Читать книгу Glorious Boy - Aimee Liu - Страница 11

Mosquito boots. Bush trousers. Topi with netting. Field tent. Binoculars. Insect repellant. Snakebite kit. Sulfa, tablets and powder. “What did R-B take?” Shep asked.

Claire had no idea. There was no field manual for ethnographers. But then, their first weekend exploration would hardly qualify as a professional field study.

They’d secured a naval launch to take them up the coast. With Leyo leading, this would shave the two-day trek to two or three hours from the point where they landed. So easy, it seemed like cheating.

“Excited?” Shep asked as they crossed the empty parade ground to the pier. It was that sinister hour before dawn when trees looked black and water red, and the sky seemed at war with itself.

“I’m glad we’re doing this together,” Claire said.

“You all right?” He examined her with concern.

For a moment, she wondered if he saw through her. She’d lost weight and often complained that the Atabrine he insisted they take against malaria made her feel as sickly as it made them both look. The warning signs screamed, yet she’d admitted nothing, and he’d promised to support her in this work. Now—January—was the coolest month, the safest and most bearable for trekking. The duration was what really worried her.

Three days was nothing, she scolded herself and gestured toward the sky. “It’s going to be a scorcher.”

Reynold, the naval lieutenant in charge of the boat, had a Cockney accent, sun-bleached hair, and a tan that Cesar Romero would envy. He’d charted every inch of the Andaman coastline, he told them. No one knew the islands better. Then, with a sidelong glance as Leyo secured their packs, he muttered that he’d seen enough of the blacks up north to know never to trust one of them.

Claire beat a quick retreat with Leyo to the canopied bow while Shep stayed aft to occupy Reynold. Fortunately, the lieutenant was a punctual man who obeyed his orders, and as soon as they were off, the noise of the outboard muffled his further remarks.

The sun broke through as the launch sped north past the tricorn bulge of Mount Harriet—as Shep said, a drumlin that only homesick Europeans would think of upgrading to mountain status—and in minutes the lighthouses on Ross and North Point were behind them. The coastline thickened with mangroves and towering ficus trees, the water turning from celadon to cobalt, and the sand burned so white it seemed to percolate under the brooding sky.

Coconut palms lined the beach like sentries as their Indian pilot spouted British names: Kyd Island. Napier Bay. Neil. Havelock. The Union Jack snapped in the sea spray.

An hour later they entered the forest, Leyo in his element. Even under their largest pack, his bare feet skipped over vines the size of pythons, shoulders swooped beneath fallen trunks. His close-cropped hair escaped the nettles, twigs, thorns, and creepers that bedeviled Claire and Shep as they stumbled along single-file, struggling for footing on the bottomless sponge that passed for ground, for breath in the gaseous heat of decay that seemed to envelop them.

A hornbill, like some prehistoric aviator, sailed beneath the canopy. A stream materialized to their right. Emerald green monitor lizards followed their progress, and toads the size of rabbits scuttled between the fern fronds.

Gradually, as their eyes adjusted to the viscous light, they began to spot the orchids high in the branches or clinging to trunks, trailing plumes or shooting small explosions of color. Once Shep and Claire got the hang of it, as if mastering a child’s game of hidden pictures, they saw them everywhere.

A field guide from the settlement library having served as Shep’s primer, he managed to identify even from afar the basic contours of lady’s slippers, Dendrobium, giant Vanda, and the delicate winged grace of Phalaenopsis. But these were altogether different species from those that grew near the port. Some blooms here were the size of helmets. Some transparent as ghosts. A few moved as if breathing, though eventually they realized this was because the stems were covered with ants. Some, even at a distance of several yards, gave off powerful fragrances or stinks. And many, suspended from their host trees by nearly invisible threads, appeared to float in mid-air.

Mesmerized to distraction, Claire tripped and went down. Shep was on her in an instant, but she waved him off.

“I’m fine. These damned boots!”

She smelled the change before she understood it. Still prone in the decaying leaves, she caught a whiff of oil and sweat, a shift in atmospheric tempo. In her periphery she had the impression that Leyo’s feet had multiplied and wondered if she was hallucinating. Then two pairs of hands gripped her arms, hauled her up, and she saw that the new feet belonged to two small young men—or boys—who looked just like the pictures in Radcliffe-Brown, except for their lively movements. One had tonsured his scalp. The other wore two conical tufts, like horns of hair, rising from his otherwise shaved head. Their eyes seemed huge and wet and black in their lean faces.

