Page 100 of A Thousand Painted Hours

This morning, I watch you sleep after a terribly restless night. You appear to be more yourself each day. I see your flesh return to cover your bones, and the color has returned to your cheeks, but I know you suffer still.

I do not know how to help you, but here is one small beauty: I am so deeply grateful that you are still alive, that the terrible things did not kill you and take you off the earth where I could never hear your voice again.

At the same time, I miss you, the you who spoke to me of everything, stars and books and independence and love and duty and ridiculous jokes. I miss knowing what is in your heart, and I think you must miss expressing what’s there.

It must be so terribly lonely.

Despite the strangeness of this situation, I expect nothing of you but friendship, so if it is your fear that I will misinterpret this queer intimacy we are sharing, do not worry. I shall be entirely circumspect in every way and never imagine you mean anything but friendship.

But it would be remiss of me not to say that I love and care for you as a person, as my friend, as a man I hope to help live well and whole in the future. How might I do that,mere ham-nafas?

Elsie

I folded the letter and placed it in an envelope with his name in full, just as I would have done to mail it, and I left it on the table. In the kitchen, I grabbed a hunk of the dry brown bread we’d been eating, and headed out to the garden.

When I returned to the sitting room hours later, he was nowhere to be found, but on the table was a folded sheet of paper with my name on it.

July 27, 1917

[In Urdu]

Dear Elsie,

One small beauty: a vase of red and white flowers you’ve set in the window, cheerful and alive.

Another: the troop of kittens marching into the field behind their mother, off for a hunting expedition, their tiny tails in the air.

Another: your face flushed with steam when you cook, which makes me think of another time your cheeks flush so red.

Another: the delicate feeling of your wrist against my belly at night.

Another: the quick paintings you make, a cat or a flower or me.

Another: the way you hum to yourself when you arrange flowers.

Elsie, I truly do not mean to be cruel. I simply do not know how to reach through the cage enclosing me. I fear if I let any of it leak out into the world, all of it will, and I will be consumed by rage and darkness and that will only add to the evil in the world.

You are not the sun and stars. You are the very earth, the air that I breathe. Please do not think otherwise.

Tanveer

—51—

I sent for my paints and other supplies. Opening them, smelling the oils, made my heart sing, and I bustled about with purpose, setting up an easel left over from my girlhood in the sunny window, where I could paint as many still lifes as I’d like. On the table, I set out charcoals and paper for Tanveer, but he did not use them.

He had grown well enough to take up long walks, much as I had done when I first arrived here, following the public footpaths for miles and miles. It gave him both physical and mental vigor. The fresh air and sunshine worked their own magic.

Slowly he began to talk to me again. Not about anything of his experiences, but about the walks and what he saw. He saw bluebirds, he said, and sat under a willow tree with fingers trailing in the water. He wanted to know the names of the grasses.

Sometimes, at evening, we ambled the back lanes companionably and came back to drink chamomile tea I made from flowers in the garden. Topaz followed us around, disinclined to wander far. I read aloud, or Tanveer did. Nothing in Urdu, for my books were back in London, and his were lost somewhere in the trenches. We found some enjoyment in Shakespeare’s comedies, and he proved to be a good mimic.

We had moved upstairs, to my room, where the bed was more comfortable. He no longer needed my help with his dastaar, morning or night, but sometimes he asked me to brush his hair. I wanted to wrapit around my wrists, my neck. I wanted to lean into that place below his ear, the tender spot on his neck.

I did not.

When we first moved upstairs, he asked if it was too much to ask that we continue to sleep together. The unspoken chasteness was there. “I don’t mind,” I said. I found peace in the stolen time, however it had happened. Peace in the feeling of him close by, the sound of his breathing, the way he always turned to me in the night and pulled me close to his body and we spooned as if we were lovers.

Well, we had been, and learned it then.