The Splendor Of Silence (41 page)

The women who serviced the white soldiers, officers, and NCOs of the Rudrakot Rifles practiced their singing and dancing in the afternoons. At night, they performed, and later still, well after midnight, they took the men into private rooms, which led off the corridor, where the only furnishing was a curtain on the window and a bed against a wall. Nothing more was necessary or needed, for these women had no conversation and only one skill. The doors to these rooms, now unused, were also open since they were empty, and Mila could not help looking into them as she passed, filled with a sadness and an aversion at the same time. In some of the rooms, she heard the clearing of a throat before the girl or the woman rehearsed her night's recital, or the tuning of the sitar, or the gentle thump-thump of the tabla player's fingers upon the smooth skin of his drums. When she entered her room, she saw that her students, three girls ranging in age from fifteen to eighteen, were already there, heads bent over their slates, laboring over their Hindi alphabet.

"Namaste, Didi," one of the girls said, folding her hands in front of her in salutation.

They called Mila thus, didi, or elder sister, and it was in its own way a mark of respect. They had called Father Manning Bapu, the same appellation that was now being used for Mahatma Gandhi, but for these girls the priest was in the place of a father. In the very beginning, Mila herself had been incredibly shy with them and then had realized that under their loud and coarse voices were hearts that were wounded and shattered. That they had lost the ability to trust and had no capacity for believing. The girls had been suspicious of Mila at first, and had stared at her, eyes open very wide, mouths sometimes agape to deliberately show how ignorant they were, seated on their haunches, with their saris wrapped around their knees as though they were sitting over a latrine. Their writing had been indifferent, their attention span minimal. And then, something had falle
n i
nto place with all of them. Mila learned to keep the horror out of her face and her expression, and the girls learned that she did not consider them entirely with disgust, as most of the other memsahibs did. Mila had returned home and cried until she thought her heart would break that first afternoon, and then remembered how young most of them were, how afraid, how maladroit behind all the bluster. And so she had returned. If Raman had known of these visits, he would have put a stop to them. If Pallavi had known, she would have taken a whip and flayed the skin on Mila's back and then locked her in a room. If Ashok had known, he would have been thrilled and would have wanted to accompany Mila, just to see for himself. Kiran would have been ashamed to have his sister anywhere near the Lal Bazaar, for he had been here before, often enough, once even with Sims and Blakely. Jai would also have locked Mila away, covered up any impropriety, and asked her to contribute her charity in other, much cleaner avenues. Knit a scarf, he would have said, or crochet a table napkin. Organize a mela. So Mila told no one and did what she wanted to do. She assumed--and because she was young she could assume so and consider that it would be true--that not one person of her acquaintance would ever find out.

But even as she bent over the black slate of one of the girls, wiping it first with a dampened piece of cloth, a man walked by the open door to the room, looked in as he passed, and then came back to stand in the doorway. His footsteps were almost silent, because he too had to take off his boots inside the front doorway to the house--it was a rule the madam, Leelabai, was very strict about. He stood in the rectangle of the doorway for a while, his face filled first with surprise and then chased by cunning and malice. He rubbed at a chin that did not exist, for he had only a weak bone under his thin mouth. He moved away for a bit and then came back with a friend. The friend, also an officer in the Rudrakot Rifles, pursed his mouth in a whistle, but a warning hand on his arm stayed that sound.

And so Mila never looked up from her work or heard the men, for the girls had begun chattering, telling her stories of their childhoods, of how many goats one of their fathers had, how the village idiot had made eyes at one. Her sari pallu fell off her shoulder once, revealing the satin skin of her neck and the shadowed cleavage of her breasts in her blouse. She draped it up again, almost absently, but not before Sims and Blakely had gaped in surprise and then, smiling, retreated down the corridor again.

Chapter
Twenty-Three.

