A Sahib's Daughter Read online

  Sheila informed her that Samira had left her can-can petticoat and her yellow ribbon in the guest bathroom.

  “I also wanted to let you know that I’m leaving Anil,” Sheila said. “I’m going back to Calcutta on the next flight.”

  Charles groaned when Ramona told him.

  “Oh, no! We all know what that means. There’s going to be yet another ‘Aunty’ for us to explain to Mark!”

  Samira’s bedroom was the dressing room off Mark’s room. Although it was much smaller than Mark’s and not really a bedroom at all, she was happy with it because she had been allowed to choose the lilac paint and peacock bedspread. The children’s rooms led off the drawing room so when there were parties, the sound of laughing and dancing kept them awake.

  Recently, however, Samira found herself unable to sleep because of Charles’ shouting. It would start about an hour after she had gone to bed. She would hide her head under the covers, blocking her ears. Why was he shouting at Mother? How could he go on and on like that? What could she have done that was so terrible? Samira would scrutinize her parents the following morning. Ramona seemed calm and unruffled. Charles was his normal self. It was most baffling and went on for many weeks until one night the shouting woke Mark.

  Without hesitating, he jumped out of bed and opened the drawing room door. From her bedroom, Samira could see him go in. The shouting instantly stopped. She jumped out of bed and followed him, in curiosity and fear. Ramona and Charles were sitting with their drinks, unperturbed.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” Ramona held out her arms to Mark, and he ran up to sit beside her.

  “Why is Daddy yelling at you?” he asked. He looked accusingly at Charles.

  “Goodness, children, Daddy’s not shouting at me,” said Ramona, laughing.

  “But I heard him. He’s been doing it for weeks,” said Samira, who had followed Mark into the room.

  “I was just telling her things I’m angry about,” Charles explained. “I’m not angry with Mummy. There are things in the factory that have been worrying me, and I’m upset with the company. That’s all.”

  “Oh,” breathed Samira. So he had been shouting to her and not at her all this time! What a relief.

  “Now, off to bed with you. I’ll try to make less noise from now on,” said Charles, briskly.

  Chapter 7

  Dooars, 1969-1971

  “If you see Caroline, run!” Rachel Moorhead told Samira as soon as the Clarke family arrived at the club. It was December, and Rachel was home for a whole month. They hugged and kissed, happy to see each other, but evidently Rachel had other, more pressing issues on her mind. Ramona and Charles were already striding off in the direction of the golf course, followed by their caddies. Mark was kicking a football with some younger boys.

  “But why?” asked Samira, trying to keep up with Rachel, who was running around the side of the clubhouse.

  “Coz, I hate her, that’s why. Come on!” She said this as she spotted Caroline who had grown tremendously during the past year and who did not seem at all interested in pursuing the indignant Rachel.

  “Why? What did she do?” asked Samira, wondering what Caroline could have done to upset Rachel in such a short time. Although Rachel and Caroline had their differences, the three girls had enjoyed good times together over the years. They needed each other in a place where company of any kind was scarce, especially company of their own age.

  “Just look at her!” said Rachel in disgust. “That dress…those shoes…and,” she whispered in Samira’s ear as though the words were too awful to be uttered out loud, “she’s wearing a bra!”

  “Oh-h,” stammered Samira. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because she told me, of course,” Rachel said, scornfully. “Just as soon as she saw me.”

  Samira looked at Rachel, whom she had not seen for almost a year, and gulped. There was no way of saying this without seeming terribly disloyal, but there was no escaping the fact. She might as well get it out in the open.

  “I’m sorry, Rach,” she said nervously, as though confessing to some awful crime. “But I’m… er…I’m wearing a bra, too. My mother said I had to.”

  Actually, Samira had been delighted to wear a bra, and there was no debating the fact that she was well ready for one. Rachel glared at her, speechless for a moment, and then stormed, half in tears,

  “It’s not fair! It’s just not fair! You’re both all grown up. Nothing will ever be the same again.”

  Samira, going through the same process of adjustment, knew exactly what she was talking about and burst into tears, too.

