The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  “I was curious about the meeting and wanted to hear Vimal’s speech,” Sam said.

  A wry smile turned up the corners of Mila’s mouth. She began to speak and then flushed when she realized what she was saying. “What was it you said in the verandah earlier this evening? That is not enough of a reason.” She had to stop, her heart thumping at the remembrance, and it was almost a minute before she could speak again. “It is not just the nationalist movement, for we have our part to do also in this struggle. On the one hand, we are taught not to be individualistic, that fealty to our parents must supersede every other want and every other need, on the other, it is quite simply the question of freedom for my people. I choose to be loyal to my father, not because I am taught so, but because I choose so.

  “What I fear for Ashok…is Vimal. I do not like that boy, and it is, really, an irrational distaste based on something as stupid as the fact that everyone seems to adore him because he has a slick tongue and a becoming appearance. Perhaps there is more, but I do not like him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. He could also have said, I had to take Ashok to the political session; I had promised Vimal. But he did not, and his silence brought a little wedge of distrust between them, for Mila wondered why, and then thought that Sam must have had a reason or he would not have done something she so disapproved of.

  The trumpeters near the gate of the courtyard lifted shining silver trumpets strung with silver tassels to their mouths and a sweet melody floated over the courtyard. They all became silent as the dulcet voice of the diwan rang out, first announcing Jai’s arrival in the balcony, for which they all rose, and then, one by one, all the men and women who were to pay obeisance to the prince. Lady Pankhurst sailed by, so did the wife of the colonel of the Rifles regiment, the vicar’s wife, and quite a few of the ladies from the Civil Lines where Mila lived. The men came next, first the officers of the two regiments and, finally, in the end, Raman, who walked up the aisle and smiled at his daughter as he passed her. Mila covered her mouth with the palm of her right hand and kissed it, sending her love to her father.

  Over the next two hours of the White Durbar, the moon shrank in the sky, and when it had ended, strings of aquamarine lights were lit all around the courtyard. Jai stayed in his balcony watching the crowds below, the women of the zenana disappeared from their perches, and the audience remained where it was for the grand finale. Bearers in white, with flowing turbans and bare feet, came by with large silver trays on which rested little silver saucers of the specialty of Jai’s kitchens, served only on this night, and only to the assembled guests. It was a sweet made from the milk of buffaloes fed only on a diet of almonds and honey. This milk was laced with jasmine honey, boiled for long hours while the top foam was skimmed off and deposited upon the silver saucers. These saucers were then taken into the glass-enclosed conservatory that held the prized roses of the Rudrakot palaces and left there overnight on the cool floor. The dew that formed on the milk was rose-scented, light as air, and sparkled in the moonlight like crystals upon cream.

  Each teaspoon of this precious dessert evanesced upon Sam’s tongue and soared through his body like an incantation. He knew then that Mila was lost to him forever; how could he even begin to compete with the love of a man who could, so casually, feed four hundred people the sweetened cream of milk drenched with dewdrops? His heart yearned for her, and even though she sat by his side, so close to him, he could not sense her presence. It was as though she were elsewhere.

  And Mila was elsewhere. While all the pomp of the White Durbar was meant to awe and impress, on Mila its effect was one of suffocation. She saw herself in this life, in this same life, year after year, perhaps in one of the tiny zenana balconies after a while, looking down upon the durbar. There would be little room for spontaneity, not when so many people had to be appeased. She thought of her day and of her evening and how different they had been. The wife of the prince of Rudrakot could not be seen in the brothels of the Lal Bazaar, teaching the girls the letters of the Hindustani alphabet. Her charity, if that is what it was, would have to be more distant, through someone else. Besides, no matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise, she did not love Jai. Not as she loved Sam.

  It took a couple of hours for everyone to leave the house at the end of the Lal Bazaar, but finally it was empty and only Ashok and Vimal remained. As each person left, they came in their own way to pay obeisance to Vimal also, just as Jai received respects in the White Durbar. The boy or girl would bend from the hip, drag their fingers along the floor, near Vimal’s feet but not actually touching them, for he had made it clear that the practice of asking for blessings thus was extremely distasteful to him.

