The Sleeping Dictionary Page 5

  “Abbas-chacha, I must thank you for what you did.” Consciously, I used the Muslim honorific for uncle, because what he had done made him much more to me than a stranger.

  “I was only following Allah’s command.” Abbas had a warm voice, and the skin around his eyes crinkled as he smiled at me. “Every life has value; it was my duty to stop. Normally, we would not have been driving that way. We changed our route because of puja celebrations happening in some villages that day. The memsaheb does not like to see such things.”

  “I thank your Allah then.” I paused, wanting to say more. “But also you for listening to him.”

  Abbas raised his eyebrows and said softly, “Once you learn English, the burra-memsaheb is the one who needs proper thanking. It was only with her agreement that I could carry you to hospital.”

  I glanced behind and saw that the strange Englishwoman was reading a book. She could have left me to die but had not. I turned back to Abbas and whispered, “I will always be afraid to speak to her!”

  “They will like you at Lockwood School then,” Abbas-chacha said in a joking way. “Quiet is the rule. Don’t ask about your pay; for young ones like you, Miss Rachael keeps it safe. It is only a few rupees each month, anyway.”

  Not ever having held a coin as valuable as one rupee, this news did not disturb me. But something else did. “Do you stay at the school?”

  “No, I live in town with my wife.”

  “And how many children?” He struck me as being a very funny, kind father. Different from my own, but probably just as good.

  He shook his head. “My wife is a good woman, but we were cursed—we have no offspring. We live alone!”

  “Oh,” I said, unable to imagine this. “Nurse Gopal said many of the girls sleep at the school. Have they lost their homes, too?”

  “Not at all. They are Europeans,” he said, and at my blank expression, he laughed. “Ingrej and children from other countries are called Europeans. They often fall sick in Bengal; this school was built one hundred years earlier because it is on high ground believed to have better air.” He was describing the countries in a place called Europe that the foreigners came from when Miss Jamison’s low, grumbling voice came from behind.

  “Yes, yes, Burra-memsaheb!” Abbas switched to English and his pitch became higher, and he began bobbing his head as the headmistress continued in her address. He answered her in that high, falsely happy voice after a bit; I could not understand any of it except for the name I’d told him, Pom. The burra-memsaheb spoke again, and then Abbas told her “Yes, yes!” and returned his gaze forward.

  The horses picked up speed with a flick of his reins. Under his breath he said to me, “She says your name is too strange. From now on you shall be Sarah. She wants me to tell you it is a good woman’s name from the Christian holy book.”

  “Say-ruh.” I pronounced the strange, sharp-sounding name the way Abbas had done and repeated it to myself silently for the next several miles. I should have minded losing my name, but the thought of getting a fresh name to go with my new clothing seemed fitting.

  We made a stop in some hours’ time for lunch, and it turned out each one of us had our very own tiffin box. After that, there was more driving. There were fewer rice paddies here than in Johlpur, and many more fields of grain. At last, the land changed a little, with some villages and a big road leading to a town called Midnapore. But we turned off in a different direction, up a long, slowly rising hill.

  “A sign for the school.” Abbas pointed to some English letters printed on a white board. Below it were two crossed strips of wood painted gold that he said was the symbol of their religion. I looked at the cross, trying to quell the rapid beating of my heart. We were here, and the wide, tall building ahead was like nothing I’d ever seen before: built not of mud or wood but something entirely foreign.

  “The school is built of bricks.” Abbas-chacha seemed to sense my unspoken question. “They are strong enough to resist wind and rain and everything else. The Ingrej sometimes call a person a brick; he is one with a determined, hardworking manner who does not complain.”

  I nodded, understanding why he was telling me this. It was how I should behave.

  Two bearers in green costumes stood in front of the school’s grand sculpted brass doors. Then two Ingrej girls stepped out the front door toward us. They are here to meet me, I thought with some excitement, but their eyes slid past as if Abbas and I weren’t present.

