The Splendor Of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

child back to her bed, his heart touched by this devotion, and Mila would be asleep again before he put her down. He scolded her so much Mila understood that she did not need to waken before her father--it was a wife's place, not a daughter's, or at least not a child's responsibility. But this did not stop her from getting up before he did, though now she stayed in her room, waiting to hear his footsteps pass her door.
    This morning the top floor of the house was quiet. One of her brothers, Kiran, snored delicately from the room on her right. Ashok, younger than she, the youngest of them all, was a room away on her left, and h e w ould not have been merciful to Kiran had he known of the snoring. Ashok would have stomped around the house trumpeting like an elephant--but he was only sixteen, and so young enough to find this sort of thing terribly amusing.
    Mila brushed her teeth in the bathroom without glancing into the mirror above the porcelain sink. The toothpaste was chalky and bitter, made of the neem tree's fruit and leaves. It reminded her of the time she had tasted the walls of the corridor outside her room just after they had been brushed with a wash of slaked lime. Mila had felt an irresistible urge to lay her tongue against the dripping whitewash to see if it tasted as good as it smelled. She had placed her fingertips on the wall for support, leaned inward, and touched the tip of her tongue on the gritty coating as her nose was crushed against the surface. The taste was abominable, and Mila had backed away hurriedly, swallowing that stinging flavor, wiping her fingers on her frock, just as Kiran climbed up the stairs. He said nothing, just grinned, dabbed at her white nose, and made sounds of retching.
    When she came out of the bathroom, she paused by the photographs on the wall between the windows that fronted the balcony. Jai, ruler of Rudrakot, was in each of them, glorious in his royal finery. Rudrakot was now a princely state in British India, and Jai's title, inherited as it was, had little meaning other than to bestow pomp and circumstance upon him. But this minor inconvenience had never stopped him from considering privilege to be his birthright. In one photograph, he was on his beloved horse, Fitzgerald, saddle and boots indistinguishable from the horse's ebony coat, Jai in his ICC uniform of salt white jacket, white turban, all rimmed in light blue and gold braid. In another, Jai was with Lord Wellesley, governor of the Bombay presidency, and was turned away from the governor just a little, head up, chin ferocious, arrogant as usual. In the third, Jai had been captured during one of his famed White Durbars, held on the night of purnima--the full moon--more shadows than light on his thin, sharply planed face.
    Mila touched this last photograph lightly, the glass cool under her fingertips. Jai had been away at the Imperial Cadet Corps for sixty-two days, and by her counting, it would be at least another month before he returned. He had written her eight letters so far, which she had read with a deep sense of happiness, for in them, he had been candid, open, passionate--attributes difficult to posses when they came face-to-face because o f a n inbuilt shyness in both. As Mila stood by Jai's photograph, she heard the first splash of the brass pot into the well. She went out into the balcony and leaned over the edge.
    The sky above her lightened, skewered with skeins of tangerine, but the backyard, thick with the arms of the banyan tree, still held the ebony of the night. And there, amidst that gloom, Mila saw the gleam of the well's whitewashed wall and heard Raman's voice, soothing and mellow in praise of God.
    Mila bent down until her chin rested on the concrete parapet. She would pray with Papa, she thought, but she could not concentrate. A m-molt of sound crept into her consciousness--the crows cawed, the koyal cooed maddeningly, water splashed from the well, the soft, morning voices of the servants rose