The Crow Eaters (24 page)

PUTLI and Jerbanoo had almost identical fantasies about the land of their rulers. Their thrill was imaginative. They envisaged an orderly kingdom under the munificent authority of a British monarch based on their knowledge of the gigantic statue of Queen Victoria, cast in gun-metal and protected by a canopy of marble, in the centre of the garden in Charing Cross in Lahore. Her gun-metal Majesty had austere features and imposing rolls of flesh. She had a crown on her head and was carrying an orb and a sceptre. Her steel-trimmed mantle flowed voluminously about the throne.

Then there was the marble sculpting of the Consort astride his towering horse: bearded, haughty-eyed, a sheathed sword resting aslant his high-fitted boots.

To them England was a land of crowns and thrones; of tall, splendidly attired, cool-eyed noblemen and imposing, fair-haired ladies gliding past in gleaming carriages; of elegant lords in tall hats and tails, strolling with languid ladies who swept spotless waterfront promenades with trailing gowns, their gestures gracious and charming, marked by an exquisite reserve.

Had someone suggested to them that Englishmen, too, defecate, they might have said, ‘Of course … they have to, I suppose,’ and their exalted opinions would have been touched by doubt. But since such suggestions were not ventured, the England of their imaginings was burnished to an antiseptic gloss that had no relation to menial human toil.

When they boarded the ship at Bombay in November, a month after Freddy’s dulcet gesture, their pulses throbbed
enchantedly – I am going to England! I am going to England!

As the ship neared their destination Jerbanoo’s heart expanded with mounting elation. She strutted about the deck, thrusting out her seal-like overcoated chest, and Faredoon found her supercilious expression painful to behold.

The effect of their imminent arrival on Putli was exactly the reverse. She shrank into herself, alarmed at the prospect of associating with a race so awe-inspiring and splendid. Her mouth pressed into a thin anxious line, her face compressed into a sharp triangle, and her eyes became more staring and humourless than ever. She snapped nervously at Freddy at the slightest pretext.

They had had their first disturbing confrontation with reality on the ship when they beheld Englishmen scour the decks and wait upon them. Within two days of landing in London their disillusionment was complete.

They saw grubby Englishmen, in ill-fitted woollen garments, scurry past with faces that betokened a concern with the ordinary aspects of life. They saw meek, unassuming men with mournful, retiring eyes; and men with the sly, cheeky eyes of street urchins. They saw seedy looking Englishmen sweep roads, clean windows and cart garbage. They met sales girls, clerks and businessmen; all English, all white-skinned and light-eyed, on a footing of disconcerting equality. And the expression on the faces of Londoners was no different from that stamped on the faces of a cross-section of India. Where were the kings and queens, the lords and ladies and their gleaming carriages? Where were the men and women with haughty, compelling eyes and arrogant mien? They realised in a flash that the superiority the British displayed in India was assumed, acquired from the exotic setting, like their tan.

Above all, they saw Mr Charles P. Allen, on whose household they descended, scrub out his toilet bowl with a little, long-handled brush. This was the final blow! This, and the fact that Mrs Allen had no servants except for an insolent and slovenly maid who came for an hour each morning.

Mr Allen had invited the Junglewallas to stay with them. Mrs Allen, having lived long enough in India for a glimpse of its domestic intricacies, was justifiably apprehensive. Their children, Barbara and Peter, were married and living separately in London.

Mrs Allen had changed greatly since they last remembered her in Lahore. Her stylish langour and patronising air as a Commissioner’s wife were replaced by the bustling abstraction of an overworked housewife. Her blue eyes were diffident, her face beginning to show a pallid large-nosed gauntness. She had permed her hair into a dull-red fuzz.

Mr Allen’s corpulence was less abundant, and the beguiling flash of pink thigh tragically sealed up in flannel knickerbockers.

They lived in a square grey stone house in a row of similar houses in Finsbury Park. The house had the complicated and ingeniously contrived levels that can only be found in England. The three or four top levels and the attic were let to students. Mr and Mrs Allen occupied the ground floor and the Junglewallas were given two rooms on the half-landing to the first floor.

The hosts were overwhelmingly hospitable. Their guests charmed and overwhelmed – except Jerbanoo.

