As he stood there, his shoulder throbbing, the pain beginning to creep up his neck, Sam felt glorious, and they gazed at each other under the string of lights. Mila first broke that gaze, everything within her floating and delighted. It was as though nothing else mattered right now but Sam—the patches of night on his face where the light did not touch, the darkened blue of his eyes, the sweep of hair across his forehead. He stood rubbing his shoulder.
Mila ducked under the booth and ran her fingers along the wooden boards searching for a prize. She began to giggle, imagining Sam’s surprise when he was given a neatly crocheted set of six napkins. She searched and realized that the prizes had all been given away. In one corner, long forgotten from some previous mela, was a little cardboard box. Mila pulled it out and set it on the counter, her head almost bumping into Sam’s, who had been leaning over to see what she had been doing.
A cloud of dust rose into the air when Mila thumped the box down and Sam coughed. “I’m afraid there are no other prizes left, Captain Hawthorne, but I found this instead. Whatever is in it is yours.”
“Wait.” Sam’s grip on her wrist was strong this time and he yanked her hand away from the box. “Let me look. There might be a snake or a scorpion hiding inside.” He pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and gingerly flipped open the box’s cover with one end. There was a pile of straw inside, quite flattened out, and on that straw rested three tiny monkeys, chopped roughly out of a light-colored wood.
“The Mahatma’s monkeys,” Mila said. “They speak no evil, they see no evil, they hear no evil.” She picked them up one by one and set them on the table, facing Sam. “Are these good enough for a prize?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “But let me give them to you. I want to give you something.”
“Oh no,” Mila said. “You have rightfully won these monkeys. They are yours, Captain Hawthorne.”
“Are they made of sandalwood?”
They bent their heads to the carvings. Mila studiously kept her face away from Sam but was aware, with every breath and every sense, that Sam’s head was thus so close to hers. She could smell the wood-sweet aroma of the sandalwood and the sharper cut of Sam’s cologne in the air around her. She knew he was looking at her and wanted desperately to clasp his hand again. Perhaps if she made as if to place the monkeys in his hand…Mila straightened up. As she did, she saw Lady Pankhurst drifting toward them, the chiffon from her skirt trailing along the grass.
“Mila,” Lady Pankhurst said, waving her white arms around languidly to mean nothing at all. “Please do bring Captain Hawthorne to see me at my ‘at home’ tomorrow. How fortunate it is,” she said, turning to Sam, “that you are here on a Thursday. My ‘at homes’ are usually tomorrow afternoon. At two o’clock.”
Mila felt her heart still and die and all that silly euphoria of a few minutes ago come to a clean end. Three years ago, when Lady Pankhurst had first made her appearance in Rudrakot on Colonel Pankhurst’s arm, she had arranged Friday afternoons as her “at homes,” and these solely for Mila. For you know, my dears—she had told the civilian and regimental wives, somewhat suspicious that this exclusivity was a sign of favor not bestowed upon them—I must get to know her. We are to be at the same level, Edward says, though how I do not see. I must find out.
Mila had visited Lady Pankhurst at two o’clock every Friday afternoon and sat for an uncomfortably long time in the drawing room attached to her bedroom. Mila was only eighteen when these forced “at homes” began, and she went because Papa had suggested to her that they might well be a very good idea. Until then, all of Colonel Pankhurst’s parties and balls had occurred without a hostess, and suffered as a consequence. Lady Pankhurst was decorative in the best of ways, and Raman was man enough to appreciate this. That she was friendly to his daughter was simply wonderful.
The first three Fridays, Mila did not see Lady Pankhurst at all. She waited for two hours in the lush and hushed drawing room until she could recall everything in it from memory. There were long-stemmed dahlias in silver and porcelain vases; the poor stuffed tiger Colonel Pankhurst had shot in a past shikar with Jai gazed at her with a frozen stare; Dresden dolls lounged on the occasional tables. This waiting, this lack of attention from Lady Pankhurst, was all very bewildering to Mila, but she did not complain, or even, in the innocence of her youth, consider what it might mean. On the fourth Friday afternoon, the door to Lady Pankhurst’s bedchamber opened and a lieutenant from the Rudrakot Rifles came out, buttoning his collar. He stopped and flushed when he saw Mila, but did not recognize her as the political agent’s daughter; otherwise his momentary discomfort would have been more acute. When he had left, Lady Pankhurst emerged with a gin and tonic to talk for the rest of the afternoon with Mila. Or rather, she talked, Mila listened.
