*

Does it hurt?" Mila asked, her fingers tracing the dark abrasion on

Sam's shoulder. She lay on the bed, naked and on her stomach, her hair falling around her to her waist. Sam lay next to her, also naked, his hands clasped on his ribs. He reached out and traced the arc of her but- tocks, grasped a handful of her silky, sweet-smelling hair, kissed her bruised mouth.

She smiled against his teeth. "I can see," Mila said, her voice muffled by his skin, 'that! will never get a straight answer to anything if I lie here without my clothes on."

He covered her mouth with the palm of his hand. "Never say that."

"Never wear clothes?"

"Not around me, anyway." He took his hand away and slid it behind her hair, seeking the nape of her neck. Sam pulled her down on him. The night's heat had finally come to rest and become quiet, so it was cooler now, the very nadir the temperature would reach before it began to climb again. There were two hours left for the sun to rise, but Mila and Sam could already hear the birds beginning to stir in the trees outside. Mila knew she would have to leave Sam, and soon, before the servants awoke, or before Pallavi got out of bed. This was like a madness, a joyful intoxication where nothing mattered but Sam. Even as she kissed him, touched every inch of his skin so that her fingers would always remember what he felt like, buried her head in the crook of his arm so that she would never forget the aromas of his body, she wondered about where they would be five years from now. Ten years from now.

"I could not live without you," she said.

His eyes were bright with amusement and glowed in the semidarkness like a sun-washed sky. "You will not have to live without me." It was a simple statement, simply made, a token of Sam's love for Mila. He could not imagine life without her either, but he had no idea that May morning how true this was going to be. He framed her face with his hands and her face was so small, his hands so large that his fingertips almost linked at the top of her head. Sam had to laugh at that, and Mila asked why, so he told her.

She smiled. "You have not been concentrating on my head, Sam."

"No," he said, "I was more interested in other parts of you. But I promise that from now on, I will interest myself in all parts of you." Then he sobered. "I don't do this," he waved around the room and at them with one hand, "very often, you must know that, Mila."

"You do not take women to your bed?" she asked quietly.

"No, not this easily. I mean for you to marry me, become my wife, have my children."

"Is this a proposal?" she asked, and at that moment, for the first time in quite a few hours, Mila thought of Jai. She had now received two propos,. als of marriage in her life and neither of them had been conventional .. . well, conventional in a Western ideal. In an Indian ideal, Papa would tell her whom she would marry, and she would marry that man and consider herself lucky if she were allowed to meet him before the wedding. A deep and aching sadness came over her when she thought of Jai. Sam rubbed at the lines that had formed on her forehead.

"Tell me," he said.

Jai."

"When will you tell him?"

"When do you leave, Sam? How long will you be away?"

Sam was silent for a long time; Mila felt something shift between them, and all the old questions came rushing back. She sensed, instinctively, with merely all the experience her twenty-one years had bestowed upon her, that he was an honest man, that whatever furtiveness he practiced now had put him under a great strain. That there was something hidden from them all was equally obvious. Papa knew too, or he would not have sent a telegraph to Calcutta on the very first day that Sam had come to Rudrakot.

"Tell me," she said now, placing a hand upon his heart. "Trust me, darling Sam."

So he told her, finally unburdening himself of three days of guilt and pain. He told her about Mike, who he was in the Rudrakot Rifles, when he had disappeared, why he had been taken to the field punishment center.

"I remember Michael Ridley," Mila said slowly, her forehead patterned with lines of recollection, "although I met him only twice. I liked him. Are you sure that is why he has been interned at the center?"

Sam stacked the pillows behind him on the carved wooden headboard and pulled himself up. "Vimal said that he was at the site of the schoolhouse the day it blew up." He could not bring himself to say what else Vimal had said, but how did it matter, Sam thought miserably, if Mike had been there; he was as culpable as if he had lighted the fuse to the bomb. And yet his imprisonment at the center was nothing short of ridiculous; there had been no trial, no conviction, Mike had just disappeared. As he was going to disappear again, Sam thought grimly.

