Lips Touch: Three Times Page 5

  Vasudev chuckled and chortled and went off whistling, leaving Estella to her work. Still pale, she took a flask from her pocket and drank down her daily dose of the tonic Vasudev delivered to her, lest she too be burned passing through the Fire. Then she walked slowly into it. When she reemerged some time later, she carried the souls of two babies in her arms and the older children walked behind her in a row like ducklings. Silently, they followed her out of Hell.

  And far away in the mountains of Kashmir, the rescuers, on the very verge of giving up, unearthed a pocket of air and pulled twenty-two children out of the rubble alive.

  It was a miracle.

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  TWO The Curse

  A t the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of. It was generally agreed that she had been in India too long. It had "gotten to her." She spoke the native tongue, and not just Hindustani but also Rajasthani and a touch of Gujarati, and she had even been heard to haggle once in Persian! It suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India into her very mouth and tasted it, like a lover's fingers. It was indecent.

  And if that wasn't bad enough, she ate mangoes in the bazaar with the natives, juice dribbling down her chin, and was said to imbibe a tonic prepared for her daily by a dreadful little man with a burn scar over half his face. She touched beggars and had even been seen carrying rag-swaddled infants home with her in her arms. It was rumored that her handsome factotum had been one such baby, which in itself bespoke a lifetime in this land -- a lifetime of rescued beggar babes grown to manhood.

  He was always at her side, lordly as a raja and unsmiling as an assassin, with a dangerous gleam in his eye and odd bulges about his tailored suits that hinted at concealed knives. Plenty of whispers went round town about him -- that he could speak with tigers, that he had a forked tail he wore tucked down one trouser leg (the left),

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  that he had been seen crossing a street without his shadow, and that he would do anything for the old bitch. Even the most shameless of gossips can inadvertently hit upon truths. He would do anything for her, and had done, many times.

  Pranjivan was his name, which meant "life," and Estella had given him both: his name and his life. She had carried him out of the Fire in her arms when he was a tiny brown child too young to follow on his own two feet. He alone knew all her secrets, and aside from his household duties, he spied for her. He sent out his shadow across the land -- she had taught him how when he was a boy -- and he maintained detailed lists of the wicked. He helped Estella decide who would die, in order that children might live. And when she emerged from Hell each day through a trapdoor in the shade of a massive peepal tree, he was there waiting for her with the rickshaw men, ready to take her home.

  On the day of the earthquake, he knew something was wrong as soon as she came up blinking into the light of day. "What is it, Memsahib?" he asked.

  "Take me to the Agent's Residence," she said quietly, and he did.

  Jaipur was a Rajput kingdom ruled by warrior princes, not a part of the British Empire. There were no officious governors or magistrates here, only the Political Agent, a mustachioed former cavalryman whose military career had come to an end when he lost an arm to a tigress in the Himalayas. Now he had to hold the reins in his teeth when he hunted jackal with the native princes, which was one of his primary duties, and for which service he was rewarded with a palatial home and a small army of servants. He even kept a hookah-burda just to light his pipe.

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  When Estella appeared uninvited at his gate, the party was in full swing. It was a christening for the Agent's third daughter, but it looked like any other party -- bright gowns billowing in a garden, gentlemen lolling about with drinks sweating in their big, hot hands. There was a table laden with gifts, and there was a pink iced cake, but the baby's bassinet seemed like an afterthought at the edge of things, and the baby within lay silent and composed, gazing up at the fringe of neem trees with solemn gray eyes.

  "What's the old bitch doing here?" murmured the Political Agent to his wife, and they both cringed. At the best of times Estella had a way of robbing them of amusement at their own vapid talk, and she looked particularly grim on this occasion. The usually neat coils of her silver hair were frayed from the drafts of hellfire she had passed through, and her heart was heavy with the curse she had come to deliver.

  She went straight to the bassinet and looked down at the pretty baby. Silence fell over the merrymakers. It struck them all like a scene from a fairy tale, and Estella a witch come to spoil their fun. "She looks like a madwoman," someone whispered. Estella didn't even look up. She reached toward the baby, and the baby grasped her finger and smiled up at her.

  Estella's heart clenched. She couldn't change her mind. Twenty-two children in Kashmir lived and Vasudev wouldn't hesitate to take them back again; he was no doubt dreaming up awful accidents at this very moment. So she did what she had come to do. She said, "I curse this child with the most beautiful voice ever to slip from human lips." She looked up and peered around at the partygoers. Their faces were flushed with laughter, with liquor. They seemed to be waiting for her to continue, so she did. "But take care that you

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  never hear it. Anyone who does shall fall down dead on the spot. From this moment forward, any sound this child utters will kill"

  There were gasps across the garden, and then a titter of incredulous laughter. Someone cried out, "A curse! How rare!"

  "Capital fun!"

  "It's too, too divine!"

  Estella stared at them. Delight gleamed in their eyes. They didn't believe her. Of course they didn't. Her Majesty's subjects didn't go around believing things willy-nilly. But whether they believed it or not, the curse was as real as the heat, and soon they would know it.

