23, Homecoming

"I always thought there was something special about this house... every time I drove past and looked up at that strange archway I would... sort of, shiver."

"Of course you would have sensed something, beti. This house is your ancestral home. It must have been calling out to you. And I always said you were perceptive, didn't I?"

"But then Deepak said it was the headquarters of the Manjaria Women's Movement...But didn't you say this was a vegetable farm...? Carrots or something? Where are the fields...?"

"Shush, shush, shush, beti." Aunty Seema cupped Kamala's chin in her hand and squeezed her cheeks together, forcing her lips into a pout like a little child. "So many questions, just rest now and then go and take a bath. You can use the silver pitcher which the Maharaja gave your great grandmother...Then afterwards we'll eat, we'll talk, everything will be explained."

Kamala followed Aunty Seema's huge, swaying figure up the marble stairs. Shivers of light from the yellowing, wire-dangling bulbs ran off her billowing flanks. Kamala didn't want to take her eyes off her, to risk losing her again, but at the same time her eyes wanted to drink in every inch, every molecule of this house, her "ancestral home". She trailed her fingers along the walls - cool and clammy. Creamy flakes of damp plaster came off on her fingers and snowed down on her sandals. Along the corridor there were many shuttered doorways, and Kamala sensed, rather than heard outright, breathless, shuffling sounds behind them - Aunty Seema raised her voice, cheerily reminiscing about how she and Kamala's mother, used to run and play along these very corridors when they were little.

"Look," she said "See that chest over there?" The deep, curling incisions in the wood made little trees and birds and flowers leap out of its shadows... "We used to play hide and seek in there!"

Kamala was enchanted. She bent to touch it, imagining her mother, little Meera with her pigtails, crouched in the box, gleaming eyes peeking through a chink in the lid, giggling to herself... but, at the touch of the wood, a shock of cold fear ran up her arm. She snatched her hand back. Aunty Seema had sailed on, showing Kamala to her room, hurrying her to have her bath. "And then hurry down for khanna, beti, people are waiting to meet you." She shouted over her shoulder as she thundered back down the corridor.

After she had slaked the dirt and the terror and the rage of the last few unbelievable hours away from her body with cool water, she pulled the thin, white cotton cloth which she presumed was to be used as a towel around her and stood for long minutes on my balcony, the carved screen behind her, gazing up at my beautiful hill view. She dressed in the fresh clothes someone had laid out for her - white churidar trousers clinging tight round her ankles and a pale lilac kurta embroidered around the neck with fine white flowers and mangoes. She found my ivory comb on the dressing table and pulled it luxuriously through her hair, which had grown long and thick and dark in the months since she'd been here. She drew it up and looped it into a loose knot at the crown of her head, leaving her long, slender neck bare.

Once dressed, she hurried back down the corridor towards the stairs, trying not to think about those noises behind the doors. She'd seen and heard too much already today. She didn't even want to know what all this meant. She had found Aunty Seema! That's all she wanted to know, and she wanted to spend every possible second with her - especially as Aunty Seema had made it quite clear that it was not going to be safe for her to stay more than a single night... God knew what was going to happen tomorrow. But at one of the doors, something made her hurrying footsteps stop. A soft voice was singing beyond the curtain. She listened, spellbound for some reason, although there was nothing particularly beautiful about the voice... just something - familiar. And then the voice stopped too. And after a moment of pregnant silence, it spoke slurrily. "Co' here..." it said.

They must have assumed she was someone else, so Kamala started hurrying guiltily on... But the voice called after her.

"Hey, girl! Where 'r' you runni' off to? Co' here, I said. I wan' look t'you."

Kamala went back and pulled the curtain aside. An old lady was lying on a low, wide bed. Stripes of light from a kind of bamboo lampshade rose and fell across the fine bone contours of her face. Grey hair fanned out in fine brushstrokes against the pillow. Her skin was translucent - Kamala suddenly understood what the word meant as she looked at that skin - light actually seemed to glow through it. It was softly, finely gathered at the eyes and mouth and neck, in just the same places, and in just the same way that Mother's skin crinkled. At least it did on the right hand side. On the left side, the skin was slack and expressionless.

The cool green-grey eyes looked levelly at Kamala in just same way Mother's eyes did... assessing. Then the old lady laughed - a surprisingly strong, clear laugh coming from a body like fine porcelain. "Oh, now I see who you are, gir', you are my younger se'f co' into th' fushure to taun' me with my los' youth and m-m-beauty."

