—53—
Dear Mother,
I am so delighted to hear about your life in Taos.
It suits you, and I can feel the energy in you glowing across the sea.
Tanveer is healing, though he cannot walk without instability yet, a good thing because he has declared he will not participate in the war any longer.
He does not speak of it in any detail, but the horrors of the trenches have left a mark on his soul.
Of course, he cannot return to India just now, either.
We stay in Herewich, living an ordinary domestic sort of life, time out of time.
I paint and cook, he walks and collects eggs and is making his way through the entirety of the library, and in the evenings, he writes and writes and writes, working out for himself the history of colonialism, and the British in India, and how to move forward from it.
He has been corresponding with some of his fellows in India.
They have elegant arguments and debates about the way to shape the future, and trade books on various ways to tackle the subject.
I fear I do not have the same power of mind as they display, but I grasp the need for deep change, and the difficulty of creating a new India with so many disparate parts. How to unify them?
And you may surmise we have formed a unit again, as we have in the past. I know you worry, but I am an adult woman now and realize that not all connections have a fairy-tale ending. He will return to India. I will return to London to paint. Perhaps we will meet again, perhaps we will not.
But I refuse to believe this is a wrong choice. To say I love him is entirely inadequate, like comparing the twinkle of a distant star to the force of the noonday sun, and it is the same for him.
At any rate, it was inevitable that it should happen this way. I could not leave him in hospital.
Please don’t worry. I would rather have these days and months, knowing they will shatter us (again) than to never experience this depth of love. Not everyone is so fortunate as to love and be loved in such a way.
Now we are going to walk the lanes, but not to town. Harriett Snowden lost her son Jake two weeks ago, and every time she sees Tanveer limping through the streets, she sneers that he could be back at the front.
How long until it ends? Daily the death of another one of my group, or another student from Slade, or a son of the village, comes by letter or grapevine.
At least Tanveer has not died. And my brother so far survives as well.
I had a letter from him a week ago. It was quite strange, fanciful, and Tanveer said perhaps he has desert madness. It is said to plague men sometimes.
Please write and entertain us with cheerful stories from the American West! I want to know everything.
I miss you.
Love, Elsie
In early October, the rain began. Tanveer was trapped inside the house, and he paced like a tiger, down the passageways to the closed-off rooms, up the stairs, circling the ballroom that was shut up and mildewed, the wallpaper peeling.
He discovered a leak in the library and moved dozens and dozens of books from that wall, but they were already destroyed.
“Herewich is crumbling just as Talwarpur is,” he said.
“I don’t know how any of these big estates will survive in the modern world.” I washed brushes in the sink, pumping water with my foot. Blue and red and yellow ran in rivulets over my fingernails, across my wrists. “Nor the palaces in India.”
He nodded, deep in thought, as he stared out the window. “Perhaps this war will finally change things, create a more equal world.”
“Will you mind if your family palace crumbles, if there are no more queens and princes and maharajas?”
He leaned on the sink, arms crossed. “That is a very good question, and I don’t know the answer. Of course I would mind losing my home, but I would like to see an end to royalty.”
“Will you be the same person if you are no longer a prince?”
“I shall still be myself.” He tilted his head. “Will you still love me if I am a common man?”
“It would be easier, if you were.”
“Is it so difficult, though, Elsie? Or are those stumbling blocks in our minds?”
A faint hope, like pink smoke, blew through me. “What do you mean?”
He stepped closer and picked up my wet hand. Using a tea towel, he dried my fingers, one by one, and my wrist. “I have been thinking that there must be a way for us to make a life for ourselves. Together.”
“And what might that look like?” I asked, weaving my fingers into his.
“I haven’t worked it through, but why would the fates conspire to bring us back together, over and over, if it was not meant to be? If our union would not bring some good into the world?”
“Why indeed?” I whispered, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, wrapping my arms around his neck so he wouldn’t see my tears.
But he felt them, wet against his throat, and brushed my hair away from my face. “I do not want to live a life without you in it,” he said, and smoothed a thumb over my wet cheek.
“Nor do I.”
“Perhaps we live in both our countries, here and there.”
“Art here, politics there.”
He smiled. “Perhaps.” He held my hands. “We shall marry then.”
I closed my eyes, thinking of my mother’s warning years ago, that neither of us would have a penny if we didn’t marry well. “We have no money, Tanveer, either of us.”
He chuckled. “The palace and this place are crumbling, love. No one has any money.”
“How will we live?”
“How does anyone live? You’ll paint, and I’ll go into politics, and we’ll get by.”
I looked up at him. “Will we hate each other in a decade?”
“What do you think?”
“No.” To have the opportunity to eat meals with him, to walk in the evenings with him, to perhaps one day bear his children, seemed an absurd blessing. “I shall teach if need be. And you have many talents.”
“Yes,” he said, and lifted a wicked eyebrow. “I do. Allow me to show you.”
As the days grew shorter, Tanveer embarked on a course of deep study. In the Herewich library, he found copies of The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, and texts by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. “Who among your ancestors was so interested in democracy?” he asked.
I knew exactly who it was. “My father.”
“Ah. That explains a great deal.”
A package from India arrived with books from Indian writers, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, by Naoroji, and speeches by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, but the pamphlets by Gandhi, mentioned in the letter, were removed by censors.
All through the winter, he wrote and read and walked on fine days. Often he read his own writings aloud to me, asking for feedback and argument, so I had to read the texts, too, so I could understand what he grappled with.
I painted and painted, finding some truth in domestic scenes I had never noticed.
It had once felt unimportant to paint kitchens or food or cats, but it felt powerful to me now.
A battlefield cannot have an easy kitchen scene.
A bombed village leaves no space for gardens.
A home is a powerful thing, and I was glad to claim that idea for myself.
As winter tilted toward spring again, it began to seem as if a new world might be possible.
Once the bloody, brutal war was over.
In a way, I felt protected by it. As long as it raged, nothing in this sacred, special time would end.
We could live, Tanveer and I, in the crumbling house in our four little rooms, eating simply, and painting, and reading, and writing, with a pair of cats and buckets of love, and all would be well.