Punjab, March 1896
When the British officer rode up, Vandan Kaur was working in her upper field.
She wondered for a moment why a soldier would come to her gate – had the war reached even here? – but then she saw. There was only one British officer who was black as coal and wore the uniform of the 36th Sikhs, and she was calling his name even before she ran to meet him.
“Ibrahim!” she called again as he swung down from his horse, and a moment later they had fallen into an embrace. It had been nearly two years, and his face looked different – twenty-two could be a lifetime older than twenty, if the time between had been spent at war – but the smell was the same, and so was the feel of his hands caressing her back. For a minute, two, three, it seemed the months of separation had vanished.
“It’s been so long,” she said, stepping back so she could memorize his face again.
“So long, so far, but the 36th is home again. They’ve sent us back to the frontier.” He reached back to his horse and untied the trussed lamb and laying hens that had complained all the way from the market. “And these are home now too,” he said, and as if to prove his point, they began exploring Vandan’s yard.
“I’ve got another present for you later,” he added. He didn’t, she noticed, mention money, though she could see that he was dismayed at the poverty of the farm. He’d given her five hundred rupees once, which had bought her out of prostitution and paid for this land; she hadn’t taken an anna from him since.
“Later, we’ll see,” she said. “Where are they sending you on the frontier?”
“My company” – of a sudden, she noticed that he’d become a captain – “they’re sending us to someplace called Saragarhi.”
She tried to place that in her mind. “This isn’t on your way there, is it?”
“In a general sense,” he admitted, “but not directly.”
“Won’t they miss you?”
Ibrahim shook his head. “They sent me ahead with Anil and a few of the sowars to scrounge from the markets. The market here’s as good as any other.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “Supplies are short?”
“Of course they are. If it were otherwise, the natural order of things would fall apart. Haven’t you heard?” And before she could answer, he’d broken into song.
The men who inhabit the Horse Guards
Do battle with paper and pen
And theirs is the absolute power
Of what goes abroad, where, and when.
“A regiment marching through jungle?
Then thick winter coats they will need!
A camel patrol in the desert?
Send oats so their horses can feed….”
It went on from there, the story of a supply officer who accidentally sent the right thing to the right place and chased it across oceans and battlefields to take it back. By the time the tale reached its tragic ending, Vandan was laughing uncontrollably. Ibrahim had always been able to do that, even when she’d been a whore in an Amritsar brothel.
But I’m not that anymore, she recalled,
and there’s work to do. Still laughing, she led Ibrahim up the slope from her house. He was a city boy, she knew, and he’d never farmed, but some tasks required only a strong back and willing hands, and clearing the stones from her new field was one of them. They worked together for a while in companionable silence; once, Vandan heard Ibrahim begin a rhyme about a farmer who grew stones for the market, but evidently unsatisfied, he trailed off. No doubt he’d finish it later.
“Where did you go?” she asked when they broke for the noon meal. “I heard they sent you to Siam.”
“Siam, Cambodia, Cochin-China – there, and Samoa after.”
“Samoa?” The other countries, at least, Vandan had heard of, but that one was beyond her imagining.
“An island kingdom in the Pacific. They sent a company’s worth of us there to train the king’s soldiers and watch for the French navy.”
“Was there fighting there?”
“A little. Some French marines one time… everyone has some nobles in their pocket, and everyone tries to overthrow the kings that support the other side. They never told us, but part of our job was to make sure the king stayed on
our side, and to replace him if he didn't.”
Something in Ibrahim’s voice sounded different – cynical. He’d never been cynical before. He’d known of the foibles of the world, but he’d laughed at them. He still did – the supply-officer’s ballad was proof of that if anything was – but there was something else in him as well. The war, and the games of kings, had changed him.
“There must be stories.” She cast the words into the air to stop the direction that his – and her – thoughts were drifting. “In Samoa.”
“I was
named after a story there. They called me the west-wind person. They have a hero named Tui who married the four winds, and that was how the earth was peopled. They said the west wind must have given birth to the Africans.”
Ibrahim smiled at the memory, but Vandan didn’t see, because her imagination was suddenly afire. What might it be like to marry the winds, to soar above the earth without limit, to leave nothing behind but the cool caress of the breeze? Maybe Ibrahim, the mystic traveler, might know. She could only wonder and question.
Another question occurred to her. “Did you have a woman in Samoa?”
Ibrahim looked at her carefully, and nodded slowly as he realized that her question was an unjealous one. “Yes,” he said, and then, “I thought I’d find you here with a man.”
