Under the Jeweled Sky (5 page)

“I was hot,” Sophie said. “I took my shoes off and put my feet in the fountain.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Ripperton didn't quite follow. “So where was the snake? In the fountain?”

“No. I mean, I was sitting there and I thought I saw one in the grass, and…”

“You really should have put your shoes back on first. Dearie me.” Mrs. Ripperton clucked to herself. “Look at the state of you!”

“Please don't tell my mother,” Sophie said. She looked around nervously again. There was no sign of Jag. “I told her I was in the library. She doesn't like me wandering around. You won't say anything, will you? She'll be awfully cross if she thinks I've…” The poor girl looked stricken.

“Not a bit of it, my dear.” Mrs. Ripperton took hold of Sophie's arm and tucked it firmly into her own. “Mum's the word. Now come on. Let's go and get you tidied up a bit, shall we? We can have tea in my apartments, and you can tell me all about it. A snake, eh? How tremendously exciting.”

August arrived, the oppressive heat adding to the cloying air of heightened tension. The plan had been announced two months ago, at the beginning of June, that India would be divided into two dominions. At first, nobody believed it. They were calling it a
partition
, and the nation would be split in two. Sophie had read about it in the newspapers. The Congress Party had called for a single country, the voices of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru pleading for a harmonious land, united in its many glorious differences. But the leader of the All-India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had demanded a separate Moslem nation, and he would not budge. Negotiations ground to a halt, the two sides coming to a stalemate, and Jinnah was granted his wish.

Many of the Moslem staff had gone already, making their way to their new lives in the new lands, even though the Maharaja had decreed that no one should feel compelled to go unless they wanted to, and that they could be assured of his protection while they lived under his care. Yet the servants had left in droves.

Jag's father would stay, for he was a Hindu, with many years left to serve before asking for his retirement. When that day came, he would return to Amritsar, to live out his old age with his family. They were not his immediate family by blood, but those of his beloved wife, who had left a sister there. The sister lived in a modest house on Kim Street, where her husband ran a small business making shoes. That much his father remembered, although the finer points of his recollections had faded until he was not so sure of the details, such as the color of the door.

Jag knew that it was his father's destiny to return to his home city one day. He talked about it all the time. They would travel there together, father and son, and reestablish old family ties while Jag passed his matriculation and began his adult life, fixing another generational rung on the ladder of his forebears. His father spoke of it often as they sat together in the evening, talking man to son by thin lamplight after washing and performing their
puja
. Jag's father would secure his pension before making his final journey, compensation from his master after a lifetime of devoted service intended to sustain him through his weakening years. For that, he was prepared to wait, for without it, he would be sure to face an old age filled with nothing but hard work and penury.

Jag thought of all this as he washed their clothes, soaping them for far too long, distracted by the mire of worries that kept him awake night after night. He wanted things to be different. He wanted to be able to make his own choices and walk his own path. He was tired of hearing his father's plans for the future. What about
his
future? What was he going to achieve by being dragged off to Amritsar? Three months. That was all she had left. August, September, October, then she would be gone. She had said that they might stay on until Christmas, but what good would that be to him? He knew what he wanted now. He wanted to be able to walk with her, side by side, without hiding in the shadows and sneaking around like criminals. They weren't doing anything wrong, yet he could not even imagine what the consequences would be if they were to be found out.

Jag pulled at the water pump, venting his frustration as he worked the handle hard, filling the trough to rinse the clothes he had come to despise. He hated wearing these things, these simple cottons that marked him as different from her, different from
them
. He should be able to wear a shirt and a tie, and smart trousers with a jacket, to show that he was educated and respectable. He could read and write as well as any man, and he had a natural gift for mathematics. Equations, multiplication, long division. There was no problem he couldn't solve. Except this.

That is the trouble with this country, he thought. You are born to your status, to your given caste, and once you have come into its being, you can never leave it, never move up and be seen as better than the life you were birthed into. It was wrong, and once India had been freed, it would have to change. Even Gandhiji himself had said so. He had been moved to speak out on behalf of the Dalits, the Untouchables, saying that every person who sought to perpetuate the lowliness of that rank without hope of release should hang their heads in shame.

