Emeralds Included: A Jana Bibi Adventure (Jana Bibi Adventures) - Hardcover

Woodman, Betsy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805093583 ISBN 13: 9780805093582

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2014

Synopsis

Feathers fly and cultures clash as the Jolly Grant House prepares to welcome a special delivery from Scotland

In the third installment of the Jana Bibi series, Betsy Woodman takes us back to the Jolly Grant house for the arrival of Jana's son, Jack, from Scotland, and his Hungarian bride-to-be, Katarina Esterhazy. The whole gang is excited to welcome their international visitors―and Jana is determined to repair the house to Jack's high standards and those of her grandfather, from whom she inherited the eccentric building. But this puts a strain on Jana, both emotionally and financially, and she risks her most prized and valuable possession―the (surprisingly real!) emeralds she got from the Treasure Emporium―to help her through it.

Jana saved the town from a government dam in Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes and foiled an international bird-smuggling ring in Love Potion Number 10, but in Emeralds Included, Jana faces her biggest challenges yet: preparing for her son's arrival and planning a wedding in the upside-down town of Hamara Nagar!

About this title

About the Author:

Betsy Woodman is the author of Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes and Love Potion Number 10. She spent ten childhood years in India, studied in France, Zambia, and the United States, and now lives in her native New Hampshire. She has contributed nonfiction pieces and several hundred book reviews to various publications, and was a writer and editor for the award-winning documentary series, Experiencing War, produced for the Library of Congress and aired on Public Radio International.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Best Foot Forward

News from Glasgow

Bundled up in a heavy cardigan over a wool pullover over a warm jersey, Jana took Jack’s letter and settled down in the window seat of the salon of the Jolly Grant House. She was grateful for the midafternoon sun streaming in. Her son’s dutiful missives from Scotland had become quite scarce recently, and she’d wondered why. Had he been sick? Working too hard at that engineering job?

A moment later, she did a double take. Had Jack really used the word "marvelous"? That was pretty gushy for him. She reread: "We plan to be . . ." There it was, in plain, unmistakable English and Jack’s strong, forward-slanting handwriting.

"Mr. Ganguly!" she cried. "Jack’s going to be married."

Her parrot detected the excitement in her voice; he picked up on any emotion, good or bad. He stopped tearing at the knot in the rope dangling from the roof of his cage, flapped his emerald-green wings, and cried, "Jack zindabad!"

"Yes," said Jana, "long live Jack!"

She turned back to the letter and read on, hungry for details. Just who was the lady who had captured her son’s heart? Here, in her small town high in the Himalayas, more than four thousand miles away from Jack, Jana was not able to pepper him with questions and get immediate answers.

The things Jack saw fit to mention or omit in letters never ceased to amaze her. Such as the big promotion he had gotten at his engineering firm the year before—six months had gone by before he’d modestly sent her a tiny printed announcement.

So, how long ago had he met . . . ah, here was her name. Katarina. Katarina Esterhazy. Goodness, Jana wondered, what nationality is she?

Jack, obligingly if surprisingly, had anticipated this question. "She’s Hungarian, but she’s been here several years. She got out by the skin of her teeth in 1956."

Well, wasn’t this all most intriguing! Her more-Scottish-than-thou son was marrying an Eastern European who had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, and not one of the young women he met at dinner parties around Glasgow.

"As an unattached male," Jack had once revealed, "one is invited to fill in more often than one might expect."

Jana could well imagine the invitations coming in fast and furious. And why not? Jack Laird was definitely a catch. She considered his assets: the MacPherson castle outside Glasgow and the MacPherson fortune, first-class degrees in all his studies, the solid position with the established engineering firm. Not to mention extremely pleasant good looks, if she did say so herself. Jack was a highly successful combination of his American father’s sandy hair and athletic build, Jana’s good bone structure, and his own steady gray-blue eyes.

Granted, Jack was reserved, even a bit shy, and that could be a drawback when looking for a mate. She wondered whether Katarina was outgoing and had managed to coax Jack out of his shell. Or perhaps Katarina too was shy, and the two of them had been drawn to each other’s quiet ways. Had it been a case of opposites attracting or similar people finding that they saw the world the same way?

Moreover, what did Katarina look like? Jack, the wretch, hadn’t even put in a photograph. "Hungarian" conjured up two contradictory images in Jana’s mind—people fleeing with battered suitcases, and the ultra-sultry Zsa Zsa Gabor, blond with prominent cheekbones and a come-hither look in her eye. If my son has fallen in love with a Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jana mused, he’s seeking the opposite of me. She glanced into the mirror at a hazel-eyed woman of sixty, whose olive-colored skin and braided curly hair did not often see the inside of a beauty salon. Plus, she usually dressed for comfort rather than style—layers of sensible Western clothing in winter, salwar kameez in summer. Not exactly Zsa Zsa’s evening gowns, with their plunging décolleté.

