The Splendor Of Silence (26 page)

It was all said with a little shade of superiority and some condescension, for no matter what personal sentiments might be, no matter what their jobs or duties were in India, no Englishman or Englishwoman could help being unaware of the fact that if Mr. Raman had conversation, if he was charming, if indeed, he was intelligent--it was all born of them, their language, their charm, their methods of refining minds in Oxford or Cambridge, at the latter of which Raman had read history and economics before appearing for his ICS exams.

But nothing that Amelia Pankhurst said was offensive to Sam, not immediately, not even later when he had reflected upon her words. For she had tact, and diplomacy, and not quite such an empty head as everyone imagined. Amelia Pankhurst was no fool, but they none of them around her saw it except Sam, because he was not so taken by the delicacy of her profile or the slenderness of her neck, or the length of her legs. The officers hung over her, enamored. The young lieutenant who had lit her cigarette cradled his lighter in the palm of his hand with the attention of a new father about to smother his newborn with kisses. Mrs. Stanton had regained some composure, her feathers smoothed down. Sam saw that Mrs. Stanton had a place of convenience at the residency, she took care of matters that Lady Pankhurst could not be bothered with--those matters that Amelia really cared for, she handled herself.

So he was to stay on at Mr. Raman's, he thought, though not all the weight of society or etiquette would have made him change his residence. The group broke up as the waiters brought more tea and cakes. A plate was pressed into Sam's hand. The officers of the Rudrakot Rifles left their places by Lady Pankhurst as she got up and wandered away in a vague manner. When she passed Sam, the sleeve of her dress brushed his arm, and she lifted her shoulder in a tranquil shrug. That little touch was deliberately done and she left Sam bemused and wondering. He saw Mila enter the tent and began to call out to her, but she just smiled quickly and made her way to the other side where more officers were ranged around a table in white uniforms with light blue facings, their shoulders braided, as with the Rifles, with gold epaulets. These were the officers of the Rudrakot Lancers--Jai's regiment. The regiment that was commanded by, in Mike's words, some sort of a prince. Discomfort began to inch its way under Sam's skin as he watched Mila laugh at a joke, take the seat warmed for her by a young man with a magnificent mustache. He saw their division now, for the first time.

There was a clear demarcation between the Indians and the British even within the tea tent. Something tacit and understood. Here and there, a few of each color strayed to the other side, but this was mostly to say hello, to nod, to complain about the heat, or to feel thankful that it had cooled down. The groups formed cohesive units, each person at rest only while belonging to their own species, and imperceptibly bothered while on the other side, hands in motion, backs rigid with protocol, manners in check. Though many people from Sam's side wandered to Mila, they did not stay long, and she, he noticed, never rose from her seat to come to him. She did talk with Lady Pankhurst, but they met somewhere in the middle of the tent, each on the pretext of the search for a thinly sliced cucumber-and-butter sandwich. They shook hands, spoke for a very little while, and then wandered away from each other.

It was magnificently done--this comedy of manners. Mila was her father's hostess, Amelia Pankhurst was the resident's, and, as such, they had equal footing in Rudrakot's society because each man was equally important, the colors of their skin notwithstanding. At every dinner where they were both present, the two women rose to lead the way out of dining rooms (to leave the men to their port) alternatingly, so there was no impropriety.

Sam knew that Mila was not stupid; he now saw that Amelia Pankhurst was not either. Whatever Amelia might think inside of herself, however she viewed her position, she had grace and diplomacy. His admiration for Amelia Pankhurst was brief; he looked at Mila longer, until he was afraid that he was beginning to stare. What was she saying? And why?

There were two little Indian boys, about ten and eight years old, dressed in suits even in this heat, their faces scrubbed clean, a glitter of coconut oil in their dark hair. They looked alike, though with the indiscernible features of childhood, and it was difficult to estimate if they looked like their mother or their father, or both, for they resembled none of the keepers around them. Each boy had on a light blue tie with diagonal muted white stripes, their cuffs came halfway down the backs of their hands, adorned with three tiny diamond links, and as they sat, their trousers creased at the knees and pulled up to reveal thick white socks and black patent leather shoes that gleamed with polishing.

