The Splendor Of Silence (11 page)

He sat in the drawing room waiting for Mila to return and thought of her without realizing that he thought only of her. Trivialities really. She was not very tall; her head came up only to his shoulder. A drop of sweat had run down along her cheek and dispersed wetly into the collar of her white shirt.

When he remembered this second meeting later, he realized that he had seen her like an artist studying his subject limb by limb, hair by hair, and for Sam this was an astonishment, for he usually saw the entireties of people--what they said, how they used their hands, what matter was contained in their brains. Asked what his mother, Maude, had worn when she left the house, he had never remembered much, not even an impression of a color. But this is what he remembered of Mila that morning. When she had turned to meet him, her eyebrows had lifted into the narrow expanse of the skin of her forehead and created fine lines of questions. She had a tiny mole flanking the outer edge of her right eyebrow. Her hand was easy in his grasp, her grip was firm, not insipid, and her palm fitted around his warmly. He followed her into the drawing room and noticed the creases in the khaki of her jodhpurs where they were tucked into the top half of her boots, from where they blossomed into exaggerated, wide, buckram-enforced curves around her thighs. He saw the curve of her breast under the thin white shirt, the plunge of the collar in front, drowned in the aroma of her skin without being anywhere close to her.

And despite that near reference to Mike--or at least Sam thought it must have been Mike that Mila mentioned--he did not think of Mike. He did not think of his mother's letters from home, or of his purpose in being here in Rudrakot, or even of the four short days he had to accomplish what he had come for. He listened instead to the sound of her fading footsteps, and hankered for her to return.

Chapter
Five.

I was neither Englishman nor Indian, but it was not a national matter. It looked to me as if the whole globe might be in the war before it was over It might be America's business, too, before so very long. The world had shrunk. India was no longer far away from anywhere. What with the radio and the Quiz Kids, we talked in New York Gandhi was no stranger to US . I found myself tingling with a kind of impotent impatience. Europe was aflame, the sparks were flying in India's direction, but the politicians would not help man the fire engine!

--Post Wheeler, India Against the Storm, 1944

*

Sayyid came to lead him to his bedroom, not Mila, and upon entering L., it, Sam saw nothing in that room--not the gossamer white curtains on the windows and the door leading to the balcony, not the malachite green mosaic floor or the burnished teak furniture; Sam saw only the bed.

He touched the cool sheets, bent to rub his face against the clean soap-nut smell of the fabric. An immense weariness overtook him; his limbs turned to water, his legs folded beneath him, and he barely heard Sayyid asking when he wanted breakfast. One moment Sam had his nose against the fragrant dhobi-washed pillowcase, the next the bed reached out to yank him into its inviting embrace. He fumbled with the alarm clock on the bedside table in those last few moments before he slept. Sam slept with his boots on, on his face, just as he had fallen, and did not move the entire morning.

His dreams were manacled with images of Mike, of their childhood together with their mother, and, briefly, of the father he had not known. George Ridley had left his wife and children, unable, quite simply, to bear the burden of a family. Maude herself was silent to a stillness about the husband she had once loved, but there were lingerings of their father's presence all around the house, in photographs tucked into the flaps of albums, in a letter laid facedown at the bottom of a box under Maude's winter sweaters.

