Читать книгу Glorious Boy - Aimee Liu - Страница 10

“If you want to be the next Margaret Mead,” Shep had agreed, “the Andamans do seem ready-made.”

They were sitting on the grass in New York’s Central Park in the summer of ’36, having known each other less than a week. Her hair cropped short, her limbs still coltish, Claire looked, Shep would later tell her, like Louise Brooks without the eye makeup. He, on the other hand, was twenty-eight, more Ronald Colman than Gary Cooper, but Shanghai-born and trained in London, now headed for his first posting as Civil Surgeon in the most tantalizing place Claire had ever heard of: a barely civilized archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

“I could skip all the hoops,” she plotted, hardly believing her own moxie. “No research grants, no department approval.”

Shep whistled. “Can you imagine the reception you’d get from Columbia? Or Oxford, for that matter—if you walked in the door having already conducted your own original field study!”

Could she imagine. She reached across the picnic basket and gripped his hand. This ruddy, disarming Brit had kissed her for the first time just four nights earlier, and in her mind, she was already halfway around the world with him, plunging into uncharted territory. It was madness. But he was nothing if not a willing co-conspirator. They’d spent every available hour since that kiss laying the groundwork for this scheme.

He leaned over and kissed her again, then threw off his seersucker jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The way he watched her, his sea-glass green eyes were slightly out of sync with his mouth, and this flicker of anxiety warned Claire that Shep wasn’t just besotted. He was serious—unlike her previous college-boy suitors. Also, trusting and protective. And vulnerable. She’d need to be careful not to take undue advantage, but what was he offering if not the invitation to take full advantage?

Truth be told, she was out of her depth. When they’d met at the 21 Club last week, she’d initially mistaken this raw-boned stranger for a world beater. Asia, England, now America for a just-finished fellowship at Johns Hopkins. His doctor colleagues had brought him up to Manhattan to celebrate his appointment; it was that new. “A colonial port on a tropical island,” was how Shep first described his destination. Bully for you, Claire had thought, and was turning away when one of her meddlesome roommates piped up, “Claire here fancies herself the next Margaret Mead. Before you know it, she’ll be hunting heads in Borneo.”

The gin-soaked glitter of their surroundings had flared, and Claire deflected. Her friends loved to tease her, she told Shep. She’d been drawn to ethnography ever since reading Coming of Age in Samoa when she was thirteen, and she applied to Barnard just so she could study with Dr. Mead’s own teachers, but she’d never been west of Chicago—or east of Long Island. All painfully true. Claire had graduated less than a month earlier, was only twenty-one and barely qualified for the steno pool, let alone Borneo. The only way she could live in New York was to share a room at the Barbizon with three other girls, and the only reason she stayed in New York was because the alternative was to move back home to Connecticut. With the economy still in tatters, her parents couldn’t afford to send her to graduate school, and not even Dr. Benedict’s recommendation had been enough to land her a scholarship.

Shep said, “I’m told where I’m headed the tribes date back to the Stone Age.” He smiled. “I can’t promise that they hunt heads, though.”

He was flirting. Nothing more. But he’d gotten her attention. She asked, “What do they hunt?”

That seemed to catch him off guard. “To be honest, I’ve no idea.” He looked down at his martini as if he wasn’t sure how it had wangled its way into his hand. “I’d never heard of this place until I received my marching orders this morning.”

She felt herself redden. “So you made all that up.” Again, she prepared for flight.

“No!” His drink splashed across her forearm, and he gasped. “Oh. Sorry!”

Claire watched a kaleidescope of emotions flash across this stranger’s face. Despite his nervous British manners, he seemed to radiate candor.

“It’s nothing.” She licked off the damage and grinned, but Shep remained as flustered as a nabbed truant. It was his turn to blush—or, more accurately, for the tips of his ears to turn bright pink. “Seriously,” she said. “I know times are tough, but sloshing a few drops of gin is hardly a federal offense.”

He took a half-step away from her, the packed room offering little leeway. Their friends had vanished. “I didn’t make it up,” he said. “I just don’t know much more than I’ve told you.”

They both were novices, then. She studied his eyes, their clear, open color. By contrast, her own dark gaze must seem furtive, but that didn’t appear to bother him. “What do you want?” she asked softly.

A new ripple restored Shep’s smile, simultaneously daring and winning. “Everything,” he answered. “Don’t you?”

Instead of returning to Baltimore with his “mates,” Shep had stayed in New York, and they’d seen each other every day since. Getting down to business now in Central Park, he unfurled their blanket under a sheltering maple, unpacked their picnic—two wrapped sandwiches, two cups and one bottle of cola—then handed her the leather-bound volume they’d found in the library that morning: The Andaman Islanders by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.

He was calling this their “research phase.” Since he knew almost as little about his destination as she did, he’d suggested they find out what they could together before taking “any next steps.” In the process, he didn’t need to say, they’d also research each other. Exposed already: this gangly redhead was as methodical as Claire was impatient. Doubtless a good thing, under the circumstances.

