The Secret Life of Winnie Cox

Book 2: The Quint Chronicles

by Sharon Maas

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Historical Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

1910, Guyana. A time of racial tension and poverty. A time where forbidden love must remain a secret.

Winnie Cox lives a privileged life of dances and dresses on her father’s sugar cane plantation. Life is sweet in the kingdom of sugar and Winnie along with her sister Johanna, have neither worries nor responsibilities, they are birds of paradise, protected from the poverty in the world around them.

But everything can change in a heartbeat…

When Winnie falls in love with George Quint, the black post-office boy, from the other side, she soon finds herself slipping into a double life. And as she withdraws from her family, she discovers a shocking secret about those whom are closest to her. Now, more than ever, Winnie is determined to prove her love for George, whatever price she must pay and however tragic the consequences might be.

A breath-taking love story of two people fighting to be together, in a world determined to break them apart.

" I absolutely love Sharon Maas writing style - you can just picture the setting and the relationships between the characters in such a vivid world." Bookworms and Shutterbugs

"Superb book about love in a different age against all the odds. Brilliant." Baatty about Books

 

Release date: October 1, 2015

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 420

Sample

1910 – British Guiana

A telegram! There it sat, in its innocence and its power, staring at us in silence from a silver platter on the hall sideboard. Waiting. Unsuspecting, we had gambolled in from tennis, sweaty and exhausted, chattering and laughing as young girls do; Yoyo was fourteen and I sixteen, as blithe and blind as our age and our daydreams. And then we saw it, and an axe of reality fell through our little carefree world, cutting off our prattle mid-sentence; and we remembered: Mama. My heart lurched and slid to the soles of my feet; the tennis racket slipped from my hand. Yoyo gasped and her hand flew to her mouth. Such is the power of an unopened telegram.

It paralyzed us. We simply stared. It stared back, daring us to rip it open and read – which of course we couldn’t. My first panicked thought – once I could think again – was, Mama’s ship has sunk. The second was, or has been captured by pirates. One heard such dreadful stories about the Atlantic crossing. One sang hymns For Those in Peril on the Sea. One prayed and hoped and yet still imagined the worst at the sight of that little grey envelope:

THE HON ARCHIBALD COX

PLANTATION PROMISED LAND

BERBICE COUNTY

BRITISH GUIANA

Papa was out in the cane-fields and wouldn’t be home for another two hours at least. Once we had recovered our minds and our speech we ran to Miss Wright, our governess: we begged her to let us ride out to Papa, to deliver it ourselves, but she was adamant.

‘You know the rules, girls! Either we’ll send it with one of the yard-boys, or we’ll wait till your father returns.’

We did know the rules: the fields were forbidden territory for us girls. We pleaded; we reasoned: ‘But surely Papa would want to know at once, and have us all together, for support?’ But no, Miss Wright was adamant. Yoyo and I looked at each other; she raised her eyebrows and I nodded. There was no question: we couldn’t send it with a yard-boy. We sighed and surrendered to Miss Wright’s decision. We would wait. I knew this of Yoyo and she knew it of me. That’s how close we were in those days: we read each other’s minds.

We had to be there when Papa opened the envelope. We needed to read his face as he read it – distorted with pain, or smiling in relief. And so, pacing the gallery and glancing out the windows every few seconds, or running downstairs to the drive and out to the gate, we waited and watched for Papa’s return; we listened for his horse’s hooves, the creak of the gate when the guard-boy opened it, the barking of the watchdogs.

As luck would have it, Papa was late that day and the six o’clock bee had already started its punctual screech before we finally heard the longed-for hooves on the driveway. Yoyo and I flew down the front stairs. Papa, unsuspecting, flung himself off his horse and handed over the reins to the waiting groom, only to find himself beleaguered by two desperate daughters leaping at him, grabbing his hands and dragging him up the stairs, crying into his ears in a jumbled chorus.

