A murmur began in the crowd. They glanced at each other with anger. Not many of them had known this history because they were too young—when Annadale had allowed admission to Indians—but now their blood was fired by this past impropriety.
“A fine rule that was, my friends,” Vimal said, feeding on the wave of discontent that swept through the courtyard. “When our British friends speak of the Raj, they speak only of themselves—we do not figure in any translation of that word at all. The Raj is the British, and yet, where would they be without us?
“Our government advises patience and yet refuses us independence. And here they are”—Vimal encompassed the air with an arcing movement of one arm—“striving to set other people free, defending the Home country against Hitler’s ravages, seeking freedom with one hand—” he flung his other arm out—“dominating an entire other people with the other!”
The crowd roared in a massive shout.
Vimal abused the British government of India; he insulted the poor, perspiring inspector; he talked passionately about love for his country and the need for independence. By the end of it, Sam was as swept away as the others. He saw Ashok rapt in the front row, gazing at Vimal with a look of adoration. When Vimal finished, the crowd clapped long and hard, the noise reverberating around the small courtyard while he stood there on the front steps in front of the constabulary of Rudrakot. A policeman walked through the crowd, his khaki uniform like a dab of mud among all that khadi white, and wrote down the names of as many people as he recognized.
Sam saw Vimal wilt and collapse into a seated position on the front steps, his chest heaving, exhaustion whitening his face. A hundred arms reached out to him, but he waved them all away and said, “Go. Only he must be here.” He was pointing at Ashok.
Ashok went to kneel by Vimal’s side, drew out his white silk handkerchief, and mopped his brow. Vimal’s breathing returned to normal and the color in his face came back. They both waited for Sam to approach them, and when he did, Ashok said firmly, not even looking up at Sam, “I will stay here with Vimal right now, Captain Hawthorne. You must carry on to the White Durbar.”
April 1942, a Month Earlier
Somewhere in Burma
So this is it, Sam thinks. This is where his training has brought him. From basic training in Georgia with its interminable and dragging marches. The lessons in camouflage, with shrubs and branches and twigs and leaves on helmets. Night raids on sandbags masquerading as the enemy. The killing of that enemy, sand spilling out for guts and for blood. Then one afternoon, the major puts his head into the barracks and hollers, “Ridley, Samuel! To the colonel’s office. ASAP. With your kit. You’re outta here.”
That day he becomes Sam Hawthorne. That day Sam learns about a fledgling OSS unit. What, he asks? Office of Strategic Services. You are going to Burma. What do I do there, sir? You’ll know when you get there, Hawthorne. Why the change in name, sir? So you are nobody. Use your background, just as it is, but be sparing about your past life. You have a brother and a mother? Keep them. Thank you, sir. I will, if you don’t mind, Sam thinks with amusement. The army orders his name changed, orders for him a new identity, and orders him to get used to that name so that whatever he is ordered to do during the war will not be traced back to the Ridleys of Seattle, Washington, USA. It seems like an elaborate act of play to Sam at the beginning, but then he realizes that he does not exist at all on any document extant in his country or Burma or India. Even his CO has only a muddy understanding of the backgrounds of all his men in the Third Burma Rangers—all men like Sam, rife with secrets that will save their lives if the Japanese capture any of them. Eventually, in a few months, the Third Burma Rangers will parachute back into Burma and begin to wage a war behind Japanese lines, to weaken the enemy within itself. But before this, Sam is sent in to rescue Marianne, and finds himself saddled with Ken, who has collapsed after the sound of the bullet from the plantation bungalow.
All this sweeps through Sam’s brain in less than a second. Ken has folded to the ground without a sound, and he falls on his face, wet mud slinging out as his forehead hits the dirt. Sam shoves Marianne down. He kicks at Ken’s face in the mud so that he flips onto his back, and so that he can breathe…if he can still breathe. “Don’t move,” he says in a harsh whisper, “that’s an order.”