  “Oh, Miss Jamison,” the tallest girl called out, waving a book in her hand. Then she spewed many more English words I couldn’t understand. I stared at her face and that of her companion: not colorless like Miss Jamison’s but a bright pink. Both girls wore neckties like Englishmen with white blouses and dark green skirts almost as long as Miss Jamison’s. Their legs were shielded by thick gray stockings, and their feet were covered in heavy black shoes that tied with laces. I curled my toes, feeling self-conscious about my rough bare feet.

  The bearers came forward to help Miss Jamison off the tonga, and then she went inside with the girls. I stayed on the cart bench as Abbas drove us around the school building and past a large garden bordered by square hedges. Inside the hedges were round clipped bushes of flowers; a thin old man moved between the plants, pouring water over them. Beyond the flower garden lay a field of short grass; horses were skipping around it with girls dressed in men’s trousers and jackets riding on top.

  Abbas drove the tonga straight into an open building where there were other horses, carts, and carriages. A group of men who had been lounging inside the darkness came forward to detach the horses from the cart’s harness. As two workers led the horses off for a drink, Abbas introduced me to everyone as the new house girl, Sarah.

  “Hindu or Muslim?” one of the stable hands asked, looking me up and down.

  “Christian,” Abbas said quickly. “Come, Little Sarah, I will show you the animal you have been missing.”

  “Am I really to be Christian?” I whispered to Abbas as he walked me deeper into the stable, away from the crowd of stable hands.

  “Miss Jamison wants you to convert. Not having parents to speak up, you have no choice.”

  My body stiffened at this. Changing a name was one thing, but changing religion was quite different. It didn’t seem safe. Where would I go after death if there were no chance for reincarnation?

  “Christians are favored here, Beti.” Abbas was whispering in the same reassuring way he had during the tonga journey, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “Miss Rachael, the housekeeper, is Christian. She will treat you better if she thinks you are like her.”

  “But I cannot be Christian. I don’t know their gods’ names except for Mary and Jesus, and I know nothing of the prayers!” And what of my beloved Goddess Lakshmi or Thakurma’s favorite, Lord Krishna? Goddess Durga, Lord Shiva . . . I resolved never to forget these holy friends, no matter what the Burra-memsaheb or Miss Rachael wanted. I would not speak their names aloud, but I would keep them in my heart.

  “You will learn those prayers.” Abbas beckoned me forward. “Come see your old friend.”

  I recognized Mala’s sweet brown face peering out from the midst of other buffalos and cows and hurried forward to greet her. Where pointy ribs had stuck out before, there was a smooth layer of fat. As I reached my arms toward her, the new, healthy Mala stamped, forcing me to step back. She bent her head and continued eating, not giving me a second glance.

  I was taken aback, for Mala seemed to have forgotten how I’d rescued her from the dogs and fed and watered and milked her during our long journey together. I had become as invisible to her as I’d been to the English girls. And this lonely bit of knowledge gathered so quickly upon my arrival turned out to be an accurate prediction of how the next three years at Lockwood School would pass.

  CHAPTER

  5

  VOUCHSAFE: 1. To confer or bestow (some thing, favour, or benefit) on a person. 2. To give, grant, or bestow in a gracious or condescending manne
r.

  —Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 12, 1933

  In no time at all, I lost track of the traditional Bengali seasons. A year was divided into three academic terms, and that was how I thought of things: whether the girls were almost to Christmas holiday or summer leave or October’s puja days. But while Lockwood students were promoted to a higher standard each year, things did not change for me, even though it was 1933, and I was thirteen years old.

  I spent the early mornings bringing bed tea to sleepy teachers housed in their private rooms off a long red oxide corridor. It rattled my nerves, even after all this time, to be the first each morning to enter these bedchambers with their exotic furniture—tables designed just for one person to sit and write; wooden cases filled with books and papers; and a tall, netting-draped bed that belonged to a memsaheb who expected morning service of tea and biscuits her own particular way, without fail each morning. After delivering the teachers their bed tea, it was time to set up the dining hall. I did this for each meal and afterward washed the room clean. Times in between were spent dusting, polishing, and cleaning other parts of the school, depending on Miss Rachael’s wishes.

