The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  Father Manning’s unusual request a few months ago had been surprising and somehow stunning, for too many reasons. Mila had heard of the Lal Bazaar, of course, from Jai and from Kiran, but they were always vague about the specifics. She only realized what occurred there after the officer had exited Lady Pankhurst’s bedchamber, buttoning the front of his coat. Mila was eighteen that year, old enough to have been married herself and to know what happened between a man and a woman. But she had kept herself deliberately obtuse, not curious, not even interested. The Lal Bazaar came as a shock when she passed through it. The women had called out to her, their language rich with phrases and sentences she could not understand; at times, she did glance at them furtively and saw strident mouths, brightly colored saris draped unbecomingly, manlike stances with legs apart, and a tautness to their bodies that came from belligerence. None of this was appealing and she kept her eyes from them as much as she could.

  Father Manning was the first man to talk openly with Mila about the women of the Lal Bazaar, and it was with a great deal of embarrassment that she could even listen to what he had to say. They were poor, uneducated, in need of help. He asked her to teach in his stead since he—being a man—was forbidden to.

  Why? Mila had asked. Why did these women deserve anything, need anything other than the life they had chosen?

  Mila flushed with regret when she thought of this question now. Hers had always been a privileged life because Papa, though not rich, had access to the perquisites of the wealthy. They did not own their home or even the Morris or the jeep, but these would not so soon disappear from their lives; they were on extended loan until death. Mila had an almirah full of saris and pants and jodhpurs, shirts in silk, enough jewelry to weigh down two brides, and now, with her marriage to Jai, even all that Papa had given her would be inconsequential. For Mila there had always been a choice, even in the choosing of Jai to be her husband; it was not a decision Papa would ever have forced her into. She had thought that the women of the Lal Bazaar had chosen to do what they did. Father Manning had said simply that such a life was never a choice.

  At one time, early in the days when Father Manning had given lessons to Ashok and Vimal, Raman and he would sit in the upstairs verandah under the jute matting and take their afternoon chai and scones together. Mila had listened in on these conversations too, intrigued, and most of their debates had been about religion. Raman talked of the philosophies of Hinduism, and Father Manning talked of his Lord Jesus Christ. They had found many similarities, many differences, much to ponder, even asking Mila what she felt or thought at the time. Until now, Mila’s only encounters with missionaries had been the proselytizing type, with every conversation invariably ending in an exhortation to cleave unto their God or to disdain her own. But Father Manning had been content merely to discuss. He did not assert the superiority of his religion, why, he had even agreed that its policies of forcible conversion were unbecoming of Christian values. If it had not been for these series of talks with Father Manning on the afternoons of the tutoring sessions, Mila would never have agreed to visit the Lal Bazaar with him that first time.

  Somewhere in the back of her consciousness was also the thought, never fully enunciated, that of all the British in Rudrakot, Father Manning was the only one who was not…well, British. He did not consider himself a master, a member of the ruling race, did not attempt any condescensions. Father Manning had come to Rudrakot because of the empire, true, sent here to proselytize and protect a people considered to be in need of religious succor and reassurance, but he was not the empire.

  Mila reached the edge of the bazaar, near the tailor’s shop, and tucked her bicycle under the tattered tarpaulin awning that shaded him as he stitched clothes on an ancient, clanking Singer. He had an understanding with Father Manning that Mila could leave her cycle with him and he would look after it all afternoon. Then she pulled the pallu of her simple pink sari over her hair and walked into the bazaar, toward the section that housed the brothels, her head bowed, her steps measured, a cheap cloth shopping bag hanging on her bare arm. The man seated at the entrance to the brothel grunted at her, but Mila did not answer back. Her heart thudding with an unnamed fear, one she always experienced when she came here, she left her chappals inside the front door and then climbed the concrete stairs to the main corridor.

  Rooms lined the whole length of the corridor, with most of the doors thrown open. Mila did not glance either to her right or to her left as she walked to the room at the far end, her skin bristling with discomfort and something so acute in her chest that it was almost painful. There was the smell of old, used perfumes; cheap attar; the lingering essence of sandalwood and myrrh. All the entertainment rooms were garishly done with toffee pinks, copper sulfate blues, and parrot greens on the walls, and covered with frescoes of dancing girls in tight bodices and flaring skirts. The accompaniments to the women’s singing, the tabla, the harmonium, the violin, the sitar, sat in their cloth housings at one end. The mosaic floor was thick and padded, first with a layer of jute matting covered by a thin cotton mattress, this covered with a thick cotton sheet of the purest white. The nautch girls danced on this padding, performing for private audiences of soldiers from the Rudrakot Rifles regiment, who would be seated against one end of the room, under a satin and gold canopy, propped against silk bolsters and cushions.

