—14— #2
We walked down a dusty path lined with yellowed grasses, and finally to another outbuilding surrounded by a high wooden fence.
Tanveer opened the gated door, and I followed, blinking in the dimness.
He secured the door behind us. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The room was cool, with windows cut high in the walls.
A half door led to the fenced area, and sun poured through, spilling on the dirt floor.
It smelled of hay and dust and something I couldn’t quite name.
He was already approaching with a creature in his arms, which at first I thought was a puppy.
“Meet my new cat,” he said, “Chhoti Billi.”
The shape resolved itself, a round soft ball of orange and white, with long whiskers. His left front paw was half gone, a bandaged stump. I gasped. “A tiger cub! How did you find him?”
“Her.” He hefted her weight into my arms, and the cub made a mewling noise, turning her head toward me. “She was orphaned in a hunt, and her paw was mangled by a trap. My father brought her to me.”
My entire being glowed with the sandbag weight of her warmth.
I bent my head to kiss her, and she rubbed upward against my chin.
Instantly smitten, I plopped down right where I was so I could settle her on my lap.
Her fur was soft, baggy on her muscles, and she leaned on me easily, titling up her golden eyes to look at me. “Oh, Tanveer, she’s so beautiful!”
He rubbed her ears and chin, and she closed her eyes, just like a house cat.
“I kept her in my room for a while, and then this room was prepared. Eventually, when she’s healed, she’ll have a home in an enclosure we’re building, outside, so she can hunt and sun and all those things, but she’ll be safe. ”
“Does she purr?”
“No, but she chases balls, and anything on a stick, and she likes to sit in boxes.” He pointed to a wooden box in the corner.
I cooed to her, rubbing her body, winding her soft ears through my fingers, touching her broad nose in wonder. She liked that, and rubbed hard against my knuckles, making me laugh. “I wish I’d brought my sketchbook down.”
“You can come back.” He glanced toward the door. “No one comes here until I tell them to.” He looked at me. “Only me. And now you.”
All at once, the strange thing between us awakened again.
I could not look away from his reassembled and remarkable face, a vivid rustling in my throat, my torso, even my thighs.
Embarrassed, blushing, I looked down, my gaze falling on the bright kara around his wrist, and the shape of his oval nails.
Silence hung between us, as alive as the dust motes wafting around each other in the bars of sunlight. I was afraid to look at him again, completely unsure how I should respond, if there had been some other thing implied in his words that I both wanted to hear and did not want to hear.
The tiger playfully clutched my hand and bit it with tiny teeth, and I squeaked, yanking my hand out of her mouth. The tiger, unafraid, reached out and grabbed me back, wrapping one white-tipped paw around my wrist and slamming her lower paws against my forearm like a bunny.
I laughed, and next to me, so did Tanveer. I hazarded a glance at him, and he was grinning at the baby, tugging her ear, and all at once, it was again the most precious face I had ever known. As if he felt it, he looked up, and, pierced, I looked down again.
“Elsie.”
I swallowed. “I can hardly look you. Something changed. It’s scaring me.”
He took my hand, which he must have done a hundred times before, but the feeling of his skin against mine sent a current through my bones. “I shall hate it if you are afraid of me. Imagine if it were reversed.”
At that, I did look up. “That would be terrible.”
“It is new,” he said quietly, and lifted a hand to my face. His fingers burned a tattoo over my cheek, brushed across the corner of my eye. “Is this all right?”
“Yes.” I could barely breathe.
And then, the tiger attacked my arm a little more forcefully, and I yelped.
Tanveer swept her out of my lap, and we tumbled sideways into the soft hay, face to face.
So close. Not quite touching, but only the smallest space between us.
I smelled his skin, and again, it made me dizzy.
“I never noticed how wonderful you smell.”
“I thought you might be wearing perfume.” He stroked my hair, my ear. I found my gaze on the sooty thickness of his lashes, the angle of his eyebrow.
Then I was snared in the depth of his dark eyes, and I tumbled into the moment, feeling as if our spirits traveled between us, mine to him, his to mine.
I touched his jaw, some distant part of my brain mixing paint to capture the shimmer of light over his irises, the pure white of his sclera, the faint rose in the brown of his jaw, the red ocher of his full lips, cut precisely.