Little by little, Mike and Sam had pieced their father together--a salmon and crab fisherman in Alaska, a man who preferred the seduction of the wild, the cold, the raw land up north, who had abandoned their mother after a few years when the sea called out his name so insistently that it shut out everything else. The photographs showed a prematurely white beard on a startlingly immature face, a wide smile, and burly shoulders. Even then, when he was ten or eleven or fourteen, Sam had wondered what had attracted them to each other, kept them together for as long as they had been married, since they had so little in common. Their childhoods had been varied, their manners different; Maude was a reader, George had read very little, for he had grown up on the docks in Juneau, surrounded by the aroma of fish, schooled in fishing and little else. On winter days, when the snow lay softly on the shoulders of the Olympic Mountains out to the west, Sam would go to the pier at the cusp of night and watch the sun slip behind the mountains. Then his gaze would drift north and west, where he thought Alaska was, where his father was, and Sam would wonder if he thought of them all. Through the fog of no news, they had heard that George Ridley had married an Aleut woman and fathered a daughter. After that, they had heard nothing more. Mike was born three months after George left, when Sam was four, and his memories of the events of that time were as lucid as when they had happened. Maude wearily hunched in the rocking chair, her feet firmly on the floor, still pitching the chair, the baby asleep against her breast. Maude clucking over Mike, her nose buried in his little tummy, his giggles of rapture as he clutched at her hair. Sam had felt as though he was being deserted again, this time by his mother, for a tiny, mewling, demanding creature who took all of her time. He had refused to look at Mike, to hear his gurgles, to notice that his gaze only followed Sam when he was in the room. And then one day he looked at his little brother, who smiled and spit at him, and Sam fell in love.

They grew up alike, Mike an adoring shadow of his older brother. They climbed the same trees, hid in the branches of the plum while Maude shouted at them to come inside for lunch, and hugged their mother all around, their arms linking her waist, their faces smothered in the cool linens of her summer dresses. On the rare winter days of snow, when school was called off by a mere whitening on the roads, Sam and Mike filched a tray from Maude's kitchen and sledded down the slope near the house, arriving at the bottom in a wet, cold heap of happiness. Mike was the one with the outward passion--he shouted, drummed his fists on the floor, threw his body around on the furniture, in moments of distress tore at the rugs like a puppy. Sam was quieter, more thoughtful, amazed by Mike's antics, even more astounded that they brought results. But even then, very young, he understood that they each had their ways and their peculiarities, that these vagaries made them unique. Maude was a painter and was absorbed in the afternoons in her studio atop the house with huge daubs on canvases gleaming with colors splattered haphazardly to Sam, but perfectly understandable to Mike.

When the war had come three years ago in Europe, Mike, then only eighteen, chafed in the safe confines of Seattle. There was a war on, he would tell Sam, and they were doing nothing to contribute to justice. These were the words he used--truth, hones, integrity, conviction--there were no shades of gray in Mike's world, no place for guilt that could not be atoned for, no hiding from his own flaws.

Sam, more patient, had been content to wait for America to go into the war; he knew that the waiting would not be long, but not Mike. He had joined the American Field Service and taken ambulances out to the war front in France in 1940, and then, sometime the next year, he wrote to them to say that he was in India, training for a British Indian regiment. Times of war were forgiving; all Mike had needed was a sanction from the U
. S
. embassy in Paris and a nod from the India Office in London to join an Indian army without losing his American citizenship. Four months later, Second Lieutenant Michael Ridley joined the Rudrakot Rifles as an emergency commissioned officer. We are all pristinely white here--the Rifles are a British regiment, and we live unhappily across the road from the Rudrakot Lancers, an all-Indian regiment, right up to their commanding of cer, who is, if you can believe it, some sort of prince. Do you remember reading about the struggle for _freedom, Ma, Mike had written to Maude, well, t
o a
live, well, and kicking here though too slow for my liking. These Indians are too quiet a people, steadily persistent though, and I just don't understand Gandhi's nonviolence movement--whack the hell out of these sorry British bastards, I say, and they will leave India. Or better yet, refuse to engage in the war--after all, it is not an Indian war, but a British one. Why should Indian regiments, fighting on behalf of the British Raj, die in droves on war fronts like Egypt and Libya poorly clad, ill equipped, shabbily trained, fighting an enemy they do not even recognize as their own?

This letter was written in February 1942, by which time Sam was already also on his way to India. For one month, Sam had tried to make contact with Mike, but his letters had been unanswered, his phone calls dropped by one of the myriad operators who would have linked him from his base camp in Assam to Rudrakot. The day before he left for Burma to find and rescue Marianne Westwood, he received Maude 's frantic letter. Mike was missing, considered AWOL from the army, which, like all armies, blew minor infractions out of proportion and labeled liars murderers. The Rudrakot Rifles had closed their files on him for now--the war was on, Burma had fallen, there was no time to search out errant officers. Find him, darling. I'm only grateful that you are in India already. But Sam had had to put his mother's pleas away and go into Burma, and all through that journey with Marianne and Ken, he had seethed with the desire to be in Rudrakot.

