The Splendor Of Silence (14 page)

And so the afternoon passed that May in Rudrakot. The natives, except for Vimal's army of exercisers, crept into their houses and slept the heat away, waited for the sun to die in the arms of the coming night. All over the Raj, all over India, the natives followed this policy of hibernation on summer afternoons. So the days were always split into two sections, the earl
y m
ornings and the late afternoons and evenings. If they all did not sleep, they "took rest" after lunch, ensnared in desultory conversations and caustic hand-rolled beedis, their movements slow and unhurried--hands to mouths, a considerate drag, a reflection on the taste, a flicking of ashes, the same repeated again. In many ways, this slowing down was a wise policy, more efficient certainly, and more considerate of irritable tempers and simmering bloods.

Sam took the beaten mud path around the fringes of the town. On one side were the huge bungalows and mansions of the Civil Lines, on the other, the shacks and shanties of the servants who served the sahibs and memsahibs. Over the last few months, Sam had sat outside his barracks, or lingered in the bazaars in Assam, to watch the peasants walk, and now he duplicated that walk and manner as best he could.

His head was angled to his chest and he kept it down for two reasons--one, that he was expected not to stride about, chin in air in a very sahiblike fashion; and two, because he could not, as a servant, meet a master's gaze. Though the Burma sun had painted its ochre hues upon his skin so he could pass for Indian, nothing could take away the telltale blue of his eyes. He could very well be an Anglo-Indian, half British and half Indian, invariably the product of a liaison, for it had been decades since Anglo-Indian marriage alliances had been sanctioned by Raj society.

The shift in thinking had come after 1858, when Victoria became queen empress of India. The British officers in the Indian army, the civilians in the civil service, the industrialists and traders had now become the masters of India. If they wanted to marry, pretty English roses, especially those a little long in the tooth or short in the purse, shipped themselves out in aptly named "fishing fleets" to marry them and create a little England in this heathen land.

But men, it seemed, would be men. And Indian women were not that often unattractive, no matter what color their skins were. So the British pleasured themselves and begat children most often outside the bonds of marriage, children whom neither society, Indian or British, wanted to claim as their own. They were called half-castes, or Eurasians, both derogatory and embarrassing names. Anglo-Indians had long been reserved for the use of the British in India, but had only lately been appropriated for the use of well, the true Anglo-Indians--the ones who could, somewhere in the past, trace an ancestry to a Briton and an Indian.

Sam, then, could have been Anglo-Indian, but he could not have been Anglo-Indian and been a gardener in the regiment grounds because the two (profession and race) did not readily mix and would cause suspicion. He had to keep his head bowed to the ground. He also had to remember that if someone talked to him, he had to respond to the earth and not raise his head.

His bare feet burned in the mud, and with each step he drew clouds of dust around himself. He had slung the spade over his shoulders and looped his arms around the wooden haft with his hands falling near his face. Surprisingly, his right shoulder did not protest much; the heat, the fluidity of his muscles, the warmth on his skin had loosened the pain. The shacks that housed the servants petered out into a hot, dusty plain just past the Civil Lines and the homes of the rich in Rudrakot. Sam saw a stand of trees in the far distance, and a metalled road that cut across the plain and vanished into the foliage. Somewhere in the middle of this road, his rickshaw had broken down earlier that day. In the distance, skirting above the trees and the deserted landscape, was a hill of some considerable size. Looming on that hill, in every sense of the word, was an ancient fort. The battlements that snaked their way in loops and curves along the slopes of the hill were massive and built of huge blocks of red sandstone thrust one upon the other. There were tiny window holes cut in squares at uneven places along the face of the wall, but they were too high to be reached by a marauding army struggling its way up the hillside. From this vantage, Sam could see the dun-colored palaces and mansions that perched precariously on the knife-edged summit of the hill. He saw minarets and domes topped by tarnished brass finials and the triangular steeplelike roof of a temple festooned with pillars. Below, trees and crawling bushes dotted the hillside, keeping the land from sliding down. Though the fort palace absolutely dominated the slice of sky above the road, Sam had not even noticed it when his rickshaw stopped.

