Alice’s life changes on a perfectly ordinary afternoon in the midst of a perfectly ordinary week.
Later, she will wonder: did she have any inkling of what was to come that drowsy, jasmine-and-dust-tinted afternoon?
She will look back at the day, her actions – the same as every other day, talking, listening, playing with and helping the children – and wonder, did she have a premonition, a hunch that something momentous was poised to happen?
No, she will decide.
She had absolutely no inkling that her orderly world with its everyday routines was about to tilt on its axis; that this day, which seemed like any other, was anything but.
She is in the little room off the nursery, which passes for her office, catching up on paperwork while the children have their afternoon siesta, when there is a knock at her door.
And with it, although she doesn’t know it then, events are set in motion that will completely, irrevocably, inevitably alter the course of her life.
It takes so little to change a life.
The whisper-soft sigh between one breath and the next – that’s all it takes to devastate the life you have so carefully constructed.
All it takes to pay for the happiness that is more than your due.
All it takes to balance the giant account sheet monitored by a punishing God who keeps a tally.
Janaki’s stomach spasms, her body reacting to what she has just heard before her mind can make sense of it.
Around her the world goes on, a woman’s low, throaty laughter clashing discordantly with the plaintive mewl of a kitten; two men arguing, each louder than the other; a child sucking the juice from a mango, his chin spattered yellow with syrup, attracting flies; a woman carrying pails of water, one in each hand, while balancing another expertly on her head, the bangles adorning her wrists chiming a merry tune, glimmering saffron and marigold in the dancing sunshine that falls in gilded streaks on the dust by the doorway against which Janaki is slumped.
All it takes is one moment for happiness to transform into tragedy, for everything to go to nothing, for life to never be the same again.
All it takes is one moment.
When Alice wakes, she knows immediately that all is not right; there’s something vital missing.
She looks around her at a world pixelated by the mosquito net that drapes her cot. The windows are open and moist air laced with cinnamon, frying onions, caramelised sugar and cardamom drifts in through the mesh screen that keeps insects at bay. She is hot, sweaty, but that is not what distresses her. It is the sound of laughter, warm and unconstrained, just beneath her window. Now the chuckles, which she imagines as bright rainbows, stop and natter begins. She cannot take any more. She opens her mouth and screams…
‘Arre, Missy Baba, why the upset?’ Ayah laughs, gathering Alice to her, twirling her around.
And even though Alice is comforted, that dark, fathomless upset of being left out, abandoned, which had squeezed her heart – the notion that the world was turning, people going about their lives having forgotten all about her, the fear so vivid she can still taste it, salty bitter – returns in remembered sobs that come as hiccups now her wailing has quieted.
Alice breathes in Ayah’s soothing smell – the tang of perspiration, jasmine from the creamy white flowers circling her bun, and sweet rose from the joss sticks she burns to the gods religiously every morning and evening – and peers around her shoulder.
Searching. Searching…
Where is her friend?
Ayah reads her mind even before she can formulate the word ‘Raju’.
‘Your first word,’ Ayah likes to say, her voice warm. ‘Not Mother, Father or even Ayah, but Raju. I was worried when your mother handed you over to me as a baby that my own baba might be jealous. But when Raju saw you crying, he started up as well, and when I soothed you, he grinned and clapped his hands. You were a newborn but you squinted up at him then and, I swear, you smiled. That was it, Raju’s little face lit up with joy and after that, you were inseparable.’
Raju, always waiting outside her room for her to wake in the morning, always beside her, Alice’s loyal companion until she goes to bed at night – today being a puzzling exception – laughs out loud when Ayah recounts this story.
Alice’s friend’s mirth is like the explosion of colourful bubbles that time Ayah filled the bucket with water by the tamarind and mango trees, and Alice tipped the entire cake of soap into it. Bubbles had risen, bright and profuse, holding shimmering rainbows within them. Raju and Alice had toddled after them, swatting at the bubbles. Ayah, having fished the soap out of the bucket, the cake now just a fine sliver, had been too charmed by their joy to tell them off.
‘Raju is ill. He’s with my sister. I couldn’t risk you getting his fever,’ Ayah says now.
Alice’s upset, briefly appeased by Ayah’s arms, erupts again.
She is lost without her playmate and counterpart.
In all her four years, she cannot recall a day when Raju has not been beside her, keeping her company. He looks after her, cares for her. He understands her every action, reading her emotions sometimes even before she can articulate them herself…
She opens her mouth and her disappointment, her hurt at Raju not being there beside her for possibly the first time that she is aware of, manifests, once again, in heart-rending bawls.
