The Tiger Claw Read online

  Something in his voice said I was expected, that he’d been waiting for me a very long time, and it made me give him my unequivocal trust, as if I were a bottomless well. I blushed, tongue-tied—you must understand, I was almost seventeen but it was the first time I’d been alone with a man who was not my relative.

  Another day, still the summer of ‘31. I see myself at a corner table at Les Deux Magots with Josianne, and Armand approaching. Josianne had known me since childhood, and knew I expected my marriage would be arranged. So she was amused when my eyes lit up at the sight of Armand, and left us alone. Armand and I sat talking for hours and sharing silence as if we’d known one another always.

  A week later I saw Armand sitting cross-legged among the disciples in the Sufi school. He said he came from curiosity about Sufi music. When I knew him better, he said he’d been expecting micro-tones, superlative raags and complex rhythms because I’d described the school so lyrically. I had described what I loved—the school the way it used to be, not as it was under Uncle. Uncle’s sitar whined the simplest of melodies in repetitive fragments; a gramophone recording might have shown greater emotion. Still, Armand listened with great attention. He listened as Uncle Tajuddin lectured for an hour on Love, Beauty and Tolerance. And another hour on the relationship between Love, Lover and the Beloved—Uncle Tajuddin always tried so hard to imitate my long-gone Abbajaan. But I knew Armand had come for me.

  Three years later—how long ago it seems, though it was only 1934—when I delayed your soul from entering the world, I told myself the time was not right, that when Armand and I were married by law and in the eyes of our families, I could ask Allah to send you again. I was only twenty when Madame Dunet was enlisted to stop your soul from taking shape, twenty when I first promised never again to meet Armand. But I should have been stronger, should have stood by my dearest friend turned beloved.

  Mother wanted me to marry one of the rentier class who dabbled in Sufism at the school in Suresnes, secure the family by alliance, no less than Uncle Tajuddin expected me to marry a nawab and secure the Indian branch of the family by alliance. How hard Mother worked to create the perfect package from her too Indian daughter—the right lycée, the École Normale de Musique, piano lessons with Mademoiselle Nadia Boulanger, riding lessons, art history and literature lessons—while Uncle countered with Urdu poetry, Arabic lessons and calligraphy. Everything but finishing school, which was far beyond our means.

  Mother and Uncle never asked me to describe the life I dreamed of composing.

  It was Mother who found out about Armand. Meeting Mademoiselle Boulanger one day on the Champs-Elysées, Mother greeted her and asked how I was progressing. Mademoiselle Boulanger replied that she hadn’t seen me in months.

  Confronted, I confessed to meeting Armand in secret. My family should have rejoiced with me that I had found the twin of my soul: I said to Uncle, “Didn’t Rumi say the desire in a woman for a man is so that each may perfect the other’s work?” But there was consternation, anger, accusations of betrayal; the inquisition began. I who wanted never to disappoint my family had, with a single deed, succeeded in disappointing them utterly and irrevocably.

  Mother said I was confused between love for the Divine—what Abbajaan would have called ishq-i-haqiqi—and ishq-i-majazi, loving a man. Loving a man, she said, requires very different skills from loving the Divine, though a man might believe he has something of the Divine in him. She recited everything she had lost or given up to love and follow Abbajaan, and told me Dadijaan and our Indian family had considered her his concubine for years—until she bore a son.

  I said Abbajaan told me love in any form, though it be for an idol or another person, is sacred because it derives from love for the Divine.

  “We make our choices,” she said, and bit her lips closed as if she couldn’t allow herself to say more. She is from America, a place where it seems one has choices unless a woman makes the wrong ones, as Mother did. And so Mother proposed a quick courtship with a large donor to the Sainah Foundation.

  Why, I asked Uncle Tajuddin, did Allah allow love in the world if marriages are to be forced by our elders? Allah could spare me the yearning, the rushing in the heart at the sound of my beloved’s name, but instead he created passion in me, a woman, just as he created it in men.

  Uncle, knowing nothing of your body preparing itself within me, blamed Mother’s American example for the scandalous situation—I had allowed an ineligible young man’s name to be linked with mine. He proposed an immediate liaison with Allahuddin, a poor, God-fearing cousin in Baroda.

