The Splendor Of Silence

Indu Sundaresan

*

Somewhere Near Seattle

At
T
he Cabin

Cam painted the stairs that zigzag down the cliff's face to culminate at the beach. He had asked Olivia what color she wanted, and she had said red, so he painted the stairs Victoria Red--the same color as his breathtakingly expensive 1950 Crown Imperial limousine. Olivia was seven that year, and remembers lying on the sand in the hot sun, looking up as her father meticulously painted his way down. Having cornered himself and her on the beach by nightfall, they jogged up to the cabin, careful not to bump against the railings, but leaving footprints on the paint-wet wood. Olivia still has those red-soled shoes, but now, fourteen years later, fourteen Northwest summers and winters have stripped the paint, bleached the wood, weathered the railings into an old woman's face. A gust of wind grasps Olivia's hair, yanks it loose from the collar of her coat, and sets it flying. One strand whips over her mouth, soaks into the tears that fall down her cheeks. She looks up the cliff in the approaching darkness and imagines that she sees a light in the window--one her father has lighted in welcome. But Sam died five days ago; he will never come here again. Elsa the dog nudges against Olivia's shins to remind her that it is cold here, and begins the climb up the seventy-nine steps. Olivia slowly follows, hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched about her ears. Once Sam said to Olivia, "You look like your mother." She had just washed her waist-length hair, and drowsy from the bath, had laid her head on a pillow in front of the wood stove and fanned the strands out to dry. Sleep fled. "I do, Papa?" she asked. "Did you love her?" "With all of my heart; I still love her, as I love you." "Tell me about her. Tell me about my mother." "Later," Sam said. "Later." He always said later.

Olivia would then gaze intently in the mirror, trying to find her mother in herself--in her ebony hair, her curved eyebrows, even the elongated shape of the blue eyes she has inherited from Sam. Her Indian side and her American side.

They came to this cabin from Seattle each summer to while away the long daylight hours when Sam did not have to teach. He would write and she would fish desultorily in the chilled waters of the cove, or read, or throw sticks for Elsa until he was done for the day and they could go to the store or the library. She did not lack companions her age in the neighboring cabins, but she did not want them; she only wanted summers unadulterated by anyone but her father. On most weekends though, Grandma Maude would come to visit, and they would eat dinners by candlelight on the outside deck as the day died, and the night was born in skies of jewel
-
like stars.

On other nights, they would build a fire on the beach, huddling together in a blanket while Sam told her stories, and Olivia would fall asleep, warm in his arms, not awakening until morning, in her own bed. Sam's stories were mostly of India--rajas atop caparisoned elephants, camel markets in the desert, bazaars in a riot of colors, the chug of a train journey, the fire of curry in his belly. Every now and then, very late at night, when it was quiet and the rains came to scatter mellow gold drops in the light on the cabin's deck, he would be reminded of his first trip into Burma in April 1940 and into the thick of the war, and those were stories of packed, impenetrable jungles, stone pagodas, the slick of sweat, the crackle of gunfire, the pain of death.

By the time she reaches the cabin, the rain has begun again; the skies have turned a mottled gray, a muted thunder rumbles over the Cascade Mountains, over the bejeweled city of Seattle, and disperses into this sheltered cove in the Puget Sound. Olivia lights the fire in the stove, removes her coat, and rubs her cold hands together. Then she drags the enormous mahogany leather trunk from the front door to the rug in front of the stove. The knuckled brass fittings on the trunk gleam gently in the light from the fire as Olivia lifts the lid. The trunk arrived five days ago from India--a twenty-first birthday gift for her, from whom, she is yet to discover. On the same day this trunk came, her father died, so she now has to discover its secrets for herself.

She tugs at the silks at the very top and the fragrance of jasmine an
d s
moke eddies around, let loose from its imprisonment within the trunk. The materials melt under her hand, the colors as vivid today as they must have been when they were woven--the pale lilac of early lavender; the pink of roses heavy with fragrance; the yellow of near-ripe mangoes. Olivia hugs the cool silks to her chest, wondering how anyone could drape these long lengths of cloth around themselves and still manage to look elegant. As her mother must have once. The only aromas from the fabrics are of mothballs and sandalwood--there is no hint of the real, living woman who once wore these saris, whom her father loved so much, whom Sam continued to love, but whom he could never talk about. Not even to their child, not even to Olivia.

She reaches in. An enamel-etched casket holds tiny silver anklets, blackened with age, their bells tinkling like faintly heard wind chimes. A black cord is coiled inside a palm-size wooden box inlaid with old ivory. It is too thick to be broken by hand, and is hung with little gold charms--a few golden beads, a coin with a dog carved on it, and a minute gold cylinder, scarcely larger than Olivia's fingernail. She strings the cord with its frayed edges around her throat and it barely fits. So it is not a necklace. Then what?