“I remember Professor Benedict talking about Radcliffe-Brown,” she said, scanning the book jacket. “She called him one of ethnography’s big-picture men, but she never described his fieldwork.” Claire wished Dr. Benedict hadn’t left already for her own summer fieldwork. Her advice would be worth gold.

She opened to the introduction and gave the book back to Shep. “You first.”

He hesitated, as if this might be some sort of test. She said, “I can picture it better if you read it to me.”

“Ah.” He stretched his long legs and leaned back against the maple’s trunk. Then he cleared his throat and began to read with the buoyant lilt of a radio announcer. “‘Viewed from the sea, the islands appear as a series of hills, nowhere of any great height, covered from sky-line to high-water mark with dense and lofty forest . . . The coast is broken by a number of magnificent harbours. The shores are fringed with extensive coral reefs—’”

Claire scowled. “Sounds like paradise.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

She blurted without thinking how it might strike him, “I’m not looking for a holiday!”

“No,” he replied quietly. “I can assure you, Claire, you needn’t worry about that.” He seemed on the verge of saying something more and different, but instead returned to the book. “‘The Andamanese belong to that branch of the human species known to anthropologists as the Negrito race. They are short of stature with black skins and frizzy hair—’”

“Wait,” Claire stopped him. “Let me see that.” Until this moment, she’d assumed the Andaman islanders must resemble Polynesians—like Margaret Mead’s grass-skirted Samoans. The image that now formed in her head made her search for the book’s photographic plates. Though grainy and faded, they confirmed her mistake. In picture after picture, men, women, and children glared back in hostile defiance. They looked more African than Asian, and far wilder to Claire’s eye than Mead’s smiling islanders. The Andamanese wore necklaces and loincloths, and little else. Their chests and backs were threaded with patterns of scars, and their hair resembled black fleece shorn close to the skull. Some sported tattoos of clay. A couple of the men held bows and arrows longer than the hunters were tall. One girl had a skull strung to her back.

Claire wondered whatever had possessed her to think she was qualified to communicate with these people, to make this preposterous journey. At the same time, her longing to do just that struck her dumb.

She flipped back to read that the Andamanese were likely related to the aboriginal inhabitants of the interior of the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. They’d been isolated on these islands off Burma for thousands of years. Even though Europeans had begun scouting the islands in the 1700s, many Andamanese tribes in Radcliffe-Brown’s time had yet to encounter a westerner, and he was the most recent ethnographer to study them.

That was it, she thought. That was the prize. To meet these people would be like entering a time capsule. Like starting life over. Erasing everything that came before.

“Claire?”

She looked up with a sense of shifting lenses to find Shep studying her the way her father used to when she was little, when they went out searching for fossils or egret feathers, just the two of them. His expression curious. Hopeful. Forgiving.

She dropped her gaze. “It says Radcliffe-Browne was the only trained anthropologist ever to study the Andamanese. Many of these tribes were already dying out, and that was thirty years ago.”

A paper boy stopped in front of them, belting out the evening headlines: “Louie Meyer wins Indy in four! Mussolini declares Italy an Empire! Remington Rand Strike, Day Five!” It seemed to Claire he was ringing a gong. Time! Time! Time!

Shep finally bought a paper just to get rid of the kid. Then he shook his head, as if having a silent conversation with himself. Without meeting her eyes, he retrieved the book, flipped back to the introduction, and held it for her inspection. “There’s something else you need to consider, Claire.”

Confused by his sudden gravity, she read where he was pointing: “‘The islands, save for the clearings of the—’” She looked at him. “‘Penal Settlement’?”

He closed the book and lowered it to his lap. “Port Blair—the town where I’ve been posted—was founded as a place to send India’s political prisoners. It’s the only modern settlement in the islands, and technically, it’s a penal colony.”

Claire’s bewilderment must have shown. He said, “I guess you Americans would call the inmates revolutionaries. The Indian nationalists call them freedom fighters.” After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, he explained, the British Indian government decided to distance the leaders of the insurrection from their followers. “I expect the remoteness of the Andamans was their appeal for this purpose. Back then the place had a rather sordid reputation.”

“But that was . . .”

“Eighty years ago.”

“So this is ancient history.”

“Not quite.” The concern in his voice told her this was the real test he’d been dreading. “After the convicts finished building the settlement, the British put them to work on a jail, where the violent criminals could be held while their more peaceable comrades were sent to work the island’s teak plantations and sawmills. The jail was completed around the time your Mr. Radcliffe-Brown arrived.”

“I don’t understand. You’re making it sound like some sort of tropical gulag.”

“Well, in a way I guess it was. Back then, anyway. But once the hardened types could be confined in the jail, the general atmosphere calmed down and the port began to flourish.”