The newcomers laughed, bantering with Leyo in the language he’d begun to teach her, except that in their throats the phrases seemed to twitch. They plucked at her hair and clothing, and she and Shep both stood speechless. Fascinated. Confounded. Only when the Biyas’ two yellow dogs found them and, tongues in a lather, leapt toward Claire, did Shep snap back into himself. He stepped to shield her and pulled her behind him, away from the others.

“Hang on, old girl,” he whispered, and this time she did.

The Biya camp consisted of a narrow clearing with thatched shed-like structures that housed fewer than a dozen people, most clad only in a belt of leaves or shells. The Biyas decorated their skin with dried yellow clay. A few wore twine necklaces, women bare-breasted, and all but the youngest were scarred in distinctive patterns up and down their torsos. None stood taller than five feet.

Claire glanced at Shep, whose delighted expression mirrored her feelings exactly. They had done it. They had entered a time capsule by leaving almost everything familiar behind and discovered a reality so strange and new yet ancient that it made every nerve in her body quiver. Except, of course, that they hadn’t actually discovered anything. The Biya had been living here all along. She and Shep were simply catching up.

They needed to appear at ease. She must keep clear mental notes until she could get to her field journal. She had to become what Professor Benedict called an inconspicuous observer. But how?

“Just act natural,” Shep breathed as they followed Leyo to the center of the clearing.

“Natural to who?” It was an honest question. Everything from their ground cloths and netting to mosquito boots must seem preposterous to the Biya. As would her desire to study this clan.

Then something released in her. How would she feel if some stranger from an alien world asked to watch her every move? The Biya were no different. No different. Treat them with respect and compassion, not condescension. Trust that they know what they’re doing, even if you don’t. Show the genuine interest of a friend, not the intrusiveness of a voyeur.

An older woman with a frizz of gray hair and a man’s blue necktie looped around her broad belly stepped from one of the huts. Leyo embraced himself, then hugged the woman, who responded by patting his face and tugging at his singlet with amused disapproval. He’d told them he had just one living relative, an auntie named Mam Golat. “Umimi,” he called her now. Aunt, or great aunt, or adoptive aunt—Claire wasn’t sure which, and Leyo didn’t immediately introduce them.

Instead he motioned them toward a male elder with pronounced lips and eyes. Kuli was the smallest of the adults, with slender limbs and a sequence of horizontal scars forming a ghostly ladder from right to left up his torso. He wore a headdress of grass that resembled a blond wig and a matching necklace that covered his collarbones. His cheeks were high and wide, his bearing regal, his composure absolute.

Chief Kuli pursed his lips, looked the foreigners solemnly up and down, then grinned and crossed his arms over his chest.

Claire made the same cross, nodding slightly in deference. Shep followed suit, then dug in his pocket for the gifts that Leyo had recommended. A pair of shoelaces. A pair of tin spoons. A candle and a box of wooden matches. Nothing to eat, sniff, or drink.

Kuli took the gifts in his leathered hands and raised them level with his chin, then turned them over to Mam Golat. His attitude was so calm and practiced that Claire couldn’t help asking Leyo, “Did you tell him we were coming?”

Leyo waggled his hand like an Indian headshake and turned back to confer with the headman.

“How could he?” Shep asked Claire. “He hasn’t been off Ross long enough to make this trip, and there’s not exactly postal service.”

“True,” she said. “Maybe Kuli’s just naturally hospitable.” Or perhaps, she thought, the Biyas’ silent language traveled.

Animated conversation now burst around them as the rest of the clan resumed their chores. Talk, Claire, reminded herself, was reserved for problems and planning. Were she and Shep deemed a problem? She listened for the full-throated phonetics that Leyo had been struggling to teach her. Sixteen vowels, sixteen consonants. Amid the clicking and tapping and uvular gulps, she managed to make out only the words for hair, skin, hands, white, snake.

The last, on the menu for lunch, was a huge reticulated python being sliced beside the cookfire.

