Page 4 of A Thousand Painted Hours

The first bombs fell on September 7. We’d been bracing for weeks, but perhaps in the way of every person who has known comfort and is loath to let it go, we kept believing that the war would remain distant, far away from us.

We were setting the table for tea when the sirens went off. I looked at Mother, and then at Peter. We’d had a number of false alarms. Was this one real? Betty, our housekeeper, ran through the door from the kitchen, wringing a towel through her hands. “What do we do?” she cried.

I headed to the back door to look out, and the sky was clear. I could hear no engines over the sound of the sirens, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.

Peter said beside me, pointing, “There.”

On the horizon was a sprinkling of what looked like birds. I felt my blood drain through my body, leaving me shivery and frightened. I froze until Peter took my arm and gently directed me toward the cellar door.

Mother nudged Betty ahead of her. “All is well, my dear. We’ve prepared.” She waved her hand at Peter and me, and we followed her through the kitchen. “Elsie, bring the biscuits. Peter, that pitcher of water.”

Before we reached the stairs, the first bombs whistled through the air, the sound piercing, terrifying, and we instinctively looked toward the sky, holding our breath, counting as with lightning. A boom sounded, and another, and another. The walls shook. I ducked instinctively.

Behind me, Peter roared, “Down to the cellar!”

Dust shook from the rafters as we clattered down the steps, diving into the shelter Peter had painstakingly built over the past three months, larger than an Anderson shelter, making more space for all of us. I was grateful as we took our places around the little table Mother had ordered brought down weeks ago. We sat on the old sofa, draped with blankets, and she sat in the chair that had once graced our house in Nainital, so many years before. A bag of knitting awaited. “There, now,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the noise, the sirens going on and on, along with the irregular whistling and thudding of bombs.

Betty shivered, arms clasped around herself. “I didn’t know it would be so loud,” she said.

I grabbed a shawl from the back of the sofa and flung it over her shoulders. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s have some biscuits. We mustn’t waste the sugar, now, should we?”

Only Peter paced, back and forth, back and forth. His face was the color of snow, and I felt pity. He’d known terrible suffering in the last war, taken prisoner in North Africa. “Bloody bombs,” he muttered.

“Language, please,” Mother said. “Come, sit and have a biscuit, Peter. The sugar will do you good.”

The sirens slowed, and I took a breath, reaching for a biscuit. “Are these lemon—?”

A loud whistle, sounding as if it were right over our heads, sailed down, down, down, and an explosion much closer than any other we’d heard made the windows rattle. Dirt shook down on our heads. Betty yelped.

“Oh, dear.” Mother met my eye. Smoothly, to create distraction, she said, “Elsie, do you remember when the tiger threatened the village?”

Tigers and Stars

1906

Nainital, India

—4—

We had moved to Nainital, in the hill country, from Lucknow, mainly for my mother’s health. The cooler mountain air was thought to ease her bouts of malaria. My father remained in Lucknow and visited for a few months each summer, but we stayed. I loved the forests, the cooler air, the lake, the mountains hanging in a ragged curtain across the horizon.

The summer I was ten, a tiger had been plaguing the area, stealing goats and small livestock. A farmer reported his dogs gone, and everyone fretted that a child would be carried off next. Reports of a wild man-eater in the east had come to us, and many feared she had made her way over the mountains.

My father, spitting tobacco off his tongue, called that notion poppycock. “It is not a magical beast. It would never travel so far.”

I found the idea of a tiger thrilling. From my high window, I peered into the forest, hoping to glimpse her. She would stalk to the end of the garden on her giant paws, then pause and look up to see me, her compatriot of spirit. Our eyes would lock, and I would peer deeply into her gold irises for long moments before she gave a roar and trotted back into the trees.

The adults were less romantic. As a result of the threat, we were confined to the courtyards, so I sat in the heat with my ayah, sketching the laburnum tree. I was ten, one of only a handful of English children in the village my age. The others had all been sent away to England for school.

I must have sketched a great many other things before that day—I had always had a pencil in my hand—but my mother had given me a grand new sketchbook for my birthday. The pages were heavy, bound in leather, complete with a little strap and buckle to keep it closed.

The house was built in the Indian fashion, with verandas and a large courtyard in the middle. Benches and fountains filled the sunny space, and at the center was the great tree in full, cascading flower.

I sat on a bench in the slender shade of the courtyard. My ankles and feet were warmed by sunshine, my stockings and shoes discarded to one side. Before me, the tree bloomed yellow against the blue of the sky. The sight so excited my heart that I spent two hours trying to capture it—the shape of the tree trunk, the arch itself, and the tumble of flowers like sunlight hanging in the air. I had begun to grow frustrated as the heat rose, and might have torn it out of the book and flung it away had not my ayah come by and exclaimed loudly in Hindustani, “So beautiful!”

She loved me more than anyone, so it wasn’t a surprise. Still, I accepted her praise with a warm flush of pleasure, and carried the book inside to show my mother. She sat in the open-air parlor, drinking tea with another woman I had not seen before. The other woman was delicately lovely, with large dark eyes and a smooth tan complexion framed by her gold tissue scarf.

“Elsie,” my mother cried. “I was about to send for you. This is the maharani of Talwarpur, and these are her children, Tanveer and Gurdaya. They have just come to Nainital, and will be our neighbors, just down the road.”