The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  A lull, heavy and silent in the heat, extended over the bazaar. The shop fronts were shuttered with gunnysack matting, cows dozed in the shade of awnings, and stench flew upward from the gutters filled with viscous, black, and now drying water. Nothing moved in the afternoon heat—in the houses atop the shops, windows were closed, and women slept on the bare cement floors, heads laid on arms and hands, glued to their skins with drops of sweat. The bazaar was called such, “lal,” or red, after the color of the uniforms worn by the officers of the Rudrakot Rifles, who were half of the patrons of the Lal Bazaar. It sold an item of necessity to men in army regiments, to men all over the world—sex. The houses fronted the little, crooked street, painted in brilliant pinks and blues, much like the saris the women draped so casually as to reveal everything, their faces painted in livid lines in the same colors in the evenings, blue around their eyes, reds outlining their mouths.

  At one end of the bazaar was a house set away from the street. It had a small compound in front sheltered by a gracefully growing banyan tree. And under the shade of that banyan, fifteen pairs of arms and legs moved in unison. The boys and girls, most in their teens, were all clad in white kurtas and churidars, indigo sashes around their waists. Their teacher, a youth of seventeen, still smooth faced, shouted out orders in a singsong voice, “One-two-three-four. One-two.” And his fifteen pupils obligingly followed in jumping jacks, twists and turns, bending from the waist to meet their left foot with their right hand and their right foot with their left, the girls’ long plaits swinging down over their backs to the dust and up again.

  Inside the two-story house, Vimal Kumar stood near the window, looking down upon the exercising, sweating group. He was a slim, intense man, not much older than the group outside, but he had been elected their leader almost from the beginning. He wore the same white kurta and churidar, but he was cool inside the room even though there was hardly any breeze from the ancient, creaking, ceiling fan.

  Vimal turned back to the room, his delicate hands clasped behind his back. There was a wooden table in the center, with four chairs, three of which were occupied by two men and a woman. His eyes burned into them, bright with fervor, his back straightened, and he whipped his head so that his hair slung over his forehead. The other three stared, their breaths shallow. They all shared the intensity of Vimal’s expression, their faces blank canvases of focus and nothing else, their gazes fixed hungrily upon him. They waited for him to speak.

  “Will they be able to keep this up much longer?” he asked, with a nod over his shoulder. “It is hot. Blastedly hot.”

  The girl spoke softly. “They will have to, comrade. We can meet for the next hour, no more, and they will exercise until we are done.”

  A little smile touched Vimal’s perfectly formed lips. “Mahatma Gandhi asked us to give our lives for our country; I don’t believe this was what he meant.”

  One of the men shifted in his seat and said, “The police will not come into the house as long as they see the exercisers outside, comrade.”

  Vimal Kumar sat down in the fourth chair and laid his hands on the smooth and bare wood of the table. He wore a gold ring on one finger, his left index, engraved with an etching of the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and a gold chain with a coin around his neck. Vimal had been adorned with many more ornaments upon his birth, since his father was one of Rudrakot’s leading dry-goods merchants, for the black town, of course—a British merchant ran the store in the cantonment area. But over the months of being the unheralded head of the underground nationalist movement in Rudrakot, he had slowly divested himself of each piece of jewelry. He had worn earrings at one time, and those had gone into the fund plate to buy this house and compound in the Lal Bazaar. The silver watch with diamond studs had gone into another collection plate, at a meeting one night when he had stripped it off his wrist and flung it onto the plate with a, “Money means nothing to me, comrades, freedom is worth all I have now, and all I can give in the future!” That speech was so impassioned, so moving, that merely looking upon the handsome Vimal on the platform, sweat soaking into his kurta until it stuck to the lines of his chest, his hair plastered to his well-formed skull, his mouth spewing words that brought chills up the listeners’ spines, money and jewelry piled onto the plate. That night they collected forty watches, a thousand rupees, fifteen gold chains, fifty bangles, nose studs, earrings, anklets—all for the cause. That night they also collected the hearts of most of Rudrakot’s young.

