The Splendor Of Silence (3 page)

"The native carriages are at the back of the train," she said. "Please find your way there. This is my seat. There can be no possibility of a mistake here."

The British conductor hovering behind Mrs. Stanton's vast figure, with a "May I?" edged through the narrow doorway to look at the Indian's ticket.

"It's quite all right, Mrs. Stanton," he had said, and cleared his throa
t i
n that uncomfortable silence. He held the little pink rectangle of cardboard between the tips of his fingers, and Sam saw the name MOHAMMAD ABDULLAH stamped on it, along with FIRST CLASS, BOGIE 4.

It would have been quite all right if the matter had stopped there. "I'm sure," Mrs. Stanton said, the pale yellow feather in her purple hat quivering with the movement of her head, "this gentleman has been issued the right ticket. But this is not his place. Surely you realize that?" "You are welcome to sit beside me, madam," Mr. Abdullah said. "But I have bought, and paid, for this ticket. There is no possibility of a mistake here." He echoed Mrs. Stanton's words, but his voice was so bland, his expression so unmarked that Sam saw the underlying sarcasm only in a little smile that touched his lips within his neat, graying beard.

Mrs. Stanton seemed to grow until she filled the doorway with her obstinate presence. And when she spoke, she did not look at the man, but at the conductor. "I cannot be asked to sit in the same compartment as this man. There must be another seat in this bogie."

Her words roused a flurry of worry in the poor conductor, who mopped his brow, and cleared his throat even more. Sam, still seated near the window, had not said a word. He had merely watched the three of them, frozen in a tableau of stubbornness--Mr. Abdullah, unyielding to all influence; Mrs. Stanton, equally shut from everything, but simmering in anger, her breathing harsh; and the conductor, sighing and repeatedly patting the pocket where his handkerchief reposed. The conductor had taken Mr. Abdullah out into the corridor and Sam heard him talking, entreating, pleading. At first, his voice was persuasive, and then raised and threatening, but Mr. Abdullah's voice was always tranquil in response. "This is my seat," he had said. "She is welcome to go elsewhere." The train had waited, because Mrs. Stanton insisted that it would not leave Palampore until Mr. Abdullah left her compartment.

The tags on Mrs. Stanton's bags read CALCUTTA-PALAMPORERUDRAKOT. On the Calcutta to Palampore train, Mrs. Stanton had sat uncomplaining with Mr. Abdullah. But there she was unknown, just anybody. On the Rudrakot train, she was someone of consequence. She knew the conductor well; he got his little packet of Christmas biscuits and an envelope of rupees from her as baksheesh. He was under her patronage. She could hold up the train if she so wanted. This was her train--the train of those like her who owned and ran Rudrakot.

Sam leaned forward to rest his elbows on his thighs and stared fixedly at the floor of the compartment. A little crowd of coolies had grown outside on the platform, along with some pointing of fingers and some asking of questions in Hindustani and Urdu, and Sam could understand only bits of that. What a bloody memsahib she was, he thought. The memsahib of the British Raj, so typical, so true to what she had to be--imperious, disdainful, blind to any color of skin but hers, fearful even behind that mask of rudeness. He also experienced a well of irritation at Mr. Abdullah, with his quiet voice, his gentle insistence, his expectation of such behavior. Sam would have wrung Mrs. Stanton's skinny neck by now. His shoulder throbbed.

Mr. Abdullah and Mrs. Stanton had fallen silent, each inflexible, until the train blasted its horn and pulled out of the station after thirty minutes. All the immense built-up drama deflated into futility, because Mrs. Stanton's influence over the night train to Rudrakot from Palampore could bear the weight of only half an hour. For anything beyond that, she would have to be someone and something greater in the British Raj.

She sat then, finally, her bags and hatboxes littered under the bunks, her knitting by her side, and the train moved into its measure without a word spoken in the carriage. And this was Sam's introduction to the India he had not yet seen for himself because, though he had been in the subcontinent since February, all his time thus far had been spent in Burma dealing with the Japanese invasion. With his own attention caught by the war, the Indian nationalist struggle for independence from the British had only briefly imprinted itself upon his consciousness. Ten or fifteen years ago, the Rudrakot train would have stayed at Palampore at Mrs. Stanton's command and Mr. Abdullah would have been forcibly removed to the back. Much had changed since then--the world war, the insistence on a free and independent India--and so, in 1942, Indians often traveled (when they could afford it) in first-class carriages, some journeys conducted, as this one promised to be, in total silence.