  The women who serviced the white soldiers, officers, and NCOs of the Rudrakot Rifles practiced their singing and dancing in the afternoons. At night, they performed, and later still, well after midnight, they took the men into private rooms, which led off the corridor, where the only furnishing was a curtain on the window and a bed against a wall. Nothing more was necessary or needed, for these women had no conversation and only one skill. The doors to these rooms, now unused, were also open since they were empty, and Mila could not help looking into them as she passed, filled with a sadness and an aversion at the same time. In some of the rooms, she heard the clearing of a throat before the girl or the woman rehearsed her night’s recital, or the tuning of the sitar, or the gentle thump-thump of the tabla player’s fingers upon the smooth skin of his drums. When she entered her room, she saw that her students, three girls ranging in age from fifteen to eighteen, were already there, heads bent over their slates, laboring over their Hindi alphabet.

  “Namaste, Didi,” one of the girls said, folding her hands in front of her in salutation.

  They called Mila thus, didi, or elder sister, and it was in its own way a mark of respect. They had called Father Manning Bapu, the same appellation that was now being used for Mahatma Gandhi, but for these girls the priest was in the place of a father. In the very beginning, Mila herself had been incredibly shy with them and then had realized that under their loud and coarse voices were hearts that were wounded and shattered. That they had lost the ability to trust and had no capacity for believing. The girls had been suspicious of Mila at first, and had stared at her, eyes open very wide, mouths sometimes agape to deliberately show how ignorant they were, seated on their haunches, with their saris wrapped around their knees as though they were sitting over a latrine. Their writing had been indifferent, their attention span minimal. And then, something had fallen into place with all of them. Mila learned to keep the horror out of her face and her expression, and the girls learned that she did not consider them entirely with disgust, as most of the other memsahibs did. Mila had returned home and cried until she thought her heart would break that first afternoon, and then remembered how young most of them were, how afraid, how maladroit behind all the bluster. And so she had returned.

  If Raman had known of these visits, he would have put a stop to them. If Pallavi had known, she would have taken a whip and flayed the skin on Mila’s back and then locked her in a room. If Ashok had known, he would have been thrilled and would have wanted to accompany Mila, just to see for himself. Kiran would have been ashamed to have his sister anywhere near the Lal Bazaar, for he had been here before, often enough, once even with Sims
and Blakely. Jai would also have locked Mila away, covered up any impropriety, and asked her to contribute her charity in other, much cleaner avenues. Knit a scarf, he would have said, or crochet a table napkin. Organize a mela. So Mila told no one and did what she wanted to do. She assumed—and because she was young she could assume so and consider that it would be true—that not one person of her acquaintance would ever find out.

  But even as she bent over the black slate of one of the girls, wiping it first with a dampened piece of cloth, a man walked by the open door to the room, looked in as he passed, and then came back to stand in the doorway. His footsteps were almost silent, because he too had to take off his boots inside the front doorway to the house—it was a rule the madam, Leelabai, was very strict about. He stood in the rectangle of the doorway for a while, his face filled first with surprise and then chased by cunning and malice. He rubbed at a chin that did not exist, for he had only a weak bone under his thin mouth. He moved away for a bit and then came back with a friend. The friend, also an officer in the Rudrakot Rifles, pursed his mouth in a whistle, but a warning hand on his arm stayed that sound.

  And so Mila never looked up from her work or heard the men, for the girls had begun chattering, telling her stories of their childhoods, of how many goats one of their fathers had, how the village idiot had made eyes at one. Her sari pallu fell off her shoulder once, revealing the satin skin of her neck and the shadowed cleavage of her breasts in her blouse. She draped it up again, almost absently, but not before Sims and Blakely had gaped in surprise and then, smiling, retreated down the corridor again.

  Twenty-three

  The bee, the lotus, the cloud, the conch-shell, the fish, the deer, the bow, the leaf of the banyan tree, the stem of the plantain tree, the yet unopened flower, silver moonlight and golden goblets—all these must dwell in harmony on my beloved.

  —K.P.S. Menon, Many Worlds: An Autobiography, 1898

  Mila returned exhausted from the Lal Bazaar and sat in an armchair in her room, watching the ceiling fan revolve overhead. She had shed her sari when she’d come back and had piled it on the floor. Her blouse, its armpits dampened with sweat, she had peeled off and thrown on the floor also. So she lounged now much as Kiran had in front of their father, her legs over one arm of the chair, her back resting against the other, her head flung back. She put a hand out into the air, and then slowly tucked one finger and then another into her palm, counting aloud all the while, “One…two…three…” How easy that was to her, and to numerous other people in the world. When had she learned to count? When she was a year old? Two? What did it really feel like to look upon the writing on rupee notes and see nothing but indecipherable gibberish?

