The Splendor Of Silence (29 page)

"Well then," Lady Pankhurst said. "So it goes." She shrugged gracefully and nodded at them both. "I will see you next Friday as usual, Mila?" "Of course, Lady Pankhurst," Mila said, "as usual."

"When does our dear Jai return?" Lady Pankhurst said this with a shard of malice, and it was a question that required no answer from Mila, for by the time the last of those words had been spoken, Lady Pankhurst was well out of earshot.

For a long while, Mila and Sam did not speak. Something had happened between them, hurtling them toward a future that was still indiscernible, and there was the real fear of that unknown that kept them silent. Mila gathered the coconuts in a box, placed the money on top, and Sam carried it for her across the lawns to the tea tent.

They walked carefully apart from each other, uncertainty marring their brows. From his table, Kiran watched them with foreboding, thinking that this surely could not be, dreading that Sims could be right in his estimation. He was well on his way to getting drunk and saw everything through a gimlet smog that was surprisingly clear and lucid. Come tomorrow, he would not remember all of the evening, but this one moment of a sudden dread would return, repeatedly. Sam and Mila could not be. Kiran knew that Sims, much as he extended a hand of friendship, even brotherhood toward him, would not look kindly at Kiran if he coveted a white woman. It was as simple as that, obvious to all of them, obvious, really, to everyone but Sam and Mila.

Sam excused himself briefly to visit the men's washroom just beyond the billiards room, which was off-limits to women. The stalls in the washroom had been built with rich brown chin-high mahogany partitions. The toilets, known affectionately as thunderboxes, were little more than holes in mahogany seats with deep galvanized tin trays beneath to accumulate the waste. Sweepers emptied these trays; they were a special caste of men who came in the dense of the night, their skins charred and darkened by this dirty work. The men's washroom was more primitive in its fitting
s t
han the women's washroom with its wicker furniture, talcum powder on trays, and gurgling, new, flushing toilets.

Kiran followed Sam and occupied a stall near his. Their eyes met over the partition but they said nothing. More than once Kiran dragged words from his sluggish brain, but he could not speak them, for all he had was a suspicion. How did one voice that?

Sam left first and paused quite by chance to glance at the map of Rudrakot on the far wall of the billiards room. He traced his bearings with his finger--the Victoria Club, the Civil Lines, Raman's home, the residency, and striking out into the desert was Chetak's tomb, where Mila said they were to go tomorrow. That would not happen, of course; he had to return to the Lancers' headquarters and talk with Sims and Blakely, find out what they knew. His finger idled over the contours of Chetak's tomb and then strayed out into the wilderness. A little building was drawn on in pencil, and somewhere in the sands were the words, Field Punishment Center, 193
0
. Sam snatched his hand away with a thudding heart. He looked around. There were a few officers lounging around the room, a few more playing pool, leaning on their cue sticks.

Almost casually, without another glance at the map, Sam nodded to the men and sauntered out to meet Mila and Ashok. On the drive back Ashok chattered away. At another time, Mila would have seen that his eyes were feverish with excitement, his speech was impassioned and frivolous, and she would have been worried. She had noticed him at the hedge, talking with Vimal Kumar, the man they had passed near their house who had stood and stared at them in all of his glorious beauty, the man who had studied mathematics and English with Ashok. Mila had never been able to rest easily in Vimal's presence, and now the rumors were that he was involved in the nationalist movement and she did not want Ashok pulled into the snares of nationalism. Mila herself was ambivalent about the movement, and whatever her private feelings, she could not, would not, voice them in public because that would mean going against Papa and his life's work. Her loyalties lay with her father.

On another day, Mila would have fretted about Ashok renewing any friendship at all with Vimal. Now it was Ashok who caught the uneasiness in their silence and fell quiet himself, thinking, as his brother had done, that something was not right between Captain Hawthorne and Mila.

May 29, 1942

(Rudrakot, India

Chapter
Fifteen.

our women are not allowed to Igo. I out ... long as we have the purdah we must observe it strictly said it would be alright if he took his maharani sahibs to any place in Kirhengarh, but as regards taking them outside to such places as Calcutta I was quite against. So long as we have the purdah we must not do these things

--Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan Singh Kanota, Reversing the Gale: Amor Singh', Diary, A Colonial Sable, Narrative of Imperial India, zoos

*

T
wo missives passed each other that night, neither read until the morning, when it was too late to do anything about the information contained within. By the time Mila, Sam, and Ashok returned home the previous evening, it had been late. Not perhaps late in the calendars of the officers who went to the soiree at the residency and danced away a good portion of the night, but Raman was in bed and well asleep before nine o'clock.

Mils paused outside her father's door for a long while, listening for a sound from within. She heard him sigh in his sleep, turn over in his bed, but then his breathing settled into evenness. She went back to her room and sat down at the lithe teak desk that Papa had bought for her when she
was

As and wrote out a short note for Raman that they--Sam, Ashok, and she--were going to Chetak's tomb early the next morning on a pi, Mc, that they would be out the whole day and return perhaps for dinner
,
perhaps not until much after. She did not ask Raman for permission. He would not have denied it, though he might have hesitated and thought about the propriety of their leaving like this and being away for so long without him as a chaperone. But there was no impropriety really in what Mila was going to do, just a hesitation, a cautiousness. She expected that they might well be out of the house before Papa woke up in the morning, so she wrote him a letter in her own hand without leaving a message with Sayyid.

She stepped out of her room and felt against the wall for the switch to turn off the corridor light. Now light seeped from under the doors near hers--Ashok at the far end, Sam right next to her, only darkness from Kiran's room to her left, and a disapproving peel of light under Pallavi's door, next to Kiran's. Papa's side of the house, opposite her, was dark and silent. He was still asleep. She switched on the light again and went across to slide the note under the door.

