—4—
We had moved to Nainital, in the hill country, from Lucknow, mainly for my mother’s health.
The cooler mountain air was thought to ease her bouts of malaria.
My father remained in Lucknow and visited for a few months each summer, but we stayed.
I loved the forests, the cooler air, the lake, the mountains hanging in a ragged curtain across the horizon.
The summer I was ten, a tiger had been plaguing the area, stealing goats and small livestock.
A farmer reported his dogs gone, and everyone fretted that a child would be carried off next.
Reports of a wild man-eater in the east had come to us, and many feared she had made her way over the mountains.
My father, spitting tobacco off his tongue, called that notion poppycock. “It is not a magical beast. It would never travel so far.”
I found the idea of a tiger thrilling. From my high window, I peered into the forest, hoping to glimpse her.
She would stalk to the end of the garden on her giant paws, then pause and look up to see me, her compatriot of spirit.
Our eyes would lock, and I would peer deeply into her gold irises for long moments before she gave a roar and trotted back into the trees.
The adults were less romantic. As a result of the threat, we were confined to the courtyards, so I sat in the heat with my ayah, sketching the laburnum tree. I was ten, one of only a handful of English children in the village my age. The others had all been sent away to England for school.
I must have sketched a great many other things before that day—I had always had a pencil in my hand—but my mother had given me a grand new sketchbook for my birthday. The pages were heavy, bound in leather, complete with a little strap and buckle to keep it closed.
The house was built in the Indian fashion, with verandas and a large courtyard in the middle. Benches and fountains filled the sunny space, and at the center was the great tree in full, cascading flower.
I sat on a bench in the slender shade of the courtyard.
My ankles and feet were warmed by sunshine, my stockings and shoes discarded to one side.
Before me, the tree bloomed yellow against the blue of the sky.
The sight so excited my heart that I spent two hours trying to capture it—the shape of the tree trunk, the arch itself, and the tumble of flowers like sunlight hanging in the air.
I had begun to grow frustrated as the heat rose, and might have torn it out of the book and flung it away had not my ayah come by and exclaimed loudly in Hindustani, “So beautiful!”
She loved me more than anyone, so it wasn’t a surprise.
Still, I accepted her praise with a warm flush of pleasure, and carried the book inside to show my mother.
She sat in the open-air parlor, drinking tea with another woman I had not seen before.
The other woman was delicately lovely, with large dark eyes and a smooth tan complexion framed by her gold tissue scarf.
“Elsie,” my mother cried. “I was about to send for you. This is the maharani of Talwarpur, and these are her children, Tanveer and Gurdaya. They have just come to Nainital, and will be our neighbors, just down the road.”
Until then, I had not seen the children, who sat in poorly hidden boredom on a settee nearby the open doors to the courtyard.
The girl was a little older than me, I thought, already getting long legged.
Her black hair was tied back in a braid, the same as mine, and she viewed me with a haughty gaze, beneath her notice.
In contrast, her brother jumped to his feet. He was nowhere near as compelling as his sister. His nose was prominent, his brows quite heavy, but his eyes were friendlier than hers. He peered at the drawing I carried. “Did you draw this?” he exclaimed.
“Who else?” I said, but instead of taking offense, he smiled.
“Let me see, Elsie,” my mother said, and I gave it up to her.
She took her time, and I moved from foot to foot, worried that I would not please her, that she would give me the most desultory of smiles and hand it back to me as she so often did, but today she said quietly, “Elsie, this is quite the best thing you’ve done so far. Well done, you.”
“May I?” asked the maharani.
I nodded. She, too, gave grave consideration to my creation, then handed it back to me. “It is lovely, my dear.”
“Elsie,” my mother said, “take the children to the playroom, and you may have your lunch there.”
“I’d rather stay,” the girl said. “I’ve brought my embroidery.”
“All right,” her mother said, and then to my mother: “She dislikes children’s games.”
“I was such a girl myself.”
I led Tanveer to the playroom, another room off the same courtyard, but because it seemed so plainly watched, I’d discovered the servants and adults paid me no mind here, amid the games and toys.
A breeze lifted the curtains, cooling the space, and the open doors looked toward the mountains towering in the distance.
