And the World Changed (15 page)

“Of course he didn't! I was 14 or 15, just a naïve little girl to him, barely out of
parda
. He was comfortable with me, that's all, because I had been close to Frances and used to play badminton and tennis with her. Anyway, I had been betrothed to Mo since childhood.”

“That would hardly have been an impediment. He had no regard for any Indian custom.”

“Oh, Mother!!”

The conversation died. The afternoon wore on. My head grew heavy with the heat. I sipped cool water. Suddenly, a breathless servant charged in. “Begum Sahib, Begum Sahib, a
terrible thing! A woman has been killed and eaten by a tiger near Jim Sahib's house!”

I sat up.

“Nonsense,” said my mother. “There isn't a tiger within miles.”

“My brother saw it,” the servant took in a great gulp of air. “He heard its roar and he heard her screams. In the cane fields—that belonged to Jim Sahib once. There's a secluded stream that people visit.”

“Visit?”

“They use it as a latrine,” Nani Jaan explained.

My mother rang Uncle Jim. He said the tiger had escaped from a reserve thirty miles away and somehow found his way, crosscountry, to Amarkot. Oh no, Uncle Jim said, the animal was nowhere near his house, he wasn't in any danger. But his best advice was for everyone to stay put. There was utter confusion outside. People, mostly young men, had come out with sticks and stones to combat the animal. One look at the mangled woman and the sound of another roar, and they had fled. Within a few minutes the story had spread. Everyone wanted to see the tiger, they were converging on the cane fields.

“Dear God,” my mother said. “What do they think it is? A fun fair? Where are the authorities? The police?”

She called my father from his room. Lalla, too, woke up. The servant wheeled in the tea trolley but no one looked at it. My father donned a
sola topi
and walked up to Nani Jaan's gate with us. Two jeeps appeared with the Chief of Police and the local MP, accompanied by HH in safari dress. HH had been at Aitcheson College in Lahore with my father. He said, “Hello, Mo, old chap. Want to join us?” My father hopped into the jeep despite my mother's protests. The jeep's loudspeaker blared: “There is a tiger in Jim Sahib's old cane fields. Do not go near. Keep away. Keep away! We have everything under control.”

This had quite the opposite effect. Soon, the avenue was
crammed with people heading toward the fields. Vendors of sweet drinks, cigarette, and
paan
jostled along with the curious mob, advertising their wares with loud singsong chants. There was a distant rumble and screams. A movement of people, pushing, shoving, running. A passerby told us that the frenzied animal had leaped at the crowd and killed one more woman.

My mother returned to the house with Lalla and me. Rivulets of sweat ran down her flushed face and ours. We retreated into the dark, cool passage and gulped down iced water. Nani Jaan tried to ring Uncle Jim but the line was busy. Some of her servants slipped away to join the melee; others supplied us with bulletins. No one quite knew what was going on. We huddled next to my mother.

Someone reported that the mob had reassembled. The police had moved in with jeeps, rifles, and megaphones, asking people to clear the area. No one had budged. Instead, one-time hunters, political workers, and everyone who possessed, or could aim, a gun had turned up. Suddenly, Shahla
Momani
ran in, screeching, “
Hai! Hai
, Allah! Do something. Jim has disappeared with his rifle.”

“God preserve us!” my grandmother began to pray. My mother sat there with her hands wrapped around her head saying, “Where is Mo? Where is Mo? I wish he was here.”

What happened next was pieced together by conversations between grown-ups and eyewitness accounts. Uncle Jim was seen striding through the field with his gun. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd that had encircled the tall, unkept cane where the tiger had retreated. He came across some boys laying bets on whether the Chief of Police or HH would kill the animal. Apparently Uncle Jim said, “I will kill it.” The boys gawked. An old family retainer crept toward him and tried to wrest the gun away. A shot rang out. The tiger sprang from its hiding place at its attacker—Uncle Jim. In that split second Uncle Jim aimed and fired. The animal sank to the ground. Half a dozen
other bullets went off from all directions. The brief silence that followed was shattered by another loud bang.

