CHAPTER 16

When Gene returned home, he noticed that the Afghan guards were not at their usual standard. Ever since they had arrived, they’d given off a sort of superiority with every movement and every look. Gene thought they must see Ellis as some sort of royal. But as he approached the house and threw down his bike in the grass, the guards did not acknowledge him. They did not stand in their usual formation but instead huddled near the cookhouse.

“You made it back. Took you long enough.”

Will leaned against the verandah railing, peeling orange slices apart from each other and popping them into his wide mouth.

“Yeah,” Gene said, distracted.

Lee stepped up onto the verandah and tossed his topi over a chair. “What’s going on over there?”

Will looked toward the cookhouse, squinting into the late-afternoon sun. “Oh,” he said. “That woman’s gone.”

He sounded pleased about it, but Gene worried about the guards. He knew they wouldn’t leave their posts for just anything. “What does that have to do with them?” he said, nodding in the guards’ direction. Backing down the steps, he tried to get a closer look at them. But at that moment, the enormous mass of the judge stepped out of the house and knocked him aside on his way down the steps.

“Don’t bother!” Ellis roared to the guards, who all snapped to attention. “She’s already gone, and where she goes, I don’t give a fig. No, I need you all here with me. That’s what you’re all damn well here for, isn’t it?”

The guards didn’t answer. One gave an order to the others, and they all marched back to their posts.

Ellis grunted as he lowered himself into a chair on the verandah. “Ah, enjoying the new bikes, I see. How did they feel?”

Gene didn’t respond. No guest had ever left so abruptly before, without saying goodbye. But it was too much to think about; the events of this afternoon took up all the space in his head, leaving no room for anything else.

“We went to the fort,” said Will.

“Saw some men up to no good there.” John pulled the pistol out of the holster and laid it on the table in front of the judge. The metal rang clear as the weight of it dropped on the wood surface. Ellis stared at it for a long time before giving John a clouded look.

“Hope you didn’t do anything stupid,” he said.

Mr. Hinton appeared on the lawn, coming from the forest with a bow in his hand from his afternoon hunt. From the looks of his other empty hand, he had been unsuccessful. The judge scooped the pistol into his jacket. “Ellis, what’s happened?” Mr. Hinton said.

The judge’s stern face broke into a grin, and he chuckled. He slapped his thigh and left behind a faint handprint of dirt. “Oh! This business with your guest? I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t insane.” He shifted in his chair and looked out over the grass, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “I went to the cookhouse to . . . you know, scrounge around for an apple or something to hold me over until dinner. And there she was inside, brandishing a knife at me! Now, I’m never one to be afraid of a woman, but the look in her eyes made me keep well back. She had that long, black hair all roughed up, looked just like a monster. Ghastly. But I didn’t even think of calling the guards over. If I can’t keep safe from a woman, let alone an Indian one, then I have no business getting out of bed every morning. So I backed out the door and gave her plenty of space because at that point she’d started swinging. Then she came out, gnashing like a badger. The only sense I could talk into her was to drop that knife. It’s still over there in the doorway. She took to the forest after that, and I say we’re lucky she left us. I can’t believe you let a thing like that into your home. Now you know to think twice before you let another one in.”

“Why didn’t you just ask my wife to get you something?”

It sounded so territorial. My wife. But the judge just shrugged and shook his head as though he didn’t know the answer.

“Gene, get the knife,” Mr. Hinton continued. “And put it away.”

As Gene passed his father, he could feel the cold emanating from his gaze. He found the knife among the grass right in front of the cookhouse door. The blade was clean. He knelt to pick it up and heard Lee ask, “Where is Mother? Does she know?”

“No,” Ellis said. “She’s up in bed with a headache.”

Arthur spent that afternoon down in the bazaar. It was well after the morning rush, the time of day when you could see the bottoms of crates and barrels. He hardly noticed as a produce seller filled his basket with bruised fruit, for his mind was elsewhere. This past whole week, he had watched the judge domesticate Moti, his Moti, into practically another servant. Sit, stand, stay, come, beg—it must have pleased the burra sahib very much to order someone around endlessly. And Moti proved a worthy disciple, eager for all the bits of cooked chicken that the judge gave so readily. Arthur hadn’t had to feed Moti scraps anymore; oh no, the judge was fattening her just fine with food off his own plate. She was as hungry as she was intelligent, and in no time at all, she was the picture of “man’s best friend.”