Claire shifted her focus to ward off a wave of nausea and noticed a toddler approaching on a club foot, swaying from side to side. He had a round belly and an amiable smile and seemed to have no sense that his deformity was a handicap.

Shep knelt in front of the child, offering his pith helmet as a plaything. With glee the boy plunked the topi over his own head and peered out like a tortoise from its shell. Shep proceeded to play peekaboo with him while Claire looked around for the child’s mother.

There were two possible candidates. One thickset young woman with shaved eyebrows laughed and chided the boy. The other, whose buck teeth gave her frown the quality of a rictus, yanked the child roughly away from Shep, sending the topi rolling and the little boy tottering off toward the dogs. Parenting appeared to be a communal enterprise.

Claire fingered her Kodak. Photographs would help. With images, she and Leyo could discuss the roles and relationships of everyone in the clan.

A young girl, perhaps nine or ten, stood in front of her offering a pithed coconut. In Port Blair, vendors along the beach peddled freshly hacked coconuts whose water was refreshing, if tasteless. This liquid, however, was dark and silty, and Claire only pretended to sip it before handing the shell back with thanks to the girl.

The girl stayed, gawking. Still flat-chested with the pudgy limbs of a child, even she had been scarred. The featherlike markings covered her belly. She wore a dirty white band resembling surgical gauze around her forehead, and her mowed hair was divided like two sides of a brain by a shaved path straight down the middle. Her bright eyes studied Claire with bold intensity.

Claire pointed to herself, spoke her name, then pointed to the girl and lifted the camera. The girl grabbed it.

“Ekko!” Leyo cried and pried the device from her hands.

Claire offered Ekko her compact as a consolation prize. When she showed her the mirror inside, the child was transfixed. Soon the entire clan surrounded them. Claire asked Leyo to explain that the Kodak worked like a mirror in a box. It would borrow the clan’s reflections, and on her next visit to Behalla she would give their reflections back to them on paper.

The adults had heard of cameras. Some of their forebears who’d escaped from the old Andaman Home had brought back photographs from their time on Ross Island. Leyo told her that Kuli actually remembered Radcliffe-Brown, who’d spent several months in this area when the chief was young. The others didn’t understand why white people wanted to look at the Biya people, but they understood that they sometimes did, and soon everyone went back to their chores, except for the club-footed toddler.

Shep whistled to hold the child’s attention as he studied his movements. “He is called Jodo,” Leyo said.

“Where are his parents?”

“His brother Tika.” Leyo indicated the younger of the friends who had met them in the forest. Tika looked close to Leyo’s own age. He was now squatting beside the girl Ekko.

“Mother Obeyo,” Leyo said, causing the bucktoothed woman to scowl up from the root she was mashing.

Shep asked Leyo to translate his request to her. “Jodo is young enough. If we brought him to town, I could operate on his foot. I could make him well enough to walk.”

Claire, who was photographing this conference, sensed Leyo’s reluctance as she released the shutter. Had he flinched? Pursed his mouth? Nothing so obvious as a negative word or even a frown. He would never directly oppose the surgeon of Port Blair. But she could tell that he parsed his words carefully in the relay to the boy’s mother, and with good reason from the looks of her.

Obeyo’s reply was short and curt and required no translation.

The brother Tika suddenly snatched the compact from young Ekko’s hands and ran off with her in pursuit. Leyo said to Shep, “Come. I show you the scorpion flower.”

Claire thought her husband would press his case for the little boy now laboring after the two older children. Jodo’s locomotion twisted him sideways, so he landed on his ankle as if it were his heel. She knew it could be relieved with a relatively simple operation, but simplicity itself was a culturally relative term.

Shep rose, turning from Obeyo’s glower to ask Claire if she wanted to come with him. She waved him off. Become invisible, Professor Benedict would advise, or at least unobtrusive. She and Shep were less obtrusive apart.

She found a spot of deeper shade by the corner of the long hut and shrank into it, swallowing another surge of nausea. Nearby, the young woman with no eyebrows lifted and dropped a heavy stick into a bowl of seeds.

