And the World Changed (14 page)

We were torn between the temptation to pick them up (after all, the peasants did) and our polite upbringing. Lalla became restless and ran off, with An'na Bua panting behind. “Lalla
Bibi
!
Thero
! Lalla
Bibi
! Wait!”

Uncle Jim and I strolled back. I asked him the one question that had been bothering me for some time. “Uncle Jim,” I said. “Why, when we like it so much here, do we have to go back to London?”

“Don't you want to go back?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” he said. He lit a pipe. “The English were here for a very long time. Now they have left.”

“Like Aunty Frances,” I said. I knew I was venturing into forbidden territory.

“No. Aunt Frances—or Fanny as I called her—died of tuberculosis. The best doctors in India, England, and Switzerland couldn't do anything for her. There was no cure. In any case, she was my wife so she was one of us.”

Uncle Jim and I walked through leafy shadows. He puffed his pipe, thought a bit, and began again.

“You see, Jo, the English ruled us for many years. Now they don't. Now we are independent. But the country has been divided. Many, many people have been killed. My sisters, your uncles, and many others, have left for the new Muslim country, Pakistan. I, like your grandmother, wish to live and die here, where I was born. Your father, on the other hand, thinks very highly of the English. He's decided to settle in England.”

Somehow this did not seem a very satisfactory explanation, but I soon realized that it was all I was going to get. Besides, Uncle Jim had seen Nani Jaan approaching. He became boisterous again. He rumbled and roared like a tiger and chased me until I sought refuge in Nani Jaan's silk sari.

“Jim
Mia
, will you never grow up?” Nani Jaan said.

“Never,” he declared.

“Never?” I asked. “Like Peter Pan?”

He laughed and ruffled my hair. “Yes, Jo. Like Peter Pan.”

Of course this was quite wrong, I decided, because Peter Pan had only been a boy while Uncle Jim was quite grown up. He was even older than my mother and father, though he was much more fun than either of them. And he knew about Peter Pan.

4.

“Uncle Jim,” I said. “Have you ever been to England?”

Uncle Jim gave a short laugh that made me think I had said
something very stupid. But then he smiled and said, “Yes, Jo, I've been to England.”

He had invited us to tea. We hardly noticed the peeling paint and faded surfaces in his stately colonial home. In his wood-paneled study, leopard and cheetah-skin rugs lay at our feet; antlered heads gazed at us from the wall with shining glass eyes. A wood fire warmed us.

“England?” said my grandmother. “Why he was almost born in England.”

“Were you?” asked Lalla.

Lalla was half swallowed up by a leather chair, her hair tightly scraped into two neat bunches, hands very white and small against the armrests.

“No,” he answered. “No, I wasn't.”

An elderly servant in green and white livery served crumpets, sandwiches, scones, and sponge cake in silver dishes. Uncle Jim's pallid wife, Shahla
Momani
, poured tea. Lalla and I were almost afraid of being too boisterous in her presence in case she fainted, or of bumping into her in case she fell. She seldom contributed to a conversation, unless it revolved around her misfortunes.

“If his father, the Judge Sahib, had had his way, probably he would have been born in England,” said Nani Jaan. “The way he carried on, you would have thought anything Indian was a sin. He had to have English governesses, English food, English furniture. . . .”

“Then what happened?” I asked

“What do you think happened?” she said “He sent him to school in England in 1912. When he was nine.”

Uncle Jim's mother, Nani Jaan, and my father's mother had all been sisters.

“Then why don't you live in England?” asked Lalla.

“Yes,” Shahla
Momani
suddenly spoke up. Her small beady eyes danced; her thin bloodless lips compressed into a feline smirk. “Ask him why.”

Uncle Jim didn't answer.

Instead, he took us off to his piano. His strong, manicured hands pounded and slithered rapidly over black and white keys. We sang with him, clapped our hands, and did a twirl or two.

Lalla and I began to visit him often.

Uncle Jim taught us to play chopsticks. He helped us fly kites. He sketched us. He used an easel where I, too, liked to stand and draw. He encouraged me to portray the jackals I had glimpsed near the waterfall at the far end of his garden, or the hyenas I heard after dark. He would hold my attempts up for scrutiny, pointing out minor improvements I could make. But he warned us, these were wild animals. They lived in the snake-infested vegetation and tangles beyond the shrubbery, though there had been beautiful cane fields and secluded walks there, once. The government had taken the land away from his family, after Partition, but it was too boring to explain. He showed us the water colors he had painted some years ago, of the trees and arbor and stream, as well as squirrels, flowers, and birds. Oh yes, he said, the paintings in the house of Shahla
Momani
, their sons, HH's pink palace, the bazaar, and fort, were all done by him.

Suddenly Shahla
Momani
loomed in the arched doorway. “It is six o'clock,” she announced.

“Oh,” said Uncle Jim. “Right. I'd better get these children home, hadn't I?” He added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Your grandmother's a stickler for time, you know.”

In time, he introduced us to his favorite trophy: an enormous stuffed tiger with a fierce snarl, pointed teeth, and glistening green eyes, which stood in a large, musty billiard room. “Isn't it beautiful?” asked Uncle Jim. Lalla and I were paralyzed. How were we going to get past without being devoured?

Uncle Jim laughed.

“It's not real,” he said, “look.” He stroked the tiger, touched its teeth, and put his hand into its mouth. He persuaded us to do likewise.

“It's very special, you know,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it was a man-eater. It had eluded capture for many, many years, but I finally caught up with it. It had killed lots of people in the villages my father owned.”

“Did it eat them, too?” I asked with held breath.

“Yes, I am afraid it did.”

“Then why didn't it eat you?” Lalla asked.

I blushed at her lack of tact and discretion.

