The Splendor Of Silence (43 page)

"I know you will." Mila's voice was subdued. Even the very fact that Jai had wanted to marry her had come under attentive scrutiny from as far as Delhi. When Jai had announced his intentions, Raman had caviled, though only mildly. On a personal level, Raman was both happy and discontented. His happiness had arisen from the fact that Jai was a good match for Mila--a prince could be nothing less than a good match, after all--his discontent and worry had come from the fact that he knew Jai very well, knew his temper, knew his tantrums, knew of his expectation that his authority most always prevail. Yet even Raman had not counted on love. When he had agreed to Jai's proposal, a smile had lit him so brilliantly that Raman had to literally consider shading his eyes, and when he had seen that smile, he had known that his daughter would be cared for and adored for the rest of her life. He had made the right decision for her.

On a professional level, the match between Jai and Mila was appalling, and there was really no lesser word for it. After having rejected an excellent alliance from the maharaja of Kurvi for one of his three daughters, Jai was now wasting his princely resources upon a mere political agent's daughter. What worth did she bring to the kingdom? What political connections did she have? Who was she? Who was her father?

All of these questions and their rather pathetic answers Raman was more than aware of. He did point this out to Jai, but Jai just laughed. Colonel Pankhurst was not quite so sanguine, and neither were the kings of the neighboring princely states, quite a few of whom had a gaggle of eligible daughters--well, daughters of childbearing age anyway. A slow storm had begun to stir two months ago, and though none of them acknowledged it in Rudrakot, it continued to blow with ferocity. From what Papa mentioned, every now and then, Mila knew that Jai had been bombarded with letters, missives, even visits from various ministers of state, diwans, servants and the princes themselves asking him to consider marrying elsewhere. Even the viceroy, or rather a member of his cabinet who was presumably speaking for the man himself, had written to Jai condemning this action. And if it had not been for Papa, Mila would have known none of this, for Jai behaved as though it did not matter one whit. If he could stand up and oppose what seemed to be the diplomatic corps of most of the neighboring kingdoms for her, her life would indee
d b
e easy with him. Overwhelmed by an emotion she could not identify, Mila took his hand in hers and kissed his knuckles, much as he had upon first seeing her earlier in the evening. Then she leaned over and laid her head on his chest. Thank you, she said silently.

"Will you do me a favor?" he asked.

"Anything."

"Sheela wishes to meet you tonight, before the White Durbar; will you go and see her in the enana?"

Until now, Mila had not given much thought to Jai's first wife, even though she met his children often at parties at the Victoria Club or at the residency. She knew he had a wife, why, her own father had helped in the picking out and choosing of that wife--Jai had in the end married the woman Raman, in his capacity as political agent, had decided was right for him. Jai had never spoken to her about Sheela, who was the princess of Shaktipur, and had come into the marriage with a royal title of her own. Jai's love was all her own, Mila thought, but proprieties had to be maintained. Since she was also going to be Jai's wife, in the parlance of such alliances, Jai's first wife would be a sister to her. They had to learn to be friends, to meet at family functions, to spread their affection among all of their children.

"Where will I live, Jai?" she asked, a sudden fear besetting her.

"Why," he said, rubbing his hand over hers, "with me, in the palace."

Jai's first wife lived within the walls of the ?enana, the women's quarters of the palace. It was a world populated solely by women, a few children, many servants, also mostly women. There were no eunuchs in Jai's fenana, it was a practice he abhorred, and he had retired the oldest eunuch almost as soon as he had gained the crown, at thirteen. That eunuch lived in the lower part of the fort, pensioned for life. There were menservants in the Tenana now, brought in to move the plant pots, sweep the carpets, mow the lawns, and clean the corridors. But for all this, all the women's lives still revolved around Jai. He would have visited his wife a few times, perhaps more than a few times at night, in order for her to have conceived the children. But even Jai would have entered his wife's apartments in the Tenana for these nocturnal visits via a set of stairs built in the back of the rooms, and left by them before the sun broke into the sky in the morning. All of his other visits to the fenana would be conducted in plain sight o
f t
he many other women there--the wives of Raja Bhimsen, the cousins, sisters, nieces, and grandmothers. It was little wonder that he did not love his wife; he did not know her. He had his own array of apartments in another wing of the palace, a series of sitting rooms, drawing rooms, music rooms, a mammoth bedroom built on a miniature lake, a slew of dining rooms of different sizes where he ate if he did not feel like eating in the main dining hall with its seventy-foot-long table.

