LITMIR.BIZ

      The next week, Shep discovered that the hospital chowkidar belonged to one of the island’s forest tribes. Though still in his teens, the boy spoke excellent missionary English, and he also knew the native uses for all the local flora. Young Leyo was being wasted as night watchman, so Shep hired him to help Som establish a medicinal garden. Then he sent him over to see if Claire would like him to tutor her.

      Would she!

      “My people,” Leyo told her. “Biya people.”

      His features resembled those of Radcliffe-Brown’s subjects, but he’d evidently accommodated to the western custom of clothing. He carried a cloth sack and wore a white singlet and coral sarong, albeit without shoes. His hair was cropped close to his scalp and parted by a broad straight line shaved from his left temple all the way back and down to his neck. He barely came up to Claire’s collar bone.

      He had volumes to teach her. “Aka Biya,” he said grinning. “Aka mean mouth-talk. Together we aka Biya”

      Elated at her good luck, Claire asked him to spend an hour with her each morning. But he presented a couple of challenges that she hadn’t expected.

      For one, he’d spent enough time in Port Blair that his command of his language had been diluted with Urdu. In fact, he told her, the only one left who spoke pure Biya was his headman, Kuli, who lived with the rest of his clan in the forest to the north.

      The second challenge was the Biya’s entirely separate nonverbal language. To explain, Leyo gestured with his palm to his crown, then his chest. “Spirit talk is for head, for heart; silent, still we hear.”

      Among the Biya people, if Claire understood him correctly, this silent spirit talk was valued more than the language of words. The language of the spirit was communal and empathic. It was also the language of nature. Leyo told her he’d noticed in Port Blair that neither Europeans nor Indians could speak this spirit language, but in his tribe, newborns learned naturally to communicate through silence with the world around them. Gestures and expressions of spirit conveyed warnings, exhortations, and concerns from the Biya god Biliku, as well as shared feeling, from the heart.

      Speech, in contrast, was transactional, used for trade, planning, or resolution of problems. It was needed most when a member of the tribe needed to leave or when the communal bond was threatened by conflict—when dealing with outsiders, for example.

      This lesson would alternately console and torment Claire in the years to come, but at this point the concept of talk without words seemed alluring. It filled her mind that same afternoon when she rode across the harbor to shop in Aberdeen.

      In the bazaar, languages streamed together. Her fellow foreigners—mostly British, but also French and Dutch and various admixtures—all seemed helpless to understand each other without raising their voices. Likewise, most of the mainland-born Indians and Burmese, of whom there were many more, chattered nonstop in Urdu, Karen, Hindi and Marathi. Among both groups, silence seemed synonymous with isolation or disconnection, with fear or shame. Witness the town vagabond skulking at the entrance to an alley off the bazaar.

      She spotted him sitting cross-legged across the street. His skin was so dark that he would have blended invisibly into the shadows but for his filthy red shirt and tattered khaki shorts and those bloodshot eyes, which shone bright and mad within the haggard frame of his face. This was surely the poor soul Naila had called Porubi. Apart from Leyo, he was the only Biya anyone seemed to know outside the forest—and by all appearances he was unreachable as well as mute. Remembering Dr. Benedict’s irate descriptions of government agents plying American Indians with whiskey, Claire had to turn away as this Porubi hoisted his own brown toddy jug. Isolation. Fear. Shame. The very sight of him filled her with all of that.

      She climbed the whitewashed steps of the Kobayashi Kodak Shoppe and found peace at last. The front of the store was empty. An electric fan whirred from the ceiling. She touched the brass counter bell.

      Floorboards creaked behind a black curtain, and a small, trim man and woman wearing matching steel-rimmed spectacles and white cotton jackets came through and bowed across the desk. Claire tentatively bowed back.

      “May we help?” The man spoke English as if it hurt his mouth.

      “I’m Mrs. Durant,” she said. “The new Civil Surgeon’s wife.”

      The woman let out a small exhalation, then bowed quickly again. Coming up she smoothed the tight black bun at the nape of her neck and gave Claire a gentle smile.

      “Welcome to Port Blair,” the man said. “We are Kobayashi. Husband, wife.”

      After an awkward pause when they all seemed to run out of conversation, Claire reached into her purse for the films that she’d shot aboard the ship and around Ross. The husband and wife began opening and closing drawers, exchanging and marking packets for the film without exchanging a word. A young Sikh MP entered. Mrs. Kobayashi, still mute, showed him the print he’d ordered, and counted his payment before bowing him out.

      When Claire inquired how long they’d lived in Port Blair, Mr. Kobayashi whispered to Mrs. Kobayashi, who smiled at Claire from behind a cupped palm. It didn’t seem a complicated question, but apparently it required a conference.

      “Five year,” Mr. Kobayashi said at last and handed her the chits for her films. “This is a good place. We are happy you come.”

      Claire wanted to shake their hands, but she found herself instead salaaming. As they bowed her out, Mrs. Kobayashi winked at her, and she felt as if they were enacting some arcane comedy of gestures, but not even this friendly pantomime compared to the silent language Leyo had described. What all the non-natives had in common was dependence on verbal thought; without words, neither reason nor understanding could occur. Not so among Leyo’s people.

      “We’d call that mind reading,” she said when they met for their next lesson. “A power that many equate with magic, if they believe it exists at all.”

      “Magic.” Leyo smiled at the pale palms of his dark hands.

      “I don’t imagine there’s any hope for me.”

      He looked perplexed.

      “I mean, to learn your silent language.”

      He led her out onto the porch and pointed at the sea, which lay matte beneath a metallic sky, the day’s heat crushing the surface like a blotter. “You hear?”

      “I hear the waves.” A soft concussion from the beach.

      Leyo shook his head and stabbed the air. She saw the angry brown spot that he was indicating far to the east, like a divot chipped from the sky. “Big storm there.”

      “And you can hear that in the waves?”

      He grinned. “Big water, big mouth.”

      “In your camp, everyone can speak the water’s language, then?”

      “Yes.”

      “Even little children?”

      “Yes.”

      “And the forest has a big mouth, too?”

      He covered his ears, laughing. Then he drew a gestured line from his eyes to the storm at sea to the closer waves, and finally to Claire. He didn’t speak a word: Tonight, there would be rain.

      The unspoken language wasn’t silent at all, she thought. It must be positively cacophonous, once you learned to hear it. She remembered Professor Benedict quoting Chief Seattle’s plea to Franklin Pierce: My words are like the stars that never change . . . Even the rocks, which

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