The Splendor Of Silence (56 page)

I did not stop to consider then why Marianne was in Rudrakot, or rather why she had chosen a private journey to my kingdom when sh
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ould have traveled anywhere else in India and have been feted in a much grander manner. She had come, of course, to find out how Mila was faring, perhaps even to ask her why she had not fled Rudrakot with Sam. He most wanted a response to this question. I was overwhelmed with a little shame, I must confess, at hearing of Sam's heroism in Burma, and was remorseful at ... shall I say, not having been too welcoming or friendly with him while he was here. But then, he came back to Rudrakot, and I intercepted his letters to Mila, and everything began to make some sense, and I was no longer riddled with even the slightest guilt.

Sam came back for a week, six months later, only to hear that Mila was married. It must have been a shock to him; I wonder how he managed that news, for he had not known, you see, we had heard nothing of him after he left Rudrakot other than the news from Marianne--he had simply disappeared. Did he go back into Burma and into the war? But he came back in December, I remember, for the nights were cooler then and we sat outside for dinners and lunches without being ambushed by mosquitoes as in the days of the rains. I did not see him, but knew he was here, because I know--knew--everything in Rudrakot. He came in stealth, since his exploits had not yet lost their luster; the Victoria Club talked of it, the Lancers and the Rifles buzzed with his rescue of Michael Ridley and the strange and unexplained death of that officer what was his name, ah, Sims. So Sam came into Rudrakot dressed as a peasant, bronzed by the sun, given away only by the tint of his eyes. He seemed to have well perfected the art of this deception by then, had almost become native, something he would doubtless have been immensely proud of--this ability to shed his skin, and to don the skin of another people without the seams showing. He kept his gaze down, mumbled in Urdu and Hindustani, gesticulated, scratched, and spat like a farmer, smiled with teeth stained by pawn. He played his role well, but I knew he was there. I was not prince of Rudrakot for nothing, even if I may have to seem immodest when I say this, my dear child, but I had my spies, I had my resources.

Your father rowed out into the lake in a little boat he had hired on the other side, the side away from the lawns of the Victoria Club and my hunting lodge. This he did every night, and finally, on the last day of his stay, I took Mila to the lakeside verandah for dinner. Sam had written to Mila, two letters for each of the previous five days he had been here, some of them no more than a note, some long and pleading epistles asking for
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limpse of her, and all of these, quite naturally, fell into my hands. I read only the first one and kept the others, why I did not know then, but I send them to you so you can learn of your father's love for your mother in his own words.

To Sam it seemed as though Mila did not respond to him. But that was not true; if she had known he was back in Rudrakot, she would have fled with him to wherever he had asked her. He only saw her then from the dark waters of the lake, and when she turned in profile he must have seen that she was heavy with a child. My child, as he thought then, as I thought then. I could not have let her go, for if she had, what would have happened to me? This then, was my little ... deception. Your father prevaricated with us; I manipulated the truth just a bit, for the cause of my own happiness. At least he had that sight of your mother. Mila too stood at the parapet and gazed out into the murk beyond for a very long time that night after dinner. Once site said to me, "Do you see a light out there? Is someone fishing?"

I saw nothing when I stood by her, but she sensed your father's presence. She would not leave her place by the parapet and stayed there for three hours, waiting, watching, until the night draped its coldness over us. And then, finally, she consented to come to bed.

Then you came. Two weeks early, not by much really, not early enough to set the gossiping old women chattering, who counted backward on nine fingers, and no less. It cast sorrow upon their brows; you could have been on time, could have come early on your own, not by any design of your mother's or mine--for they thought, of course, that the wedding was hurried because of me, not Sam. Sam did not figure in anyone's calculations, or if he did at all, it was because he had lied to us, misrepresented himself, assailed the hitherto unbreachable--only because it was in the middle of the desert, not because of any effort on the part of the laggard guards--field punishment center, taken away one of its inmates, and doubtless had lived to tell about it.

