Kalpana's Dream Read online

  Kalpana’s

  Dream

  Also by Judith Clarke

  Angels Passing By

  Night Train

  The Lost Day

  The Heroic Life of Al Capsella

  Al Capsella and the Watchdogs

  Al Capsella on Holidays

  Friend of My Heart

  The Boy on the Lake

  Panic Stations

  The Ruin of Kevin O’Reilly

  Luna Park at Night

  Big Night Out

  Wolf on the Fold

  Starry Nights

  Kalpana’s

  Dream

  JUDITH CLARKE

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  First published in 2004

  Copyright © Judith Clarke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposesprovided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Clarke, Judith, 1943 – .

  Kalpana’s dream.

  ISBN 1 74114 253 9.

  1. Intergenerational relations – Juvenile fiction.

  2. Self-realization – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover photograph by Susan Gordon-Brown

  Cover and text design by Jo Hunt

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Doctor Ignatius Grace’s biblical compliments to his wife and daughter come from ‘Song of Solomon’, King James Version of the Bible.

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  For Erica and Susan

  and Nirmolini – with thanks

  and to Rashmi Desai

  for help with the Hindi

  Contents

  1 Little Again

  2 Kalpana’s Dream

  3 Count Dracula’s Essay

  4 Sweet Lucy

  5 Nirmolini

  6 Boss! Boss! Boss!

  7 Nani’s Coming

  8 Ms Dallimore at Home

  9 ‘Is That Your Homework?’

  10 Awkward

  11 Dear Sumati

  12 A Spot of Writing

  13 Mum’s Going Loopy

  14 Knobbly Knees

  15 Trouble Sleeping

  16 How Many Words?

  17 Lucy Crying

  18 White Sari

  19 Find Happiness: Retrain

  20 Nani’s Film

  21 At the Zoo

  22 Uran Khatola

  23 Nani Learns to Fly

  24 Dr Vladimir Goole

  25 The Night Before

  26 A Shock for Mrs Drayner

  1

  Little Again

  ‘Know what? We’re little again!’ gasped Kate.

  Neema couldn’t get a breath to answer. She was too hot, and her mouth was dry from the kind of panic she’d last felt on her first day at primary school, when through the window of the infants’ room she’d watched her mum walk down the path, through the gate and out into the street, leaving her behind. She didn’t feel herself at all.

  Which was what Kate had meant, of course. Last year, just six weeks ago in December, Kate and Neema had been the big girls of Short Street Primary – now, on their first day at Wentworth High, they were little again, right at the bottom of the school.

  They felt like crying; they couldn’t even find the room for their next lesson, which was English with Ms Dallimore.

  ‘Where is it?’ wailed Neema. ‘Where on earth’s Block A?’

  ‘I don’t know, ’ Kate answered dully. The photocopied map they’d been given that morning at assembly seemed too crowded and difficult to understand.

  So they were lost as well as little. Wentworth High was huge: a crazy jumble of unfamiliar buildings, courtyards and playgrounds, steep steps up and down the hillsides, echoing covered ways. They’d been running since the first bell at lunchtime, like puzzled rats caught in a maze. At any moment the second bell would go, and there was no-one to ask for directions. The playgrounds, noisy and crowded only a few minutes back, were now silent and deserted; everyone had vanished, swallowed down into the school.

  They stumbled at last into a small paved courtyard. On one side was a low grey building Neema thought she might have seen this morning on the Year Seven tour.

  ‘I think that’s the library.’

  ‘I know, ’ Kate snapped, exasperated, wild eyes almost popping from her head. ‘But where’s Block A?’

  ‘Lost?’

  They spun around. As if by magic, three kids had appeared on the steps of the library: two girls, one fair and one dark, like Snow White and Rose Red, and a tall, thin boy, too gangly for a prince, with a battered old skateboard tucked beneath his arm.

  Neema felt an odd little flicker of recognition when she saw the boy. Surely she knew him from somewhere? But her head felt so thick and heavy, and her ears were buzzing from all that running round, and when she glanced at the boy again – no, of course she didn’t know him, she’d never seen him before. Sheep, shepherd, new lamb – the words darted unexpectedly across her mind, as if the sight of the boy had brought them there. Why? He didn’t look the least bit sheep-like.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked them, and now she thought there was something familiar in the kindness of his voice, and the way the skin round his eyes crinkled when he smiled . . .

  ‘Room 27, Block A, ’ she heard Kate saying. ‘English with Ms Dallimore.’

  ‘Ms Dallimore!’ Rose Red rolled her eyes, and Snow White murmured, ‘Oh dear!’

  ‘The Bride of Dracula!’ said Rose Red.

  ‘The Bride of Dracula?’ echoed Neema faintly.

  ‘Is she that little pointy one?’ asked Kate, alarmed. ‘In the–’ ‘In the hat?’ finished Neema. They’d both noticed this teacher at assembly, a stringy little woman, all edges and sharp angles, wearing a stiff orange dress which resembled an overall, and a funny floppy red velvet hat. Beneath the hat a pair of vivid black eyes had glowered round at everyone. What subject did she teach? Whatever it was, Neema and Kate had prayed she wouldn’t be teaching them.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Rose Red giggled. ‘That’s Mrs Drayner – Draino, we call her. She’s the chief school cleaner.’