Mila touched his face and tried to rub the scowl away. "Did you find your brother, Sam?"

"Yes, the night we went to Chetak's tomb."

"So that is where you disappeared to with Vimal."

"You knew?" Sam asked, surprised, for he had left her asleep and returned to find her still asleep.

"I did not sleep that night, Sam."

"I leave tonight, Mila," Sam said finally. "At midnight. Vimal is going to take me to the horse trader at the bazaar and help me get into the field punishment center again. He ... knows the guards, and says that they will deliberately be lax for a few hundred rupees. I've already given Vimal the money. I will take Mike to Delhi and either hide him there or find him passage on a ship back home. He needs medical care and he needs our mother. And then, I have to go back to Assam."

"Who are you, Sam Hawthorne?" she asked then, sketching the lines of his eyebrows and the bones beneath his skin. Then, not waiting for his response, she went on, "I will tell Jai tomorrow that I cannot marry him." She bent her head. "He will be disappointed."

"I know," Sam said. "I'm sorry sorry for him, not for us. We are meant to be, my love."

"Will you be careful tonight? Are you in any danger?"

Sam shook his head slowly. "I do not think so. I don't believe that anyone will care if I take Mike away from the field punishment center. If they do " He did not finish that sentence, but said instead, "But there is, should be, no danger."

"I will miss you," Mila said, already feeling an emptiness take over her heart at the thought of Sam's being away at Assam. But these were times of war, and any man in uniform, any man at all, had no control over his own life; everything was dependent on the vagaries of the army. There were more questions within her--where they would live, when they would marry, what would happen next, but she did not voice any of them yet, for it was too early to think about a future that seemed so distant. "Will you write to me?"

"Yes," Sam said, and it was a promise he would keep, though Mila would never see any of his letters. "I will send you my address when I get back to Assam. I will have to go back into Burma at least once, Mila, if not twice." He hesitated. "I can say no more than that."

A breeze lifted the curtains of the room on the side of the back balcony and brought with it a thin dusting of dirt. The gritty sand swirled around the room and came to rest upon Mila and Sam on the bed. She ran her fingers through Sam's hair and shook out the dirt, looking deep into his eyes as though she was memorizing every detail of his face so that she would never forget this moment. "A dust storm comes," she said softly.

"Again?"

"Now we will be beset by dust storms until the monsoon rains. They herald the rains."

"When will this storm hit us?" Sam asked, turning away toward the windows where the curtains now lay quiescent, hanging straight down in still folds of cloth.

"In a few hours. Wait for that moment during the day when all becomes quiet, when it seems as though everything is dead, and just after that the storm will come."

"Spend the day with me," Sam said, recklessly. He still had to go and see Vimal in the bazaar, pay for the horses, make preparations for the rescue. There were too many details he had not considered, and yet he could not help wanting these precious last hours with Mila.

"I cannot," she said. "I have too much else to do. I must talk with Papa, see to Ashok " Here she paused and Sam waited, but she said nothing more.

When she left, Mila kissed him once, twice, a third time when she had reached the door to the balcony and had to return for that third kiss before she stepped out to go to her own room.

Chapter Twenty-Nine.

My father had dropped me a hint about the bad habits of this unlucky cadet. . * I began to see there that matters were going on too much ahead. Masturbation and sodomy had commenced in the corps.

I hear he is still trying to get back in this corps but this is all mere idle fancy These are the results of sodomy. Beware those who practice it. --Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan

Singh Kanota, Reversing the Gave: Amor Singh's Diary, A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India, So you see, my dearest Olivia, that just before the monsoon rains in those four days in May we were all hurtling headlong into an inevitable disaster. I mention the rains because they were the barometer by which we lived our lives, by which we died, after which we celebrated marriages, welcomed our children into the world. We welcome the rain because it brings tor coolness, calms our very skins, lets us breathe, feel alive again.

