The Splendor Of Silence (31 page)

They wait. It is hushed here, quieter still near the bungalow, and the red tiles of its many roofs glisten in the rain. Parts of the bungalow are still smoking, there are gaps in the tiles where the roof has fallen in, and a deathly placidity lies over the whole.

"Let's go and explore," says Ken, pleading in his voice. "I can't stand being wet anymore. We can spend the night there."

He begins to move and Sam shoves him behind the tree again. "Wait. It's too quiet--"

"Because there's no one there, Sam," Marianne says. "I agree with Ken, let's go in. The Japanese are done with the bungalow; they've moved on."

"And they won't come back again?" Sam asks.

"Why would they?"

"For the same reason as us--shelter for the night."

Ken and Marianne groan together and slide down below the hill's crest. They lie on their backs, breathing slowly into the moist air, hands clasped across their bellies. Sam stays where he is and lifts his head cautiously so h
e c
an peer over the foliage. He lets his eyes glaze over after a while, but is still alert to the possibility of any movement in the bungalow below him. After half an hour, Sam turns to them. "We can go a little closer if you like."

They fall onto their stomachs along the steep slope and begin to inch forward, slowly, until they are halfway down the hillside. The bungalow is enormous. It has a red-tiled portico in front, a covered teak walkway leading to a driveway, lawns on either side of the walkway fringed by rosebushes. The sloping roof has an embellished fringe with scalloped wooden overhangs all around, painted white. One of the courtyards is actually a swimming pool, with the verandah jutting out onto the translucent pea green water. The edges of the verandah's floor are inlaid with lime green tiles and it gives the effect of the verandah dissolving into the pool.

Sam drops his face into the mud, and digs his toes in to get a grip and not go sliding down the hillside. This is like a dream, a movie set, a scene out of Orwell's Burmese Days--the lush plantation, the gently misting rain disturbing the glassy surface of the pool, the plantation chairs on the verandah, the roof with scalloped edges, for pity's sake. He's waiting for people to stroll out onto the lawns, gimlets in hand, the women's hats wide-brimmed in colors of pale greens, blues, and yellows, skirts swishing about their knees, their Are they all dreaming? Would the Japanese leave this lavish bungalow and go elsewhere?

"It's a trap," he says softly. "Look, the western half of the bungalow has been trashed and burned; the rest is still intact. They are waiting for us."

"They don't know we are here, Sam," Marianne says. "You are just being morbid."

"Let's go." Sam lifts his head to look at each of them. "We are going to skirt around the plantation. No stopping here."

Ken, his shoulders lodged against a vine to give him stability on the slippery mud, shakes his head stubbornly. "I want to get dry. I hate this. I want to get dry, Sam. I feel like moss; things are growing on me."

"Ken "

Marianne reaches out for Sam. "He's right. We deserve this rest; we have been pushing ourselves too hard. How much will one night under a dry roof slow us down? We need to sleep, in any case."

Sam looks down at the bungalow. This is his decision; he is responsible for Marianne and Ken. But a sudden and intense longing fills him too. He wants to be under that roof, to air out his shirt and pants, to take off hi
s b
oots and let his feet dry. His toes feel turgid and swollen, beyond aching, and surely there are leeches feasting inside on the skin of his ankles. He turns and finds Marianne and Ken watching him, heads raised from the ground. Teak trees slant behind at an unnatural angle; Sam realizes that the trees are not aslant, he is. A big drop of water splashes onto Sam's head, right at the part of his thick hair. It cuts a line through the middle of his forehead and divides into two thin streams of water on either side of his nose. Perhaps he can wash inside the bungalow, Sam thinks, perhaps even swim in the lovely waters of that pool. Hibiscus bushes, with great, green, glistening leaves, throng the path around the pool and drop their brilliant white and yellow flowers into the water. Although it is not raining anymore, merely misting, it is still deadly hot, and damp and sweat are all mingled upon their bodies. They no longer know the smell of clean; they have been filthy for so long, bloodied by leeches, muddied by dirt.

"We wait," he says finally. "Right here. No movement at all, is that understood?"

"How long?" Marianne asks.

"Till nightfall, until I'm sure there is no one inside the bungalow." "Hooray!" Ken says in a whisper.

