Sam closed his eyes from the strain of having stared too intensely into the horizon and listened hard. But all he could hear was the raucous chatter of the servants as they prepared the afternoon’s lunch, the clatter of the vessels, the tinkling cooling down of the jeeps’ engines. Where was the field punishment center? According to the Victoria Club map, it was somewhere close by, and yet he had seen nothing through the binoculars. Mike, Sam thought, suddenly overcome with a terrible fear that threatened to break his heart, are you there? He listened more intently, sifting out the sounds near him, yearning for the miraculous sound of Mike’s voice calling out to him, knowing it was stupid to wish for something so strange, so unreal. But everything had been unreal to Sam for the last few days, even Mike’s disappearance. For people did not simply vanish from the middle of a regiment without any reason, without a trace. Sam rubbed the weariness out of his temples and lifted his gaze to the horizon. Nothing. Nothing but a slow swirl of sand, a waver of radiance. He began to raise the glasses up again and saw, without the aid of the binoculars, that the light had altered, cleared, magnified in the distance. And in that shifting a low building of red sandstone crystallized into being.
The field punishment center was less than two miles from Chetak’s tomb.
Seventeen
I had begun to understand and sympathise with the problems of the white man in India soon after my arrival, when I reached the phase that everyone goes through of thinking of the Indians as Wogs. When this happens, all your preconceived ideas seem to go sour on you and then melt away in the hot sun; you see the Indians as a lot of hopeless degenerates and the Soul of India as backsheesh.”
—Louis Hagen, Indian Route March, 1946
At two o’clock in the morning, Raman had risen from his bed, bathed and prayed, eaten a light breakfast to keep hunger away, and then set off on his way to Nodi. The old villager had slept at the back of the house, on the steps leading down to the garden. It had been his best night’s sleep in the last ten days, since he had left Nodi to come in search of Raman. The old man had stopped under a few banyan trees, terrified by every rustle of the leaves (for ghosts of the ill-treated lingered there), on the roadside, in the verandah at Chetak’s tomb, in the bazaar, and finally, spent the last three nights on the platform in the railway station, using his cotton towel to cover his face from the gaze of others. When they left from Rudrakot, Raman rode his horse, fancifully named Sans Reproche by Jai (after he had spent a summer in Paris), who had reared this horse in the regimental stables. Sans Reproche was a gentle, doe-eyed creature, with a propensity for nuzzling his warm and wet nose against Raman’s neck each time he dismounted. The old man had been convinced to ride a donkey, and he had agreed to mount this lesser animal only because it was not a horse. The donkey’s lead was tied to Sayyid’s horse’s saddle and the three of them set out with two other servants to run ahead and light their way with kerosene lanterns held aloft at the end of a pole.
Sayyid had laid his head down for only a brief rest the night before because Mila had returned from the Victoria Club to say simply, “We are going to Chetak’s tomb for a picnic, Sayyid, about six o’clock. Will you see to the arrangements, please?”
“Of course, Mila,” Sayyid said. He had been with Raman for twenty-eight years, since he was sixteen years old, and looked upon Raman as a brother, and his children as his own nephews and niece. But at no time in the last three decades had Sayyid forgotten that he was a servant. Raman, he addressed as “Sahib,” and Lakshmi as “Memsahib,” for they were his masters. With Pallavi, the situation had been fraught with tension and difficulties—for Pallavi too had been a servant when Raman had first married, and had grown into adulthood and the status of the children’s mother, a fact that was still questionable to Sayyid. He ignored Pallavi. He had called her by her name, or “girl,” when she was young, but as she grew older and more assertive in the house, at times daring to order him around, he began to grow deaf and had by now quite forgotten that she even had a name. Sayyid was respectful, but always found an opportunity to materialize under her nose before he spoke so that he did not have to use any form of address.
