Bengal Nights/La Nuit Bengali

8

One afternoon, several days later, I met Harold coming to ask me to a picnic. He seemed even colder and even nastier than usual. "Is it true you are to marry the engineer's daughter?"

I reddened, and began joking, as I always do when I am embarrassed- especially if someone dear to me is involved.

Harold ignored my quips and told me he had found out the news at work. He also knew that I was going to abandon my religion and take up Hinduism ... He himself is nothing but a filthy sinner, who only sets foot in church to meet Iris, but he was visibly horrified by the idea of my conversion. He told me firmly that Narendra Sen was a monster, that I had been bewitched and that I would do well to give five rupees to the Little Sisters of the Poor to intercede for me.

I stopped him mid-flow. "And the girls, how are they?"

"They miss you. You must be saving a lot, at Bhowanipore. You don't pay for your room or your board, you never go out to town. What do you do all day?"

"I'm learning Bengali for the Provincial Manager's exam," I lied, "and then it's a new world for me. I don't know how the time passes, but it does."

He borrowed five rupees to go to the YMCA ball that evening. "You don't want to come?"

I did not. The memory of those profligate years at Wellesley Street and Ripon Street evoked neither sadness nor regret in me. I looked at Harold. This hulking fellow, with his swarthy face, magnificent eyes - a little shadowed - this companion of the night, with whom I had chased girls and wasted so much time, was now nothing more than a stranger to me. My new life seemed so pure, so sacred, that I dared not describe it to him.

He promised to come and visit me soon and carefully noted down my address - doubtless, I thought, in anticipation of another, and larger, loan.

On my return, I found all Narendra Sen's family in the dining-room, having tea. Mantu and Lilu were there and Khokha with his two sisters - two of those shadow-women whom I almost never saw. I described my meeting with Harold to them frankly and confided my disgust at the life the Europeans and Anglo-Indians led in Calcutta - a life of which I had for so long been a part. My declaration delighted them. The women gazed at me intently and complimented me in their unintelligible jargon. Mantu shook my hand, closing his eyes as was his custom. Only the engineer did not congra­tulate me on that over-zealous condemnation of my race. He left us to read his inevitable detective story.

I went up on to the roof with Maitreyi, Khokha and Lilu. Stretched out on rugs, cushions under our heads, speaking little and shifting about to find the most comfortable posi­tion, we waited for night to fall. I had kept my sandals on. I moved my feet around, trying, by dint of casual, surreptitious movements, to lean them decently against the wall. Over the previous months, I had learnt a whole set of rituals: I knew, for example, that if I knocked into someone, I must bend down and touch his foot with my right hand, that I should never, even in jest, execute the gesture of a kick - and several other such precepts and prohibitions. I did not know what rites might surround the resting of feet against parapets. At that moment, I heard Lilu murmur something in Maitreyi's ear.

"She finds your foot very beautiful. It is as white as alabaster," Maitreyi explained to me, her expression filled with an unmistakable desire and sadness. I blushed, both from pleasure (believing myself ugly, any praise of my physical features delights me) and shyness. I did not know how to interpret Maitreyi's intense scrutiny of my legs. Her smile was one of contempt, wickedness, shame. To break the silence, I threw out some inept remarks and declared that the beauty of feet is irrelevant, since we never see them, at least in western cultures.

Maitreyi grew calmer.

"With us, it is different. Two friends show their affection for each other by rubbing their bare feet together. That is what I do whenever I talk with a friend. Look, like this ...." Quite flushed, she lifted the hem of her sari and went over to Lilu. Something curious then happened. Lilu began squeez­ing Maitreyi's leg between her ankles and Maitreyi quivered, smiling with pleasure as though she were being kissed. Those lazy sweeps along the calf, the clenched fingers, the heel pressed against the skin, followed by the kneading of flesh, warm and shuddering, against flesh, gave me the feeling I was watching the most intimate of love scenes. I was in agonies of jealousy and revulsion at that absurd contact between female bodies.