The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  When they reached the harem apartments, the manservant bowed and stood aside in front of a heavy teak door painted bright red and studded with brass fittings, like the outer doors of forts and palaces. He reached out and thumped on the wood with his fist and the door opened to reveal another servant, also male, but part of the zenana.

  The second servant bowed to Mila and swung his hand inward, indicating that she should join him there. His glance fell upon the raised doorstep and then up to her face and Mila nodded as she lifted her foot to step across the threshold into the zenana. As she took that first step, she wondered how many times she would have to come in here in the future and what the etiquette would be then, when she would be officially part of Jai’s household. For now, she was merely a guest.

  Here also there was no electricity, but the wall niches had been put to good use with oil lamps made of clay, the flames standing upright in the torpid air. The lamps only threw little pools of light within their very tight peripheries, and the rest of the corridor was in darkness, but beyond the corridor were the gardens again and here the stars and the rising moon lit the landscape. Mila went through another set of corridors and another set of doors, and as she neared the heart of the zenana, where the most important women in Jai’s harem lived, the embellishments on the walls and the doors and the verandahs became more and more ornate. The brass was polished and shiny, the lamps held clean, newly pressed oil with barely the hint of an odor, the floors were clean with wiping, the bushes in the gardens rampant with cloyingly fragrant blooms, the views in the distance, of the town of Rudrakot, like a diamond necklace flung out into the desert night.

  And then, from this semidark, glorious world of aromas, Mila stepped into a brightly lit, dazzling room, the main reception hall of the harem. She entered and stopped, her breath taken away by a grandeur she could not ever have imagined.

  There were lights everywhere, in the niches in the walls, the candles hung from glass globe chandeliers all over the ceiling, the enormous five-foot floor lamps with a hundred wicks floating in the oil, each one lit to a brilliance. The walls were covered in a light blue mural of arabesques on a bright white background, lotus flowers and peacocks entwined with each other on every surface, and each brush of paint had embedded within it a little sliver of mirror. So the light from the numerous lamps roved around the room and met the mirrors on all sides and returned upon itself until the air seemed on fire. The floors were marble inlaid with turquoise, and of these Mila could see only the portion that she was standing upon, for the rest was covered in thick Persian rugs that led to the other end where there were low, ivory-inlaid wooden tables weighted down with plates of sweets in all colors and surrounded by thick mattresses and divans.

  There were four main women, this much Mila saw in a brief glance as she bent down to undo her high heels before stepping on the carpet. Then, barefoot, the bottom of her sari sweeping the floor, she approached the women who were seated on the divans, surrounded by a multitude of other women, members of the zenana, and servants. The woman in the center was Raja Bhimsen’s wife, the one who had not been able to provide him with a male heir, and though she was nominally Jai’s mother in the harem, he had never really liked her because she had detested him. There was also one grandmother, one aunt, and finally, on Mila’s right, a younger woman leaning against a bolster, smoking a hookah.

  “Please sit,” she said, in Hindustani, her voice rasping. “You must forgive me, for I speak no English. I have no use for it.”

  “It is not a problem, Your Highness,” Mila replied, sitting down gracefully on one edge of the divan in front of the women. She sat alone on this side of the room and looked only at the woman who had spoken to her, though she could not help but be aware of the dark, kohl-rimmed eyes of the others gazing at her.

  “We,” the princess of Shaktipur continued, waving her hookah pipe at the rest of the women, “have been curious to meet you for two years now.”

  “But I thought—,” Mila began, surprised.

  The princess shook her head, and the long, hanging diamond earrings in her ears glittered in the reflected light from the lamps. “We have always known, of course, perhaps even before Jai knew, that one day we would be welcoming you into this harem.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Mila said. She sat very straight on the divan and her back had already begun to ache because she was unused to sitting in chairs without supports for the back. The public rooms in Jai’s palaces had Western furniture, but here there was no concession to the West, here all was as it must have been a hundred years ago—the same carpets, the same lighting, the same groups of women rife with inquisitiveness, waiting for the first glimpse of a new member of their zenana. The air in the room closed in upon Mila.