The children he called by their names. Though rightfully, when they were young, Sayyid should have called Kiran and Ashok something like chota baba, or little Sahib, and Mila missy baba, which had no translation. This he had not, and one day three years ago, suddenly mindful of his place in the house as a butler, and his duties, he had said Chota Sahib to Kiran in the course of a conversation. And Kiran’s response, in his impeccable public school English, had been, “Come off it, Sayyid. I’m a Chota Sahib now? Don’t be ridiculous.” Kiran had gone chortling to Raman’s room to tell him of this latest joke.
Sayyid had then retreated into a dignified silence on that matter and continued to address Kiran, Mila, and Ashok as he always had, all the while bemoaning their too-familiar ways with the household help. Not done, he thought. The masters ought to keep their distance from the servants, and so he had learned from the other butlers in the Civil Lines, especially the British one, imported to the residency to add pomp in the front portico with his elevated nose and his dour visage.
At Mila’s request for a picnic lunch at Chetak’s tomb, Sayyid had balked, but within himself. Where Pallavi could ask, no, demand that Mila talk with her father about the proposed trip, Sayyid kept quiet, not even telling his master the next morning. But he had his duties to the child of his master. Mila did not think about the lateness of the hour or any inconvenience to Sayyid from her request, and neither did Sayyid. He telephoned from the hall phone to the quartermaster of the Rudrakot Rifles, caught him at home as he was sitting down to a late dinner with some friends, and asked for an extra jeep for the next morning. The quartermaster merely asked how far the jeep was to travel in order to write out a chit for the petrol. By midnight, the jeep was parked in the driveway of Raman’s house, its driver asleep on the backseat in twenty minutes.
Then Sayyid went about meticulously arranging for the picnic lunch. He took care of every little detail himself, and finally lay down on his charpai under the brilliantly starred night sky, the near-to-fullness moon hanging pendant above him. When he woke, Sayyid checked on the arrangements again, wishing all the while that he could have gone along with Mila on the picnic to be sure that every element of his preparations was attended to, but he had to, wanted to, accompany Raman to Nodi.
At Chetak’s tomb, the servants began making the first round of drinks with a care that belied Sayyid’s absence. They shook out ice cubes from the thermoses into another, insulated container and set this aside in the shade of one of the pillars. A cocktail shaker was placed within this ice, to cool to freezing. The servant then poured in cognac, pineapple syrup, orange curaçao, a dash of Angostura bitters, and some ice chips and then capped the shaker and shook it gently. The ice hissed and splintered within the cold shaker, and when the servant poured his version of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club cocktail into the shining martini glasses set upon a carved wood tray, the drink frosted the outside of the glass upon contact. He carefully lifted his tray and went around Chetak’s tomb in search of his masters. Mila he found leaning against a pillar at the north entrance. She held the delicate stem of the glass between her thumb and index finger and drank a good portion of the cocktail even before the servant had turned to leave.
“Bring me another one please.”
“Ji, Memsahib,” the boy said. He hesitated. “Right away?”
“No, take the drinks to the others. Only two, maximum, for Ashok Sahib.”
The boy nodded and went off. He found Ashok peering under the stone stairs that led up to the tomb, hoping for another glimpse of the varan. Like Mila, Ashok drank his cocktail in one mouthful and reached for another glass.
“Only two, Sahib,” the boy said gently.
“All right.”
The servant found Vimal standing a few paces behind Sam, at the east-facing verandah of Chetak’s tomb. Heat rose in waves and gusted to
ward them. It hung in the air, clawed its way into their lungs until they could not breathe, dragged perspiration out onto the surface of their skins. Sam did not know yet that Vimal stood behind him; he had his binoculars raised to the view of the field punishment center. The building dozed in the midday sun, bare and unembellished. It was constructed with slabs of sandstone glued together with mortar, and on the side that faced Chetak’s tomb was a wooden gate with an arched top that mimicked the arch of the gateway. There were no windows on this wall, or perhaps on any of the other walls, Sam thought, for this was a prison. Four square minarets rose out at the four corners, topped off by a stone pavilion with a stone roof. The minarets, guard towers, were empty. Even if a prisoner was foolish enough to escape in the middle of the day, he would be seen for miles in this deserted land, and if he was not caught immediately, the sun would kill him. At night other dangers, human, inhuman, and animal, awaited. Rudrakot was the nearest place of habitation and it was three hours by car, and innumerable hours by foot. The field punishment center was literally in the middle of nowhere.
