Page 3 of A Thousand Painted Hours

My life, we knew this day would come, that our paths would come to this place of parting, that I would go on to my duties and you would go to yours in another world. It grieves me more than I expected. I am sensible and clear sighted, but my heart seems not to recognize the presence of reason. It only wants what it wants, to hold you always, to have you as my own. I cannot bear the idea of a husband for you that is not me, nor awife for me that is not you. It is a great tragedy.

And yet, we are dutiful. We must each serve the lives we were born to live.

I do not think it wise for us to continue to write to each other. It will only sear my soul each time I see your words, but know that I am always your love, until the stars no longer shine.

Tanveer

I did not wish to be sensible, nor accept my fate so passively. I did not want to leave my beloved India for a landscape unknown to me—and to my mother, for she, too, had been born and raised on the subcontinent.

Two months before, my father’s inheritance had made him an earl, thus elevating our status in the world remarkably. The British community at Nainital had been entirely aflutter at the news, fussing suddenly over the new countess, whom they’d always slightly shunned for doing things her own way, befriending locals like the maharani, studying methods of medicine they did not approve of (though I noticed they leaned on her when they wanted help with some recalcitrant stomach problem or sore feet).

Of course, they never entirely shut her out because she owned the thing in a woman that cannot be ignored—a great and impossible beauty, with wide blue eyes, perfect red lips, and exquisite dark hair. I’d heard all manner of gossip about my mother, that she was the secret daughter of a sultan, that she was the love child of English royalty, even one that said she’d been found in the forest and was therefore an orphan of uncertain parentage.

In truth, she was the daughter of a Welsh couple who’d taken the road to India as a way to escape the brutality of their home village. Her father had been a minor bureaucrat in Lucknow, and they had indeed raised their status, and thus their daughter’s, in the world. She had not been my father’s social equal, but beauty will level the field in such matters.

Mother dismissed every bit of gossip, holding no grudge. “People make up stories when they do not have enough to keep themselves occupied.”

Nor did she take her beauty seriously. She was far more occupied with her passion for healing, for the vagaries of the human body, with caring for the poor.

My father adored her. I do not think he ever understood, his entire life, what grand surprise of fortune had landed him such a beautiful wife, and one who was not foolish or empty headed, or driven by social climbing. He, too, was a man who did not fit well with his peers, a second son left to his own devices who liked reading rather too much, and desperately wanted—against all odds—to serve the people he was charged with leading. He no more wanted the title and lands he’d inherited in England than my mother wanted to move, but what choice did he have? One did not turn down an earldom.

So now we sailed to England, and I wept for the loss of all I knew.

October 10, 1911

Aboard the SSPeregrine

[In Urdu]

Tanveer,

I do not know how to address you, so I shall lead only with your name.

You said we should not write, and I will not do so again after this, but I have one more thing to share with you.

Tonight was another interminable dinner, at which I had to perform my role of the earl’s daughter in front of an audience of unspeakable sycophants. They do not care about me or even really my father, but only his position. Six months ago, they thoughthim beneath them, and now, they can’t crowd closely enough.

I escaped to the deck and the cold seafaring dark. The darkness at sea is an encompassing, unbroken blackness, no distant lights from windows or the village or an inconsiderate moon, only the vastness of night, lit with uncountable numbers of stars.

So vast, Tanveer! Endless, endless swathes of stars, large and small, white and red and blue, all the way to the horizon, in all directions. I have never seen such a thing!

And there above me was Venus, shining so brightly I could see her glow reflected on the sea.

I could not help thinking how much you would have loved it, how much I wished you were standing there with me, looking up. You would have told me what the constellations were. I know some of them, al-JabbarandThat al-Kursi, of course, but never so many as you do.

It made me feel less bereft, bathing in the light of Venus, knowing you might at that very moment be seeing her, too. It shrank the distance between us, somehow.

I won’t write again, but I thought you would want to hear about the stars over the ocean. I painted them for you, but it is a poor imitation of the reality.

Be well,

Elsie

[Enclosed watercolor of the night sky and Venus]

—3—

London, 1940