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they're looking for a husband.'
    'How could you marry anyone but me? You won't, will you? You promised '
    'But, David…’
    How could she make him understand, whispering here in stolen moments of the night? How could he ever grasp what it was like, not to be an Ingresi? What is was like when all that you want does not fall into your lap?
    ‘You promised, so that's settled. And I won't marry anyone else but you. You know, don’t you?'
    Savitri’s eyes were moist but David couldn’t see. And he couldn’t see when she nodded earnestly, just to humour him. But in her she knew, she felt, that life is not like a meal you cook adding the ingredients you want, one by one, and turning out delicious, because you have decided what goes in, and how much, and what stays out. True life is different; it is cruel and it is indifferent to your wants and even to your needs. Though she had not yet seen the full face of that cruelty, yet somehow she sensed it in every cell of her body; a sense passed down to her as was the colour of her eyes or the gentleness of her touch.
    David, not knowing all this, reached through the bars and gently pulled her face so close the bars crushed her cheeks. Then he leaned forward and planted a kiss on her startled lips, and said, 'There. Now we're engaged to be married, and I'm going to give you an engagement ring as soon as I can, and they're not going to stop us playing together. Never. I promise, Savitri. I'll work things out. I'm the young master and I can do whatever I want.'

CHAPTER FOUR
NAT
    A Village in Madras State, 1949
    N AT DREAMED of a woman with a high hysterical voice, standing outside on the verandah, calling his father's name, screaming and beating on the door till her screams pierced the layers of sleep and frayed out the dream and it was all real. He sat up on his sharpai, rubbing his eyes because his father had switched on the light, and in the stark glare of the single bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling he saw that his father was hastily wrapping his lungi around his hips.
    'I'm coming,' Doctor called out in Tamil to the woman outside. He reached up to the shelf for his medicine box, walked to the door, drew back the latch. Nat slipped down from his sharpai, wrapped his blanket around him and padded to the open doorway to watch through the mosquito screen. His father had switched on the verandah bulb. The woman held a bundle in her arms, under the pallu of her sari. It was a baby, Nat saw, because a little black foot peeped out through the folds of torn grubby cotton in which it was wrapped. His father was speaking in soothing words and trying to take the bundle from the woman, but she clasped it even closer to her body, not wanting to let go, and screaming at Doctor as if he was responsible for the child's condition which, Nat knew, was bad.
    It was probably dead. When they brought their children in the middle of the night it was usually too late.
    Outside the gate Nat could just make out the hulking shape of a bullock cart in the half-light, piled high with coconut-tree branches. The bullock stood with its head lowered, trying to sleep, whereas the driver had already stretched himself out on the cart and covered himself with a sheet, indifferent to the woman's plight. He'd sleep there till dawn, Nat knew, and then continue his journey to whichever village he was heading for, the bullock plodding along the dusty lanes, the driver crouching on the cart holding its tail between his toes and twisting it occasionally when the plodding got too slow.
    Doctor persuaded the woman to lay the child on the waist-high sharpai on the verandah and bent over, unwrapping the cloth and talking to the woman, who had quietened down considerably. He was asking her questions, speaking in that deep warm voice which never failed to work magic with the villagers. It was as if the healing process began with that warmth, which seeped through the cocoon of lethargy and hopelessness wrapped around them