Page 26 of Six Days in Bombay

Chapter 14

Bombay

1956

I watch my daughter’s arms undulate like the wings of a swan. She is one of twelve dancers, women and men, who are part of the Uday Shankar Dance Troupe. The Royal Opera House is full and, thankfully, air-conditioned. Indira has loved dance since she was three years old, often making up her own routines for songs she heard on the radio. She’s going on tour with them to Europe and then on to America. I would have preferred her to study for a degree but being selected for an esteemed dance company is a remarkable achievement. Who knows? She may return to college at a later date. Or maybe never.

Still, I’m nervous about her going, a girl of eighteen. Then I remind myself, didn’t I travel through Europe—alone—at twenty-three? I’d had no idea what I was doing, which was probably a blessing. At least Indira will be traveling with a group. But I worry. What if someone steals her money as Agnes stole mine? What if she falls for someone like Mira fell for Paolo? What if she’s attacked by a stranger as I was in Paris? Fear for her makes my palms sweat. I force myself to concentrate on the stage.

The performance is somewhere between ballet and classical Bharatanatyam . There are twelve dancers, six of them women of various ages. I hope the older ones will look out for Indira. I remember the kindness of Madame Renaud, the French ambassador’s wife, even Pavel and Martina in Prague, and of course Dr. Stoddard. Each gave me the courage to move on to the next stage of my journey.

Edward puts his hand on my arm, letting me know it’s intermission. I’d been deaf to the clapping. All these years later, I love these simple gestures of his. I cover his hand with mine and smile at him. He’s going out to the lobby to stretch his limbs. He was the biggest chance I took. Not the steamship voyage to Istanbul. Not the train trips around Europe. Not the haphazard way I went about looking for Mira’s friends, wandering alone through the streets, not sure what I would find. Not the trip to my father’s house in London.

And not Amit. I learned he never made it back to Bombay. His employer sent him to Burma to conduct hygiene studies among cholera patients. He wrote to me through the British Embassy in Bombay to tell me he missed me terribly and would be there for at least two years, building a team to do the work. By then, Indira was already growing inside me, and I didn’t want to force Amit to marry me—as I’m sure he would have offered to do. I’d already decided the day we parted in Paris that our union would do more harm to his work than it would help him. But the care we had taken that night in Paris to avoid conception had failed. Three months later, when I realized I was pregnant, I hadn’t despaired. He’d given me Indira.

Amit’s work would take him from Burma to Bengal to Nepal to Afghanistan to Geneva to London. Perhaps one day he would settle in India again. Perhaps one day I would tell him about Indira. Or keep her to myself.

Leading up to Independence Day, so many Anglo-Indians like me left India. Had they decided their identity lay with the other or did their English families claim them? By the time I returned from Europe, I was excited to claim India as mine. I wanted to join the marches, wave placards, shout from the rooftops that India deserved her freedom. I would roll the bandages, organize the work, bring cheer to those on the front lines. Edward understood. He and I were more alike than Amit and I were. For us, there had always been a choice. And we’d chosen India.

When Dr. Stoddard arrived in London, I was down to my last pound. He came with me to meet Lucy and Alistair, my half-siblings. I don’t know if I could have done that without him. He bought our plane tickets to Bombay. It was my first time on a plane, and I held on to his hand during the entire journey. It was something I’d always imagined I’d do with my father—hold on to his hand on the Ferris wheel or on the walks to school. All my life I’d been looking for my father to hold my hand only to find that the hand belonged to Ralph Stoddard.

Edward was waiting for us at the Bombay airport when we arrived. I was surprised at my reaction, how excited I was to see him. I remembered Agnes telling me, That’s quite the handsome young man you have . I’d said he wasn’t mine, but what would happen if he were, I wondered. Goose bumps traveled down my arms. Within a month, he’d proposed. If he ever wondered why Indira came early, he never brought it up.

Mira sent me on that journey to take chances. It’s what my mother wanted for me too. And it’s what I want for my daughter. How my mother would have loved her granddaughter! Indira is fearless. She believes she is capable of conquering the world. She charges into the unknown, places I was too scared to go at her age. When she falls, she gets back up and tries again or moves on.