Her name was Imulu. She might be fifteen, or thirty, for all Claire could tell. Her head was shaved clean around the back so that her remaining hair resembled a glistening caracul skullcap. She had a sturdy build and wore a diagonal sling of woven birchbark across her heavy round breasts. Occasionally she threw Claire an inscrutable glance as the stick fell. Thunk.

Claire lifted the camera and, since the woman made no protest, was about to snap the shutter when the rhythm broke and her subject reached into the shadows behind the bowl. An instant later Imulu was hoisting an infant from a bed of pandan leaves.

Claire’s pulse quickened as the baby snuggled into its sling and latched onto the young mother’s breast. This time when Imulu looked her way, Claire felt exposed, as if this stranger could read her every fear, every pretense that had brought her here and, most clearly of all, the primal condition that was destined to thwart her ludicrous ambitions. Far from the hostile glares of Radcliffe-Brown’s Andamanese, Imulu’s face bloomed with good-natured derision.

Before she could react, however, Shep reappeared with an armload of blooming white specimens. He looked thrillingly young and happy.

“Eria kurzii!” he cried.

Field notes

January 20, 1937

By most accounts, the trip was a success. This morning I heard Leyo boasting to Som and Jina that memsaab tasted snake in the forest. The story of our great adventure seems to amuse him no end. That we went at all earns us gold stars. That we cut it short earns black marks only in my own book.

I did survive my first taste of snake and one night in the field, but the next day’s boar did me in. When I crawled back to the fire after losing my lunch, Imulu grinned as if I were the most pathetic excuse for a female she’d ever laid eyes on. I suspect she’d detected my secret from the start but thought I was too dumb even to know I’m pregnant. At this point in my disgrace, however, I realized that she’d been trying all morning to model the Biya way of motherhood for me, and I had been too dumb to see that these lessons in infant caretaking were offered in charity.

Shep, alas, took one look at my pasty face and insisted we head back to Ross.

It took everything I had to convince him I didn’t need to be carried.

I felt better as soon as the stink of boiling pig fat was behind us, but then the trek absorbed me, and only when we reached the beach, as Shep was checking his watch, did I regain the presence of mind to ask how the launch would know to come for us.

He scuffed his boot heel in the sand and told me not to be angry. He’d arranged for Lieutenant Reynold to make a run past the cove each day at four o’clock—just in case.

To top it off, he took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. Despite all the layers of grime and sweat and citronella. Had he really asked me not to be angry with him?

Of course, I couldn’t get away scot-free. Claire, darling, he said. Damn stupid, all things considered, but now the cat’s out . . .

No future field trips for me. Claire, darling. He’d caught me cold being selfish and foolhardy, and many another husband would be far less forgiving. But I don’t regret this first foray, brief and fraught as it was. Night in the jungle was a misery of heat and wet and biting, stinging, whining, crawling creatures against which our puny net offered little defense, but we saw the Biya dance. We listened to them chant. Shep up and stomping with the other young men. Leyo’s head thrown back in delight as the full moon breached that penny of sky far at the top of the canopy.

I can still feel the quiet pressure on each of my fingertips in turn as Kuli took my hand in his and tried to teach me the correct sounds of the old Biya language—sounds that Leyo gets all wrong. Before I ruined everything, Shep had gone out twice with Leyo and Imulu’s husband, Sempe, and they collected more than a dozen orchid specimens while I stayed with Kuli and the women.

I learned from old widow Mam Golat how to boil a boar and how the wily Imulu worked while simultaneously nursing little Artam—

Breast feeding. God help me. Am I ready for this?

If only I’d managed to hold on. If I were Ruth Benedict or Margaret Mead, I’d have been living with Leyo’s people for weeks by now. Pregnancy would never hold them back, much less childbirth.

No, they’d give birth right in the field, presided over by the old grandmother and chief. Then they’d mine every minute for cultural significance and write a bloody book about it.

The monsoon was in full swing by the time she went into labor. All through the hospital, pails had been set out to catch the leaks, around which teams of lizards raced, little phantoms against the furred green stains of mildew. Fists of rain slammed against the tin roof as Claire counted through her contractions, and the young Indian nurses hummed as they wiped her brow. The daring giggled at Shep’s lanky presence brooding through the hours.

