The Tiger Claw (21 page)

And lastly, news of the colonies. “British field marshal Archibald Wavell became governor general of India today …”

Lord Wavell on his way to New Delhi would find three hundred million Indians who had been agitating for their independence from British occupation for nigh on fifty years, exactly as the French
were resisting the Germans, but without arms drops, with no weapons but determination and their meagre flesh against British truncheons, machine guns and armoured cars. Had she been in India, carrying out the same actions as she was in France, Lord Wavell would label her a terrorist, not a resistant.

Maybe Dadijaan would be a little happier today. She might be hopeful that the next governor general of India would re-evaluate Mr. Churchill’s boat denial and rice denial policies. Maybe Lord Wavell was different. Maybe he wouldn’t consider Indian millions dying of famine “acceptable losses” in this, the war for the world.

I wish I had learned to fight oppression as early in life as Odile, but I didn’t have her confidence at seventeen—and I couldn’t imagine myself riding to Verdun all alone when I was fourteen. When I was seventeen, I cried all day after Uncle Tajuddin reprimanded me for opening the front door of our home for a man—as if I could have known before I opened the door that the man was not our relative. When Uncle shouted at me for wearing a pair of red shoes I’d borrowed from Josianne, I took them off and ran barefoot to my room, and cried because I wanted so much to please, wanted everyone, even Uncle, to love me
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Odile! So different. She reminded me of Mother—the most adventurous woman in our family
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A bricolage of images comes, each rising like a Poussin painting from a miniature tableau. The five of us around the table for the evening meal always served, American style, at seven; Josianne’s family served dinner at eight. The light changes from image to image, streaming, swelling, decaying. But our positions never change. Practical, ambitious Mother at the head of the table, spinning yarns, a Yankee Madame Defarge knitting the threads of her narrative around our Indian blood till her stories fulfilled their
Oriental promise. In her stories Abbajaan was transformed from itinerant court musician and dervish to “Pir”—Indian sage, preacher of Sufism—a spiritual master privy to the mystical secrets of living connection with the infinite compassion of Allah. Kabir was called Pirzada Kabiruddin, the closest word to Prince that Mother could tease from Abbajaan’s repertoire of Muslim titles. Little Zaib loved to call me Pirzadi Noor-un-nisa, for then she could play at being Princess Zaib-un-nisa. And when the students came to the summer school that year, Mother christened Abbajaan “Hazrat,” his new title of respect, and all the students were “mureeds.”

