Sail Upon the Land (34 page)

Leeta hesitated. The taxi driver hooted his horn outside.

‘He’ll be worried about blocking the lane. I’m sorry the gate is shut, or he could have pulled in.’

‘It doesn’t matter, I’m going now.’

She started for the door, and then turned back. She looked uncertain for the first time since the baby’s birth.

‘Damson, I’ve asked so much of you.’

‘Yes, you have.’

‘I’ve been a bit muddled, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s OK. You’ve just had a baby.’

‘I’ll be OK, remember I’m nearly a doctor too. I can be my own doctor. I know what the danger signs are and if anything starts I’ll go to the nearest A&E for help. So don’t worry.’

‘How will you explain your condition?’

‘I’ll say the baby is with its grandmother in England. They’ll understand, I’m sure.’

Leeta paused. She turned round to face Damson, and stood quite close to her, looking into her eyes.

‘You should know that I wanted to pay you back for abandoning me, by disrupting your life and forcing you to have a baby after all. But that isn’t what I feel now. You’ve the space for a baby in your life now, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I have. Thank you for trusting me.’

She left quickly after that. She hadn’t touched Damson, and Damson made no further move towards her.

She listened to the minicab disappearing down the hill. A baby’s cry sounded through the cottage. She turned to go up the stairs.

The baby was heavy as he slept against her sweaty breast. Damson bent her head to kiss the top of his damp head and plodded onwards leaning on a stick she’d found beside the path. Baby on the front rucksack on the back balanced her but she was sinking into the ground with every step after a mile or so. Acclimatising herself to India by travelling around in the cooler hilly parts of Gujarat was all very well but a pushchair would have helped. Hiking with a baby was not one of her better ideas. When she could finally take both baby and rucksack off she seemed to float above the ground. It was almost worth it for the sensation.

The idea of travelling had begun to grow as soon as it became clear that Hari was an easy baby. Damson had become determined to cut loose from almost every aspect of the barren life she had built for herself at Fenning almost as soon as Leeta had erupted into her life.

She resigned from the practice and put Swine Cottage on the market. With plenty of savings and a young and portable baby to look after, travelling seemed obvious while she decided what to do next. Leeta’s physical presence had brought back memories of India and what had happened there. Why not return, carrying the triumphant end-product of that long-ago disaster, and consign the whole sorry business to the past where it belonged? She examined herself closely to make sure this was a reasonable thing to do. Without anyone she trusted with her secrets to advise her, she had to give herself permission.

If she was to go travelling with Hari, it was important to do so before he got mobile but after he had had his immunisations. She brushed up on how to keep him and herself safe, and gave him his antimalarial medication crushed up in his mashed banana. She would keep away from wet, mosquito-infested areas, and make for the airy hills as fast as she could. She bought a pop-up cradle with an integral mosquito net that had been impregnated with an effective insect repellant.

She arrived in the relatively cool month of February, travelling between places she hadn’t visited before in easy stages while she built up her courage for the main event. She always booked herself into the Ladies’ Carriage on any train. With the rise in what was innocuously called ‘Eve teasing’ – known in the West as sexual assault – she’d read in the
Times of India
that Ladies’ Carriages, which should have been phased out years before, were more in demand than ever. There was a long official notice nailed to the inside of the carriage door detailing what constituted harassment and promising that Indian Railways exercised zero tolerance. Even singing could be an assault.

When she’d gone back to Cambridge after Mellita was born, she’d taken the free self-defense classes for women undergraduates, determined never to be so vulnerable again. Tucked into the side pockets of her rucksack were two powerful chilli pepper sprays to deter both human and animal attacks. She imagined that she was too old to attract much attention as a woman this time but thought that being prepared did no harm.

Hari had been a great hit on trains, creating an instant and healthy bond with both women and men. Toothless grandfathers in enormous red
puggaris
had stretched out lean hands to touch the top of his head. Young men smiled and women melted at the sight of his large grey eyes fringed with thick dark lashes. She fished him out of his carrying pouch, and dandled him on her knee as much as she could, so he could wave and gurgle at other babies as well.