‘Papa, Papa, Papa! There’s a telegram, Papa, from England! Quick, hurry! We’ve been waiting ever so long!’

Thankfully, Papa picked up on our urgency and hurried over to the sideboard where the little grey envelope still sat waiting on its platter. His eyes widened. He turned pale, just as we had. Yet still he would not be hurried. He picked up the silver platter, placed it on the side-table next to the Berbice chair. He removed his pith helmet and handed it and his whip to the hovering house-boy. He sat himself down in the chair and held out his legs for the boy to remove his boots. He slipped his feet into the waiting slippers. He removed a big handkerchief from the pocket of his breeches and wiped his face free of sweat and dust. He drank the entire contents of the water-glass held out to him by the boy, not without first taking the time to squeeze a sliver of lime into it. And only then did he pick up the telegram. By this time I had almost wet myself with desperation. It might be indecorous to mention this, but it’s true.

We watched his face, hardly daring to breathe. I’m sure my heart must have slowed to a stop as I waited for him to slit open the envelope, remove the slip of paper within, unfold it, and read. As he read, Papa’s moustache turned upwards at the ends with the curl of his smile. ‘Everything’s fine, girls!’ he said as he passed it to us to read: RUTH AND KATHLEEN ARRIVED SOUTHAMPTON STOP LETTER CONCERNING HEIR ON WAY GOOD NEWS STOP PERCY.

We breathed again.

‘I wonder what Uncle Percy means about an heir,’ Yoyo mused later, as she climbed under the mosquito net to join me in the big bed we shared. I held the sheet back for her and covered her as she lay down.

 ‘What does it matter?’ I replied. ‘Mama’s safe, and that’s the important thing. And Kathleen.’

Kathleen, our eldest sister, was the ostensible excuse for Mama’s voyage to England. Hungry for the London season and, hopeful of finding a suitable husband, Kathleen had begged to go too. Mama was to be her chaperone. But we all knew that Mama’s illness was the real reason for the journey.

But Yoyo frowned. ‘It must mean something!’ Yoyo’s mind, even then, was sharp and critical, less trusting than mine. Though we were close we were so very different. Yoyo – the childhood pet name that had stuck, short for Johanna, pronounced the German way, Mama’s way – was the one more likely to rebel, to protest, to challenge and break the rules. I was the gentle, compliant one, all of which makes my story all the more improbable. My story should have been Yoyo’s. The story of my transformation from a girl into a woman.

But on that day, I felt safe and comforted, as safe and comforted as a girl can feel when her mother is so very far away. It was the calm before the storm. Our very last days in the artificial paradise of Promised Land.

Two Months Later

I was in the middle of my afternoon violin practice – Elgar’s Salut D’Amour – when Yoyo burst in, a vision to behold. Her clothes were disarrayed. Her blouse that hung out from the waistband of her riding culottes was not only limp from the heat and sweat of her body but strangely mud-splattered, and her face was spotted with brown, and tear-smudged. She was wearing her riding boots – strictly forbidden indoors. Her cheeks were ruddy with some violent emotion and her eyes wide, and wild, and red. Her hair was dishevelled, falling free from its molly, and her voice was shrill with dismay.

‘Winnie! You’ve got to come with me! Now!’

‘Yoyo! What on earth … Why …’

‘I’ll explain. Just come. I need you to come. Please, Winnie. Please!’ She took the violin from my hands, peeled my fingers from the bow, and laid both on the table. I moved to put them away properly, but she would not let me.

‘Yoyo, really …’ Miss Wright, sitting at the piano, interjected. Yoyo ignored her.

‘Come on!’ She pulled at my arm. ‘Khan’s saddling Tosca for you.’

‘We’re riding? I need to change!’

‘Yes, but hurry! Hurry!’

