“Anything.”
“Sheela wishes to meet you tonight, before the White Durbar; will you go and see her in the zenana?”
Until now, Mila had not given much thought to Jai’s first wife, even though she met his children often at parties at the Victoria Club or at the residency. She knew he had a wife, why, her own father had helped in the picking out and choosing of that wife—Jai had in the end married the woman Raman, in his capacity as political agent, had decided was right for him. Jai had never spoken to her about Sheela, who was the princess of Shaktipur, and had come into the marriage with a royal title of her own. Jai’s love was all her own, Mila thought, but proprieties had to be maintained. Since she was also going to be Jai’s wife, in the parlance of such alliances, Jai’s first wife would be a sister to her. They had to learn to be friends, to meet at family functions, to spread their affection among all of their children.
“Where will I live, Jai?” she asked, a sudden fear besetting her.
“Why,” he said, rubbing his hand over hers, “with me, in the palace.”
Jai’s first wife lived within the walls of the zenana, the women’s quarters of the palace. It was a world populated solely by women, a few children, many servants, also mostly women. There were no eunuchs in Jai’s zenana, it was a practice he abhorred, and he had retired the oldest eunuch almost as soon as he had gained the crown, at thirteen. That eunuch lived in the lower part of the fort, pensioned for life. There were menservants in the zenana now, brought in to move the plant pots, sweep the carpets, mow the lawns, and clean the corridors. But for all this, all the women’s lives still revolved around Jai. He would have visited his wife a few times, perhaps more than a few times at night, in order for her to have conceived the children. But even Jai would have entered his wife’s apartments in the zenana for these nocturnal visits via a set of stairs built in the back of the rooms, and left by them before the sun broke into the sky in the morning. All of his other visits to the zenana would be conducted in plain sight of the many other women there—the wives of Raja Bhimsen, the cousins, sisters, nieces, and grandmothers. It was little wonder that he did not love his wife; he did not know her. He had his own array of apartments in another wing of the palace, a series of sitting rooms, drawing rooms, music rooms, a mammoth bedroom built on a miniature lake, a slew of dining rooms of different sizes where he ate if he did not feel like eating in the main dining hall with its seventy-foot-long table.
Mila crinkled her eyes and it seemed to her that the tiny blue lights on the palace walls began to smear their beams in horizontal and vertical lines, as though they were the iron bars of a prison. She would not be able to bear a life in the zenana, or even shut away in some part of the palace on her own.
“Where will I be, Jai?” she asked again.
In response, he rose and put his hands out to pull her to her feet. He glanced at his wristwatch briefly. “We have two hours before I have to dress for the White Durbar.” As they walked toward the palace verandah, Jai stood still for a moment and inclined his head. A servant came hurrying up and bowed.
“Will you please let First Her Highness know that Second Her Highness will come to visit her in an hour and forty-five minutes? Thank you.”
Then, still holding her hand, he led her into the palace’s verandah, through a narrow, unlit corridor that Mila had not noticed before, and into the courtyard that led to his apartments. Not all of the rooms were wired for electricity; there were, in fact, so many rooms here, so many tiny squirreled-away inner courtyards and gardens with little pavilions, that even Jai had not fully explored all of these. A servant scurried forward with a petromax lantern and turned the wick on high so that its white light shone with a bright and constant hiss.
“You may go now,” Jai said to him as he took the lantern from the servant.
The man dithered. “Your Highness, it is not safe for you to wander here alone.”
“Thank you,” Jai said politely and waited until the man bowed and backed out of the courtyard. He turned to Mila.
“Do you want to decide where you are to live? Or rather, if you decide to live somewhere too far from my rooms, where we are to live? For I will have to move closer to you, you know.” He held the lantern up in his right hand and grasped her hand tightly with his left.
She nodded, filled to choking with tears. And so they wandered through all the rooms, some in minor use, some unused, with Mila holding the lush folds of her white sari above her ankles as she walked so that the chiffon would not gather dust.
