A Moment Comes Read online

  Forget him. And me. Us.

  Alec.

  I want to say his name out loud, whisper it the way I did sometimes in the dark in my dormitory back at boarding school—where Mother sent me after she found out about us. But I don’t. Don’t want to give her a chance to say the things she always says about him if I bring him up. That he was a soldier of no birth or connection, an American, for God’s sake. A rogue almost ten years my senior who had designs on ruining my virtue and my family’s reputation, and blackmailing Daddy in the bargain.

  The only parts Mother ever gets right are that he was American and he was twenty-five.

  Alec was a hero. He took shrapnel in his leg when he was manning a machine gun at Bastogne, but he kept his post, kept firing, kept the other men in his unit alive. When he came to the ward where I volunteered, they’d just given him medals for valor and for being wounded. He was shy and quiet and kind and still having nightmares about the war. I used to sit up with him talking. We became friends. And then more.

  The day he walked for the first time without his crutch was the day he told me he loved me.

  He loved me.

  But then Mother found out. She didn’t believe we were really in love. I was sixteen. What could I understand about love, yet? They packed me off to boarding school the next week, and I never saw Alec again.

  When I got back from boarding school for the summer holiday, she gave me a letter that had been waiting there for me for the last two months.

  I remember seizing it, running up to my room. I savored every word until I got to the bit where he told me about how he’d met a girl back in Pennsylvania and he was very sorry but my parents made it clear that he was not welcome.

  Mother announced the next day that she’d decided we’d join Daddy for the last couple of months of his service in India. She hadn’t even considered coming with Daddy when he first got the appointment to work on the boundary award—hardly any of the other men who’d been brought down had their families along—but when the papers back home started featuring Lady Edwina and Cousin Pammie looking noble and selfless every day as they slummed it down in India, Mother must have hatched her plan. Said it would be wonderful to be together, wonderful to have a chance to expand my horizons.

  Then I was too heartbroken to argue with her. But now. Now. This place. What am I doing here?

  I lean down and mop my forehead with the skirt of my dress. “I don’t know how my perspiring to death in a country the empire is soon to wash its hands of will do the trick of making me virtuous again.”

  She eyes the damp patch near my hem with contempt. “I don’t suppose you do.”

  The car lurches to a halt, our driver exiting this time to gesture and shout at a man pulling a cart laden with what look like bed frames. As the car idles, I hear a bit of music, almost sounding like an organ. I look around, but can’t tell where it’s coming from. The tune hums and calls, some kind of drum providing rhythm beneath the melody. I find myself suddenly eager for a piano, wondering if I can copy the notes.

  The driver hops back into his seat. He’s spied an open track on the road, and he speeds for it with abandon, horn blaring. Soon we’re clearing our way of the town proper, the houses spreading out a bit. Mother’s barmy. But I don’t say so out loud in case the driver’s English is better than he let on when he collected us on the platform. Plus, I’ve said it before. It didn’t do any good then, either.

  Bells, I want a cigarette. Just to smell something other than the stinking air in the car. But that wouldn’t do. Not with Mother right next to me. She’s been campaigning since I got back from school to have me give them up, even though she smokes a few a day too. But it’s different for me. She doesn’t want people seeing me smoking, doing something adult because she reckons it puts them in mind of the other adult things I’ve done.

  Instead she wants people seeing me sweating like a scrubber in church, spooning gruel into some refugee’s cup. Because that’ll make me respectable again.

  The car slows as we turn and drive through an open iron gate, flanked by walls as yellow as the sun in a child’s painting. I almost have to look away.

  We slide to a stop, and I look through the window and the cloud of dust kicked up by the tires to study my new home. The building is painted a version of the yellow on the high walls surrounding the compound, but faded and peeling in spots. I can see where someone has come round with a brush recently and tried to touch it up in places, but the new paint on top of the old is so much brighter that it does more to shine a light on the bad patches than it does to cover them up. The facade is broken by a wide veranda on the second floor. Screens stretch across all the windows. White gables around the columns reveal more cracks in the paint like lacy spiderwebs. The dusty gravel driveway fades into a scrub of baked brown grass that presses up against the interior walls. It might have been a grand house once, but something about it has given up.

  Father opens my door.

  “Meggie!” he cries, pulling me from the car, folding me in his arms, uncharacteristically enthusiastic in his embrace. He’s been lonely for us, I suppose.

  He lets me go, rushes to the other side to meet Mother. They stand there a moment, almost unsure. Father is tall, his sandy hair thinning at the front but still wavy along the sides. His blue eyes squint against the low sun as he looks at my mother, just a tick shorter than he is, her brown eyes and hair the closest any of us might come to fitting in here in India.

  She reaches for his hand, takes it, and he pulls her the rest of the way in, kissing her full on the cheek. Honestly.

  “There’s your room there, love,” Father says to me, pointing at the window on the second floor opposite the verandah.

  I look up, shade my eyes. “Can the piano be moved in there for me?”

  Father’s mouth drops open a bit before he turns and says to Mother, “I thought you told her.”

  She gives him a look that says she had a hard enough time getting me here at all.

