The Splendor Of Silence (48 page)

"There," she says, wiping her hands of the gore from the python on the thighs of her pants, "you're a mess now, Sam. Put on some clothes; you're going to catch a cold."

Sam clambers into his underpants, shivering, his teeth clattering so much the sound fills his ears. He cannot bear to look back at the twitching length of the python by the pool, but before she turns away, Marianne kicks the still-dying carcass into the water with a vigorous thrust from her boot. She bends to pick up the rest of Sam's clothes and the packet of letters from Maude and Mike falls out. Sam lunges for it but not before Marianne has seen the writing on one of the letters.

"What is your connection with Rudrakot?" she asks.

"Do you know of it?"

"It's a small princely state in the Sukh desert, one of the six hundred odd in India. Nothing special, only spectacular for the forts and palaces built in the fourteenth century, where I believe the reigning prince still lives." Marianne 's brow is furrowed in thought. Her expression clears. "Rudrakot has a regiment?"

"Two," Sam says, wiping the plastic wrapping around the letters free of water drops against the cotton of his underpants. "My brother, Mike, was in one."

"Was?"

"He might be dead. He's been AWOL for two months now." Marianne drapes Sam's clothes over her arm, tucks her tiny pistol into the pocket of her pants, and puts a hand to Sam's elbow to nudge him int
o t
he bungalow. Sam has begun to shiver. The temperature is nowhere near cold or even cool, but the trembles rack his body as he hunches into his chest. He has not allowed himself to think that Mike might already be dead, but after that encounter with the python, he has used that word, enunciated it flatly, as though it is a fact, not a mere supposition.

"Well," Marianne says in a voice carefully devoid of emotion, "you'll never know until you go to Rudrakot. And you'll never get there like this. Let's go in, get warm, eat that damned bird, and get to India."

When they enter the bungalow again, Sam in agonizing pain from the arm that flaps by his side, they find Ken braced against a wall of the drawing room and interrupt his conversation with the Japanese soldier. Marianne and Sam halt at the archway, both knowing instinctively that this cannot be right--Ken is speaking a laborious Japanese, carefully enunciating each word ... why?

"Oh, shit," Sam says under his breath.

He bends at the waist so that his useless right arm will have some place on which to rest and with his left, he scrambles for his pistol, which Marianne carries, along with his pants and his shirt, but it is too late. Ken levels a pistol of his own at Sam and Marianne.

"Sit," he says, and when they collapse, he waves at them. "Apart from each other, please. I have a story to tell you."

Chapter
Twenty-Seven.

Love, when sought out, is an ailment

Between the flesh and the bone .. .

--Khalil Gibran, The Procession, 1942

*

A
s it happened, only one member of Ra
man's household slept during
the remaining hours of that night, for they were all, in some form or another, engaged in the act of love.

Kiran came home sodden and stewed after the White Durbar because on the way back he had stopped again at the Victoria Club for yet another drink, and again Sims made some maddening suggestions about a secret he held, a secret he would not tell Kiran. They were both drunk, they were all drunk, and it was with great difficulty that Blakely and Forrest managed to part the wrestling Kiran and Sims. They both hurled abuses at each other, and Sims left the indentation of his teeth, a perfect set of thirty-two, on Kiran's back where he had bitten him while they grappled on the floor.

Sayyid opened the door to Kiran and dragged him, none too gently, up the stairs to his room. There, he stripped off his clothes, ran a bath, and forced a staggering Kiran into the bathtub. Once, Kiran cried out, when Sayyid dabbed tincture on his wound to cauterize it, but his touch was firm on his master's son's back. He washed the blood from his skin and put a bandage over it. Then he hauled Kiran out of the nth, dried him as he stood limp and wet in the middle of the bathroom floor, helped him on with his pajamas, and put him to bed. Kiran slept for the next twelve hours.

