Free Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson Page B

uncomfortably aware that my hair was mussed.
    I looked at the now cold plate of partridge and potatoes on the desk. And then I turned to Tudor and gave him the tray.
    â€œCould you hold this for me?” I loaded the tray with the dirty cups and cutlery Anto had used earlier in the day.
    Bull’s-eye, I thought. You wait on him, you horrible man—he’s worth two of you.
    A small, sweet victory, which I feared could not last.

- CHAPTER 8 -
    O ne day he would struggle to even remember the name of the pretty girl at Wickam Farm, or the Bird Room, or the barn. He would shut down this part of his life just as he had shut down India on the ship coming here, or at least managed to cram it into some back room in his mind.
    But right now: the crunch of loose floorboards above him, Kit’s faint tread on the stairs, the clink of her bottles in the bathroom, the rustle of her dress coming off. To corral his mind, he got out the box from under his bed and laid out letters and photographs of his family on the eiderdown and switched on the lamp.
    His long-ago family: Appan, his father; Amma, his mother; Mariamma, his sister; and his grandmother, Ponnamma. The women who pinched his cheeks, fed him delicious meals, tucked him in bed at night, loved him up until they suddenly sent him away. He tried never to be melodramatic about this, tried to believe Father Damian’s suggestion that it might have been the making of him.
    And underneath, more photographs, splayed like a deck of cards, the extended family groups: hundreds of vaguely remembered ghosts from Christmases, christenings, Onam festivals, weddings. He studied them with the expression of a man studying for an exam he was bound to fail. He picked up a faded snapshot of his father. Studious, bespectacled, grave, Appan stood a few feet away to the right of a group of young Englishmen. A photo taken, as his father had told him many times, on the greatest day of his life:his graduation from Lincoln’s Inn, where he was called to the bar. Appan, wearing the dark Savile Row he still wears, stood skinny, scared-looking on some grand-looking steps, holding a piece of rolled-up cardboard.
    Anto’s face clouded as he remembered his father: the handsome, authoritative face at the end of the table. The family ringmaster who could change the emotional temperature of a room simply by walking in. His father’s car, a Bullnose Morris, one of the few in the district. Appan leaving for an important court case in Pondicherry, conker-colored briefcase bulging with grown-up mysteries, shaking his hand in the hall as he went to an overseas conference. “Look after your mother.”
    His hungry desire to keep his father’s love with good results, good cricket innings, good behavior felt like a source of weakness now. When he fell below Appan’s high standards, he saw disgust on his father’s face. “You’re on the seventh stair, my friend,” before the cane came out of the top drawer of his desk.
    When Anto first arrived in England, it was a freezing September. No sun for days on end, gray skies, gray streets, and he’d wondered if this was the eighth stair: a place where you could die from unhappiness. This abandonment from home felt so unexpected, so complete that it almost destroyed the balance of his mind. Being happy, being loved, he now saw, had been the worst preparation possible for a life in which nobody knew him. Not a single soul in England.
    His mother sent letters to Downside. Ordinary things: Pathrose cooking prawns and okra in the kitchen, the cricket match with the whole of the Thekkeden family on the lawn with, she’d written, “an Anto-sized hole in the fieldings.”
    The letters, in her impeccable handwriting, faint tang of jasmine oil on the envelopes, had in his first term almost destroyed him.
    Before the other boys came, he’d snatched them from the basket in the refectory, where milk and biscuits were