The Splendor Of Silence (24 page)

Raman did not think India was ready for democracy, not yet anyway. He did not consider the masses to be educated enough to make their own decisions, in any democratic fashion, without being influenced by one source or another. The well builder who came to him today had had a very specific and seemingly trivial request--keep his well water clean--but to him it was a problem of gargantuan proportions. Why would he care in the future about the value of his vote? Or that it would elect a leader for his thronging country? His entire life had been lived in Nodi, and his allegiance would extend only to those who administered his village; for him, the geography of India was Nodi.

In the most honest moments of this wrenching discourse in his head, Raman also had to admit his greatest fear was that democracy would shatter his carefully cultivated bureaucracy.

Now there were mild rumblings of the nationalist movement in Rudrakot also, in the shape and form of earnest young men and women who went, ostensibly, to an "exercise camp" for their health, but in reality to gather and rouse each other in the name of Mr. Gandhi.

At Annadale College a few months ago, Raman had watched a demonstration from inside the grounds, along with the principal, Mr. Stokes, and the chief inspector of Rudrakot. The shouts rose and died out over a period of two hours. Send them home, I say, a young man had called out, and was answered by a hugeyes. India is for Indians; we do not want their like here. And Tilak's doctrine, taken and adopted firmly into the freedom movement: Swaraj is my birthright. Self-rule. Self-rule, they shouted, let u
s r
ule ourselves, by ourselves. Go Home. Quit India, would come later tha
t y
ear, but those latter two phrases were already in the consciousness of all

Indians. Then they had begun to sing "Vandemataram" in praise of India.

I bow to thee, Mother

Richly watered, richly fruited, cool with the winds of the south Dark with the crops of harvests, Mother!

Nights rejoicing in the glory of moonlight

Lands clothed beautifully with trees in flowering bloom Sweet of laughter, sweet of speech

O
Mother, giver of boons, giver of bliss!

Their voices had been hoarse and sweet together, mostly men's voices, a few higher-pitched women's voices interspersed in between. Raman, enclosed in Stokes's office, the windows open toward the gates so they could hear what was being said, even if they could not see or be seen (for security reasons), was overwhelmed as his heart swelled to stifle within his chest. Tears caught in his throat when he heard the words, made him feel whole with the crowd outside. Then the song died down, the man on the gatepost began to yell invectives, the police constables toppled him off into the crowd, and then the students went home.

But they had all learned something that March morning in Rudrakot from the thousand-strong throng outside Annadale College--that the nationalist movement was here to stay in 1942, that it had been growing unfettered in the exercise camps without their knowledge, that it was a threat needing to be checked.

At least, Raman thought, his children were not involved. Kiran, with his self-imposed idleness, was in danger of having his head turned, but Kiran was too much like his father; he would never join the movement. Mila and Ashok were enigmas of sorts--idleness would not draw them into nationalism, conviction would. But they were safe for now ... unless that boy Vimal, who was tutored with Ashok, approached him. But there could be little opportunity for a meeting, Raman hoped.

Putting away all this, he sat sipping his cold chai and munching on his scones. He would leave early tomorrow morning, while the night was old but not yet dead, at two o'clock or three o'clock, and he would ride in th
e d
ark to catch what little cool there was in the air. As the sun rose, they could stop for a breakfast. When Raman had been a young assistant collector on tour, Sayyid had thrown fabulous curry omelets on a smoking cast-iron rava* eggs whipped with a fork with milk and a pinch of sugar; slivers of red onions; whole leaves of coriander; one garlic clove, plump and pungent when crushed; a sprinkling of cumin powder; ground peppercorns. His mouth watered. Sayyid would toast the bread slices in the same ghee used to cook the omelet and bring the whole, hot and steaming, to Raman. This is what he remembered most about being in camp, the breakfasts under a canopy of fading stars accompanied by the song of birds. Surely, Pankhurst would not mind if Raman took over this little duty of his.

