The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  And then Pallavi said, somberly, “Where do you think you will live with this Captain Hawthorne, Mila? In India? In America? And where will you raise your children? Will they not be half of you and half of him? Who will accept this?”

  Mila buried her head between two pillows. There would be difficulties, she knew that also, but did not want to think of them yet. Pallavi said softly, “Remember Grace, Mila.”

  And Mila did.

  Six years ago, when Jai had gone to London for a visit, Raman had accompanied him, in the official capacity of an advisor, but really to keep Jai out of trouble and the titled British ladies from falling in love with him. Prince or not, it would have been bloody inconvenient and necessary to dissolve an unwanted alliance of this sort. Raman was to be away for more than half a year and so Kiran, Mila, Ashok, and Pallavi had traveled with him, stayed at a hotel and taken their studies with privately hired tutors. At the home of her piano teacher, Mila had met Grace Leghorn, and had been charmed by her prettiness and her enthusiasm. They became friends with a speed that youth, indulgence, and a lack of common history grants to most friendships, took walks on Sunday afternoons, drank tea at each other’s homes, read Jane Austen together, and promised to write letters if they were ever parted again, and write all their lives. Grace gave Mila a little photograph of herself in a locket, with a curl of lovely golden hair tucked under it. Mila pestered Raman to take her to the photo studio so that she could return the favor. And then, just as Raman was to leave England, Grace told Mila that she was to go with them to India; she had been invited to stay with her uncle and aunt in Bengal.

  The affection died on the eastern side of the Suez Canal. It was a cruel lesson for Mila. Grace had been her very best friend in the whole world, had considered the British in India abominable, had read the papers with Mila about the nationalist struggle, and had claimed to admire Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Nehru. But somehow, in washing the blues of the Mediterranean from her pale hands, and dipping them in the darker hues of the Arabian Sea, Grace Leghorn became the Raj even before she set foot on Raj land.

  The irony was that Grace’s uncle was some minor official in the textile industry, in some forlorn village miles from Calcutta, and Raman was political agent of a princely state that quartered two slapdash regiments. It was no consolation for Mila though. She was fifteen, she mourned deeply the loss that this lesson brought, and in doing so, learned its value very well. She was only fifteen; she recovered from Grace Leghorn, but did not forget her.

  “Sam is different,” she said finally to Pallavi.

  And for the first time Pallavi agreed, but she also said, “You will see, my dear, as you grow older, that you cannot change the way the world will view the two of you, no matter how much you try. Are you willing to fight for the rest of your life?”

  The door to Mila’s room opened and Raman came in, his shoulders bowed as though he carried a huge weight on himself, his feet dragging, and when he spoke, his voice was hoarse with crying. “Mila,” he said, “Ashok has been arrested for trying to place a bomb in Colonel Pankhurst’s car.” He ran a hand over his face, as though he could wipe away the pain from his skin with just that action. “How can this even be possible?”

  April 1942, a Month Earlier

  Somewhere in Burma

  Ken talks for an inordinately long time, most of it directionless and rambling. Most of it self-serving. He speaks of a childhood in Colorado, within sight of the Rocky Mountains, of a paucity of food so dire at times during the cold winter months that his mother once boiled the flattened leather of an old pair of boots for a very long time until the leather was soft and almost edible.

  Sam and Marianne have both clearly heard him speak textbook Japanese with the young soldier as they came back into the bungalow. Sam sits against the wall, cradling his arm in his lap, and again, just as he had with the python under the water of the pool, he has now also forgotten the pain because there are more important matters to take care of. An immense stillness descends upon him as he searches the environs of the room without seeming to. Night has come upon them a few hours ago, but they do not notice it. Ken lights a little fire in the middle of the room’s mosaic floor and the fire smokes damply as it struggles to take a bite out of mildewed and mossy twigs and logs. It is the only light by which they can see each other.

