Lips Touch: Three Times (7 page)

Pranjivan was his name, which meant "life," and Estella
had given him both: his name
and
his life. She had carried him out of
the Fire in her arms when he was a tiny brown child too young to follow on his
own two feet. He alone knew all her secrets, and aside from his household
duties, he spied for her. He sent out his shadow across the land -- she had
taught him how when he was a boy -- and he maintained detailed lists of the
wicked. He helped Estella decide who would die, in order that children might
live. And when she emerged from Hell each day through a trapdoor in the shade
of a massive peepal tree, he was there waiting for her with the rickshaw men,
ready to take her home.

On the day of the earthquake, he knew something was wrong as soon
as she came up blinking into the light of day. "What is it,
Memsahib?" he asked.

"Take me to the Agent's Residence," she said quietly,
and he did.

Jaipur was a Rajput kingdom ruled by warrior princes, not a part
of the British Empire. There were no officious governors or magistrates here,
only the Political Agent, a mustachioed former cavalryman whose military career
had come to an end when he lost an arm to a tigress in the Himalayas. Now he
had to hold the reins in his teeth when he hunted jackal with the native
princes, which was one of his primary duties, and for which service he was
rewarded with a palatial home and a small army of servants. He even kept a
hookah-burda just to light his pipe.

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When Estella appeared uninvited at his gate, the party was in full
swing. It was a christening for the Agent's third daughter, but it looked like
any other party -- bright gowns billowing in a garden, gentlemen lolling about
with drinks sweating in their big, hot hands. There was a table laden with
gifts, and there was a pink iced cake, but the baby's bassinet seemed like an
afterthought at the edge of things, and the baby within lay silent and
composed, gazing up at the fringe of neem trees with solemn gray eyes.

"What's the old bitch doing here?" murmured the
Political Agent to his wife, and they both cringed. At the best of times
Estella had a way of robbing them of amusement at their own vapid talk, and she
looked particularly grim on this occasion. The usually neat coils of her silver
hair were frayed from the drafts of hellfire she had passed through, and her
heart was heavy with the curse she had come to deliver.

She went straight to the bassinet and looked down at the pretty
baby. Silence fell over the merrymakers. It struck them all like a scene from a
fairy tale, and Estella a witch come to spoil their fun. "She looks like a
madwoman," someone whispered. Estella didn't even look up. She reached
toward the baby, and the baby grasped her finger and smiled up at her.

Estella's heart clenched. She couldn't change her mind. Twenty-two
children in Kashmir
lived
and Vasudev wouldn't hesitate to take them
back again; he was no doubt dreaming up awful accidents at this very moment. So
she did what she had come to do. She said, "I curse this child with the
most beautiful voice ever to slip from human lips." She looked up and
peered around at the partygoers. Their faces were flushed with laughter, with
liquor. They seemed to be waiting for her to continue, so she did. "But
take care that you

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never hear it. Anyone who does shall fall down dead on the spot.
From this moment forward, any sound this child utters will
kill"

There were gasps across the garden, and then a titter of
incredulous laughter. Someone cried out, "A curse! How rare!"

"Capital fun!"

"It's too, too divine!"

Estella stared at them. Delight gleamed in their eyes. They didn't
believe her. Of course they didn't. Her Majesty's subjects didn't go around
believing things willy-nilly. But whether they believed it or not, the curse
was as real as the heat, and soon they would know it.

How
soon?

Estella's finger was still caught in the girl's tiny fist -- she'd
never ceased to marvel at the strength of a baby's grip -- and she looked back
down into those gray eyes. She was a lovely little thing, this child. Estella
had never had a baby of her own, her husband had died so young. In the darkness
of grief in the days after his death, she'd hoped ferociously that there might
be a baby--that something of him might be arranging itself within her even as
she followed his coffin to the cemetery. But it was not to be. She had been
left alone, and she had also been left
empty.

A breeze stirred the trees and the baby smiled again. She looked
as if she might coo, and Estella felt suddenly that her own death was perched
upon her shoulder like a bird. How easy to die, she thought, and how fitting,
if she were to be the first victim of this curse ... the first victim of this
child, whom at the behest of a demon she had just turned into a murderer. For,
as surely as twenty-two children in Kashmir
lived,
people in Jaipur
would
die.

But not yet. Vasudev had his curses, but Estella was not without
power of her own. Before the Political Agent's wife could sweep over

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and scoop up her child, Estella leaned down, pressed her fingertip
gently but firmly to the baby's lips and whispered, "You will stay silent,
won't you, little thing? Until you are old enough to understand the curse, your
voice will be as a bird in a cage." And so it was.

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Three Limbo

Year by year the girl grew up. Queen Victoria died. Black rats
aboard steamships carried plague from China to India. Millions died. Estella
and Vasudev were kept very busy. The Great War began with a shot. The Germans
used poison gas first, but the British followed suit. They were so ashamed of
themselves they forbade the very soldiers who carried the chlorine canisters
from uttering the word "gas." Millions died. In India, Vasudev's
curses mostly came to their fruition. Among their victims were a child in
Chittagong who went fleetingly invisible every time she sneezed, and a Punjabi
princeling who crowed like a cockerel at dawn.

But through some remarkable depth of will, the gray-eyed daughter
of the Agent of Jaipur held her own curse in a curious limbo, and after more
than seventeen years, the British still had no reason to believe in it.

Vasudev chafed and swore. "It's not fair, you meddling with
the servants!" he hissed to Estella, his face flushing in fury so that its
two halves nearly matched crimson. "You haven't let things take their
natural course!"

