“Do tell.”
Sims slurped up the rest of his shandy and set the glass down on the table. When the bearer stepped through the door to refill his drink, he waved him away. “I want a clear head tonight. And there’s more drinking to do at the club.”
“Sahib,” the bearer said, not understanding all of that, but moving away beyond the door’s frame and out of their sight to sit against the wall in case they needed him again, or changed their minds, as they were wont to do.
“I once knew…,” Sims began, and then cleared his throat. “I need to stand for this.” He stood up to face Blakely, and Sam saw that the wicker chair had posted tiny, circular patterns of red on the skin of his back and the backs of his thighs.
“I once knew a girl called Rosalie,
Who said ‘how do you do’ so very prettily.
On the floor she held sway
Swains leaping into love night and day.
Proposals though she awaited eagerly,
Most men were content to skip over fleetly.”
Blakely roared with laughter. “But why?”
Sims held out his hand. “Wait, you must wait. I’m not finished.
For Rosalie, hide them as she may,
Her fingernails gave her away.
And in the end, all knew that it was true,
Rosalie was only four annas in the rupee.”
The two men bent over with mirth, laughing at their own cleverness. Blakely was actually crying, wiping his eyes, coughing over his cigarette. “That was priceless, Sims,” he said, his voice rasping in his throat. “How long did it take all of you to figure out that she had a touch of the tar brush? Did no one come close to marrying her?”
“One officer did; he wouldn’t believe us when we told him of her ancestry. You should have seen her, Blakely. Skin as white as cow’s milk, as creamy as whey, eyes as green as slime in a water tank. Auburn hair, and not from a bottle. She wouldn’t take that poor chap to see her parents or her brothers and one day he followed her home and saw them for himself. Two days later, we heard that some thugs set upon her and cut up her face with a shaving blade. That was the end of Rosalie; she never came to the dance hall again. A good thing too.” Sims’s face hardened. “She had tried to pass herself off as one of us, but was nothing but a half-caste.”
Around the verandah and alongside the wall of the barracks, Sam leaned on his spade. Talk such as this he had heard many times before, perhaps too many times before, and it caused a ruffling anger to grow within him. He had understood the mean and cheap rhyme about the poor girl called Rosalie. Her fingernails gave her away. This was the myth among soldiers, that Indians who looked British because they had some white blood could never hide the darkening skin around their fingernails, or the ridge of browner color in the half-moons of skin. It was prejudice of the shallowest and most petty kind, practiced on both sides. As much as the British had brought their color consciousness into this society, the Indians Sam had met in Calcutta or Assam, sometimes in the Grand Hotel, sometimes in clubs, had also been surreptitiously proud of their color, especially when it seemed as though they would bleed white if pricked, without the aid of a British ancestry. The color bar was everywhere, and this Rosalie, if she really existed, had paid for it, perhaps more so because she was Anglo-Indian.
Sam moved so that his eyes were level with the verandah’s floor. Sims and Blakely were still laughing, without a sound now; the heat had robbed them of even their laughter. And if this joke was funny, it was funny no longer, because it was so oft repeated. The two men had talked about the cook’s beating; why, Sims was the very man who had beaten the cook. Had Mike mentioned his name? Or any connection with him at all? Had he known him?
He peered at the two men to commit their faces to his memory. The sun had begun to cast longer shadows on the ground and Sam knew that it was time to return to Raman’s house and slip back into his room before the servants began to stir from their afternoon sleep. He hefted the spade back on his right shoulder, and at that moment, the pain returned in a full, blossoming anger, sending fire through his muscles. Sam cried out and dropped the spade. It thunked onto the ground, lifting a fine sheen of dust around his feet. The two men in the verandah moved with an astonishing speed down the slick concrete floor; Sam heard them before he saw them leaning over the parapet.
“What are you doing here?” Sims shouted.
Sam raised his head to look at them, and then ducked, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Sorry, Sahib,” he mumbled, his voice hoarse, falling into a singsong intonation. He moved slowly, tiredly, his back hunched, to pick up the spade and turn his back on them.
“Who is it?” Blakely asked.