Mila crinkled her eyes and it seemed to her that the tiny blue lights on the palace walls began to smear their beams in horizontal and vertical lines, as though they were the iron bars of a prison. She would not be able to bear a life in the fenana, or even shut away in some part of the palace on her own.

"Where will I be, Jai?" she asked again.

In response, he rose and put his hands out to pull her to her feet. He glanced at his wristwatch briefly. "We have two hours before I have to dress for the White Durbar." As they walked toward the palace verandah, Jai stood still for a moment and inclined his head. A servant came hurrying up and bowed.

"Will you please let First Her Highness know that Second Her Highness will come to visit her in an hour and forty-five minutes? Thank you."

Then, still holding her hand, he led her into the palace's verandah, through a narrow, unlit corridor that Mila had not noticed before, and into the courtyard that led to his apartments. Not all of the rooms were wired for electricity; there were, in fact, so many rooms here, so many tiny squirreled-away inner courtyards and gardens with little pavilions, that even Jai had not fully explored all of these. A servant scurried forward with a petromax lantern and turned the wick on high so that its white light shone with a bright and constant hiss.

"You may go now," Jai said to him as he took the lantern from the servant.

The man dithered. "Your Highness, it is not safe for you to wander here alone."

"Thank you," Jai said politely and waited until the man bowed and backed out of the courtyard. He turned to Mila.

"Do you want to decide where you are to live? Or rather, if you decide to live somewhere too far from my rooms, where we are to live? For I wil
l h
ave to move closer to you, you know." He held the lantern up in his right hand and grasped her hand tightly with his left.

She nodded, filled to choking with tears. And so they wandered through all the rooms, some in minor use, some unused, with Mila holding the lush folds of her white sari above her ankles as she walked so that the chiffon would not gather dust.

Chapter
Twenty-Four.

On April 13 1919
,
a peaceful meeting of several thousand men, women and children was held in the walled garden of Jalliansvala Bagh in Amritsar, and, under orders of General Dyer, troops fired on the people, who could not get out of the garden because it had only one small exit. Over a thousand were killed and wounded M this infamous massacre, and while General Dyer was applauded in the House of Lords, the poet Rabindranath Tagore returned the knighthood he had earlier accepted from the British.

-Vijaya Lakslimi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness, 1979

*

E
ven before he had told Mila that he loved her, in no many words
,
Sam made a mistake that would make her doubt her affection for him. And he did this knowingly, fully aware that he was betraying the woman he loved. But Sam was on that day in Rudraltot caught irrevocably between Mila and Mike. He loved them both dearly, his allegiance lay with them both, but he was not the type of man who frittered away his word once he had made a promise, however unpalatable it might be.

So Sam lied to Ashok and Raman when he said that he would be glad to take Ashok to the Victoria Club for a drink. It was the only excuse he could think of at a moment's notice after Mila had left him to answer the toot of Jai's limousine's horn and Ashok had come racing out of his room on Sam's left to say, "Is the damn car here already? I'm not even close to being ready. Will you tell Mila please, Captain Hawthorne?"

"Do you want to go to the dinner, Ashok?" Sam had asked.

Ashok's young face folded into all sorts of despair--he wrinkled his nose, bit his lower lip, and knotted his eyebrows. Rolling his eyeballs to the very back of his head so that all Sam could see briefly were the whites of his eyes, Ashok said, "I detest these evenings. Jai will hang over Mila, they will talk stiltedly until he makes an obvious play to get me to go somewhere for a while so that he can kiss her behind a pillar or a fern. Papa has told me not to leave them alone for more than fifteen minutes--I usually give them twenty and make a great deal of noise as I return. I wish they would just get married. And soon."