Uncle Jim had shot himself in the head.

6. 1956

In our London house there was a photograph of Uncle Jim. He was standing under a tree with Frances outside their elegant summer home in the wooded hills of Nainital. He was looking directly at the camera with a wide, confident smile. A center parting divided his hair into two bouncy waves. The open collar of a white sports shirt clung to his neck and its tip rested casually against his cleanshaven chin. A tennis racquet dangled from his hand, almost as if it were an extension of his long, sinewy arm. Frances had an air of such fragility that it almost seemed as if, but for the small, pale hand anchored in the crook of his arm, she would have wafted away. The impression was reinforced by the gentle billow of her skirt against her knees, the fine strands of translucent, sunlit hair that had escaped from her perm and the tautness with which she held her long neck high, at a slight angle, her eyes fixed firmly on him.

I still wonder how or why it was possible that my mother, who seemed to know everything imaginable about Uncle Jim and Frances, should not have known or recognized the name, Raynard's Wood.

Of course we didn't talk much about Uncle Jim any more, but my mother was always going on about Rajas and Nawabs, Lord This or Lady That, or her ambassadorial brothers, one Indian and one Pakistani.

“What are we?” I asked her.

“We are British,” she said. But whenever I said this to people, the British looked blank and Indians and Pakistanis laughed—one or two pinched my cheeks and said, “How shweet.”

By this time my father's business in real estate had prospered. Our new house in Richmond was filled with light, gleaming parquet floors, and subdued colors. One day my
mother declared that she could send us to “a proper school” at last. School prospectuses flooded in, but on further inquiry no school had a vacancy. One day, Lady This-That, an ex-colonial friend, suggested Raynard's Wood School and wrote a letter of recommendation. Despite this august introduction, the principal, Mrs. Fotheringay, wanted to meet us to ascertain our “standard of English” and our “ability to adapt to English ways.” My mother exclaimed, “Oh really, how absurd!”

She dressed carefully and stylishly in gray, beige, and blue that icy spring morning, and we drove to Raynard's Wood. We turned into the wrought-iron gates, down a drive lined with cedars. There, before us, rose a white edifice topped with faux battlements and a central tower. My mother clasped her hands together and gasped, “Isn't it beautiful, Mo?”

A thin woman let us into a wood-paneled hall. A huge animal skull sat on a wooden chest. Hunting trophies, including antler heads, looked down at us from a great height. A tiger head was mounted and spotlit against false jungle foliage in a glass box by the marble stairs. Lalla blanched. I felt nausea rising. My father placed a soothing hand on my shoulder and took Lalla's hand. Mrs. Fotheringay, a large regal woman, sailed down the stairs toward us.

My mother seemed transfixed by a row of oil paintings, dominated by one of a slim, handsome man in the khaki uniform of the First World War. “They are rather fine portraits, aren't they?” said Mrs. Fotheringay. “That's the previous owner, Sir Roger Allis. And those are his three children, Godfrey, Hugh, and Frances, with Lady Caroline, their mother. Sir Roger sold the house to a South African businessman during the Great Depression. No one has lived here since. We found the pictures in the garage.”

“How sad!” my mother said. “How sad!”

My father steered her firmly by the elbow into Mrs. Fotheringay's study. There he put on his plummiest English accent (which was too round and too pronounced to be really English)
and trotted out the usual, “During the war when I served in the Royal Indian Navy,” or “When I was at Dartmouth,” which always seemed to break the ice with the English. My father and Mrs. Fotheringay discussed The Two Wars for some time. She showed us the Great Hall with the Allis coat of arms emblazoned above the fireplace. We saw dormitories, classrooms, common rooms. My mother kept exclaiming, “Oh, how beautiful! How beautiful!” at every vista of evergreens, bare trees, or terraced lawns as we wandered across to the tennis courts, the hockey pitch, and the swimming pool.