  “I know you mean to have the rooms surrounding the kinshuk tree, and that you mean to live there. This is fine with us, but it would be nice if you could come and visit us every now and then.” The princess smiled sadly and suddenly Mila saw a loveliness in her that was not immediately apparent, for she was plump, comfortably round in the face, with a button nose and a fast-fading chin tucked in folds of flesh. But now—when her gaze darkened with an ache at having to welcome her husband’s second wife, a woman he so obviously loved, into his palace—an attraction had lit her face.

  “I thank you,” Mila said again. “You have been…are…most kind.” She hesitated, not sure anymore of what else to say. Should she apologize for Jai’s choice? Should she even be repentant? She saw that her life would touch these women’s lives only gently, for most of the time she would be with Jai.

  And this First Her Highness affirmed by saying carefully, “It has been a great disappointment to Jai that I do not speak English and that I cannot accompany him to parties at the residency or even at your father’s house. My life—” here she spread out her hands to encompass the room—“has always been within walls, or if outside, merely in the company of other women. I know you are different, you will be comfortable in the presence of the British women with their white faces and their short skirts that reveal calves and ankles, and perhaps you even wear such dresses yourself?”

  Mila shook her head. “Not all the time, Your Highness. I wear pants more often; my Papa frowns upon dresses, well, Pallavi, she is…she is in our house, she does not like me in dresses either.”

  “So you have restraints too?” the princess asked. “It is good for a woman to have restraints.”

  To this Mila could not respond, for her life was constrained as it was, quite simply because she was a woman. With the new wave of nationalism there had been more liberties for women in India, but it was of the strident, masculine type, where even the Mahatma exhorted women to stand up for their Mother India, but in the same way that the men did. In this traditional world, however, Mila thought, it was women like the princess of Shaktipur—and indeed all the women in these zenana walls whose eyes devoured her with such burning curiosity—who imposed limitations on other women. Whether out of spite because they had themselves suffered, or because of a genuine concern, it was difficult to tell. Mila said nothing to the princess of Shaktipur because she could not agree with her last statement, but Jai’s first wife, young as she was, perhaps only two or three years older than Mila, understood this.

  Her gaze was thoughtful upon Mila’s face. “If we were to behave like men, then the men would have no one to look after, no one who would help them feel protective and masculine. I know that Jai likes you for your…your ability to travel with him to Paris and London perhaps, because you will ride a horse in the regimental maidan without fear, because you can read and write. These are all good skills, my dear, but he must not be made to feel less than he is. Or rather, you must make him feel more than he is. Let him be the man.”

  Mila bent her head, unable to even smile. When First Her Highness had mentioned reading and writing as one of Mila’s skills, it was only because she herself was illiterate. And yet what a difference there was between her and the women of the Lal Bazaa
r. This sort of speaking was the last resort of the zenana—the only way the women within it could feel inviolate and sacrosanct, if somehow they were under the impression that they were being guarded from some terrible atrocities in the outside world. She spoke as though she knew Jai very well and yet Mila knew that the princess’s interaction with him had been very limited, and if most of it had been her pandering to Jai, pretending a fragility she did not possess, then it was no wonder that he sought love in her, Mila. The other three older ladies were quiet and watchful, puffing at their hookahs too until the smoke hung in a fog around Mila and the brilliant light of the room was diffused, as though through a piece of glass. The smoke was sweet, almost fruity in flavor, and Mila realized that the tobacco in the hookahs was laced with something else, perhaps opium? Yet the scrutiny on her from the many eyes in the room had not wavered—it was steady and it was questioning. Mila did not intend to satisfy all their curiosity at the same time.

