The entrance to the house in which Miss Tuhy lived was up a flight of stairs between a vegetable shop and a cigarette and cold-drink one. The stairs were always dirty, and so was the space around the doorway, with rotted bits of vegetable and empty cigarette packets trampled into the mud. Long practice had taught Miss Tuhy to step around this refuse, smilingly and without rancour, and as she did so she always nodded friendly greetings to the vegetable seller and the cold-drink man, both of whom usually failed to notice her. Everyone in the neighbourhood had got used to her, for she had lived there, in that same house, for many years.
It was not the sort of place in which one would have expected to find an Englishwoman like Miss Tuhy, but the fact was, she was too poor to live anywhere else. She had nothing but her savings, and these, in spite of her very frugal way of life, could not last for ever; and of course there was always the vexed question of how long she would live. Once, in an uncharacteristically realistic moment, she had calculated that she could afford to go on for another five years, which would bring her up to sixty-five. That seemed fair enough to her, and she did not think she had the right to ask for more. However, most of the time these questions did not arise for she tended to be too engrossed in the present to allow fears of the future to disturb her peace of mind.
She was, by profession and by passionate inclination, a teacher, but she had not taught for many years. She had first come to India thirty years ago to take up a teaching post at a school for girls from the first families, and she had taught there and at various other places for as long as she had been allowed. She did it with enthusiasm, for she loved the country and her students. When Independence came and all the other English teachers went home, it never for a moment occurred to her to join them, and she went on teaching as if nothing had changed. And indeed, as far as she was concerned, nothing did change for a number of years, and it was only at the end of that time that it was discovered she was not sufficiently well qualified to go on teaching in an Indian high school. She bowed her head to this decision, for she knew she wasn’t; not compared with all those clever Indian girls who held MA degrees in politics, philosophy, psychology and economics. As a matter of fact, even though they turned out to be her usurpers, she was proud of these girls; for wasn’t it she and those like her who had educated them and made them what they now were – sharp, emancipated, centuries ahead of their mothers and grandmothers? So it was not difficult for her to cede to them with a good grace, to enjoy her farewell party, cry a bit at the speeches and receive with pride and a glow in her heart the silver model of the Taj Mahal which was presented to her as a token of appreciation. After that, she sailed for England – not because she in the least wanted to, but because it was what everyone seemed to expect of her.
She did not stay long. True, no one here said she was not well qualified enough to teach and she had no difficulty in getting a job; but she was not happy. It was not the same. She liked young people always, and so she liked the young people she was teaching here; but she could not love them the way she had loved her Indian pupils. She missed their playfulness, their affection, their sweetness – by comparison the English children struck her as being cool and distant. And not only the children but everyone she met, or only saw in streets and shops: they seemed a colder people somehow, politer perhaps and more considerate than the Indians among whom she had spent so many years, but without (so she put it to herself) real love. Even physically the English looked cold to her, with their damp white skins and pale blue eyes, and she longed again to be surrounded by those glowing coloured skins; and those eyes! the dark, large, liquid Indian eyes! and hair that sprang with such abundance from their heads. And besides the people, it was everything else as well. Everything was too dim, too cold. There was no sun, the grass was not green, the flowers not bright enough, and the rain that continually drizzled from a wash-rag sky was a poor substitute for the silver rivers that had come rushing in torrents out of immense, dark blue monsoon clouds.
So she and her savings returned, improvidently, to India. Everyone still remembered her and was glad to see her again but, once the first warm greetings were over, they were all too busy to have much time to spare for her. She didn’t mind, she was just happy to be back; and in any case she had to live rather a long way from her friends because, now that she had no job, she had to be where rents were cheaper. She found the room in the house between the vegetable seller and the cold-drink shop and lived there contentedly all the week round, only venturing forth on Sundays to visit her former colleagues and pupils. As time went on, these Sunday visits became fewer and further between, for everyone always seemed to be rather busy; anyway, there was less to say now, and also she found it was not always easy to spare the bus fare to and fro. But it didn’t matter, she was even happier staying at home because all her life was there now, and the interest and affection she had formerly bestowed on her colleagues and pupils, she now had as strongly for the other people living in the house, and even for the vegetable seller and the cold-drink man though her contact with them never went further than smiles and nods.