Jana flipped over the aerogramme and found even more news. "We’re hoping that a visit in mid-May would be convenient for you," Jack had written.

"Hoorah," Jana cried. "High time!"

"High time!" Mr. Ganguly repeated.

"Come on, Mr. G," said Jana, "let’s go tell Mary."

A moment later, the parrot was on her shoulder and they were heading out of the house to the detached kitchen on the far edge of the side yard.

Mary, at this moment, was not ideally situated for getting big news. She was absorbed in cleaning a chicken she’d bought this morning from the wallah who came around twice a week, shortly after sunup. Fortunately, Mary did not have to behead the chicken; the wallah did that beforehand, as a special favor. However, she still needed to pluck it and remove its entrails, a messy job. The large canvas apron she wore over her old white work sari was spattered with red, like the abstract paintings one saw in the Illustrated Weekly of India.

Mary was a sturdy South Indian woman with a round face, dark eyes, and a smattering of pox scars across her cheekbones. Strands of black hair now escaped from the bun at the nape of her neck. Brandishing a blood-smeared knife, she was an intimidating sight.

On seeing the pair of disembodied chicken feet on the floor—or maybe it was Mary with the knife—Mr. Ganguly went into a series of piercing screeches. Jana beat a hasty retreat back into the side yard. Mary wiped her knife on her apron, took the apron off, rinsed her hands, and came out, too.

Meanwhile, the noise brought the other members of the household up from various corners of the compound. Twelve-year-old Tilku appeared first, followed by old Munar, the sweeper, his broom of long reeds in his hand. Last of all, a very groggy Lal Bahadur Pun arrived; Jana felt bad about interrupting the Gurkha’s sleep, since he’d been up all night at his watchman’s post, keeping them all safe. At least this let her tell everyone the news at the same time.

She looked around at the circle of puzzled faces and said, "Everybody—I have an announcement. Something you will be happy about." She paused to give them a chance to guess.

"Madam is getting married," said Lal Bahadur Pun and Mary together.

Jana burst into laughter; she knew that this was their fondest hope. Their faces fell when she said, "No, not me. But . . ."

Mary’s glance fell on the aerogramme Jana still had in her hand. "Jack sahib?"

"Yes!"

There was a chorus of "Jack sahib ki jai!" and "Mubarak ho!" and Tilku did a couple of dance steps. Then came a burst of questions: "Where, Jana mem? When? Who is the lady?"

"I’m not sure when," said Jana. "I think in Scotland, though."

Tilku did not let a lack of information deter him from making suggestions. He said brightly, "We will all fly to U.K. in an airplane and go to the wedding, yes? Maybe one of those double-decker planes, where one can sit upstairs or down." Tilku, who aimed to be a pilot, collected pictures of aircraft.

Lal Bahadur Pun announced, "Yes, the best thing is for us all to go to the U.K. I will compose a tune and play pipes for the wedding march."

Munar merely murmured, "Wedding, good. Thanks be to God."

Mary, however, weighed in forcefully with her own idea: "They should come here for their wedding. And then they should stay forever."

"I don’t know if we can talk them into having the wedding here," Jana said, "but they are coming for a visit, soon."

This brought another round of cheers.

"When?" Mary demanded to know. "When are they coming?"

"In May, if all goes well," said Jana.

"Good." Mary grinned broadly in anticipation. "By then it will be nice and warm."

"But I’ll be in boarding school!" Tilku wailed. "This is no good! How can they come then?"

"You can see them on term break," Jana said. "Or maybe they could go visit you at your school. Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. You won’t miss everything."

Meanwhile, Mary was mulling over another problem. "Jana mem," she said, "where will they stay? Jack sahib stayed at the hotel last time he came."

Jana hesitated barely a second. "They’re staying here," she said firmly. "Mary, when you’re finished with the chicken, shall we go around the whole house and see what we need to do to get ready?"

She went back into the house to look for the clipboard and a pencil and pad of paper and swapped her cardigan for a coat. When she’d moved into the Jolly Grant House, almost two years earlier, she’d done a lot of repairs, not to mention chasing out the troop of monkeys that had been there for years, and cleaning up the mess they had created. She spent lots of money before she even moved in, but the lower two floors of the lookout tower had never received any attention. The second year she was in residence, a pipe had burst in the large main room that served as her living room, dining room, and fortune-telling salon, and a good number of rupees had gone just to get things back to scratch.

This year, she vowed, the house was going to be perfect. It was going to be up to the standard of her meticulous, observant son, and it was going to give a wonderful welcome to her Hungarian future daughter-in-law. The house and all the people in it would put their best foot forward.

A Prayer to Grandfather Jolly

By the time Mary had found Jana at the front gate of the compound, a cold February wind had come up and the shadows were lengthening. Jana tried to write with her gloves on, finally getting too annoyed and stuffing the gloves into her coat pocket. Mr. Ganguly was plucking at a strand of her hair.

