The book was harder to write than she thought it would be. Although Daisy had several times tried to warn her against such lazy thinking, somewhere at the back of her mind she had always imagined that living at the Tamarind must, for many of these children, be an amazing treat, a glimpse into a style of life most of them had only dreamed of. Now she saw that this view was both sentimental and arrogant. Some, it was true, were grateful for the food and the bed; others felt uneasy at this living between two worlds. They missed the rich, broiling, rough-and-tumble life of the slums; they worried that other people in the streets outside might think they had become “rice Christians” and were selling their souls for a hot meal; a couple of the boys told her flatly and defiantly that they may be here for the time being but they were first and foremost Gandhiji’s boys.
But whatever they said, she was determined to record it faithfully and bit by bit, day by day, the sheets were piling up on her desk. Daisy had already shown some of the stories to a friend of hers at Macmillan, the publishers, who’d said if she could produce more chapters of this quality, they might be interested.
She was now so concentrated on this work, so determined to do it and do it well, that when she opened the Pioneer Mail and saw the announcement that Captain Jack Chandler’s wife, Rose, had had a baby boy, Frederick, she’d felt surprised and shocked at herself for feeling…well, what was it? When she tried to chase down the feeling, she wasn’t sure. To say she was jealous was putting it too crudely, but certainly powerful and dismaying emotions had been stirred. By nipping the Frank business in the bud and concentrating on her book she had hoped to find a cleaner, harder version of herself, and in some ways this had worked. Long hours of concentration had brought a kind of quiet joy, a feeling of being emptied and made full by her own efforts. But sometimes, particularly when she was on the margins of sleep where everything is allowed, she felt his arms around her again, the terrible intimacy of his kisses, all the things that had shaken her to the core and made her feel so frightened.
She immediately wrote a note to congratulate Rose, and sent a pretty shawl, made by one of the girls at the school. She went back to work, for there was still an enormous amount to be done on the book before she felt confident to show it to the publishers. September passed in this way and then October, and then what passed for winter in Bombay, bringing clear, warm, sunny days and sudden sunsets, and the occasional nights when the wind swept down from the Himalayas and across the Deccan Plains and you put an extra blanket on the bed.
At the beginning of November, all the children started to get excited because the full moon would soon be in Kartika, and that meant their biggest festival of all had come: the Festival of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. Held on the darkest night of the year, it marked the arrival of winter, the return of the Hindu divinities, Sita and Ram, a time for celebrating light over the forces of darkness.
For weeks now, lessons had been interrupted by local tradesmen calling in to ask for donations to help build pandals, the huge floats that would soon be transporting gods down the streets of Byculla. The dormitory above Viva’s head had vibrated with the feet of children scrubbing their rooms from top to bottom, whitewashing walls, and then making their own statue of Durga—a towering edifice of tinsel, paper, and lights—that Viva had been called upstairs several times to admire and advise on.
Fireworks, set off early, stopped them sleeping, and outside the school gates, on the corner of Jasmine and Main Street, sweet vendors were sitting selling traditional milk-based Diwali sweets like barfis and laddus, and making delicious fresh jelabis on their charcoal stoves.
On Tuesday, November 3, the night before the festival was to open, Vijay as Lord Ram had rushed around, cardboard sword in hand; Chinna, an orphan girl from Bandra, had played Sita.
While they were all clapping, Daisy had put her head around the door and asked Viva, Mrs. Bowden, and Vaibhavi, an Indian social worker, to come to her room.