This ritual continued for the next three years, with only minor changes. Mila visited Lady Pankhurst promptly at two o’clock, sat in the drawing room, and read a book while a slew of young officers entered her bedchamber. Then she would hear the soft, singsong murmur of Lady Pankhurst’s voice, unending and boring, and Mila would be thankful that all she had to do was wait outside, not listen to that voice. By now, Mila knew what was happening and once had even dared to flatten her ear against the door to listen. She heard a soft thumping of flesh on flesh, and Lady Pankhurst saying, “That was marvelous, darling. Hand me a cigarette, will you?” Lady Pankhurst’s bedchamber did have another door leading to the outside verandah and the back gardens of the residency, but she had very soon deemed it necessary for her young men to leave through the drawing room to the outside in case anyone was around to see this or ask questions. She could always tell Edward that she had been having a nice little chat with Mr. Raman’s daughter and the young man.
Heat and anger crept under Mila’s skin at the mela grounds. She watched a thick and large moth flap lethargically around Lady Pankhurst and settle on her thin shoulder, and wanted to slap at that shoulder with a newspaper, ostensibly, of course, to kill the moth. Mila’s face seethed with warmth, and she wondered dispassionately, in the midst of all that rage, where this loathing had come from. She had never before hated someone as much as she hated Amelia Pankhurst right now. She had never even cared that she had assisted in Lady Pankhurst’s randy “at homes,” and when Raman asked—as he invariably did—how her afternoon was, she would reply noncommittally and he would be satisfied.
Lady Pankhurst held out a hand to Sam and he took it in his. To Mila, it seemed as though he held it for an unnecessarily long time, but it was Lady Pankhurst who left her hand in his, opening her mouth to talk a few times, but seeming not to succeed with the words until this came out somewhat coyly, “So I will see you tomorrow then, Captain Hawthorne?” It was a command, not a request.
Before Sam could answer, Mila said, “I’m afraid that will not be possible, Lady Pankhurst. Captain Hawthorne wishes to visit Chetak’s tomb; we have a picnic planned for tomorrow.”
Lady Pankhurst sighed and withdrew her hand from Sam’s. “I think,” she said, turning now to face Mila, “you must have misunderstood me, dear Mila. I would very much like to see Captain Hawthorne tomorrow. I’m sure he wishes to come too.”
Sam finally cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Lady Pankhurst. But we do have a prior engagement. It is a pity that your ‘at homes’ are only on Fridays, since I am not going to be here next Friday.”
An immense hush then descended upon them. Lady Pankhurst’s back grew rigid. To Mila, the band seemed to play American jazz unnaturally loudly and she watched the dancers twirl on the floor, their skirts flying, their mouths open and toothy. Sam looked away, his shoulders shaking. He was laughing, Mila thought with outrage. Laughing at them both. She should let him go to Amelia Pankhurst’s lecherous afternoons and let him be ensnared by her in an iron web. But she did not want that, really. She wanted Sam Hawthorne unsullied by anyone else here at Rudrakot. That was a thought that lurked unacknowledged somewhere inside; on the outside Mila considered that Sam was their guest, and Papa had sa
id that she was to look after him. And tomorrow just happened to be a convenient time to take him to Chetak’s tomb.
“Well then,” Lady Pankhurst said. “So it goes.” She shrugged gracefully and nodded at them both. “I will see you next Friday as usual, Mila?”
“Of course, Lady Pankhurst,” Mila said, “as usual.”
“When does our dear Jai return?” Lady Pankhurst said this with a shard of malice, and it was a question that required no answer from Mila, for by the time the last of those words had been spoken, Lady Pankhurst was well out of earshot.
For a long while, Mila and Sam did not speak. Something had happened between them, hurtling them toward a future that was still indiscernible, and there was the real fear of that unknown that kept them silent. Mila gathered the coconuts in a box, placed the money on top, and Sam carried it for her across the lawns to the tea tent.
