Of Marriageable Age (11 page)

The Indians had no sense of colour. Savitri would wear a shocking pink skirt with a lime green
choli
and a tangerine shawl, all together: yes, like a butterfly. And always with flowers in her hair, placed there by her mother early in the morning at the hair-combing session. Goodness knows how these Indian mothers always found time not only to plait their daughters' hair, but also to weave little flower-garlands to decorate them with, and that apart from all their other early morning duties.

Once Mrs Lindsay had seen Savitri dancing all alone, believing herself unwatched, in the sandy open space beyond the rose arbour, and as she watched she felt the hair on the back of her neck rising. For Savitri was not of this world as she danced. It was as if she was
being
danced, as if the dance had taken possession of her and moved her limbs according to its own commands. Mrs Lindsay at once recognised the gestures: Savitri was dancing the Bharata Natyam, the classical dance of Shiva in the form of Nataraj. Her fingers formed mudras, her knees bent, her waist swayed as she took on the attitude of Shiva with his head adorned by the crescent moon, receiving the river Ganga in his hair. The bells on her ankles jingled in rhythm as she tapped the ground with her heels in the skilful play of the sacred dance, and her arms and hands moved in measured nuance to tell an ancient story. Savitri, lost in the transport of her dance, seemed enveloped in stillness, as if the whole world and all of nature beheld her in awe and only she, its centre, moved. She is
Shakti
itself, Mrs Lindsay thought, and even her breath stood still.

When Savitri brought the milk at seven each morning she would be a picture of Indian feminine beauty, grace and docility — freshly bathed and groomed, flowers in her hair, clothes clean with the obligatory shawl decorously arranged over her shoulders. On her forehead she wore the typical heathen marks in ashes and red powder (Mrs Lindsay did not forbid the servants their heathen practices; as a theosophist she was tolerant of all religions, but still these signs were, somehow, uncanny). She wore bangles on her wrists and around her ankles silver anklets, from which little charms dangled and tinkled as she walked. And during the mornings, when she came to help Iyer in the kitchen on the days she didn't go to school, she'd be hardworking and diligent. But as soon as David was released from the schoolroom off she'd run with him — shawl, anklets and bangles discarded, skirts flying, flowers slipping down her shiny black hair — to their hundred games and thousand secret places, lost to the adults.

Savitri was a blessing, and Mrs Lindsay vowed to 'do something' for the child. The Iyers had only one daughter, and as such were in a much better position than Kannan, who had three, but daughters were always a headache for the poor Hindu fathers. They had to be married off and if there were too many of them they could cause the ruin of a family. Although Mrs Lindsay frowned upon the dowry system, money was obviously always the key to a better life. Didn't she herself know that? No, definitely she would do something for Savitri.

Mrs Lindsay had been thinking along these lines for some time, and had decided that the 'something' would be a cash gift. Mrs Lindsay's family had been connected with India from the very beginning, in the days when John Company ruled the British Empire. Things had changed since then, of course, but still there were investments. Mrs Lindsay wasn't too sure herself exactly what these investments were. She tried to keep her mind pure, free from thoughts of money and other material matters. A lawyer in London took care of business matters, and all she knew was that there was an ever-ready flow of cash, most of which she was leaving untouched so that David could one day be master of a fortune.

David would surely approve of this idea, to 'do something' for Savitri. But later; the child was only six, and there was lots of time. But when that time came, the cash would buy a first-class husband for the girl. Because you could abolish dowries as much as you wanted to — a wealthy wife still had a better choice of husband. Why, it was that way among the English too. So she herself would ensure that Savitri was not married off to the first suitor her parents could find. Give her some money, and let the girl — or her parents, or whoever decided these things — choose.

She was thinking all these pleasant, generous thoughts when David came to her with his idea, and this idea was so much in keeping with her own plans for Savitri, that she hugged him tightly — a very rare occurrence which quite took his breath away — and knew that this was a case of telepathy. Which only went to show that her idea was really ordained from Above, and that she herself was but an instrument of the Divine on Earth.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SAROJ

Georgetown, 1964

L
IKE
I
NDRANI'S WEDDING SARI
, Baba had imported Ma from India. That was all her children knew of her. Ma didn't count; what counted was Roy history.

