Page 24 of The Girl from the Tea Garden (The India Tea #3)
Adela tore her gaze away from the speaker and his mesmerising performance and looked round.
Blocking the steps from where they’d come were dozens of police armed with their long baton-like lathis.
Her stomach tensed. Abruptly the officer in charge raised a loudhailer and bellowed out commands in Hindustani for the crowds to disperse. He repeated them in Urdu.
‘Go home! Your demonstration is over. This meeting is breaking the law. Go home now and no one will get hurt!’
The fiery speaker made some riposte, standing his ground, but at the sight of ranks of police, the crowd began to break up.
The other activists on the stage spoke urgently to the communist, who remonstrated with the police in their attempts to close down the meeting.
But soon his supporters were bundling him off the stage.
At this the police officer barked an order, and his men began to push forward, cutting a line through the melee towards the stage. Adela and Fluffy were elbowed and shoved as people tried to get out of the way. Pandemonium broke out.
‘They’re after that man,’ gasped Fluffy.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Adela cried over the shouting and confusion.
But they were being carried by the tide of people in the opposite direction to the steps, caught in the crush.
Adela seized Fluffy’s arm and held on for all she was worth.
There was nothing to be done but let themselves be carried along.
Tugged and jostled, Fluffy cried out, ‘My shoe– it’s come off! ’
‘Don’t stop, Auntie,’ Adela screamed, heart banging with fear. ‘Hold on tight.’
Suddenly a man wrapped in a cloak grabbed Fluffy’s other arm and pulled.
‘Let go of her!’ Adela shouted.
‘This way, memsa’b,’ he urged. ‘In here.’
‘Noor?’ Fluffy gasped as the cloak fell back from her bearer’s face. ‘How ...?’
He didn’t answer, but hurried them into an alleyway and then through a low door.
All at once they were out of the mayhem, standing in the back kitchen of a food stall, a large vat of steaming dal cooking on an open fire.
The skinny boy who was tending it, gaped at them in astonishment.
Noor said something to him that Adela didn’t understand, except for the word ‘chai’; the boy nodded and disappeared behind a curtain.
Outside they could hear shouting and police whistles. Fluffy let out a gasp of relief.
‘Please sit, memsa’bs.’ Noor indicated a couple of low stools. ‘We will wait for men to go.’
The boy reappeared with a metal tray of small glasses filled with tea and handed them round. Adela sipped gratefully at the sweet, milky chai , the pounding of her heart slowing. Fluffy was grey-faced, her hat askew and a shoe gone; her stockinged foot filthy.
She trembled. ‘Noor, how did you come to be there?’
‘I followed you, memsa’b.’ Noor’s lean face smiled. ‘In case there was trouble.’
Fluffy’s eyes welled with tears. ‘Thank you. You are my guardian angel.’
‘Do you know who that last speaker was?’ Adela asked.
Noor shook his head. ‘Someone from the city, not local.’
‘What was he saying?’
‘Something about the Praja Mandal,’ Noor said, glancing round as if fearing he might be overheard, ‘and bad things about the hill rajas.’
‘The police knew him,’ said Fluffy. ‘That’s what seemed to set them off.’
‘Yes,’ Adela murmured, thinking of the passionate speaker so full of energy and rage. ‘I wonder if he got away.’ Silently she hoped he had evaded a beating from the police sticks.
They waited half an hour and then Noor summoned a rickshaw.
Rain had set in again. The bazaar was strangely deserted and quiet, the Congress flags torn down and trampled in the mud.
The women sat in silence as they were pulled back up the slope to the Ridge and Jakko Hill.
Noor ordered hot water for baths and more tea with cake.
‘I’m so grateful, Noor,’ said Fluffy, ‘and feel terrible for putting you and Adela at risk.’
Noor shook his head. Adela felt full of bravado now they were safely home. ‘I’m glad I went– it was a great piece of theatre.’
Fluffy gave an impatient tut. ‘It’s not play-acting for the Indians,’ she said. ‘For some people the cause of swaraj is a matter of life or death.’
The next day Adela scanned the newspaper for any mention of the meeting or the scuffles with the police, but there was none. She talked it over with Boz, who was cross that she had gone.
‘Lassie, I warned you to stay away. I hope no one saw you.’
