Simla 1898
Perched in pinnies on the stairs,
two girls, their knock-knees embraced like clusters of flowers,
hair all ringlets and red ribbons
and eyes wide as wonder.
Spread before their sight, the regimental ball:
Officers, twirling batons of dance steps in red and gold,
their stiff jackets tucked up tight as girdles,
waltzing belles in giddying dresses about a dance floor
speckled with splinters of wax
to rousing rhythms, a raj rag time of imperial certainty.
The regimental colonel, their gaunt grandfather
a tall sinew, stepped quietly up the stairs
to sit beside them on the landing.
Then after an aeon of silence,
voiced no louder than a sigh, ‘Look at all this; it is all Illusion.’
They looked to him, one puzzled, one certain,
one straining excitement,
the other, adamantine and still.
He looked beyond the yearning of one
to the poise of the other, contained,
even when she nuzzled in beside him like a ball of small love,
she required nothing.
Even her fears were iced over.
But he sensed when she flowered
beyond the haloed arrogance of empire
she would see.
Beside him, curled in the furrows of his body,
she searched the creases of nightshirt and pale skin,
for reasons beyond shape and form.
She wondered how he trod the interstices of barked commands
and a head shaved and shawled in orange robes,
like some draped fruit,
and divined the contradictions of adrenalin skirmishes
and stilled contemplation.
She heard his voiced incongruities: respect life; kill well,
yet listened to the tears weeping through the walls.
Quietly at his side she watched him sacredly turn the ola leaves of scripture, gathered like a concertina of scrawled script.
She imagined them fanned like cards, a game of chance.
‘Is it an Illusion?’ she asked with the innocence of knowing,
and he reeled to the face of the question,
before him the fragile and awed
antique sutras he caressed with care.
His face paused with reflection
the sound sad, formed of acceptance,
‘Yes.’
Ladakh 1948
Long after his earth had become ashes she sat as he had in the cool evening of weeks of silence, erect in composure.
Far below her altitude of rest, the thud of artillery proclaimed
the return of war
as scorched light stained the sky and bled among the bruised hills.
She saw, stacked to the horizon, the ola leaves of script
in regimental order, each leaf of distilled wisdom,
touched by the last light as the sky vanished
and there was nothing
but a murmured emptiness.