Jag's father had returned with the Maharaja three weeks ago, and Jag had barely managed to get away for a moment since then. There was too much work to be done. So many people had left, and the bickering had already started about how the extra duties were to be divided among the palace's diminished manpower. To make matters worse, his father had announced joyfully that he would not be accompanying the Maharaja when he went to Delhi for the independence celebrations. The Maharaja would take only six bearers with him, and his father would be permitted to stay behind, to be with his son so that they might welcome India's new dawn together. Jag had joined in his father's happiness, hugging him hard while swallowing his disappointment.

He pummeled the clothes in the water trough before hauling them out and wringing them tightly until his knuckles turned white, hands hurting. If he did not see her soon, she would forget about him, and he would be left behind, bereft. Had he been a son of the Maharaja, with fine clothes and big certificates from fancy schools and universities, he would be able to march right up to her in front of everybody and ask if she would like to go for a drive or for cocktails. The British always had cocktails, and so did the Indians as far as he could see, at least some of them did, the ostentatious ones who came to visit and went on shooting parties and such like. He had seen them, him peering out from hidden panels, watching them fawning around the Maharaja, who, admittedly, stuck to the fruit juices and never touched alcohol. It wasn't right that Jag should be in this position, that he should somehow be made to feel that he was not good enough or did not deserve to become the kind of man he intended to be. He did not want to clean out the elephant stalls and wash clothes and copy pages of obsolete texts when he already had so many ideas of his own. Important ideas. He would find a way to change things, to show his father that the world was a different place now and that he was no longer a boy who must be corralled into the same pen as his ancestors. He wanted more from his life, more than he had ever imagined possible. Above everything, he wanted her.

• • •

Inside the palace, whispers traveled the corridors on a matter even more alarming than the day's politics. The source of the trouble came as no surprise to anyone. The First Maharani was up to her usual tricks, this time spreading malicious gossip about the Maharaja's new bride, saying that she looked like a monkey and that the Maharaja had been tricked into the arrangement. All this and more she shared with her ladies-in-waiting while her maids enrobed her in a brocaded sari of Benares silk and placed the heavy bangles on her wrists. By the time she had finished dressing, every one of her servants knew that the Maharaja's intended was covered in fur, and that she had been born that way as a result of an ancient curse in the family's bloodline. The fur had been painfully threaded from her face and hands so that her image could be taken and shown to the Maharaja, but by the time of the wedding it would all have grown back. The comb had become still in the hands of her maid as the First Maharani speculated on the moment His Highness would glimpse his new bride, saying that he would probably die of a heart attack when he realized he had taken a monkey as a wife. Then her own son, the Maharaja's firstborn, would accede to the throne, and she, as Dowager Maharani, would have wife number three paraded through the streets naked like a zoological exhibit. Not that she had ever seen her, of course, but nobody ever took any notice of such immaterial details, particularly not in the
zenana
, where the women of the palace remained in
purdah
, locked in a deathly monotony of confinement, peering at the world through delicately latticed portals. Each of the maharanis had their own apartments, with their own complement of staff, trained in the nature of their particular foibles. The First Maharani, for example, liked her food rich and sweet, and her chef had perfected all her favorite dishes during his years of service to her. The Second Maharani, on the other hand, never ate meat and only rarely ate fish. Naturally, her chef was very thin.

News of the monkey bride spread through the palace like wildfire, first through the
zenana
, causing the Second Maharani to faint dramatically into the waiting arms of her maid. The screams of anguish from her ladies-in-waiting could be heard all the way to the durbar hall, closely followed by the rushing of feet bearing a message for Dr. Schofield to come straight away.

