What You Call Winter

In the Garden Three days before her tenth birthday, Marian Almeida came home unexpectedly early. Usually her afternoons were spent at Uncle Neddie's, who was no uncle of hers at all but the nearest neighbor with a piano for her practice. Of course, Uncle Neddie and his wife and his three unmusical children spent the drowsy stretch of hours before supper curled on narrow mattresses, napping through the merciless heat. The shops were closed, dogs panted under wiry trees, shadows darkly spotted the roads and yards. The servants sifted rice or ground spices; the dancing grains and elliptical rhythm of mortar and pestle lulled even the restless children to slumber. Marian, seated before the scarred wooden box of Uncle Neddie's piano, touched her fingers to the yellowed keys so lightly that she did not make a sound. She practiced her fingering in silence while the household slept. "It shouldn't make a difference, how hard you thump," her mother had decided when she arranged for Marian's practice sessions. "You can just learn theshapesof songs for now." On lesson days, when Marian perched on the glossy black bench of St. Jerome's piano, the noise of her own playing startled her. But Uncle Neddie's wife, known to the neighborhood as Aunty Neddie although it was commonly believed that she must once have enjoyed a name of her own, met Marian at the door with the news that one of the children had fallen ill. "Go on, then." She shooed the girl away. "Tell Mummy not another week, at least. We can't have you carrying anything home." Marian imagined carrying the germs of the sick Neddies in her belly. She thought of the careful way she would have to lower herself into chairs. Her own mother, she'd been told, was carrying twins. The afternoon spun before her, golden and dusty, suddenly free. Marian walked home with a mounting sense of excitement. She had two hours, at least, before her mother finished tutoring, perhaps longer if she stopped off to market. (Marian's daily bouts at the piano lasted ninety minutes, with extra time, her mother reasoned, for imagining the sounds.) Usually, Marian had just enough time to change out of her school uniform skirt before her mother arrived and homework began. Sometimes, if she hurried to reach St. Hilary Road before six, she might run into her father, home from the university but on his way out again to meet his friends at the Santa Clara Gymkhana. Perhaps this was the day she could go with him, she thought. Some of his friends were Parsees, named for their jobs and not for saints like Marian and all the Indian Catholics. Her father's name was Francis, but the Parsees called him "Frinkie," which made him laugh in a way he never laughed at home. For a moment Marian thought of her brother, Simon, two years younger and still trapped at his desk, and she felt a pang of sympathy that threatened to spoil her own enjoyment. Twice a week Simon took special classes after school to prepare him for seminary, which both of them agreed was rotten luck. But every second day he was allowed to bowl for the cricket team, she reminded herself. Nobody had ever suggested he take up piano, Marian further realized, and found she could once again rejoice in her good fortune. The road flew beneath her feet in jerks and rushes as she began to skippast the tall gates of St. Jerome's Church, where families of beggars held out their hands to the Catholic ladies. One small girl, whose hair was thick and matted, the color of clay, looked sorrowfully as Marian sped by. "Wait, madam!" the child called in English, and Marian, shocked, stopped and turned to face her. Marian and her family and most of the middle-class Catholic families spoke EnglJones, Nalini is the author of 'What You Call Winter' with ISBN 9781400077953 and ISBN 1400077958.