“It very nearly did,” Uncle Jim answered. “Twice, when I thought I'd caught it, I discovered I had shot some harmless animal. In the end I tracked it down. I had calculated it was a little ahead of me when I almost walked into it. I saw it just in time. I stood absolutely still. It looked at me like a satisfied cat just before it sprang. I brought my gun very, very slowly into position. I shot it, and in that moment it leaped.”

After that, Uncle Jim became our hero. We loved to hear about his exploits. We learned about distinguishing pug marks, the importance of wind direction, the individual habits of a tiger. Uncle Jim said the tiger was the most magnificent of animals. It stood fearless in the jungle, until men intruded into its territory with guns, elephants, and beaters, and shot it down in cold blood from a tree. Uncle Jim had vowed that once he caught up with his man-eater, he would never hunt again.

He showed us the bullet marks that had killed the tiger. He pointed out the wound and the broken teeth that had made it difficult for it to find food and had turned it into a man-eater. We played around and around the tiger—and our favorite game became Jungle Jim and the Man-eater.

5. 1953

“Well, Sitara, Mo. What do you think of your children? Haven't they grown up?”

Uncle Jim was among the first to greet my parents, along with Nani Jaan, Lalla, and me, that sweltering summer morning
when they alighted from HH's limousine, which had motored them down from Delhi.

“You have been so kind to them, Jim
Bhai
,” said my mother. My mother had had her hair cut and permed; her eyebrows were plucked into a fashionable arch; she wore bright red lipstick, as always.

Lalla hurtled toward her, but I was conscious that I was too big for that now. I flung myself on my sturdy, comforting father instead.

“Hello, Old Girl,” he said and hugged me. My mother gave me a kiss on each cheek and was soon chatting away with relatives in the drawing room. I kept trying to interrupt, to show her my paintings of tigers and jackals, jasmine and double jasmine, of peasant huts, but my mother said, “Jo, can't you see I'm conversing?”

She was regaling her cousins, the Begum of Amarkot and Shahla
Momani
, with an account of the chiffon saris you could buy on Jermyn Street.

“Sitara, the child is pleased to see you,” Uncle Jim interceded, “she wants a little attention.”

My mother turned toward me and smiled valiantly. “Yes, Jo,” her face creased in lines of concentration. “What do you want?”

I was so confused I couldn't think of anything to say. I had forgotten how we taxed her patience in London and how often, in our sparse, dark, and creaky Kensington flat, she would break down and cry, “I can't cope. Oh, I just can't cope.”

The ceiling fan whirred overhead. I could hear the zap and snap of the cotton-lined bamboo blinds being unrolled by servants on the verandah outside to block the midday sun. I shuffled sideways to a space somewhere between Uncle Jim and my father. I tried to tell my father about the Man-eater.

“Man-eater?” my father said. His dark hair was slicked close to his head; his feet were planted squarely on the ground and a signet ring glistened on his finger. “What Man-eater?”

Uncle Jim was stuffing his pipe, but golden strands of
tobacco scattered on the rich blue Persian carpet. Suddenly, I was conscious of the gray that peppered Uncle Jim's hair and the lines etched on his face. Nani Jaan pressed him to stay for lunch, but he left shortly.

Nani Jaan kept telling everyone how well Uncle Jim had looked after Lalla and me.

“I don't see why that gives him license to tell them tall stories,” my father said.

“Mo!” protested my mother.

“His father was a great hunter,” my father rocked on his heels, his hands in his pockets, “I doubt if Jim has shot anything but a partridge.”

“That's not true!” Lalla and I chorused.

I didn't want to go to England with my parents, I wanted to stay in Amarkot. I said as much the next day.

“Jim
Bhai
has really spoiled these girls,” my mother said to my grandmother that afternoon. I was half-dozing beside Lalla on an old-fashioned divan with silver legs. My mother was reclining against a bolster. We were in the wide passage that divided Nani Jaan's portion of the house from the half she had decided to rent. At the far end, a matting of tall, sweet-smelling reeds,
khas ki tatti
, blocked the large window. Outside, a man sprinkled water to keep it wet. A large electric fan fitted in the center blew in the cooled air. “He loves children,” Nani Jaan said. “His own don't respond to him as yours do. Shahla encourages them to scorn his English ways in the name of nationalism.” I could hear the click and chop of her silver cutter as she dexterously cut betel nuts into tiny pieces.

“I don't know why you chose Shahla for him,” my mother burst out.

“He said he wanted a girl with a pale skin, beautiful feet, and a mole on her chin. We were lucky we found anyone.”

“He said it as a joke! He was shattered when Frances died, he didn't want to marry again.”

“What difference does that make?” Nani Jaan said. “He
never had any consideration for anyone's feelings. No one in our family has married an Englishwoman—and that was bad enough, but to bring all the scandal and shame upon us! No one would receive him in England. No English official would receive him in India. He ruined his chances of joining the Indian Civil Service, which was his father's dearest wish. Can you imagine what his poor parents went through? His education, honor, everything—thrown to the winds.”

“Civilized English people met him,” my mother answered, “as did enlightened Indians. We all knew that if there had been any justice, he should have been allowed to marry Frances in the first place. Instead, they encouraged her to marry that awful man with his titles, horses, dogs (and an American mother's fortune), who beat her black and blue and wanted heirs, even when childbearing became a grave risk for her.”

“Poor Frances,” my grandmother sighed. “She was too good for this world, so kind and gentle. But if his mother wanted to find him a suitable Indian bride from our own family in Old Delhi and with the same background as us, who can blame her?”

“He was speechless when he heard you had proposed to Shahla on his behalf and her family had accepted,” my mother said. “He felt honor-bound to go through with it.”

“He had his eye on you.”