  How soon?

  Estella's finger was still caught in the girl's tiny fist -- she'd never ceased to marvel at the strength of a baby's grip -- and she looked back down into those gray eyes. She was a lovely little thing, this child. Estella had never had a baby of her own, her husband had died so young. In the darkness of grief in the days after his death, she'd hoped ferociously that there might be a baby--that something of him might be arranging itself within her even as she followed his coffin to the cemetery. But it was not to be. She had been left alone, and she had also been left empty.

  A breeze stirred the trees and the baby smiled again. She looked as if she might coo, and Estella felt suddenly that her own death was perched upon her shoulder like a bird. How easy to die, she thought, and how fitting, if she were to be the first victim of this curse ... the first victim of this child, whom at the behest of a demon she had just turned into a murderer. For, as surely as twenty-two children in Kashmir lived, people in Jaipur would die.

  But not yet. Vasudev had his curses, but Estella was not without power of her own. Before the Political Agent's wife could sweep over

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  and scoop up her child, Estella leaned down, pressed her fingertip gently but firmly to the baby's lips and whispered, "You will stay silent, won't you, little thing? Until you are old enough to understand the curse, your voice will be as a bird in a cage." And so it was.

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  Three Limbo

  Year by year the girl grew up. Queen Victoria died. Black rats aboard steamships carried plague from China to India. Millions died. Estella and Vasudev were kept very busy. The Great War began with a shot. The Germans used poison gas first, but the British followed suit. They were so ashamed of themselves they forbade the very soldiers who carried the chlorine canisters from uttering the word "gas." Millions died. In India, Vasudev's curses mostly came to their fruition. Among their victims were a child in Chittagong who went fleetingly invisible every time she sneezed, and a Punjabi princeling who crowed like a cockerel at dawn.

  But through some remarkable depth of will, the gray-eyed daughter of the Agent of Jaipur held her own cur
se in a curious limbo, and after more than seventeen years, the British still had no reason to believe in it.

  Vasudev chafed and swore. "It's not fair, you meddling with the servants!" he hissed to Estella, his face flushing in fury so that its two halves nearly matched crimson. "You haven't let things take their natural course!"

  "Natural course?" Estella repeated, giving him a flat look. "There are no curses in the 'natural course.' You've had every opportunity to

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  influence the Agent's servants too, Vasudev. You spend enough time spying in the garden there."

  The demon gave her a sour look but said nothing. What could he say? That that damned Pranjivan had taken unfair advantage of his broad shoulders and flashing white teeth to sway the girl's servants? That the factotum was too damned handsome, and an ugly little demon hadn't a chance at a game like that? It was true, but he wouldn't say it. Even demons have some dignity. The truth was, Estella had won -- so far. First that trick of whispering the girl silent until she was old enough to understand the curse, and now this. The servants believed Pranjivan, damned handsome beggar, and the girl believed the servants. In that raucous palace of singing sisters, she lived her life butterfly-silent, never giving so much as a laugh out loud. When Vasudev spied on her in the garden, he saw a deep sadness in her, a dreamy wistfulness, but he never saw her test the curse, not even on a beetle or an ant. It was inhuman. The girl wasn't normal!

  That one unfulfilled curse was the single blemish on Vasudev's joy when he guessed that the old bitch was dying.

  Estella had been old for a long time, and sometimes the demon had feared that she would never die, that he would be hamstrung by her human sensibilities forever. But now she was fading. Growing papery. Pain became plain in every furrow of her face and in the way she moved gingerly down the onyx tunnels to their morning meetings. She was dying at last! Vasudev wanted to gloat, but the curse restrained him. It was unthinkable he shouldn't have the satisfaction of it while the old bitch was still alive to suffer from it!

  He sat opposite Estella and drummed his fingers on the table, unable to triumph at her pain and pallor. Furiously he wondered

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  how he might finally tip the balance. How he might make the girl speak at last.

  He had no way of knowing, as he scowled and muttered, that at that very moment a soldier on a train from Bombay was discovering a lost diary wedged between the seat and the wall, and not just any lost diary, but the lost diary of the cursed girl herself. And even as that train wended its way toward Jaipur, the soldier was flipping it open to the first page.

  Some would assert that Providence was at work, shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Others would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: A lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched memories.

  In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.

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  FOUR The Solders

  he soldier's name was James Dorsey, and he had dropped his lighter down between the seat and the wall of the compartment. It was the lighter his friend Gaffney had told

  him to take off his corpse if he became a corpse, and then he had. Six hundred thousand men had died at the Somme, but James had not. What remained of his regiment had been torn apart in the Second Marne, and again, somehow, James had survived. He'd joined the Foreign Office after the War and come to India for another try at death -- a more interesting one than mortars and gas, perhaps. Here among the tigers and the dacoits' long knives there were many to choose from, not the least of them the marvelous fevers with names like exotic flowers.