I hurried – up to my room and then back down the stairs to the bottom house where I sat and pulled on my riding boots. That done, Yoyo grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. Infected by her urgency, I dashed across the sandy forecourt behind her to the stables, where Khan had already saddled a second pony for me. Yoyo’s own pony, Pascale, was as splattered with mud, or worse, as she was. His flanks still heaved from what had obviously been a punishing ride back from … somewhere. Khan handed us our helmets. We put them on; Yoyo mounted.

Both of us rode astride; we had given up our side-saddles a year ago and rejoiced in the freedom of riding like men. Papa had of course protested, saying it was most unladylike. But who cared about being ladylike out here on the plantation? We were Sugar Princesses in a magical realm, a sunlit, wind-blown bubble of sweetness: sugar was our livelihood, sugar determined the seasons, sugar was our world. When your father is a Sugar King you grow up basking in such sweetness and light you think it will last forever. You grow up never knowing how fragile that bubble is, and that one day, it must burst.

 I was about to swing myself up into the saddle when the ringing of a bicycle bell caused Tosca to leap away. I stumbled behind her, hanging on to the reins, and looked around.

A darkie was sailing up the drive on a bicycle. Not one of our darkies; I’d never seen this young man before. He approached with carefree abandon, his bicycle swinging down the drive in wide curves; as he drew nearer he flung one arm into the air in greeting. Yoyo, already mounted, and I, still on foot, watched in mute surprise as he rode right up to us, swung his leg over the cycle’s saddle and dismounted. His clothes were clean but worn: long khaki trousers, a short-sleeved khaki shirt and a peaked khaki cap: almost a uniform, a little too large for his lanky frame, a little too short for his height, for the trousers stopped well above the scuffed brown shoes. He wore no socks.

He carried a canvas bag slung around his shoulder, and into that bag he pushed a hand as he greeted us with an affable ‘Good afternoon, Miss!’ – and looking up at us, grinned, first at Yoyo, and then at me. He looked me straight in the eye, which I found strange; darkies always looked down when they addressed us. Yet his gaze was not impertinent; there was no disrespect in it, but also no deference. Instead, a playful innocence, coupled with such self-possession as I had never before seen in a darkie: frank, unfettered by convention. His eyes, I noticed, were almost black, deep-set and wide apart in a smooth-skinned face of burnt bronze. His voice, when he spoke, was deeper than one would assume for his apparent youth; a rich voice, with a pleasant Creole lilt.

‘You mus’ be Miss Cox? A letter for …’ he removed a small white envelope, and read the name on it, ‘The Honourable Archibald Cox.’

Did I detect a mocking note as he spoke the words the honourable? I must have been wrong, for his face showed nothing but innocent candour.

 ‘Yes, that’s our father,’ Yoyo replied, although he had addressed me; but I had lost my tongue. ‘There’s a letter-box at the gate – didn’t you see it?’

The young man scribbled in the air. ‘Registered delivery, Miss! Somebody gotta sign.’

I stepped forward to sign, Tosca’s reins slung over my arm, but Yoyo spoke out. ‘No, we’ve no time, Winnie’ She looked down at him, twirled Pascal around to show her impatience. ‘Take the letter to the door; give it to the housekeeper. She’ll sign.’

I finally found my voice.

‘Where’s Mr Perkins?’ I asked. Our letters were usually delivered by genial old Mr Perkins who lived above the Post Office in the village.

‘He retired, Miss,’ said the youth. ‘I’m the new postman, temporarily at least. I …’

‘We have to go,’ said Yoyo, interrupting impatiently. He nodded, touched his cap – I noticed he had not removed it – smiled again, placed his cycle on its stand, and walked towards the main entrance to the house.

‘No!’ called Yoyo, ‘The back door: you have to walk around the house, to the kitchen!’

‘Ah! Righty-ho, Miss!’ He grinned, again – looking at me, not at Yoyo – and then marched off to the back of the house. He turned around one more time, grinned again, touched his cap, and disappeared behind the building.

