The women were settled in the veranda and busy with their needles so Pallu felt her way to the side and flung her bare feet over. Normally she cringed away from dirt, but with her eyes blindfolded it was somehow easier to let her toes sink into the mud.
But Ammi must have noticed her errant daughter squelching through mud churned up by the night’s rain as though it was as clean as the tiled veranda that encircled the two rooms of the house.
‘Pallu, Pallu!’ Ammi cried out, and Pallu stopped and turned.
‘Come back to the veranda and sit in one place,’ Ammi said. ‘We are falling behind in our work without you, and none of us can be spared to keep you from stepping on a rusty nail.’
It was true, Pallu was one of the best needleworkers in the family. But the small, nimble fingers of a fourteen year old were useless without sharp eyes, and Pallu had strained hers badly. Trying to focus on white thread against off-white silk gave her such a headache that Ammi had feared blood rushing into the brain as had killed her own mother. The hakim, when consulted, had reassured her, telling her it was just eye strain. He had given Pallu a powder of beaten seeds and roots and told her to drink it twice a day, mixed into water that had had a prayer blown over it. He had also advised her to take regular exercise, apply kohl from Arabia, and wear a blindfold made of the same off-white silk, embroidered with the prayer in white thread.
How long she would need to follow this regimen was unclear, but already for three days Pallu had lived in a world of smells and sounds and sensations against her skin. The passing of days were marked by meals and the cycles of work of those around her and, always, the reliable shifts in air currents as the airships passed overhead.
As she filled a round pot to pour water over her feet before climbing back onto the raised veranda, Pallu heard her mother mutter to someone else – ‘I can’t manage our work like this. I will write to Jodiawal today.’
*
Ammi must have written to Jodiawal, the village from which her own parents had emigrated forty years ago, for two days later a country cousin arrived in Lawari.
Pallu’s family was poor by the town’s standards, merely one more contributor of the long strips of silk that were an unknown but essential part in the airships that floated overhead. Most of the oiled silk bags that held them aloft were stitched in factories in Bartanya, but there were some components that were so sensitive (as Pallu understood it) that only Lawari’s women and children, who had once created fine embroidery for Hindustan’s emperors, could produce the tiny, accurate stitches required. It took three women working together for a day to produce a single length, for which the overseer, Motilal sahib, paid them fifteen annas but told his Angrez boss cost a full rupee. It was an agreeable arrangement, though it left no time for embroidery, which only the old women, those with shaking hands and clouded eyes, cared about.
They were wealthy compared to their country cousins in Jodiawal, which was located in the forest tracts to the south. Jodiawal was in a silk-producing region that had been badly struck by kata a few years ago. This had devastated the area’s farms; many starved and others fled so villages were depopulated. Ammi had sent three-quarters of their savings to the village but insisted that a portion be set aside for buying silkworm eggs when cultivation could be restarted. As a result, the Jodiawal cousins had weathered the plague and famine better than most, but though they had started producing silk for the Bartanya factories once again, they remained desperately poor.
The visitor’s name was Lakhi and she was the same age as Pallu. It was not clear to Pallu how they could be related, though Lakhi was willing and able to recite the genealogies which proved the connection. Pallu rolled her eyes behind her blindfold and said, ‘In the city we have better things to talk about than who is related to whom. Come, I’ll show you the infirmary.’
Lakhi, whose voice was as squishy and countrified as her rough-skinned hands, hung back. ‘In Jodiawal we aren’t allowed to go where there are sick people,’ she said, sounding scared.
The infirmary at the end of the street was new and all visitors to the city were given a tour. It had a doctor trained in Angrezi medicine. The neighbourhood was proud of him, though they still supplemented his prescriptions with the hakim’s medicines which were, after all, tried and tested on their bodies over generations. The hakim himself had been very welcoming to the new doctor, telling him, ‘you care for the parts, and I care for the whole person.’ Indeed, the two had got along well and often worked together in the infirmary, though were careful to keep their collaboration secret from the district health officer.
‘The Lawari infirmary is not like the ones you find in the countryside,’ Pallu said. ‘People go there to heal, not to die.’
They started walking down the street, hand in hand, to keep Pallu from stumbling in an area she knew less intimately than the courtyard of her home. Suddenly, Lakhi halted.
