by Arjun Gaind
Rising up on his tiptoes, he reached out curiously, only to find the errant book was wedged much too tightly to extract without going through the effort of removing the others first. Nonetheless, Sikander, who was an exceedingly stubborn man, refused to surrender quite so easily. Wiggling his fingertips back and forth, he managed to pry it loose, and the flimsy book fell to the floor at his feet, its pages flapping loosely like an angry bird’s wings.
Eagerly, the Maharaja leaned forward and scooped it up. Much to his surprise, it was not a book at all, but rather a thick cloth-bound envelope, folded over double and bound with a band of rubber. Another secret! Sikander thought, his ennui fading, replaced by a surge of enthusiasm. Impatiently, he pried open the envelope’s flap with one thumbnail. Inside, to his amazement, he discovered a slim collection of photographs. It was a set of six, an array of sepia-stained calotypes featuring a young Caucasian girl, barely out of her teens, dressed as an Oriental courtesan. She was entirely naked, as pale as a ghost except for a large gem-crusted necklace around her neck and a belt of coins around her pelvis, clasping her pubescent breasts in a sad parody of sexuality as she gazed out at the camera-lens with dull lifeless eyes.
Sikander grimaced, overcome by a pang of embarrassment. Once more, the Major had managed to surprise him, and he was not an easy man to surprise. Other than his love of good sherry, it seemed, the Resident had possessed another hidden passion, a penchant for the lowest variety of Victorian erotica. The Maharaja had seen this type of thing before, cheap pornography which could be purchased discreetly in Holywell Street to satisfy gentlemen of certain tastes. In fact, he knew of one or two Maharajas who were avid connoisseurs of such rubbish, one in particular who would remain unnamed who had an entire room in his palace stuffed chock-full of French postcards. Of course, Sikander had never needed to resort to such trite measures himself to satisfy his carnal needs. Personally, he much preferred the real item—what had always attracted him to women was not the concupiscence of their flesh, but rather their quintessence, what the Romans had called the animus, that germinal of taste and smell and touch and soul that could never be substituted with stiff paper and silver nitrate.
A frisson of disgust shook him as he imagined how many times the Major must have stood there and stared down at those very photographs. God only knew what the man had gotten up to, he thought, glad that he was wearing gloves.
Unfortunately, the Havildar chose that very moment to return with the first of the servants, who was none other than the khansameh, Khayyam.
Sikander hastily stuffed the photographs back into the envelope and shoved the whole scandalous bundle right back where he had found it. Then, turning, he ran a critical eye over the cook as the Havildar pushed him into the room, like a drover herding a particularly recalcitrant sheep. The man was about sixty-five, with lank white hair and a well-trimmed beard. His shoulders were stooped, and his protuberant belly suggested he enjoyed partaking of his own cooking a little too much. He was dressed like a dandy, in a red silk kurta that came to his knees and a silver embroidered waistcoat, as if he were off for an evening in a kotha. Sadly, his encounter with Jardine had left him somewhat worse for wear. The kurta was filthy, streaked with sweat and dirt, and the waistcoat had a rather prominent rip across the back. As for his bruised eye, it had darkened to a rich shade of purple, as livid as a ripe plum. It made Khayyam seem untrustworthy somehow, duplicitous, an impression that only deepened when he immediately began to complain vociferously.
“Oh, Sahib, I am innocent,” he wailed piteously, pulling at his hair and dissolving into a cataclysm of theatrical sobs. “Let me go, I beg of you. I have seven children and one of them is lame. If you harm me, who will care for him?” He fell to his knees, groveling. “Why do you punish me when I have done nothing? Are you not afraid of Allah’s wrath?”
Sikander watched this overly dramatic performance with detached disinterest. Melodrama came naturally to most Indians. It was like a sixth sense they had, the ability to cry and wail and curse their ancestors and make a general spectacle of themselves at will, and he was much too experienced to be duped so easily.
“I have no intention of harming a hair on your oily little head, Khayyam the bawarchi,” he said patiently. “All I wish to do is have a conversation.”
