Coral Strand

Ravinder Randhawa

Description

From English winters to Indian summers. From the cold streets of modern Britain to the glamorous, turbulent and impassioned world of 1940's Mumbai. Each year, Sita makes a mysterious journey to the Mausoleum, the place of dark memories and warped beginnings. She goes to spy on Emily and Champa, the strange 'guardians' she once escaped, and on whom she had taken a daring revenge. This year proves to be fatefully different... This year, the terrible secrets of the past are starting to emerge; secrets that inexorably link the three women to each other, to the grey-eyed stranger Kala, and to an altogether different world - the glittering, violent and passionate world of 1940's Mumbai.Ravinder Randhawa's women, caught in a desperate fight for survival, cross taboos and forbidden lines in this richly plotted novel, imbued with fascinating historical detail, and the beauties of place and period. Readers of modern and historical novels alike will enjoy Randhawa's evocative portrait of the compelling relationship between Britain and India, which continues to enthrall and engage us.

Sujets

• Mumbai
• Bombay

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785895500
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE CORAL STRAND
Also by Ravinder Randhawa
A Wicked Old Woman
Beauty and the Beast: enemies. romance. fireworks.
Dynamite: adventure. life. love.
www.ravinderrandhawa.com
www.facebook.com/ravinderrandhawaauthor/
@RealRavs