"It’s a good thing Jack and Katarina aren’t coming until May," Jana said to Mary. "I don’t see any way to put central heating in this house. Any affordable way, that is."

She was already realizing that "perfection" was a relative term. Perfection in Hamara Nagar was not what perfection in Delhi would be, or Scotland, let alone some far-off paragon of luxury such as America.

"Still," she said to Mary, "we want to make things as pukka and comfortable as possible."

Jana tried to put herself in the shoes of a complete stranger—Katarina’s shoes—and see everything about her home as if for the first time. Stepping out into the street, she cast her gaze on the ornamental wall surrounding the entire compound, the brick pillars flanking the metal front gate, and the shiny brass plaque engraved with "Jolly Grant House, 1890." All seemed in order until she took a close look at the sign that read, "Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes." In just two years, sun and rain had taken their toll. The feathers of the parrot pictured in the corner had gone from brilliant emerald to pale yellow, and the ruby-red beak had turned pinkish gray.

"We can’t have fading paint, can we now, Mr. Ganguly?" Jana said. "We want the sign to look as good as you do." Also, she was struggling to dispel a niggling worry that her future daughter-in-law might be put off by her small fortune-telling business. She hoped that Jack had already explained it to his fiancée.

Next, she stepped through the gate to survey the general appearance of the house and felt a rush of affection for this fantasy designed by her maternal grandfather, Ramsay "Jolly" Grant. The exuberant spirit of old Jolly seemed present in the lattices and gables and verandahs, and in the six-sided tower attached to the southeast corner.

People in town were proud of this eccentric structure; all one had to tell a team of rickshaw pullers or a porter was "Grant sahib’s house" and they knew where to go, even though old Jolly had been dead for fifty years. Jana’s friend Rambir, writing in the local newspaper, had mentioned the house as one of the historic spots that tourists should visit (and get their cards read in the bargain).

Of course, the sniffier side of Jana’s family had always referred to the place as "Grant’s Folly." Jana’s paternal grandfather, James MacPherson, had described it as an "Indo-Hebridean vulgarity"—without ever having seen the place in person.

No one, however, regardless of their taste in architecture, could deny that the setting was majestic. The red corrugated roofs of the house and the conical hat of the tower made a romantic silhouette against the forested hills and the enormous expanse of sky.

"Jana mem," Mary said, bringing her back to her immediate surroundings. "Courtyard needs weeding."

"Oh, Mary, of course you’re right," Jana said. "It always needs weeding. Why are weeds so much quicker than people?" Her eye fell on a broken flowerpot and then strayed to the bench, which was encrusted with bird droppings.

She added "Clean up courtyard" to the list.

"All right, let’s go inside," Jana said, and she and Mary went through the ornately carved wooden front door. Jana reached for the old-fashioned light switch.

"Light bulb out in chandelier," she wrote. "Umbrella stand broken. Coat rack too small. Wall needs touch-up paint."

They crossed to the far end of that hall, where a short passageway jutted off diagonally toward the tower. Through a door that also needed paint, they entered a large, echoing room, which had an exit on the far wall to provide access to the side yard and cookhouse. Mary crossed the room and tugged on the door, which finally opened with a long, complaining screech.

"This door always sticks, Jana mem," Mary said. "It’s hard to go in and out when you’re carrying a tray of food."

Jana went around the perimeter of the room trying to open the ten pairs of French windows; the curly wrought-iron handle of one of them fell off in her hand. She grimaced at the peeling paint of the frames and grimly jotted down "Replace all windows in dining room."

Then she stood in the middle of the huge room, with a sudden pang of nostalgia for things she had never seen but had only heard about.

"My grandfather gave dinner parties in this room," Jana said. "Big tamashas."

Jana herself had not had anything resembling a dinner party since she had moved to the Jolly Grant House. Everything about such a project, from making up the guest list to planning the menu, intimidated her.

Her favorite people in the town were of varying faiths, tastes, and dietary restrictions. No meat for some; no eggs for others. Many eschewed alcohol—at least in theory. Editor Rambir and his science teacher wife, Ritu, would certainly accept food cooked on her premises; the more conservative Ramachandran, probably only a piece of fruit. While her Anglo-Indian optometrist, Mr. Niel Powell, would love bacon, her Muslim neighbors Hajji Feroze Ali Khan and his wife, Zohra, would sooner starve than touch it.

Someday, when she solved all the possible problems surrounding what to serve to which combination of people, she would give a party. Maybe even a big one, preceded by cocktails! And bring in the string band from the Victory Hotel, to add to the ambience.

For the foreseeable future, however, she would at least have nice family meals with Jack and ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0805093583
• ISBN 13: 9780805093582
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288