The Splendor of Silence

by Indu Sundaresan

  That first month passed without my having any sense of its passing. Over the next two months, I visited you often in the zenana, searching for your mother in you, finding more of your father. Mila married me even though she loved Sam. I loved her, fiercely, much as Sam loved her, but she loved Sam. Oh, she loved me too, but it was not quite like the love she had for your father.

  When you were three months old, Pallavi suggested that we send you to America, to be with Sam and Mike and your grandmother Maude. I did not want to at first, but I agreed in the end because, you see, you belonged more to Sam than to me. You were the gift Mila gave to Sam, that piece of herself.

  You might wonder why we did not keep you with us, why you grew up so distant from the land of your birth…and…how do I answer this without insulting you, my dear Olivia? Know that I mean not to be derisive; we gave this matter a great deal of careful consideration, thought about who we were, where we all were in our lives and where you would best fit—with us or with Sam in America. You see, we did not seem very much to belong in our country either, even as full-blooded Indians. One of the reasons your grandfather, Mr. Raman, after one visit, never went to the hill station of Mussoorie to escape the heat of the plains was that although he was accorded entry into the best clubs in the place, the finest restaurants, the homes of the Raj grandees, even the viceregal “at homes” and balls, he could not and I could not enter the public library. On one of our walks through the Mall, when we thought of popping into the library for a book with which to spend our hours of leisure that afternoon, we saw nailed outside on a post a painted board that read: NO DOGS OR INDIANS. There was no circumventing the intentions behind that bland statement. It was a blatant prejudice of the British Raj. Remember, my dear Olivia, that while it seems as though your father killed Sims because he was a courier in the pay of the Japanese, Sam actually killed his first man in the war because of that man’s bigotry about a girl named Rosalie. And if I could not gain entry into a damn poky library in Mussoorie, you would not stand much of a chance in either a British Raj India or an independent India—for we would retain our prejudices well after the British quit us. So we thought that perhaps America would be best; realize, my child, that we sent you from one family that was very much yours to another that was equally yours—we would have, in making this decision, entertained no other option.

  Marianne Westwood took you to America. She had returned also to Rudrakot right after your birth, had seen you, held you in her arms, known from the beginning that you were Sam’s child. When we decided to send you to your grandmother, Maude, we could think of no one other than Marianne to entrust you to. I handled all the details of the travel and your passport; I am, if I may be so immodest again as to point out, not without resources. A princely title still counted for much in those days.

  I never had the time to grow out of love with your mother. I am told by many, many people that marriages are such—a rush of early passion defined mostly by the need of the body; a mellowing out as visages become familiar, as gestures start to grate on nerves; an indifference and a settling into a life other than the one lived with the once beloved. I never got to that last part, or indeed, even the middle part. I loved Mila’s walk, her talk, her limbs. I do not mean to embarrass you by speaking of your mother’s beauty and grace and loveliness in the terms a man would use, but know that she had all of those, she was loved for those, and because I had known her since she was very young, I loved her for more.

  April 1963

  Somewhere Near Seattle

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  —Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  The fire in the stove has long since cooled into a heap of glowing embers turning ashen and gray as each minute passes, and for the last hour of reading, Olivia has had her feet propped against the glass. She wears no shoes, and the soles of her feet are hot and toasted, and there is pain there. She lies on the floor on her back, the pages of the letter heavy and satisfyingly solid against the skin of her stomach. And then she remembers what she has forgotten during the telling of this story, that Sam is no longer here.

  “Papa,” she says softly, and beside her, Elsa picks up a warm nose from the carpet and lays it in the crook of Olivia’s neck as though to say, I miss him too. How senseless death is, Olivia thinks, how stupid and uncaring. At one moment she gets a phone call from her father saying that he is coming to visit her on campus, an hour later she hears the hushed, grieving tones of the dean of his department saying that he was hit by a car as he crossed Fifteenth Avenue.

  “Did he break a leg?” Olivia asks hopefully. “An arm? Break his damned back?”

  But no, nothing so lucky. It takes his life. It is five days before Olivia can raise herself out of her stupor and go to the cabin with the trunk that holds the secrets of her life. Uncle Mike asks if she wants him to accompany her, but as much as she adores him, she cannot bear to have anyone else here but the dog. Grandma Maude says merely this as she kisses Olivia’s hair, “Go my dear, go mourn for your papa. We all have our own ways.”