Now, Shep explained, the town of Port Blair was populated by Burmese and Indian convicts who’d been released for good behavior. These former prisoners had to remain in the Andamans but were otherwise free to marry or import their wives and children. They’d built settlements along the coast, started farms and businesses. Many chose to work as servants for the civilian and military administrators. “The officials live on an island that’s set up as a cantonment across the harbor from the town. That’s where the main hospital is—where I’ll be based. The British there call it the Paris of the East—though I assume that’s somewhat in jest.”

“The Paris of the East,” Claire deadpanned. Shep seemed to expect her to recoil at the notion of moving to a penal colony, but Port Blair sounded more bizarre than off-putting. Trouble was, she didn’t yet know enough to know how to react. In Claire’s experience, the history of the British Raj, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Independence Movement, even that famous little man Gandhi amounted to no more than exotic newsreel images. If she had to pick a side, Shep was correct that she’d probably line up behind the freedom fighters, but it didn’t sound as if it would come to that. Anyway, her primary destination was not this port or penal colony or whatever it was, but those “dense and lofty forests,” where she envisioned herself spending most of her time among the islands’ true and rightful inhabitants.

Why, then, did Shep look so sheepish?

“Am I supposed to be afraid?” she asked.

“It’s not that.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “But there are bound to be tensions . . . It’s different from China, of course, yet I expect there’ll be parallels. Colonial attitudes die hard in Asia, and the Brits aren’t always as benevolent toward their ‘loyal subjects’ as they pretend to be.” He scowled, perhaps remembering his childhood in Shanghai. His freckles and ginger cowlick sometimes reminded her so much of her brother, Robin, that Claire had to look away.

Whatever colonial tensions might await them, she sensed that they weren’t what worried Shep most. No, he was more worried about her, afraid that she might not turn out to be the go-getter he imagined, the partner he needed as he returned to a world that obviously filled him with ambivalence. And she was hardly equipped to reassure him.

She leaned closer and placed her palm on The Andaman Islanders. “If Radcliffe-Brown could work his way around this wrinkle in paradise, then I ought to be able to, too.”

She waited for him to meet her gaze, then reached for the bottle of cola, opened it and, ignoring the cups Shep so thoughtfully had arranged on the blanket, took a swig and passed him the bottle.

Shep returned her gesture with a smile as a streetcar clanged on Fifth Avenue. They watched two miniature sailboats collide on the pond in front of them, a group of children playing blind man’s bluff on the hill beyond. Claire considered asking why Shep had pretended to know next to nothing about Port Blair, when he obviously knew plenty, but she let it go.

At length he took her hands. “I’ll help you, you know. I mean, as much as I possibly can—what do you think?”

She held very still. “Are you suggesting we take the next step?”

A wave of relief—or, no, it was more like elation—charged his grin. “What’s that thing Americans say?”

“What thing?”

“Like, you’re on.”

“You bet?”

He shook her arms like reins. “You bet.”

Four weeks later they were married in a small, stifling ceremony at home in Connecticut. Her father wept and her mother sat characteristically stiff and dry-eyed, a Yankee stoic through and through. Shep’s sister, Vivian, sent a whimsical topiary elephant and best wishes from Sydney, where she was based as a foreign correspondent. Shep’s parents, from their retirement village in Wales, sent proxy wishes in the form of a funereal tower of gladioli. After all, the bride and groom were bound for a penal colony.

Innocents, the two of them. Naifs willfully twisting omens into romantic curiosities.

Their first night at sea, Shep recited Kipling. They were lying stripped and spent, surprisingly yet deliciously renegade in their abandonment on the SS Ormonde’s upper deck. Lounge chairs like shadow sentinels stood guard against the August torpor, which had followed the ship from shore.

“‘We’ve painted The Islands vermilion,’” he sang, soft and jubilant as Claire traced the Pleiades to reorient herself.

“‘We’ve pearled on half-shares in the Bay,

We’ve shouted on seven-ounce nuggets,

We’ve starved on a Seedeeboy’s pay.

We’ve laughed at the world as we found it—

Its women and cities and men—

From Sayyid Burgash in a tantrum

To the smoke-reddened eyes of Loben.’”

Dawn burnished the eastern horizon. She placed her ear to her new husband’s heart and wondered at the whoosh.

Shep’s geography was pale and angular next to her own softer honeyed flesh, and his exuberance soon yielded to a more studious intimacy. Back in the pink light of their stateroom he’d trace the curve of her jaw, the hollows behind her knees, the moles arrayed in the shape of a mouse just below her left breast.

Claire squirmed under this microscopic mapping. One night she caught his hand. “You touch me like I’m much more valuable than I really am.”

But there was that fraudulent voice again. She felt as if she were trying to walk atop a giant ball. Could she pull it off, should she? Some part of this cavalier act must be true.

Another part was necessary. She lacked the nerve to make her admission without cover of jest. So, she lay back in the swirl of bedclothes, flung an arm above her head, and waggled her hips like a floozy. “Maybe I should have confessed up front, but then I thought, you’re a worldly man.”