‘What is it now, don’t you want to visit our infirmary?’ Pallu said, annoyed.
‘No, it’s – I’ve never seen an airship before,’ Lakhi said, still standing still. Indeed, there was that almost imperceptible change in the nature of the air that signalled the passage of an airship. Pallu thought Lakhi must be staring overhead into the bright sky, and forgave her.
‘We are under the main route between Amarwal and Jawadabad,’ she said. ‘They pass overhead a dozen times a day. You will get used to them.’
‘I don’t think I can ever get used to them,’ Lakhi said.
The airships had been passing overhead since before Pallu’s birth, so she was at first surprised by Lakhi’s wonder. Then, thinking what it must be to see one for the first time, she admitted to herself that they were indeed wondrous things. The great bags of oiled silk, painted with the insignia of their Angrez owners; the long, narrow gondolas suspended beneath, with copper and brass fittings gleaming in the sunlight, and above all, the magic of being high above the earth, gliding like a jinn from city to city and continent to continent. And somewhere in that assemblage of wood and silk and brass were the lengths of silk she stitched. She wondered what they were used for. ‘That’s true, they are beautiful,’ Pallu said. ‘Like magic.’
‘That reminds me, I got you something from Jodiawal,’ Lakhi said. ‘I thought I’d wait till you could see before giving it to you, but you can at least feel it with your fingers. It’s magical too, maybe you will know what it is here in town.’
She pressed a cool metal object into Pallu’s hands. Pallu felt it carefully. It was about the size of her palm, a thin flat engraved disc – no, more than one disc overlaid on each other, one solid and incised with patterns, perhaps writing, and the next filigreed with whorls and concentric circles.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘I wish I could see it… It feels like it must be beautiful.’
‘It is beautiful,’ Lakhi said. Pallu could hear the pleased smile in her voice. ‘We don’t know what it is, something our great-great-grandfather made long ago. I found it when we burned the silkworm sheds to get rid of the kata. It used to be a big workshop, long ago, and people used to come from all across Hindustan, maybe even from Delhi, to buy his magic. He was your great-great-grandfather too…’
She trailed off into genealogy so Pallu stopped listening, concentrating instead on feeling the details of the disc. Hakim sahib, who was her friend, had once listed the various types of magic: there was the magic that came from God, the magic that came from the jinn, the magic of the earth and its creatures, and the magic of evildoers who blow on knots. The final magic, he said, had nothing to do with the supernatural but, like alchemy, required advanced knowledge, years of study, specialised materials and a seed of gold. She knew he meant the magic of the airships from Bartanya and thought maybe this disc was similar even though it was from Jodiawal.
When Lakhi finally wound down, Pallu thanked her again and put the disc in the pouch tied around her waist. ‘It’s nothing,’ Lakhi said, suddenly sounding shy. ‘We didn’t have much in the village that was not given by your mother, so I thought this would be interesting for you.’
They walked on towards the infirmary, now feeling like they had been friends forever.
*
Lakhi was awed by the infirmary and proved surprisingly knowledgeable about disease. Pallu supposed that the kata plague, and the famine that had followed, had given her some experience of pestilence. The doctor, a young Bengali whom all the girls of the neighbourhood agreed was handsome, seemed very interested in Jodiawal and showed Lakhi around personally.
They returned home in the early evening, and Lakhi immediately got to work in the kitchen, boiling daal, chopping onions and kneading flour. They all ate in the courtyard in the evening as night fell, Lakhi producing thick country-style roti with inhuman speed. After dinner, Motilal sahib arrived for his weekly collection. Ammi was amongst the few whose quality he trusted enough to not inspect on the spot, so their house was always the last on his weekly rounds. There were thirty lengths for him to collect, a fall from the numbers when Pallu was well enough to work, and he tweaked her ear familiarly, telling her to heal quickly. Nonetheless, after the money was divided amongst all the women, Ammi decided that she would give them all a treat. One of the boys was sent down to the market and returned with a basket of kulfi. The air was cool and the mood celebratory, and it was only because of her heightened hearing that Pallu could tell that Lakhi crying softly next to her as she ate the ice cream studded with pistachios and laced with khoya. It was something, the country cousin later told her, that she had not believed existed, even in the wealthy, magic-filled world outside Jodiawal, where those who fell ill were expected to live, and airships floated overhead like jinn.