It might almost have been enough to just lie there. I felt suspended, alight. His hand moved on my neck, my shoulder, and then we acted as a single entity, and our lips met.
His mouth was so soft! So full! I made a little sound, and we moved closer, his arms coming around my shoulders, mine around his back, so that it was not only our lips touching, but chests and bellies and thighs.
We kissed slowly, with wonder, pausing once to open our eyes and look—so closely—into each other’s eyes, and then we dipped again, opening each to the other, and it was an entirely different sort of kiss. Intoxicating, delicate, exploratory.
After a time, a long time or a short one, I had no way of knowing, we paused, catching our breath. “I have never kissed anyone before,” I said.
“Nor I.” He smiled. “I quite like it.”
I laughed. “Me, too.”
“We should return before they wonder where we are.”
I suddenly thought of what my father would do if he saw me lying there kissing Tanveer. What his father might do. “Yes. We might get into terrible trouble.”
He stood, brushing dust from his sleeves, then offered a hand to help me up. I brushed at my skirt, and smoothed my hair. “Anything amiss?”
Taking a small bit of straw from my hair, he said, “Turn around.”
I did so. He brushed the back of my skirt, and tucked a tendril of hair into my bun. “There.”
I turned back slowly, wishing we could stay here in the cool room with the tiger cub and the silence and kiss all day.
He said, holding my hand, “I feel as if I didn’t know what it felt like to be alive before this. As if the world was gray, and I didn’t know that it had color.”
I laughed in startled recognition. “Yes!” But then I frowned, aware that I was missing a piece of our connection, something that might be lost now under the weight of desire.
“It scares me to think we are so changed. What if this ruins our friendship, Tanveer? I don’t think I can stand a world where I’ve lost my best friend. ”
“Nor I.” He held up his hand, offering his little finger. “Let’s swear it, then. I swear you shall always be my best friend, Elsie Turner.”
“And I swear you shall always be mine, Tanveer Singh.”
The maharaja’s birthday celebration was held that evening in the great hall, set with banquet tables groaning with food, free-flowing drink, and dancers.
I wove along the edge of the crowd, sketching.
Mother had not allowed a new dress, saying I’d barely worn the one she’d had made for the school fete, which was true.
But it was bland, meant for school, and dreadfully dull in this landscape of glittering scarves and jewel-encrusted bodices and brocaded saris.
The Indian women, Sikh and Hindu, wore bracelets and earrings and nose rings and heavy collars made of rubies and emeralds and pearls.
Their eyes were ringed with kohl, their lips bright with paan.
The men were no less spectacular. The maharaja wore a necklace with an enormous teardrop sapphire at the center, and alternating pearls and diamonds in a star shape. And while the Muslim women were hidden behind screens, the men were lavishly dressed, too.
I sketched as much as I could—the groaning tables of food, rajma and dal, mutton korma with almonds, piles of rotis, naan and puris and rice, towers of jalebis dripping with syrup. I was deeply fond of petha, here sprinkled with rosewater and pistachios, and devoured it as well as sketched it.
Around the courtyard I went, drawing portraits of the laughing men, the swords some of them wore, the turbans adorned with strings of jewels and brooches.
I sketched women covering their mouths with the edge of their scarves when they laughed, sketched their heads leaning together to whisper or gossip, sketched the children playing hide and seek amid the draperies and their mother’s skirts.
The maharaja had taken his third wife, a haughty beauty with enormous black eyes, who could not have been much older than Gurdaya.
I was appalled when I heard, but the maharani, Tanveer’s mother, only laughed.
“Darling child,” she said, stroking my hair, “I was his second wife, and it is no hardship for me. Rather pity her.”
I sketched the new wife, too, and she did not appear to be particularly happy. Like Gurdaya, who sat beside her, she looked weighed down with jewelry and bangles, expression hidden behind a mask of calm.
Also seated at their table was Surinder, Tanveer’s older brother, and the prince who would one day inherit the title and lands.
I’d never seen him before, and he did not at all have the same look as his siblings, for his mother had died at his birth.
He had none of Tanveer and Gurdaya’s elegant shape, but rather a harsh, squat form and a nose I struggled to capture, finding it lumpish and purple.
His eyes were small and sharp, revealing his cleverness, upon which Tanveer had often commented.
Officials and other princes deferred to him, and he ate vigorously.
One day, I thought, he would be very fat.