When I opened my eyes, I was alone in our bed underneath the mosquito netting suspended from its high canopy, with only an opened folder of research summaries next to me where Eric must have just been. I looked around and he was standing by the glass doors that lead to the balcony. Beyond its low stone balustrade lay the graveyard with the squat, ponderous tombs of Dutch spice traders and colonialists laid to rest 500 years ago. Across the room was a commanding view of the Sea of Arabia. Even after fifteen years in Cochin, I still shivered at the sound of it, foreign and exotic: The Sea of Arabia.
‘Eric, darling, come back.’
‘Yes, coming.’
But he stayed where he was, holding aside the filmy curtains, his face close to the panes. He inched back and began working loose the thick brass rod of the antique British latch system original to our 18th century villa. He pushed his shoulder against the door panel, infrequently opened and swollen with South India humidity, until it gave way. I felt the cloying damp slide into our room, dragging with it an eerie quiet. The raucous crows had gone to their evening perch and the low tide had stilled its rhythmic heave and slap against the sea wall. The overhead fan beat at the steamy, smoky mist outside my gauzy refuge. The acrid burning smell from the twilight trash fires, set at intervals between the wharf and the parade grounds, seemed fresh and strong. Perhaps the smell of smoke is what drew Eric outside.
Brushing aside my tulle cocoon, I reached for the kimono tossed on the bench at the foot of the bed and tied it around me as I padded to the door. ‘Darling?’ I whispered, adjusting my voice to the blanket of quiet.
Eric was at the railing, leaning out and craning to get a better look at something below. I started to cross the ten feet of balcony between us, hobbling as chips of crumbling tile ground into my feet. I reached his side and looked to where he pointed, into the shadowy graveyard toward the tallest tomb, a phallic tower rising ten feet above its squat, testicular base. In the light of a dim lantern I could make out a man wearing dhoties bent low beside a crude lean-to tethered to the high side of the wall. He was larger than the average Indian male but was turned away so we could not make out his features. A small fire with the smell of fish recently fried sent off plumes of smoke as if hastily doused.
‘Call the authorities,’ I hissed, but Eric signaled me to be silent.
Adjusting my eyes to the dark, I could make out a tidy campsite: a small stack of branches beside the fire pit, a pot up-ended over a low bush, a string bag of oranges secured to the side of an obelisk monument. From a line stretched between two low tombs, out of street view, a few rags and a shirt hung limply in the windless night.
‘He’s been there awhile,’ Eric whispered. ‘Odd but perfect place to hide.’
The cemetery dates back to the 18th century when commerce in peppercorns, cinnamon and cardamom had brought thousands of Dutch, Portuguese and British to India’s southwestern coast. Governors, traders, ship commanders, and ladies and gentlemen of every stripe, taken down by tropical diseases, lay in the grounds. Busloads of tourists had once tromped through, an intrusion Eric and I had tried to ignore, but the grounds had been locked for years. It was indeed a perfect place for a camper, but the idea flushed me with fear. Eric seemed calm and focused, as though observing a bacteria specimen in one of his labs.
We watched in silence as the man rose from his crouch and groped with his fingers along the lichen-encrusted gravestone until he came upon a small pink item. He picked it up and I heard a flick and saw the burst of a bluish-orange flame. Within minutes a different fragrance wafted upward, a smell familiar as one that had drifted under our son’s bedroom door when he was home from school on holiday, usually about this time of night. At such times Eric would ruffle whatever journal he was reading, signaling a slight disturbance devoid of any resolve to investigate. In collusion with both Eric and our son, I would pretend not to notice.
Eric took my hand and led me toward back to our room. I’d been trembling with anxiety but relaxed, assuming he would contact the CSI. He told me to stay inside, then he pivoted and returned to the balcony where he picked up three clay flowerpots holding leggy white petunias and hurled them over the wall. The first two smashed, likely hitting tombs, and the third landed with a dull thud, probably on grass.
‘You be gone by morning,’ he shouted, ‘or I’ll have the CSI clear you out.’
