Teatime for the Firefly (28 page)

Mrs. McIntyre got news of our roof collapse and sent us sandwiches through her driver. Manik returned from Mariani at lunchtime to find the house pell-mell. That day the servants killed twenty-nine baby kraits and days later they were still showing up in odd places. We even found one quietly curled on top of a record jacket right on Frank Sinatra’s face, looking exactly like a mustache.

Since we had no roof over our heads, Manik and I moved into the guest room—the one with the hole in the floor. Halua, Kalua and Potloo spent the better part of the night clearing out Manik’s hunting junk so that we could sleep. It was well after midnight when we finally went to bed.

CHAPTER 26

Aynakhal

24th April 1946

Dear Dadamoshai,

I know you must be worried hearing about the earthquake. The epicenter was thirty miles from Aynakhal. But we are all safe. Our
Chung
bungalow withstood the tremors fairly well, considering how old it is. The only damage was that a part of the roof in our bedroom caved in. Huge mounds of moldy thatch everywhere! The roofs of these old-style bungalows are very heavily thatched to keep out all the rain we get here and sometimes the beams rot and give way. This is common. Oh, and the biggest dilemma of all! Our bungalow was crawling with snakes—banded kraits! They are extremely venomous. Halua and Potloo have killed more than two dozen so far.

The Jardine Henley director flew in today from Calcutta to do garden inspection. You will never guess who it is? James Lovelace! Charlie, the Jardine’s pilot, flew the small yellow Cessna low over our bungalow so Mr. Lovelace could see the damage to our roof. I was in the bedroom at the time and waved at them through the hole in the thatch. It was very surreal. The McIntyres are throwing a cocktail party for James Lovelace this evening, so I will get to meet him finally.

Several other Jardine Henley gardens in the Mariani district have been badly damaged. The Dega factory has collapsed, damaging all the machinery. In other tea gardens, labor lines have been flattened and there is a substantial loss of life and livestock. The aftermath is even more horrific, because a deadly outbreak of cholera has crippled the workforce in many gardens.

I must get ready for the party now, Dadamoshai. I will give this letter to Charlie to post from Calcutta. It seems like letters take a shorter time to reach Silchar from Calcutta than they do from the gardens.

My love to you,

Layla

James Lovelace was a tall, bony man with a Van Dyke beard. He looked like an old-fashioned count. He was the brother of Estelle Lovelace, Dadamoshai’s English sweetheart from his Cambridge days, and had known my grandfather as a young man.

“What was my grandfather like when he was young?” I asked him.

We were chatting in the smoking room of the McIntyres’ bungalow, a large study-cum-library with teak paneling and a stone fireplace. Long shelves of books lined the walls. A tiger skin complete with a monstrous head and glassy yellow eyes was spread across the wooden floor. On one wall was a large framed photograph of a group of Scottish highlanders in their tartan kilts standing stiffly, their guns by their sides.
Gordon Highlanders, 1932
was inscribed at the bottom. A military sporran with long hairy, tasseled tails and a crested metal insignia hung on a hook to one side of the photograph. Everything about the room was warm, woodsy and manly.

“Ah, Biren Roy,” James Lovelace reminisced, swirling the brandy in his snifter.

Biren Roy.
I sometimes forgot my grandfather even had a real name. Everybody just called him the Rai Bahadur. “He was quite a firecracker even back in those days. An excellent debater. You could tell Biren Roy was destined for great things.”

James Lovelace remarked he was surprised Estelle and Dadamoshai never married. They had exchanged letters for several years after Dadamoshai returned to India. It was Estelle who told him about Dadamoshai’s educational work in Silchar. “She was very excited to hear I reconnected with Biren.”

“Perhaps you could persuade her to visit India,” I suggested.

“Well, it’s certainly a possibility.” James Lovelace smiled, stroking his beard. “My daughter Bridgette is doing her doctorate in Colonial History, and she plans to visit India next spring. I’ll ask Estelle if she wants to come along.”

I smiled at the thought of Dadamoshai reunited with his old flame. I was sure he still harbored tender feelings because when I once asked him about Estelle, Dadamoshai had acted surprisingly boyish and shy.

Ian McIntyre joined us. He was a stocky man in his late fifties, brusque and bushy-eyed, dressed in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches over a white shirt with no tie. He was unmistakably an army man.

“Hello, Layla,” he said, removing the curved Dunhill pipe from his mouth. “I hope you are doing a good job keeping our man Deb in check.”

