“I think those are from the famine,” Constance replied with uncharacteristic solemnity.
“What famine?”
She watched the path as it twisted across the landscape under the looming clouds.“It was thirty years ago.A third of the people died.”
“Here?”Neil studied the landscape around them, which did seem to be very sparsely populated.
Constance’s eyes were sad.“In Odisha.”
“A third ofOdisha?But that must have been…”
“Over a million people,” Constance filled in.
Neil reeled as he tried to absorb the sheer scale of what she described.He thought of other empty buildings that he had seen as they had traveled from Puri to Nandapur.He hadn’t paid them much mind at the time, but now those collapsing walls and broken fences took on a terrible significance.“But…how?”
“There was a drought.The authorities didn’t have enough reserves to feed everyone.”
Her words caught in Neil’s ear.He remembered a radical classmate of his at Cambridge who had railed about the impact of British policy on the horrific famine in Ireland during the middle of the century.“Didn’t have enough—or couldn’t be bothered redistributing what they had?”
Constance watched the ruined homes recede behind them.“Aai told me that my grandfather believed very firmly that the administration could have done more than they did.”
“Your grandfather was English, wasn’t he?”Neil asked.
“He was the Agent for Nandapur—that’s the chief local administrative officer, representing the Raj to the royal court.It was all very scandalous.Indian Civil Service members weren’t supposed to marry natives—even royal natives.I think he nearly lost his post over it.”
“When was this?”Neil asked.
“Just after the mutiny.I still don’t know exactly how it came to happen—if Aai pursued my grandfather because she thought an alliance with an Englishman would protect the family or because she wanted to escape from some other match that her father had arranged for her.Or maybe she just fell for him.One can’t always account for love.”
Neil gazed at Constance’s elegant profile.“I suppose not.”
“After the famine, my grandfather told Aai that he couldn’t do it anymore—serve as Agent and see all this suffering but not really be able to change anything about it.He asked her if she would go back to England with him.She agreed.She thought there would be more opportunities for my mother and her sisters there.”
“Your mother has sisters?”
Constance shot him a wry look.“She has three of them.”
“And they all live in England?”
“Well, all except Auntie Hannah.She moved to Canada.”
“I didn’t realize you had aunts.”Neil felt a touch ashamed at the admission.
“I would hardly have expected you to investigate my family tree while I was painting glue onto the seat of your chair,” Constance cheerfully replied.
“I had forgotten about that one,” Neil grumbled.
Constance’s eyes sparkled wickedly.“How could you forget that one?You had to crawl out of your own trousers to escape.”
Neil ran a hand over his face.“Yes, well.I suppose it just got lost in between all the other ways you attempted to torment me.”
He wondered how much else he had overlooked about Constance during those early years.He might have grown up with her, but he’d hardly been quizzing her about her hopes and dreams between rescuing his scorched term papers and shaking moles out of his boots.In the brief few weeks since they had become reacquainted, he was constantly stumbling across new discoveries, all of them adding to his respect and admiration for the woman who rode beside him—astride, in her damnably well-fitting trousers.
Neil forced his attention from the curve of her thigh back to the road.
“A million people,” he said, unable to shake the thought from his mind.“How could anyone let something like that happen?If a famine had threatened to take out a third of the population of Essex, I should imagine a great deal more would’ve been done about it!Did this one not matter as much because they were Indians?”
Constance studied the achingly green landscape, painted here and there with sunlight where it broke through the clouds.“I doubt the English did as much for Odisha as we might have done for our own people.”She caught herself.“Their own people?I’m not really sure which side I’m supposed to be on in all of this.”
