The Splendor Of Silence (39 page)

And then. Ken crumples to the ground.

Chapter
Twenty-Two.

... an Indian woman strayed into the lines where we were barracked, and she got into very serious trouble. I don't know whether she'd some in by mistake or whether she was looking for business, but things must've got out of hand and she was passed from bed to bed and finished up as a dead body on the incinerator in the morning There'd been about twenty-four to thirty fellows involved, probably a lot more than that The thing was that she had come in of her own accord and that was the result

--Anton Gill, Ruling Passions: Sex, Race and Empire, 1995

*

Jai did not move even as Mila neared. Ashok flitted around him, almost too happy to see him. He shook his hand, patted his shoulder, an
d n
ow, almost hung on his arm rife with questions--when had he returned, how was the ICC, how long had he been at the house. To all of which Jai gave, what seemed to Mila, noncommittal replies. His attention was all hers. She jogged down the driveway, and then, suddenly overcome with shyness, stopped fifteen feet away, her breath searing her lungs.

His mouth lifted at one corner and Jai brought his swagger stick forward to touch it to his turban in a salute.

"You remember the story," he said, with a fuller smile now that irradiated his face with charm.

She nodded, and still waited where she stood.

A few years ago, the maharaja of Kurvi had come on an official state visit to Rudrakot. He was an older man, with three grown daughters wh
o w
ere potential candidates as a second wife for Jai. Raman and Colonel Pankhurst had discussed the possibility of an alliance between Rudrakot and Kurvi for many months, ever since Kurvi's divan had flung open hints about this at Raman's last visit to the hill station of Mussoorie, where they had all been members of the same club. It would have been a politically gainful union for Rudrakot for two reasons--Kurvi was a neighboring kingdom, with two-thirds of Rudrakot's boundaries abutting it; and it would finally mean the end of a sometimes torrid, sometimes indifferent war between the two princely states.

The origins of the disagreements came from a woman, naturally, and in the lands around Rudrakot, all disagreements stemmed from water, women, livestock, or land. What had happened was that about a hundred years ago, a daughter from the house of Kurvi had been given in marriage to a reigning Rudrakot king. She had only been a third wife, and had been so unfortunate as to have been born ugly--a fact the king had only realized upon lifting her veil within the seclusion of his bedchamber on the wedding night. The marriage remained unconsummated, and finally, the much-beleaguered wife admitted the shameful fact. Her husband had since taken another wife, a French woman, and had lustfully begat two half-caste children with her.

The king of Kurvi came roaring into Rudrakot to haul up his errant son-in-law and demand that his daughter be impregnated so that she could bear an heir for the kingdom. And Jai's ancestor had lazily said something that loosely translated into, "I'm sorry, old chap. No can do. She makes my skin crawl." It was an unfortunate set of phrases to speak to a father about his, admittedly, ungainly daughter. The Kurvi king spluttered and shouted, but he could not very well launch an all-out war because he had been well aware that his daughter was unprepossessing (and had hoped the Rudrakot king would manage somehow); and, the East India Company had offered the services of its armies to Rudrakot by then. That began a century-old official policy of the two kingdoms blackballing and ostracizing each other until finally, a few years ago, the current maharaja of Kurvi decided to offer one of his daughters to Jai to bring the feud to an end.

Jai did not intend to marry any of the Kurvi girls, but well aware of this history, he still demanded, and got, three photographs of each of them--one full length (to check for deformities), one seated, and on
e c
lose up. Even though they were blessed with a minor amount of pulchritude, Jai had already decided against an alliance with Kurvi, for two years ago, when Mila was nineteen, he had fallen in love with her and could think of no other woman as his wife, not even the one he currently had.

Raman and Colonel Pankhurst were understandably thrilled by the offers of friendship from Kurvi, for management of the land around the boundaries between two warring kingdoms had been a difficult task for them and for Kurvi's political agent. They cajoled and pleaded with Jai to let the maharaja at least come for a visit, whether it led to a marriage or not--there was no sense in saying no this early in the negotiations. Jai agreed, with a great deal of reluctance.