“Oh, I thought that was your job, Mr. McIntyre,” I quipped.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” guffawed Mr. McIntyre. “Been complaining about me, has he? Hey, Deb!” he called across the room.

Manik, who was leaning against the mantel chatting with Larry, sidled up, meek and respectful.

“You’ve been complaining about me to your wife, I hear?”

Manik looked discomfited, as if he had swallowed a marble. “S-sir?” His eyes darted at me nervously. It obviously didn’t take much from Mr. McIntyre to turn my husband into a babbling wreck.

“Oh, never mind.” Mr. McIntyre laughed amiably, giving Manik a thump on the back, causing him to teeter forward a little. “Let’s just both keep him on a tight leash, shall we, Layla?”

Larry was talking to a dark-haired man wearing a fashionable dinner jacket. I recognized him as the stranger at Flint’s house the night I dragged Manik home. The man had the slink of an alley cat. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Larry, as usual, looked slightly disheveled, with his dark curly hair and sleepy blue eyes. He waved us over.

“I don’t know if you’ve met Charlie,” he said, introducing us.

Charlie threw up his hands. “Please don’t shoot me—I am only the pilot!” he cried in mock terror.

Manik grinned. “Charlie has the most enviable job in the world. He flies around in his little yellow Cessna...”

“And gets cozy with dishy air hostesses in Calcutta,” added Larry.

Charlie gave a crooked smile. “What are you whinging about, mate? Give me a
chowkri
with a
tokri
any day.” He looked at me with a straight, hard gaze that made me slightly self-conscious. “Pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Layla. The last time I saw you, you were hauling off our Cinderella without his shoe. I hope he got the lashing he deserved.”

“Lashing for what?” cried Manik, indignantly. “I am innocent.”

“I’ll vouch for Manny,” said Larry. “Charlie tried every trick to tempt Manny, but the fellow held on to his chastity for dear life.”

“You know how I hate losing,” drawled Charlie, “so I’ve kept your shoe as a trophy, old chap. I think I’ll hang it off the tail of the Cessna for good luck. Indian style.”

“You bugger!” Manik aimed a mock punch at him, but Charlie nimbly skipped out of the way.

“I’ll give your shoe back,” Charlie whispered huskily in Manik’s ear, “if you find me a bedfellow like your one.” He said it just loud enough for me to overhear.

Manik laughed, a happy boyish laugh. His gaze lingered on my mouth and I saw the heat rise in his eyes. Charlie’s flirting fueled my husband’s ardor, it seemed.

Charlie cleared his throat. “Easy now,” he murmured. The man did not miss much.

A turbaned bearer was holding out a tray with triangular pieces of toast topped with spiced chicken.

“Nowhere in Calcutta will you find tasty
sikkins
like here in the tea gardens,” said Larry.

“Tasty sikkins?”
Charlie quirked an eyebrow and gave him a naughty look. “Am I missing something, old chap?”

“You dirty-minded bastard.” Larry pointed at him with his toast. “
Sikkins
are appetizers—that’s what they call them in tea lingo. A
borchee-khana
specialty.”

“Ah,” said Charlie, looking disappointed.

“Try these shammi kebabs with the mint chutney,” said Manik, as the second tray came around. “They are my favorite.”

“My favorite
sikkins
is not here,” said Larry, looking around. “Where is Debbie Ashton?”

“The Ashtons may not come today,” said Manik. “Both Ash and Jimmy O’Connor have their hands full with the rhino case.”

“What rhino case?” asked Charlie, taking a bite of the kebab. “God almighty, this
is
spicy!”

“I’m surprised you have not heard about it, old chap, considering you land right on the Dega airstrip,” said Larry.

“We flew in late this afternoon,” said Charlie. “Mr. Lovelace drove straight to the Gilroys and dropped me off at Flint’s on the way. So no, I’ve not heard about the rhino. Did Jimmy O’Connor shoot one?”

“It’s not that simple,” said Larry, wiping a greasy finger on his dinner jacket. “There’s a big male rhino creating havoc in Dega. You know the earthquake we just had? It’s common for wild animals to get disoriented and wander into tea plantations after one of those. We just chase them out when that happens.”

“Dega borders the Kaziranga game sanctuary, doesn’t it?” asked Charlie. “I know Kaziranga is famous for its one-horned rhino. They are an endangered species, I believe.”

“That’s right. Anyway, this rhino wandered into the tea plantation and instead of chasing it out, the laborers unwittingly drove the rhino deeper. Now it’s wedged between the tea bushes, causing serious damage to that section. It’s a belligerent animal and charges at the slightest provocation.”

