She stands and turns to leave. He grabs her wrist. She yanks her hand away and whirls around to face him. He recoils.
In Digby’s quarters, early on a Saturday evening, a wide-eyed Muthu appears in the doorway to the bedroom. Digby is propped up, reading. He has spent the afternoon painting listlessly and taking a long nap.
“Saar, visitor! Missy, Saar,” Muthu says, and hurries away.
Which Missy? A puzzled Digby washes up and puts on a fresh shirt over his trousers. He sees a woman’s bicycle outside on the verandah.
In the living room, when he recognizes who it is, he wishes he’d changed his paint-flecked trousers. He feels a rush of adrenaline, every little sound amplified, from the clink of dishes in the kitchen to the chirp of a bulbul outside. She has her back to him. What did she make of his décor, he wonders, the cavalry of terracotta horses on the verandah when she walked in? He’d seen giant versions of these when riding Esmeralda through villages: offerings to Aiyanar, protector from famine and pestilence. On his living room floor is a hand-loomed grass-silk mat from Pattamadai. But of course, her gaze is on the one wall that cries for windows. Instead, from floor to ceiling it is covered with kalighat paintings in crude wooden frames, each one no bigger than a postcard. A village of kalighats stares back at her. Her hands are on her chest, frozen in that first moment of surprise.
After a long while, she turns to him.
His breath catches. She’s even lovelier than in memory. The orange glow of the setting sun lights the left side of her face like a figure in one of Vermeer’s paintings. He remembers her goodbye in the car so many months ago, so definitive.
He speaks first, to relieve her of that burden. “I bought them in Calcutta.” He walks up to stand beside her. “I was deputed to accompany the governor of Bengal’s wife, who took ill here. I spent just one night there, but I went to the Kali temple on—”
“On the banks of the river,” she whispers. “I grew up close by.”
“The vendors were hawking these to the pilgrims. I was a pilgrim myself.” I wanted to visit the house in which you grew up, your old school, visit your parents’ graves . . .
She nods, her hands wringing her embroidered handkerchief.
To be in her presence, to smell her attar, is intoxicating. “I visited the artists’ workshops,” he continues. “Their repertoire goes beyond religious images. Like that one.” He points. “A notorious crime involving a British soldier and his Indian lover. Or this theater-of-life series. See the curtains of a Western playhouse? But with Shiva dancing. Occident and Orient in a few brush strokes.”
They’ve come to that threshold beyond which words lose their utility. Standing so close to her, in his own house . . . there are no more words he wants to say except her name. He has sounded it in the dark, bounced it off the ceiling and walls. Celeste. Celeste. Its last syllable lingers in the corners like a trapped whisper. He wants to say it aloud now. His hand moves, as though of its own volition, reaches for hers. He cannot know that hours before, her husband reached for her wrist and she yanked it away. “Celeste,” he says, dragging out her name. “Celeste, there’s more paintings you must see.” Her fingers find refuge in his.
Hand in hand, she lets him lead her to the next room, his “studio”—formerly the dining room. The paintings, finished and unfinished, are the modest size of the kalighats, but the subject is unvarying: the same woman. She comes into being with an economy of line and color: chestnut eyes; the mass of brown hair; the sweep of the long neck; the slight overbite whose proof is in the pouting upper lip, which Digby thinks is the most beautiful thing on earth. Celeste had seen the template when he sketched her in the shadow of the great rock in Mahabalipuram. The artist sees in the model a grander beauty than she sees in herself.
Her hand quickens in his. He leads her to his bedroom.
In a land where parrots with clipped wings predict the future from a deck of cards, where marriages are determined by horoscopes, Celeste’s foreknowledge of where this will lead—not just in the next few minutes, but in the days and weeks to come—makes her try to disengage her hand, but it is too late. He reels her in, draws her close, and with a sigh she lets herself fall into his body.
Neither of them knows that every time they seek each other out, furtively, in the heat of late afternoon, they will begin as they did today, in front of the wall of village portraits, the framed figures each sounding out a note, a raga that is all theirs. His tongue will run down from her lips, her chin, down the midline past her thyroid, her cricoid, to the little hollow above her sternum. Once he undresses her, he’ll step back and move her like a dancer, posing her, spinning her as though on a revolving pedestal. He will take in the tall, lean figure; the small breasts; the gentle swell below her navel; the flare of her pelvic bones that are like wings hovering over the long, gazelle-like legs; the fragile instep; and finally the toes, the clever gap between the big toe and the second. He will take it all in, memorizing every detail . . .
Celeste has had one husband and one lover, the latter like her, a wayfarer in the wasteland of an unhappy marriage, and the affair didn’t help either of them find their bearings. She succumbs to Digby’s lack of irony or self-consciousness, an innocence and purity that gives him authority, like the bold lines he sketches. His passion for her singes her skin, enlivens her. Who would not want to be loved that way?
At this moment she can no longer bring up the purpose of her visit. She came not to ask for his silence, which is what Claude must have wanted, but to warn him of a perfidious and utterly false accusation that he would soon hear: that they are lovers.
If she doesn’t tell him, if they don’t stop . . . then the accusation will no longer be false. Why doesn’t she speak? Why doesn’t he ask?
She must tell him. She must.
CHAPTER 21
Forewarned
1935, Madras
Four days after they become lovers, Celeste rides to Digby’s quarters once more. She crosses the railway tracks to Kilpauk, bypassing the heart of the city. She dodges a cow, overtakes a laborer struggling with a cart piled high with scrap metal. She is seeing Madras through a new lens, no longer the Celeste she was five days ago.
A group of unsmiling Indian men stare at her. They stand outside Satkar Lodge, a tall, narrow building on Miller Road. They are probably clerks or students, attired in the “modern” outfit: a white dhoti pulled through the legs, paired with a tweed jacket—an absurd choice for the weather, but no more absurd than the linen suits and ties of ICS officers. Their Gandhi side caps, the ends pointed fore and aft, symbolize the desire for self-rule. One of them calls out “Vande Mataram”—Hail to thee, Motherland—the slogan on the lips of the whole country. The sleeping giant is waking.