She gestured with her right arm to a picture on a dark, heavy chest of drawers behind Kamala. And Kamala's own face looked back at her, in faded sepia tones.

And Kamala went over to her grandmother, sat on the bed and took her limp left hand. "And you must be my future self, come into the past to reassure me how beautiful I'll be when I'm old!" They gazed at the time-teased mirror of each other's faces, touched each other's cheeks, hair, arms. Smiled at each other. Then Chitra said she just wanted to close her eyes for a minute... and after ten, Kamala realised that she was sleeping.

She tiptoed over to the chest of drawers to have another look at her other self. Then she noticed the other picture beside the one of her grandmother. Two little girls, one of them an unmistakeable miniature Aunty Seema - large even in miniature, overflowing her clothes like a warm, yeasty bread roll, her glittering eyes challenging the world, undimmed and undiminished even in that smudged little photo. Another small girl sat beside her, clutching her arm. She was everything Seema was not - arms as thin as willow twigs, eyes big and dark and earnest... or was that frightened? Her thin face framed by tightly plaited pigtails, looped back up and tied with ribbons. She had the look of someone who could see something monstrous coming towards her and knew there was nothing she could do to stop it. Kamala ran her finger across the top of the silver frame...

When she entered the dining room, there was a large group already seated around the big table. Aunty Seema sat at the head of the table - smiling in a way that Kamala couldn't quite interpret - expectant, excited. Beside her sat Sunil (with his arm in a clean, white sling) He looked up, grinning at her. "The man is not dead, Kamala Madam! He is alive! He is in upstairs room...Seema-ji is looking after him!" Kamala felt a wave of relief (coupled with a twist of confusion, the injured Manjaria man who'd been trying to attack them was upstairs? How? Why?). But she gave Sunil a big, relieved smile in return. Deepak - at the near end of the table - glanced up at her and quickly down again. Next to him, along each side of the table sat six or seven women and a couple of men. Kamala got a momentary impression of a rippling mass of gold and ivory and silk. They had all turned towards Kamala as she stood in the doorway.

With a shock she noticed now that they all had the Manjaria facials markings and features that had become so familiar to her. The blood shot to her face. She wanted the floor to swallow her up, she waited for them to hurl insults at her, hurl their stainless steel thali plates and tumblers at her... she bit her bottom lip hard, gripped her snake pendant, and concentrated on getting her heartbeat steady - ready to face whatever was in store for her. Whatever the reason that Aunty Seema had allowed this to happen, it was only fair. She deserved to be punished... Aunty Seema hadn't rescued her, she had simply brought her to trial.

She sensed someone approaching her - though the footsteps were, of course, silent. They stopped in front of her. The clink of heavy bracelets indicated arms were being raised over her head. Kamala clenched her fists by her side, digging her nails into her palms to stop herself from running away or fainting... she had no idea what was about to happen to her, but remembering the fury and violence in those yellow-black eyes rammed against the car, the blood, the broken glass, Sunil's wailing - she knew it was not going to be pleasant. And yet, the scent of jasmine which now wafted over her, was rather pleasant - and now she felt cool petals, heavy and moist against the back of her neck. She looked up. The woman was smiling up at her, she took both Kamala's hands in hers and, to the cheery shouts from the rest of the table, led her, garlanded, to her place at the table, facing Aunty Seema, and to the left of Deepak.

When the shouts had died down, she looked up at the beaming Aunty Seema.

"I don't understand... why? I thought they hated me..."

"Of course they don't hate you, why should they? They practically worship you after what you did in the forest..."

"I didn't do anything. I don't remember anything... but, oh, they probably don't know. It was me who showed Greenfields where the tree was, I had a GPS on..."

Her throat thickened now that she realised that this was only a temporary reprieve... that once they knew how she'd betrayed them, they would hate her again. This time she just wanted to get it over with.

"They trusted me, Dhanmatbai trusted me, and I wore that watch which showed Greenfields where the sacred tree was. I'm sorry. Dr Singh told me I'd be helping them. It was me. They know that, that's why they were trying to kill us at the Greenfields office, and now Dhanmatbai is being tortured and it's all my fault...!" she was sobbing loudly now, covering her face with a blue cotton napkin.

