1977 (3 page)

Bloxsaw into the garage, locked him in, then told Ibrahim that he was dismissed and could

clear out right away. He had paid him off. That was at 9.15.

Ibrahim knew it was 9.15. Having taken his money he glanced at his watch to work out

how much longer Lucy-Mem would be at the hairdresser and so how long it would be

before the business of negotiating his reinstatement could begin. If it ever did. The paying

off had been an ominous variation on the theme of getting the push.

For another few minutes Ibrahim hung around, out of sight, anticipating a yelled complaint

that the breakfast egg was off, but the only sound was the racket made by the dog using the

garage door as a punch-bag. Presently Ibrahim went out by the back to look for the young

mali
(his trump card on this occasion). The
mali
was nowhere to be seen. Instead there had

been Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s maid, Minnie, looking for him and now handing him a letter.

“Much trouble,” she said, nodding at the envelope.

“Good,” Ibrahim said. He told her he’d been sacked. She covered the lower part of her

face, grinning with him, sharing the comedy of life. Then she went. He took the letter to

Tusker Sahib at once, prepared for anything from a shied tea-cup to a friendly smile. The

Sahib had always been unpredictable, more so since his illness, but it was always better to be

sacked by him than by Memsahib. Once Memsahib had sacked him she had a way of not

looking, not listening, not seeing him for days as though the mere fact of her having told

him to go had caused him to disappear. All his longest periods of technical unemployment

stemmed from notice given by Colonel Memsahib. The Sahib, although sometimes

threatening violence, was a soft touch by comparison. With Memsahib the war tended to be

one of attrition, not confrontation. Even when she was on his side against Tusker Sahib he

dealt with her cautiously.

“A letter, Sahib,” he announced. “Just now come.”

“I told you to get out!” the Sahib shouted. “You’ve got your money, so go, now.
Ek dam
.”

“From Management,” Ibrahim said, putting the letter on the breakfast table. “Shall not

trouble household further. Only performing last duty. The world collapses around one’s

head. So it is written. Salaam Aleikum.”

He retired into the bungalow and waited, listening for the sound of the envelope being torn

open out there on the verandah. He guessed what the letter was about. In the servants’

quarters both at Smith’s and the Shiraz the subject of the future of The Lodge and of

Smith’s itself had been discussed for weeks; and news—from conversations overheard of

plans made by the consortium of businessmen who owned the Shiraz to buy up Smith’s and

“redevelop”—swapped for news of what was known or guessed about Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s

latest successes in playing one of these businessmen off against the other with a view it was

supposed to being invited to join the consortium herself.

Apart from the Shiraz, the consortium owned a new hotel in Ranpur, one in Mayapore, and

another down in Mirât (The Mirât Lake-Palace Hotel). They also owned a small chain of

restaurants called the Go-Go-Inns which specialized in Punjabi food. All the businessmen

concerned in these enterprises had come from the Western Punjab in 1947 when it became

part of Pakistan at the time of Independence and Partition, and had arrived in India

penniless, they said. Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s first husband was believed to have come from there,

having “lost his all” in the riots between Muslims and Hindus. It was agreed by the servants

both at Smith’s and the Shiraz that you could hardly find a Western Punjabi, once destitute,

nowadays not making a packet. “Bloody immigrants,” Ibrahim sometimes called them.

Ibrahim did not hear the sound of the envelope being opened. Bloxsaw was now yelping as

well as punching the garage door. What he did hear was a shout, “The bitch! The bloody

bitch!” and the scrape of Tusker’s wicker-chair as he rose, no doubt to go and sort Mrs

Bhoolabhoy out.

Ibrahim smiled. Since he had been dismissed it was no concern of his that the Sahib leaving

by the front and himself by the back meant the bungalow would now be unattended. He

went to the servants’ quarters in the rear compound and found the young
mali
trying to

repair the leak in the old water-can.

“Leave that,” he said. “We are dismissed. One out, all out.”

“When shall we be reinstated?”

The
mali
had been employed for only a few weeks. But he knew the score. Ibrahim had

briefed him.

“This time perhaps never. Come. Help me pack a few things then pack a few things

yourself to make it look good.”

“I also should pack?”

“Of course.”

“Where shall we go?”

“To the Shiraz.”

“We seek employment at the Shiraz?”

“No. We shall take up positions near main entrance to accost Memsahib when she comes

out,”

Mali
put the watering-can aside but remained squatting on his hunkers. His brown eyes

darkened with the effort of concentrating.

“Ibrahim,” he said. “Why when you are pushed am I also pushed?”

“I have explained it before. There is no time to explain it again now.”

“What of pay?”

“What of it? Did I say
I
was sacking you? You are still in my employ, at least until end of

the month. Speak of pay then, not before.”

“If we are pushed, what of shelter, what of food?”

“Given push, not pushed. If you hope to go foreign you must learn pukka English. Stop

asking questions and get on with it. Allah will provide.”

The hut where Ibrahim slept lay behind the corrugated iron garage which was a

comparatively new construction. As a bungalow The Lodge had always been diminutive, the

servants’ quarters correspondingly so: six or seven men, women and boys had once had

accommodation here, just sufficient for a modest bachelor establishment in the days of the

raj
. Then, there had been several huts and a cookhouse. Only the hut in which Ibrahim slept

remained in good repair. The others had fallen into ruin and of the cookhouse there was

nothing left except a few blackened bricks. No one had used it to cook for the occupants of

The Lodge since the time Smith’s annexed it. A modern kitchen of sorts had subsequently

been installed inside The Lodge but this was seldom put to major use because—breakfasts

and buffet parties apart—the Smalleys usually ate in the main hotel dining-room or had

Ibrahim bring trays over.

