The Sandalwood Tree Read Free Page B

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                                            … bored …
                                                                   … a good cry …
    … duty to yourself …                          …. but your health …
    … intrepid Fanny Parks … not consumptive …
    … worry about you …
    The letters were personal, and trying to fill in the blanks felt like peering into these people’s lives uninvited. I struggled with a brief pang of guilt before reminding myself that the letters were dated 1855, and the people concerned were long past caring. Still, I glanced at the back door. Gloomy Martin and lighthearted Rashmi would not have cared about the letters, but Habib was a sphinx-like Indian who spoke no English, and I never knew what he was thinking. I always felt a bit off balance around Habib, but he was a reliable cook, who hadn’t poisoned us yet with his incendiary curries.
    In spite of my reluctance to trust the suspicious snacks on the train, Martin and I had decided to eat the native food in our own home. Indian cooks had long been preparing English meals—they smirked and called it invalid food—but Martin convinced me that it would be more interesting to eat curries than to teach an Indian how to make meatloaf. “Either you’ll give cooking lessons to a cook who doesn’t speak English or we’ll eat nothing but shepherd’spie and blancmange.” He grimaced. I knew he was right, and he clinched it with the very reasonable observation that “It will be the same ingredients from the same markets made by the same cook no matter how they are seasoned or arranged in the pot.”
    Unfortunately, Habib’s curries were so hot that most distinguishing flavors were lost under the searing spices. Martin, the great promoter of eating local dishes, said the meals in our house were not consumed but survived. One night, he stared at his goat curry and rubbed his belly. “OK,” he said, sheepishly. “I know we agreed, but …” He sighed. “Does every meal have to leave blisters?” I nodded, sympathetic. At that point, we both could have done with a little English invalid food.
    I tried to get Habib to cut back on the hot chilis with pantomimes of fanning my mouth, panting, and gulping cold water. But the silent little man with the skullcap and expressionless eyes only rocked his head from side to side in that ambiguous, all-purpose gesture that no Westerner can completely decipher—the Indian head waggle. It can mean “yes” or “no” or “maybe,” it can mean “I’m delighted” or “utterly indifferent,” or sometimes it seems to be an automatic response that simply means, “OK, I heard you.” Apparently, it was all about context.
    I shuffled the letters, scanning another sheet of writing spoiled by time and weather, and I felt a spurt of irritation with both the letter and the place that had ruined it. I had hoped that cultural isolation would force Martin and me back to each other, but India had not brought us together. India had turned out to be incomprehensibly complex, not a wellspring of ancient wisdom, but a snake pit of riddles entwined in a knot of cultural and religious contradictions.
    And speaking of contradictions, India seemed to make Martin simultaneously paranoid and reckless. He still never wore a hat and brushed me off when I offered him calendula ointment for his red, peeling nose. As a historian, he interviewed Indians about their forthcoming independence from Great Britain, which meantwalking through the native quarters of Simla and driving the open Packard over steep, rutted roads into the hills to visit remote villages. When I told him to be careful, he laughed, saying, “I’m a war veteran. I think I can handle myself.” He whistled as he left the house.
    But every morning, when I made up our bed, I had to whisk flat the spider cicatrices in the