*
Ammi must have regretted the kulfi the next morning for she woke in a bad temper. Pallu, recognising this mood, nudged at Lakhi and two crept around quietly to do the morning chores. Pallu sat in a corner, rolling parathas by feel for breakfast and Lakhi swept and mopped the veranda while Ammi was bathing. The gleaming tiles and the fresh parathas must have improved her mood, for she told the girls that they could be off during the day – there was enough left over from dinner that it would do for lunch – but they should bring back some aubergines for dinner.
‘Let’s go,’ Pallu said to Lakhi, knowing that Ammi’s goodwill was unreliable, and they hastily left the compound. ‘What would you like to see today? We could go to the market – no, let’s go in the afternoon and get the vegetables then – or I could show you some of the bazaars or the brassworkers’ street. Or we could go to see the Angrez houses in the Civil Lines and watch the memsahibs walking around in their traditional clothes.’
‘I want to see the airships again,’ Lakhi said.
‘You can see those from anywhere,’ Pallu said, disgusted at her friend’s lack of imagination. An idea occurred to her – ‘Or, wait, I know.’
While the airships rarely stopped in Lawari, when they did, it was in the Maidan that lay outside the city walls, almost directly underneath the flight path. Normally, the Angrez rode their horses and played games there, though in the past it had been the site of a big saint’s festival. As the hakim was the saint’s descendent, his house overlooked the Maidan, and if one climbed to the topmost rooftop, one could hoist oneself up to the minaret of the mosque next to it and climb to its gallery which was nearly the highest point in the city. From there, one felt as though one could almost touch the airships passing overhead. If one were lucky, an airship might even land in the Maidan.
Pallu explained this to Lakhi, and reassured her that it was not dangerous even if one was blindfolded.
‘If you are sure,’ Lakhi said doubtfully.
‘I am,’ Pallu replied. ‘The houses there are built so close together one can’t fall far anyway.’
Pallu was less sure than she sounded, so when the time came to climb to the minaret, she tugged up her blindfold, leaving a narrow gap she could see through. The sun was high by now, and the light fierce, so as soon as they were safely in the gallery, she pulled it down again. Nevertheless, she felt a familiar throb behind her eyes and told Lakhi she would stay on the western side of the gallery in as much shade as she could find at this time of day.
As Lakhi waited for an airship to pass, she speculated aloud about the ships. Pallu told her what little she knew about the air that held them aloft, but had no answers to questions. Was more air required or less during the blazing summers? What if the silk caught fire? Who flew the airships? Who built them?
To that, at least, Pallu had an answer. ‘There are factories in Bartanya that build them,’ she said. ‘Some of the most important and delicate parts are made here in Lawari, but the manufacture of the large pieces, like the silk bag, the gondola and the metalwork, all of that takes place in Bartanya.’
‘We send silk from Jodiawal to the airship factories in Bartanya,’ Lakhi said. ‘I wonder if anyone makes airships here in Hindustan. Maybe our great-great-grandfather made them in the Mughal times.’
Pallu heard Lakhi leap to her feet. ‘It’s here!’ Lakhi cried. Going from east to west – where is it going, Pallu?’
‘Towards Jawadabad, but it’s early. It must be a chartered ship,’ Pallu said. ‘Can you describe the insignia?’
Instead, Lakhi emitted a sharp gasp. ‘I think – is there something wrong?’ she said. ‘Pallu, there is black smoke and the bag looks like it has deflated.’
‘What do you mean, black smoke?’ Pallu said.
‘It’s listing!’ Lakhi said. ‘Look – ’
Uncaring of her headache, Pallu pulled off the blindfold. The noonday light blinded her at first, then she saw, a few hundred gaz away, the airship. It was small, and far lower than it should be as though it were coming in to land, but it was in obvious distress and she could see the crew moving around frantically. Their voices carried shrilly over the wind but their words were incomprehensible through the dull roar of a fire. A rope was flung over the side of the gondola, and a slight figure, a boy or small man, clambered down, seeming to inspect something near the base. There was a bang, the airship jolted, and its silk bag seemed to deflate further. A man near the front of the gondola appeared to be turning a great rod, but the airship was falling.