The day passed, slowly, with the stops along the track, the white heat of the sun, the blessed death of it by evening, the coming of the night. Sam and Mrs. Stanton went to dinner together, beckoned by the call of the bogie chai boy, who popped his head deferentially into their compartment and said, "Dinner is served, Sahib," to Sam, and then added, "Memsahib," to Mrs. Stanton. Mr. Abdullah, the boy ignored, knowing he would have his own food with him, that he had permission to occupy their compartment, but not to sit at the table in the dining carriage. Progress had stepped, gingerly, into their compartment, but did not yet dare step over the threshold into other parts of the train. Sam and Mrs. Stanton sat across from each other, for such as it was, they knew only each other, and he learned that the best way to keep her from asking questions was to ask them of her. He knew precious little about her by the end of dinner, because he had not listened to her answers.

They returned from the dining carriage at nine o'clock to the aroma of curry and spices. Mr. Abdullah was just stacking the layers of the round steel vessels of his tiffin carrier, which had been filled in the waiting rooms at Palampore with rice, chapattis, and chicken curry, and from which he had surreptitiously nibbled throughout the day. She wrinkled her nose, but Mr. Abdullah did not seem to see it. He was scrupulously polite and climbed up on his berth, turned on his side, and went to sleep.

When Mrs. Stanton had also closed her eyes, Sam took out his map of Rudrakot and traced all its possessions with his finger. The cantonment area. The native town. The lake. Chetak's tomb. He had four days of leave before he had to return to his regiment. Would it be enough to find his brother? It had to be. Any alternative answer to that question was too terrible to consider. So it was love for Mike and for his mother that drove Sam Hawthorne to Rudrakot.

What he did not know then was that love, of another kind, fulfilling and cherished, would bring him back here, and would eventually occupy his life. Would give him Olivia.

As the train cut through the night toward Rudrakot, Mila sprawled on her stomach, her face flattened against the pillows. Every now and then, she twitched and her eyelids fluttered, her sleep sprayed with dreams she could not stop. Somewhere, a conscious part of her watched the pictures in her mind and told her it was only a dream, that it meant nothing. There was the mocking face of the madam of the Lal Bazaar, Leelabai, her appraising eyes, her too-knowing gaze upon Mila.

She is going to teach us, an Indian girl? Teach us what? Girls are good for only one thing, Missionary Sahib, you should know that. Or perhaps not, your God does not allow you the normal pleasures of a man. What a cruel God you have.

Leelabai was soft and dumpy, dimpled at her elbows, with skin pale as ripening wheat, her hair balding at the part on the crown of her head. Her guttural voice was fed by the harsh smoke of the hookah she smoked incessantly. Mila had almost departed then in disgust, but Father Manning had put a gentle hand at her elbow and said softly, "Look at the women. And then leave if you want to."

So she lifted her eyes for the first time to the women--some only girls with childhoods barely brushed out of their expressions. They were all caricatures of any real women Mila had known, caricatures of herself even, their faces powdered white, quarter-inch-thick kohl lining their eyes, its curves elongated to their hairlines, mouths red with paan, beauty marks to ward off the evil eye painted on a chin here, a cheek there.

Mila woke shaking, exhausted, her breathing ragged, with a sudden sting of tears behind her eyes, the images of her dream hanging before her. She had not known that such places existed until Father Manning had taken her there, and once she had visited the Lal Bazaar, she was not able to stay away. So Mila went twice a week, listened to the women's shrill laughter and to their bawdy jokes, heard the hurt lodged somewhere deep within them that they could not be her, privileged and clean--that they had never been able to be her, and would never be her now, for they were fallen women.