They walked carefully apart from each other, uncertainty marring their brows. From his table, Kiran watched them with foreboding, thinking that this surely could not be, dreading that Sims could be right in his estimation. He was well on his way to getting drunk and saw everything through a gimlet smog that was surprisingly clear and lucid. Come tomorrow, he would not remember all of the evening, but this one moment of a sudden dread would return, repeatedly. Sam and Mila could not be. Kiran knew that Sims, much as he extended a hand of friendship, even brotherhood toward him, would not look kindly at Kiran if he coveted a white woman. It was as simple as that, obvious to all of them, obvious, really, to everyone but Sam and Mila.
Sam excused himself briefly to visit the men’s washroom just beyond the billiards room, which was off-limits to women. The stalls in the washroom had been built with rich brown chin-high mahogany partitions. The toilets, known affectionately as thunderboxes, were little more than holes in mahogany seats with deep galvanized tin trays beneath to accumulate the waste. Sweepers emptied these trays; they were a special caste of men who came in the dense of the night, their skins charred and darkened by this dirty work. The men’s washroom was more primitive in its fittings than the women’s washroom with its wicker furniture, talcum powder on trays, and gurgling, new, flushing toilets.
Kiran followed Sam and occupied a stall near his. Their eyes met over the partition but they said nothing. More than once Kiran dragged words from his sluggish brain, but he could not speak them, for all he had was a suspicion. How did one voice that?
Sam left first and paused quite by chance to glance at the map of Rudrakot on the far wall of the billiards room. He traced his bearings with his finger—the Victoria Club, the Civil Lines, Raman’s home, the residency, and striking out into the desert was Chetak’s tomb, where Mila said they were to go tomorrow. That would not happen, of course; he had to return to the Lancers’ headquarters and talk with Sims and Blakely, find out what they knew. His finger idled over the contours of Chetak’s tomb and then strayed out into the wilderness. A little building was drawn on in pencil, and somewhere in the sands were the words, Field Punishment Center, 1930. Sam snatched his hand away with a thudding heart. He looked around. There were a few officers lounging around the room, a few more playing pool, leaning on their cue sticks.
Almost casually, without another glance at the map, Sam nodded to the men and sauntered out to meet Mila and Ashok. On the drive back Ashok chattered away. At another time, Mila would have seen that his eyes were feverish with excitement, his speech was impassioned and frivolous, and she would have been worried. She had noticed him at the hedge, talking with Vimal Kumar, the man they had passed near their house who had stood and stared at them in all of his glorious beauty, the man who had studied mathematics and English with Ashok. Mila had never been able to rest easily in Vimal’s presence, and now the rumors were that he was involved in the nationalist movement and she did not want Ashok pulled into the snares of nationalism. Mila herself was ambivalent about the movement, and whatever her private feelings, she could not, would not, voice them in public because that would mean going against Papa and his life’s work. Her loyalties lay with her father.
On another day, Mila would have fretted about Ashok renewing any friendship at all with Vimal. Now it was Ashok who caught the uneasiness in their silence and fell quiet himself, thinking, as his brother had done, that something was not right between Captain Hawthorne and Mila.
May 29, 1942
Rudrakot, India
Fifteen
…our women are not allowed to [go] out…so long as we have the purdah we must observe it strictly…I said it would be alright if he took his maharani sahiba to any place in Kishengarh, but as regards taking them outside to such places as Calcutta…I was quite against. So long as we have the purdah we must not do these things…
—Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan
Singh Kanota, Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary,
A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India, 2002
Two missives passed each other that night, neither read until the morning, when it was too late to do anything about the information contained within. By the time Mila, Sam, and Ashok returned home the previous evening, it had been late. Not perhaps late in the calendars of the officers who went to the soiree at the residency and danced away a good portion of the night, but Raman was in bed and well asleep before nine o’clock.