‘Winnie! Come on!’ Still whirling on Pascal, Yoyo was red-faced with displeasure.

‘No,’ I said simply. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s wrong? Where are we going?’

Yoyo had a tendency to overdramatize events; she also possessed the skill of infecting others with her zeal before they were aware of what they were doing. For all I knew she had trodden on a beetle and wanted me to save its life. Not that I didn’t think a beetle’s life worth saving. I just needed to know.

‘It’s Nanny! She’s dying!’ It was a cry that would rend the heart of a statue. Her voice broke. ‘I was out riding on the back dam … I met Gopal … he told me.’

‘Oh!’ was all I said, and swung myself into the saddle without a further word. Yoyo had already spurred Pascale and leapt away, towards the gate. I cantered off after her, down the driveway and out the gate onto the gravel road outside. This road ran east-west, parallel to the coast, but soon met a junction, a wider road that ran south towards the back dam and north towards the senior staff compound, the Promised Land village, and the East Coast. Yoyo turned north and spurred her pony into a gallop. I followed suit. The road cut through the cane fields, the growing canes now at half height were almost six feet tall. They acted as a funnel for the strong Atlantic breeze, which whipped the wide legs of my culottes high up around my thighs. Ahead of me, Yoyo lashed Pascale with her crop, urging him on. The gap between us widened.

Where on earth were we going? I had no idea where Nanny lived, and as far as I knew, neither did Yoyo. But perhaps she did? Gopal must have told her where to find her. In the village perhaps, as we were headed in that direction.

Nanny had left us years before, dismissed by Papa and replaced by Miss Wright. We were too old for a nanny, Papa had said, and Nanny was too old to work. Yoyo, the youngest of us all and the closest to Nanny, had thrown a tantrum, but Papa was adamant: Nanny must go. Nanny had gone and we’d never seen her again. More concerned with trying to win back Mama’s love and attention than by Nanny’s dismissal, I had forgotten her. Yoyo hadn’t. I had always been aware of the little notes she sent Nanny via her grandson, Gopal, our gardener. Nanny never replied, as far as I knew; but then, Nanny couldn’t read or write. I assumed someone had read the notes out to her. I hadn’t taken much interest. I hadn’t even thought of Nanny again before today.

The village was just over two miles away, but we weren’t anywhere near the first house before Yoyo slowed to a trot and then to a walk. She seemed to be looking for something in the cane field, and before long found it: an opening, barely visible between the man-high canes, and an overgrown stone bridge over the trench that ran beside the road.  

She turned to me. ‘This must be it,’ she said. She walked Pascale over the bridge into the opening, which was, in fact, a well-hidden path; so well hidden that I had never noticed it before. We often rode to the village, where we would buy a packet of boiled sweets from Chan’s grocery, or crispy mittai from Singh’s bakery, or a variety of other treats. The village belonged to the plantation, and served the people who worked there. We knew the villagers and they knew us, and would smile and salute us, the men removing their hats if they wore them, and the women curtsying as we rode past, and we would smile, wave, and greet them, sometimes by name, in return.

Some instinct told me that this path was taboo, hidden as it was between two cane fields and made of earth, not of gravel or sand, and I hesitated. Narrow and crude, it was no path for a sugar princess to venture down. It felt alien, wrong; I had an intimation of venturing into forbidden territory, a vague sense of peril. But Yoyo had no such scruples. Without a word she led the way. She turned in the saddle, and gestured to me to come. I followed.

 It was the beginning of the rainy season and it had rained on and off all day: a burst of rain lasting for five or ten or twenty minutes, followed by sunshine in a brilliant blue sky and fluffy white clouds drifting by until the next cloud came with a new downpour. As a result the earth on this path had turned to mud. Yoyo slowed to a walk and our ponies’ hooves squelched as they moved. Now and then we came across a puddle that filled the entire path, and still in single file, we waded through it. I called out:

‘Are you sure this is the right way, Yoyo?’

