Page 104 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“Nor do I.”

“Perhaps we live in both our countries, here and there.”

“Art here, politics there.”

He smiled. “Perhaps.” He held my hands. “We shall marry then.”

I closed my eyes, thinking of my mother’s warning years ago, that neither of us would have a penny if we didn’t marry well. “We have no money, Tanveer, either of us.”

He chuckled. “The palace and this place are crumbling, love. No one has any money.”

“How will we live?”

“How does anyone live? You’ll paint, and I’ll go into politics, and we’ll get by.”

I looked up at him. “Will we hate each other in a decade?”

“What do you think?”

“No.” To have the opportunity to eat meals with him, to walk in the evenings with him, to perhaps one day bear his children, seemed an absurd blessing. “I shall teach if need be. And you have many talents.”

“Yes,” he said, and lifted a wicked eyebrow. “I do. Allow me to show you.”

As the days grew shorter, Tanveer embarked on a course of deep study. In the Herewich library, he found copies ofThe Rights of Manby Thomas Paine, and texts by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. “Who among your ancestors was so interested in democracy?” he asked.

I knew exactly who it was. “My father.”

“Ah. That explains a great deal.”

A package from India arrived with books from Indian writers,Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, by Naoroji, and speeches by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, but the pamphlets by Gandhi, mentioned in the letter, were removed by censors.

All through the winter, he wrote and read and walked on fine days. Often he read his own writings aloud to me, asking for feedback and argument, so I had to read the texts, too, so I could understand what he grappled with.

I painted and painted, finding some truth in domestic scenes I had never noticed. It had once felt unimportant to paint kitchens or food or cats, but it felt powerful to me now. A battlefield cannot have an easy kitchen scene. A bombed village leaves no space for gardens. A home is a powerful thing, and I was glad to claim that idea for myself. As winter tilted toward spring again, it began to seem as if a new world might be possible.

Once the bloody, brutal war was over.

In a way, I felt protected by it. As long as it raged, nothing in this sacred, special time would end. We could live, Tanveer and I, in the crumbling house in our four little rooms, eating simply, and painting, and reading, and writing, with a pair of cats and buckets of love, and all would be well.

—54—

The telegram arrived by bicycle on a bright April morning. “Sorry, Lady Turner.”

I took it with a trembling hand, sick to think it was my mother or brother.

Instead, it was addressed to Tanveer. It was brutal and to the point.Maharaja and Prince Dead in Automobile Crash Stop You Are Heir Stop Return Home as Soon as Possible Stop

He read it once, twice, three times. His fingers trembled. I guided him to a chair. “I’ll fetch a cup of tea.”

When I brought it back and set it on the table, he had not moved, only held the paper in his hands. “I can barely comprehend this.”

I sat on the settee facing him, my hands on my thighs. I thought of the night my father and mother told me we were leaving India, and how the world had tilted. I felt it tilting again.

“Of course I mourn my father and my brother, but I do not want this,” he said fiercely. “All the work I’ve done”—he gestured toward the table, piled high with his books and notebooks and inkpot—“will disappear under this mantle of maharaja.”

My heart felt as if an elephant stood on it. Here it was, the disaster that would rip him out of our little cocoon. But he looked pale with reaction, and I squeezed his hand. “Take a moment, Tanveer. It’s a shock.”

He took a breath, set the telegram aside, picked up his tea. His hand stilled, but he stared into the cup with despair. “I do not want to leave this space of study and quiet.”