Lonerism

Indian Summers

A.N. Some of you have probably read the unedited version of this from a few years ago. It's updated and better than ever before. I hope you enjoy it.

Indian Summers

The year was 1946, a hot summer for the sweltering seaside provinces of British India. I'd been stuck here with my father, one of the imperial officers of the Royal Navy, who'd been reposted to Bombay a few months ago. It was all last minute and he couldn't find anyone to care for his twelve year old boy, so he had to grapple me along with him. It was something to do with the growing tension there, all that blabber about Indian independence from the British. I was too young to really know what was going on, to know the kind of chaos that was about to erupt across the country.

It had only been my father and I for a long time now. The rest of the Mountbilling family had been bombed out in the great German air-raids they called the Blitz. I was being tutored in the Scottish Highlands at the time, as the eldest in the family. It was in one of those quiet and small academies no one's ever really heard of, and when the news had reached me, the war was already over and my entire family had been dead two or three years.

After that, my father, a man I hadn't seen for half a decade, had plucked me from school and told me that they were all dead. The names ring in my ears today, the names of my younger siblings, all dead. The idea that they were dead hardly even affected me. I knew it should have made me feel something like guilt or sadness, but it didn't. The only thing that the Mountbillings were to me was a far-off notion of a family or a home. The people who paid my tuition fees and who were waiting for me in London. If it wasn't the academy in the Scottish Highlands, then it was the boarding school in the Cotswolds before it.

I hardly knew any of them, had only seen them on a handful of occasions in my entire life. Hearing that they had all been blitzed by the Germans almost felt like the death of an estranged friend or benefactor. I felt something, a weak pang, but other than that, perhaps just regret that they were dead, that I never got to know any of them. All that was left for me now was my father.

His name was Arthur Mountbilling, a ranking official in the Royal Navy. My own name was Henry Mountbilling. After the war was won, he was posted back in England, but soon after was moved to Bombay. I remembered the day we had to move, the newspaper my father was reading on the train to London had caught my eye. An Indian man splashed across the cover. Mahatma Gandhi - they called him The Great Soul of India.

The month was August, when I met a scrappy young boy by the name of Anwar. He was a quiet thing lurking on one of the many filthy corners in Bombay, in the alleys and the shadows. No shoes, rags for clothes, and bullish black hair freckled up in all places.

I first spotted him from the bedroom window of the manor - all that was still standing from the spice plantation our family once owned here. He was creeping around the maze-like alleyways that encircled the back streets of the city like a cat, and caught my attention for no particular reason at all, until he jumped the wall and trekked his way up to the manor.

The time was nearing midnight, and I'd been up reading when I'd heard his rattling and went to the window to inspect. I'd been watching him the whole time. It wasn't until he climbed through and unlocked the window on the lowest floor that I realised what he was doing. He was robbing us.

I'd dropped my book and, after taking a moment to think, decided to deal with the riff-raff myself. I'd grabbed the metal poker by the fireplace and unlocked the bedroom door. Creeping down the stairwell, I could hear him in the far kitchen, probably looking for the expensive silverware. I slipped into the room and turned the nozzle on the wall. He jumped as light splashed around the room, his eyes falling onto me.