Chapter 4: The Cottage

EELA — 1943

The hill above the cottage was the highest point for miles.

They had discovered it together on a Sunday afternoon in March, five months after the dance, when the relationship had progressed from stolen conversations in the mess to long walks along the perimeter road to this — a borrowed motorcycle, a borrowed afternoon, and a cottage in the hills outside Pune that belonged to Rajesh's uncle and was available to anyone in the family who needed a place to disappear. The cottage was small — two rooms, a kitchen with a wood-fired stove, a tin roof that amplified the rain into a percussion symphony — and it sat at the base of a hill that rose steeply through scrub and lantana to a bald summit of black basalt.

They climbed the hill because Rajesh said it was the thing to do. 'My grandmother used to say you haven't visited a place until you've stood at its highest point and seen everything it contains.'

'Your grandmother had a lot of opinions.'

'She had opinions the way other people had teeth — a full set, and she used every one of them.' He was ahead of her on the path, his long legs covering the slope with an ease that made her own scrambling feel clumsy. He stopped and waited, extending his hand. She took it. His palm was warm and dry and calloused from the control column — the particular roughness of a man who spent hours gripping a metal stick while the sky tried to kill him. She held on longer than she needed to.

At the top, the view was absurd. The Deccan plateau stretched in every direction — flat, immense, the colour of burnt sienna in the afternoon light. The Western Ghats were a blue smudge on the horizon. Below them, the cottage was a white dot in a landscape of red earth and green scrub and the silver thread of a river that Rajesh said was the Mutha but that looked, from this height, like something a child had drawn with a silver crayon.

'Touch the sky,' said Rajesh.

'What?'

'My grandmother's other thing. When you're at the highest point, you stretch up your arms and stick out your tongue and you touch and taste the sky.'

'That's ridiculous.'

'That's what my grandfather said. She threw a chapati at him.'

'You've told me that story.'

'It bears repeating. Come on.' He stretched his arms above his head, tilted his face to the sky, and stuck out his tongue. He looked absurd — a Flying Officer in the Indian Air Force, standing on a hilltop in his weekend clothes, his tongue out like a child catching rain. Eela laughed so hard that her stomach hurt.

'You look like an idiot.'

'Try it before you judge.'

She did. She stretched her arms up and tilted her face and stuck out her tongue, and the air — warm, dry, carrying the taste of dust and something else, something mineral and clean, the taste of altitude — touched her tongue and she tasted the sky. It tasted of nothing and everything. It tasted of freedom.

'Well?' said Rajesh.

'Your grandmother was right.'

He kissed her for the first time on that hilltop. His lips were warm and dry, like his hands, and the kiss was gentle — not tentative but deliberate, the kiss of a man who had decided what he wanted and was in no hurry to rush the wanting. She kissed him back. The sun was behind him and when she opened her eyes, his face was haloed in light, and for a moment — just a moment — he looked like something from a temple painting, a god descending to touch a mortal, and she thought: this is dangerous.

She was right. It was dangerous. But she did not stop.

*

The months that followed were the happiest of her life. She would not know this until later — happiness, she discovered, was a thing you could only identify in retrospect, the way you could only see stars after the sun went down — but during those months, she lived inside a joy so complete and so unexamined that it felt less like an emotion and more like a climate. She woke happy. She worked happy. She slept happy, and in her sleep, she dreamed of Rajesh's hands and Rajesh's laugh and the way he said her name — Eela — as though the word contained a secret that only he knew.

They went to the cottage every weekend they could get leave. The motorcycle belonged to a ground crew sergeant who owed Rajesh a favour and who, Eela suspected, was also a romantic. The road to the cottage was unpaved and treacherous — stones, ruts, a bridge over the river that consisted of two planks and an optimistic prayer — and she learned to hold on to Rajesh from behind, her arms around his waist, her cheek against his back, feeling the vibration of the engine through his body and the warmth of his skin through the cotton of his shirt.

At the cottage, they cooked. Rajesh was a better cook than she was — a fact she found both surprising and attractive. He made dal that was simultaneously simple and complex, the spices layered in a sequence he had learned from his grandmother, the final tempering of mustard seeds and curry leaves executed with the precision of a man who understood that cooking, like flying, was a matter of timing. He made rotis that were round, unlike hers, which were shaped like small countries with disputed borders. He made chai that was stronger than hers but not as sweet, and they argued about sugar content with the passionate dedication of people who had no real problems.

'Too much sugar kills the cardamom,' he said.

'Too little sugar kills the point,' she replied.

'The point of chai is the tea.'

'The point of chai is the sweetness. The tea is just the vehicle.'

He laughed and added more sugar to her cup without being asked. She noticed. She always noticed.

They made love for the first time in the cottage, in July, during the monsoon, with the rain hammering the tin roof so loudly that they could not hear each other speak and did not need to. She had been nervous — not afraid, never afraid with him, but nervous in the way of someone stepping into a river for the first time, unsure of the depth, unsure of the current. He had been patient. His hands moved over her body with the lightness and precision that characterised everything he did — no urgency, no demand, just the steady, attentive exploration of a man who understood that attention was the highest form of desire.

Afterwards, they lay on the narrow bed and listened to the rain and she traced the scar on his shoulder — a shrapnel wound from a sortie over Burma that he had described as "a scratch" and that she could see was anything but. The skin was raised and rough under her fingertip, a ridge of healed tissue that ran from his collarbone to the top of his arm.

