The Splendor Of Silence (50 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Nine.

My father had dropped me a hint about the bad habits of this unluck
y c
adet. . * I began to see there that matters were going on too much ahead. Masturbation and sodomy had commenced in the corps.

I hear he is still trying to get back in this corps but this is all mere idle fancy These are the results of sodomy. Beware those who practice it. --Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan

Singh Kanota, Reversing the Gave: Amor Singh's Diary
,
A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India
,
So you see, my dearest Olivia, that just before the monsoon rains in those four days in May we were all hurtling headlong into an inevitable disaster. I mention the rains because they were the barometer by which we lived our lives, by which we died, after which we celebrated marriages, welcomed our children into the world. We welcome the rain because it brings tor coolness, calms our very skins, lets us breathe, feel alive again.

I was unaware for a very long time of this love between your mother and your father; in fact, I did not know of it untilyou were born. I suspected something, but chose willfully not to be/tot-etc my suspicions, and yet, when I found out for sure, there was not a sense of betrayal, but strangely, only gratitude to your mother for having given me much of herself as she did. I'm not being cavalier about this-

at the beginning it was a great, thundering shock for me, it rent me apart, brought my world crashing don's
but all that comes later in this story I tell you, my dear child. Much later.

I sometimes wish, even now, that I had been as lucky as your father.

To have possessed her love, to have known myself secure in her love, as he had considered himself--for a short time anyway. And that is why I wanted to cause him pain, for I ivas in the agony of ignorance myself by the time he came back to Rudrakot six months later.

But I digress again here, picking up threads to weave my tale from well beyond this point and if I continue to do so, I will leave a gap in the fabric of your understanding.

Let me just say this much. I do wish, even now, that Mila had responded to the eight letters I wrote to her fiom the Imperial Cadet Corps, before she met Sam. Then at least, I would have had a scrap of paper on which she would have put down words that were meant just for me. just for me.

rrhe dust storm woke up the town and the kingdom of Rudrakot
,
and in the parlance of storms, this one was a black one, and vied from moment to moment with the red storm Mila, Sam, and Ashok had encountered at Chetak's tomb. So one minute there was that thick, dense silence when even the birds crept back into their nests, huddled with each other in the trees, silenced their demanding early morning chirps, and at the other minute the wind whistled gently, like a lover calling out to his beloved. The air cooled as if plunged into a vat of ice, and then it cracked and fissured as though it contained body and form, and expanded fleetly over the kingdom. Snakes and varans scurried for cover under the tombs of the dead in the Sukh desert. Horses snickered uneasily in stables and retreated to wedge their heads under some sort of shelter; pariah dogs lay quivering under plows and bicycles.

It was still so early in the morning--actually, the night's skirts had barely swept through the horizon to reveal the mighty sun's glow--that there were few people awake after the exhaustion from the revelries of the White Durbar the previous night. So the dust storm took everyone by surprise. Clouds coagulated across the vast desert sky, carrying within them the seeds of monsoon rains, lightning crawled across the heavens followed by so distant a thunder that not one windowpane in Rudrakot rattled, no
t o
ne child awoke to wail in his mother's arms. The night watchmen were also asleep all over the city and within Jai's fort and his palaces, fatigued by the heat, thinking that no one would dare invade their domains at the brink of daylight. No one, that is, but the magnificent storm.

It came thundering onto Rudrakot, blackening the sky, blotting out the surprised sun, rousing the dirt and the dust to an ebony fury. On the terraces and in the courtyards across Rudrakot, people awoke screaming, partly with laughter, partly with fear at the tempestuousness of the storm. Girls woke to face the lusty wind, their eyes shut tight, their hair and ghagaras billowing behind them like ships in full sail, boys shouted into the storm and heard no sounds from their mouths, their voices snatched and carried away in an instant.

Mila ran to the door to her balcony, which had still been left open and was flapping as if demons were banging on it, and began to shut it, using all the force of her strong young arms. But as she struggled with the last four inches, the door would not budge and she looked down to see why and saw Ashok kneeling in the opening, holding it ajar with his body, his head bowed.