He steadied himself by folding a two-month-old Times into birds of paradise, an island diversion he’d picked up from Som. The nurses offered him tea and sweets, as unaccustomed to the presence of fathers during labor as they were to viewing their chief surgeon as a human being.

Claire told him to go tend to his other patients, but his only other patients at the moment were waiting for elective procedures on the mainland.

“You’re stuck with me.”

“Then do something useful.”

“You’re irritable.”

“You try pushing a watermelon out between your thighs.”

“I might have to go back to America to find one.”

“Go, then!”

He went. She screamed. Dr. Ratna Bose—the “ladies’ doctor”—swept in and monitored Claire’s progress with a magisterial wave.

But now she felt abandoned. What if the baby came before he returned? What if something went wrong? It would all be her fault. She knew she wasn’t thinking straight, but she couldn’t help it. She shouldn’t have driven him away.

She began to shiver as the nurses mopped her brow. “Where did he go?”

“It is just as well. Gentlemen don’t belong in maternity wards.” Dr. Bose parked her fists on ample hips. “Especially gentlemen doctors.”

And then she was seized by another spiral of pain and could think of nothing else.

Four contractions later Shep returned, breathless, bearing something in a bell jar. He set the wooden base on the table beside her bed. Under the glass a yellow orchid bloomed with the face of a monkey.

He removed the bell and squeezed the monkey’s jaws between his fingers like she and Robin used to do with snapdragons when she was a child. Shep put no words in its mouth. Instead he gently bent the stem so the monkey appeared to dance as he hummed the “Waltz of the Flowers.”

The nurses gaped from the doorway until Dr. Bose shooed them away. Claire, weeping, was midway through it before she noticed the next contraction.

“Who are you?” she demanded when the agony shuddered off again.

He blazed his dazzling gap-toothed grin. “Damned if I’ve the foggiest.”

One hour later, young Tyler Durant emerged on the crest of a final convulsive push. He let out a polite but voluble cry, measured eight pounds, twenty inches, and had all requisite fingers and toes, plus big pink ears and a velvety shag of chestnut hair, eyes that blinked at the strange world around him as if calculating its weight.

Claire was speechless when their son was placed in her arms. Shep leaned over them both.

“Hallo, young Ty,” he greeted their son. “Welcome home, little man.”

Naila bonded with the baby right from the start. Bookish and shy, she seemed to have few friends of her own. She preferred to orbit around her parents, and caring for Ty gave her an excuse to stay close. Every day she’d race home from school to help Jina tend and play with him. She’d sit on her haunches memorizing the lullabies that Claire sang, and with the slightest encouragement, she’d chant him ditties in Urdu. She was tender and careful, as attentive as her mother—both of them as gentle as any trained ayah Claire could imagine.

Shep wasn’t so sure. “There’s a line between servants and family in Asia,” he said one night in bed. “It can get blurry, but it’s best not to forget it’s there.”

However well-intentioned, the warning landed like an affront. Claire tried but failed to keep her voice light. “You sound like your father.”

For several seconds, she heard only the breath of the surf outside. Then, “That’s a low blow.”

The sting of hurt surprised Claire. “Sorry. It’s something I’d imagine your father saying. Remember, I’ve never met the man.”

“And I intend to keep it that way.” He rolled toward her, found the tip of her nose and kissed it in truce, but she took note. However much Shep loathed his father, the arrogant colonialist, he might have more in common with him than he cared to admit or even realized.

As far as Claire was concerned, Naila was simply a wonder. One day the child demonstrated how, when she was little, she used to press her face to the kitchen screen so the wires would carve the world outside into squares that made her feel safe. Then, when she started school, her teacher Sen fastened a map of the earth onto Naila’s classroom wall, and the crisscross of latitude and longitude gave her a similar sense of security, a way to manage—to bear—the immensity of all that she could not fathom.

Teacher Sen’s map became a new screen through which she traced continents, oceans, mountains. These are our islands, Naila would repeat and show on Claire’s map how her teacher stabbed at the pale blue Bay of Bengal, how he ran his forefinger up and down the spine of green bits marked Andaman Nicobar Archipelago. Then he would sweep both palms outward as if to embrace the wall—but all of this is our home.