Balwant Uncle had appointed himself custodian of family history. After all, he was history master at Queen's College, and well qualified to keep the family archives, drawers full of yellowing, curl-edged photos, boxes of letters falling apart at the folds, and a thick black-bound ledger recording every single birth, marriage and death of every single Roy several times removed.

The book was almost full now; yet it had all began so simply.

I
N 1859 THREE
B
RAHMIN BROTHERS
, Devadas, Ramdas and Shridas Roy, were walking through the bazaar to the Kali temple in Calcutta when they were approached by a recruiter.

'Come to Damra Tapu,' the recruiter said. 'It is a country far across the seas, a bright and sparkling country, money is growing on the trees; many Indians are already amassing a vast fortune there. When you have made your fortune in five years you can come back to India. No problem.'

The three brothers took the recruiter's words as a sign from God. Just the day before this their father, a school teacher, had been bitten by a black scorpion under the neem tree and died, and the boys were on their way to the temple to pray to God for help and guidance. Jobs were scarce, especially for young boys with no skills, and their eldest married brother Baladas could not support his own family, their mother, their two sisters and themselves. So the recruiter, they decided, was God in human form showing them their destiny. They agreed to go to Damra Tapu, wherever that might be, and accompanying the recruiter to a sub-agency. There they signed themselves to work on a sugar plantation in the colony of Damra Tapu: Demerara, British Guiana, South America, to take the place of recently liberated African slaves. Then they went to the temple to thank God for showing them the way so explicitly. Shortly thereafter they sailed from India on the ship Victor Emmanuel, leaving their mother and sisters in the care of Baladas.

The three brothers were allotted to the sugar plantation Post Mourant as indentured servants, but due to their fiery spirits and quick minds already sharpened by a basic English medium education in India they soon made swift strides forward. Ramdas, the eldest, discovered that certain Hindu ceremonies were not difficult to perform, and thus became a priest, the small fee he received being more remunerative than what he received as a cane field labourer. He went on to become
sirdar
(foreman) on the estate, saved every cent, and bought Full Cup, an abandoned sugar plantation on the East Bank of Demerara.

Shridas acquired a horse and carriage with which he ran a highly successful taxi service in the settlement of Hague, later going to Georgetown and starting a motorised hire-car business and moving into a white mansion in Kingston. Devadas became a Hindi-English interpreter, going on to teach in a private school and finally founding a school of his own, attended by Indian children; it was his nephew, Ramsaroop, who opened the first Hindi-language cinema in Georgetown, the Bombay Talkies. Thus all three brothers remained in the colony after their five-year contract ran out.

Their only problem was that they had no wives. Indian women were reluctant to leave home and family and make the long sea journey to another continent, and parents were reluctant to send their daughters far away to a country that, so rumour had it, swarmed with wild black savages, released African slaves. Which meant that women accounted for less than thirty per cent of the Indian population, which explained, Balwant claimed, the high suicide rates among Indian indentured servants.

The brothers wrote home to their mother to send three wives for them. All she could find was an old widow of twenty-seven years, a low-caste orphan girl of sixteen, and a twenty-five-year-old woman with a harelip, the latter being the only one among them who could pay a dowry. She got Baladas to bribe the same officer who recruited her other sons, and with the dowry paid by the harelipped bride got the three women on to the ship
Ganges,
which sailed for Georgetown in 1865. The bride-problem was thus solved.

T
HE
R
OY FAMILY
grew in size and prominence in the prospering colony. By the turn of the century the third generation of Roys was well established in Georgetown.

In 1964, the year Saroj turned thirteen, there were well over a hundred descendants of Ramdas, Shridas and Devadas — now long dead and cremated, their ashes sent back to India to be scattered in the river Ganges. The Roys continued to prosper and seek prosperity. Indians were industrious, and certain professions tended to run in families. The Luckhoo family specialised in law; the Jaikaran family in medicine; and the Roys in business. They owned four dry-goods stores, two pharmacies, a cinema, two provisions stores, an electrical appliances company, a furniture store, three hardware stores, a construction company and the Jus-ee cool drinks company. Roys were emigrating to England, Canada, the USA. Some had settled in Trinidad, some in Surinam. But nobody, as far as Saroj knew, had ever returned to India. You didn't return to India. You left India.