He said all of this in a light tone and Sam's heart slowly crumbled and crashed to the floor. He saw Jai and Mila together, behind a meticulously maintained geranium in forced bloom, but he could not see them kiss--that very word nauseated him. And yet it was possible, Mila had gone downstairs to get into the limousine.

"Would you like to come to the club with me?" Sam asked casually, forcing his voice to be indifferent. Around them as the sun set, the birds of the back garden began to chirp. "Perhaps we can convince your papa to let you have a first drink ... in public that is."

"Oh, can we?" Ashok was delighted and clapped his hands. "But I have to go with Mila, what will Papa say?"

"Ask him."

Ashok turned and ran into his room again, and Sam heard his room door open into the corridor and then shut as he shouted for his father. Raman's voice answered, more quietly.

Sam lit a cigarette and leaned back against the verandah's parapet to wait for Ashok. He tried not to think of Mila getting into Jai's car. Surely, if Ashok was not allowed to go, Mila would not too? Raman would frown upon it. Surely. Sam wanted to take Ashok with him to keep his word to Vimal, but if it meant that Mila's dinner plans would be thrown into disarray, then so much the better. Dragging smoke into his lungs, Sam held it there and waited, his hands suddenly quaking. He did not believe that Mila truly loved Jai, it could not be, she would not have responded to him as she had if that were true. But she did think she had a duty, and that was not enough for Sam, for he wanted all of Mila, not just the part she was willing to keep from Jai. She had proclaimed in no uncertain terms that she would marry Jai, and that she loved him. When she had left after saying so, Sam had still been exhilarated. Still thrilled. He had not really listened to her. He had said something frivolous about his daughter, about a child he would have, a child he wanted to have with her.

He flung his cigarette away into the bushes below the verandah and watched as the butt glowed and ate at one of the dried branches and then petered out and died in a wisp of smoke. Sam wrapped his arms around one of the verandah's pillars and laid his face against the cooling stone.

"Captain Hawthorne," Ashok said behind him, popping his head from the doorway. "Papa says I can go with you. How splendid!"

Sam nodded, still with his back to Ashok, and his unasked question rushed into the span of space between them and grabbed Ashok by the throat.

"Oh," Ashok said, before disappearing into his room, "Mila goes alone to be with Jai. I'm going to go tell her; she will be thrilled."

Sam waited, listening hard until he heard the soft purr of the Daimler's smooth engine, and Mila went out into the night and to Jai's waiting arms. He felt a layer of hardness form over him. If he had been religious, Sam thought with a sense of irony, still wrapped around the pillar, he could have prayed, but their mother had rarely taken them to church and he had not sought the solace of God when he had learned Mike was missing. And even now, when he was but a day from rescuing him, he would not consider the possibility of defeat or failure, for he had always believed that he could do for himself more than adequately without any help from above. Belief in God had raised too many questions, too much doubt about the existence of any sort of benevolence when there was so much hurt, pain, poverty in the world and when there was this war, which had brought him to Rudrakot. And the Great War before this one, when too many men had died for causes that made little sense to him. Sam had to finish what he had come here for. He had to rescue his brother.

Ten minutes later, Sam and Ashok got into the jeep and drove out toward the Victoria Club. The sun had set by the time they left. Sam drove slowly through the Civil Lines where the houses were almost in complete darkness because even though most of them had electricity, this was visible only by the presence of a lone and weak bulb in the front verandah. But the glass plates were lit in their niches on the gateposts and showed clearly the names of the occupants. Here and there, Sam could see the glowing end of the watchmen's beedis. When they passed the cantonment area
,
Sam switched off the jeep's headlights and they drove through a wondrous starlight-dappled tunnel of trees, the skin on their arms blue and green, visibility stretching for the entire length of the road. He could feel Ashok next to him, quivering with excitement, and he almost turned the jeep around.