Tikkipala (2 page)

When the Raja and Ranee of Bidwar arrived, a European girl with very long legs and wearing a dress so short that it stopped before it reached her knees, rushed to the car.

‘I'm Daisy and you must be Sangita. Welcome to our home. Pa says you are exactly my age.' She said excitedly. She ignored the Raja

On Daisy's head was what looked like a golden Roman helmet, fitting tightly round her face and from which sprouted a single long feather. Round her neck she
wore a necklace so long that it reached below the hem of her minuscule dress. On her feet she wore a pair of golden high heeled shoes.

Before the waiting bearer had time to do so, Daisy had whisked the car door open on Sangita's side.

‘Come on. Get out. I can't wait to get to know you. It's been awful, living here all this time with everybody old enough to be my granddad.' She gave the Raja a quick glance and laughed. She did not seem to notice the Raja's glare of fury.

As Sangita got out, shrouded in her sari and heavy jewels, Daisy was still jabbering on, ‘there's a marvellous tennis court here, but everyone is so old. I don't want to play tennis with a lot of old men. So I hope you play tennis. And there's a swimming pool too. Do you swim?' She did not wait for Sangita's answers as though these questions were merely rhetorical and Sangita, because she was as young as Daisy, would be sure to answer ‘yes' to everything.

Later, seated in the grand drawing room and sipping chilled sherbet served by the uniformed butler, Sangita looked away each time Daisy was forced to tweak down her tight and tiny skirt. She had never, in her whole life, seen so much of a woman's body. When Sangita dared peep again, Daisy was laughing, her blue eyes sparkling, as though she found Sangita's embarrassment funny.

While Sangita's husband and Daisy's father talked about important things, Daisy came over sat beside Sangita.

‘Your clothes are darling,' she said with a laugh, taking up a pinch of the heavy silk in her fingers. ‘I do like them.' Her nails were long and painted with crimson varnish. ‘But aren't they rather hot in this weather?' Daisy's laughing mouth was crimson too painted with bright lipstick. Although she was clearly a girl in every other way, her breasts were as flat as those of a young boy's. Later she would tell Sangita that this
was because she wore a hand towel pinned tightly round her chest to press her bosom down.

‘I like your clothes too,' murmured Sangita and then glanced nervously in the direction of her husband.

As they left, Daisy told the Raja, ‘You've got to let your wife come again tomorrow and play a game of tennis with me,' and when the Raja looked as though he was about to say ‘no' persisted, ‘Relations between Britain and India will suffer if you don't agree.'

The Raja winced.

The Collector said, ‘You will be doing us a great service, sir, for my daughter is feeling lonely without the company of other young people.'

‘If it will create good relations between your government and my country,' said the Raja stiffly, ‘then I suppose I must allow it.' And later told Sangita, ‘Remember that the Collector's daughter is an English girl and that their customs are different to ours. And also that she is of a lower class.'

Sangita persuaded her husband to let her wear a simple cotton sari on the day of the tennis game.

‘You will look like a peasant. What will they think?' he said at first.

‘I shall look ridiculous, all draped up as though I'm going to a wedding when Daisy's only got a short frock on,' Sangita argued.

Daisy threw her arms round Sangita when she arrived. ‘I didn't think you'd come. I thought they wouldn't let you because they'd think I was a bad influence.'

‘Why would they think that?'

‘My father said that the people here feel very shocked at the way we modern young people dress. He tried to get me to wear a longer skirt and to cover my arms when you and your father came the last time, but I wouldn't do it and he couldn't make me. I think you look super, by the way.'

This time Daisy wore a sleeveless muslin frock that hung straight from her shoulders to half way down her thighs. In strongly resembled, to Sangita's eyes, a rickshaw wallah's genji apart from the fact that it ended in a transparent fringe, was caught by a sash at the hips. Today Daisy wore no hat and Sangita did not need to keep her head covered either for there were no one around to whom she must show respect.

Daisy won easily. ‘I don't know how you managed at all with that sari on,' she said as they came, panting, off the court. ‘You would have beaten me if you'd been wearing trousers.'

