“Within a week, perhaps,” he tells me.
“It seems abrupt, now that it’s here,” I say.
He leans forward, his voice playful. “A moment ago you were telling me how bored you are, and now you want to stay?”
I shake my head. “I suppose . . . Well, this is going to sound silly, but I’d just like to know what I’m leaving.”
He sits back, drops his chin, and looks at me as if I’ve just said something brilliant. “I think I understand.”
I peel myself off the chair and go to the window, where the air is fresher. “I wish I did.”
“India is a confusing place,” he says, “and I’m not sure I understand it better for having seen more of it than you have. But someday I’d like to come back. I’d like to come and see that the people have made a go of independence. That it will be safe for everyone when our work has had time to take hold.”
“It’s just that London seems so far away,” I say, trailing off, twisting the muslin hanging at the window.
When he realizes I’m not going to say more, he speaks, and what he says shocks me. “Did you know that the boy asked me to bring him to England?”
The fabric knots itself around my fingers. “Tariq?”
He swings his chair back to the desk, begins tidying up papers. “Wants to leave India. Or doesn’t want to go to Pakistan, rather.”
“Why not?” I ask. My heart begins thumping wildly in my chest.
Tariq wants to leave.
He wants to come to England.
I think of a passage from one of those poems he left me.
I and my mistress, side by side
Shall be together, breathe and ride
So one day more am I deified.
Who knows but the world may end tonight?
He wants to be with me. He wants to be with me! And the sureness of it fills me up so completely I think I might split in two.
Father is speaking.
“Are you listening, Margaret?” His voice comes louder now, like I’m swimming up from underwater.
“Hmm?” I manage, without facing him. I can’t look at him. Not now, not when I’m sure what I’m feeling is written all over my stupid face.
“I said he wants to go to Oxford,” Father says, lifting one eyebrow. “Imagine.”
I freeze. But . . . No . . .
Oxford. In an instant it all makes sense. The linen from the curtain is all bunched up in my hand now. I shake it free, take a steadying breath, and face Daddy. “He asked you?”
Father shrugs. “In so many words. He says it is the best way to help his people, that the real leaders of the subcontinent have been educated there.”
Oxford. And suddenly I’m ashamed. Ashamed of myself for not even considering that the boy might have ambitions. That he was perfectly content to fetch and carry for a white man because that’s the way it’s been here for ages.
But just as suddenly I’m angry. Angry as I begin to knit together what Tariq—with his smiles and the presents—is likely to have been playing at in the last weeks. “When?” I ask.
“Sorry?” Father says.
“When did he ask you?”
He hesitates, thinking. “Ages ago. When we were coming back from the survey trip.”
The very day he cornered Anu in the kitchen. He’d given me the book the week before, when they left.
“What did you tell him?” I ask, though I already know.
Father scratches at a bite on his wrist. “That I couldn’t help him. That he belonged here, that the people of India and Pakistan didn’t care anymore for the trappings of British status . . . ” He trails off like he doesn’t believe it very much himself.
“Is that true?”
He rubs his eyes, stands. “I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t know how a place can exist for a century with one paradigm and suddenly liberate itself it for another. I don’t know.”
He’s right. I think about how at school they changed the name of the chapel when some old spinster left a load of money to the school. They named it after her, even had a ceremony and a new sign and everything. But we went right on calling it Shepherd’s Reach, or just the Reach, like before, even though the teachers all wanted us to honor the lady who’d left all that money by calling it after her name. But pretty soon even the teachers forgot, and it was like it never happened, apart from the sign, at least.
“Old dogs, new tricks,” I say bitterly.
“You may be right,” he says.
After a long silence I have an idea so utterly mad that I seem incapable of keeping it shut up inside. “Would you help him?” I demand. “If you had reason to?”
“Reason?” He looks at me curiously.
“What would be a reason?” I press. “What would be enough?”
He hesitates. “We’ve no business upsetting the way of things here.”
I laugh. “Honestly? England’s been mucking about here for centuries upsetting the way of things. What harm can one person do?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but then shuts it, considers. “I suppose that’s so. But it doesn’t seem right, somehow. As long as I’m drawing lines on maps, as long as I’m not dealing with faces, it seems quite the thing to do. My duty. But playing fairy godmother to a boy with outsized ambitions is another thing altogether.”
I want to ask him why they’re outsized. I want to know what makes Tariq so different from Father. What makes Tariq so different from me? What makes him less deserving of a spot at Oxford than any other man?
But the words stick in my throat, held there by another thought: Why do I even care?
I’m still wondering when my father swings back to his desk, begins stacking papers into neat piles. We’re done talking about this. Whatever this is.
I begin rounding up the pencils and erasers and drafting tools, sorting the equipment into ordered groups.
Something catches my eye.
A small brass medal on a tricolor ribbon sits inside an open velvet box, atop a letter bearing the seal of the viceroy.
“What’s this?” I ask, reaching for it.
He looks up. “Ah,” he says, bemused. “My commendation. Lord Mountbatten’s letter thanking me for my service to the empire and a medal to commemorate said service.”
“Jumping the gun, isn’t it?”
