The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  —Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj, 1987

  For many years after the death of the Raj, my dear Olivia, British writers would pen long tales about Raj childhoods, Raj service, the might of the empire, the necessity for it, why it benefited India. Indian writers tell of sacrifices made and horrors undergone in the name of that ultimate mother, India. Neither opts to be deliberately untruthful, but as much as the passing of the years has brought a clarity about the characters and attitudes of the rulers and the ruled, the distance has also created a fog. The Indian writers can sometimes be overly vehement, and the British look back wistfully upon their pukka sahib childhoods with memories clouded by sentimentality and twaddle.

  But there was no losing sight of the fact that, friendly or not, sympathetic or not, the British were the masters and we were…They were unwelcome, and would be asked to Quit India in a few short months.

  So back then, my dearest Olivia, back in 1942, on that 28th of May, the differences were sharp and clear, as though newly cleaved into being. As Sam moved down the lawns toward the mela at the Victoria Club, he did not see these differences or realize what they could mean—why, he was in love with Mila, how could he separate her from her people?

  Sam looked out in the direction of the lake. From here he could not see the mela itself, but a path, fringed with a short hedge of jasmine bushes led out between the lush lawns. Everything was neat, trimmed to precision, mowed to perfection, the blades of grass short cropped, as though with the razor of a skillful barber. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw Mila and Ashok on the steps to the club. Nothing had taken away his own surprising attraction to her, and this rush of feeling startled him anew. He found himself thinking of the drive here, of the way her hands rested on the steering wheel, the folds of her sari around her waist and the curve of her thighs, the obvious affection she had for young Ashok, the fact that both of them thought deeply about matters that had little to do with them.

  A loudspeaker boomed somewhere near the lake just as Sam lit a cigarette. “Two fat ladies, eighty-eight!” “One short of my age, twenty-nine!” A shout came out into the air. “You saw thirty at least a decade ago, mate.”

  “A pair of hockey sticks, seventy-seven,” the loudspeaker went on.

  “Housie!”

  There was the sound of laughter, both men’s and women’s voices screaming to check the results. Sam went down the path and came out into a clearing that sloped gently to the lake. There were rows of stalls set in a ring around a central tent, topped off by striped red and dull gold shamianas with fringe in the front, in the colors of the Rudrakot Rifles. Wooden poles held up the shamianas at regular intervals, wrapped in red and gold ribbons that climbed up in dizzy diagonals. The tables at each stall were covered with immaculately white tablecloths, their edges dragging on the grass. One huge wooden pole had been dug in at the very center, like a maypole, and strings of triangular flags swung down over the grounds and up onto the shamiana poles. The flags simmered limply in the still-lingering May afternoon heat.

  A castle gate loomed over the path, complete with battlements and pointed merlons, the large stone slabs painted in blacks and grays of undulating color on canvas stretched across a wooden frame. The gate was meant to evoke the chilly black stone of Home fortifications, of knights in armor, of maidens in distress, of mists across moors and muffled horse hooves and flying capes. But the artists—one of the bearers at the Victoria Club and a gardener—had not been able to comprehend all this foreignness, even though it had been explained with a great deal of patience and some eventual asperity, by both the club secretary and Laetitia Sexton. So the castle was now both English and Indian; the main gate had blue-and-white-tiled Persian and Hindu inlay, mimicking most of the forts in Rudrakot; the stone slabs had furtive dabs of ocher, for the artists had never before seen black stone, only the red sandstone from the local quarries. What little English part remained on the canvas sweated reproachfully in the heat, the paint melting in spots.

  At the ticket booth, Sam counted out four annas. He held the coins in his palm for a fleeting moment before handing them over. The last time he had looked at money in his hand was at the railway station. Four annas bought entry into a church mela. Three further eroded the innocence of a little boy, made him think that all adult men were predators. Life was cheaper in India than music organs.

