He shook his head. ‘I was too late. I had hoped to talk them out of it. They had hidden the girl. I thought I had time.’
He put an arm around her shoulders and helped her back to the motorcycle.
As Eliza climbed up into her seat, her heart still pounding to the beat of a drum that had surely been calling the woman to her death, she wept. Then, as it passed a little, she gazed at Jay, whose arms were folded on the handlebars with his forehead resting on his hands. There was such a bursting pain in her chest that she knew her own voice might take over from where the frantic, screaming woman had left off.
‘She was so young,’ he said.
Eliza didn’t reply, but gulped at air in an effort to breathe normally.
‘We won’t go home. I think I’ll take you to my palace. It’s only an hour from the Juraipore castle but there’s more privacy. We’ll be able to talk in a way we could not back at the castle.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ she managed to say through subdued sobs that very quickly began to erupt again.
‘There’s a great deal to say, but first you have to deal with the emotion of witnessing such a thing. I have seen it before.’
They didn’t speak during the journey and, after about an hour, they arrived at what she immediately could see was a palace of faded beauty. He took her through a large gateway set into a long high wall, and into a beautiful area surrounded by buildings of golden stone on three sides, with doors on two sides facing into the courtyard.
‘Servants’ quarters, stables and store rooms,’ he said.
On the side opposite the gateway a colonnaded veranda stretched the length of an ancient two-storey building. It was clear there was water here too, because, unlike everywhere else she had been, the courtyard was remarkably green and what looked like pink and red petunias spilled from tubs placed around the edges. A tall yellow flowering tree with long leaves stood in the middle, providing a vast amount of shade to the two benches beneath.
‘It’s Siamese cassia,’ he said when he saw her looking. ‘They can reach a height of sixty feet. This one is not quite that yet. We use this kind of tree for furniture and crafts. There are more in the gardens beyond,’ he said, pointing at somewhere beyond the colonnade.
As they walked through the building and along an open gallery and terrace at the back to an exterior staircase, Eliza could see the extensive gardens and what looked like an orchard. The scent of grass drifted across and she breathed in the green freshness of the air. Though she still had no idea how she would ever process her disgust and horror, it had been a thoughtful choice to come to this quiet retreat. She stopped for a moment to gaze into the distance and saw that the land right at the back sloped gently downwards.
Jay showed her to a first-floor bedroom. ‘When it is cooler and you are ready, join me on the terrace below.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Until later.’
Eliza lay down on a bed that could not have been slept in for some time. She could smell mothballs, but also some kind of perfume that reminded her of Laxmi. Perhaps this had been Jay’s mother’s room at some point? There was a small drawing room attached too, which Jay called adari khana, with a large rug on the floor and several cushions. Eliza tried to think of other things but all she could hear were the woman’s screams, over and over in her head. A stranger in a strange land, she had hoped that coming here would help her find her feet but, in fact, she was sinking further out of her depth. This was not a comfortable world for her, for any woman, she thought, and couldn’t help wondering if she was even safe? She was a widow too. How must it feel to be put to death in such an agonizing way: the searing pain, the dread, the raw cruelty more awful than she could ever have imagined?
As the brightness of the day faded and the sky turned lilac and then pink, she went in search of Jay, eventually finding him nursing a whisky and slumped in a wicker chair on the arched terrace or gallery at the back of the building, this one smaller and more intimate than the colonnaded walkway at the front. With a dejected air he ran his hand over his head to push the dishevelled hair from his face. When he rubbed his forehead she could see it was smeared with black from the fire.
‘We used to live out here, most of the time,’ he said, and waved a bandaged hand at the area beyond. ‘Drink?’
While a butler fetched her a drink, she sat in a chair opposite Jay. As darkness descended, the moon was rising and casting a silvery light over the garden, from where night-time scents of earth and some kind of intensely aromatic stocks infused the air. She felt as if she could lose herself in its gentle warmth, but then Jay began to speak.
‘A couple of weeks before my grandfather died, my grandmother stopped eating and drinking. She looked after her husband and nursed him, but late one night I heard her chanting“Ram-Ram”repeatedly. He had just died and she had already announced that she was going to commit suttee when he was cremated the next morning. She believed it a dishonour for a wife to outlive her husband.’
He pocketed a box of matches that had been lying on the table, got to his feet, and picked out a taper from a metal box attached to the wall. He pulled out the matchbox, struck a match and lit the taper. As he touched the taper to a couple of lamps fixed to the exterior wall, the smell of burning oil filled the air. The light flickered and Eliza watched the trail of smoke for a minute or two.
‘You were there?’
‘I’d gone there with my mother because she knew her father didn’t have long. After he died my grandmother washed herself and put on her wedding clothes, then sat with my grandfather’s body for the rest of the night with only the howling of the city dogs for company. When the sun rose herdevararrived, her husband’s brother, who was going to perform the last rites. When asatigoes to the pyre she is accompanied by crowds of people and they had already started gathering.’
‘You saw all this?’
He had been gazing out into the darkness but now he turned back to look at her, his eyes sombre, the light gone, but with his lips twisted in a grim smile.
‘She had sent for me, but my mother intercepted the message and ordered me locked in my room. My mother didn’t approve, but I had to see so I climbed out of the window. I loved both my grandparents.’ He paused and swallowed visibly before resuming. ‘Sometimes they tie the women down. Not my grandmother. When I finally arrived the flames were raging and I couldn’t even see her – but I could hear her. She was chanting“Ram-Ram”, right up until she died. People still worship her to this day.’
Eliza fell silent for a few moments. She gazed at the chiselled angular lines of his face, seeming more full of shadows in the lamplight, and could see the grief and shock still etched there. How had she not spotted it before? But then he hunched his shoulders and sank into some kind of internal silence, bending his head and gazing at his hands. She could see the muscle in his jaw working. What an awful thing for a child to witness; it must have broken him, just as her father’s death had broken her.
‘How old were you?’
‘I was thirteen. It was a week before my fourteenth birthday. It happened during the school holidays or I’d have been in England.’
She watched him with tears moistening her eyes, full of pity for the child he had been. ‘And I don’t suppose you told anyone when you went back to school?’
He shook his head and looked back at her. She felt as if she was seeing right into him and he into her. Then he glanced away.