The house was old, dirty and inward-looking. In the centre was a courtyard which could be overlooked like a stage from the galleries running all the way round the upper storeys. The house belonged to an old woman who lived on the ground floor with her enormous family of children and grandchildren; the upper floors had been subdivided and let out to various tenants. The stairs and galleries were always crowded, not only with the tenants themselves but with their servants. Everyone in the house except Miss Tuhy kept a servant, a hill boy, who cleaned and washed and cooked and was frequently beaten and frequently dismissed. There seemed to be an unending supply of these boys; they could be had very cheaply, and slept curled up on the stairs or on a threshold, and ate what was left in the pot.
Miss Tuhy was a shy person who loved other people but found it difficult to make contact with them. On the second floor lived an Anglo-Indian nurse with her grown-up son, and she often sought Miss Tuhy out, to talk in English with her, to ask questions about England, to discuss her problems and those of her son (a rather insipid young man who worked in an airlines office). She felt that she and Miss Tuhy should present a united front against the other neighbours, who were all Hindus and whom she regarded with contempt. But Miss Tuhy did not feel that way. She liked and was interested in everyone, and it seemed a privilege to her to be near them and to be aware of what seemed to her their fascinating, their passionate lives.
Down in the courtyard the old landlady ruled her family with a rod of iron. She kept a tight hold of everything and doled out little sums of pocket money to her forty-year-old sons. She could often be heard abusing them and their wives, and sometimes she beat them. There was only one person to whom she showed any indulgence – who, in fact, could get away with anything – and that was Sharmila, one of her granddaughters. When Miss Tuhy first came to live in the house, Sharmila was a high-spirited, slapdash girl of twelve, with big black eyes and a rapidly developing figure. Although she had reached the age at which her sisters and cousins were already beginning to observe that reticence which, as grown women, would keep them away from the eyes of strangers, Sharmila still behaved with all the freedom of the smaller children, running round the courtyard and up and down the stairs and in and out of the homes of her grandmother’s tenants. She was the first in the house to establish contact with Miss Tuhy, simply by bursting into the room where the English lady lived and looking round and touching things and lifting them up to examine them – ‘What’s that?’ – all Miss Tuhy’s treasures: her mother-of-pearl pen-holder, the photograph of her little niece as a bridesmaid, the silver Taj Mahal. Decorating the mantelpiece was a bowl of realistically shaped fruits made of plaster-of-paris, and before leaving Sharmila lifted a brightly coloured banana out of the bowl and held it up and said, ‘Can I have it?’ After that she came every day, and every day, just before leaving, helped herself to one more fruit until they were all finished and then she took the bowl.
Sharmila was lazy at school all the year round, but she always panicked before her class promotion exams and came running for help to Miss Tuhy. These were Miss Tuhy’s happiest times, for not only was she once again engaged in the happy pursuit of teaching, but she also had Sharmila sitting there with her all day long, bent ardently over her books and biting the tip of her tongue in her eagerness to learn. Miss Tuhy would have dearly loved to teach her the whole year round, and to teach her everything she knew, and with that end in view she had drawn up an ambitious programme for Sharmila to follow; but although sometimes the girl consented to submit to this programme, it was evident that once the terror of exams was past her interest sharply declined, so that sometimes, when Miss Tuhy looked up from a passionate reading of the romantic poets, she found her pupil fiddling with the strands of hair which always managed to escape from her sober pigtail and her mouth wide open in a yawn she saw no reason to disguise. And indeed Miss Tuhy had finally to admit that Sharmila was right; for what use would all this learning ever be to her when her one purpose in life, her sole duty, was to be married and give satisfaction to the husband who would be chosen for her and to the inlaws in whose house she would be sent to live?
