The Splendor Of Silence (12 page)

The only mirror in his room was above the chest of drawers and Sam had to climb up on the bed to look at his efforts. The dhoti fit snugly around his waist and over his body. Mr. Gandhi's loincloth, Sam thought, this is what it was, a piece of cloth woven around the body, easily washed, with no seams that would come unraveled, no stitches to pick up or to lose. He donned his kuna, rolled up the sleeves above his elbow, and then tackled the blue-and-white turban cloth. Sam had watched peasants tie on turbans with a great deal of ease, with concentration and no mirror, at most a river's reflection to look into. So he did the same, and as he worked, slowly and laboriously, he let his mind go blank and turned from Sam Hawthorne, U
. S
. Army, into a simple Indian peasant.

The cloth he wrapped around his fingers until it was twisted, and one end he set at the middle of his forehead. Still holding the end in place on his forehead with his left hand, Sam used his right hand to twirl the cloth and wind it around his head in larger and larger circles. The last bit he tucked into the side, above his right ear. The turban, so wrapped, left a circle of emptiness on the top of his head, where his hair shone black and shining. Sam smoothed down the shine with some talcum powder, and then spread some powder over his eyebrows and the stubble on his face. He did not need to worry about the color of his face or his hands; he had a farmer's tan from Burma, but his legs and his feet were still sickly pale from having been encased in pants and damp and mildewed socks. He reached into his holdall again and brought out a compact of dull brown powder that had come from the United States--there was no brown makeup powder to be found in India, only white. He broke the compact powder into little pieces, and went to the bathroom to make a sludgy mess in his hand with some water. This he rubbed over his legs and his feet. The water would soon dry and the powder would fall off, but by then Sam hoped the dust outside would muddy his legs.

There were a pair of worn leather chappals also in his holdall; Sam took these out and slipped them on his feet, and then slipped them off again. If he truly was to be unnoticeable, he had to be barefoot, as Indian peasants and gardeners and coolies often were. Why, even Sayyid, butler in the house of the political agent, for all of his uniform finery of a white jacket studded with brass buttons, red cummerbund, and red turban, had had no slippers on his feet when he led Sam to this room.

Sam opened the door to the balcony and paused at the threshold, listening. But it was an afternoon quiet that hung over Raman's house. The gardens below and behind the house were deserted, the servants in a deep slumber, the sun beat down upon them all, victorious at having driven all living beings, human and animal, indoors.

He went along the length of the balcony softly, down the spiral concrete stairs to the gardens, and walked along its length to the back where there was a little iron gate set in the concrete wall. Sam opened this gate and held his breath, but the hinges did not creak. Before he closed it behind him, he took a rusty spade from where it leaned against the wall, set it upon his shoulders, and started along the back of Raman's house toward the cantonment area and the grounds of the Rudrakot Rifles. To the beginning. Where his brother was first lost.

As Sam wended his way through the scrub and bush behind the houses and then, with an eye on the sun, bore northwest behind the Civil Lines, the day wore on in the field punishment center, still and onerous, bearing the weight of a summer holding its breath in anticipation of the rains. Heat mirages shimmied across the desert, drawing distorted images along the horizon--the blue of water, the green of palms, the slow sway of a camel caravan--none of which existed, of course, in the arid emptiness of this dismal earth.

The sun burned, unforgiving and harsh, over a squat building of red sandstone. It was built in a square, with a courtyard in the center, and cells fronting this yard without the cover of verandahs. The cells were tiny, six feet by six feet, the floors bare and filthy, a hole in ground at the far end for a latrine, their every corner visible, like pens for caged animals on display. There was a well in the courtyard surrounded by a low brick wall, covere
d w
ith wooden shutters. A silent, struggling row of men knelt in the hot sun, their heads bare and drenched in sweat.

"Again," the guard said, and he flipped the box of matches into the air.

One man watched the matches twirl and fall into the dust, and cringed as the sun hit his eyes and scorched his face. He bent from his knees, and scrambled slowly in the red mud with his fingers, blowing on each match as he picked it up, and then rubbing it against his dirty shirt before he slid it carefully into the box. He counted in his mind ... one ... two ... three ... four ... as the matches stacked up inside the little box. His fingers were raw with blood from a lashing across his knuckles the last time he had lost a match. The box held forty-five matches. Forty-five. Michael Ridley had lost count again. His brain was too tired for even this simple math, starved of food, famished for rest. He had even lost count of how many days he had been here. Months? Maybe a year? He had no idea where he was. In the two months Mike had spent at the Rifles barracks, he had seen no building like this prison, or nothing that looked like this on the inside. What it was camouflaged to be on the outside, Mike had no idea.