  Digging out the dropped lighter, James found the diary wedged down between the seat and the wall and he fished it out too. It was bound in floral linen and filled with girlish script. "The secrets of a blushing maiden," he quipped with a smile that brought his dimples out, and he flipped it right open with no scruple to preserving the maidenly modesty of its writer. Indeed, he expected none. He had endured his sea voyage in the company of the "fishing fleet" -- English ladies hying themselves to India to catch husbands -- and

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  he felt as if he had barely escaped being drugged and dragged to the altar. He thought he knew the character of English girls in India, and surely this diary would be more of the same.

  Tucking Gaffney s lighter back into his pocket, James began to read.

  His smile wavered. It clung for a time in disbelief and then fell away in stages. The little book did indeed hold the secrets of a blushing maiden, but they weren't the sort of secrets he'd expected, and by the time his train arrived in Jaipur, James had read the diary through twice and found himself -- against all expectation -- to be half in love with its writer.

  That was ridiculous, of course. Certainly a man couldn't fall in love with cursive on a page, could he? He scanned the inside covers of the little book for some hint of the girl's identity but found no name.

  So, a mystery.

  He held the book tenderly as he stepped off the train and into his new life, and later, in his lodgings, he read it a third time, mining it for clues as to who the girl might be. There was enough to suggest she had lived in Jaipur, though whether she still did was uncertain. The diary had been lost on a train, after all. It occurred to him she might be gone. Absurdly, the thought left him desolate. He chided himself that she was only a stranger.

  But she wasn't, really. She was all here, in this book. Not her name, and not her face, but she was here, and absurd or not, he thought he might actually love her.

  If she was in Jaipur, he vowed, he would find her.

  He didn't have long to wait. It was only his second day in the city when he was invited to a garden party at the Agent's Residence.

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  The upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service were known as the "heaven-born," and when James saw the legion of white-turbaned servants bearing trays of colored sweets and cocktails among the fantastical banyan trees and the overlush vine flowers, he began to see why. In England, bureaucrats could never have lived like this, like little kings with monkeys on leashes and stables full of fine hunting horses. He smiled at his new colleagues, but behind his smile he was thinking how these men had been tipping back gin while other, better men had been holding in their entrails with both hands. His fingers went automatically to Gaffney's lighter in his pocket.

  All of James's childhood friends had died in the War. Every single one. James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once, he might have believed it to be the work of Providence, but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others, flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands, and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.

  He was distracted from his grim thoughts when he heard a raspy voice over his left shoulder say, "That one, at the piano, that's the girl the old bitch cursed. Damned good fun!"

  His cursed girl! James's first impulse was to turn to look but he stopped himself. He didn't like that raspy voice. It had a lecherous sneer about it, and he didn't want his first glimpse of the girl to come at the end of a lecher's pointing finger. He held himself still, his back to the conversation and the piano. He heard the music, though, and became suddenly alert to it.

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  He had a good ear, and even in the din of high, thin laughter and meaty guffaws he could tell the pianist was extraordinary. Again, he almost turned, but stopped himself and went on listening, imagining what she looked like, trying to conjure a face from the exquisite notes that flowed from her fingers. Delicate, he guessed, but passionate. He felt certain her hair would be dark, and whimsically he imagined freckles. He smiled. It had been a lon
g time since he had savored anticipation like this. Mostly in the past years the things he'd anticipated had been heart-stopping, vicious things like death-wish dashes from one trench to the next.

  While the notes of a Chopin sonata drifted through the garden, he waited and imagined, and behind him, the gossip ensued.

  "Cursed?" asked a brassy female voice.

  "She's going to be the death of us all," came the reply in a low, ominous whisper such as children affect to tell ghost stories by candlelight.

  The woman laughed and asked skeptically, "Her?"

  "I know, I know. She seems an unlikely instrument of doom, but so it is. It happened at her christening. The old bitch -- the emerald miner's widow, you've heard about her? -- stood over her frilled bassinet and said the lass would slay us all ... not with knives, mind you, or with poison in our rum or asps in our beds, not by mutiny or pistol or any other means you might conjure for killing, but with a very queer murder weapon indeed. You see, that little lady will slay us with ..." -- he paused for effect -- "... her voice"

  This was not news to James, who had read the girl's diary, but he heard a derisive snort of laughter from the woman. "Her voice? Whatever do you mean?" she asked.

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  Slowly, careful to keep the piano out of his line of sight, James turned to the gossipmongers. The lecher was a white-bearded fellow and the woman had a horsey, well-bred face. They were craning their necks to see across the garden, and there was a leer in the man's eyes as he darted out his pink tongue to wet his lips. With great restraint, James did not follow his lewd gaze to the piano.

  "Simply this," the lecher explained to the woman. "The old bitch pronounced that when the girl speaks, all within earshot shall drop down dead."

  "Ha-ha! You lot are still living, I see. It must have been a good joke when she spoke her first words -- bit of a flinch all around?"

  "Yes, well, I suppose there will be. You see, she has never yet uttered a single sound."