Glorious Boy, page 6
Teacher Sen’s map became a new screen through which she traced continents, oceans, mountains. These are our islands, Naila would repeat and show on Claire’s map how her teacher stabbed at the pale blue Bay of Bengal, how he ran his forefinger up and down the spine of green bits marked Andaman Nicobar Archipelago. Then he would sweep both palms outward as if to embrace the wall—but all of this is our home.
When he spun to face the class—Naila reenacted the movement—Teacher Sen’s spectacles often fell from their perch atop his bulging forehead, and he’d catch them with a flourish in his left hand even though he wrote with his right, and he never stopped talking about the miracle of geography as he performed this feat. Master the map and you master the world. That is how the British did it.
His other pupils sniggered and picked their noses and ridiculed him behind his back, but Naila understood. The British came from a place that occupied barely one square of the map’s screen, while India and Burma spread over more than ten squares. How could people from such a small place rule over a land so far away and so much larger than their own?
Claire had no answer, but Teacher Sen did. Map mastery. Like Naila in her mother’s kitchen, the British stayed securely at home with themselves, yet by mastering the map, they owned the world on the other side of the screen.
Naila imagined floating invisibly through that screen and descending into scenes she’d glimpsed only in photographs and illustrations. Cities, palaces, deserts, and lakes. Teacher Sen said it snowed where he grew up, in Kalimpong. He tried to describe the towering mountains of his childhood, but for Naila, such natural wonders were as foreign as skyscrapers. She loved to dream of them even if she never expected or would dare to visit them in real life.
She told Claire about the day she came home from school to the news that she and her parents would soon be leaving the house with the blue gate where they had lived since she was born, that they were to move across the harbor to Ross Island to work for the new British doctor and his American wife. To Naila, it felt as if America herself was coming to Port Blair!
America seemed the most exotic country of all. Larger on the map than England and India combined, home to the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon, to Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers, who sometimes appeared in moving pictures at Aberdeen Cinema. The funny men Naila liked, but she didn’t know what to make of the cinema ladies who hiked up their skirts and drove motorcars and kissed men full on the lips. No one behaved like that in Indian movies, let alone in Naila’s own experience, but Americans seemed to have bigger spirits even than the British. Would the new memsaab also have a big spirit? Her ma had laughed at such childish excitement and said she hoped so.
Claire took the girl’s hand and replied that her spirit paled next to Naila’s.
The baby appeared to think so, too. One afternoon Claire came out of her study to find Naila alone with Ty in the parlor. Naila, in her blue school uniform, sat cross-legged on the divan with Ty Babu, as she called him, in her lap. Neither the infant nor the girl noticed Claire. Naila was too busy feeding him.
All she had was a bottle of water, but her head tipped birdlike to one side, arms nesting the baby against her. Beautiful, was Claire’s first thought. Precious. But it was more than that.
Naila held that bottle like a sacred object, and as he sucked, Ty kept his gaze locked on the girl’s. He caught a red thread from the stitching in her blouse, and the intensity with which he rubbed it, between his thumb and middle finger, made it seem a gesture of devotion.
November 15, 1937
Happy birthday, dear Vivvy!
I’m sending this care of your editor in Sydney, though you’re doubtless raising muck up and down the Malay. I hope as I write this that you’re having a bang-up celebration.
As for us, it’s been rather a turbulent year in paradise. Ty is the highlight, of course. In my entirely unbiased opinion, the boy is abso-blooming brilliant. At five months he swims like a fish and sits like a dog. Any day now he’ll be babbling Aka Biya—the language of the people Claire is studying.
Or trying to, between setting up the nursery and fielding congratulatory visits from the cantonment matrons. My bride has become a stunning young mother, and she dotes on Ty, as do we all. Occasionally she grumbles about getting back out in the field, but I remind her that patience is a virtue.
