shout abuse at the man at the gate who delivered that tree and the turkey the previous day.
Christmas lunch was served by Dhruv and another two chefs from the British Club who had been hired for the occasion.
“What an incredible spread of food!” Lily remarked. “Absolutely grand effort,” Roy added, and the two families tucked into the food whilst the servants watched, hungry for the Indian food they had cooked separately for themselves.
Tulsi Devi and Rohini discreetly took small pieces of the turkey and placed them under some roast potatoes on their plates. The Colonel braved the bird and took an extra large portion to compensate. As they tucked into the English food, Roy said, “we’re going to miss India. Really. It’s been such a privilege to work here.”
“But aren’t you excited to be going home?” Tulsi Devi asked.
“It’s not my home yet,” their young daughter Juliet said. “I’ve never been to England.”
“She’s in for a shock,” added Lily. “There’ll be no maidservants over there to clean up, no cooks, no nothing. Juliet will have to learn some independence.”
“We’re all going to have to learn about independence,” the Colonel added sagely. “And we’re going to have to learn that it comes at a price.”
There was an uncomfortable silence before the Colonel continued. “If they divide India and give Jinnah his Pakistan there will be bloodshed like this country has never seen before.”
“They won’t divide India,” Tulsi Devi interrupted, mostly through politeness to their guests. Yet she knew as well as the Colonel that it was only a question of time before some doddery English hand drew a line that would separate India from herself: create Pakistan and create huge upheaval in the process.
“It’s going to happen,” Roy spoke, quietly. “It’s been decided. But God only knows where the division will be.”
There was a knock at the door to break the awkwardness of their political discussions. Dhruv left the table and came back with a group of five giggling girls.
“The children are going to sing Silent Night, announced the Colonel, back in his festive spirit as the commander of events. “Come betis, sing for us.”
Silence.
“Come along now. Sing it for the nice people.”
“They’re shy,” Juliet said.
“This is why it’s called Silent Night, I guess,” Roy laughed.
“You must sing now children, come on.”
Lily started them off, Rohini joined in, and then all the children started singing self-consciously about heavenly peace and the night that a holy infant was born, not in India, not in England, but in some place that none of the children had heard of.
March 1948
“It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East. A new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed…
“We think of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good or ill fortune alike…
“To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy. And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and bind ourselves afresh to her service. JAI HIND!
The Colonel turned the radio off. “Can’t they stop replaying that speech of his? Nothing has improved since this Independence business. As peace-loving citizens we should beg the English to return and restore some order to this place.”
Tulsi Devi continued eating her paranthas at the breakfast table. “It will settle down. It has to. How long can people carry on killing each other? Muslims against Hindus. Everybody against everybody else.”
“As long as people are leaving their homes and losing the people they love they will retaliate.”
Tulsi Devi couldn’t eat with her husband brewing up for an argument, and so she picked up the paper and pretended to read. Her eyes were tired from being woken too early by the morning call to prayer that floated out from behind the walls of the Old Fort where Muslims were temporarily being given refuge and protection. The wailing submission to divine forces had been so heart-piercing, so haunting, that she couldn’t help but pity the Muslims who survived beyond those walls, refugees in their own city.
Her tired eyes rested on The Statesman headlines. More killings, more unrest, more fear, more hatred. The Colonel, not wanting to discard his argument, stood behind her and looked over her shoulder, pointing to the pages of the newspaper. “See what I mean? This fighting is relentless.”
“It’s the fault of your beloved British,” Tulsi Devi responded with unusual pluck. “This business of a divided India was their idea. It was their good-bye present to us.”
“And what good-bye present did we give in return?” asked the Colonel, and both of them, without saying a thing, remembered Christmas Day and their inability to reciprocate the generosity of Lily and Roy.
“Look here,” Tulsi Devi said, pointing to a picture in the paper. An Englishman was standing next to a gangplank in Bombay with a coolie holding a peacock, its legs tied together for the journey. “This was a goodbye gift from a distinguished Indian to his English colleague.”
The Colonel looked at the picture closely and once more he thought about Christmas Day. He thought about the bearer who arrived the evening before with a bird of around the same proportions, diligently plucked so that it resembled a turkey in every way except for a few electric blue feathers on its neck.
Who knows what Lily and Roy would have thought if they’d known what they’d been offered to eat for their final Christmas in India? What would they have said or done? One good thing about Independence, the Colonel thought, is that nobody will ever have to find out.
Background to The Final Christmas, by Bem Le Hunte
I wrote The Final Christmas as a literary accompaniment to a novel I published in 2000, The Seduction of Silence, a story of five generations of an Indian family. A spiritual and emotional journey that traversed 100 years, three continents, this life and the next, The Seduction of Silence flourished with untold stories that couldn’t fit between the jacket sleeves produced by HarperCollins and Penguin, my publishers. The abundance of excess narrative somehow demanded recording. The Final Christmas is just one of the stories that evolved out of my novel: it tells of how the British finally left India, having stayed as uninvited guests for over 200 years.
In The Seduction of Silence every character had a complex relationship with the British, and so in The Final Christmas, each of them translates Nehru’s triumphant ‘Freedom at Midnight’ speech to fit their individual ideologies. I hope you enjoy this short story, and if you do, I’d love to hear what you think of this and The Seduction of Silence, should you be willing to share your response at www.bemlehunte.com. Happy reading and thank you so much for sharing these stories with me!
Praise for The Seduction of Silence
“The Seduction of Silence is a work of persuasive imagination, of such scope, power and narrative charm that it does make you wonder, as with Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry and others, whether all good modern writing has an essential connection with the Indian sub-continent.”
Thomas Keneally, Booker Prize winning author of Schindler’s List
“A splendidly conceived saga weaving the history of an entire culture into the portrait of one family: vivid, compelling, utterly fascinating.”
Kirkus Review, US.
“Passion, grief and glory infuse this novel, which is at once wholly original and yet squarely in the tradition of the great family sagas. In prose as vivid and arresting as a marigold, Le Hunte gives us five generations of seekers. Her account of what they find and what they lose is irresistible. I couldn’t put i
t down.”
Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of March
“This intricate tale moves across continents and time as it maps the reaches of the soul. Is Le Hunte an Anglo-Indian Allende? Or even a female Rushdie? You decide in a very worthwhile read.”
Helen Elliott, Vogue.
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