‘Missy Baba, if Raju came here in the state he’s in, he’d give you his fever. It wouldn’t do at all.’
But Alice will not listen, she cannot.
All she is aware of is the pain of missing her friend, his yawning absence.
‘Raju,’ she screams, ‘I want Raju.’
Ayah takes her to the central courtyard around which the house is built, carrying her past the climbing roses, the saffron marigold smiles and the cascading profusion of bougainvillea to the well, letting Alice look inside – something she and Raju have been warned not to do.
‘You’re to steer clear of the well, it is out of bounds,’ Ayah has told them sternly, her normally smiling eyes bright and sharp. ‘Dangerous.’
Now, Ayah allows Alice a peek, reiterating, her voice firm: ‘No doing this on your own. Ever.’
The hollow, yawning hole, seemingly endless save for a darkly glittering grin, deep, deep down – a tantalising, barely-there slither of shimmering silver – sends shivers down Alice’s spine.
She is allowed to touch the rope, wet and coarse, thick brown, the pulley with the pail, half-full of glinting water. The cat, daringly perched on the rim of the well, is drinking from the pail, pink tongue darting. The washing stone beside the well glows bright navy-streaked-grey in the sunshine.
Alice caresses the moss, soft velvet, lining the well surround and marvels at its carpet-like texture, her tears temporarily forgotten.
She looks around for Raju, to ask him to feel too, and is assaulted afresh by his absence, her tears starting up again, louder.
Ayah permits her to slip and slide on the cement floor, which has been sprayed with water to cool the house. This activity usually makes her break out in giggles when with Raju, the burst of her friend’s laughter too infectious to resist. But it is not much fun all on her own.
Ayah carries her high up on the seat of her shoulders so that she is almost level with the fruit trees in the compound at the back of the house, allowing her to pluck a guava and count the number of bananas in each of the crowded bunches that are weighing down the banana trees so they look like stooped old women. Past the knobbly tamarind they walk, and the green peppercorns, their pungent tang making Alice sneeze.
Ayah points out the spiky pineapples growing from little shrubs on the ground like offerings, with their juicy yellow fragrance; the prickly humps of jackfruit, the sun dazzling gold, the air a festive celebration of scents, seasoned liberally with dust. And yet, despite the rosy ripeness of the guava sweet in her mouth, Alice feels bereft.
‘I want Raju,’ she cries, even as the other servants – the sweeper, the ends of her sari tucked in at the waist, waging her perpetual battle against the ever-present dust; Dhobi delivering a stack of freshly washed and ironed clothes smelling of soap and sun; Mali, dirt from working the soil in the garden ingrained into the grooves of his calloused fingers, the nails quite black – all make a fuss of her.
‘Why so upset, Missy Baba?’ they ask. ‘Look, even the sun is slipping behind clouds because you’re sad.’
Alice looks up. The sun is as golden bright as ever in a blinding turquoise sky majestically free of clouds. She blinks, eyes stinging.
‘Fooled you,’ Mali chortles, his laughter morphing into hacking coughs. ‘Made you stop crying for a minute.’
Alice starts up again, furious.
Mali goes back to his plants, still coughing. He plucks potent green chillies, elegant okra, plump brinjals in their resplendent aubergine coats and lanky beans.
The peacocks that frequent the compound dance around his feet, their plumes open in a theatre of winking sapphire and iridescent copper-gold.
‘They make a louder racket even than you,’ Ayah tells Alice, smiling at her.
But Alice will not stop until her friend is with her, as always.
‘Alright,’ Ayah sighs, ‘we’ll ask Memsahib if you can visit Raju, how’s that?’
At this, Alice’s sobs stall, subsiding once again to hiccups.
‘And if she agrees, we’ll go. Just for a while, mind. Raju’s ill, and may not be his usual self. And if we do visit, you’re not to touch him or get close to him, you understand?’
Ayah wipes Alice’s face with her sari pallu. It smells of sweat and sun, onions and comfort, patience and love.
‘What are we to do with the two of you, eh?’ Ayah says, but she is smiling. ‘Inseparable.’
Alice giggles, throwing her head to the wide sky, her tears quite forgotten at the prospect of seeing her friend again.
She takes another bite of the guava and relishes its juicy nectar, savouring the syrup.
Clang, clang, clang!