Truthfully, Arthur was grateful that the judge’s attention had been shifted off himself. As much as it made Arthur sick to see Moti salivate over the judge, the burra sahib spent more time teaching her commands and less time berating Arthur.

Memsahib begrudgingly let the dog on the verandah, but never inside. “Even with a bath, she is still a street dog,” she’d said. The Padre Sahib had no opinion at all. And at least the dog had the good sense to not outstay her welcome, leaving every evening to sleep somewhere in the forest, Arthur guessed, or on the sunbaked pavement in town. Still, Arthur couldn’t shake off this edge, this feeling that the judge would do something nefarious, that surely the judge had not come all this way to sit around drinking tea on a cobwebbed verandah and training the first pariah dog he found to pay him respect.

As Arthur busied himself selecting bunches of spinach and bushels of limes and piling his woven basket higher and higher, he had only Jaya on his mind. He tried to guess the sort of things she liked to eat, a challenging game, as she had refused almost everything she had been given, except the fruit. Hers was a polite refusal, one that came after a few well-mannered bites, chewed once or twice, before she slipped the food almost whole down her throat as she set the foreign fork down on the napkin. Of course, it was normal for pregnant women, but Arthur recognized it as a refusal all the same.

So he picked something she hadn’t tried before—palak paneer. It was vegetarian, simple. He had hoped that Mr. Hinton would be unsuccessful on his hunt, so that she wouldn’t be surrounded by the smell of meat, if that was what disquieted her appetite. He knew how Hindus were.

On his return to the house, he stopped at the melon patch and picked a ripe one. He made sure it looked just small enough to tuck under his arm and be hidden by the draping of his oversize shirt. The rough rind of the cantaloupe didn’t feel anything like Jaya’s lips or the way he remembered them. He thought they should plant honeydew next year.

But before he could slip into the cookhouse unseen, two guards seized him. It all happened so fast. Without a word, one of them dumped the contents of his basket into the dirt, shook it with far too much force, and held it in his arms like classified evidence. The other guard punched his wooden baton through the loose folds of Arthur’s clothes, knocking the melon free. It fell to the ground and rolled to join its other edible comrades. The guard raised an eyebrow but backed away.

The first guard thrust the basket back into Arthur’s hands. Arthur knelt to gather the items. He would have to wash them.

The guards offered no explanation, and their stony faces and metallic eyes did not invite conversation. He used to think they were the same as him, service men for white masters, but from where he knelt in the dirt among his vegetables, he knew now where they stood. They were off again before he could get to his feet.

He set the basket inside the cookhouse. Mrs. Hinton wasn’t there to order him around, so he took the cantaloupe into his open hands and strode out the door, in the direction of his hut. But a voice stopped him.

“Arthur!”

He nearly toppled back into the cookhouse again. He steadied himself against the door frame and realized he gripped the melon so tightly that his nails had punctured the rind. Up on the verandah, the family looked down at him through the slats of the railing.

“You’ll have to do all the cooking tonight,” called Mr. Hinton. “No luck on the hunt. But that’s all right. What you got from the bazaar should be enough for us.”

“Yes, sahib,” Arthur said.

They all turned back to their conversation. He wiped his sticky hands on his tunic and entered the house through the back.

Tiktikies peppered the walls of the hallway, which led to the downstairs guest room. Arthur found his pocketknife in the folds of his clothes, cut a slice of the melon, and left it on the floor to the side. The geckos began to crawl down the walls, their miniature bodies wiggling cheerfully. He’d pick up the rind tomorrow morning. Then he continued to the door and knocked.