'Does it hurt?' she asked.

'Not anymore. Except when it rains.'

'It's raining now.'

'Then yes, it hurts.' He turned to face her. His eyes — dark, almost black, with the particular depth of a man who had seen things he would never tell her about — were serious. 'Eela, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you that this — you, the cottage, the hill, this bed — this is the thing I carry with me when I'm up there. When the flak is coming and the engine is screaming and I can't see anything except cloud and fire, I think about your face. I think about the way you taste the sky. And I come back.'

She did not cry. She wanted to, but she did not, because crying would have meant acknowledging the possibility that he might not come back, and she was not ready for that. Instead, she kissed the scar. She pressed her lips against the rough, raised skin and tasted salt and something metallic, the taste of a body that had been torn and repaired, and she thought: I will remember this. Whatever happens. I will remember the taste of this scar.

'I love you,' she said. It was the first time she had said it.

'I know,' he said. 'I've known since the hill.'

*

She discovered she was pregnant on a Tuesday in October.

The signs had been there for weeks — the nausea that arrived every morning like a punctual and unwelcome guest, the exhaustion that settled into her bones by mid-afternoon, the tenderness in her breasts that made her uniform uncomfortable. She had dismissed each symptom individually but their accumulation was impossible to ignore. She sat on the edge of her bed in the billet, holding the result from the camp's medical officer — a kind, tired woman named Captain Mehta who had delivered the news with the practised neutrality of someone who gave this news often and had learned not to attach judgement to it.

'You have options,' Captain Mehta had said. 'But not many, and not much time.'

Eela had nodded. She had not spoken. She had walked back to the billet and sat on the bed and stared at the opposite wall and tried to understand that her body, which had been hers alone for eighteen years, now contained a second life — a collection of cells that was already, according to Captain Mehta, approximately eight weeks along, which meant it had been conceived in August, which meant the cottage, which meant the rain, which meant Rajesh.

She needed to tell him. She needed to tell Billu. She needed to tell someone, because the weight of knowing this alone was already more than she could carry.

She told Billu first.

They were in Billu's room — the room that shared a wall with Eela's, through which Eela had heard Billu humming every night for thirteen months. Billu was sitting on her bed, cross-legged, a cigarette in one hand and a letter from her mother in the other. She listened without interrupting. When Eela finished, she put down the cigarette and the letter and looked at Eela with an expression that was not shock — Billu was incapable of shock, or at least of showing it — but something more complex. Calculation. Concern. And beneath both, something that Eela could not read, something that flickered behind Billu's eyes like a flame behind glass.

'Does Rajesh know?'

'Not yet. He's on ops this week. I can't get a message to him until Friday.'

'Then we wait until Friday. In the meantime, you tell no one else. Not Lata, not Dolly — god, especially not Dolly — no one. I need to think.'

'Billu, it's not your problem to solve.'

'Everything about you is my problem to solve. That's what friends do.' She reached out and took Eela's hand. Her grip was fierce — not comforting but anchoring, the grip of a woman who was physically preventing another woman from drifting away. 'Listen to me, Eela. Whatever happens, whatever you decide, I am here. Do you understand? I am not going anywhere.'

Eela believed her. She had no reason not to.

*

Rajesh never received the news.

On Thursday — one day before Eela planned to tell him, one day before she would sit in the cottage and explain that their love had produced a consequence that neither of them had planned but that she wanted, desperately, irrationally, completely wanted — his Hurricane was hit by anti-aircraft fire during a sortie over the Arakan peninsula. The aircraft went down over the jungle. There were no survivors. The report came through to the station at fourteen hundred hours. It was read aloud at the evening briefing by the commanding officer, who mispronounced Rajesh's name — Desh-pan-dee instead of Desh-pan-day — and the mispronunciation was so minor and so wrong that Eela felt it as a physical blow, a pain in her sternum that made her gasp.

Billu was beside her. Billu's hand found hers under the table and held on with that fierce, anchoring grip. Eela did not cry. She did not make a sound. She sat perfectly still and listened to the rest of the briefing and when it was over, she stood and walked to her room and closed the door and lay on the bed and pressed her face into the pillow and screamed. The pillow absorbed the sound. The thin walls did not. Through the plaster, she heard Billu's door open and close, and then Billu was in the room — she had a key, they had exchanged keys weeks ago, a casual intimacy that Eela had thought nothing of at the time — and she was lying beside Eela on the narrow bed, her body pressed against Eela's back, her arm around Eela's waist, her hand flat against Eela's stomach where the baby — Rajesh's baby, the baby he would never know about — was growing.

'I'm here,' Billu whispered. 'I'm here.'

They lay like that for hours. The base quieted around them. The tropical dark closed in. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere a radio played a Hindi film song — something sweet and melancholy, a woman singing about separation, the kind of song that seemed designed to accompany grief.

Eela did not sleep. She lay in the dark with Billu's body warm against her back and Billu's hand on her stomach and she thought about Rajesh's hand at the small of her back at that first dance, and about the taste of the sky on the hilltop, and about the scar on his shoulder that hurt when it rained, and she understood — with the terrible, permanent clarity that comes only from loss — that she would never see him again, and that the child inside her would carry his face into a world he would never inhabit.

She closed her eyes. Billu's breath was warm against the nape of her neck.

Outside, the rain began.