The bee, the lotus, the cloud, the conch-shell, the fish, the deer, the bow, the leaf of the banyan tree, the stem of the plantain tree, the yet unopened flower, silver moonlight and golden goblets--all these must dwell M harmony on my beloved.

--K
. P. S
. Menon, Many Worlds: An Autobiography, 1898

*

M
ila returned exhausted from the Lal Bazaar and sat in an armchair in her room, watching the ceiling fan revolve overhead. She ha
d s
hed her sari when she'd come back and had piled it on the floor. Her blouse, its armpits dampened with sweat, she had peeled off and thrown on the floor also. So she lounged now much as Kiran had in front of their father, her legs over one arm of the chair, her back resting against the other, her head flung back. She put a hand out into the air, and then slowly tucked one finger and then another into her palm, counting aloud all the while, "One two three " How easy that was to her, and to numerous other people in the world. When had she learned to count? When she was a year old? Two? What did it really feel like to look upon the writing on rupee notes and see nothing but indecipherable gibberish?

She let her hand fall back beyond the chair and drag on the floor, not left with any energy to even hold it up again. The girls she had taught had names, Chameli, Radha, Richa, and some others, names that they told her with a great deal of pride, but none of those names was actually bestowed upon them at birth. They were the property of the madam
,
Leelabai, who sent the officers of the Rifles regiment the Chameli they had so enjoyed the last time, and substituted one girl for another with a great deal of ease. The rooms were darkened, and Leelabai assumed that the white men could not tell the difference, and in any case, it was not their faces they cared about. Mila thought that the girls did look the same. They had the same long hair, just beyond their shoulder blades, the same artificial arch in each of their eyebrows, the same mole dotted on the right of their mouths (to ward off the evil eye), the same heavily powdered faces, thickly rimmed eyes, lush painted lips. And the same frightening mixture of innocence and artifice. The girls had been brought to the brothels and kept there with threats and whippings; this was to be their life, for now no reasonable man would marry them or provide them with another home.

Still saddened, Mila went to bathe and dress for the dinner with Jai. The water was tepid at best, almost on a par with the temperature of the room, but the soap bar dissolved into a mint green foam, the shampoo lathered her hair richly, the towels were thick and clean. When she came back into her room, still dripping from the bath, she saw that Pallavi had left a tray upon the table by her bedside with a teapot in a tea cosy and a plate of nankatais, sugar biscuits baked an hour ago in the outdoor oven. Mila ate and drank slowly, watching the movements of her mouth in the dressing-table mirror. By the time she had finished, she had driven all thoughts of the afternoon's happenings from her mind and rose to dress with the simple anticipation of what the night was to bring.

Pallavi had laid out a white silk chiffon sari upon the bed. The sari was almost plain in its simplicity, no borders, no patterns, just the vibrant sheen of the weave, but hand-embedded in that weave were thousands of tiny, glowing, white crystals set less than an inch apart over its entire six-yard length. Her tight blouse was plain white cotton, closed with three strings at her back, revealing the rest of the skin there. Her sleeves though came all the way to her wrists and her waist was bare under the shimmer of the sari's pallu. Mila left her neck undressed and looped large silver hoops inlaid with diamonds all along their rims into her ears. She wore three diamond bangles on each arm and slipped her feet into a pair of high-heeled chappals studded with crystals on the heels so that as she walked and as the edges of her sari lifted, the light emanating from her person continued in a glitter to the ground.

It was still too hot to make up her face too much, so Mila merely dusted on some powder, lined her eyes with kohl, and painted her lips pink with one of the lipsticks Kiran had bought her in England. She pondered a long time on how to dress her hair, whether to gather it into a bun, or pin the sides and let the rest loose, or plait just a few strands and tie up the rest and finally, as she was running her comb through her hair, she decided to leave it the way it was.

Her hair lay thick and lush across her shoulders, over her breasts. It had no curl in it at all, and fell in a shining long sweep to her waist. Even caught up behind her head, it was more than a mere handful. At every small movement, even the merest breath, the light from the sconces on the wall frittered over the crystals in her sari so that she seemed to be on fire.