Happily, I’m not quite so constrained. Just yesterday I made an excursion that might interest you, to a convict settlement called Ferrargunj—one of about sixty built around the archipelago over the past half century by released prisoners and their wives. Ferrargunj is one of the few not on the outer coastline. It sits near an inland river, which allows the Ferrargunjians to clear the valuable inland timber and send it by raft down to the sawmill here in Port Blair.
My official purpose was to check on the village dispensary, though “official” is a slight stretch. Technically, these village rounds are the duty of my second-in-command, Lt. Gupta, but Gupta’s more British than I’ll ever be and seems to consider the convict settlers so far beneath him that he can’t be bothered to spit on them. As part of my collegial appeasement policy, I’ve elected to visit these outpost dispensaries myself. Two birds, as they say. I always take our man Leyo with me and, after I treat a few raging sores and machete wounds and the standard quota of malarial cases, we go orchid hunting.
Yesterday we also had a forest officer to see we didn’t lose our way. Not much chance of that with Leyo along, but the forester, one Luke Benegal, was a fine chap, and I was lucky to have them both, since we discovered a giant Grammatophyllum speciosum in the crotch of an ancient marblewood tree. This particular orchid is not only rare and enormous, but the aboriginals use it as a cure for scorpion and centipede poisoning. It blooms only once every two years, and this one was covered with spears of beautiful leopard-spotted blossoms! The whole thing must have weighed over a ton, but we managed to wrestle off a single root bundle that we could hoist between the three of us. As we staggered back to the boat, Leyo pointed out a dozen more specimens that I’d have given my eye to collect, but this trophy was all we could manage for one day.
It’s how one survives in the Andamans, to cultivate these sorts of fascinations with the local flora and fauna. Our current Commissioner Wilkerson tells me Ferrargunj was named after his predecessor Michael Ferrar, who spent eight years in the Andamans, studied five South Asian languages, and collected over four thousand butterfly specimens! A man cut from the cloth of Kipling’s Lurgan Sahib.
I do believe that Claire, too, will make something swell of our time here, once she’s able to return to her tribe. You astutely remarked in your last letter that she sounded like my kind of girl. I never knew I had a “kind of girl,” but I do now believe she is it. Not fearless like you. Sorry, dear sister, but I’d be terribly intimidated by a wife who wanted to beat the world’s drum as loudly as you do. You know I say that with hugest affection, but I’m sure you are not surprised to hear that I love Claire for her quiet tenacity and her youthful formlessness. I don’t mean that she is formless—au contraire! Only that she’s still coming into herself, you know? She’s willing to admit that she doesn’t know it all, and between the two of us, we refreshingly know next to nothing!
And you, Viv? Your last missive about the nefarious doings of the Japanese in our old stomping grounds sounded decidedly ominous, and I don’t trust you to keep your nose clean if all hell breaks out. Why don’t you see about coming here instead?
You could cover our latest Nationalist rumblings. There’s talk of another round of hunger strikes brewing at our Cellular Jail—there have been several over the years—and I’m quite in sympathy. All the prisoners are demanding is basic stuff like clean water and light and books, but Mr. Gandhi’s now weighing in, too, and he wants the politicals to be sent back to jails in their home states. If he prevails it won’t exactly be the end of the Raj, but it might be newsworthy.
And of course, I’d love to introduce you to Claire and our glorious boy. Do come!
Your ever-loving brother,
Shep
Claire loved motherhood. She did. It had simply come too soon. Her only physical outlet was to walk the baby around Ross Island, which took all of an hour, and some days she would pause when Ty was asleep in his pram, and gaze out across the water to the forest in the north and wonder what her other self would be discovering at this exact moment in Behalla. What Kuli could be teaching her, or how that other baby, Artam, was growing. Not that she would trade Ty for any of them, but the Biya beckoned her in a way that motherhood couldn’t. While her son represented the future, the Biya represented a world that might soon become extinct. Time was crucial in both cases, but she felt it especially keenly when it came to documenting the Biya, and she’d only just begun to trust the promise of that work when pregnancy intervened. She longed to get back to it.