I was unaware for a very long time of this love between your mother and your father; in fact, I did not know of it untilyou were born. I suspected something, but chose willfully not to be/tot-etc my suspicions, and yet, when I found out for sure, there was not a sense of betrayal, but strangely, only gratitude to your mother for having given me much of herself as she did. I'm not being cavalier about this-

at the beginning it was a great, thundering shock for me, it rent me apart, brought my world crashing don's but all that comes later in this story I tell you, my dear child. Much later.

I sometimes wish, even now, that I had been as lucky as your father.

To have possessed her love, to have known myself secure in her love, as he had considered himself--for a short time anyway. And that is why I wanted to cause him pain, for I ivas in the agony of ignorance myself by the time he came back to Rudrakot six months later.

But I digress again here, picking up threads to weave my tale from well beyond this point and if I continue to do so, I will leave a gap in the fabric of your understanding.

Let me just say this much. I do wish, even now, that Mila had responded to the eight letters I wrote to her fiom the Imperial Cadet Corps, before she met Sam. Then at least, I would have had a scrap of paper on which she would have put down words that were meant just for me. just for me.

rrhe dust storm woke up the town and the kingdom of Rudrakot, and in the parlance of storms, this one was a black one, and vied from moment to moment with the red storm Mila, Sam, and Ashok had encountered at Chetak's tomb. So one minute there was that thick, dense silence when even the birds crept back into their nests, huddled with each other in the trees, silenced their demanding early morning chirps, and at the other minute the wind whistled gently, like a lover calling out to his beloved. The air cooled as if plunged into a vat of ice, and then it cracked and fissured as though it contained body and form, and expanded fleetly over the kingdom. Snakes and varans scurried for cover under the tombs of the dead in the Sukh desert. Horses snickered uneasily in stables and retreated to wedge their heads under some sort of shelter; pariah dogs lay quivering under plows and bicycles.

It was still so early in the morning--actually, the night's skirts had barely swept through the horizon to reveal the mighty sun's glow--that there were few people awake after the exhaustion from the revelries of the White Durbar the previous night. So the dust storm took everyone by surprise. Clouds coagulated across the vast desert sky, carrying within them the seeds of monsoon rains, lightning crawled across the heavens followed by so distant a thunder that not one windowpane in Rudrakot rattled, not one child awoke to wail in his mother's arms. The night watchmen were also asleep all over the city and within Jai's fort and his palaces, fatigued by the heat, thinking that no one would dare invade their domains at the brink of daylight. No one, that is, but the magnificent storm.

It came thundering onto Rudrakot, blackening the sky, blotting out the surprised sun, rousing the dirt and the dust to an ebony fury. On the terraces and in the courtyards across Rudrakot, people awoke screaming, partly with laughter, partly with fear at the tempestuousness of the storm. Girls woke to face the lusty wind, their eyes shut tight, their hair and ghagaras billowing behind them like ships in full sail, boys shouted into the storm and heard no sounds from their mouths, their voices snatched and carried away in an instant.

Mila ran to the door to her balcony, which had still been left open and was flapping as if demons were banging on it, and began to shut it, using all the force of her strong young arms. But as she struggled with the last four inches, the door would not budge and she looked down to see why and saw Ashok kneeling in the opening, holding it ajar with his body, his head bowed.

She pulled him inside, yelling that he was an idiot, what was he doing up so early. Then he lifted his face to hers and she almost died. Tears inundated his cheeks, his eyes were red, there were teeth marks on the curve of his shoulder, where his neck met his collarbone, and he shook as though he had been doused in a fever.

Mila shut the door firmly and latched it. She gathered her brother in her arms, half-carried him to her bed but could not lift him onto it, and he had no strength left in him to even raise himself a few feet. He disintegrated to the floor and she collapsed next to him, yanking his shoulders up to prop him against the bed, putting her arms around him fully, so that he could rest his head against her chest.

