by Jon Stock
I decided to ring Frank. I knew it was risky but it was eating me up not knowing how he was. There was a booth across the street, from where a few minutes later I was listening to the sound of his phone ringing. An Indian voice answered. I hesitated, wondering if the line was tapped, and then asked for Frank.
“London,” the man said. “Gone to London.”
“Susie? Madam?” I asked, not sure whether I was worried or relieved that they had left Delhi.
“London.”
I asked for a number and after a long pause and much rustling of paper I was given one. What were they doing there? Had they gone from choice, or had they been forced out? On balance, I felt they were probably better off out of Delhi. I would ring Frank tomorrow; it was too late in London.
Increasingly disconsolate, I went over to the boatman and asked if he had been sent by Macaulay, pointing at the harbour as I said the name. I couldn’t bring myself to ask whether he was “fatman row-row” but it seemed not entirely impossible in the circumstances. His many chins were unshaven, the whiskers grey, and he wore a tight white vest, which failed to cover his stomach.
“Macaulay?” he said, nodding as he looked me up and down.
“Macaulay,” I repeated, encouragingly.
“Shari,” he said, nodding his head from side to side. It was hard to tell whether he was saying yes or no.
I persevered, despite his lack of English, asking him whether he had seen a young woman called Priyanka. It was a desperate question, made worse by having to repeat her name slowly, syllable by syllable. But when I said her name in full again, rolling the ‘r’ for good measure, his eyes lit up like an Italian icecream seller.
“Ah, Priyanka,” he said, nodding towards the harbour. “Five,” he added, beaming as he tapped a finger on his watch. If my arms had been long enough I would have hugged him. Instead I settled for a tentative pat on his hairy shoulder and we made our way down to his boat.
The water was choppy in the middle of the main channel and our progress was painfully slow. I watched as the oars twisted in the rusty rollocks, glancing up occasionally at fatman, willing him to row-row faster. But his pace had the steadiness of habit, fast enough to beat the tide but sufficiently slow to avoid breaking into a sweat. I wondered why Macaulay didn’t provide him with an outboard engine.
It was not immediately obvious where we were heading. Already we had rounded Willingdon Island, passed the terrace where I had been drinking beer a few hours earlier, and we were now drifting out towards an island on the far side of the harbour entrance which I assumed was Vypeen. I could see a smaller island in the foreground and another one behind that. I pointed towards it, gesturing beyond the first one, and he nodded. It was covered in thick vegetation but I caught a brief glimpse of some white pillars and a grand, box-like porch through a gap in the coconut trees.
Had fatman, whose hairline was finally beginning to bead with sweat, really understood what I had said? Was it a desire to please? Or had those three syllables, Priy – ank – a, broken through the language barrier to mean the same as they did to me?
We were almost at the island now but our progress was slowed still further by a bed of water hyacinth, its roots sticking to the oars like glutinous noodles. A man had appeared on a small jetty, waiting to take our bow rope. There were no other boats around, and when I looked back to where we had just come from I realised that we were much more tucked away than I had originally thought.
I began to doubt whether Priyanka could really be here and felt foolish again. But then I saw her sitting on a cane chair on a lawn in front of the main building, her white salwar kameez clearly visible through the trees. Her posture was unmistakable, upright, in control. She was talking with Macaulay, who was also wearing white, having changed into a kurta pyjama. There was a tape recorder on the table between them. Behind it, squatting on the grass close to Macaulay was a photographer, whose flash suddenly brightened the dimming light.
I jumped off the boat, trying not to run, and walked round a curved gravel path. There were some rhododendron bushes between the jetty and the lawn, but I managed to catch a few more glimpses, her head tilting back with that light, unselfconscious laugh of hers. Her presence here meant one of two things. Either she was a career journalist who had been presented with an irresistible scoop. Or she wanted to see me. If the latter was the case, she might just wish to tell me to back off, a final plea to show some respect. I was hanging on, by a single spinning thread, to something else.
“Raj,” Macaulay said, in a booming, friendly voice as I stepped onto the lawn and approached them. “Glad you could make it.” We were clearly picking up from where we had left off.
I glanced at Priyanka, who looked away, abashed rather than cross. I wondered if the pulse beating in my temples was noticeable. Priyanka ran a hand through her long, healthy hair and glanced down at her notebook. She wasn’t swimming.
“How could I turn down such an offer?” I said, still a few yards away, looking around at the incongruously grand setting. The lawn, dotted with painted croquet hoops, had been recently mown with precise diagonal stripes. There were rosebeds in full bloom at each corner, and the gravel path swept on round the lawn to the house, which appeared to be an original white Lutyens bungalow, although it looked more recently built. A square porch worthy of a viceroy dominated the entire setting, offset by Lutyens’s trademark pillars that ran along the front of the house on either side. A Union Jack was fluttering from the flat roof, and there were rows of solar-heating panels just visible through some jali lattice set further back.
