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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 long 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.