A weary Raman also came home to Sayyid's careful ministrations and he accepted them with a scolding and gratitude at the same time. They had both returned from Nodi at about ten o'clock in the morning after having been in the saddle for most of the early part of the day. When Raman entered his home, went upstairs to his bedroom, sat in the galvanized aluminum tub, and felt the ache of his aging body, he knew that he could not tour the villages and the districts anymore. That part of his life was over, and with good reason, for he could no longer carry himself for days on end without adequate sleep, and there was no more comfort in the thin tarpaulin sheets laid on rocks that were to substitute for his bed. The exhilaration of the previous day had deflated in the bright light of this one, and he felt old beyond his years. They had come back also to a house that was empty and silent, and Raman knew then that his fears had come trueMila, Ashok, and Sam had spent the night at Chetak's tomb, unchaperoned. In his head, he said it like this, Mila, Ashok, and Sam, as though to evenly divide his daughter's and Sam's names with Ashok's name in his thinking would add propriety to their having been away. Raman did not know then, of course, and would never know, that it was not the night he had to fear, but the happenings of the afternoon, during the dust storm. Raman returned to Rudrakot and was caught almost immediately in the news Jai had brought from the ICC. Jai was home too from the corps before the end of the session because he had had to expel the maharaja of Kishorenagar from the school. And that had had its repercussions, for Kishorenagar was a princely state with a great deal more importance in the Raj than tiny Rudrakot, and enjoyed the privilege of an eighteen-gun salute to Rudrakot's thirteen. Amongst all of that were some thinly veiled accusations from Kishorenagar that Jai was party to the same habits he had been accused of. There was no truth to the charges of homosexuality on Jai's part, and Colonel Cameron had seen that clearly, but he had also suggested that Jai take a leave of absence from his duties and return to Rudrakot for the duration of the session. Until all of this could be sorted out.

Raman spent the afternoon writing letters to various people. First, he had to let Colonel Pankhurst know at Delhi that a storm was about to thunder above their heads and that he might well be asked about these fictitious charges while he was visiting with the viceroy. Then, he wrote to the two other British instructors at the ICC on Jai's behalf. He pointed ou
t t
hat there was absolutely no truth to Jai having any inclination toward homosexuality--Jai was married, had three children, and further, he was betrothed to another woman, Raman's own daughter. I find this whole affair extremely repugnant and distasteful, Raman wrote, and feel somehow, that in asking Jai to leave the ICC, you are lending credence to the tantrums of the young maharaja of Kishorenagar. He is the one accused of, and might I add, convicted of these base habits. I would not give my daughter's hand in marriage to a man with such proclivities, even talk such as this, of such unnatural conduct, is disgusting to me, Cameron.

Jai had been hesitant about convening a White Durbar on that very night; it would be a hastily ordered affair quite simply because Jai was back in Rudrakot unexpectedly. But Raman had insisted upon it, knowing that this was not the time to run and hide their heads in a dark corner somewhere, but to let Jai lead the durbar, accept the obeisances, let everyone see that he was still ruler of his princely kingdom, glorious in his brocade and diamond sherwani in the light of the full moon. What of the special dessert served after the White Durbar, Jai had asked. Raman had looked at his watch and measured out a good twelve hours before the sweet was to be served, and had even arranged for the conservatory to be sprayed with water every two hours so that enough condensation could form on the roses to weave into the milk cream.

And so Raman did not have a moment left in the day to see his children, to inquire after them, to find out how they had comported themselves in the last twenty-four hours, or indeed, what they had done with themselves on this day. When he walked down the aisle of the audience at the White Durbar, he finally saw Mila seated next to Sam, and his heart overflowed with love for his daughter whom he had missed in just one day of being away. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would bring her into his office for a nice long chat. He thought she looked tired, but it might have been a trick of the moonlight. He hoped she was happy, for even if he did not know about her afternoon's activities in the Lal Bazaar, he did know that Jai and Mila had dined together in the Blue Palace without Ashok being there.

Raman came home and Sayyid opened the door to his master, much as he had done to Kiran an hour ago.

"Are you still awake?" Raman asked. "You should have been in bed long before this."

