Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson Page B

mother later, she blamed me, or maybe she didn’t but it felt like it. She said that it was not a bad thing to marry an older man who would do things for you, and that Mr. Jolly was an attractive man anyway, so what about settling down with him? I said, “What about my exams, my matric? My life?”
    â€œOh, don’t be so serious,” she said. I didn’t speak to her for three days after that, I felt so empty and pointless: a paper cup tumbling down a stream towards a future entirely out of my hands.
    * * *
    Anto had been waiting for ten days to hear whether his fifty-thousand-word PhD thesis had been passed when a letter with an Exeter College monogram on the envelope arrived. Daisy, who’d once played hockey for the county, snatched the envelope from the postman, raced across the yard with it, and pinged it on his desk.
    He went so pale, she said, “Do you want me to open it?”
    â€œNo,” he said. He stared at it, his lips moving silently.
    â€œPrepare for the worst and expect the best,” Daisy said.
    He took the letter, touched the sandstone elephant, gave me a strange look, then closed his eyes. A few seconds later he said, “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Over his head, which was in his hands, Daisy and I exchanged a look. This was heartbreaking, horrible—all those hours and hours of burning the midnight oil.
    â€œAnto, I’m so sorry,” I said. “You worked so hard.”
    I wanted to stroke his hair, to find words of comfort that wouldn’t sound too maddening.
    He looked up at me out of his right eye, grinned, and said: “Doctor Doctor Anto Thekkeden, please, from now on. They liked my thesis.”
    â€œYou absolute fiend!” Daisy whacked his head with a roll of cardboard, and without thinking I hugged him, and if Daisy noticed the quick kiss Anto gave me, nothing was said.
    â€œNow, Anto,” Daisy said, when we had quieted down, “we must definitely have a party; if we dig around the cellar, there might even be some champagne. We could invite some people from the village over too, to make it more fun.”
    Anto was sitting at his desk again, staring ahead, in shock, I imagined, at the good news. His normal Indian way was to be very polite and to hate saying no to anything, but now he looked up and said, “What I’d most like is to go to the cinema in Oxford.”
    â€œThat sounds fun,” Daisy said. “We can have dinner afterwardsat the Cardamom. I’m going to suck up to him now,” she said to me with no attempt to quiet her tone. “He’ll be a great asset to the Moonstone when we get him home.”
    â€œMaybe.” He sounded guarded. I knew by now that Daisy’s “Notes for Indian Midwives” worried him. We’d had a careful conversation about it the week before.
    â€œShe knows that Indians aren’t exactly in love with the British at the moment,” I’d said.
    â€œWell and good then,” he’d said softly. “I know she is a kind lady and that her intentions are good, but my fear is she is stepping into a snake pit. So much has changed since she was there.”
    * * *
    The Ritz on George Street had once been a church but was now a warm, smoky, exciting dungeon with a flaking plaster angel on the roof and the cinema organist hidden behind a faded red velvet curtain.
    And later that night we followed the usherette’s torch towards the middle rows, and I sat down in the middle with Tudor on one side and Anto on the other. Flora, wearing a dress of stiff purple satin that crackled like fire, sat down on Tudor’s other side.
    The film, To Each His Own, wasabout a girl who falls for a handsome pilot, has his baby, and then spends the rest of her life in mourning for him. Watching it in the dark, with Anto beside me, I felt almost unbearably excited, as if this shabby little cinema was charged with life and some promise of excitement