Authority did not come easily to Eric, despite his senior rank at the global pharmaceutical company he’d been sent to India to manage. The darkness seemed to muffle his bark. I was glad he’d punctuated his threat with the smashed pottery.
‘Shit. Asshole.’ The voice was hardly more than a mutter, but something familiar in it compelled me to the door.
‘Darling. Did you?’ I stammered, pushing against Eric, who’d dashed to the door to hold me inside. ‘Eric. Warren.’
‘Madeleine, wait.’
I ran through our room and down the long hall toward the staircase, the crown jewel of our home, its bannister a dramatic sweep of hand carved mahogany. Our agent had enthused about all the royals and rajahs that had grandly descended these steps at glittering parties during British Raj. Prince Albert had stayed here during his tour of the sub-continent, she’d claimed, and had gifted the home with the prismic chandelier that dropped like a pendant in the middle of the railing’s graceful curve. But it was the balconies with their views of the sea that had captured us, so we purchased the home and returned to London and Bonn during completion of repairs from its years of being boarded up. By the time we returned, two years later, I was fragile and nervous after a suffering two miscarriages, and pregnant with Warren. I felt safe within the solid old structure’s thick, ten-foot high walls and its generous set-back from the street and the sea.
‘Madeleine, stay.’ He came up behind me as I hesitated on the stairway, speaking in the tone he used when he wanted to restore calm and quash exasperation, a tone he’d perfected with me, balancing cajoling and command. ‘Call the school. I’ll go after him.’
As rapidly as I had surged into action, intending to storm the cemetery, I deflated, sinking to the cool travertine step and looking up at the chandelier. ‘Yes, I suppose you are right. I should stay here. Do you think?’
Passivity and confusion are a symptom of the depression I’d fallen into after Warren’s birth. Sometimes, when I am having a difficult day, Eric holds me and tells me that his labs are testing all sorts of rare plants and herbs from the Kerala backwaters, developing treatments for people like me.
‘I’ll handle this, Madeleine. You ring Devi for a cup of tea.’
He returned to our room to change out of his pajamas. A moment later, as he headed toward the back stairway that led to the kitchen, I noticed the handgun secured to his shoulder in its holster. He pulled a jacket over it, jabbed his wallet into an inside pocket, and was gone.
I crossed the hall to the somber Travancore suite, which had once housed emissaries negotiating the status of South India’s princely states within the Raj. We rarely used those rooms, and the drapes of their front-facing windows smelled musty as I pulled the cords to draw them aside. At the entry gates our watchman Ravi sat on his haunches, both passive and alert, as he had every day and night since we’d moved in. Catching sight of Eric hurrying from the back door toward the front gate, he jumped up and bowed.
‘Ravi, good evening,’ Eric’s clipped, nasal tenor cut into the quiet night. ‘Be a chap and come with me. I may need a hand. Come along.’
Ravi opened the gates. The ancient hinges squealed and groaned as they moved, then clanged shut after Eric and Ravi exited and disappeared.
It was close to midnight in India, but still an acceptable hour to call Switzerland. I returned to our room and phoned Goetting Hall, Warren’s dormitory in Lausanne. ‘Hello? Hello, Mr. Berndorf? Madeleine Teal here. Warren Teal’s mum. I wonder, might I have a word with Warren?’
‘Good evening, Madame Teal. Yes, Berndorf here. Master Teal is still on holiday. Should we be expecting his early return, Madame?’
I willed my voice to project calm. ‘Mr. Berndorf, put me through to the Headmaster, please. Urgently.’
‘Yes, Madame. I will go round with your message. Surely he will ring you shortly.’
I replaced the phone in its cradle and then seized up in a cramp. Warren on a holiday? In the middle of the term? He must have been kidnapped! In panic, I pulled the cords that summon the servants. Through the open balcony door of our bedroom I could hear men’s voices, Eric’s the most pronounced: ‘Hello! On guard! Come out at once. You are trespassing on private property.’ I worried that Eric might be hurt, so boldly confronting a stranger, but I remembered that he had the gun. And then I panicked: ‘My God, what if he … what if they?’
