The Splendor Of Silence (32 page)

Sam put the cool, long barrel of his Colt against his forehead. India was strange, he thought, with its ghosts that disappeared, a lazy lizard downstairs large enough to eat them all, buildings that existed on maps and not on the earth. He went back to the jeep. Sam offered his hand to Mila to help her out, as though it was the most natural thing to do. He wanted to tell her of his attraction for her but there was no time. He had to be back in Calcutta and Assam soon, back in Burma. For a moment last night, when he had held her hand at the mela, Sam had almost asked Mila to dance with him to the music the band was playing, but something had stopped him.

Ashok and Vimal scurried away, shouting with delight as their feet pounded over the sandstone floors of the tomb. They came to a halt by the slothful lizard.

"A
v
aran!" Ashok shouted. "A colossal one. Look, Vimal, he's moving."

Mila shuddered and retreated to the other end of the tomb. "Get it out of here," she called over her shoulder. "It's disgusting."

Sam watched as Ashok and Vimal knelt by the varan and stroked its thick hide. It swung its tail about, thwacking at their legs, and then lifted itself on powerful thighs and arms and waddled away. Greens, blues, and reds undulated under its skin as it slid over the edge of the verandah and fell onto the ground on the far side, raising a fine plume of dust.

Then, the two boys climbed on the sarcophagus and lay on their backs on the dusty stone, gazing up to the roof of the second story. Here they had the best view of the ornate, carved ceiling. At the very center was a huge lotus flower, etched into the stone, the petals lush and creamy. Peacocks danced in full form at the four corners of the ceiling, each detail of their feathers cut patiently into the stone. Other flowers--jasmine and hibiscus--abounded; a nilgai nibbled on grass, its blue neck bent as an offering to a hunter's musket. A black buck stared out for all eternity, its ears pricked for a sound it would never hear, its eyes large and liquid. Once h
e r
ealized what Ashok and Vimal were looking at, now in a complete silence, Sam lifted his neck and bent his head backward.

Despite everything, he was overcome by a sense of awe and peace at the sight of the ceiling. This was the real and hidden beauty in Chetak's tomb. In everything else, it was simple to the point of being austere, straight Persian lines for the shape of the inside and outside verandahs and corridors, smooth, unembellished curves on the pillars. The sarcophagus was like a gleaming jewel in the center of the floor, its top and sides carefully inlaid with the purest of white marble in patterns of hexagons, triangles, and squares. This inlay work, called pietra dura, traced its origins to Italy, but was now ensconced firmly in Indian architecture. The work was as flawless as it must have been when the tomb was constructed more than a hundred years ago. The tiny marble slices had been embedded in the sandstone with glue and mortar and then the whole was polished and smoothed until it looked as though the sandstone was born that way--seamless to the touch. For the rest of the stark tomb, the only adornments were the striations of cool beiges in the sandstone, everywhere the eye lit. The stones had been chosen to match, color for color, slab for slab. The ochers, rust-golds, and browns harmonized perfectly, melding, until the whole tomb looked as though it had been cut out of one mammoth piece of stone.

But Sam had not come to admire the beauties of Chetak's tomb. He looked around. Ashok and Vimal had disappeared from the top of the sarcophagus, and Sam could hear their deep-timbred voices in the upstairs verandah. He caught a little glimpse of Mila's brown arm wrapped around a pillar at the far entrance of the tomb; she was leaning against it, facing north. Sam could see her shoulder, the curve of her cheek, and a wisp of her hair lifting in the gentle, heat-laden breeze that flew through one entrance and out the other. Sam moved to the east-facing verandah, reached into his shoulder bag, and brought out a pair of binoculars. The contours of the desert swam and rippled through the glass. Here and there, a lone khejri tree spread out its irregular, thorn-ridden branches. Its leaves were sparse and it was selfish with shade, proudly lifting its spiky arms into the furious blaze of the sun.

He lowered his glasses and gazed out into the distance, shading his eyes with his hand even though he was not standing in direct sunlight. The map that Sam had glanced at on his way back from the men's washroom at the Victoria Club had upon it a building east of Chetak's tomb. Written in an uneducated hand were the words Field Punishment Center, 093
0
. Even fainter than that, mixed in around the artist's fanciful rendering of a gallery of trees and shrubs in the barren reaches of the Sukh, was a cheap little rhyme: Beware, all ye who enter here. For once ye do, give up all that ye hold dear.

