Page 18 of A Thousand Painted Hours

Dear Tanveer,

[In Urdu]: One small beauty is the cat who sat with me while Mother shopped.

[In English]: Thank you for the feather! I drew it for you. I’m sorry you broke your arm. I expect you will be home soon. We shall all have a picnic!

Your friend,

Elsie

[Enclosed drawing of a feather]

—10—

The summers became the best time of year. The three of us, Gurdaya, Tanveer, and I, convinced our mothers that Nainital was safe and intriguing for children, and we would watch out for each other. The freedom was not common, and it did not happen all at once, but an incident at a time, a picnic, then another time a hike. Because our fathers were always away on various matters of business and our mothers approved and had few others to socialize with in the hill station, we slid beneath their attention.

We pretended to be explorers, sighting strange flora and fauna, giving things nonsense names. Gurdaya liked using pretend Latin names to make us laugh. She and I had become better friends in Tanveer’s absence. She was a year older than me, but I had been pushed into higher forms when I arrived, so we shared a handful of classes, one of which was Latin. I despised it, but she was as clever as her brother with languages. She named treesBarkius grumpiiandStickius cratchiiandSneezia allergica. Tanveer liked climbing to the top of a hill and declaring all he saw to belong to the Land of Maharaja Tanveer Singh.

“You are not the heir,” Gurdaya said disdainfully.

He retorted, “And there are no trees namedBarkius grumpii.”

Her comment made me pause. “Is a maharaja the same as a king?”

They both looked at me as if I’d lost all my brains. “What else?”

I frowned, choosing words carefully. “Well, it seems there are rather a lot of maharajas, while in England there is only one queen, and she is queen of all the lands, including the empress of India, yes?”

“And?”

“If there are so many maharajas, how can any of them be really kings? Aren’t they more like dukes and suchlike?”

Gurdaya snorted, but Tanveer held up a hand to still her. “It is a good question, Elsie, and complicated. It was not always this way, one country under an empress. We had our own lands, each of us, some quite large, some very small, only a village, but each one is ruled by its own maharaja or raj.”

“Does your father rule a large country or a small one?”

“It is smallish. Only a small city, a few villages, and much desert.”

“But we are still royalty,” Gurdaya said. “And very rich.”

Tanveer snorted. “We are hardly rich.”

“Still royal.”

I gave her the eye. “Perhaps, then, I am too ordinary and poor for you.”

She laughed, and leaned hard into my shoulder. “Your father is the younger son of an earl, so you’re hardly ordinary.”

“How do you even know that about my father?”

She blinked. “I know the status of everyone.”

It would never occur to me to collect such information, but it impressed me nonetheless.

On those hot summer days, I brought along my sketchbook and logged hours drawing the leaves and flowers and tree bark we encountered. I hardly knew the names of any of them, while often the two of them knew the names in several languages, a fact that amazed me and challenged me. They switched between them all the time, arguing in Punjabi, melding a mix of Hindustani and English for casual conversation, telling jokes in English. My Hindustani was improving, but I could understand more than I could speak. The Punjabi was their own.

My gift to the group was a sense of adventure, as I was the least fearful. It was my suggestion to hike the trails in the forest, keeping a compass in hand at Tanveer’s insistence. Gurdaya made sure we had lunch and water.

One of our great discoveries was a small pond, hidden away in the forest. It was fed by a waterfall, and flowed out the other side, so it stayed fresh and cool, even at midday when the sun poured down like molten gold. The first time we came upon it, we were hot and tired from the hike. “We shall have our picnic here!” Gurdaya declared.