“So come and eat,” Arjun said lightly.
But I just couldn’t imagine doing this. Imagine farting on a stage for everyone to hear; it felt that shocking. Now imagine you’re told you’ll have to do it all the time!
Jhalkari and I returned to the table, slowly, as I translated what Major Wilkes had said.
“So what are they serving you?” the major asked. He’d said before that he couldn’t imagine how vegetarians survived without lamb, or cow, or pig for eating.
The waiters removed the silver lids from the trays and steaming piles of strange foods were revealed.
“Ah! Quiche,” he said, pointing to the tray of yellow and green cakes. “And there’s something you know. Broccoli and carrots. I’m not sure what that is”—he was looking at a soup—“but bon appétit,” he said, which didn’t sound like English.
With that, he left.
There was no bread to eat with, no lentils or chickpeas or anything with protein. We looked at each other and laughed.
“This is what they eat?” one of the men said.
“No, they have meat mostly. They don’t understand vegetarians,” Arjun explained. He started making a plate, then handed it to me.
I flushed.
“Eat,” he said. “No one here cares.”
As everyone was trying out the tiny cakes, Jhalkari whispered to me, “I understand now.”
I looked around the room, but the men were engaged in conversations about ships, as if they had all dined with women and taken multiple sea journeys throughout their lives. “You understand what?”
“Arjun. He’s in love with you.”
I glanced at Arjun and felt suddenly light-headed, though not from the motion of the ship.
“Imagine what the rani will do for us if Queen Victoria restores her to the throne of Jhansi? She might retire us from the Durga Dal. You would have the freedom to marry.”
“I don’t know. . . .” To find love at court and marry at twenty-one? It was an unbelievable dream.
“Sita, if it can happen for me, it can happen for you.”
“I don’t dare to hope for it,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I was never the one who was meant to marry. My sister—”
“Has been married and her dowry fortune paid. Sita, what if this is your chance?”
I felt a lightness inside of me that almost made me dizzy. And though I knew I shouldn’t hope for it, secretly I did.
In the mornings Arjun and I started practicing yoga. We sat on our blankets and watched as the sun rose over the ocean, sparkling over the cresting waves. In the afternoons, we read poetry together, and in the evenings, we gathered with the others to read the Puranas, our most holy Sanskrit texts. Suddenly, the impossible seemed less so.
It was an enchanted time.
Then, a day before we were set to reach England, Jhalkari came to me with shattering news. I could see from her face that something was wrong. I thought it might be the rocking of the boat, since it made us all sick at least once a day. But she requested that I sit with her in one of the small wooden chairs in our room, and then asked me when I had last spoken with Arjun.
“This morning,” I said. “We practiced yoga.” I couldn’t imagine why her face was making so many contortions, or why it was taking her so long to speak. So finally I said, “Jhalkari, what is it?”
She folded her hands in her lap. “We were just on the deck having a conversation about our futures—what he wanted for his life, what I wanted, what we would do if the queen granted our petition.”
Already a knot was forming in my stomach.
“When I asked him what he saw ahead of him, he said marriage.”
I exhaled. That wasn’t bad news. If the queen granted our petition, the rani would certainly give us her permission to marry.
But Jhalkari’s face was solemn. “Sita, I’m sorry, but when I asked him what sort of girl he might choose, he said one from the city.”
I didn’t understand. “What city?”
“Jhansi. He said, ‘I have my eye on someone from Jhansi.’ ”
It felt as if the breath had been ripped out of me. “He said from Jhansi? Jhalkari, are you sure?”
She lowered her head. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t sleep at all that night.
The next morning, a sailor shouted, “Land ho!” the way they do in books, and everyone rushed up to the decks to see England for the first time. A heavy fog hung like loose gauze over the shore, but beyond it, rising into the mist, were the tallest cliffs I had ever seen. They were covered in green, trees so tall and thick that they looked like fistfuls of jagged emeralds. We were all silent, trying to imagine what sort of world we would find beyond them.