The Game

She lowered her voice, and her gaze. “Tell me . . . is it drugs?”

“Sometimes. Often it’s just another way to smoke tobacco.” I thought, all in all, that most of these in the room held nothing more intoxicating than pipe tobacco, although as the evening went on I did catch the occasional whiff of something stronger. “Sunny, are you enjoying your stay in Khanpur?”

“Oh yes,” she replied, although her tone was not one of unrelieved ecstasy.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, really. Mama’s wanting to go, and I have to say, although this has been just the most fantastic thing ever, it’s also a little, well, strange.”

The entertainments were a bit too grown-up for her, I thought; I could only hope that what was to come did not shock her bone-deep innocence further.

But in the end, the gyrations of the nautch girls were more athletic than erotic, and the three impossibly flexible Chinese contortionists who came onto the floor afterwards gave no reason to cover the child’s eyes. Sunny imbibed more champagne than she would have if her mother had been watching, but the fizzy wine brought no more harm than high spirits and the promise of a head-ache on the morrow, so I did not interfere. She laughed at the antics of the swirling-skirted women with the heavy kohl on their eyes and the chorus of bells on their ankles, sat up astonished at the three slim figures tying themselves into knots, and clapped like a child half her age when a boy with a black-and-white monkey came to do tricks. Then the nautch girls returned, to the somewhat raucous approval from the other side of the room.

Sunny glanced over at the burst of male laughter, old enough to know what they were reacting to, too inexperienced to know precisely why. Suddenly, I had to know the answer to a question.

“Sunny, what did the maharaja say to you that first night, that embarrassed you?”

It embarrassed her still, as a flush beyond that of wine crept down her neck. “It was just a silly joke. The kind of thing Daddy says to my girlfriends when he’s had too much to drink.”

“What was it?”

“Just a comment on my skin. Something about, he wondered if it was as soft all the way down.”

I glanced involuntarily over at where the maharaja was reclining, the mouthpiece of a hookah in his hand, his head bent to hear something Harry Koehler was saying.

“How much longer are you stopping here?” I asked her.

“I think Mama needs to go in a couple of days. Kumaraswami is expecting her by the end of the week. Tommy wants to stay on, but I’ll go with her. I don’t like to think of her travelling by herself,” she added virtuously, although I thought she would be glad to see the last of this place, with its uncomfortable nuances and scarcely comprehended activities.

I had to agree with Gay Kaur, that Khanpur was no place for the child. And when the evening’s entertainment came to an end, I made certain that Sunny did not give in to her temptation to linger with the adults, by standing myself and patting down a yawn.

“Time for us girls to get some beauty sleep,” I told her.

She looked around the beautiful room as the noise level rose sharply, the guests chattering as noisily as a flock of bright birds in a palm tree.

“Maybe in a bit,” she said. Her eyes swept over the exotic crowd, but then her anticipation faded, and she took a little step back.

I looked to see what had caused her to shy away—the maharaja himself, his eyes on us, working his way through the crowd. When he reached us, I found that I was between him and the girl, although I couldn’t say whether she had moved to seek shelter, or I to provide it.

“I hope you’ll join us, we have any number of games set up in the hall. Billiards, darts, cards.”

“We were just saying that we felt tired, but thank you.”

His eyes smiled at Sunny past my shoulder. “I hope you enjoyed today,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she said, a polite child again. “Very much, thank you.”

“Tomorrow you must see my zoo. And you, Miss Russell. Have I made a convert of you to the art of pig sticking?”

“It was extraordinary,” I admitted. All evening—in the bath, sipping my wine, watching the twirling dancers —I had found myself reliving that moment when, on the ground with the pig’s tusk touching my boot, the world had come rushing back in on me. I met his gaze and said, “I’ve never felt anything quite like it.”

His eyes held mine, and a look of—what? understanding? memory?—came into them. “The exhilaration of survival.” He said it so softly I didn’t think it was meant for me to hear. It was as if I had reminded him of something long forgotten.

And then he blinked, and the moment passed. “So I take it to mean that you will join us again.”

“I don’t know about that,” I told him. “I should think the sensation becomes less astonishing with repetition. It may be a thing that should be done once, and treasured for its uniqueness.”

I wished him a good night, and steered Sunny through the crowd of guests and servants to the door. She paused to look back in, half wistful, and we both saw the maharaja watching us.

On the stairway, she said to me, “He doesn’t seem entirely happy.”

“The maharaja? No, he doesn’t, does he?”

“But you’d think, with all this . . .” She gestured at the stones, the garden beyond, the world created for this one man’s pleasure.

I didn’t answer. I thought the maharaja had, in fact, looked at me with envy. And how else, if a man had arranged his entire life with the goal of excitement? He had conquered every danger he had set himself against— racing cars, aeroplanes, casino tables, dangerous game animals fought with sparse weapons; what thrills were there left to seek?

Chapter Eighteen

The morning found me aching from scalp to soles, and I nearly asked the chuprassi who brought the tea tray to fetch me strong drink, or a nice dose of morphia. But then I noticed the thick white envelope tucked under the saucer, which proved to be a note written by the same elegant hand that produced the daily schedule:

His Highness will see you at nine o’clock for a tour of Khanpur zoo. Please meet him in the toy room.

Under those circumstances, intoxication did not seem a good idea, so I waved the servant away and tottered into the bath-room to switch on the geyser. At least with a gentle walking tour of the maharaja’s zoo, I might avoid too much sitting on my black-and-blue posterior.

The bath loosened me enough to dress and take a gentle turn through the gardens, where the combination of motion and crisp, fresh air had me moving almost normally as I turned for the dining room. Half a dozen of my fellow guests were there, distributed among three tables. I waved to Faith and Lyn but chose a seat near the novelist Trevor Wilson, whose presence in Khanpur interested me. I eased myself onto the chair, murmured a greeting, and opened his discarded copy of the previous day’s Pioneer. When he’d had a few minutes to become accustomed to my presence, I pushed the paper away as if weary of the world’s problems.

“Mr Wilson, pardon me, but you’ve been here for quite a while, I believe you said? It’s just that I was thinking of taking a walk into the city this afternoon, and wondered if there was anything you could suggest that I see there?”

“I’m not much of one for sight-seeing,” he answered, then proceeded to list for me a dozen sights that should not be missed, encompassing as he did so a fairly comprehensive history of Khanpur. I kept my gaze on him as he spoke, nodding and exclaiming occasionally to keep him going. We spoke of Moghul ruins and inheritance rights for a while as I slowly worked the conversation around to what I was really interested in.

“So, how long have you actually been here?”

“Eighteen months, more or less.”