Sam closed his eyes from the strain of having stared too intensely into the horizon and listened hard. But all he could hear was the raucous chatter of the servants as they prepared the afternoon's lunch, the clatter of the vessels, the tinkling cooling down of the jeeps' engines. Where was the field punishment center? According to the Victoria Club map, it was somewhere close by, and yet he had seen nothing through the binoculars. Mike, Sam thought, suddenly overcome with a terrible fear that threatened to break his heart, are you there? He listened more intently, sifting out the sounds near him, yearning for the miraculous sound of Mike's voice calling out to him, knowing it was stupid to wish for something so strange, so unreal. But everything had been unreal to Sam for the last few days, even Mike's disappearance. For people did not simply vanish from the middle of a regiment without any reason, without a trace. Sam rubbed the weariness out of his temples and lifted his gaze to the horizon. Nothing. Nothing but a slow swirl of sand, a waver of radiance. He began to raise the glasses up again and saw, without the aid of the binoculars, that the light had altered, cleared, magnified in the distance. And in that shifting a low building of red sandstone crystallized into being.

The field punishment center was less than two miles from Chetak's tomb.

Chapter
Seventeen.

I had begun to understand and sympathise with the problems of the white man in India soon afier my arrival, when I reached the phase that everyone goes through of thinking of the Indians as Wogs. When this happens, al I your preconceived ideas seem to go sour on you and then melt away in the hot sun; you see the Indians as a lot of hopeless degenerates and the Soul of India as backsheesh."

--Louis Hagen, Indian Route March,
1
946

*

A
t two o'clock in the morning, Raman had risen from his bed, bathed ..-fi and prayed, eaten a light breakfast to keep hunger away, and then set off on his way to Nodi. The old villager had slept at the back of the house, on the steps leading down to the garden. It had been his best night's sleep in the last ten days, since he had left Nodi to come in search of Raman. The old man had stopped under a few banyan trees, terrified by every rustle of the leaves (for ghosts of the ill-treated lingered there), on the roadside, in the verandah at Chetak's tomb, in the bazaar, and finally, spent the last three nights on the platform in the railway station, using his cotton towel to cover his face from the gaze of others. When they left from Rudrakot, Raman rode his horse, fancifully named Sans Reproche by Jai (after he had spent a summer in Paris), who had reared this horse in the regimental stables. Sans Reproche was a gentle, doe-eyed creamer, with a propensity for nuzzling his warm and wet nose against Raman's neck each time he dismounted. The old man had been convinced to ride
a d
onkey, and he had agreed to mount this lesser animal only because it was not a horse. The donkey's lead was tied to Sayyid's horse's saddle and the three of them set out with two other servants to run ahead and light their way with kerosene lanterns held aloft at the end of a pole.

Sayyid had laid his head down for only a brief rest the night before because Mila had returned from the Victoria Club to say simply, "We are going to Chetak's tomb for a picnic, Sayyid, about six o'clock. Will you see to the arrangements, please?"

"Of course, Mila," Sayyid said. He had been with Raman for twenty-eight years, since he was sixteen years old, and looked upon Raman as a brother, and his children as his own nephews and niece. But at no time in the last three decades had Sayyid forgotten that he was a servant. Raman, he addressed as "Sahib," and Lakshmi as "Memsahib," for they were his masters. With Pallavi, the situation had been fraught with tension and difficulties--for Pallavi too had been a servant when Raman had first married, and had grown into adulthood and the status of the children's mother, a fact that was still questionable to Sayyid. He ignored Pallavi. He had called her by her name, or "girl," when she was young, but as she grew older and more assertive in the house, at times daring to order him around, he began to grow deaf and had by now quite forgotten that she even had a name. Sayyid was respectful, but always found an opportunity to materialize under her nose before he spoke so that he did not have to use any form of address.

