The Splendor Of Silence (22 page)

"Yes, of course, forgive me, Sahib." The old man sighed and scoured his head with a gnarled hand. His hair was all white, barely dotting his dark skull.

In the early days, when Raman was a new ICS officer, he had spent most of his time in camp, living out of a tent, traveling over his district on a horse, with only three servants and Sayyid by his side. This was an unstated ritual of investiture into the civil service. And so Raman had come to know the land and the people intimately, listened to all of their problems, big and small, learned where the pulse of the district lay. Since coming to Rudrakot, his geographical boundaries had shrunk to his house, his office, Jai's palace, of course, and the Victoria Club. Raman was at Rudrakot to look after Jai--there was nothing tacit in this understanding; so he had been told when he was posted to Rudrakot at Raja Bhimsen's insistence. In all else, the agriculture, the taxes, the issues of land rights, the quarrels over livestock, the lack of water, or, rarely, the surfeit of it, Colonel Pankhurst, the British resident, had command.

Much as Raman loved Jai--as a son, as his prince--he missed his early nomadic days in the ICS. It had been a harsh life at times, with rocks for chairs, and sheets on the hard ground for a bed, no conversation around the campfire, the hunger for the scent of a woman, the sudden noises of the jungle night, predators in human and animal form. But it had been the ICS that he had dreamed of when he was a child. Present wher
e t
he villagers were, at their homes, there to settle squabbles minor and petty, to scold, to mollify, to pet, to rule. He was, to the villagers, their Ma and their Baap. / am your mother and I am your father.

Now he warmed a chair behind a desk, he saw only pane-size chunks of land outside; his world had shrunk to the confines of his office and to much conversation about what went on beyond.

Nodi was a day's ride from his house. Both Jai and Colonel Pankhurst were away right now, Jai at the Imperial Cadet Corps on a teaching assignment, Colonel Pankhurst at Delhi on the invitation of the viceroy. He should not go, Raman thought, he could not go .

"I will come tomorrow," he said to the old man.

The man smiled, his lower jaw deepening toward his toothless mouth. His blurry, cataract-smeared eyes filled. "Thank you, Agent Sahib."

"Stay here tonight," Raman said. "Sayyid will find you a place to sleep. We can ride together in the morning."

"I do not ride, Agent Sahib. I have never ridden a horse; a water buffalo, once, when I was young, but never a horse."

But of course he would not ride a horse, Raman thought. He could not ride a horse, only lead it and walk next to it. Horses were for the privileged few in India, the sahibs and their wives, the princes and their consorts, the landowners--all floating above the old villager in a social class rife with the rarified air of advantage. Raman looked at the old man's feet, bare and cracked at the heels, fissures of dirt crawling upward, his soles hardened into a hooflike quality. He had never worn either shoes or chappals before and wouldn't know what to do with them if he was given a pair. His feet, spread out and flat from the weight of his thin body, would not fit into them. Seeing the old man's feet, Raman's foot ached and he slid his left foot out of its sandal, and ran his toe around the rim of his right heel, smooth and pale from Sayyid's nightly massages with sesame oil. There was an immense gulf between the two men in that room, measured in terms of their right to ride a horse, to clad their feet in the skin of animals, to sit on furniture. Such were the rules of their world. Raman was a sahib, here to serve the old man as a civilian--a member of the Indian Civil Service--but the old man was a commoner, served and scolded, and in turn, kept in his place.

"We'll find a way to get there then." Raman hoisted himself off the chair and went to the door. Sayyid was standing just beyond. He listened to his master's instructions and beckoned to the old man.

"Ask Kiran to come," Raman said.