Devi knocked on the door. ‘Madame?’
Devi had been in our service since we arrived in Cochin. She had been at the gate when we returned from hospital with our infant Warren and had taken his swaddled form into her arms like an Indian amah. Devi was childless and her husband worked overseas, so she and my son found refuge in each other during the years I had spent shuttered in my room. He loved the bright kitchen with its baskets of fruits, spices, coconuts, and fish from the mongers who rode by on their bicycles balancing plastic bins dripping with the daily catch. He loved to pound the mortar into the pestle of cumin and ginger, then tossing the pungent pastes to sizzle in hot oils. Often, when I rang for a tea tray, Warren helped cut a flower for the vase or arranged the cakes on the plate, and skipped alongside Devi when she brought it to my bedside.
I looked at Devi, forgetting why I rang for her. I could see that she been sleeping. She looked at me with concern.
‘Are you having trouble sleeping, Madame? May I…’
The situation flooded back to me. ‘There’s a disturbance in the cemetery, Devi. Ravi has gone with Eric to roust an intruder who has set up camp there. There is nothing you can do. Except yes, perhaps some herb tea, for the nerves.’ As she turned toward the door I clutched at her with my words. ‘Devi, Warren is missing. I called his house at school. They say he is on holiday. I must get to my husband with this news.’
‘I will convey the news to Sir Eric. You must not go out into the night.’
I hesitated, attracted to the possibility of remaining apart from what was unfolding, trusting Devi to complete the action I had initiated. This was the pattern between us, as my resolve usually dissipates into uncertainty. Passivity is the curse of my condition. ‘Yes, please. Tell my husband that Warren is missing from school.’
The bedside phone jangled and I lurched to answer it. ‘Hello? Hello? Madeleine Teal here.’
‘Madame Teal, this is Mr. Bostritch, Headmaster.’ His voice conveyed no urgency. ‘As Mr. Berndorf has advised you, Master Teal has been on holiday, as authorised in your husband’s signed letter of permission, Madame Teal. Master Teal has been gone for seven days, due to return day after tomorrow. Are you unaware of these arrangements, Madame Teal?’
I flushed with shame that Mr. Bostritch seemed, obliquely and politely in the way of such administrators, to question my competence. Of course we have never discussed my condition with him or the school; it would have been unseemly. Perhaps Warren had . . . but no, that would have been a personal betrayal.
‘Madame Teal, are you there? Hello?’
‘Yes, Mr. Bostritch, I am here. It is your duty to keep me advised of Warren’s whereabouts.’
‘As your husband authorised, Master Teal was to travel with his room mate Reza Mahmood to Dubai to observe the Ramadan holiday rituals. Master Warren planned to write a paper on the Ramadan. He mentioned that Master Reza’s father developed some of the buildings that your housekeeper’s husband helped to build. He hoped to visit him and do a photo essay of the life of a migrant worker in Dubai.’
‘No doubt my husband is aware of these details, Mr. Bostritch,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster. ‘Have you been in contact with the Mahmood family?’
‘Only after your call this evening, Madame Teal. Most unusual. The Mahmood family did not host Master Warren in Dubai, after all. I recommend, Madame Teal, that we engage a private investigator to ascertain Master Warren’s whereabouts, if he does not return on the date scheduled. Of course the school wishes to avoid the publicity of turning it to the police. Insofar as Master Warren filed the appropriate – and signed by your husband, bear in mind – paperwork, The School is puzzled but not culpable.’
‘Mr. Bostritch, you have mentioned several times a signed authorisation. We have never received nor signed an authorisation for Warren to take a holiday.’
‘Madame Teal, you may want to consider carefully whether it is wise to claim the holiday authorisation was forged. I recommend that we focus on finding Master Warren, who is, indeed, on holiday, insofar as he is not here.’
‘May I have contact information for the young man in Dubai? There is obviously collusion between him and my son. My husband will make inquiries.’