Sam plunges down the hillside, yanks the safety off the pistol, and runs toward the front entrance of the plantation house. Someone has told him a story of an officer who was caught in enemy fire on a flat land with nowhere to hide, on a tennis court, of all places, and the officer ran at the shooter for lack of anything else to do and managed to lob a grenade into the thicket before he was wounded, killing the shooter and earning himself one of the early medals in the war. Sam gallops toward the house, thinking of all this, but not shooting yet, for he does not know where to aim his precious bullets. He thinks he saw a flash of fire when the gun sent its bullet into Ken, to the right of the front door. Sam reaches the long, covered walkway and clatters down its teak surface, moving so fast that two bullets sing into the stagnant air and then sail into the pillars that hold up the roof of the walkway, right after he passes. Sam hears them, hears the soft thud of metal into wood, hears the pillars creak and moan in protest, but keeps his eyes on the window to the right. The glass is broken, an ugly black rifle nose juts out, wavering as it tries to follow his fleeting path.
To the shooter, Sam is a blur of khaki and green, his arms pumping as he runs, his boots almost silent on the polished walkway, his hair flying. Sam means to kill. If he is not killed himself.
Another bullet bursts into the air, but Sam does not even duck as he runs, his breathing strangely even, unhurried. Everything he has learned in training, every exercise he has performed, every lesson taught moves him through that walkway and toward his enemy without hesitation. He barrels through the half-open door and spins into the front porch. Sam comes to a halt and listens. There is a drawing room to his right, the entrance framed by a brick arch. Light spills in from a window. Even though he has been running, his breathing is quiet enough that he can hear the slither of some kind of furniture (a chair perhaps?) near the wall where the window is. Sam picks up a stool from the front porch with his left hand, and moves toward the arch, his gun held steady in his right. As he nears, he heaves the stool up and throws it into the room. The rifle shots reverberate crazily, and Sam rushes in, his pistol firing also. Once. Twice. He sees a pair of legs behind a sofa and takes aim at both ankles, pulverizing each into a mass of blood and bone.
And then there is silence. And a sound of crying. There is only one person here. Someone left behind. The acrid smoke of their bullets hangs in the air, bites into Sam’s nostrils. Still holding his gun, Sam moves around the sofa. The Japanese soldier lies along the back of the sofa, hands clutching his knees, tears plunging down his attenuated cheeks.
“Tanomuyo,” he says, waving emaciated fingers in the air. “Tekidato omottanda. Ore wa kowakattanda.”
Please. I thought you were the enemy. I was afraid.
Sam looks at him, and looks down at the ankles he has shattered. Why, he thinks, he is just a boy. He cannot be more than fifteen years old. Tears gush wetly down his face, an old, decomposed bandage grasps his thin ribs, the coverings mottled with blood and pus, his hair is sweaty and sticks to his head. Sam grabs him by the collar and drags him to the center of the room, kicking his rifle away to the side so that the boy cannot reach it. He tears a white tablecloth into strips, binds the boy’s wrists behind his back, and leaves him propped up against a sofa. The soldier’s blood pools at his feet and his face pales. Sam surveys him for a few minutes before tearing more strips from the tablecloth and using these as a bandage to bind the boy’s ankles. He will never walk again, but he will at least still be alive.
Marianne and Sam bring an immobile Ken into the bungalow after Sam is sure that there is no one else here. There are many rooms, and all of them except for the front drawing room where the Japanese soldier
lies in his own blood are trashed beyond recognition—furniture splintered into sticks, sofas and armchairs slashed, brass vases flattened, mattresses and bedding burned and moldering damply. There are big gashes in the red-tiled roof of the bungalow and rain has taken up occupancy in most of the rooms, bringing with it spiders, mosquitoes, innumerable leeches crawling along the stone floors in search of living flesh to feed on. The drawing room is the only safe and dry place in the house. Sam knocks out the door on one end and clears a path from the room to the back of the bungalow so that they now have three exits if they need them—the doorway, the concrete arch leading to the front porch, and the windows along the front from where the soldier shot at them.
