Glorious Boy, page 22
As darkness falls, Naila becomes aware of new sensations within her body. Her breasts feel swollen. Deep in her belly a large fist squeezes. She tries to catch Ekko’s attention, but the other girl stares straight ahead, her face in the same rude mask it has worn all afternoon.
She remembers her mother washing blood from rags. Naila asked if someone was hurt and her mother shooed her away, saying no, it was only women’s business, but someday she’d understand. She remembers also Mem standing in the kitchen over a pot, boiling something that smelled like seaweed. This was the only thing that Mem ever insisted on cooking herself, though when Naila stole a peek, all she could see in the pot were sponges in reddish brown water.
Deep in the night the rain stops and a crescent of gold shines between the clouds. Its light skims the ledge, making a path to the hut, where Ekko lets out soft snoring spurts. Her own body aches too much to sleep, but she shuts her eyes and tries to relax. When she looks again to the path of light, Leyo’s straight lean silhouette forms a bowstring on the moon.
Two evenings later, they are released. Artam’s mother has washed Naila’s singlet and drapes it over her before they return to the round house. Naila tries to embrace her to thank her for this kindness and for keeping Ty safe, but Imulu just spins her around and pushes. Leyo stands so close that she bumps his chest.
He laughs as his nose grazes her cheek. “Now you are Yulu.” He points to a nearby cluster of trees bearing fragrant white flowers. “Yulu, your flower name.”
And she blushes at a memory of his saying once, four years earlier on Ross Island: Yulu is most beautiful.
Turning, she sees Ekko, now to be called Chenra, standing on the far side of the ledge. Tika has slung his arm around her waist and is smiling into her ear. Ekko at first shrugs him off. She glowers at Leyo, but then grabs Tika’s hand and pulls him into the forest.
Kuli kept his distance from the pandan hut, but through her long hours sitting there Naila watched him closely and realized that he does not simply stare into space all day. Rather, he stands the way old Ranjit used to stand in the wheelhouse of the ferry Benbow, the way Doctor Shep and her father stood as they gazed down the rows of orchids in their old shade garden, the way she herself once stood on the bluff scanning the seas for her parents.
Kuli spends his days searching. And a few days after Naila helps tear down the girls’ hut, he calls the clan together to tell them what he’s found.
Leyo sits beside Naila with Ty in his lap and teases her by calling her Yulu. “Tell me what Kuli is saying,” she scolds. She can follow routine talk now, but tonight’s is too difficult.
“Kuli says that the rains discourage the Japanese from entering the forest, but during gumul, the weather will be softer. Today he saw a new break in the forest far to the south. Someone is clearing trees near the coast.”
Porubi has told Kuli that the Japanese are offering words of honey to the Indians and Burmans, saying that they will be allowed to live in peace. Kuli doubts that the new invaders will make war with the Biya, but he doesn’t trust them any more than he trusts the settlers. His people must not cross paths with these new invaders or attract their attention. He repeats the tale about the ancestors that Naila told to Imulu in the forest.
From now through the dry season, Kuli says, there will be no chanting. The chief then turns to Ty, who is busy exchanging finger signals with Artam across the fire. He waits until the children pay attention.
Some dancing will continue, Kuli says, as it serves to warn vipers, cats, and bad spirits from troubling the camp, but each dancer must sing soundlessly. “As the sun sings,” he says in Biya.
And Ty, understanding perfectly, raises one finger to the sky and, with Artam at his heels, circles the fire in silence.
They meet at the Barrackpore golf club, where, according to Vivian, forty percent of the members were Japanese before Pearl Harbor. Viv has come up from Calcutta to investigate what those erstwhile members might have been up to and where they went, but at the moment her lunchtime conversation with Claire is focused on Roger.
Viv has been staying with him for eight months now. Lately, she’s noticed a change. “He’ll be dozing over his papers and bolt upright. I think he has nightmares about the invasion.”
“We all have nightmares,” Claire manages to say without inflection as Ty splashes into her spectral sea.