  Kabir preferred Uncle’s solution though such exile meant he’d rarely see me again. Eighteen that year, he was tyrant-in-training, eager to assert his newly minted masculine authority, eager to pronounce my sentence first, verdict afterwards.

  My Dadijaan wasn’t living with us then, but she would have been equally horrified. She came from a place where women had an area of choice, a leftover area men didn’t need. And she would have blamed Mother too, if she knew.

  And all this when I felt already and forever married to Armand.

  Embarrassed by my family, I telephoned my beloved, whispering, “Not now, not now,” till I had only myself left to rely on. Only my trembling self.

  I learned that my body belonged not to me but to my family, and it was my uncle’s right to say yea or nay to marriage. Because I lived in Paris, he said, didn’t mean I was no longer Indian and Muslim. He expected me to deposit my life in his care, and was so hurt and then insulted at my slightest hesitation.

  Seeking to change me, he spared me no diatribe against Jews, no lecture about the degradation of Muslim women who shame their families by consorting with unbelievers. He forbade me to leave Afzal Manzil for one month, and I spent that month weeping, confined in the dead air of my room, your body growing inside me. Never will I forget that feeling of changelessness, of being held hostage by a strong man’s will.

  I was no better than a Montmartre prostitute, Uncle said, but because he loved me, he would keep my secret. His only condition: if I spoke to Armand ever again, everyone I loved—Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib—would never see me or speak to me again. This for the sin of loving without permission; what if he had known of your body, that beautiful miracle Armand and I made the night of our clandestine marriage, growing within me?

  I didn’t fully believe Uncle’s threat, for I still believed in my family’s love, in my Abbajaan’s teachings that all religions are equal paths to a Universal God, like many roads to the Ka’aba.

  The very evening Uncle’s sentence was lifted, I crept out and went to Armand’s garçonnière, the tiny garret he rented so he could keep regular hours for composition; Madame Lydia’s apartment was always full of cousins, mostly refugees from Germany. I looked up and saw candles shining in both windows. I had not imagined him celebrating Hanukkah along with other Jews. His family did not keep kosher, spoke no Hebrew or Yiddish at home, and only his father had read the Torah. How little I knew Armand, I thought.

  And so I came away without telling him about you.

  I felt abandoned by your father after that—I don’t know why. It was I who kept you secret from him, but I felt that he, intuitive in so many ways, shouldn’t need to be told of you. But even your father couldn’t know what was in my heart as long as I was silent.

  I never wanted Armand to feel he had been ensnared into marriage. He had commissions for new works for more prestigious orchestras. He heard an inner music, from his heritage of Russian folk harmonies, and it demanded to be rendered in concert music. He was introducing microtones, experimenting with “chain forms,” jazz colouring and variations, reinforcing his personal style. How cruel to suppress his music with domesticity.

  Even so, I planned to meet him as soon as I could—till Uncle mentioned casually, so very casually, one day that if I met him even once more, it would be my fault should something terrible happen to him. This time, I believed him. I didn’t see balding Uncle who had
banished himself from his respectable home to wear closed European shoes and live in fear of Parisians; to me, Uncle was vindictive, hate-filled and angry—and powerful.

  So your mother was a coward, for my family made me ashamed of loving Armand, ashamed of love though there is never enough in the world. I had no confidence in our future, I had nothing to offer you in the present. I had not lived my own life enough to know myself—how could I be a mother?

  At first I confided your existence to no one, not even my dearest friend, Josianne. But later, in desperation, I confided in your aunt Zaib. Zaib said I wasn’t ambitious enough, that I could have done better than Armand, but she’d help me.

  Armand and I met again, four years later. My Dadijaan had just unpacked her bedding roll full of gifts and spices in November 1938 when we heard the news of Kristallnacht. I telephoned Armand to ask if he had relatives or students in Germany, to commiserate, and most of all to ask for reassurance that he would be safe.

  Armand was angry. After all, we had not met in four years. He told me of Jews forced to sweep the streets, of regulations, a cousin in Berlin and an uncle in Vienna who were missing. His voice was tender at the end; he was touched that I still cared.

