She sat back on the sill and pulled her knees up under her chin, still listening to the sounds from the verandah and still not able to discern the whole of the conversation. She had always eavesdropped, without a sense of shame though, for she had always been curious. When she was nine, she had heard whispers behind the rath-ki-rani bush at the club one night. There had not been much talking after that, just the hum of sighs and breathing, and mouths meeting. Illicit, of course, in the grand tradition of an affair—a Rudrakot Rifles captain with the wife of a major. She had seen them fused into each other, the woman straddling the man, his hands under her skirt, cupping her buttocks, their mouths merged. Nothing more—forbidden trysts rarely found completion on stone benches behind bushes—and this Mila realized only later when she thought of that evening. But there had been something spellbinding that moonlit night—the hotly scented white flowers amidst glossy green-black leaves, the tableau of mind-losing lust, the sweep of silk over skin, the groans of unfulfilled desire. Leaning out from behind a tree to watch, Mila had tripped and toppled to the dirt. She had picked herself up, dusted off her frock and elbows, but the two people ensconced in the fragrant embrace of the rath-ki-rani did not notice her presence, so engrossed were they in each other. Surely, the young Mila had thought, this must be love, this absorption, this blight of all else but the beloved, this rapture.
A year later she had asked Papa—and only once, since most people did not talk to their parents about love and such nonsense anyway—if he had loved Lakshmi. And Papa had said, “Of course, she was my wife.”
“But you did not know her before you married her?” Mila had asked. By then she had observed the British officers pursuing the women who became their wives, seen them stepping out with each other, and thought that this was how courting was to be. She was ten that year, and this conversation had taken place at dinner, with Pallavi leaning toward their side of the table with a scandalized air. She told Mila later that one did not talk with one’s parents about love and such nonsense, and that it was wrong to have even initiated the topic. But this was after Raman had taken the care to answer Mila.
“I did not know her, true,” he had said, “your grandmother chose her for me. But I fell in love with your mother, and it turned out all right.”
“And what if you had not loved her?” Mila asked.
Pallavi sucked in air between her teeth, and shouted at Sayyid, “Get the buttermilk, Sayyid. Sahib’s rice is cooling.”
“I would have learned to love her; it would have been a tempered love, perhaps not the furious and fierce one it was, but one more vested with calm,” Raman said with a smile.
“I think I want a love like yours, Papa,” Mila had announced. Raman grinned at his daughter, and hoped, in his heart, that she would find a love much like his had been for Lakshmi. He was enchanted by the question and not at all embarrassed. The only two people at the table whose skins mottled with discomposure were Pallavi and Kiran. They knew what a furious and fierce love was—Pallavi because she had slept in a room close by theirs while Raman and Lakshmi were married, Kiran because he was fourteen already, and Jai had taken great care to initiate him—not physically yet, for now it was all wonderment and chatter—about the marvels of love. A misused word in Jai’s and Kiran’s context, but still one that had some resemblance to the love of which Raman spoke.
Mila had asked the question because the year she turned ten, Jai, who was seventeen, got married. His marriage was arranged, of course, by Raman himself. The bride, the wife-who-was-to-be-loved, was the princess of Shaktipur. Jai had not seen her at the betrothal ceremony, and his first sight of his wife would be at the official viewing, after the wedding. He had been told by his diwan, his prime minister, that she was beautiful, and his diwan had been told so by the Shaktipur diwan. Neither of the men had seen the princess, but each was equally assertive of the merits of her beauty. Jai had come home to moan and pout to Raman about this strange state of affairs. Mila had stood at his knee, literally at his knee, for she was leaning against his legs and watching the curvings and swivelings of his beautiful, discontented mouth, fronted by a neat, clipped mustache. Why did he have to marry? he had asked Raman. Because, Raman explained patiently, Rudrakot needed an heir, and he had to provide one or the line would die. Why couldn’t he see her, damn it, before the wedding? Because it was not done; he knew this, surely?