B
ACK IN
C
ALCUTTA
, Deodat Roy, Baladas's first grandson, grew up and won a scholarship to study law in England where he graduated with honours and practised as a barrister-at-law for a few years in London. But Deodat was an Indian through and through, and life in racist England, a member of the despised immigrant Indian society, did not appeal to him. England was too secular, too materialistic, too cold. Even with his education he was not treated with due respect. News of his dissatisfaction and plans to return home circulated through the family grapevine and reached Georgetown. In 1929 he received a joint letter from his three great-uncles, now old men and heads of the Georgetown Roy clan.

It was one of the most important items in the family archives, heralding as it did the New Age of Roy tradition. Balwant Uncle liked to read it aloud at family functions:
‘This is a bright and shining colony, much better than India,’
the great-uncles had written,
‘and there's a crying need for well-trained Indian lawyers. Do not return to Calcutta, come here and settle in British Guiana. In India, even if you are successful, you will be at best a small fish in a big pond; here you can be a big fish in a small pond.’
(This was Balwant Uncle's favourite saying.)
‘You would not believe the leaps and bounds with which we Indians are progressing! We came to this colony as poor coolies owning nothing and less than nothing, yet through God's grace and our own diligence and thrift we Roys are all well-to-do and highly respected pillars of society, and we are by no means the exception! Now there are over 300,000 Indians here; we make up over forty per cent of the population! Diwali and Holi are national holidays, as well as Eid-al Mubarak for the Muslims. This is indeed Little India and opportunity is knocking on our doors! Kindly come and put your shoulder to the grindstone to help build the colony! We, your loving great-uncles, will accord you a hearty welcome. Only one thing: before you come, get married, for ladies are in short supply
here.
It would be preferable if you find a wife with several young sisters or female cousins to accompany her, for we know of many highly eligible Indian boys in dire need of a wife, and we can make excellent connections
through marriage. Dowry and caste not relevant.’

This last sentence alarmed Deodat exceedingly. He promptly married his first wife Sundari, daughter of Brahmin immigrants, in London, and brought her with two younger sisters to British Guiana. The sisters were immediately married into prominent Georgetown families so that the BG branch of the Roy clan grew further in consequence and connections.

Sundari gave birth to three boys in quick succession, Natarajeshwar, Nathuram, and Narendra, but Narendra was barely eleven years of age when Sundari tumbled down the tower staircase in Deodat's Waterloo Street mansion and broke her neck. The three boys were immediately boarded out into various other Roy families, so all quickly recovered from the tragedy, and Deodat set about finding a new wife. But there were problems.

Deodat, an orthodox Brahmin, refused to take a wife born and bred in BG. In such a woman traditions were diluted, culture was dying, he claimed. He was appalled at the gradual disintegration of Hindu traditions, and the spineless capitulation of Indians to the secular spirit which ruled the colony.

In fact, Hindus were split down the middle. On the one side were the Traditionalists, trying to uphold their culture as much as possible but nowhere reaching Baba's strict standards. After all, these were second, third, fourth and even fifth generation Indians, not one of them had ever been to India, hardly any of them spoke Hindi, and compromise had been necessary. Of this clan Baba was the undisputed leader and authority, for he had actually grown up in India, he spoke Hindi as well as Bengali and a smattering of Urdu.

The Modernists were non-practising Hindus, sunk in a mire of debauchery, growing worse from generation to generation. Nowadays Hindu men and women even went to parties and danced; the women wore trousers, or dresses showing their knees; and they chose their own marriage partners. They were all eating meat, even beef. They were converting to Christianity, giving their children English, Christian names. A man's name meant nothing. You could not tell a man's caste from his name, for caste was non-existent. Brahmins no longer wore the sacred thread, and as for the ritual purity called for in this caste, only a few pundits knew the theories that no-one practised. In fact, except for a few carefully-bred Roys, there were no Brahmins left. Hindus were mongrels, a boiled-down stew where no man knew his roots.