‘They weren’t interested in me,’ she retorted. ‘Who do you think the man in the beret was?’
‘Some hothead by the sounds of it. There’s real trouble brewing in the Hill States– Dharmi in particular– and the government is trying to keep a lid on it.’
‘But surely it’s up to the hill chiefs whether they decide to hand over more power to the– what do you call them?– Praja Mandal.’
Boz sighed. ‘Aye, you’re right, and many of us are sympathetic to their aims, but we don’t want unrest spreading or things falling into the hands of extremists like the communists.’
They talked no more about it, but it preyed on Adela’s mind.
Up until now she had taken little interest in politics, preferring to read the magazines that Cousin Jane sent her from England rather than the piles of newspapers that Fluffy waded through each day.
She knew more about what was happening in Hollywood than New Delhi, let alone the Hill States that bordered Simla.
Yet she liked the tribal women she had met through Fatima’s clinics and felt ashamed that she had not been more curious about their lives beyond the daily humdrum.
She wondered what Sam’s opinion would be of those who came from outside the region agitating for change.
Did they make life difficult for him in his mission in the hills, or did he support them?
She had a vague memory that he had discussed such things at her birthday supper, but she had taken none of it in, except to steal glances at his handsome animated face.
Oh, Sam! Had he really come seeking her out just a few days before she returned from Assam, or had it just been a social call to Fluffy?
Adela could not stop thinking about him.
While far away in Belgooree having a busy social time with her family, she had suppressed her feelings.
She had even promised herself that this coming season she would look for a romantic friendship among the many young beaux in Simla society who would come up from the hot plains in search of love.
She would be eighteen in a few short months and was impatient for romance.
Captain Maitland’s robust kisses the previous summer had whetted her appetite for physical love, and Adela wanted to go further.
Thoughts of Sam made her discontented, and the incident at the Ganj spurred her on to seek out Fatima.
She would volunteer for the clinics again.
Better to be helping the hill women than rearranging camping equipment for the umpteenth time.
Besides, her parents had given her a small allowance so that she could stay on in Simla until June without relying on a job at the Forest Office.
At the hospital they told her that Fatima was ill and hadn’t been in for a couple of days.
Concerned, Adela went straight round to the doctor’s third-storey flat in Lakkar Bazaar, mounting the dark stairway and knocking on the door.
No one came. Adela’s alarm mounted. Perhaps she was too sick to come to the door.
Surely her housekeeper, Sitara, a low-caste Hindu widow who had come with the doctor from Lahore, would answer.
She knocked again harder and called out, ‘DrFatima, it’s me, Adela. Are you all right?’
To her relief she heard the soft tread of bare feet and the door being unlocked. It opened a fraction. Fatima peered out.
‘Are you okay? They told me at the hospital that you were unwell.’
Fatima hesitated. ‘I am fine thank you.’
‘Can I come in? I want to talk to you about helping out at the clinics again. I know you’ll start going up into the hills soon,’ gabbled Adela, ‘and I’d like to help. There’s too little to do in the office, and I’m driving Boz mad asking for jobs.’
Again Fatima hesitated, glancing over her shoulder and then back at Adela. ‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes—’
‘Come in quickly.’ Fatima opened the door just enough to pull Adela through it, close and lock it.
Fatima appeared nervous; Adela had never seen her like this before.
Adela respectfully took off her shoes, then wondered if she should stay.
The doctor forced a smile. ‘I’m sorry; I’m being a bad hostess.
Take a seat please. I’ll see if Sitara can make us tea. ’
While Fatima disappeared into the next room, Adela went and sat at the table in the bay window, with its plummeting view over Lakkar Bazaar.
The wooden houses and open-fronted shops seemed to defy gravity, pegged to the slope by occasional trees.
The day was dank and the buildings drab in the steel-grey light of the late January day.
The room was high-ceilinged and plainly furnished with the bare essentials: a table and two chairs; a large desk and reading lamp; a bookcase jammed with textbooks; an armchair; a locked medical chest; and cushions against the far wall, where Fatima preferred to sit when she didn’t have company.
The cushions were still rumpled. There was something amiss.
A cigarette, hastily stubbed out, was still half burning in a brass ashtray on the floor. Fatima didn’t smoke.