lamp, dried Jack carefully with his towel, helped him put on his underpants, then held open the waistband of his trousers so he could put first one leg in and then the other.
There was a time when Jack had loathed being dressed like this. The first time it happened he had offended Dinesh by laughing nervously and snatching his clothes away. It was embarrassing, demeaning, like two grown men dressing dolly. Now he rather liked it. The way he explained this to himself was that he now understood so much better what each job meant to each person in this house. But if he was honest, Dinesh’s tender ministrations made him feel less lonely here, and, also, his deepest instincts told him that such cosseting would not last for much longer.
Everything was changing, everybody knew it. Nobody talked about it much, but it was always there, like the scuffling of rodents under the floorboards. On top of the house, while the masters were still having their bridge nights, their endless cocktail parties, the servants in the basement were burning the furniture.
Amish, one of the high-class Indians he played polo with, had recently returned from a year reading law at Cambridge University. “And do you know what I most loved about Trinity?” he’d teased Jack in his lazy Home Counties drawl. “Having one of your lot clean my shoes and leave them at my door.”
Only the week before that, Jack—he’d been in tennis flannels at the time strolling home from the club—had been spat at in the street. He’d stood there in absolute astonishment with another man’s phlegm on his shoulder, completely unsure as to whether to ignore him or strike back.
He ate supper on his own in the dining room. A nondescript room with mismatched chairs and an annoying light that was belching out paraffin fumes. That would have to be fixed now, too.
Dinesh brought him a simple kedgeree for supper. Normally, it was one of his favorite meals; tonight he pushed it around his plate, too nervous to eat much.
He drained a glass of beer, thinking about how contrary a man’s mind could be. Six months ago, when he’d first met Rose, he’d felt an emptiness at the center of this life, which in many ways he loved so much, a hunger for someone to talk to about something other than politics or polo or parties, the staple diet at the officers’ mess and the club. But now, a goblin in his head was whispering to him about the bliss of bachelorhood: not having to tell anybody when you’re coming home from the club, being able to work until midnight when the heat was on, as it had been recently with the riots in the Punjab. The thought that his colonel, who was against his men marrying young, might exclude him from active service was unbearable.
All of a sudden he stopped thinking, buried his head in his hands, and heaved a shuddering sigh. Why not be honest, at least to himself? It was Sunita who filled his thoughts tonight. Sunita, darling Sunita, who knew nothing about the changes ahead and had done nothing to deserve them.
“Master, tonga man will come in ten minutes. Do you wish pudding? There is junket, jelly even.”
“No, Dinesh, but thank you. The kedgeree was very good.” Dinesh took his plate. “I’m just not particularly hungry.”
Jack went out onto the veranda to smoke a cigarette. The night was hot and humid, unusually hot for this time of the year in Poona—eighty degrees by the glass thermometer tied to the veranda railings.
The fly screen closed with its usual squeak, the old pie dog that hung around their kitchen door waiting unsuccessfully for food slunk away into the violet shadows, and across the dirt, at the servants’ quarters, he could hear the sounds of laughter and a tabla being played.
Could she take the heat? Would the dog with its revolting hairless tail scare her? Would the dreary cocktail party he’d been forced to attend last night, hosted by his colonel, have bored her as much as it had bored him? This was the area in which he had started to lose his nerve. He simply didn’t know enough about her.
“Tonga is here, master.”
A skinny old horse and tonga waited by the kitchen door. Inside its creaking interior, he sat tensely, feeling like a criminal and wondering why even the prospect of marriage had made certain areas of his life—Sunita, his bar bills, Dinesh’s ministrations, even his habit