As if by magic, a gold coin appeared in his hand, a heavy sardari he pulled from his cummerbund faster than the eye could see. As expected, the gleam of gold bought an immediate end to the cook’s caterwauling, curtailing his complaints immediately. The Maharaja hid a smile. Yet again, his instincts had been spot-on. The cook’s eyes never once left the scintillating coin. He licked his lips hungrily, his face flushed with piggish greed, and no wonder. To the Maharaja a gold sardari was a pittance, but to the cook it was a veritable fortune, probably worth at least a month’s wages, if not more, and from the naked desire on his face, Sikander guessed, the man looked like he would sell his own mother for a quick profit.
“What would you like to converse about, Huzoor?” The man asked. “I am your faithful servant.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sikander replied. Nonchalantly, he sent the coin dancing across his knuckles, flipping it from finger to finger as easily as a professional prestidigitator. “Why don’t you surprise me?”
“I know many things, Sahib,” Khayyam said, his face twisting into an expression of pure avarice. “The Major had many secrets.”
“Is that so?” Sikander bared his teeth like a starving raptor which had just scented its prey. “Well then, regale me. I’m all ears.”
He threw the coin at Khayyam, who snatched it out of the air greedily. Grinning, the cook bit it once and then made it disappear into his clothing with blinding alacrity.
“Did you know,” he whispered, lowering his voice so that only Sikander would hear him, “that the Major Sahib was very fond of low women?”
The Maharaja raised one eyebrow.
“Low women?” He echoed quizzically.
“Oh, yes.” Khayyam’s lips broke into a leer, exposing an expanse of cracked, paan-stained teeth. “Every nine weeks or so, he would tell us he was going on an overnight inspection tour of the border outposts, but in reality, he would pay a visit to the English havakhana. You can ask his driver, Sahib, if you do not believe me.”
This tidbit made Sikander gasp. In Lahori cant, a havakhana was a brothel, a house of ill repute of the lowest kind, even cheaper than a tawaifkhana or a khopcha, the sort of place patronized only by the poorest of patrons who could not afford to take their pleasure on their backs in a bed beneath a roof, and were thus forced to carry out their business propped against a wall or squatting under the open sky, hence the slang, to “eat air,” or hava khana, in Hindustani. Could the cook possibly be trying to insinuate that the Major had been a patron of such a low-class establishment? It made no sense, unless…Could he possibly mean Mrs. Ponsonby’s? No, Sikander scoffed, it couldn’t be. The man had to be lying, spewing out whatever salacious rubbish popped into his skull to try and extort a few coins out of the Maharaja.
“Have you any proof?” he asked, unable to disguise his dubiety.
“Proof, Sahib?” the man echoed, as if he couldn’t quite understand what Sikander was talking about.
“Why should I believe you? Without proof, how can I be sure that you are not lying to me?”
“I am telling the truth, I swear it,” Khayyam exclaimed, bristling with indignity, visibly affronted that the Maharaja would question his veracity. “You can ask anyone. It is well known that Khayyam the bawarchi never lies.”
The forcefulness of his insistence caused Sikander’s brow to knit into a perplexed frown. Of all the things he had expected to uncover while interrogating the servants, this was by far the most unimaginable. On the face of it, it was hard to think of the Major as the sort of immoral degenerate who patronized prostitutes. In fact, Major Russell had always struck Sikander as an unmitigated prud
e. Why, less than a week previously, he had accosted the Maharaja at the Imperial and insisted upon giving him a stern telling to about what he had called Sikander’s dissipated lifestyle, calling it a grave affront to both good taste and decency.
Still, what if the bawarchi was telling the truth? An unexpected stab of doubt clawed at the Maharaja as he sat back, weighing this new snippet of information against what he already knew about the Major. Curiously, it did not surprise him as much as it should have. In fact, the more he contemplated it, the more it seemed to make sense. Was it really that hard to accept that Russell had sought the company of low women? If there was one truth Sikander knew all too well, it was that no man, however strong-willed he might be, could muzzle the beast inside him completely. And the Major, it seemed, had been no exception. Behind his stiff exterior, he had concealed a prurient side, as was clearly evidenced by the photographs Sikander had uncovered, and now, if the bawarchi was to be believed, by this revelation about his salacious proclivities.