So Raman ruminated with pleasure on the next day. Many, many years later he would know for certain that he should not have gone from Rudrakot to Nodi, that he was needed at home, that Pallavi would not be strong enough to resist Mila's pleas or Ashok's tantrums. That his children, because of that one night and day, would hurl the paths of their lives away from him, break that umbilical cord that connected them to him as surely as if a midwife had gnawed through it with a knife. Raman would never regret knowing Sam Hawthorne, and so would never be remorseful that he had invited him to stay in his house when he could very well have bunked at the Victoria Club. Raman believed in karma, in a fate that etched the lives of men and women into stone well before they were born. Sam Hawthorne, he considered a karma for them all. They were meant to know him.

But he did wish in later years, when he was old and grizzled, confined to an easy chair in the verandah, two grandchildren on his lap, their fragrant heads resting on his chest as he told them stories, that the gap left by Mila's child could be filled too. That the granddaughter he had known for only a short time after her birth would come to lay her face against his, wind her arms around his neck, kiss him and call him tharha--grandfathen If she had stayed on with them, they would have used one of her Indian names, but in America, she was called Olivia.

Unknowing of how fate was to unravel all of their lives, Raman put down his teacup and called Sayyid into his office to talk with him about packing his clothes.

Chapter
Thirteen.

They didn't come from very good families at all. They married for the sake of marrying, I suppose, and companionship. And they became very haughty. They had doyens of servants, though they never had one servant in England; and they thought every one of no was servant class I remember once at a gathering one Englishwoman turned to me and said: "Oh, what beautiful English you talk." I said: "Really? I'm surprised you acknowledge h. After all, we educated Indians talk English all the time. Thank you for noticing, Ito its not a compliment."

--Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj, 1987

For many years after the death of the Raj, my dear Olivia, British writers would pen long tales about Raj childhoods, Raj service, the might of the empire, the necessity for it, why it benefited India. Indian writers tell of sacrifices made and horrors undergone in the name of that ultimate mother, India. Neither opts to be deliberately untruthful, but as much as the passing of the years has brought a clarity about the characters and attitudes of the rulers and the ruled, the distance has also created a fog. The Indian writers can sometimes be overly vehement, and the British look back wistfully upon their pukka sahib childhoods with memories clouded by sentimentality and twaddle.

But there was no losing sight of the fact that, friendly or not, sympathetic or not, the British were the masters and we were They were unwelcome, and would be asked to Quit India in a few short months.

So back then, my dearest Olivia, back in 1942, on that 28th of May, the differences were sharp and clear, as though newly cleaved into being. As Sam moved down the lawns toward the mela at the Victoria Club, he did not see these differences or realife what they could mean--why, he was in love with Mila, how could he separate herfiom her people?

Sam looked out in the direction of the lake. From here he could not see the mela itself, but a path, fringed with a short hedge of jasmine bushe
s l
ed out between the lush lawns. Everything was neat, trimmed to precision, mowed to perfection, the blades of grass short cropped, as though with the razor of a skillful barber. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw Mila and Ashok on the steps to the club. Nothing had taken away his own surprising attraction to her, and this rush of feeling startled him anew. He found himself thinking of the drive here, of the way her hands rested on the steering wheel, the folds of her sari around her waist and the curve of her thighs, the obvious affection she had for young Ashok, the fact that both of them thought deeply about matters that had little to do with them.

A loudspeaker boomed somewhere near the lake just as Sam lit a cigarette. "Two fat ladies, eighty-eight!" "One short of my age, twenty-nine!" A shout came out into the air. "You saw thirty at least a decade ago, mate."

"A pair of hockey sticks, seventy-seven," the loudspeaker went on.

"Housie!"

There was the sound of laughter, both men's and women's voices screaming to check the results. Sam went down the path and came out into a clearing that sloped gently to the lake. There were rows of stalls set in a ring around a central tent, topped off by striped red and dull gold shamianas with fringe in the front, in the colors of the Rudrakot Rifles. Wooden poles held up the shamianas at regular intervals, wrapped in red and gold ribbons that climbed up in dizzy diagonals. The tables at each stall were covered with immaculately white tablecloths, their edges dragging on the grass. One huge wooden pole had been dug in at the very center, like a maypole, and strings of triangular flags swung down over the grounds and up onto the shamiana poles. The flags simmered limply in the still-lingering May afternoon heat.