Shep grinned too needily. He made the sign of a cross over her unclothed body before touching her hipbones, elbows, ribs. “Semilunar fascia, serratus magnus, brachialus anticus, latissimus dorsi.” The beautiful anatomical terms floated like an incantation of forgiveness.

“You’re not secretly Catholic.”

“Just a reverent doctor.” He would not be rushed. He kissed the hairline scar across her sternum, the bitten cuticles of her right hand. He grazed the cap of short dark hair, each imperfection with his lips, his teeth.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

He sighed and lay back, stared at the ceiling as if at a cinema screen. At length he said, “Back in Shanghai I used to make quite a pest of myself at the apothecary stalls. I’d pretend they were opium dens, and I was king of the devils.”

“You mean, I’ve married a bad boy?”

He grinned. “You sound hopeful!”

“How exactly were you a pest?”

“I wanted to try everything. Ticked off the merchants to no end. They didn’t dare shoo away little white boys—no telling who my father might be. On the other hand, they were bound to catch bloody hell if I got sick from their herbs and potions.”

“What was the attraction?”

“Ah. Those places were everything I was forbidden. Dark and smelly and dank. Native and scary. The ginseng roots looked like shrunken scrotums.”

“That appealed to you, did it?”

“When I was nine,” he said as he stroked her thigh, “I didn’t yet appreciate the importance of healthy testicles.”

She slapped his hand. “Is there a story here?”

“Well. There were these botanical buttons that looked like stars and tasted like licorice. I pinched one and swallowed it as soon as I got home. Turned out, it cured constipation in thirty-four minutes flat. Vivvy timed it. You should have seen my father’s face when I told him.”

“Why on earth did you tell him?”

“More the fool, I thought he’d be interested. He threatened to sack the cook for taking me into the native quarter, and I got the belt, but that only taught me to keep my experiments secret. Lo and behold, other heathen cures worked better than any dose of Father’s Kaputine, Piso’s, or Cheracol.”

She saw, finally. “You won.”

He didn’t answer, but then said, “It’s the work I really want to do when we get to the Andamans, Claire. Those forests are like one great undiscovered apothecary shop. They could well contain the next medicinal miracle.”

“Your very own treasure hunt.” She gave her husband a kiss. “That makes two of us, I guess.”

He raised himself up to look down at her. “Now you.”

“Now me what?”

“Tell me what you should have confessed up front.”

And though she’d rehearsed this a hundred times, still she fumbled for a way in. She pulled the sheet over her nakedness. “My parents. It’s not what you think.”

“What I think . . .”

“I mean, they’re sad to see me leave, and maybe they blame you for taking me away, but it’s not just that. Or, not just you. See, I had a little brother. He died when I was eleven. Drowned in the pond behind our house.”

She’d never spoken of Robin like this. She’d never needed to. Her brother was no longer mentioned at home, and her other suitors had all been intent on pretending that life was a lark. The Depression did that to some people, but maybe not in China. And Shep wasn’t a suitor anymore.

So, before he had time to react, Claire pressed ahead. Robin was eight years old. He wanted to play with her and the girl who’d come home with her after school, but Claire was jealous because this friendship was new and her gawky little brother embarrassed her, so she told him to get out of her room. The pond looked frozen but wasn’t. Robin went out and never came back. Her parents insisted it wasn’t her fault, but she knew better. She and the girl who’d been there that day could not so much as look at each other afterwards.

“For months I couldn’t even face the mirror, much less talk about Robin.” Ten years ago was one hundred twenty-seven months. “I remember he stuck out his tongue as he was leaving. Licorice was his favorite candy. His tongue was black with it.”

Shep didn’t move. “You loved him,” he said. Not an exoneration, but not a question. An offering.

She thought he’d go on about a life without risk not being worth living, about her brother never intending to saddle her with guilt, about the mistake it would be to forever blame herself. The old, useless exhortations, which only her father had ever had the heart to even attempt.

Shep said, “Want to tell me about him?”

The answer that came to her startled her. “Someday.”

He took her hand and cradled it, open-palmed, as he would a bird being willed to fly, and she knew she would forever remember this sensation, the spare architecture of his bones, solid as a bridge. A doctor’s hand, she thought then. Surgical. Confident. She didn’t yet know the truth of him, that his heart was his liability. Back in London, he’d nearly lost a child on the operating table because he couldn’t bring himself to amputate the little girl’s leg when there might yet have been a chance to save it. Five years old, that child was, her family too poor and too brown to justify a specialist, as if she deserved to be a practice case. Shep, only a resident, froze, unable to make the first incision, failing to recognize the sepsis hurtling through his patient’s bloodstream. His chief surgeon had to step in, and this might have ended Shep’s career but for the influence of his father, a Royal Medical Officer. Shep’s “fellowship” in America was a form of exile, his posting to the Andaman Islands no plum but a booby prize that he was struggling to make his own.