It landed with a slow groaning crash that seemed to last forever. Somehow they had managed to steer it onto the Maidan and slow its fall, but the vessel landed at an angle that smeared its great body across the dry summer grass as men leaped from its sides to safety. At last it came to a stop in a long streak of wood and ropes and silk, with flames running lightly over it. Miraculously, one of the ropes was the one on which they had seen the boy, who had held on to it and lay on the grass, uncrushed but unmoving.
‘We have to help,’ Pallu said, and without waiting for Lakhi, leapt off the side of the minaret’s gallery onto hakim sahib’s rooftop. The two girls dashed down the stairs and out to the Maidan, where there were already dozens of men and women, airmen and locals, working frantically to put out the flames.
No one had yet reached the boy, so Pallu and Lakhi darted towards him. He was breathing, but his leg was twisted and there was an ugly gash in his side. Lakhi ripped off her dupatta and stuffed it into the wound. She gestured impatiently at Pallu, who handed her own dupatta over. By this time some men had arrived from the hakim’s house with rope beds to carry away the wounded. Among them was hakim sahib himself who glanced at Lakhi’s work and said, briefly, ‘Well done, girl.’ He then saw Pallu and said ‘You will have strained your eyes. Go with the boy to the infirmary and rest in darkness. I will come once I am no longer needed here.’
He turned away and Pallu, who was already swaying from the brazen clanging in her head, dropped to the ground. Lakhi helped her up and seated her on the rope bed with the injured boy. Together, the three children, along with the bearers, made their way to the infirmary.
*
By the time they arrived at the infirmary, Pallo felt like a great brass bell, similar to the one that hung at the entrance to Valmiki Mandir and was the cause of much quarrelling with the mosque next door. But bigger, much bigger, the sound of her bell resonated through the entire universe. She allowed herself to be led, unresisting, through the infirmary. Blinded by the noise, disoriented, she was not sure where she was being taken, but grasped Lakhi’s pudgy hand tightly as the only certainty remaining to her.
At last, they stopped and Pallu felt herself being pressed to lie down on a pallet on the floor. The room was cool and dark but she shut her eyes. There was movement next to her and she turned her face to where she thought Lakhi might be. A cool hand stroked her brow and Lakhi said, ‘It’s the boy from the airship. They are dressing his wound and setting his leg.’
A few minutes later she said, ‘I hope he doesn’t wake up for this.’ The hand was replaced by a cold, wet compress.
The boy didn’t wake up, or if he did, Pallu couldn’t hear his screams through the clanging of the bell. At some point Lakhi left her side and then returned. At a later point, Ammi arrived. Pallu tried to apologise but Ammi just said ‘Sssh.’ She started singing, so softly that she could barely be heard through the sound of the bell, but somehow it was comforting.
*
When Pallu awoke, the clanging of the bell had finally stilled. She stirred, and sat up slowly, holding the damp compress against her eyes. Yes, the bell was quiet for now, but it was still there, threatening to ring out again with any sudden movement or sound or flash of light.
‘Hello,’ said a weak voice. ‘Why can’t you see?’
‘I get headaches,’ Pallu said. ‘Who are you? Are you the boy? Where’s Lakhi?’
‘She’s asleep next to you,’ he said. ‘My name is Zaigham. I fell from the airship.’
‘I saw you,’ Pallu said. ‘You didn’t fall, the whole airship fell.’ She paused, realising how oddly he had phrased his few words, as though he didn’t know male from female. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Mardan,’ he said. ‘But I work on Theodore sahib’s airship. I am the ship’s monkey.’
Impressed with the English words and the fact that he actually worked on the airship, she asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a very important role. Monkey means bandar, and like your Hanuman-ji I keep the ship flying.’
‘I’m not a Hindu,’ she said. ‘He’s not my Hanuman-ji, and you didn’t do a very good job of keeping it flying, did you?’
‘We were going to land anyway,’ Zaigham said. ‘Fogg sahib has important business in Lawari.’
Tentatively, Pallu lowered the compress and allowed an eye to open slightly. The room was only dimly lit by a single oil lamp so she opened the other eye. It was not too bad.
Lakhi was curled up asleep next to her on the pallet, while the boy lay on a second pallet a few feet away. It was hard to tell under the bruises and scrapes on his face, but she thought he might be her own age.
‘Where all have you flown to?’ she asked.