In the girls’ dormitory, Janaki jerks awake, eyes opening to the shadow-steeped darkness vibrating with deep bronze reverberations.
The others all sleep on, seemingly oblivious to the persistent ringing of the bell.
How can they sleep through the noise?
The air in the room is hot and heavy, scented with many slumbering breaths; the sticky, sweet dreams of the girls lying side by side on mats on the floor.
Janaki gets up, softly, so as not to disturb her neighbour and best friend Arthy, although she doesn’t know why she bothers. Arthy would sleep through an earthquake and wake up wondering why she was pinned down by rubble.
Janaki is grateful that she is closest to the door and that there’s nobody on her right. She’d be claustrophobic, stuck in the midst of a row of girls.
‘I sleepwalk, you know. You don’t want to be woken by me stumbling over you, blinking and weaving like a bhoot,’ she’d declared to the other girls, and they had believed her, allowing her the coveted spot by the door.
Sister Nandita had called her aside. ‘It doesn’t do to tell lies.’
‘But, Sister—’
Sister’s all-seeing eyes had speared Janaki. ‘You don’t really sleepwalk, Janaki.’
Fiddling with her clothes, Janaki had been unable to meet Sister’s gaze. ‘But I do need to get up in the night to use the toilet.’
‘Why not say that then?’
‘The others will argue that they want to as well.’
‘Do you have to have the space by the door? Can’t you share?’
‘I… I don’t like being hemmed in.’
‘You can sleep by the door for a month, then you will allow others a turn, yes?’
Biting her lower lip and studiously avoiding Sister Nandita’s eyes, Janaki had said, ‘Okay.’ But at the same time her mind had been frantically trying to come up with ways to convince the others not to claim the place by the door even when offered it. Perhaps, out of Sister Nandita’s hearing, she could convince them it was haunted? Cursed?
Now, Janaki slips out of the door and into the corridor. She peers down through the railings, inhaling the metallic odour of rust, towards the entrance to the orphanage, where there is a bell that can be pulled when someone leaves a baby outside. One of the nuns – usually Sister Malli, who’s the most junior and thus, always on night duty – would come to rescue it.
St Ursula’s orphanage is in the middle of a busy street in the heart of the city of Jamjadpur.
‘When our fellow Carmelite nuns from England started St Ursula’s, this was a quiet street. But the city grew and grew, and now we are right in the centre. Along with Jamjadpur, the orphanage has grown as well. We are bursting at the seams,’ Sister Shanthi had once informed Janaki as they’d sat threading jasmine together. ‘The businesses on either side of us keep wanting to buy our land: the compound with fruit trees at the back and this shady area in front, with its flower bushes and vegetable patch. But our benefactors, the Carmelite nuns from England who still own this property, don’t want to sell. This is the best orphanage in the city, the children here growing up well rounded and—’
‘Why then, every evening, do we have to pick out worms from the flour that will be used for our porridge and chapatis the next day?’ Janaki had asked, surprising even herself; usually she was quiet and rule-abiding, not daring to question the nuns even on things she privately disagreed with. But the memory of the worm she had found in her chapati at lunch prompted this unaccustomed feistiness.
Sister Shanthi had stopped weaving jasmine and had perused Janaki with beady eyes. ‘You’re sounding very ungrateful, Janaki. It’s not like you.’
‘Sister—’
‘You’re a thousand times better off than the street kids who don’t have a roof to sleep under. They’d be grateful for any food, even the leftovers of those chapatis you’re complaining about. That flour, by the time it arrives from abroad, is not at its best, but at least you have three meals a day which is more than can be said for—’
‘I’m sorry.’ Janaki had been chastened.
Smells of stewing tea and roasting vegetables, sounds of clanging utensils were wafting from the kitchen, which was directly to the left of where they were sitting beneath the mango trees, fashioning fragrant wreaths to place before holy statues in the small chapel attached to the orphanage. The other orphans were having their afternoon nap (girls and boys in their dormitories on opposite sides of the orphanage, separated by the nuns’ rooms and the chapel), as were most of the nuns. Janaki did not like afternoon naps and Sister Shanthi felt the same: ‘If I nap now then I can’t sleep at night.’
Wanting to change the topic and Sister Shanthi’s mood, Janaki had asked, ‘How did I come to be here?’ She never tired of hearing the story of her arrival at the orphanage, as a newborn eight years earlier, and Sister Shanthi always obliged.