As the servant approached, Sam turned to see Vimal. They both accepted the cocktails gratefully.
“Will lunch be soon?” Sam asked.
“In an hour, Sahib,” the boy replied, bowed, and padded his way to the tent that the servants had erected to cook the food. A little spiral of smoke and the aroma of wood and charcoal wafted over them to signal that a fire had been started.
Vimal sipped his cocktail and looked out eastward. “The walls of the center are twenty feet high, Captain Hawthorne, and sheer. The gate has no footholds in the planks of wood; in any case, two sentries stand guard all night on the inside of the gate. The guard towers are usually manned on every night except for the nights before and after purnima, the full moon. There is a common superstition in this part of the world, and I’m not quite sure where it came from, but Chetak is said to rise and ride through the desert on the nights before and after the full moon, and one of those,” he said, turning to look at Sam, his skin glistening with a thin sheen of perspiration, “is tonight. Tomorrow the moon swells to fullness. It is considered to be bad luck to lay eyes upon the horse’s ghost, so the guards stay inside.”
“Does it matter if there are guards in the towers?” Sam said, wiping the sweat from the eyepiece of his binoculars against his shirt.
“Not really,” Vimal replied. “They are a bunch of lazy buggers. There is not much excitement in their lives, Captain Hawthorne. The men they watch over are on their way to meet death in any case—no one has ever escaped from Rudrakot’s field punishment center.” He put his empty glass down on the verandah parapet’s ledge and almost at once, a line of red army ants came marching up the latticework stone, swirled around the base of the glass, and then swarmed into it. Vimal knocked against the glass and the ants shuddered, fell to the stone, regrouped, and marched up again.
By his side, Sam sweated in silence. Vimal knew somehow that Mike was his brother, and knew also that he was at the field punishment center. As he watched the building, it evaporated again from sight and the sun whitened into horizontal lines in front of his eyes. Ghosts and disappearing buildings, Sam thought, how was he to battle all of this to find Mike? His shoulders bent under the weight of this entire burden, and the pain of loving the woman who now stood silhouetted in the entrance archway. Nothing seemed possible suddenly.
“How did you know?” he asked finally.
Vimal did not answer for a long time and all Sam heard was the ragged intake of his breath. He had asthma, or some other breathing disorder, and Sam wondered if he was aware of this.
“You have the same face, Captain Hawthorne,” he said finally. “Or should I say Ridley?”
“It does not matter, the name does not matter,” Sam said. “Michael is my brother.” But Mike had sandy hair that bleached to a straw yellow by the end of the summer. His lashes were light too. Sam had never given much thought to their physical resemblance, he had supposed, as one always took for granted that they looked alike, that perhaps they spoke in the same way, had the same mannerisms. They had grown up in the same house; they must be alike. Yet they were physically different and Vimal was the only one who not only had seen the likeness, but had made connections with that knowledge and had come to him. By now Vimal’s martini glass was completely covered by the brown and red bodies of the ants, thickly layered like treacle. He knocked on the glass again, and the ants fell off, only to climb back again.
“They have a great deal of determination, Captain Hawthorne,” Vimal said. Then he looked upon Sam, a faint dusting of red on his cheekbones. “But so have I.”
“Is Mike at the field punishment center?” Sam asked.
“Yes.” The answer came too quickly.
“Why?”
“He was”—Vimal spread his hands out—“sympathetic to us, to our cause.”
Sam leaned against the verandah’s parapet and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Others have been, and not everyone is incarcerated because of harboring sympathies toward the nationalists.”
“Bravo, Captain Hawthorne,” Vimal said softly. “You know who I am then.”
