An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao Read Free Book Online Page B

vicar had called “an unfortunate position.” Within a week Mr. Templeton was transferred to a parish in Wales and Jenkins, as his mother wept and his father looked away shamefacedly, boarded a train for Warwick. When the train pulled out of the station Jenkins stuck his head out of the window. He wanted to wave but he couldn’t. His mother was still crying, but now she’d laid her head against his father’s shoulder, while his arm held her to him. They stood like that—leaning against each other—for as long as Jenkins watched them. And it was that , that simplicity of feeling that Jenkins knew he’d somehow lost.
    Even Mr. Templeton, after being found in the vestiary, when they were waiting for the vicar in his office, had said, “Deny it. Deny everything.”
    â€œBut how ,” Jenkins said. “He saw us.”
    Mr. Templeton leaned toward him. “Make him doubt what he saw.”
    â€œThat’d be lying.”
    â€œNo,” he said. “It’d be concealing the truth.”
    Jenkins looked at him. It seemed hard to believe that this had been the same person who’d held him to his beating chest, who’d kissed him only moments ago. The vicar, in the end, made it clear he wanted only for them to be out of his parish. “The empire’s vast,” he said, showing them to the door. “Try, if you could, not to come back.”
    And so Jenkins had been sent off to boarding school. Though, even at the age of sixteen, it seemed absurd to Jenkins that he should be sent to a boarding school for boys . The two years he remained at Warwick—along with the two or three tousles he had while there—did nothing more than solidify his sense that he was different, and that what he did must always be kept concealed, and that for him, in spite of the ache that had settled into his chest, clogged the passageways to his heart, there was no greater peace than the peace of another’s arms. And so what, he thought, bracing against the cold of the long West Midland winters, if the arms happened to be those of another boy?
    *   *   *
    There had, of course, been no need for Jenkins to summon Abheet Singh; he’d been waiting for him in his office early that Monday morning. Once he’d brought the jeep around they’d headed into the village. They didn’t return to the station for another twelve hours.
    The looting had spread. Stores in the mainly Sikh and Hindu populated city center were locked as of midday. Jenkins imposed a curfew from noon till the next morning. They’d patrolled the streets for hours, chasing after small itinerant fires and skirmishes, crumbs thrown along their path just to taunt them. Jenkins, with Abheet Singh driving, rounded corner after corner only to see the marauding gangs vanish into a narrow alley or a nondescript doorway. They’d race to the end of the street, or the alleyway, and find a silence so deep it was as if the gang had simply vanished into thin air, as if it’d never existed.
    They’d reached one such alley when Jenkins jumped out of the jeep and yelled, “Where the devil did they go?”
    â€œIt’s easy to outrun the English, sir,” Abheet Singh said calmly. “You never go anywhere without your jeeps.”
    So they abandoned it under a peepal tree and set out on foot. By then the sky burned white with heat, the last of the sun’s rage before it began its descent, and the sand blew straight into their eyes. After half an hour of this Jenkins knew it was of no use. They headed back toward the jeep. As they neared the peepal tree Abheet Singh was the first to notice. “Sir, the tires,” he gasped. All four had been slashed. They ran to it as if they could staunch its wounds but the air had let out long ago and the jeep rested, sleepy and bemused, on its axles. They looked around them; the street and the market were deserted.
    â€œAt least the