The Splendor Of Silence (17 page)

Jai was equally curt. "Come in and sit down, Kishorenagar." He used a shorter form of his title, and so the name of his kingdom, to address the maharaja. Employing his actual name (and he too had many, like Jai) would have shown a degree of familiarity that was not encouraged at the ICC. Since most of the cadets, if not all, had some title or other, this is how they were addressed and urged to address each other.

There was something in Jai's voice that propelled the maharaja into the tent, and he stomped in with clouds of dust, not bothering to wipe his feet on the mat. The flap remained open.

"Ramlal," Jai said quietly. When the servant appeared, he said, "Go to the mess tent. I will call for you when I want you." The servant bowed and began to retreat. "Wait." Jai turned to the prince. "Are any of your toadies outside?"

"I don't know what you mean." The maharaja's tone was icy. "Ramlal," Jai said again, as the figures of four or five men blotted the door to the tent behind the servant's shoulders, "there must be no one outside the tent for the next half hour. Not one single person, is that understood?"

`Yi, hrgoor."

"You are being ridiculous, Rudrakot." Now the maharaja's voice was full of spite.

"When you are here," Jai said slowly, holding the young prince's gaze, "at the ICC, you will address me as Major Jaikishan."

The boy headed to the sofa opposite Jai. He lounged casually; none of the fight had left him, but there lurked some fear, some nervousness as he picked with his thick fingers at the fabric of the sofa's upholstery. Jai let him sweat for a while and then brought out the letters and placed them on the table between them.

"Captain Cameron came by these yesterday and sent them to me." Kishorenagar's eyes darted to the table and his face blanched. "They are not mine."

"I think the authorship of these letters is easily established. You have signed them yourself."

"It is a forgery."

"A very good one, then, for I can recognize your handwriting."

Kishorenagar made a sucking sound with his mouth and then stuck his tongue out in distress. He took a deep breath, cunning marking his face now. "You would have no opportunity to read my dictation or my essays, Major, you teach us foot drills and riding." He sat back on the sofa. "Unliterary pursuits."

Jai rubbed his face slowly, damping the anger as it rose within him. He had expected resistance, bravado and some brashness, from the young maharaja. And perhaps some insinuations about their respective positions in the royalty ladder, but not insults. He bit down on the words that came swelling up. Kishorenagar sat watching him, his eyes screwed up and sly beneath his brows.

"Captain Cameron recognizes your penmanship, then, Kishorenagar." "Oh." The prince was quiet. Then he said, "But it is nothing. An attempt at play, a way to pass time while we are here."

"You are here to learn to be an army officer, Kishorenagar," Jai spat out. There were many and better ways to handle this situation, but Cameron had enlisted Jai's help because he had thought that the reprimand would be better coming from another Indian, an Indian prince. And Jai, as much as he knew he seethed at insults, also knew that at some time in his life he had to learn to control his temper--perhaps this was Cameron's way of giving him a chance. But Jai's anger was not to be stopped, especially at this insult to his beloved corps. Why could Kishorenagar not see that this was a privilege, being here at the ICC? He asked him.

The maharaja sat up and crossed his legs in his best drawing-room manner. "What you do not see is that we are, none of us, allowed to sit for the examinations at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, for if we did, and if we passed out of Sandhurst, we would have to be granted king's commissions, right?"

"We get them now, Kishorenagar, or rather, you would get one if you were able to give up these bad habits and graduate from the corps."

"To what avail, Rudrakot?" the maharaja said with a sneer. "Can you command British officers, or will you just return to your tiny kingdom and reign over your all-native, all-black Lancers? What use is a king's commission under such false pretense?"

What an audacious bastard he was, Jai thought, a little calmer now. He recognized that Kishorenagar's arrogance was reflected within himsel
f a
lso--like this prince, he had always also believed that he was here by some divine right to be king. Under the British Raj, the concept of divine right, of an absolute right to rule, was laughable. Arrogant or not, the maharaja was correct--Jai had his king's commission, but until he had the right to command any battalion of the British Indian army, it was pretty much worthless. The anger rose again within him, not just because Kishorenagar had pointed out this truth, but because it was the truth and it had troubled him for many years.

"Yours is not to question, Kishorenagar," Jai said. "You are here to train to become an officer in the Indian army, to hold a commission signed by the king-emperor himself, to be a facet of the British empire, to be a worthy representative of that empire. Your job, your responsibility is to rise strongly to the defense of the empire."

The maharaja of Kishorenagar clapped his hands languidly, slapping flabby fingers against one another. "Well done, old chap," he drawled. "You do us all proud--it is a speech fit for a king. You are a king, are you not, Jai? One can never be too sure, you know. My mother still resides in the Tenana quarters of my father's palace. I look like my father; I have his eyes, his nose"--he tapped his nose gingerly--"even his damned receding hairline." Kishorenagar stroked the top of his forehead. "I am my father's son, not some usurper who makes claims to the throne. Ishould be the one giving the speech of kings."

Jai's voice went quiet. "Just what are you insinuating, Kishorenagar?"

"Nothing," the boy said, sitting up now, knowing somehow that he had gone too far, said too much. "Nothing, Major. Permission to leave, sir."

"Stay," Jai said, with as much inflection in his voice as if he were talking to a dog. He picked up Cameron's letter again. The words, masturbation and sodomy, swam before his eyes. Pm afraid the young maharaja is guilty of both; make him see reason, will you, Jai? Before the boy had come in, Jai had been prepared to reason with him. All boys in boarding schools indulged in this nonsense at some time or other. When Jai, at sixteen, had been at school in England for one brief year, he had been approached three times and had rebuffed each of these proposals. Not because he had been disgusted, but because he had already been with a woman, and unlike the boys in his school, knew what women had to offer. There had been no need to experiment with members of his own sex.