“Some mali, listening to us. What are you doing here?” Sims shouted again.
“Sorry, Sahib,” Sam said again as he moved toward the bushes and the NCOs’ quarters.
A pebble sang through the air and nicked Sam on his leg, but he kept going. An argument he could not have with these men, and he hoped they hadn’t looked into his face too closely. Still maintaining his slouch and scramble walk, Sam shuffled away. More stones littered the dirt around him.
“Damn,” he heard Blakely say. “I must have had too many shandies; I can’t even get a clear shot at the bugger.”
As he walked away, more swiftly now, Sam sneaked a look back at the men, and found them leaning over the parapet in a wet, sweating exhaustion. All the way back on the dirt path, he thought about what he had heard, the men he had seen, tried to remember if their names sounded familiar. But no, it was not their names that caused some forcibly buried memory to stir within him.
It was the name of the girl. Rosalie.
April 1942, a Month Earlier
Somewhere in Burma
They smell the village first. Before they see it, before they even know it is there. Sam’s map shows a green, jungly void here in the Kachin hills, just forests unbroken from the eye of a mapping plane above. But they smell the village and know it has to be an entire village, not just the remains of a single human, but many. Men, women, children.
When that awful stench rises up the hillside and hums around them, Sam, Marianne, and Ken crash to a halt where they are on the track. That first horrid breath of carrion decaying ambushes them. It punches into their lungs. They cough violently into their hands, bend over from the waist to squeeze out that smell from their bodies. When they straighten, Marianne reaches out a shaking hand for Sam, who is ahead of her in their single-file walking, and the other hand to Ken, who is behind her.
“It cannot be,” she whispers. “Say it cannot be, Sam. Not again.”
Sam tears his gaze from Marianne’s face and down to the glistening brown and green leaves on the forest’s floor. He hears Ken hobble closer to Marianne, grasp her arm into his chest, and lay his head on her shoulder. For comfort. Sam can say nothing, his tongue grows thick, glues itself to the top of his mouth, and tears prickle at the back of his eyes. As they stand there, linked together in the slowly dripping forest, the sun comes out somewhere above them, hews through the monsoon clouds, sends glittering spears of slanting light between the leaves and branches.
Marianne begins to cry. Not again. Not again, she says to herself.
Sam straightens his back, swabs at his eyes, and ties his filthy and damp handkerchief around his nose. “We must go see,” he says.
Marianne holds him back, not letting go of his hand. “No. Let us go around. There must be a way around. Why do we have to go through the village?”
Sam begins to trudge down the track, his boots gathering leeches from fern fronds. It is only when they cut away a tiny triangle of his flesh that he even knows they are there, feasting on his blood with surgical precision, feeding poison into his body to keep the blood thinned, and flowing. But he does not feel their bite, does not feel them plop onto the ground, fat and satiated, gray with pleasure from the feed.
“There must be something in the village we can salvage, Marianne,” Sam says, mor
e to himself than to her. “We have no food left; we have to go through the village.”
“I’m not coming,” she says, and sits down on the ground, pulling Ken, whose hand she is still clutching, down with her. The leeches drop off from the trees onto their heads, wend their way around their collars and slide inside.
“I’m not coming either,” Ken says now. His face is discolored, ash on his cheeks, salt around his mouth and his eyes. His ankle is swollen, the skin straining against the bandages that are drenched in blood again. The leeches on Ken’s shirt and his khaki pants move downward, enticed by the scent of fresh blood.
Sam bends to whack at them and knocks them to the ground. He takes out his tin of cigarettes, shoves three in his mouth and lights them all together. That first draft of nicotine gladdens his lungs, and the air around them is so still, so humid that the smoke hangs over his head in a mist. Sam gives Marianne and Ken a cigarette each, then sets his, lit end smoldering, against the leeches on his legs. They shrivel in protest and drop off, one by one.
“Aren’t you afraid of the Japanese smelling the smoke, Sam?” Ken asks, his face more drawn in fatigue now that they are at rest, even so briefly.
“It’s doubtful that they can smell anything beyond the death of that village.”