Sometimes, ma petite, parents are captured in the web of their own stories, and retell the past to match their times and needs. That was Mother, Aura Baker, your grandmother from Boston who never told the cover story of her lineage the same way twice. Only to me would she speak of her first day in the orphanage a month after her mother died. She was vague about where her father vanished—something related to gambling debts. Sometimes she’d tell of her life after the orphanage, living with her older stepbrother, our uncle Robert and his wife, slowly becoming his unpaid domestic servant
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I always believed Mother and I had a special bond, but later I learned we never did. She was the teller of tales, I the listener and her confidante. I kept my own hopes and dreams secret from Mother from the time I met Armand, and she never knew, because she never asked
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Let me tell you how Mother and Abbajaan met. It was highly symbolic: Abbajaan was looking in one direction and walking a different one, the way he often did, and their paths collided. He could have collided with anyone, Mother said, but he’d collided with Aura Baker on Maverick Street in Boston—she was fond of retelling this. To Abbajaan such encounters manifested the laws of life and Allah’s undefinable aims, but to Mother almost every person and every thing was Opportunity
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In the short version of their meeting, the one reserved for the public, they met while he was playing the veena on tour in America
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This version did not mention that she invited him home to dine, it being Thanksgiving, when the tale of the Mayflower pilgrims was making its yearly round at the schoolhouse and it was appropriate to invite a troupe of Indians to dinner, if only to mitigate the error of Columbus. But Abbajaan and his brothers were the wrong Indians for the story, and so Mother compounded Columbus’s error instead of honouring tradition
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Mother eschewed both History and Geography, being prone, in 1910, to the American conceit that the world was in need of a demonstration of how to melt people in a large pot devised expressly for the purpose. I’m joking, of course. But really, she was overwhelmed by Abbajaan’s dark strangeness, his respectful manner. She was enthralled by his lilting English and elevated him instantly to maharaja status, the better to introduce him to Uncle Robert. So Uncle Robert found an Indian from the Princely State of Baroda at his Thanksgiving table, a dark, intense, golden-turbaned man with praises for everyone flowering on his courtly tongue, in a fitted black brocade coat, strings of pearls dangling on his chest
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Uncle Robert immediately forbade Mother to have anything to do with Abbajaan ever again
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But Mother wasn’t a trembling kind of woman, as I was. As soon as she was twenty-one, she ignored Uncle Robert’s edict and followed Abbajaan all the way to London. And when they married there, Mother took a Muslim name, Rukhsana, to uphold Abbajaan’s religion and traditions. She knew next to nothing about his religion or traditions, but she loved him so much, she was willing to uphold anything Abbajaan held dear. She went with him on music tours the first few years after they were married—that’s how I was born in Moscow—but a few years after he moved to Paris, Abbajaan began travelling alone, returning to Paris in the summers to teach Sufism
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That was your grandmother—Mother before Abbajaan returned to India. When we returned to Paris, having paid our respects at Abbajaan’s tomb and toured the major Sufi shrines, she learned a different courage. Every time Uncle made his dutiful
offer of marriage to his half-brother’s widow, she mustered copious widow’s tears and Uncle Tajuddin’s own traditions against all his gallant propositions of co-wifehood. She went into weeks of self-imposed purdah, emerging from her seclusion periodically to confront him with the courage of a squirrel facing down a Doberman. Poor Uncle Tajuddin! He’s probably still bewildered by her rejection of his well-intentioned charity. For five years she was as a Shia waiting for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, as Penelope weaving by day and unravelling by night, and she was ever and also Aura Baker, always imagining the next story for her children to live
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Mother would have loved being undercover at Grignon
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In the lavatory at the château, after my ablutions, I slipped the cover off my jacket button, referred to the compass beneath and faced southeast towards the Ka’aba. I used my headscarf as hijab and knelt on cold tile in the first motion of my Tahajjud prayer. Abbajaan would tell us—your uncle Kabir, your aunt Zaib and myself—that if we couldn’t find time for five prayers, a remembrance of Allah once a day was better than none. The Tahajjud prayer time, when one can speak one’s mind to Allah, from whom all favours come, always refreshes me
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That night at Grignon, I dreamed that masked demons danced around Odile’s room. One bore the face of Gilbert, which metamorphosed into a mask with the haunted eyes of Renée Garry. I thought such nightmares terrible then—but they shrink to nothing compared with the one I live here. Vogel and I are enchained together in a nightmare whose shared space has become this room no bigger than a water closet, ten feet by six
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I could pray five times each day in this cell, but I don’t. How can I dare devotion, now I have lost my freedom, when I never thanked Allah on my knees five times a day for it before? Instead, I perform only the Tahajjud prayer late at night, and pray for Armand, your grandmother Lydia, Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib
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Even so, Fajar, Zuhr, Asar, Maghrib and Isha—the prayer times—sustain me through each monotonous day. It was Fajar
when the pale dawn mist filtered through the iron bars and the bell rang to wake all the women along the cellblock. The guard came to unlock my hands; she turned away while I used the toilet in the corner of the cell, then turned back to shackle me again. On pain of the dungeon, regulations forbid me to look directly at her or the other SS woman, who pours a foul-tasting liquid in my wooden bowl and gives me the wedge of bread I get once a day
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The clang of iron doors and shouts of guards said women prisoners were filing out of cells into the corridor and out into the freezing courtyard. I stood on tiptoe on my iron bed so I could see them walking slowly in circles, one behind the other, never touching. As for me, I am taken into the courtyard alone once a week for exercise, never allowed to speak to anyone except Vogel
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When the clinking of keys stopped, it meant the women had been returned to their cells, and I allowed myself half the bread, saving the remainder for its fragrance. Then silence as Zuhr began. When, standing on the bed again, I saw the barbed wire fencing above the courtyard wall become one with its shadow, I knew only a single hour had passed. And that it was time for warm swampy gruel: a second bowl of swedes, crushed peas and a paste of sour cabbage. When it came, I committed each morsel to memory. The guard collected my bowl and I returned to the odour of previous inmates permeating the thin straw of my mattress
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Some days, though not today, the guard brings me white paper tickets, string and a knitting needle I have to use to string them together. A purposeless task I barely manage with my chains. Zaib was always a better needlewoman than I
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Most days now, since Vogel authorized paper and pen, I manage to write to you
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When the shadow of my pen doubles, Asar will have passed. And with it, two, perhaps three, hours? Maghrib, earlier and shorter at this time of year, will begin at the last slotted rays of lukewarm sun. I will bang my chains on the door to demand an oil lamp or that the naked bulb be lit. The flap door will drop for a brief moment. There will be water for the basin, another bowl of the same soup. And when
a stray star winks through barred fog, it will be time for Isha prayers, and I will have outlived another two hours of captivity. Only then will I allow myself to chew the last of the hard brown bread, to help me through the lice-infested dark
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When I came to this cell, I passed many days and nights furled into a ball as you were in my womb, dwelling on my multiple failures. But now I find I am not alone. With me are the reformers, anarchists, nihilists, the mad, the pacifists, the utopian Communists, the atheists, and devout women of all faiths. This is a zenana, an Auratstan, a place of segregation. Here we silenced women wring our collective hands at our state, and outside the world goes on with its killing
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Bombs crash in the distance. We call out in hope the Allies are coming closer
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As I write, a woman is singing the news in French. The guards cannot stop each teardrop note from carrying. “The Allies bombarded Munich and Dusseldorf again. Churchill, Marshal Stalin and Roosevelt met in Teheran and demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender.”

