The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  Twenty

  In his own account of what he did, Neill continues that the first culprit was a subadar of the 6th who was made to do the work with a sweeper’s brush put in his hand by a sweeper; a Mahommedan officer of the civil court was flogged and made to lick up part of the blood with his tongue. “I will hold my own,” Neill continued, “with the blessing and help of God. I cannot help seeing that His finger is in all this…”

  —Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour, 1974

  They departed when the moon had just begun to ascend, cutting a newly hewn gold arc into the horizon. When it finally rose, perfectly round and enormous, it would take on a honeyed cast, like a harvest moon.

  Sam stepped down the stairs from Chetak’s tomb and into, literally, another world. For the next few minutes, his breath stilled as the glorious silver-blue brilliance of a million stars percolated into the air around him. There was so much light that the desert was better illuminated at night than it had been at midday. When the sun was out, its rays had seared Sam’s retina, almost blinding him; now there was a clear and cool ultramarine light that bled right into his skin. His fingernails were shadowed half-moons, the lines on his palms, normally brushed lightly, stood out indigo black, and Vimal’s eyes glowed with a fire. Sam could see for what seemed to be miles to the extremity of the earth, with no obstructions or fuzziness in the images imprinting themselves into his brain. The field punishment center was discernible in every detail, the empty guard towers, the mammoth walls, the closed gate. For just a moment, Sam hesitated as he stood there. If he could see so far, and so lucidly, they could see him too.

  “Tonight is the night Chetak rides out, Captain Hawthorne,” Vimal said softly.

  And that meant no one would dare to linger outside for fear of seeing the horse. “Let’s go,” Sam said. And they set out.

  The desert air was fresh, cooled and scoured of the day’s heat. It had even cooled enough in the last two hours to necessitate a fire in Chetak’s tomb as they ate the last of the provisions the servants had brought for their dinner. Cold grated-egg sandwiches with pepper and salt, thick slices of cucumbers, tomato juice or warm Bloody Marys (their ice had long since melted and puddled into the sawdust in the ice coolers), coffee and tea, and a platter filled with Indian sweets—coconut burfis, sweet samosas stuffed with jaggery and lentils, mysorepak, a chickpea-flour bite-size cake.

  “This is our dinner?” Sam had asked, incredulous; he had expected much less when Mila had sent Ashok to warn him that they might not have enough to eat since they had not come prepared to spend the night.

  “Sorry it’s so little,” Mila replied. “This was to be for our tea, and Sayyid would not have expected us to have to stretch it for dinner.”

  The sweets were almost too sweet, and Sam felt a rim of sugar still coating his tongue as he walked beside Vimal. There were no sounds in the empty desert night. Nothing but the rhythmic flap of their shoes upon the hard dirt, Vimal’s feet dragging more than Sam’s as he struggled with the weight of the giant varan he had strapped across his back like a rucksack. The varan slumbered, undisturbed by the jolting ride it was being given. Its head lolled this way and that, slapping against Vimal’s neck.

  “Why do we need that thing?” Sam asked in disgust. “Couldn’t you leave it back at the tomb? Ashok would have looked after it for you.”

  “Oh no,” Vimal said, reaching around to pat the varan’s back and to stroke its long tail. “We need him.” He glanced at Sam with a lambent smile, his teeth ultrawhite in the light from the stars. “You’ll see.” He looked ahead of them. “It’s not very far, Captain Hawthorne, and here in the desert, sound travels vast distances. We must no longer talk and must keep our noise to a minimum.”

  Sam nodded and paused for a minute, allowing Vimal to trudge ahead. He turned to look back at Chetak’s tomb, black and gloomy in the starlight. They had already come enough of a distance that Sam could no longer see the orange glow of the fire left burning on one end of the verandah. At the other end, Mila had given instructions to the servants to make up beds for them with the tarpaulins they had brought. She lay down next to Ashok, her hand linked through his. Vimal was to be across the stone floor at the other end of the wall and Sam could sleep anywhere he wanted. Sam and Vimal had waited for Mila and Ashok to fall asleep and, even thus, she would not let go of Ashok’s hand. She did not like Vimal, Sam had thought again, watching her through the cigarette smoke. He had not lain down or even rested, merely sat against a wall and looked at her, smoking one cigarette after another.