For Kiran's talk, Raman dragged his chair behind the desk and sat down. Earlier in the afternoon, he had heard Mila zip out of the drive in the jeep with Sam and Ashok. Raman arranged his pens on the blotter in a straight line and wished his daughter would not drive as though an army of asuras was chasing her. Pallavi disliked Mila driving the jeep, driving at all or being out on her own, without an escort. She should be married, Pallavi said to him often, too often sometimes, until he would snap back at her that she was going to be married, so what was the hurry anyway? In another, more ideal world, Raman would have wanted to invite Sam into his life, perhaps even as a husband for Mila. But he was not Indian, though Raman felt that in another life Sam must have been Indian, else why this affinity between them? Why was Sam so knowledgeable about his community, about the names people carried upon themselves? His daughter would like him very much, as much as he himself liked him. Raman saw Sam's charm, he even saw his physical attraction in his long and lean body and his gentle hands--Mila would like him. There was a centuries-old wisdom in arranging marriages in India, something the Western world often overlooked, thinking all such marriages to be based on economics and pride. But no father or mother would willingly give their child to a man or a woman who did not fulfill all needs--economic, physical, emotional. Since such depth of knowledge into a person's character came only after a lifetime of learning, and since marriage negotiations did not allow for this amount of time, the parents learned to judge character upon first or second meetings. Raman had not considered any of this when he'd had met Sam earlier that morning, but as the afternoon had passed, as he heard Mila drive away to the club, he had been left with a feeling of comfort and affection for this man who had strayed into their home, carrying on his demeanor fatigue and an underlying fear--what that was Raman did not know. It was almost as if Sam was searching for something in Rudrakot; he had an air of anticipation, of expectation, of trepidation at the outcome of his search.

For Raman, Sam was an easy read, almost too easy. The excuse of his being here to rest his shoulder was just that--an excuse. Raman swiped his broad hand over the smooth wood of his desk, once, twice, feeling the coolness under his palm. His hand came away smelling faintly of polish. He would have to find out who this Sam Hawthorne really was.

April 1942, a Month Earlier

Somewhere in Burma

The opium hangs around them in the stagnant, moisture-laden air, and they breathe that sweet, almost cloying smell into their lungs
,
over and over again. Sam drifts in an amicable opium smog. Ken's face is indistinct to him, he seems to be asleep, but his eyelids flutter spasmodically. Sam pats his chest, hoping to ease the uneasiness there. Surely he must have imagined that transformation in Ken when he had talked of that girl what was her name? Marianne begins to speak and he turns his attention to her as she tells of her last few days in the Kachin village. It was, in many ways, an idyllic existence. A peaceful one, fueled by the opium that every Kachin smoked--men, women, even the children. Fed by the drug, they ate little, worked hard at tilling, plowing, keeping their poppy fields lush with pink and red flowers. The Kachin were opium farmers; they had not always been so, of course, but in the last century or so, British colonists had encouraged them to convert their rice fields into the more lucrative poppy fields.

It was here Marianne and Joseph Westwood had come to preach their mission of Christianity, to talk of their God, to convert where they could, mostly, to live and work among a people so unlike themselves. To learn from them. Humbly. As few missionaries did. They were not new to Burma; Joseph had taught for one year at the American Baptist mission school at Rangoon University, Judson College. They were new, though, to the Kachin village they came to. Strangely, the Kachin here, along the overgrown dirt track from Burma to Ledo, in India, where white men were most likely to stray, had not seen many white men. But they took to the two new members of their village, and made them theirs, made them wanted.

The Kachin were friendly, smiles painting their faces, tempers evened and stamina nurtured in an opiate smoke. Marianne and Joseph settled into a basha standing cranelike on stilts above the swampy water at the edge of the village. That first day, and for months afterward, the Kachin brought them potable water in bamboo poles of different widths and lengths and stacked these poles against the side of their basha like a pipe organ. They brought them eggs. And hens. Joseph built a church with their help; it had a bamboo cross on a bamboo steeple. It collapsed the next year, the year they ran out of malaria pills, the year the mosquitoes fed on Joseph's blood and killed him.

Marianne could not leave. There was nothing to keep her, with Joseph gone; she could only speak English to the walls of her basha and she knew she would not see a white face for months. But she could not leave. For here, among these half-naked tribesmen of Burma, Marianne Westwood forgot that she was from New Jersey, from a different land, forgot even the more modern, more convenient pleasures (such as they were) of Rangoon, and found her peace.

And then late last year came rumors swirling up from Rangoon and Mandalay that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. There had been a war, somewhere in Europe, this much Marianne had known, but this bombing changed the trajectory of all things peaceful, and this she discerned almost immediately. America would go to war. Join forces with Britain, become her ally. What Hitler had been smart enough not to do--compel America into the war--and therefore had kept Britain without the help of its most powerful friend--the Japanese had unnecessarily precipitated. Too early. What, Marianne had thought, that December morning in her basha, would keep the Japanese from invading Burma? It was their closest link to India. And sure enough, a few months later, she heard that Rangoon was to fall. Then she heard that that was all just a silly rumor; the British troops would hold out. Burma? Fall? Ridiculous. And then Rangoon fell.