He seemed to perk up at this. ‘Oh, all over Hindustan! Every big city in Punjab, and Peshawar of course, and I’ve been to Delhi thrice, Bombay, Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Hyderabad, oh, too many to say. I haven’t been to Ceylon, though,’ he said in a tone of dissatisfaction.
‘Have you ever been to Bartanya?’
‘Not yet, but I will soon! After we have completed our work in Lawari we are going to London.’
‘My mother’s workshop stitches silk for the airships,’ she said, trying to match his boasts. ‘No one else can do it as well as we can. Not even in the factories.’
‘All our silk comes from Bartanya,’ he said dismissively. ‘An airship has to use the very best.’
‘Our Jodiawal silk goes to the airships, the factories in Bartanya just stitch it together.’ Lakhi sat up; she must have been woken up by their voices.
‘Well in Lawari we stitch it as well,’ Pallu said. ‘I stitch it myself and then Motilal sahib buys it for the airships.’
‘Nothing on the airship is from Hindustan,’ the boy said definitely. ‘The helium is mined in Tanganyika but everything else is from Europe.’
‘I have a piece here, Zaigham, see?’ said Lakhi. ‘I put it in my pouch while cleaning and forgot to return it to your mother,’ she explained to Pallu.
‘It does look familiar,’ Zaigham said reluctantly. ‘It can’t be, though. Ripperton sahib, our engineer, gave me a lesson about the airships when I joined, and he said that Britain Keeps the Empire Aloft. That means it was made in Bartanya.’
‘Maybe,’ Pallu said, thinking he probably hadn’t paid attention during the lesson. ‘I have this,’ she said, reaching into her pouch and taking out the metal disc. She held it out to him.
‘What is that? You will have to slide a bit closer, I can’t move too much.’
‘I’ll pass it over,’ Lakhi said. ‘It was made by our great-great-grandfather.’
There was a moment’s pause as the boy seemed to inspect the disc. ‘That’s very interesting but I’m sorry, your great-great-grandfather couldn’t have made it,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ Lakhi and Pallu said almost simultaneously, both equally outraged.
‘He must have been a rich man, though,’ the boy said hastily, in placation. ‘These aren’t cheap and he must have imported it all the way from Europe.’
There was another pause, and then he said, ‘This is a very fine one, and he had it inscribed in Farsi, see? Not Angrezi. I can read a little Angrezi but he probably couldn’t. It’s an astrolabe. We use a much more advanced device developed by the Angrez, called a sextant, to navigate in the air.’
‘You can navigate in the air with this as well,’ Lakhi said. ‘Our great-great-grandfather was extremely wise.’
‘You can’t navigate in the air with this,’ said the boy. ‘But that doesn’t mean your great-great-grandfather wasn’t wise. If he did make this himself, well, it’s a shame he wasn’t born in these days, or someone that intelligent might even have become a ship’s monkey.’
‘You must be very intelligent, then, to be a ship’s monkey,’ Pallu said.
The boy didn’t reply, so she added, ‘And maybe you’ll fly your own airship one day and fly to the other side of the world if you wish.’
The sound of footsteps and voices echoed in the hallway. Suddenly, the room was full of men. Pallu felt the cool wall against her back – without realising it, she had slid back as far as she could go. The sound of Angrez voices and clip-clopping hard-soled shoes bounced off the bare walls, she felt she might be trampled. Lakhi’s hand grasped hers as the country cousin joined her against the wall.
Electric light flooded the room. Pallu buried her face in her hands to protect her eyes.
‘They must be the airmen,’ Lakhi whispered in her ear. ‘Look at what they’re wearing! No, you mustn’t look up. They’re all dressed in leather. It must be very hot. Maybe they get cold in the sky? I would think it would be hotter, close to the sun!’
Zaigham was replying to whatever they were saying in a mixture of Hindustani and Angrezi, sounding bright and eager. Pallu thought he was telling them that he was well enough to get back to work as a ship’s monkey. With his injuries, she doubted that he would be able to clamber up and down ropes for a while yet.
‘What is this you are holding, boy?’ one of the men said in strongly accented Hindustani.
‘He’s looking at the what was it called?’ Lakhi said. ‘Astrolabe.’
Pallu wished she could see them admire the astrolabe, but did not dare open her eyes. She wished she knew more than a few words of Angrezi so she could explain about her great-great-grandfather.