"What happened?" she said, her heart fracturing as he sobbed. His arms went around her waist and his fingers pinched the skin there, but she did not mind or even notice. "Tell me," she said, much as Sam and she had invited confidences from each other earlier that night. "Tell me, karma." Karma, apple of my eye, my love, a term of endearment Mila had used for Ashok when he was but a child and she had sung him to sleep at night, or sat by his bed when he was ill and when Pallavi did not have the heart to shoo her out of the room.

Mila ran her hands over Ashok's thin body, his head with its sweat-matted short hair, his neck, his shoulders and ribs, his thighs, calves, and ankles. He was all right. He was still in the clothes he had worn for the White Durbar the previous night, but they were soiled, not torn, dirty, as though he had rolled in the dust outside.

"Are you all right?"

So he said to her, I am in love with Vimal, Mila. I love him. As men love women, as women love men.

At first she did not understand and her heart died to a quietude at the thought. She had been afraid of Vimal's influence on Ashok, afraid that he would haul him into the nationalist movement and that that would cause embarrassment for Papa, afraid even of some nameless thing she could not identify. But never this. Never this, she thought. How was it even possible? What was it, this love between two men? What would Ashok do now? How could he live? How much more embarrassing this would be for Papa. It would kill Papa.

"You cannot know what love is, Ashok," she cried. "And in so short a period of time. Why, Vimal returned to our lives just two days ago." She said this without much consideration and then the full import of her words came upon her too. She knew what love was, and now, looking back, she knew she had fallen in love with Sam the moment he had held her hand at the meta and she had not wanted him to let go. And how long had Sam been with them ... two, perhaps three days, and he would be gone tomorrow, but her love for him would not die.

"I have done wrong, Mila," Ashok said, wretchedness saturating his face. He plunged his head into his hands and did not have the courage to look at the sister he had always considered in the place of his mother. It was only to her he would dare confess this shameful secret. He had not been able to stop himself, he had not been seduced by Vimal, he had wanted this. He had been desperate for the touch of Vimal's mouth on his, for the taste of his skin, for the feel of his body next to his. Desperate with a need that had grown inside him for a few years now, a need he had not recognized, because, like Mila, he did not know what this was.

"Yes," she said heavily. "You have done wrong, Ashok. I do not know what to say, what to do." And so saying, Mila turned away from Ashok. An anguished cry came from him and he wept harder. She saw the bruises underneath the collar of his shirt with a renewed but almost dispassionate interest. She felt the pleasant tiredness in her own limbs from the hours of making love to Sam; she rubbed the side of her thigh, where she knew Sam's teeth also adorned her skin, much as Vimal's teeth had left their mark on her brother. At that moment, all her disgust fled, for Mila understood what this love was between Ashok and Vimal. Under any other circumstances, given this with any other man or boy, perhaps even with Kiran, Mila would not have comprehended this passion or realized that it could be as strong as, as powerful as the one she shared with Sam. Within the span of one night, three men in her life--Papa, Sam, and Ashok--had taught her how varied and rich love could be, and that in its own way, in each of those ways, these different loves could be enduring. But with Vimal, of all people Mila thought with distress that Vimal would not return Ashok's love; he was incapable of something so unselfish and giving. Her heart grew leaden with grief for her brother because he was sure to be betrayed, and though Mila did not know just then, that betrayal was to come, and soon.

She put her arms around him again, this time calmly, and laid her lips against his sweaty head. She rubbed at the grains of sand in Ashok's hair, hugged his slight shoulders, and said quietly, "Papa must never know, karma."

"What shall I do, Mila?"

