Glorious Boy, page 12
Though Shep’s childhood China was a different Orient than Kipling’s India, he always identified with the risk of being left, lost, reclaimed, and refashioned on the other side of the racial divide. Some of his own amahs were dearer to him than his mother ever could be, but others would have sold him to the highest bidder if given half a chance. And even the blend of solicitude, duty, and possessive delight that the very best servants displayed around their white charges could be unsettling. As a child, Shep never quite believed his mother’s That could never happen to you. Flung with an air of exasperation, it always suggested to Shep that “that” likely would.
Kipling’s line had first returned to him one night when Ty was nearing two. Claire was off in the forest, and Shep and his son had come home for supper after an evening swim at the club. At the table, Ty got lost in his spoon.
“What do you see in there, old boy?” Shep had leaned closer. The light outside was nearly gone, but the bulb overhead burned bright enough that the child’s round face shone in the polished surface.
“Why, what happened!” Shep gasped. “You’re upside down!”
Ty frowned, glancing up at him and back, rotating the spoon like a wheel. Shep smiled at his confusion.
“It’s a trick of optics,” he said. “Reflection on a concave surface is inverted.”
Naila brought their supper to the table, setting fish and rice beside Shep, curd and mashed plantain by Ty. She hovered.
“It’s all right,” Shep said. “I can handle him.”
The girl stepped back but didn’t leave the room.
He ignored her, addressing his son, who was still examining his spoon. “Did you catch Evelyn Crisp’s face at the pool tonight?” Shep asked. “She looked like she’d just given birth to an aardvark.”
He dipped his own spoon into the plantains and raised it to Ty’s mouth. The boy ate without seeming to notice either the food or his father.
“Fascinating phenomenon. Englishmen take such pride in producing sons, but apparently, it’s against the rules to have anything to do with them if their mummies aren’t around. I thought Wilkerson was going to need smelling salts to get him to the bar. Nice of Major Baird to give us an attaboy, though. He almost seemed to mean it.”
In the back of Ty’s spoon Shep’s own face danced like a whitefly.
The child took another bite, still absorbed in his reflection. Light fascinated Ty. Music and sound and water, as well. Now he’d discovered that the same bright ball in his spoon was reflected in the lip of his silver cup, and he was trying to bring the two balls together.
Shep picked up his knife. “Listen to this, Ty.” He tapped the blade against his water glass, filling the room with a resonant low note.
Ty looked up at his father, eyes widening, mouth forming a silent, perfect circle. He dropped his spoon and reached for the knife.
“No, don’t do that.” Shep put the spoon back in his son’s hand and guided it to the cup. “Tap it.” He showed him, and a mid-scale note rang out.
They listened to it quaver and fade, then Ty banged the metal too hard.
“Gently.” Better. “Watch this.” Shep sipped his water and brought the knife to his glass again.
Ty stared, mesmerized.
“You noticed the change?” Shep tapped again, then took another two sips, nearly emptying the glass.
The next time he tapped, it rang high. Then he held the cup to his son’s mouth to drink and helped him guide his spoon.
Naila and Jina and Som all stood gawking from the doorway as Shep filled and emptied the cup and glass.
It must have taken ten rounds before the child’s interest waned, at which point he yawned and reached for his father to carry him upstairs. As they passed the dumbstruck servants, his son’s soft weight at his neck, a defiant thrill swept through Shep.
He thought, Distrust this!
In the morning, he tells Leyo to make a place at breakfast for himself and Naila. Yes, at the same table.
The sun pushes through the cloudcover, and the side of the house casts a hard, diagonal shadow across the terrace. Shep seats Ty beside him in the shade. Then they all watch the boy watch the yellow and green dotted finches sail above the garden.
Ty’s eyes are as swollen as Shep’s, but in Naila’s presence the child willingly stuffs his mouth with bread.
Leyo and Naila continue to wait, their toast and tea untouched.
“You may as well eat,” Shep says finally. “We’re in this together now, and you’ll both need your strength, whatever comes next.”
