Mr. Abdullah and Mrs. Stanton had fallen silent, each inflexible, until the train blasted its horn and pulled out of the station after thirty minutes. All the immense built-up drama deflated into futility, because Mrs. Stanton’s influence over the night train to Rudrakot from Palampore could bear the weight of only half an hour. For anything beyond that, she would have to be someone and something greater in the British Raj.
She sat then, finally, her bags and hatboxes littered under the bunks, her knitting by her side, and the train moved into its measure without a word spoken in the carriage. And this was Sam’s introduction to the India he had not yet seen for himself because, though he had been in the subcontinent since February, all his time thus far had been spent in Burma dealing with the Japanese invasion. With his own attention caught by the war, the Indian nationalist struggle for independence from the British had only briefly imprinted itself upon his consciousness. Ten or fifteen years ago, the Rudrakot train would have stayed at Palampore at Mrs. Stanton’s command and Mr. Abdullah would have been forcibly removed to the back. Much had changed since then—the world war, the insistence on a free and independent India—and so, in 1942, Indians often traveled (when they could afford it) in first-class carriages, some journeys conducted, as this one promised to be, in total silence.
The day passed, slowly, with the stops along the track, the white heat of the sun, the blessed death of it by evening, the coming of the night. Sam and Mrs. Stanton went to dinner together, beckoned by the call of the bogie chai boy, who popped his head deferentially into their compartment and said, “Dinner is served, Sahib,” to Sam, and then added, “Memsahib,” to Mrs. Stanton. Mr. Abdullah, the boy ignored, knowing he would have his own food with him, that he had permission to occupy their compartment, but not to sit at the table in the dining carriage. Progress had stepped, gingerly, into their compartment, but did not yet dare step over the threshold into other parts of the train. Sam and Mrs. Stanton sat across from each other, for such as it was, they knew only each other, and he learned that the best way to keep her from asking questions was to ask them of her. He knew precious little about her by the end of dinner, because he had not listened to her answers.
They returned from the dining carriage at nine o’clock to the aroma of curry and spices. Mr. Abdullah was just stacking the layers of the round steel vessels of his tiffin carrier, which had been filled in the waiting rooms at Palampore with rice, chapattis, and chicken curry, and from which he had surreptitiously nibbled throughout the day. She wrinkled her nose, but Mr. Abdullah did not seem to see it. He was scrupulously polite and climbed up on his berth, turned on his side, and went to sleep.
When Mrs. Stanton had also closed her eyes, Sam took out his map of Rudrakot and traced all its possessions with his finger. The cantonment area. The native town. The lake. Chetak’s tomb. He had four days of leave before he had to return to his regiment. Would it be enough to find his brother? It had to be. Any alternative answer to that question was too terrible to consider. So it was love for Mike and for his mother that drove Sam Hawthorne to Rudrakot.
What he did not know then was that love, of another kind, fulfilling and cherished, would bring him back here, and would eventually occupy his life. Would give him Olivia.
As the train cut through the night toward Rudrakot, Mila sprawled on her stomach, her face flattened against the pillows. Every now and then, she twitched and her eyelids fluttered, her sleep sprayed with dreams she could not stop. Somewhere, a conscious part of her watched the pictures in her mind and told her it was only a dream, that it meant nothing. There was the mocking face of the madam of the Lal Bazaar, Leelabai, her appraising eyes, her too-knowing gaze upon Mila.
She is going to teach us, an Indian girl? Teach us what? Girls are good for only one thing, Missionary Sahib, you should know that. Or perhaps not, your God does not allow you the normal pleasures of a man. What a cruel God you have.
Leelabai was soft and dumpy, dimpled at her elbows, with skin pale as ripening wheat, her hair balding at the part on the crown of her head. Her guttural voice was fed by the harsh smoke of the hookah she smoked incessantly. Mila had almost departed then in disgust, but Father Manning had put a gentle hand at her elbow and said softly, “Look at the women. And then leave if you want to.”
So she lifted her eyes for the first time to the women—some only girls with childhoods barely brushed out of their expressions. They were all caricatures of any real women Mila had known, caricatures of herself even, their faces powdered white, quarter-inch-thick kohl lining their eyes, its curves elongated to their hairlines, mouths red with paan, beauty marks to ward off the evil eye painted on a chin here, a cheek there.