"Don't be silly, beti." Aunty Seema intervened in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, as she waved the alarmed diners to continue with their meal. "Of course you didn't lead Greenfields there, they've been sniffing around Manjaria for years... and anyway, they took you there, not the other way round. And as for that gadget of yours, it didn't make any difference. What the Manjaria know about the tree cannot be measured - or destroyed - with scientific instruments. Now stop blubbing and being hysterical and eat up your dinner!" And she proceeded to demonstrate, with gusto, how it should be done."

"But Dhanmatbhai...?"

"She's quite capable of looking after herself. Now please, beti, eat your dinner."

"But then... then why were they trying to kill me?!" She blurted out.

"What?" Said Aunty Seema, her mouth full of curry. "Deepak, beta, please talk to this hysterical girl. All these questions are spoiling my digestion."

"It wasn't you they were after," Deepak said, "It was Greenfields. Not any particular person - the company as a whole. They'd gone too far this time, they've closed off the whole forest you know - and taking Dhanmatbai in like that... that was deeply disrespectful. The Manjaria have practically burned the whole office down. The people in that riot weren't local Manjaria, they didn't recognise you. We were in danger because our car had Greenfields markings. If they'd known what you'd done for them, everyone, they would never have..."

She gazed back at him, grateful, a little less confused... but still with the question endlessly going on in her mind...

"Deepak - you were there." She whispered urgently "Please tell me, what the hell is this great thing I'm supposed to have done? All I remember is stripping off and climbing into that tree."

Deepak grinned. "Yeees, that's pretty much what I remember too - ow!" He gripped his arm where Kamala had thumped him.

"Sorry, yaar, I really don't know any more. That's all I saw. But there are things these women know about that lesser mortals will never understand. If they say you did something good, just trust them and go with the flow, OK?"

She stared at him, but suddenly realised that she didn't have the energy for any more mystery or terror or relief... she was just ravenously hungry. She nodded and tucked in.

Deepak started to murmur a translation of the conversation going on around her, and gradually she was able to piece a picture together, with Deepak filling in the gaps himself. These women and men were members and supporters of a group called the Manjaria Women's Movement who were, with Aunty Seema's help, fighting court cases against Greenfields' claims of ownership of large tracts of forest land which the Manjaria had been given lifelong rights to by the British when they ruled the area. Kamala had grown to respect the Manjaria people during her time in the village for their dignity, patience, wisdom and knowledge of nature, but now she was seeing another side of them... they were barking out legal precedents to their cases, citing Government bills framed to protect their rights, comparing their cases to those of litigants in post-war Poland...

"How do they know all this stuff?" Kamala whispered to Deepak. He turned his cool gaze on her.

"How does anyone know stuff like this? They've studied law, they've read the statute books, they've discussed their cases with top lawyers..."

"Yes, but how can they afford it? I thought you had to be filthy rich to even consider legal training like that in this country? And how would they even know that statute books and things existed if they never get to go near a school or university?"

Deepak laughed gently. "Oh, well, you'd better see Ma about that!"

"Ma?"

"Seema, talk to Seema about it."

After dinner, she had her chance. Aunty Seema, Deepak and Kamala settled on the veranda to smoke and talk - Aunty Seema had progressed onto slim cigars, Deepak stuck to his cigarettes. Sunil had been ordered to go to bed early and rest his wound and the others had melted away soon after dinner. Kamala heard how Aunty Seema had taken in girls from Manjaria and other indigenous villages who had been raped - often by forestry officials or miners - and had then become destitute because they'd refused to return to their families for fear of bringing shame on them - but also, explained Aunty Seema, out of a certain sense of pride, of self-respect... and as far as they were concerned there was no irony in this. She had inducted them into the profession of the House.

"You taught them carrot farming?" Kamala asked, with a mischievous glint in her eye.

Seema looked puzzled for a brief moment, then remembered and sent peals of throaty, cigar-smoke-laced laughter bellowing up to the rafters. Kamala had realised pretty quickly what the House's real business was. She knew she should be shocked, horrified - but for some reason it all seemed terribly natural and ok. The women seemed strong and in control of their lives, not crushed and exploited. And she had to admit, the image of Aunty Seema reclining on a divan with a lustful local worthy, seemed much more natural than the one of her with the red tractor and the wellies.

While the Manjaria women earned their living at night, she taught them to read and write during the day. Aunty Seema heard their stories, the stories of their families, their villages - the gradual filching of land and rights and dignity and resources by people already much more powerful, more wealthy and more educated - and she shook with indignation. She strode into local government offices, and into the offices of swanky city lawyers and demanded information. She got the women enrolled onto law courses, she got hold of politicians for them to harangue, she led them in demonstrations... she taught them how to manipulate the world outside the forest, to protect the forest.

