The Splendor Of Silence (51 page)

As the light smeared the horizon, beyond the lake and Chetak's tomb, it illuminated the yard behind the house and the man who stood by the well. A thin rope of thread clung to his bare upper body, looped over his right shoulder and down under his left arm. The thread was a symbol of caste, bestowed upon Raman at the cusp of manhood, and the ceremony he performed now was part of that symbol. He poured a spoonful of water into his right palm and drank it three times. And then, with the practiced ease of years, Raman began the ritual, dabbing his face with his thumb, touching his eyes, his nose, his ears, his shoulders, and laying his fingers on his chest. From where he stood, Mila and Ashok could hear the melodious breatheand-stop cadence of his voice as he chanted the verses that accompanied his ritual. A dwelling peace came upon both of them then, watching their father engaged in his daily prayer ritual without thought for how the rest of the day, the rest of their lives and his, would progress.

They turned together as they heard a slight movement and Sam came out into the balcony. He smiled when he saw their arms wrapped around each other, Ashok's head laid on her shoulder, as though they had been born that way, fused at the hip. He went to where they were standing, by Mila's side, his right hand resting on the parapet ledge only a few inches from her waist. She inclined her body so that her skin touched his, and this was the most they could do with Ashok firmly affixed to her other side, and even this much was comforting.

"Are you all right?" he asked, in a low voice.

She shook her head briefly, tears filling her eyes, but she said, so that Ashok could hear, "We are fine, Sam."

He caressed her shoulder, and, greatly daring, wiped the tears away with the back of his hand.

"Papa prays," Ashok said. "Perhaps for us all."

Sam leaned beyond the rise of the balcony's wall, cradling his right arm with his left, his palm supporting the elbow. His shoulder hurt, and he had almost forgotten this until reminded as he climbed the wall of the field punishment center and not since then again, but Mila's tears, her unnamed sorrow, brought the ache back. She was in pain, and so Sam was too.

At that moment, Raman glanced up from his meditations near the well, his lower garment of a white veshti clinging to him from his early bath, his body beginning to quake from a sudden, unnatural chill. Mila and Ashok both ducked briefly beyond his gaze, behind the low parapet, wiped their faces, and reappeared with watery smiles for their father. But he was not looking at them.

Instead he said, his voice somber, "Will you come to see me in my office, Captain Hawthorne, later today? I have news from Calcutta that I would like to discuss with you."

"Yes, sir," Sam said. "When?"

"Before you leave the house, please." With that, Raman, still shivering in his damp skin, wrapped a cloth towel around his upper body.

Before Mila could even begin to ask Sam what that meant, why Papa seemed so distant with him, what had he done, Pallavi's door opened and she stepped out into the balcony.

She said, her expression hardened and angry beyond anything Mila had seen before, "I want you to take a bath and then come and see me, Mila. Ashok, get to your room and do the same, you are no longer a child and do not need to hang on to your sister like this."

"PallavtrAshok began to wail, but she cut him short.

"Now/"she said. She did not look at Sam, did not even acknowledge his presence, but she said in very clear, grammatically perfect English, "We need our house to be our house now; visitors tend to overstay their welcome."

The first hailstones began then, pelting out of the sky like a sprinkling of flung pebbles and then cannonading down upon them in ten seconds, until everything was blurred into a thick sheet of ice formed over man
y m
onths of winter somewhere up north, near the arctic. The hailstones were enormous, the size of a ripe chikku fruit, perfectly round and incredibly painful when they made contact with their skins.

It was the first of the catastrophes that would come upon them all on that day, and there was nothing they could do to stop them. They would all be deluged with disasters, all of them--Mila, Sam, Ashok, Raman ... even Kiran.