While Ty was nursing, of course, field work would be impossible, but once he was weaned, it would still be a challenge. As a new father, Shep had become unnervingly protective. Lately, in honor of his paternal role, he’d even cut back on his own expeditions.
Also, there was a new insistence to his affections that could verge on cloying, and the harder he reached for her, the more Claire tended to pull away. It horrified her to admit this, even to herself, but a part of her was responding to both Shep and Ty the way she once had to Robin—as if they somehow threatened something deep inside her that she couldn’t even name.
Duty played a role in all this. She should have known it would. There had been a day back in New York. A thundershower. Romantic, she’d thought at the time. To Shep, however, the downpour represented an obligation.
As they’d settled into a coffee shop to wait out the rain, he kept apologizing for his failure to bring an umbrella. “I could kick myself,” he persisted, even after they ordered their lunch.
“Sounds like you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.” The words had bubbled up, amused, scolding—and unrecognizably libertine.
Shep wouldn’t play. “Conditioned response is more like it.” He fingered the starched white cuff of his shirt, which gaped around his thin wrists. His hands tapered to squared pink nails, their restlessness at odds with their grooming.
The rain had formed silver thistles on the window glass. “My father’s a British Royal Medical Officer,” Shep said. “In our family, a mistake like that would result in the silent treatment for days.”
The silent treatment. In our family. His confessional tone had thrown down a marker. Whether he wished to or not, he held himself accountable. At the time, Shep didn’t know about Robin’s death, and his response when she did tell him later was the soul of compassion. Still, Claire shuddered to think how the British Royal Medical Officer would react if he learned what she’d done to her brother. Tread with care, Shep was telling her. Duty, to a fault.
And what could be a greater duty than motherhood?
Evenings at the club, she watched her husband across the terrace, sucking on his pipe. A new habit he’d picked up from the officers, she suspected, to make himself appear more mature. More fatherly.
Their son was their joy, their connection. She adored them both. But she couldn’t help herself. When Tom Lutty, the wireless officer from North Point Station, happened to mention that some new field transceivers had come in for use by the bush police, she wanted to know more.
According to Lieutenant Lutty, the devices were small as rucksacks and had a signal range of about eight kilometers. This was approximately the distance from Behalla to the coast.
“How do they work?” she asked, bracing herself for Lutty’s effusive reply. The young redhead’s father was a Royal Scots Fusilier, his mother Bengali royalty—reputedly a scandalous liaison, though there was nothing remotely scandalous about Tom Lutty himself. He loved his “tinker-toys,” as he called the station equipment, and could go on about their technical intricacies, ad nauseum.
Before he got too deeply into the nuts and bolts, Claire figured out what she was really asking. “I mean, how do you talk through them? They’re not telephones, are they?”
The wireless officer bit back a laugh. “You never heard of Morse?”
She laid out her plan to Shep that night as they walked back to the house. If Lutty trained them, they could have a lifeline when they went into the forest. All they’d have to do was ask Lieutenant Reynold to run his launch past a point within range of transmission, and whichever of them was out in the field could deliver a daily AOK.
She didn’t mention that it had been an afterthought to include Shep in the training, a subtle way of making her point, since he’d never seen any need to touch base when he went off without her.
“You’re that eager to get back at it?” The flickering gaslight warped his smile. “We could go out together, like before.”
But the quaver in his voice betrayed him. She said, with some calculation, “You’d leave Ty alone with the servants? Without either of us nearby?”
His distrust of servant loyalty aside, Shep had been just five when his parents sent him and his sister off to boarding school. If not for Vivian, he’d told Claire, he never would have survived it. And one was a far cry from five.
There was a long pause. “I just hate to let you go,” he said finally.
She took his arm and pulled him close.