When Jaya did not answer, he put his ear to the door but heard nothing. He squatted and put his eye to the ground, trying to see in. He could detect nothing. He desperately did not want to open the door—he’d never opened a closed bedroom door without permission, and he didn’t feel that he should now, not with a pregnant woman. He knocked once more, but when there was still no answer, no stirring sound, he decided he would come back later. It wasn’t important anyway—he had forgotten why he’d come to see her. Maybe there wasn’t a reason in the first place. He walked back down the hall, careful to step around the geckos.

He could count only a few times in the past when he had had to make dinner all on his own. Mrs. Hinton usually took care of it, and he was there simply to help and to serve the food at the table. But this evening, he liked the idea of being in charge in the cookhouse. He’d take his time, start early, and make something special. This would be the best meal they’d ever had. He got to work, whistling as he fished the produce out of the basket.

Onions were already frying to a perfect golden brown and the scent of cardamom and jeera wafting up to the rafters when he stopped. Mrs. Hinton hadn’t even checked the basket. She always did—and made a point of it. (“The boxwallahs were always looking for someone to cheat,” she would say.) He could have bought anything he’d wanted . . .

He looked at the basket in the corner, still laden with vegetables for the rest of the week. No one knew what was in there, no one but him. Wasting no time, he hurried over to it, forgetting the onions still on the stove. The best produce was at the top, uncrushed by the weight of everything else. He picked out the oranges, fresh mint, and dates. Oh, how he wished he’d bought some jelabies! He filled his hands up with more and more, then stepped toward the door for somewhere to hide it for himself. But if everyone was still on the verandah, he couldn’t run out unseen to his hut. He glanced around the cookhouse and spied baskets of dirty linens along the wall. He tucked the food under the sheets.

An hour later, he was almost done cooking when Gene ambled through the door. Arthur looked up from his stirring, wondering what he could want. But the boy didn’t say anything—he made his way around the room, peaked at the pot on the stove, and swiped some chopped nuts off the cutting board. Then he found a seat on top of the laundry basket and peered at Arthur with his blue eyes, eating the nuts one by one.

It was the crunching sound of his chewing that made Arthur sweat. Could the boy feel the food underneath the sheets? Gene shifted his weight, trying to find a more comfortable position. Arthur held his breath. Gene reached a hand underneath his buttocks and pulled out a single lime.

“How did this get in here?”

“Mmm, sahib, it . . .” Arthur thought quickly. “It is to feed Minnie, sir.”

Gene looked down at the lime, frowning. “More than she deserves.”

Arthur turned back to his cooking, but the boy still did not leave. “Is there something the matter, sahib?”

Gene shook his head and began swinging his legs. They were too short to reach the ground. With his mouth full, he said, “That smells good.”

Arthur smiled. He hoped everyone would like it.

“Did Dad tell you there’s one less mouth to feed?”

“No, sahib.”

“That woman is gone. Uncle Ellis told us she left when we were at the Old Gope. And Mother isn’t coming down to dinner. Said she has another headache.”

“She’s gone?”

“No, she’s just up in bed, sleeping it off.”

“Jaya—the woman, I mean. She is gone?”

“Yes.”

Arthur knew that the rice would be done in two minutes, and the dal would begin to burn if he didn’t stir it. He still needed to set the table and brew the chai and change out of his tunic. But all that didn’t matter now. He bolted out of the cookhouse, scanning the porch for anyone still there. When he saw no one, he burst through the front door and spotted Mr. Hinton mounting the stairs.

“Padre Sahib!” he said, out of breath.

Mr. Hinton paused, his face alarmed. “What is it, Arthur?”

Arthur was suddenly aware what a sight he must look. He tried to calm himself. “Kindly, sir—is it true? Has the woman called Jaya left this afternoon?”

When Mr. Hinton did not answer right away, Arthur knew it was true. He cleared his throat. “Should we search for her, sir?”

“It is not necessary,” Mr. Hinton said.

Not necessary—vital, was what Arthur wanted to say. “I will search for her, then. It is my duty, sir.”

Mr. Hinton raised his eyebrows. He placed a hand on the banister and tilted his head. Arthur felt proud. He knew the Padre Sahib would encourage a good deed, and what better deed was there than to rescue a pregnant woman all alone in the world?

“Your duty,” said Mr. Hinton, “is to serve dinner tonight.”