The Art of Inheriting Secrets(66)

“Partition was 1947.” He shook out a length of fabric, riddled with holes but mainly intact. “She probably knew it was time to leave.” He separated relatively good fabric from the crumbling, destroyed things, each in their own pile on the floor.

The name of the place was tacked to the frame on a tiny brass tag. “Have you ever seen photos of the plantation? Is this it?”

“It was called Sundar Hills.”

“This is it.” I took the painting off the wall. “I’m going to take this with me too.” I looked on the back of the painting for a clue from my mother, but there was nothing more, and I laid it on the bed next to the Lalique perfume bottles.

Next, I moved to the dressing table, opening drawers to find the usual accouterments—a brush, a manicure set made of bone, bobby pins, a loose button. A line of carved wooden elephants, all sorts of them, some decorated with bits of mirror or beads and, shockingly, bits of ivory fitted into their tusks, marched across the back of the table, their reflections murky in the spotted mirror. The elephants, too, I wanted to bring with me, and I gathered them up, frowning again over the idea that no one had cleared the room after Violet’s death. Had it been too painful? Had my mother been angry? Why hadn’t her son done it either?

What happened here?

I brushed off my hands and looked at the pasha again.

A line from a book ran through my head: “White Persian cats lay limply on the lawn,” from One Last Look, by Susannah Moore, a book my mother and I had read as one of our choices for our book club of two. It was a novel about a woman being seduced by India, resisting, then falling in love with it. I’d loved it more than she had, and now I wondered if it was because the woman had reminded her of her mother. I crossed the room and tipped the painting upward to see if there was anything obviously behind it, but it was very heavy, and only dust and cobwebs were visible. “Samir, will you help me with this?”

“Sure.” We lifted it together and leaned it against the bed. Dust and mildew stained the wall behind.

But there, taped to the wooden frame, was a key. I let go of a chortle. It was an old-fashioned brass key, with curlicues and a flag at the end, tied to the wood with red string. I yanked it, and the string gave way easily. “I was right. It’s a treasure hunt.” Holding it in my hand, I said, “Now what could this unlock?”

Samir touched my arm and pointed me to a heavy wardrobe. Sure enough, the key fit, and although it took some doing to open the swollen door, with enough yanking it did at last give way.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was not paintings, two shelves’ worth, all carefully wrapped in tissue paper, then sandwiched between appropriately sized cardboard. None were large, and there were probably fifteen or sixteen of them. They’d been so carefully wrapped that I had no idea what they were, but my gut said this mattered.

Except, why leave them here, where they might have been stolen, plundered, destroyed by time? “We can’t leave these here,” I said. I took one out, wondering if I should take a peek before I—

“Olivia, you’ll want to see this.” Samir sat on the floor with a low, flat box.

“Okay. Just a second.” I chose a smaller painting and began to gently release the tissue paper wrapping.

“Olivia,” he said in a quiet voice.

Drawn by his tone, I nested the painting back in its place and sat down beside him. “What is it?”

He handed over a sheaf of pictures. Most were black-and-white photos, faded, some so faded they were hard to decipher. India, clearly, often the plantation in the painting. “Was the box in the wardrobe too?”

“Yes.”

I leafed through the photos slowly. A meal at a long table with a dozen guests, men and women; a badminton match with two unknown women making a gesture of conquest. A house with a wide porch—a portico. A handful of letters were tucked into the mix and ephemera of all kinds—a program from a play in India from 1943, a receipt so faded it was impossible to read, a scrap of a note with colors in a list.

“Look. This must be your uncle,” Samir said, handing over a dozen snapshots of a blond child at several ages—a thin, tired-looking toddler; a still-skinny but smirking twelve-year-old; a shot of a group of children with the same boy standing on a chair with a sword over them.

“Oh, he looks just swell,” I said drily.

“It would have been a surprise if you’d discovered all the rumors of his nastiness were inflated.”

“Are there journals or anything? That would really, really help.”

“I haven’t seen any yet.”

We both dug through the box, picking out this and that, looking for clues, anything we could understand. Near the bottom of the box, however, was a surprise—a stash of pornographic photos of women. “What’s this?”

Samir sifted through another stack of papers and didn’t look up. “What is it?”

“Naked women.”

No, not women. A woman, singular. An Indian woman with astonishing black hair she smoothed down over her naked body, looking at the camera in a coy way, sprawling over a patterned bedspread completely naked, her breasts lush and young. “She’s so beautiful,” I breathed, and then, electrified, I grabbed his arm. “Oh my God, Samir! Did my grandmother like women?”

“What are you talking about?” He leaned in as I flipped to the next photo, this one larger and more beautiful than the last, the sloe-eyed woman in her twenties, looking straight at the camera with a small smile, her shoulders elegant, her waist tiny—