Arrangements were made for the maharaja of Kurvi and his 150-strong entourage to be housed in the hunting lodge that Jai's foster father had built on the outskirts of the town of Rudrakot, four and a half miles from the fort and the palaces where Jai lived in his own stately splendor. The maharaja came by train, even though his kingdom and his palaces were only a day's ride on horseback and eight hours by car and jeep. The Kurvi maharaja wanted his own bogie, much like Jai's, shunted onto the Rudrakot train and wanted to travel in style, much as he had heard Jai did. He also wanted his bogie to rest in the train yard in Rudrakot, so that all the citizens could marvel at the green-and-gold embellishments and the pure brass fittings and bars of the carriage windows.

For four days after his arrival, Jai waited for the maharaja of Kurvi to pay a call upon him. He did not come. Raman and Colonel Pankhurst, in their official capacities as diplomats of the Indian government and of Rudrakot, went over to beg and beseech and importune with the maharaja, and finally realized that he was waiting for Jai to come and pay his respects to him. The hunting lodge in Rudrakot, jai's hunting lodge, had become, temporarily, the maharaja's property and it was here Jai had to visit since he was younger and Rudrakot was a smaller kingdom than Kurvi. This went back and forth for another week, while Raman and Colonel Pankhurst began to grow weak with fatigue from all the running trips from the palaces to the hunting lodge and back. Finally, they all reached a compromise. The distance between Jai's palace and Jai's hunting lodge was measured and found to be four and a half miles. Diwan
. S
, ministers, and sycophants paced this off on each side until an exact midpoint was found, and here, eleven days after the maharaja of Kurvi had first set foo
t u
pon Rudrakot soil, Jai and Kurvi met. Then, Jai took Kurvi back to his palaces so that the official visit could begin.

The whole incident had vastly amused Mila and Ashok for months and Kiran too, when she had written to him in England about it. They had all laughed at Jai and the maharaja, and Mila had been concerned that Papa had been too harried and too ill rested during the whole of the official visit. To her surprise, Jai had laughed at himself too. He had the capability of being self-deprecating and honest about himself, and had admitted that the whole exercise had been one steeped in silliness and idiocy. But Mila had known, even though Jai had said nothing and neither had her father, that it was the appearance of anything remotely like impropriety that had to be battled, whether it was silly or not. She had asked him once why he had not married one of the princesses of Kurvi, and he had said, "Because I am in love with another woman. If I take another wife, it will be her and no one else. If I had known I would be in love with her, I would not have married my first wife."

Mila stood fifteen feet away from Jai in the front driveway of her father's house, and waited for Jai to come up to that imaginary line between them and meet her halfway. Ashok had begun to accompany Jai when he turned to him, put a staying hand on his arm and said, "Wait, Ashok. Please," and sauntered toward her, the swagger stick tucked under his right arm, his hands in his pockets. With much the same attitude, outwardly, as he had employed with the maharaja of Kurvi, but the difference was--and Mila was well aware of this--that Jai had not cared about Kurvi, but he cared about her.

Now Mila knew that she was the woman Jai loved. His offer of marriage had come, scrupulously, after he had asked Raman for permission two months ago, after he had received his king's commission in the army. He had said nothing of love at the time he made the declaration, but an anxiety had assailed him, and his gaze, normally bold, had dropped to the points of his shiny boots. "Will you be my wife ... sometime in the future, whenever you want?" She had said yes, because his offer was irresistible, because she had been wondering if she would ever meet someone she would want to marry so much that nothing else would matter in her world, and because, after all, she had known Jai since she was seven years old and she had been in love with him, in some fashion or the other, for that long.

He came up to her now and stood staring down at her. His hands moved
,
only once, to brush against her hair and follow its lines down to her waist.

"It becomes you," he said. The same words Sam had used a few hours ago.

Jai shook Mila's hand and held it fora long while. He would not lean in to kiss her on the cheek or put his arm around her. Doubtless, there were people watching even this encounter, Sayyid and Pallavi, the other servants.

Mila was equally formal. "How was your visit at the ICC?"

A fine spasm of pain flashed across his eyes. "All right. I will tell you about it later. Will you have dinner with me tonight?" Jai turned to look toward the house. "Ashok can come too, as he always does, to be a gooseberry between us, because your papa will not let us dine alone. Will you come?"

This last was said almost hopefully, as though he was afraid of a negative response, and Mila's heart went out to him. "Yes," she said.