‘Oh, your arrival was dramatic. It was right in the middle of the riots.’ Her eyes had glowed with the mellow light of reminiscence.
‘What riots?’ Janaki had asked – Sister’s cue – although of course she knew.
A gentle breeze was stroking Janaki’s face with soft caresses, like her absent mother’s palms would have done, she fancied.
‘The Hindu Muslim riots of nineteen thirty-six.’ Sister Shanthi had sighed, her expression pensive. ‘Not much has changed since then. Hindus and Muslims are still at loggerheads and, if anything, the violence is getting worse. They all want freedom from the British but instead of finding common ground in this, they are turning on each other. However, thankfully, at the moment at least, there’s peace here in Jamjadpur.’
She had fallen silent, both she and Janaki listening to the noises outside the sleepy compound: horses neighing, carriage wheels creaking, people chattering and arguing; vendors shouting out their wares, their tones slightly desperate; beggars jangling their cans, the paltry coins rattling inside.
‘The city was on fire, houses burning, corpses littering the road,’ Sister Shanthi continued. ‘There was so much chaos, such mindless violence. And in the midst of all this, a reedy, unmistakable cry. The mewling siren of a newborn. We didn’t have the bell at the time, you see. That was only installed later, when…’ Sister Shanthi swallowed, shadows crowding her soft honey eyes.
‘When what, Sister?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Please tell, Sister.’
‘One of the babies… He must have been left at dawn but whoever left the child did not rattle the gate to let us know – or perhaps they did, but not loud enough for us to hear.’
‘And?’ Janaki had nudged as Sister was lost in musing.
‘We were busy that day, the Bishop was visiting, so we didn’t check the little nook by the gate as usual. The child must have been sickly and it was a very hot day. By the time we found him, later that afternoon, he was dehydrated. We… we couldn’t save him.’ Sister Shanthi had sighed deeply, her eyes sparkling gold.
‘Oh.’ Janaki had not heard this part of the story in previous retellings. A dip formed in her stomach at the thought of that unfortunate boy, a stinging in her eyes.
‘After that, we installed the bell.’ Sister Shanthi had sighed again. Then, shaking her head, ‘Now then, I’ve gone off on a tangent. I’m beginning to do so more and more nowadays.’
Yes, you are, Janaki had thought but hadn’t dared to say out loud, having learnt from experience that although they (or at least Sister Shanthi) admitted their faults, the nuns did not like you to concur.
‘Where was I?’
‘The cry of a baby in the middle of the riots,’ Janaki had prompted.
‘We were in the chapel praying for peace. Then we heard the unmistakable cry of a baby in the midst of all the agonised screams. But Mother Superior was leading the prayer and we didn’t want to…’
‘Mother Superior can be quite scary,’ Janaki had said with feeling, recalling the times she had been summoned to see her and had been made to kneel on the floor, contemplating her sins while looking up at Christ on the cross, His mild, blood-stained face smiling down at her, despite His crown of thorns.
‘Then there was this banging at the gate and someone calling, “Nuns! Sisters!” Mother Superior opened her eyes and nodded at me; I went running at once.’ Sister Shanthi had paused again to take a breath.
A crow cawed up among the mango trees. A blue-and-yellow-sequinned butterfly, like sun-splashed sky, landed on a maroon hibiscus flower next to Janaki.
‘At the gate, a miracle,’ Sister Shanti had informed her. ‘The Hindus and Muslims who’d been engaged in fighting unto death were all gathered together and smiling down at you, united in admiration. You were such a beautiful baby, wrapped in a green cardigan that brought out the unusual, starry blue of your eyes. You were blinking up at the men who had, a minute before, been hell-bent upon violence, ready to commit murder. Those mercenaries were misty-eyed and when I came to collect you, one of them said, “This one’s special.” Once I took you in, they started fighting again, taking up where they’d left off, all traces of tenderness gone.’
Now, Janaki brings her thoughts back to the present, as she stands with her nose flattened against the iron railings, night pressing, dark and secretive with shadows.
Here and there is a golden pin-pricked flicker of light. The street outside, never quiet during the day, is now dozy with slumber, even the drunks and street dwellers out for the count.
Janaki watches as Sister Malli rubs the sleep from her eyes and opens the gate, gently cradling the bundle left in the nook, bringing it inside.
A dog whines plaintively in the alleyway behind the orphanage. A cat jumps off the low, broken wall of the compound opposite, sniffing curiously at the rubbish heaped in the ditch, spilling onto the road.