  Sam put the rest of the change back into his pants pocket and stepped onto the grass that squished damply under his feet. The recent watering, the moisture on such a hot day, had brought out little clouds of mosquitoes hovering around in patches. The insects did not follow to swarm about him, but it was less than an hour to sunset, and that was when they would begin their seeking of light from unnatural sources and the seeking of flesh and blood without discrimination, both Indian and British. The biggest crowd, the most people, drifted in and out of the main tent, which had the legend bearing the letters TEA. Sam paused at the entrance.

  He saw them in a tableau—the Indians seemingly on one side, the British on the other. Hands froze toward mouths, glasses slanted precariously, the lemon slices in the gimlets nudging the rims. Smiles and half smiles widened mouths. In every gaze, there was a question. Sam was new, he was unusual, he felt it to be so, and yet he was aware that they must all know that he was in Rudrakot. The Indian women were in a mass of color, saris that were of all fabrics, silk and cotton, chiffons with a sheen, glittering embroidery. The English ladies were in deliberately muted pastels, their legs cast in stockings, bows on their shoes.

  Eventually, the tableau disintegrated, as it had to, for they had all stood regarding each other for a while. The lines shimmied, coughs arose in throats, an elbow itch was scratched. An officer from the Rudrakot Rifles came forward.

  “Second Lieutenant Sims,” he said. “Fourth Rudrakot Rifles.”

  “Captain Hawthorne,” Sam replied. He did not flinch from either the handshake or the gaze leveled upon him—there was nothing to show him as the afternoon’s mali outside the barracks. Now he saw Sims clearly. He was a young man without the shadow of hair on his smooth cheekbones and palely lashed eyes that blinked in the light.

  “You’re an awfully long way from home, aren’t you?”

  “Not that far away,” Sam said easily, “Third Burma Rangers.”

  Now the other officers came up and introductions swung around the circle. Blakely, Marriott, Patton, and Miles. Sam strained his memory for a mention of the new names in Mike’s letters, but could remember little. If Mike drank in the mess with these young men, if he played bridge at this club, if he even had an altercation with another officer, his letters had said nothing about it. Instead there were reams of prose on Rudrakot, the town, the cantonment, the bazaar, and the freedom movement. Mike had come to India for India, and for the war, and though he had not expected to be stationed in Rudrakot, so far from any war front, there was India everywhere around him, and little else had engaged his attention when he picked up his pen twice to write to Maude. They were all curious, he saw that, but too polite to ask anything more, until one young man said, “How long have you been in this infernal country?”

  “Three months,” Sam replied, even as a slow burn began within him.

  “And Burma?”

  “Just a little while,” Sam said. “I’m glad to be here. I had not realized there was a regiment quartered at Rudrakot.”

  “Have a drink?” someone else said. They parted to let him through to the chairs ranged around a wood table, and as he came up to the table, he was introduced to the ladies sitting there. The final one, when his eyes came to rest upon her, was Mrs. Stanton.

  “Why, we are old friends,” she said. She spoke with the assurance of a long friendship, though theirs had been a mere acquaintance, tinged by something very akin to loathing in Sam. “We shared a coupé from Palampore last night,” she said to the listening ears around her. Even the officers of the Rifles had stilled, waiting for more, watchful. She tittered and raised a hand to hide a
smile. “Nothing inappropriate, I assure you. There was simply no other place in the bogie. Captain Hawthorne has been in the war, at Burma. I had no idea that your business in Rudrakot was at the Victoria, Captain Hawthorne.”

  Two of the Rudrakot Rifles officers wistfully slid their hands along the brass buttons on their uniforms, a sharp red, with dull gold epaulets. Only in India, Sam thought suddenly, would even men wear the red of ripe cherries—a color so bright as to almost be naughty—with no effect on their manhood. Here everything was so shamelessly hued—countenances, clothes, hair, even the languages, rich with ribaldry that Sam had not even dared to understand. For he knew that all such ribaldry would suffer in translation into English and become, from the colorful, merely banal. The khaki, his khaki, represented the war, any other color, especially red, which was difficult to camouflage, meant a regiment in waiting, a rear guard, and one perhaps never to be called to the front, never to glory in victory, never to die a stupid death.