Once she had said those words, Mila learned within herself yet another lesson, that she had finally grown into an adult, become a woman of her own. It was not necessary to reveal all the details of her life, in this case, of Ashok's life to Papa. She realized that he would be devastated, that it would be a hurt he could not possibly recover from, that she might understand a part of it, but never Papa. Because she was a woman, had been a girl child, there were almost naturally many things she did not discuss with Papa, and this had been easy. On the day when she had glanced down with dread at the first blood in the lining of her underwear, when she was twelve, it was Pallavi she had sought out, ashamed and frightened. Pallavi had told Raman later in the evening, and Raman had merely kissed Mila on the forehead and said to Pallavi, "If Mila does not want a fuss made about this, then there will be no fuss."

"But she has become a woman now," Pallavi had wailed. "We have to conduct the pujas, invite the women of the neighborhood to come and visit her, seat her in a special chair so that everyone can see her and bless her."

Raman pulled away from Mila, and held her by her young shoulders. "Well, do you want all this, my dear child?"

Mila was more horrified than she had been at seeing the blood, and gone in that instant were the fears that she would bleed to death, that someone had taken a knife to her insides and had twisted it unmercifully until all of her would leak out through ... there. "No, Papa," she said fearfully, thinking that perhaps Pallavi would triumph after all and put her out in the verandah on display. Look at the daughter of our house; she has attained womanhood. Papa had said quietly to Pallavi, "This is one of those instances where my will must prevail. We will let Mila do what she wants. Is that clear?"

And yet even after that, on months when she had been prostrate with cramps or worried about the changes in her body, she had gone to Pallavi with her worries, not their father. Raman would not have been embarrassed at explaining what little he knew, and he understood only very little about women's affairs because even his children had been born behind the closed doors of his house and only brought out cleaned and swaddled in bedsheets, but Mila knew not to go to him then. As she knew now that their father must never learn of Ashok's ... love for Vimal.

"What shall I do?" Ashok asked again. His tears had stopped and his face had aged with this knowledge of himself. They both wished in that silence as Mila pondered his question for the right answer that rime could somehow be turned back and recant the happenings of the previous night for Ashok.

"Nothing. You can do nothing about this. You can never talk of this, and if you are to ... to meet Vimal again, know that I will not help make up excuses for you or for your absence." He stiffened in her embrace, but she went on doggedly, hoping that he would understand, that he would see things as she did. "No one most know, and no one must ever find out. Be very, very careful, Ashok."

The storm now invaded their consciousness, flinging its winds upon the closed balcony door, thumping against the windows, sending fingers of dirt in snakelike patterns under the door's frame. Fifteen minutes later, it died as abruptly as it had started, and Mila and Ashok heard, just a few minutes later, the crash of a brass pot against the surface of the well's water. They rose without speaking and, still holding on to each other, went out, the cranking of the pulley luring them to the balcony.

Raman had beaten the birds to activity. But as Mila and Ashok leaned over the parapet of the balcony to look down upon their father, the sparrows started their relentless chirping in the mango trees, and the first smoke coughed its way out of the chimneys of the kitchen house, palely white against the dark sky. There was the merest touch of chill in the air, and a half gloom still blanketed everything. The lime-washed wall of the well gleamed dully in the brightening light, and they saw the partly clad figure of their father near the well. His arms moved in a steady rhythm, yanking at the rope, one hand fluidly replacing the other until the brass pot swayed up and over the wall. Still holding the rope with his left hand, he leaned over the vast, yawning mouth of the well and pulled the pot to the well's ledge. Raman tilted the pot to splash some water into a steel tumbler dipped with a spoon. He then heaved it over his head, held it there for a minute, and upended the water over himself.

As the light smeared the horizon, beyond the lake and Chetak's tomb, it illuminated the yard behind the house and the man who stood by the well. A thin rope of thread clung to his bare upper body, looped over his right shoulder and down under his left arm. The thread was a symbol of caste, bestowed upon Raman at the cusp of manhood, and the ceremony he performed now was part of that symbol. He poured a spoonful of water into his right palm and drank it three times. And then, with the practiced ease of years, Raman began the ritual, dabbing his face with his thumb, touching his eyes, his nose, his ears, his shoulders, and laying his fingers on his chest. From where he stood, Mila and Ashok could hear the melodious breatheand-stop cadence of his voice as he chanted the verses that accompanied his ritual. A dwelling peace came upon both of them then, watching their father engaged in his daily prayer ritual without thought for how the rest of the day, the rest of their lives and his, would progress.