That night, at dinner, Mila asked Raman what love was, and if he had ever possessed it, for it seemed poor Jai was doomed.
Still sitting on the windowsill, Mila wondered why she thought of Jai’s marriage to the princess today; there had been, if she so wanted, plenty of other opportunities to think of it. Now the marriage was an old one; they had three children, the younger two boys, an heir to spare for Rudrakot. Jai had never talked of love for the princess of Shaktipur, and now, Mila would not ask him. She heard her father and his guest rise from their armchairs in the verandah and step over the door frame into the corridor. Mila stood up. Before she could head for her rooms, Raman came down the corridor and saw her.
“Mila,” he called out, “wait, my dear. I want you to meet Captain Hawthorne.”
Mila turned to her father, and saw a tall man following behind him, his stride long and easy, clad in the omnipresent khaki of the war, his figure all but blotting out the light through the door frame from the verandah. He had to duck his head under the door frame and almost stumbled over the six-inch threshold in the doorway, built to deter snakes, or rather to contain them to the room they found themselves in. She felt that she was smiling even before he neared—it was the stranded stranger. Why had he come to their house? To see Papa? Sam put out his hand without hesitation, and Mila gave him hers in return, thinking that this Captain Hawthorne must be special indeed for Papa to allow him to intrude upon his coffee hour.
“How are you? Since my father forgot to introduce me, I must tell you that I am his daughter.”
There was a long moment of silence, which stretched so far that Mila found it difficult to hold Sam’s steady gaze upon her face. Then Sam cleared his throat and said, “I gathered as much.” For someone who had expounded at great length upon the qualities of the rudraksha tree, he seemed to have given in to a paucity of language. His teeth flashed a startling white in his sun-browned face.
Their crow-heralded visitor, Mila thought suddenly, the one who would bring them ill luck. But how could Sam Hawthorne be that man?
“Captain Hawthorne will be staying with us, Mila,” Raman said. “Will you see that a room is prepared for him?”
“Sam, please,” Sam said. “I have already convinced your father to call me thus; perhaps you will give me the honor of doing so too?”
“Yes, of course,” Mila said. “I am Mila. Well…” She hesitated. “Not Mila exactly; I have other names, but everyone calls me Mila.”
“Is this your father’s doing?” he asked.
Raman roared with a delighted laughter, and slapped Sam on the arm before turning to go down the corridor to his room. “Yes, it is my doing, Sam. If I can meddle with my own name, I have no reason not to do so with my daughter’s.”
They watched him head away, and then Mila turned to Sam. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping in the drawing room for a while, I will see that your room is made ready.”
“I’m glad,” he said hurriedly, and then paused to consider his words, “that you…live here, in this house; we can now talk longer about Rudrakot and its history. I hope this is no inconvenience.”
She shook her head. She had been curious about him, but now she wanted to leave, to go wipe her face and hands, to change into something else, something more becoming, a sari. Sam Hawthorne was not one of Papa’s usual strays. Raman had a delectable propensity for inviting strangers into their home, to stay, at times, as long as they wanted. He liked people, he enjoyed investigating their minds, he had the same curiosity Mila had. And the ICS, being a social and sociable service, afforded many opportunities for unlooked-for house guests.
But Sam Hawthorne was already different. He was American, and that made him different. Not the first American she had met, but still different from all others. He was unsettling, with a gaze too intense, a demeanor too focused…on what though? Why was he here, Mila wondered, but she would not ask him. She hoped that he would stay long with them. But she could not ask him that either, in case he understood the question to reflect their impatience to have him leave. Not done.
They both tarried in the corridor outside the drawing room, suddenly plagued with shyness, heedful of themselves and of each other, not quite knowing what to say or how to say it.
Sam lifted his right hand to gesticulate and begin a sentence, but Mila began to talk almost as he did and he stopped to listen, his eyes fixed upon her face.
“I hope you have a wonderful time here at Rudrakot, Captain Hawthorne,” she said with a smile. “It is not often that we have American guests at our home. Ashok, my brother, he will be thrilled, and you must please not mind it if he asks you too many questions about your home.”