  Abbas had warned me that Burra-memsaheb Jamison was the most important person at Lockwood, but I did not see her nearly as much as Miss Rachael: a tall, strong Christian woman with skin like copper who wore a sari in the same green as the school uniform, which was mill-woven with a fine border of white. The directress of housekeeping seemed older than my ma but younger than Thakurma. The other servants said she was married to a man who worked as a driver in Calcutta, but had never had any children. Because of this, and my Christian conversion, Abbas thought she might take a liking to me.

  He was wrong. From the moment she’d received me, there was never a smile or laugh, only criticism. Miss Rachael sang at Sunday services in a tuneless shout that reminded me of the way she called after me in the school hallways. Sarah, get here now. Fans are dirty. You missed a dead cricket near English classroom. Pick up your feet, close your mouth!

  Miss Rachael was the one who decided I shouldn’t sleep with the other servant families in their huts but on a mat in a tiny lean-to occupied by Jyoti-ma, the old widow in charge of collecting and washing all the students’ and teachers’ used sanitary cloths. Jyoti-ma snored, groaned, and coughed in her sleep, but I didn’t mind; it made me feel safe on dark nights.

  Jyoti-ma was able to kill mice without even needing a candle to see them. She was also the one who helped me on the morning I awoke to find blood on my thighs. I was twelve, but with no understanding at all of what was happening. Jyoti-ma taught me how to tie long cloths around my middle and gave me an old bucket that I could use for soaking them. Of course I washed the cloths myself, as I did my dress, with water gathered from the courtyard pump.

  I had shot up like bamboo just before my first bleeding, and after that, my breasts kept growing. My blue dress that once grazed my calves had become indecently short in length and tight across the chest. When the male staff began teasing me about it, Miss Rachael replaced the blue dress with a gray one from the charity collection. I was glad, because I wanted to look respectable for the one job at Lockwood I thoroughly enjoyed: moving the punkah in Miss Claire Richmond’s classroom.

  I had become a fan puller whenever the electrical generator at Lockwood broke down. The first time the electric fans stopped and lights went dark, Miss Rachael shouted for me to go into Miss Richmond’s classroom. Her room was part of the oldest section of the building, with wooden fan blades attached all the way across the ceiling. These blades shifted back and forth, moved by the power of a servant sitting in the back with a cord tied to her foot. I enjoyed being in the back of the room, lazily moving my foot back and forth and observing pretty Miss Richmond, who gave her students real smiles and spoke in an accent as rich as her orange-gold hair.

  The first six months I was utterly confused about the meaning of her speech. But as time went on, her vocabulary flowed into my brain without need for translation, and with my finger touching my dress, I traced the same words she wrote on the blackboard. And then I was reading: first the books for the littlest ones and then the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling, followed by Treasure Island and A Little Princess. Miss Richmond maintained a side shelf for borrowing what she termed pleasure reading; almost every evening I sneaked one of these to the lean-to and brought it back in the morning before classes had begun. When I came across an unknown word, I memorized its spelling and investigated later in Miss Richmond’s Oxford English Dictionary. As I continued to study, I felt secretly rich: for each word I learned was something that could never be taken away.

  I wanted to speak English, too. The Irish and English and Australians and Anglo-Indians all spoke slightly different-sounding variations of it; with so much confusion, I chose to pattern my English after Miss Richmond, the only English person I admired. In the back of her room, I whispered along with her; when I visited Abbas, who was cleaning and polishing the tongas in the evening, I repeated those phrases more loudly. He encouraged me with praise and small gifts, such as pencils and paper. However, he warned me to practice where the other servants would not see or overhear, for they could become jealous. As a result, after three long years at Lockwood, I could speak and read English. Yet very few knew.