He laughs. “Seems Dickie’s as eager to be done with the whole business as the rest of us. I think he sent them out a week ago. Though I have to credit his tenacity. He said August fifteenth from the time he agreed to partition, and we’ll make it, after all.”
I close the box and replace it on the table.
Father goes to the corner and lifts the lid on the giant trunk he had sent over by steamer almost a year ago. He lifts out various cases for the equipment and books and instruments.
He clears his throat once. Twice. “They want me to leave this afternoon, darling,” he says, nestling a compass into its case.
I reel on him. “What?”
“We are to convene in Delhi tomorrow to finalize the maps with Governor Jenkins. The viceroy’s staff fears such a gathering might present a perfect opportunity for those who might get up to mischief, so we’ve been asked to keep it a secret.”
“But . . . but . . . ” My mind races. Mischief? “But what about Mother? And me?”
“The evening papers tomorrow will carry word of the meeting. You’ll likely be safer here without me. And you’ll join me in Delhi on Friday, the day after the meeting. We might jog down to Agra and see the Taj Mahal before we head home. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I shrug. But the idea of the Taj doesn’t have me excited. “Are you sure it’ll be safe?”
“The Taj? I—”
I cut him off. “Not the Taj, Daddy. Us. You. Are we safe?”
He lays the box gently into the crate, walks over, and gives me a quick hug. “We’ll be fine. They’re just being cautious, is all.”
I try to believe him, but it’s hard. Hard now that the sh
ine’s worn off the whole Tariq thing. If he was plotting something, why not somebody else?
Daddy lets me go and returns to the packing. He picks up a scope and gives it a quick polish with his sleeve. “The Taj is wonderful, Meggie, you’ll see.” He rummages for the right case for the scope. “Now ring the girl for some tea, would you, please? And would you see if she has any more of that eggplant curry we had at lunch? And a few of the chapatis. They really are the most perfect little edible cutlery, aren’t they? I’m going to hate going back to forks and things, but don’t tell your mother.”
“Certainly, Daddy,” I say, reaching for the bell.
“I will miss those, I think,” Father says, smiling to himself as he finds the correct case and buries the scope in the straw. “A sight better than a crumpet, I’d say.”
I watch him for a moment more, wondering what else we’ll miss, if I’ll miss anything, before I turn and pull the cord for the bell that will bring Anu.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
TARIQ
The bell above the door at the telegraph office announces my departure as I walk slowly to my bicycle. I’ve just delivered what may well be the last of Mr. Darnsley’s messages. A sort of dread is building slowly in my stomach. I don’t have much time left to figure out how to get Margaret to help.
But I still can’t bring myself to hurry back to the house. Instead, I turn for the lane leading home.
Half the houses on the street are empty. Squatters have taken up in some of them.
I roll to a stop in front of ours. The windows are shuttered; there’s a lock on the gate. I put my foot down and catch myself as I remember my mother clinging to me, sobbing out her prayers for protection, Abbu’s eyes on mine, asking me silently, You see what you have done?
The dread continues to well up inside me, choking off my breath, and I pump down on the pedals, racing away from that house and all I have given up. And for what? The slightest of hopes.
I ride hard, taking the ruts in the street with too much speed, glad to have each little impact rattle through the frame and into my bones, reminding me that I am still here. I stop at that same corner where I saw Sameer in the market that day I came home for lunch. But much has changed.
The block is ruined. The glass of the finer shops is shattered, the storefronts gaping like slack mouths, charred black by the fires that were set inside. A few pickers still comb the wreckage for bits of fabric from the cloth seller, or rice from the grocer, or medicine from the chemists. The bookshop I hid in is gone.
But two stalls remain relatively untouched.
The juti seller’s.
And the goldsmith’s.
The very ones I saw Sameer enter when I watched him that day a few weeks ago.
The crowd waiting to cross the lane surges forward, carrying me and the bicycle with them. I let the movement guide me across, drifting with it as I piece together what Sameer has been up to, how he came to have that gold chain that hung around his neck when I saw him last.
Sameer is extorting protection bribes from the merchants.
I’d heard Abbu complain about the bribes, how someone would come into his shop promising to protect it if rioters came that way. He had no idea how it worked, and he refused to pay.
But others had. And Sameer had been collecting. Part of me can’t help but admire him. It strikes me that had I thought about it sooner, I should have asked him how to handle Margaret and her father. He would have known what to do. More than that, Sameer would have known exactly how to do it.
Sameer wouldn’t have moved too slowly with a girl like Margaret. Wouldn’t have let his chance slip by.
The last time I saw him, he told me to be ready. What could he and his men need from me? Would they really help me if I did what they wanted? And what would it cost me? I guess it would be illegal, but how far a step could it be from how I’ve already tried to use the Darnsleys? How bad could it be?
Bad. Very bad.
No. Even if it meant getting me to Oxford, I couldn’t do what Sameer asked me to do. The last time I went along with him, I may have killed someone. I wouldn’t let it happen again.
Besides, Sameer’s always been a liar. I could never trust him to make good on a promise. And he probably won’t even live long enough to make it to Pakistan with all the risks he takes.
