At Sam’s next intake of breath, a fine mist of dirt entered through to coat the inside of his lungs and he coughed. Vimal stood aside, watching and smiling more fully now. When Sam finally looked up, bleary eyed and irritated, Vimal said, his finger again flung out into the horizon, “A dust storm approaches, Captain Hawthorne. We call this the Lu, the heated wind. It will come in a few hours, last for a few more. There is no question of returning to Rudrakot tonight.”
Sam rubbed his eyes, gazed out again, and saw now, for the first time, a fine smear of red dust at the very point where the washed-out blue sky met the burning, red earth.
“When will we leave?” Sam asked, his heart beginning to bang and crash within his chest.
“After everyone is asleep,” Vimal said.
Sam walked back to the eastern verandah and reached out in his mind to the myth of his brother in the field punishment center. There was no guarantee that Mike was still there, or even that he had ever been there. He would be a fool to trust Vimal. And yet…when at the Victoria Club he had looked at the map and had seen the pencil drawing of the center, Sam had been assailed by an unshakable conviction that Mike was there, that he was alive, that he had called out to him for help. Until now, Sam had been sure that he would go to the field punishment center and find Mike, but having seen its mammoth, impenetrable face, and hearing Vimal’s account of it, he was no longer sure that he could get inside without assistance. And Vimal had offered himself up as a…friend, no, as someone who would help him. But why?
His face inscrutable and stony, Sam finally turned to the young, handsome man by his side and said, “What is it you want in return, Vimal?”
Eighteen
The air was heavy with dust and sand from the bed of the river, that filled boots and pockets and drifted down necks and coated eyebrows and moustaches…The wind seemed to be picking up the earth and pitching to leeward in great heaps; and the heat beat up from the ground like the heat of the Day of Judgment.
—Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, 1899
Lunch was a desultory, somnolent affair, exhausted as they all were by the incalescence of the day. Sam had thought that he could not bear to put a morsel in his mouth, and yet when the food was being cooked and the aromas came eddying toward him, he found himself suddenly ravenous.
Sam and Mila sat on the side of one of the verandahs, watching a servant make rumali rotis with practiced movements. He patted the dough into a large circle, turned his hand over, palm facing down, and draped the dough over his fingers. Then he flipped his hand in the air, with each flip flinging the dough out into the sky, and with each flip the circle of dough swiveled outward until it became thin and almost translucent. Handling this waferlike dough carefully, the servant swathed it over a kadai, a scoop-bottomed pan that rested upside down over the wood fire. The kadai had been roasting over the slow fire until its surface was crimson hot. The roti, thin and airy as it was, took less than minute to cook. The man peeled it from the surface of the kadai with a pair of iron tongs, layered its many folds on a plate, dabbed it with some fragrant ghee, and deposited the roti into a porcelain dish with a lid. The dish was fancifully wrought with a detailed painting of a peacock, the blue of its skin iridescent in the sunlight, a tree in bloom with white flowers in the background. Sam watched as the servant’s thick fingers held the lid’s handle with delicacy and elegance. The dish was a Sevres china dish. Only in India, he thought, would there be such a study in contrasts, only here would Sevres china be used at a mere picnic, amongst the dust and dirt of a centuries-old tomb built to celebrate the life of, and then mourn the death of, a horse.
He glanced to his left at Mila. “I will never quite get used to the fluidity with which you can settle into this life in India—servants a plenty and no work to do.”
“And yet,” she said deliberately, “the British do not really want to be here.”
Sam raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I thought they did. Isn’t that what the nationalist movement is about? Them leaving India?”
Mila sighed, her fingers twisting into each other. She had been fretful for a long time, seated by Sam’s side. “Oh, they want to be here because India is a conquered country and they are the conquerors. But every Englishman I have known has always talked fondly of Home.”