Twenty-four
On April 13 [1919] a peaceful meeting of several thousand men, women and children was held in the walled garden of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, and, under orders of General Dyer, troops fired on the people, who could not get out of the garden because it had only one small exit. Over a thousand were killed and wounded in this infamous massacre, and while General Dyer was applauded in the House of Lords, the poet Rabindranath Tagore returned the knighthood he had earlier accepted from the British.
—Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness, 1979
Even before he had told Mila that he loved her, in so many words, Sam made a mistake that would make her doubt her affection for him. And he did this knowingly, fully aware that he was betraying the woman he loved. But Sam was on that day in Rudrakot caught irrevocably between Mila and Mike. He loved them both dearly, his allegiance lay with them both, but he was not the type of man who frittered away his word once he had made a promise, however unpalatable it might be.
So Sam lied to Ashok and Raman when he said that he would be glad to take Ashok to the Victoria Club for a drink. It was the only excuse he could think of at a moment’s notice after Mila had left him to answer the toot of Jai’s limousine’s horn and Ashok had come racing out of his room on Sam’s left to say, “Is the damn car here already? I’m not even close to being ready. Will you tell Mila please, Captain Hawthorne?”
“Do you want to go to the dinner, Ashok?” Sam had asked.
Ashok’s young face folded into all sorts of despair—he wrinkled his nose, bit his lower lip, and knotted his eyebrows. Rolling his eyeballs to the very back of his head so that all Sam could see briefly were the whites of his eyes, Ashok said, “I detest these evenings. Jai will hang over Mila, they will talk stiltedly until he makes an obvious play to get me to go somewhere for a while so that he can kiss her behind a pillar or a fern. Papa has told me not to leave them alone for more than fifteen minutes—I usually give them twenty and make a great deal of noise as I return. I wish they would just get married. And soon.”
He said all of this in a light tone and Sam’s heart slowly crumbled and crashed to the floor. He saw Jai and Mila together, behind a meticulously maintained geranium in forced bloom, but he could not see them kiss—that very word nauseated him. And yet it was possible, Mila had gone downstairs to get into the limousine.
“Would you like to come to the club with me?” Sam asked casually, forcing his voice to be indifferent. Around them as the sun set, the birds of the back garden began to chirp. “Perhaps we can convince your papa to let you have a first drink…in public that is.”
“Oh, can we?” Ashok was delighted and clapped his hands. “But I have to go with Mila, what will Papa say?”
“Ask him.”
Ashok turned and ran into his room again, and Sam heard his room door open into the corridor and then shut as he shouted for his father. Raman’s voice answered, more quietly.
Sam lit a cigarette and leaned back against the verandah’s parapet to wait for Ashok. He tried not to think of Mila getting into Jai’s car. Surely, if Ashok was not allowed to go, Mila would not too? Raman would frown upon it. Surely. Sam wanted to take Ashok with him to keep his word to Vimal, but if it meant that Mila’s dinner plans would be thrown into disarray, then so much the better. Dragging smoke into his lungs, Sam held it there and waited, his hands suddenly quaking. He did not believe that Mila truly loved Jai, it could not be, she would not have r
esponded to him as she had if that were true. But she did think she had a duty, and that was not enough for Sam, for he wanted all of Mila, not just the part she was willing to keep from Jai. She had proclaimed in no uncertain terms that she would marry Jai, and that she loved him. When she had left after saying so, Sam had still been exhilarated. Still thrilled. He had not really listened to her. He had said something frivolous…about his daughter, about a child he would have, a child he wanted to have with her.
He flung his cigarette away into the bushes below the verandah and watched as the butt glowed and ate at one of the dried branches and then petered out and died in a wisp of smoke. Sam wrapped his arms around one of the verandah’s pillars and laid his face against the cooling stone.
“Captain Hawthorne,” Ashok said behind him, popping his head from the doorway. “Papa says I can go with you. How splendid!”
Sam nodded, still with his back to Ashok, and his unasked question rushed into the span of space between them and grabbed Ashok by the throat.