Mila stopped by their table and the two boys rose with immaculate courtesy to shake her hand, to speak, to bow and almost click their heels. The boys had half-eaten slices of cream cakes in front of them, and they had laid their little forks at an angle on their plates and swabbed at their mouths with napkins. For all their grace and elegance, they were, in the end, little boys, and the older one had a starlike pattern of yellow cream on the right side of his mouth. Mila rubbed this from his face with her thumb and said something. The boy blushed. Sam pondered who they were, and if he had had the time to think about it at all, he would have realized that the little boys' ties were the same blue as a summer sky bleached into paleness--the same blue as the trimmings on the uniforms of the Rudrakot Lancers. The regiment commanded by HRH Jai, prince of Rudrakot.

Ensconced within that circle of men who had at one time been Mike's friends, or, at the very least, his acquaintances, Sam answered as many questions as he could about his purpose at being here, how long he was going to stay, what he was going to do for the next few days. As he talked, his mind and the corner of his eye followed Mila's progress around th
e t
ent. He kept that pond water green chiffon sari in sight; if she stopped to talk with a man, he wondered who he was. And so Sam did not notice that Sims was watching him over the rim of his gimlet glass, lighting one cigarette from another.

And then this finally penetrated Sam's consciousness, this phrase that would tell him that they knew of Mike, that they acknowledged his presence, which Sam had been wondering how to bring into the conversation without evoking suspicion.

Sims said in an exaggerated, Western-movie-learned drawl, "By golly, damn if we don't have another Yankee in our midst."

April 1942, a Month Earlier

Somewhere in
B
urma

Come," Sam says, holding out his hand for Marianne. She wipes her eyes and gives him a half smile. Now--in the dull gloom of afternoon forest light, with her white hair sparkling with wet, her eyes liquid, the age lines on her face muted--Marianne looks like an elf. Sam suddenly does not like the way Ken looks, though. His face is too wan, his brow too blemished with streaks of pain. The opium they have smoked has helped dull everything--the pain they carry, the sorrow, the fear, and even, when they allow themselves to feel it, the hopelessness of their quest for India. In one piece, all alive.

"Come, Ken," Sam says, helping him to his feet and grasping his arm tight as Ken puts weight back on his shattered ankle. "We must find some food."

"We cannot say no to you anymore, can we, Sam?" Marianne asks. She heaves her haversack onto her shoulders and leans with it against the trunk of a teak tree so that she can adjust the straps.

They lumber down the hillside and come upon the clearing that once housed the village. Again they stop to absorb what they see, but distantly, for the opium has cut away the keenness of their observation, so Sam, Marianne, and Ken see what they see, but they do not react to it. The bashas are black skeletons staggering drunkenly on crisscrossed stilts. The trees of the village are stumps of charcoal. The bamboo poles used for water lurch against the sides of broken walls, lie heaped on the ground like a pile of matchsticks. At the far end of the village are three new and pristine palm-thatched silos, like inverted weaverbird nests. They are untouched, but even from here, they look helpless and empty to Sam. The silos once housed rice, brought up here to the Kachin villages from southern Burma, to be kept safe from the Japanese army. But the Japanese army has clearly been to this village; Sam knows the silos are empty.

They step into the village's main street. All of them, even Sam, lucid as lie is at this moment, glide on their opium haze, and so willfully do not see the bodies of the villagers scattered around them as they walk toward the silos. Arms and legs chopped off, skin charred into dust, a thick section of black hair untouched by the fire. A little boy on his side, legs curled up to what was once his stomach. A man lying on his back, two gaping holes in his ankles, his feet hanging onto the rest of his legs by severed tendons. All these people, shells of humanity, are now blessedly and gratefully dead. They feel no pain, no humiliation, no fear anymore. And Sam, Marianne, and Ken, stepping around their bodies, feel no pain either. The opium has eaten away their capacity to feel.

They enter the hollow silos and scramble through the dust for the precious, pearly grains of rice that gleam in the light from the one window set high up. They dust off each grain and pile them into Sam's handkerchief until they have almost two handfuls. Armed with the rice, they search through the village for other stuff, a vessel to cook the rice in, water to wash it and to drink, a moldy green gourd from a garden that Sam reverently slices with his dah. As the rice cooks, its starchy aroma wafts over them, the white meat from the gourd glistens and softens in the heat from the fire, and Sam sits away from Ken and Marianne, his back against a tree. They are still in the vicinity of the village, for seen from here, a wisp of smoke from their cooking fire will not be suspicious, as it would be if they were somewhere else in the deep jungle.