And none of this would have happened, my dear Olivia, if Sam had not come to Rudrakot. This I _firmly believe. Although that searing pre-monsoon heat was already upon as all, had lefi us limp and irritable and unreasonable, it was a state of mind we were familiar with, after all. If that spark, in the form of your father, had not come upon the aridity that surrounded us, we would not have been set to flame. And we were burned beyond recognition. It would be many years before we could talk of those four days in May, many years before I could consider them with something akin to equanimity.

So many years before I could pick up my pen, write to you, and tell you all of this.

Chapter
Thirty.

On the boat, I had made friends with an Englishman ... After Port Said, he had a worried look ... He said last night those senior chaps got hold of me, and they said: "Look, we're just telling you this for your own good, that when you get to Calcutta and take up this job, you musn't be very friendly with Indians this young Indian might have been at Oxford and the rest of it, but still you had better be careful."

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

*

W
ill you have some more pink champagne?"

"No, thank you, Your Highness." Sam sat back in the chair and bumped his head against the head rest with its carved head of a lion, its mane flowing with careful etching, its jaws open in a frozen, unheard roar, teeth filling its mouth. The rest of the chair was upholstered in silver and blue, its feet ended in claws clutching wooden balls.

The whole room was fantastic, it was an indoor-outdoor room, and Sam could hardly have considered it a verandah, in the manner of the verandahs he had seen so far during his stay in India. The room was constructed around the outer wall of a white marble palace perched on the lake at Rudrakot, and just beyond where Sam and Jai sat, he could hear the soft lapping of the water against the foundation, gentle, soothing, in an ageless rhythm. The sun marched sentinel above them somewhere, already tilted toward the west, since it was late in the afternoon, but the skies were clear, a blanched blue, no hint of the morning's dust storm remaining in the air.

The room's walls were painted in blue to mimic the sky, and on this background were drawn coconut trees with ridged trunks and ripe coconuts hanging from between their lush leaves, thick grasses hiding the ears of elephants, monkeys swinging from vines, brilliant butterflies swooping across the land. The room's walls were also hung with mirrors with no frames, so that they seemed to be an unending reflection of the mural. On his way in, Sam had almost tripped over two magnificent stuffed lions, with two perfect gunshot holes in each of their ribs, the only place where their skins were broken. He waited for the servants to bring in the silver tray with two glasses of pink champagne before he asked the man seated in front of him, "Are there lions at Rudrakot, Your Highness?"

Jai took a sip of his champagne, put his glass down upon the carved teak table between them, and said, "But of course, Captain Hawthorne. I shot these specimens," he said, waving a lazy hand behind him, toward the door, "myself, in my hunting forests. I would take you on a shikar if you were to be here longer."

"But I can't be," Sam said. His glance swept away into the waters of the lake and then upward to the breathtaking marble ceiling with its carved lotus flower in full bloom. The light reflecting from the lake tumbled in a waterfall across the lotus and surged through the whole room in a burnished glow that seemed to touch both of them.

"Yes," Jai said reflectively, stirring the fizzing champagne in his glass with his right index finger and then putting that finger into his mouth, "it is indeed a pity that we cannot keep you here longer than tomorrow as our guest."

His voice reflected none of this professed sorrow, and Sam wondered if Jai knew already, without being told, that Mita belonged to him. Under normal circumstances, under any other circumstances, Sam would never have considered the word belong in talking of, or thinking about, the woman who was to be his wife. He had always thought that if he were given the blessing of such an incredible love, then he would worship the woman who bestowed it upon him, and so he still thought. But he had become arrogant, a fine skin of pride blanketing him as he sat in one of Jai's numerous palaces in the kingdom of Rudrakot--this one on the banks of the lake, so pendant over the water as to actually be floating on it. Sam could not give Mila all of this, perhaps not even a fraction of this, well, there was no perhaps about this, for Sam was just a professor of South

Asian languages at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Jai was a bloody prince with a kingdom. For pity's sake, as Mike would say.