True, the Resident had managed to be admirably discreet about indulging his vices, but that was a carefulness born out of pragmatism, Sikander suspected, not shame. Most likely, he had tried his best to keep his base desires hidden, because if even the slightest hint of impropriety, particularly of the sexual kind, had leaked back to Simla, it would have prevented his advancement. But unfortunately, that was the damning thing about a man’s carnal desires. They were instinctual, a visceral need, like hunger or rage, and no man could live without losing control of them from time to time.
Could that somehow have contributed to his death? Inexplicably, Sikander was struck by the conviction that it was somehow at the very heart of why he had been killed. Lust, desire—those were the oldest and fleshiest justifications for murder of all, having caused more fatalities than all the other sins put together. And when thrust together with power, it made for what was a truly intoxicating cocktail of motives.
Sikander bit his lip, trying not to let his excitement show. Once more, his eyes swiveled upward, in the direction of Major Russell’s moldering corpse.
“Oh my, you were a naughty boy, weren’t you?” He let out a vicious little cackle. “And that, I suspect, is exactly what got you killed.”
Chapter Nine
The next servant to be ushered in was the dhoby.
Sikander attempted to question him, but the man was obviously simple-minded and knew nothing other than the frequency with which the Major’s underwear was laundered and how much starch he liked in his shirts. Annoyed, Sikander sent him packing. He had equally little luck with the pair that followed, first the bhishti who was a deaf-mute and then the ayah, an angry old crone who spent ten minutes chastising him for the spiraling prices of vegetables in the market as if it was all his fault personally.
“Who is next?” he asked the Havildar once he finally managed to shoo this vociferous grandmother out of the room. Before the man could answer, a tiny man marched stiffly into the room. He was even shorter than Sikander, just a shade over five feet tall, but very fit, as wiry as a bantamweight prizefighter, dressed in rough breeches cut off at the knee and a tattered vest that stank of sweat and horse-dung. The Maharaja surmised from the Oriental cast of his features that he was a Gurkha, an ex-soldier, he thought, a man who had seen battle and not blinked in the face of death. He could infer at least that much from the imperturbability of his gaze and his ramrod straight posture, not to mention the distinctive curved knife he wore at his hip. The oversized kukri was as much the trademark of the Garwhali tribesmen as the kirpan was to the Sikhs.
Rather than bowing to the Maharaja, he snapped to attention instead and gave him a prim salute, so crisp that it would have put any parade ground soldier to shame. Sikander smiled, and mirrored this gesture. He had nothing but respect for Gurkhas. The mountain men were doughty fighters, as valiant as lions. It was said that a Gurkha would rather die a thousand deaths before surrendering to an enemy, and their sense of honor was so rigid and unyielding that it could have been cast from stone, a stalwartness which made them excellent friends and formidable enemies.
“I am Gurung Bahadur, Sahib,” the man said, inclining his head slightly. From his weather-beaten visage, Sikander guessed he was in his early thirties, although he could have been younger. It was always hard to tell the age of mountain men, given their wizened features and leathery skin, but in Gurung Bahadur’s case, it was made doubly difficult because his face was horribly scarred, marred by a serpentine bolt of dead-white flesh that jagged wickedly across one cheek and the bridge of his nose to twist his left eye into a perpetual wink. Sikander recognized it as a bayonet wound. The man was damned lucky to be alive, he thought with a shiver, an inch higher and he would have lost an eye.
“It was at Gyantse Dzong, Sahib,” Gurung Bahadur said when he noticed Sikander staring at his face. “That was where I got this little memento. The Tibetans mounted a surprise attack on our camp and very nearly routed us, but we managed to push them back after some spirited hand-to-hand fighting.” He smiled sardonically, baring his teeth. “Whenever I look in the mirror, I tell myself it could have been worse. At least I still have my head on my shoulders, by the grace of the goddess.”