Fortunately, Tom made Morse code fun. He loved puzzles and games, and he seemed to take special pride in his speed of translation. The wireless was a battery-powered kit with an antenna that extended several feet overhead. On clear days they practiced setting it up on the lawn behind the station, with Claire transmitting essential messages such as AOK and SOS. Lutty would give them a thumbs up or down from the window when he received the correct, or botched, message.
Claire and Shep both needed the chattering keys slowed to the pace of a metronome before they could grasp even the most basic incoming phrases. “It’s like music,” Claire said.
“Right,” Lutty agreed. “Notes an’ rests. Rests an’ rests. Notes an’ notes.”
“Patterns.” She studied the page of dots and dashes.
“Just listen.” Lutty closed his eyes and began to nod as his finger tapped the key.
Shep said, “Sounds like cardiac arrhythmia to me.”
But Morse was the least of it. Frequency, range, call sign, directional, crystal, coil, triode . . . Claire thought, even machinery has its own language.
At the end of their eighth lesson, after ten straight thumbs up, Tom placed a box phonograph on the window ledge above them and set it spinning with “Goody, Goody.”
“Guess he’s signing off on you,” Shep said as Benny Goodman’s clarinet trilled down at them. “Can you jitterbug?”
“Not well.”
He called up to Lutty. “Get on down here, Tom, and show my bride what you’ve got.”
An hour later she collapsed, laughing beside Shep on the grass, the exuberant lieutenant still spinning and shimmying solo before a crowd of cheering officers and bemused Indian MPs.
1938
Claire tried to compromise between Ty’s needs and her own by ending their morning walks at the little stone library behind the club. The room was usually cool and empty, and apart from the bookshelves, a mahogany table and four heavy wooden chairs were the only furnishings. Each time she lifted him out of the pram—an ancient schooner-like vehicle on loan from Mrs. Wilkerson—Ty would give her a thoughtful blink and stretch his limbs for the scrubbed slate floor. If she handed him his rattle, he’d take it in both hands and examine it end to end, tracking its changing rhythms.
Her quiet, serious baby. Ty’s hair had grown into a rich curly umber, eyes a dark mossy green. Though he showed no sign yet of talking, he was stubborn and definite in his likes and dislikes. This she’d known ever since they introduced him to the swimming pool, when he was barely three months old. The entire club membership had turned out that evening to celebrate the end of the monsoon season. The baby was a bonus, and the Ross matrons passed him around like a parcel of light. Marian Small pronounced him The Angel of the Andamans. Rita Wilkerson called him The Cherub. The cantonment’s aging wives were as greedy for white babies as they were indifferent to brown ones. Ty’s birth even helped to mitigate their disapproval of Claire’s career ambitions and willful fraternization with the natives.
Still, five minutes of ogling and lavender-scented goosing was more than enough for their glorious boy. He let out a wail, and Claire and Shep fled with him into the water, where they expected surprise, at best a bit of tentative splashing. Instead, the infant took to the pool like a porpoise. Claire felt the tension leave Ty’s limbs as soon as he was immersed. He kicked and chortled and reached for the coral glints of sunset skittering across the waves.
“He’s a natural,” Major Baird declared. “You’ve got yourself a real amphibian there.”
Ever since, they’d taken Ty swimming almost every evening, and no matter how long they stayed, he would fuss when they pulled him out.
He was like that in the library, too. Focused. Definite. Persistent. These qualities took a new turn, however, one morning soon after his nine-month birthday.
At first, Claire saw nothing out of the ordinary. She set Ty on the floor beside her so she could study the library copy of Portman’s Andamanese “history.” M. V. Portman was a British officer who’d overseen the “home” for Andamanese captives on Ross in the 1880s. He’d also taken a stab at documenting their languages.
“Do nga’ araulo,” she read aloud. “I am following you. Do nga’ paiti ke: I am going to shoot you. Do nga’ bilak: I am going to carry you away. Do tra’ mke: I wrap myself in it.”