  I felt stronger after I spoke with my love, but burdened with secrets. So I wrote. I told him about you, ma petite, and I told him how I came to lose the courage to marry him. I didn’t know what he would say, and I was ashamed to reveal my uncle’s hypocrisy and threats, but I had to write. I waited and waited—it seemed forever. But he did write back—such a letter, ma petite! Your father wrote to comfort me. Half the blame was his, he said. He wrote that his cousins and refugee students had worse tales of anti-Semitism.

  He wrote that he loved me—I must remember this today. He and Madame Lydia agreed, he wrote, that in these times when love has become so rare, our hearts must become our only compass. He promised we would marry one day in the eyes of the law and together bring you back. He wasn’t afraid of Uncle as I was, nor did he believe Uncle’s threats and bombast, but we lived in France, where, as in India, I needed Uncle or Kabir’s permission to marry.

  War came very soon after that, in 1939, and Armand left his students and the sonata he was composing. For almost a year he sat in the fortified bunkers waiting for the Germans to breach the velvet rope of the Maginot line. Or the Imaginot line, as Kabir and I called it later—the line that marked the limit of our imaginations, and through which no one, certainly not Hitler, could venture.

  I wrote every day, I sent Armand parcels. I stole away to Madame Lydia’s to share his letters. Madame told me stories about Armand—how his Jewish name was Aaron but he chose Armand himself as his French name to use in school. How he sang before he learned to speak, and would, as a child, borrow money to buy her flowers. I listened, wanting her tales to make up for all the years I had not known him. Shared love for Armand made us special to each other, as if we’d never been strangers.

  I was almost twenty-six by then, and again I thought perhaps now I was old enough to make my own choices the way my mother had. I turned to her again for help, but Mother said I was making the very mistakes she made. After all the love she’d lavished on me.

  I was betraying the entire life Mother planned for me to live.

  Kabir was twenty-four then, and I hoped, if he met Armand, he would see, he would feel intuitively, that my Armand is a refined man, an educated, decent man. What more can anyone ask in a brother-in-law?

  In the spring of 1940, Armand had but ten days’ leave and was back in Paris. I persuaded Kabir to meet him. I waited in my room at Afzal Manzil, praying Kabir would be willing to share me with Armand and give permission for our marriage. But Kabir! He returned from meeting Armand and said he agreed with Uncle!

  “It is impossible that you could love Rivkin,” said he, assuming a deep voice of authority. “You’ve never been in love, you don’t know what it feels like. But you’re tender-hearted. Yes, you have feelings, deep feelings. But you feel pity, not love. That’s all one can feel for a Jew—pity! But you—you care so little for this family that you can even think of marriage. Listen to me! If I marry an unbeliever, she’ll become Muslim. But if you marry Rivkin, Jews will inherit Afzal Manzil. That’s disgusting. Think how you would feel if I told you I wanted to marry a man. Wouldn’t you be disgusted? That’s how I feel.”

  He had begun to name my feelings on my behalf, tell me what I felt—so I would know what he permitted me to feel. Just what did he know of love at twenty-four? He said I’d ruined my chances of marriage to any wifeless Muslim; a marriage should be arranged for me in India—perhaps our cousin Allahuddin could yet be persuaded to take me as his third wife. He was playing head of the family again, posturing to show he could be a man. Scandal was to be avoided at all costs; we were dependent on donations to the Sainah Foundation.

  Now that even Kabir, beloved brother who was to carry our father’s teachings of tolerance forward, had turned against us, I lost courage a second time, capitulated again, setting off these years of separation and grief. Too weak to break my blood ties, too anxious to please, too frightened of penury, I did not protest enough that Kabir had excluded the man I trusted, admired and loved most from my life, in the belief that he was protecting me, preventing further “mistakes.”

  So I was given love, that rarest, most precious spark that can ignite between man and woman, and I had not the courage to accept its demands for fear of losing my family’s love.

  I had expected Armand to argue with Kabir, to fight like a knight for his lady. Instead, Kabir said Armand had agreed we should part.

  When we said goodbye in the Bois beneath the locust trees, Armand explained why. Yes, I agreed we would part, it’s true, but what I did was desertion. Unpardonable even though Armand wanted it.

