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Master and Servant by Anne Eldridge © Anne Eldridge
How different it was now, in England sixty years later. The Indians - and there were many of them - were mixed in with the Whites, part of the general population, not a people apart, and except for their colour and sometimes funny accents, familiar to her from her girlhood, they seemed as British as anyone. Of course, many of her race were prejudiced against them, but she rather liked them. They reminded her of home. Yet not at all of home, for these people were individuals. When she thought of India she remembered dusty dirt roads under a blinding white sun or the vast cloudbanks of the monsoons, and, in the cities, a mass of anonymous, featureless brown faces, impassive except for the handful of politicals who stared resentfully, more numerous after the war broke out, and the young men who used to throng around the memsahib smiling eagerly, hoping to be hired for some errand. She knew personally only a few educated Indians who worked for the Raj, the family servants, and those of her friends’ families. The others she would not have recognized if she saw them a second time. She recalled only one face she had seen just once; she even remembered the name that went with it: Chandak. A handsome, smiling, self-assured face, that made her ill at ease, although the man himself was very polite and friendly. Perhaps he stood out in her mind because she met him at her first grown-up dinner party. She had not yet turned fifteen. Her father had to spend two weeks in Cal on business, and since school had broken up she and her mother went along. A Mr Ainsworth, whose face, curiously, she did not remember, invited her parents to dinner, and when he learned she was also in town and her father would rather not leave her alone in the hotel, he’d said, “By all means, bring your daughter too.” “Who is this Mr Ainsworth?” her mother had asked. “A colleague of one of my associates. I barely know him. Mullens says he’s a queer bird, altogether too chummy with that Indian secretary of his, and not really his secretary. More of a servant he seems to have taken under his wing. But I’m told his table is excellent.” The fare was indeed excellent, and the Indian secretary-servant dined with Mr Ainsworth and his eighteen guests, the only person whom everyone addressed by his first name and the only brown face at the table - darker than the faces of those who waited on them. She had been seated next to him, across from her parents, and he struck up a conversation with her on the assumption she would not find what the adults were talking about entertaining, which indeed she did not, or perhaps because the other guests largely ignored him. She had the impression they they did so less out of snobbery than an inability to decide what his status was, for which reason they felt uncomfortable having to speak to him at all. Before they had moved into the dining room, it was he who poured the sherry - an ambiguous act, in that pouring sherry might be either the host’s job or that of a servant, and Chandak was neither; so in a sense he was both. Over dinner he called her ‘Miss’ and seemed to focus all his attention on her, but his gaze seldom left their host, who in turn would glance back at him from the head of the table, as though there were some secret understanding between them and they were engaged in silent communication. She found it quite unnerving. They took coffee and dessert in the sitting room. Chandak sat close to Mr Ainsworth, their knees almost touching. She thought he spoke too loudly and laughed more than was necessary, though not from nervousness. That was how she pictured him when she recalled the party. Because she was so young, her parents did not want her staying out late, and they were the first to leave. “A pity we couldn’t stay longer,” her mother said in the car. “How long do you think it will go on, Reggie?” “Till after midnight, I imagine.” “And will Mr Chandak stay the whole time?” “Just ‘Chandak’, dear; it isn’t a family name. And I suspect he’ll be the last to leave.” “To help the servants put things back in order?” “Hardly. What did you think of him, Jennifer? He was very attentive to you at dinner.” “To be honest, I didn’t think of him at all. I suppose I thought he was a bit odd.” “Odd? In what way?” her mother asked. “I can’t put it into words, Mummy.” “Well, what did you talk about?” “Nothing, really. He asked me questions. Where we lived, what I thought of Cal, how long I’d been in India... I told him I was born here, and he asked how often we went back to England. I told him, ‘Never’, and he said that I was as much an Indian as he.” Her mother was indignant. “Imagine! Telling an English girl she’s Indian!” Her father, more liberal than her mother when it came to social niceties, said, “He was just teasing, dear.” “Exactly. The man doesn’t know his place, Reggie, and he takes too many liberties.” “From what I understand, he knows his place quite well, and what he takes is not what we usually call ‘liberties’.” “You don’t mean...” “I’m only repeating what I heard. Personally, I don’t believe a word of it.” “Then you oughtn’t to repeat it,” her mother said coldly. That was her other clear memory of that evening - how annoyed she was that, in the middle of a discussion she had been part of, her parents had suddenly excluded her and started talking of things she didn’t know about, or of things she did, but in such a way that she wouldn’t understand them.
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