I had considered naming my daughter Mira. But the painter had already lived a life full of music and art and love and play and outrage and laughter and wins small and large. Indira, Balbir’s wife, hadn’t. I wanted to give Indira the life she didn’t and couldn’t have. So I named my daughter after my old friend. I never saw Indira after her last day at Wadia’s, but when I look at my daughter—brave and daring and spirited—I imagine my friend smiling at her.

Until I took that trip to Europe, I hadn’t given my mother credit for being the risk-taker she was. She gave up her own family for a man whom she loved desperately. She’d taken a leap, and when he couldn’t fulfill his promises, she hadn’t regretted the chancing. I haven’t forgiven him yet, but I keep trying.

Twice, we’ve visited Alistair and Lucy in England. We send letters back and forth and share photos. Lucy’s family visited us in India about five years ago, and we traveled with them to the Ajanta Caves, New Delhi and Shimla, places where Mira loved to paint. Indira is a few years younger than Lucy’s daughter, Ellie. They write to each other, and they’re looking forward to seeing each other when Indira’s dance troupe performs in London.

It’s such a comfort to me that my daughter had a chance to know her grandfather, Ralph (I could never get used to calling him that, so I just addressed him as Doctor, which Edward and Indira teased me about no end). He took my girl to the Hanging Gardens to catch fireflies, read to her from Tales of Krishna , showed her his photo albums to tell her about her grandmother, Deva. Indira only knew Ralph Stoddard for the first five years of her life, but I know he’ll be in her memories always, as he is in mine.

The lights are flickering in the theater, which means intermission is over. Edward takes his seat next to mine, puts his hand on my knee and smiles fondly at me.

He’s been much happier since leaving the British Embassy. When it seemed the British were making a hash of the hand-over to India, he was disheartened and confused. Here he was, half British and half Indian, like me. He felt, as I did, that he could do more good helping Indians rebuild a country that had been left depleted and wanting. He found work with an organization that was moving India’s dependency on British goods to those produced in India. Sometimes, when I catch him in profile, I see his father and I can’t help but smile. When I need counsel over a troubling matter, I talk to Ralph Stoddard in my head. He always reassures me my choices are the best choices.

We clap when the curtain lifts and the dancers take their places on the stage. It occurs to me that Mira’s painting The Acceptance is also like a stage set, with the lead in front and the minor players in the background. It hangs in our bedroom.

I kept in touch with Pavel, Petra’s friend. He’s now the director of the History Department at Charles University. He wrote to tell me the Hitzig family was sent to a camp called Terezin in 1942, despite Mr. Hitzig’s belief that his business dealings with the Germans would save his family from death. Mr. Hitzig couldn’t or didn’t want to understand that his people, who employed thousands of Czechs in their businesses and contributed so much to the arts, could be considered an inferior race. Terezin became home to a hundred and forty thousand Jews. Pavel found out through a number of sources that while Petra was there she began encouraging the children to draw. She scrounged and begged for pencils, paper, chalk, cardboard—anything the children could use to draw a happy return home, a favorite birthday, what Heaven was like, a fantasy garden they would like to create. Only a small number of those children escaped the gas chamber, but for all of them, Petra provided paradise through imagination for a short time. Eventually, she, along with her family, were sent to Auschwitz. I think of her often, much to my surprise. She was fragile but sweet, and when the time came, she was brave.

I sent a postcard to Josephine Benoit’s gallery a few months after I returned home. In the short time I spent with her, I came to believe she cared for her artists more than she cared for money. The postcard was returned with a no addressee known stamp . I assumed she and her sister had returned to Martinique safely before the start of the Second World War. But when I heard four years ago on All India Radio that Mira Novak’s work was being installed permanently at the National Gallery in New Delhi, I knew Jo had had something to do with it. I took Indira to see the exhibit and told her about my friend, the painter. I told her about Mira’s belief in her art, in India, in her conviction that only by seeing the world do we learn to see ourselves. Indira had taken my hand and squeezed. When we got home, she told Edward and me that her life and dance were one, that Mira’s story had decided it. I’d wrapped my arms around her, around Indira.

Edward learned through his connections that Whitney had divorced Paolo in Florence. She’d married a wealthy American, a widower with two children, and finally persuaded her father to settle his fortune on her. I imagine Paolo continued to duplicate master paintings for commissions, pieces that would hang in the homes of the nouveau riche, the wives of whom he would most likely bed.

At night, I sometimes look up at The Acceptance and think of her.

“Hello, Mira,” I whisper.

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