Mila woke shaking, exhausted, her breathing ragged, with a sudden sting of tears behind her eyes, the images of her dream hanging before her. She had not known that such places existed until Father Manning had taken her there, and once she had visited the Lal Bazaar, she was not able to stay away. So Mila went twice a week, listened to the women’s shrill laughter and to their bawdy jokes, heard the hurt lodged somewhere deep within them that they could not be her, privileged and clean—that they had never been able to be her, and would never be her now, for they were fallen women.
She sat up on the bed and put her feet on the cool mosaic floor. The previous day’s heat had lost its edge, but only a little, enough to transmute into a deceiving semblance of coolness. Though the fan whirred overhead, Mila had woken in a sweat, her skin damp on the undersides of her breasts and the nape of her neck under her hair. The outside khus mats covering the windows of her bedroom had been drawn up by a servant and the sky beyond was saturated with the beryl blues of predawn. Mila had lived in Rudrakot for most of her life, and yet had never tired of the tranquility of this time of day, or been overwhelmed by the waiting vastness of the desert outside that would receive her. She had once been awed by its immensity, when she was a child. Around Rudrakot, the Sukh was a desert not of sands, but a hard, pounded ground of dirt stretching out for miles. Trees and scrub dotted its arid countenance where they could find hold, but they were so sparse, so thirst ridden, their leaves and branches grew into a spinelike hardiness. But there were ways to survive in the Sukh, shelter to be found in the shade of the little hills and hillocks formed of its slowly eroding surface, water to be tapped if one only knew where to look, journeys to be made with a surefootedness led by the sun during the day and the canopy of stars at night.
And in the view from Mila’s bedroom window, well into the horizon, one small hill was adorned with a hundred-year-old tomb. It housed a massive, square sarcophagus, ten feet by ten feet, large enough to provide that eternal rest for five humans lying side by side. The tomb was called Chetak, after its occupant, so beloved in life that, in death, he warranted this magnificent creation of stone. The enormous sarcophagus covered the remains of an enormous body. Not human. Chetak was a horse, of the four-legged kind.
The fright from the dream had melted away, and Mila titled her head to listen for sounds within the house. She had woken at this time—the cusp of night and day—ever since she was seven years old because this was what her mother, Lakshmi, used to do for Mila’s father, Raman.
Lakshmi had always opened her eyes before Raman, reached down the bed to touch his feet lightly in the darkness, as a wife was taught to do, asking for a daily blessing from the man who was her master. After Lakshmi died, Mila would awaken to listen for her father’s rising and his going down the stairs to the well for his prayers. Mila did not have to sweep the courtyard, wash it down, draw the rice flour kolam to welcome visitors at the front door; there were enough servants in the house to do this. But the rules of engagement between men and women were laid out such that Mila had felt, without ever being told so, that a woman in the house had to rise before the men. In the early years, when she was merely seven years old, she would knock softly on her father’s door with a, “Papa, it is time to get up,” her limbs loose with sleep, her long hair tangled in knots, he
r short petticoat (which she wore under her frocks) crumpled. Raman would carry his child back to her bed, his heart touched by this devotion, and Mila would be asleep again before he put her down. He scolded her so much Mila understood that she did not need to waken before her father—it was a wife’s place, not a daughter’s, or at least not a child’s responsibility. But this did not stop her from getting up before he did, though now she stayed in her room, waiting to hear his footsteps pass her door.
This morning the top floor of the house was quiet. One of her brothers, Kiran, snored delicately from the room on her right. Ashok, younger than she, the youngest of them all, was a room away on her left, and he would not have been merciful to Kiran had he known of the snoring. Ashok would have stomped around the house trumpeting like an elephant—but he was only sixteen, and so young enough to find this sort of thing terribly amusing.
