Of Marriageable Age (23 page)

The end of a long hard war, it seemed to him, his most noble, for with this war he was keeping history alive, and himself, for these memoirs would be the ultimate history book of the Great War, and every schoolchild would one day copy passages from it, and schoolmasters would struggle with tears as the book divulged those poignant, secret moments when the human spirit rises far beyond itself to unknown heights, as it can, it seemed to the Admiral, only during War. Memories crowded him, and this was the only way they accepted release. The book was modestly named The Great War — A Memory. What a clever understatement! His heart swelled with the greatness of it all, and his humble role as chronicler. And here now was Celia, intruding on his precious privacy with some preposterous tale about David and the native girl — before breakfast!

Mrs Lindsay wrung her hands in anguish.

'I know, I know… that's what I keep telling myself. And yet… I can't tell you the very seriousness of their vow… John, it gave me gooseflesh!'

She wished there was someone, anyone, she could talk to about this. Her husband was hopeless, in more ways than one, and she couldn't think of confessing to one of her friends — why, the rumour would run like wildfire through the English community, and how they would all titter! Unless she made a silly joke of it all — but it wasn't a silly joke. There was something of… Mrs Lindsay struggled for the right word. Not
solemn
— a solemn vow — no, that was banal, a cliché, not at all what she had sensed. No, something of
prophecy
in Savitri's promise of marriage.

That was it. As if the girl
knew.
And it gave her, Mrs Lindsay, the shivers. And that was why she had to talk to someone, and it couldn't be an English friend, because then she couldn't reveal her fears… that somehow she had made a mistake. She should never have thrown the children together, never. The child's words seemed to have cast a spell on her, holding her so that all logic, all reason, took flight and all that was left was fear, because the child had spoken words of truth.

'Well, what do I care, good Lord!' spluttered the Admiral, impatience bursting out of him. 'Separate them! Dismiss the cook! Send David to England. Marry off the girl. This is all your business, Celia, not mine. Now, if you don't mind . . .' he signalled to Khan standing in the corner.

'Breakfast, Khan. I'll have it here, at my desk. Thank you Celia . . . please . . .'

And Mrs Lindsay knew that her husband had already closed his door on her. She sighed and withdrew, but as she closed the study door she smiled, because the Admiral, bless his dear soul, had broken the spell with the words spoken in innocence: 'Marry off the girl.'

'Silly me!' she thought. 'To get myself all worked up like that! All I have to do is do nothing. The girl's going to Bombay anyway, to get married to this clubfooted cook.'

T
HE MUEZZIN CALL
did not wake Savitri that morning, for she was already awake. She listened, as she always did. The muezzin to the west was always a few seconds earlier than the one to the north, but slower, so he caught up and they sang in unison, far away, over the roofs of Madras, meeting and mingling and drawing all souls who would listen to meet the Lord. The hair at the back of her neck stood on end at the holiness of the call.

She was not supposed to listen. She had asked Appa, once, if that was the voice of God himself, and he said no. It was only the Muslims. They were not Muslims, so they should not listen. Khan was a Muslim and so was Ali the potter down Old Market Street, and Mr Bacchus who had been the school-teacher in the government school, which was why Appa hadn't liked her going to school, because she had a Muslim teacher. Savitri could not understand it. When the muezzin voice rang out, the call entered the space behind her thought-body and she knew it was really God calling. So why should one thought-body call itself Muslim, and respond, and the other call itself non-Muslim, and not respond?

So Savitri prayed with the Muslims every morning when it was still dark and it was the only sound in the world. She prayed with Khan and Ali and Mr Bacchus, and Appa would never know.