An airman said something in a surprised tone. Zaigham replied, and told Pallu, ‘he is saying this is very impressive, it should be in a museum. He says, few people know it but the East preserved the knowledge of the Greeks till it was returned to Europe to be brought to fruition. I don’t know what fruition means. Doctor sahib?’
‘It means something like completion,’ a softer voice replied in Hindustani. It was Dr Bhaduri’s rounded Bengali vowels; Pallu had not seen him amidst the throng of much larger men. ‘Now, my child, I am afraid I have already informed Captain Theodore that you will not be able to return to work for some time. Your wound was deep, moreover we had to put a screw in your leg and it will take three months before we can even remove the cast. Your father has been wired to come and take you home to heal.’
‘I don’t want to go home!’ Zaigham said. ‘I will be fine in a week and I can go back onto the airship.’
‘My son, you will not be able to travel in an airship even after a week,’ the doctor said gently. ‘I know it is a great disappointment. You were unlucky, the only other injury was the ship’s passenger, who sprained an ankle and will stay in Lawari to conduct his business while a new vessel is sent for him.’
‘If Fogg sahib can fly I can fly,’ Zaigham said. His tone was defiant but ragged, as though he were holding back tears.
The Angrez who could speak Hindustani interjected: ‘Now, now, boy, no need to worry about your family. The benevolent fund will tide them over during your convalescence. After you are well, why, we are expanding our Indian operation and there will be a place for an intelligent, hardworking young man in our offices, you may depend upon it! You will have my personal recommendation!’
Zaigham’s reply was barely audible. ‘Thank you Fogg sahib.’
‘They’re leaving,’ Lakhi whispered. ‘Poor Zaigham! Do you think he can still be a ship’s monkey? Oh they’re all gone now, I’ll turn the light off. Here. You can look up.’
Pallu lifted her face from her hands to see Lakhi leaning over Zaigham’s pallet. ‘I’m sure you will be back on the airship soon,’ Lakhi said to him, encouragingly.
‘Yes.’ The boy’s voice was dreary.
‘You’ll travel to Bartanya! And wear a tie-coat and blow your nose loudly in a cloth, and –’
Pallu finally caught Lakhi’s eye and frowned at her. Lakhi subsided.
*
Two days later, an Angrez in a tie-coat and leaning on a silver-topped cane, came to the house, accompanied by Dr Bhaduri. It was the early evening and the other women had left.
All this Lakhi whispered into Pallu’s ear as they sat in the corner of the veranda, winding thread onto wooden bobbins. Pallu still had her blindfold on and while she heard the sound of boots, it was hard at first to distinguish what was being said.
Eventually the men were seated and Dr Bhaduri’s voice became audible. ‘ – for troubling you, madam.’ Pallu was impressed; he must be speaking to Ammi who was far his social inferior, but he used the very politest form of address.
‘You are welcome, sirs,’ Ammi replied.
Lakhi scurried away from Pallu’s side. Pallu knew that Ammi must have signalled to her to bring bowls of cool water and a handful of mulberries.
There was a pause, during which Pallu imagined Ammi’s perfectly impassive face, while the visitors became increasingly uncomfortable with the silence. She had often admired this tactic of Ammi’s during Motilal sahib’s visits.
There was a shuffling of feet and a cough or two, then a grateful ‘Thank you’ as Lakhi served the refreshments.
At last Dr Bhaduri spoke. ‘Madam, this gentleman is Fogg sahib, the son of the founder of Fogg Concern. This, you may know, is one of Britain’s most important airship lines, and Fogg sahib is responsible for its Hindustan operations.’
‘I have heard of it,’ Ammi replied.
‘Madam, it is a great honour to visit your workshop and to meet the women through whose handiwork Britain keeps the empire aloft,’ the Angrez interjected. His accent was heavy and diction Brahmanical, but Pallu had to admit he had a good way with words.
‘It is our honour for us that you have come,’ Ammi said. ‘The fame of the Fogg Concern has spread far and wide in Hindustan.’ This was untrue; none of them had heard the name until the previous week.
‘Yes madam,’ the Angrez said eagerly. ‘We are at the forefront of airship design and operation globally.’
No one replied to this and he coughed loudly. He said something to Dr Bhaduri in his own tongue.
