Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortune

Betsey Woodman

Description

In the first of a charming series, we meet Jana Bibi, who has inherited her grandfather's house in a quaint hill station in India. Casting aside the conventions of her upper-crust upbringing, Janet (Jana) Laird moves with her chatty parrot, Mr. Ganguly, and her loyal housekeeper, Mary, to Hamara Nagar, a town where the local merchants are philosophers, the chief of police is a bully, and a bagpipe-playing Gurkha keeps wild monkeys at bay. Settling in, Jana meets the town's colorful local characters who gather at the Why Not? tea shop-the contemplative darzi who struggles with his business and family; a kindly shopkeeper whose shop is bursting at the seams with objects of unknown provenance; a newspaper editor who burns the midnight oil at his printing press; a tyrannical head of police who rules with an iron hand; and a young man with a golden voice, who wants to be a singer in the movies. When word gets out that a new government dam will flood the little hill station, forcing everyone to move and start over, Jana is enlisted to save the community. Will Hamara Nagar survive? With some luck and Mr. Ganguly the fortune-telling parrot, the townspeople may have fate on their side.

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184003468
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jana Bibi s Excellent Fortunes

a novel
Jana Bibi s Excellent Fortunes

a novel
Betsy Woodman
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
First published in 2012 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Published by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
All rights reserved
Copyright Betsy Woodman 2012
Betsy Woodman has asserted her right to be identifiedas author of this Work.
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B
A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184003468
To Lee
Contents
Author s Note
A New Life in an Old Place
Hamara Nagar Threatened
The Jolly Grant House
Feroze and His World
Making Herself a New Home
Remembering William
Moving In
The Work of Royal Tailors
Police Chief Bandhu on the Warpath
Mary Spreads Rumors
Jana Gets a New Career
In Business
Roo and Moustapha
A Change of Season
Jack s Visit
Preparations for the Talent Show
The Town Gears Up for the Futurologists
The Day After
Bandhu Under Siege
Over the Khud
In the Golden Rain Tree
Hamara Nagar in the News
On the Map
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Author s Note
I have set Jana Bibi s Excellent Fortunes in 1960 and used the place names and spellings common at that time-Bombay (now Mumbai), Madras (now Chennai), Simla (now Shimla), and Benares (now officially Varanasi, traditionally Kashi, and, today, in some contexts, Banaras).
Hamara Nagar is a fictional town; it would be somewhere in today s Uttarakhand, a state that got carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000 and for a while was called Uttaranchal. Terauli is also fictional.
The Indian rupee went decimal in 1957, but the characters in the book think in terms of the old system of sixteen annas to a rupee, four pice to an anna, and three pie to a pice. Similarly, both metric and British Imperial (and also various traditional Indian measures) were in use at the time of this story, hence the mix of kilometers, yards, and feet.
Recent travelers who have budgeted their trips at 40 to 50 rupees to the U.S. dollar may be puzzled by the exchange rate mentioned in the book. For many years, the rate was 4.77 to 4.79 rupees to the dollar.
Also, American readers may wonder why the boarding school students in the story are in school in July and August. With some short breaks, hill station boarding schools were-and still are-in session from February or March through November, with their long vacation in the winter months.
A New Life in an Old Place
Two Letters
Mr. Ganguly perched on the wrought-iron chair and preened his emerald-green feathers. In the palace garden, a flock of wild Indian ringnecks came swooping down into the mango trees, settled and chattered and screamed at one another, reached some agreement, and took off again. The parrot turned his head briefly to look at them, without much interest. His wings were not clipped. Yet he flew only a few feet at a time, from chair to ground to table, table to chair to perch, always returning to safety.
Jana put down her teacup, took a peanut from her pocket, and held it out. Mr. Ganguly held it daintily with his claw, shelled it with his beak, and ate it.
More, he said.
Later. Oh, all right. She gave him another.
She heard a door close and looked up to the verandah of the palace, watched Mary s rotund figure come down the steps, the afternoon post in her hand. Most days, Jana got no letters. Who would write? Jack sent dutiful filial missives from Scotland, and friends in Bombay sent greetings on major holidays. Otherwise, people from her past stayed silent.
Jana mem! Mary s smile transformed her heavily pockmarked face. Two letters! Postman was so excited, he almost fell off his bicycle. She handed over the letters and adjusted her sari. He said it was good luck to get letters on Monday. Lord Shiva rules on Monday.
