Lips Touch: Three Times (9 page)

When I was a boy, it was my job to slice the heels off the new loaves
and throw them in the woodstove to feed the imp my mum said lived in the fire,
to forestall him burning down our cottage out of spite. He was a hungry imp,
she said, but I was a hungry boy and I ate those heels myself when she looked
away, and that poor imp might've starved but our cottage never burned, and
maybe I grew taller for the extra bread.

And I was tasked more than once to go and drown the May kittens in
the pond, as my gran said cats born in that unlucky month suffocated babes in
their cradles and invited snakes into the house. But I never killed a kitten in
my life and only hid them and brought them cream when I could. And never did a
baby die from my failure to murder kittens, nor a snake cross our threshold but
that I brought it there myself in the pocket of my own short pants.

And I have fought on the plains of France where evil fifinelle
spirits, they say, tickle gunners and make their shells go astray. And though I
manned a howitzer myself and sent many shells arcing into the night, I never
felt their tickle on my neck. Maybe the fifinelles fought for our side and only
beleaguered the Germans, and maybe a shell went astray by their ministrations
that would have been meant for me.

95

Or maybe all that's done in the world is done by men and chance,
and omens are only fears, and curses are only fancies. I never saw God save a
kitten or fill a boys belly with bread, and I never met him on the battlefield
passing out gas masks to the men. And if he cant be troubled to catch some
bullets in his fists, and if he wont reach down to grab a mountain and keep it
from crumbling away, and if he forgets to send the rains one year and millions
die of hunger, is it likely he's bothering himself cursing one beautiful girl
in Jaipur?

Maybe he's sitting somewhere right now knitting up Providence like
homespun, but I've seen too much blood to ever trust his cloth. I would sooner
trust to a song from your lips than to Providence, though I've seen no proof of
either one. When the day comes that you finally sing I hope I shall be in the
audience. In truth, I hope I might be the only member of your audience, that I
might hoard all your words for myself. I believe I had forgotten about beauty
until I saw you, and now I'm greedy for it, like the boy I was once, recklessly
eating all the imp's portion of bread.

Yours, enchanted, James Dorsey

Anamique remembered the way the handsome soldier had stared at her
in the garden, the way he had
seen
her, and she flushed and had to bite
her lip. She tucked the letter back into her diary but a moment later took it
out and read it again. And again.

She passed the night restlessly, waking from vivid dreams of
singing to lie wide-eyed in the dark with a pounding heart, listening for any
trace of her voice lingering in the air. Once she even went to

96

her sister's door and strained to hear her breathing and be sure
her voice hadn't escaped in her sleep and slain the whole household. Finally,
afraid to close her eyes, she composed a reply to the letter. It was simply a
quotation from Kipling and it read:

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases;
man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and
the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified
supervision in the case of Englishmen.

After breakfast she gave it to the chaprassi to deliver.

James laughed when he read it, a bright, surprised burst of a
laugh. He wrote to her again, fabulating a means by which, he outrageously
claimed, the devils of India might easily be outwitted by leaving out saucers
of sherry overnight for their spies, the wall lizards, who would grow tipsy and
forget to carry their mission reports back to Hell.

This too the chaprassi duly delivered, and Anamique wrote back
again the same day to tell him how her ayah practiced
gowli shastra,
the
art of reading the stripes and scamperings of wall lizards for omens. She
added, shyly, that she had been to an astrologer once in the bazaar. She had
never told anyone that, and James wondered in his reply what fortune had been
foretold for her, and had it mentioned a soldier, by chance?

For days in a row they continued in this way, and slowly they
discovered each other. The letters grew longer and Anamique's gray eyes lost a
bit of the haunted shadow James had seen in them, and James's heart began to
lift itself, step by step, out of the swamp of mud and ghosts in which it had
been steeping since France.

97

SIX The First Touch

The second time they saw each other was at a musical evening
arranged by Anamique's mother. She routinely invited the unmarried young men
over for a spot of light opera to amuse her daughters, and James was handsome,
and he was a war hero, and to top it all off he turned out to have a glorious
tenor voice. The one thing that kept him from becoming a new favorite among the
memsahibs was his irredeemable habit of looking only at Anamique while he sang.

The others all remembered that stare in the garden, and they could
see now in the look that passed between the two that something was already
under way. A bridge begun at both ends, reaching toward the place in the middle
where they could rest against each other and find completion.

James cajoled an old missionary's wife to take a turn at the piano
at the end of the evening, so he might have the chance to dance with Anamique.
They touched for the first time, first delicately and decorously, fingertips to
waist and hand to shoulder in the pose of the dance. But by and by James's lips
brushed softly against Anamique's earlobe as he whispered something to her. She
blushed furiously at the intimate touch, and a look of wistfulness and hope
came into her eyes.

98

98

"I love you," he had whispered, and it seemed to him as
she pressed her lips together, that she was imagining whispering it back.

She
was
imagining it. She thought she could
taste
the
words, all ginger and chili and sugar, fiery and sweet, and she held them in
her mouth like candies. It would take more time than this to coax them from
her, but something began to happen at that moment. An idea fell like a seed,
and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine, lush and
conquering, twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until
they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket -- and just as deadly.

