The Caprices

by Sabina Murray

  “Ma’am,” he says again, “what is wrong?”

  She sees him finally. In a quiet voice she says, “We must take the early bus home.”

  Shori has his gun. What is there to be afraid of? Not that he cares what this child thinks. This American had better be where she says he is. It’s one thing to send a man over, it’s another to have to go on your own. The ridiculous thing is that none of his men were available to apprehend this American because they were all out searching for him. Some would find that funny. Shori doesn’t. At one point this was probably a beautiful house. There are paintings of fruit and flowers in the corners of the ceiling, but the ceiling is rotting. Everything rots in this country. The furniture is heavy and ornately carved, much of it with the letter G—that much he can recognize. There is a layer of dust on everything, and the corners are blunted by thick deposits of cobwebs. He follows the twin pigtails and narrow shoulders. Where could she be leading him? They walk through the kitchen. The floorboards creak beneath his weight. The child raises her two dark, round eyes and meets his in a most impolite and disquieting fashion. Shori sniffs. He achieves the nonchalant look of the truly uncomfortable. The child swings open the door. A staircase swoops down into the darkness.

  The child raises her arm. She holds Shori firmly in her gaze, then gestures him downward.

  “Bring him here,” says Shori. He’s not sure if the child understands the Japanese. Shori gestures up and out of the basement. He holds his ground.

  The child looks at him, wide-eyed, angry.

  Shori peers into the basement. He can’t see an American down there. In fact, the basement’s so dark that he can’t see anything in there at all.

  He feels two small hands hard at the base of his back.

  He is plunged into darkness and his ankle is sending him distressing waves of pain. He is sitting on a dirt floor. What happened? There is no reasoning in this hellish country. He hears the jangle of a key trying to find resistance in a lock. Shori finds his gun and he points it about him; he can only articulate his fear in Japanese.

  “I have a gun. I have a gun,” he says to his invisible menace, the harsh breathing. This darkness makes the sound of his own breathing too loud, too harsh.

  Mrs. Garcia is sure she saw Auring standing in the kitchen. Auring, her old nanny, who has been dead for close to a month. She stood clear as day there in the kitchen. She was wearing a faded pink dress that Mrs. Garcia remembered her favoring around the turn of the century. She said, “Baby, go home.”

  Mrs. Garcia waves a fly from her nose. It settles on her hand. She waves it off again, this time more vigorously, and watches it spiral upward toward the ceiling of the bus.

  “Jose, why aren’t we moving?”

  “The driver’s putting water in the engine.”

  Mrs. Garcia feels fear in the bottom of her stomach. She closes her eyes and watches the slow pools of purple erupt in the blackness. She would like to sleep for a year. She is that tired.

  Shori’s eyes struggle to focus. His ankle feels icy. The blood is pulsing in his ears. He holds his breath and hears a movement on the floor. A rat, maybe. This terrible country is full of them. He widens his eyes and, slowly, nameless shapes begin to emerge from the dark backdrop. His nostrils are dilated, like a wild animal’s. He could be dead any second now. He could be killed, his guts ripped neatly from his belly by an angry, skeletal American right here in the bowels of this evil house. Shori can make out a doorway about ten feet from where he sits. Brighter shadows outline the rectangle of the door. Shori has never thought of darkness possessing degrees. He watches the shape slowly change as the door swings open on singing hinges. A small chair leans on the wall by the door. Shori wonders if he should get the chair to use as some form of protection, to use as a barrier between him and the unknown. Suddenly, the chair moves and begins creeping along the wall. Shori has lost it in the darkness. He hears the soft, light breathing of the figure. He raises the gun in the direction of the sound. Then, without warning, the figure appears between him and the doorway—a moment of revelation. Shori hears a crisp popping sound. He’s moving across the floor, scooting back, still sitting. He breathes heavily. His right arm swings in wide arcs. Then all is quiet. His left hand is closed in a painfully tight fist. His right hand is closed around the gun. How many times has he fired? He isn’t sure.