  And this is Olivia’s way of remembering her father, by filling all the silences of her childhood with stories of who she is, where she came from, who her mother was. Why her father never married, why he could not replace Mila in his life, why Olivia was enough for him. Olivia is formed from these silences. There is nothing distant anymore, nothing dissipated and half understood. Jai’s story gives her a tale with shape and structure, gives her, finally, her mother and her father. A grandfather. Uncles in their youth. A surrogate father also, who tells little about himself, more about Sam and Mila, and in the telling of this tale, comes through emblazoned in each word.

  She knows something of what happened afterward, after Marianne Westwood brought her here to Seattle to be with Grandma Maude and Uncle Mike. It was a little more than two years before Sam could leave Burma and return home. He knew, of course, well before he returned, that Olivia had been born, that she lived with his mother. And strangely, Olivia has a very vivid memory—her earliest memory—of that first meeting with Sam in Grandma Maude’s house on Queen Anne Hill.

  Sam had come into his mother’s arms and sobbed fiercely until it seemed to Olivia so incongruous that this large, lanky man with a thin face and thick black hair streaked with an early gray could be so childlike, much as she herself was when she wanted to throw a tantrum. She had viewed him from behind the paisley print sofa in greens and blues, standing on tiptoe so that she could see over the sofa’s back, wearing her favorite patent leather shoes and her prettiest church dress. From the other side, only the tips of her fingers and the top part of her head showed. She had been told that her papa was coming home from the war, but those words, papa, war, meant so little to her. “Is he like Uncle Mike?” she had asked Grandma Maude. And they had both laughed so joyously at that and said that yes indeed, he was just like Uncle Mike, only he was all her own if she wanted him.

  So Olivia had waited for this papa creature to come down on his haunches by the sofa, and when he still could not see the whole of her and when he could not fit between the side table and the wall, he pulled the sofa out with one strong arm and slid into the gap. Olivia had retreated to a corner when her fort’s walls had thus crumbled, and watched him with a tilt of her head. Sam sat down, cross-legged, and waited for her. He let her peer at his face for as long as she wanted. There were sharp cuts of scarred skin, one slashed from under Sam’s left eye down to his jawline, two more on the right forehead; the scars were turning white with healing and seemed blanched out of his sun-darkened skin. He put out his hand and waited some more, patiently, telling her he was her father, and that from now on they would be together forever.

  Olivia had finally put her little hand in his and allowed him to settle her on his lap so that he could slant her head and gaze down into her face. He k
issed her on the forehead and Olivia fell in love with him.

  But he had talked so little, all of her life, about what had happened in Burma and what had happened in India.

  Sam’s stories have been abstract, lovely jewels by themselves, but without the luster of life, as though he cannot bear to talk of the woman he has loved so deeply that what he has considered betrayals—Mila’s abandoning him at Chetak’s tomb, her subsequent marriage to Jai, even her death—have taken away his power of speech. The most he says to Olivia every now and then is that she looks like her mother when she dries her long hair and spreads it out on her pillow, or when she ponders her homework, tapping her pen against the table, a frown upon her young forehead. And with this she has been fretfully content.

  Olivia sits among the garden of colors from all the silk saris, muted and throbbing dully in the abated light from the stove. She has one of her mother’s names, and two others, Padmini and Nazeera, from whom…? There are still questions that have no answers.

  The monkeys crouch in front of her, the gift her father did eventually give her mother. The black cord in the box strung with gold charms was tied around her waist when she was still a baby, to ward off the evil eye. Jai tells her the significance of each of the charms and that the little gold cylinder contains a sliver of the umbilical cord that had tied her to her mother. To Mila. The box also contains that pile of thin gold chain her father bought for her mother in the Lal Bazaar. Olivia rummages through the trunk until she works up a sweat, but the white sari from the White Durbar is not here. Where is it then? Still in India? Why did Jai not send it to her? She pulls her legs up to her chest and cordons them with her arms, her chin resting on her knees. Jai speaks so eloquently in this letter of a gift for her for her twenty-first birthday—and this trunk of memories, this letter of his dispelling the silence that lingered over her childhood is also his gift to her. Olivia is beset with an unreasonable anger at Sam—why did he have to die before he could open this trunk, read this letter? Would it have finally loosened his tongue?

  The trunk arrived on the day Sam died, and he was on his way to her apartment to tell her of it, to take her back to his house and show it to her. And as he crossed the street he was hit by the car. So now only Jai’s voice remains, clear and lucid, only Jai remains to speak of the splendor of all the silences. But there are others too…

  Olivia rises from the floor of the cabin and goes outside into an early dawn. The rain has stopped and it has cleared the air, cleaned it and hung it out to dry, freshly scented and aromatic. Elsa throws herself down the red stairs and Olivia listens to the clatter of the dog’s nails on the wood. When the sound stops, a little too soon, she shouts out, leaning over the railing, “All the way down, pooch. No pooping on the stairs.” Then she hears Elsa let out a heavy sigh and hurtle down the rest of the stairs to the beach below.