They were sitting under the fan on the veranda drinking nimbu pani.

‘'Come. I'll teach you how to do the chachacha,' said Daisy. ‘Pull up your sari and I'll show you.'

Giggling at the thought of her husband's warnings, Sangita hitched her sari to her knees while Daisy wound up the gramophone and put a record on. ‘Come on, like this. Keep your knees together and swing your legs out to the side.' Round the veranda went the two of them, till at last their legs became tangled and they fell in a giggling heap on the floor.

Sangita discovered that there was only three weeks between their birthdays. They were both sixteen.

‘I can't believe you've got a baby already,' said Daisy. ‘I don't plan to even get married for years. I want to have lots of fun first. I must have still been at school when you got married.'

Sangita said nothing.

In the weeks that followed, Sangita and Daisy were often in each other's houses, playing tennis, dancing to the cranky old gramophone, or when the weather was too hot for such things, lying limp and luscious on the veranda under the noisy fan.

Daisy taught Sangita the latest popular songs from England and together they would sing ‘Joshua, gosh you are, better than lemon squash, you are,' or ‘Let him go and let him tarry, let him sink or let him swim. He doesn't care for me and I don't care for him.' ‘This is my favourite,' cried Daisy. ‘He flew through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze.'

‘They're all about men,' said Sangita.

‘So they are,' said Daisy. ‘I hadn't realised.'

She read Sangita bits out of the romantic books she had had sent out from England and the two of them would giggle and sigh as they imagined passionate kisses and men's hands fondling women's breasts.

Sangita had never before heard of such things even talked about, although Daisy assured her that English girls kissed boys all the time, even when they were not engaged to be married to them. ‘You should have seen what fun we had on the ship. I danced with a different boy every night and kissed nearly every one.'

‘Didn't your father mind?'

‘He didn't know.' She said suddenly, ‘Let's swop clothes. I want to see what you would look like if you were an English girl.'

Sangita felt a shiver of panic as she slipped into Daisy's tiny frock. Never in her life, not even in bed, had she worn something that showed so much leg. Then Sangita showed Daisy how to tie a sari and the two of them examined their reflections in the full length mirror and could not stop laughing.

‘You are absolutely beautiful,' said Sangita.

Daisy said, ‘The boy's on the ship would have gone wild with excitement if they saw you like this. You'd have been the prettiest girl on board.'

Sangita felt her face flush scarlet and seizing Daisy's dressing gown, swiftly wrapped herself in it and refused to emerge till Daisy returned her clothes.

‘Never tell my husband that I put your dress on,' she whispered as she prepared to go home.

‘Why don't you ever bring Anwar with you when you come to visit me?' Daisy asked.

‘My husband won't let me.'

‘Why on earth?' cried Daisy. ‘Surely the Raja can't think I would be able to corrupt a baby.'

Sangita explained that her husband, who was thirty years older than her, had been married before but Preeti died while giving birth to the little boy who died too. ‘Because of that, Anwar is very precious to my husband. He thinks I am irresponsible and says he is taking no risks with this son.'

‘I don't know why you let him bully you,' said Daisy.

‘All the way through my pregnancy my husband went on worrying in case the baby was a girl. Also there is a birth defect in his family. Boy babies are usually born with
a small red mark on their upper lip. My husband was very pleased that Anwar did not have it.'

‘I can't see what's so awful about a little mark,' said Daisy.

‘My husband says that a lot of the men in his family were born with the mark, and they all turned out to be drunkards.'

‘How amazing,' said Daisy.

Sangita wished that her husband did not adore Anwar so, for she hardly ever got a chance to have her baby to herself.

The Raja would sit by his son's cot for hours, pretending to read, but really taking frequent surreptitious peeps at the baby, as though to reassure himself that the child was real. When he worked in his office he would instruct the ayah to bring the cot and set it by his desk. Even when he went for walks round the gardens in the cool of the morning, he would often order the ayah to walk alongside carrying the child.

