The Splendor Of Silence (10 page)

"Enough, Pallavi," she said. "I'm not that old, you know. And I am going to get married one day."

"One day, one day. When, may I ask? Why all the waiting? Are you not fine enough as you are? Why the riding lessons? I need to talk with your papa."

"I am not taking lessons," Mila said, holding herself up so that Pallavi seemed much shorter; she had also settled, seemingly, into the flecked mosaic floor of the landing, digging herself in like a besieged soldier. "I rid
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etter than any other woman I know, and most of the men of our acquaintance.

"And a fine skill that is." Pallavi's voice shook with her climbing vexation. "Is it going to help you bear children? Do the books teach you this?"

"I'm not going to fight," Mila said quietly, drooping over Pallavi. "What is it you do not like now? What happened?"

"Nothing." Pallavi pulled thepallu of her sari around her shoulders and went down the stairs. "I have to see to breakfast. I do not know what has happened to this household today. There is your papa, still talking to some man. When is he going to come to eat, when will he go to his office...."

Mila backed to the landing windows and sat on the thick wedge of the sill. She heard laughter from the verandah, and strained toward it, but the words were too obtuse for her to make out anything. She leaned her head against the glass pane and looked out over the front of the house. She was strangely lethargic and exhausted after the ride. Sleep would deplete the weariness of her body, but the agitation, somewhere in the area of her chest, had lingered for almost two months now. Perhaps Pallavi was right; it was merely time for her to marry, to have children, and to settle down into the routine that was every woman's lot. But that would mean no Papa, no Pallavi, no Ashok, no Kiran although he had been away for so many years now, he was almost unknown again. Kiran had returned from England a stranger. He was charming, he was funny, he was elegant and eloquent, but he too was somehow dissatisfied, and in her unnamed fraught state Mila picked up that his laughter was edged with irritation, that his confidence wasted away behind the bluster. Much as she felt. She sat back on the sill and pulled her knees up under her chin, still listening to the sounds from the verandah and still not able to discern the whole of the conversation. She had always eavesdropped, without a sense of shame though, for she had always been curious. When she was nine, she had heard whispers behind the rath-ki-rani bush at the club one night. There had not been much talking after that, just the hum of sighs and breathing, and mouths meeting. Illicit, of course, in the grand tradition of an affair--a Rudrakot Rifles captain with the wife of a major. She had seen them fused into each other, the woman straddling the man, his hands under her skirt, cupping her buttocks, their mouths merged. Nothing more--forbidden trysts rarely found completion on stone benches behin
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ushes--and this Mila realized only later when she thought of that evening. But there had been something spellbinding that moonlit night--the hotly scented white flowers amidst glossy green-black leaves, the tableau of mind-losing lust, the sweep of silk over skin, the groans of unfulfilled desire. Leaning out from behind a tree to watch, Mila had tripped and toppled to the dirt. She had picked herself up, dusted off her frock and elbows, but the two people ensconced in the fragrant embrace of the rathki-rani did not notice her presence, so engrossed were they in each other. Surely, the young Mila had thought, this must be love, this absorption, this blight of all else but the beloved, this rapture.

A year later she had asked Papa--and only once, since most people did not talk to their parents about love and such nonsense anyway--if he had loved Lakshmi. And Papa had said, "Of course, she was my wife."

"But you did not know her before you married her?" Mila had asked. By then she had observed the British officers pursuing the women who became their wives, seen them stepping out with each other, and thought that this was how courting was to be. She was ten that year, and this conversation had taken place at dinner, with Pallavi leaning toward their side of the table with a scandalized air. She told Mila later that one did not talk with one's parents about love and such nonsense, and that it was wrong to have even initiated the topic. But this was after Raman had taken the care to answer Mila.

"I did not know her, true," he had said, "your grandmother chose her for me. But I fell in love with your mother, and it mined out all right." "And what if you had not loved her?" Mila asked.

Pallavi sucked in air between her teeth, and shouted at Sayyid, "Get the buttermilk, Sayyid. Sahib's rice is cooling."

"I would have learned to love her; it would have been a tempered love, perhaps not the furious and fierce one it was, but one more vested with calm," Raman said with a smile.

