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well her students did, she was never made a senior teacher. Finally, when shecomplained, the Head told her that she should have stayed in the tea gardens."The tea gardens - is that the English equivalent of our rose garden?" askedthe Headmaster.Joan smiled. "Perhaps. My husband was an engineer in the DaIjeeling teagardens."She didn't add details. It all seemed so unreal now: the whist drives and bridgeevenings, tennis parties and moonlight picnics. They were like guests in their ownhouse - with a mali for the garden, a dhobi for the washing, a cook, a sweeperand a house boy. Their son was away at boarding school."I see," said the Headmaster, rising to his feet to show the interview was at anend. "What an exotic background." He had no other questions.So she stayed, grew used to wearing a cardigan in the summer and complainedlike everyone else about the weather. She bought a maisonette, a peculiarly Englisharrangement of half a house with a pocket handkerchief garden. She planted palewatercolour crocus for the spring and showy dahlias for the autumn. She learnedto cut wafer-thin slices of roast beef and cook fat, fluffy Yorkshire puddings forEnglish friends.Joan still remembered how her cook had cried when she told her that she wasleaving for England."The memsahib will starve - she can't cook.""I can learn," Joan replied."The memsahib will die of poisoning.""Poisoning?""The English eat in the street out of newspaper."Many years later Joan still laughed when she saw the English eating fish andchips with their faces bent over the newspaper wrapping, like horses with nosebags.She missed her son and his wife, but they'd chosen to go to Australia. They hadtwo girls whom she'd never seen except in photos of them blowing out birthdaycandles or frowning at the sun.Her son had been one of the young men in the Calcutta police who patrolledthe streets during the Hindu-Muslim riots. When the British left India he wasquestioned about his loyalty and accused of protecting British interests in the strugglefor independence. He received hate mail warning that his name was on a death listof Anglo Indian policemen. He was worried about his wife. Joan tried to persuadehim to come to England with her, but he said he was tired of being caught in acolonial tug of war.When she was due to retire her son urged her to come to Australia for a holiday.She went to the travel agency and came back with brochures of shocking blue skiesand immense twisted trees with sharp narrow leaves turned away from the sun. Therewas a photograph of a tree with spiky red flowers that looked like brushes. Shehad never seen anything like it.She sent the photo to her son to ask what it was. He wrote back with a photoof a "bottlebrush" from his garden.She couldn't imagine having anything as strange and beautiful in her back garden.And then something about the intensity of the colour shocked her into rememberingthe bright berries that grew in Simla. She couldn't recall their name and as she triedand failed to remember she realised that this was the first time she had thoughtabout Simla since she'd left India ...During the war years the school where Joan taught, Entally Convent, had beenevacuated to the foothills of the Himalayas. The Hindus believed that the gods livedin the hill. In summer it seemed natural to share this belief as she heard the coolrush of water or the clear notes of some hand made pipe. But even in summer she24 WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989