He says nothing of Claire but looks severely at Naila. “The Japanese—I know you’ve heard talk in town about Asian brotherhood and all that. But Ty and I are not Asian. We cannot afford any further confusion. You’re a bright girl, Naila—”
A spasm of anger overcomes him. He swallows hard and forces himself to continue.
“I know you love Ty. You—you’d do anything for him.”
The girl pinches her lips together and nods. Her small frame contracts like a moth. She looks as if she might cry.
Fine. He’ll drive that pain home. “If the Japanese come before the next evacuation ship, they will take us both prisoners. I don’t think Ty would survive that. Do you understand me?”
At the mention of his name Ty stops chewing. To him prisoner is a game he plays with Naila on the beach. But the girl’s eyes widen. She’s a child, too, Shep reminds himself. An orphan, God help her.
She whispers, “Yes, Saab.”
He cups his hand over Ty’s head, then looks back along the slope of scrub toward the ridge road. Not a sound. He thinks of the commissioner’s dead dog.
He passed the poor creature yesterday morning, on his way to the ship. The shepherd lay by the road with his throat slashed wide as a scream. On Ross, Ty used to ride Wilkie like a pony. The two would have long silent conversations. Yesterday Shep had Narinder stop the car. He carried the corpse into Wilkerson’s compound himself. Then he put the whole matter out of his mind until he learned his son was missing.
How could he and Claire have been such fools?
Ty climbs down from his chair and tugs at Naila’s skirt. When she doesn’t move, he tugs harder.
Shep watches until his son’s tear-streaked face reddens. “Go ahead.”
Naila hoists the boy to her lap and breathes into his neck. Ty rubs her ear.
Shep says, “That tree where you were hiding. Is it true that no full-grown person can get in there?”
Naila opens her mouth but says nothing.
“Leyo saw you come from that direction.” He feels rather than sees the exchange of accusation between his two servants. “Answer me.”
“Yes, Saab. The way in, it is small.”
A plan is coalescing—contingency plan, he corrects himself—but before he can complete it he notices dust rising along the road.
“Quick,” he tells Naila. “Take Ty downstairs and give him a bath. And be quiet about it. Someone’s coming, and they mustn’t hear you. Don’t show yourselves, either, not to anyone except me and Leyo—” He thinks of his driver, dispatched after the scene at the ship to search for the children up and down the coast. Shep decides to dismiss him when he returns. Better to drive himself now. “Not even Narinder.”
He goes up to the forecourt to intercept the visitor and finds Alfred Baird climbing out of his Willys.
Without preamble, Baird says, “Found your boy?”
Shep crumples his expression and drops his gaze, acting never his forte. When he phoned North Station last night to wire Claire, he explained to Lutty that the message was a necessary ruse, so his wife wouldn’t worry. He made sure the telegraph officer understood that the boy was “actually still missing.”
To Baird now he says, “I thought you might have news.”
“Ah. I see. I wish—No.”
But then Baird’s expression toughens. “I came to warn you. There’s been trouble at the jail.”
As the major details this trouble, Shep again pictures Wilkie, feels the slaughtered animal’s weight in his arms, the vengeful message directed at Wilkerson and, through him, at them all.
“We’ll keep searching as best we can,” Baird is saying. “You did the right thing sending Claire off safe.”
And the whole port must know by now how he did it. Shep slides his fists into his pockets.
Once Baird’s gone, he calls for Leyo to bring the children down to Claire’s study.
He closes the blackouts. Naila perches on a stool while Ty, still damp from his bath, draws flowers with a stray pencil and paper. Leyo squats beside him. The room is suffocating.
Shep leans against Claire’s vacant desk. “You understand that the freedom fighters up at the jail were all sent away.” This is true. Shortly after he and Claire arrived in Port Blair, a series of hunger strikes at the jail made their point, and most of the recent political prisoners were sent back to appeal their cases in their home states, leaving the Cellular Jail largely, but not entirely, empty.
“The convicts left inside are real criminals—murderers, thieves. They’re as dangerous to you, Naila, as to me.”
Leyo surely knows this, and Leyo has no more use for these local goons than Shep has, but though Naila nods, he doubts her comprehension.
