The Splendor Of Silence (21 page)

Mila had refused to believe that the two portraits were of the same woman at different times of her life. Surely, it was just an aunt or someone like that, a wicked, older, uglier aunt of the princess on the left. She had spent many hours here, in the doorway, the light behind her falling upon the portraits. There was something fascinating about the oils, something so much more intimate than a mere photograph. It was also the size of the canvases, so mammoth and so colorful across the back wall that the effect was astounding. True, Jai's palace had paintings of that size and bigger, but Mila had seen his gallery only once; here she could visit as often as she wanted. And since she was Raman's daughter, no one denied her right to stand in the doorway and gaze at the paintings.

There were pictures along the walls on the sides--the one in the center was of the governor-general's visit to Rudrakot when Raja Bhimsen was alive. It was a typical, crowded picture, everyone seated in chairs in two rows, one row higher than the other, their legs crossed from right to left on one side of the governor-general and from left to right on the other side, like well-coordinated cancan dancers frozen in motion. Raman was the reason for the visit, not the official reason, of course, but the great man himself had to come and see who this young whippersnapper was who had Raja Bhimsen's ear. Raman was at the very left in the front row, and, apart from Bhimsen, the only dark face among the whites.

There were two doors on either side of the club's main hallway, which led to the ballroom and the main dining room, and two doors behind the counter that went into the club secretary's office. Mila went past the clerks at the counter with a nod and they said good afternoon. The way to the murgikhana was through the main dining room, which was empty now, the tables laid for dinner with white tablecloths, napkins, and cutlery. The windows were opened early every morning and late every evening to air out the dining room. And when "God Save the King" was played to announce dinner, it was accompanied by bearers carrying tiny coal braziers wit
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moking sandalwood chips to freshen the air. Yet the dining room held the hinting aroma of long-gone food--turned milk used in a pudding; a scorched chicken curry; the stale scent of after-dinner cigars.

The powder room was empty and Mila slid into it with a feeling of relief. She unwound the sari palls from around her hair, set her sunglasses down on the dressing table, and went to the sink to wash her hands and her face. When she returned, the ayah offered her a towel and a hairbrush. She then switched on the row of bulbs over the mirror on the wall. Mila sat down on the stool and smoothed her hair back from her face. She opened her purse, took out a little vial of perfume, and brushed it against her wrists and on her neck. The cool bite of the perfume chilled her heated skin. She patted some talcum powder against her neck and forehead, not too much, for she was sure to sweat outside and the powder would just congeal into a white mess eventually.

The mottled glass windows of the powder room faced west, infused with the glow of the sun. The ayah sat in the shadows somewhere, knitting, Mila thought, for she could hear the quiet click of needles. Water gurgled in one of the toilets, wasteful and melodious. Brushes and combs guarded the surface of the teak dressing table. Pink tins of talcum powder were arrayed on a silver-embossed tray, now dusted with the powder that Mila had used. There were sanitary napkins in the drawer, along with cigarettes and hairpins. Despite the lavatories, the pleasant aroma of countless sprays of perfumes and the smoke of cigarettes tarried in the air. Mila, still at the mirror, was strangely lethargic, unwilling to move and go back outside. But she had to. She pleated the end of her sari again, put it over her left shoulder, pinned it into place, then gathered one end, swung it over her right shoulder, and tucked it into her blouse. Picking up her purse, Mila left the powder room to go battle the heat and the mela crowds.

Chapter
Eleven.

So far as I was concerned, I cannot give any satisfactory answer to the question why I should have sought to enter the [Indian Civill Service after my reactions to the activities of Sir Michael O'Dwyer and Brigadier-General Dyer. Certainly it was not with any idea of ever supplanting the British, since in 1924 the latter showed no indication whatsoever of being supplanted there must have been the youthfully egotistical desire to prove to all that I was as good as the next man (English, of course!).

--N. B. Bonarjee, Under Two Masters, 1970

*

My name is Pithamber, Agent Sahib," the old man said. "I come from, the Nodi village and have lived there all of my life. I do not know how old I am, Sahib, but the year I was born, the monsoon rains failed."

The man paused to wipe his eyes with the clean cotton towel he carried slung over his left shoulder. He cleared his throat, bent his head, and spoke into his chest, "There was a story, when I was a boy, that I had brought bad luck to Nodi because of the misfortune the year of my birth. I could have gone away, sometimes the teasing became very hard but where could I go? I was my parents' only son, the sole sustenance for their old age. And they had lived in Nodi all their lives. How could I move them?"

His voice fell silent in the cool room. The westward windows had their khus mats rolled down; the east windows were open to the backyard and the garden beyond. A little breeze, bearing a sudden and welcome dab of coolness, wafted in through the windows, birthed from the waters of the lake near the Victoria Club. Above them, the green ceiling fan clanked an
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huddered, making a sharp, twanging sound at every fourth revolution. With the room quiet now, Raman listened for the next twang.

He was in his office, but not seated behind his mammoth and gleaming desk, for he would not have been able to see the old man from behind it. He had pulled his chair out to the side when the petitioner had insisted upon sitting on his haunches near the door. Raman was a short man, much like his ancestors from southern India, and his feet barely touched the floor. Actually, only his toes touched the floor if he sat up straight in the chair, so he slouched a little, arms on his stomach, the old man's voice pleasantly sonorous to his ear. The Turkish carpet in deep reds and black separated them; the man would not even sit upon it, preferring the cool of the mosaic floor.

Why he had come to the political agent's office, Raman still did not know, and it would be a while before the old man would tell him. For Raman first had to listen to the story of his life, his birth, his marriage, the petty squabbles of the village--it was a process of gaining trust, this listening. And over the years, even before he had become a civil service officer, Raman had adopted this skill of paying attention to stories, for they told him more about the situation than the facts could.