In one way or the other, Sam too had noticed this particular quality of speech among the British ever since he had come to India. He had encountered officers of the Indian army who had been in India for four or five generations—always marrying into the British community, bringing up their children in an insulated India made to seem like that elusive Home.
“Have you heard Mrs. Stanton speak Hindustani?” Mila asked.
“Yes, her English accent slips when she does.”
“And she speaks then like one of us, like a native. Mrs. Stanton grew up in India; she has always lived here, so she strives harder to not seem too much like an old India hand. She learned her Hindustani from the servants in her father’s house; but early on she learned her English from them too.”
Sam began to laugh as the full import of that last line sank in. “Why?”
“Children, by a very Victorian standard, are meant to be seen and not heard. They are meant to be kept away and brought out on special occasions to be shown off to company. So Mrs. Stanton’s childhood nursemaids were Indian ayahs, her playmates were the malis who took time off from watering gardens, her guardians during afternoon rides were native syces—all of whom, doubtless, insisted upon practicing their smashed English upon the missy baba. So she originally spoke English in that same chee-chee accent that she now deplores, that set her apart, made her almost Indian.”
“A pity indeed,” Sam said, no sympathy in his voice. “How did her parents get around it?”
“The servants were forbidden from speaking English with her, only the native languages, where the accent did not really matter. She had a British governess”—Mila paused and looked out into the distance—“as did I, once; Papa thought it necessary. The governesses are usually girls seeking marriage among the many eligible officers and civil servants in India, for you see, alliances between Indians and the British are forbidden by society.” She shrugged. “I learned how to say, ‘thank you’ and ‘toodleoo,’ and comport myself at high teas, but I can never forget that I am Indian. If my papa had to arrange a marriage for me, it would not be with someone who was not…Indian.”
Sam had no reply to this, and did not know how they had transitioned from one conversation to another so personal. He could not argue with that statement, so simply offered as an indisputable truth. For too many years now, since 1858, the British in India had claimed a superiority over the Indians because of the color of their skins. That prejudice had given birth to a dislike, an antipathy, a feeling among Indians that everyone who was white held the same chauvinistic opinions. Mila rose and walked away and Sam let her go, his heart thumping with pain.
He turned his attention to the servant who had fashioned a chula, a stove, out of three bricks that had come loose from the stairs leading to the tomb. Sam lit a cigarette and watched through the smoke as the fire under the chula licked the sides of the kadai in which there was a chicken curry. Sweat poured down Sam’s forehead and he wiped it with the back of his hand. How did the servants keep cool enough to bend over a living fire in this heat? They squatted in the sun, bareheaded, the skin on their arms browned and charred, not a drop of perspiration on their faces or necks. The curry cook’s movements were as deliberate as the bread maker’s, even though he managed to make it look casual in the way he hurled pinchfuls of salt, and scattered cumin and coriander powder. The gravy in the kadai simmered and Sam’s mouth watered. The servant chopped fresh coriander leaves on a wooden cutting board and stirred this into the curry. Then, holding the two handles of the kadai with the cloth towel he had draped around his neck, he took the pan off the fire and looked up at Sam.
“Lunch is served, Sahib,” he said. “Come. Sit. I will ca
ll the others.”
“No,” Sam said, flicking his unfinished cigarette to one side. “I’ll do that.”
The servants’ gazes swung to the still-smoldering cigarette on the ground, and they waited, hands frozen in midair, for Sam to leave so that they could pounce on that precious, remaining one inch, dab out the cigarette and store it away carefully for a future smoke. Sam saw the lust in their eyes, and quietly took out a handful of cigarettes from his tin, laid them on the ground, and went away to call Mila, Ashok, and Vimal for lunch. When he returned, the cigarettes he had left had gone, along with the half-burned one he had so carelessly tossed on the ground.