“I won’t,” Sam replied. “It will be a pleasure for me. Bring on all of your brothers and I will be happy to talk with them. But…can I repay your…and your father’s hospitality in some other way also?”
She laughed and rested against the wall, her hands clasped behind her. The collar of her white blouse strained over etched bones at the base of her neck with a little dip between them. A slender gold chain rested its excess length in that dip. Mila smelled of a just-risen sun, still cool and fresh. Sam saw and felt all of this and yet seemed not to see any of it. He leaned against the other wall of the corridor, and from the way they were positioned, their feet were just a few inches apart, Sam’s scuffed army boots more gray with dust than black, Mila’s riding boots with their three-inch heels still shiny from all of Sayyid’s ministrations with a brush and polish.
Mila had forgotten her need to flee from Sam; like him, she too wanted to be here and nowhere else, but for her the thought was merely instinct. She did not know that she was flirting with Sam, inviting his gaze upon her face and her neck, searching his own face for a smile or a crinkle of skin around his eyes.
“We had a young army officer here whom Ashok pestered so much with all of his America questions that he preferred to leave Rudrakot itself. I hope that you will stay, Captain Hawthorne.”
Sam was still staring at Mila with a grin on his face, and in the midst of that haze of joy, the question finally searched for and found his brain. “I have only a few days of my leave, but”—his voice dropped to an overcasual tone—“who was this man? Was he American?”
And Sam waited for the answer with his heart banging in his chest. Something though, about the way he had posed the question, about what he had said, or left unsaid, rose to curdle the air around them.
“Yes,” Mila said as she straightened from the wall. “But you would not know him. America is a big country, isn’t it?”
She led the way to the drawing room, waved him to a chair, gave him a quick smile, and ran out of the room, leaving him suddenly stunned and out of breath.
Sam sank into the stuffed armchair and bent his head. He was tired; his mind was playing tricks upon him. He had left Mila at the road and pushed her firmly out of his mind, thinking that he would never see her again, that the encounter had been one to remember and cherish. He raised his hands to his face, and spread out his fingers, palms downward, and watched as his hands shook slightly, trembling in midair. Mila. What a lovely name, whatever her other names might be. Swept away by an exhilaration he could not identify, because he had never felt this before, Sam still wondered if he was merely being stupid. And all at once, he compared her to his other loves, if such a word could be used with them. He had dated many women, and there had been one…her name even escaped him now, who when she knew he was going to India and Burma, had offered him marriage. They liked each other, she had said (they had), they were both reasonably attractive (they were), and if he never came back, at least he would know he had had her. Everyone must marry at least once. But something in Sam rebelled against this arrangement without sentiment or emotion, even though he was too academically trained to think of sentiment or emotion as being attractive. And he did not think of marriage in terms of at least once, he thought of it as at most once. And so that had ended, the most serious relationship Sam had ever had. With that woman, he had hiked in the Cascades, kissed in the rain, fumbled at her clothing on the sofa in his apartment.
He sat in the drawing room waiting for Mila to return and thought of her without realizing that he thought only of her. Trivialities really. She was not very tall; her head came up only to his shoulder. A drop of sweat had run down along her cheek and dispersed wetly into the collar of her white shirt.
When he remembered this second meeting later, he realized that he had seen her like an artist studying his subject limb by limb, hair by hair, and for Sam this was an astonishment, for he usually saw the entireties of people—what they said, how they used their hands, what matter was contained in their brains. Asked what his mother, Maude, had worn when she left the house, he had never remembered much, not even an impression of a color. But this is what he remembered of Mila that morning. When she had turned to meet him, her eyebrows had lifted into the narrow expanse of the skin of her forehead and created fine lines of questions. She had a tiny mole flanking the outer edge of her right eyebrow. Her hand was easy in his grasp, her grip was firm, not insipid, and her palm fitted around his warmly. He followed her into the drawing room and noticed the creases in the khaki of her jodhpurs where they were tucked into the top half of her boots, from where they blossomed into exaggerated, wide, buckram-enforced curves around her thighs. He saw the curve of her breast under the thin white shirt, the plunge of the collar in front, drowned in the aroma of her skin without being anywhere close to her.