“I’m not going there,” Marianne says again. She too is tired, but there is something else in her eyes, something Sam has not seen before today. Fear. Marianne is afraid of confronting a scene much like the one she left behind in the Kachin village where she lived for so many years. There, every death was of someone dear, someone she had laughed with, taught the scriptures to, kept safe from the menace of the white man. They had been her children, given to Marianne by her god. And in the end, they had taken care of her, given her the gift of her life. So Marianne sits stubbornly amongst leeches and dead leaves, her heels dug into the ground, upwind from another, shattered village that has not survived the onslaught of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Sam squats on his haunches, his knees creaking. “Tell me,” he says. He cannot order them to move. They are not children; they are not even army. Well, Ken is, and Sam outranks him. But the rules do not seem to apply here anymore. Sam will not leave Marianne and Ken on the hillside to forage through the dead village on his own. He does not know what he will find there, who will still be living, who dead, what terrors await to haunt future dreams for many years. He does not know if the Japanese still linger, if he will come out alive. He does know though that they have to scavenge for food. From their last supply drop all they have left is a can of cherries in heavy syrup, a can of cream to go with it—not enough to keep them alive. Sam also cannot leave them alone here even for a brief while, no matter how stubborn they are, how pigheaded; he is their guardian and he must either stay with them or take them with him. He chooses to take them with him. Since he also cannot order them to lift their behinds from the forest floor and follow him, he will coax them.
“Tell me,” he says again. Gently.
Marianne’s eyes fill with tears. She shrugs the thick straps of her haversack from her shoulders and pulls it onto her lap. From inside, she draws out a whittled teakwood pipe and a dried plantain leaf full of a powdered substance, much like tea leaves. She stuffs the pipe, sets it smoking with the lit end of her cigarette, and inhales. As the opium races through her lungs, into her veins, it dulls the sharp edges of fear on her face. Her blue eyes, washed out and overexposed to the Burma sun, glaze over. The opium smacks its calmness into her with even just that one draw, for Marianne, like Sam and Ken, is hungry, is tired, is weak from the rain and the blinding heat. She offers the pipe to Ken. Then to Sam. And they both clasp it gratefully, even Sam, despite his best intentions—and he does intend to go into the village, come what may—wants the blessed relief of a few hours without worry.
A grinning idiocy comes over Sam. His mouth widens and his ears seem to grow funnel-like on either side of his head. He can hear every drip of water in the hush of the forest.
“Have you?” he asks, feeling his lips stretch over his teeth.
Marianne lifts a slow gaze to his and then shifts on her buttocks to face Ken.
“Once,” Ken says. “I’ve been in love only once, Sam.” He had asked Sam this very question, once, so many days ago, and it is only now Sam thinks to ask him back. But Sam has mulled over this word, this love, not wanting to think of the other word, death, in relation to his missing brother, Mike.
“Who…,” Sam begins and then pauses to consider the pictures of emotion Ken displays so violently across his youthful face. The effect of the opium takes away all pretense of civility Ken might otherwise have shown—his mouth twists, he heaves from his stomach, his fists clench into bloodless stumps at the ends of his wrists. Sam almost shudders at this sudden and unexpected ugliness. Ken is the ideal of an all-American boy—thinly muscled, lean jawed, clean shaven, with an easy manner and a beguiling, faultless smile. But some passion lurks beneath that surface, pulled out by Sam’s innocuous question.
“What is her name?” Sam asks, more out of curiosity than anything else. He watches Ken with care, leaning forward. Marianne does not see any of this, for she is humming a tune and examining her fingernails with the studied attention of the very inebriated.
Ken turns from the bright scrutiny of Sam’s blue eyes and rests his chin against the tree trunk behind him. His voice comes out sour. “What do names matter? It was a pretty enough one. Rosalie.”
Eight
One hard-pressed Resident, Sir Bertand Glancey, had travelled hundreds of miles to talk to one of the Princes about a problem. He was very put out to be told that his Highness could not be disturbed. He protested that he had come a long way and eventually the Maharajah appeared. “Ah, Sir Bertrand,” he said in a state of excitement, “we are having a very urgent Cabinet meeting.”