Vivian hands her plate to the white-gloved waiter. Despite the war, the club still strives to maintain the airs of the Raj. “I don’t remember my dreams.”
The reply comes automatically. “Shep doesn’t either.”
“Growing up in China . . .” Vivian hesitates. “In ways, it was worse than India, especially during the winter and wars. I remember frozen babies—cartloads of them. You learned to block out the horrors. You especially learned not to let your imagination run the show. That’s one reason Shep fastened onto science and I went for the news. Facts and figures are safer than stories your mind makes up.”
“What happens when the facts and figures are the horror?”
Viv stares at a rhombus of blue light cast onto the table from a mirror across the room. It threatens to suck them both in. Then, abruptly, “How’s our favorite major?”
“Charming as ever.”
Viv gives her a hopeful glance. “Yes?”
Claire nods, but zips a finger across her mouth. Secrecy as refuge. As conspiracy. “So, what’ve you learned about Tojo’s golfers?”
Her sister-in-law watches her closely. “The Japanese apparently are very keen on golf. So keen you’d think they’d have preferred the Tolleygunge course, but what Barrackpore lacks in its fairways it more than makes up for in its proximity to strategic armament factories and waterworks. One month before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese members all were mysteriously called home. Those are the facts. The caddies tell me they spoke Japanese exclusively and pretended never to have heard of the concept of baksheesh. Apparently, their assignment did not extend to promoting the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
“I’m grateful,” Claire says. “Thank you. I really wish I could tell you more, but even what I have to tell doesn’t add up to much. Believe me.” She can tell Vivian doesn’t.
The waiter brings their tea, and they drink it in silence as the dining room empties around them. She needs to get back to the College, but Viv stops her getting up.
“Do you think you could get the day off next Sunday?” Her voice has an unusually sheepish quality.
“I expect so. If it’s important.”
“It is to Roger and me. We’re getting married. Just a small ceremony at St. John’s. We’d like you to be our witness.”
Claire is too surprised to reply.
“We’d also like your blessing.”
“Sorry. Yes! Of course. It’s just so unexpected.”
“Is it?” Viv grins.
And finally, she comes to her senses. “I’d be honored.” She smiles despite the accompanying wrench of sadness. It’s Shep who should be their witness.
His sister pats her hand and stands. “We decided it was time to stop the wagging tongues around the FO. They’re a much stuffier lot than the press corps.”
Claire hugs her. “I’m so happy for you both. I know—I know Shep will be too.”
“Is it what you actually think, or just what you want to believe?” Ward asks the following Sunday.
Claire locks eyes with the bullock that’s blocking the bridge ahead. They’re riding into Calcutta together, a sensible arrangement, since Roger has asked his cousin to be the other witness at the wedding—and it’s about time she and Ward talked this through without any witnesses of their own.
The ox swings around and lumbers off the road, and a jeep filled with American GIs blasts its horn and guns past them. Claire closes her eyes against the ensuing geyser of dust and sees Shep smiling, Ty pinwheeling his arms.
Child of ours, at friend’s shelter in the deep forest.
MeNnot/ThIre/meLE/eKOTrA/NO/TImiuKOON
Four weeks, it took. Last night she fell asleep at her desk, then awoke and had it.
Their driver snaps his whip, and the gharry begins to move.
“Both,” she says finally. “It means they’re alive—almost certainly hiding at the Biya camp where I was doing my fieldwork.”
“Or that the Japs—”
“—would have no way of coming up with this.”
“Unless they caught Shep sending it.”
“No.”
A careening red sun. A racing torpedo. Shep flying, then falling. And then . . . Shep elated, holding aloft his trophy of blossoms the way a very different man would hoist a great white shark. The flowers shine like tiny stars against the blue backdrop of water. “Eria kurzii,” she whispers. Gobsmacked.
“What?”
How could she have been so blind? “The Latin in the note you carried. Eria kurzii was the first orchid Shep found when we went into the field together. He found it just outside the Biya camp.”