Tusker Sahib occasionally had crazes for going to the market and bringing back fresh food

which he made a hash of, burning the potatoes, over-spicing the stew. Ibrahim was prepared

to make tea, toast, cook eggs, squeeze fruit juice, pour from the packets of cornflakes,

oversee the stocking of the refrigerator with butter and milk, and in winter have a go at

making the morning porridge which kept his master’s and mistress’s old bones warm. If

either was ill he could and did turn his hand to anything in the line of nursing and

commissariat. Years younger than both he felt for them what an indulgent, often exasperated

but affectionate parent might feel for demanding and unreasonable children whom it was

more sensible to appease than cross.

He had spoiled them both three months before when Tusker Sahib had been taken

seriously ill for the first time in his seventy-odd years, and Dr Mitra had ordered him to bed,

either in the hospital or at home, preferably the hospital. “Bugger hospital,” Tusker had

shouted. “Come to that, bugger bed. Ibrahim’ll look after me, so will Lucy if she can get her

arse off the chair.”

One of the pleasures of working for Tusker Sahib was the further insight it gave him into

the fascinating flexibility and poetry of the English language. Since his youth in Mirât, since

his boyhood even, it had never failed to stun him with its elegance. Only those few months

in Finsbury Park, London N, had caused him any disquiet. The language had sounded

different, there. But the place was stiff with Greeks.

For days after Tusker’s confinement to bed he had gone round muttering, “Bugger bed,

and get your arse off the chair.” For days, too, he and Lucy-Mem separately or together

shopped for the ingredients of the good nourishing-broth which would keep Tusker’s

strength up without overheating his blood. Separately or together they had slaved over the

rarely used electric oven at The Lodge that was either not hot enough or too hot, somehow

not in either their separate or combined competence, a regular djinn of a stove, one moment

exhaling smoke and flames and at the next as cold as Akbar’s tomb; while in the bedroom or

on the verandah Tusker Sahib lay either incomprehensibly docile—like a man (Ibrahim

thought) who knew he’d left it too late to go to Mecca or, at other times, pronouncing

anathema, against the broth, his wife, Ibrahim, Dr Mitra, and the Shiraz whose tall shadow

darkened The Lodge’s garden in the mornings until the sun got high enough for the five-

storeys to emit heat rather than cast shadow, and cut The Lodge off from the cool breeze

that sometimes came at midday in the warm weather. Chiefly, though, Tusker pronounced

anathema against Mrs Bhoolabhoy whose chief
mali
was supposed to tend The Lodge’s

garden as well as the kitchen-garden and the ragged flower pots in the hotel’s own

compound. Ibrahim belonged to Tusker and Lucy; but the
mali
and the sweeper had always

been Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s responsibility, their services paid for in the rent.

Throughout Tusker’s illness the old
mali
hadn’t worked at The Lodge. The grass began to

need cutting. The canna lilies began to wilt. The jungle was advancing.

“What does Mrs Bhoolabhoy think I am?” Tusker cried one day. “A sleeping beauty?

What’s she going to do? Wake me in a hundred years’ time after hacking her way through

her own bloody thickets? Who does she think she is? Prince bloody Charming? Just wait till

Billy-Boy gets back. I’ll have both their guts for garters.”

“What is Sahib saying?” Ibrahim asked Colonel Memsahib.

“Nothing. It is only his delirium,” Lucy replied. “But we must do something about the
mali
.

The state of the garden is beginning to retard Colonel Sahib’s recovery.”

Ibrahim disagreed. He had worked for the Smalleys for several interesting tumultuous years

and wasn’t ready yet to lose them. They were the last survivors of Pankot’s permanent

retired British residents. This and the fact that he himself was England-Returned gave him a

certain cachet among the other servants. If Tusker died now Lucy-Mem might go Home. He

judged that Tusker’s anger about the state of the compound was the main thing that kept

him on the boil, and so—alive. Tusker was a man who needed irritants. Often he invented

them. Here was one ready-made. From a peaceful orderly scene of a
mali
cutting grass and

watering canna lilies Tusker might have turned his face away, and to the wall.

Sometimes, feeling himself both demeaned and exalted, Ibrahim threw a can of water on

the lilies. He even picked a few marigolds for Tusker’s bedside vase. Cut the grass he would

not. He was a head-bearer, not a gardener; and in any case he agreed with Tusker that Mrs

Bhoolabhoy’s
mali
had always cut the grass, if only by steering the old machine while his

tenpence-in-the-shilling assistant dragged it on ropes.

“It’s in the lease!” Tusker shouted one day. Exasperated and ignoring Ibrahim’s advice to

do nothing until Mr Bhoolabhoy was back from his mysterious trip to Ranpur, Lucy-Mem

went to confront Mrs Bhoolabhoy, something Ibrahim couldn’t remember her ever doing

before.

“I never interfere with business matters,” she once said to him in her small light voice. “I

have no business brain at all.” Ibrahim took this with a pinch of salt. Memsahib was a devil

when it came to checking change and prices on shopping lists. And most of the concessions

Tusker Sahib wrung out of Mrs Bhoolabhoy, Ibrahim knew, originated in what Lucy

described as her own “addled little brain”. Without that addled little brain there would have

been no new refrigerator two years ago, no repair to the garage door the same year, no new

seats on the twin thunder-boxes which stood side by side on a dais in the bathroom like

viceregal thrones and which the liar of a sweeper declared he had evidence of having been

used at times simultaneously.

So when Lucy-Mem went to confront Mrs Bhoolabhoy about the case of the disappearing

mali
he almost expected her to return with a
mali
in tow.

“Old
mali
seems to have resigned,” she told him, “and hired himself out to the Shiraz.