• • •

“Describe to me her symptoms.” Dr. Schofield spoke through the pink alabaster fretwork, his face respectfully averted from the hidden lady-in-waiting who relayed his instructions from voice to voice from behind the screen. He waited patiently for the reply to come, knowing that it would take some time and would probably make no sense at all when it did eventually arrive, thirdhand. This whole process usually took about an hour, sometimes two, depending upon the Second Maharani's need for attention that day.

“She is feeling very weak,” the lady-in-waiting reported.

“I see,” Dr. Schofield said. “What is her pulse rate?”

Another long pause followed.

“It is very faint and irregular.”

“I see.”

Dr. Schofield knew that this was not the case, and that the Second Maharani would be lying there on her splendid bed, issuing symptoms to her ladies. Dr. Schofield had gradually learned the ropes over the course of his first month at the palace, most of it passed down through the jungle telegraph. Initially he had declared to the ADCs that he could not possibly be expected to carry out his duties with any efficacy if he was to be prevented from actually seeing and examining a patient, but that was declared impossible. Both Her Highnesses observed strict
purdah
, and seeing as the good doctor was neither related nor married to either of them, he could take it on reliable authority that he would never lay eyes directly upon them. His first reaction had been to resign his post rather than run the risk of accidentally killing one of them through misdiagnosis, but he was soon persuaded to stay when the Maharaja presented him with a gold cigarette case and assured him that they would of course make an exception if it were ever thought that either of Her Highnesses were in any serious danger.

Dr. Schofield had come to learn that there were rarely any real ailments in the
zenana
apart from a good deal of bickering and the occasional bout of indigestion. In this instance, he was already convinced that there was nothing much wrong with Her Second Highness except an acute case of having her nose put out of joint. A century and a half of British rule had been largely irrelevant to the princes, yet all this had changed in the run-up to independence, as the rulers came to recognize that their states must integrate with one dominion or the other, either with India or with the newly formed Pakistans, East and West. Making up almost half of India's territory and people, the new nations would be a hopeless patchwork that would never hold together without the princely states. Negotiations were opened and complicated agreements drawn up, and the six hundred princes signed their states away, to India in the main, the rest to Pakistan, bringing down the curtain on centuries of feudal rule. In compensation, the princes would each benefit from the granting of a privy purse, set at a fraction of their state revenues, and few were in any doubt that the time might well come when the royal families might disappear altogether, given their reduced circumstances. It was no wonder the Second Maharani was feeling unwell. Not only had the Maharaja announced his intention to take a third wife, but if the rumors were to be believed, they would soon be shrinking their grand household and selling off the family silver.

Dr. Schofield continued patiently through the screen. “And what is her temperature?” This was his favorite question of all, as the women in the
zenana
clearly had no idea about the correct temperature of the body. On past occasions he had been told variously that her temperature was fifty degrees, two hundred degrees, and almost every nonsensical number in between. After another long wait, the answer came.

“She is as cold as ice!”

“How is her breathing?”

“It is fast and shallow.”

“Is there any rash on her body?”

It seemed like an eternity before the Second Maharani decided whether she had a rash, by which time Dr. Schofield had taken a seat beside the screen and begun to look through his book. It reassured the women of the
zenana
that he was carefully checking the indications of each symptom, weighing up the severity of the Second Maharani's condition before delivering his diagnosis. This particular volume was entitled
How
Green
Was
My
Valley
, and the doctor had found it hard to put down since finding a signed copy tucked away on a shelf in the Maharaja's library. He made sure to frown occasionally, pinching his chin in thoughtful manner, nodding at the page.

“There is no rash,” the lady-in-waiting relayed.

“I see.” Dr. Schofield read to the end of the passage, then snapped the book shut. “Hmm,” he mumbled, then got up from the chair and paced around a little before opening his bag and taking out a bottle of plain aspirin adorned with a fussy handwritten label. “Tell Her Highness that she is suffering from vanucitis. She requires complete bed rest, and she is to take one of these every morning for five days. Then she will be as right as rain.”

The lady scurried back to her mistress with the precious nostrum, another of the doctor's miraculous cures, proof in itself that the Second Maharani was indeed most unwell, which was all that she wanted.