They turned together as they heard a slight movement and Sam came out into the balcony. He smiled when he saw their arms wrapped around each other, Ashok's head laid on her shoulder, as though they had been born that way, fused at the hip. He went to where they were standing, by Mila's side, his right hand resting on the parapet ledge only a few inches from her waist. She inclined her body so that her skin touched his, and this was the most they could do with Ashok firmly affixed to her other side, and even this much was comforting.

"Are you all right?" he asked, in a low voice.

She shook her head briefly, tears filling her eyes, but she said, so that Ashok could hear, "We are fine, Sam."

He caressed her shoulder, and, greatly daring, wiped the tears away with the back of his hand.

"Papa prays," Ashok said. "Perhaps for us all."

Sam leaned beyond the rise of the balcony's wall, cradling his right arm with his left, his palm supporting the elbow. His shoulder hurt, and he had almost forgotten this until reminded as he climbed the wall of the field punishment center and not since then again, but Mila's tears, her unnamed sorrow, brought the ache back. She was in pain, and so Sam was too.

At that moment, Raman glanced up from his meditations near the well, his lower garment of a white veshti clinging to him from his early bath, his body beginning to quake from a sudden, unnatural chill. Mila and Ashok both ducked briefly beyond his gaze, behind the low parapet, wiped their faces, and reappeared with watery smiles for their father. But he was not looking at them.

Instead he said, his voice somber, "Will you come to see me in my office, Captain Hawthorne, later today? I have news from Calcutta that I would like to discuss with you."

"Yes, sir," Sam said. "When?"

"Before you leave the house, please." With that, Raman, still shivering in his damp skin, wrapped a cloth towel around his upper body.

Before Mila could even begin to ask Sam what that meant, why Papa seemed so distant with him, what had he done, Pallavi's door opened and she stepped out into the balcony.

She said, her expression hardened and angry beyond anything Mila had seen before, "I want you to take a bath and then come and see me, Mila. Ashok, get to your room and do the same, you are no longer a child and do not need to hang on to your sister like this."

"PallavtrAshok began to wail, but she cut him short.

"Now/"she said. She did not look at Sam, did not even acknowledge his presence, but she said in very clear, grammatically perfect English, "We need our house to be our house now; visitors tend to overstay their welcome."

The first hailstones began then, pelting out of the sky like a sprinkling of flung pebbles and then cannonading down upon them in ten seconds, until everything was blurred into a thick sheet of ice formed over many months of winter somewhere up north, near the arctic. The hailstones were enormous, the size of a ripe chikku fruit, perfectly round and incredibly painful when they made contact with their skins.

It was the first of the catastrophes that would come upon them all on that day, and there was nothing they could do to stop them. They would all be deluged with disasters, all of them--Mila, Sam, Ashok, Raman ... even Kiran.

And none of this would have happened, my dear Olivia, if Sam had not come to Rudrakot. This I _firmly believe. Although that searing pre-monsoon heat was already upon as all, had lefi us limp and irritable and unreasonable, it was a state of mind we were familiar with, after all. If that spark, in the form of your father, had not come upon the aridity that surrounded us, we would not have been set to flame. And we were burned beyond recognition. It would be many years before we could talk of those four days in May, many years before I could consider them with something akin to equanimity.

So many years before I could pick up my pen, write to you, and tell you all of this.

Chapter Thirty.

On the boat, I had made friends with an Englishman ... After Port Said, he had a worried look ... He said last night those senior chaps got hold of me, and they said: "Look, we're just telling you this for your own good, that when you get to Calcutta and take up this job, you musn't be very friendly with Indians this young Indian might have been at Oxford and the rest of it, but still you had better be careful."

--Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj, 1987