Page 18 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
While Auntie Tilly was motherly, Auntie Sophie was glamorous and a little bit notorious. She was a divorcee with a deep laugh and Scottish lilt who had married an Indian and converted to Islam. With her shapely figure and wavy fair hair, she could make a mechanic’s boiler suit look stylish– which she often did when helping to fix one of the five cars that belonged to the Raja of Gulgat. Her husband, Rafi, worked as an aide-de-camp and chief forester for the Raja in the neighbouring principality to Belgooree. Rafi Khan, with his dark good looks, startlingly green eyes and film-star moustache, was the most handsome man Adela had ever seen. Together, he and Sophie were like a Hollywood couple, with no children to make them seem ordinary. They were fun and athletic and would organise treasure hunts, party games and camping trips. One day, Adela vowed, when she was grown up, she was going to dye her hair blonde and perm it to look like Sophie Khan.
On Christmas Eve in Gulgat, Sophie distributed baskets of fruit, flowers and money to the bungalow servants and their neighbours, explaining how they would be in Belgooree for Christmas.That’s if we ever get away,she thought, sighing, and went to look for Rafi.
As she mounted the steps to the Raja’s modern pavilion, built eight years ago to accommodate his second wife, Rita, she heard her husband’s placatory voice.
‘Don’t worry, sir. He can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Stourton is just here to advise.’
‘I don’t want his advice,’ said Kishan in agitation. ‘Why are the Britishers always interfering where they’re not wanted? My meddling old mother has him wrapped around his pink little finger.’
Sophie heard Rafi give an amused snort. ‘I think it’s supposed to be her finger that he’s wrapped around.’
‘His finger, her finger,’ the Raja answered with impatience, ‘what does it matter? I want them all to keep their fingers to themselves and let me decide who my successor will be.’
Sophie hung back as the two men discussed the latest palace intrigue: the dowager rani’s attempt to force her son Kishan to declare his nephew Sanjay his heir rather than his own daughters. She glanced up through the thick subtropical jungle of banana trees, bamboos and sal to the crumbling fortress on the escarpment above. Somewhere in the gloomy depths of its shuttered rooms, the old rani brooded over the loss, eight years ago, of her favourite son, Ravindra, swept away by a river in spate. Together with her widowed daughter-in-law, the timid and grieving Henna, the old woman kept their bitterness inflamed.
‘Was it not Kishan’s fault for taking Ravindra fishing when the day had been decreed inauspicious?’ she would rail. ‘Kishan should never have encouraged his younger brother to enjoy swimming in the first place. He is to blame for our unhappiness!’
In the widowed rani’s eyes, her eldest son’s sins were many. He had preferred to go overseas and study in Scotland rather than live with his own people. He had neglected his first, high-caste wife, and when she had died in childbirth, he should never have married that woman from Bombay, who refused to live in purdah and could not give him sons. But the Raja’s biggest crime to date was to send Ravindra’s only son, her beloved grandson Sanjay, away to school near Delhi and to refuse to name him as the heir to Gulgat.
Poor Sanjay,Sophie thought. Alternately spoilt and neglected, the boy was incapable of pleasing them all. She had liked him as a small boy– he could still be charming and friendly– but at seventeen, he could be petulant if he didn’t get his own way. Recently he had grown overfamiliar with Rita and with her, making suggestive remarks and trying to kiss them when their husbands were not there. Perhaps it was a phase that boys of his age went through, but it made her uncomfortable.
‘Why are you lurking outside?’ a silvery voice called from the veranda above.
Sophie looked up guiltily to see Rita’s attractive dimpled face grinning down at her. The Raja’s wife blew a smoke ring over the balcony. ‘Come up at once, MrsKhan, or I’ll report you to that stuffy Britisher, Stourton, for spying on us all.’
Sophie bounded up the outside stairs two at a time.
‘So you do possess a dress?’ Rita teased, stubbing out her cigarette and eyeing her friend with approval. ‘Turquoise suits you. Is it too early for a cocktail? Yes, I suppose it is. Coffee then?’ She ordered refreshments and made room for Sophie on the swing seat beside her, gathering in her immaculate cream sari.
Sophie gazed out on the valley below– a shimmer of emerald paddy fields wreathed in morning mist– and breathed in the temperate air.
‘I love this time of year, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Rita agreed, ‘but only because Kishan and I will be going to Bombay. A month of theatre and concerts for me, and parties and dancing for the girls.’
‘Are Jasmina and Sabeena very excited?’ Sophie smiled.
‘Ready to burst,’ Rita said, and chuckled. ‘And I can’t wait to get Kishan away from all this.’ She waved a slim be-ringed hand in the air. ‘Before his mother poisons us all, or the Britisher brings in the army and hoists a flag over the house.’
Sophie laughed. ‘Aren’t you being a bit overdramatic?’
‘Me?’ Rita arched her eyebrows in mock surprise over large brown eyes. ‘Don’t pretend you’re not worried too. Why else did you have your ear to the door down there?’
‘I must admit,’ said Sophie, ‘that I’m looking forward to getting Rafi away for a few days. He works so hard.’
‘Next time you must come with us to Bombay.’
‘I haven’t been there since I arrived back in India over ten years ago,’ Sophie mused. ‘We’ve become like hermits in the woods.’
‘Well, you can let your hair down with your tea-planter friends, can’t you? They know how to party from what I hear.’
The coffee came and they sipped it as the sun grew stronger and the mist burned off to reveal a shimmering landscape of pools and jungle. Green-and-red parrots flitted between the trees.
‘Will Sanjay go with you to Bombay?’ Sophie asked.
Rita shrugged. ‘That is one of Kishan’s battles with the old witch and Henna. He would like to take the boy, but they complain they don’t see enough of him as it is. Kishan’s mother will refuse to let him go, but it’s me who will get the blame. Sanjay will be moody and resentful, and the whole thing will give Kishan an ulcer. Happy families, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ Sophie gave a pained smile.