Damson noticed that many babies had large black spots painted on their faces like eighteenth-century court beauties and asked a friendly mother why. Instead of answering, she rummaged in her bag, bringing out a little pot of kohl. Dabbing her finger into it, she gestured for Damson to bring Hari closer to her. She made a nice round black mark on his golden cheek, saying: ‘He is very beautiful. You don’t want him to attract jealousy and the evil eye. I have made him ugly for you as a precaution.’

It was clear when she first arrived that while the women approved of Hari they thought she looked awful. The less polite sniggered and pointed, covering their mouths with the ends of their saris. It was beginning to make her self-conscious and she questioned why she should still dress in such an ugly way.

One incident in particular encouraged her at last to shed the sexless camouflage that was just a thoughtless habit now. Two women climbed into the same compartment, empty except for her and Hari, asleep on her lap. The older one appeared to be the younger woman’s chaperone, addressed as Auntie. They greeted Damson politely and peered with interest at Hari, asking how old he was and what was his good name?

Damson said, ‘Hari. He’s nearly five months old.’

Everyone smiled at his sweet sleeping face. The women got out the usual steel cups and tipped water straight down their throats without stopping to swallow. Damson had a large thermos of chilled boiled water for herself to which she’d added a pinch of salt and the juice of a
nimbu
or little green lemon. This enabled her to refuse their kind offers to share without feeling rude.

When he awoke, Hari requested in his own way to sit up with her hands supporting him, and he looked about with a great deal of interest, crowing his pleasure and smiling at his audience. Damson pointed out of the window.

‘Look, Hari, in the trees. Can you see the monkey?’

Hari was perfectly capable of responding to her suggestion, and his small behind wriggled on her knee as he swivelled round to look as she held him under the arms and bounced him gently.

She glanced at the girl, wearing for an everyday journey a fuchsia silk sari trimmed with silver threads. Damson had heard somewhere that fuchsia pink was the ‘navy blue of India’ – it was simply normal to look so glorious. The train had no corridor, so the two women were her companions until they reached the next station an hour away. The girl’s cap-sleeved blouse or
choli
, also pink, had silver rosebuds embroidered all over it. Her firm tummy showed above where her sari was meticulously pleated into the petticoat and the rest of the vivid fabric was thrown over one shoulder.

The girl’s auntie was dressed in dark green cotton with a geometric pattern in subtly glossy red silk woven into the selvedge. The older woman’s brown midriff emerged in two folds. Given the prevalence of ‘Eve teasing’ a chaperone was a vital necessity, just as this kind of protection had been needed in Europe in wilder, earlier times.

Damson glanced down at herself. On her feet were ugly greying trainers. Her legs were hairy as she never bothered to shave them. She wore men’s army surplus shorts that were much too big for her and had to be held up with a belt. Over the top she was wearing a baggy T-shirt. Nowhere on her person was the slightest expression of herself as a woman. No colour, no shape, no fold in any fabric, no suggestion of female softness or style. For the first time since she had dumped her femininity in her room at the Vhilaki Guest House, she desired something different. How ridiculous she was, thinking she could make the whole thing go away by dressing like a man.

She leaned towards the girl and said, ‘I love the colour of your sari. At what age do girls in India usually start wearing one?’

‘It varies,’ and the girl smiled and confided: ‘When I was fifteen, my mother was away, so I decided to try on one of her saris. I was so proud of myself when I had dressed up in it that I walked out into the town.’ She giggled, hiding her mouth behind her hand. ‘I thought people were staring at me because I looked so lovely and grown up. But the whole lot was trailing all down the street behind me. Now I always get Auntie to wrap my sari for me. She pulls the waistband really tight.’

The girl went on, ‘Sorry if you think I am rude, but I always wanted to know. Why do European women dress like men? Or like bad women?’

‘Do you think I look like a man?’ Damson asked.

‘No, you don’t look like a man,’ she hastened to add. ‘But it is not pretty what you are wearing, and your hair does not look nice. Doesn’t your husband mind?’

