Lips Touch: Three Times(16)
Author: Laini Taylor

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

After breakfast she gave it to the chaprassi to deliver.

James laughed when he read it, a bright, surprised burst of a laugh. He wrote to her again, fabulating a means by which, he outrageously claimed, the devils of India might easily be outwitted by leaving out saucers of sherry overnight for their spies, the wall lizards, who would grow tipsy and forget to carry their mission reports back to Hell.

This too the chaprassi duly delivered, and Anamique wrote back again the same day to tell him how her ayah practiced gowli shastra, the art of reading the stripes and scamperings of wall lizards for omens. She added, shyly, that she had been to an astrologer once in the bazaar. She had never told anyone that, and James wondered in his reply what fortune had been foretold for her, and had it mentioned a soldier, by chance?

For days in a row they continued in this way, and slowly they discovered each other. The letters grew longer and Anamique’s gray eyes lost a bit of the haunted shadow James had seen in them, and James’s heart began to lift itself, step by step, out of the swamp of mud and ghosts in which it had been steeping since France.

SIX The First Touch

The second time they saw each other was at a musical evening arranged by Anamique’s mother. She routinely invited the unmarried young men over for a spot of light opera to amuse her daughters, and James was handsome, and he was a war hero, and to top it all off he turned out to have a glorious tenor voice. The one thing that kept him from becoming a new favorite among the memsahibs was his irredeemable habit of looking only at Anamique while he sang.

The others all remembered that stare in the garden, and they could see now in the look that passed between the two that something was already under way. A bridge begun at both ends, reaching toward the place in the middle where they could rest against each other and find completion.

James cajoled an old missionary’s wife to take a turn at the piano at the end of the evening, so he might have the chance to dance with Anamique. They touched for the first time, first delicately and decorously, fingertips to waist and hand to shoulder in the pose of the dance. But by and by James’s lips brushed softly against Anamique’s earlobe as he whispered something to her. She blushed furiously at the intimate touch, and a look of wistfulness and hope came into her eyes.

"I love you," he had whispered, and it seemed to him as she pressed her lips together, that she was imagining whispering it back.

She was imagining it. She thought she could taste the words, all ginger and chili and sugar, fiery and sweet, and she held them in her mouth like candies. It would take more time than this to coax them from her, but something began to happen at that moment. An idea fell like a seed, and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine, lush and conquering, twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket — and just as deadly.

There were more musical evenings and more letters, furtive hand-holding at dinner, duets at the piano, more dancing, more whispers in her ear that raised goose bumps on Anamique’s neck and sent shivers down her spine. They were never alone, but may as well have been, the way they looked only at each other. Sitting apart from the crowd at whatever party or gathering they were at, James spoke, and Anamique wrote on her tablet small notes that James saved and kept with her letters. She even began to teach him some of the simpler signs of her gesture language, such as those for "thirsty" and "dance." He asked her, eyes merry, how to sign "I love you," just so he would recognize it if she ever gestured it to him, and, blushing, she showed him.

Anamique grew radiant. Other men began to wonder why it had taken that damned James Dorsey to make them see that, silent or not, Anamique was quite the loveliest creature in Jaipur, if not all of India. None of them bothered to court her, though; they couldn’t even catch her eye, and she demurred from dancing with anyone but James.

And while they danced, James whispered to her. He urged her to sing for him, to tell him that she loved him. "How can I ever believe it," he asked, his brown eyes pleading, "unless you tell me so yourself?" He knew about the bird in the cage, and he imagined it languishing there like a sad animal in a roadside menagerie. "Birds shouldn’t be kept in cages," he told her, his lips warm against her ear. "They should fly."

By and by Anamique formed a resolution: If James asked her to marry him, she would answer him. The first word she would ever speak aloud would be yes.

SEVEN The Gloating Demon

Crouched in the garden muttering, Vasudev saw the light in Anamique’s eyes and gave a loathsome gloating chuckle.

The girl was in love! Nothing could scatter caution like love. Nothing could turn a girl silly half so fast as a handsome soldier whispering in her ear! And a soldier begging her to talk, no less! It was so perfect it almost made Vasudev believe in Providence, but he knew the way the cogs worked and whirred in the winding up and down of human lives. Gods though there might be, they cared little for the minutiae. If an English soldier had lived through the bloodiest war the world had ever known and made his way half around the planet to fall in love with this particular girl and goad her into fulfilling her curse, well, Vasudev had only that mad bastard Chance to thank for it, and he did.

It came in the nick of time too. The old bitch wouldn’t last much longer. Vasudev gave her a week at the most. He chuckled again. Estella had missed their tea that morning for the first time ever. He had waited for her in Hell, his smile widening with each passing moment that didn’t bring her tall, spare silhouette down the black tunnel.

He had her tonic in his pocket now, and went whistling up to her ornate, filigreed palace to deliver it. "Good day to you!" he cried when Pranjivan opened the door to him. With feigned solicitude Vasudev asked, "Is Memsahib feeling unwell today?"

Pranjivan gave him his customary stony stare and said, "Memsahib is very busy and sends word she will come tomorrow at the usual time."

Vasudev laughed out loud. "She hasn’t missed a day’s descent to Hell since Yama foisted her on me. Not for any illness, not for anything! Busy? My teeth, Pranjivan, lying beggar that you are. If she isn’t dying, she’d better come tell me so herself."

Pranjivan didn’t even blink. "Have you brought Memsahib’s tonic?" he asked.

What Vasudev resented most about the factotum was his stolidness. Even Estella could be made to wince and scowl, but Pranjivan, never. His face may as well have been cast in an expressionless mold. The demon found it extremely unrewarding. Reluctantly he produced the flask and handed it over. "Not that she’ll need it," he said. "I imagine the next time I see dear Estella in Hell it will be her soul alone, drawn like a moth to the flames, just like any other pathetic human."