Mila paused outside her father’s door for a long while, listening for a sound from within. She heard him sigh in his sleep, turn over in his bed, but then his breathing settled into evenness. She went back to her room and sat down at the little teak desk that Papa had bought for her when she was six and wrote out a short note for Raman that they—Sam, Ashok, and she—were going to Chetak’s tomb early the next morning on a picnic, that they would be out the whole day and return perhaps for dinner, perhaps not until much after. She did not ask Raman for permission. He would not have denied it, though he might have hesitated and thought about the propriety of their leaving like this and being away for so long without him as a chaperone. But there was no impropriety really in what Mila was going to do, just a hesitation, a cautiousness. She expected that they might well be out of the house before Papa woke up in the morning, so she wrote him a letter in her own hand without leaving a message with Sayyid.
She stepped out of her room and felt against the wall for the switch to turn off the corridor light. Now light seeped from under the doors near hers—Ashok at the far end, Sam right next to her, only darkness from Kiran’s room to her left, and a disapproving peel of light under Pallavi’s door, next to Kiran’s. Papa’s side of the house, opposite her, was dark and silent. He was still asleep. She switched on the light again and went across to slide the note under the door.
When she came back to her room, she unwound her sari, threw it on the chaise longue, stepped out of her petticoat, and unbuttoned her blouse with a great weariness. Then, in just her bra and underpants, Mila sat at the dressing table and dabbed some lotion into a piece of cotton to clean away the lines of kohl under her eyes and wipe away the big red bindi she had painted on the middle of her forehead. She heard Pallavi’s soft footsteps in the corridor outside as she walked up and down the length of it in bare feet.
Mila let her hair loose from its plait until it fell around her shoulders to her waist and began to brush it until it shone. Her movements were jerky until the knots had come loose from her hair and then the brush slid in smoothly. Her arm tired, but she would still not ask Pallavi to come in and do this for her. This was the first time Mila could remember that Pallavi had not helped her prepare for bed, combing her hair and plaiting it again, even rubbing her forehead gently until she slept. A tear formed at the corner of her eye and slid down her cheek and she wiped it away, deafening her ears to Pallavi’s striding in the corridor. She knew Pallavi would continue this for at least another two hours, until she was able to contain her anger, until fatigue forced her to bed.
The idea of going to Chetak’s tomb had come in a moment to Mila, upset as she ha
d been with Lady Pankhurst’s machinations to get Sam into her boudoir. But this was not something she could explain to Pallavi. What could she say? That she wanted Sam Hawthorne for herself, and so she had made up an excuse with Lady Pankhurst? It sounded so stupid even in the coolness of the night, Mila thought, even now when she was free from any provocation, that it must be untrue. She was just being solicitous of their visitor. Let him leave Rudrakot after having visited and seen all they had to offer. He was, after all, their guest, not staying at the residency. Why should Lady Pankhurst take up any part of his time here? But none of this would have even remotely mollified Pallavi, who had been on the edge of being scandalized when she heard of their plans. Her reaction had been unnerving, stunning.
“Tell your papa,” she had hissed, pulling the pallu of her sari close around her.
“Why?” Mila asked in exasperation. She hoped both Ashok and Sam had gone up to their rooms after they had parted at the front entrance and were not anywhere nearby to listen to this conversation. “I mean, I will tell Papa. What do I do in this house without Papa’s knowledge, Pallavi?”
“Tell him now,” Pallavi said. “And see if he gives you permission to leave like this tomorrow.”
“Sam Hawthorne is our guest, Pallavi.”
“He can find his entertainment at the Victoria Club. Why does he not stay there? Would it not suit him better, all the parties, the women who dance and drink and smoke? These women who speak English?”
Now Mila had to grin. “You speak English too.”
Pallavi was pleased by the compliment and so her face lightened but was soon replaced with a frown again. “Mila, this is not right. I have not seen you all day long. You were away riding in the morning, at the mela since late afternoon, and now it is so late.” She gestured at the grandfather clock in the dining room, which obligingly began to chime out the hour of ten so that Pallavi had to raise her voice to speak over the sound. “When are you ever at home? A woman must find her amusements within the walls of her house. Here you must supervise the servants, tend to the kitchens, embroider and knit in the afternoons, wait for your husband to return in the evenings. Your mother never went to the club, even after she was married and had the right to go. She never stepped out of her house before she was married.”
The Splendor of Silence Page 22