Mila brushed her teeth in the bathroom without glancing into the mirror above the porcelain sink. The toothpaste was chalky and bitter, made of the neem tree’s fruit and leaves. It reminded her of the time she had tasted the walls of the corridor outside her room just after they had been brushed with a wash of slaked lime. Mila had felt an irresistible urge to lay her tongue against the dripping whitewash to see if it tasted as good as it smelled. She had placed her fingertips on the wall for support, leaned inward, and touched the tip of her tongue on the gritty coating as her nose was crushed against the surface. The taste was abominable, and Mila had backed away hurriedly, swallowing that stinging flavor, wiping her fingers on her frock, just as Kiran climbed up the stairs. He said nothing, just grinned, dabbed at her white nose, and made sounds of retching.
When she came out of the bathroom, she paused by the photographs on the wall between the windows that fronted the balcony. Jai, ruler of Rudrakot, was in each of them, glorious in his royal finery. Rudrakot was now a princely state in British India, and Jai’s title, inherited as it was, had little meaning other than to bestow pomp and circumstance upon him. But this minor inconvenience had never stopped him from considering privilege to be his birthright. In one photograph, he was on his beloved horse, Fitzgerald, saddle and boots indistinguishable from the horse’s ebony coat, Jai in his ICC uniform of salt white jacket, white turban, all rimmed in light blue and gold braid. In another, Jai was with Lord Wellesley, governor of the Bombay presidency, and was turned away from the governor just a little, head up, chin ferocious, arrogant as usual. In the third, Jai had been captured during one of his famed White Durbars, held on the night of purnima—the full moon—more shadows than light on his thin, sharply planed face.
Mila touched this last photograph lightly, the glass cool under her fingertips. Jai had been away at the Imperial Cadet Corps for sixty-two days, and by her counting, it would be at least another month before he returned. He had written her eight letters so far, which she had read with a deep sense of happiness, for in them, he had been candid, open, passionate—attributes difficult to posses when they came face-to-face because of an inbuilt shyness in both. As Mila stood by Jai’s photograph, she heard the first splash of the brass pot into the well. She went out into the balcony and leaned over the edge.
The sky above her lightened, skewered with skeins of tangerine, but the backyard, thick with the arms of the banyan tree, still held the ebony of the night. And there, amidst that gloom, Mila saw the gleam of the well’s whitewashed wall and heard Raman’s voice, soothing and mellow in praise of God.
Mila bent down until her chin rested on the concrete parapet. She would pray with Papa, she thought, but she could not concentrate. A tumult of sound crept into her consciousness—the crows cawed, the koyal cooed maddeningly, water splashed from the well, the soft, morning voices of the servants rose behind the house. The racket never seemed to bother her father; his focus was complete in the midst of chaos. In the distance, she heard the short and sharp hoots of the night train to Rudrakot. Still balanced on just her toes and chin, her body bent at the waist, she watched the steam from the engine dissolve as a tiny slice of the sun brightened the horizon just beyond Chetak’s tomb.
This train would bring Jai home to his kingdom of Rudrakot, though when, Mila did not know. Jai was never very specific with time; he did not have to be because, as in everything else, time adjusted itself around him. Jai would travel, of course, with the train, not on the train, his own bogie shunted to the back. He would merely use the engine to pull him to Rudrakot, but would endure none of the discomforts of travel. Jai’s bogie had hushed custard apple carpets, Louis XV sofas and giltwood chairs, teak and brass appointments, a gold-plated sink in the mirrored bathroom. Even, at one end, his own kitchen and bar. His own palace-uniform-clad servants, in white turbans and coats with silver-braided sashes. Gaslight-shaped lamps that picked diamonds out of shimmering cut-glass decanters. Mila had traveled in Jai’s bogie only once, with Papa and her brothers many years ago, and she had been astounded by how easily Jai fit into his surroundings, lounging casually on the French damask of the sofa, barely distressed as his wine sponged into that precious fabric when the train braked. The conductor and driver had come later to apologize for the train’s shudders, with promises to never let that happen again.
Mila listened to the chug-chug of the train, and wondered who came to Rudrakot today, traveling in a much more common way. She lifted her elbows from the balcony’s ledge and straightened her back. It did not matter. This night train to Rudrakot would bring them no visitors. Nothing would ruffle the calm of their lives, nothing would break the routine…until Jai came back home.