Copyright © 2016 Ravinder Randhawa
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
First published by House of Stratus, 2001.
An imprint of Stratus Holdings.
Matador
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ISBN 978 1785895 500
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To my parents Sardar P. S. Randhawa and Sardarni Kartar Kaur Randhawa With my love, admiration and gratitude.
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE
London, January 1997. Early morning
‘Afraid? No fear. Not me,’ chanting her early morning litany into the tiny mirror that only has space for a fragment of her face – Sita’s daily dose of Dutch courage.
Sita, the woman who used to have two names; the woman who’d cut them in half and burnt her boats. Sita the Ferret was what she used to be: Sita from Champa, Ferret from Emily. She’d joined them up and would murmur them to herself in a jagged symphony: Sita/Ferret-Sita/Ferret. Syllables of the self. Which she’d guillotined! Cut and separated when she ran. Shearing off the Ferret in the house and taking the Sita: normal, well-known, and best of all, anonymous.
Taking the bottle of Old Spice from the shelf, she removes the top and dabs drops onto her clothes, wrists, the base of her neck; breathing in deeply, inhaling the pungent, spicy scents.
The history of a scent. More than twenty years earlier, Emily had caught the child Sita at her dressing table trying to open a silver perfume bottle. The young girl had flinched and immediately moved away waiting for Emily’s hand to rise and crack across her face. Instead, Emily had done something unusual: she’d opened the carved doors of an almirah and searched inside. The child had stood still, waiting. She wouldn’t move till she was given permission, their last fight still vivid inside her when she’d shouted back at Emily and tried to run out of the kitchen. Emily, furious with rage had caught her by the arm: ‘Gutter ki batchi , vermin of the sewers, thinks she can talk back to a memsahib!’
‘Mutant Memsahib!’ Sita had retorted recklessly.
‘Disobedient worm!’ Emily had said, spitting the words. ‘A servant is not her master’s equal. I was too lax with her.’ Who her ? ‘Even bringing her here. Great Britain itself. You,’ finger pointing like a knife at Sita’s heart, ‘you’re living off me and I won’t have you getting uppity.’
Closing the almirah, Emily had held out a bottle. ‘This is for girls like you, from Over There. Look, it says “spice” on it, so it’s especially for you.’ Emily opened the bottle of Old Spice and sprinkled drops over her hair, shoulders and face; suddenly the air was filled with a sharp, sweet, peppery perfume. The child clamped her mouth shut and held her body tight, determined not to breathe in Emily’s scents from Over There. ‘As obstinate and stubborn as her,’ Emily commented acidly, ‘it won’t do any good.’
Will and flesh are enemies. Sita had held on till her chest and throat were burning, but then her mouth burst open with a gasp, the aromatic sting hitting her tongue. Emily held out the bottle. Even if it had been a burning coal, the child could not have refused it. Sita put her fingers around the bottle and held it away from her body. ‘No genies in there to jump out and eat you up.’ Emily knew about fear, not only that, Emily knew about the frailties of the flesh too. ‘Stop snivelling.’ Emily had once commanded. ‘If I’d done that I’d have rotted on the dung heap.’ Sita had rushed upstairs to her room, driven by relief that no worse punishment had been visited upon her. Her room was at the top of the Victorian house, with a sloping ceiling, a small fireplace, and a window through which she could watch the street beyond the garden gate. Leaning out, Sita would watch the ebb and flow of people: those on their own, couples arm-in-arm, families, groups, cats and dogs. In the dark winter evenings, street lamps would transform the street into a distant, mysterious place. Pulling a box from under her bed, Sita had carefully placed the bottle of Old Spice in it. She hadn’t thought to throw it away. She possessed so little of her own that every odd object she’d managed to pick up was carefully hoarded. Each one helped to give her some weight in the world.
Since those early years Sita, who used to be Sita the Ferret, had grown up and run away from Emily the Mutant Memsahib and Champa the Dumpa. After her ‘great escape’, she’d spent many an hour browsing among the perfume counters of the city, as fascinated by the crystal, gilded containers as the precious contents themselves, contents which promised passionate pleasures and liquid dreams. She would look, linger, and indulge in experimental dabs, but at the end, she always moved to the men’s counter, and out of a perverse stubbornness, bought the one that Emily had said was for girls like her, from Over There.
Coming out of her bathroom into her rented attic room, Sita opens the curtains and rubs at the condensation on the old window pane, the one that Mrs Sangeeta Rayit, her new landlady, had pointed out as being original, as old as the house. Freezing glass against her palm. Darkness outside. Sita has never complained about the English winter, neither has she admitted to the heresy of enjoying the bitter-sweetness of its grey embrace. In the block of flats across the road a few windows are also lit, early risers providing her with a distant sense of camaraderie. She wonders if, like her, they have a special reason for their dawn start this morning, or if this is their habitual time. Are they part of that secret army whose work starts in the dark, lonely hours?
Picking up her heavy, thick-soled boots, she pushes in her feet, pulls and tugs the laces into a hard knot. Emily and Champa would have a fit if they saw them. Tip-tapping ladies’ shoes with thin heels were their style. Her boots are hardwearing and dependable. Sita has to provide her own certainties.
Taking a dark, woollen coat out of the wardrobe, she first puts it on the bed, checks the hem, makes sure all the stitches are securely in place, then picks it up and urgently pushes her arms through the sleeves.
Only now is she ready for her annual pilgrimage. To peek and spy at the house in which still lived Champa the Dumpa, and Emily the Mutant Memsahib. The house that Sita had called the Mausoleum. That Emily had named ‘Simla Sunshine’.
Coincidence – the mysterious hand of fate.
Symmetry – a poetic balance.
Calculation – the logic of mathematics.
Sita wants them to unlock their hidden power and answer all the questions simmering inside her. She cannot beg, she cannot ask, she can only utilise the past, and it is for this that she arranges her secret visits on the anniversary of the day she left, setting herself up for a bruise with the past. She’s argued with herself that she could cut the connection, save her money and the wear and tear on her emotions; she could use the day for indulgences, relaxation and pampering; or put in extra time at work and improve her prospects and her pension. But year after year, when the day comes, Sita sets her alarm clock extra early.
Her boots tread lightly down the stairs. She doesn’t produce unnecessary noise. ‘Are you an elephant or a donkey?’ Champa’s voice would spiral through the Mausoleum, ‘no need to walk on my head.’
Swinging open the front door Sita steps out, and silently closes it behind her. Just as she had done when she left the Mausoleum. The sleeping occupants wouldn’t even know that someone had made an exit. She turns into the dark, freezing cold of the early morning. Street lamps shed a yellow glow, icy air hanging like a veil; her breath puffing into little clouds in front of her, the sound of her boots dispersing into the darkness. Occasionally, other solitary shapes pass her, enveloped in anonymity. For her, these are the symphonies of winter.
The weight of a coat, the protection of gloves, the softness of a scarf: the imagined love of a family.
Emily had taught her the techniques of survival in a cold climate. And more. Not that she’d ever known any other. Her skin had never been burnished under the heat of a faraway sun. It was deepened brown all by itself. The young Sita had taken a chart of paint colours and compared her pigmentation with the little squares on the sheet, the back of her hand sliding backwards and forwards, halting at a pink rosiness. At a wish? Or a consideration of the difference? The hand had moved on to the colours that grew darker with richer hues. Th