  By Sam’s side, Marianne sits with a stunned expression on her face that has not abated since Ken pointed the pistol at them a few hours ago. Mingled with that is shock and sorrow and pain, an almost palpable and physical pain—Sam can feel it reach out in waves toward him. He wants to say that she must not mind Ken’s betrayal so much—for these are the casualties of war. Ken grew up in abject misery, poorer than he can ever imagine anyone to be, and in Calcutta Ken sees human beings so mutilated by poverty he can finally consider that his life has been better than at least someone else’s life. There is a strange and pathetic consolation in this to him. His eyes glow with a disturbing glee when he says this to Sam and Marianne and they cannot even turn to each other and show their pity, for they know that any movement could send a bullet their way.

  “When did you decide to”—Sam hesitates, picking his words carefully, not wanting Ken to rush into an untimely temper—“approach the Japanese?”

  “They came to me,” Ken says. “There is a club in Calcutta, the Cardamon Club, in a little alley behind the Grand Hotel. It is a well-hidden place, seems to be exclusive until your nose shrinks at the stink of piss on the walls of the houses nearby. It’s a dance hall, really, plenty of half-caste women wanting to dance for a few annas; they even allow you to touch them here and there in the alley outside for a few more.” Ken falls into a musing. “There was one girl though who was so pretty…auburn hair, skin white and luscious, long limbs, a tiny waist.” His expression hardens and he wipes the clammy hair from his forehead with his left hand. “I went to the club while on leave a year ago; it was just for fun, nothing more. I expected to throw down a few rupees for the women and the drinks and then come home again, but a man came to me with a proposition. He knew I flew for the AVG, well, he knew that I was a pilot.” He falls silent, reflective. “The whole club, though I did not know it then, was for people like me, rich with money from the bloody Japs.”

  “What did he want?” Sam asks.

  “Photographs of the Calcutta docks, as many as I could take while flying over them. I have them here.” Ken pats his haversack and Sam and Marianne hear the crinkle of paper inside. Why, Sam thinks, has he not considered all this before? It was almost too easy, even their being here in this bungalow was too well planned, too well thought out in advance. For the nudge toward this part of the map has been Ken’s idea, and this Sam remembers now. It had been a very strong suggestion, such as it was. The bungalow is a meeting place, a drop-off point for the photographs. Sam looks upon the young Japanese soldier with a stronger curiosity and a mild regret, thinking that he should have killed him when he first came rushing into the house. The boy had said to Sam in Japanese, I thought you were the enemy. He had thought Sam was Ken. The boy was partially right, Sam thinks. For he is the enemy, only Ken is not. Now the boy knows and he nods sleepily over his crippled feet, the pain sending him to unconsciousness.

  “What did they pay you?” Sam asks.

  Ken’s eyes light up greedily, for it is more money than he has ever seen in his life, more money than he thinks he will ever see again. “Ten thousand dollars. Five before I even started. Five now, when I give them the photographs.”

  A little sound of repugnance escapes Marianne, but she says nothing, her head bent toward the floor as though she cannot bear to even look at Ken anymore. The hurt is the most in her, Sam thinks, for he was never quite as enamored of Ken as Marianne was, and she has transferred her grief for her Kachin villagers into affection for him.

  “What happened to the girl?” Sam asks.

  “She had a pretty name,” Ken says, and his face puckers with distress, overlaid with mortification, which seems st
range to Sam. “Rosalie. Rosalie Gonzalez. I did not think much about that last name or what it meant, mostly because I did not know. We danced for five months together, she gave me her affections sparingly, she kissed me, she let me take her to a hotel, but that was just once, and it was the best sex I had ever had. I saw her naked in the light of the bedside lamps, in the light of an early morning, and saw not one single blemish on her skin—that she carried under her skin, in her tainted blood. But I did not see it, for I was in love with Rosalie. I wonder,” Ken says, worry patterning his brow, “if it would have mattered if I had known right from the beginning that she was a half-caste, that some weird trick of fate had given her the white skin, the hazel eyes, the demeanor of people like us even though she was, in the parlance of the Cardamom Club, just four annas to the rupee. One fourth British, and not a drop of blood more.” He begins to cry, though his aim at them with his pistol is steadfast. He was in love with Rosalie, Sam thinks, but a little, mean part of his brain is in the end much stronger than any love he might harbor. Hence that malevolence in him when he thinks of her, when he thinks that he has been willfully tricked by her. The Kens of this world are not really made for love; they are too parsimonious.