She pulled him inside, yelling that he was an idiot, what was he doing up so early. Then he lifted his face to hers and she almost died. Tears inundated his cheeks, his eyes were red, there were teeth marks on the curve of his shoulder, where his neck met his collarbone, and he shook as though he had been doused in a fever.

Mila shut the door firmly and latched it. She gathered her brother in her arms, half-carried him to her bed but could not lift him onto it, and he had no strength left in him to even raise himself a few feet. He disintegrated to the floor and she collapsed next to him, yanking his shoulders up to prop him against the bed, putting her arms around him fully, so that he could rest his head against her chest.

"What happened?" she said, her heart fracturing as he sobbed. His arms went around her waist and his fingers pinched the skin there, but she did not mind or even notice. "Tell me," she said, much as Sam and she had invited confidences from each other earlier that night. "Tell me, karma." Karma, apple of my eye, my love, a term of endearment Mila had used for Ashok when he was but a child and she had sung him to sleep at night, or sat by his bed when he was ill and when Pallavi did not have the heart to shoo her out of the room.

Mila ran her hands over Ashok's thin body, his head with its sweat-matted short hair, his neck, his shoulders and ribs, his thighs, calves, and ankles. He was all right. He was still in the clothes he had worn for the White Durbar the previous night, but they were soiled, not torn, dirty, as though he had rolled in the dust outside.

"Are you all right?"

So he said to her, I am in love with Vimal, Mila. I love him. As men love women, as women love men.

At first she did not understand and her heart died to a quietude at the thought. She had been afraid of Vimal's influence on Ashok, afraid that he would haul him into the nationalist movement and that that would cause embarrassment for Papa, afraid even of some nameless thing she could not identify. But never this. Never this, she thought. How was it even possible? What was it, this love between two men? What would Ashok do now? How could he live? How much more embarrassing this would be for Papa. It would kill Papa.

"You cannot know what love is, Ashok," she cried. "And in so short a period of time. Why, Vimal returned to our lives just two days ago." She said this without much consideration and then the full import of her words came upon her too. She knew what love was, and now, looking back, she knew she had fallen in love with Sam the moment he had held her hand at the meta and she had not wanted him to let go. And how long had Sam been with them ... two, perhaps three days, and he would be gone tomorrow, but her love for him would not die.

"I have done wrong, Mila," Ashok said, wretchedness saturating his face. He plunged his head into his hands and did not have the courage to look at the sister he had always considered in the place of his mother. It was only to her he would dare confess this shameful secret. He had not been able to stop himself, he had not been seduced by Vimal, he had wanted this. He had been desperate for the touch of Vimal's mouth on his, for the taste of his skin, for the feel of his body next to his. Desperate with a need that had grown inside him for a few years now, a need he had not recognized, because, like Mila, he did not know what this was.

"Yes," she said heavily. "You have done wrong, Ashok. I do not know what to say, what to do." And so saying, Mila turned away from Ashok. An anguished cry came from him and he wept harder. She saw the bruises underneath the collar of his shirt with a renewed but almost dispassionate interest. She felt the pleasant tiredness in her own limbs from the hours of making love to Sam; she rubbed the side of her thigh, where she knew Sam's teeth also adorned her skin, much as Vimal's teeth had left their mark on her brother. At that moment, all her disgust fled, for Mila understood what this love was between Ashok and Vimal. Under any other circumstances, given this with any other man or boy, perhaps even with Kiran, Mila would not have comprehended this passion or realized that it could be as strong as, as powerful as the one she shared with Sam. Within the span of one night, three men in her life--Papa, Sam, and Ashok--had taught her how varied and rich love could be, and that in its own way, in each of those ways, these different loves could be enduring. But with Vimal, of all people Mila thought with distress that Vimal would not return Ashok's love; he was incapable of something so unselfish and giving. Her heart grew leaden with grief for her brother because he was sure to be betrayed, and though Mila did not know just then, that betrayal was to come, and soon.