  Night had come rushing in on them even as the mighty Lu wind had died and departed. At one moment, there had been the murk of the storm, at the other the gloom of night, and so returning to Rudrakot was out of the question. It would have been madness to seek out a path in the dust storm, and even greater lunacy to attempt to capture that thin, metallic ribbon of road in the night. With everyone else around, Mila had retreated from Sam. She would no longer even look at him; when she talked, it was with a stilted affectation, as though she was being a little too polite to a stranger. Sam, his nerves still throbbing from the encounter under the red tablecloth, had been bewildered at first, had sought her out only to be rebuffed, and had finally become angry. What had he, they, done wrong? Ashok and Vimal chattered all through dinner. Mila ate little and once asked Sam for a cigarette. She put out a hand to steady the lighter as he held the flame for her and then flushed at the contact of their skins. Why? Sam wanted to ask, exhilarated.

  She had stared at Vimal, at his overfamiliar gestures toward Ashok, the touch on the shoulder, the rubbing of his forearm. Ashok’s eyes glittered; he was in the throes of some excitement and was jittery. At various times during the day, Ashok had accosted Sam and asked him for a cigarette, and he did so again after dinner. Then Mila and Ashok began a spat. She harangued him for his smoking; Ashok was astounded at first, saying that she knew he smoked, she even stole the odd cigarette from him every now and then. Come off it, Mila. She would not listen and insisted that he put out the cigarette right away or she would tell Papa. Now. Ashok’s lower lip began to tremble, and soon Mila too was in tears and they both ended up bawling in each other’s arms. Sam had stared at them, bemused. Why all the fighting? Why would she not look at him? Why was she so distraught?

  Only Vimal was unaffected. At the first signs of the quarrel, he had risen, taken himself to the other end of the tomb, and only returned to hear Mila giving orders to the servants about the sleeping arrangements. Ashok and Mila lay down almost immediately and held hands, the ankles of their opposing feet looped around each other. At one point, well after Sam had thought her asleep, Mila had turned to her side, toward him, her face cushioned under her left hand. She opened her eyes and looked at Sam for a long time, as though she was memorizing the features of his face. Neither of them spoke, and this was what Sam remembered the most—the lingering scrutiny from Mila, filled with an intensity, a yearning, even a want, and behind it all an aching sadness. Why? Sam wanted to ask, but he had been too mesmerized by the flicker of the fire’s gold over her smooth cheek, the length of iridescent hair along her chin. The linen of her pants was stretched tight over the bow shape of her hips. She had taken off her boots and her feet were long and narrow, her toenails painted with a clear varnish. Her hair flowed behind her. Sam’s hands hankered for a touch of that hair, of that skin, but he did not make a move. His gaze kept returning to hers and he tried to seek out what she would not tell him in words. Finally, Mila slept.

  Sam reached Vimal easily, even without lengthening his stride, and saw that the boy had begun to slow his steps to a crawl.

  “I’ll carry that monster on your back,” he said in a whisper.

  Vimal nodded gratefully and unslung the vapid varan from his back and helped Sam tie him on. The varan’s skin was cold and a little slippery, and its feet and hands came to clench at Sam’s shoulders and back with a surprisingly puissant hold. Sam almost shouted from that sudden pain and Vimal quickly
peeled the varan’s fingers from Sam. He spoke to the animal softly, his voice breaking into song, and the animal quietened. It relaxed and laid its head against Sam’s neck.

  “You experienced his hold on you, Captain Hawthorne,” Vimal said as they moved on. “That is why we need him.”

  They reached the outside of the field punishment center thirty minutes later. The sandstone walls loomed before them whittled and chiseled into a smoothness by twelve years of ferocious Lus. It looked as though the building had been there for centuries, embedded in the ground, beaten into the earth by the sun and the winds, glossed to a shine by the stars in the sky. Sam put his hand on the stone. It bore some traces of roughness, of nicks and slips from the stonemason’s chisel, but the mortar used to bind the stones together was thin and hardened to a shiny patina. There were no footholds on these walls; it was an effective prison. Even if it had not been birthed in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a desert, miles from any vestiges of civilization, the field punishment center would have been a formidable fortress.