Sayyid had packed white china plates, cups, and saucers in sheets of old editions of the Rudrakot Daily News, and these had been carefully unwrapped, rinsed in water, and laid out on a red-checked tablecloth on the floor of one of the verandahs. By the side of each plate was a gleaming cut-glass tumbler of water, choked full with ice cubes. The hot kadai with the chicken curry rested on a folded-up kitchen towel, and the Sevres dish with the rumali rotis was to the side of it. There was also a kachumber salad—thick slices of cucumber, onions, and tomatoes, tossed with lemon juice, black salt, and coriander leaves. There were no forks and knives, and Sam realized that he was expected to eat his food Indian style, with his right hand only. He had learned to eat with his hands as politely as he could, smearing the food only up to his knuckles and no farther. The process was still a trial, but, somehow, he felt as Indians did that food did taste better when eaten without the metallic medium of cutlery.
The servants brought steel bowls with tepid water and a piece of lime for them to wash their hands, and then they all sat on the floor, cross-legged, in front of the plates. Each of the finely wrought rumali rotis was as flimsy as air, and Sam devoured nine of them, mopping up the chicken within their delicate folds. The food melted in his mouth, spiced as it was with the heated desert air, the tiny flakes of desert mud, the desert wind. A strange lethargy seemed to have come over all of them, and though they were all hungry, they ate in silence, not even meeting one another’s eyes but staring out into the distance instead.
At the end of the meal, Vimal said, “The Lu is coming. I can feel it in my bones.”
Mila said without raising her gaze, “How old are you, Vimal? A doddering eighty? You can feel it in your bones?” Then she flushed, knowing she had been rude, but her mouth firmed with determination.
“He only means to protect us all, Mila,” Ashok said.
“I can feel nothing,” Mila replied. She washed her hands in another bowl of water with lime and wiped them on the towel the servant proffered. “Thank you, that was delicious. Quite the best picnic we have had in a long time. Will you please pack up everything so that we can leave from here in an hour? And don’t forget to eat lunch.”
“Ji, Memsahib,” the servant said. He made to go, and then turned back resolutely. “What that sahib says”—he gestured toward Vimal, who was leaning back against a pillar, twirling an unlit cigarette held between his lithe fingers—“is true, Memsahib. It is the day before purnima, the Lu will come, either today or tomorrow and blow for fifteen days.”
“From where?” Mila asked.
“The soothsayer in the Lal Bazaar says from the west.”
They all turned around to face west. The sky and the earth were framed in a rectangle of space down the long length of the verandah, its pillars throwing streaking shadows across the floor. Where there should have been blue, there was now, most definitely, a mottled burgundy daubed across the sky.
Mila looked at her wristwatch and frowned.
“When?” Sam asked.
“It will catch us in an hour, or maybe two. Have you been in a dust storm, Captain Hawthorne?” she asked, and when Sam shook his head, she continued with a sudden wash of fear in her voice, “We will not be able to get back to Rudrakot tonight.”
In the Sukh desert, heat began to take life by the end of February. There had been no rain or even the slightest hint of moisture in the air for the last three months. Instead, each morning the sun had scorched a steady trail across the thin blue sky, dipped into the horizon at night but left its searing embrace upon the earth. The red sandstone rocks and boulders sizzled and roasted all day long and many a lizard and snake hid in shadowy crevices to sleep at the height of the afternoon, only to be cremated to death by nightfall. The land emanated heat in huge gusts and all this hot air rose skyward, day after day, until May when the relatively cooler air rushed in to replace this boiling air. And that created the Lu. Although science said the Lu was cooler air, to the inhabitants of Rudrakot, the Lu was as dry as cracked, unused farmland, and as hot as the heart of a burning chula. This thick Lu came in many colors, depending upon where the wind had a mind to wreak havoc—mustard-flower yellow where the wind picked up and sifted the very top layer of the Sukh dirt into the air; raven black where days were turned into night when the wind brought clouds to kill the sun; and hibiscus red where the earth spat into the sky, encouraged by the wind.