Ward’s voice flattens to an ugly sheen. “And you just remembered this.”
“It’s only beginning to fit together. My God, of course. It was always Shep’s assumption that Naila and Leyo would flee to the forest—if the Japanese came after we left.” She struggles to find the right term in Ward’s lexicon. “Their bolt-hole. He must have sent the wireless message on his way there.”
A glance of surprise. “It’s a neat theory, Claire. But plans are one thing—”
She waves him off. “Shep can’t have been detected. If they caught him, there would have been other messages. They’d try to use the code to ensnare us.” But then she realizes her own mistake. Shep only knows a handful of Biya words. He’d be useless if the Japanese caught him. She doesn’t tell Ward this.
“You’re betting a lot on a highly wishful decryption of a message that could have been sent by anyone.”
His logic sideswipes her. The message is so crude that there’s no way of knowing even which side sent it. Perhaps it’s just the fumbling of some shipwrecked Japanese.
Ward glances up at the driver. The wheels creak and the horse’s hoofs clop on the parched dirt road. Still, he lowers his voice so she can barely understand him. “If you’re wrong about this, our entire operation will be exposed. There are other codes we could—”
She focuses hard on the gold Sanscrit letters crumbling along the back of the driver’s seat. Ward’s inflection makes it clear that “we” in his alternative won’t include her.
“Any code or cipher that translates into a known language is vulnerable,” she recites from the training manual. “And none is safe for mobile units on the ground.”
He pulls a pair of dark glasses from his pocket and arranges them over the caves in which his eyes dwell. “It was your husband who let on that your son had died. With the girl. And they do things like that, the Orientals.”
“Like what?”
“Girls here set themselves on fire after their men die or reject them, rather than carry on.”
“You think Naila would intentionally have killed our son?”
“They’ll do almost anything to escape dishonor.”
“What are you saying?”
A muscle twitches in his jaw. The glasses aren’t quite dark enough to hide the vulgarity of his thoughts.
Shep and Naila? Relief spars with revulsion. But of course, that’s what he’d think. It must have gotten all over Port Blair that Dr. Durant had to knock out his wife to get rid of her. That the ayah hid the child as a hostage to ensure that her lover would stay. Stranger things happen in Asia.
“If only it were that simple.”
He frowns.
“Believe me, there was nothing between Naila and my husband. But our little boy was her whole life. If anything happened to Ty, she would kill herself. I’ve no doubt of that. What she couldn’t do was let him go.”
“Why didn’t you all leave months earlier then, when you could have taken her with you?” The vulgarity is gone, replaced by genuine puzzlement. He hands her a white handkerchief.
She blots her eyes and cheeks with the cloth, then refolds it, clean side out. The gharry sways as it picks up speed. “Blindness.”
After the brief ceremony at St. John’s, Viv and Roger host their own celebration at the Great Eastern Hotel. It’s just the four of them—“just family,” as Roger puts it—but they treat themselves to prawn curry and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, courtesy of Viv’s boss back in Sydney.
“With a telegram saying I was hands-down the last girl in the world he ever expected to tie the knot.”
“Not sure if I should drink to his health,” Roger says, “or challenge him to a d-duel.”
“I took it as a compliment.” Viv raises her glass to her new husband. She’s pinned a gardenia above her ear and traded in her broadcloth and khaki uniform for a blue silk dress.
“I expect if he could see you tonight, he’d eat his words,” Claire offers. It’s all she can do to play along, now that she’s deciphered Shep’s note. She wants to hop the next bomber, to parachute directly into Behalla. She wants to alert the War Office that she knows where her husband and son are hiding, to demand an immediate rescue. But she also knows that her discovery can change nothing until Ward and his men make their crossing. She longs, at the very least, to alert Shep’s sister. But Ward has commanded her to hold her tongue.
“I still take it as a compliment.” Viv tosses her head and the gardenia flies across the table, landing in front of Denis, who places it between his teeth. She laughs. “Olé!”