  Ashok sat in one corner of the room, still spellbound by what he had seen and heard. It was difficult not to be swept away by the adulation of so many, all about as old as he was, fifteen, sixteen, or perhaps as old as eighteen. He recognized a few of them as students from Annadale College and marveled that Vimal’s hold over them was so compelling. As each person approached Vimal, a tremor seemed to take hold of his or her body simply with the joy at being so close to their beloved leader. They did not dare to meet Vimal’s burning eyes, which swung every now and then to Ashok and saturated him with trembling also. Vimal’s skin was white on his temples, lines had formed deep grooves around his mouth, his hair was wet with perspiration, and his breathing was shallow, his chest heaving with every breath, and Ashok felt fiercely protective toward him. He thought that Vimal’s energy had drained slowly in the two hours that he sat upon the chair in the middle of the bare room so that his followers could bend, to speak a tentative word in his ear, receive a smile or a nod. Finally, they all departed and left Ashok seated in his corner of the room, on the floor, uncaring that the seat of his expensive linen pants was smudged with dust and dirt.

  “Shall we go up to the roof?” Vimal asked, putting out a hand.

  Ashok leapt from his place, ran up to Vimal, and helped him out of his chair as though he were a very old man. They went up the narrow staircase, walled on either side, with Vimal’s arm around Ashok’s shoulders, and Ashok’s arm around Vimal’s waist.

  After the heated closeness of the room downstairs and the stink of sweat from too many bodies, the terrace was lit with the palely lustrous moonlight and a sprinkling of stars across the night sky. They sat down in one corner of the terrace, on the floor, after scratching their feet over the cement to check for snakes or scorpions their eyes could not see in the shadow of the parapet. The stone, still warm, retained the blazing heat of the day, but it was strangely comforting because they were both tired. Vimal was physically exhausted from his speech in front of his disciples, and Ashok had lost all life from his limbs in the worship of Vimal. He could not stop his hands from trembling.

  Vimal took out a tin of cigarettes from the pocket of his kurta and lit one, the flare of the flame glowing gold over his beautiful face. The image of that face stayed imprinted on Ashok’s brain long after Vimal had blown out the match and thrown it away. Vimal offered the cigarette to Ashok and he put it between his lips, feeling the cool wetness on the tip where Vimal’s mouth had closed over it. A shiver ran through him as he handed the cigarette back. They were silent for a long while, listening to the mighty blow of the trumpets at the fort to announce Jai’s arrival at the White Durbar.

  “You should be there,” Vimal said softly.

  “I want to be here,” Ashok replied, his voice rough and daring.

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes.”

  Another silence followed as Vimal smoked his cigarette to the very end and threw the still-glowing butt away, toward the center of the terrace. It bounced and bumped along the floor and came to rest facing them, and then slowly it burned itself out until the only light upon them both was the radiance from the moon swelled to fullness.

  Vimal took Ashok’s hand in his and pulled him closer, until his head was upon his chest. There was nothing left in the world that As
hok cared about at that moment apart from Vimal. Ashok too, like Mila, would never know another love like this, for the rest of his life.

  “An hour before sunset,” Vimal said, “I want you to accompany me to the grounds of the residency. They will not let me in by myself, but if you were to come, it would be all right. I am going to put a bomb in Colonel Pankhurst’s Daimler. He will drive it himself to the club later in the evening.”

  It was a testament to Vimal’s astonishing power over his fellow human beings that Ashok felt only a fine twinge of guilt, but he also felt almost immediately that Vimal could very well have hidden the purpose for his request and had not. He had trusted him with this incendiary secret. He made a small sound of assent and that was enough.

  Vimal put a hand under Ashok’s chin and kissed him on the mouth.