"Thank you." Jai let go of her hand and walked back with her to the Hispano-Suiza. "I will send the limousine for you. Remember, tonight is the White Durbar--"

"I will wear white," Mila said. "Thank you, Jai. I must go in now, we had to spend the night at Chetak's tomb because of the dust storm, and so we weren't able to return yesterday evening." She fumbled over her words, smitten with pain again, thinking that if she could only cleave herself in two, then all of her would be satisfied. It was impossible to think that she was in love with Sam Hawthorne, and yet there was nothing about him that she did not like; his presence made her yearn for the comfort of his arms, he listened as she talked, even about the most inane things, and in the end, her attraction for him, if it could be called by so mild a word, was indefinable. She was almost embarrassed by her desire for him, by how much she had been lost in his kisses, how fascinating were the lines of his mouth, his face, and the bones under the skin on his chest. And yet here was Jai whom she loved for who he was, because he was charming and could be funny (though not very often, because his sense of duty often overcame any humor), because he loved her with a devotion that she would not find anywhere else, in any other man. Perhaps not even Sam Hawthorne.

Mila was miserable. She dragged her steps up the three short stairs to the front door and turned to Jai to say good-bye, her voice broken and laden with tears that she could not shed yet. "I'm sorry," she said. "I am tired, and hungry."

"Yes," Jai said. "Do go in, my darling. Tell me, was your guest, this Captain Hawthorne, with you last night at Chetak's tomb?"

Mila nodded.

"I'm glad to hear that; you must have been safe."

She went into the house and up the stairs to her room, thinking that perhaps if Sam had not been at Chetak's tomb, she would have been safer. At the landing, she looked out as Sam came up the driveway and met Jai. The two men shook hands and spoke before Sam also came into the house and Jai got behind the wheel of the Suiza and drove away. When Mila heard Sam's footsteps on the stairs, she slipped into her room, but held the door ajar a few inches so that she could see him pass by.

By the time Mila left for the Lal Bazaar, later that afternoon, she had made two decisions that she intended would hold good for the rest of her life. But nothing could be held true for the rest of one's life, every coveted thing in the end was maya, illusion, a myth, and this the great sages of India had always understood--little was real. We were put on this earth transitorily; we deposited our genes in offspring; deluded ourselves that we would be missed when we were gone; pretended that money, wealth, titles, and land were to be desired. But every such thing was ephemeral, prone to change. The only reason to live was love.

That afternoon, Mila thought about Jai's love for her as unconditional, but also capable of outrageous jealousy and demanding assertion. She was aware of his devotion though. If Mila had wanted or indicated a need for anything--jewelry with rubies and diamonds, silks spun so thin as to be made of cobwebs, wines and furniture from the reigns of dead French kings--Jai would have acquired it for her somehow. Instead, he would come to visit her with a rose from his famous conservatory within the fort, or a silver dish with one slice of rabadi in it, layered with sweetened cream, flavored with golden strands of saffron, drizzled with a dusting of finely ground pistachios. He had invested thought in every gift, knowing somehow that she would not, could not accept an exorbitant gift from him before marriage.

When she had finished her bath and sat on her bed eating her lunch from a thali she had ordered from the kitchens, Mila read through all of Jai's letters. Before that, when he had not yet declared his intentions, ther
e h
ad been no question of a correspondence between them, and even so, Raman had hesitatingly given his permission, wishing within himself that they were already married so he would not have to meditate over the propriety of this. In each of the letters--and there were only eight, a restrained eight--filled on four pages with handwriting reduced to a tiny scrawl, Jai had included a gift. A champa flower he had plucked and pressed in his copy of The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot; the leaf of a mango tree; the wispy seeds from a dandelion glued to a sliver of parchment; a sketch of the horse he had given her, Ghatoth. It was a funny name for a horse, taken from the name of the demon king Ravan's brother from the Ramayana. Why, Mila had asked once, would he name his horse for a demon? And Jai had replied, Do you remember what Ghatothguch did for six months of the year? He slept, Mila replied. And when he woke up, he ate a lot. Right, Jai had said, running an affectionate hand over the horse's glossy rump, this Ghatoth likes to eat and to sleep, but he is gentle, unlike his namesake. It still astonished her that Jai loved what he loved so passionately, that he had watched and learned of the horse's personality before naming him.