A liar. A liar taking too many risks.
Maybe I’m more like him than I want to admit.
The blasted bicycle chain slips off the crank again when I’m a hundred yards from the compound. It’s the third time in two days. At least I’m close enough that I can wheel it back to the yellow house and fix it there.
I guide the wheel around a rickshaw wallah who offers to fix it for me if I give him a few paisa, past the bent man making roti on the corner in the tandoor. I’m hungry, realizing I missed lunch to get Darnsley’s papers to the telegraph office. Maybe there’s something left in the kitchen. My mind jumps just as quickly to wondering if Anu will still be in the kitchen.
Stop! I have to stop. I’ve got to make myself think of Margaret in the way that I cannot stop thinking of Anu. But I can’t help it. Anu is already there in my mind, lingering, the image of her walking away, the way her braid rides against her neck, the way it sways as she walks . . .
Why can’t it all go back to the way it was before? Back when Sikh was Sikh and Muslim was Muslim, but we were all Indian?
I cover half the distance to the house thinking of her, but then I see Sameer and freeze.
He’s hanging back near the market on the opposite side of the margh. His two gundas, who follow him around like dogs, stand a ways off, the little one holding a parcel wrapped in brown paper. They’re talking to a third man, a skinny wallah I recognize who does odd deliveries in the neighborhood. He is like me, running all over town, but with no regular employer. People call on him to get a meal carried to a sick friend, or a stack of books delivered from the booksellers when they don’t want to carry them.
Sameer watches the three of them intently, one hand twisting the rope of gold at his neck.
I’m too far away to hear them, but the wallah tilts his head, screwing up his face in confusion, and points at the yellow walls of Darnsley’s compound. One of the thugs reaches over and snaps his arm down, leans in close and whispers something, passing a roll of rupee notes into his palm. The wallah looks down at his hand, mouth falling open. But he still hesitates a moment before putting the money into his breast pocket and taking the parcel. He nods once. The others cross their arms and watch him walk away.
I begin to move again, let out the breath I didn’t even know I was holding.
I have to stop that package.
I sprint across the road, passing the wallah and his parcel as I go. I avoid looking back at Sameer and his men. They can’t know I’ve seen them. I push my bicycle through the gap the porter opens for me. I’m close enough to hear Margaret’s harmonium now, so I glance up quickly. This time she is not watching me.
The wallah, avoiding looking either me or the guard in the eye, holds out the parcel to the guard. He takes it, and the wallah runs off.
“Who’s it for?” I ask the guard in Punjabi.
The man studies the label and screws up his face, the wrinkles in his brow matching the ones in his turban. “The mister.”
This is bad. Very bad. Dread opens up a hole in my gut, sucking everything in. “I’ll take it,” I say, perhaps too quickly.
The guard shrugs, hands me the box. It’s heavier than I expected. I lay it carefully in my basket and head for the back of the house. I shouldn’t look back, but I can’t help it.
Standing across the lane, perfectly still as the crowds stream back and forth around him, is Sameer. And he is staring at me.
I trip over the bike, almost fall, almost dump the package from the basket.
Sameer just stares, his jaw twitching, eyes flashing.
The guard misses all of this. “Hurry!” he shouts. “Darnsley goes.”
He points at the great black car idling in front of the house, waiting to carry Mr. Darnsley away.
I make a face at him, not sure I heard him right. “Now?”
“Haan,” he barks, gesturing up toward the study windows. “Waiting for you.” He sounds disgusted to admit this last part, but I’m too scared to be insulted. I have to get rid of the box. But I have to get upstairs. It is my last chance. Maybe he has changed his mind.
I run the bike across the yard, and can feel Sameer still staring at me as I go. Once I reach the back of the house, I move quickly, leaning my bicycle up against the wall, and then unlatching the small door in the rear wall that leads to the alley.
I don’t want to leave it here, but it will have to do. I can’t risk missing Mr. Darnsley. I’ll take it to the river as soon as he goes. I glance around me to make sure no one is watching, then I gingerly lift the package from the basket, careful not to jostle whatever is lying inside. It could be a cobra, like the one sent to Radcliffe in Delhi. I lower it onto the rubbish pile, pulling some loose paper over its sides until it is hidden. I straighten, scan the alley, and realize with a start that I cannot hear Margaret playing anymore. I look up to the back windows in the library, hoping she has not followed me here. Blessedly, the windows are empty. Taking a deep breath, I slip back inside the door and bolt through the kitchen.
Anu is not here, but the old woman looks up from the pan of aloo gobi she is stirring on the burner. She mutters to herself in Bengali, cursing me, and returns to the potatoes. I’m used to her disapproval. But now her curses feel somehow earned.
I pass through, grabbing an apple and a handful of cold naan when she is not looking. My fingers brush up against the scabbard of the knife tied at my hip when I shove the apple into my pyjamas. I’m folding one of the pieces of naan and cramming it whole into my mouth when a voice surprises me. “What are you doing?” Margaret is at the top of the stair, looking down. Dust swims in the air between us.
I almost choke on the plug of bread in my mouth when I try to speak.
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