  “I’m not. I promise. It’s still the same old me.”

  “I don’t ever want to grow up and be an old woman,” Rachel wailed. “I want everything to stay the same!”

  The girls put their arms around each other and sobbed for their lost childhood. It was not easy, having to part for long periods and then being expected to take up exactly where they had left off. The last time they were together, they were climbing trees and riding bicycles, both of which seemed like childish activities now. Suddenly, they were one of the older girls. They didn’t want to join in the children’s games any more. The adults were busy playing tennis, golf or cards. What was one supposed to do with oneself when one was thirteen years old?

  Samira, looking at Rachel, was also aware for the first time of inexplicable differences between them, differences she had never noticed before that were far more intangible than the difference of not wearing a bra. It was not about appearance or maturity but something about attitude. Something she could not quite pinpoint yet in her thirteen-year-old mind.

  “I know,” she said, “Let’s go to the ladies room. Caroline won’t find us there.” Although they both knew that Caroline was not trying to find them.

  Rachel continued the charade. “Okay. Race you!”

  The girls sped off noisily, their burden of maturity momentarily forgotten.

  They loved the elegant ladies room and would sit and whisper and giggle endlessly on the pink chaise lounge to the annoyance of the ladies who wanted to gossip and powder their noses in private. The room was very grand in their eyes. There were pink silk curtains in the windows and across each of the changing cubicles and pink floral upholstery on the wicker chairs. They sat and viewed themselves from all angles in the three mirrors on the pretty, white dressing table in the center of the room and played with the gilt brushes and cotton-wool balls, pretending to powder their noses, speaking in society ladies’ voices until it was time for afternoon tea.

  They wanted to sit with the adults at the table on the verandah, not on a rug on the grass with the children. Ramona looked sternly at Samira.

  “Please, Mother,” Rachel begged Lorna. “We’re not children anymore.”

  “And besides,” she added, “Caroline is sitting at the adult table.”

  “Oh, all right.” said Lorna, smiling at Ramona. “as long as you both promise to behave like grown-ups.”

  Everyone had brought homemade offerings for tea. There were cucumber and chicken sandwiches, chocolate éclairs, meringues, shortbread and cake. Rachel and Samira were on their best behavior, balancing their cups of tea and mindful of not talking with their mouths full, under Ramona’s watchful eye. Rachel was sipping her tea with one finger in the air when suddenly her cup slipped and she spilled tea all over herself. She gasped in horror, and Samira stifled a giggle. Suddenly, they were both giggling and snorting so uncontrollably that they had to leave the table and scamper back to the ladies room.

  “Oh, no!” cried Samira, wiping away tears of mirth. “We are going to be in so much trouble!”

  “Did you see your mother’s face?” Rachel was convulsed with laughter as she tried to dry her dress with a towel.

  “They’ll never allow us to sit with the grown-ups again!”

  “And do we really care?” Rachel asked.

  “What do you think they’ll do to us?” said Samira. She was a safe distanc
e from the box room.

  Fortunately for the girls, most of the adults had seen the funny side of the situation, and Anita Dutt had come to their rescue, sensing their predicament.

  “Don’t be too hard on Samira,” she said to Ramona. “She’s at a difficult age. The girls are too old to sit outside with the children. They’ll learn soon enough.”

  Lorna smiled across the table at Greg. They saw so little of Rachel that it was impossible to be too hard on her. When they first took her home to Aberdeen when she was three, she had shocked their relations by not being able to speak English, having spent so much time with her ayah and the servants.

  After tea, everyone moved indoors, the men heading straight to the bar or to the billiard tables. Some of the ladies retreated to the card room to play bridge, while others went to the library to stock up on books for the following week. When the girls emerged furtively a little later, they were surprised when Charles offered to buy them both cokes, and no one seemed annoyed. Growing up was confusing.

  During the journey home that night, Samira asked Charles when they planned to go ‘home’ to England.

  “I don’t want to go right now, of course, Daddy, but maybe after Rachel leaves?”