Claire knew none of this that night in their stateroom on the Ormonde. Had he told her, matching her confession in order to placate or absolve her, or simply to come clean, would she have judged him weak? Or, would she have resented “his” child’s survival and his own reprieve? Would just that much have broken the spell, or would she have loved him that much more for his ungodly humanity? He was wise not to trust her, not to take that risk. If he truly wanted her.

He did. She could tell that much even then without question, the way he held her, as if she were the lightest being imaginable. This was his true dare.

So she flipped her palm and touched his wrist, the tapestry of blue veins over pale stalks of bone, the weft of fine creases beneath an almost imperceptible nap of fine golden hairs. The pulse beneath the surface, proof of life in his skin. He watched her, waiting.

The nerve, her father had whispered. Another summer, four years earlier.

They were standing in front of Gauguin’s La Orana Maria. Hail Mary. Polynesia, landed in New York City. Claire was in her first year at Barnard then, providing her father with a ready excuse to escape his Depression-soaked law offices in Stamford for the illusory reprieve of Manhattan. The two of them explored museums the way they used to comb the beaches and woods of Connecticut after Robin. For uplift, he would say. Which was a good description of Claire’s response to Gauguin’s sinuous lines, rounded colors, and worshipful gestures, the serenity of the naked boy riding his mother’s shoulder and the quietly mocking reverence of halos on a South Seas Madonna and child. While other museumgoers cleared their throats and muttered about shame, Claire longed to dive into that heat and lust and lose herself.

The painter’s nerve, for her father, involved something else. As a boy, Tyler March would weave baskets out of willow peelings like the Algonquin Indians. Left alone he probably would have become a naturalist. Like Thoreau, or Muir, or, God help me, Mr. Darwin. Instead he became a probate attorney, like his father before him. He used to tell Claire his weakness was his reliance on the helping hand. She never believed him until she saw him in front of that painting, rivers pearling in his sad gray eyes, envy making him hoarse.

She’d heard his longing again in her ear when she repeated the words on her wedding day: I do. But her first view of the Andaman Islands put the lie to her own nerve.

First, a small uninhabitable pincushion of palm trees appeared on the turquoise sea. Then a massive green monolith rose behind it, like a waking dinosaur. The behemoth’s coat of forest green undulated, dense and vast as a creature in its own right—a creature intent on driving the slender white snake of beach back into the ocean. This was North Andaman, the top of the island chain that would terminate for them in the south at Port Blair.

“There’s no one there,” she said, stunned by the confounding shimmer of beauty, humidity and primeval heat that seemed to pulse from shore.

“No see-ums,” Shep quipped, but his heart wasn’t in it, either.

Claire gripped the bulwark, fighting a spasm of nausea. His arm wound like a question mark around her waist. It didn’t help.

Who did they think they were fooling? Both of them, impostors.

Over the next six hours the shoreline remained relentlessly wild. They spotted a couple of isolated coastal villages, but even these looked deserted. Then a distant lighthouse blinked. Atop a bluff beyond, a regimental block of concrete rose, spiked with gleaming antennae.

“There.” Shep looked up from the gazetteer spread-eagled in his palm. Hope and relief cracked his voice as he pointed to the outer bank of Ross Island, their new home.

The hillock stretched like a long green breaker at the entrance to a harbor that abruptly bristled with boats. A mirage is how Claire would record this first impression. A miniature replica of a world she thought she’d left behind. A dark gothic church with a soaring steeple. The semblance of a town square and parade ground. Victorian houses along the ridge, with gabled roofs and wide verandas, pale gingerbread trim. The colonial residents themselves were scarce, but small brown figures in white uniforms appeared and disappeared among the towering shade trees. Their numbers multiplied toward the southern end of the island, where the western architecture yielded to a dark brick scramble of shop houses and the humanity of a bazaar. The Hindu temple on the waterfront resembled a multicolored stack of Life Savers.

The Ross cantonment was the seat of British power for the entire Andaman archipelago, but to reach it, they had first to continue across the harbor to disembark on the “mainland,” where Port Blair proper stretched like a lizard’s claw out of the forest’s interior. There, whitewashed bungalows like those throughout India ranged along the slopes, and high on the lizard’s outmost knuckle stood an imposing fortress with rose-colored crenellations.

“The Cellular Jail,” Shep said.

Claire gazed up at the pink castle walls. Inside—reputedly—the Raj’s most hardened convicts sweltered. By design, the whole port functioned as one vast concentration camp, but since the inmates’ dominant crime was their will to fight for independence, Claire felt far more disgust for their British overlords than she did any fear of the prisoners themselves. The anxiety playing across Shep’s face told her he’d been dreading this reckoning as much as she’d been refusing to think about it. He was now working for those overlords, after all, and she was their subject by marriage.