She could not reconcile herself to what she considered Mrs Allen’s treacherous degradation. She remembered her surrounded by lackeys trained to jump to her bidding. She recalled her parties on flower banked lawns. And just as she could not relate the superior Mrs Allen to the inconsequential drudge doing all the dirty housework, so she could not reconcile her fantasies of England to the commonplace Londoners. She felt greatly betrayed. Her idols toppled, as it were, with a thunderous crash, leaving nothing but a pulverised residue of contempt! Scorn that turned up her nose in the air and her mouth down at the corners! She maintained this disdainful expression throughout her stay in London.

Poor Mrs Allen, closeted with Jerbanoo while the household frolicked about London, received the full blast of her
scorn. Soon Jerbanoo felt it demeaning to address such an inconsequential person as ‘Mrs Allen’, and took to calling her hostess ‘May-ree’. Mr Allen became ‘Charlie’.

Mr Allen, Faredoon and Putli went to lectures, to the theatre and sight-seeing and shopping from dawn to dusk. Jerbanoo, unable to stand the pace, went with them occasionally in the evening. She spent her time at the house tormenting Mrs Allen, meddling with her chores and generally making herself obnoxious.

Every morning she descended from the half-landing with cautious leaden thumps that boomed up to the attic, and Mrs Allen’s heart sank. Jerbanoo would waddle into the kitchen and thrust an armful of clothes at Mrs Allen. ‘Here, May-ree. You wash little little?’

Then she would step back into the dining room, drag a chair a few belaboured inches to the tiny fire-grate and shout, ‘May-ree! Stool!’

Having appropriated the best chair in the room, and the entire warmth of the grate for the day, Jerbanoo raised her legs to the stool. Muffled in woolly scarves and cardigans, she proceeded to issue orders.

‘May-ree, tea!’ After the breakfast tray was lapped up, ‘Finish! Take away!’

And if a rare sun was out, ‘May-ree, sun, sun! I out.’ Mary, trailed by Jerbanoo, would carry the chair out, pop in and fetch the stool.

If nothing else, Jerbanoo certainly exercised her smattering of English monosyllables, and by the time she left England she was able to construct adequate small sentences.

Mary, obliged to be dutiful at her husband’s insistence, accommodated the old lady. She was a naturally easy-going person, worn placid by her stay in India. There she had also absorbed a compelling sense of Indian hospitality that is both profuse and slavish. She was willing to indulge her guests.

But Jerbanoo did not content herself with merely making demands. She meddled. ‘Why you not make curry today?’
‘Why you not cut onion proper?’ ‘Why you not rinse O.K.? I not drink with soap!’ ‘No chilli? I no digest!’

Sometimes her remarks were India-personal, India-insulting: ‘Why you not wear nice long gown? Silly frock. It shows you got a terrible leg.’ ‘Why you not have bath! Water bite you?’ ‘You sit, you drink tea-cup every two, two minutes. Mind, demon of laziness make your bottom fat.’ And once, ‘Why you got no breast?’ she asked, reproachfully thrusting her own abundance forward and patting Mary’s flat chest. ‘Not good. Poor Charlie!’

Jerbanoo touched, tampered, and tinkered with everything, poking her inquisitive nose into cupboards, drawers and larder, drawing things out for inspection. Often she summoned Mary from her work to inquire. ‘May-ree! May-ree! What is this?’

At the end of two months Mary’s patience wore thin.

The rain had not let up for four days. It had been a particularly trying day. Mary unwisely tried to counter the offensive by adopting Jerbanoo’s methods: ‘Why you so fat?’ she fired. ‘Why you so meddlesome? Why you so lazy?’ and Jerbanoo snubbed her by snapping: ‘Why you poke your nose into me, Miss?’

Jerbanoo called Mrs Allen ‘Miss’ whenever she wished to be especially offensive.

A little later, when Mrs Allen bent forward to adjust the fire, Jerbanoo jacked up her skirt with a fork from the dining table to examine her underwear.

Mrs Allen snapped around, whipped the fork from her hand and stood red-faced and glowering. She was trembling, too enraged to utter a word.

‘Shame, shame, shame! You wearing such a small knicker!’ tut-tutted Jerbanoo.

That evening Mr Allen knocked anxiously on the locked door of his bedroom, a door that had never before been locked, and discovered his wife in hysterics. The next day he had a quiet little chat with Faredoon. ‘It’s not that we don’t like your mother-in-law, old chap. It’s just that she keeps
Mary at her beck and call. You know, things are different here – we don’t have bearers and chokra-boys. The old dear just doesn’t understand. And,’ he said, lowering his voice and blushing solemnly, ‘I’m afraid, she gets a bit personal every now and again.’