You had black hair, Mila's hair, mine even, though there is a subtle brush of brown in mine in an ambient light; some ancestor had doubtless dallied with one of our masters. And yet no one would have dared to call me a half-caste; I was born for the throne of Rudrakot. However ... that is not important, for what was important was that your hair was black and you were well chubby for a month early, fully formed in your mother'
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omb before your time. But your eyes were blue, like settled indigo in its stewing pot, with a ring of dark iris. Sam's eyes. Mouths fluttered, voicing thoughts that were true, though not evil.

I did not see you again for a whole month after you were born, though I did come to satisfy my curiosity when you first came to us. Sadness, anger, spite, a jealousy that ripped me apart--they all came to lodge within me. Mila died, you see, a few days after your birth. How my hand shakes even now to write those words, Mila died. It was then such a colossal physical pain to my heart; I thought I would die too just from the ache in my chest. I did not eat for five days; I saw no one, I talked with no one. I lit the funeral pyre first, as was my duty as her husband, and it was the only duty to her I loathed so much that the torch shook in my hands and fell to the ground three times. She had the best care possible, but something had fled from her when Sam left Rudrakot, something he took with him, and in doing so, took away her will to live. You kept her alive, as long as you were within her, but once she delivered you safely into other hands, she left Rudrakot too. She died because of an infection from the childbirth, that is the official conclusion, but I think she died because she could not live without your father.

That first month passed without my having any sense of its passing. Over the next two months, I visited you often in the fenana, searching for your mother in you, finding more of your father. Mila married me even though she loved Sam. I loved her, fiercely, much as Sam loved her, but she loved Sam. Oh, she loved me too, but it was not quite like the love she had for your father.

When you were three months old, Pallavi suggested that we send you to America, to be with Sam and Mike and your grandmother Maude. I did not want to at first, but I agreed in the end because, you see, you belonged more to Sam than to me. You were the gift Mila gave to Sam, that piece of herself.

You might wonder why we did not keep you with us, why you grew up so distant from the land of your birth and how do I answer this without insulting you, my dear Olivia? Know that I mean not to be derisive; we gave this matter a great deal of careful consideration, thought about who we were, where we all were in our lives and where you would best fit--with us or with Sam in America. You see, we did not seem very much to belong in our country either, even as full-blooded Indians. On
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f the reasons your grandfather, Mr. Raman, after one visit, never went to the hill station of Mussoorie to escape the heat of the plains was that although he was accorded entry into the best clubs in the place, the finest restaurants, the homes of the Raj grandees, even the viceregal "at homes" and balls, he could not and I could not enter the public library. On one of our walks through the Mall, when we thought of popping into the library for a book with which to spend our hours of leisure that afternoon, we saw nailed outside on a post a painted board that read: NO DOGS OR INDIANS. There was no circumventing the intentions behind that bland statement. It was a blatant prejudice of the British Raj. Remember, my dear Olivia, that while it seems as though your father killed Sims because he was a courier in the pay of the Japanese, Sam actually killed his first man in the war because of that man's bigotry about a girl named Rosalie. And if I could not gain entry into a damn poky library in Mussoorie, you would not stand much of a chance in either a British Raj India or an independent India--for we would retain our prejudices well after the British quit us. So we thought that perhaps America would be best; realize, my child, that we sent you from one family that was very much yours to another that was equally yours--we would have, in making this decision, entertained no other option.

Marianne Wesrwood took you to America. She had returned also to Rudrakot right after your birth, had seen you, held you in her arms, known from the beginning that you were Sam's child. When we decided to send you to your grandmother, Maude, we could think of no one other than Marianne to entrust you to. I handled all the details of the travel and your passport; I am, if I may be so immodest again as to point out, not without resources. A princely title still counted for much in those days.

I never had the time to grow out of love with your mother. I am told by many, many people that marriages are such--a rush of early passion defined mostly by the need of the body; a mellowing out as visages become familiar, as gestures start to grate on nerves; an indifference and a settling into a life other than the one lived with the once beloved. I never got to that last part, or indeed, even the middle part. I loved Mila's walk, her talk, her limbs. I do not mean to embarrass you by speaking of your mother's beauty and grace and loveliness in the terms a man would use, but know that she had all of those, she was loved for those, and because I had known her since she was very young, I loved her for more.