Sam woke as the train pulled into Rudrakot at the first shine of dawn. Of the birth of the sun over the flat edge of the earth he saw nothing, for his window looked out toward the cavernous platform. He raised the shutter as the brakes squealed on the tracks. Both Mrs. Stanton and Mr. Abdullah were already awake. The Indian was seated cross-legged on his bunk, hunched against the curved roof of the compartment, his head dangerously close to the fans. She was dressed and finished in a white voile dress printed with lilacs, dog-skin gloves on her hands, her curls coaxed back into place on her skull, her bags packed, the nightgown stuffed in with her knitting.
There were little boys and old, wizened men along the edges of the platform, staring solemnly as the train trundled by. They all had their hands raised into the air, fingers splayed in the Churchillian V. Their stances were overcasual, free arms looped about each other’s waists, weights depending upon one foot so their hips stuck out. It was an odd gesture, one Sam had witnessed at other train stations during this journey, but never up this close. He began to laugh, and the weight of the last few weeks lifted.
The men and boys had their palms facing inward, not outward, with two fingers, the middle and the index, up in the air. If one of them tucked his index finger out of sight, it would mean something else altogether. Surely, Sam thought, filled with delight, it was a mistake. Or was it? Would the vast, uneducated Indian masses, with their unwashed faces and their ragged clothes, show the finger to the first-class compartments normally occupied only by the British?
The platform crackled with a sudden life. Coolies lined up where the bogie doors were to stop, one after another, four or five deep, their turbans and short coats a brilliant red, white dhotis wrapped around their waists and tucked between their legs. Even in the gathering heat of the morning, steam blew from the cauldrons of chai makers, wafting the aroma of cinnamon that made Sam think suddenly and yearningly of his mother’s pumpkin pie. Men and women who had slept through the night in neat rows along the platform, in anticipation of the train, sat up on their haunches to watch it unload its bellyful of passengers. Vendors shouted out their wares, hoping for a hungry passenger who could not wait until he reached his home in Rudrakot. There were crisp golden samosas and persimmon-colored jalebis wrapped in newspaper, and toted in wicker baskets aswarm with flies. Water bearers carried earthenware pots atop their heads—Hindu bearers for Hindu water, and Muslim bearers for Muslim water—covered with steel p
lates, long-handled cups hooked on the side. To the India-uninitiated, this raw, unboiled water was a silent invitation to cholera and dysentery.
Mrs. Stanton leaned out of her window and pointed at a coolie. “You! Andhar aao. Jaldi! Now!” and he obligingly fought his way into the carriage to their compartment and began to pile her luggage onto his head, his shoulders, slung on his arms, settled on his thighs, wherever he could find a place so he did not have to share his burden and thus his fee. She made him drop all the bags on the platform outside the bogie, around her feet.
Sam waited until Mr. Abdullah had also left, then pulled out his holdall and tried to hoist it onto his good shoulder. He almost collapsed with its weight, so he settled for dragging it behind him down onto the platform. Here and there, uniformed officers from the Rudrakot regiments, both Indian and British, turned to glance at him with a mild curiosity, but no one approached him. Mrs. Stanton still waited in front of the bogie, glancing at the watch on her wrist. There was clearly no one to meet her, and she had expected someone. Sam almost offered his services and then stopped himself. He would be damned if he would help this hellish woman. The crowds milled around her in a tightening circle; the coolie sat by, spitting out paan near her feet, a few bright red spots sprinkling on her lilac shoes; people fell against her as though by accident, knocked her bags about; and still no one came to receive Mrs. Stanton. She began to droop.
A bevy of little boys appeared from nowhere to surround Sam. “Sahib, baksheesh!” “Please, Sahib, some baksheesh.” “You like dance, I do dance.” And then an incongruous flailing of arms and legs was followed by “Hip, hip, hurrah” in strident voices. They pawed at him; he fought them off as well as he could, then reached into his shirt pocket for a bunch of coins, which he gave them, one by one, placing each anna coin in an upturned, blackened little palm. They all looked the same to him, bright-eyed, sweet-faced creatures, with a great deal of cunning and slyness all at once. With the money tucked into their torn shorts and shirts, the boys melted away to go bother someone else. But one boy gave Sam a solemn look and shook his head when he proffered the coin.
The Splendor of Silence Page 3