Jai had accosted Sam at the outskirts of the Lal Bazaar as he had just finished negotiating for the hire of two horses and a bale of cotton wadding with which to muffle the sound of their hooves as they fled out into the desert. The horse dealer had barely melted away into the bazaar, his smile yellowed, his eyes aflame with greed, fingers still running over a quarter of the agreed-upon amount of rupees (Sam knew better than to give him the whole before he got the horses), when a blue-and-silver Daimler hissed to a halt next to him, the darkened window was rolled down, and Jai slanted his head through the opening to say, "What a coincidence, Captain Hawthorne. I too was on my way to buy some cotton baling. Do come, have some champagne with me, and escape from our heat for a while. I promise not to ask what you intend to do with all of that cotton."

Sam reddened, not happy at the invitation, but hardly knowing how to say no to the prince of Rudrakot. "Thank you," he began, "but--"

"Oh, but I insist," Jai said, and his chauffeur glided out of the car and opened the door for Sam in what seemed like one smooth movement and Sam found himself in the car next to Jai with the newspaper-wrapped cotton on his lap. The can took them away from the road that led to the fort and toward the Victoria Club instead. There they branched away again and sped along the side of the lake, coming to a halt, finally, in front of a massive marble-and-red-sandstone palace, which Jai introduced to Sam casually as, "One of my hunting lodges." There were guns, muzzle loaders, swords and shields, battle-axes, and gold-and-pearl-handled whips on the wall. The mural in the verandah room, jutting out onto the waters of the lake, was copied in every room Sam passed through. The heads of chinkaras, the local gazelle, nilgai, the blue bulls, and tigers adorned the walls. The floors were dazzling and impeccably clean and the rooms were cool, picking up moisture and vigor from the lake even under the heated midday burning of the sun.

So Sam thought that at least, at the very least, Mila belonged to him, throwing himself back to his adolescence with its willful and unreasonable competitiveness.

He was beginning to think that everyone except Mila abhorred him in Rudrakot and he thought back to his morning's talk with Raman in his office. The summons at the well, and there was really no other word for it than that, had been unmistakably grim and Sam had gone to see Raman with a leaden heart. The political agent had a white-and-blue telegraph sheet in his hand.

"It says here," Mila's father had said, "that you are an OSS officer, Sam. What exactly is that?"

Sam was silent for a long while and when he raised his face to Raman again, his gaze was level and met the older man's without any embarrassment. "I'm not sure what you are talking about, Mr. Raman. I am with the U
. S
. Army, in the Third Burma Rangers."

"Just that?" Raman said wryly.

"Just that, sir. Nothing more."

"I fear," Raman said wearily, brushing sleep out of his eyes, "that you have come to us under false pretenses. You refuse to admit it, but I too have my resources in Calcutta; I know partly who you are not completely. I'm sorry, but I must ask you to leave my house, and if possible at all, leave Rudrakot."

"I hope to be able to explain, Mr. Raman," Sam said quickly. "I cannot, just right now."

Raman shook his head. "That is not good enough."

Sam had left the office torn in two directions, by his duty and by his heart. He was sworn to secrecy by his government, and even though Raman had, most astonishingly, ferreted out the existence of the OSS by some means or other, Sam could not have talked to him about it. Now he was being ordered out of his house, but he would return for Mila, and this man would be his father-in-law. One day he would tell him all the secrets, reveal everything that had forced him into deceit, beg forgiveness. He could not bear the thought that Mila's father would dislike him so much. But for now that had to be the case, and Sam loathed the creature he had had to become and could not wait to crawl out of this skin and into a more honest, open one when this damn war ended.

Jai hummed a little tune and Sam watched him warily. They had barely spoken in the drive over to the hunting lodge, and Sam knew that this invitation was no offer of friendship. And he knew too that there could be no friendship between them. Jai would grow to detest and abominate Sam in a few short hours, and though Sam would be well on his way to Delhi by then, he would return to Rudrakot to take Mila with him.

"You are very kind to bring me here, Your Highness," Sam said finally, putting down his empty champagne glass. "But I really must leave."