  Vimal had nicked his finger while slicing a green mango the day before. The wound on the pad of his left index finger was quite deep, but no longer bleeding, with only a lurid red gash to show where the knife had slashed through the whorls and circles of his fingertip. He looked down at his finger ruefully, and the three around the table reacted together in reaching out toward him. The girl wanted to lift his finger to her mouth and kiss away the hurt. The two men wanted to slice his mangoes for him from now on and bear the burden of any future cuts. Vimal noticed their movements and smiled into himself. He had always had this power over people. All leaders, he thought, had a personal charisma, an almost sexual energy that consumed their followers. In Mahatma Gandhi’s case, this last was not quite true, but he still possessed a strange and awe-inspiring power in his quiet voice, his studied sentences, his use of just-adequate language. The one aspect of the Mahatma’s teachings that Vimal had never been able to fully understand or accept was the concept of nonviolent resistance. It seemed too futile for him, too much like waiting too long and not wanting enough for the cause.

  From the outside came the shrill cries of the exercise leader, one-two-three-four, and Vimal leaned into his comrades. “I have heard news.”

  They all waited, looking into his beautiful face with adoration.

  “Since Burma has fallen to the Japanese, the British have shown themselves to be grossly inadequate. They were thrown out of Burma and fled back to Assam like pariah dogs, tails between their legs. And the goras were given first preference for evacuation, leaving our Indian comrades defenseless against the Japanese in many cases, or leaving them quite simply to walk out of Burma and Malaya into Assam. Do you know how far that is? A thousand miles.”

  Vimal’s voice rose into the silent room to drown out the steady clank of the ceiling fan. He moved his hands as he talked, blood flooding into the clear skin of his face. “The refugees from Burma walked into Assam to camps in search of assistance and food, and they were divided into two groups—the goras on one road, the Indians on a parallel road. A white road, my comrades, and a black one. Which group do you think received the best aid, the best medications, and the best supplies? One gora even took his billiards table while our brethren were left to perish on the roadside.”

  The three listeners flushed and their eyes glowed. “I know we are too far from the war frontiers, that the first Japanese threats are to Assam and Calcutta and Madras and parts of Ceylon, but are these cities fortified? Are they capable of withstanding an assault from the Japanese? Are they then capable of defending the whole of India?”

  “No,” the three breathed softly.

  “Our British government, too craven and cowardly to defend our motherland, is now ready to take flight. Do you know what the government has decided to do?” Vimal demanded, pushing back his chair to stand up, his palms on the table. “A policy of scorched earth, they call it. They are going to bomb all the docks in Calcutta and Madras, destroy the local infrastructure of industry and buildings, all in anticipation of a Japanese takeover. And this is the country they consider the jewel in their crown. Since they cannot defend her, our Mother India, they seek instead to destroy her!” He spat on the floor, and the three spat along with him. “The Mahatma has written in condemnation of this. But I say we should go further than mere words. We have to show them that we will not stand for this willful destruction of our property and of the livelihoods of our people. We must do something!”

  He strode around the table in quick, short strides,
panting from all the shouting. Outside, the exercise leader had increased the volume of his cries to muffle Vimal’s voice. One-two, he shouted.

  “What shall we do, Vimal?” the girl asked, her question accompanied by the slapping of hands against thighs in the compound below.

  Vimal stopped and his breathing slowed, his chest heaving. “Nonviolence is not the answer,” he said slowly. “I say we return violence for violence. Attempting to destroy our docks and our buildings is an attempt at violence against our people.”

  He shook his head. “I shall have to think of something.” He glanced at one of the boys. “Can you make a bomb, Parekh?”

  The boy nodded eagerly. “Of course, Vimal.”

  “When?”

  “In a day.”

  “A day….” Vimal rubbed his chin and then looked at them again. “Do you know where Colonel Pankhurst is right now?”

  “The British resident?” the girl asked.