She put her arms around him again, this time calmly, and laid her lips against his sweaty head. She rubbed at the grains of sand in Ashok's hair, hugged his slight shoulders, and said quietly, "Papa must never know
,
karma."

"What shall I do, Mila?"

Once she had said those words, Mila learned within herself yet another lesson, that she had finally grown into an adult, become a woman of her own. It was not necessary to reveal all the details of her life, in this case, of Ashok's life to Papa. She realized that he would be devastated, that it would be a hurt he could not possibly recover from, that she might understand a part of it, but never Papa. Because she was a woman, had been a girl child, there were almost naturally many things she did not discuss with Papa, and this had been easy. On the day when she had glanced down with dread at the first blood in the lining of her underwear, when she was twelve, it was Pallavi she had sought out, ashamed and frightened. Pallavi had told Raman later in the evening, and Raman had merely kissed Mila on the forehead and said to Pallavi, "If Mila does not want a fuss made about this, then there will be no fuss."

"But she has become a woman now," Pallavi had wailed. "We have to conduct the pujas, invite the women of the neighborhood to come and visit her, seat her in a special chair so that everyone can see her and bless her."

Raman pulled away from Mila, and held her by her young shoulders. "Well, do you want all this, my dear child?"

Mila was more horrified than she had been at seeing the blood, and gone in that instant were the fears that she would bleed to death, that someone had taken a knife to her insides and had twisted it unmercifully until all of her would leak out through ... there. "No, Papa," she said fearfully, thinking that perhaps Pallavi would triumph after all and put her ou
t i
n the verandah on display. Look at the daughter of our house; she has attained womanhood. Papa had said quietly to Pallavi, "This is one of those instances where my will must prevail. We will let Mila do what she wants. Is that clear?"

And yet even after that, on months when she had been prostrate with cramps or worried about the changes in her body, she had gone to Pallavi with her worries, not their father. Raman would not have been embarrassed at explaining what little he knew, and he understood only very little about women's affairs because even his children had been born behind the closed doors of his house and only brought out cleaned and swaddled in bedsheets, but Mila knew not to go to him then. As she knew now that their father must never learn of Ashok's ... love for Vimal.

"What shall I do?" Ashok asked again. His tears had stopped and his face had aged with this knowledge of himself. They both wished in that silence as Mila pondered his question for the right answer that rime could somehow be turned back and recant the happenings of the previous night for Ashok.

"Nothing. You can do nothing about this. You can never talk of this, and if you are to ... to meet Vimal again, know that I will not help make up excuses for you or for your absence." He stiffened in her embrace, but she went on doggedly, hoping that he would understand, that he would see things as she did. "No one most know, and no one must ever find out. Be very, very careful, Ashok."

The storm now invaded their consciousness, flinging its winds upon the closed balcony door, thumping against the windows, sending fingers of dirt in snakelike patterns under the door's frame. Fifteen minutes later, it died as abruptly as it had started, and Mila and Ashok heard, just a few minutes later, the crash of a brass pot against the surface of the well's water. They rose without speaking and, still holding on to each other, went out, the cranking of the pulley luring them to the balcony.

Raman had beaten the birds to activity. But as Mila and Ashok leaned over the parapet of the balcony to look down upon their father, the sparrows started their relentless chirping in the mango trees, and the first smoke coughed its way out of the chimneys of the kitchen house, palely white against the dark sky. There was the merest touch of chill in the air, and a half gloom still blanketed everything. The lime-washed wall of the well gleamed dully in the brightening light, and they saw the partly clad figure of their father near the well. His arms moved in a steady rhythm, yanking at the rope, one hand fluidly replacing the other until the brass pot swayed up and over the wall. Still holding the rope with his left hand, he leaned over the vast, yawning mouth of the well and pulled the pot to the well's ledge. Raman tilted the pot to splash some water into a steel tumbler dipped with a spoon. He then heaved it over his head, held it there for a minute, and upended the water over himself.