‘Madam, this gentleman is greatly admiring of your household’s needlework,’ Dr Bhaduri said.
‘We are honoured,’ Ammi replied. ‘However, our production is already lower than usual because of my daughter’s illness, and we cannot sell our work to others without Motilal sahib’s knowledge. I am sorry to disappoint Fogg sahib.’
‘Madam, Mr Motilal is one of our best suppliers,’ said Fogg sahib. ‘We honour and respect his diligence, but we would like to request something that he cannot provide for us.’
Ammi said nothing.
‘We would like – we would like –’ the Angrez stopped as though unsure how to phrase his request. Instead he spoke again to Dr Bhaduri.
When Dr Bhaduri spoke, his voice was even softer and more Bengali than before. ‘Madam, forgive me, but he would like to take your daughter to England for six months.’
Next to Pallu, Lakhi gasped audibly.
‘It is a great honour to be so asked.’ From her tone Pallu, but probably no one else, knew Ammi was furious. She wondered that the mulberry tree at the corner of the courtyard had not come crashing down on this Angrez, crushing him under its branches. Then she thought, Bartanya!
Dr Bhaduri conversed urgently with the Angrez. Finally Fogg sahib himself spoke. ‘Madam, we will care for your daughter as though she were one of our young ladies. She will be under the care of my wife, who is returning to England for her health. We will undertake to send her back to you safe, healthy and fully conversant in English.’
‘And why would a sahib want my daughter, under the care of his wife, in Bartanya?’ Ammi asked.
‘It’s very simple, madam,’ Fogg sahib assured her. ‘We would like her to demonstrate the technique you use in preparing the Fletcher rig –’
‘That’s the Angrezi name of your lengths of silk,’ Dr Bhaduri interjected.
‘– the Fletcher rig to the engineers at the Fogg Concern. Although we have access to samples of course, you seamstresses use certain tricks to the knotting, I am told, that are still obscure to us and that appear to be critical to its function and strength.’
‘I see,’ Ammi said.
She wasn’t asking the obvious question. Pallu bit her tongue, knowing that an interruption might bring a slap later, but Lakhi, physically vibrating next to her, was less wise. ‘Why do you want Pallu to demonstrate it?’ Lakhi asked. Her country-bred voice pierced through the adults’ quiet tones.
‘Is that your daughter, madam?’ the Angrez said.
‘No it is not,’ Ammi said. From the undercurrent to her voice the mulberry tree should have burst into flame.
‘It is a relative, the daughter is the one with the blindfold,’ Dr Bhaduri said. ‘She has suffered a slight eyestrain but is being treated by my colleague.’
Lakhi stirred again and Pallu nudged her to silence her, to no avail, ‘No one can make a – a – Fletcher rig like Pallu can, so what is the use of demonstrating it in Bartanya?’
‘Silence, Lakhi,’ said Ammi.
‘No matter madam, it is a good question,’ Fogg sahib said. ‘My child, we are a scientific people. We like to know how things work and to see how we can improve them and their production with modern techniques. Your relative’s needlework is sufficient for our needs today, but perhaps there are ways to improve it in our factories for the next generation of airships and to produce it in the quantities that will be required in the coming years.’
‘That is enough, Lakhi,’ Ammi said. ‘Sahib, I will think it over.’
‘Of course there will be a small token of our gratitude,’ Fogg sahib said.
‘I am sure of it,’ Ammi said.
Pallu heard a scraping sound as the booted man got to his feet, saying something to Dr Bhaduri, and walked away to inspect the mulberry tree. ‘Very fine fruit, madam!’ he called out.
Dr Bhaduri stayed to say that the Angrez would expect an answer the following day and warned that he had a list of other workshops, though few with as fine needlework and a skilled child to spare. He added: ‘Of course silk will be purchased in ever greater quantities for this new generation of airships and it is not something that can be produced in England. You might wish to consider this information for your family’s lands.’
‘Thank you, Dr Bhaduri,’ Ammi said. ‘You have been very good at a time of difficulty.’
The gate creaked open, and a familiar voice rang out: ‘Salam alaykum, bibi ji!’
It was hakim sahib. He came straight to Pallu’s side. ‘Child, how are you feeling?’ he asked.
Pallu told him, and held out her right hand, palm upward, for her pulse to be read.