There were more musical evenings and more letters, furtive
hand-holding at dinner, duets at the piano, more dancing, more whispers in her
ear that raised goose bumps on Anamique's neck and sent shivers down her spine.
They were never alone, but may as well have been, the way they looked only at
each other. Sitting apart from the crowd at whatever party or gathering they
were at, James spoke, and Anamique wrote on her tablet small notes that James
saved and kept with her letters. She even began to teach him some of the
simpler signs of her gesture language, such as those for "thirsty"
and "dance." He asked her, eyes merry, how to sign "I love
you," just so he would recognize it if she ever gestured it to him, and,
blushing, she showed him.

Anamique grew radiant. Other men began to wonder why it had taken
that damned James Dorsey to make them see that, silent or not, Anamique was
quite the loveliest creature in Jaipur, if not all of India. None of them
bothered to court her, though; they couldn't even catch her eye, and she
demurred from dancing with anyone but James.

99

And while they danced, James whispered to her. He urged her to
sing for him, to tell him that she loved him. "How can I ever believe
it," he asked, his brown eyes pleading, "unless you tell me so
yourself?" He knew about the bird in the cage, and he imagined it
languishing there like a sad animal in a roadside menagerie. "Birds
shouldn't be kept in cages," he told her, his lips warm against her ear.
"They should fly."

By and by Anamique formed a resolution: If James asked her to
marry him, she would answer him. The first word she would ever speak aloud
would be
yes.

100

SEVEN The Gloating Demon

Crouched in the garden muttering, Vasudev saw the light in
Anamique's eyes and gave a loathsome gloating chuckle.

The girl was in love! Nothing could scatter caution like love.
Nothing could turn a girl silly half so fast as a handsome soldier whispering
in her ear! And a soldier begging her
to talk,
no less! It was so
perfect it almost made Vasudev believe in Providence, but he knew the way the
cogs worked and whirred in the winding up and down of human lives. Gods though
there might be, they cared little for the minutiae. If an English soldier had
lived through the bloodiest war the world had ever known and made his way half
around the planet to fall in love with this particular girl and goad her into
fulfilling her curse, well, Vasudev had only that mad bastard Chance to thank
for it, and he did.

It came in the nick of time too. The old bitch wouldn't last much
longer. Vasudev gave her a week at the most. He chuckled again. Estella had
missed their tea that morning for the first time ever. He had waited for her in
Hell, his smile widening with each passing moment that didn't bring her tall,
spare silhouette down the black tunnel.

He had her tonic in his pocket now, and went whistling up to her
ornate, filigreed palace to deliver it. "Good day to you!" he cried

101

when Pranjivan opened the door to him. With feigned solicitude
Vasudev asked, "Is Memsahib feeling unwell today?"

Pranjivan gave him his customary stony stare and said,
"Memsahib is very busy and sends word she will come tomorrow at the usual
time."

Vasudev laughed out loud. "She hasn't missed a day's descent
to Hell since Yama foisted her on me. Not for any illness, not for anything!
Busy? My teeth, Pranjivan, lying beggar that you are. If she isn't dying, she'd
better come tell me so herself."

Pranjivan didn't even blink. "Have you brought Memsahib's
tonic?" he asked.

What Vasudev resented most about the factotum was his stolidness.
Even Estella could be made to wince and scowl, but Pranjivan, never. His face
may as well have been cast in an expressionless mold. The demon found it
extremely unrewarding. Reluctantly he produced the flask and handed it over.
"Not that she'll need it," he said. "I imagine the next time I
see dear Estella in Hell it will be her soul alone, drawn like a moth to the
flames, just like any other pathetic human."

Pranjivan started to shut the door in Vasudev's face and the demon
blurted, "And I wager she'll have a whole lot of British company on her
way, do you hear me? I'll see that curse through yet!"

The door snicked shut. Vasudev stamped his foot and hollered,
"That girl's going to speak! Do you hear me? Any time now her voice is
going to burst out of her like a tornado and I'm going to win! She's in love,
Pranjivan old devil! Do you hear? A girl will do crazy things for love. Just
ask Estella --
she
went to
Hell
for it!"

There was no answer from within and Vasudev was left standing at
the servants' entrance, breathing fast through gritted teeth. "Damn

102

Pranjivan," he muttered, giving up and going away, trying to
console himself by dreaming up grim deaths for the beggar once Estella was
finally dead and not there to protect him.
Something painful,
he
thought.

Something excruciating.

103

EIGHT The Stolen Shadow

A namique's eighteenth birthday party was the following evening.
In his rooms, James slid a small velvet ring box into his pocket, put on his
dinner jacket, and took a deep breath. He couldn't afford much in the way of a
diamond, much as he couldn't really afford to support a wife, especially a
privileged heaven-born daughter like Anamique. It was madness, surely, but of
all the madness he had known, it was the sweetest. He patted his pocket and set
out.

He had just bought flowers and was walking past the Palace of the
Winds when a man loomed up before him, tall, Indian, severe. For a moment James
thought he must be a cutthroat, he had such a look of intensity -- almost
savagery -- in his eyes, but then he recognized him by his fine English suit.
Here was the factotum of the widow called "the old bitch," the one
who had filled Anamique's head with fear and nonsense and blighted her young life
with silence.

"What do you want, man?" James asked him, drawing
himself up to his full height, which, he was pleased to see, was a bit taller
than the Indian's.

"Do you love the girl?" Pranjivan asked.

104

"It's no business of yours," said James, his voice
dropping to a growl.

"If you love her, you can love her silence too."

"Love her
silence?
What is this? Some kind of a
game?"

"It is a game, but not a funny one. It's a demon's game, and
if you encourage the girl to speak, you encourage her to kill you, and the
demon wins. I especially wish the demon not to win."