He had woken one night to a fist jammed into his mouth, and before he could struggle, his hands and feet were tied, his mouth gagged, a blanket draped over his head. A horse had borne him here; he had been flung over the saddle, his face smothered in the thick of the blanket, thudding against the horse's belly. His own stomach and ribs had been banged raw by the riding, and when his feet and hands had been untied, blood had strung its way painfully into his veins again. In the beginning, so long ago, Mike had demanded a trial, asked for one, begged and pleaded, ducking his head from the careless, swinging wallops from the guards' lathis. The guards had taken away his food, taken away his water, taken away everything but his will to live. Once also, the iron gates in the middle of one of the walls had swung open during the day to let in the water lorry (it mostly opened at night) and they had all leaned their heads hard against the bars, twisted their necks, thrown their visions to the outside, to that world beyond. But a burl of cinnamon mud in the maw of the sky was all they had seen. Brown and blue. A tree in the Very far distance like an opalescent pale mushroom. The heat haze lifted then and something else, a building, a monument, came into almost sharp focus for Mike. But it then disappeared so quietly in front of him that he could no longer capture its image in his exhausted mind. What had it been? A temple? Surely he had seen it before?

Forty-four. Only forty-four matches, Mike thought. He dug through the dirt again, praying, oh God, let me find the last one, oh God, please God. The dust rose to choke him, fill his nostrils, burn his eyes, but he kept looking.

"Time's up, chaps, hold up your boxes."

The guard went past the line of prisoners, counting the matches in each box, until he came to Mike. "Didn't find them all, did yer?"

Every interminable day had been like this one, with games and tasks that had once seemed stupid, when his brain could still reason so, but no longer. There was always the hope that if he counted all of his matches right, they would let him go beyond the iron gates of the entrance, that that would be the reward. His brain had tricked him into thinking so, had made an enemy of logic. Mike bowed his head, waiting for a blow something some punishment. His knees burned in the hot dirt. Anger came roiling over him all of a sudden. Where was Sam? Why had his mother not tried to find him? He hadn't written to them in months, and letters went astray because of the war, but did they not wonder, or care? Where was Sam? At some European war front--a beribboned and decorated officer?

He hunched into his chest, sobbing softly, his mouth parched and open to the salt of his tears. The pot went spinning into the well, thwacked into the water, gurgled with fullness, and came swinging up the pulley. He closed his eyes as the guard flung water at the men who had found all of their matches, and heard their thirsty slurping as the drops came their way. A drop splattered near his knee and kicked up dust. With the sun beating down upon him, Michael Ridley felt a blessed coolness. He still cried, still tasted his tears, absorbed that moisture back into his body and listened for the next soft drop of water in the dirt.

Chapter
Six.

BRITAIN THE CRADLE OF DEMOCRACY. Although you'll read in the papers about "lords" and "sirs," England is still one of the great democracies and the cradle of many American liberties the British enjoy a practical, working twentieth century democracy which it
flexible and sensitive to the will of the people

--War Department, Instructions for American

Servicemen in Britain, 1940

*

And by now, my dear Olivia, you have met a few of the main players in this stage I have created for you. But as you will see, the setting also matters. Mila lives in one part of Rudrakot--the elite part. Toward the reaches of the desert, away _from the civil and cantonment lints of the city is--in the parlance of the British Raj--the black town. In other words, only the natives inhabited this part of the land, linked to the cantonment by a bazaar street. Mila and her family were also "native," of course, but they were one of the few, privileged families to find their residences situated within the Civil Lines of Rudrakot. Times were, my dearest Olivia, when even this little invasion would not have been possible. But it was 1942, and there were now more Indians in the civil service, more Indians with wealth and power, more Indians demanding _freedom from British rule. The encroachment into the once-inviolable Civil Lines was inevitable. For all her entitlements
,
Mila never forgot that she was Indian--different in skin, understanding, and disposition from most other people in her neighborhood or at the Victoria Club.

say this because here is your father, Sam, tumbling headlong and rashly in love with your mother. And here is Mila, her equanimity already shaken by him (though she does not know it yet). For the first time in her life, a man who is not Indian has stirred an interest within her. For the first time also, she is considering Sam in the light of a lover, of a love that would last her for the rest of her life.

lull, heavy and silent in the heat, extended over the bazaar. The shop ./t. fronts were shuttered with gunnysack matting, cows dozed in the shade of awnings, and stench flew upward from the gutters filled with viscous, black, and now drying water. Nothing moved in the afternoon heat--in the houses atop the shops, windows were closed, and women slept on the bare cement floors, heads laid on arms and hands, glued to their skins with drops of sweat. The bazaar was called such, "lal," or red, after the color of the uniforms worn by the officers of the Rudrakot Rifles, who were half of the patrons of the Lal Bazaar. It sold an item of necessity to men in army regiments, to men all over the world--sex. The houses fronted the little, crooked street, painted in brilliant pinks and blues, much like the saris the women draped so casually as to reveal everything, their faces painted in livid lines in the same colors in the evenings, blue around their eyes, reds outlining their mouths.