Sam settles his elbows into the mud and rests his chin on his hands. He tries not to think of the maddening drizzle, of the damp dirt beneath him, of the stench of rotting vines and insects in the mud. He hopes that no one from the bungalow is looking up the hillside, for they have so little cover here. Their skins are cured into a muddied brown, their uniforms and boots covered in slush and filth; they must meld into the hillside. No one will notice them if they do not betray their presence with a movement. A little part of Sam is still suspicious of such a bounty as this below them, and an idea forms in his brain then. The plantation bungalow is not on the map, but Ken must have known of its existence--he is the one who has prodded them from the marked trail and into these lands. How could he have missed this building from the air, if indeed he has flown over this area as he said he had? Sam's belly rumbles; he is ravenously hungry. If they lay siege to the bungalow for the next five hours, perhaps there will be food to be found there, and definitely shelter and dryness. He struggles to keep his eyes open. The sound of the rain lulls, the wet sludge under his stomach is no longer a discomfort, his body aches and now slows into sleep.

Chapter
Sixteen.

All kinds of magic are out of date, and done away with except in India where nothing changes in spite of the shiny, top-scum stuff that people call "civilization."

--Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, 1899

rom half a mile away, the real dimensions of Chetak's tomb too
k f
orm, almost piece by piece and stone by stone. It was erected on a sandstone platform with a flight of fifteen stairs leading up to the entrances, of which there were four. The four sides of the square structure faced north, south, east, and west and each side mirrored the rest, so they looked the same, no matter where one stood to view the tomb. Built only a hundred years ago by jars great-grandfather, this style of the building, equally symmetrical on every face, was copied from the Mughal emperors who had ruled India until 1898, when Victoria became queen-empress. The Mughals in turn had brought into their architecture elements of Persian and Turkish influences. So Chetak's tomb, in a much-convoluted path from many centuries ago, was built in a Persian style, imitating the Mughal and Muslim emperors, and was constructed by a Hindu king for his much-beloved horse. If a horse could have been said to profess a religion, and during his lifetime the majestic Chetak had been adorned with many a tikka--a red vermillion streak of protection on his forehead--then Chetak had been a Hindu too, like his master.

The black-tar road had given way to wasteland a mile back, and the jeeps now bumped and jolted over the dirt path to the tomb. As they approached, Ashok, the most keen-eyed among them all, pointed forward through the dusty windshield and said, "There's someone there."

They peered in the direction of his finger. Sam was driving, and he reached out with his right hand and rubbed some of the dust from the front of the windshield so that he could see better. It did seem like there were two or three human figures in white in front of the tomb in the shadow of the eastern side, their dhotis and kurtas aglow with ambient sunshine.

"A ghost!" Ashok cried out, and then facetiously, "Chetak's ghost." "Don't be silly, Ashok," Mila said. "Chetak was a horse, not a human being. Are they though," she asked worriedly, "human ghosts?"

Sam began to laugh, gave her a quick glance, and sobered. Fine lines of worry marred her brow. Mila clasped her arms around herself and shuddered. She was afraid of ghosts that walked abroad in the middle of the day? Her anxiety transferred itself to him and a tingling crawled up Sam's spine. Later, many years later, Sam would look back upon this time in Rudrakot as a dream, as something that had happened and had not, a jumble of impressions, ghosts and beloveds, blood and heartbreak so mingled that he could no longer tell where one began and the other found its end. Everything in India acquired a magical quality; nothing was impossible, nothing even improbable.

Through the clouds of dust, Sam saw one of the figures drag a cow to the front of the tomb, or what appeared to be a cow; it could very well have been a horse from this distance. Mila gasped when the man lifted his arm and brought it down upon the animal's neck; he did not seem to be holding a knife or a sword, he merely used the edge of his palm. The cow seemed to move its head about once, and then twice, before its knees crumpled and it collapsed to the ground, its head hitting the dirt first, before the rest of its body.

Sam pressed on the accelerator and the engine began to protest. What was going on? And who were those men? For Sam, of course, did not believe in ghosts or consider that those figures ahead of them were not real men. Mila had a hand over her mouth, and behind them Ashok and Vimal gagged and coughed. If it had been a cow that had been sacrificed, or even slaughtered for meat, the men would have to be Christian or Muslim, fo
r n
o Hindu would commit such a sacrilegious act. If it had been a horse for some reason, at this thought, Sam felt a sickening in his gut. If it had been a horse, it would have been a foul ritual, some sort of sacrifice offered to that entombed horse that had once been so adored by his master. Had he been driving alone, Sam would have thought that the desert was playing tricks on his eyes as usual, here, because the spaces were so large, the horizon limitless, objects formed and melted without cause, as though to provide the mind with some relief from all that immensity.