“It’s strangely picturesque,” she offered. “Maybe things won’t be so bad.”

As if in confirmation, traveler’s palms waved like giant hands welcoming them to Phoenix Bay Jetty, where the mood seemed downright festive. There, Europeans and Indians and everything in between—soldiers, civilians, and pukka sahibs, barefoot Indian and Burmese women wearing scarlet, turquoise, and canary yellow—called to arriving passengers. Children and pye-dogs scuttled around waiting rickshaws. Cries of Jao! and Boy! skittered across the harbor.

Suddenly the deck tipped, the anchor splashed, and Claire’s gaze was thrown down and back toward the stern, where a dozen manacled convicts, who must have made the crossing inside the ship’s bowels, stood waiting for a tender to take them ashore. A single voice had begun to chant, “Inquilab Zindabad! Inquilab Zindabad!” The others took it up. Long live the Revolution!

Claire and Shep had heard this and other nationalist slogans rising in the distance and behind closed gates during their weeklong stop-over in Calcutta, but this one now was chased by the sickening thwack of wood on flesh and bone. The victims screamed as the others fell silent. A rear gangway lowered. The prisoners shuffled onto the bobbing tender, prodded by their armed guards.

Shep took hold of Claire’s elbow. She heard his voice climb. “Steady on, darling. No apologies, no regrets.” It sounded like a plea.

They took a little wooden ferry back to Ross Island and tried to put the prisoners’ cries behind them as they walked to the top of the ridge. There they landed in front of the low red gate to the Civil Surgeon’s bungalow.

Shep flipped the latch, and they stepped through to a vivid green lawn ringed with coconut palms, birds of paradise, flaming heliconia, and orchids of every description. The bungalow itself had freshly whitewashed walls and a wide triangular red tin roof with gables at either end. A deep columned veranda ran the length of the house, overlooking the sea.

It was late in the afternoon. Thick stripes of jade-green ocean laddered to meet the sky. The air had a queer golden vitality, like jazz music made visible.

“We’re home,” Shep said, as if testing the gods.

“We’re home,” Claire answered, taking his hand.

“Welcome to paradise, my love.”

The following morning, about an hour after Shep ventured across the yard to report for duty at the hospital, the servants arrived, shyly peering in the front door. Som was a careworn middle-aged man with a trim salt-and-pepper mustache and slicked-down hair emblazoned by a white streak over one temple. He seemed as reticent as his much younger wife, Jina, was bold, her confident warmth somehow enhanced by her red-stained teeth. Shep had hired the couple sight unseen, on the recommendation of his predecessor, who described them both as island-born and nominal Christians, descended from convicts but not criminals themselves and therefore worthy of trust.

When Claire invited them inside, Som bobbled his head in that Indian way that she’d learned could mean Yes, Good, I understand, I’m pretending to understand, If you wish, If I must, or We shall see. Jina’s broad smile, however, spoke to Claire more directly. She held her muslin sari over her head and whispered to her husband in Urdu, the lingua franca of Port Blair.

Claire liked them for their sweetness toward each other and for their curiosity about her and Shep. It was decided that Jina could manage the house and cooking. Som, whose English was almost nonexistent, would handle gardening and maintenance. They’d live in the two-room servant quarters out behind the kitchen.

Only after all that was settled did Som beckon his daughter from the shadows where she’d been waiting across the yard. His and Jina’s reference had not mentioned a child, but after her initial surprise, Claire found herself enchanted.

Naila was a very petite eight-year-old, with dark eyes almost too large for the delicate face that framed them. As she took in her new memsaab’s wrinkled shorts, the unpacked bags and parlor furnishings of the civil surgeon’s bungalow, she seemed both shy and precocious, amused and critically attentive.

“But what will she do for school?” Claire asked. It was the first question that came to mind. Education was not a foregone conclusion for girls in India, and there was no school on Ross Island, since any European children here had long ago been shipped “home,” but she could hardly accept this bright little girl not being educated on her watch.

Jina pushed the child back a step and signaled her to lower her eyes. “Aberdeen school on mainland, Memsaab.”

“By boat each day?”

“Certainly, Mem.”

“But who will take her?”

“She herself, Mem.”

Claire, at once relieved and impressed by this plan, smiled at Naila, who clearly understood every word. She looked less Indian than either of her parents, more Burmese, or possibly Andamanese. Her hair was a glossy black and springy, cut nearly as short as Claire’s own. Her nose was broad and flat, a little ungainly, but her figure was as fragile as her mother’s was full, her eyes behind their long, thick lashes as lively as her father’s, her skin a lovely pekoe color. Not pretty, exactly, but obviously perceptive.

When Claire put her palms together in an awkward salaam, Naila replied with a curtsy.