  ‘She always comes to assemblies.’

  ‘She says she wants to see the kind of individuals who can turn a school into a tip.’

  ‘Ms Dallimore’s the one with the dark red hair.’

  ‘In the long swirly skirt–’ ‘The pale one–’ ‘Very pale.’

  ‘And getting paler–’ Snow White and Rose Red exchanged knowing glances. The boy with the skateboard looked away, and as he did Neema thought there was something familiar in the shape of his fine, narrow nose.

  ‘Ms Dallimore looks all right, ’ said Rose Red, suddenly reassuring, a
s if she might have said too much.

  ‘No harm in her, you’d think, ’ agreed Snow White. ‘Except for those essays of hers, of course.’

  ‘Now they are tricky.’

  ‘How?’ asked Kate uneasily. She hated English; it was her worst subject; she was simply no good with words, her brain seemed to set in concrete when she had to write down her thoughts. ‘How are they tricky?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Thoughtfully, Snow White twirled a lock of her long blonde hair. ‘Well, it’s like, they look easy, but when you start, you find they’re really hard.’

  ‘I reckon He sets them, you know?’ Rose Red whispered to Snow White.

  ‘Could be, ’ agreed Snow White.

  He? Who was He? Neema and Kate felt more lost than ever, as if, besides the maze of buildings, classrooms, new subjects and new teachers, there was an extra hidden world at Wentworth High which they’d have to get to know. It was all too much. ‘Oh, ’ sighed Kate wearily.

  ‘Don’t worry, ’ said Snow White kindly. ‘She won’t give you an essay for ages, seeing as you’re new.’

  ‘And she mightn’t be here for long, anyway, ’ added Rose Red mysteriously.

  Why? Neema wondered. Why wouldn’t she be? There wasn’t time to ask; the second bell rang out.

  ‘Oops! Gotta go!’ Snow White and Rose Red rushed up the steps to the library.

  ‘But where’s–’ ‘Block A?’ said the boy. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ He led them to a small flight of steps at the corner of the courtyard. Shepherded them, thought Neema, though it wasn’t a word she’d normally have used.

  ‘Down there, see?’ He smiled at them again, that smile Neema felt she knew. ‘That building at the bottom is Block A. And Room 27 is the first one on your left, in through the big glass doors.’

  ‘Did you see how short those girls’ skirts were?’ exclaimed Kate, as they clattered down the steps. ‘They were heaps above the knees. I told Mum, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I’m going to take mine up the minute I get home.’

  Neema didn’t reply. If she’d been listening to Kate properly she would have said there was no way she was taking up her skirt. She liked it long; it covered her big knobbly knees. But Neema wasn’t listening. She was still thinking about the boy with the skateboard, wondering how a person could seem so strangely familiar, when, surely, you’d never seen him in your life before.

  Inside the library, Snow White and Rose Red settled themselves at a small table near the window. Their real names were Sarah Dunne and Ivy Stevenson, they were in Year Eight, and they’d both had Ms Dallimore for English only the year before.

  ‘Poor kids, ’ observed Sarah thoughtfully, as she arranged her folders on the table.

  Ivy was frowning. She’d just found an old sandwich in the bottom of her school bag, left over from last term. ‘Yuk! What poor kids?’

  ‘Those two little girls in the courtyard. Did you see how long their skirts were? Year Sevens, eh? Remember when we were new?’

  ‘Oh, don’t remind me!’

  ‘Hey, look!’ Sarah pointed to the window. Out in the courtyard a tall red-haired lady in a long swirly skirt was hurrying towards the steps that led down to Block A.

  ‘She’s late again.’

  ‘Mmm. Perhaps she’s been out to lunch with her boyfriend. With Him.’

  Ivy studied the teacher, frowning. ‘Do you think it’s true, what people say?’ she asked Sarah. ‘That her boyfriend really is Count Dracula?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘Could be.’

  ‘No-one’s ever seen him though – only that big black car that picks her up from school. It could be anyone behind those tinted windows. Might be her mummy, even.’

  Sarah grinned, craning her neck for a last glimpse of Ms Dallimore. ‘She’s definitely getting paler, though – and in the summertime!’

  Ivy nodded. ‘Oh, very definitely.’

  At another table in the library the boy with the skateboard sat thinking about the slender dark-haired girl he’d met in the courtyard a few minutes back, the girl who’d sent a strange little shiver of recognition tingling down his spine. The boy’s name was Gull Oliver, and though he was in Year Eight he was new to Wentworth High.

  His skateboard sat beside him, propped against his bag. ‘Who was she, mate?’ he asked it softly. ‘Who?’

  Someone he’d known a long time ago, thought Gull, so that now she looked entirely different: that was the sort of thing that was always happening to him these days.