‘Very good, very good, child,’ the old man said. ‘You will continue the same treatment, there is no need to change anything, only to rest your eyes and move your body. I will show you an exercise also. Such work as you women do is not meant to be done sixteen hours a day, it is good for you to rest.’
‘Bhaduri, is this a hakim, a traditional healer?’ Fogg sahib asked from the far corner of the courtyard. ‘What’s he doing to the girl?’
‘Sahib, she is his patient,’ Dr Bhaduri said. ‘He is here to instruct her in certain exercises of the eye.’
Fogg sahib spoke loudly and rapidly in Angrezi, and though none of them could understand, it sounded excited or even outraged.
Pallu felt hakim sahib rise stiffly to his feet. ‘Doctor sahib perhaps you could apologise to the sahib for my lack of English,’ he said quietly. ‘I am sorry if I have trespassed. I know the unani medicine of our scientists is not regarded highly in London but for our humbler bodies it serves well enough.’
‘He only meant to say –’ Dr Bhaduri said.
Fogg sahib, seeming to recognise that he had unintentionally shown disrespect, said hastily in Hindustani, ‘We have nothing but respect for your learning, sir. Why, my wife was sent one of your country’s traditional powders for a fever and her physician was very impressed.’
‘Thank you, sahib,’ said the hakim. ‘Now if you will excuse me…’
Pallu took off the blindfold on his instruction. The smoky pall of twilight had fallen though the lamps were as yet unlit. Her eyes felt fine, but soon began to water.
The hakim demonstrated an eye exercise, ending with: ‘Doctor sahib, do you have anything to add?’
‘Certainly not,’ Dr Bhaduri said.
‘I’m not a fool, despite my white hair,’ hakim sahib said. There was anger in his voice now, an echo of the anger Ammi had hidden from all except her own daughter. He spoke loudly, knowing that the Angrez could understand him, but no longer caring if he were heard. ‘I know that there are new ideas, new knowledge arising in the west and that these have great value. But the knowledge is born from wealth and power.’
‘Yes hakim sahib,’ Dr Bhaduri said. His dark face looked miserable.
Pallu glanced at Fogg sahib, still standing by the mulberry tree. He was beardless and didn’t look very old, though it was hard to tell with Angrez. He looked uncertain. She didn’t think he had understood the hakim’s soft, Persian-inflected Hindustani.
The hakim caught her anxious glance, and sighed. ‘No matter, no matter. Put your blindfold back on, child, the world is change and soon you will see again. Doctor sahib, please request this gentleman that if he has the time, and if he would like to learn more about our sciences, I would be delighted if he would take dinner at my home where I can show him my books.’
Fogg sahib agreed enthusiastically when he heard the offer. Pallu thought he was not that young but probably quite a nice man. She submitted to being blindfolded again.
After all the men had left Ammi finally stirred. Instead of slapping Lakhi, she turned to the subject of dinner. They would have kebabs from Sattar Baba, she declared. It was a delicacy they only had on Eid, so Pallu knew that Ammi would say yes to Fogg sahib but drive a hard bargain, and invest the money in the silk farms in Jodiawal. Wealth would flow to the countryside, not enough to send for an astrolabe from Bartanya, or birth the knowledge to make one, but sufficient for Lakhi’s family to have enough to eat and even indulge in kulfi sometimes.
But first – first, she herself, Pallu, would go to Bartanya. It felt too big a thought to grasp, so she wandered off to the mulberry tree to ponder it alone. She thrust her hand into her pouch and touched the astrolabe. She had still not seen it with her eyes but the whorls and incisions were familiar beneath her fingers. She imagined her great-great-grandfather as a man with a trim white beard like hakim sahib’s but bright eyes like Fogg sahib’s and a will like Ammi’s, bending over metal discs in his workshop, fitting them together with tools as precise as her own silks and needles.
A change in the air currents told her an airship was passing overhead. She pulled the astrolabe out of her pouch and held it up, over her head, towards where she thought the airship must be.
‘Pallu, come inside!’ Lachi called. ‘You shouldn’t stand under a tree at night!’
It was true, you risked being taken by a jinn. She wondered if the jinns could reach up as easily as down, hooking fiery claws into the airships overhead to possess unwary passengers. She held the astrolabe up a moment longer, daring the jinn to take her great-great-grandfather’s work, and then went inside.