“Oh,” Ashok said, before disappearing into his room, “Mila goes alone to be with Jai. I’m going to go tell her; she will be thrilled.”
Sam waited, listening hard until he heard the soft purr of the Daimler’s smooth engine, and Mila went out into the night and to Jai’s waiting arms. He felt a layer of hardness form over him. If he had been religious, Sam thought with a sense of irony, still wrapped around the pillar, he could have prayed, but their mother had rarely taken them to church and he had not sought the solace of God when he had learned Mike was missing. And even now, when he was but a day from rescuing him, he would not consider the possibility of defeat or failure, for he had always believed that he could do for himself more than adequately without any help from above. Belief in God had raised too many questions, too much doubt about the existence of any sort of benevolence when there was so much hurt, pain, poverty in the world and when there was this war, which had brought him to Rudrakot. And the Great War before this one, when too many men had died for causes that made little sense to him. Sam had to finish what he had come here for. He had to rescue his brother.
Ten minutes later, Sam and Ashok got into the jeep and drove out toward the Victoria Club. The sun had set by the time they left. Sam drove slowly through the Civil Lines where the houses were almost in complete darkness because even though most of them had electricity, this was visible only by the presence of a lone and weak bulb in the front verandah. But the glass plates were lit in their niches on the gateposts and showed clearly the names of the occupants. Here and there, Sam could see the glowing end of the watchmen’s beedis. When they passed the cantonment area, Sam switched off the jeep’s headlights and they drove through a wondrous starlight-dappled tunnel of trees, the skin on their arms blue and green, visibility stretching for the entire length of the road. He could feel Ashok next to him, quivering with excitement, and he almost turned the jeep around.
At the roundtana where the road branched into many directions, the policeman’s box was empty. Sam went around the roundtana twice, missing the turn to the road that led to the Victoria Club, until Ashok said, shouting above the jeep’s engine, “We are not going to the club, are we, Captain Hawthorne?”
“No,” Sam said. “Do you mind?”
“Vimal?”
Sam nodded, and finally, on the last circle cut out of the road, drove into the lane that led to the Lal Bazaar.
When they reached the house where Vimal’s freedom fighters had their headquarters, Sam turned off the jeep and stayed where he was, his thumb and forefinger still curled around the key. The front grounds of the house thronged with people, all dressed in white, just as they were, but Sam did not think that they would all be heading for the White Durbar after this. The men and women—and really, some of them were so young that they could not even have accomplished adolescence—were clad in the khadi of the nationalists. The khadi that Mahatma Gandhi had declared to be the uniform for them all, dull white cloth fabricated by each of the freedom fighters at home, the cotton carded, made into thread, woven in a loom, cut and sewn into clothes. All of this was in defiance of the British Raj, to avoid buying machine-knit clothing made in British mills, to create a boycott of all things British.
The crowd, both men and women, were wearing loose pajamas and tuniclike kurtas, short and reaching only to midthigh for the men, and longer, to the knees, for the women. Even in all their finery, their silk shirts and their white linen pants, Sam and Ashok blended in with the crowd and not one inquisitive glance came their way.
A little twinge of regret washed over Sam and he said, “We can leave if you want, Ashok.”
“No.” Ashok shook his head, the laughter obviated from his face, his excitement more restrained. Something else, something more powerful had taken over and Sam almost pulled him back into the jeep and drove back to Raman’s house. But he had brought him here at Vimal’s behest, and already, even though Vimal was nowhere to be seen, the young man’s arms had reached out and yanked Ashok in. Sam did place a hand on Ashok’s shoulder, but he brushed it off with a surprisingly wiry strength. He got down and joined the crowd, lightly touching an arm here and there for them to make way for him so that he could move up to the front of the house. Sam stayed where he was, at the very back, determined that he would not leave Ashok alone here. Even though he towered well over the heads of most of the crowd, no one paid any attention to him. They did not even talk, they barely seemed to breathe. All they did was stare with an intensity at the still-darkened steps that led up to the front door of the house until it seemed to Sam that surely they must all go up in flames if no one appeared soon.