The Resident, appreciating this sort of priority, was suitably impressed.
“Yes,” went on the Maharajah. “There is a most interesting item on the agenda; we have three canaries and we are trying to decide which one sings best.”
—Ann Morrow, The Maharajas of India, 1998
The same sun that blistered Rudrakot flamed harsh and white over the Civil Lines and the cantonment of Meerut, about three hundred miles east. Northeast of the city was a large, wholly tented compound that simmered along with Meerut. This was a military compound, so the tents, though white, blazed with the care of scrubbing from a hundred servants; the mud paths between the tents were swept and blighted of vegetation, stones lined the paths, dabbed with red, white, and green paint, liquid in the heat.
Inside the tents, it was as though India had stepped back three hundred years into the traveling tents and entourages of the great Mughal kings. Oils of present, past, and future kings (or in this case, princes) of the princely kingdoms in India adorned the walls. Canvas tarpaulin mats had been laid on the ground, these then covered with jute mats, and these further clad with Persian carpets in grasshopper greens, coconut browns, or chameleon reds, depending upon the whimsy of the prince. Unlike the divans and bolsters and low beds of the Mughal kings, furniture of every modern and ancient English kind abounded—secretaires and writing desks, chairs and tables, four-poster beds, a lot of which would have been not just welcomed in the best of British homes, but desperately vied for.
It was here, so far away from Rudrakot, that Jai had spent many months. This was the headquarters of the Imperial Cadet Corps, a concoction of Lord Curzon’s brain. Curzon, viceroy of India at the turn of the century, had sought to birth a military school in India for the sons and male members of the Indian elite, and by that he naturally meant the princes—the natural nobles of the country.
In the quiet dull of that afternoon in May, Jai lounged in a wooden armchair with curved legs and blue damask upholstery. Blue was the predominant color in the tent. The sheets on his bed, placed on a raised platform, were of a light blue silk; the coverlet was a darker blue-and-puce brocade; the carpets were a rare Per
sian white, with a blue-and-gold weave in the pattern. All the furniture was in gleaming wood, mahogany and a dark, rich walnut—the Queen Anne bookcase with its marquetry inlay and an opalescent oyster veneer; the table at which he wrote his letters and corrected his notes; the sofa and armchair in an eighteenth-century Chinese style. Jai had his feet propped on an occasional table and a blank writing pad rested on his knees.
A cool breeze swirled around the tent, repelling the immense heat of the sun, as a rectangular punkah swung back and forth, pulled by rope by a boy seated outside. This was the time for a siesta, but Jai, restless as ever, had never yet closed his eyes in the afternoon unless it was on a day when he was ill with a fever.
He was a tall man, leanly muscled from all his years in the saddle. Horses were Jai’s first love. There was no time in his life when he could not remember the scent of a stable, the nicker of pleasure when one of his horses saw him approaching, the sigh when he ran his hand along their corded and muscular necks. Because he was a prince, the heir to Rudrakot, Raja Bhimsen, Jai’s father, had frowned on his sleeping in the stables at night, but no other power on earth had kept him from his horses for every waking moment. Riding horses almost from the day he could walk—first his Shetland ponies, and then the walers—had burned Jai’s skin to a dark ochre. His cheeks were pitted by a childhood bout of smallpox, which he had fought and vanquished, but which had left its mark upon him. He had a strong face, cut in sharp angles; a slanting, clean-shaven jaw; and a trimmed, thin mustache, more a darkening above his well-formed lips than a mustache.
He moved his right hand and dipped the pen into the inkwell by his side, then, holding the nib against the rim of the glass, drained the excess ink. When he put the pen to paper and began drawing in broad strokes, the mane, forelock, glittering eyes, and flared nostrils of his favorite horse, Fitzgerald, took shape quickly. Jai shaded in the area on Fitzgerald’s forehead, and left a tiny star of white unmarked. Then he tore the paper from the pad and let it fly loose into the tent, where it wavered in the breeze from the punkah before settling on the floor. His hand hovered again over the paper, his pen dropped blotches of ink upon its unmarred surface, but he could not sketch again.
The Splendor of Silence Page 12