Page 2 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“Amusing enough.” I sat on her bed. “They’re a witty lot.”

She nodded. A faint yellow cast marked her skin, and her hands were cold. “How are you tonight?” I asked. “Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you. Betty brought me my ginger tonic before she went to bed.”

“And how are you?” I repeated, smoothing my hand on her wrist.

“Well enough,” she said, glancing away. She was seventy and suffering liver disease from a recurrent malaria infection she’d suffered from since my childhood. Ill health had plagued her repeatedly since, but this last round seemed far worse.

Always my mother, she patted my hand and put her book aside with a smile that did not mask the pain around her mouth. “I was onlywaiting up to say good night. Go paint now. I’ll see what you’ve done in the morning.”

I kissed her forehead and turned off the light, tucking her in as she’d so often tucked me, then headed upstairs to my sanctuary, the studio that had been part of the bargain I’d agreed to when I finally gave in to Peter’s wish for me to come home. It was a wide-open space beneath the eaves, an attic meant for storage, but perfect for my purposes. It was too hot in summer, too cold in winter, but in the daytime, I could look out over the treetops of Bloomsbury.

Within, the floors were spattered with decades of paint, and canvases leaned against the wall. It was startling to see the reduced number—I’d sent more than two dozen to Helen Bonhome, a friend from art school who lived in the north, where we hoped they’d be safe from bombing. I was in the process of finding places for the rest.

A bubble of worry burst in my diaphragm as I imagined any of them going up in flames. The work of my life. I flipped through some of my earliest oils, the courtyard in Nainital with the laburnum tree, a portrait of my friend Gurdaya when she was still young. I paused at the rendering of the maharani and my mother taking tea in a sunlit room, the light shining behind them, highlighting the crowns of their heads, the edges of their hands, shining through the delicate china of the cup my mother held. I’d once been offered a small fortune for this particular work, but as with so many others, I found it difficult to let it go.

Foolishness. Especially now.

I wrapped myself in an oversize cardigan, opened my sketchbook, and found my peace in drawing the faces around the dinner table this evening, and the roses hanging in ghostly beauty in the garden. Art, as I’d learned so many times, could distract me from the harshest pain.

I remembered sketching the receding skyline of Bombay the day we left it.

Leaving India

1911

—2—

I was born in India, where my father had been in the ICS, the Indian Civil Service. When I was fifteen, his elder brother, the Earl of Herewich, died suddenly of a spleen injury sustained on a hunt, and my father was abruptly summoned home to take up his title.

It was the worst news I could have heard. I had never known any home but Nainital, and I loved it—the forests and the mountains and the lake, my friends and my collection of little animals.

I protested. I wailed. I begged.

There was no negotiating. We were leaving India, immediately.

It took two weeks to travel to Bombay from Nainital, in the foothills of northern India, then a week to await the ship. Every minute of it I burned with resistance.

And yet, here we stood on the stern of the great liner, watching Bombay slip away below the horizon. Parts of my body felt as if they were tearing away from me, my veins turning to fragile glass, my lungs as thin as rice paper.

My mother stood behind me, her hands cold on my shoulders. I did not turn to see if she was weeping, but I certainly was. Every thread of my life was being severed—the sight of the mountains rising in the distance, parakeets and monkeys, the sound of a treepie crying out, laburnum trees dripping their yellow flowers like long hair from their branches, the scent of my ayah’s sari, the courtyard on summer evenings, the air alive with insects and stars.

And of course, Tanveer, mixed into every single second of it. I could not speak his name for fear my mother would hear more than she should in my tone, but it was he that I would most mourn, even as I was furious with him.

When land had disappeared and there was only sea everywhere around us, my mother shook herself. “All right, then,” she said. “That’s done. Shall we find some tea?”

I held my arms around my ribs. “I will stay here.”

“My dear, it will serve no good to cling to what must be left behind.”

“Perhaps not,” I said, and then could think of nothing else to add.

She stroked my hair. “We shall return one day, you and I.”

I did not reply, and she left me standing alone against the rail, wind blowing my shawl up around me, rustling my skirts. In my pocket was his letter, but I dared not take it out in such gusts. I fingered the edges, imagining that I could feel his words against my skin, words he’d written in the Urdu script, which we had learned first as a challenge, then later to hide the words of our communication. His father spoke and wrote four languages, but had not bothered with the written script of Urdu. My mother had some skill with Hindustani, even some Persian, but she could not write Urdu. It had become our secret code.

I did not need to read the words, for I had memorized every paragraph.