So far, I have managed to forbear and doubtless I will go on forbearing. But sometimes when they treat me like an idiot child, talking loud and in short sentences, with that smug sense of their own charity -- how good they are, to speak to the idiot girl!-- I can't help but amuse myself deliberating, if I were to kill them with a word, what should that word be? Hello? Listen? Oops? But I rather think it wouldn't be a word at all, but a song, that they might hear the voice I sacrifice for their sake every single day.
I am always sick with guilt after such wicked thoughts, and the guilt drives the wickedness out.
Her name was Anamique, after a Flemish soprano her mother had heard sing the role of Isolde once at Bayreuth. Anamique had been singing Isolde in her head since she was twelve and her mother had ordered the libretto for her older daughters' singing lessons. Inside herself, where she sang, Anamique's voice was far more beautiful than her sisters' voices, but she was the only one who knew it. She was the only one who would ever know it.
Years of warnings had built up in her. Her ayah believed the curse and so did the rest of the servants, even the stern old Rajput whose job it had been to guide her around the garden on her pony, Mackerel, when she was small. The servants had always implored her to keep silent, and they prevailed. Even while her mother commanded her to speak, her ayah was there whispering in Rajasthani in her other ear, "Hush, my pearl, keep quiet. You must keep your voice in its cage, like a beautiful bird. If you let it out, it will kill us all."
Anamique believed her. One couldn't help believing things whispered in Rajasthani.
To her family, she wrote notes on a small tablet she carried always with her, though her mother often disdained to read them, as it would have required putting on her spectacles, which she took great pains never to do.
For the servants, who were illiterate, Anamique developed an elaborate language of gestures that almost looked like dance when shaped by her graceful hands. And when they spoke to her - bless them -- they didn't raise their voices as if she were deaf, or speak slowly as if she were dim-witted.
Because of her silence, Anamique had not been sent to school in England like her sisters and all the other British children, but had spent her whole life in India, and most of that with the servants. There was more of India in her than of that far green isle she had rarely seen. She played the vina as well as she played the piano, and she knew all the Hindu gods by name. She had ridden a camel in the Thar Desert, scooped rice into a saddhu's bowl, and been lifted by an elephant's trunk to gather figs from the high branches. She had even gone back to her ayah's dusty village for festivals and slept on a string charpoy with the native children, nestled together like spoons. The voice that was full within her not only sang full lyric soprano but could chant the Vedas, and yet she bit her lip and played accompaniment to her sisters' unremarkable singing.
As her ayah instructed, she kept her own voice like a bird in a cage. She imagined it as a willful songbird with a puffed breast, its feathers gray like her eyes, with a flash of peacock blue at the neck, and the cage as an ornate prison of rusted scrollwork with a little latched door that she never dared open. Sometimes the urge to do so was nearly overpowering.
She was playing piano for her sisters one afternoon a few days after the garden party when a parcel was delivered for her. The chap-rassi brought it to her and Anamique ceased playing at once so that her eldest sister's voice was left stranded in the air. "Ana!" Rosie scolded, but Anamique paid her no heed. Nothing had ever been delivered just for her before. She scraped back the piano bench and took the twine-tied parcel out into the garden where she opened it and slid her diary out. Stunned, she clasped it to her chest. She had thought it lost forever! Her relief bled into agitation, though, as she began to think of someone finding it, reading it, as they must have done to know to deliver it here. Her heartbeat quickened as she opened the little book and saw a letter tucked inside it. With trembling fingers she unfolded it and read:
When I was a boy, it was my job to slice the heels off the new loaves and throw them in the woodstove to feed the imp my mum said lived in the fire, to forestall him burning down our cottage out of spite. He was a hungry imp, she said, but I was a hungry boy and I ate those heels myself when she looked away, and that poor imp might've starved but our cottage never burned, and maybe I grew taller for the extra bread.
And I was tasked more than once to go and drown the May kittens in the pond, as my gran said cats born in that unlucky month suffocated babes in their cradles and invited snakes into the house. But I never killed a kitten in my life and only hid them and brought them cream when I could. And never did a baby die from my failure to murder kittens, nor a snake cross our threshold but that I brought it there myself in the pocket of my own short pants.
And I have fought on the plains of France where evil fifinelle spirits, they say, tickle gunners and make their shells go astray. And though I manned a howitzer myself and sent many shells arcing into the night, I never felt their tickle on my neck. Maybe the fifinelles fought for our side and only beleaguered the Germans, and maybe a shell went astray by their ministrations that would have been meant for me.
Or maybe all that's done in the world is done by men and chance, and omens are only fears, and curses are only fancies. I never saw God save a kitten or fill a boys belly with bread, and I never met him on the battlefield passing out gas masks to the men. And if he cant be troubled to catch some bullets in his fists, and if he wont reach down to grab a mountain and keep it from crumbling away, and if he forgets to send the rains one year and millions die of hunger, is it likely he's bothering himself cursing one beautiful girl in Jaipur?
Maybe he's sitting somewhere right now knitting up Providence like homespun, but I've seen too much blood to ever trust his cloth. I would sooner trust to a song from your lips than to Providence, though I've seen no proof of either one. When the day comes that you finally sing I hope I shall be in the audience. In truth, I hope I might be the only member of your audience, that I might hoard all your words for myself. I believe I had forgotten about beauty until I saw you, and now I'm greedy for it, like the boy I was once, recklessly eating all the imp's portion of bread.
Yours, enchanted, James Dorsey
Anamique remembered the way the handsome soldier had stared at her in the garden, the way he had seen her, and she flushed and had to bite her lip. She tucked the letter back into her diary but a moment later took it out and read it again. And again.
She passed the night restlessly, waking from vivid dreams of singing to lie wide-eyed in the dark with a pounding heart, listening for any trace of her voice lingering in the air. Once she even went to her sister's door and strained to hear her breathing and be sure her voice hadn't escaped in her sleep and slain the whole household. Finally, afraid to close her eyes, she composed a reply to the letter. It was simply a quotation from Kipling and it read: