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‘Yes, rather sweet, isn’t it. Always offering to make tea and take it to the servants. She’s not ours to worry about darling. I was married and had a family at her age.’ ‘Were you really darling. Who to?’ ‘Oh darling. Go to sleep. She’ll be fine.’ But Susan was not fine and all her problems began two days later in Calcutta, almost as soon as she descended from the train. ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Please don’t come any closer. Leave my luggage, stop touching it. Someone help, help me. Oh God...’ Mrs Lewis - her mother’s cousin - had not arranged to meet Susan or have her met at the large Howrah train station in the west of Calcutta. The British-built vaulted hall was filled with an un-English pandemonium - beggars and travellers, porters and beggars, coolies and colour, bodies and faces and none of them familiar. |
Susan had never seen such huge crowds, except possibly at Newbury races, but her father had been with her then. She had been surrounded as soon as she had got off the Assam Express and for a moment could hardly breathe. The porters were the worst, they came in their uniforms of red and white like a swarm of red and white ants, all over her luggage, her clothes, her blue and white dress. She had grubby handprints all over it as she had tried to defend her luggage. Finally two Loreto nuns who had come from Darjeeling on a parallel platform spotted that this situation was never going to resolve easily. They knew Bengali and their way around the system and within a minute had got a circle of space around Susan and were steering her away towards the gathering gloom of a polluted Calcutta sunset. ‘My address, my address... It’s all torn to shreds, what am I going to do...’ Susan could barely conceal the panic in her voice. ‘They ripped my address book.’ The nuns took charge and got her into a taxi and accompanied her, after much talk, to what they thought from some inquiries and Susan’s memory, was the right address. They arrived at a smart modern block of flats |