“Maybe I should offer to fly over it with the Cessna and shoo it out? That should be interesting.”

“It won’t work,” said Manik. “Chances are the rhino will panic and injure itself and cause more damage to the tea bushes. It is in too deep and it can’t get out by itself. This is a very serious problem. Thanks to this mess, tea plucking in Dega has come to a near standstill.”

“So what is going to happen now?” asked Charlie.

“The easiest solution is of course to shoot the animal,” said Larry. “Jimmy, as you know, would have wasted no time to do this. But Sircar the Forest Officer meanwhile got wind of the situation and sent him an official notice warning him that killing a one-horned rhino, an endangered species, is a criminal violation. So now the only option Jimmy has is to trap the animal and relocate it back to Kaziranga. But instead of dealing with Sircar he used his company connections to get the trapping permit directly from the Central Forest Department in Calcutta, bypassing Sircar’s authority altogether—giving him the royal snub, so to say.”

“That worries me,” said Manik, thoughtfully. “I would be very careful dealing with Sircar. He’s a snake in the grass, if there ever was one. Sircar is a petty man with a king-size ego, and he can make endless trouble.”

Larry shrugged. “There’s not much he can do, can he? Jimmy has his permit. He’s following the law.”

“So how are they going to trap the rhino?” I asked. All three men turned to look at me in surprise. As usual I had been listening quietly, unobserved.

“The same way you’d trap any creature, I’d imagine,” purred Charlie, giving me a loaded look. “Stealth and cunning.”

Larry, oblivious to the undercurrents, piped up earnestly, “Not just stealth and cunning, old chap—there’s a fair amount of planning and logistics involved. You have to dig a pit, camouflage the top and drive the rhino toward it and make sure it falls in. The pit has to be measured and carefully constructed. It can’t be too deep because then rhino might get injured. Also getting it out will be difficult.”

“So how do you get it out, anyway? The damn thing probably weighs as much as the Cessna,” said Charlie.

“We use trained elephants,” said Manik. “Once the rhino is in the pit, we let down a bamboo ramp and use ropes and elephants to guide it out. It’s a complicated and tricky procedure, but it has been done before. Rupali, our Aynakhal elephant, is very experienced in this kind of thing. She will lead the whole operation.”

“It sounds bloody complicated, if you ask me,” said Charlie.

“Put it that way...it’s not simple,” said Manik. “Things can go wrong.”

Who knew
how
complicated it would be? You can plan an operation down to the minutest detail, get all the manpower, permits, tractors and elephants you need, but all it takes is a tiny shift in the universe to make things go wrong. Very, very wrong, as we would soon find out.

* * *

Three weeks passed. It was close to midnight when we got home from the Mariani Club. The full moon cast a waxy glow in the bedroom through the translucent sari curtains. We were still sleeping in the spare room. It would take another week for the roof repair in the master bedroom to be complete.

For some reason, I slept uneasily in that guest room. There was that dreadful hole in the floorboard, for one, temporarily patched up with a thin piece of plywood with the white chalk square clearly visible in the dark. Sometimes at night I imagined I heard dull thudding sounds coming from below. There was also the cloying smell of some oily chemical Manik used to clean his guns that bothered me. The bed was smaller, too: cozy to make love in, but some nights I would wake to find Manik spread-eagled, hogging the entire bed, and me pushed to one skinny corner like a discarded chicken bone on a dinner plate. This was one of those nights. Once awake, I found I could not go back to sleep. The gossip I heard at the Mariani Club that evening kept going through my mind. The latest news about Jimmy O’Connor was very disturbing. From what I could gather, a chain of rather bizarre events had catapulted the rhino case into a full-blown catastrophe, and Jimmy O’Connor had inadvertently walked into his own trap.

At first everything was going nicely according to plan, it seems. The trapping permit procured, the rhino was temporarily barricaded and the pitfall trap measured and dug out. Tea bushes were cleared to create a straight path leading up to it. All three neighboring gardens—Chulsa, Aynakhal and Kotalgoorie—pitched in with tractors, manpower and elephants. Manik was over at Dega most days and kept me updated on the operation.

On the day before the trapping, a group of laborers led by the Headman of Dega Tea Estate approached Jimmy O’Connor and begged him to reschedule the operation. It was unlucky Tuesday, they said, and that portended a disaster. Jimmy, of course, had little time for cosmic portents and hocus-pocus. The planets had never stood in his way; he usually pushed past them. But it did not happen this time.