Manjaria men and women from the villages started realising how their "fallen sisters" were fighting for them, and they joined forces with them, those whose hunting grounds had been destroyed by the planting of cash crop eucalyptus groves or the flooding of valleys and foothills for hydro-electric dams, those whose backs had been shattered breaking stones to build Greenfields' roads for less than subsistence wages, those who murmured of darker things, whose swollen eyes closed up, who started walking with a limp... in the charred remains of whose houses lay the ashes of their land rights papers...

As Aunty Seema talked, Kamala sat on a stool pulled up close to the big, cane and wicker armchair, her arm being gently stroked - catlike - by her Aunty's long, pearly fingernails. She wanted to be absorbed by her warmth, her vastness, her powerfulness - Aunty Seema, the secret memory, pulled out on the end of silver chain and caressed in the darkness for so many years that the memory faded to the fragility of a vision, something might have imagined rather than remembered... and now here she was sitting right beside the real thing - engulfed by the sweet, musty scent of her, swimming in the love that exuded from her, that lapped around the edges of every living thing for miles.

Having shown the Manjaria the ropes, given them the same weapons as their opponents to even things up a bit, Aunty Seema stepped back and watched with pride as they argued their cases in court, belted out their protest songs outside TV stations, brought their injustices to life on the streets in lively little dramas full of slapstick to make the kids shriek and pathos to make anyone with a heart weep and rage. She bankrolled any venture that they couldn't afford themselves, a press conference, a demonstration, a sit-in outside a Greenfields laboratory. She had just paid for a contingent of Manjaria to travel to New Delhi to present a complaint to the Prime Minister's office about Greenfields' closure of the forest land around the old tree. The local government, the timber and mining companies, the Forestry Commission thought twice now before they took advantage of these people... (and it didn't hurt their cause that many of these big cheeses were nocturnal clients of the House) "It used to be as easy as taking candy from a baby before" said Aunty Seema (Kamala winced) "But no more... now it's more like taking a cub from a tigress!"

But Greenfields were more subtle. They bought and bribed and spied and spin-doctored... The Manjaria played them move for move, sometimes outwitting them, sometimes succumbing to the temptation of pay-outs, liquor, jobs in the big city... Only this time Greenfields had overstepped the mark. And the tigress was lashing back...

"And where do you fit into all this, Deepak?" Kamala asked - the question washed against an impassive back as Deepak blew his blue cigarette smoke into the black night.

"Deepak?" Aunty Seema replied for him, "Oh, didn't he say? Deepak's my son."

"Your son?!!" Squeaked Kamala.

"Hi coz!" He grinned back over his should at her and gave her a wave... his cigarette leaving a ghostly, blue question mark in the air.

"Yes, my adopted son. I was on my way back from visiting him in America when I stopped off in England, remember? His ma used to... work here - she was Manjaria. She died when he was a baby. And now he's my baby, na, beta?" Deepak grunted, his face turned back to the night. "He's my eyes and my ears... my photographic eyes and my electronic ears, eh?"

And they both laughed.

Soon Aunty Seema said it was time to go to bed. She said Kamala wasn't safe in the house, Greenfield's spies would not be sleeping, they would find out she was there very soon and would find a way to get at her... so the best thing was to get right away for a while. Disappear. Become invisible.

"Yes, I agree, I think it's time I went home..." Kamala was disappointed.

"Home? How is that possible, beti? Of course! you haven't seen the news for days, have you? Apparently, those silly beggars in the Middle East are now beating hell out of each other even worse than ever, and so no oil is coming out - something one country said about another country's Prime Minister's wife in one of that nice Mr White's newspapers, apparently. So that means the rest of us have to do without fuel!"

Deepak continued "All international flights have been suspended, except for high ranking government, military and industrial people. We have to hide you inside India."

"How?" asked Kamala, realising now, that the idea of not going home was even more disappointing.

"Shshshsh! Said Aunty Seema, dramatically. "Walls have ears... you'll find out soon enough".

"What about Dhanmatbai?"

"She can take care of herself - she's a powerful old lady, that one... don't worry, now go on, off to bed!"