They heard a chattering and a pointing of fingers from the jeep behind them that carried the servants and the food. The driver of the second jeep began to honk. Sam waved to him.

"We should stop, Captain Hawthorne," Mila shouted over the scream of the engine. "It doesn't look safe there."

"It's nothing, and there's nowhere to stop, no shade from the sun. It's an illusion, that's all," Sam said with determination, although he did not believe this himself. He had seen something--they all had--that much was true.

They drove on, nearing the tomb, and all the while their hearts crashed against their ribs. Their skins seemed to exhale fear, turgid and fermenting in the air around them. Sam bit his lower lip to taste blood and shake himself out of this strangeness. Ghosts did not bother him, and yet it had all been so real, for all of them had witnessed it. The cow, or the animal, was dragged away by its legs around the tomb and the two men in white finally looked in their direction. One put a hand up to protect his eyes from the sun and stared at them for a long while, unflinching. Sam drew his foot away from the accelerator, almost involuntarily, at that long stare. Then the man moved unhurriedly and they watched his figure and that of his companion disappear around a corner.

There was no approach left to Chetak's tomb; it simply rose out of wasteland, a monolith of red sandstone, its edges buffed and buffeted by the hot winds that yowled through the Sukh desert in May, just before the monsoons. The dirt path ended abruptly just in front of the tomb and here, facing west, the jeeps arrived under the burning rays of the sun. Sam switched off the engine and a thick, heated silence descended upon them. "There was nobody here," Sam said. "There's nothing to fear."

No one moved. The servants in the jeep next to them had fallen silen
t a
lso, their faces blanched with dread, knuckles intertwined in prayer. Their driver had his fingers wrapped around the key, which was still in the ignition.

"Wait," Sam said. He drew his Colt .45 out of the holster at his belt and swung his legs out of the jeep.

"Would you like me to come with you, Captain Hawthorne?" Vimal asked.

Sam shook his head. He moved slowly toward the tomb, looking into each arch in the verandahs on both stories, but there was no movement, no suggestion of human inhabitation. The ground was smooth dust and strewn with pebbles, small and large, but there were no footprints there, or indeed even hoof prints from the animal. On the rest of the short drive over, Sam had thought that the men they had seen could have been nomads, taking cover in the tomb. This was common all over India. There was no fear among the many poor about sleeping where death had slept and they found shelter where they could, whether it was with the living or the dead. The dirt was crisp around the tomb and Sam's boots crunched as he walked around, the Colt held loosely against his thigh, his forefinger on the trigger. But there was no one around, no sign even of the fantastic tableau they had witnessed, the sacrifice of the cow, the brooding men in white--there was nothing.

Sam climbed the stairs to one of the entrances to Chetak's tomb. From here, he could see through the entire structure, as it was built in an open floor plan. Three steps led down to a sunken rectangle, and the horse's sarcophagus was raised in the center, its white-marble-inlaid cover level with the floor on which Sam stood. The verandah on this story let in shards of light from the outside. Sam froze for a moment when he saw an enormous varan, an iguana-like creature five feet long and barrel thick about its belly, sunning itself in one of the arches. It slept undisturbed, eyes closed against the sunshine, its prehistoric scales glinting with iridescence. A steep set of stairs, its stone banister crumbling, led upstairs, and Sam took these two at a rime. Here he was in another open gallery; in the center the floor opened to the story below and a view of the sarcophagus, and around the outer edges was another verandah with a low wall and cusped arches. Here also light streamed in, shadows leaking in long, black strips from the verandah's pillars, in patterns of champa flowers from the latticework of the outer walls. There was a faint, musty odor, and a smel
l o
f rotting bones. But here too there was no one to be seen. Sam ran around the long, outer verandah, looking out into the desert that stretched in an unbroken swath of bleached brown on all sides. Nothing again. No sign of the men, no sign of anything out in the wilderness. If the men had been here with their sacrificial cow, they had disappeared into the rays of the sun.