  “I took her out for one last time,” Ken says, “and then slashed her face with my pocketknife so that she would not so easily defraud another serviceman.” He sobs now, loudly, his nose running, tears submerging his face, hiccups racking his thin body. “Oh, Sam,” he says, “I loved her.” Then, most incongruously, “It was a true love, a real love, and it was for love that I injured her. Now she is mine and can’t be anyone else’s lover.”

  Marianne is sobbing too, her heart atomized into a thousand pieces. Sam knows that her sorrow is partly for Rosalie, but also partly for Ken, who could have been a strong and courageous human being but has lost all his capacity for goodness and, as far as she is concerned, is doomed to hell.

  The Japanese boy says this: “Koitsu wa ikashite okou; yasashii kao wo shiteiruna. Kini itta. Soitsu wo nigashite yare.”

  Sam understands what he says, just as he understood what he had said when Sam first ran into the house and blew away his ankles. Sam has known that one of the other two, Ken or Marianne, was going to dupe him, and even from the beginning he has thought it would be Ken because it was a man the Japanese soldier had looked up at when he said, I thought you were the enemy. Now this boy is asking for the gift of Sam’s life from Ken, he says, He has a kind face, let the man live. Why, Sam wonders, was it because he did not kill the boy, because he tied his wrists behind him but lightly, or because he bandaged his ankles?

  As the boy’s reedy voice, mangled by pain, cuts through the air and hangs between them, Ken raises his pistol deliberately and shoots him through the heart. The Japanese soldier’s body convulses once, then twice, and then he sinks with a sigh to the ground, falling on his cheek, his arms akimbo as life ebbs out of him.

  Before Ken can turn his attention to Sam and Marianne, another shot rings out in the room and a look of extreme surprise and hurt comes into Ken’s eyes even as a round hole, initially bloodless, blooms in the center of his forehead like the red tikka that Hindus wear to mimic Shiva’s third eye and ward off evil influences. Ken dies, but he does not move from where he sits, only his pistol drops from his hand to the floor.

  Sam fleetly drags himself across the floor even before the last echo of the bullet fades away and grabs Ken’s pistol, which he throws across the room. It bangs with a tremendous clatter against the wall and bounces before coming to a rest.

  “You saved my life twice,” Sam says to Marianne, who is staring at the smoking pistol in her hand with something akin to amazement. He had not known Marianne had a weapon until she had shattered the python’s head, and neither had Ken. When they reentered the bungalow, Ken had taken away Sam’s pistol, but not Marianne’s.

  “I had to kill him,” she says. “You would not have; you would have tried to talk him out of his betrayals and in the process he would have killed us.”

  Sam, still lying on his left side, holding his right arm tightly against his body, says, “I did not think it was necessary, and I must say, I did not expect it of you.”

  “This courage?” she asks wryly.

  He nods, his heart thundering in his chest.

  “Because I am old?”

  He nods again, feeling a sense of shame.

  “It is because I am old that I recognize evil and poison where I see it, Sam, and I know when to get rid of it, and when to try and placate it. You have to know when to kill, and when to grant the mercy of life.”

  At this astounding statement, from a missionary’s wife no less, Sam has to smile. “Like God?”

  She nods, serious. “Yes, like Him. In wars, we must be almost like gods.”