When he spun to face the class—Naila reenacted the movement—Teacher Sen’s spectacles often fell from their perch atop his bulging forehead, and he’d catch them with a flourish in his left hand even though he wrote with his right, and he never stopped talking about the miracle of geography as he performed this feat. Master the map and you master the world. That is how the British did it.

His other pupils sniggered and picked their noses and ridiculed him behind his back, but Naila understood. The British came from a place that occupied barely one square of the map’s screen, while India and Burma spread over more than ten squares. How could people from such a small place rule over a land so far away and so much larger than their own?

Claire had no answer, but Teacher Sen did. Map mastery. Like Naila in her mother’s kitchen, the British stayed securely at home with themselves, yet by mastering the map, they owned the world on the other side of the screen.

Naila imagined floating invisibly through that screen and descending into scenes she’d glimpsed only in photographs and illustrations. Cities, palaces, deserts, and lakes. Teacher Sen said it snowed where he grew up, in Kalimpong. He tried to describe the towering mountains of his childhood, but for Naila, such natural wonders were as foreign as skyscrapers. She loved to dream of them even if she never expected or would dare to visit them in real life.

She told Claire about the day she came home from school to the news that she and her parents would soon be leaving the house with the blue gate where they had lived since she was born, that they were to move across the harbor to Ross Island to work for the new British doctor and his American wife. To Naila, it felt as if America herself was coming to Port Blair!

America seemed the most exotic country of all. Larger on the map than England and India combined, home to the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon, to Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers, who sometimes appeared in moving pictures at Aberdeen Cinema. The funny men Naila liked, but she didn’t know what to make of the cinema ladies who hiked up their skirts and drove motorcars and kissed men full on the lips. No one behaved like that in Indian movies, let alone in Naila’s own experience, but Americans seemed to have bigger spirits even than the British. Would the new memsaab also have a big spirit? Her ma had laughed at such childish excitement and said she hoped so.

Claire took the girl’s hand and replied that her spirit paled next to Naila’s.

The baby appeared to think so, too. One afternoon Claire came out of her study to find Naila alone with Ty in the parlor. Naila, in her blue school uniform, sat cross-legged on the divan with Ty Babu, as she called him, in her lap. Neither the infant nor the girl noticed Claire. Naila was too busy feeding him.

All she had was a bottle of water, but her head tipped birdlike to one side, arms nesting the baby against her. Beautiful, was Claire’s first thought. Precious. But it was more than that.

Naila held that bottle like a sacred object, and as he sucked, Ty kept his gaze locked on the girl’s. He caught a red thread from the stitching in her blouse, and the intensity with which he rubbed it, between his thumb and middle finger, made it seem a gesture of devotion.

November 15, 1937

Happy birthday, dear Vivvy!

I’m sending this care of your editor in Sydney, though you’re doubtless raising muck up and down the Malay. I hope as I write this that you’re having a bang-up celebration.

As for us, it’s been rather a turbulent year in paradise. Ty is the highlight, of course. In my entirely unbiased opinion, the boy is abso-blooming brilliant. At five months he swims like a fish and sits like a dog. Any day now he’ll be babbling Aka Biya—the language of the people Claire is studying.

Or trying to, between setting up the nursery and fielding congratulatory visits from the cantonment matrons. My bride has become a stunning young mother, and she dotes on Ty, as do we all. Occasionally she grumbles about getting back out in the field, but I remind her that patience is a virtue.

Happily, I’m not quite so constrained. Just yesterday I made an excursion that might interest you, to a convict settlement called Ferrargunj—one of about sixty built around the archipelago over the past half century by released prisoners and their wives. Ferrargunj is one of the few not on the outer coastline. It sits near an inland river, which allows the Ferrargunjians to clear the valuable inland timber and send it by raft down to the sawmill here in Port Blair.

My official purpose was to check on the village dispensary, though “official” is a slight stretch. Technically, these village rounds are the duty of my second-in-command, Lt. Gupta, but Gupta’s more British than I’ll ever be and seems to consider the convict settlers so far beneath him that he can’t be bothered to spit on them. As part of my collegial appeasement policy, I’ve elected to visit these outpost dispensaries myself. Two birds, as they say. I always take our man Leyo with me and, after I treat a few raging sores and machete wounds and the standard quota of malarial cases, we go orchid hunting.