  Sam put his ear to the stone and coolness seeped into his skin.

  “They all sleep,” Vimal said. He glanced up at the moon, which had risen to a quarter of the sky and was now the gleaming white of seashells. “Twelve o’clock. The witching hour in your literature, Captain Hawthorne. In our legends, the ghost of a horse will walk now.”

  A fissure of uncertainty crept up Sam’s spine. He looked back over the sand and dirt to the stout outline of Chetak’s tomb. “Will they be all right?” he asked, his voice rife with worry.

  Vimal laughed. “So you believe me now, do you?”

  Sam rubbed his hand over the stones on the wall that went up twenty feet into the sky. “There is no way up. We will have to get in through the gate somehow.”

  “Wait,” Vimal said. He untied the varan and pulled it from Sam’s back to set it on the ground. Sam massaged his neck and reached down to peel his shirt from his skin where it was glued with sweat. A rank odor of fish and rotting offal pervaded the space around him. The varan was not particular about its personal hygiene, or it had emptied its bowels upon his back as he had carried it. He cringed at the thought, but did not even bother to shrug his wet and stinking shirt from his back, so spellbound was he by Vimal’s actions. The boy unwound the length of rope he had carried looped around his arm and fashioned a halter on one end. He slipped this halter over the varan’s neck and threaded its short arms through. The other end of the rope he coiled loosely and flung on the ground. Vimal hefted the varan into his arms and laid his head close to the gigantic head of the lizard. He crooned to it, sang to it in Hindustani, called it “darling.” The animal began to shift its fluid neck, its tongue slicking out into the air.

  “He will get you up the walls, Captain Hawthorne,” Vimal said, his eyes luminous. His face was drenched with sweat, the stench emanating from him matched the one from Sam, his hair stuck to his head in unruly curls, and yet Vimal possessed an undeniable beauty. The giant lizard licked at his arms with its thin, liquid tongue.

  “How?” Sam asked, enthralled by the sight of the varan twisting its weight in Vimal’s arms.

  In response, Vimal bent low to the ground with his knees and heaved the lizard on the wall. It slammed against the stone, moved its arms and legs about and slid down the wall into a flaccid heap.

  “It is too heavy to carry its own weight,” Sam whispered.

  “No.” Vimal picked up the varan again and threw it upon the wall, and again it slipped down. “You try, Captain Hawthorne,” Vimal said, “I am not able to throw him high enough; he’s too big for me.”

  With a thudding heart, Sam bent to pick up the animal and cradled it in his arms. On the second try, it had flailed about as though it finally knew what was expected of it. Could it really scale these walls? They were immense and so sheer. No human could climb them, surely. What harm was there in trying? Sam only hoped they were not making too much of a ruckus on the outside walls but did not realize that the walls were five feet deep all around the perimeter of the field punishment center; a cannon blast would, perhaps, wake the inmates and the sentries, nothing less than that.

  He slid one hand under the varan’s neck and the other under the root of its enormous tail and stepped back a few paces from the wall. The animal began to squeal, its throat undulating unpleasantly under Sam’s hand, and before it could protest anymore, Sam leaned back and threw it as hard as he could against the wall. His shoulder screamed with pain and he waited, panting from the effort. The varan scrambled fervently as it hit the wall, slid down a few yards, and then its tail snaked out to catch a slender gap in the mortar and simultaneously its fingers and toes burrowed into the stone. It started to climb.

  Sam and Vimal stood on the ground, their mouths open with wonder at the speed with which the black figure of the varan moved up the wall. The rope began to unravel on the ground. Vimal bent to pick up the other end and loop it around his wrist.

  “You must follow him quickly, Captain Hawthorne,” he said. “When you get to the top, reel him in. He will stay where you leave him; when you return you can climb down the rope again.”