When the muezzin's call was over there was a space of silence, but not quite silence because there were faint noises of waking all over Madras, like little tender strains of sound rising in tendrils, tentatively at first, then gathering courage until all the city was crowned by a dome of daybreak noise. But something was different today, and Savitri listened. An early cock crowing, a flutter of wings, a brain-fever bird with his hysterical three-tiered cry ascending into madness. Water from a tap, a bucket dangling down a well, a rope fluttering behind it. The swish-swish of thresholds and bridges and streets being swept. A baby crying, a wife shouting at her drunken husband. One horn, another, a rickshaw's klaxon, the creaking of a bullock cart, horses' hooves.
'Hare-Rama-Hare-Krishna'
from a temple, and
puja
bells, the hollow blaring of a conch, rattling drums. But a single familiar strain was missing.

Thatha
called.

Savitri, her ears finely tuned to the morning, was on her feet and with him in a trice, for it was she he was calling, and the call did not belong to the morning chorus.
Thatha
's chant, Savitri now realised, was that single strain that had been missing all along, the mantra of
'Shiva-Mahadeva'
he always sang for two hours before dawn, and that was what had been different today.

'Yes,
Thatha
, I am here,' she said, greeting him with folded hands and sinking to the ground before him.
Thatha
sat leaning against the wall, all swathed in a blanket, for there was a chill in the morning air, and his face was the only part of his body unswathed.

'Beloved child,' he said.

He spoke no more but his hands emerged from the folds in the blanket and he took hers in his, and she felt the space and the vast power filling that space, until she was all space and all power without even a trace of a thought-body, and neither she nor
Thatha
existed nor all the world — and then she was back, and the darkness was gone,
Thatha
's face was wrinkled, his eyes were smiling, and he let go of her hands and, without a word, raised his palm and dismissed her. She withdrew, backwards, with folded hands and head bowed to
Thatha
, humble in the power that still filled her space.

She knew she would not be leaving for Bombay. She knew it, as much as she knew that David was a part of her.

Smiling to herself, glowing from the warmth and light of the power, she cut herself a twig from the neem tree in the back yard and cleaned her teeth, and then went to the wash-house at the back of the yard to bathe, and then her mother was there, and the day and all its duties. On her way to deliver the milk Vali danced for her again. But she already knew the day was auspicious.

I
N FACT
, the morning passed in a very ordinary way. It was not until the late afternoon that the Admiral — alone at home except for the servants, for Celia had taken David to the dentist in an effort to separate him from Savitri for that day — felt a sudden inexplicable urge to leave his study. He simply could not write a further word.
Writer's block,
he thought.
It happens to the most brilliant of writers.
This morning, after breakfast, a rush of emotion had overcome him, to such an extent that his left hand had begun to tremble and he could not hit the keys. He had reread the last few chapters, just to win time, and for inspiration, but that had not helped. All morning he had struggled with words but had not proceeded further than a few paragraphs, which, he felt, contained nothing more than hot air. It wasn't the words, he knew now, it was the
memory…

So he signalled to Khan, and for the first time in several years he asked to be wheeled about the garden, so as to clear his mind and prepare it for the Climax.

Savitri had not seen the Admiral for several years. When she'd been a toddler, of course, and had kept nearer to the house, the figure rolling here and there in a wheelchair had been quite familiar. But over the years the Admiral had withdrawn more and more to his study, into himself and the pages of his growing memoirs. The only times he left the refuge of his home was on Thursday evenings, when Khan pushed him across the verandah and helped him into the waiting car, so Savitri had never really seen him. Not from close up. And he had never seen her.

And he had never seen his own garden;
seen
it, of course, but never really
looked
at it. The garden was Celia's world. Now, as Khan pushed him along the quiet paths of reddish sand he opened his eyes and thought himself in paradise. Such a wealth of colour, of fragrance! Thick heavy grapes of bougainvillea cascaded down from above, in brilliant, translucent shades of violet, vermilion, shocking pink, orange, and maroon. Between the bougainvilleas the hibiscus bloomed in a last triumphant flush of glory, before the dusk came and then the night, where they would close for ever, to be replaced in the morning by fresh new blossoms as young as the day. And roses of course, lilies and camellias, and a hundred other points of colour he had not names for. Glorious! The Admiral felt lifted out of a battlefield and into heaven.