"It is but a little wakefulness, Sahib," Sayyid said. "Now you are home, now everyone is home." Ashok was not in his room, but neither of them knew that yet.

Sayyid helped Raman to bed, massaged his feet with warm sesame oil, covered him with a sheet, and was going to the door when Raman's voice, half asleep, stopped him. "Is it too late to ask for the woman from the village?"

"No, Sahib," Sayyid said. He paused. "She waits downstairs. I asked her to come tonight in case I felt you might want to avail yourself of her services."

"Send her in then," Raman said. "Thank you." He turned on his back and folded his arms behind his head as he waited for the woman. Tonight, exhausted as he was, he wanted a woman's touch upon his body; he wanted to erase the day and start anew the next morning.

And so fifteen minutes later, the woman, who had just one name that Raman knew of, walked down the corridor to be with him. She was dressed in a thick red ghagara and a sequined Mai open at the back and tied with two strings. She wore anklets in silver, the chiming kind, but most of her footsteps were muffled in the folds of her skirt. And had she passed through the corridor just this way, no one in the house would have realized she was there. But Sayyid, who normally accompanied her, had sent her upstairs on her own, and she had forgotten which door led to Raman's room. So she opened the door to Mila's room first and saw the Japanese screen with its embroidered geishas blocking a part of the entrance and knew almost immediately that this was not the spare, masculine room that Raman occupied. She shut the door softly and then went across the corridor to the other side, opened Raman's door, and let herself in.

Mila wandered around in her room, pacing the floor from her bed to her dressing table and back until her head spun. She had returned from the White Durbar in the jeep with Sam, since her father had brought the Morris and come back in that. And during the drive they had not talked. Now she had begun to wonder why Sam Hawthorne was even here in Rudrakot. He had so many secrets from them, it seemed, and they knew so little about him. What had he done today, when she was away at the Lal Bazaar and at dinner with Jai? Why had he really taken Ashok to the political meeting at the house near the bazaar? Though concerned for her brother, all she had done was watch Sam's hands on the driving wheel of the jeep, wished for him to talk with her and dispel this strangeness that had come between them. She imagined herself in bed with Sam, lying side by side, their arms touching. And an immeasurable longing ate away at her heart. What would it be like, she thought, to waken with him by her side every morning?

They had broken away at the door to her room with a few niceties. Mila did not change when she went into her room, she just combed her hair, fanned it around her face, and stared fora long time at herself in the mirror.

She stopped in the center of the room, a tingling running through her limbs, unable to keep still, frazzled from all the pacing. As she stood there, she heard the door to her room open and then quietly shut. Even in that brief space of time, the perfume of jasmine flowers floated into the room. Mila went to the door and opened it so that she could put an eye to the length of the opening. She saw the woman, or rather, only her back, the swirl of her ghagara's skirts, the lush garland of jasmine in her hair, and heard the little tinkle of the bells in her anklets and the fall of glass bangles on her wrist as she opened Raman's door and closed it behind her. Mila waited for five long minutes, but the corridor remained in semidarkness and the woman did not emerge from her papa's room. And then, for the first time, she knew irrevocably that this was the first step toward adulthood--when the love of a parent, a child, a sibling was simply not enough. To be truly loved, to truly love, one must love an equal, share a proximity of skins, indulge a lover. She did not think, as she stood there, that this nameless woman would mean more to Papa than the engagement in the sexual act, for she had recognized also a furtiveness in her being here, and had seen from her gait and her clothing that she was from the village. But those five minutes at the door taught Mila more about her father as a man than she would ever have known about him otherwise. She went back into her room, crossed over the floor, and went out into the balcony. Sam's door was open too. He had played a gramophone record, but it had wound down and come to the very end, and all she could hear was the scratch of the needle against the record, over and over again. Mila went to Sam's door and parted the curtains. There was only one light left on in his room, a little, frosted glass lamp on his bedside table. The gramophone was near the door to the inside of the house. Sam sat o
n t
he edge of his bed, hunched forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He was clad in only his white pants and his chest was bare. His face was turned toward Mila, hair falling over one part of his forehead.