  April 1942, a Month Earlier

  Somewhere in Burma

  The waters of the pool are suddenly icy cold to Sam. When the python pulls him under the surface with one sweep of its muscular body, he barely has time to register what is happening. His mouth is open to shout out to Marianne, and when he sinks, it fills with water, sending him gasping and choking as his lungs expand and protest.

  Sam flails and tries to loosen his right arm from the snake’s tenacious grip and feels an immense, shattering pain as it snaps his arm out from its home in his shoulder, tearing tendons and ligaments under his skin. The ache sears its way through his brain and Sam’s vision whitens and blurs as everything dissolves in front of him. He can no longer feel the water even, or the lack of oxygen to his veins. If he could think at such a time, he would realize that Burmese pythons are gargantuan creatures, often reaching ten feet or more in length and weighing more than a hundred pounds at full maturity. He would know that once the python begins its crushing embrace, it rarely lets loose until it can feel that its prey has stopped breathing and is completely still. This one, Sam’s python, is an adult male, five years old, particularly aggressive and fifteen feet long. The snake has been hungry for twelve days now and has slipped into the pool at the bungalow for the same reason as Sam—to cool off in the immense heat of the late afternoon and to contemplate its hunger in peace. Normally it would not think of humans as prey…but there is always a first time.

  None of this reasoning is part of Sam’s brain the moment it shuts down all other aspects of his body. He can no longer see in the water, no longer suffer from the pain of his dislocated shoulder, no longer even feel the cold of the pool. And in that moment of blankness, comes a sudden clarity, a will to survive, a need to do so—the same resolution that keeps his brother alive in the field punishment center in Rudrakot.

  Sam heaves upward with a powerful thrust of his legs and hauls himself and the python out of the water like projectiles. He opens his mouth, breathes in deeply before he plunges back into the water, and then strikes out with just his left arm and his legs toward the verandah, dragging the python behind him, still attached firmly to his useless right arm. He opens his eyes finally, and as the water streams from his retina, he sees the figure of Marianne Westwood come into focus. She stands at the edge of the pool, a tiny, pearl-handled pistol held steadily in her hand, aimed at him. She pulls the trigger. The bullet goes cleanly through the python’s head and it explodes into a mess of muscle, tissue, sinew, all palely yellow and bloody. Sam reaches Marianne, and just as calmly, she kneels to help him out of the water and unwinds the snake’s quivering body from his right arm as though she is unwinding thread from a bobbin.

  “There,” she says, wiping her hands of the gore from the python on the thighs of her pants, “you’re a mess now, Sam. Put on some clothes; you’re going to catch a cold.”

  Sam clambers into his underpants, shivering, his teeth clattering so much the sound fills his ears. He cannot bear to look back at the twitching length of the python by the pool, but before she turns away, Marianne kicks the still-dying carcass into the water with a vigorous thrust from her boot. She bends to pick up the rest of Sam’s clothes and the packet of letters from Maude and Mike falls out. Sam lunges for it but not before Marianne has seen the writing on one of the letters.

  “What is your connection with Rudrakot?” she asks.

  “Do you know of it?”

  “It’s a small princely state in the Sukh desert, one of the six hundred odd in India. Nothing special, only spectacular for the forts and palaces built in the fourteenth century, where I believe the reigning prince still lives.” Marianne’s brow is furrowed in thought. Her expression clears. “Rudrakot has a regiment?”

  “Two,” Sam says, wiping the plastic wrapping around the letters free of water drops against the cotton of his underpants. “My brother, Mike, was in one.”

  “Was?”

  “He might be dead. He’s been AWOL for two months now.”

  Marianne drapes Sam’s clothes over her arm, tucks her tiny pistol into the pocket of her pants, and puts a hand to Sam’s elbow to nudge him into the bungalow. Sam has begun to shiver. The temperature is nowhere near cold or even cool, but the trembles rack his body as he hunches into his chest. He has not allowed himself to think that Mike might already be dead, but after that encounter with the python, he has used that word, enunciated it flatly, as though it is a fact, not a mere supposition.

  “Well,” Marianne says in a voice carefully devoid of emotion, “you’ll never know until you go to Rudrakot. And you’ll never get there like this. Let’s go in, get warm, eat that damned bird, and get to India.”