But the Germans won’t surrender without an invasion on the ground. And it’s too late this year, too cold now. Insh’allah, the Allies will come with spring
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It would be comforting if I could believe that Allah placed Vogel in his role as captor and I in the role of prisoner, that every feeling, every moment is predetermined, that the outcome of this charade with Vogel is predestined, but no strand of logic strains that far—the Allah I love cannot be so cruel
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Our conversations, when Vogel comes, eventually drown in his terror and mine—terror of the perverse violence and rage of which he is capable against his “Princess” for whom he professes only the deepest concern and love. But your mother has known the love of an honourable man, and so I recognize Vogel’s “love.” Like Uncle Tajuddin’s, it is love of his own power, love of my dependence on his every whim. Out of “love” Vogel invokes German orders and says my bondage is for my “safe custody,” just as Uncle Tajuddin once
invoked custom and the Qur’an for my “protection,” as the British “defend” India, starving millions while reciting odes to the white man’s burden
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When I think of this war, I am glad I delayed your soul, for you would have entered the world Vogel and Uncle Tajuddin prefer, a world that wants its bloodlines pure, its people destructive or acquiescent
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Often, Armand comes to visit me, teasing, his voice smiling. Today I could swear he was in one corner of my cell, leaning with furrowed brow over a chessboard, Anoushka in hand. Another time he was at the piano. “Sing, Noor! Sing—with me, or alone—but sing.”

When your father and I marry again, ma petite, there will be singing. Singing of love in many languages. I won’t wear white. I see myself in the red-and-gold lehnga Dadijaan promised me. Armand will wear his black formal jacket and a red cummerbund as he does when performing with an orchestra. We’ll stand beneath a chuppah, drink from the same glass and smash it; our valima celebrations will last till dawn
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Before we bring you back again, we must try to make this world a better place. You are the essence of our future, our future together. When you enter your body, let it be when your parents and others like us are free to marry, keeping our own faiths, and honouring one another’s just as my Abbajaan taught. Armand and I will travel with you to the Kingdom of Baroda, to India, Russia and even Jerusalem—may the lands of our forefathers someday be free
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