‘My dear friend, don’t speak one more word. I understand. It will be fixed!’ assured Faredoon.

Jerbanoo was banished to her room on the middle landing. She was allowed down only when Faredoon or Putli were in the house.

That evening when the decision was conveyed to her Jerbanoo descended for supper in a huff. She dragged her slippered feet more than usual, sniffed, moaned, snorted, and sat down making as much noise as possible.

Mrs Allen’s face was red and puffed. She met nobody’s eye and spoke primly, and only when absolutely necessary.

Mr Allen carved the roast. He stood to dish it out and he served Jerbanoo a generous helping of beef, gravy and potatoes.

Jerbanoo glared at the mealy potatoes as if they were cockroaches. She stabbed them with a fork and set them aside on her sideplate with a sour expression of implacable displeasure.

The atmosphere round the dining table was strained. Putli sat mute and staring. Faredoon and Mr Allen attempted to converse with a heartiness that did not ring true.

Mary and Putli got up to clear the dishes. Her stomach full, Jerbanoo sat in slightly mollified umbrage before her mess of bread crumbs and spilled gravy.

‘Why don’t you help clear the table?’ asked Faredoon. ‘Your legs been amputated or something?’

Jerbanoo flashed him a look of pure venom. ‘Why you always poke your damn nose into me, Mister! Why?’ she bawled.

But Faredoon was more able to cope with her questions than poor Mrs Allen had been. He directed a rebuking, lawyer-like finger at her. ‘Because you like to poke your
goddam nose into everybody’s business! Tell me, you don’t cook, you don’t wash, you don’t help at all – you are a no good guest … Why?’

‘I have a chance? No. I never have chance!’

‘All right then. I give you your chance. Tomorrow you do all the cooking.’

Mary, overhearing the conversation in the kitchen, cried: ‘Oh no! There’s no need for her to cook, really.’ She was horrified at the thought of the devastation Jerbanoo would wreak in her kitchen.

‘O yes, yes!’ called Faredoon. ‘She will give you a holiday … you two visit your children.’

Mary would not have it. But Charles later persuaded her to change her mind. They would spend Saturday with their daughter, and invite both Barbara, Peter, and their families to a dinner cooked by Jerbanoo.

There were four days to Saturday.

The morning after Mrs Allen rebelled, she once again heard the dreaded thuds on the staircase. She was aghast. She rushed to the landing and beheld Jerbanoo almost halfway down.

‘No! Get back! Back to your room, back!’ she squealed with such firmness and ferocity that Jerbanoo’s advance was checked.

Mary stood at the bottom of the staircase waving her hands. ‘Up you go. Up! Up!’ and Jerbanoo turning submissively, lumbered up to her room.

In the evening Jerbanoo declared that she was homesick. She missed her grandchildren. They must return at once. She could not bear the cold any further.

‘I want to go back to my Lahore. I don’t want to die in a foreign land,’ she declared, whenever she got hold of Putli or Faredoon alone.

Saturday came. Mr and Mrs Allen drove away to spend the day at Barbara’s. Putli remained in the house to assist her mother, and Freddy did the shopping. Putli’s assistance consisted of preparing the entire dinner. Jerbanoo directed,
and messed up pans. Curry rice, a sweet-sour and spicy shrimp stew, and onion salad were ready. Only the cutlets remained to be fried.

Jerbanoo, ready an hour before their guests were due, descended to fry the cutlets.

She fried half the lot and placed the dish on the dining table.

The meaty fumes, drifting up the house, penetrated Faredoon’s nostrils and teased his appetite. His stomach growled. He came down, tip-toed into the dining room and began eating the cutlets. Halfway through the fourth he was caught red-handed. Jerbanoo stood like a grisly and hostile apparition in the kitchen door.

Faredoon wiped his mouth guiltily. ‘Umm, nice cutlets,’ he gurgled, attempting flattery.

Jerbanoo, eyes glowering, smoking frying-pan in hand, remained motionless and avenging in the kitchen door.

Faredoon turned and retreated up to his lair.

The obese apparition advanced to the dining table and stuffed its mouth with cutlets.

When the door-bell rang Faredoon and Putli were still upstairs. Jerbanoo opened the door partially, and presenting a most injured face to the party stranded outside in the bitter wind, said, ‘He eat up all and all of my cutlace!’

It was beginning to snow.

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Allen trying to edge past Jerbanoo. ‘You haven’t met Peter’s wife, have you? Sheila, meet Mr Junglewalla’s mother-in-law.’