  I had grown accustomed to an almost-invisible existence until the day that changed everything. It was at the end of morning lessons in late spring of 1934, and although the electric generator had begun working again, I’d lingered in my fan-pulling corner to hear a few more sentences from A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Then Miss Richmond raised a discussion about whether young women living in a crowded school might like occasional solitude. If I had been one of her students, I would have raised my hand to say that any person could build a room of her own in her mind, just as I had an imaginary cupboard where I kept Thakurma’s and Ma’s stories to comfort me. And then, like a voice from that cupboard of childhood dreams, I heard a girl’s voice say: “Aey, Broom Girl. Aey!”

  The voice was not inside my head but somewhere nearby. I jerked my head up, thinking I must have been daydreaming. But then I saw the new Indian student who’d arrived the previous week: a pretty, plump girl with untidy black braids. I was confused again, for how could anyone know that I’d once sold brooms?

  “You don’t remember me,” she said in Bengali, and the disappointment in her voice gave me the courage to look again. In a flash, I recognized the long-lashed eyes that had watched me years ago from a veranda in the countryside near Johlpur. It seemed unbelievable, but this new student might be the jamidar’s little princess daughter.

  “When I was younger, I sold brooms. Did you know my mother and me?” My tongue curled at the unfamiliar feeling of our shared old dialect.

  “Yes, certainly. You came to my house when we were very little girls.” She spoke in a manner that fit her high caste—but without impatience or anger.

  “I called you Princess. I remember your frocks,” I blurted.

  “Yes, I liked them much better than what I’m wearing now.” She flicked her stiff green school skirt. “My name is Bidushi. Bidushi Mukherjee. What is yours?”

  It was unusual for someone high up to declare her name to a servant. But she was looking at me in a kind way, so I mumbled my new first name, Sarah. How I hated it; but I understood that it was just one of many changes I’d had to make to live under the protection of Lockwood School.

  “Sarah! Must everyone call you that now? It sounds strange, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve become a Christian.” I dropped my head, expecting that the conversation was done, but it seemed that Bidushi expected more. Clearing my throat, I asked, “And how is your esteemed family?”

  Bidushi pressed her rosebud lips together for a moment. Then in a somber voice, she said, “Four years ago, a tidal wave killed my parents.”

  “I know that wave!” I said. “I saw it. That same wave took my whole village and family. I escaped only becaus
e I was on higher ground in the jungle.”

  “I suppose that we were both lucky,” Bidushi said, but her voice was heavy. “They didn’t take me to the beach because I needed to finish my lessons. The next day, the Collector came to explain to my ayah and me that all of them had drowned.”

  “Have you been alone since then?” I ached for her.

  “My father’s brother and his wife came to take over the estate. My aunt began keeping me inside, because well-bred girls should not be seen outside the family. I have been trapped inside the walls of our estate until last week!” From the tone of her voice, she sounded glad to be away.

  Feeling shy but wanting to reassure her, I said, “Welcome to Lockwood School. I hope it will be a good home for you.”

  “Yes, because you are here.” Bidushi’s eyes shone. “We are the same, two Johlpur orphans alone in a strange place.”

  But we were not the same. I was a servant, and she was a student; and she still had her relatives’ protection and money, while I had a stipend that I’d never seen because Miss Rachael was keeping it for me. But I could not say all of that. Instead, I asked why she was studying in such a faraway school.

  “My uncle and aunt didn’t really want to send me. But a plan was made many years ago for me to marry my mother’s cousin’s son from Calcutta. Recently, his parents inquired about my education. You see, Pankaj—that is my betrothed’s name—is in England studying law at the University of Cambridge.”

  “I have heard of Cambridge!” I knew that Miss Richmond was a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and that many Englishmen who’d been at Cambridge or Oxford ruled within the government of India.