She was just sixteen when she was married. Her grandmother, who usually hated spending money, excelled herself that time and it was a grand and memorable occasion. A big wedding marquee was set up in the courtyard and crammed tight with wedding guests shimmering in their best clothes; all the tenants were invited too, including Miss Tuhy in her good dress (white dots on a chocolate-brown background) and coral necklace. Like everyone else, she was excitedly awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom and his party. She wondered what sort of a boy they had chosen for her Sharmila. She wanted a tall, bold boy for her, a soldier and a hero; and she had heightened, almost mythological visions of the young couple – decked out in jewels and gorgeous clothes – gaily disporting themselves in a garden full of brightly coloured flowers. But when at last the band accompanying the bridegroom’s party was heard, and everyone shouted, ‘They have come!’ and rushed to the entrance to get the first glimpse, then the figure that descended from the horse amid the jubilation of the trumpets was not, in spite of his garlands and his golden coat, a romantic one. Not only was Sharmila’s bridegroom stocky and ill at ease, but he was also no longer very young. Miss Tuhy, who had fought her way to the front with the best of them, turned away in bitter disappointment. There were tears in her eyes. She knew it would not turn out well.
Sharmila came every day to visit her old home. At first she came in order to boast, to show off the saris and shawls and jewellery presented to her on her marriage, and to tell about her strange new life and the house she lived in and all her new family. She was brimming over with excitement and talked non-stop and danced round the courtyard. Some time later she came with different stories, about what her mother-in-law had said to her and what she had answered back, about her sisters-in-law and all the other women, how they tried to get the better of her but how she soon showed them a trick or two: she tucked in her chin and talked in a loud voice and was full of energy and indignation. Sometimes she stayed for several days and did not return till her husband came to coax her back. After a year the first baby arrived, and a year later the second, and after a few more years a third. Sharmila became fat and matronly, and her voice was louder and more raucous. She still came constantly, now with two of the children trailing behind her and a third riding on her hip, and she stayed longer than before, often refusing to go back even when her husband came to plead with her. And in the end she seemed to be there all the time, she and her children, so that, although nothing much was said on the subject, it was generally assumed that she had left her husband and her in-laws’ house and had come back to live with her grandmother.
She was a little heavy now to go running up and down the stairs the way she used to: but she still came up to Miss Tuhy’s room, and the English lady’s heart still beat in the same way when she heard her step on the stair, though it was a different step now, heavier, slower and accompanied by children’s tiny shuffle and patter. ‘Miss Sahib!’ Sharmila would call from the landing, and Miss Tuhy would fling her door wide open and stand there beaming. Now it was the children who moved from object to object, touching everything and asking to know what it was, while Sharmila, panting a little from her climb up the stairs, flung herself on the narrow bed and allowed Miss Tuhy to tuck a pillow behind her back. When the children had examined all the treasures, they began to play their own games, they crawled all over the floor and made a lot of noise. Their mother lay on the bed and sometimes she laughed and sometimes she sighed and talked about everything that came into her head. They always stayed for several hours, and when they left at last, Miss Tuhy, gorged with bliss, shut the door and carefully cleaned out her little room which the children had so delightfully disordered.
When she didn’t feel like going upstairs, Sharmila stood in the middle of the courtyard and shouted, ‘Miss Sahib!’ in her loud voice. Miss Tuhy hurried downstairs, smoothing her dress and adjusting her glasses. She sat with Sharmila in the courtyard and helped her to shell peas. The old grandmother watched them from her bed inside the room: that terrible old woman was bedridden now and quite unable to move, a huge helpless shipwreck wrapped in shawls and blankets. Her speech was blurred and could be understood only by Sharmila, who had become her interpreter and chief functionary. It was Sharmila, not one of the older women of the household, who carried the keys and distributed the stores and knew where the money was kept. While she sat with Miss Tuhy in the courtyard, every now and again the grandmother would make calling noises and then Sharmila would get up and go in to see what she wanted. Inside the room it was dark and smelled of sickness and old age, and Sharmila was glad to come out in the open again.