There are photographs in a transparent envelope. Letters. A wooden doll. Three carved wooden monkeys that fit in the palm of her hand. Olivia takes out one of the photographs and gazes at the woman in it. She has a thick swath of hair, sharp collarbones, a gentle face, a sweet smile. Who is she? Is she.... She looks again at the photograph, yearning to see something in the woman's face that she, Olivia, also carries in her own face. But there is little resemblance for the woman's face is thin and long, and Olivia's is broad, rounded. They both have long hair, black as thunderclouds, though that is too little of a coincidence to claim as ancestry. The woman's skin is smooth, as though things have not yet happened to her in her life. She half-smiles and yet a little edge of discontent seems to lift the edge of her mouth. There are no colors but black and shades of gray, so no way to tell the color of her blouse, or the sari pallu that drapes over the woman's left shoulder. Her neck is bare; tiny gold studs glow in her ears, and there is a flash of what looks like a diamond in her nose. Olivia turns the photo over but there is nothing behind it, no name, just
a d
ate and a place. RUDRAKOT, MAY 1942

Where is this Rudrakot? Will the letters tell her? A thick, unopene
d e
nvelope lies against the side of the trunk. Framed against the light from the stove is a sheaf of papers inside, and the darkening brown blotches of glue along the flap.

On the envelope is one word. Nazeera. Something about the name is familiar; the sound of it is familiar. Olivia has heard it somewhere, at some time, but this memory lies stubbornly buried inside her. She carefully peels back the flap of the envelope and takes out the letter. Her heart crashes and thuds. It is addressed to her, as Olivia. Here is some person calling her Olivia. Who then is this Nazeera? The memory surfaces suddenly in a blast of three names--Olivia, Nazeera, Padmini. They are her names, ones she was born with, ones she has never used, for herself or with others. And here, in the writing in this long and looped hand, must be the stories that fill all the silences in her life, the stories Sam never told her, the ones he saved for a later that never came. Here they are then.

Outside the cabin, the storm dies as suddenly as it was born, extinguished into the womb of the Cascades, but night has crept up on the heels of the storm. The fire in the stove spits out a bit of ash that ebbs into oblivion on the stone hearth. Olivia leans against the trunk, its treasures scattered around her, holds the papers up to the light, and reads.

My dearest Olivia
,
I wonder, even as I set ink on paper, if you will ever read this letter. If you are reading it now, I 'yonder who you look like, what you know already of us all, if you know anything at all. What has Sam told you about us?

So many questions. But all I hold in my memory is a baby of smiles, a dimple on her chin, lashes so long all the women around envied their length and called them cow lashes. It sounds odd, but this was a compliment then. Have you seen a cow's lashes? They are enormous, like the tassels on a woman's sari. I am sorry, I ramble on when I want to be to the point and succinct but I also want to tell you a story.

All stories start with a little telling. Interest evoked, question
s a
sked, the first nugget unearthed and brought forward, shining bright on the palm of the narrator. Here, this is for you. From me.

I am an unlikely narrator of this story; you will see that when yo
u k
now it all. I am the last person who would want to write to you, bu
t b
y the end, you will also see why I want to be that person. I put down events as I know them. Some things I know of from having been there, but most came to me from other voices. Where I have detected malice, I have cut out its evil heart. I want to tell you, truthfully, or a
s t
ruthfully as I can, what happened in Rudrakot in 1942. I do not believe that anyone else will speak of this silence that hangs over us. They have not, perhaps, the courage.

Forme, there are some stories that defy all silences. This is one of them.

Sorg, but I will settle down now to the actual telling. You must forgive my ramblings, my self-absorptions. I have been brought up to consider myself important, so reveling in the sound of my own voice is a an occupational hazard, even a genetic predisposition, if you will. Never mind, a fresh pen and here goes.

All stories have their beginnings, not always evident as such when they happen. I have looked back over the years and thought, Was it then or then when? Even as I search for this beginning, I must tell you that this story spans a mere four days in May 1942. But you must not think of these as a mere four days, for you know, don't you, my child, that those four days were just a culmination, a climax toward a meeting that spiraled our lives out from that moment in time. Oh, we had histories before that May; we have had histories after that May. But you exist, as a reminder to us all of those four days in Rudrakot. I write to you. Our histories are linked, will always be. You exist, my dear, because of that May in Rudrakot.

Your father, Sam, came into our lives and threw to into turbulence. He came wounded, a bird with a broken wing, from Burma. Has he talked to you of his first foray into the war, as the British and Indian forces retreated when the Japanese invaded Burma? He did not tell us, or perhaps he told us--some of us--and we did not stop to think of why he had been there, and so who he was, or might have been. For, you see, everyone was fleeing Burma, but Sam had gone into that country and come back out alive. That in itself should have been a warning to us that Sam Hawthorne (how easily I use this name) was no ordinary man. Perhaps you, my dear, can excuse the events of those four days upon your father's injuries in Burma; perhaps that was why he was ready to fall in love with your mother. But I cannot. I

choose not to. Sam was never really honest with us; he could not be, of but still.

I still say us, and him. Yet he is part of us now. As are you.

You see how much I have vested in this story. Oh, it is barely told yet, so you will see how much I have vested in this story. Then perhaps, you will excuse me too. For I was not entirely honest either. So where do I commence?

Here then. For our story began, of course, when Sam came to Rudrakot.

May 28, 1942

the Kingdom of Rudrakot

Chapter
One.

Every station had separate dining-rooms for Hindus, Muslims, and for Europeans Many towns had separate stations, one for the Indian town, and one for the European cantonment Indians who did attempt to travel first class often found themselves in the humiliating position of being thrown out of the compartment, either by brute force or by the stationmaster.

--E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 2001

IX cold moon washed the skies as the single, black caterpillar line of .71 the night train to Rudrakot cleaved through the Sukh desert. The train's headlamp, fiercely ablaze like Shiva's third eye, illuminated the way across the glistening steel tracks--a triangle of golden light amidst this background of silver and shadows.