Sam takes out his map for what seems like the hundredth time, spreads it out, and traces their route. He does not know exactly where they are; there are so many Kachin villages here, they all just meld into a motley bunch of squiggles on the map. Even Marianne does not know; she has been singularly narrow-minded and focused during her years in Burma, and knows little of the tribes and habitations beyond her village.

Ken comes up to him and points at a patch of emptiness on the map. "We should head this way," he says. "There's a trail here, I've seen it from the sky."

Sam peers at the spot Ken's grimy finger indicates. It strays from his originally planned-out path. He shakes his head doubtfully.

Ken shrugs. "Suit yourself. If we don't go that way into the wilderness, we might well encounter the Japanese on the marked trail." He wanders away to sit by Marianne, leaving Sam to ponder his suggestion until the greens in the paper swim into one color in front of his tired eyes.

He puts the map back into his pocket and takes out his tin of cigarettes. There are only ten left. He rubs his fingers over their long and smooth lines, sniffs at the tobacco smell, shuts the tin and puts it away too. Marianne lifts the green banana leaf over the pot of cooking rice and gourd and its fragrance swirls up to Sam. His mouth begins to water and he swallows his saliva, and forces himself to wait. To share, when the rice is finally cooked. To not be greedy, for he knows his two other companions are rabidly hungry too. And then, after this, they have cherries and cream for dessert. What about tomorrow? Damn tomorrow, Sam thinks, as soon as that thought comes to his mind, tomorrow they will find other food. Today, they will feast. He shuts his eyes, allows the saliva to fill his mouth again and wonders what it will be like when they reach India. What it will be like in a world where there is no want of anything, where food is aplenty, and where, though he does not know it yet--love awaits.

Chapter
Fourteen.

the average Indian makes very little difference between the Americans, the British or any other European nation, as long as their skin is white He approaches all white men with the same extreme caution, and treats them all with the same self conscious, rather theatrical courtesy in his efforts to impress them.

--Louis Hagen, Ihdian Rouse March, 1946

A
nd so that day slipped quietly into the arms of the night. There wa
s n
o twilight to speak of, at one moment the sun still burned hotly above Rudrakot, as though unwilling to restrain its ambush, and in the next it ducked below the horizon, pulling all light with it. For a few minutes, a glowing blue stained the air around the mela, faces grew indistinct and blurred, whether from the lack of light or the speedily dispatched gimlets and beers, it was hard to tell.

Rudrakot had one mosque, and from the slender concrete minaret on one corner of the mosque rose the muezzin's deeply melodious voice. Allah u Allah u Akbar. Ya Allah The sound of his call to the faithful for prayer swung out over the town, aided by a loudspeaker, floated through the cool of the shaded Civil Lines, skittered over the waters of the lake, and caused pause in the conversation around Sam. In Raman's home, Sayyid pulled out his prayer mat and faced toward the front of the house, and west toward Mecca. Temple bells rang out from the hundreds of temples in Rudrakot, as the priests' voices rose in chants of Sanskrit shlokas
,
welcoming the presence of God within. It was the time to light the hundreds of diyas and lanterns in and around the town.

As Sayyid prayed in the back garden, kneeling on his prayer mat, no Raman did too, seated cross-legged in the verandah, his sacred Brahmin thread, worn slung across one shoulder and under one arm, held between his fingers. He had not been entirely truthful when he had spoken to Sam earlier that morning about abandoning his caste--Raman had given away his name, but kept the other marks of his caste in the thread worn across his chest, under his clothes where no one but he knew it existed. Part of owning that thread, of being of the Brahmin caste, was to pray three times a day, morning, noon, and evening, and this Raman did because he honored where he came from and honored his ancestors. Sayyid and Raman were separated from each other by a few feet, master and servant, each with his eyes closed, his mind immersed in prayer, appealing to two different Gods without any sense of irony.