christmastime, he sends her a copy of his temporary address. First there were various army missions, and later on he was sent to the front. Under the address he had written, in his precise hand,
merry christmas, father
. Is he bald? Maybe he has a beard or a moustache. Does he wear glasses or is he perhaps missing an eye? She doesn't know. After she received that one photograph taken in front of the house when Donald was two, she received no other pictures. She has longed to return to Rampur, but suddenly she no longer knows why. There is no one there that she knows. There's no one waiting for her. Years ago she prayed and begged to be allowed to come home. It wasn't that boarding school was all bad, but she always dreamt of India.

She has no idea where the captain is taking her, and she doesn't want to ask. She wants to keep on walking beside him. As long as she's walking beside him, she's not alone.

HE WAS RIGHT.
She was standing on the exact spot he had indicated and she was wearing a blue hat. Except that her dress had circles on it instead of stripes. Peter didn't believe the maharaja's astrologer when he told him that his wife would be waiting for him at the harbour, wearing a striped dress. He laughed and said that he didn't have a wife, and wasn't in love. After the horrors of the front, all he wanted to do was enjoy the quiet and luxury which the maharaja had promised him. After consulting his calculations, the astrologer concluded that this was his only chance. He was to put on his uniform again and not waste any time, since the day after tomorrow the stars would be in the right position. So without even informing his host, the maharaja, he threw a few things into a valise and headed for the station. It was all totally counter to his inclinations, but the astrologer had insisted, and in the end he managed to make the night train to Bombay. He spent the whole night and the following day on the train, going over the scenarios, thinking up ways he could make contact with an unknown woman, and then discarding them again. He approached the harbour terrain without a plan and filled with apprehension.

He had spotted the blue hat when he was still some distance away. The woman proved to be a young beauty who had only just turned sixteen, and he fell in love with her as if he had been hit by lightning. In love . . . he had never imagined that it could happen again. He hears that she is out of breath, and he slows down. It feels right that she's walking next to him.

THE HOTEL IS
on a narrow street. Peter doesn't know where that special hotel is located where British girls travelling alone spend the night, so he takes her to his hotel, where Charlotte registers and asks for a room with a bathtub. She gives him a quick smile and walks down the corridor with the key in her hand. Peter has no idea what to do next. He has never seduced a woman before. He's only been in love once, when he was just about her age, and the girl didn't even know it. He was going to tell her the day he left for India, but she didn't show up. He cycled over to her house and waited there for hours, but he never summoned the courage to ring the doorbell. He must not allow such a chance to slip by a second time.

At the end of the corridor there is an outdoor café. He moves his chair to a spot where he has a view of the corridor, and orders a whisky. He wants to be there for her if she can't sleep or feels like company. He wants to be able to comfort her if she has a bad dream. He wonders if she realizes that the India she is returning to is a totally different country than the one she left as a young child. Does she know that the power of the British is waning, and that the army is being deployed to put down riots organized by freedom fighters? He believes in an independent India, but now that he is in uniform again, he does not dare say so out loud.

HE AWAKES WITH
a start. Charlotte is sitting next to him, wearing a long white nightgown. The doors leading to the corridor are closed. The stars twinkle above.

“I couldn't get to sleep,” she says.

“Have you been here long?”

“You snore,” she says with a giggle.

“Do I snore?”

“Very softly. No one else heard you, only me. And you wiggle your nose while you're asleep.”

“My nose?”

Charlotte wiggles her nose up and down very fast.

“No, I don't.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You look like a rabbit.” He chuckles.

“You're the one who looks like a rabbit, not me. I was just imitating you.”

“I don't believe a word of it.”

“It's true.” She smiles. “And you talk in your sleep, too.”

Peter looks at her in amazement.

“You said you liked the girl in the blue hat.”

Peter looks at this girl who is flirting with him so openly and innocently. Does she realize what she's doing? Should he stop her, send her back to bed, and then take a cold shower? She puts her hand on his hand. She runs her forefinger over the spot where his little finger should have been.

“Did it hurt?”