  “Told me what?” I ask.

  “Well . . . ,” Father begins, “there is no piano. . . . ” He drones on a bit about how awfully expensive they are, how they don’t abide the heat, how they couldn’t get one no matter how hard they tried and, besides, I’ll only be here a couple of months . . .

  But all I hear is no piano.

  Of course there isn’t.

  I’m about to argue back that they can’t bring me halfway round the world and not provide me a piano. But then I realize that what must be the household staff has assembled to greet us on the drive.

  A household staff of precisely four people.

  There is a girl about my age whom I almost miss because she’s lingering in the shadows of the main entrance. Even in the dim, I can tell I’m in the presence of a girl far prettier than I am. A girl who doesn’t stoop to hide her height like I do, a girl whose features aren’t as sharp as mine.

  She is beautiful, and I fight the instant flash of resentment clawing its way up my spine.

  Next to her is a woman who looks twice as old as my mother, a woman whose demeanor and stance and clothing telegraph her existence as the housekeeper of this place.

  And beside her, a man who fits so perfectly with her that he can only be her husband. A matched set.

  But fetching the bags from the boot of the car is someone who belongs to no one.

  A young bloke. My age. With the same dark skin and hair I’ve seen everywhere. But his eyes, his eyes are something like amber. He lifts the trunk like it’s nothing and starts toward the house.

  He’s deadly good-looking, this one.

  A little something stirs and stretches in my belly. And it dawns on me that maybe India won’t be so terrible after all.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  TARIQ

  Darnsley’s daughter brought more items with her than I own. I carried everything from the car to the second floor and her bedroom. By the time I finished, the bed had all but disappeared behind a collect
ion of trunks, three hatboxes, and an old leather portfolio, its corners peeling back to reveal sheet music. When I collected the last of her things, she told her parents she was going to look at the room and started up the stairs ahead of me.

  She’s tall. Almost as tall as me. And her hair is bright and sort of yellow. She’s pretty, I guess, in the way white women are. And I have to keep myself from staring at her legs. They’re great, the part I can see sticking out below the bottom of her skirt. But they’re strange, too, the way I can see the faint line of the blue blood vessel running up her calf. She’ll take some getting used to.

  She points across the hall when we get to the top of the stairs. I nod, let her lead the way into her room.

  “Cozy,” she says, looking around.

  “Anything more, miss?” I ask, placing the box on the floor with the others.

  She doesn’t answer, turning toward me, crossing her arms, and tilting her head to one side. Now it’s her turn to size me up. Only she’s even bolder about it than I was on the stairs. I don’t like it. It feels too much like when I walk by a group of women and they whisper to one another and laugh after I pass.

  “Whatsat?” she asks after too long. Her English is a wreck. The words are right, but the way she throws them out is all wrong. So the fact that she cannot understand me, with the accent I have worked so hard to perfect, irritates me.

  “Anything more, miss?” I flatten out the syllables that are necessary in Punjabi but sound singsong when they creep into English.

  “I’m Margaret,” she offers. “What’re you called?”

  She’s toying with me. A cat with a mouse.

  “Tariq,” I tell her.

  She straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin. “Tah-reek,” she says, exaggerating the sounds. “Thanks ever, Tah-reek.” And she grins.

  Bakavasa. This could be trouble. She could be trouble.

  I bow slightly, turn on my heel, and slip out of the room, pulling the door shut behind me as I retreat. My mind is reeling.

  I have too golden an opportunity here to let anything get in the way. Everything depends on Mr. Darnsley’s satisfaction with me.

  So far I have found my new employer easy enough to please. In the three weeks I have worked for him, I’ve unpacked crates and boxes, helped organize a schedule for his work, translated for him when he had need, and fetched messages back and forth to the telegraph office. He seems happy with my work.

  It’s been easy. Like school. They made me head boy my last year. All I had to do was do whatever the teachers wanted before they asked, and do it better than anybody else. And here, there is no one to compete with like there had been at school.

  But at school there were no girls. No girls to distract me or complicate things.

  And in this house, there are two.

  Margaret. Margaret I didn’t bargain for. I have to step lightly with that one.

  But Anupreet.

  Anupreet.

  She is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Even with that scar, or maybe because of it. Something about it makes her mysterious. Like she has a story that I wish I knew. Already I find myself inventing reasons to go below stairs, just to have a look at her. The other employees—especially the cook and her husband—give me the evil eye whenever I come close. Of course they do. She is Sikh. It didn’t matter before. Sikhs and Muslims even married sometimes. But not anymore. Not since this started, and everyone began worrying about who was going to get what if India got split up.

  It’s just as well. I can’t afford the distraction if I’m going to make it to England. All the same, I can’t get her out of my head. I go to Darnsley’s study and am surprised to find him back at his desk so soon after his family’s arrival.

  “Tariq?” Mr. Darnsley looks up from his blotter, then reaches for one of the envelopes I stacked in the tray.

  I move to the desk and stand ready.

  “Take this note to the post.” He scrawls an address on the outside of the envelope, and I see that it is bound for New Delhi and Lord Mountbatten. He dumps a handful of coins into my palm.