“Major Baird just told me a gang of men from town went up there this morning and threatened the guards. The Commissioner was able to stop it, but not before several inmates escaped.”
He pauses, looks up at the ceiling. “Abraham,” he says, and his voice leans sideways. He was wrong not to trust his instincts. “Abraham was one of the ringleaders.”
Leyo draws a breath and nods.
“Come here, mitai,” Naila whispers, but Ty ignores her, busy as ever, and when Shep pushes away from the desk and discovers the boy has unbuckled his mosquito boot, he kicks it across the room.
Naila pulls the startled child out of the way.
“I have to trust you,” Shep says to her. “You haven’t earned that trust, but I’ve no choice. For Ty’s sake, Naila, you must do as I ask.”
March 17, 1942
Just keep him out of the way.
Claire stares into the stifling darkness and girds herself for another day of waiting. She can’t afford to keep turning back. She can’t stop. Her only defense is to focus on her immediate surroundings: morning at the Fairhaven. It stinks. It clatters. It blooms with the sour reek of dread. Beyond these walls she can feel Calcutta opening like a boil.
She pushes herself up and out from under the mosquito net. Through the blackout curtains comes the pump squeak from the courtyard behind the hotel. Boys below her window shout and splash. Temple music whines in the distance.
She shoves the drapes aside and stands before a spire and a dome, their black silhouettes hard against gunmetal sky. Dung smoke and lead, the rev of two-stroke engines. Only the morning’s liquid texture hints at the nearness of water—and that only the river. For all the city’s turbulence, it’s the missing pulse of ocean that disorients her, almost as much as her missing family. Phantom limb, Shep would call it.
But then she catches the reassuring smells of boiled milk and toast. The low murmur of kitchen staff drifts, along with intermittent harangues. Carry on. Carry on.
Claire’s room is so small that to dress she has to climb over luggage and bang into boxes of ethnographic field notes and artifacts. Serves her right. All that effort, that study. Five years. The nerve of her. As if words could save her own family, let alone a whole doomed tribe.
She catches herself on the end of the bed and reels back into the vortex of waking on the ship four days ago, the cabin whirling, a smell of machine oil and disinfectant and a small, swarthy man in uniform peering down at her, as if into a cage.
She was still drugged. The wire he handed her didn’t compute:
TY FOUND AOK STOP NAILA TOO.
Even now the relief Shep was sending feels dubious and painful. She rubs the bruises on her forearms where the MPs had to restrain her. But, she tells herself, this will all be over by the time the bruises heal. A few more days, just as soon as the next ship brings them across, life can resume. She’ll fumble for redemption then.
If only those last unforgivable moments would stop repeating. The children blinking, those quizzical frowns. Naila’s blouse, the color of love.
They were only doing as Claire asked: Just keep him out of the way.
I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I wasn’t myself, so much to do and no more time—I wasn’t thinking, I meant for Naila to keep Ty safe, so he wouldn’t be stepped on, wouldn’t fall or hurt himself.
The excuses stream, but the words she actually uttered hang her.
Just keep him out of the way.
The two of them stepped with such excruciating obedience over the maze of objects on her floor. Objects that spoke to a devotion and people she prized over her own son.
Is that true? Or is it simply a story she’s telling to punish herself?
Her memories grow more treacherous. She can still feel the gouge in her chest where Ty punched her with the arrowhead.
When she glanced up and the children were gone—did she give them a second thought? Worse, did she breathe relief?
Inside the Freedom Tree, Naila and Ty play a game called “camping.” Part of this game is to sort the medicines that Doctor Shep has sent with them. “Fever,” she’ll say, and Ty will hand her the glass tube with the green label. “Cut,” she slices a finger across her arm, and he points to the red. “Spider!” she cries softly, splaying her hand in the air, and Ty Babu reaches for the salve.