Sam inclined his head. There was much he did not know about Rudrakot and its residents, but Vimal Kumar and his nationalist supporters had been on every page of the report Sam had read in Calcutta. So far, Vimal had only led a few student demonstrations at the local college and somewhat alarmingly filled the front compound of his “exercise camp” headquarters with a throng of supporters to listen to his vehement speeches. There was also mention of a bombing and the authorities suspected Vimal was involved in it. It was only on the drive here that Sam had finally recalled who Vimal was; until then his name had merely been familiar.
“Four months ago,” Vimal said, using the palms of his hands to heave himself onto the parapet so that he was no longer facing Sam, “a British schoolteacher died in the schoolhouse she had set up on the outskirts of Rudrakot. Her name was Jane Crowley. Or rather”—he grinned and his face lit up with a beauty an artist would have envied—“as you say, names are not important. Suffice it to note that Miss Crowley was a dried-up old bird who had been born in Palampore to a major in the Indian army, never married, and had grown meddling and troublesome—there are a thousand Englishwomen like her in India.” Vimal’s voice dropped, even though Mila and Ashok, and the servants, were nowhere near. “We wanted the schoolhouse and the land it was built on as a base for keeping our fleeing freedom fighters safe from the police. I went and offered Miss Crowley a very large sum of money for the property, but she refused. The ornery old bitch.” Vimal said this last without any inflection or change of tone, as though Jane Crowley ought to have succumbed to the money if not his overabundant charm.
“We courted and wooed her for seven months, Captain Hawthorne, and all the while the freedom fighters were sent to safe houses elsewhere in the country because we could not look after them properly here.” Vimal tilted his martini glass and it wobbled for a moment on the edge of its base before falling through the hot, still air to the ground where it broke into tiny, shining pieces. “Because of Jane Crowley, I could not meet the great men of my time, could not host them, and look after their needs.”
To Sam’s astonishment, tears pearled at the edges of Vimal’s eyes and came rolling down his well-formed cheeks. He did not bother to wipe them away. “The old bitch,” he said again, and this time there was a murderous intensity to his voice.
“And so what did you do?” Sam asked.
“We set a bomb in the schoolhouse on a Sunday afternoon when no one was to be there, but Miss Crowley had decided to correct term papers at that very time. The bomb,” Vimal said matter-of-factly, “blew her into little pieces. But we bought the land and the remains of the house and rebuilt the structure.”
Sam felt an overwhelming wave of pain sweep through him. He could barely bring himself to form the words, but did eventually manage to say, “Did Mike light the fuse?”
Vimal smiled. “Of course, Captain Hawthorne, that was the point of my story.”
“He was punished for that?”
“Well…” Vimal paused and considered his next words. “I cannot lie to you, it was not just for that. Your brother, Mike, was involved in a month-long argument with one of the officers of the Rudrakot Rifles; I’m not sure what that was about, some stupid bawarchi who had been thrashed…something like that.”
“Sims,” Sam said, his whole being crushed with rage. “That bloody Sims.”
“Ah, yes,” Vimal said. “That was the name of the officer. Well, so they managed to send Michael Ridley…er…away.”
“Is he in the field punishment center?” Sam asked quietly. Again.
“Yes.”
Sam looked out into the shaky landscape that shimmered in the heat. They would have to return to Rudrakot without him since he was going to the field punishment center.
Vimal put a hand on his arm. “I will take you there tonight, Captain Hawthorne. It is not an easy fortress to storm. Let me show you the way.”
“Go back to the others. I will handle this myself.”
In response, Vimal jumped off the parapet, dusted his hands, and dragged Sam to the west-facing verandah. He pointed out into the distance. “Look,” he said. “We will not be able to return to Rudrakot this afternoon.”
Sam peered where Vimal’s finger was pointing, his eyes crinkling for clarity. He could see nothing but the hot dust and a thin, ailing tree. He began to reach into his bag again for his binoculars, but Vimal stayed that gesture. He dipped his head past the shade of the tomb into the sunlight. Every curl on Vimal’s handsome head glittered, his eyes gleamed with delight, and a tiny smile arched the bow of his lips, as though he was going to make an important announcement. “It is not visible yet,” Vimal said. “But it will be, and soon.”
The Splendor of Silence Page 25