Kamala was tucked up in her bed and gazing out at the stars through the open casement, when Aunty Seema's warm, cinnamony presence filled the doorway. She came and lay down beside Kamala - as though she was still a little girl and not a mature young woman who almost had an agricultural degree and who was about to go on the lam from a bunch of possibly murderous industrial spies... Kamala drew out the serpent pendant and held it out to Aunty Seema. They smiled at each other. Aunty Seema stroked Kamala's hair with her soft, cool hand and Kamala closed her eyes and was a little girl again.

"So, Beti, tell me, how is your poor Ma?"

"'Poor' Ma?" Kamala opened her eyes again.

Aunty Seema laughed.

"Yes, she somehow always got called that - 'poor little Meera' even before...."

"Before what?"

"What, 'what'? I asked you how your mother was - aren't you going to give me news of my little sister?"

"She's fine... well, sort of fine. She was so upset that I was coming here, Aunty Seema! When I told her she..."

Aunty Seema looked at Kamala carefully. Waiting.

"She went into a sort of... trance. It was as though she was reliving some awful trauma that she'd been through."

She noticed the quick look of pain that passed across Aunty Seema's usually unperturbable features.

"Why won't anybody tell me, Aunty Seema. What happened to her? Why does she hate and reject India? Don't I have a right to know about my own mother?"

Aunty Seema pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples - then shook her head.

"Maybe not unless she chooses to tell you herself, hanh beti?"

"Maybe, but I feel that she, sort of, can't choose to. That whatever it is hurts so much that even if she wanted to, it would be too painful to tell..."

"You might be right... but sadly, I don't know the full story myself." Seema sighed deeply and seemed to come to a decision. "Well, I suppose there's no harm in telling you what I do know..."

So she told Kamala about the second coming of the Sadhu or the coming of the second sadhu, whichever it was, and she tried to explain how the adults of the house could have brought themselves to give away a little girl to a complete stranger (she averted her eyes from Kamala's gaze of horrified accusation), she told her how angry she had been with their mother, Chitra, with Bimla, Chitra's guardian, for sending her little sister away - how she'd raged and howled and kicked their shins and torn her clothes. But at the same time she said she knew the terror of the sadhu's curse, and she knew that, in the end, they'd had no choice.

She told Kamala too about their father's disappearance at the same time. Some people said that a man who leapt in front of a train, whose body was found mashed beyond recognition on the railway tracks that same day was her daddy, but she refused to believe it. So did Chitra. They even refused to go and look at the remains, at the 'personal effects' that the police had collected. They knew that however broken hearted he might have been at the loss of his darling Meera, would never have thrown his life away and deliberately abandoned his beloved Chitra and his other darling, Seema. They guessed he might have followed Meera and the Sadhu to the station, but nobody knew what had happened to him after that. Seema, Bimla and Chitra convinced themselves that by some horrible coincidence he had been abducted on that same evil day, and, feeding each other's desperation, weaving the threads of a frail fantasy together to try and bolster up an even frailer hope, they waited for him to escape and come back to them. But gradually the knowledge grew in their hearts that he was never coming back.

Chitra never recovered from the loss of her baby and her husband on the same day. She was soon struck down with a stroke that paralysed the left side of her body and had been bedridden ever since. "I met her" smiled Kamala through her tears... "...my Grandmother" Aunty Seema nodded, smiling too. Bimla too succumbed to the shock and seemed to age a hundred years within the space of a few weeks. One night, she wandered out onto the veranda of her old mistress' bedroom and was found there in the morning sleeping peacefully - never to wake again. "You're not scared of ghosts are you, beti? Because Bimla could never be anything but a good spirit... a guardian angel..."

"Please, Aunty Seema... " murmured Kamala, "I'm a scientist!" Aunty Seema laughed, and continued her story. Though there was not much more to tell.

A few years later the postcard had arrived. ‘Meera (Mary) Steel’ and an address - in thin, blue ink. No-one had ever been able to explain who sent it or why.

Yes, that was messy, I admit. But believe me, it isn't easy in my current straitened circumstances to get everything - everyone - lined up as they should be... and do it subtly too. But resorting to sending a mysterious postcard - I'm almost ashamed of myself!

"So you see, baby, I can't tell you. I don't know what happened to her after that. But didn't we do the right thing? See how well off she is now. I don't know how she came to meet your father, go to Bilaiti, have you... I'm just glad she did. The sadhu must have made that possible. Maybe nothing else did happen to her to make her hate us so much, maybe it was the pain of leaving her family - even if it was for her own good...that could be enough."

"Yee-es, that could be enough" echoed Kamala.

But they both had a small, niggling voice in the back of their minds say - there must have been more.