Glorious Boy - Aimee Liu

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of the earth onto Naila’s classroom wall, and the crisscross of latitude and longitude gave her a similar sense of security, a way to manage—to bear—the immensity of all that she could not fathom.

      Teacher Sen’s map became a new screen through which she traced continents, oceans, mountains. These are our islands, Naila would repeat and show on Claire’s map how her teacher stabbed at the pale blue Bay of Bengal, how he ran his forefinger up and down the spine of green bits marked Andaman Nicobar Archipelago. Then he would sweep both palms outward as if to embrace the wall—but all of this is our home.

      When he spun to face the class—Naila reenacted the movement—Teacher Sen’s spectacles often fell from their perch atop his bulging forehead, and he’d catch them with a flourish in his left hand even though he wrote with his right, and he never stopped talking about the miracle of geography as he performed this feat. Master the map and you master the world. That is how the British did it.

      His other pupils sniggered and picked their noses and ridiculed him behind his back, but Naila understood. The British came from a place that occupied barely one square of the map’s screen, while India and Burma spread over more than ten squares. How could people from such a small place rule over a land so far away and so much larger than their own?

      Claire had no answer, but Teacher Sen did. Map mastery. Like Naila in her mother’s kitchen, the British stayed securely at home with themselves, yet by mastering the map, they owned the world on the other side of the screen.

      Naila imagined floating invisibly through that screen and descending into scenes she’d glimpsed only in photographs and illustrations. Cities, palaces, deserts, and lakes. Teacher Sen said it snowed where he grew up, in Kalimpong. He tried to describe the towering mountains of his childhood, but for Naila, such natural wonders were as foreign as skyscrapers. She loved to dream of them even if she never expected or would dare to visit them in real life.

      She told Claire about the day she came home from school to the news that she and her parents would soon be leaving the house with the blue gate where they had lived since she was born, that they were to move across the harbor to Ross Island to work for the new British doctor and his American wife. To Naila, it felt as if America herself was coming to Port Blair!

      America seemed the most exotic country of all. Larger on the map than England and India combined, home to the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon, to Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers, who sometimes appeared in moving pictures at Aberdeen Cinema. The funny men Naila liked, but she didn’t know what to make of the cinema ladies who hiked up their skirts and drove motorcars and kissed men full on the lips. No one behaved like that in Indian movies, let alone in Naila’s own experience, but Americans seemed to have bigger spirits even than the British. Would the new memsaab also have a big spirit? Her ma had laughed at such childish excitement and said she hoped so.

      Claire took the girl’s hand and replied that her spirit paled next to Naila’s.

      The baby appeared to think so, too. One afternoon Claire came out of her study to find Naila alone with Ty in the parlor. Naila, in her blue school uniform, sat cross-legged on the divan with Ty Babu, as she called him, in her lap. Neither the infant nor the girl noticed Claire. Naila was too busy feeding him.

      All she had was a bottle of water, but her head tipped birdlike to one side, arms nesting the baby against her. Beautiful, was Claire’s first thought. Precious. But it was more than that.

      Naila held that bottle like a sacred object, and as he sucked, Ty kept his gaze locked on the girl’s. He caught a red thread from the stitching in her blouse, and the intensity with which he rubbed it, between his thumb and middle finger, made it seem a gesture of devotion.

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       November 15, 1937

       Happy birthday, dear Vivvy!

      I’m sending this care of your editor in Sydney, though you’re doubtless raising muck up and down the Malay. I hope as I write this that you’re having a bang-up celebration.

      As for us, it’s been rather a turbulent year in paradise. Ty is the highlight, of course. In my entirely unbiased opinion, the boy is abso-blooming brilliant. At five months he swims like a fish and sits like a dog. Any day now he’ll be babbling Aka Biya—the language of the people Claire is studying.

      Or trying to, between setting up the nursery and fielding congratulatory visits from the cantonment matrons. My bride has become a stunning young mother, and she dotes on Ty, as do we all. Occasionally she grumbles about getting back out in the field, but I remind her that patience is a virtue.

      Happily, I’m not quite so constrained. Just yesterday I made an excursion that might interest you, to a convict settlement called Ferrargunj—one of about sixty built around the archipelago over the past half century by released prisoners and their wives. Ferrargunj is one of the few not on the outer coastline. It sits near an inland river, which allows the Ferrargunjians to clear the valuable inland timber and send it by raft down to the sawmill here in Port Blair.

      My official purpose was to check on the village dispensary, though “official” is a slight stretch. Technically, these village rounds are the duty of my second-in-command, Lt. Gupta, but Gupta’s more British than I’ll ever be and seems to consider the convict settlers so far beneath him that he can’t be bothered to spit on them. As part of my collegial appeasement policy, I’ve elected to visit these outpost dispensaries myself. Two birds, as they say. I always take our man Leyo with me and, after I treat a few raging sores and machete wounds and the standard quota of malarial cases, we go orchid hunting.

      Yesterday we also had a forest officer to see we didn’t lose our way. Not much chance of that with Leyo along, but the forester, one Luke Benegal, was a fine chap, and I was lucky to have them both, since we discovered a giant Grammatophyllum speciosum in the crotch of an ancient marblewood tree. This particular orchid is not only rare and enormous, but the aboriginals use it as a cure for scorpion and centipede poisoning. It blooms only once every two years, and this one was covered with spears of beautiful leopard-spotted blossoms! The whole thing must have weighed over a ton, but we managed to wrestle off a single root bundle that we could hoist between the three of us. As we staggered back to the boat, Leyo pointed out a dozen more specimens that I’d have given my eye to collect, but this trophy was all we could manage for one day.

      It’s how one survives in the Andamans, to cultivate these sorts of fascinations with the local flora and fauna. Our current Commissioner Wilkerson tells me Ferrargunj was named after his predecessor Michael Ferrar, who spent eight years in the Andamans, studied five South Asian languages, and collected over four thousand butterfly specimens! A man cut from the cloth of Kipling’s Lurgan Sahib.

       I do believe that Claire, too, will make something swell of our time here, once she’s able to return to her tribe. You astutely remarked in your last letter that she sounded like my kind of girl. I never knew I had a “kind of girl,” but I do now believe she is it. Not fearless like you. Sorry, dear sister, but I’d be terribly intimidated by a wife who wanted to beat the world’s drum as loudly as you do. You know I say that with hugest affection, but I’m sure you are not surprised to hear that I love Claire for her quiet tenacity and her youthful formlessness. I don’t mean that she is formless—au contraire! Only that she’s still coming into herself, you know? She’s willing to admit that she doesn’t know it all, and between the two of us, we refreshingly know next to nothing!

       And you, Viv? Your last missive about the nefarious doings of the Japanese in our old stomping grounds sounded decidedly ominous, and I don’t trust you to keep your nose clean if all hell breaks out. Why don’t you see about coming here instead?

      You could cover our latest Nationalist rumblings. There’s talk of another round of hunger strikes brewing at our Cellular Jail—there have been several over the years—and I’m quite in sympathy. All the prisoners are demanding is basic stuff like clean water and light

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