—2—
I was born in India, where my father had been in the ICS, the Indian Civil Service. When I was fifteen, his elder brother, the Earl of Herewich, died suddenly of a spleen injury sustained on a hunt, and my father was abruptly summoned home to take up his title.
It was the worst news I could have heard. I had never known any home but Nainital, and I loved it—the forests and the mountains and the lake, my friends and my collection of little animals.
I protested. I wailed. I begged.
There was no negotiating. We were leaving India, immediately.
It took two weeks to travel to Bombay from Nainital, in the foothills of northern India, then a week to await the ship. Every minute of it I burned with resistance.
And yet, here we stood on the stern of the great liner, watching Bombay slip away below the horizon. Parts of my body felt as if they were tearing away from me, my veins turning to fragile glass, my lungs as thin as rice paper.
My mother stood behind me, her hands cold on my shoulders.
I did not turn to see if she was weeping, but I certainly was.
Every thread of my life was being severed—the sight of the mountains rising in the distance, parakeets and monkeys, the sound of a treepie crying out, laburnum trees dripping their yellow flowers like long hair from their branches, the scent of my ayah’s sari, the courtyard on summer evenings, the air alive with insects and stars.
And of course, Tanveer, mixed into every single second of it. I could not speak his name for fear my mother would hear more than she should in my tone, but it was he that I would most mourn, even as I was furious with him.
When land had disappeared and there was only sea everywhere around us, my mother shook herself. “All right, then,” she said. “That’s done. Shall we find some tea?”
I held my arms around my ribs. “I will stay here.”
“My dear, it will serve no good to cling to what must be left behind.”
“Perhaps not,” I said, and then could think of nothing else to add.
She stroked my hair. “We shall return one day, you and I.”
I did not reply, and she left me standing alone against the rail, wind blowing my shawl up around me, rustling my skirts.
In my pocket was his letter, but I dared not take it out in such gusts.
I fingered the edges, imagining that I could feel his words against my skin, words he’d written in the Urdu script, which we had learned first as a challenge, then later to hide the words of our communication.
His father spoke and wrote four languages, but had not bothered with the written script of Urdu.
My mother had some skill with Hindustani, even some Persian, but she could not write Urdu. It had become our secret code.
I did not need to read the words, for I had memorized every paragraph.
My life, we knew this day would come, that our paths would come to this place of parting, that I would go on to my duties and you would go to yours in another world.
It grieves me more than I expected. I am sensible and clear sighted, but my heart seems not to recognize the presence of reason.
It only wants what it wants, to hold you always, to have you as my own.
I cannot bear the idea of a husband for you that is not me, nor a wife for me that is not you. It is a great tragedy.
And yet, we are dutiful. We must each serve the lives we were born to live.
I do not think it wise for us to continue to write to each other. It will only sear my soul each time I see your words, but know that I am always your love, until the stars no longer shine.
Tanveer
I did not wish to be sensible, nor accept my fate so passively. I did not want to leave my beloved India for a landscape unknown to me—and to my mother, for she, too, had been born and raised on the subcontinent.
Two months before, my father’s inheritance had made him an earl, thus elevating our status in the world remarkably.
The British community at Nainital had been entirely aflutter at the news, fussing suddenly over the new countess, whom they’d always slightly shunned for doing things her own way, befriending locals like the maharani, studying methods of medicine they did not approve of (though I noticed they leaned on her when they wanted help with some recalcitrant stomach problem or sore feet).
Of course, they never entirely shut her out because she owned the thing in a woman that cannot be ignored—a great and impossible beauty, with wide blue eyes, perfect red lips, and exquisite dark hair.
I’d heard all manner of gossip about my mother, that she was the secret daughter of a sultan, that she was the love child of English royalty, even one that said she’d been found in the forest and was therefore an orphan of uncertain parentage.
In truth, she was the daughter of a Welsh couple who’d taken the road to India as a way to escape the brutality of their home village.
Her father had been a minor bureaucrat in Lucknow, and they had indeed raised their status, and thus their daughter’s, in the world.
She had not been my father’s social equal, but beauty will level the field in such matters.
Mother dismissed every bit of gossip, holding no grudge. “People make up stories when they do not have enough to keep themselves occupied.”
Nor did she take her beauty seriously. She was far more occupied with her passion for healing, for the vagaries of the human body, with caring for the poor.
My father adored her. I do not think he ever understood, his entire life, what grand surprise of fortune had landed him such a beautiful wife, and one who was not foolish or empty headed, or driven by social climbing.
He, too, was a man who did not fit well with his peers, a second son left to his own devices who liked reading rather too much, and desperately wanted—against all odds—to serve the people he was charged with leading.
He no more wanted the title and lands he’d inherited in England than my mother wanted to move, but what choice did he have? One did not turn down an earldom.
So now we sailed to England, and I wept for the loss of all I knew.
October 10, 1911
Aboard the SS Peregrine
[In Urdu]
Tanveer,
I do not know how to address you, so I shall lead only with your name.
You said we should not write, and I will not do so again after this, but I have one more thing to share with you.
Tonight was another interminable dinner, at which I had to perform my role of the earl’s daughter in front of an audience of unspeakable sycophants.
They do not care about me or even really my father, but only his position.
Six months ago, they thought him beneath them, and now, they can’t crowd closely enough.
I escaped to the deck and the cold seafaring dark. The darkness at sea is an encompassing, unbroken blackness, no distant lights from windows or the village or an inconsiderate moon, only the vastness of night, lit with uncountable numbers of stars.
So vast, Tanveer! Endless, endless swathes of stars, large and small, white and red and blue, all the way to the horizon, in all directions. I have never seen such a thing!
And there above me was Venus, shining so brightly I could see her glow reflected on the sea.
I could not help thinking how much you would have loved it, how much I wished you were standing there with me, looking up. You would have told me what the constellations were. I know some of them, al-Jabbār and Thāt al-Kursī, of course, but never so many as you do.
It made me feel less bereft, bathing in the light of Venus, knowing you might at that very moment be seeing her, too. It shrank the distance between us, somehow.
I won’t write again, but I thought you would want to hear about the stars over the ocean. I painted them for you, but it is a poor imitation of the reality.
Be well,
Elsie
[Enclosed watercolor of the night sky and Venus]