The children he called by their names. Though rightfully, when they were young, Sayyid should have called Kiran and Ashok something like chota baba, or little Sahib, and Mila missy baba, which had no translation. This he had not, and one day three years ago, suddenly mindful of his place in the house as a butler, and his duties, he had said Chota Sahib to Kiran in the course of a conversation. And Kiran's response, in his impeccable public school English, had been, "Come off it, Sayyid. I'm a Chota Sahib now? Don't be ridiculous." Kiran had gone chortling to Raman's room to tell him of this latest joke.

Sayyid had then retreated into a dignified silence on that matter and continued to address Kiran, Mila, and Ashok as he always had, all the while bemoaning their too-familiar ways with the household help. Not done, he thought. The masters ought to keep their distance from the servants, and so he had learned from the other butlers in the Civil Lines, especially the British one, imported to the residency to add pomp in the front portico with his elevated nose and his dour visage.

At Mila's request for a picnic lunch at Chetak's tomb, Sayyid had balked, but within himself. Where Pallavi could ask, no, demand that Mila talk with her father about the proposed trip, Sayyid kept quiet, not even telling his master the next morning. But he had his duties to the child of his master. Mila did not think about the lateness of the hour or any inconvenience to Sayyid from her request, and neither did Sayyid. He telephoned from the hall phone to the quartermaster of the Rudrakot Rifles, caught him at home as he was sitting down to a late dinner with some friends, and asked for an extra jeep for the next morning. The quartermaster merely asked how far the jeep was to travel in order to write out a chit for the petrol. By midnight, the jeep was parked in the driveway of Raman's house, its driver asleep on the backseat in twenty minutes. Then Sayyid went about meticulously arranging for the picnic lunch. He took care of every little detail himself, and finally lay down on his charpai under the brilliantly starred night sky, the near-to-fullness moon hanging pendant above him. When he woke, Sayyid checked on the arrangements again, wishing all the while that he could have gone along with Mila on the picnic to be sure that every element of his preparations was attended to, but he had to, wanted to, accompany Raman to Nodi. At Chetak's tomb, the servants began making the first round of drinks with a care that belied Sayyid's absence. They shook out ice cubes from the thermoses into another, insulated container and set this aside in the shade of one of the pillars. A cocktail shaker was placed within this ice, to cool to freezing. The servant then poured in cognac, pineapple syrup, orange curacao, a dash of Angostura bitters, and some ice chips and then capped the shaker and shook it gently. The ice hissed and splintered within the cold shaker, and when the servant poured his version of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club cocktail into the shining martini glasses set upon a carved wood tray, the drink frosted the outside of the glass upon contact. He carefully lifted his tray and went around Chetak's tomb in search of his masters. Mila he found leaning against a pillar at the north entrance. She held the delicate stem of the glass between her thumb and index finger and drank a good portion of the cocktail even before the servant had turned to leave.

"Bring me another one please."

"Ji, Memsahib," the boy said. He hesitated. "Right away?"

"No, take the drinks to the others. Only two, maximum, for Ashok Sahib."

The boy nodded and went off. He found Ashok peering under the stone stairs that led up to the tomb, hoping for another glimpse of the varan. Like Mila, Ashok drank his cocktail in one mouthful and reached for another glass.

"Only two, Sahib," the boy said gently.

"All right."

The servant found Vimal standing a few paces behind Sam, at the east-facing verandah of Chetak's tomb. Heat rose in waves and gusted toward them. It hung in the air, clawed its way into their lungs until they could not breathe, dragged perspiration out onto the surface of their skins. Sam did not know yet that Vimal stood behind him; he had his binoculars raised to the view of the field punishment center. The building dozed in the midday sun, bare and unembellished. It was constructed with slabs of sandstone glued together with mortar, and on the side that faced Chetak's tomb was a wooden gate with an arched top that mimicked the arch of the gateway. There were no windows on this wall, or perhaps on any of the other walls, Sam thought, for this was a prison. Four square minarets rose out at the four corners, topped off by a stone pavilion with a stone roof. The minarets, guard towers, were empty. Even if a prisoner was foolish enough to escape in the middle of the day, he would be seen for miles in this deserted land, and if he was not caught immediately, the sun would kill him. At night other dangers, human, inhuman, and animal, awaited. Rudrakot was the nearest place of habitation and it was three hours by car, and innumerable hours by foot. The field punishment center was literally in the middle of nowhere.