It was only in the afternoons, when the Raja took his lie-back, that Sangita truly felt that Anwar was hers.

When Daisy came to the Bidwar palace to visit, the two girls tickled, played with him and gave him sweeties till sugar juices ran down his chin, and his face became sticky.

The Raja told Sangita, after Daisy had gone, ‘My son might have become sick because of your feckless behaviour. This is exactly why I do not trust you with my son.'

When Daisy told Sangita that she was returning to England, to go to university, Sangita felt desolate.

‘Cheer up,' laughed Daisy, ‘I'm not going forever. I'll be back for the summer holidays.'

‘I bet you meet some young man, fall in love, never want to come back here again.'

Daisy looked haughty. ‘I have no intention of falling in love with anyone, ever. I am going to be my own woman. I shall have a career, look after myself and when I have money, spend it all on me. And fun.'

‘What about babies? Wouldn't you like babies?'

‘I adore Anwar, as you know, but I just don't seem to have the mothering instinct.'

‘It might come later,' suggested Sangita.

‘Never,' said Daisy.

After she had gone Sangita counted the days till her friend would return.

Although the Raja was doing his nightly best to produce another son, Sangita did not get pregnant.

‘It is this moping around, wishing for the tennis games and such childish pursuits that is preventing it,' he said at last. ‘We will go up to the mountain palace and perhaps the mountain air will improve your health and aid conception. Hopefully this time you will not be so nauseous.' The year before, when she was pregnant with Anwar, she had been sick about twenty times on the steep and winding journey to the Parwal palace.

The Raja was right. Sangita's spirits did start reviving on the journey into the Parwal hills, and the aching longing for Daisy began to diminish a little. This time she did not suffer from nausea and, because the Raja sat in front with the driver, instructing, directing and reprimanding, Sangita, in the back, was able to cuddle her baby.

As she nibbled her lips gently over Anwar's fluffy head or stroked the luscious smoothness of his pristine feet, the Raja would be telling the driver, ‘Don't drive so fast, you fool,' or ‘Are you blind or something? Do you not see that buffalo?' Gently Sangita would press her child's cheek to her own, while the Raja shouted, ‘Why are you crawling like a snail? Do you think this is a European funeral?' All his concentration was on the faults of the driver so she could enjoy her baby as much as she liked.

And even when they arrived at the hill palace at last, Sangita still was allowed to keep Anwar in her arms, for the Raja, who was an amateur geologist, said that as soon as he had had a shower, he would go up the mountain to collect crystals before the last of the light had gone.

When he had left, she asked one of the palace servants to bring her a chair, and with her baby across her lap, sat watching the sun dip quickly in a blaze of scarlet and purple. The baby fell asleep and the light of the setting sun illuminated his face, so that he glowed like a little god.

‘I am in love,' she thought, watching the tiny breaths quivering his baby nostrils and his petal shaped mouth wrinkle as it dreamt of suckling ‘These feelings, the shining warmth inside my heart and the stealthy tickling that is wandering through my body must be what women feel when they fall in love with a man. This must be the thing they wrote about in those books Daisy read to me.' And she thought again of the wild kisses, the uncontrollable longings, the life without meaning when the loved one is lost.

‘If I lost my baby,' thought Sangita. ‘My life would lose all meaning too.'

There came a series of shrieks, piercing, high and human sounding, from the high jungle and the baby woke with a jerk and started crying.

Sangita, holding Anwar to her heart, peered into the distance. But the sun had set behind the mountains and the jungle had become clapped into darkness.

The screams stopped very suddenly, as though chopped off. As though a throat had been bitten.

Shakily, hugging the baby, Sangita ran though the palace till she found her husband who had just returned from a mountain side search.

‘It is only the call of some wild animal,' he told her sternly. ‘You are unused to the ways of the country otherwise you would not be so agitated and your nervousness is transmitting itself to my son. Give him to me that I may soothe him.'

Reluctantly she passed the baby over and promised herself that in future she would not let the Raja see if she was startled.