In the dull of the afternoon, Sam heard the roar of an engine and searched around him for a bush to hide behind. A jeep broke out of the green of the trees ahead, a tiny, moving insect at first, heralded only by the noise of its engine, a sound that moved cleanly across the land to meet Sam. As the jeep neared, Sam shuffled his feet, lowered his eyes, and tried not to flinch as the tender skin of his soles rested on the heated dirt. The jeep passed by him in a roar of petrol fumes and red dust. An Indian jawa
n w
as driving the jeep, an officer from the Rifles regiment, a major, by the markings on his uniform, sat upright and beside the driver. They did not even glance at him.

Thirty minutes later, he trudged into the stand of trees, and rested for a few minutes against the trunk of a tamarind, wiping the wetness off his face and his arms. His kurta clung to his body, and perspiration ran in lines down his inner thighs to his ankles. The compact-powder makeup Sam had slathered on his legs had muddied and puddled and muddied again, and his whole body was awash in sweat. Sam moved away from the road that went into the center and toward the outside perimeter of the regimental headquarters. Here, at the very back, there were no gates into the regiment, the neatness and precision that adorned the front entrance had given way to the cookhouses and quarters for the servants of the regiment and their families. All the buildings were of one story with flat roofs, once whitewashed upon first being built, they all now carried a soot-covered countenance. Sam stepped quietly into the path that meandered between the cookhouses. Hens pecked in the dust busily, unfazed by the heat. An aroma of stale meat and blood hung about the yard. For the most part, everything was silent as the servants slept in the afternoon. A cur, its fur dotted with beige and white, tied to a bicycle with a length of hemp, lifted its sleepy head and snarled at Sam. He did nothing to respond, did not kick in its direction, or throw a stone at it, and the dog dropped its head back down again. Its nostrils twitched and Sam knew that his body smelled different to the dog. A baby cried as he passed the servants' quarters, and continued to sob and hiccup, but no one woke or came to call out to Sam or to demand of him what his business was here.

Just beyond these quarters was an underground water tank, reached by a series of steep steps and landings; the water level always determined which was the last step to stand upon to dunk the pot in the water. The well provided water for the whole regiment, and the roof above was to keep the sun from evaporating that precious resource. The regimental dhobis had set up their business around the water tank, and rows of clothes lines stretched out into the sunshine, the cloth already stiff with drying. There were whites of underwear and undershirts, the browns of khakis, the reds of the Rifles's dress-uniform jackets, and their socks and handkerchiefs. It was an almost bucolic scene and Sam wondered if he would really find Mike amidst all this domestic rusticity.

The NCOs' barracks stretched on either side of the path; these had tiny verandahs in front of the rows of rooms. The doors to the rooms were open, and here and there a half-asleep punkah boy looked up at Sam as he passed, lying on the verandah with the punkah's rope tied to his toe. When he waved his foot around, the punkah moved the heated air around the room.

Next came the officers' quarters. These too were barracks, and tiny houses consisting of one and two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a drawing room were scattered around the barracks. Each little house for the married officers of the Rudrakot Rifles had its own garden, a handkerchief-size plot of land, a slew of roses in red clay pots on the verandah, the odd jasmine vine valiantly attempting to clamber up to the flat roof. There were two men in their undershorts and shirts lounging in wooden easy chairs on the verandah of the barracks to Sam's left, their feet swung over the extended arms of the chairs. A folding table stood between them and on it reposed two frosted glasses of beer. The men's heads cocked in Sam's direction when they heard the soft thud of his feet, but he kept his eyes away from them. Here though, in these barracks, Mike must have lived.

