The Splendor Of Silence (18 page)

So when Bhimsen brought Jai to the palaces at Rudrakot in 1917, the British resident visited, looked grave, shook his head, wrote to the viceroy and did nothing. He did not demand Rudrakot dissolved because of a fear that anger would lead the princes and their subjects toward the nationalist movement. On orders from up high, the resident did insist on some compensation for recognizing Jai as heir, and Bhimsen agreed to raise a cavalry regiment for the British Indian army. And so the Rudrakot Lancers came into being.

In return, Bhimsen asked that the number of his guns be elevated from eleven to thirteen. This was another example of Bhimsen's tenacity and persuasiveness, because the Lancers were raised in return for Jai as heir, but Bhimsen managed to get an extra two guns by pretending to do the British government the favor of raising the Lancers. And this was how he did it.

Once Jai was crowned heir in a grand durbar at Rudrakot, with the British resident attending, Bhimsen took an inordinate amount of time ordering the walers from Australia and training his soldiers. The horses were finicky, the men were prone to sickness, their uniforms were not ready, the instructing officer was on a constant holiday due to an illness in his family and so it went. Once his gun salute was raised to thirteen guns, the regiment was magically in commission, almost within a month, after a four-year delay.

In Rudrakot, few people remembered (or if they did remember, chose to forget) that Jai was not born of Raja Bhimsen. He had not seen his biological parents since he was adopted; and though he had met his older brother three times in the last twenty-five years, on state occasions, it was a bond that had been frittered away from disuse. The palaces at Rudrakot became his home, he was addressed as the rajkumar, the heir to the throne, and very soon the child Jai forgot that he was anything but entitled to Rudrakot.

When the young maharaja of Kishorenagar had said that his own mother had been part of his father's Tenana, he was referring to this part of Jai's past. Even though Jai had ruled Rudrakot for the past fifteen years now, since he was twelve. -.

As the bugle sounded over the white tents of the ICC at Meerut to signal the end of the afternoon siesta, Jai rose from his armchair, exhausted and limp with perspiration even though he had been under the punkah. The carpet around him was littered with pages torn out of his drawin
g p
ad, which had now been reduced to the stiff, outer cardboard, no papers left on the pad.

A woman gazed out of each of the sketches with half smiles, a laugh, a pout. Her hair raged behind her in the wind. In each sketch, her gaze was direct and candid.

Every picture was of the woman Jai loved--Mila.

Chapter
Nine.

One of the greatest stumbling-blocks here is the personal relationship between the British and the Indians--between whites and coloreds. At the best we're patronifing. At worst--and thats pretty of en--we're arrogant and domineering Any British Tommy thinks he's a perfect right to go into a shop and call the proprietor a thieving black bastard. Maybe he is too, but would he sturry, into a British shop and call the proprietor a "thieving white bastard"? Even white children draw away from Indian kids as if they'd the plaguel--which maybe they have got. But don't forget the Indians didn't ask white children to come to their country. The Indians feel aliens in their country, just by the way we treat them.

--W. G. Burchett, Trek Back from Burma, 1943

*

A little after six o'clock Sam stood on the front doorstep, in full view of the waning westerly sun, and cursed the architect who had thought this was England. In the morning when he had arrived at Raman's home, this part of the house had been a gleaming white, still cool in the shade, with a hint of the moisture in the air that had been birthed during the night. Now the air around him was dry enough to flake into pieces, Sam's mouth parched, and his skin seeming to leach moisture into the seeking heat.

Seeking the relative freshness behind the tamarind tree's trunk, he flung his cigarette to the ground and trod it out with the heel of his shoe. He took out his handkerchief, swabbed his forehead with it, and then raised the sola topi Sayyid had given him and mopped up as much sweat a
s h
e could from his hair. The topi was a blessing; it was a round pith helmet of sorts with a wide brim, like a safari hat with a buckram rim, constructed to battle the Indian sun. Sam had brought only his Burma Rangers cap, which left the back of his neck exposed.

