He told her his idea.
Estella blanched. "No!" she said at once, appalled. "No? No7. All right then, how about this? I'll give you all of them. Every child in that village!" "Every ... ?"
"Every last brat will live! How can you say no to that?"
She couldn't say no, as well he knew. She would have nightmares over this curse for the rest of her life, and Vasudev knew that too, and that was his favorite thing about it. After a long, miserable silence, Estella nodded.
Vasudev chuckled and chortled and went off whistling, leaving Estella to her work. Still pale, she took a flask from her pocket and drank down her daily dose of the tonic Vasudev delivered to her, lest she too be burned passing through the Fire. Then she walked slowly into it. When she reemerged some time later, she carried the souls of two babies in her arms and the older children walked behind her in a row like ducklings. Silently, they followed her out of Hell.
And far away in the mountains of Kashmir, the rescuers, on the very verge of giving up, unearthed a pocket of air and pulled twenty-two children out of the rubble alive.
It was a miracle.
TWO The Curse
A t the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of. It was generally agreed that she had been in India too long. It had "gotten to her." She spoke the native tongue, and not just Hindustani but also Rajasthani and a touch of Gujarati, and she had even been heard to haggle once in Persian! It suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India into her very mouth and tasted it, like a lover's fingers. It was indecent.
And if that wasn't bad enough, she ate mangoes in the bazaar with the natives, juice dribbling down her chin, and was said to imbibe a tonic prepared for her daily by a dreadful little man with a burn scar over half his face. She touched beggars and had even been seen carrying rag-swaddled infants home with her in her arms. It was rumored that her handsome factotum had been one such baby, which in itself bespoke a lifetime in this land -- a lifetime of rescued beggar babes grown to manhood.
He was always at her side, lordly as a raja and unsmiling as an assassin, with a dangerous gleam in his eye and odd bulges about his tailored suits that hinted at concealed knives. Plenty of whispers went round town about him -- that he could speak with tigers, that he had a forked tail he wore tucked down one trouser leg (the left), that he had been seen crossing a street without his shadow, and that he would do anything for the old bitch. Even the most shameless of gossips can inadvertently hit upon truths. He would do anything for her, and had done, many times.
Pranjivan was his name, which meant "life," and Estella had given him both: his name and his life. She had carried him out of the Fire in her arms when he was a tiny brown child too young to follow on his own two feet. He alone knew all her secrets, and aside from his household duties, he spied for her. He sent out his shadow across the land -- she had taught him how when he was a boy -- and he maintained detailed lists of the wicked. He helped Estella decide who would die, in order that children might live. And when she emerged from Hell each day through a trapdoor in the shade of a massive peepal tree, he was there waiting for her with the rickshaw men, ready to take her home.
On the day of the earthquake, he knew something was wrong as soon as she came up blinking into the light of day. "What is it, Memsahib?" he asked.
"Take me to the Agent's Residence," she said quietly, and he did.
Jaipur was a Rajput kingdom ruled by warrior princes, not a part of the British Empire. There were no officious governors or magistrates here, only the Political Agent, a mustachioed former cavalryman whose military career had come to an end when he lost an arm to a tigress in the Himalayas. Now he had to hold the reins in his teeth when he hunted jackal with the native princes, which was one of his primary duties, and for which service he was rewarded with a palatial home and a small army of servants. He even kept a hookah-burda just to light his pipe.
When Estella appeared uninvited at his gate, the party was in full swing. It was a christening for the Agent's third daughter, but it looked like any other party -- bright gowns billowing in a garden, gentlemen lolling about with drinks sweating in their big, hot hands. There was a table laden with gifts, and there was a pink iced cake, but the baby's bassinet seemed like an afterthought at the edge of things, and the baby within lay silent and composed, gazing up at the fringe of neem trees with solemn gray eyes.
"What's the old bitch doing here?" murmured the Political Agent to his wife, and they both cringed. At the best of times Estella had a way of robbing them of amusement at their own vapid talk, and she looked particularly grim on this occasion. The usually neat coils of her silver hair were frayed from the drafts of hellfire she had passed through, and her heart was heavy with the curse she had come to deliver.
She went straight to the bassinet and looked down at the pretty baby. Silence fell over the merrymakers. It struck them all like a scene from a fairy tale, and Estella a witch come to spoil their fun. "She looks like a madwoman," someone whispered. Estella didn't even look up. She reached toward the baby, and the baby grasped her finger and smiled up at her.
Estella's heart clenched. She couldn't change her mind. Twenty-two children in Kashmir lived and Vasudev wouldn't hesitate to take them back again; he was no doubt dreaming up awful accidents at this very moment. So she did what she had come to do. She said, "I curse this child with the most beautiful voice ever to slip from human lips." She looked up and peered around at the partygoers. Their faces were flushed with laughter, with liquor. They seemed to be waiting for her to continue, so she did. "But take care that you never hear it. Anyone who does shall fall down dead on the spot. From this moment forward, any sound this child utters will kill"
There were gasps across the garden, and then a titter of incredulous laughter. Someone cried out, "A curse! How rare!"
"Capital fun!"
"It's too, too divine!"
Estella stared at them. Delight gleamed in their eyes. They didn't believe her. Of course they didn't. Her Majesty's subjects didn't go around believing things willy-nilly. But whether they believed it or not, the curse was as real as the heat, and soon they would know it.
How soon?
Estella's finger was still caught in the girl's tiny fist -- she'd never ceased to marvel at the strength of a baby's grip -- and she looked back down into those gray eyes. She was a lovely little thing, this child. Estella had never had a baby of her own, her husband had died so young. In the darkness of grief in the days after his death, she'd hoped ferociously that there might be a baby--that something of him might be arranging itself within her even as she followed his coffin to the cemetery. But it was not to be. She had been left alone, and she had also been left empty.