His first experience in lying with a woman had been when he was fifteen. His diwan had brought him the girl and had left her in his bedchamber, naked on his bed. She had been irresistible, and he had never felt even a shred of guilt about it later, knowing somehow that this was what men did. He had never told Raman about it why, he could still not fathom, though this inculcation into manhood (as long as it was done discreetly and well) would be something both the political agent and the British resident would approve of as a necessity for a prince. But Jai had always wanted the respect of Raman the man, the father figure, and did not somehow think that this was the way to earn that respect. Jai had been married at seventeen, the same age as this young maharaja, who was betrothed, but not yet married. God help his young wife-to-be, Jai thought. This boy is a bastard.

"I am leaving now." A little bluster had returned to the maharaja's tone, now shirred with disrespect again.

"Yes," Jai said simply, refusing to react. "Pack your bags. I want you out of the ICC by sundown."

"You are joking."

"No," Jai replied. "There is nothing remotely humorous about this. You have constantly defied the rules of the ICC, you have come here under false pretenses; you have been unwilling to conform. The filthy habits you indulge in"--Jai's upper lip curled--"which I am loath to even give name to, have blackened the name and reputation of the ICC." Jai had always thought the young maharaja of Kishorenagar to be a vapid, unthinking young man, but now he saw a terrible malevolence marking his pudgy features. "There will be repercussions, Jai," he said in a growl.

"So be it," Jai replied with a forced nonchalance, turning away again to his papers. "The scandal of your dismissal from the corps will be nothing. We have a standard to uphold here, and in giving you permission to leave the ICC, we are maintaining that uprightness for which the corps is known."

The maharaja of Kishorenagar jumped up from the sofa and staggered toward the entrance of the tent. He would say no more in his defense, this also Jai knew, for they were both princes, not used to explanations or excuses. But he did say something when he turned at the doorway, the flap lifted, the sunshine outside casting his body in a silhouette and smudgin
g h
is features. "There will be repercussions for you, Jai. I will remember this insult for a long time."

When he had left, Jai rose from his armchair and stumbled blindly around the tent in circles, bumping into various pieces of furniture, cursing as he tripped over an occasional table. His hands ached for the smoothness of Fitzgerald's reins, he wanted to bury his face in the sweet aroma of the horse's coat and mane, feel the pounding exhilaration of a ride even in this dense afternoon heat. But he had to stay here, within his tent, stay and pretend, as though this conversation, Kishorenagar's insults and allusions, had not almost taken the life out of him. Would he never be free of his past? How had Kishorenagar, as young as he was, the impudent and swaggering puppy, known? How had he dared to repeat what he had heard?

When Jai finally sat down again, reaching for the drawing pad with a desperate yearning, hardly able to hold his pen steady in his fingers, he was saturated with sweat. Leaning over the pad, he began to draw with an urgency--the line of a finely carved brow, the curve of a neck, the liquid eyes, hair the color of a moonless midnight, all taking shape in a matter of seconds. Little drops of sweat ran down his cheek and dripped onto the sketch, blotching the lines, making the ink run.

The young maharaja of Kishorenagar had an instinct for knowing when to tell the truth. Or to put it another way, Kishorenagar knew the stories and tales and gossip about the royal houses in India that usually lurked only in the recesses of the old-timers' minds. He had had a lot of time in London to listen to these stories from his diwan and the other members of his entourage while he was dressing to go to a ball or to the park or to the theater. So when he had suggested kinks in Jai's lineage, he had been speaking the truth.

Jai was not Bhimsen's natural son, but was the child of a cousin a few times removed, who was precariously pendant on a distant branch of the family tree. Jai's original father was a minor chieftain, but the family were, and this was important in the adoption process, Rajawats--a line from which kings and princes could be safely adopted. Hindu law recognized the necessity of the carrying on of the male line, or the frailty of the human condition in not being able to supply that male heir, and considerately provided loopholes such as this one--any child, male or female, adopted into a family and brought up as their own, would become their own. The bloods would merge, the histories would become one, and they would be, in everything, born of the parents who nurtured them. Such was the forgiving and providing nature of the law.

Bhimsen brought Jai to live in the penana with the women of his household, and declared him his heir--Jai had the right to be king of Rudrakot after him. The British resident initially balked. Bhimsen had adopted Jai in 1917, when he was three, when Rudrakot was still a princely state in the empire, bound to bow to the vagaries of the Raj.

When India first became part of the Raj in 180 and Queen Victoria took upon herself the title of empress of India, the independent kingdoms retained their sovereignty, though it was at best a tenuous claim to kingship. Although allowed pomp, circumstance, and an elaborate ritual of the pretense of royalty, the kingdoms were now merely princely states. Their rulers were rulers only in name, tightly controlled by the India Office in King Charles Street in London, six thousand miles away; the viceroy in Delhi; the governors and governor-generals of the provinces where their princely states fell; and the British resident or political agent.

The rulers kept for themselves their native titles, whether raja, which meant king, or maharaja, which meant a great king. In English, they were called "princes" and addressed simply as "Your Highness."

The majesty all belonged to the queen-empress of India. And she lived in England.

In the early years of Victoria's rule over India, princes who could not produce heirs invariably lost their lands to the greater British Raj, with the kingdom annexed and absorbed under the "doctrine of lapse."

But by 1917, when Jai was adopted, a little man come recently from South Africa had started to rustle up some not inconsiderable trouble for the British. He was educated by the selfsame system the British had set up to create the brown sahib in India--one in taste, accent, education, manner, and deportment British, and only in the color of his skin Indian. His ideas, initially founded on the asserting of rights for the Indian in India, had now reshaped themselves most dangerously into thinking that India was for Indians, and that the British should leave. The man's name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.