  She rose and said, “You are indeed kind to have invited me here, First Your Highness.” The use of that title, with the word first appended, was a deliberate drawing of battle lines in that if there were a first there would be a second. They would meet in the future, be polite to each other, but there was no mistaking that the princess of Shaktipur was jealous, perhaps understandably so, that her husband had gone out of the zenana for his affections. Mila knew that once Jai married her, he would never return to the arms of this woman, even though she had a right to his presence in her bedchamber. It was a tacit understanding between Mila and Jai, and an agreement without which she would not marry him.

  As Mila sat in the zenana apartments talking with Jai’s first wife, Sam drove from the political meeting at the Lal Bazaar house to the fort for the White Durbar. He was deeply troubled at having left Ashok there alone with Vimal, but there was no shaking the boy’s resolution once he had made it. He refused to leave, and promised, eventually, that he would come to the fort in an hour’s time, before the durbar started. And with that Sam had to be grudgingly content.

  He drove past the Victoria Club and slowed down at the gates, wondering if he should go inside for a desperately needed drink and then decided against it. If Sam had gone in, he would have found Kiran at the bar with the officers of the Rifles regiment, all of them steadily getting drunk, on their fourth gin and tonics. They were due at the White Durbar also; it was a strict requirement and part of the regiment’s rules. When quartered within the boundaries of a princely state, all the officers and men had to present their respects to the ruling prince, irrespective of their personal views on the matter.

  Sims downed his fifth gin and tonic, to bolster his stagger across the durbar hall to bow to Jai, and wiped his receding chin. The alcohol had sent a fire into his veins, and the sight of Mila that afternoon in the brothel house had excited him immeasurably. Without thinking, he said to Kiran, turning him around on his bar stool, “Guess who I saw today?”

  At that, Blakely, a little more sober on this hot night, clamped a hard hand on Sims’s shoulder and said, “No one. You saw no one, Sims.”

  Sims shrugged off his hold belligerently. “I did.”

  “Later,” Blakely said. “Later.”

  Twenty-six

  …many of India’s marvels…must be seen to be believed. In cold print they read like fantasy or exaggeration…eleven acres of Palace: an immensity of rose-pink sandstone that would make Versailles look like a cottage, the interminable façade soaring aloft from redder terrace; the vast central saloon furnished with English chairs and sofas…bedrooms like reception halls, the bathrooms like ballrooms.

  In fifteen dining-rooms as many dinners would be served each day on a silver dinner service worth no less than £30,000; the elaborate courses prepared by a hundred and forty-three cooks and kitchen helpers of whom seventeen chefs were dedicated to curries only.

  —Maud Diver, Royal India, 1942

  It was not until well past midnight that all the grandees were gathered for the White Durbar on the night of the full moon in Rudrakot. The durbar itself, a conclave of the court in the middle of the night, was an ancient tradition, and it had long been forgotten which Rudrakot king was responsible for its inception. But it was an opportunity, as all such assemblages were, to demonstrate the might of the king, the magnificence of his person, his domination over his people, the plenitude of his treasury. In the beginning, the White Durbar was also an event where the vassal thakurs, or landholders, came to pay their respects to their king, to swear allegiance to him, to bow before him and establish their unswerving loyalty. But in May 1942, the king was a mere figurehead. He nominally held the lands of his kingdom, he was responsible for the well-being of his people, but he knew that his authority was hollow, the fealty of his subjects merely routine, since he himself was a satellite of the British Raj.

  But none of this affected the actual ritual of homage, and all the participants—the king, the vassals, and the audience—comported themselves with the solemnity demanded by the occasion. The British Raj was built as much upon this pomp and circumstance, this open show of might, as any of India’s previous other rulers—the Mughals or the minor kings—might have been. The rituals were to placate the masses, to make them think that there still existed some semblance of normalcy, whatever that normalcy might actually be, that nothing had changed from a hundred, or two hundred years ago. The masses, however, were not invited to the White Durbar; they would merely hear of it from the distance of the next day and nod with satisfaction that their king was revered.