Raman heard him say that the rains did come the year he was married, drenching the village lushly. His wife was an incarnation of a goddess the day he married her, fiery eyed, with a sharp tongue. She had been dead for ten years now, but she had done him well, giving him three sons and three daughters. The sons were long gone from the village, the daughters were all married he saw them sometimes he missed his wife. He did not know how old she had been when she died, or how old she had been when he married her; he knew only that she was two years past puberty. "What do you do for a living?" Raman asked when the man had fallen to quiet again. He was quite old, perhaps seventy or eighty, and yet Raman knew that he would still work. To this peasant, not working meant to invite the God of Death, Yama, into his home, noose in hand. His dark, desert skin stretched tightly over a thin frame, his shoulders were bent with age, his bare feet calloused and the nails cracked, the soles thick as shoe soles.

"I build wells, Agent Sahib," the man said, and smiled for the first time since he had come into the office.

And so he had redeemed the misfortune of his birth, Raman thought.

So he had stayed on in Nodi, not just to look after his parents, but because he had honor in the village. The old man's tale was otherwise not so different from countless other stories that Raman had heard since he had come to Rudrakot. All lives in the desert, he had realized, revolved around water. Births were marked by the monsoons--the year they came, the year they did not; superstitions swirled about water--the first rains of the year were beneficial to the health; marriages were conducted after spring because a mating after the rains would result in the blessing of many children. The villages in Rudrakot were too poor for the villagers to own wells--or those would have been marked out as assets in wedding negotiations--but almost every village in Rudrakot now had a communal well, at least one. How far away are you from the village well? was now the question prospective brides' fathers asked. The farther away, the lesser the dowry, for their daughters, newly brought into the family and so low in its hierarchy, would be the ones who would hike to the well for the family's

Water.

The door to his office opened, and the old man, startled by the noise, scrambled to his feet. Sayyid looked in.

"Yes, Sayyid?"

"Sahib, Kiran Sahib wants to talk with you."

Raman shook his head. "I'm busy now. Afterward."

Sayyid lingered in the doorway, and the villager half-bowed to him, his hands raised together in a greeting. Sayyid nodded back briefly before saying to Raman, "When"--he paused to be respectful--"do you think you will be able to see Kiran Sahib?"

Raman clicked his tongue in exasperation. Was Kiran finally awake, then? He had been away late last night, and Raman had not even seen him for lunch, with Sayyid covering up for Kiran's lateness at both ends of the night. What was he to do with this son of his? He had to see him. He wanted to see Kiran. It had been what, four, maybe five days since Raman had seen Kiran. And they lived in the same house.

"In half an hour, Sayyid," Raman said finally, in English.

The butler nodded, stepped back beyond the door frame, and shut the door.

The old man turned and Raman said, "Please sit down again."

"Are you sure, Agent Sahib? I can come back later, when you are less busy."

The man had walked three days from Nodi and had waited four days outside the political agent's office to see Raman for a few minutes. He had spent the nights at the railway station, sleeping on the platform. Yet he was willing to go back outside and wait for his turn again. It was an inbuilt patience, Raman thought, an inbuilt persistence even. The villagers knew that the sahibs had their vagaries, but they were their Ma-Baap, and would in time tend to their needs.

"Please sit," Raman said. "I have nothing else to do. Tell me why you are here."

As the man began to talk again, Raman wondered whether, after all these years, he was fit for the job of an ICS officer. It seemed as though no matter how many little matters were taken care of, others cropped up just as fast as those were resolved. Raman had wanted to be an Indian Civil Service officer because the officers who had visited his village when he was a child had been a source of awe and wonder to him. Sage and even tempered, and so all knowing. They had descended from their mansions in the cities to mediate, scold, fuss, and settle issues. I am your mother and I am your father was their credo. They were here to look after the people. The ICS was the backbone of the Indian government, why, the ICS was India.

"They do not listen to me, Agent Sahib," the old man said. "I tell them, I built the rainwater well; I know how it works. If they wash their clothes on the surface and bathe the children, it rots the water. And we have to drink that water."

"You build rainwater wells?" Raman asked, looking at the shriveled old man in front of him with a new respect. The rainwater wells were a Sukh desert construct; Raman had seen these nowhere else in India. They were actually enormous brick-laid saucers that sloped gently toward the middle, capped in the center by a six-foot-high dome. The dome had eight or ten iron jabs along the bottom, screens that filtered the rainwater into a well beneath. The brick and mortar saucer sluiced up the rains and rushed them into the well; the dome kept the precious water from evaporating under an unsympathetic sun.

Raman knew that building these wells was laborious and tedious work, requiring the finely honed skills of a well-trained engineer. The saucer had to be sloped at the right angle, the dome had to sit right, and the well below the surface had to have channels for possible overflows. This old man who had brought bad luck to his village by staunching the monsoo
n r
ains in the year of his birth had more than made up for it by providing precious water for his village.

"Do you have enough water if the monsoon fails this year?" Raman asked.

"Enough with what is in the ground, Sahib," the man replied. "Even if it is not replenished, it will last and will not bring disease. But the villagers sleep on the well at night; children throw stones into it; cows graze and defecate too close to it. The water will not keep fresh."

"This is," Raman said finally, "a matter for the resident sahib. Nodi does not lie in my jurisdiction."

"I did go to the resident sahib, Colo-nel Pank-hurst," the man said, Pankhurst's name coming out with hesitation. "He sent a munshi to talk with the villagers; the munshi ate and drank with us; we even slaughtered a goat for the meal. But in the end, he left without talking about the well. If you could come to Nodi, Agent Sahib ... they would listen to you."

"I cannot come," Raman said automatically. "I do not have the time."