Ken’s wound is only superficial, and they find this out after Marianne undresses him in one corner of the drawing room as the Japanese soldier watches them, fear blanching his face. The bullet has only singed the skin on the side of Ken’s neck. It still takes him a very long time to come around though, and all through this Marianne sits by his side, rubbing her fingers along his temples. She does not look at the Japanese boy, but when her gaze does fall upon him inadvertently, she shudders.
“Will Ken live?” Sam asks.
“Yes,” she replies, “there is really nothing wrong with him. I’m not sure why he does not wake up.”
At that moment Ken stirs, his eyelids flutter, and when he opens his eyes his gaze is direct and focused, as though he has been awake for a while. Marianne fusses around him and he smiles weakly at her.
“It takes more than a bullet from a bloody Jap to kill me,” he says, but he has not yet looked around or seen that the Japanese soldier is in the room with them; he could not have known, Sam thinks, who shot at him.
“Why is he still alive?” he asks.
Sam shrugs. “No point in killing him in cold blood, and when I had a chance he only presented me with his legs, so I crippled him.”
Ken seems satisfied with that explanation and closes his eyes again. In a few minutes, his breathing evens and he is asleep. Sam meets Marianne’s eyes and the same worry is reflected in them both—Ken is injured on his neck, there is no telling how it will affect him; and they are now guardians of a Japanese soldier who has no capacity to walk. What will they do with him? Leave him here by himself, so that he can point his army toward their direction? Kill him before they leave, to keep themselves safe? Carry him out with them? How will they manage two wounded men? For all the resilience and courage she has shown so far, Marianne Westwood is still an old woman. Sam, who is so much younger, is exhausted already, he only sleeps in fits and wakens drenched in sweat and nightmares; he cannot begin to imagine how long Marianne’s strength will last.
Sam digs through his haversack for another pistol, and when he pulls it out, the barrel is rusted through. Three short days ago, it fell into a river they were forced to ford on the trail.
“I will go out and find the hen,” he says, “and prepare dinner for us. And,” he says, pausing, “for the boy.” Here he glances at the Japanese soldier. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes.”
Still Sam lingers, uneasy, not wanting to leave Marianne alone. She waves toward the door. “Go.”
The rain has stopped by the time Sam steps out into the darkening light under the moist teak trees. He walks around the perimeter of the bungalow, his boots squelching in the damp grass. What he sees on the inside—a shambles—is mirrored here too, the lawns are blown up with unnecessary throws of grenades, the bushes are hacked down by someone gone mad with his dah, the creamy yellow shrouds on the murdered earth are the annual blooming padauk flowers. Such destruction, Sam thinks, as his nostrils fill with the fragrance of the flowers. There is a sudden movement in the bushes and the scrawny hen comes clucking out and stops at Sam’s feet. He puts out a hand to it and it does not move for a second, then turns around and flees, rending the still air with the sound of its frantic clucks. Sam finally pounces upon the hen on one of the walkways surrounding the house and grabs it by the neck. It flutters in his arms, protesting in a flurry of feathers until he wrings the thin neck with one twist and settles its still-warm body in the crook of his elbow.
Sam comes upon the pool on the side of the bungalow and looks down into the clear, green water, his whole self rampant with longing. The temperature still hovers somewhere over blazing, though the sun is close to setting and the canopy of trees over him has darkened everything to a blur. Water drips from the leaves of the hibiscus bushes and the pool seems to glow as though lit from inside with a string of lights. Sam sets the dead bird down by the side of the pool and strips off his clothes until he is naked. He dives from the side into the water, barely breaking the surface. When he comes up for air after a blessedly long time in the cool water, his body feels clean and strong, the sweat and dirt of the past few days washes away, he can breathe and feel human again. Sam floats in the water on his back, submerging himself until only his nose is in the air. He drifts weightlessly, his arms out, his fingers dragging under the surface to keep his body in balance.
He thinks he feels the smooth and clammy brush of skin against his, for just a moment, but is too lethargic to open his eyes. The feeling passes, but then there is a distinct rising of the hairs along his back and on his nape. Sam does not open his eyes but listens intently, raising himself out of the water just enough for his ears to be revealed. This is no sound from a human being. An animal? His clothes lie in a pile along the side of the pool, by the dead hen, and right on top is his leather holster with his Colt tucked safely in it.