  “Not the telegraph office?” I ask.

  He sighs. “I’m afraid not. It is not official. My wife . . . She asked that I—” He stops himself as if he suddenly recalls to whom he is speaking. “It’s not important. Nor is the speed with which it makes its way to New Delhi. Only the fact that I have fulfilled this obligation is of any import.”

  I return half the money he gave me. “This is enough, sir,” I say, shaking the remaining paisa in my hand. He looks at me approvingly. I could have pocketed the extra money and he’d never have known the difference. He knows it too.

  “Thank you, Tariq,” he says. “Now be off with it before that woman can ask me about it again. She’s only been here an hour, but I know I won’t have a moment’s peace until the letter has left my desk.”

  I go downstairs, head outside, and grab the bicycle from behind the house. Pulling the leather satchel from the basket, I slide the envelope inside and throw the satchel over my shoulder. The guard doesn’t even look at me as I push the bicycle to the front. He tugs the gate open, barely waiting long enough for me to get through before shutting it behind me. He does not like me. None of them do. I am the only Muslim working in the house. It makes me easy to dislike.

  I wheel to the street, glad to be out of doors, glad to be doing something other than moving that girl’s luggage.

  “Your fancy white employer hasn’t given you a car?” Sameer calls from behind me as I sling my leg over the bicycle.

  Sameer. The last person I want to see. My whole body goes tense. Taking a deep breath, I face him. “What are you doing here?” My grip tightens on the leather courier pouch strapped to my chest.

  He has a cut across his temple—nearly healed—that he might have gotten after I left the riot. But the skin beneath his left eye is purple and yellow with a fresh bruise. He’s been busy since then.

  “You’re the empire’s man now, are you?” he says, ignoring my question, a smirk that is hinting insult across his face.

  “I am no one’s man,” I say, placing a foot on the pedal. “But I am in a hurry.”

  He laughs. “Of course you are. Ferrying their notes across the city like a good little boy—”

  “It is work,” I spit out, adding, “something you should try.”

  The grin falters a bit. Sameer’s family is poor. Abbu says it’s because Sameer’s father is too proud to work at a job he thinks beneath him. Sameer recovers, but he wags a finger at me. “Tariq.” He shakes his head. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

  We’re not friends. We never were. Friends have things in common. Things other than the few afternoons we spent as boys looking for something to do, waiting for something to happen.

  “Did you need something?” I ask, reasoning there’s little chance Sameer would make the two miles from our neighborhood to Darnsley’s compound for nothing.

  He smiles again, the motion pulling the wound at his temple. The smile shifts into a wince. He reaches up to touch it. “Got this that day at the gurdwara.”

  He pauses, looks me up and down. “I lost you in the crowd, but you’re no worse for the wear, are you? And you got the better of at least one of those kuthas.”

  I don’t respond, but I feel the wave of nausea that hits every time I think of the man, the one I hit.

  “How are you getting on with your little job? What does he have you doing for him, this great sahib?”

  I square my foot on the pedal, lean over the handlebars, but still I do not go. “I serve as Mr. Darnsley’s secretary.” The title is one of my own making, and maybe a bit overdone, but how will Sameer ever know? “I am a courier and translator. And he works for Radcliffe, who is determining the boundaries, the borders themselves.” I know I stand a bit taller as I say this, but I cannot help gloating.

  But before the words even finish leaving my mouth, I realize my mistake. Chutiyaa.

  Sameer came
here for a purpose. And something about his expression now tells me that I have accomplished it for him.

  “Then you are a prince among us indeed.” He bends slightly at the waist as if to bow. “Fetching papers and teaching Punjabi to a Britisher who will never leave his compound—”

  I know I should keep my mouth shut—shut!—but still I cannot stop myself. “He goes out. We go on a surveying trip next month.”

  The smile again. And I hate that Sameer apparently knows me well enough that he can coax information from me with simple taunts.

  I hate him.

  “A man of the people,” he says then, with mock surprise. “No wonder you’re so eager to do his bidding—”

  “It is work,” I manage, “no more.”

  The smile vanishes slowly, like mist off the hills. Now he is serious. Now he is staring at me fully.

  “Work is good,” he says carefully, “but it is even better that this man is nothing but an employer to you. That your position is nothing but a means to an end.”

  “Sameer—”

  “Because we have ends as well.”

  We?

  “And should you find yourself with an opportunity to serve the cause of the oppressed Muslim—”

  “I have to go,” I say, cutting him off. I can’t listen to this anymore. I’ve heard it all before from the men who fume inside the mosque, the same men who rile up crowds in the streets, arm them with clubs and knives and then lead them into Hindu or Sikh neighborhoods. I don’t need to hear it from the likes of Sameer.

  I turn, push down hard on the pedal, and ride fast up the lane.

  His voice calls out after me. “You are one of us, Tariq,” he reminds me, adding, “and I know you’ll remember that.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  ANUPREET

  “I don’t like that boy,” Manvir says when he comes to collect me for my first Sunday off.

  Tariq sits in the shade of the wall mending a puncture on his bicycle tire.