Mrs. Fotheringay duly indicated that there would be a vacancy for us in the autumn. My mother squeezed Lalla's hands and mine in the car and said, “Well done. You behaved impeccably.” She was in a curious mood, a mixture of elation and silence. “Can you imagine, Mo, what it must have been like in the old days,” she said, “when Jim
Bhai
was here?”

“At a girl's school?” I asked. “Uncle Jim?”

I could talk about him now without tears. “Of course not! Jim
Bhai
was at Sherborne. This was the family home of Aunty Frances.”

7.

That evening my mother pulled out entire folios of Uncle Jim's watercolors and drawings from a steel trunk. My father was amazed. He had no idea that she had carted all that paper all the way from India, but even I could tell the work was really good: It was signed with Uncle Jim's real name: Zulfikar Ali. There was Frances as a young girl, wispy and blue-eyed; Frances's mother “among the first women in England who learned to fly” in goggles and baggy trousers, her elbow resting possessively on the wing of her aeroplane; Frances's gaunt father, “wounded in the First World War,” propped up on crutches, not at all the proud and stately man with the shining leather boots in the portrait we had seen at Raynard's Wood. He had been “a bitter critic of the war,” but “had served his country
with honor and lost a leg.” My mother told us that Uncle Jim had lived in England throughout “the terrible days” of the First World War. He used to spend his school holidays next door, at The Vicarage, with a family known to his in India. She showed us a watercolor of Raynard's Wood (I knew I had seen it somewhere before, she said) with that familiar building against a backdrop of blazing autumn trees. My mother said a part of it had been turned into a convalescent home. Uncle Jim and Frances, childhood friends, had helped out with first aid there. Sir Roger and Uncle Jim used to go out sketching together, with Uncle Jim pushing his wheelchair. They drew war-wounded patients too, but some were rather frightening pictures and my mother wasn't going to show us any of those. “Can't see any point in paintings like that,” said my father.

My mother told us that Uncle Jim wanted to be an artist, but his father forbade it. He had done a wonderful picture of Frances with her two little girls. I looked at my blond aunt with short, shingled hair, a pearl necklace, and her two blond children. I thought that almost made me blond too, not dark, curly haired, and big-nosed.

“Oh,” I said. “Does that mean I have English cousins?”

“Don't be silly, Jo!” my mother cried. “Don't be so stupid!”

“She's only a child, Sitara,” my father said.

I didn't know what I had said that was so wrong.

My mother shut the folios. She said, “He gave them to me long, long ago. He said they belonged to his Old Life. He didn't want them any more.”

My father ruminated: “There are still a good many people in England who remember Frances and Jim.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “Yes, I know what you mean.” She twitched a fine, plucked eyebrow. Lalla and I knew this meant that something had to be said, or not said, to us.

“The point is,” my father continued, “if you girls go around saying your aunt lived in that huge mansion, people will just think you're showing off. We don't want that, do we?”
Lalla and I shook our heads.

“Good,” he said. “So there's no need to mention Jim or Frances again.”

My father didn't know about the need that every English boarding school has to have a ghost, or the power of stories and images of a man with a wooden leg going thump, thump, thump along drafty corridors, crying “Fanny! Fanny!” They would be enmeshed in my nightmares and my being, along with white faux battlements and a tower, the face of a snarling tiger, a mangled woman, gunshots, the bier of Uncle Jim covered with a white cloth amid the wailing of Shahla
Momani
, my mother and Nani Jaan, crying and crying, and Lalla bawling, “But if he killed the Man-eater, why did he die?” and the silence of his ashen boys, my father, the Chief of Police, the MP—and even HH who, by tradition, had not shouldered any bier except his father's—as they carried him away from us, from me, from Lalla, forever, amid whispers that truly Jim Sahib had saved the town from a ferocious Man-eater and died a hero.

Those are the imploding dreams I try to exorcise through my paintings. As for my three dominant colors, why do people ask? Isn't it obvious? Red for blood, white for blindness, blue for sorrow.

A FAIR EXCHANGE