A castle gate loomed over the path, complete with battlements and pointed merlons, the large stone slabs painted in blacks and grays of undulating color on canvas stretched across a wooden frame. The gate was meant to evoke the chilly black stone of Home fortifications, of knights in armor, of maidens in distress, of mists across moors and muffled horse hooves and flying capes. But the artists--one of the bearers at the Victoria Club and a gardener--had not been able to comprehend all this foreignness, even though it had been explained with a great deal of patience and some eventual asperity, by both the club secretary and Laetitia Sexton. So the castle was now both English and Indian; the main gate had blueand-white-tiled Persian and Hindu inlay, mimicking most of the forts in Rudrakot; the stone slabs had furtive dabs of ocher, for the artists had never before seen black stone, only the red sandstone from the local quarries. What little English part remained on the canvas sweated reproachfully in the heat, the paint melting in spots.

At the ticket booth, Sam counted out four annas. He held the coins in his palm for a fleeting moment before handing them over. The last time he had looked at money in his hand was at the railway station. Four annas bought entry into a church mela. Three further eroded the innocence of a little boy, made him think that all adult men were predators. Life was cheaper in India than music organs.

Sam put the rest of the change back into his pants pocket and stepped onto the grass that squished damply under his feet. The recent watering, the moisture on such a hot day, had brought out little clouds of mosquitoes hovering around in patches. The insects did not follow to swarm about him, but it was less than an hour to sunset, and that was when they would begin their seeking of light from unnatural sources and the seeking of flesh and blood without discrimination, both Indian and British. The biggest crowd, the most people, drifted in and out of the main tent, which had the legend bearing the letters TEA. Sam paused at the entrance.

He saw them in a tableau--the Indians seemingly on one side, the British on the other. Hands froze toward mouths, glasses slanted precariously, the lemon slices in the gimlets nudging the rims. Smiles and half smiles widened mouths. In every gaze, there was a question. Sam was new, he was unusual, he felt it to be so, and yet he was aware that they must all know that he was in Rudrakot. The Indian women were in a mass of color, saris that were of all fabrics, silk and cotton, chiffons with a sheen, glittering embroidery. The English ladies were in deliberately muted pastels, their legs cast in stockings, bows on their shoes.

Eventually, the tableau disintegrated, as it had to, for they had all stood regarding each other for a while. The lines shimmied, coughs arose in throats, an elbow itch was scratched. An officer from the Rudrakot Rifles came forward.

"Second Lieutenant Sims," he said. "Fourth Rudrakot Rifles."

"Captain Hawthorne," Sam replied. He did not flinch from either the handshake or the gaze leveled upon him--there was nothing to show him as the afternoon's mall outside the barracks. Now he saw Sims clearly. He was a young man without the shadow of hair on his smooth cheekbones and palely lashed eyes that blinked in the light.

"You're an awfully long way from home, aren't you?"

"Not that far away," Sam said easily, "Third Burma Rangers."

Now the other officers came up and introductions swung around the circle. Blakely, Marriott, Patton, and Miles. Sam strained his memory for a mention of the new names in Mike's letters, but could remember little. If Mike drank in the mess with these young men, if he played bridge at this club, if he even had an altercation with another officer, his letters had said nothing about it. Instead there were reams of prose on Rudrakot, the town, the cantonment, the bazaar, and the freedom movement. Mike had come to India for India, and for the war, and though he had not expected to be stationed in Rudrakot, so far from any war front, there was India everywhere around him, and little else had engaged his attention when he picked up his pen twice to write to Maude. They were all curious, he saw that, but too polite to ask anything more, until one young man said, "How long have you been in this infernal country?"