  She let her hand fall back beyond the chair and drag on the floor, not left with any energy to even hold it up again. The girls she had taught had names, Chameli, Radha, Richa, and some others, names that they told her with a great deal of pride, but none of those names was actually bestowed upon them at birth. They were the property of the madam, Leelabai, who sent the officers of the Rifles regiment the Chameli they had so enjoyed the last time, and substituted one girl for another with a great deal of ease. The rooms were darkened, and Leelabai assumed that the white men could not tell the difference, and in any case, it was not their faces they cared about. Mila thought that the girls did look the same. They had the same long hair, just beyond their shoulder blades, the same artificial arch in each of their eyebrows, the same mole dotted on the right of their mouths (to ward off the evil eye), the same heavily powdered faces, thickly rimmed eyes, lush painted lips. And the same frightening mixture of innocence and artifice. The girls had been brought to the brothels and kept there with threats and whippings; this was to be their life, for now no reasonable man would marry them or provide them with another home.

  Still saddened, Mila went to bathe and dress for the dinner with Jai. The water was tepid at best, almost on a par with the temperature of the room, but the soap bar dissolved into a mint green foam, the shampoo lathered her hair richly, the towels were thick and clean. When she came back into her room, still dripping from the bath, she saw that Pallavi had left a tray upon the table by her bedside with a teapot in a tea cosy and a plate of nankatais, sugar biscuits baked an hour ago in the outdoor oven. Mila ate and drank slowly, watching the movements of her mouth in the dressing-table mirror. By the time she had finished, she had driven all thoughts of the afternoon’s happenings from her mind and rose to dress with the simple anticipation of what the night was to bring.

  Pallavi had laid out a white silk chiffon sari upon the bed. The sari was almost plain in its simplicity, no borders, no patterns, just the vibrant sheen of the weave, but hand-embedded in that weave were thousands of tiny, glowing, white crystals set less than an inch apart over its entire six-yard length. Her tight blouse was plain white cotton, closed with three strings at her back, revealing the rest of the skin there. Her sleeves though came all the way to her wrists and her waist was bare under the shimmer of the sari’s pallu. Mila left her neck undressed and looped large silver hoops inlaid with diamonds all along their rims into her ears. She wore three diamond bangles on each arm and slipped her feet into a pair of high-heeled chappals studded with crystals on the heels so that as she walked and as the edges of her sari lifted, the light emanating from her person continued in a glitter to the ground.

  It was still too hot to make up her face too much, so Mila merely dusted on some powder, lined her eyes with kohl, and painted her lips pink with one of the lipsticks Kiran had bought her in England. She pondered a long time on how to dress her hair, whether to gather it into a bun, or pin the sides and let the rest loose, or plait just a few strands and tie up the rest and finally, as she was running her comb through her hair, she decided to leave it the way it was.

  Her hair lay thick and lush across her shoulders, over her breasts. It had no curl in it at all, and fell in a shining long sweep to her waist. Even caught up behind her head, it was more than a mere handful. At every small movement, even the merest breath, the light from the sconces on the wall frittered over the crystals in her sari so that she seemed to be on fire.

  She wondered if the sun had completed its journey of the day already, for Jai had said that he would send the limousine at ten minutes to sunset, and Jai’s chauffeurs were very rigid with times. She wondered if she should go to Ashok’s room and make sure that he was ready. And then she heard the soft click of a cigarette lighter in the verandah beyond her room and the flare of the flame and Mila moved toward that sound to find Sam. She told herself, even as she walked, that she was only going to look out into the sky to see if it was time for the car, but that thought and all others disappeared as she stepped through the doorway.

  Sam had his back to her and when he turned to face her, it was with an expression so filled with despair that she almost went over to put her arms around him. He had just begun to dress and had donned only his white pants and his white silk shirt. His feet were bare, his collar unbuttoned, his hair still sodden from his bath, even his cigarette was damp as he held it between wet fingers.

  “The darzi has done a good job,” Mila said.

  Sam ran his hand over the front of his shirt and around the waistband of his pants. It had been only seven hours since he had met Jai and been invited to the White Durbar later that evening, and already, since he did not have the appropriate clothing for the occasion, a tailor had been hired from the bazaar to sit in the downstairs back verandah and sew him a new set of clothes. The shirt and pants had then been washed, flung on the clothesline in the backyard for an hour to dry, ironed into a pristine crispness by Sayyid, and laid out in readiness upon his bed before he had stepped into the bathroom.

  “I’m still amazed by the speed with which I have these,” he replied. “But why the insistence on white?”

  “Tonight is the night of the full moon, Sam, and Jai holds a White Durbar…” She paused. “It is a meeting of his court in the moonlight. There are no colors but w
hite, to mimic the essence of the moon. The durbar itself is a practice of old, when the feudal lords in the kingdom would come on the night of purnima to pay their respects to the Rudrakot king. The rituals are in some ways similar. In the olden days, the thakurs, the lords, would lay down their arms in front of the king and bow to him; now it is merely a bow and a knock upon the floor with a sword. You will enjoy it immensely, I’m sure.” She finished in a rush, with a pounding heart, knowing that she had been talking too much and to no purpose.