She half turned in the saddle. ‘Yes. Gopal told me. Just follow.’

So I followed and mud from the hooves splattered up onto my culottes – now decorously around my legs again – and fronds of green from the cane on either side reached over and stroked my bare arms as the path grew narrower, and my heart beat faster for I did not like this place at all.

After twenty minutes of this my nostrils became aware of a pungent smell, a smell that grew into a stench as we continued.

‘Yoyo … I think …’

‘Be quiet!’ she commanded, and I left the sentence unfinished. On a normal ride, even if we were far apart, she would be chattering away gaily of this and that and I would be smiling and nodding. Now, I understood her silence; I knew well that death made people silent. I had learned that from Mama, after Edward John’s death. Dear little Edward John, our baby brother, his life snapped shut before it had even begun.

Yoyo’s attachment to Nanny began long before Edward John’s death. For years before that sad day, Mama had been drifting away from us, losing herself in a melancholy none of us could pierce. Yoyo, too young to cope with the gradual withdrawal of motherly affection, turned with full force to Nanny, who responded in kind. Nanny took Mama’s place in Yoyo’s heart; quite literally a Mutterersatz, as Mama would say in her own tongue.

We did not know the source of Mama’s sorrow; we suspected a part of it was mere homesickness, yearning for Austria, her homeland – but so extreme? It was puzzling. We only knew that she buried that sadness in the keys of her piano, and for years the Plantation Promised Land reverberated with Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, incongruous on the hot flat plains of the Courantyne Coast.

Edward John’s death – finally broke her. Little Edward John, the only son and long-awaited heir – dead in his cot, a week after his birth – just when it seemed that Mama was returning to life, and rediscovering lost joy. His death almost took Mama with him. Her body recovered; her soul never.

And if Nanny was now dying – well, no wonder Yoyo was too distraught to speak. I understood it. But right now, disquiet was slowly seeping through me, and the silence made me shiver in spite of the heat of the afternoon, and it had nothing to do with death.

 The silence, and the stench. The stench grew worse and I pulled out a handkerchief and held it against my nose and was just about to call out to Yoyo to insist that we return home as I could not breathe, when the first glimpse of a rooftop rose above the green of the waving cane. Two seconds later we were there, and at last she drew to a halt. I walked Tosca up to stand beside her and we both stared in silence.

‘We have to go in there,’ Yoyo said at last, and we looked at each other and I nodded. ‘Nanny’s in there. But …’

She looked at me in anguish. She did not need to complete her sentence. I nodded again, understanding, and searching for words. I knew where we were. I knew we couldn’t go any further. This was finally, that other world. Up to now we had only played on its outskirts, pretending we knew it, but this was the real thing. These were the logies.

You couldn’t live on a plantation, in a plantation owner’s household, without occasionally hearing that word and grasping, however vaguely, that the logies were the homes of the coolies. The words would be dropped casually into conversation when Papa had visitors, maybe one of the managers, or a planter from one of the neighbouring estates, Dieu Merci or Roosendaal or Nieuw Haarlem, and they would discuss in grim tones the Labourer Problem. Somewhere at the back of my mind I had picked up the knowledge that the coolies lived in logies, but I had had no idea where these logies were or what they looked like. Why, I hardly took note of the coolies themselves.

The coolies were a part of the landscape. They belonged, quite simply, to the backdrop of life in this grand Kingdom of Sugar. Riding out along the back dam, or even from our bedroom windows, we saw them: half-naked men, their skin dark brown and shiny with sweat, their muscles rippling as they hacked at the cane with their cutlasses or bound the cane into bundles and carried those bundles to the canals and loaded the punts. Coolie women, fully clothed, up to their waists in water, pulled the loaded punts along the canals. Coolies were everywhere, so ubiquitous one never even noticed them, and with the wisdom of hindsight I’m ashamed to make these confessions. Why, I even thought it romantic: coolies at work in the fields, coolies in the trenches. An essential part of the scenery we loved so much, to be taken for granted.

