The Henna Artist(61)



“Come help me, Radha,” I coaxed, forcing my voice to be gentle, as I had done a thousand times to put my ladies in good humor. I gripped the handle of the pot with both hands so she couldn’t see how badly I was shaking. “Tomorrow, everything can be the way it was. Back to normal.” My jittery voice belied my words.

“You worry what your ladies will think.”

I stiffened.

“Your respectable MemSahibs who don’t know what you do outside their drawing rooms,” she sneered. “How you make babies disappear.” She sounded so different, this Radha, whose words had a dagger’s edge.

I turned to face her.

“What would they say if they knew you had gotten rid of your own babies?”

She must have seen the stricken look on my face. “Hari told me. Then, after Joyce Harris, I figured it out. What you’d done to stop from having your own.”

I was finding it hard to breathe. “This isn’t about me! This—this is about you. You’re thirteen! A girl with a chance to do more, be more—”

“You’re talking about yourself, not me! I’m not you.”

I pressed a hand against my chest. “No, we’re talking about you—a girl with a child and no husband,” I wheezed.

She thrust her chin. “We’ll get married.”

She was overwrought. Delusional. I gripped the edges of the countertop to keep myself upright. “By this time tomorrow, Radha, you won’t even remember you drank the tea. You’ll be whole again, and clean. Tomorrow, we’ll start over.”

“You’re not listening. You never do! I’ll tell the father, and we’ll marry. We’ll keep the baby.”

“And what if he refuses, Radha? Then what will you do? Think about it. Who will dress your child and give him dal to eat when you go back to school?”

Her eyes grew huge in her face, Maa’s face. Even now, incredibly, she hadn’t thought of this. “I won’t go back to school. I’ll work. Like you.”

I shook my head. “You think it’s that easy? This house took thirteen years of hard work and Yes, Ji and No, Ji and Whatever you say, Ji. You’ll never have to do that if you go to that school. You have many years in which to have a child, after you’ve finished school. Listen to me, Radha. Please. The Maharani School is a prize—few get in—and you go there for free. You can be something better than a henna artist. Better than me. You can have a meaningful life.” The water was almost boiling. “Just—please help me find the cotton root bark.”

Her voice trembled. “He said I was just another cheap pair of hands to you. Your business only took off after I arrived. You told me yourself you book more appointments now because of my henna. If that’s true, then why can’t you trust me to think for myself?”

She moved to stand in front of me, her face inches from mine. The blood on her lip was glistening. “You didn’t trust me at the holiday party and you don’t trust me now,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how much I do. You’ll never have faith in me!”

More than her words, the tone of her voice, its bitterness, was worse than any insult I’d ever endured from my ladies. What had I ever done for this girl but house her, feed her, clothe her! My heart closed in on itself, curled into a ball.

I pointed a finger at her chest. “You’re going to drink every drop of this before dawn arrives.”

“I won’t. I’ll prove you wrong!”

She took flight as swiftly as a hummingbird. As she ran past me, her chiffon skirt brushed the hair on my arm. I tried to grab her, but I felt as if I were moving through water, and I only managed to rip the delicate fabric off her dress. I heard the slap of her bare feet in the courtyard and then she was gone.

I watched the flicker of blue on the Primus stove, heard the water boiling. I wouldn’t need it now. I turned the burner off.

I crossed the room and fell onto the charpoy. It must have been after three o’clock in the morning.

This was a day that should have ended in celebration, full of hope for the future. Instead, I felt a void as wide and as deep as the river Ganga.

Without my parents to witness the long road I had traveled to get here, the struggle to build my house seemed pointless. In their place, I’d been sent Radha to look after, and I’d ruined her future, as well.

Where would she go at this time of night? Not to her lover surely? Who was he? If not the milkman, Mr. Iyengar or Mr. Pandey, who?

The teachers at the Maharani School were women. It couldn’t have been the toothless old gateman? Impossible!

With a start, I thought: Samir? He had admired her beauty. But...no. Radha didn’t fit his pattern; she wasn’t a widow, and she was far too young, wasn’t she?

Wherever Radha was going, she would have to walk. Everyone, including the tonga-wallas and the rickshaw-wallas, was in bed. Radha had no money to take a train or even a bus. Would she sleep in the street as she and Hari had done when they first came to Jaipur? She couldn’t be going to Hari, surely?

Kanta would know. I should phone her. But how? At my lodgings I had used Mrs. Iyengar’s telephone with her permission, but I couldn’t afford a phone line here. The post office, where I sometimes paid a princely sum to use the phone, was closed.

If Radha didn’t return by morning, I would send Malik to Kanta’s with a note. I sighed. Another embarrassment. Girls from good families didn’t run away from home. Which is probably what the gossip-eaters had said about me thirteen years ago.

Alka Joshi's Books