In the days that followed, Claire invited Naila to help shelve the library and was pleased to see the girl eagerly leafing through each book before placing it. She seemed particularly fascinated by the photographic plates in The Andaman Islanders. Apparently, she’d never encountered any native Andamanese herself, though one picture, she said, resembled the layabout Porubi in Aberdeen Bazaar. “But,” she added, “Porubi at least is keeping his clothing on.”

Claire noted the disparagement in her voice. She wondered where it stemmed from.

“What is this book, Mem?”

“It’s the story of the people who lived in these islands before you or I or even your parents were born, Naila. The people whose ancestors came here first. They still live in the interior, you know. Have you never seen any yourself?”

“The naked people.”

There was that same disapproval, but this time flatly matter-of-fact. Claire asked, “Is that what you’ve been taught to call them?”

Naila swayed her head back and forth like her father. She told Claire that everyone in Port Blair—Europeans and locals alike—viewed the naked people as pests because they were strange and dirty and ugly to see, uncivilized. When the British began to build Port Blair, they fought the largest of the tribes in the Battle of Aberdeen and nearly wiped out the Great Andamanese entirely. Teacher Sen said the surviving forest people still raided settlements and plantations up north, and some of the most remote islands had tribes that were said to be cannibals. Most of the naked people still used spears and arrows, however, so they were no match for British guns. The girl wrinkled her nose at the picture of an aboriginal couple seated rigidly, perhaps ritualistically, back to back and staring in opposite directions. “They are not looking real.”

Eventually, Claire would deduce that Naila’s father himself had a grandmother from the forest, but she’d died before he was born, and he and Jina never mentioned her, instead instructing Naila to say that she had Tamil ancestors, dark people from south India being racially preferable to the indigenous Andamanese, and “local-born” designating a class meaningfully distinct from “native.” Prejudice in British India, Claire would learn, was actively transferable and widely embraced.

She persevered with Naila. “The Andamanese tribes have lived here for thousands of years. They’ve survived in the forest without schools or farms or motor cars. Without hospitals—or prisons, either.” She tapped the book the girl was still holding. “The man who wrote this is called an anthropologist. It’s his job to learn how they survived.”

“Are you antha-ro-po—”

“Not yet. But I’m trying to figure out how to become one, and I hope the Andamanese can help me.” She glanced up. “And you, Naila? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The question caught the girl off guard. Her grandfather had trained as a chemist before his arrest, but as the son of a convict, her father was forbidden to receive a proper education. He often told Naila that she was different, and India, too, would soon be different. Great leaders like Gandhiji were working to persuade the British to send the freedom fighters back to their home states, and once that happened, their local-born children and grandchildren also would be allowed to leave these islands and make a different future for themselves.

In Calcutta there is a street called College Street. Someday, daughter, you will go there to study and you will make us so proud. And her mother agreed, You go to school, you learn with all your might, and one day you will cross that water. Jina would fling her arm at the horizon as if scattering seed. Daughter, you—

Naila never let her mother finish. She was drawn to maps and books about the world beyond the sea, but she’d never spent even one night away from Port Blair or apart from her parents. She didn’t want to become someone different than she was, especially not if it meant she must leave those she loved.

Claire said, “Well, I’m not so sure who I’m going to be, either, so let’s try to help each other figure it out.” She extended her hand.

Naila slid her fingertips tentatively along the outstretched palm.

Claire clasped Naila’s fingers. “Friends?”

The child stared at their joined hands and answered in a voice so grave, she sounded apologetic even as she echoed, “Friends.”

The next week, Shep discovered that the hospital chowkidar belonged to one of the island’s forest tribes. Though still in his teens, the boy spoke excellent missionary English, and he also knew the native uses for all the local flora. Young Leyo was being wasted as night watchman, so Shep hired him to help Som establish a medicinal garden. Then he sent him over to see if Claire would like him to tutor her.

Would she!

“My people,” Leyo told her. “Biya people.”

His features resembled those of Radcliffe-Brown’s subjects, but he’d evidently accommodated to the western custom of clothing. He carried a cloth sack and wore a white singlet and coral sarong, albeit without shoes. His hair was cropped close to his scalp and parted by a broad straight line shaved from his left temple all the way back and down to his neck. He barely came up to Claire’s collar bone.

He had volumes to teach her. “Aka Biya,” he said grinning. “Aka mean mouth-talk. Together we aka Biya”

Elated at her good luck, Claire asked him to spend an hour with her each morning. But he presented a couple of challenges that she hadn’t expected.

For one, he’d spent enough time in Port Blair that his command of his language had been diluted with Urdu. In fact, he told her, the only one left who spoke pure Biya was his headman, Kuli, who lived with the rest of his clan in the forest to the north.

The second challenge was the Biya’s entirely separate nonverbal language. To explain, Leyo gestured with his palm to his crown, then his chest. “Spirit talk is for head, for heart; silent, still we hear.”