  Mrs. Stanton had made everything worse, as women would when they meant to be clever but ended up being merely shrill. Envy rose and sighed above them all, onerous, souring the sun-fired air—it extinguished some of the goodwill around Sam and he wanted to say to these young men, not so much younger than he in age perhaps, that wars were messy, deflating exercises, that life never returned to normal, that the only way to survive was not to feel anything, especially not regret at a well-ironed red uniform.

  “There’s no business as such, Mrs. Stanton,” he said. “I’m here, as I said on the train, to rest my shoulder. On leave.” He paused. “I’m not at the Victoria Club either.”

  They waited.

  “I’m staying with the political agent.”

  Mrs. Stanton raised her thinly penciled eyebrows. “You mean the resident, surely. But I did not see you in the house. Is he with us, Amelia?” This last to the young woman next to her who wore a wide-brimmed hat even under the shamiana’s shade, and lifted it and her head with an effort. Sam transferred his attention to Amelia Pankhurst and felt a slight surprise when he saw her. For she was young, younger than he had expected the wife of a British resident to be, perhaps not even thirty. She had a conventionally pretty face, with eyes, nose, and mouth at the right places, and a sleek head of golden hair. Her eyes were blue, but the blue of newly blown glass, without any character behind them. Amelia Pankhurst had slung her long and thin body on the easy chair, arms on the armrests, a glass of something cold casting drops of condensation upon the wood. Her expression did not change, the smile remained the same, no life came to her eyes. Mrs. Stanton surreptitiously nudged her in the ribs. “My dear, is Captain Hawthorne with us?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, Adelaide.” Her voice held a little bit of childish petulance. “I was lying down after lunch; perhaps he is in the house, but I wouldn’t know that.” She caught Sam’s gaze eventually and said, “Welcome to Rudrakot, Captain…er…Captain. We hope you have a good stay with us.” And then she subsided into her loose, flowered dress and allowed it, in doing so, to fall in becoming folds around her body. Amelia Pankhurst was not quite as detached as she seemed; she knew how to be picturesque in the best of ways without seeming to think about it.

  Sam bowed his head. “Thank you, Mrs. Pankhurst.”

  “Lady Pankhurst,” Mrs. Stanton corrected, and Sam acknowledged that with another nod and continued, “But I am staying at the political agent’s house.”

  “Ah…” That came out in a rush of whispers from almost everyone around him.

  “By special invitation?” Mrs. Stanton asked. “Surely not, Mr. Raman would have no reason…”

  The underlying implication was that if Sam was at all important enough to have been invited to stay with the political agent, when he could, as all other visitors did, have just as easily stayed at the Victoria Club, then Mrs. Stanton had very poorly judged her traveling companion of the previous night. Sam saw her dust something invisible off Amelia Pankhurst’s shoulder and saw Mrs. Stanton for what she was—not a relative, not an aunt or an elderly cousin, but a hired companion. Engaged for the special purpose of keeping Amelia Pankhurst connected with the real world. Mrs. Stanton oversaw the myriad duties of a resident’s wife; she wrote out the elegant dinner invitations at the end of which Amelia scrawled her pretty name; she scolded the servants into obedience.

  Colonel Pankhurst had escaped the arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of love, all over the length and breadth of India for thirty years, only to fall prey to Cupid on his last Home leave three years ago. He had met Amelia in London and had been charmed by her aloofness, her exquisite grace in smoking cigarettes, even by the crimson lipstick imprints on her wineglasses when she set them down on the table. The war was but a few months away, trouble rumbled all through town, but Amelia was untouched. So strong, so brave, Pankhurst had thought, while they were all in such a dither. So he married her after a very brief courtship; she married him because she was told to do so and thought it would be jolly good fun to go out to India and ride on an elephant or watch the races at the gymkhana in her best hats. It took Pankhurst two months to realize that his wife was unruffled all the time because very little meant anything to her, but he was still in lust with his her, and still envied for the perfection of her complexion and the gloss of her hair. He was a practical man—even reasonable at times or he would not have been inculcated from the army into the more hallowed Indian Political Service as a diplomat stationed in princely kingdoms—so he’d hired Mrs. Stanton from the ranks of old, widowed army wives who had stayed on in India.