Sikander shuddered, an involuntary tremble of his shoulders. He had heard terrible stories about Younghusband’s campaign, especially what the Tibetans did to British troops unfortunate enough to be captured, particularly the Gurkhas, whom they hated with an unholy vengeance. The lucky ones died, but if they were taken alive, the Tibetans had strung them up and cut them apart piece by piece with their own kukris and left them to die slowly, pecked at by crows and vultures until all that was left was carrion.
“What regiment?” he asked.
“Eight Gorkha, Sahib,” the man snapped back, staccato-voiced.
“Rank?”
“Havildar Major, Your Highness.”
This gave Sikander a moment’s pause. It was the highest rank a native officer could achieve, the equivalent of a Sergeant Major, which meant the man must have been a halfway decent soldier. Sikander felt his opinion of the Gurkha changing. Though he was poorly dressed, and at first glance, looked as slovenly and unkempt as a beggar, beneath the surface Sikander could still discern the drab vestiges of the soldier he had once been, the seasoned veteran who had survived the Tibetan debacle and rallied other men in battle.
“You seem to be a brave man, Havildar. What are you doing as a mere syce? Surely you could do better for yourself…?”
“Times are difficult,” the Gurkha mumbled stoically, “and a man does what he must to survive.”
There was something very evasive about the way he gave this vague reply, a close-mouthed reticence that made Sikander suspicious, certain that there was far more to the truth than what the man was willing to reveal.
“How long have you worked for the Major?”
“Not long,” the Gurkha replied, “only a few months, since September.”
“How did you happen to end up in Rajpore? It is very far away from your homeland.”
The man winced. Momentarily, his carefully maintained mask wavered. A tremor of barely hidden sorrow flickered across his face like a shadow. This slip lasted less than a heartbeat, before the Gurkha managed to get his emotions under control and resume his stony faced demeanor.
“I was discharged in Lahore, Sahib, but my sister was here in Rajpore. She was…” The man hesitated, as if he were struggling to find the right words. “She was taken ill, and I came to care for her during her convalescence. By the grace of god, the mess club of my old regiment put me in touch with one of the stewards at the Rajpore Club. He was kind enough to help me in my time of need, and found me this position.”
Sikander nodded. The brotherhood of old soldiers was a sacred thing. He found himself wishing he could help the man, an impulse he promised he would see through if the Gurkha answered his questions honestly, without guile.
&nb
sp; “Tell me, was the Major a good master…?”
The man did not reply. Instead, he held the Maharaja’s gaze. Somehow, the epicanthic folds of his eyes made his expression inscrutable, difficult to read.
“I cannot answer this question, Sahib,” he said softly. “It would not be fitting.”
His tone was respectful, almost deferential, as if to convey he had no desire to offend the Maharaja but at the same time, there was iron in his voice, to suggest that he would not be swayed. From any other man, such a blunt refusal would have made Sikander angry. But this once, the Maharaja understood why the Gurkha had refused to speak, even as he knew instinctively that no threat of violence would loosen his tongue. It was their way. No Gurkha would ever willingly betray his master. Once they had sworn to serve a man, they would never betray his confidence. Loyalty was like a religion to them. They would give up their lives, but never surrender their honor.
“Very well,” he said with a sigh, “let us talk about last night instead. Are you comfortable with that much at least?”
The man nodded, a curt bob of his head.
“Good. I believe it was you who escorted the Major back after the disturbance at the gymkhana.”
The man’s face tightened. “Yes,” he said warily, “we did.”
“By we, I presume you mean yourself and Captain Fletcher, yes?”
Another brisk nod of agreement, followed by the briefest flicker of hesitation across his face, so tenuous that most men would have missed it, but Sikander’s skilled eye recognized it immediately. The syce was hiding something, and it involved Captain Fletcher.
“Is there something you wish to tell me?” He asked softly. “There is no dishonor in telling the truth, I assure you.”
The man’s jaw clenched. He seemed to struggle to make a decision, before finally replying in a stifled monotone. “There was an argument, Sahib.”
Sikander wrinkled his brow, assuming that he was speaking of the altercation between the Major and the Lieutenant at the Ball.