Without Benefit of Clergy

Beneath the saffron haze of a Bengal dusk, taciturn surveyor Alan Fielding—his theodolite slung like a cross—purchases a child-bride from a village headman, sealing the transaction with a gold mohur that glints like a fallen star. The girl, Ameera, threads marigolds through her hair, whispering to the parched wind that she will become memsahib without benediction, without priest, without witness. Their mud-walled Eden—an indigo-dyed cottage on the edge of a jute swamp—sprouts secret joys: a pet mongoose named Nip, a crib carved from jackfruit wood, nights stitched together by fireflies and half-remembered lullabies. Yet the cantonment mems whisper of cholera, of dishonor, of the Kipling curse that stalks sahibs who dilute their blood with duskier rivers. When a cholera-laden monsoon lashes the compound, Ameera’s infant son coughs once, a scarlet bubble, then surrenders to the white shroud. Grief mutates into delirium; she drags the tiny corpse to the river, begging Kali for rewinding time, while Fielding—his face a cracked porcelain mask—rails against a heaven deaf to interracial grief. The colonial chaplain refuses burial rites; the native mullahs recoil. In the final reel, Ameera, draped in her wedding sari the color of dying suns, walks into the swamp, the hem of her garment kissing the skulls of drowned buffaloes; Fielding, arriving too late, clutches the mongoose to his chest, its heart ticking against his like a broken watch. Fade-out on a single marigold drifting atop black water—an unblessed nuptial, an empire’s unspoken epitaph.