Then began the frightening panorama of the flight from Burma on the dirt track that led to Ledo in India, passing by their Kachin village. Huge hordes of refugees at first, civilians, British and Indian, some traveling most incongruously with bedsteads, chairs, footstools, even a baby grand, the keys frittering music at every bump in the road. The refugees stopped at their village; they were fed, they rested, they moved on. Some looted rice from the godowns that the Kachin were hired to build to store Burma'
s p
recious rice supplies farther north, nearer the Indian border. Some raped the Kachin women. Most left their diseases among the Kachin. The dreaded cholera, something the Kachin had never been exposed to before. It devastated their population. Confused and numbed by this, the Kachin withdrew the hands of friendship they had so eagerly extended to the white strangers who looked and spoke like their beloved Marie-anne. As the flood of evacuation continued, RAF planes flew over the village so often that when the first Japanese planes came, the Kachin literally forgot to duck, thinking the new planes to be friends too. The first bomb ate out a chunk of the swampy earth, the second denuded the hillside, and in the next morning's rain, mud sluiced downward to bury the remaining bashas and the poppy fields.

"Why didn't you leave then?" Ken asks, his eyes still closed. So he has been listening, Sam thinks. They are all relaxed now, no longer tired, not afraid, hunger at bay. If the village sends its death reek toward them, they can no longer smell it. They have not forgotten, but they are engrossed in Marianne's story.

"I wanted to leave," she says. "I begged them to leave. I knew the Japanese army would follow the planes. But where would they go? North and west toward India on that dirt track?"

"We are here now." Sam points to the muddy road below, along the slope of the hill, carved and gutted into deep ruts with bullock-cart tracks, imprinted with the footsteps of thousands of men and women. They avoid the track, follow it only within the jungle, staying away from its obvious lack of cover. Burma has fallen, absolutely and completely. Japanese troops are in front of them--hence the devastation in the village they are to go into--and behind them and around them.

The edges of Marianne's mouth lift in a wan smile. "This road leads to India through the Naga hills. My Kachin had not had very ... shall we say bonding experiences with the Nagas?"

Ken chuckles as he cups his hands around the opium pipe's bowl. "The headhunters? Surely, that's a joke? Who hunts heads in 194z?"

"The Nagas are said to still prey on white men, Ken," Marianne says. "And we have to travel through their territory to India." Then she smiles. They both smile. Only Sam is grim, watching them, no longer mesmerized into lethargy by the opium. When he was given his plastic-coated map and his orders in Assam to rescue Marianne, Sam was also told abou
t t
he Naps. Like Ken, he had been disbelieving at first. And then he was told that last October, a Naga tribe had gone on a rampage (perhaps for them, with all this encroaching civility toward fellow humans and just plain civilization, a last rampage) and acquired a bounty of a hundred and fifty heads. Whose heads? Sam had asked his CO. Just anyone around. They were not very particular. He lets Ken and Marianne grin at each other somewhat asininely and then says softly, "We must go now." "N
OOOO
," Marianne begins to sob. "No ... ,"

Sam digs his fists into his eyes, fits his head into the curve of his arm, and wishes he could rest, just for a little while. He knows how obstinate Marianne is; it is because she is pigheaded that she did not leave Burma when she was ordered to evacuate. And it is because she did not leave that he is here to take her out. Oh, for some relief, Sam thin., from this constant argument. If only they would listen to him, follow his orders, be reasonable, so he can do his duty. If only he can shake off the sight of Ken swamped with the hurt and pain this girl Rosalie has caused him. Sam shrugs to loosen his skin. Marianne is still crying, her voice growing louder and louder in the silence of the forest. The monkeys have stopped their interminable shrieking at last. Sam ignores Marione's tantrum, like an ostrich, his hod though, buried in the crook of his arm. The letters from Maude and Mike lie heavy against his chest. Sam wishes he could cry too.