fell suddenly, the sun extinguished in a few fiery minutes. The bats came out. Fireflies began to dance among the silhouettes of trees. Behind her the lights came on in the Hatibari. She began to hear people calling her from the house. Never before had she stayed here after dark. Footsteps running over the paths. People calling, calling.
She held the baby tightly to her body, kept quite still and waited. She did not know what to do.
Her mother and Boodi Ayah were coming closer, shouting, ‘Koonty, Koonty, Koonty.’ Her mother was saying, ‘Sometimes she goes down there by the river, but she surely wouldn’t be there now, in the dark, when you have no idea who might be on the water.’
The household had been so absorbed in the news they had heard on the radio that they had not realised that Koonty was still outside. There was a fear of all-out war with Pakistan who had, that day, made an illegal military attempt to grab the Indian state of Kashmir. But now the worry about Koonty had made them forget about war and rush panicking around the estate, searching for the missing daughter.
Their voices came closer and Koonty gripped the child and felt dazed with fear. Then they began to move off again, their voices growing distant. ‘Perhaps she’s in the rose garden. Go and look there, Boodi.’
A little later, hurricane lamps and men’s voices. Her mother talking too loudly because she was afraid. ‘The only place left is the river. I am terrified that she has fallen in. Even though she can swim, this river is deceptive. The current can be very strong even for a healthy girl.’
The voice of the young zamindar. ‘Give me the lamp. I will go and look there.’ Her husband-to-be coming to where she sat with the Sun God’s baby in her lap. She could see, reflected in the river water, the swinging light approaching.
‘Koonty, Koonty,’ called the young man who was to marry her. He was getting very close. She could tell them that she had found the baby at the river’s edge. She could tell them it was a villager’s baby and she was only holding it for a moment. He was quite near now. At any moment he would see her sitting here. She could hear his panting breath. She could see his face gleaming in the lamplight. The young zamindar found her there, standing knee-deep in the river.
‘Why are you crying, Koonty? What’s the matter?’ Pandu kept asking her as he helped her back to the house. ‘You are shivering all over and wet from head to toe. Whatever have you been doing all this time? We have all been worried sick about you.’ He tried to hug her but she shook his arms off. ‘Come on, Miss Koonty,’ he whispered. ‘Tell your Pandu what’s the matter.’
After a while, when she only wept and would not speak he became angry. ‘You are hiding something. It’s those village boys, isn’t it? I heard them shouting. Have you been talking to them? I should have listened to your mother. She always said it was not proper for you to be roaming round the estate without a chaperone. She always said you’d turn out like your sister.’ All the way back to the Hatibari and even after they got inside, he kept on, sometimes trying to console her incomprehensible grief, sometimes raging against the suspected deception or infidelity. ‘You are going to be my wife. You should have some consideration. Don’t cry, my sweet. Here, wipe your face on the corner of my shawl.’
Later he told her mother, ‘She was trying to rescue a kitten, I think, though I can’t get her to talk about it.’ He felt he was doing well, impressing the mother with what an understanding husband he was going to be. ‘I heard something. A sound of mewing in the water.’
‘She was always very kind to animals,’ said Koonty’s mother and secretly thought that perhaps the zamindar’s family would be satisfied with a smaller dowry, now that they had discovered what a compassionate bride they were getting. ‘She would sacrifice herself for some small creature.’
Later the young zamindar presented Koonty with a kitten, but at the sight of the furry mewling thing she began to cry and thrust it from her. ‘Take it away. I don’t even want to look at it.’
2 A LITTLE SUIT OF SHINING ARMOUR
Bowed with drops of toil and languor, low, a chariot driver came, Loosely held his scanty garment and a staff upheld his frame. Karna now a crowned monarch to the humble Suta fled, As a son unto a father reverentially bowed his head.
The Emperor Aurangzeb suffered from a carbuncle until an East India Company official called Job Charnock found a physician who managed to cure it. As a reward, Job was granted a tract of land eighty miles up the Hoogly river by the Nawab of Bengal and there he founded the city of Calcutta.
By the end of the eighteenth century Calcutta was the capital of the East India Company’s government, with an opulent and lively social life and opportunities for making a quick fortune for a lucky few. To this day, throughout the town, grand Western-style buildings, now crumbling, point back to its imperial past.
Dolly, her impoverished parents’ eleventh child, was born in the house where once William Hickey had dined with his face covered with blood, because he had become ‘sadly intoxicated’ at a previous get-together and had fallen while dismounting from his phaeton.
At the time of Dolly’s birth, more than a hundred families were living in considerable squalor and poverty in Hickey’s one-time grand residence. But because the new baby was born in the year of India’s independence her parents said, ‘Perhaps the goddess is going to bless us at last even though this is only a female child.’ For this reason, when she was old enough, they sent Dolly to the local school although their other daughters had never been give such an opportunity.
Each evening Dolly would come home and as she helped her mother pick through the rice for stones or roll the chupatties she would chatter joyfully about the things she had learnt that day. ‘We did fractions,’ she would announce, as she crushed the spices on the great thick slab of stone. Splashing water from the brass jar onto the seeds and pods and barks, she would heave the heavy stone roller over the top. Rolling, splashing, crushing she would tell her mother, ‘Did you know that the Moguls ruled India before the British and that this is the first time for ages that we Indians have been free?’ Or, as she stirred the great pan of simmering milk, keeping the iron spoon going to stop the milk boiling over or burning at the bottom, she would tell her mother about trade winds, or magnetism.
Sometimes the father would say worriedly, ‘Do you think all this education is spoiling her? Perhaps she is getting too much of it and won’t be able to find a husband.’
‘She is not neglecting her domestic duties,’ said the mother.
Later, after her parents and her ten siblings slept, Dolly sat by the light of a kerosene lamp and did her homework. She was determined to do well. She planned one day to live in a proper house, not a room in the bustee. If she passed her exams and got a good job, when she was grown up her children would have a bed each and they would eat mutton curry every day. Sometimes one of the babies would wake and cry, disturbing her. Then she would take it on her knee and joggle it on one arm while going on with her writing.
‘My teacher says I will certainly get into university. He is sure I will get a scholarship,’ she told her parents.
Her father’s face was stern, her mother’s anxious. ‘What? What?’ cried Dolly, suddenly afraid.
‘All this education is not needed for a woman,’ said her father.
‘There