‘Hmmm,’ Damson glossed over the idea of a husband.

‘It’s practical, I suppose,’ she added, feeling ashamed as she remembered that even the women breaking stones to make roads wore saris, tucked up neatly out of their way, but still beautifully folded and often coloured. And other women wore
salwar kameez
– trousers with a tunic – with a
dupatta
or scarf thrown effortlessly over the shoulder, controlled with fluid gestures of their hands.

The conversation with the two women had resulted in the younger playing peek-a-boo with Hari, while Auntie wrapped a sari from their luggage around Damson, telling her how nice she looked in apricot. That was the beginning of a change which had been creeping towards her ever since Hari had been put into her arms. She began to experiment after that, buying some embroidered cotton
salwar kameez
.

Her hair started to grow out which looked awful. Instead of going to a barber as she usually did and getting it neatly shorn, she gritted her teeth and let it grow. She squeezed lemon juice on to it, and gradually it grew fairer in the sunshine. Holding a baby on her hip made her sway from side to side in a rocking motion that soothed him.

After a couple of weeks, she moved north, booking herself into the Vasa Hotel in Rikipur. Then it was just a matter of taking the little rack train up into the hills to Hunters’ Halt. When she booked her ticket, she’d found out that there was only the one day train these days, and you had to request a stop at Hunters’ Halt, otherwise the train just went straight on up to the old hill station of Girigarh. This chimed with the mysterious absence of the Vhilaki Guest House from the latest edition of the backpackers’ bible. She could find no trace of it anywhere on the web either, and when she had asked about it down in the town no one seemed to know what she was talking about.

Damson wasn’t planning to stay up there anyway. She’d left her big rucksack firmly padlocked to a staple in the wall of her room at the Vasa Hotel. She had just a light rucksack with her, with her chilli spray, changes of clothes, nappies, food, ready-to-feed formula and her thermos, plus Hari’s little pop-up cradle strapped to the top. She carried an emergency medical kit with her as well at all times, containing medication as well as disposable latex gloves and sterile syringes. In the peace and privacy of the empty carriage, on the final leg of her journey back into the past, she could feel herself tensing again. She examined herself for pain and scars from her last visit to the Vhilaki Guest House, and then glanced at Hari. Because she had him, it should be possible to close the loop whatever she found there. She realised she didn’t have any expectations. The demands of looking after a baby anywhere, let alone in India, were all-consuming and elbowed out other emotions.

Although it was already quite hot on the plain, even early in the morning, it grew cooler as they clanked slowly through the forest ever upwards, the sun dappling through the trees into the carriage. She’d popped up Hari’s little travel cradle and settled it on a plastic bag on the carriage floor, lifting him from his carrying pouch and laying him on the sheepskin inside that she used as a mattress.

After her visit to the Vhilaki Guest House, she planned to settle into a villa she had rented near the beach in Goa for a proper holiday. There she would see if she could experiment with getting some new Western-style women’s clothes made up from sari fabrics. She craved colour. Maybe she would have her eyebrows and legs threaded. She sighed when she thought of the prettiness of sheer youth that she’d wasted with her stubborn concealment. Drifting and dreaming in this novel world of womanhood, she was brought back to the present by Hari grumbling.

She rubbed antibacterial gel onto her hands and took out and opened a bottle of ready-made formula. She screwed a sterile disposable teat to the neck and then unzipped the mosquito net to lift Hari out, settling him into the crook of her left elbow to feed. Mothering Hari never failed to give her intense pleasure – a joy she’d believed would never be hers as she moved into her forties – even when he woke her several times in the early nights.

He was not at all what she’d assumed babies were like. But then she was so completely his that he had nothing to complain about and enjoyed an excellent digestion. The trouble with being a GP is that she had experienced far too many sick, miserable babies, rather than healthy, happy ones.

She reminded herself regularly that her daughter could change her mind months or even years down the track. Damson was irretrievably bound with hoops of steel to her grandchild so it made no difference when this happened. She told herself that this was Leeta’s absolute right although she trembled at the prospect.