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‘If you think that, then what are you doing in England?’ Letty challenged.
Ramy looked at her as if she were crazy. ‘Learning, woman.’
‘Ah, to acquire the weapons to bring down the Empire?’ She scoffed. ‘You’re going to take some silver bars home and start a revolution, are you? Shall we march into Babel and declare your intentions?’
For once, Ramy did not have a quick riposte. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said after a pause.
‘Oh, really?’ Letty had found the spot where it hurt; now she was like a dog with a bone and she wouldn’t let go. ‘Because it seems to me that the fact that you’re here, enjoying an English education, is precisely what makes the English superior. Unless there’s a better language institute in Calcutta?’
‘There’s plenty of brilliant madrasas in India,’ Ramy snapped. ‘What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people.’
‘So you’re here to ship silver back to those mutinying sepoys, are you?’
Perhaps he should, Robin almost said. Perhaps that’s precisely what the world needs.
But he stopped himself before he opened his mouth. Not because he was afraid of breaking Griffin’s confidence, but because he could not bear how this confession would shatter the life they’d built for themselves. And because he himself could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes. The only way he could justify his happiness here, to keep dancing on the edges of two worlds, was to continue awaiting Griffin’s correspondence at night – a hidden, silent rebellion whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt over the fact that all this gold and glitter had to come at a cost.