Tanveer kept his hands behind his back as he inspected the space. He wore a white tunic over loose trousers, his hair gathered in a knot on top of his head and covered with a thin cloth, as was the custom for such boy children.
“I hope you are not a bossy boy,” I said.
A smile flashed over his face, transforming his sober expression. “I hope you are not as bossy as my sister.”
It made me laugh. “How old are you?”
“Ten.”
“So am I! I just had my birthday.”
“Why aren’t you in England?”
“My mother refused to send me.”
He measured me, hands still tucked behind him, like a little old man. “It is unusual.”
I sat at the low table, scattered with paper and drawing utensils. “I’m glad. I don’t want to leave India.” He continued to stand, surveying the room, the windows, the tools. “Sit down. Do you like to draw?”
He sat across from me, his hands flat on the table, as he considered the tools. “I have, at times, yes.”
It was a serious answer, very precise, and I inclined my head. “Are you a prince if you’re the maharani’s son?”
“I am a prince, but not heir,” he said, again so specific. “My brother will be maharaja.”
“Do you ride on elephants?”
“Sometimes.” He pulled a sheet of paper toward him, and picked up a small block of charcoal. A silver bracelet on his right wrist clacked against the table, an adornment I had often noticed Sikh men wore. “Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Yes.” I grinned. “And I often get into trouble over it. My father says I am too nosy by half.”
On the paper, he drew a curve, and then a small tube, and feet, and then a big tube, and ears.
“An elephant!” I cried.
“This is Noor Baba,” he said, adding a blanket over the creature’s back and then ears. “He is a very good elephant.”
“I like your drawing.”
“Thank you.” He raised his head and gave me a much less impish smile. This one was small and quiet, shining in his dark eyes.
I thought perhaps we could be friends.
“Have you heard about the tiger?” Tanveer asked, taking a new sheet of paper.
“Who hasn’t?” It was all the adults spoke of, servants in whispers, parents and visitors in voices that hummed with fear and excitement. “I heard it dragged off a goat yesterday.”
“It stole a girl from a village in the mountains!”
“A girl! How old of a girl?” I thought of the tiger in my imagination, golden eyed, sleek.
“I don’t know. Not very old. Her mother came to see my father, weeping and weeping.”
“Why?”
He looked up. “Why did she weep?”
“No, why did she come to see your father? What could he do once the tiger had taken her?”
“She wanted justice. She wants the tiger dead, the hide given to her as compensation.”
I recoiled. “Dead! But tigers do what tigers do!”
“Yes, but once they get a taste for humans, they won’t stop hunting them.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. “I can’t bear the idea of it being hunted.”
He sobered, his great dark eyes shining. “Nor I, to be honest.” He touched his chest. “I hope he eludes the hunters.”
“Me, too.” I turned to a fresh page. “Let’s draw tigers, shall we?”
So we did. It was more challenging than I expected, and I started over a few times, my mind snagging on the stripes, the orange of the body, the long tail. Tanveer instead drew a face, the ears and whiskers and eyes, staring right out of the page.
“That’s good,” I said. “Show me how!”
“I only drew my cat, and then made it bigger like a tiger.”
“You have a cat? What is its name?”
“He is Shera,” Tanveer said with a smile. “That is the Punjabi word for tiger.”
I laughed, delighted. “Is he orange?”
“He is!”
“I would love to have a cat of my own.” On a fresh page, I copied the shape of the tiger Tanveer had drawn, working with the fatter cheeks, the strong nose.
“There are always kittens. I shall bring you one if you like.”
“Oh, yes! I would like that very much.”
“Would you like to see how to write tiger in three ways? I am learning scripts.”
“Yes!”
He wrote them out. “Shair,” he said, “which is Urdu.” The letters ran right to left like a vine. “Shera in Punjabi.” It was a word like little houses, left to right. “And this is Sanskrit, vyāghra.”
“How do you know so many languages?”
“I only know this word in all of them. I am given lessons in all of them, so I might be well versed in my father’s palace.”
“But you are not the crown prince?”
His smile flashed, showing a dimple in his right cheek. “True, but one must be prepared.”
“Teach me!”
“I will show you Urdu.”
The letters were nothing like English, but I carefully copied them, loving the shape of the script, the tails and accents. “Do you know the whole alphabet?”
“No. But I can show you the ones I do know.”