  Suresnes was bombarded a few weeks later. Uncle Tajuddin took a steamer from Marseilles back to Baroda while the rest of us escaped to England. Uncle could not threaten me now, and Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib were safe in London.

  The unpardonable can be neither forgiven nor punished, only atoned for by action. So as I flew towards Paris in the Lizzie from Tangmere, laden with admonitions, instructions and directions from the SOE, I also went determined to make amends. I told myself I was no longer a trembling kind of woman, that I claimed my life and body as my own. This time I would not fail Armand.

  Three weeks in Paris for my secret mission, and if I could not touch Armand’s cheek once more and hold him to my breast, I would find a way to tell him only this: that I will always love him, that if he should still desire, we will marry anew in the eyes of the law when the world finds peace.

  CHAPTER 9

  En route to France

  Tuesday, June 15, 1943

  NOOR SCANNED THE NIGHT SKY, looking out as ordered, for patrolling German night fighters. Thankfully, for almost an hour now, only the silvered dark rushed over the clear cowl-roof.

  Edmond pulled a leather-jacketed hip flask from his raincoat pocket, unscrewed the top and proffered it. Noor shook her head. She liked a glass of wine on occasion, now Uncle Tajuddin was too far away to sour it with his frowns, but tonight she needed every sense alert.

  “Landing soon.” The pilot’s shout burst against her eardrum.

  He must have identified himself by s-phone to the waiting resistance team and the air movements officer, the lieutenant code-named Gilbert. Now he’d be searching for the inverted-L-shaped flare-path from their torches. Strangers—but please, Allah, not the Germans—were standing below with upturned faces, right now.

  Noor’s stomach lurched as the Lysander began its descent. She was tipping backwards in her seat. She listed against Edmond’s shoulder as the small plane circled to come down against the wind. There was a bump, a jolt, a rise and another bump. The plane taxied down the long leg of the L, turned sharp right along the short leg and came to a standstill. The pilot throttled back his engine, exchanged a challenge question for the password from the waiting reception team.r />
  The roof above Noor slid back. The dark shape of a peaked cap appeared over the rim.

  “Venez—vite!” invited a hoarse voice.

  She rose quickly in the cramped space and swung herself out, feeling for each rung in the ladder leaning against the plane. Halfway, strong hands gripped her waist, then someone lifted her bodily from the plane, held her a moment against the vigorous thumping in his chest, and set her feet on spongy, grass-stubbled ground. Slightly winded, she looked up into a flashily handsome face under the peaked cap.

  “Bienvenue, mademoiselle,” he said with a chivalrous grin. “Wait here.”

  A commanding overarm gesture marked him as the air movements officer. An experienced pilot, Edmond had said over dinner. Gilbert was trained by the SOE to select and arrange fields on which the cloak-and-dagger planes could land—nothing ploughed, no soft mud. The Loire was as the back of his hand, and, the pilot informed Noor, Gilbert was a walking Michelin guide to the best black market cuisine in northern France. Besides, since he had begun selecting landing sites, the squadron had not lost a single flight.

  Three men carrying small valises and clutching their hat brims scurried past Noor to the foot of the ladder. Edmond lifted out Noor’s coat and handbag, his own valise and, with some effort, the long drum-like canister. These passed down the ladder to waiting arms of the departing passengers. Other figures crowded around and carried the canister away in their midst. Then Edmond hoisted himself from the plane.

  How could three men fold themselves into the tiny gunner’s cockpit she and Edmond had just vacated? But they must have done so, and rapidly.

  The roof of the gunner’s cockpit slid closed. A hand emerged from the cockpit window and wiped a smudge of oil from the windscreen.

  The engine gave a bursting howl loud enough, Noor felt sure, to wake every German from here to Berlin. Gilbert gave the thumbs-up sign. In sixty yards the Lysander was airborne, the roar fading to a distant drone in the sky. Gilbert signalled and two men ran from the clump of trees behind Noor and pulled the guiding torches from the ground. Noor read her wristwatch by moonlight—00:45 hours. Landing and takeoff had taken only three minutes.