Five minutes later Vimal came out of the door, dressed as he always dressed, simply, in white, holding his hands together in a namaste. Sam leaned back against the back wall of the compound and searched desperately over the slew of black heads for the one that belonged to Ashok, but from here it was difficult to tell which one was him. When this ended he would take him back home; his promise to Vimal had merely been to bring Ashok here for this meeting and Sam had seen nothing wrong in that. There was no guarantee that Ashok would become a nationalist because of this one night, or be ensnared in some illegal activity. Sam told himself that they were here because he was himself curious about the nationalist movement. But if he was to be perfectly honest, he had owed Vimal this favor—any favor at all—for having helped him find Mike. Besides, he knew, without having talked with either Raman or Mila, that they would have disapproved of Ashok’s being here.
Fifteen Indian policemen led by a British police inspector now slipped in through the front gate and lined up along the wall, blocking the entrance. Sam felt a little trickle of fear. The policemen carried rifles; the inspector, who stood in the gateway, legs apart, rested his right hand on his revolver. Sam moved along the wall as unobtrusively as he could, but the inspector’s beady eyes swung in his direction and then away. He had been seen. Sam searched again for Ashok, wishing now that he had not let him leave his side. The crowd of students had, upon the arrival of the police, turned to stare at them stoically, but all too soon their attention was again riveted upon the beloved figure of their leader. And when Vimal spoke, it was only to voice Sam’s own fears.
“Do not worry, comrades,” he said, barely above a normal tone, but clear and audible, “there will be no repetition of the Jallianwala Bagh incident. The British are now too cravenly to attempt again to massacre an entire population of men, women, and children at a peaceful meeting by blocking off all exits and firing upon a scrambling crowd. The eyes of the world are upon India; they cannot stand up to such scrutiny again.”
The crowd began to clap, thumping palm against palm, elbows pumping with effort, sweat drenching brows. “Jai Hind!” they cried. “Hail to India!”
Vimal held up a hand. “And our police inspector, Mr. Dyer, though an admirable man in his own right and fortunately thus christened at birth, can make no pretensions to being a General Dyer.”
A laugh rippled through the crowd and they all turned again, in one body, to look upon the reddening face of the police inspector, who blushed. A tic sprang up on the side of his mouth and he gazed ahead, above the heads of the students. Sam smiled at Vimal’s silver tongue and his wit. General Dyer was the man who had ordered the firing upon the crowds at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians gathered for a political meeting. When asked why he had not used the machine guns mounted upon the armored vehicles he had brought to the meeting, Dyer had answered that he could not fit the vehicles through the entrance. Dyer had gone to Jallianwala Bagh with the intention of committing a mass massacre; he had blocked all the accesses to the park so that no one could run out, and without a warning to the people, ordered his men to fire. It had been the catalyst of the nationalist movement in India, and after that, nothing but absolute and complete freedom from the British had been acceptable. And yet, Sam thought, here they were in 1942, more than two decades after Jallianwala, witnessing a similar scenario. He glanced at Inspector Dyer and saw that indeed, Vimal had been right. This man was very well aware of posterity’s harsh gaze upon him, this crowd too was peaceful and peaceable, and he would not dare order his men to fire upon them.
The meeting went on then and out of Vimal’s beautiful mouth rolled words of fire and strength. “What is the name of Rudrakot’s only institution for higher learning, my friends?” he thundered. “Annadale College, named for John Annadale. It admits us now—” he held up his hands and rolled back the sleeves of his kurta to expose his skin—“people like you and me, but only for profit. Did you know that it was instated for the use, exclusively, of the children of the Raj? And by that, they did not mean us, the colored, the natives, they meant the children of the whites. But all too soon, they realized that just to keep alive, to barely be able to breathe, they needed the fees we would pay too and opened the doors. And that is why you can call yourself students of Annadale.”
The Splendor of Silence Page 33