—66—
Taos, New Mexico
Oh, Elsie, what have you done! I received your letter and one from Peter on the very same day, and you present quite different stories.
He admits to drinking heavily in Cairo, and regrets his behavior.
He did not elaborate, but I can piece things together myself.
British men are often known for their wandering eye, and while regrettable, it is not grounds for this kind of drama. Running away!
It is also not safe for an English gentlewoman in India now. The turmoil reaches us even in America—riots and trouble and even people murdered.
I am distraught. Please write and tell me you have ended this mad sojourn and have returned to mend your marriage.
Peter offers me a great deal of financial support of which I do not think you are aware.
My husband is not a wealthy man, an artist who lives very simply. Those funds from Peter are my lifeline.
Go home to your husband, Elsie. You have never thought clearly about the prince, but you cannot risk everything to live in India no matter how much you wish to do so.
Mother
The letter came with the morning post, an airmail envelope that looked battered and stained.
I read it and then sat on my balcony holding it while I let her words sink in.
You present quite different stories. Why had she believed him instead of me?
The scolding tone of the letter made me feel strangely ashamed, even as I knew I was in the right.
But if my mother did not support my choice, even when I told her the truth, what hope of anyone else giving me the benefit of the doubt?
In that case, why would I bother to return to that world? Why wouldn’t I stay in India, where I felt loved and welcomed?
In the tower across the courtyard, I saw Tanveer emerge, toothbrush in hand, his chest bare, his hair not yet bound. He faced the mountains, and tucked the toothbrush into his mouth, then stretched tall, arms overhead.
I was entirely riveted. His bare arms were a burnished burnt umber, and his hair fell nearly to his waist. When he swung around, I saw the black hair across his chest, something that had been missing when I had last seen that chest unclothed.
Virility surrounded him like a sheen, or perhaps it was only my eyes, devouring the surprise, coming alive to a hunger I’d done very well to ignore.
But, oh, he was so beautiful standing there in the morning light! So easy in his skin, so cheerfully looking out at the world. When he caught sight of me, he grinned and waved, then crossed his arms in jest as if to cover himself. I waved back, shaking my head.
He disappeared into his rooms. I stood at the wall with my mother’s thin letter in my hand.
With sharp gestures, I tore it into ribbons and flung it into the air to be carried away by the breeze.
My limbs shimmered with life and a longing I could not satisfy, but it was still better to be alive here in this place, with these challenges, than in the life I had fled.
I would not go back.
Life settled into an easy rhythm over the new few weeks.
I spent my mornings painting and sketching and reading, sometimes writing letters to Nina and Gurdaya.
I did not write my mother or Peter, even though letters did arrive from both of them.
I threw them away unread. Tanveer held durbars with various villagers and officials and his munshi.
Often, we had a light midday meal together in a small courtyard that was deeply shaded until very late afternoon.
I told him about my painting and he shared stories of the durbar—a Hindu farmer complaining about his Muslim neighbor’s cow, a road that needed work, complaints about celebrations that had grown too loud.
Sometimes there were more serious problems—a conflict over the gurdwara in the village that had been recently reclaimed, the struggles of cells of radicals who wanted more visible action against the British, but this was only spoken of in low voices.
Channan rarely joined us at midday. She reserved her small pools of strength for our afternoon portrait sessions, and for the more festive evening meal.
Festive in the fact that we all three were there, and sometimes were joined by visiting officials or politicians, even some locals who were not of high status to show that Tanveer embraced the Guru’s edict of equality between classes and between the sexes, a philosophy that had led to the names of Singh for men, and Kaur for women, since Indian surnames revealed the caste of the bearer.
The discussions on such evenings was lofty and illuminating, and quite lively.
Often the discussions with the men would continue long into the night, plans and problems and the worries of danger.
Channan and I took tea into her chamber where her maid readied her for bed.
I read to her and we talked about the readings, or simply sat quietly.
She loved needlework, and claimed it kept her fingers flexible.
When I returned to my chambers, I could often see the lanterns flickering from the parlor below, men’s voices rolling out indistinctly into the night.
In the afternoons each day, when the sun was too high for comfort, we gathered in a courtyard on the north end of the palace, shaded by neem trees and cooled by an ancient system of water pouring through a grid in the walls.
It was still quite warm, but Channan suffered more if the air was cool, and she preferred the courtyard to any other room in the palace.
Pots of bougainvillea and hibiscus bloomed against the tiled walls, and a fountain burbled cheerfully.
I’d kept the easel she supplied in my room and asked the carpenter of the palace, Ramu, to make me one that was larger and sturdier in preparation for the size of canvas I planned. The palace walls were enormous. The painting needed to be, as well.
Before I officially began, I did watercolor studies in various poses.
Channan always sat. Sometimes, Tanveer sat beside her, sometimes stood behind.
He was so much larger than she that I felt we had to balance the painting in some way or she would appear a child.
And there was the challenge of painting her both as the woman who had been so badly hurt and the woman who had survived, the courageous lion who lived with joy, despite her physical frailty.
I tried various saris, discarding them all, until her maid brought out one of layers of green with gold embroidery. It brought her alive.
Tanveer resisted the trappings of a maharaja.
He wanted to wear the simple fabrics of the area, as Gandhi asked, but Channan was irritated by this.
It would be a royal portrait, after all.
He must be in royal dress. “Aside from my desire to break from this absurd tradition,” he protested, “it is too hot for such clothing.”
“Elsie,” Channan said, “do you agree with me?”
I held up my hands, out of the fight. In the end, he wore the black maharaja coat he’d been wearing when he and Gurdaya fetched me from Bombay, and a dastaar made of black silk with a brooch of rubies and pearls I remembered from his father’s day.
Each day when we began the sitting, I settled into my painting self, not seeing humans or objects, only light and color and shape, the shadow of an arm, the circle of a jewel, the color and shape of a fingernail. My focus was deep and clear.
But each day, at some point or another, I would fall back into my body, and I would see Tanveer looking back at me with his soft gaze.
For a moment, we would rise, suspended in the gold-tinted air, and then I would breathe and return to my selfless self and remember to think of shape. Of light. Of color.
Despite the hours we spent on our own, Tanveer and I were models of honor.
We quickly fell back into our long-established modes of debate, talking over ideas in the books we shared and sometimes just sitting side by side to read.
We walked the perimeter of the palace, along a section where the grasses were kept low to discourage snakes, and talked about everything, speaking in English and Hindustani in the same way our letters had moved back and forth, to talk about books, history, time, place, the skies, ourselves.
One overcast morning, he took me on a high wooden walkway that had been built above the tiger enclosure, and I glimpsed two tigers sleeping in the long grass. “You may come here to draw them whenever you like,” he said.
I thought of the tiger we had mourned together, so long ago. “It is quite moving that your love of that first tiger led to this special place.”
He leaned on the railing overlooking the vast enclosure, hands clasped. The steel kara on his wrist caught the light, and blue ink stained his thumb. “Our love of that tiger,” he said.
I nodded, thinking of her enormous paws, the way we wept over her. I thought, too, of the tiger he’d rescued, and how it felt to hold her, and how everything had changed between us that day. “Is Chhoti Billi still alive?”
“She lived to be twelve,” he said. “And nurtured the other ones who came in.”
I did not spend any time thinking of that hay-filled room, but my body remembered, a whisper of the lost erotic at the back of my throat, a shimmer over my scalp. I shook it away.
Perhaps it was the same for Tanveer, for he straightened and gestured for me to head back the way we came.