"Natural course?" Estella repeated, giving him a flat
look. "There are no curses in the 'natural course.' You've had every
opportunity to

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influence the Agent's servants too, Vasudev. You spend enough time
spying in the garden there."

The demon gave her a sour look but said nothing. What could he
say? That that damned Pranjivan had taken unfair advantage of his broad
shoulders and flashing white teeth to sway the girl's servants? That the
factotum was too damned handsome, and an ugly little demon hadn't a chance at a
game like that? It was true, but he wouldn't say it. Even demons have some
dignity. The truth was, Estella had won --
so far.
First that trick of
whispering the girl silent until she was old enough to understand the curse,
and now this. The servants believed Pranjivan, damned handsome beggar, and the
girl believed the servants. In that raucous palace of singing sisters, she
lived her life butterfly-silent, never giving so much as a laugh out loud. When
Vasudev spied on her in the garden, he saw a deep sadness in her, a dreamy
wistfulness, but he never saw her test the curse, not even on a beetle or an
ant. It was inhuman. The girl wasn't normal!

That one unfulfilled curse was the single blemish on Vasudev's joy
when he guessed that the old bitch was dying.

Estella had been old for a long time, and sometimes the demon had
feared that she would never die, that he would be hamstrung by her human
sensibilities forever. But now she was fading. Growing papery. Pain became
plain in every furrow of her face and in the way she moved gingerly down the
onyx tunnels to their morning meetings. She was dying at last! Vasudev wanted
to gloat, but the curse restrained him. It was unthinkable he shouldn't have
the satisfaction of it while the old bitch was still alive to suffer from it!

He sat opposite Estella and drummed his fingers on the table,
unable to triumph at her pain and pallor. Furiously he wondered

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how he might finally tip the balance. How he might make the girl
speak at last.

He had no way of knowing, as he scowled and muttered, that at that
very moment a soldier on a train from Bombay was discovering a lost diary
wedged between the seat and the wall, and not just any lost diary, but the lost
diary of the cursed girl herself. And even as that train wended its way toward
Jaipur, the soldier was flipping it open to the first page.

Some would assert that Providence was at work, shaking out its
pockets in Humanity's lap. Others would argue for that mindless choreographer,
Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: A lost diary fell into the hands of a
soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired
of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of
his wretched memories.

In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and
ruined lives.

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FOUR The Solders

he soldier's name was James Dorsey, and he had dropped his lighter
down between the seat and the wall of the compartment. It was the lighter his
friend Gaffney had told

him to take off his corpse if he became a corpse, and then he had.
Six hundred thousand men had died at the Somme, but James had not. What
remained of his regiment had been torn apart in the Second Marne, and again,
somehow, James had survived. He'd joined the Foreign Office after the War and
come to India for another try at death -- a more interesting one than mortars
and gas, perhaps. Here among the tigers and the dacoits' long knives there were
many to choose from, not the least of them the marvelous fevers with names like
exotic flowers.

Digging out the dropped lighter, James found the diary wedged down
between the seat and the wall and he fished it out too. It was bound in floral
linen and filled with girlish script. "The secrets of a blushing maiden,"
he quipped with a smile that brought his dimples out, and he flipped it right
open with no scruple to preserving the maidenly modesty of its writer. Indeed,
he expected none. He had endured his sea voyage in the company of the
"fishing fleet" -- English ladies hying themselves to India to catch
husbands -- and

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he felt as if he had barely escaped being drugged and dragged to
the altar. He thought he knew the character of English girls in India, and
surely this diary would be more of the same.

Tucking Gaffney s lighter back into his pocket, James began to
read.

His smile wavered. It clung for a time in disbelief and then fell
away in stages. The little book did indeed hold the secrets of a blushing
maiden, but they weren't the sort of secrets he'd expected, and by the time his
train arrived in Jaipur, James had read the diary through twice and found
himself -- against all expectation -- to be half in love with its writer.

That was ridiculous, of course. Certainly a man couldn't fall in
love with cursive on a page, could he? He scanned the inside covers of the
little book for some hint of the girl's identity but found no name.

So, a mystery.

He held the book tenderly as he stepped off the train and into his
new life, and later, in his lodgings, he read it a third time, mining it for
clues as to who the girl might be. There was enough to suggest she had lived in
Jaipur, though whether she still did was uncertain. The diary had been lost on
a train, after all. It occurred to him she might be gone. Absurdly, the thought
left him desolate. He chided himself that she was only a stranger.

But she wasn't, really. She was all here, in this book. Not her
name, and not her face, but
she
was here, and absurd or not, he thought
he
might
actually love her.

If she was in Jaipur, he vowed, he would find her.

He didn't have long to wait. It was only his second day in the
city when he was invited to a garden party at the Agent's Residence.

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The upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service were known as the
"heaven-born," and when James saw the legion of white-turbaned
servants bearing trays of colored sweets and cocktails among the fantastical
banyan trees and the overlush vine flowers, he began to see why. In England,
bureaucrats could never have lived like this, like little kings with monkeys on
leashes and stables full of fine hunting horses. He smiled at his new
colleagues, but behind his smile he was thinking how these men had been tipping
back gin while other, better men had been holding in their entrails with both
hands. His fingers went automatically to Gaffney's lighter in his pocket.

All of James's childhood friends had died in the War. Every single
one. James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring
him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once, he might have believed it
to be the work of Providence, but it seemed to him now that to thank God for
his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others, flicked them
away like cigarette butts by the thousands, and that seemed like abominable
conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these
days was Chance.