At one end of the bazaar was a house set away from the street. It had a small compound in front sheltered by a gracefully growing banyan tree. And under the shade of that banyan, fifteen pairs of arms and legs moved in unison. The boys and girls, most in their teens, were all clad in white kurtas and churidars, indigo sashes around their waists. Their teacher, a youth of seventeen, still smooth faced, shouted out orders in a singsong voice, "One-two-three-four. One-two." And his fifteen pupils obligingly followed in jumping jacks, twists and turns, bending from the waist to meet their left foot with their right hand and their right foot with their left, the girls' long plaits swinging down over their backs to the dust and up again.

Inside the two-story house, Vimal Kumar stood near the window, looking down upon the exercising, sweating group. He was a slim, intens
e m
an, not much older than the group outside, but he had been elected their leader almost from the beginning. He wore the same white kurta and churidar, but he was cool inside the room even though there was hardly any breeze from the ancient, creaking, ceiling fan.

Vimal turned back to the room, his delicate hands clasped behind his back. There was a wooden table in the center, with four chairs, three of which were occupied by two men and a woman. His eyes burned into them, bright with fervor, his back straightened, and he whipped his head so that his hair slung over his forehead. The other three stared, their breaths shallow. They all shared the intensity of Vimal's expression, their faces blank canvases of focus and nothing else, their gazes fixed hungrily upon him. They waited for him to speak.

"Will they be able to keep this up much longer?" he asked, with a nod over his shoulder. "It is hot. Blastedly hot."

The girl spoke softly. "They will have to, comrade. We can meet for the next hour, no more, and they will exercise until we are done."

A little smile touched Vimal's perfectly formed lips. "Mahatma Gandhi asked us to give our lives for our country; I don't believe this was what he meant."

One of the men shifted in his seat and said, "The police will not come into the house as long as they see the exercisers outside, comrade."

Vimal Kumar sat down in the fourth chair and laid his hands on the smooth and bare wood of the table. He wore a gold ring on one finger, his left index, engraved with an etching of the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and a gold chain with a coin around his neck. Vimal had been adorned with many more ornaments upon his birth, since his father was one of Rudrakot's leading dry-goods merchants, for the black town, of course--a British merchant ran the store in the cantonment area. But over the months of being the unheralded head of the underground nationalist movement in Rudrakot, he had slowly divested himself of each piece of jewelry. He had worn earrings at one time, and those had gone into the fund plate to buy this house and compound in the Lal Bazaar. The silver watch with diamond studs had gone into another collection plate, at a meeting one night when he had stripped it off his wrist and flung it onto the plate with a, "Money means nothing to me, comrades, freedom is worth all I have now, and all I can give in the future!" That speech was so impassioned, so moving, that merely looking upon the handsome Vimal on th
e p
latform, sweat soaking into his kurta until it stuck to the lines of his chest, his hair plastered to his well-formed skull, his mouth spewing words that brought chills up the listeners' spines, money and jewelry piled onto the plate. That night they collected forty watches, a thousand rupees, fifteen gold chains, fifty bangles, nose studs, earrings, anklets--all for the cause. That night they also collected the hearts of most of Rudrakot's young. Vimal had nicked his finger while slicing a green mango the day before. The wound on the pad of his left index finger was quite deep, but no longer bleeding, with only a lurid red gash to show where the knife had slashed through the whorls and circles of his fingertip. He looked down at his finger ruefully, and the three around the table reacted together in reaching out toward him. The girl wanted to lift his finger to her mouth and kiss away the hurt. The two men wanted to slice his mangoes for him from now on and bear the burden of any future cuts. Vimal noticed their movements and smiled into himself. He had always had this power over people. All leaders, he thought, had a personal charisma, an almost sexual energy that consumed their followers. In Mahatma Gandhi's case, this last was not quite true, but he still possessed a strange and awe-inspiring power in his quiet voice, his studied sentences, his use of just-adequate language. The one aspect of the Mahatma's teachings that Vimal had never been able to fully understand or accept was the concept of nonviolent resistance. It seemed too futile for him, too much like waiting too long and not wanting enough for the cause.