  When they enter the bungalow again, Sam in agonizing pain from the arm that flaps by his side, they find Ken braced against a wall of the drawing room and interrupt his conversation with the Japanese soldier. Marianne and Sam halt at the archway, both knowing instinctively that this cannot be right—Ken is speaking a laborious Japanese, carefully enunciating each word…why?

  “Oh, shit,” Sam says under his breath.

  He bends at the waist so that his useless right arm will have some place on which to rest and with his left, he scrambles for his pistol, which Marianne carries, along with his pants and his shirt, but it is too late. Ken levels a pistol of his own at Sam and Marianne.

  “Sit,” he says, and when they collapse, he waves at them. “Apart from each other, please. I have a story to tell you.”

  Twenty-seven

  Love, when sought out, is an ailment

  Between the flesh and the bone…

  —Khalil Gibran, The Procession, 1942

  As it happened, only one member of Raman’s household slept during the remaining hours of that night, for they were all, in some form or another, engaged in the act of love.

  Kiran came home sodden and stewed after the White Durbar because on the way back he had stopped again at the Victoria Club for yet another drink, and again Sims made some maddening suggestions about a secret he held, a secret he would not tell Kiran. They were both drunk, they were all drunk, and it was with great difficulty that Blakely and Forrest managed to part the wrestling Kiran and Sims. They both hurled abuses at each other, and Sims left the indentation of his teeth, a perfect set of thirty-two, on Kiran’s back where he had bitten him while they grappled on the floor.

  Sayyid opened the door to Kiran and dragged him, none too gently, up the stairs to his room. There, he stripped off his clothes, ran a bath, and forced a staggering Kiran into the bathtub. Once, Kiran cried out, when Sayyid dabbed tincture on his wound to cauterize it, but his touch was firm on his master’s son’s back. He washed the blood from his skin and put a bandage over it. Then he hauled Kiran out of the tub, dried him as he stood limp and wet in the middle of the bathroom floor, helped him on with his pajamas, and put him to bed. Kiran slept for the next twelve hours.

  A weary Raman also came home to Sayyid’s careful ministrations and he accepted them with a scolding and gratitude at the same time. They had both returned from Nodi at about ten o’clock in the morning after having been in the saddle for most of the early part of the day. When Raman entered his hom
e, went upstairs to his bedroom, sat in the galvanized aluminum tub, and felt the ache of his aging body, he knew that he could not tour the villages and the districts anymore. That part of his life was over, and with good reason, for he could no longer carry himself for days on end without adequate sleep, and there was no more comfort in the thin tarpaulin sheets laid on rocks that were to substitute for his bed. The exhilaration of the previous day had deflated in the bright light of this one, and he felt old beyond his years. They had come back also to a house that was empty and silent, and Raman knew then that his fears had come true—Mila, Ashok, and Sam had spent the night at Chetak’s tomb, unchaperoned. In his head, he said it like this, Mila, Ashok, and Sam, as though to evenly divide his daughter’s and Sam’s names with Ashok’s name in his thinking would add propriety to their having been away. Raman did not know then, of course, and would never know, that it was not the night he had to fear, but the happenings of the afternoon, during the dust storm.

  Raman returned to Rudrakot and was caught almost immediately in the news Jai had brought from the ICC. Jai was home too from the corps before the end of the session because he had had to expel the maharaja of Kishorenagar from the school. And that had had its repercussions, for Kishorenagar was a princely state with a great deal more importance in the Raj than tiny Rudrakot, and enjoyed the privilege of an eighteen-gun salute to Rudrakot’s thirteen. Amongst all of that were some thinly veiled accusations from Kishorenagar that Jai was party to the same habits he had been accused of. There was no truth to the charges of homosexuality on Jai’s part, and Colonel Cameron had seen that clearly, but he had also suggested that Jai take a leave of absence from his duties and return to Rudrakot for the duration of the session. Until all of this could be sorted out.