  “Yes, don’t confuse him with the political agent…,” Vimal said, pausing, an idea registering on him, and then went on, “that chap is Indian, not on our side, a staunch imperialist of course, but perhaps he can be brought to reason…. Colonel Pankhurst is the resident and he is outon a tiger hunt right now in the Sukh. Can you believe this? Our borders are being threatened and the resident is away on a pleasure trip.”

  “The bastard,” the three followers said simultaneously, and Vimal turned away to disguise a smile. Colonel Pankhurst, that poor shit, was actually in Delhi in deep conference with the viceroy, most probably on Rudrakot business, but such tedium would not foment his followers into action, hence the little lie. The mention of Raman’s name set his head aflame with ideas. Why had he not thought of Raman before? Vimal’s father and Raman were old acquaintances despite the difference in their social stations, because Raman chose his friends where he found them. And yet Vimal knew that there was never a man more loyal to the British cause than Raman—a born-and-bred ICS officer.

  The other three had begun chattering, their voices rising and falling in passion, cursing the British resident, cursing the government, decrying Gandhi’s lethargy in only demanding but not taking freedom from the British. Vimal did not listen to their talk; he wandered to the window and gazed out into the deserted street of the Lal Bazaar. The boys and girls below whipped themselves into a perspiring frenzy at the sight of his beloved figure at the window, all eager to please him, all heedless of their own comfort. Such was his power. Such, he knew too, was his power.

  It had been Vimal’s idea to buy this dirty little house in this bazaar of filth. The British Indian army, the Rifles regiment specifically, which was an all-white regiment, had petitioned for and received permission to construct the Lal Bazaar. Half the women, on one half of the street, clearly demarcated, were allotted for the use of the Rifles; the other half were for the Lancers, an all-Indian regiment. Neither group of men wanted to be contaminated by women who slept with the other kind, though the Rifles were the first to demand this demarcation. The Lal Bazaar, then, was a sanctioned street of brothels, ruled over by two madams, attended to by two separate physicians, British and Indian. It was—the British government of India had determined—a necessity for their men, so they provided it helpfully, along with their mess kits, their canteens, their turbans and hats, their revolvers and swords, their stirrups and uniforms. But the bazaar was also, most naturally, the bastard child of the army. An unfortunate necessity, and so rarely patrolled, little acknowledged except in times of emergencies. And so, Vimal Kumar, leader of the Freedom for India movement in Rudrakot, had brought his band of freedom fighters here, under the noses of the men who ran and policed Rudrakot.

  The police inspector had bothered them only once, when one of the girls had fainted in the heat and a little crowd of prostitutes had gathered around, awash in cheap perfume, raucous voices, and useless advice. The inspector had asked where the girl was from, and Vimal, in a moment of brilliance, had mentioned a side street in the poorer section of the black town, and not where she actually lived, within the Civil Lines, the daughter of a rich Indian lawyer. The inspector ordered them to take her home, and to keep their physical activities to a minimum in the afternoons. They had nodded respectfully, shrieking with laughter inside at the poor sod’s red face and the bracelets of white skin on his neck where the sun had not touched. So they confined their exercising to the times when the sun smoldered over Rudrakot, confident the inspector, even though he was British (and so by definition insane), would not come out in the heat to check on them.

  Vimal thought of Raman again. For a few short years, Ashok and he had studied mathematics and English with the same tutor. Ashok Raman had been a shy little boy, as enamored of Vimal then as were the members of his movement now. Raman had two other children though? Kiran and Mila. This Kiran chap would be of no use; he was too much like his father, too much in love with the British and their ways. And the girl, not her either. If he approached Ashok, he would have to be careful of her. From what he remembered, the girl had been imperious, mothering of Ashok, smothering of Ashok; she would not be so easily led. Vimal had been irritated by her indifference when she had looked past him in their study room. No matter, he thought, he held no grudges. She would come under his influence, as all others did, if he but exerted himself. It was Ashok he wanted to see again.