The alarm on the bedside clock beeped for five minutes before its sound delved into Sam's sleep-fogged brain. For a moment, he could not tell where he was. The white-washed expanse over his head, the fan hiccupping through its revolutions, the quiet around him at this time of the day bespoke almost all of civilized India. He had been in so many places over the last four days that this could be any one of them. And then he remembered his morning conversation with Raman, remembered meeting Mila, and an ache began to grow within his chest, for then he also recalled why he was here at Rudrakot. His shoulder had stiffened with the rest, the bones seemed solidified under his skin and Sam shrugged gently to loosen the hardness. His stomach rumbled, as though glad he was finally awake. On the table beside his bed was a tray covered with a thin film of cloth. Sam lifted it and found a plate with a domed aluminum lid, a pot of tea in a Devon teapot, one cup and saucer, a fork and a knife clad in the folds of an ivory napkin, and, most incongruously, a wilted red rose laid alongside th
e p
late. He was almost afraid of lifting the dome to see what lay underneath, for the aging of the rose told him that the tray had been by his bedside since shortly after he had fallen asleep. Two eggs from Pallavi's chicken coop blinked their unbroken yolk eyes at him, the fat still runny around the edges, since it was too hot for the butter to congeal. There was also a slice of potted meat, decorated with a wilted sprig of coriander leaf. A toast rack also stood by the tray and two pieces of bread, now dry and flaky, disintegrated onto the table's shiny surface. The tea was at room temperature, which was to say that it was not cold, but not as hot as it ought to be, and slivers of creamy milk and tea swirled from the spout into the teacup when Sam poured. He dusted his eggs with pepper and salt. Ever since he had come to India, Sam's taste buds had blossomed under the care of the army cooks who with no finesse had fed spices into the dishes by the handful. In the beginning his stomach had revolted; a thin flame of heat had burned around the periphery of its lining until Sam could feel the throbbing shape and size of his stomach within his torso. That burning had finally settled into a dull ache, and then had miraculously vanished.

The eggs melted in Sam's mouth. The toast broke into a thousand shattered pieces of baked dough and he sponged up every minute piece with his wetted forefinger. He even wiped the teacup out with his finger and held it, cup upended, over his mouth until the last drop of tea slid out onto his waiting tongue. Sam was still hungry. He walked over to his holdall, unzipped it, and rummaged around the sides for the two chocolate bars. Still sitting on the floor, he ate the chocolate, not slowly, not savoring it, but in a sudden rush of hunger.

Sam had chosen to awaken in the middle of the afternoon--his watch told him it was a little after one o'clock--because this was the time of rest and sleep in India and for what he wanted to do, there would be no prying eyes to encounter.

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, and then came back to his holdall. He dug around the bottom of the bag and came up with a dhoti, a long piece of cloth, about five feet by three, muddied and browned beyond its woven-white color. Sam had dipped the dhoti in the river behind his barracks in Assam and then, without rinsing out the mud, had flung it on some bushes; it had dried in less than half an hour, the sun eagerly eating up all moisture in the cloth. He laid the dhoti on the floor, and then brought out a kurta, also dulled from its former color t
o l
ook aged and worn, its sleeves torn and frayed at the edges where they would fall upon his wrists. Another piece of cloth, navy blue and white, he deposited near the dhoti and the kurta. And then Sam began to dress. He took off his pants and his shirt, folded them, and stuffed them under the mattress. He knotted the dhoti skirtlike around his waist. Bending over, Sam reached for the back of the dhoti, drew it up in front, over his crotch, and tucked the end into his waist. Then he ruffled the edges along his legs, pulling them down until his knees were covered.