‘Poor old Granny,’ she said to Miss Tuhy, who nodded and also looked sad for Granny because she was old and bedridden: as for herself, she did not feel old at all but a young girl, sitting here like this shelling peas and chatting with Sharmila. The children played and sang, the sun shone, along the galleries upstairs the tenants went to and fro hanging out their washing; there was the sound of voices calling and of water running, traffic passed up and down on the road outside, a nearby flour mill chucked and chucked. ‘Poor old Granny,’ Sharmila said again. ‘When she was young, she was like a queen – tall, beautiful, everyone did what she wanted. If they didn’t she stamped her foot, and screamed and waved her arms in the air – like this,’ Sharmila demonstrated, flailing her plump arms with bangles up to the elbow and laughing. But then she grew serious and put her face closer to Miss Tuhy’s and said in a low, excited voice: ‘They say she had a lover, a jeweller from Dariba. He came at nights when everyone was asleep and she opened the door for him.’ Miss Tuhy blushed and her heart beat faster; though she tried to check them, a thousand impressions rippled over her mind.
‘They say she was a lot like me,’ said Sharmila, smiling a little and her eyes hazy with thought. She had beautiful eyes, very large and dark with heavy brows above them; her lips were full and her cheeks plump and healthy. When she was thoughtful or serious, she had a habit of tucking in her chin so that several chins were formed, and this too somehow was attractive, especially as these chins seemed to merge and swell into her very large, tight bust.
But her smile became a frown, and she said, ‘Yes, and now look at her, how she is. Three times a day I have to change the sheets under her. This is the way it all ends. Hai,’ and she heaved a sigh and a brooding look came on her face. The children, who had been chasing each other round the courtyard, suddenly began to quarrel in loud voices; at that Sharmila sprang up in a rage and caught hold of the biggest child and began to beat him with her fists, but hardly had he uttered the first cry when she stopped and instead lifted him in her arms and held him close, close to her bosom, her eyes shut in rapturous possessiveness as if he were all that she had.
It was one of the other tenants who told Miss Tuhy that Sharmila was having an affair with the son of the Anglo-Indian nurse from upstairs. The tenant told it with a lot of smiles, comments and gestures, but Miss Tuhy pretended not to understand, she only smiled back at the informer in her gentle way and said ‘Good morning’, in English and shut the door of her room. She was very much excited. She thought about the young man whom she had seen often and sometimes talked to: a rather colourless young man, with brown hair and Anglo-Indian features, who always dressed in English clothes and played cricket on Sunday mornings. It seemed impossible to connect him in any way with Sharmila; and how his mother would have hated any such connection! The nurse, fully opening her heart to Miss Tuhy, never tired of expressing her contempt for the other tenants in the house who could not speak English and also did not know how to live decently. She and her son lived very decently, they had chairs and a table in their room and linoleum on the floor and a picture of the Queen of England on the wall. They ate with knife and fork. ‘Those others, Miss Tuhy, I wouldn’t like you to see,’ she said with pinched lips (she was a thin woman with matchstick legs and always wore brown shoes and stockings). ‘The dirt. Squalor. You would feel sick, Miss Tuhy. And the worst are those downstairs, the—’ and she added a bad word in Hindi (she never said any bad words in English, perhaps she didn’t know any). She hated Sharmila and the grandmother and that whole family. But she was often away on night duty, and then who knew – as the other tenant had hinted – what went on?