April 1963

S
omewhere Near
Sea
ttle

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. --Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The fire in the stove has long since cooled into a heap of glowing embers turning ashen and gray as each minute passes, and for th
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ast hour of reading, Olivia has had her feet propped against the glass. She wears no shoes, and the soles of her feet are hot and toasted, and there is pain there. She lies on the floor on her back, the pages of the letter heavy and satisfyingly solid against the skin of her stomach. And then she remembers what she has forgotten during the telling of this story, that Sam is no longer here.

"Papa," she says softly, and beside her, Elsa picks up a warm nose from the carpet and lays it in the crook of Olivia's neck as though to say, / miss him too. How senseless death is, Olivia thinks, how stupid and uncaring. At one moment she gets a phone call from her father saying that he is coming to visit her on campus, an hour later she hears the hushed, grieving tones of the dean of his department saying that he was hit by a car as he crossed Fifteenth Avenue.

"Did he break a leg?" Olivia asks hopefully. "An arm? Break his damned back?"

But no, nothing so lucky. It takes his life. It is five days before Olivia can raise herself out of her stupor and go to the cabin with the trunk tha
t h
olds the secrets of her life. Uncle Mike asks if she wants him to accompany her, but as much as she adores him, she cannot bear to have anyone else here but the dog. Grandma Maude says merely this as she kisses Olivia's hair, "Go my dear, go mourn for your papa. We all have our own ways."

And this is Olivia's way of remembering her father, by filling all the silences of her childhood with stories of who she is, where she came from, who her mother was. Why her father never married, why he could not replace Mila in his life, why Olivia was enough for him. Olivia is formed from these silences. There is nothing distant anymore, nothing dissipated and half understood. Jai's story gives her a tale with shape and structure, gives her, finally, her mother and her father. A grandfather. Uncles in their youth. A surrogate father also, who tells little about himself, more about Sam and Mila, and in the telling of this tale, comes through emblazoned in each word.

She knows something of what happened afterward, after Marianne Westwood brought her here to Seattle to be with Grandma Maude and Uncle Mike. It was a little more than two years before Sam could leave Burma and return home. He knew, of course, well before he returned, that Olivia had been born, that she lived with his mother. And strangely, Olivia has a very vivid memory--her earliest memory--of that first meeting with Sam in Grandma Maude 's house on Queen Anne Hill.

Sam had come into his mother's arms and sobbed fiercely until it seemed to Olivia so incongruous that this large, lanky man with a thin face and thick black hair streaked with an early gray could be so childlike, much as she herself was when she wanted to throw a tantrum. She had viewed him from behind the paisley print sofa in greens and blues, standing on tiptoe so that she could see over the sofa's back, wearing her favorite patent leather shoes and her prettiest church dress. From the other side, only the tips of her fingers and the top part of her head showed. She had been told that her papa was coming home from the war, but those words, papa, war, meant so little to her. "Is he like Uncle Mike?" she had asked Grandma Maude. And they had both laughed so joyously at that and said that yes indeed, he was just like Uncle Mike, only he was all her own if she wanted him.

So Olivia had waited for this papa creature to come down on his haunches by the sofa, and when he still could not see the whole of her an
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hen he could not fit between the side table and the wall, he pulled the sofa out with one strong arm and slid into the gap. Olivia had retreated to a corner when her fort's walls had thus crumbled, and watched him with a tilt of her head. Sam sat down, cross-legged, and waited for her. He let her peer at his face for as long as she wanted. There were sharp cuts of scarred skin, one slashed from under Sam's left eye down to his jawline, two more on the right forehead; the scars were turning white with healing and seemed blanched out of his sun-darkened skin. He put out his hand and waited some more, patiently, telling her he was her father, and that from now on they would be together forever.