  This is just a bus moving along a road flanked by rice fields. This is just an old woman with her disabled houseboy. She has been visiting her cousin, and is now rushing home. She will find her granddaughter dead in her basement. Shot. Two bullets in her head. She will find four other bullets pressed into the walls and beams of the basement. There will be a knife on the floor.

  People will speculate for years. The kalesa driver will never forget the look on the girl’s face, such determination. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense. Why would this little girl want to lure Shori to the basement? What did she hope to achieve? Of course, Shori denies being there at all. The woman will not insist. She will not want the memory of Shori in her basement. She will not need that particular someone who took the life from her little granddaughter. She has enough villains to stand up for all her pain.

  The bus rounds a curve, passes farmers and water buffalo. The sun hangs unblinkered in the sky. The dust clings to everything. The woman holds her bag in her lap. She covers her mouth with the back of her hand and blinks. A cold trickle of perspiration drips down the back of her calf. There is grit on her tongue and dust filming her teeth. The bus hits a bump, awakening her servant. He looks around, self-consciously. He wipes the saliva off his chin. In response to this, a young woman tugs at her skirt, forcing it to cover her knees. This bus juggles the passengers over bumps, around ditches. The driver clears his throat and sends a bulb of spittle flying out the window. He checks his rearview mirror. The image presented is the clear curving road, blue sky, green fields. This could be peacetime.

  This could be any bus en route to any provincial town.

  Order of Precedence

  IN THE WANING MONTHS of 1944, Harry Gillen found himself in Singapore, a resident of the prison camp at Changi. The camp had a dusty assembly area, several low-ceilinged, rat-infested barracks, and an overflowing pit of a latrine, where the fly population nested and hatched, rising to meet each new visitor with a cacophonous buzzing that reminded Harry of a brass band. All this was contained within a perimeter of chain-link fence topped with a coil of barbed wire. The guardhouse was raised by the gate, barring exit, which in turn was facilitated—in one sense—by the hospital. A Japanese colonel named Takashi lived in a whitewashed wooden bungalow bitterly watching as the war dragged on and he lost opportunity after opportunity for distinction. It was rumored that Takashi spent his evenings drinking copious amounts of confiscated English gin, but rumors were all Harry had to go on.

  After three years of imprisonment, Harry considered himself basically the same, although possessing an entirely new perspective. His abominable hunger made him think about his beloved horses only as the occasion for stew, and Harry, once a heavy smoker, had now learned to chew leaves with bovine complacency. In fact everything from the once familiar past had in some way been translated to his current (and only) pastime: struggling against his slow starvation. He’d watched all his muscle shrink to bone. His mind too was shrinking. He imagined that his brain was now the size of a salted prune. Sometimes he remembered what it felt like to dress in the morning, the feel of starched underclothes, the divide of a sharp pleat running the length of his leg. Or even the way he nudged the underbelly of a horse with his boot heel during a polo match, how he pulled his shoulders back to get the spine long and flexible so that when the ball came his way, he was in good shape to reach and send it spinning beneath the straining muscle of the horse’s neck. Sometimes Harry could meditate on a downpour as it thundered across the roof; he could translate it into galloping hoofs across the cantonment polo turf. And in the early mornings, if he could focus out the groaning of the
dying and smell of the dead, he remembered the anticipation and excitement that happened in the brief coolness before the day blossomed into searing heat.

  Harry had never considered fighting alongside the Japanese. He was aware of Subhas Chandra Bose’s movement and the Indian National Army. Bose had originally tried to recruit Germany to help him rid India of the British, but in 1940 Germany was occupied with the war in Europe. Bose had found the Japanese more helpful. Indian National Army officers had shown up at Changi, but had only managed to recruit five thousand of the forty thousand Indian troops captured on Malaya. These men were now fighting the British in Burma. Harry had not been approached to enlist. He decided the Indian National Army thought him too British. And he was. Muslims and Hindus were as bad if not worse to the Anglo-Indians as the English. He’d cast his lot with the Raj, which at least aimed to do everything in the name of civilization. This loyalty had landed him in Singapore.