Miss Tuhy never slept too well at nights. She often got up and walked round her room and wished it were time to light the fire and make her cup of tea. Those night hours seemed very long, and sometimes, tired of her room, she would go out on the stairs and along the galleries overlooking the courtyard. How silent it was now with everyone asleep! The galleries and the courtyard, so crowded during the day, were empty except where here and there a servant boy lay sleeping huddled in a corner. There was no traffic on the road outside and the flour mill was silent. Only the sky seemed alive, with the moon sliding slowly in and out of patches of mist. Miss Tuhy thought about the grandmother and the jeweller for whom she had opened the door when it was like this, silent and empty at nights. She remembered conversations she had heard years ago among her English fellow-teachers. They had always had a lot to say about sensuality in the East. They whispered to each other how some of the older boys were seen in the town entering certain disreputable alleys, while boys who came from princely or landowner families were taught everything there was to know by women on their father’s estates. And as for the girls – well, they whispered, one had only to look at them, how quickly they ripened: could one ever imagine an English girl so developed at thirteen? It was, they said, the climate; and of course the food they ate, all those curries and spices that heated the blood. Miss Tuhy wondered: if she had been born in India, had grown up under this sun and had eaten the food, would she have been different? Instead of her thin, inadequate, English body, would she have grown up like the grandmother who had opened the door to the jeweller, or like Sharmila with flashing black eyes and a big bust?
Nothing stirred, not a sound from anywhere, as if all those lively people in the house were dead. Miss Tuhy stared and stared down at Sharmila’s door and the courtyard washed in moonlight, and wondered was there a secret, was something going on that should not be? She crept along the gallery and up the stairs towards the nurse’s door. Here too everything was locked and silent, and if there was a secret, it was being kept. She put her ear to the door and stayed there, listening. She did not feel in the least bad or guilty doing this, for what she wanted was nothing for herself but only to have proof that Sharmila was happy.
She did not seem happy. She was getting very bad-tempered and was for ever fighting with her family or with the other tenants. It was a not uncommon sight to have her standing in the middle of the courtyard, arms akimbo, keys at her waist, shouting insults in her loud, somewhat raucous voice. She no longer came to visit Miss Tuhy in her room, and once, when the English lady came to be with her downstairs, she shouted at her that she had enough with one old woman on her hands and did not have time for any more. But that night she came upstairs and brought a little dish of carrot halwa which Miss Tuhy tried to refuse, turning her face away and saying primly that thank you, she was not hungry. ‘Are you angry with me, Missie Sahib?’ coaxed Sharmila with a smile in her voice, and she dug her forefinger into the halwa and then brought it to Miss Tuhy’s lips, saying ‘One little lick, just one, for Sharmila’, till Miss Tuhy put out her tongue and shyly slid it along Sharmila’s finger. She blushed as she did so, and anger and hurt melted out of her heart.
‘There!’ cried Sharmila, and then she flung herself as usual on the bed. She began to talk, to unburden herself completely. Tears poured down her cheeks as she spoke of her unhappy life and all the troubles brought down upon her by the grandmother who did not give her enough money and treated her like a slave, the other family members who were jealous of her, the servants who stole from her, the shopkeepers who cheated her – ‘If it weren’t for my children,’ she cried, ‘why should I go on? I’d make an end of it and get some peace at last.’
‘Sh,’ said Miss Tuhy, shocked and afraid.
‘Why not? What have I got to live for?’
‘You?’ said Miss Tuhy with an incredulous laugh, and looked at that large, full-bloomed figure sprawled there on the narrow bed and rumpling the bedcover from which the embroidery (girls carrying baskets of apples and pansies on their arms) had almost completely faded.
Sharmila said, ‘Did I ever tell you about that woman, two doors away from the coal merchant’s house? She was a widow and they treated her like a dog, so one night she took a scarf and hung herself from a hook on the stairs. We all went to have a look at her. Her feet were swinging in the air as if there was a wind blowing. I was only four but I still remember.’
There was an eerie little pause which Miss Tuhy broke as briskly as she could: ‘What’s the matter with you? A young woman like you with all your life before you – I wonder you’re not ashamed.’
‘I want to get away from here! I’m so sick of this house!’