‘Even in these unusual circumstances, Madame Teal, I am not at liberty to provide contact information for another student, although I will certainly act as liaison between you and the Mahmood family.’
‘Mr. Bostritch, my husband and attorney will call you to discuss next steps. Good evening.’
I hung up the phone, angry and distressed. In the meantime, Devi had scurried to the cemetery and returned to report, ‘Ravi is guarding the gates, and Sir Eric is inside questioning the intruder.’
‘Devi.’ I leaned against the thick English oak bedpost with its mosquito netting wrapped in powder-blue grosgrain ribbons. ‘Why does Ravi guard a gate that is already locked? Why is he not inside with my husband, in case there is danger?’
‘Madame, there does not seem to be danger.‘
I continued, thinking out loud, lapsing from the formality appropriate between mistress and servant, as often happened when we were alone together. The ceiling fans whirred and shushed the thick atmosphere, randomly lifting a limpid curtain or fluttering a paper from my nearby desk.
‘Devi, the headmaster said a letter was delivered here, from the Lausanne school. Certainly you or Ravi would have made sure this letter was brought to me.’
An ominous clarity washed over me, even as I wondered if my suspicion might be the paranoia that my psychiatrist labeled anxiety: Eric and Ravi, even Devi, were colluding to keep information from me about Warren, whose voice I was certain I had heard in the cemetery. Immediately after, Eric had said to call the school, so he had also recognised the voice. The bits and pieces thrown into the atmosphere were coalescing into a shape that indeed seemed a figment of imagination. Still, I had to ask.
‘Devi, your husband Ajeeth – all these years he’s been on those work teams, in Dubai. Isn’t he coming home soon?’
I’d been too self-absorbed to think very much about South India’s poverty and the lack of opportunity that drove legions of Kerala men to join construction teams in Dubai, often for years on end in a kind of indentured servitude. Employment with us covered shelter and basic needs for Devi and her brother Ravi. Her husband’s salary from Dubai was earmarked solely for the upkeep of his ailing parents.
‘Warren,’ I continued, agitated with intuition. ‘Did he know about Ajeeth’s work in Dubai?’
‘Yes, Madame. They talked in the kitchen when my Ajeeth came home. You remember, Madame? You came to fetch Master Warren to go to the Cochin Club? For luncheon and croquet? While they were talking? And Warren did not want to leave?’
I did not remember. My medications often fogged my recollection, despite Dr. Lazar’s denial that they were opiates. ‘What did they talk about, Devi?’ ‘Strange, Madam, the man who builds in Dubai, the large hotels in the water, his son goes to school in Switzerland. Same school as Warren. Same man my Ajeeth works for.’
‘When is Ajeeth coming back again, Devi? Come, tell me along the way. We must see what is keeping Eric.’
‘Ajeeth will be in Mattancherry tomorrow, Madame, to visit our mother for many days. Then coming here to Kochi.’
She spoke at my back as we descended the stairs toward the front entry, pushed on the heavy doors, and stepped outside under the porte cochere. Broad sheets of lawn rolled up to the high white walls around our enclave. The peppery nip of lemongrass and the sweet perfume of tuberoses, layered on the earthy smell of compost and chips recently spread over the cutting beds, rose from the earth. Ravi had resumed his post as sentry and assumed his usual impassive mask.
‘Ravi, where is Sir Eric?’ I spoke in panic.
‘Madame, Sir Eric has left the cemetery with the intruder,’ he replied in his melodic, Malayalam-accented voice. ‘By taxi.’
‘Where did they go? Ravi, tell me what happened in the cemetery. Who was there? Where did my husband take him?’
‘I did not see the young man from close by, Madam. Sir Eric asked for a taxi and took him away. He said he would call you with news and that you were not to worry, Madame.‘
‘You summoned the taxi, Ravi, so you had to barter for the fare. What was the destination?’ I looked at him with as much severity as I could muster, and he twitched with discomfort. ‘The truth, Ravi.’
‘The airport, Madam. To fly to Bangalore at 2:20. He is taking Master Warren to Lausanne.’
