Heat and Dust Read Free Page B

say how nice it was and also donate five rupees. I was anxious to get out as it was stifling in there with no ventilation and all these people crowded in. Inder Lal was making his obeisances to the three smiling gods. He had his eyes shut and his lips moved devoutly. I was given some bits of rock sugar and a few flower petals which I did not of course like to throwaway so that I was still clutching them on the bus back to Satipur. When I thought Inder Lal was not looking, I respectfully tipped them out the side of the bus, but they have left the palm of my hand sticky and with a lingering smell of sweetness and decay that is still there as I write.
     
    1923
    Olivia first met the Nawab at a dinner party he gave in his palace at Khatm. She had by that time been in Satipur for several months and was already beginning to get bored. Usually the only people she and Douglas saw were the Crawfords (the Collector and his wife), the Saunders (the Medical Superintendent), and Major and Mrs. Minnies. That was in the evenings and on Sundays. The rest of the time Olivia was alone in her big house with all the doors and windows shut to keep out the heat and dust. She read, and played the piano, but the days were long, very long. Douglas was of course extremely busy with his work in the district.
    The day of the Nawab's dinner party, Douglas and Olivia drove over to Khatm with the Crawfords in the latter's car. The Saunders had also been invited but could not go because of Mrs. Saunders' ill health. It was a drive of about 15 miles, and Douglas and the Crawfords, who had all of them been entertained by the Nawab before, were being stoic about the uncomfortable journey as well as about the entertainment that lay ahead of them. But Olivia was excited. She was in a travelling costume - a cream linen suit - and her evening dress and satin shoes and jewel case were packed in her overnight bag. She was glad to think that soon she would be wearing them and people would see her.
    Like many Indian rulers, the Nawab was fond of entertaining Europeans. He was at a disadvantage in not having much to entertain them with, for his state had neither interesting ruins nor was it hunting country. All it had was dry soil and impoverished villages. But his palace, which had been built in the 1820s, was rather grand. Olivia's eyes lit up as she was led into the dining room and saw beneath the chandeliers the long, long table laid with a sevres dinner service, silver, crystal, flowers, candelabras, pomegranates, pineapples, and little golden bowls of crystallised fruits. She felt she had, at last in India, come to the right place.
    Only the guests were not right. Besides the party from Satipur, there was another English couple, Major and Mrs. Minnies, who lived near Khatm; and one plump, balding Englishman called Harry something who was a house guest of the Nawab's. Major and Mrs. Minnies were very much like the Crawfords . Major Minnies was the political agent appointed to advise the Nawab and the rulers of some adjacent small states on matters of policy. He had been in India for over twenty years and knew all there was to know about it; so did his wife. And of course so did the Crawfords. Their experience went back several generations, for they were all members of families who had served in one or other of the Indian services since before the Mutiny. Olivia had met other such old India hands and was already very much bored by them and their interminable anecdotes about things that had happened in Kabul or Multan. She kept asking herself how it was possible to lead such exciting lives - administering whole provinces, fighting border battles, advising rulers - and at the same time to remain so dull. She looked around the table - at Mrs. Crawford and Mrs. Minnies in their dowdy frocks more suitable to the English watering places to which they would one day retire than to this royal dining table; Major Minnies and Mr. Crawford, puffy and florid, with voices that