She wondered if the sun had completed its journey of the day already, for Jai had said that he would send the limousine at ten minutes to sunset, and Jai's chauffeurs were very rigid with times. She wondered if she should go to Ashok's room and make sure that he was ready. And then she heard the soft click of a cigarette lighter in the verandah beyond her room and the flare of the flame and Mila moved toward that sound to find Sam. She told herself, even as she walked, that she was only going to look out into the sky to see if it was time for the car, but that thought and all others disappeared as she stepped through the doorway.

Sam had his back to her and when he turned to face her, it was with an expression so filled with despair that she almost went over to put her arms around him. He had just begun to dress and had donned only his white pants and his white silk shirt. His feet were bare, his collar unbuttoned, his hair still sodden from his bath, even his cigarette was damp as he held it between wet fingers.

"The darti has done a good job," Mila said.

Sam ran his hand over the front of his shirt and around the waistband of his pants. It had been only seven hours since he had met Jai and been invited to the White Durbar later that evening, and already, since he did not have the appropriate clothing for the occasion, a tailor had been hired from the bazaar to sit in the downstairs back verandah and sew him a new set of clothes. The shirt and pants had then been washed, flung on the clothesline in the backyard for an hour to dry, ironed into a pristine crispness by Sayyid, and laid out in readiness upon his bed before he had stepped into the bathroom.

"I'm still amazed by the speed with which I have these," he replied. "But why the insistence on white?"

"Tonight is the night of the full moon, Sam, and Jai holds a White Durbar " She paused. "It is a meeting of his court in the moonlight. There are no colors but white, to mimic the essence of the moon. The durbar itself is a practice of old, when the feudal lords in the kingdom would come on the night of purnima to pay their respects to the Rudrakot king. The rituals are in some ways similar. In the olden days, the thakurs, the lords, would lay down their arms in front of the king and bow to him; now it is merely a bow and a knock upon the floor with a sword. You will enjoy it immensely, I'm sure." She finished in a rush, with a pounding heart, knowing that she had been talking too much and to no purpose.

He beckoned to her with a hand, and she obeyed, if only to get closer to him. When she was near enough to feel his breath, he said, "I thought Jai was married. I saw his children at the mela."

"Yes," Mila replied. "He has three actually, a little girl also, but she's in purdah in the tenana. She is kept behind a veil, in ... in the women's quarters of Jai's palace, because his first wife"--and here she hesitated again, stumbling--This first wife was brought up in purdah herself and so thinks it right for her daughter to be so to."

"I will not ask if Jai can marry again and if it is not against the law," Sam said wryly.

But he had asked, so Mila said, "The law, such as it is, is fluid and flexible around the princes and their kingdoms. I will have all and as many legal rights as the First Her Highness after I marry Jai." She reached out to Sam's cigarette, and he gave it to her as though she was a child, putting it carefully between the index and middle fingers of her right hand. Then he guided it to her mouth, his palm cupping her chin as she dragged on the cigarette. His touch was gentle and just hovered near her skin, but Mila could not breathe. She saw now that Sam was not angry with her. The kisses at Chetak's tomb had been something they had both wanted. Mila did not reach up to clasp Sam's hand, but she did not object when he continued to hold hers.

"What will you be?" he asked.

"Second Her Highness."

"And will you be in purdah?"

She shook her head. "I don't keep purdah."

And then he asked her the question she knew he had wanted to ask all this while. "And why are you going to marry him?"

But he had still sidestepped the real question, Mila thought. The smoke from the cigarette in her fingers curled gently between them. Sam took the stub from her hand and threw it over the ledge of the balcony. He wound one strand of her hair around his finger and tugged at it and then raised it to his nose and inhaled. Mila felt herself melting into Sam and swayed toward him, her gaze riveted upon the lines of his mouth.