—7— #2
In another, I swam with Gurdaya and Tanveer, all of us wickedly diving into the lake with abandon.
Flash . . . an orphaned tiger cub. Flash .
. . arriving at last on a dark, misty day at Herewich Manor, the skies gray, the stone house gray, my heart gray with loss.
Flash . . . that same house, those same stones, golden with summer, and a kiss so deep and wild I would have happily died.
I shook myself awake. On the sofa, my mother dozed, and I was grateful that she could rest at all.
The room was silent, but outside were sirens, the whistling of bombs, far away explosions.
How many planes had the Germans sent? How many more could possibly be coming?
Surely they would eventually run out of bombs or fuel or the pilots would need to sleep.
I made myself seek out happy memories—the weekend at Nina’s when we were all so young and happy, so wildly unaware of what was about to befall Europe. I saw myself, dancing with Rocky and Jonathan, and Peter, so handsome, younger than me but so earnest.
But when I fell asleep, it was the darkness that came back. Peter coming home from war hollow eyed and unmoored. The hospital at Brighton. The sight of Tanveer there, broken and so desperately unwell.
A howl rose from my gut. Stop, stop, stop!
I sat up straight. How did people bear living entire lives? My mother was seventy. I was forty-four, and I couldn’t imagine how I could carry another twenty or thirty years’ worth of memories and sorrows and disappointments. Perhaps it would be a relief if the Germans killed us all.
You will paint.
I took a breath, steadied as ever in the work. That was always the thing, the one thing.
I would paint.
Taking refuge in my practice, I took up my sketchbook and captured my mother’s hands, long and beautiful even as age gave them depth in veins and marks.
How often she had been my model! How many times I had drawn and painted her, to the point that the bones of her face, the tilt of one ear, the changing shape of her mouth were as familiar to me as my own.
Now, I sketched her too-thin body beneath a blanket, her stockinged feet, her face in slight detail.
Her frailty showed in the sharpness of shoulder and jaw.
Little stars of injury marred her hands and cheeks, marks of her failing liver.
This, too, roused melancholy. Impatient with myself I turned the page. Nothing was ever solved by wallowing.
Outside, the bombs whistled and fell. My shoulders braced for the explosions—boom, boom, boom—but they were not as close as the previous group. I uncapped my pen, settled into myself, began to write. Another ritual—a letter to Tanveer.
How long had I been writing letters with my old friend? More than twenty-five, close to thirty. In recent years, we’d written less, as I struggled deeply with the circumstances of my life and he grappled with the changes sweeping India.
As he’d always known it would be, his life was filled with the responsibilities of his position as a leader, a husband, and a father.
Those duties lent a reserve to his letters now, as was appropriate.
It was never cold—we had shared too much of our lives, our interests and passions woven tightly in a fabric that had been made over decades, but I sometimes longed for the depth of intimacy that had once bonded us.
I wished to be able to speak with him tonight, to have one of our long rambling conversations that wandered easily between memory and politics, astronomy and books, hope and darkness. A conversation with him might help ease this sense of despair.
Instead, I imagined Tanveer standing on his rooftop with his father’s telescope. I felt myself standing there, next to him in the warm, dry night, and telling him, I am so afraid.
He would straighten, his long fingers swiveling the eyepiece to offer it to me. Look, he would say. How small we are. How fast we disappear.
September 7 (perhaps September 8, for it is nearly morning), 1940
London
Dear Tanveer,
[In Urdu]: One small beauty: My mother is asleep on the sofa we’ve moved to the basement, her elegant hands folded, a loose lock of hair trailing over her cheekbone. Her skin is translucent, like opals, and I am grateful to look at her tonight, right now.
[In English]: I write this from our fortified cellar, where we have taken shelter from the bombs falling all over London.
You will already have heard that the Germans have taken their revenge for Berlin.
They have been dropping bombs on London for hours and hours, a relentless barrage of whistles and explosions that are hard to describe—although I suppose you know these sounds all too well.
I fear what I will find when we emerge—if we emerge.
I heard an owl the other night in the garden. It hooted overhead somewhere, then swept down and captured some small hapless being and flew away. What will happen to the owls in such an onslaught? The squirrels, the cats, the humans who didn’t know it was all going to be over for them tonight?
It’s all so wasteful. That’s what I think about, the utter mess of it.
War wastes lives, but also everything else.
It lays to waste homes and perfectly good streets that have to then be rebuilt, and parks that have been standing for years and years.
What will be left when all the shouting and fighting is over?
Where will the homeless live? What will be left of London, Paris, Berlin?
How long will it take to smooth the fields and repopulate them with wheat and sheep?
To tell you the truth, Tanveer, some part of me was so very sure that it would never come to this, even as I’ve already witnessed one war and all the catastrophe it unleashed, even as Paris fell.
I had hoped that England might emerge unscathed.
The heart bends toward hope, I suppose, or at least mine does.
My heart hoped that something would clog the war machine, this destructive monster mowing everything down in front of it, before it got here. Even after the Germans bombed the ports to the south, the aerodromes, the various targets that one would expect to see destroyed.
I ask you, what point is there to all of this? When it’s all done, what will be left of Europe, of England? Wasn’t it enough to destroy a generation once before?
Never mind.
Let me think of something happier. We told the story of when the tiger first came the village tonight, how she terrified us all.
I was so sure that if I met her in person, we would be friends, as if she were a creature in a fairy story.
How I wish I could capture that sense of possibility tonight, that wonder.
Tell me what transpires in your world. How does India fare these days? How is your family? Give my love to Channan and Kirandeep.
Your friend always,
Elsie