‘Let’s go back,’ I said eventually.

‘We can’t,’ Yoyo replied. ‘I have to see Nanny. She’s dying, don’t you understand? I have to see her; I have to go in there. We have to go.’

She was crying openly by now. Yoyo never cried. She had not cried when Mama boarded the ship that would take her away. She had not cried when Edward John died. She had last cried, as far as I remembered, when her beloved dog Frisky died, three years ago. I on the other hand, wore my heart on my sleeve, and cried easily. I cried at a litter of new-born kittens, at music too beautiful to bear, at exquisite poetry, at sad endings of novels. Yoyo never read novels; she considered love-stories soppy and sentimental, a waste of time. She wore a sheath of hard-edged cynicism to protect her from the world, whereas I – I was raw and exposed, my soul laid bare to the elements. But now it was Yoyo who cried, not me.

‘Yoyo …’

She looked at me, and fire burned in her eyes. ‘Nanny lives in there, Winnie. Somewhere. I have to see her before she dies. I have to say goodbye. I …’ Her face crumpled. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. I realised, in many ways, she was still a child. I realised, too, how important it was that she should see Nanny again. I realised I would have to take her in. In there. Into this … this horror before us.

It was a city set in mud. The houses, if you could call them that, were ramshackle windowless shacks that seemed held together with nothing more than luck. They were made of no recognizable building materials, though here and there a wooden plank was to be seen, or a broken sheet of corrugated iron for a roof. Mostly they were made of coconut palms and rice sacks, pieces of tarpaulin or canvas, crumbling mud bricks: bits and pieces haphazardly fitted together to do no more than provide a rudimentary protection from sun and rain. Two raggedy lines of such shacks stretched away before our eyes along a narrow lane of oozing black slush, and several more such lines lay to our left and right. On either side of the lane ran two ditches, overflowing with some kind of sickening black ooze. Over the entire area hung that abominable stench that had assaulted my nostrils some time back and had now grown so strong as to be unbearable. I still held a handkerchief to my nose; the sight had distracted from the stench for a while, but now I realised just how ghastly it was, a melange of offal and excretion and rotting flesh and various other unidentifiable but equally nauseating odours.

And the flies. Oh, the flies, swarms of them nestled on the ground. Flies, whirring around the eyes of small children and the sores on dogs’ backs. Perhaps they gorged on stench.

It was, quite simply, horrendous. To think of Nanny, our beloved Nanny, living within this abomination – it was unbearable. Did Papa know she lived here? Had he sent her away, knowing she would move here? Had he knowingly thrown her into a pigsty?

By this time word had spread and people, that is, small children, young women with babies and toddlers, old women, and old men, for every able-bodied coolie was working in the canes, had emerged from the nearest shacks and come forward and now stood watching us. Silently. Just stood there, waiting for us to do something. Dogs, too, had gathered, and stood there barking, warning us to keep away, but coming no closer, no doubt wary of our horses and their hooves. The overseers rode horses. Overseers and their horses were dangerous beasts.

Beside me, Yoyo seemed to wake up. She straightened her back, signalled to one of the women nearest us, and called.

‘Come!’

Come the woman did, but reluctantly, taking time to move away from the little crowd outside her hut and looking around as if to see it was really she who had been addressed. She arrived at our side and Yoyo said, looking down at her, ‘We’re looking for – for …’

She looked at me, seeking an answer. She could hardly ask for Nanny, but she had never called her anything else. Luckily, I knew Nanny’s name

‘Yashoda,’ I said to the woman. ‘We’re looking for Yashoda. Gopal’s grandmother.’

‘Gopal?’ she repeated, looking up and shaking her head, ‘plenty people name Gopal. Plenty people name Yashoda.’

She wore a faded, tattered strip of cloth as a sari. Her thinning hair, grey and shiny with coconut oil, was pulled back behind her neck. It would be gathered into a long plait down her spine in the style of the coolie women.