  • • •

  Harry pinpointed the beginning of his ill fortune to a polo match at the start of the cool season. The day began inauspiciously. Over runny eggs, steak, and toast, Harry read about the latest developments in Africa. Outside the mess, he’d run into Tunsdale, who was still drunk from the night before, and because of this, was still in good shape. There was some fuss among the servants about a rabid dog. While Harry was smoking a cigarette he heard a shot. A couple of minutes later he saw the sweeper, broom in hand, rushing from the direction of the shot to the kitchen. Harry had asked about the shot and the sweeper, with his head bobbing in excitement, told Harry that the rabid dog was dispatched, midleap, going for the rifleman’s throat. As worthy a target as any young tiger.

  “I hope you’re not going for the cook,” Harry had joked. The sweeper thought that was very funny.

  Harry looked up at the sun. He had to get a move on.

  “I’m playing today,” he told the sweeper, who wished him luck. Harry headed for the stables.

  It was the start of 1941. The camp where Harry was stationed was a mere thirty miles outside of Calcutta, but this proximity meant little since the cantonment was a world unto itself; the camp had its own club and social life, and was completely autonomous. Calcutta was for the British memsahibs to go dress shopping and for the British officers to hunt for wives. Harry’s regiment, the 11th Indian, was mostly a combination of British and Anglo-Indian officers, and sowars and sepoys recruited from the martial classes, dominated by Sikhs. The officers were all educated (the British at Sandhurst in England and the others at the Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun) and a few were gifted horsemen. Once a month they played polo. Harry rented his horse from the army, but some of the wealthier fellows had their own, and the two teams were rounded out with the police chief, a local magistrate (who kept a half-dozen ponies, but preferred pig sticking), and a few Indian Civil Service men, all impeccably dressed and hesitant to get muddied.

  There was little to do but sport, and if you didn’t count drink, nothing to do but sport. The army-sanctioned, disease-free brothels were off limits to the Indians stationed there, and although Harry passed for European some of the time, if his blackness was to be discovered he would rather the discoverers weren’t the drunken, sex-starved soldiers who seemed to frequent the lal bazaar. Rumors were circulating that the Japanese were making real trouble in China and would bleed into Burma in no time at all, but the only person who seemed to take the threat seriously was Subhas Chandra Bose (who was eager to have the British quit India) and he embraced it. On a day like this, with nothing looming but a polo match and the heavy drinking sure to follow, war was far from Harry’s mind.

  Harry found his horse brushed and ready. He insisted on saddling her himself, despite the protesting groom, then walked her over to the polo field so as not to tire her out. Major Berystede arrived later with two horses, riding a third mount. Each of the horses had its own turbaned syce to minister to its needs. An attendant carrying mallets and a boot brush stood by, his expression impassive, his clothes immaculate. Couches lined the east perimeter of the field, on which an assortment of hatted, white-stockinged English ladies and their small children had arranged themselves. Waiters with silver trays propped gracefully on the left hand ministered lemonade with the right. A large tree on the west perimeter was quickly filling up with barefooted children.

  On Harry’s team were the pig-sticking magistrate, Captain McCaffrey, on a black Australian pony, and the local sanitation officer. On the opposing team were Major Berystede; a senior Indian Civil Service officer whom Harry recognized from the camp but didn’t know; the venerable Colonel Corning; and Lieutenant Ruff, who was very young and very well connected. Harry was beyond doubt on the better team. Berystede, despite his enthusiasm and entourage, could seldom give his fellow players more than an outraged “Stop sticking your elbow into my ribs, you barbarian.” His other team members were competent and that was all. In contrast, Captain McCaffrey was a ferocious player, drinker, and soldier. The magistrate was equally fierce. And the local sanitation officer had a chip on his shoulder owing to his nickname, “Toilet-wallah.”

  One short hour later, the match was over.