‘Yes, Miss Tuhy,’ said the Anglo-Indian nurse a few days later, when the English lady had come to pay her a visit and they both sat drinking tea under the tinted portrait of the Queen, ‘I’m just sick and tired of living here, that I can tell you. If I could get out tomorrow, I would. But it’s not so easy to find a place, not these days with the rents.’ She sighed and poured the two of them strong tea out of an earthenware pot. She drank in as refined a way as Miss Tuhy, without making any noise at all. ‘My boy’s wanting to go to England, and why not? No future for us here, not with these people.’
Miss Tuhy gave a hitch to her wire-framed glasses and smiled ingratiatingly: ‘No young lady for him yet?’ she asked, and her voice quavered like an inefficient spy’s.
‘Oh, he goes with the odd girl or two. Nothing serious. There’s time yet. We’re not like those others – hurry-curry, muddle-puddle, marry them off at sixteen, and they never even see each other’s face! No wonder there’s trouble afterwards.’ She put her bony brown hand on Miss Tuhy’s knee and brought her face close: ‘Like that one downstairs, the she-devil. It’s so disgusting. I don’t even like to tell you.’ But her tongue was already wiping round her pale lips in anticipation of the telling.
Miss Tuhy got up abruptly. She dared not listen, and for some unknown reason tears had sprung into her eyes. She went out quickly but the nurse followed her. It was dark on the stairs and Miss Tuhy’s tears could not be seen. The nurse clung to her arm: ‘With servants,’ she whispered into Miss Tuhy’s ear. ‘She gets them in at night when everyone’s asleep. Mary Mother,’ said the nurse and crossed herself. Instantly a quotation rose to Miss Tuhy’s lips: ‘Her sins are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.’ The nurse was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘She’s not Christian,’ with contempt. Miss Tuhy freed her arm and hurried to her own room. She sat in her chair with her hands folded in her lap and her legs trembling. A procession of servants filed through her mind: undersized hill boys with naked feet and torn shirts, sickly but tough, bent on survival. She heard their voices as they called to each other in their weird hill accents and laughed with each other, showing pointed teeth. Every few years one of them in the neighbourhood went berserk and murdered his master and ran away with the jewellery and cash, only to be caught the next day on a wild spree at cinemas and country liquor shops. Strange wild boys, wolf boys: Miss Tuhy had always liked them and felt sorry for them. But now she felt most sorry for Sharmila, and prayed for it not to be true.
It could not be true. Sharmila had such an innocent nature. She was a child. She loved sweet things to eat, and when the bangle seller came, she was the first to run to meet him. She was also very fond of going to the cinema, and when she came home she told Miss Tuhy the story. She acted out all the important scenes, especially the love scenes – ‘Just as their lips were about to meet, quick as a flash, with her veil flying in the wind, she ran to the next tree and called to him – Arjun! – and he followed her and he put his arms round the tree and this time she did not run away – no, they stood looking at each other, eating each other up with their eyes, and then the music – oh, Missie, Missie, Missie!’ she would end and stretch her arms into the air and laugh with longing.
Once, on her little daily shopping trip to the bazaar, Miss Tuhy caught sight of Sharmila in the distance. And seeing her like that, unexpectedly, she saw her as a stranger might, and realized for the first time that the Sharmila she knew no longer existed. Her image of Sharmila was twofold, one superimposed on the other yet also simultaneous, the two images merged in her mind: there was the hoyden schoolgirl, traces of whom still existed in her smile and in certain glances of her eyes, and then there was Sharmila in bloom, the young wife dancing round the courtyard and boasting about her wedding presents. But the woman she now saw in the bazaar was fat and slovenly; the end of her veil, draped carelessly over her breasts, trailed a little in the dust, and the heel of her slipper was trodden over to one side so that she seemed to be dragging her foot when she walked. She was quarrelling with one of the shopkeepers, she was gesticulating and using coarse language; the other shopkeepers leaned out of their stalls to listen, and from the way they grinned and commented to each other, it was obvious that Sharmila was a well-known figure and the scene she was enacting was one she had often played before. Miss Tuhy, in pain, turned and walked away in the opposite direction, even though it meant a longer way home. For the first time she failed to greet the vegetable seller and the cold-drink man as she passed between their two shops on her way into the house, and when she had to step round the refuse trodden into the mud, she felt a movement of distaste and thought irritably to herself why it was that no one ever took the trouble to clean the place. The stairs of the house too were dirty, and there was a bad smell of sewage. She reached her room with a sigh of relief, but it seemed as if the bad smell came seeping in from under the closed door. Then she heard again Sharmila’s anguished voice crying, ‘I want to get away! I’m so sick of this house!’ and she too felt the same anguish to get away from the house and from the streets and crowded bazaars around it.