Ward pivots in his seat, leans forward, and drops the flower by Claire’s hand. The petals are beginning to brown, and his teeth have cut small pale scars along the stem, but the fragrance rises, still strong. She brings it to her face and closes her eyes. The six-piece band tonight is playing “White Christmas.” She and Shep married in summer, but the memory overwhelms her anyway, of dancing across her parents’ parlor with her hand at the nape of his neck, the scent of the gardenia in his lapel, the still unfamiliar quiet and height of him.
A siren shrieks, rattling the tableware. The music falters, then ceases.
“Air raid!” Roger groans.
“Oh come on,” Viv says. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“Says you.”
A hand takes hold of Claire’s elbow as she overturns her chair. She grabs her shawl and purse and turns, only now registering the concern in Denis Ward’s eyes.
All he says is, “This way.”
Calcutta takes its air raids seriously, but there has never been an actual attack, and even among the officers, plenty have yet to hear their first bomb fall. As they follow the general current toward the hotel basement, cries of False alarm! and I say, watch where you’re stepping! and You won’t catch me down that rabbit hole! pop up and down like buoys. Then the distant ack-ack-ack of antiaircraft guns penetrates, and the current flows faster.
Rumors of gas begin to percolate back through the crowd, prompting a threat of panic, as no one seems to have any idea if or where there might be gas masks. Fortunately, Denis and Roger are tall enough to sound commanding.
“This way, ladies and gents. We’ll get everything sorted out downstairs.”
Claire notices that now, when the pressure is really on, Roger’s stutter vanishes.
In the crush, she loses sight of Vivian. Then, as she’s starting down the steps, the power goes out, and utter blackness descends. The sudden hysteria in the crowd is more terrifying than the sirens and guns, and for the first time Claire understands what people mean when they talk about smelling fear.
“Claire?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Hang on.” Denis again, his hand on her shoulder. No one can move, yet she’s surprised by his presence. What did she expect? That he’d charge out into the street and take aim at the skies to fight off the invaders himself? He does tend to invite such caricatures.
Then the first bombs hit, and the concussion throws them down the stairs. Claire breaks her fall by catching hold of the handrail, but around her the moaning and wailing quickly escalate. A flashlight beam ricocheting across the basement reveals Denis crouching several feet away, near Roger and Viv, who are comforting a slight, terrified Eurasian woman.
A few more thuds register, though none as close as those first ones. The injuries appear to be minor, more psychic than physical, but the thirty minutes of darkness feel endless as the crowd in the basement waits for the all-clear to sound.
When it does, a collective cheer goes up. Soon the electricity comes back on, but there’s no resuming any celebration. Upstairs the floor is awash in broken glass and china. No one appears on scene to sweep it. Customers descend on the bar, but just one lone bartender returns to sort through the surviving bottles. And though the band gamely takes up their instruments, the few visible waiters are making for the exits.
“Do they know something we don’t?” Claire asks.
Viv watches the shaken young woman she consoled downstairs return to her station at the reception desk. “They’ve no frame of reference.”
Roger kisses the top of his bride’s head. “Helluva wedding bash.”
“Major?” An MP approaches Denis. “There’s a man out front, been injured. Said he thought you might be in here.”
They all follow him through the lobby, between the blackout drapes, to the crater that now stretches directly in front of the Great Eastern’s entrance. It’s difficult to see in the dark, but several uniformed men lie on the opposite sidewalk. A nurse kneels beside one of them, cradling his foot in her lap and calling for a doctor.
“Culman!” Ward bellows.
VIII
January 1943
Before the bomb shattered Sergeant Culman’s ankle, Claire was told only what she absolutely needed to know. After decoding Shep’s message, she fantasized that Ward would make a grand dash, speeding across to fetch Shep and Ty and immediately hightailing it back with them, but two days after the Christmas bombing, the major takes her for a stroll through Governor’s Park and disabuses her of all such illusions as he proposes something even more far-fetched.
