except when Govind came home. Then they were allowed their own room off the verandah. Feeling her way in the pitch darkness, she knelt down beside the mattress on the floor where her daughter lay. The child didn’t even stir, as Jhoti eased herself under the thin sheet, and drew the little girl into her arms; then she too fell deeply asleep.
Dora Chadwick had got to know Jhoti by sight. She had often noticed the girl slipping discreetly up the side of the compound and disappearing round the back to the servants’ quarters. At first it had annoyed her, and she’d called Arjun, the bearer and asked him about her.
‘Who’s that girl who hangs around here from time to time? Is she anything to do with us?’
Arjun clicked his tongue with irritation. ‘That’s Jhoti, Memsahib, Govind’s wife. She’s always hanging round here. I’ll get rid of her.’
‘No, no! Don’t.’ Dora restrained him. ‘I was just curious. She doesn’t bother me at all, and if she’s Govind’s wife, well of course I don’t mind her coming here. I just wondered!’
‘She’s friendly with the cook’s wife, Maliki,’ Arjun told her. ‘She comes for gossip and company. They say she’s not too happy what with Govind being away, they treat her badly. But I’m always telling her to clear off.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Dora, ‘so long as she doesn’t interfere with the servants’ work, so leave her be.’
‘As you wish, Memsahib,’ Arjun shrugged, as if disappointed that he couldn’t go and make a display of pulling rank.
She watched Jhoti now as she meandered along lazily, clinging to the shade of the hibiscus hedge, while her little girl selected pebbles from the ground with microscopic precision and added them to the collection loading down her veil. Such a quaint doll-like child, Dora thought, and about the same age as her own little Edith; but where Jhoti’s child had a hard, thin sparse brown body, already worked and shaped like a piece of carved wood, Edith was soft and plump and white and golden, looking vulnerable and breakable; two more different children could not be imagined.
The two figures, mother and daughter, moved like patterns of light, almost strobing, as they passed in and out of the yellowy shade of lemon trees. Suddenly, Jhoti noticed a swing made of rope and a plank of wood, hanging loosely from one of the branches. Harold Chadwick had rigged it up only yesterday for Edith. Her body suddenly animated, and clasping Marvinder on her knee, Jhoti jumped on the swing and pushed away, urging it up and up, her head tossed back in ecstasy and the child’s laughter pealing through the still afternoon.
‘Why on earth did Govind have to go and get married so soon?’ Dora sighed with frustration. The two of them were still just children. It was ridiculous.
Harold, of course had minded for other reasons. Govind was his protégé, a symbol of everything Harold believed in for India, and he was afraid at first, that marriage would mean the end of all his ambitions for the boy.
Harold had found his home in India. Originally, he had gone over to visit an uncle of his who was a tea planter. ‘Just for a break,’ he’d said. ‘See the world before I get trapped for ever in some job in the city.’ But somehow, India struck a deep chord. He travelled it from one end to another, and found it hard to leave. The experience had been almost spiritual. He could only describe it as a feeling of having found his true home. He knew he must return; that this was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life, and he came back to England only so that he could qualify as a teacher and pursue that one goal.
It was at the teacher training college in London, that he and Dora met. They both loved music; she a pianist and he a violinist. They often played together and, of course, went to as many concerts as their meagre student funds allowed.
Dora was intending to go back to the Midlands from where she came originally. Like a good middle-class young woman, she would take a respectable teacher’s job until a suitable husband came along, and then she would join the ranks of housewives and give birth to more good little middle-class children. But then Harold asked her to marry him, and for a while she went into a state of total confusion and indecision. She found herself loving a man whose plans didn’t in the least fit in with her own.
Of course, she went back home to discuss it with her parents. They were not at all pleased with the proposition. The idea of her going to India to live and make a home there seemed foolhardy, risky; had she considered the consequences for their children, if they had any? There would be the separation, for of course, nobody kept their children in India beyond infancy, but sent them back to boarding schools, doomed, in many cases, not to see them for years at a time.
Worst of all was when they actually met Harold. It was his enthusiasm which really galled them. The way his eyes shone when he talked about the people of India; their wisdom, the customs, the beauty, the poverty, the hardship, and his absolute belief that one day, this ‘noble’ people would rule themselves. ‘After all,’ he reminded Dora’s parents, ‘Indians were one of the most civilised and cultured people on earth at a time when we Britons were running around in woad.’
It was at this point that Dora’s father could contain himself no longer. Already red in the face from mounting irritation, he exploded with ‘rubbish!’ and retreated into the garden to light up his pipe.
Later, when Harold had returned to London, Dora’s mother had come into her room that night, and sat by her bed.
‘Dora darling,’ she had said in the soft, anxious voice which had become her hallmark over the years, ‘Dora, your father and I, well, we don’t really consider this young man to be very suitable for you. I mean . . . he is a bit . . . immature. One of these idealists. A socialist too, I wouldn’t be surprised. We, er . . . really can’t allow you to throw yourself away on a man like that.’ She gazed pleadingly into her daughter’s eyes silently begging her not to rebel or make life difficult.
Dora was indeed full of doubts, but for different reasons. It was not at all what she had planned. She had wanted first of all to experience the independence of having her own profession and income: then, in her own time, when she felt ready, to marry some nice steady respectable man – a banker maybe, or even a vicar. She imagined herself leading a small town life, accompanying local singers or instrumentalists in a purely amateur way; perhaps giving little soirees in their comfortably off suburban home, and gaining some kind of minor fame as a talented and much sought after hostess in the locality.
When Harold was offered a teaching job in India and asked her to go with him, she refused, and for a while, did everything she could to dismiss him from her life. Harold, always the eternal optimist, declared that he was sure she would come round to the notion of marrying him one of these days, but in the meantime, he would go on ahead. ‘I’m sure we’re right for each other,’ he said. ‘Perhaps when I’m established out there and have found us a home, you’ll come and join me in India!’ Then he was gone.
Without Harold, the world suddenly seemed a greyer place. The pavements were harder and the weather bleaker. Nothing seemed to matter the way it did. Dora trudged on with her training; became a teacher and tried to merge into the provincial life of her small town. Her parents hoped she would marry ‘that nice young doctor,’ but neither the nice young doctor, who did indeed propose, nor the other suitable bachelors in the district, with their respectable jobs and comfortable houses, were able to quell a choking feeling of loss.
Harold wrote often. He had been sent to teach in a tiny rural village in the Punjab called Deri. He was learning the language and was full of idealism about bringing education to the villagers and persuading them to send their children to school, before putting them to work on the land. He wrote in particular about a boy called Govind.
‘Govind is just the son of an illiterate peasant farmer, but he is one of the most intelligent boys I’ve ever come across anywhere. I’m sure I