Sister Malli will take the baby to the kitchen, feed it with some watered-down milk and settle it on one of the mats in the baby room.
Janaki waits, and sure enough, a shadow unpeels itself from the wall further along the road. The woman’s silhouette, face covered by a veil, is just visible as she slips into the enveloping, obliterating darkness, gently wiping, Janaki imagines, tears from her eyes.
‘The mothers who leave their children here, will they miss them?’ she once asked.
‘Of course. Tremendously. It is because they love their children so much that they give them away,’ Sister Nandita had replied. ‘They feel their children have a better chance here at the orphanage than with them.’
‘But...’ Janaki was puzzled. How could living here with strict nuns, unyielding routine, harsh punishments for small transgressions, mealy, worm-riddled food, be better than being with family?
Sister Nandita divined her unvoiced question. ‘They’re at their wits’ end, undone by circumstances, no proper house, not enough food to go round, no means of providing their offspring with an education.’
Janaki nodded with dawning understanding, thinking of the beggars on the streets outside the orphanage, so much worse off than her. No clothes to wear or food to eat, the mothers clinging to their children, their bloodshot eyes telling stories of desperation and heartbreak.
The woman stops at the end of the street, turns once, her face, Janaki imagines, watery and wistful, although all she can see is a shadowy outline.
Janaki slips back into the dormitory and lies down beside Arthy, who is snoring away, oblivious, the thick, close air tasting of sleep and haunted by dreams. She thinks of the baby downstairs, now a part of the orphanage. The mother going to wherever her home is – if she has one – heartsick but hoping, praying her child has a better life because of her sacrifice.
Janaki dreams of a woman who leaves her child by the gate of the orphanage in the middle of riots. The woman’s face is in silhouette, but her shoulders are hunched and shuddering; she is wiping her face with the veil of her sari even as she sends a prayer coloured the transcendent yellow of hope against the odds to the gods.
In the nook by the gate, the child, wearing a cardigan the hue of rain-burnished fields, smiles up at the men who crowd around her, admiring her eyes, which are the startling blue of a cloudless summer sky.
Alice clutches Ayah’s hand, tight, as Ayah knocks on the door to Memsahib’s room. Alice doesn’t like it in there, although Ayah makes her visit twice a day when Sahib is away (for then Memsahib takes all her meals in bed). Ayah takes Alice in to greet Memsahib in the morning – after she has been scrubbed clean of the hot, flustered dreams of night and plastered with sweet-smelling talc, which she doesn’t mind as long as it doesn’t get into her eyes – and before bed.
‘You must call her Mother,’ Ayah admonishes. Alice has heard Sahib call her ‘Caro’, and Sahib’s friends refer to her as ‘the lovely Mrs Harris’. Sahib, meanwhile, is ‘Robert’ to Memsahib and to his friends. To Alice, despite Ayah’s remonstrations, her parents – remote figures, barely featuring in her life – are Sahib and Memsahib.
Alice has marvelled at how a person can be different things to different people. She herself is ‘Alice’ to her parents, but thinks of herself as Missy Baba, and feels quite peculiar when she is introduced as ‘Miss Harris’ or sometimes ‘Miss Alice Harris’ to Sahib’s friends.
‘What is Raju’s other name?’ she once queried to Ayah.
Ayah was puzzled.
‘You know, like mine is Miss Harris.’ Alice was frustrated with Ayah for not understanding.
Ayah hooted with laughter, spitting out the paan she was chewing, Alice jumping out of the way of the foul red liquid just in time.
‘Missy Baba, you’re a delight.’ Ayah swooped down and gathered Alice in her onion-and-cumin-scented arms.
Alice scowled at Ayah. ‘I wasn’t joking.’
‘Raju’s other name is Mr Kumar,’ Ayah said, smiling, her mouth stained with paan juice. ‘Although I can’t see when he will have cause to use it.’
Alice doesn’t like having to speak in English with her parents. Hindi is the language of her heart, the tongue she learnt at Ayah’s breast, the vernacular of Ayah’s lullabies and Raju’s soothing, the servants’ gossip and arguments, the lingo in which Mali converses with his beloved plants, the language of Alice’s dreams. Alice enjoys conversing in Hindi, its musical cadences more familiar than the clipped, crisp language she has to use when speaking to her parents. Although she sees Sahib even less than she does Memsahib – most days, he is gone before she is awake and returns home after she is in bed.