Sam opens his eyes but makes no sudden movements, just gently propels himself toward the rim of the pool. He senses, rather than sees, at first, the gelid pale white and daffodil yellow skin of the snake rising out of the pool. It runs its muskmelon-size head along the edge of the verandah, its forked tongue slithering out for a taste in the air of the dead hen and finds it. The python has begun to open its jaws and slide its body out of the water when Sam ducks his head into the water and swims toward it, thinking only that he is not going to lose his only delicious dinner to a damn snake.
As his splashing sends waves toward the edge of the pool, the python turns around, falls back into the water and races toward him. It comes upon his body from underneath and coils its mighty length over the part it has most access to, his right arm.
Sam suddenly finds himself in the Burmese python’s embrace, within the waters of the pool where they have both been swimming. He opens his mouth to call out to Marianne and at that instant, the mammoth snake squeezes and constricts around Sam’s arm. And yanks him under.
Twenty-five
For seven years, while her son was a minor, she practically ruled from behind the purdah; a seclusion so strict that even the doctor must look at her tongue, or the dentist pull out her teeth, through a slit in the curtain that shut off the inner apartments; and her ladies must follow suit…she triumphed over all imposed limitations; but…she could not easily move about, because of purdah restrictions.
—Maud Diver, Royal India, 1942
The zenana apartments of Jai’s palace were in a separate wing by themselves, accessed through a series of corridors. Mila walked behind the manservant who led her to the zenana, a petromax lantern held aloft in his hand. Here, there was no electricity and this part of the palace was ancient, perhaps built as early as the sixteenth century by an ancestor of the Rudrakot royal family. The corridors had huge, cusped arches and enormous ceilings painted a deep indigo blue. There were gaps in the jalis, screens on top of the arches, from where little bits of twigs and dust came floating down when a roosting pigeon flapped at the intrusion upon its night’s sleep. Mila heard the deep gurgles of protest from the pigeons’ throats, heard the cry of a peacock somewhere in the gardens beyond the light from the lantern, saw the colors of the walls intensify and fade as they passed until it seemed like they were within the embrace of an ocean.
The whole evening had been surreal, the dinner, the flight through the various ro
oms of Jai’s apartments, startling a lazy gecko here, a nesting sparrow there; their laughter and an overwhelming feeling of love and affection for this man who wanted to give her so much. She had chosen the rooms she wanted for her own when she would be married to Jai, three of them, each opening out onto a marble courtyard with a fountain in the center and a parapet on the far end with a view of the town of Rudrakot and the Panjari Mountains capping the horizon in the distance. There were two trees in the courtyard, one a kinshuk, now in full bloom with its bright vermilion flowers and its dark mahogany-colored bark, and another the prosaic neem tree, which would soon fruit with its yellow, grapelike, inedible fruit. The rooms were large and empty, and Mila had stood in one darkened corner—as Jai moved around at the other end of each room—and listened for the breathing of past occupants, a smell from their presence, an approval of her wanting this space for her own, for her being here.
When it came time for her to marry Jai and move into these apartments, the rooms would be ready—whitewashed anew, the marble polished and washed, the floors slicked clean of the dust and dirt of centuries, the niches wired for electricity, carpets laid on the floor, Louis XIV furniture moved in, complete with a four-poster bed in the bedchamber. As it was, Jai’s apartments were on another side of this wing of the palace and part of the renovation would include his removal from the old rooms to new ones close to hers. They would sleep in her bedchamber and awaken to each other every morning. No valets would be allowed to enter the room, instead Jai would have to learn to rise and go out to meet his menservants so that they could attend to his needs.
Mila’s footsteps faltered at the thought of their sharing a room. She pulled the pallu of her glittering sari around her shoulders and covered herself from a sudden chill in the heated air. The manservant walking in front of her paused, inclined his head, and waited for her to make the adjustments with her pallu. Then he went on, listening for the sound of her footsteps matching his own.
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