‘Thank you, Ravi. I am going to my room now.’
The tranquilising fragrance of the garden quelled my fear and I felt relief spinning a numbing web around my questions and conjecture. Warren was safe, Eric was putting everything right, and soon everyone would be reinstalled in their assigned stations, like actors who find their place marked with a chalked X on the stage floor. Eric would explain everything, telling me just what I needed to know to still my questions, but not enough to jostle my psyche. I only needed to get back upstairs to where this evening began, behind the draped gauze that enclosed my nest. Devi would bring the tea tray with the miniature crystal dish containing two green pills which I would take to help me rest.
Half an hour later, propped against the pillows, I balanced the tray, perplexed that Devi had brought me an assortment of medications. The array confused me. I made a small pile of blue, red and white pills and moved them around into patterns, like a puzzle to be solved. I was lost in thought when an unearthly howl rose from the direction of the kitchen.
‘Aiiiyh! Aaaiiiyh!’
I flew down the back stairs toward the sound coming from Devi’s small apartment behind the old scullery that we had converted to a greenhouse. The receiver from the kitchen wall phone was dangling from its coiled cord, emitting a droning dial tone. I rushed toward Devi.
‘What? What is it? Devi, what?’
‘Ajeeth. Ajeeth,’ she moaned. Her small body in its cinnamon-coloured sari heaved with sobs. ‘They have him, how could he? Gone, gone. Years, years.’
She began to sag and I caught her. I cradled her and began shuffling her toward her bed, which she fell upon with her face downward. Ravi entered the room with a jug of water and compresses for her head. I looked at him for answers, without uttering a question.
‘Her Ajeeth they have been arresting him at the customs station in Mumbai, Madame.’ He had been caught with two kilos of heroin in his valise.’
‘Ajeeth? He is pure and strict. What is this about?’
I doubted the truth of what he was telling me. Along with Warren’s unauthorised absence from school and unaccountable campsite in the cemetery, and Eric’s evasive behavior in spiriting our son away without bringing him into our home for a cup of tea and an explanation, my head was spinning. Devi let out a keening moan and I gestured to Ravi that we should go into the kitchen.
‘The construction boss gave it to him, Madame. Told him it was the ashes of a Dutch minister tending the Christians in the camps. Said to put in the Dutch cemetery under a bronze plate. Kochi Christians would see to a service.’
These were more words than I had ever heard Ravi utter at once and he seemed breathless with the effort, agitated and wide-eyed.
‘He was set up, Ravi, and we will get a solicitor to sort it out. Of course he did not open the parcel if he thought they were ashes. We must verify that there is a place in the cemetery to corroborate his story.’
Ravi raised his eyes to mine and a shiver of understanding passed between us.
‘Sir Eric removed all personal items from the campsite in the cemetery, Ravi? Anything left that might provide a clue or a fingerprint to identify who was hiding there?’
‘Yes, Madame, he passed several satchels over the gate to me. Even the broken flower pots we collected with the dirt. Everything tidy, Madame. Only the fire pit and the disturbed grasses, Madame, remain.‘
‘Please stay with Devi. Discuss nothing about what has happened here tonight with anyone. We will arrange Ajeeth’s release and defense. It will all be as though nothing has happened.’
I felt robotic but effective, and was glad the green pill had not yet dulled my functioning. The kitchen phone jingled like a bicycle bell and I reached for it with dread.
‘Hello. Hello, Madeleine Teal here.’
‘Yes, Mrs. Teal. Mr. Bostritch here. No reason to be alarmed. Mr. Teal has confirmed he will accompany Warren on his return tomorrow, a day earlier than planned.’
*
Nina Macheel is an emerging writer. Her short story ‘Minjekawan Mittens’ is included in the Spring 2019 Midwest Literary Review. She posts short personal essays biweekly on her blog PomegranateRed. She is nearing completion of a book-length memoir/personal essay about the ways her family’s South Pacific Island cultural experience and identity evolved after intermarriage with Chinese migrant labourers in the mid-19th Century.