  Opportunities for ‘home leave’ had come and gone over the years. Charles showed no inclination to return to England. He preferred to spend his vacations on safari with the men, hunting wild boar and deer, while Ramona visited Prava in Darjeeling with the children. One year, they visited the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Agra, and they frequently went to Calcutta.

  Eventually, it was accepted that Charles had no intention of going back, although trips to Britain among both Britishers and Indians were prized.

  “You really should go,” Ramona’s friends would urge her. “even if only for the shopping! My, the shops over there! You simply can’t imagine how huge they are, even bigger than your bungalow. Some of them are five stories. Oxford Street is almost an entire mile of department stores, on both sides of the street. You should make Charles take you at least once.”

  But Ramona had no desire to go. She would smile and say,

  “England is much too cold for me. The journey is too long. But someday, we’ll send Samira, when she’s old enough, and Mark, too. They can make up their own minds about where they want to live.” She said it almost as though it didn’t matter what they decided, though in her heart she hoped they would stay in India, close to her and Charles as they grew older.

  They were both brought up with the knowledge that when they were older they would go to England. They would visit Aunt Pauline in Hertfordshire and see the sights of London. The prospect loomed like a giant milestone in their lives. Samira would weave intricate fantasies in her mind about an England with drizzly gray streets, falling snow and narrow, squashed-up houses. She was not quite sure what she would do when she got there, but somewhere in her dreams would be a fresh-faced English gentleman and herself, richly dressed like the lady on the Quality Street Chocolate tins.

  Now, Samira at thirteen was already asking about going ‘home.’ Charles glanced at Ramona,

  “Sammy, this is our home. You can go when you’re a little older, if you do well in school.”

  Ramona sighed. They were already setting stipulations. But she knew they’d been relatively fortunate. She and Charles had been able to sidestep most of the problems that stemmed from “mixed” marriages.

  “Mummy, what are we?” the question came suddenly from Mark, sitting beside Samira in the backseat.

  “What do you mean?” asked Charles.

  “Are we Indian or English?”

  “We’re both, silly,” said Charles. “You know that.”

  “Then why haven’t we been to England?” Samira asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to go to England,” announced Mark. He was parroting what he’d heard his mother say a hundred times.

  “I don’t want to go,” mimicked Samira, giving him a shove.

  “Stop it.” He glared at her as the car sped home on the deserted road. She had stopped fighting him with her fists, realizing with a shock that he was suddenly bigger and stronger than she.

  “You’ll both go there when you grow up,” said Ramona. “Then there’ll be no more questions.”

  A few days later, Mark ran into the house in great excitement.

  “The Pathans are here! Mum, where are you? The Pathans are here.”

  Samira and Ramona ran to the verandah. The Pathans travelled all the way from Kashmir selling hand-loomed carpets, embroidered linens and furs. The children regarded them with a mixture of fear and curiosity. Their stature was further enhanced by their enormous puggaries that crisscrossed on their heads and were finished off with tails at the back. They wore intricately woven shirts and soft, embroidered shoes that ended in a curved point. Mark sniggered when he saw the shoes that were like the ones worn by the Air India Maharaja mascot. Ramona glared at him and called for Jetha to bring nimboo pani for the visitors.

  She tried to tell them that she really wasn’t interested in a carpet or a fur, but they persisted in unrolling carpet after carpet across the verandah, deaf to her protests. They unfolded dozens of tablecloths, cushion covers and napkins. Then they started to unpack the furs: gorgeous coats, hats and stoles in mink, fox and rabbit.

  “You please try,” Ramona was encouraged to try on a mink coat.

  “Oh, my,” she said. It was soft and luxurious and much too warm for the climate.

  “Mummy, you look beautiful!” cried Samira. “Buy it, buy it.”

  “Gracious, no. It’s much too expensive.”

  “Not expensive, madam,” insisted the Pathan. “I make very good price.”

  It was no coincidence that they had timed their visit for just before the Burra Sahib came home. Charles arrived right on cue and came up the steps.

  “Goodness, what’s going on?”