Among the Biya people, if Claire understood him correctly, this silent spirit talk was valued more than the language of words. The language of the spirit was communal and empathic. It was also the language of nature. Leyo told her he’d noticed in Port Blair that neither Europeans nor Indians could speak this spirit language, but in his tribe, newborns learned naturally to communicate through silence with the world around them. Gestures and expressions of spirit conveyed warnings, exhortations, and concerns from the Biya god Biliku, as well as shared feeling, from the heart.

Speech, in contrast, was transactional, used for trade, planning, or resolution of problems. It was needed most when a member of the tribe needed to leave or when the communal bond was threatened by conflict—when dealing with outsiders, for example.

This lesson would alternately console and torment Claire in the years to come, but at this point the concept of talk without words seemed alluring. It filled her mind that same afternoon when she rode across the harbor to shop in Aberdeen.

In the bazaar, languages streamed together. Her fellow foreigners—mostly British, but also French and Dutch and various admixtures—all seemed helpless to understand each other without raising their voices. Likewise, most of the mainland-born Indians and Burmese, of whom there were many more, chattered nonstop in Urdu, Karen, Hindi and Marathi. Among both groups, silence seemed synonymous with isolation or disconnection, with fear or shame. Witness the town vagabond skulking at the entrance to an alley off the bazaar.

She spotted him sitting cross-legged across the street. His skin was so dark that he would have blended invisibly into the shadows but for his filthy red shirt and tattered khaki shorts and those bloodshot eyes, which shone bright and mad within the haggard frame of his face. This was surely the poor soul Naila had called Porubi. Apart from Leyo, he was the only Biya anyone seemed to know outside the forest—and by all appearances he was unreachable as well as mute. Remembering Dr. Benedict’s irate descriptions of government agents plying American Indians with whiskey, Claire had to turn away as this Porubi hoisted his own brown toddy jug. Isolation. Fear. Shame. The very sight of him filled her with all of that.

She climbed the whitewashed steps of the Kobayashi Kodak Shoppe and found peace at last. The front of the store was empty. An electric fan whirred from the ceiling. She touched the brass counter bell.

Floorboards creaked behind a black curtain, and a small, trim man and woman wearing matching steel-rimmed spectacles and white cotton jackets came through and bowed across the desk. Claire tentatively bowed back.

“May we help?” The man spoke English as if it hurt his mouth.

“I’m Mrs. Durant,” she said. “The new Civil Surgeon’s wife.”

The woman let out a small exhalation, then bowed quickly again. Coming up she smoothed the tight black bun at the nape of her neck and gave Claire a gentle smile.

“Welcome to Port Blair,” the man said. “We are Kobayashi. Husband, wife.”

After an awkward pause when they all seemed to run out of conversation, Claire reached into her purse for the films that she’d shot aboard the ship and around Ross. The husband and wife began opening and closing drawers, exchanging and marking packets for the film without exchanging a word. A young Sikh MP entered. Mrs. Kobayashi, still mute, showed him the print he’d ordered, and counted his payment before bowing him out.

When Claire inquired how long they’d lived in Port Blair, Mr. Kobayashi whispered to Mrs. Kobayashi, who smiled at Claire from behind a cupped palm. It didn’t seem a complicated question, but apparently it required a conference.

“Five year,” Mr. Kobayashi said at last and handed her the chits for her films. “This is a good place. We are happy you come.”

Claire wanted to shake their hands, but she found herself instead salaaming. As they bowed her out, Mrs. Kobayashi winked at her, and she felt as if they were enacting some arcane comedy of gestures, but not even this friendly pantomime compared to the silent language Leyo had described. What all the non-natives had in common was dependence on verbal thought; without words, neither reason nor understanding could occur. Not so among Leyo’s people.

“We’d call that mind reading,” she said when they met for their next lesson. “A power that many equate with magic, if they believe it exists at all.”

“Magic.” Leyo smiled at the pale palms of his dark hands.

“I don’t imagine there’s any hope for me.”

He looked perplexed.

“I mean, to learn your silent language.”

He led her out onto the porch and pointed at the sea, which lay matte beneath a metallic sky, the day’s heat crushing the surface like a blotter. “You hear?”

“I hear the waves.” A soft concussion from the beach.

Leyo shook his head and stabbed the air. She saw the angry brown spot that he was indicating far to the east, like a divot chipped from the sky. “Big storm there.”

“And you can hear that in the waves?”

He grinned. “Big water, big mouth.”

“In your camp, everyone can speak the water’s language, then?”

“Yes.”

“Even little children?”

“Yes.”

“And the forest has a big mouth, too?”

He covered his ears, laughing. Then he drew a gestured line from his eyes to the storm at sea to the closer waves, and finally to Claire. He didn’t speak a word: Tonight, there would be rain.

The unspoken language wasn’t silent at all, she thought. It must be positively cacophonous, once you learned to hear it. She remembered Professor Benedict quoting Chief Seattle’s plea to Franklin Pierce: My words are like the stars that never change . . . Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch . . . In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.

She said, “I am deaf and dumb.”