  Mrs. Stanton then was the unofficial wife at the residency, and she made sure the real wife, the woman who carried Pankhurst’s name, sailed through her days with relative ease, that she came down to the parties on Pankhurst’s arm correctly dressed, that she kept up a semblance of social obligations and danced with the officers from the Rifles and the Lancers in the correct order.

  Sam could not have known all of this upon his first introduction, but he sensed most of it anyhow; since coming to Rudrakot earlier this day, he had suddenly become aware, suddenly started to see this society in India. It wasn’t just Rudrakot, of course, Sam had been in India for three months, and now the sum of all of his experiences slowed into an ultimate comprehension, all the pieces, noticed blatantly or absorbed only by his subconscious, began to fit into place. He also saw why Mrs. Stanton considered herself so important.

  Before this job as a companion to Lady Pankhurst, she had been reduced to taking quarters on a monthly basis at a hotel run by a slovenly Indian who never looked at her without seeming to want to rip off her starched collar and bury his head between her sagging white breasts. His mouth had always watered when he talked to her, his saliva stained red with paan. Mr. Stanton had been a mere boxwallah, a clerk at the local cement factory for twenty-five years, and when he died, there had been no home for Mrs. Stanton to return to, no children to impose upon, and she could only afford the rent at the second-class Indian hotel and all the travails, real and imagined, the lustful owner put her through. Here, she could not pay for the whole-meals plan, so subsisted on tea and dry toast for breakfast, the odd curry pounded into blandness for dinner, a stringy leg of chicken bathed in a squishy white sauce when her purse ran full. But for all the poverty, the shame and embarrassment at her reduced circumstances, her tongue had been cutting, her gaze keen, her sense of propriety stupendous, her person neat and presentable, every frock darned in pearl-like stitches, every stocking reused until the silk feathered and disintegrated upon touching. Colonel Pankhurst’s choice had fallen upon her, among the various other women who could have had this job. In all of her fifty-eight years, this was the best thing that had ever happened to Mrs. Stanton, and so enormous was her self-confidence, so little her humility, that she thought it only her right—after all, she had spent an unnecessarily penurious life as a wife with Harold; she had been born without either looks or money; something that was long owed to her had come due.

  Sam could not res
ist his irritation at Mrs. Stanton, could not help being petty, even though he knew he was being petty and saying, “Colonel Eden at the governor-general’s office in Calcutta suggested that I stay with Mr. Raman. He has been most welcoming.”

  There was something about stringing of those words…Colonel Eden…governor-general…that became a matter of awe and respect, just as Sam had intended. Now he was ashamed of having been so blatant, but he was tired of all the talk even without having talked very much. Sam had no drawing-room manners, not because he had been brought up without any, but the minuets with words, the fencing, the possible thrown daggers sidestepped, the chatter bored him. His mother had never asked much of him other than a few minutes of politeness when they had company and some respectful silence that could be taken for assent when it was necessary. Mike would make faces, or sometimes retching noises that would disintegrate into coughs to cover them up, and fooled no one really but the guests, but Sam had learned to hold himself courteous on a razor’s edge, and had never been pushed over that edge to make a cutting remark. Until now.

  “Of course they would have been,” Sims said, raising his glass and looking at Sam through it. “It’s an honor to be commanded by anyone in the governor-general’s council. Do you know Colonel Eden, I mean, personally?”

  “I’ve only met him once,” Sam said.

  “You must come and stay with us,” Mrs. Stanton said, swiveling her head this way and that until she saw Mr. Abdullah at a table near the cakes and the tea. She waved at him and he ignored her a couple of times and then, forced to respond, rose from his chair, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, and came to stand by her. Surprised by this supposed intimacy between them, surprised even to see Mr. Abdullah at the mela, Sam had begun to shake his head, but Mrs. Stanton would not allow him the luxury of speech. “Mr. Abdullah,” she said, “I have invited Captain Hawthorne to stay with us at the house. Will you see that arrangements are made, please?” Then to not seem too nice, for Sam was just beginning to become more astonished at all this civility, she added, “Right away.”