The return back to Raman's house earlier in the afternoon had been relatively easy, as Sam had entered the gate at the bottom of the back garden just before the servants had begun to stir from their afternoon's rest. He had cautiously passed by Sayyid sitting on his charpai, a jute-knitted bed, feet on the ground, shoulders hunched, still nodding in the last vestiges of sleep. But Sayyid had not seen him. Looking up at the house, Sam had spied Mila in the balcony and had melted behind a jasmine bush, his heart pounding. But Mila, like Sayyid, seemed asleep on her feet, her back bent at an incongruous angle, her chin and arms resting on the parapet, her eyes closed. Sam waited, and finally she rose to straighten her back, glanced in the direction of his room and then went inside her room. He had run up the outer stairs without pausing, knowing that this was probably his only chance to enter his room undetected. There, he had stripped off his clothes, folded them, and stowed them away at the bottom of his holdall, then padded naked to the bathroom for the relief of sitting in a tub filled with water, tepid and warm as it was. When Sayyid had come in with a tray of tea, to find Sam in the rub, he had said nothing, merely bowed, set the tray down on a table at Sam's elbow, and retreated to start unpacking Sam's holdall. At which, of course, Sam had shouted out through the silk curtains that he could do that himself, thank you very much.

From his vantage point behind the tamarind tree, Sam watched the front door of the house open and shut numerous times as messengers and peons flitted in and out, some carrying cotton bags filled with papers and files. They all looked the same to Sam, nondescript men, young and old, clad in khaki shirts and shorts and Nehru caps, lawyers' briefs tucked under their right arms. In those briefs were the lifeblood of the Indian Civil Service--letters, memos, and documents authenticating the mundane, endless details of the machinery of the mighty Raj.

A chameleon scampered up the tree trunk to one of the lower branches. Fear and surprise sent colors racing under the chameleon's skin in blotches of reds, yellows, and greens. Sam watched it hide from him, slung over a branch, its scaly tail hanging over one side. He settled bac
k i
nto waiting and dreaming. After the bath, and after drinking the hot chat and eating a couple of samosas fried to a flaky perfection with a ginger and coriander chutney, Sam had wandered out into the balcony for a cigarette in his shorts and a shirt that he had not bothered to button. And there Mila had found him.

"Will you join us for a fair, a mela, at the Victoria Club, Captain Hawthorne?" she had asked, somewhat shy, a half smile directed at his bare chest. Sam had buttoned his shirt and said yes, mesmerized by the masses of hair that had come loose from her plait and framed her face, and by the glint of the thin cord of a gold chain around her neck. "In two hours," she had said. "Outside the front door."

It was still too bloody hot for a mela of all things, but the mela was a church fund-raiser for a new music organ, to be purchased by the sweat of all their brows. Now Sam knew why there was even this form of entertainment at Rudrakot at the peak of summer, when normally by this time everyone would have fled to the hills. Because Sims had beaten the cook and almost killed him, and Colonel Pankhurst and the Rifles commander had decreed that the regiment would not get its normal summer leave. And not having this form of escape, they all had to be entertained somehow.

He heard the roar of the jeep in the garage then, and it swept over the gravel drive from the far side of the house to the front. Mila was driving. A pale green chiffon sari floated around her like a cloud in the sky, and in the little seat at the back of the jeep a young man mock-fought with the pallu of the sari, hollering above the din that he was being strangled by fabric. They came to a halt in front of Sam, and Mila wrestled her sari from Ashok.

"Do get in, Captain Hawthorne," she said, jumping out from her seat. Her slippered feet raised a little puff of dust. "I need to fix this or Ashok will keep yanking at my sari and complaining that he can't see." She layered the top half of her pallu over her left shoulder, wound it around her neck and over her head to cover her hair, and then brought the extra around her once more and tucked it into her waist. This she did deftly, as though from long years of practice, and when she finished, the sari swathed her slim figure and concealed all her hair, leaving a rectangle of smooth brown skin above her eyebrows. "There," she said, and put her sunglasses on again. They were large, oval, and a deep black. Ashok wa
s d
ressed with an open-necked white linen shirt, crisp fawn-colored pants, a white silk ascot blooming at his neck. Sam felt shabby beside all this finery in his Burma Rangers uniform and his boots.