"I think I want a love like yours, Papa," Mila had announced. Raman grinned at his daughter, and hoped, in his heart, that she would find a love much like his had been for Lakshmi. He was enchanted by the question and not at all embarrassed. The only two people at the table whose skins mottled with discomposure were Pallavi and Kiran. They knew what a furious and fierce love was--Pallavi because she had slept in a room close by theirs while Raman and Lakshmi were married, Kiran because he wa
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ourteen already, and Jai had taken great care to initiate him--not physically yet, for now it was all wonderment and chatter--about the marvels of love. A misused word in Jai's and Kiran's context, but still one that had some resemblance to the love of which Raman spoke.

Mila had asked the question because the year she turned ten, Jai, who was seventeen, got married. His marriage was arranged, of course, by Raman himself. The bride, the wife-who-was-to-be-loved, was the princess of Shaktipur. Jai had not seen her at the betrothal ceremony, and his first sight of his wife would be at the official viewing, after the wedding. He had been told by his diwan, his prime minister, that she was beautiful, and his diwan had been told so by the Shaktipur diwan. Neither of the men had seen the princess, but each was equally assertive of the merits of her beauty. Jai had come home to moan and pout to Raman about this strange state of affairs. Mila had stood at his knee, literally at his knee, for she was leaning against his legs and watching the curvings and swivelings of his beautiful, discontented mouth, fronted by a neat, clipped mustache. Why did he have to marry? he had asked Raman. Because, Raman explained patiently, Rudrakot needed an heir, and he had to provide one or the line would die. Why couldn't he see her, damn it, before the wedding? Because it was not done; he knew this, surely?

That night, at dinner, Mila asked Raman what love was, and if he had ever possessed it, for it seemed poor Jai was doomed.

Still sitting on the windowsill, Mila wondered why she thought of Jai's marriage to the princess today; there had been, if she so wanted, plenty of other opportunities to think of it. Now the marriage was an old one; they had three children, the younger two boys, an heir to spare for Rudrakot. Jai had never talked of love for the princess of Shaktipur, and now, Mila would not ask him. She heard her father and his guest rise from their armchairs in the verandah and step over the door frame into the corridor. Mila stood up. Before she could head for her rooms, Raman came down the corridor and saw her.

"Mila," he called out, "wait, my dear. I want you to meet Captain Hawthorne."

Mila turned to her father, and saw a tall man following behind him, his stride long and easy, clad in the omnipresent khaki of the war, his figure all but blotting out the light through the door frame from the verandah. He had to duck his head under the door frame and almost stumbled ove
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he six-inch threshold in the doorway, built to deter snakes, or rather to contain them to the room they found themselves in. She felt that she was smiling even before he neared--it was the stranded stranger. Why had he come to their house? To see Papa? Sam put out his hand without hesitation, and Mila gave him hers in return, thinking that this Captain Hawthorne must be special indeed for Papa to allow him to intrude upon his coffee hour.

"How are you? Since my father forgot to introduce me, I must tell you that I am his daughter."

There was a long moment of silence, which stretched so far that Mila found it difficult to hold Sam's steady gaze upon her face. Then Sam cleared his throat and said, "I gathered as much." For someone who had expounded at great length upon the qualities of the rudraksha tree, he seemed to have given in to a paucity of language. His teeth flashed a startling white in his sun-browned face.

Their crow-heralded visitor, Mila thought suddenly, the one who would bring them ill luck. But how could Sam Hawthorne be that man?

"Captain Hawthorne will be staying with us, Mila," Raman said. "Will you see that a room is prepared for him?"

"Sam, please," Sam said. "I have already convinced your father to call me thus; perhaps you will give me the honor of doing so too?"

"Yes, of course," Mila said. "I am Mila. Well ..." She hesitated. "Not Mila exactly; I have other names, but everyone calls me Mila."

"Is this your father's doing?" he asked.

Raman roared with a delighted laughter, and slapped Sam on the arm before turning to go down the corridor to his room. "Yes, it is my doing, Sam. If I can meddle with my own name, I have no reason not to do so with my daughter's."

They watched him head away, and then Mila turned to Sam. "If you wouldn't mind stopping in the drawing room for a while, I will see that your room is made ready."

"I'm glad," he said hurriedly, and then paused to consider his words, "that you live here, in this house; we can now talk longer about Rudrakot and its history. I hope this is no inconvenience."