That night she said to Sharmila, in a bright voice, ‘Why don’t we all go away somewhere for a lovely holiday?’
Sharmila, who had never had occasion to leave the city she was born in, thought it was a joke and laughed. But Miss Tuhy was very much in earnest. She remembered all the holidays she had gone on years ago when she was still teaching. She had always gone to the Simla hills and stayed in an English boarding house, and she had taken long walks every day and breathed in the mountain air and collected pine cones. She told Sharmila all about this, and Sharmila too began to get excited and said, ‘Let’s go,’ and asked many more questions.
‘Sausages and bacon for breakfast every morning,’ Miss Tuhy reminisced, and Sharmila, who had never eaten either, clapped her hands with pleasure and gave an affectionate squeeze to her youngest child playing in her lap: ‘You’ll like that, Munni, na? Shaushage? Hmmm!’
‘They’ll get wonderful red cheeks up there,’ said Miss Tuhy, ‘real English apple cheeks,’ and she smiled at the sallow city child dressed in dirty velvet. ‘And there’ll be pony rides and wild flowers to pick and lovely cool water from the mountain streams.’
‘Let’s go!’ cried Sharmila with another hug to her child.
‘We’ll go by train,’ said Miss Tuhy. ‘And then a bus’ll take us up the mountains.’
Sharmila suddenly stopped smiling: ‘Yes, and the money? Where’s that to come from? You think she’d ever give?’ and she tossed her head towards the room where her grandmother lay, immobile and groaning but still a power to be reckoned with.
Miss Tuhy waved her aside: ‘This’ll be my treat,’ she said.
And why not? The money was there, and what pleasure it would be to spend it on a holiday with Sharmila and the children! She brutally stifled all thoughts of caution, of the future. Money was there to be spent, to take pleasure with, not to eke out a miserable day-by-day existence which, in any case, might end – who knew? – tomorrow or the day after. And then what use would it ever be to her? Her glasses slipped and lay crooked on her nose, her face was flushed: she looked drunk with excitement. ‘You’ll get such a surprise,’ she said. ‘When we’re sitting in the bus, and it’s going up up up, higher and higher, and you’ll see the mountains before you, more beautiful than anything you’ve ever dreamed of.’
Unfortunately Sharmila and the children were all very sick in the bus that carried them up the mountains, and so could not enjoy the scenery. Sharmila, in between retching with abandon, wept loudly that she was dying and cursed the fate that had brought her here instead of leaving her quietly at home where she belonged and was happy. However, once the bus had stopped and they had reached their destination, they began to enjoy themselves. They were amused by the English boarding house, and at mealtimes were lost in wonder not only at the food, the like of which they had never eaten, but also at the tablecloths and the cutlery. Their first walk was undertaken with great enthusiasm, and they collected everything they found on the way – pine cones and flowers and leaves and stones and empty cigarette packets. As Miss Tuhy had promised, they rode on ponies: even Sharmila, gasping and giggling and letting out loud cries of fright, was hoisted on to the back of a pony but had to be helped down again, dissolving in fits of laughter, because she was too heavy. Miss Tuhy revelled in their enjoyment; and for herself she was happy too to be here again among familiar smells of pine and wood fires and cold air. She loved the pale mists that rose from the mountainside and the rain that rained down so softly. She wished they could stay for ever. But after the third day Sharmila and the children began to get bored and kept asking when they were going home. They no longer cared to go for walks or ride on ponies. When it rained, all four of them sat mournfully by the window, and sighed and moaned and kept asking, what shall we do now? and Sharmila wondered how human beings could bear to live in a place like this; speaking for herself, it was just the same as being dead. Miss Tuhy had to listen not only to their complaints but also to those of the management, for Sharmila and the children were behaving badly – especially in the dining-room where, after the third day, they began demanding pickles and chapattis, and the children spat out the unfamiliar food on the tablecloth while Sharmila abused the hotel servants in bazaar language.