  They leave the bungalow in the middle of the night, traveling down the dirt path to Ledo in India with the feeble flame of their torchlights shaded by a piece of cloth. They both know they cannot stay at the bungalow for the night because the Japanese are sure to return to keep their rendezvous with Ken. However, Sam, who has so far been the most cautious of them all, the most anxious not to call attention to their presence in the jungles, deliberately skins the chicken with his left hand and roasts it over an open fire. After they eat, they pack the rest of the food in plantain leaves. Marianne attempts to reset Sam’s dislocated right shoulder, but she has no strength left and her arms hang limply by her side after just one try. She creates a sling for him though and pads the sling at his shoulder with the cotton stuffing from a damp and smoldering mattress.

  Sam still has to carry his haversack, hung over his left shoulder, because the photos Ken has taken of the Calcutta docks are in it. Along with the photographs is Ken’s pistol and the fifteen chocolate bars that he has hidden and not shared with them even when they were at their weakest and most ravenous, just outside the Kachin village. Inside also, in a Japanese script that Sam can just barely read (his training only extends to conversational Japanese), are Ken’s orders for this meeting. He has deliberately crashed his plane into the hillside so that he can hike to this bungalow, hand over the photographs, and perhaps, if his cover is not blown, return to his unit as usual, a hero in their eyes who marched through Japanese territory in Burma and lived to tell of it.

  It has begun to rain again, but this rain, this warm, dripping rain, cleanses them both; it is like a baptism, a new life. They know they will reach India safely, at least now that they do not travel with treachery in their midst.

  Thirty-one

  One of the first distasteful confrontations experienced by Indian officers when they joined a unit was that of blatant racism…. Chaudhuri recalls the second in command of the North Staffordshire Regiment who habitually belted out epithets for Indians, such as wogs, niggers, and nig-wigs. When Chaudhuri politely expressed his discomfort at the major’s use of such language, the latter expressed genuine surprise, noting that he did not think Chaudhuri would mind, for he considered him as “one of us.”

  —Pradeep P. Barua, Gentlemen of the Raj:

  The Indian Army Officer Corps, 1817–1949

  Even as Mila and Raman waited outside the police station for news of Ashok, Kiran was at the Victoria Club that afternoon, not drinking for once, but seated on one of the bar stools and looking outside at the dulling light that heralded the setting of the sun.

  He could not remember very much of the previous night; all he could recall was his head swimming in gin, a fight about something with Sims who was being arrogant and a bastard. He flexed his shoulder and felt the tightening of skin over his clavicle where the wound from Sims’s bite was just beginning to heal. What had that been about? And why had he even fought with Sims, who had always been a good chap? Kiran blamed himself now that he was sober again and had come to the club to find Sims and apologize. What if Blakely and Sims found their amusements elsewhere, without him? What would he do then?

  He watched the light slant in a golden arc over the lawns where th
e mela tents had been just a few days ago. Now, all that remained were the holes in the grass where the tent stakes had rested and a few paper flags torn from the strings of flags that had festooned the mela enclosure. For just a moment, all of his discontent came back to him and Kiran slouched on his stool, wondering where his life was headed and what he was going to do. It was all very fine for Sims and Blakely, they had jobs, after all, were officers with the Rifles. But he had nothing but Papa’s disapproval.

  Kiran saw Sims and Blakely cross the lawn in front of him, coming in from a cricket game, their clothes gleaming white, Blakely carrying the bat on his shoulder. As they approached the open verandah of the bar, a man cut across the grass in a steady trot, and, panting, came to stop beside them. Kiran squinted into the sunshine, shading his eyes with his hands. It was the horse dealer from the Lal Bazaar. What could Sims and Blakely have to do with him? Surely they already owned their horses?

  He got down from his bar stool and went running down the steps onto the lawn. Sims and Blakely saw him, quite clearly, and just as clearly turned their backs and started to walk away. Kiran paused, struck by a sudden hurt, and then started to run again.

  “I thought you meant to ignore me,” he said as he came up on them.

  “We did,” Blakely said deliberately, not looking at Kiran. “Bugger off.”

  “What?” Kiran stopped where he was, stunned beyond speech.

  “Your brother,” Sims said, enunciating every word as though he was speaking to an uneducated idiot, “tried to kill Colonel Pankhurst today. You heard what Blakely said, bugger off.”