The storm that came upon Mila and Sam at Chetak’s tomb on that twenty-ninth of May 1942 raged red. Before it arrived, they finished their lunch and helped the servants pack the rest of the food and the dishes into the two jeeps and then lash down the contents with a sheet of tarpaulin and jute ropes. The jeeps were then driven to the east side of the tomb and parked nose first in the triangular space under the stairs, their backs jutting out. And still the storm that they waited for did not come.
Mila tied one end of the red-checked tablecloth to her wrist, swung the bulk of the cloth around her back, and then tied another end to her other wrist until it dragged behind her like a cloak slipped off shoulders at a party. Ashok and Vimal had disappeared, where she did not know. Mila raised her voice to call out to her brother, and he answered from a distance saying that he was all right, and that he was with Vimal. At the head of the stairs Mila paused, knowing that she should get Ashok to be with her while the storm blew over them, but her feet took her instead to the east-facing verandah of Chetak’s tomb where Sam Hawthorne stood against the parapet, his gaze eastward, fixed upon the lines of the field punishment center.
Mila went up and stood next to Sam. “Why the interest?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“What is that place?”
Sam turned to search her face. “Don’t you know?”
She frowned. “We’ve been here many times, but never really paid much attention to that building. One of the Rifles officers said that it was abandoned when Lady Pankhurst asked to go there, full of snakes and lizards and such.”
“He’s probably right,” Sam said slowly, dragging his attention away.
Mila moved closer to Sam, almost imperceptibly, and laid her wrists upon the parapet and leaned forward until she was supported on her hands. Sam took one edge of the red tablecloth and pulled it over Mila’s back and head.
She smiled, looking up at him. “We will need something to cover us from the storm.”
“When will it get here?”
They both turned to the west entrance. The sky was now fully red, more a terra-cotta red, the red of clay lightly fired in a kiln. Behind them, the heavens still glowed palely blue, in front of them claret. “The storm has begun to chomp at Rudrakot,” Mila said. “I give it twenty minutes.”
“Listen,” Sam said, an arm around Mila’s shoulder as he pulled her into his chest.
Her heart almost gave way at the closeness. The khaki of Sam’s uniform shirt was pleasantly rough under her cheek, and she could smell the aroma of his body, a cologne of musk, the scent of soap from the morning’s bath, the faint undertone of clean perspiration. His arm stilled, as though he was waiting for her to pull away. But Mila did not want to. There would be time for guilt later, even for atonement, if that was demanded of her. For now, she wanted to be in Sam Hawthorne’s arms. She did not reach out to embrace him though; all she did was to bring her own arms up and around herself until she was
wrapped in the red-and-white checks of the tablecloth.
At first, she could hear only the shuddering thud of his heart in his chest, and then she heard that complete silence that came before a dust storm. There were absolutely no sounds. The hum of desert life had melted away—the flies had disappeared into cracks in the walls, the varan was doubtless resting on Vimal’s lap (he had caught it and put a leash around its neck after lunch), the tomb’s breeze had stopped, preparing also to give way to the larger onslaught of the Lu. Even the heat, more sultry now than before, had slowed itself to stillness. It was as though a giant presence surrounded them, muffling everything else.
“Come,” Mila said to Sam. “We must not linger any longer; if the world dies around us, the storm is sure to come soon. We must take cover; there will be no chance later once the storm is upon us.”
She put out her hand and he placed his trustingly in hers.
“Ashok…,” he said reluctantly, not wanting to have to worry about the boy, much as she herself felt.
“He’s with Vimal,” she replied. “They will be safe.”
They walked down the corridor in that dense and unnatural tranquility, their boots hushed and heavy upon the slabs of sandstone. At each corner of the tomb were little grottos; here the floor was clean, there were niches in the walls for oil lamps, and the walls were solid, twenty-inch-thick sandstone. Mila knelt on the ground and indicated that Sam should do the same. Then she flung the tablecloth into the air and it ballooned out, still captive at her wrists, and came to settle gently over both of them.
The Splendor of Silence Page 26