He remembers everything, her boy. He amazes her. And, so long as she keeps his mind occupied, he is fearless and content. But at night, under their doubled mosquito net, she holds him to comfort herself. Can she do what she must to protect him? Doctor saab has shown her, painstakingly, how to use the snake bite kit. I trust you to do this, Naila. When you’re alone with him, you are his mother, his father, his doctor, his sister. If he’s in danger, you must do everything in your power to protect him. This is what it means to love someone.
Better to kill the snake before it bites, she thinks. And then she steels herself. She will. She must.
Leyo comes to the entrance of the tree before dawn, when the birds begin to sing, and again at nightfall with food and water, toys and crayons. He trades a clean chamber pot for their used one and takes away any rubbish that might smell or attract pests. In the low light, Leyo’s dark face is difficult to read, but his hands are gentle now.
“Are you still angry?” she asks.
He takes a wet cloth from his supplies and motions for Ty to wash his face, which the boy does without complaint. Leyo says to Naila, “Why ask me this? You have eyes, ears.” He taps lightly on the crown of her head, but he will not smile, and she doesn’t know if he means to chide, or to reassure.
“Ask this one.” Leyo motions for Ty to scrub the back of his neck. “Ask Doctor Shep. Ask Mem.” And his meaning finally takes hold.
“Mujhe maaf kar dain,” she says, as if she might apologize to all of them through him. “I was angry.”
“Yes.” He sighs. “Look. It is done. Doctor Shep, Police Chief Ward and the Commissioner and Major Baird are the only Europeans left now.”
“In all of Port Blair?”
“In all of the islands.”
We cannot afford any further confusion. She combs her fingers through Ty’s damp waves, and he arches for her to continue down and scratch his back.
“He will go on the next ship,” she says. “I promise.”
That afternoon Naila and Ty find some hardy aerial roots and climb them like rope ladders up to a height from which they can see the beach. Red and green fishing dhows slide across the water, and beyond them Mount Harriet rises as proud and haughty as ever.
In midday heat like this the waterfront typically is deserted, but today Naila senses a new emptiness. The shacks of the pariahs at the end of the beach look vacant. She can hear no engines, no voices, no whistles, few barks. She spots only one human figure, tall and alone in the long khaki trousers and mosquito boots of a firangi, moving along the shore.
Though she cannot make out Doctor saab’s face beneath the white topi, she can see the sadness in his body’s turning, to and fro, like a lighthouse missing its beacon.
March 20, 1942
Make work. Claire spends the morning at the front desk, copying the hotel register so it can be vetted by the War Office. It’s a mindless chore, but it helps stave off worries and gives her a tangible function. There might, after all, be an enemy agent hiding in the list.
She has Roger Matthews to thank for this task, as well as for her general equilibrium. Four nights ago, as the Norilla crawled up the delta toward its berth, she felt as if she hadn’t a friend in the world. Four million souls were said to inhabit Calcutta, but thanks to the blackout, the only visible lights might have been glow worms. A half moon had risen and with it the noises and smells of industry. The ghostly shapes of stevedores swarmed the wharves. Taxi and rickshaw wallahs brayed for fares. As Claire inched down the gangplank, she had only the vaguest notion of where she would go next. Then a waving boater caught her eye, followed by the advancing glow of a tall figure in white. Roger called her name.
Matthews, a childhood friend of Shep’s from Shanghai, is with the Foreign Office, stationed in Calcutta. Claire smiles, remembering their first introduction during their stopover here in ’36. Shep had urged her to dress up for the occasion: dinner with Roger at the Grand Hotel, which he described as “palatial and then some.” He was so eager to show her off; she put on a yellow beaded evening dress that he said she looked a vision in, and even applied a bit of kohl and rouge.
The Grand was just as he promised. A tuxedoed Sikh played a Steinway, and waiters in starched uniforms with plumed turbans glided across the white lobby. After the heat and dirt of the street, the high ceilings and marble floors seemed as cool as the walls of an igloo, though infinitely more decorative.
The two men zeroed in on each other as hale fellows well met. “What’s a lout like you doing in a place like this?” Roger clapped Shep on the shoulder and gave him the once-over. “You’re looking fit.” Then he spun to Claire. “But hardly worthy of a g-goddess like this!”