  Sam flexed his hands and clasped them around the fast-slithering jute rope. As he started to climb, entrusting most of his weight to his left arm, he looked down at Vimal, who stood with a faint smile on his handsome face. “Will he hold me, Vimal?”

  “I don’t know. I have only read of a great hero in Indian history who did this once to scale the walls of a fort, but I’ve never tried it before myself.” The boy chuckled. “Good luck, Captain Hawthorne.”

  The top of the wall was built similarly to a fort’s rampart, with a slender pathway from one end to the other, leading to the guard towers and to four sets of steep stairs down to the ground. Sam crawled on his belly along the path until he found the varan half-dangling over the other edge of the rampart, its breathing harsh and uneven. It shuddered when he touched it and then turned its huge head to run its tongue over his hand and his face. He dragged the lizard to the place where he had ascended the wall, moving laboriously on his knees so that his figure would not be outlined against the starry sky to anyone looking up from below. At the wall, he put his head over the rampart cautiously, and thought he saw the murky white of Vimal’s kurta and pajamas against the impenetrable black of the earth. But he was too far away and Sam had climbed a very high wall.

  Sam unbuttoned his holster and took out his Colt. Patting the varan once to reassure it, he crouched down on his knees again and crept to the staircase along this wall. The moon was still low in the sky behind him and its light along the far side threw this set of stairs in shadow. Still, Sam did not dare to stand as he went down. He found himself in a deserted square courtyard. On every wall were tiny cells fronted by iron bars that gleamed dully in the starlight. A well covered with wooden planks dominated the center of the yard. There were no trees, nowhere to take shelter from the sun, no verandahs even. There was also no sign at all of human presence. If there were men in the cells, they slept, drugged or tired. No snores cleaved through the still air. The inside of the lone gate leading into this prison was unguarded, as were the guard towers.

  The fetid odor though was a living presence. It seemed to permeate the air, clot it, and hang over the chunk of sky over the field punishment center. It was the smell of unwashed human bodies, the stink of excrement, and the acrid tang of cigarette butts.

  Sam stifled a cough, leaned back into the shadow, and waited, the Colt held ready. His own breathing slowed until he could barely hear it, and finally he could no longer smell anything, his nose charred and deadened to the stink. A faint roar swept over the field punishment center and goose bumps ran up his back. What was that? The roar came again, bigger now, the sound cutting over the flat earth and meeting the walls of the prison. A tiger, Sam thought. There was a tiger on the prowl outside. As he began to move, a door was pitched open to the right of the gate and a rectangle of light threw itself upon the dirt in fro
nt of the doorway.

  “Damn lions!” a man shouted from the inside. His figure appeared in the opening, framed by the kerosene lantern’s glow, and he stood there with his legs apart and his hands placed on his hips. He was wearing shorts and no shirt and was barefoot.

  “Come back inside, you old mutt,” another man drawled. “You are begging for a bloody krait to bite you in the bum.”

  The first man reached inside the doorway and pulled something out. He threw it against the far wall a few feet from where Sam stood. The beer bottle crashed on the stone and split into a hundred tiny pieces, and one of the glass shards nicked Sam in the arm. But he did not move, his pistol still held steadily at the man’s figure. He knew he could not be seen in the shadow, that the white light of the moon probably blinded the man, but he had sensed Sam’s presence somehow. The guard still lingered in the doorway, and then, with one last, hard look at the staircase near Sam, he backed into the room and slammed the door shut.

  All at once, a series of moans rose to rend the air around Sam. The noises came from everywhere. There were groans of pain, the scratching of uncut nails along the sandstone floors of the cells, the thumping of feet against the walls, yelps that sounded unreal, inhuman.

  The guard threw his door open and stepped out, a rifle in his hand. He had pulled on his boots by now, the laces untied. Striding out to the center of the yard, he aimed the rifle into the sky and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot exploded in the courtyard and ricocheted from one wall to another, its last echoes taking a painfully long time to die away. Sam’s ears rang. He pushed his shoulders into the wall behind him, but did not take his eyes away from the guard, who was shouting now. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, or one of you bastards is going to take the next bullet. Get it?”