Free A Far Horizon by Meira Chand Page B

also made their journey with the river to the distant sea. And there was something indefinable about the swift-running Hoogly, chasing towards its death and rebirth beyond a far horizon. There was no piety or profanity that the river did not know, and it treated both equally. It absorbed the ashes of murderers and witnessed birth on its banks. This wisdom it finally spilled into the sea. In heretical moments Emily sometimes thought God could well take the shape of the sea. She drew more strength from the river than from any church sermon, although she admitted this to no one. Beneath the river ran a silence deeper than the ocean that she listened to each day.
    She had not always been like this. Once her blood had coursed through her like the river, with the same longing for the wild. Now, in the mirror she hated to acknowledge her face, marked by lines of ennui and a miserable existence. She still saw the nut-coloured skin and bare feet of an earlier creature. Six years of marriage had turned her from a defiant brown woman into an ethereal ghost. At these thoughts a sense of mourning filled her. Not a shadow remained of that earlier woman; it was impossible to know where she hid. It was enough now to know she did not love her husband, that in her mind he still belonged to Jane. She felt a kindness for him, but little more. For days they barely spoke. He relieved his frustrations in the grog houses, which did not help his reputation. She envied the luxury of his easy relief while she remained locked in herself. Duty calcified her.
    Emily had grown up near Bombay on a large indigo farm that her father, John Coates, managed for the Company. The English population was negligible in the nearby town and Mr Coates was absent for weeks at a time. This had been a depressive weight upon her mother, who never ventured beyond her own malaise or the shadowy rooms that held her. The proper care of her daughters defeated her. It was the ayah, Parvati, who played the role of mother. It was to her that Emily ran after a fall, it was she who dispelled a fear of the dark even as her tales of gods and monsters sank easily intoEmily’s mind. And Emily had played with Parvati’s own children as if they were her kin. Their mother’s thin pleas had pulled dutiful Jane to her side, but had meant nothing to headstrong Emily. Jane had tended their mother, embroidered, read and played the pianoforte. At her mother’s side she had learned thrift, how to deal with thieving servants and keep an eye on the stores. She was five years older than Emily, from whom no such responsibility was required.
    Some learning had been necessary, so their mother had roused herself to teach. Intermittently there had been governesses but nobody stayed for long. Emily had spent much of her childhood running wild in the sun with Parvati’s children, only slightly lighter in hue than they. On the banks of the river she had watched the fishermen bring in their catch, her legs scratched by thorns, her feet bare and callused. She had thrived on the food in the servants’ quarters and spoken the rough lilt of their tongue. On the banks of streams she had made whistles from leaves, climbed trees for mangoes and green almonds, cleaned her teeth chewing a stick of neem. Under the trees she had ripped off her skirts and run about in her shift, free to trap fish in her long-fingered hands. The sunset had flamed in her eyes as it lit the river. In those days her soul had run free. It had been easier for her mother to let her go than to find the stick of discipline. During her father’s brief periods at home he had seen Emily for mere moments. All he had complained about was the state of her complexion.
    Emily was fifteen when their mother died, Jane a mature twenty. It soon struck Mr Coates that an indigo farm was no place to bring up young women, and that Jane was already beyond marriageable age with no suitable man in sight. She was twenty-two by the time Roger Drake