Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

John sits on another bench trying to explain to some men what he does for a living, with his very little Hindi and their very little English. He gestures taking photographs, and then gets out a copy of the magazine and shows them pictures of male models with his name beneath them. They pretend to misunderstand him, shaking their heads in refusal to believe that he is the man in the photograph.

The train rattles on for hours through the smells and sounds of many different stations, many different villages. When we stop, traders board with baskets of fruit and bread and pots of hot chai; and beggars with limbs as thin and knotty as their sticks; and a leper, who is beaten away by the policemen.

When my legs and backside become stiff and begin to ache, I stand up, placing the woman’s bare feet gently down on the bench. She tuts loudly. I inch through the standing passengers, all men, to the open doorway, and stand there cooling in the rush of fresh air. At each station, the breeze wilts and a rank smell leaks through the toilet door into the carriage, burning my nostrils.

I return to the bench where the woman is peeling more oranges. She holds a piece out to me, the juice dripping down her long, thin fingers and onto my white trousers.

When my father phones, I say to him, ‘ Kemcho. Tamaru naam su che? ’

‘I’m coming to pick you up,’ he says, and puts the phone down.

Again, in the car, I try this Gujarati greeting, these phrases my Aunty Frances has taught me: Hello. Whatisyourname? MarunaamJennyche. He doesn’t respond. From the back seat, I watch his eyes in the rear-view mirror, flicking back and forth and from side to side, from the road ahead to the road behind, to me, and away again. His eyes are brown with a sliver of amber; his lids are heavy; he looks sad even when he smiles. I don’t have his eyes; mine are blue like my mother’s and Aunty Frances’s. I ask, ‘Did mum ever go?’

‘Where?’

‘To India.’

‘No.’ He switches on the radio. The subject is closed.

I dream that night of Ganesha, who stands before me with his elephant’s head bearing down on his skinny body, its weight too great for his legs, which look like they might buckle. He plants his bare feet wide to keep his balance and fixes me with his elephant eyes, which are brown, with a chink of amber; the lids are heavy and make him look sad. And Shiva is begging Ganesha not to tell anybody what he has done.

We are in India for a couple of weeks to produce an article on a wedding in a village in Gujarat, a bus-ride north of Surat.

The bride’s name is Pritti. We capture her first in her daily routine before the wedding preparations start. Down by the river at dawn, John takes the photographs and I conduct an interview, while Pritti washes clothes, beating shirts so hard against the rocks that the buttons break off. She makes chappatis, rolling them and putting them out to dry on mats in the early sun, where they become pock-marked with the footprints of tiny birds which run through the dust and over the chappatis. Her brothers and sisters want to practise their English on us, but they only know how to ask our names, so conversations sound like Rumpelstiltskin riddles. In the evenings, we return to our guest house, where we eat and sleep to the sound of the cicadas, the helicopter beetles and the call to prayer.

The guest house is a family business managed by a middle-aged couple and their unmarried daughter, Sangita. Monkeys sit on the roof, watching our comings and goings. John and I have a bedroom each, and every morning Sangita brings us chai.

She tells John that it is not proper for him to visit the bride at home on the eve of her wedding. We agree that I will go alone to document the wedding party preparations, while John goes off to take contextual pictures, landscapes, whatever takes his eye. I eat with the bride and her family, and return to the guest house late. John is not in his room. I fall asleep, and by the time I wake the next morning, John is already out and about.

I return to Pritti’s house. Everybody is busy dressing and decorating the bride. One of her sisters paints my hands with cold dots of henna paste, making concentric circles on each palm, and a flower in the middle, painting bangles around my wrists and rings around my fingers.

I am expecting to see John at the wedding, but he is not there. I take some pictures on my own camera and wait for him to arrive, but he doesn’t come. He misses the wedding and the day of celebration which follows it. I collect a roll of thirty-six snaps with people’s heads and feet chopped off or with my thumb half over the lens. I forget the flash in a dim room or face the sun, which scorches out the image. My record of the occasion is skewed and blurry.

When I finally catch up with John, he makes a few lame excuses. He says we can tell the magazine that I or he took the pictures while he was ill.

As it happens, John is not ill at all, not once. It is me who goes down with terrible diarrhoea and vomiting the day after the celebrations. I stay at home feeling wretched, sleeping and sweating and washing, watching my orange henna patterns fade.

John goes out every morning to get bottles of water and Thums Up! cola for me before going to work. Each evening I ask him for the day’s stories; whether there are interviews I need to do to accompany his pictures; whether he has written down all the subjects’ names. In response, he is vague; he says he has photographed nothing worthwhile that day but will go out again the next day.

On the third day of my illness I am feeling a little better and a little bored. In the afternoon, I get up and go to John’s room. He is still out, but while I wait for him to return, I sit down to look at the Polaroids spread out on his bed. I am expecting to see pictures of the village and its surroundings, the market and the shrines, the main road and its traffic. I am surprised and puzzled to find myself looking at dozens of pictures of Sangita down by the river, stained orange by the sunrise.

When I talk about going to India, Dad says, ‘Bloody Frances.’ He says I am too young, and that I don’t have the money. This is true when I am fourteen with a paper-round, but not when I am eighteen and working, with Aunty Frances topping up my fund for my nineteenth birthday. ‘Bloody Frances,’ he says. He thought I had forgotten all about it, that I had left India behind. Still he tries to put me off, to find reasons for me not to go. ‘You’ll get ill,’ he says. ‘Frances was very ill when she was there.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘she told me. But you weren’t.’

He looks startled.

There are more than a hundred photographs of Sangita altogether. Beneath the stack of pictures of her looking fresh and shy in the morning sunshine there is another collection. In these, her sari is a little dishevelled, her hair is a little tousled, her face is a little flushed, and her smile is a little secret.

I confront John when he comes home. He is embarrassed and defensive.

‘How could you?’ I ask. ‘What about Linda? Does Sangita know you’re married?’

‘Yes, she knows,’ he says.

‘And what are you planning on doing? What are you going to tell Linda?’

‘Linda doesn’t need to know,’ he says.

I turn away.

On the day we leave, while we are waiting to catch the bus back to Surat, I see Sangita running through the village in an orange sari, scattering the dust and the chickens. She catches up with us and holds John’s hands and face and tells him he must stay.