Teatime for the Firefly by Shona Patel

Author:Shona Patel
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Soon enough, my moon-head phase waned, thank God. I hooked on my brassiere once again, tied my hair back into my old ponytail and decided to take a good hard look around me.

Manik lived what I can only describe as a grandiose but ramshackle life. The household ran like a big creaky factory with lots of faulty parts. Besides the majordomos Halua, Kalua and Potloo, I counted thirteen servants in all. There was the paniwalla, or kitchen boy; not one but three malis to take care of the garden; a bent old lady who came to sweep the portico and cut the grass—by hand, using a curved scythe; a one-eyed janitor; a cowherd, which made no sense because we had no cows; a bandookwalla, whose job was to clean the guns and sometimes accompany Manik on shikar; a boiler boy, whose job was to attend to the coal-fed boiler room and make the hot water for our baths; and a young round-faced ayah, newly hired, who was supposed to be my personal attendant.

“What do I need an ayah for?” I asked Manik.

He shrugged. “All memsahibs have an ayah, so I got you one. She can help you put on your sari, comb your hair, massage your feet, tweak your toes—whatever you want.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“Then sack her,” he said.

“No, you sack her, since you got her in the first place.”

“How can I sack her, if you are her boss?”

I sighed at Manik’s facetiousness. It was impossible to talk sense to him sometimes.

On Wednesdays, the dhobi boy arrived with the clean laundry and took the dirty clothes to be washed. He was a rabbit-faced lad with big scared eyes and such an awful stutter that he could not speak a single sentence without collapsing into a babbling wreck. Halua’s yelling and the occasional box in the ear did not help as he tallied up the items in a moth-eaten notebook. Our clothes arrived after being bashed on river rocks, boiled in rice starch and baked in the sun. The folds of my saris crackled and popped open like crispy wafers, and in just two washes the bright summer colors faded to a bleak, wintry sadness.

Manik was shockingly lackadaisical about his dress. For morning kamjari, he rushed off wearing the first shirt and Bombay bloomers off the top of the pile in his wardrobe. As a result the top six items on his shelf got worn over and over again—they were old and shabby, while the bottom ones remained spanking new. It did not cross his mind to flip the pile over. Some days Manik even rushed off with mismatched socks. Thankfully, slipshod dressing raised no eyebrows on a plantation. An assistant could report for kamjari mismatched, sockless or even footless as far as Mr. McIntyre was concerned, but if the job he was assigned to was not up to snuff, forget the feet, because the assistant’s head was more likely to roll.

Manik had other appalling habits, as well.

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