"This is my brother Ashok," Mila said, gesturing with her head.

What an attractive family they were, Sam thought. Mila looked nothing like Raman--perhaps she had more of her mother in her--and Ashok was a leaner, younger version of his father. Yet they looked alike. Perhaps it was the color of their skins, so perfectly matched in their neighboring faces, the bronze of the earth. Perhaps it was their eyes, the outer edges curving upward into their hairlines, thickly lashed. Mila's eyebrows had definition, like the arches of bows; perhaps once, without the aid of artifice, they had looked like the smudges of hair above Ashok's eyes. They both had the same strongly shaped faces, and the same manner of slanting their heads. Mila's nose had a little bump at the bridge and her sunglasses perched precariously on this bump.

A smile split Ashok's young face and he thrust his hand forward eagerly. Sam clasped it and felt the slenderness of his fingers, the smallness of the hand in his. Why, he thought, for all his grown-up clothes, Ashok was still a boy. How old was he?

"Hello," he said, and to his surprise, Ashok replied with, "Seattle must be a wonderful place. I say, do you get a lot of snow there?"

"Mostly in the mountains," Sam said.

"Ah, the Cascade Mountains. But also in the Olympic Mountains, no? West of Seattle?"

"Yes," Sam said. "But that is quite astounding--how do you know all this?"

"Oh, I know more," Ashok said. He rubbed his hands and leaned forward. "Are you getting in?" Then, not waiting for Sam's answer, he went on, "Seattle is a hundred and twenty-five nautical miles from the Pacific Ocean, on the Puget Sound, between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington. It is situated a hundred and ten miles south of the Canadian border and lies in King County. Mount Rainier, the highest peak in the Cascade Mountains, is ninety miles south of Seattle. Have you seen it, Captain Hawthorne?"

"All the time," Sam said. He climbed into the jeep on the passenger side. "That is, all the time when it is not raining. We have a saying in Seattle that when you don't see Mount Rainier, it is raining--"

"And when you do see it, it is going to rain," Ashok finished for him with a tremendous peal of laughter.

"Enough, Ashok," Mila said with a smile. "You will bore our guest." "But no," Sam said. "All this is very interesting; how do you know these facts, Ashok? I've lived in Seattle all of my life, but I haven't memorized how many nautical miles lay between Seattle and the Pacific."

"I just know." Ashok had an air of seriousness and erudition.

"Papa gave Ashok an Encyclopaedia Britannica for his birthday a few years ago, so my brother is now a walking fund of knowledge--most of it useless for life, but useful only to impress our visitors," Mila said, speaking over Ashok's little noises of protest. "Shall we go?"

Sam nodded. He turned back to face the front of the jeep. The windshield was up and locked in place. There was a handle welded onto the side of the windshield pane on the passenger's side. Sam had a few seconds to wonder what it was for before he found out.

Mila jammed the jeep into reverse, spun the tires as she backed up the jeep, thrust the gear into first, and slammed on the accelerator. The gates were shut at the end of the drive. The two watchmen dashed to unlatch the gates and had barely run them open before they sped past, with the watchmen still clinging to the wrought iron on its outward swing. A blast of the horn and, without waiting to see if there was any traffic to worry about, Mila turned onto the road. Sam clung to the handle on the side of the windshield pane.

"Mila's a maniac behind the wheel, Captain Hawthorne," Ashok yelled in his ear. "She taught me to drive."

"Remind me not to get into a vehicle again with either of you, then," Sam yelled back, his voice snatched by the wind and carried away behind them.

"I'm not that terrible," Mila shouted. "Jai taught me to drive; you should see him. It's a wonder he's still alive. It's a wonder anyone in Rudrakot is alive, considering the way he plows through the streets. There," she said, shifting down and slowing, "is this better?"

Sam leaned back on his seat finally and let go of the safety handle. Ashok seemed to have worked out a system for being stable; his hands were clenched around the leather of his seat, his feet were jammed apart against the floor; his ascot, though, was still in its place, snowily resplendent.