Yesterday we also had a forest officer to see we didn’t lose our way. Not much chance of that with Leyo along, but the forester, one Luke Benegal, was a fine chap, and I was lucky to have them both, since we discovered a giant Grammatophyllum speciosum in the crotch of an ancient marblewood tree. This particular orchid is not only rare and enormous, but the aboriginals use it as a cure for scorpion and centipede poisoning. It blooms only once every two years, and this one was covered with spears of beautiful leopard-spotted blossoms! The whole thing must have weighed over a ton, but we managed to wrestle off a single root bundle that we could hoist between the three of us. As we staggered back to the boat, Leyo pointed out a dozen more specimens that I’d have given my eye to collect, but this trophy was all we could manage for one day.

It’s how one survives in the Andamans, to cultivate these sorts of fascinations with the local flora and fauna. Our current Commissioner Wilkerson tells me Ferrargunj was named after his predecessor Michael Ferrar, who spent eight years in the Andamans, studied five South Asian languages, and collected over four thousand butterfly specimens! A man cut from the cloth of Kipling’s Lurgan Sahib.

I do believe that Claire, too, will make something swell of our time here, once she’s able to return to her tribe. You astutely remarked in your last letter that she sounded like my kind of girl. I never knew I had a “kind of girl,” but I do now believe she is it. Not fearless like you. Sorry, dear sister, but I’d be terribly intimidated by a wife who wanted to beat the world’s drum as loudly as you do. You know I say that with hugest affection, but I’m sure you are not surprised to hear that I love Claire for her quiet tenacity and her youthful formlessness. I don’t mean that she is formless—au contraire! Only that she’s still coming into herself, you know? She’s willing to admit that she doesn’t know it all, and between the two of us, we refreshingly know next to nothing!

And you, Viv? Your last missive about the nefarious doings of the Japanese in our old stomping grounds sounded decidedly ominous, and I don’t trust you to keep your nose clean if all hell breaks out. Why don’t you see about coming here instead?

You could cover our latest Nationalist rumblings. There’s talk of another round of hunger strikes brewing at our Cellular Jail—there have been several over the years—and I’m quite in sympathy. All the prisoners are demanding is basic stuff like clean water and light and books, but Mr. Gandhi’s now weighing in, too, and he wants the politicals to be sent back to jails in their home states. If he prevails it won’t exactly be the end of the Raj, but it might be newsworthy.

And of course, I’d love to introduce you to Claire and our glorious boy. Do come!

Your ever-loving brother,

Shep

Claire loved motherhood. She did. It had simply come too soon. Her only physical outlet was to walk the baby around Ross Island, which took all of an hour, and some days she would pause when Ty was asleep in his pram, and gaze out across the water to the forest in the north and wonder what her other self would be discovering at this exact moment in Behalla. What Kuli could be teaching her, or how that other baby, Artam, was growing. Not that she would trade Ty for any of them, but the Biya beckoned her in a way that motherhood couldn’t. While her son represented the future, the Biya represented a world that might soon become extinct. Time was crucial in both cases, but she felt it especially keenly when it came to documenting the Biya, and she’d only just begun to trust the promise of that work when pregnancy intervened. She longed to get back to it.

While Ty was nursing, of course, field work would be impossible, but once he was weaned, it would still be a challenge. As a new father, Shep had become unnervingly protective. Lately, in honor of his paternal role, he’d even cut back on his own expeditions.

Also, there was a new insistence to his affections that could verge on cloying, and the harder he reached for her, the more Claire tended to pull away. It horrified her to admit this, even to herself, but a part of her was responding to both Shep and Ty the way she once had to Robin—as if they somehow threatened something deep inside her that she couldn’t even name.

Duty played a role in all this. She should have known it would. There had been a day back in New York. A thundershower. Romantic, she’d thought at the time. To Shep, however, the downpour represented an obligation.

As they’d settled into a coffee shop to wait out the rain, he kept apologizing for his failure to bring an umbrella. “I could kick myself,” he persisted, even after they ordered their lunch.

“Sounds like you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.” The words had bubbled up, amused, scolding—and unrecognizably libertine.