So they went home again earlier than they had intended. They had been away less than ten days, but their excitement on seeing the old places again was that of long-time voyagers. They had hired a tonga at the station and, as they neared home, they began to point out familiar landmarks to each other; by the time they had got to their own neighbourhood bazaar, the children were bobbing up and down so much that they were in danger of falling off the carriage, and Sharmila shouted cordial greetings to the shopkeepers with whom she would be fighting again tomorrow. And at home all the relatives and friends crowded into the courtyard to receive them, and there was much kissing and embracing and even a happy tear or two, and the tenants and servants thronged the galleries upstairs to watch the scene and call down their welcome to the travellers. It was a great homecoming.
Only Miss Tuhy was not happy. She did not want to be back. She longed now for the green mountains and the clean, cool air; she also missed the boarding house with its English landlady and very clean stairs and bathrooms. It was intensely hot in the city and dust storms were blowing. The sky was covered with an ugly yellow heat haze, and all day hot, restless winds blew dust about. Loudspeaker vans were driven through the streets to advise people to be vaccinated against the current outbreak of smallpox. Miss Tuhy hardly left her room. She felt ill and weak, and contrary to her usual custom, she often lay down on her bed, even during the day. She kept her doors and windows shut, but nevertheless the dust seeped in, and so did the smells and the noise of the house. She no longer went on her daily shopping and preferred not to eat. Sharmila brought food up for her, but Miss Tuhy did not want it, it was too spicy for her and too greasy. ‘Just a little taste,’ Sharmila begged and brought a morsel to her lips. Miss Tuhy pushed her hand away and cried out, ‘Go away! I can’t stand the smell!’ She meant not only the smell of the food, but also that of Sharmila’s heavy, perspiring body.
It was in these days of terrible heat that the grandmother at last managed to die. Miss Tuhy dragged herself up from her bed in order to attend the funeral on the bank of the river. It was during the hottest part of the day, and the sun spread such a pall of white heat that, seen through it, the flames of the pyre looked colourless and quite harmless as they first licked and then rose higher and enveloped the body of the grandmother. The priest chanted and the eldest son poured clarified butter to feed the fire. All the relatives shrieked and wailed and beat their thighs in the traditional manner. Sharmila shrieked the loudest – she tore open her breast and, beating it with her fists, demanded to be allowed to die, and then she tried to fling herself on the pyre and had to be held back by four people. Vultures swayed overhead in the dust-laden sky. The river had dried up and the sand burned underfoot. Everything was white, desolate, empty, for miles and miles and miles around, on earth and, apart from the vultures, in the sky. Sharmila suddenly flung herself on Miss Tuhy and held her in a stifling embrace. She wept that now only she, Miss Tuhy, was left to her, and promised to look after her and tend and care for her as she had done for her dear, dead granny. Miss Tuhy gasped for air and tried to free herself, but Sharmila only clung to her the tighter and her tears fell on and smeared Miss Tuhy’s cheeks.
Miss Tuhy’s mother had died almost forty years ago, but Miss Tuhy could still vividly recall her funeral. It had drizzled, and rich smells of damp earth had mixed with the more delicate smell of tuberoses and yew. The clergyman’s words brought ease and comfort, and weeping was restrained; birds sang cheerfully from out of the wet trees. That’s the way to die, thought Miss Tuhy, and bitterness welled up into her hitherto gentle heart. The trouble was, she no longer had the fare home to England, not even on the cheapest route.