Jana smiled. Mary maintained that her family had been Christian since Saint Thomas journeyed to Madras- in the days of old! -but she nonetheless hedged her bets, knitting Buddhist symbols into her sweaters and shawls and celebrating Diwali by putting out little oil lamps. In her room, she kept one picture of Jesus and one of Dr. Ambedkar, her fellow outcaste who had risen from his lowly status to write the constitution of India.
Jana mem, Jack baba might be coming to visit from U.K? Mary had seen Jack s familiar handwriting on the thin blue aerogramme.
Perhaps, said Jana. If only he would take a holiday from that engineering job of his.
Engineering is good, said Mary. But holidays are also good. And every boy also should come to see his mother.
Meanwhile, Jana was looking at the second piece of mail, a large buff envelope postmarked Allahabad, 1 June 1959. Eight months ago, Jana calculated. Still, that was not too bad, considering the number of places to which it had been forwarded. Almost everywhere she had lived in her adult life-the remote mission station in northern India, the Iranis beach cottage in Bombay, her grandfather MacPherson s castle outside Glasgow, now owned by her son, and, finally, the nawab s palace, in the former princely state of Terauli. A doggedly determined letter, that!
She slit the envelope with a knife from the tea tray and withdrew a fat legal document and a cover letter. Mr. Ganguly, now perched on her shoulder, bent his head toward the letter as if reading it, and Mary lingered, not taking away the tea tray.
Dear Mrs. Laird, Jana read.
It has come to our attention that you are the sole living heir of the late Ramsay Grant, whose will we probated in 1930. At that time there was one piece of property that could not be distributed, because of the terms of the lease, which only expired in 1955. Further complications regarding succession have only recently been resolved. We are now happy to inform you that you are the owner of the Jolly Grant House, No. 108 Central Bazaar, adjacent to Ramachandran s Treasure Emporium and across from Royal Tailors, Hamara Nagar, Uttar Pradesh. We assume that you are aware of the building s historic importance.
All matters related to the execution of your grandfather s will are now resolved and all property distributed. There should be no impediment to your taking possession of the building. Enclosed herewith you will find the key.
The Jolly Grant House, thought Jana. Extraordinary that it was still standing, let alone that none of Grandfather Grant s Anglo-Indian descendants had lived to take possession. A shred of memory came back to her, of a visit to Hamara Nagar in 1912, when she was ten. The family had put up at the Victoria Hotel, even though Grandfather Grant had plenty of room in the guesthouse of his compound three or four miles away, then on the outskirts of town.
You re not actually going to visit him, Jana s father had said, and take the children? And-left unsaid-expose them to that woman , Grandfather Grant s Indian wife?
James, you re being so stuffy. He s almost ninety! Jana s mother had answered.
That little exchange summed up the two sides of Jana s family. How many generations of them-soldiers, civil servants, engineers, architects-had worked and lived in India? Five, six? From the beginning, some-like her father-considered India a place to earn their living, while keeping away from Indians as much as possible. Stuffy folks, who insisted on boundaries, categories, and boxes. But others-like her mother-adored India and were never completely happy anywhere else. Grandfather Grant, who looked like a proper Victorian gentleman, was actually of the second sort, a throwback to the eighteenth century, when it was commonplace for a British man to have an Indian wife. He got away with his eccentricity, Jana s father always maintained, only because of his wealth.
On their way to visit the Jolly Grant House, in the spring of 1912, Jana s pony had bolted, and for several terrified minutes she d thought she d be thrown over the knife-edge cliff to certain death below. She remembered arriving wobbly-kneed and in tears at a large building with a lookout tower, and being comforted by an Indian woman in a soft silk sari whose skin smelled of almond cream.
She turned to Jack s aerogramme.
Mother, you re too old to live alone, she read. Come live in Glasgow. Isn t that where you belong? I grant you that it was noble to live as a missionary and take care of Father all those years, and I suppose that the world does need musicians, but do you need to be one of them? And aren t you tired of living from hand to mouth? What if you get sick? Remember that you ll always be an outsider there.
She had to smile. Jack had always been a little old lady. As a boy, he d preferred reading to exploring the mission compound or climbing trees. She d never found a lizard in his pocket. Safety first had been his motto as a six-year-old, and apparently it still was.
Now, I ask you, she said, almost aloud. Too old? Fifty-eight? And alone? Who was alone in India, apart from a few prayer-mumbling sadhus? The only time in her life she d felt alone was during the six lonely years in Scotland. Grieving the sudden death o