  The light from the sun begins to leak into the sky behind the Cascade Mountains. Although the storm is long over, clouds still tarry in the sky, seemingly thunderous and ominously dark blue, edged now with the golden glow of the morning. The sun then finally breaks out from its imprisonment behind the mountains and sends its slanting, honeyed rays out over the cove. It is cold, not bone-chillingly so, but enough that Olivia begins to shiver as she stands there, and she wonders what Rudrakot is like in the month of May. What an enervating, exhausting heat feels like. She lifts the last page of the letter and holds it up to read.

  I write now, dear Olivia, because after so many years we all have a sudden yearning to see you. We want to know if Sam will spare you now to us—at least for a little while. You must be as old as Mila was, shortly before we lost her, and we wonder if…there are any similarities. Here, in Rudrakot, are your uncles, your grandfather, and even I—I feel as though I too have some claim upon you.

  I’m fortunately so circumstanced that I need not talk of money or the need for it, and so I am going to suggest—in what must seem to you to be an uncouth and ungainly manner—that whenever you decide to visit us, if the airplane fare or the passage by ship is…too much for Sam and you to handle, a simple word to me will suffice. I will make all the arrangements.

  Do come. Please come, my dearest Olivia.

  With all my sincere regard,

  Jai

  Glossary

  Almirah

  Wardrobe

  Amchur

  Dry mango powder

  Amrit

  Nectar

  Anna

  Raj currency; sixteen annas in a rupee

  Asuras

  Demons

  Atta

  Wheat flour

  Ayah

  Servant

  Bawarchi

  Cook

  Beedis

  Hand-rolled cigarettes

  Burfis

  A sweet, cut into slices

  Chapattis

  Unleavened bread

  Chappals

  Slippers

  Charpai

  Jute-knitted bed

  Choli

  Fitted blouse

  Chula

  Hand-fashioned stove; usually of bricks and mud

  Churidar

  Tight-fitted trousers

  Dah

  Burmese dagger or sword

  Dals

  Lentils

  Darzi

  Tailor

  Dhobi

  Washerman

  Dhoti

  Draped cloth; commonly worn by men (similar to veshti)

  Diwan

  Various meanings; clerk, prime minister, secretary

  Diyas

  Oil lamps

  Dosas

  Crisp rice and lentil flour crepe

  Gaddi

  Throne

  Ghagara

  Long, pleated skirt

  Ghee

  Clarified butter

  Ghoonghat

  Veil

  Goras

  Whites

  Hartal

  Strike

  Hookah

  Water pipe

  Huzoor

  Sire; form of salutation

  Jalebis

  A sweet; deep-fried and soaked in sugar syrup

  Jalis

  Screens

  Jawan

  Army rank; a private soldier

  Kadai

  Frying pan

  Katori

  Cup or bowl

  Khazana

  Treasure

  Khichidi

  Rice and lentil mixture

  Khus

  River reed

  Kolam

  Decorative design in rice flour drawn on doorsteps

  Kurta

  Long-sleeved tunic

  Lathi

  Heavy stick bound with iron

  Maidan

  Field or grounds

  Mali

  Gardener

  Mela

  Fair

  Munshi

  Clerk

  Murgikhana

  Henhouse

  Mysorepak

  A sweet made of chickpea flour and sugar

  Naan

  Leavened bread cooked in a tandoor oven

  Namaste

  Salutation accompanied by a folding of the palms together

  Nautch

  Dance

  Nimbupani

  Lime water

  Paan

  Betel leaves

  Pagalpan

  Madness

  Pakoras

  A savory; deep-fried batter with vegetables

  Pallu

  Drape of sari over the shoulder

  Puja

  Hindu religious ritual

  Punkah

  Fan

  Purdah

  Veil

  Purnima

  Night of the full moon

  Rabadi

  Sweet made of milk

  Rajkumar

  Heir apparent

  Sadhu

  Sage; mendicant

  Sambar

  Stew made of lentils an
d vegetables

  Samosas

  A savory; deep-fried pastry stuffed with potatoes

  Shamiana

  Awning

  Sherwani

  Fitted coat with long sleeves

  Shikar

  Hunt

  Shlokas

  Verses in praise of God

  Sitar

  Stringed musical instrument

  Sola topi

  Pith helmet

  Tabla

  Hand drums