Alice has a vivid memory of Sahib – or is it a dream? She’s not quite sure. All she knows is that it is bright and colourful and feels very real. She conjures it during those rare times when Sahib is home before her bedtime and his stern, preoccupied face causes her stomach to dip in fear.
In her memory/dream, she’s looking up at Sahib, so tall as to block out the sun.
‘Are you as tall as the sky? Does your head touch the clouds?’ she asks.
And this is where she questions her memory and is convinced it is a dream, for Sahib laughs, his chuckles like warm stones tumbling on glass, like thunder rumbling. She cannot recall ever hearing Sahib laugh or even seeing him smile except in this vibrant dream-memory.
Now he is bending down, his eyes twinkling at her. ‘You can decide for yourself.’
And then he is lifting her, oh so high! It’s as if she is flying!
‘You’re not as tall as the sky,’ she declares. ‘But you can see for miles.’ Awe and wonder burnish her voice bright rainbow.
Sahib sets her down, still smiling. ‘Go and find your nanny, Alice.’
Nanny? For a moment Alice is nonplussed and then she realises Sahib means Ayah!
‘She’s Ayah, not Nanny, and you can call me Missy Baba,’ Alice corrects imperiously. She has always associated ‘Missy Baba’ with warm affection, and now that Sahib is being so friendly and kind, she’s decided he can call her so too.
But...
A stormy scowl steals the remnants of the smile from Sahib’s face.
‘Your name is Alice – Missy Baba is what the servants call you for you are their little mistress. And your nanny’s name is not Ayah, it’s her job,’ Sahib roars.
Alice’s dream-memory ends here and she’s quite pleased that she cannot picture/recall what happened next…
Memsahib’s cheeks are thin, papery. She is pale as the skin on the milk Ayah makes Alice drink every morning ‘so you grow tall and strong’. She smells of sleep, sweat and roses. Her eyes are the broody blue of the sky at dusk, huge and watery in a narrow face.
Alice prefers Ayah’s substantial arms, smelling of onions and comfort. Her hands, brown and gnarled and yet so soft and gentle with her.
She likes it best when it is just herself with Ayah and Raju – her favourite people.
Memsahib’s room is always dark, the curtains pulled shut to keep out the day.
‘The mosquitoes, the bugs, the sticky, unrelenting heat, the incessant spices added to everything, even pudding,’ Memsahib complains, her eyes hard, flashing fire – a startling contrast to her milky face. ‘No moderation. Everything done to extremes in this horrid country.’
Alice and Raju have overheard Ayah gossiping with Cook: ‘The memsahib is an English flower, unsuited to and wilting in this heat. She’s wanted to go home since she set foot here.’
Home? Alice wondered. Isn’t this home? How can Memsahib not like it here? How can she be unsuited to the golden sunshine that makes things grow, thrive?
Alice loves the heat, the food, the people. She even tolerates the bugs.
For Alice is at home.
‘Memsahib’s always been a sickly one,’ Alice and Raju heard Ayah whispering to Cook.
They were meant to be having their naps but had sneaked out to eavesdrop – Alice the instigator, Raju as ever following her lead.
Alice’s face was pressed against the wood of the door, with its scent of sawdust and secrets, one eye positioned perfectly in the gap at the hinges so that she had a view of the kitchen, one hand tucked into Raju’s hand, sticky with perspiration and friendship.
Ayah paused, taking a big sip of ginger-and-cardamom-infused tea.
‘Here, have a samosa to go with it. New recipe. I’ve added peas to the potato mixture,’ Cook said, the oil sizzling and sputtering as she took a freshly cooked samosa out of the frying pan.
Alice’s stomach rumbled and Raju stifled a giggle, his teeth glowing yellow against chocolate skin.
‘This is delicious,’ Ayah said and Cook beamed, sitting herself down opposite Ayah, setting a plate of samosas and another of – was it rasgullas? – between them.
Alice’s stomach rumbled again and Raju suppressed another chuckle.
‘We’ll have them when we “wake up”. Not long now,’ he whispered in her ear, his breath hot and sweet, flavoured with the tartness of the fresh mango he was always munching.
‘Memsahib’s pregnancy was difficult and the birth itself an ordeal. That is why, as soon as Missy Baba was born, she was handed to me,’ Ayah said. ‘Memsahib is to have no more children, doctor’s orders. Apparently, her constitution will not be able to survive childbirth again. One seems to have destroyed Memsahib as it is.’ Ayah sighed deeply. ‘My Raju barely a year old when Missy Baba
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