  There was a fairy story he’d read when he was little, about some guy who’d fallen into an enchanted sleep beneath a mountainside for years and years and years – and when he woke up, no-one knew him, and everything was changed. It was a little like that with him. He hadn’t been asleep, of course; it was simply that when he was halfway though Grade One at Short Street Primary, Dad’s job had taken the whole family away to Germany for seven years. It was the strangest thing, how people you’d last seen as little kids were now almost grown-up, how faces had lengthened and hair grown darker and voices deepened; and yet there was always something familiar about them, so that after a few minutes you realised who they were. With the dark-haired girl it was the eyes: he’d seen those eyes before, a deep clear brown with tiny flecks of gold, fringed by dark sooty lashes and fine arched brows. Yet he couldn’t remember who she was, and he knew from that funny little tingle that had fluttered down his spine that she must have been someone special to him, back when he was six years old. And if she was special, why couldn’t he remember?

  Gull frowned. The way he couldn’t remember was a little like losing something. When you mislaid some small object you didn’t much care about, you always found it quickly; but when one of your treasures went missing, you could search and search all over and it was nowhere to be found. ‘We’ll find her, mate, ’ he whispered to the skateboard. ‘We’ll find out who she is, you’ll see.’

  2

  Kalpana’s Dream

  It was one o’clock on a brilliant summer’s afternoon when Neema and Kate walked down the corridor of Block A towards their first class with Ms Dallimore. But far away in a little country town in India, where Neema’s great-grandmother lived, it was still early in the morning.

  Her name was Kalpana, and she’d been up for hours.

  She always rose early; old people didn’t need much sleep: there were too many memories, nipping and twitching, tugging you awake. And dreams: two nights ago Kalpana had been young again; she’d felt the gentle touch of her mother’s hands at her waist, folding the pleats of the marriage sari; she’d seen her mother’s face, with tears standing in her eyes. ‘Please Ma, ’ she’d whispered, ‘please don’t cry.’

  ‘Tears of happiness, ’ her mother had replied.

  Kalpana saw many faces in her dreams, but never the one she wished most of all to see: the face of her young husband, who’d died when he was barely twenty. No, not once had she seen her Raj’s face, and even its memory was fading.

  She crossed to the window and stood there. Everything outside seemed smaller today: the cobbled courtyard, the tamarind tree, even the big iron gates that screened the house from the road. Smaller, and lonely too – abandoned, as if she had already gone away.

  Because last night Kalpana had made up her mind. She would do it, she would go; she would fly to Australia to see her great-granddaughter, Nirmolini. It was a whole nine years since she’d seen her last, and the child would be twelve now, almost grown.

  She would travel by herself, she was determined on that. When you were old, you had to do new things. Her family would fuss, of course: her nephews and grandnephews, her daughter Usha most of all. They would want to come with her, carrying her suitcase and shawl, dogging her footsteps, telling her what to do. Let them fuss! She was going on her own!

  ‘Ah!’

  Kalpana turned. Her old friend Sumati stood in the doorway, barefoot, a giant pail of washing hanging from one arm. There were washermen in plenty in their little town, but Sumati distrusted them all.
‘Thieves and liars, every one!’ She preferred to do her washing in her big old laundry pails, exactly as her mother and grandmother had done theirs, in their small rock-strewn village way up in the hills.

  When they were children, Sumati had been Kalpana’s little nurse; and when they were grown-up she’d become Usha’s nurse. Now she and Kalpana were old, Sumati was more like a big sister – a rather bossy one.

  Sumati took one look at Kalpana and set the pail down with a clang. ‘So you have decided.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sumati clapped her hands. ‘I knew. The moment I saw your face, I knew. And you will go on your own?’

  Kalpana nodded.

  A wicked grin lit Sumati’s leathery old face. ‘Ah!’ she crowed, waving one hand in an easterly direction, towards the new part of town where Kalpana’s nephews and grand-nephews lived in their big modern houses that Kalpana found ugly and cold. ‘There will be much squealing over there, ’ Sumati said gleefully.

  ‘Let them squeal, ’ replied Kalpana. ‘What else can they do? They can’t lock me up, can they?’ She grinned back at her friend. ‘We are in modern times.’

  ‘Exactly so, ’ replied Sumati, ‘modern times.’ Then she added slyly, ‘Your daughter will not like it, either.’

  Kalpana shook her head. ‘Poor Usha.’

  ‘She will come hurrying from Delhi to bother and fuss and boss. Ah, these teachers! Always boss, boss, boss.’

  ‘How would you know?’ asked Kalpana, smiling. ‘You never went to school.’

  ‘Thanks be to Heaven! But the village school was near to my father’s house. I passed it daily – such things went on there in that place! Small boys hardly taller than this’, Sumati gestured at the laundry pail, ‘slapped about the ears for talking, or getting answers wrong. What foolishness was that? Everyone knows a slap will make the thoughts fly from your head. Of course, your Usha would not slap; she was always a kindly child.’ She sucked her teeth and frowned. ‘But bossy, still.’

  ‘Bossy, ’ Kalpana agreed. She paused and then added, ‘You’re sure you don’t want to come with me, Sumati?’