Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

This was worse than anything I could have imagined. ‘What about my parts?’

‘They are under the impression that Europeans are only furnished with white skin on the parts that show — hands and face. This would certainly explain the white man’s unwillingness to bare his skin to the sun. If he did so — what is the phrase? — the jig would be up. By producing your private parts you have provided an exsh ellent opportunity for them to test this theory and perhaps even to settle some longstanding bets about the pigmentation of Western anatomy.’ And she produced a decidedly dirty-sounding laugh. If she gave vent to merriment on any other occasion that summer I don’t remember it.

As for whether her humiliating account of what we had experienced was truthful or not I really couldn’t say, since for the rest of my visit I made myself ignore the demands of the bladder until I was safely in reach of that providential piece of sanitary furnishing, the late Arthur Osborne’s commode, come all the way from Bangalore.

Peter’s presence transformed my relationship with Kuppu. Before he arrived she and I had enjoyed a warm friendship, as free and easy as any relationship can be that is based on one person’s perpetual need to be cleared up. Often she would speak to me in Tamil, starting every speech with ‘Amma, Ammaaa!’ Eventually I realised from her gestures that she meant Mrs Osborne by this, but I couldn’t follow the rest of what she was whispering so urgently.

I didn’t think she was telling me that pale children kept arriving at Aruna Giri in pairs, hand in hand, the boys in shorts, the girls in pigtails, while nothing ever came out of the house except the smell of roast meat. But it was worth bearing in mind.

Soon after he arrived, Peter exercised his able-bodied privileges and went through my little suitcase. He came upon the tin of Cadbury’s Roses, the chocolates deformed by the heat but still viable, and started doling them out to Kuppu — one every time she freshened me up, another every time she freshened the commode. This miniature bounty was enough to transform her attitude from obligingness to stark devotion. The tin was a little pharmacopœia, full of medicinal powers individually wrapped in cellophane and foil. I had to contemplate the possibility, not quite that Mum had been right all along when it came to my packing priorities, but that her hand had been guided by the guru she so resented when she had sneaked the tin back into my luggage.

Then one day we bought a dozen bangles from a stall in the town. They were ridiculously cheap — a rupee for the dozen, at a time when there were seventeen or eighteen rupees to the pound. That evening I gave them to Kuppu, thinking she should be compensated by something more lasting than chocolate for her willingness to cross caste lines and keep me clean. Her expression was unreadable as she grabbed the bangles. She simply disappeared, as if she was running for her life. She sprinted from the verandah, and we didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I tried not to be put out by the absence of a show of thanks. ‘It’s probably not the custom here,’ I told Peter uncertainly. ‘She can’t be offended, can she?’

‘At least she didn’t leave the bangles behind, unless … do you think it’s unlucky to give jewellery here? Perhaps that’s why they were so cheap.’

It was certainly a possibility, but there were others. ‘Perhaps in this culture,’ I wondered aloud, ‘I just proposed to her?’

‘A dozen bangles — that’s twelve proposals! She must think you’re head over heels.’

‘I don’t think we’re ever going to understand how things work over here.’

‘How are you going to explain her to Mum? Rather you than me. But at least she’s pretty.’

‘She’s married to the gardener already, idiot.’

The next morning, early, there was an outburst of screeching from the gardener’s hut, the one which Kuppu shared with Rajah Manikkam. Peter and I were quite alarmed, until Mrs Osborne came out of her house, rolling her eyes in exasperation, as she so often did when dealing with the locals.

‘Are they frightened of something again, Mrs Osborne?’

‘No, John, it’s not that. Kuppu has invited all her friends round to show them her new treasures. I hope you haven’t spoiled her for good with your lavishness.’

Spending one rupee on someone who made a hygienic life possible didn’t seem like lavishness, exactly. But at least we had our explanation for her rapid exit when I handed over the bangles. Kuppu had legged it before I had a chance to change my mind.

The behaviour of dogs after death

Peter didn’t react at all to Mrs Osborne as I would have expected. He hero-worshipped her more or less from the start. He said that wherever he was in the world, he would never be afraid of anything as long as Mrs Osborne was there. This from the fearless world traveller, who collapsed on Indian railway stations just to see what would happen! He wanted to ask her advice about things that were close to his heart, things (in fact) that we had never discussed with anyone.

First on the list was what happened in our room after Gipsy died. How was it that Gipsy had breathed by my bed as usual on the night after I took my Spanish oral in 1968, though she had been lethalised earlier in the day? It was as if she had forgotten she was dead. She even gave those sighs that dogs make in their sleep, aware even in unconsciousness of a job well done, the pack protected. The same thing happened every night for a week, and then the ghost breathing had simply stopped. Now it was time to take the mystery to Mrs Osborne.

She started nodding vigorously. Almost before we had finished explaining she said, ‘It was burned into her jiva that she must look after you. That was her purpose in life. When her body died, she had to be sure you were all right without her. I have no doubt that she will be as devoted in the next life as she was in this. May her rebirths be few!’

This wasn’t the wisdom I had come to India to find, but it was a pretty good explanation all the same, of something on the borderline — the melting film — between the ‘real’ and the Real.

Peter wanted to ask Mrs O about Mum’s increasingly erratic behaviour. She would go very barmy over the smallest thing. A dropped piece of cheese could easily lead to a major row, with no end of screaming. Sometimes Mum would be shaking with rage. Peter and I dreaded the evenings when we ate fish, because that always seemed to trigger a mighty fight afterwards. The best we could do was anticipate trouble and shelter as best we could.

I very much didn’t want to consult the Osborne oracle about the mundane miseries of the Cromers. She might have special insight into the behaviour of dogs after death, but she was not the guru I had come to India for. I had come to bask in the presence of Presence, not to have my questions answered. I wanted something that was equally far from a question and an answer.

I persuaded Peter that as a good Hindu Mrs Osborne would treat family itself as a source of distraction and entanglement. She really wasn’t cut out for the rôle of agony aunt — of the sort that Mum so addictively sneered at in the Daily Mirror . At the hairdresser’s in Bourne End village she would ‘tidy up’ the cluttered magazine table, and somehow the problem page would always fall open in front of her eyes.

Peter was slow to recover full strength after his illness. Much as he would have loved to, he still wasn’t able to lift me up or down those three steps onto Mrs O’s verandah. Rajah Manikkam continued to take care of that bit. Peter’s stamina was poor, and he needed a lot of sleep, some of it in the day, so we rarely stayed out late. When we did, we went to the hut that Rajah Manikkam shared with Kuppu so that he could load me into the wheelchair, now that his giggling fits had been more or less exorcised.