Shep wouldn’t play. “Conditioned response is more like it.” He fingered the starched white cuff of his shirt, which gaped around his thin wrists. His hands tapered to squared pink nails, their restlessness at odds with their grooming.

The rain had formed silver thistles on the window glass. “My father’s a British Royal Medical Officer,” Shep said. “In our family, a mistake like that would result in the silent treatment for days.”

The silent treatment. In our family. His confessional tone had thrown down a marker. Whether he wished to or not, he held himself accountable. At the time, Shep didn’t know about Robin’s death, and his response when she did tell him later was the soul of compassion. Still, Claire shuddered to think how the British Royal Medical Officer would react if he learned what she’d done to her brother. Tread with care, Shep was telling her. Duty, to a fault.

And what could be a greater duty than motherhood?

Evenings at the club, she watched her husband across the terrace, sucking on his pipe. A new habit he’d picked up from the officers, she suspected, to make himself appear more mature. More fatherly.

Their son was their joy, their connection. She adored them both. But she couldn’t help herself. When Tom Lutty, the wireless officer from North Point Station, happened to mention that some new field transceivers had come in for use by the bush police, she wanted to know more.

According to Lieutenant Lutty, the devices were small as rucksacks and had a signal range of about eight kilometers. This was approximately the distance from Behalla to the coast.

“How do they work?” she asked, bracing herself for Lutty’s effusive reply. The young redhead’s father was a Royal Scots Fusilier, his mother Bengali royalty—reputedly a scandalous liaison, though there was nothing remotely scandalous about Tom Lutty himself. He loved his “tinker-toys,” as he called the station equipment, and could go on about their technical intricacies, ad nauseum.

Before he got too deeply into the nuts and bolts, Claire figured out what she was really asking. “I mean, how do you talk through them? They’re not telephones, are they?”

The wireless officer bit back a laugh. “You never heard of Morse?”

She laid out her plan to Shep that night as they walked back to the house. If Lutty trained them, they could have a lifeline when they went into the forest. All they’d have to do was ask Lieutenant Reynold to run his launch past a point within range of transmission, and whichever of them was out in the field could deliver a daily AOK.

She didn’t mention that it had been an afterthought to include Shep in the training, a subtle way of making her point, since he’d never seen any need to touch base when he went off without her.

“You’re that eager to get back at it?” The flickering gaslight warped his smile. “We could go out together, like before.”

But the quaver in his voice betrayed him. She said, with some calculation, “You’d leave Ty alone with the servants? Without either of us nearby?”

His distrust of servant loyalty aside, Shep had been just five when his parents sent him and his sister off to boarding school. If not for Vivian, he’d told Claire, he never would have survived it. And one was a far cry from five.

There was a long pause. “I just hate to let you go,” he said finally.

She took his arm and pulled him close.

Fortunately, Tom made Morse code fun. He loved puzzles and games, and he seemed to take special pride in his speed of translation. The wireless was a battery-powered kit with an antenna that extended several feet overhead. On clear days they practiced setting it up on the lawn behind the station, with Claire transmitting essential messages such as AOK and SOS. Lutty would give them a thumbs up or down from the window when he received the correct, or botched, message.

Claire and Shep both needed the chattering keys slowed to the pace of a metronome before they could grasp even the most basic incoming phrases. “It’s like music,” Claire said.

“Right,” Lutty agreed. “Notes an’ rests. Rests an’ rests. Notes an’ notes.”

“Patterns.” She studied the page of dots and dashes.

“Just listen.” Lutty closed his eyes and began to nod as his finger tapped the key.

Shep said, “Sounds like cardiac arrhythmia to me.”

But Morse was the least of it. Frequency, range, call sign, directional, crystal, coil, triode . . . Claire thought, even machinery has its own language.

At the end of their eighth lesson, after ten straight thumbs up, Tom placed a box phonograph on the window ledge above them and set it spinning with “Goody, Goody.”

“Guess he’s signing off on you,” Shep said as Benny Goodman’s clarinet trilled down at them. “Can you jitterbug?”

“Not well.”

He called up to Lutty. “Get on down here, Tom, and show my bride what you’ve got.”

An hour later she collapsed, laughing beside Shep on the grass, the exuberant lieutenant still spinning and shimmying solo before a crowd of cheering officers and bemused Indian MPs.