There had been only two letters from Mike after he had arrived at Rudrakot, and none of them described his living quarters, or what he ate, or even the officers who were his companions, with whom he drank and played billiards. Mike had spent one and a half pages on the story of a regimental cook who had almost died as the result of a beating. An officer had shouted at the cook one day, and for the next three meals, the cook had spit in the officer's chicken curry and used his urine to water down the gravy. But the matter had gone well beyond mere irritability in the heat; the cook's legs were broken, the bones in his fingers shattered, his very livelihood lost because he could no longer hold a knife to carve a chicken or chop vegetables. When the resident, Colonel Pankhurst, had heard of this incident, as he almost invariably had, through an anonymous letter written in shabby English by an Indian servant (the language gave it away), he had notified the viceroy, and the viceroy had sent the regimental commander and the second in command on forced leave without pay for two weeks. It doesn't seem enough, Mike had written, what is a spot of wine in chicken curry (well cooked, I might add) compared to an inability to walk or hold any object in one's hands again?

Sam passed by the unshaded parade grounds, the polo field that was bare, without a hint of grass, the offices of the commanding officer and the paymaster. Here was the regiment in its full glory. There was no grass anywhere, but the terrain was swept, and lining the roads were stones painted red and white after the regimental colors; the flags on the main flagpoles were freshly laundered and limp in the breezeless air. A pariah dog wandered about, this one so light-headed in the heat, it lacked the gumption to even bark. Sam peered into every open window, saw clerks asleep at their desks, heads on folded arms, and guards dozing at their posts. The few who did notice him saw a mall, slowly shuffling through the dust from building to building. Every now and then, to lend himself authenticity, Sam flung his spade into the dirt and dug up the hard ground, flattened it with his bare feet, and then moved on.

There was not much left to investigate at the end of an hour and a heavy weight bore down upon Sam's heart. If Mike was here, where was he? There was no sign of a prison, or any building that looked like a prison. Here was only a benign regiment, the flags, the snoring administrative clerks, the offices of the commanders, why, even the two officers lounging in their smalls in the barracks.

Sam turned back the way he had come and dragged his feet to the path behind the regiment. He had to talk to someone now, one of Mike's friends or acquaintances. The regiment itself told him nothing, everything here was too perfect, too calm, certainly not the regiment of wartime, but one comatose in the summer heat, waiting for something to happen. As he passed the barracks, one of the officers yelled, "Boy! Ek our shandy lao."

And the "boy," who served them, an old man in his seventies, hobbled out of the barracks with a tray, an open bottle of beer, a glass stuffed with ice cubes, filled halfway with lime juice. The beer gurgled into the glass, and Sam stopped in the shade of a pillar, suddenly thirsty, his throat parched, listening to the crack and spit of the ice cubes in the glass. He had never liked shandies, preferring to drink his beer undiluted, but now, his tongue curled in his mouth around the sweet-sour lime taste of a shandy. He watched as the officer, a young man with seemingly no bone in his chin and a fold of flesh in his neck, took a deep draft of his shandy and placed the glass on his chest, where the cold of the ice condensed and ran down into his navel.

"Damn," he said in a weak voice, "this damn glass bleeds. Boy!"

The old man came running out, and stood in front of the officer. "Sahib?"

"This glass pisses me off. You understand? Get me a new glass. Now." The old man touched his hands together, his fingers interlocking. "Sahib, all glass will go to the bathroom. It is ice melting, Sahib."

The officer flung his glass out into the scrub beyond the verandah. There was the hard sound of glass breaking and a hiss when the dry earth soaked up the shandy. "No argument, you hear? Go get me another glass and make sure it does not piss. jaldi, or I will whip you."

"Yes, Sahib," the old man muttered and backed into the doorway.

"You are a shithead, Sims," the other officer drawled from the depths of his chair. "The boy is right, all glass goes to the bathroom; ice melts in this damn heat. Why make a fuss? It's too much damn effort."

Sims turned to his companion. "I'm bored, Blakely. Bored shitless to death. All we do here is sit and eat and drink. I should never have joined this regiment; there were better offers elsewhere."

Blakely lifted his neck from the chair. "Go elsewhere then, damn you, and see if that doesn't get you into the war." He leaned back. "I'm content to be here. I don't want to die, victoriously or otherwise."