As her ayah instructed, she kept her own voice like a bird in a cage. She imagined it as a willful songbird with a puffed breast, its feathers gray like her eyes, with a flash of peacock blue at the neck, and the cage as an ornate prison of rusted scrollwork with a little latched door that she never dared open. Sometimes the urge to do so was nearly overpowering.
She was playing piano for her sisters one afternoon a few days after the garden party when a parcel was delivered for her. The chap-rassi brought it to her and Anamique ceased playing at once so that her eldest sister's voice was left stranded in the air. "Ana!" Rosie scolded, but Anamique paid her no heed. Nothing had ever been delivered just for her before. She scraped back the piano bench and took the twine-tied parcel out into the garden where she opened it and slid her diary out. Stunned, she clasped it to her chest. She had thought it lost forever! Her relief bled into agitation, though, as she began to think of someone finding it, reading it, as they must have done to know to deliver it here. Her heartbeat quickened as she opened the little book and saw a letter tucked inside it. With trembling fingers she unfolded it and read:
When I was a boy, it was my job to slice the heels off the new loaves and throw them in the woodstove to feed the imp my mum said lived in the fire, to forestall him burning down our cottage out of spite. He was a hungry imp, she said, but I was a hungry boy and I ate those heels myself when she looked away, and that poor imp might've starved but our cottage never burned, and maybe I grew taller for the extra bread.
And I was tasked more than once to go and drown the May kittens in the pond, as my gran said cats born in that unlucky month suffocated babes in their cradles and invited snakes into the house. But I never killed a kitten in my life and only hid them and brought them cream when I could. And never did a baby die from my failure to murder kittens, nor a snake cross our threshold but that I brought it there myself in the pocket of my own short pants.
And I have fought on the plains of France where evil fifinelle spirits, they say, tickle gunners and make their shells go astray. And though I manned a howitzer myself and sent many shells arcing into the night, I never felt their tickle on my neck. Maybe the fifinelles fought for our side and only beleaguered the Germans, and maybe a shell went astray by their ministrations that would have been meant for me.
Or maybe all that's done in the world is done by men and chance, and omens are only fears, and curses are only fancies. I never saw God save a kitten or fill a boys belly with bread, and I never met him on the battlefield passing out gas masks to the men. And if he cant be troubled to catch some bullets in his fists, and if he wont reach down to grab a mountain and keep it from crumbling away, and if he forgets to send the rains one year and millions die of hunger, is it likely he's bothering himself cursing one beautiful girl in Jaipur?
Maybe he's sitting somewhere right now knitting up Providence like homespun, but I've seen too much blood to ever trust his cloth. I would sooner trust to a song from your lips than to Providence, though I've seen no proof of either one. When the day comes that you finally sing I hope I shall be in the audience. In truth, I hope I might be the only member of your audience, that I might hoard all your words for myself. I believe I had forgotten about beauty until I saw you, and now I'm greedy for it, like the boy I was once, recklessly eating all the imp's portion of bread.
Yours, enchanted, James Dorsey
Anamique remembered the way the handsome soldier had stared at her in the garden, the way he had seen her, and she flushed and had to bite her lip. She tucked the letter back into her diary but a moment later took it out and read it again. And again.
She passed the night restlessly, waking from vivid dreams of singing to lie wide-eyed in the dark with a pounding heart, listening for any trace of her voice lingering in the air. Once she even went to her sister's door and strained to hear her breathing and be sure her voice hadn't escaped in her sleep and slain the whole household. Finally, afraid to close her eyes, she composed a reply to the letter. It was simply a quotation from Kipling and it read:
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.
After breakfast she gave it to the chaprassi to deliver.
James laughed when he read it, a bright, surprised burst of a laugh. He wrote to her again, fabulating a means by which, he outrageously claimed, the devils of India might easily be outwitted by leaving out saucers of sherry overnight for their spies, the wall lizards, who would grow tipsy and forget to carry their mission reports back to Hell.
This too the chaprassi duly delivered, and Anamique wrote back again the same day to tell him how her ayah practiced gowli shastra, the art of reading the stripes and scamperings of wall lizards for omens. She added, shyly, that she had been to an astrologer once in the bazaar. She had never told anyone that, and James wondered in his reply what fortune had been foretold for her, and had it mentioned a soldier, by chance?
For days in a row they continued in this way, and slowly they discovered each other. The letters grew longer and Anamique's gray eyes lost a bit of the haunted shadow James had seen in them, and James's heart began to lift itself, step by step, out of the swamp of mud and ghosts in which it had been steeping since France.
SIX The First Touch
The second time they saw each other was at a musical evening arranged by Anamique's mother. She routinely invited the unmarried young men over for a spot of light opera to amuse her daughters, and James was handsome, and he was a war hero, and to top it all off he turned out to have a glorious tenor voice. The one thing that kept him from becoming a new favorite among the memsahibs was his irredeemable habit of looking only at Anamique while he sang.
The others all remembered that stare in the garden, and they could see now in the look that passed between the two that something was already under way. A bridge begun at both ends, reaching toward the place in the middle where they could rest against each other and find completion.
James cajoled an old missionary's wife to take a turn at the piano at the end of the evening, so he might have the chance to dance with Anamique. They touched for the first time, first delicately and decorously, fingertips to waist and hand to shoulder in the pose of the dance. But by and by James's lips brushed softly against Anamique's earlobe as he whispered something to her. She blushed furiously at the intimate touch, and a look of wistfulness and hope came into her eyes.