The Great War had never ceased for him. Long after Victory the torpedoes of his mind had rattled on, the fire and the screaming, the blood and the gore, the horror and, yes, the
glory
twisting and turning within him and finding no escape but into the keys of his typewriter.

The glory, the final glory. The Admiral could not think of the
glory
without a shudder. That moment when all was lost, when all was fire and death and blood and screaming and he knew it was the end, he was about to die, and he had made his own personal, intimate, surrender, laid down his inner arms and given himself up to death — then had come the glory, an unutterable bliss filling all space and all mind, and all the horror and terror that had gone before had been worth even one fraction of that glory — and he had died into it, but miraculously returned to life, a mental life of agony, and a physical life of decrepitude.

Since then this physical existence on earth held no more joy for him. Life, for him, was waiting for the second death, and final Glory. He was useless to both his wife — he had married late, and she was much too young for him, and he knew it had been a mistake — and his children, to whom he was more of a grandfather than a father, for the younger had been born when he was long past fifty, conceived during a brief convalescence in the last years of the war. Another grave mistake. His life held nothing but the hollow clang of cymbals. That was why he was waiting for death:
O thou last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come and whisper to me!

But the butterflies! As large as your hand, almost, and he had to smile; for once, when he was young, he had chased butterflies and loved life. He bid Khan wheel him further into this paradise his wife had created not a stone's throw from the city, this riot of peace and colour, flowers, greenery, feathery ferns, birds and butterflies — his eyes swam.

An enormous butterfly alighted on the path before him, silent as breath, wings of coloured light spread open, twirling slowly in the soft afternoon light filtering through the treetops.

It was not a butterfly.

It was a little brown girl, but her clothes were the colours of butterflies' wings and her lilac shawl, slung over her outspread arms, hung wide and open like wings of sheerest gossamer. She was dancing dreamily on the path before him and her eyes were closed, and she had not seen him.

But then, suddenly, as if she had felt his gaze on her, she opened her eyes and looked directly into his, and the Admiral was swept away, for the second time in his life, by the Glory.

It was only a split second. And then the battle-worn and battle-weary veteran smiled at this slip of a butterfly girl and it was the first time he had smiled in — oh, in years.

It all happened so quickly then that even the telling of it is too slow.

Savitri knew you didn't do
Namaste
to the English; you didn't do praying hands, you
shook
hands, so when the Admiral smiled she smiled back and, being a courteous and friendly girl, approached him the way she knew you approached the English, with your right hand stretched out to shake the other's hand, saying,

'Good afternoon, sir.'

And the Admiral stretched out his right hand and took hers.

A
FTER THAT THERE
was no more talk of Savitri's marriage. The Admiral would not hear of it. If Savitri could cure his right hand then maybe she could also cure his legs; it was a miracle, and he had felt the miracle at the moment of its happening, and where miracles are concerned the human mind has no right to utter the word
impossible.

That is what the doctors said, when he told them his hand was cured. They shook their heads and said
impossible,
but the Admiral only smiled smugly and showed them how he could move his fingers now, and raise his hand, and one day, with perseverance, he would type. And Savitri had done it.

Word of the miracle quickly spread, of course, and the English came to be healed. In the Theosophical Society Savitri was a sensation — maybe even a new Master; (in this case, a Mistress?) She was Mrs Lindsay's possession, her mascot, and Mrs Lindsay would have loved to hand her around, to give demonstrations and lectures and invite the press, but Savitri was as shy as a butterfly and at the very approach of a stranger flitted away into the bushes and could not be found, no matter how they searched the garden.

Mrs Lindsay asked her how she had done it, but all she did was look back with huge melting-chocolate eyes, shake her head, and say, 'No, madam, I didn't do it, truly I didn't, it was God that did it, God's power.'

'But you have the Power, don't you?' said Mrs Lindsay, snatching at the word. 'Your grandfather now, he gave you the Power, didn't he?'