The uncharitable hissed that she was the Mother's daughter, a slight professional accident, which is why she was there at all with a gold veil and a name stolen from a Mughul empress. All in all, the whispers were enough to account for her obsession with the mirror, the endless ground almond face packs and the muddy henna that caked her hair on holidays.

Which was why they said she was lucky when the fat Englishman came. For a whore to find a john willing to buy her out was a stroke of incredible luck -- it normally happened to the newer and more beautiful recruits. But the Englishman walked into the House well after midnight, with his seams breathing brandy and bellowing for hashish and a woman. The Mother came, held his hand and discovered that his pockets chinked impressively and that he claimed to be the owner of a tea plantation in the Dooars. Noorjehan, she decided, flicking her eyes over all the pieces of her girls she could see between the balustrades.

Noorjehan wrapped herself in the scarlet breeze of her veils and poured herself down the stairs. The sahib was in the corner room with the frayed carpet and the oil lamp smoking so evilly that all the dazzle was wasted. However, he caught sight of her scarlet and his eyes bulged.

"Come here, come here...why stand so far away?"

At four o'clock in the morning, she pulled together the flaps of his jacket, buttoned his buttons and walked him to the Mother's office room. The Mother was in a sprawl on her sofa, mouth open, spittle caking at the corners with the betel juice, fast asleep. She shook herself awake in a scatter of dead petals.

"Marry Noorjehan? Honoured one, you are robbing me of my life. She is a pearl, a gem..." Her whine calculated to a hairsbreadth how far she could go and how much she could expect. Before the Englishman had any chance to shake himself into sanity, the deal was clinched and he and Noorjehan climbing into a tonga. "Remember," the Mother's whisper fanned in her ear, "never before midnight. And if you cannot be beautiful, be good."

Her new home was wood and white paint with long mirror-lined rooms. Her husband, she found, was not an owner but an overseer. In the beginning, it hardly mattered. Her reflection glimmered with her, up and down the rooms, wincing at the creak in the living room floorboards, counting the silver and scolding the servants. It was all right in the beginning, with the jobs and the money. The English clothes she wore hid her in a frowst of ruffles and bonnets.

Evenings were more difficult since scarlet and gold veils were not part of the ensemble but, on most occasions, she was the only woman so that eyes, willing or not, automatically went to her, travelled her up and down, went away and came back again. She would look at herself sideways, lengthways and foreways in the mirror, turning backwards and forwards and backwards again, with an anxious tailor snipping at cascades of cloth and a kitchen turning out face packs by the bowlful.

"Why you even bother," Shaw told her once, "I don't know. It's not as if it made any great difference." He said it with six glasses of wine circulating in his blood, so she discounted it easily enough, but his statement rankled. It ate into any gratitude she might have felt at being freed from the House with its whispers.

"You drink too much, you eat too much," she told him viciously, "and you fuck the tea pickers."

"All of which are unfamiliar to this pure, rain-washed flower," he returned, gulped his cup of tea and removed himself from the verandah with a force that had all the floorboards protesting. She consoled herself with the verandah chairs, the china tea set and her reflection in the mirror, draped in purple silk.

Shaw drank, Shaw was fat and he grew drunker and fatter until finally he was an immobile mound of flesh, perspiring impotently in a hammock. A drowned dead red face in the middle of all that white wickerwork. For a while, she blamed her mirror image. "It is all written on my forehead," she said. The lack of beauty, the lack of love and a house full of disrespect. It had started somewhere with the fact that she could only walk in after midnight to the tune of guttering candles and eyes dazzled by the blaze of a gold spun silk veil. Not ugly enough for ordinary life, but ugly enough for what she tried to be.

While she looked into the mirror and Shaw drank, the tea picking slid into carelessness. The Manager came to complain and though he lingered on the verandah over the china teacups, his visit was very clearly in the nature of a threat. For a week or two after he left, Shaw shook himself out of his stupor but whenever he returned to confront her on the verandah, he seemed to shrink into himself again. And in his eyes she saw a reflection of everything that had ever confronted her in the mirror.

"Why did you marry me?" she asked him in futile fury one afternoon.

He raised his head from the teacup and looked her dully in the eye. "I was drunk," he said, "and you took advantage of me." Around them was the green of tea bushes, row upon row of green, clipped pyramids shining green like poison, hard edged and stacked, green as sharp as a knife. A china cup slipped from her fingers and crashed in jagged edges on the floor while the fast spreading pool of brown seeped into the boards.

Every day after that, the level of alcohol rose a little higher above Shaw's head until one day, it couldn't rise any higher. His corpse had a preserved look about it. Clean washed and pink and white, it flamed up at a touch with no need for padre or spade and with it, the last of Noorjehan's dreams went up in smoke.

Out of compassion for Shaw's long years of service, the company let her have a small bungalow and, for a while, she lingered there with some notions of taking up her old profession again. The bungalow was sharp splintered and creaked even more than the other at night, but she was hopeful. As Shaw's wife she had met and mingled with the planters and there had been some careless enough to look beyond the face to the body under the dress. Men disposed to linger in candlelit rooms, curious about native customs and nautch girls and second and third wives that they made more exotic with each imagining.

The days of almond paste were over but her silk ball dresses were still there. It was enough, she thought, to cheat Fate with. Her mirror tried to speak to her when she consulted it, but she either did not see or did not listen. She ringed her eyes huge with kohl and sat on the verandah waiting. The days dragged out and the sun rose and set. No man materialised in the gardens or rode knocking to her door. Rain dripped and balled off the leaves. Frogs croaked and the softly insidious moss coated her mirror like a velvet skin so that her drowned face glimmered at her through its green depths. The loneliness was worse than the whispering women in the House. All day and night the crickets chirped in the bushes and the silence ballooned around her. She paced up and down the verandah pursued by the creak in the wood. The ghost of Shaw's hands tormented her at night and she jerked out of her sleep to face the chirps and the creaks.

She could have left. Some seasons the House beckoned with visions of her room, the pink stucco walls and terra-cotta traces of the Mother's betel juice on the cushions. But she saw return as defeat -- her previous triumphant departure with a sahib collapsing to the old whispers of, "Noorjehan - not before midnight. Shame, shame, poor thing, what a profile!"

A stray princeling, stranded for the night in her bungalow and offered her services, took shelter in the rain instead, leaving her beached high on her rope bed. For months after that, whenever she sat in front of the mirror, she saw his face instead of her own and heard the words he never said whispered at night, joining the ghost of Shaw's wandering hands.

No garden ever grew in Noorjehan Shaw's cheeks, but peacocks trailed their tails across her grave and the four useless syllables of her name lingered to reflect in the mossy mirror. They said her bungalow was haunted and avoided it, even in the high noon of summer. A long while later, the Tea Company remembered the bungalow existed and allotted it to one of their new recruits.

He came to clean out with his servants and found a garden full of peacocks, drawers streaming with red and purple silks beginning to moulder and an old distorting mirror.

"Whose bungalow was it?" he asked, looking at the silk in the sunlight.

"Noorjehan Shaw's, huzoor."

"Noorjehan Shaw," he tested the name on his tongue as he looked at the mouldering silk with its tarnished stars of gold. The name, the decaying richness and the peacocks arranged themselves in a mosaic in his mind.

"Noorjehan Shaw," he said again, this time with definition. "She must have been a beautiful woman." The silk between his fingers suddenly gave in to time and ripped with a sharp hiss.