“Who would marry me? After what I was?”
“Can’t they see what you are, what you will be? What you have always been?”
“In the village, people talk.”
“Leave the village, then…”
“And go where? To your country? You’re promised to another.”
“Maybe not there,” he said, though his eyes told her that he wished she
would go to Africa and let his family take care of her, “but a city. Delhi. Bombay. No one there will know, unless you tell them.”
Vandan laughed again, but her laughter held notes of resignation and despair. “Listen to me. What I am, what I will be – here, on my own land, I decide. If I go to the city, my destiny will be in others’ hands. I’d sell the farm, but how long would the money last? I might not find work – I might have to be a maid or a whore again. I’ll stay here, with what is mine.”
He nodded, conceding the point. “You’re right,” he said. But she wasn’t sure he understood. Such understanding came hard for a man whose nature was to marry the winds – even one who now could feel their bitterness.
They started work again a little later, and they labored together and told stories until it was time to cook supper. Vandan slaughtered a chicken, and Ibrahim cooked it with flatbread and dhal in the pit in the yard, and rather than go into the dark of the mud-brick house, they sat against the walls and watched the stars rise as they ate.
At length Ibrahim reached into his pack and withdrew two things. The first was a photograph, taken in Phnom Penh soon after he’d been made a captain; the second, a hardwood charm carved in the shape of a star. Vandan knew from the crudeness of the carving that Ibrahim had made it, and she bent her head so he could hang it around her neck.
“It’s made from iroko wood,” he said. “From my country – from a garden my grandmother loved dearly. The Yoruba say that there are spirits in the iroko tree; maybe one of them is the spirit of God.” He began to murmur something, and when she strained to hear, he was saying, “When God dances, His shadow is in the tree; each ring in its heart a holy word; each pattern in the bark a divine memory…”
She leaned in and listened. Ibrahim never liked to recite his religious poetry loudly, and its reverence was the opposite of the verses he wrote about the war; she remembered him telling her how his father had called such poems his love songs to God. There was something new in this one – he’d learned a fascination for dance, for movement, maybe for the marriage of the winds – but its cadences were the ones she recalled. Maybe some part of him was still untouched by war.
“Am I in any of your verses?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“A woman is too great a mystery,” he answered.
“More of a mystery than God?”
“The greatest of His mysteries. You are the part of Him that is a treasure beyond my imagining.”
Vandan remembered the first time he’d said such things and how, knowing who she was, she’d struggled not to laugh, but the second time, or maybe the third, she’d realized he meant them. Now, she wanted to hear them again. Ibrahim was as much a mystic about the pleasures of the flesh as he was about everything, and she – herself not yet twenty-one, herself a veteran of many battles – wanted to be the object of worship and to lead him again to those pleasures.
He proved willing, soon enough, to go where she led.
After, they lay together, still under the stars, her head cradled on his chest. “How long will you stay?” she asked.
“Three days. They’ll miss me after that. I’ll come again on the train when I get leave.”
“Three days,” she repeated. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she missed his physical presence, how much she wanted someone beside her when she slept. She hoped, suddenly, that he had given her a child. A child would be someone to care for, a shield against breaking her vow to stay here and make a future on her land. Loneliness might drive her to the city in the end, even though she’d been still more alone in Amritsar. A child – she and a child might be companions to each other…
“Tell me a story,” she said, hoping one might banish the thought. He considered for a moment – would he tell a tale of Siam or of Cochin-China? – and then began another one altogether, a story of slaves forbidden to speak, who won their freedom but found they had lost their voice.
“That’s a written story,” she said. She couldn’t read or write herself, but she knew the cadences of stories that were read as opposed to those that were told, and she could tell that Ibrahim was reading from memory rather than simply remembering. A moment later, she realized something else. “You wrote it.”
“Yes,” he admitted, and the starlight framed an embarrassed smile. “It was too much for a song…”
And too personal, she realized. Ibrahim’s story had much of his religious poetry in it – the mysticism, the fascination, the search for the divine – but it also had that edge of bitterness she’d noticed before. It was
his story, the story of his nation – the story of a people who’d been given a cynical game of empires rather than the noble cause they’d wanted and dreamed. It was the story of someone who could never quite marry the winds, but who was still searching, always searching...
“It’s called ‘The Silent Ones,’” he said, but she might have known that before.
“Let us break the silence,” she answered. “For three days, we can look for the winds together.”
He nodded and gathered her in. “For three days,” he said, “we will live as if three days is all we have.”