And despite that near reference to Mike—or at least Sam thought it must have been Mike that Mila mentioned—he did not think of Mike. He did not think of his mother’s letters from home, or of his purpose in being here in Rudrakot, or even of the four short days he had to accomplish what he had come for. He listened instead to the sound of her fading footsteps, and hankered for her to return.
Five
I was neither Englishman nor Indian, but it was not a national matter. It looked to me as if the whole globe might be in the war before it was over…It might be America’s business, too, before so very long. The world had shrunk. India was no longer far away from anywhere. What with the radio and the Quiz Kids, we talked in New York…Gandhi was no stranger to us…I found myself tingling with a kind of impotent impatience. Europe was aflame, the sparks were flying in India’s direction, but the politicians would not help man the fire engine!
—Post Wheeler, India Against the Storm, 1944
Sayyid came to lead him to his bedroom, not Mila, and upon entering it, Sam saw nothing in that room—not the gossamer white curtains on the windows and the door leading to the balcony, not the malachite green mosaic floor or the burnished teak furniture; Sam saw only the bed.
He touched the cool sheets, bent to rub his face against the clean soap-nut smell of the fabric. An immense weariness overtook him; his limbs turned to water, his legs folded beneath him, and he barely heard Sayyid asking when he wanted breakfast. One moment Sam had his nose against the fragrant dhobi-washed pillowcase, the next the bed reached out to yank him into its inviting embrace. He fumbled with the alarm clock on the bedside table in those last few moments before he slept. Sam slept with his boots on, on his face, just as he had fallen, and did not move the entire morning.
His dreams were manacled with images of Mike, of their childhood together with their mother, and, briefly, of the father he had not known. George Ridley had left his wife and children, unable, quite simply, to bear the burden of a family. Maude herself was silent to a stillness about the husband she had once loved, but there were lingerings of their father’s presence all around the house, in photograph
s tucked into the flaps of albums, in a letter laid facedown at the bottom of a box under Maude’s winter sweaters.
Little by little, Mike and Sam had pieced their father together—a salmon and crab fisherman in Alaska, a man who preferred the seduction of the wild, the cold, the raw land up north, who had abandoned their mother after a few years when the sea called out his name so insistently that it shut out everything else. The photographs showed a prematurely white beard on a startlingly immature face, a wide smile, and burly shoulders. Even then, when he was ten or eleven or fourteen, Sam had wondered what had attracted them to each other, kept them together for as long as they had been married, since they had so little in common. Their childhoods had been varied, their manners different; Maude was a reader, George had read very little, for he had grown up on the docks in Juneau, surrounded by the aroma of fish, schooled in fishing and little else. On winter days, when the snow lay softly on the shoulders of the Olympic Mountains out to the west, Sam would go to the pier at the cusp of night and watch the sun slip behind the mountains. Then his gaze would drift north and west, where he thought Alaska was, where his father was, and Sam would wonder if he thought of them all. Through the fog of no news, they had heard that George Ridley had married an Aleut woman and fathered a daughter. After that, they had heard nothing more.
Mike was born three months after George left, when Sam was four, and his memories of the events of that time were as lucid as when they had happened. Maude wearily hunched in the rocking chair, her feet firmly on the floor, still pitching the chair, the baby asleep against her breast. Maude clucking over Mike, her nose buried in his little tummy, his giggles of rapture as he clutched at her hair. Sam had felt as though he was being deserted again, this time by his mother, for a tiny, mewling, demanding creature who took all of her time. He had refused to look at Mike, to hear his gurgles, to notice that his gaze only followed Sam when he was in the room. And then one day he looked at his little brother, who smiled and spit at him, and Sam fell in love.
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