She sat up on the bed and put her feet on the cool mosaic floor. The previous day's heat had lost its edge, but only a little, enough to transmute into a deceiving semblance of coolness. Though the fan whirred overhead, Mila had woken in a sweat, her skin damp on the undersides of her breasts and the nape of her neck under her hair. The outside khus mats covering the windows of her bedroom had been drawn up by a servant and the sky beyond was saturated with the beryl blues of predawn. Mila had lived in Rudrakot for most of her life, and yet had never tired of the tranquility of this time of day, or been overwhelmed by the waiting vastness of the desert outside that would receive her. She had once been awed by its immensity, when she was a child. Around Rudrakot, the Sukh was a desert not of sands, but a hard, pounded ground of dirt stretching out for miles. Trees and scrub dotted its arid countenance where they could find hold, but they were so sparse, so thirst ridden, their leaves and branches grew into a spinelike hardiness. But there were ways to survive in the Sukh, shelter to be found in the shade of the little hills and hillocks forme
d o
f its slowly eroding surface, water to be tapped if one only knew where to look, journeys to be made with a surefootedness led by the sun during the day and the canopy of stars at night.

And in the view from Mila's bedroom window, well into the horizon, one small hill was adorned with a hundred-year-old tomb. It housed a massive, square sarcophagus, ten feet by ten feet, large enough to provide that eternal rest for five humans lying side by side. The tomb was called Chetak, after its occupant, so beloved in life that, in death, he warranted this magnificent creation of stone. The enormous sarcophagus covered the remains of an enormous body. Not human. Chetak was a horse, of the four-legged kind.

The fright from the dream had melted away, and Mila titled her head to listen for sounds within the house. She had woken at this time--the cusp of night and day--ever since she was seven years old because this was what her mother, Lakshmi, used to do for Mila's father, Raman.

Lakshmi had always opened her eyes before Raman, reached down the bed to touch his feet lightly in the darkness, as a wife was taught to do, asking for a daily blessing from the man who was her master. After Lakshmi died, Mila would awaken to listen for her father's rising and his going down the stairs to the well for his prayers. Mila did not have to sweep the courtyard, wash it down, draw the rice flour blow to welcome visitors at the front door; there were enough servants in the house to do this. But the rules of engagement between men and women were laid out such that Mila had felt, without ever being told so, that a woman in the house had to rise before the men. In the early years, when she was merely seven years old, she would knock softly on her father's door with a, "Papa, it is time to get up," her limbs loose with sleep, her long hair tangled in knots, her short petticoat (which she wore under her frocks) crumpled. Raman would carry his child back to her bed, his heart touched by this devotion, and Mila would be asleep again before he put her down. He scolded her so much Mila understood that she did not need to waken before her father--it was a wife's place, not a daughter's, or at least not a child's responsibility. But this did not stop her from getting up before he did, though now she stayed in her room, waiting to hear his footsteps pass her door.

This morning the top floor of the house was quiet. One of her brothers, Kiran, snored delicately from the room on her right. Ashok, younger than she, the youngest of them all, was a room away on her left, and h
e w
ould not have been merciful to Kiran had he known of the snoring. Ashok would have stomped around the house trumpeting like an elephant--but he was only sixteen, and so young enough to find this sort of thing terribly amusing.

Mila brushed her teeth in the bathroom without glancing into the mirror above the porcelain sink. The toothpaste was chalky and bitter, made of the neem tree's fruit and leaves. It reminded her of the time she had tasted the walls of the corridor outside her room just after they had been brushed with a wash of slaked lime. Mila had felt an irresistible urge to lay her tongue against the dripping whitewash to see if it tasted as good as it smelled. She had placed her fingertips on the wall for support, leaned inward, and touched the tip of her tongue on the gritty coating as her nose was crushed against the surface. The taste was abominable, and Mila had backed away hurriedly, swallowing that stinging flavor, wiping her fingers on her frock, just as Kiran climbed up the stairs. He said nothing, just grinned, dabbed at her white nose, and made sounds of retching.

When she came out of the bathroom, she paused by the photographs on the wall between the windows that fronted the balcony. Jai, ruler of Rudrakot, was in each of them, glorious in his royal finery. Rudrakot was now a princely state in British India, and Jai's title, inherited as it was, had little meaning other than to bestow pomp and circumstance upon him. But this minor inconvenience had never stopped him from considering privilege to be his birthright. In one photograph, he was on his beloved horse, Fitzgerald, saddle and boots indistinguishable from the horse's ebony coat, Jai in his ICC uniform of salt white jacket, white turban, all rimmed in light blue and gold braid. In another, Jai was with Lord Wellesley, governor of the Bombay presidency, and was turned away from the governor just a little, head up, chin ferocious, arrogant as usual. In the third, Jai had been captured during one of his famed White Durbars, held on the night of purnima--the full moon--more shadows than light on his thin, sharply planed face.