  The durbar hall in the palaces of Rudrakot was an enormous courtyard with a balcony built into the ramparts of the fort in one end. The balcony was raised only five feet from the ground and cut into the thick red sandstone of the fort’s outer wall. It was constructed entirely of an unblemished white marble that fed on the moonlight and glowed like a pearl at the bottom of a dark ocean bed. Around this main balcony, still on the fort’s wall, were dotted ten or fifteen tiny marble balconies, higher off the ground, with jalis—screens—rising waist high, covered with half domes shaped in the form of unfurling lotus flowers. Here, the women of Jai’s harem had gathered to watch the proceedings of the durbar, one or two to each little balcony. A hundred years ago, the jalis had covered the entire aperture of the balcony so nothing of the women could be seen from below in the courtyard, but Jai had had the screens cut down so the women could lean over; at least their limbs and their outlines would be visible, because, of course, they would still continue to cover their heads with a veil.

  The rest of the courtyard was quite plain—its beauty lay in the inlay of white marble and red sandstone squares over the whole floor, like some gigantic chessboard. The vividness of this inlay work was not lost on the night of the full moon as each man and woman walked up the center aisle to the main balcony where Jai sat and either bowed or curtseyed before walking away, sideways, since it was not done to show their backs to the king.

  Since it was the White Durbar, the proceedings only began when the moon had reached its full height in the sky and smiled benignly upon them in all of its silver glory. The white marble of the architecture was lustrous, the white dress uniforms of the Rifles and the Lancers specially worn for this occasion were resplendent, and the women’s saris were radiant. There was no light other than the moonlight, and there was so much white, so much silver, so many glittering diamonds and brocades that there was no need for artificial light to discern visages or smiles. Everyone was clad in white, and of them, Jai, in his special sherwani and trousers, was the most brilliant.

  Before the durbar began, Mila wandered around the line of chairs set flush against the long aisle down which everyone would walk to reach Jai in his balcony and searched for Sam and Ashok. Her father, and Colonel Pankhurst (had he been in Rudrakot on this day), would be arranged in a line somewhere beyond the gates of the palace, waiting to be announced and called into the durbar for their turn. Kiran had never sat with her and she wondered where he was.

 
As she passed by Sam, he reached out and clasped her wrist gently. “Are you looking for me?”

  A flood of happiness went through her and she said, “Yes. But where is Ashok?”

  Sam’s expression was stolid. “He is here somewhere. He promised me he would come before the durbar.”

  She sat down on the seat next to Sam. “I thought he was with you at the Victoria Club. Where is he, Sam?”

  Sam took a deep breath and held it for so long that Mila began to listen for the sound of his breathing again, and a sudden fear came over her. She did not believe, even then, that Sam would knowingly do harm to her brother, but there was something that troubled him. What? She did not have to ask again, merely to prod his conscience into speech, for Sam knew she would be anxious, much as he had himself become in the last hour. So he told her. Not everything, not that he owed Vimal a promise, or that Vimal had wanted Ashok to come furtively to the meeting, but instead that he himself had taken Ashok to the meeting. He did not tell Mila that this was a fore-planned action, but he felt that she recognized it as such.

  “You should not have,” she said.

  “Why? Is it that you do not want Ashok involved in nationalism?”

  She hesitated and looked away over the heads of the people opposite them to the red ramparts of the fort. “We must seem an unorthodox family to you, Sam. I can see that you support the Indian cause for freedom, and being Indian, we should too.” She turned to him. “And we do. I do, Papa does, Ashok does when he thinks about it, Kiran does when he wants. Yet it means different things to us all. Here, in Rudrakot, Papa is a representative of the British Indian government, and as such he cannot allow his personal feelings to overrule his commitment to his duty. So not one of us can either. We must be seen to present a united front.”