  Now he had to reestablish contact and deposit a viper in the political agent’s breast, one ready to uncoil and strike, and Raman would not even know that he had nurtured it.

  Seven

  [It would be imprudent for the British] to descend from the high place which the genius of the Englishman has rightfully won, and endeavour to persuade the people of India…that they are intellectually or morally our equals, and that to them have been confided by fortune those secrets of government which in the modern world, are the inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon race alone.

  —Sir Lepel Griffin, Fortnightly Review, October 1883

  Mila lay in her bed listening to the soft sounds of the lethargic afternoon. She could not sleep, so she thought instead of Jai’s last letter from the Imperial Cadet Corps. He had gone back to the ICC as an instructor this time, fully vested as a King’s Commissioned Officer, or KCO, and his students were all, like him, princes and noblemen connected with the princely states.

  When Jai had first joined the Indian army, king’s commissions were not bestowed upon Indians—no matter that he was a prince, that he held a royal title, such as it was. But all British officers of the Indian army had king’s commissions simply because their skins were white, even though their origins might be dead common. Jai could only manage a viceroy’s commission, or a VCO. The unspoken fiction was that all ranks, VCO or KCO, were equal. But it was evident that the VCOs were black Indians, and the KCOs were the white British, so even a British subaltern considered a high-ranking Indian officer subordinate to him because of the color of the Indian officer’s skin.

  The VCO had not been enough for Jai and for years Mila had heard him complain about the unfairness of this rule. “Here is yet another differentiation between Indians and the British in India,” he would say. “I am an army officer, I command a regiment, my men and I will fight and die for the empire—why do I deserve less?”

  To murk the waters of these arguments further, Jai’s Rudrakot Lancers was a regiment raised by his father, Raja Bhimsen, and was quartered in and wholly maintained by the princely state, with no burden of responsibility on the British Indian government. As such, the Rudrakot Lancers, though ostensibly part of the Indian army, could not really be governed by these rules in the Indian army. For the British government considered that the princely states enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy within the boundaries of the Raj, and asked that Rudrakot in turn recognize the suzerainty of the king in England.

  Ten years ago, in the 1930s, these stringent color rules had begun to bleed at their edges, especially in the princely states. Jai shouted, fought, wrote impassioned letters to the viceroy and the k
ing, and, as an afterthought, exercised a little diplomacy too, at Raman’s exhorting. After much of this wrangling and petitioning and politicking, Jai got his cherished commission from the king. But he knew that he still could not rank over a British officer, even with his KCO—the color bar in India was indeed a hard line to cross. Jai still had to be satisfied to be the commander of his all-Indian Rudrakot Lancers. But wars, like this one and the Great War before this one, had a way of equalizing all prejudices, for a bleeding and dying soldier is a bleeding and dying soldier, no matter what earth he spills his blood upon, no matter what color that blood is. In the end, all was ashes and dust. Death was the great leveler, and before this war ended, Jai suspected that he might well be put in command of an all-white regiment.

  Mila could remember the day, two months ago, when the news of the commission had come. The ten-year period of waiting, the immense yearning for that commission had taken away none of its charm. That was the day Jai had approached Raman about another matter. Mila had liked Jai immensely before; it was difficult not to like him despite all of his eccentricities and his tantrums. His heart was open and he was impeccably honest—but then two months ago, there had come an inevitable shifting in their relationship. It was something she had anticipated for a while, but its coming to pass had still been mildly shocking, as though her life had been decided for her.

  She missed Jai’s presence here at Rudrakot. If a Rifles officer (bestowed with his KCO well before Jai) refused to salute Jai, or ignored his presence, as had been done before when Jai had held a mere viceroy’s commission, Jai, fire headed as usual, would plunge into a temper and Papa would be called in to mediate and pacify, as he had done all these years. There was little quiet when Jai was around; even this Sam Hawthorne could not have come unnoticed into their house and slept for so long without a visit from Jai, imperious, demanding, wanting to investigate the visitor to Rudrakot.