‘Gopal …Gopal the gardener. At Mr Cox’s house, our house. The gardener! His grandmother is Yashoda.’

I had the feeling the woman knew exactly which Gopal I wanted, and which Yashoda. That she was being deliberately ignorant. To spite us. Because we were who we were. Yoyo must have come to the same conclusion, because she said now, sharply, and more in keeping with her natural character:

‘You know which Gopal! His grandmother is Yashoda and she’s dying. Take us to her!’ There was a cutting edge of impatience in Yoyo’s voice. It made me nervous.

‘Please!’ I added, but already the wrongness of our demand had become clear to me. I reached over and touched Yoyo’s elbow.

‘Yoyo, come, let’s go. This isn’t right,’ I pleaded. She simply nudged me away, not looking away from the woman on the ground, who seemed more hostile than ever. She looked around at the other logie dwellers, looked down, and clenched the ragged skirt of her sari. Finally she raised one skinny arm and gestured vaguely into the settlement.

‘Over there,’ she said. ‘But Gopal in’t there now. He workin.’

‘It’s Yashoda we want to see,’ said Yoyo. ‘Nanny. It’s her we want to visit. Show us the way.’

‘Please,’ I added again.

What choice did the poor woman have? She hesitated again, then shrugged and walked away with a ‘follow me’ gesture, into the central lane between the rows of huts, and Yoyo urged Pascale on. Off they walked.

I followed, urging Tosca on, into the mud. Mud, that sucked at our horses’ hooves and splattered up as we walked by; past those abominable hovels. At several huts, old women and young children came out to stare, and mangy dogs came out to bark, though keeping well away. Swarms of flies rose up at our passing in a restless buzzing cloud, parting to let us through

Horrified thoughts raced through my mind as we passed by. This could not be happening on our property, under our very noses! And if it was, then Papa must be informed. He could not possibly know! Papa was a gentleman, a decent, caring man. A Christian. He would not allow such loathsomeness to blight our Promised Land. Papa must be brought here, to see for himself; he would be as horrified as we were, and put an end to it. I was eager, almost, to see more, to make a full report, and my initial impulse to whisk Yoyo away turned to gratitude that she had found this place. I needed to know everything, to suppress my own revulsion in the interest of helping these people. I needed to observe it all so as to describe it in detail to Papa.

The people, for instance. The coolies who emerged from their shacks to stare silently as we passed by, showed none of the deferential nodding of heads and curtseying we were used to when riding through the village; there were none of the polite calls of ‘Good-day Miss!’ and the obsequious smiles of the villagers. The eyes that looked down the moment I sought them – to smile, to greet, to show my solidarity – were neither obsequious nor shy.

With a start I realized: these people were hostile. And hostility was a thing I had never in all my life encountered. We moved deeper into the – well, what shall I call it – village? Community? No. Slum was more like it; a rural slum plonked bang in the middle of Paradise. And as we progressed, turning right into another identical lane and left again into an even narrower, but similarly stinking, alleyway, the more my worry increased: how could Papa not know about this? And if he knew, then why … I could think no further.

Looking behind me, I saw that we were being followed by a rag-tag group of old women and young children. The lanes grew ever narrower and muddier, the hovels more rudimentary, the glares more hostile. Presently I became aware of a moaning, keening sound, more animal than human. It grew louder as we progressed. Finally, we approached a group of women standing in the lane at the entrance to one of the shacks. The noise came from them; they were swaying and bowing and beating their breasts, clinging to each other, bawling and moaning and howling a most pitiful lament whose meaning was obvious. They wore worn saris that had once been white, and their hair was undone and hanging loose over their shoulders, instead of being plaited neatly down their backs. We needed no explanation. We were too late: Nanny had passed away.

‘NO!’ cried Yoyo and swung her leg over Pascale’s back. Oblivious