She shook her head. She had been curious about him, but now she wanted to leave, to go wipe her face and hands, to change into something else, something more becoming, a sari. Sam Hawthorne was not one of

Papa's usual strays. Raman had a delectable propensity for inviting strangers into their home, to stay, at times, as long as they wanted. He liked people, he enjoyed investigating their minds, he had the same curiosity Mila had. And the ICS, being a social and sociable service, afforded many opportunities for unlooked-for house guests. But Sam Hawthorne was already different. He was American, and that made him different. Not the first American she had met, but still different from all others. He was unsettling, with a gaze too intense, a demeanor too focused on what though? Why was he here, Mila wondered, but she would not ask him. She hoped that he would stay long with them. But she could not ask him that either, in case he understood the question to reflect their impatience to have him leave. Not done.

They both tarried in the corridor outside the drawing room, suddenly plagued with shyness, heedful of themselves and of each other, not quite knowing what to say or how to say it.

Sam lifted his right hand to gesticulate and begin a sentence, but Mila began to talk almost as he did and he stopped to listen, his eyes fixed upon her face.

"I hope you have a wonderful time here at Rudrakot, Captain Hawthorne," she said with a smile. "It is not often that we have American guests at our home. Ashok, my brother, he will be thrilled, and you must please not mind it if he asks you too many questions about your home."

"I won't," Sam replied. "It will be a pleasure for me. Bring on all of your brothers and I will be happy to talk with them. But can I repay your ... and your father's hospitality in some other way also?"

She laughed and rested against the wall, her hands clasped behind her. The collar of her white blouse strained over etched bones at the base of her neck with a little dip between them. A slender gold chain rested its excess length in that dip. Mila smelled of a just-risen sun, still cool and fresh. Sam saw and felt all of this and yet seemed not to see any of it. He leaned against the other wall of the corridor, and from the way they were positioned, their feet were just a few inches apart, Sam's scuffed army boots more gray with dust than black, Mila's riding boots with their three-inch heels still shiny from all of Sayyid's ministrations with a brush and polish.

Mila had forgotten her need to flee from Sam; like him, she too wanted to be here and nowhere else, but for her the thought was merely instinct. She did not know that she was flirting with Sam, inviting his gaze upo
n h
er face and her neck, searching his own face for a smile or a crinkle of skin around his eyes.

"We had a young army officer here whom Ashok pestered so much with all of his America questions that he preferred to leave Rudrakot itself. I hope that you will stay, Captain Hawthorne."

Sam was still staring at Mila with a grin on his face, and in the midst of that haze of joy, the question finally searched for and found his brain. "I have only a few days of my leave, but"--his voice dropped to an overcasual tone--"who was this man? Was he American?"

And Sam waited for the answer with his heart banging in his chest. Something though, about the way he had posed the question, about what he had said, or left unsaid, rose to curdle the air around them.

"Yes," Mila said as she straightened from the wall. "But you would not know him. America is a big country, isn't it?"

She led the way to the drawing room, waved him to a chair, gave him a quick smile, and ran out of the room, leaving him suddenly stunned and out of breath.

Sam sank into the stuffed armchair and bent his head. He was tired; his mind was playing tricks upon him. He had left Mila at the road and pushed her firmly out of his mind, thinking that he would never see her again, that the encounter had been one to remember and cherish. He raised his hands to his face, and spread out his fingers, palms downward, and watched as his hands shook slightly, trembling in midair. Mila. What a lovely name, whatever her other names might be. Swept away by an exhilaration he could not identify, because he had never felt this before, Sam still wondered if he was merely being stupid. And all at once, he compared her to his other loves, if such a word could be used with them. He had dated many women, and there had been one her name even escaped him now, who when she knew he was going to India and Burma, had offered him marriage. They liked each other, she had said (they had), they were both reasonably attractive (they were), and if he never came back, at least he would know he had had her. Everyone must marry at least once. But something in Sam rebelled against this arrangement without sentiment or emotion, even though he was too academically trained to think of sentiment or emotion as being attractive. And he did not think of marriage in terms of at least once, he thought of it as at most once. And so that had ended, the most serious relationship Sam had ever had. With that woman
,
he had hiked in the Cascades, kissed in the rain, fumbled at her clothing on the sofa in his apartment.