  In the course of the match, Harry scored six of the eight points for the losing team. Apparently Berystede had complete disregard for right of way, but this was not of interest to the umpires. Neither was Berystede’s menacing the magistrate’s horse with his mallet, nor his galloping right at Harry, whooping like a crazy Afghan, which had unsettled Harry’s horse. Twice the game had been stopped so that Ruff could retrieve his mallet from where he’d dropped it. This had occasioned McCaffrey to yell something that had the words “mother” and “tit” in the same sentence, and although the umpires never determined precisely what had been said to the young lieutenant, they’d awarded Ruff a penalty, which—miracle of miracles—had scored a goal.

  Harry was angry with himself for even entertaining thoughts of victory. He smiled the stiff smile of a good sportsman. There was a smattering of applause as the men left the field, ladies winging their pale hands together, the clapping of the dead. Simultaneously, a gathering of crows clattered off the ground and settled into the tree where the children had been and now were not. The sun was larger in the sky, whiter than yellow, and Harry’s shadow was pooled around the soles of his boots.

  Harry’s pony had an ugly cut on her right forefoot, but on closer inspection, the cut was bloody rather than deep. He was covered in dust and some muscle in his right hand was twitching painfully, a result of the grip on his mallet. He was ready for a drink.

  “Lieutenant Gillen, do you want my syce to have a look at that?” It was Major Berystede, who still looked remarkably clean.

  “Sir?” said Harry.

  “That cut. It might not look like much, but an open wound like that in this climate . . . You wouldn’t want it to get infected.”

  “I’d appreciate that very much.” Harry smiled and slapped the horse’s shoulder.

  “Where’s your second horse?”

  “Borrowed,” said Harry, “from the magistrate.”

  “That’s a fine mount, there.”

  “Not so fine, but she gets the job done, and for that she has my respect.”

  “Yes,” said the major, “good is as good does. Performance is the key. I think, perhaps, we British put too much stock in breeding.”

  Harry controlled his smile. The major had just put his foot in his mouth. Harry ran his hand down the horse’s leg and squeezed the fetlock, pretending to inspect the hoof.

  “Breeding horses, that is. And horses are what we’re talking about. Horses. Yes. And we breed dogs.”

  “Sir,” said Harry, looking up. The major’s face was a brilliant red. “I appreciate your offer. I feel I’m delaying you. I’d be delighted to continue the conversation at the mess after we’ve both had a chance to bathe.”

  “Absolutely. I’m buying the first round.”

  Harry had the first round in the shower. The water thundered over his head and that,
accompanied by the slow, even burn of whisky down his throat, was hard to equal.

  After his shower, Harry dressed quickly. Harry’s grandfather had said that Harry could ride all the way to colonel on the back of a polo pony. Maybe he was right. Rather than entering the dining room through the long corridor, Harry slipped out the back, letting the screen close silently behind him. He needed a private smoke before he faced the major. He needed time to remember who he was in the army—Lieutenant Gillen, reserved, elegant, somewhat mysterious as many Anglo-Indians were—rather than the conflicted, cynical man that the last few months of drinking and horse sport had created. Harry reminded himself that he was lucky to be in the army, better than the ICS with its excruciating exam and cramped offices. What else would he do other than soldier? India for Anglo-Indians was the ICS and the army. Except for the Indian railways. And who wanted to work on a train?

  Harry tossed his cigarette to the ground. Behind the mess was an impressive mango tree, whose branches stretched over the whole compound. In the right season, the tree blushed red when the green fruit ripened. Monkeys clattered through the branches, waving their bony, lax fingers at each other in angry bargaining. Birds sang in low, then shrill, keys and the leaves shivered with life when a breeze crossed the cantonment.

  A respectful distance from the mess back door, a boot-wallah in his yellowed headcloth and coarse robe was abusing a boot to a brilliant sheen with a camel-hair brush. A few bursts of conversation and an occasional gruff laugh came from the dining room. Harry took out another cigarette. He was about to light it when he caught the boot-wallah surreptitiously watching him. He returned the cigarette to the case. Major Berystede was waiting for him and despite the beautiful stillness of the early afternoon, Harry had a duty to perform, even if it was in the form of a few drinks and some idle conversation.

  The major was a moderate drinker, which was a nuisance because Harry was not. He had to pace himself while watching the slow erosion of Berystede’s ice cubes, the sorry dilution of fine whisky.