When she came back to her room, she unwound her sari, threw it on the chaise longue, stepped out of her petticoat, and unbuttoned her blouse with a great weariness. Then, in just her bra and underpants, Mila sat at the dressing table and dabbed some lotion into a piece of cotton to clean away the lines of kohl under her eyes and wipe away the big red bindi she had painted on the middle of her forehead. She heard Pallavi's soft footsteps in the corridor outside as she walked up and down the length of it in bare feet.

Mila let her hair loose from its plait until it fell around her shoulders to her waist and began to brush it until it shone. Her movements were jerky until the knots had come loose from her hair and then the brush slid in smoothly. Her arm tired, but she would still not ask Pallavi to come in and do this for her. This was the first time Mila could remember that Pallavi had not helped her prepare for bed, combing her hair and plaiting it again, even rubbing her forehead gently until she slept. A tear formed at the corner of her eye and slid down her cheek and she wiped it away, deafening her ears to Pallavi's striding in the corridor. She knew Pallavi would continue this for at least another two hours, until she was able to contain her anger, until fatigue forced her to bed.

The idea of going to Chetak's tomb had come in a moment to Mila, upset as she had been with Lady Pankhurst's machinations to get Sam into her boudoir. But this was not something she could explain to Pallavi. What could she say? That she wanted Sam Hawthorne for herself, and s
o s
he had made up an excuse with Lady Pankhurst? It sounded so stupid even in the coolness of the night, Mila thought, even now when she was free from any provocation, that it must be untrue. She was just being solicitous of their visitor. Let him leave Rudrakot after having visited and seen all they had to offer. He was, after all, their guest, not staying at the residency. Why should Lady Pankhurst take up any part of his time here? But none of this would have even remotely mollified Pallavi, who had been on the edge of being scandalized when she heard of their plans. Her reaction had been unnerving, stunning.

"Tell your papa," she had hissed, pulling the pallu of her sari close around her.

"Why?" Mila asked in exasperation. She hoped both Ashok and Sam had gone up to their rooms after they had parted at the front entrance and were not anywhere nearby to listen to this conversation. "I mean, I will tell Papa. What do I do in this house without Papa's knowledge, Pallavi?"

"Tell him now," Pallavi said. "And see if he gives you permission to leave like this tomorrow."

"Sam Hawthorne is our guest, Pallavi."

"He can find his entertainment at the Victoria Club. Why does he not stay there? Would it not suit him better, all the parties, the women who dance and drink and smoke? These women who speak English?"

Now Mila had to grin. "You speak English too."

Pallavi was pleased by the compliment and so her face lightened but was soon replaced with a frown again. "Mila, this is not right. I have not seen you all day long. You were away riding in the morning, at the mela since late afternoon, and now it is so late." She gestured at the grandfather clock in the dining room, which obligingly began to chime out the hour of ten no that Pallavi had to raise her voice to speak over the sound. "When are you ever at home? A woman must find her amusements within the walls of her house. Here you must supervise the servants, tend to the kitchens, embroider and knit in the afternoons, wait for your husband to return in the evenings. Your mother never went to the club, even after she was married and had the right to go. She never stepped out of her house before she was married."

"My mother ," Mila began and then grew quiet. What could she say about a mother she barely remembered? Pallavi knew more about Lakshmi than she did; Mila had been five years old when Lakshmi died.

This much at least was true about her, though. Her mother had been traditional and conservative, and had she been alive, a vast number of Mila's activities would have been confined. Papa might still have had his say in her education, but her mother would have influenced him in some way or the other. Mila's memories of her mother were hazy now; she could remember the scent of sandalwood on her soft skin, the white of her teeth offset by a mouth stained red with paan, an arrangement of jasmine flowers threaded into a garland, bowing down the weight of her slender, fair neck. But when Mila had been sick with a fever, it was Pallavi she recalled as sleeping by her side, and it was Pallavi's hand that had wakened her in the night, brushing softly against her brow as she checked periodically to see if the fever had risen. It was Pallavi who was here now, scolding her with a mother's insistence, but without a mother's authority.

Mila began to yield and then hardened her resolve again. If she had lingered to ask herself why, and if she had been truthful about it, she would have told herself that it was because she wanted to spend some more time with Sam Hawthorne before Jai returned from Meerut. Now, all she felt was a stubbornness, an assertion of her pride and her right.

"My mother did not speak English, Pallavi," she said. "She was a different woman, and I am different now. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?"

Pallavi shook her head. "We are never as different as we would like to be. The changes are little, subtle, but in the end it is all the same. I will say this once more," she said, rising to leave, "you must ask your papa for his permission, talk with him, and tell him what I have said." And so saying, she left the room.

In her bedchamber, Mila put down the brush and plaited her hair. When the length had grown beyond her shoulder, she brought the plait forward and continued until the end. Then, without donning her nighttime sari, Mila climbed into the bed and reached over to switch off the lamp on the bedside table. She thought she saw a piece of paper on the mosaic floor, scrunched under the edge of the door, near the hinge, but that impression was fleeting before the room plummeted into darkness.

It was not until the next morning as she rushed out of her room to the waiting jeeps that she saw the paper again. Mila picked it up and slid it into the pocket of her pants, and did not open it until they were well on their way. Raman had already left that morning, two hours before them, on hi
s w
ay to the village of Nodi for the day and the night. He said that he would return on the morning of the thirtieth of May. There was no mention of their trip to Chetak's tomb; her heart filled with guilt, Mila realized that Raman had not read the note she had slipped under his door.

In a strange series of coincidences, Raman too had missed Mila's letter, but Sayyid had seen it as he went back into the room to bring out his master's bags, and he had nicked it into his turban for Raman to read later that night.