  “Daddy, it’s the Pathans,” explained Mark, as though Charles hadn’t guessed already.

  “What a lot of stuff,” he commented. “What’s the guess we’re going to have to buy something?”

  “Sahib, we come very far from Kashmir. You please buy?”

  “I feel it would be only right,” agreed Ramona. She had her eye on a luscious, brown fox stole that did wonders for her coloring. And Charles who never showed any interest in household matters suddenly took a fancy to a large carpet. Much heated haggling and drama followed as Ramona bargained with the vendors. There would have been no pleasure in the purchase unless she felt an unbelievable bargain had been struck.

  “We have made absolutely no profit, Sahib. No profit,” the Pathans lied as they reloaded their van.

  The Clarke household excitedly unrolled their new, blue wool carpet in the drawing room. And much later, Ramona posed provocatively for Charles in their bedroom in her fabulous new fox fur and nothing else.

  Every time Samira returned home from boarding school, she seemed to withdraw further into herself. She read voraciously, lying in her room, or on the swing bed in the verandah. It was not that she didn’t like school. She thrived in the company of her contemporaries. It was adjusting to life in the real world that she had problems with. She, rather than Mark, took part in all the school plays, sang in the choir and was among the top students in her class. Mark escaped the pressure to perform and excel that landed on Samira’s shoulders. His winning ways allowed him to evade responsibility and get away with things that she was punished for.

  While she was sensitive to any form of criticism, comments made by her mother seemed to affect her most. She started to distance herself almost as a means of self-protection. She felt socially inept, always saying the wrong thing. She became distrustful of her ability to express herself, especially in the company of adults. Ironically, her insecurity was interpreted as aloofness.

  “Samira doesn’t know how to talk,” Ramona told people, which was essentially true. But those remarks were humiliating and caused her to retreat further into her shell.
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  “Is that what you’re going to wear, Sammy?” Ramona said when she showed up in a pair of stylish new slacks, ready to go to the club one Saturday. “You should see yourself from behind.”

  Mortified, Samira ran out of the room without a word and looked at herself anxiously in the mirror. Yes, she was huge. There was no question about that. She changed into one of her old dresses and returned to the verandah.

  “Why did you change?” asked Ramona. “There’s no need to be so sensitive.”

  Yes, she was too sensitive. Whatever she did was wrong. But she didn’t know how to be better, no matter how hard she tried. Samira felt the knot inside her tighten. Her mood and self- confidence shaken, she didn’t feel like going out any longer. But she didn’t want to incur Ramona’s wrath, so she climbed into the car, massive and ungainly.

  Charles’ promotion to Burra Sahib necessitated the Clarke family’s moving from the Chota to the Burra Bungalow, previously occupied by Greg and Lorna Moorhead. So what would normally have been an occasion for celebration was bittersweet for the families who had spent so many happy years together. Despite their huge pay rise and elevated status, Charles and Ramona mourned the loss of good friends and neighbors.

  The Moorheads were not the only ones leaving. British Tea Companies were hiring local managers who were proving to be as capable, if not more so, than their British predecessors. They spoke the language and instinctively understood the culture of the labor force. They were also far cheaper to maintain. There were no expensive flights to and from the United Kingdom and greatly reduced re-location and medical costs.

  The person who was most apprehensive about the Clarkes’ move was Ramchand. He knew that Jetha the bearer, Kala the driver, Mohammed, the Muslim cook and, of course, Didi, were all moving with the family to the Burra Bungalow. He would never find another Memsahib like Ramona. She had cooperated with him in every way, allowing him all the fertilizer and seeds he needed. She had understood that it was not his fault when the entire rose garden was attacked by red spiders. And although she had ranted and raged when they lost a section of lawn when he inadvertently mistook weed killer for fertilizer, she accepted his inability to read the English writing on the packaging. He would have done anything for her. He was going to greatly miss her and the babas. Nothing would have made him happier than moving to the Burra Bungalow and working with Mohan, the head gardener there. It was hurtful that they had not even considered taking him along. Each day, he went to work hoping to be called by the Memsahib and be told that he was going with them.