“I think you know Priyanka,” Macaulay said, as I drew level with them. I shook Macaulay’s hand and then turned to Priyanka, who surprised me by standing up and kissing me briefly on both cheeks. There was no intimacy in the gesture, just a calculated setting of tone: a breezy Western friendship, nothing more.
“How was your journey?” she asked, neutrally. The tide was carrying her out to sea. As she sat down again, the sweet smell of coconut hair oil still lingering, I caught her eye, acknowledged the new rules of engagement.
“Not bad,” I said. “A two-hour delay in Goa.”
“I meant the boat trip,” she said, smiling for the first time. “Did it make you seasick?”
“No,” I replied, annoyed at myself. “We met in Delhi,” I said, turning to Macaulay. “I’ve been helping her with one or two articles.”
“Including this one,” Macaulay said, gesturing to a mali to bring up another seat. “I don’t normally do this sort of thing – it always lands me in trouble – but I relented when she said she was a friend of yours.”
“Really?” I said, genuinely curious. I checked myself, wary of revealing my own suspicions about him, his earlier sudden change of heart towards me.
“Are we nearly finished?” he said to Priyanka. “I have a little work to do before dinner.” Macaulay took out a packet of Wills cigarettes, offered me one, which I declined, and then lit one himself with a plastic lighter. He inhaled through one end of his bunched fist, between his curled thumb and forefinger, the cigarette itself pointing upwards, perpendicular to the normal angle, like an improvised hookah.
“Do you have enough, Thomas?” Priyanka asked, turning to the photographer, who was still squatting, apparently taking a picture of the Union Jack.
“I’m done,” he said. “Although I wouldn’t mind one more with the elephant.” Thomas glanced over to the far end of the garden, where, for the first time, I noticed a large tusker standing quite still in the shade of a jacaranda tree. I was amazed that something so big could be so discreet.
“I think we’ve done the mahout bit, don’t you?” Macaulay said, sounding bored.
“Okay,” said the photographer. “The light’s dying, anyway.”
I watched Priyanka as they talked. She was sitting upright, despite the temptations of the garden chair, writing tidy words with a carefully sharpened pencil.
“I might need a little more on your news
agency,” she said.
“You make it sound so grand,” Macaulay replied. “It’s just a hobby, nothing more. I collect stories from the Indian press and send them to friends overseas. That’s all there is to it. ‘Three die in bogey mishap’, that sort of thing.”
He caught my eye and winked, trying to bind me into his circle of foreign friends. I looked away.
“Perhaps we could discuss it over dinner,” Priyanka suggested, leaning forward to turn off her tape recorder.
“If we must,” he said. “I have to leave you for a while. I suggest you go inside, have a drink. The mosquitos are appalling here, even worse than Vypeen, which is saying something.”
12
The solitary lightbulb on the verandah where we were talking was not very bright and neither of us was surprised when it flickered a couple of times and died. “Dim-dum”, as Jagu, my mali in Delhi, had called it. For a few moments Priyanka and I sat in the darkness, watching the beam from the nearby Vypeen lighthouse sweep across the tops of the palm trees and out to sea, before coming round to the house again, lighting up the mosquito nets draped between the verandah pillars. The moon had yet to rise but the sky above us was already a matrix of stars and smudged galaxies. The noise of cicadas in the garden had grown louder in the humid darkness, no longer a background accompaniment to our stilted words.
Priyanka was all artifice tonight, and I had so far spent the precious fifteen minutes we had been left on our own swapping facts about Kerala, its high levels of literacy and graduate unemployment, recent threats to its secular tradition, the south-west monsoon. We had been unable to talk about Macaulay, a subject that would have broken the impasse, because we were both aware of him moving around behind us in the drawing room. Perhaps the powercut – “load-shedding”, Macaulay called it – would help, let us start again.
“Are you angry with me for calling?” I asked, still looking out towards the lighthouse. I could hear her sipping her nimbu pani, the ice cubes knocking against the glass. Then we both turned as Paul, the boy from the café, came round the corner of the house and up the verandah steps, clutching two gas lamps. I winced as he managed to untwist his contorted body and hang one from a hook on a pillar; the other he placed on the table between us, catching my eye and smiling. Priyanka waited for him to go and then looked back at the sitting room.
“Raj, Cochin is a very small place,” she began, less falsely than before. “We have met once before in Delhi, professionally, that’s all. You are here because of work, seeing one of your patients, and I’m researching a story.”
“Is that what you told Macaulay?” I asked.
“It’s also what I told my family,” she said, looking round again.
“And is that why you’re really here? For work?”
“I’m getting married next month,” she said, flatly.
“So you said,” I replied.
“You almost embarrassed my father today. I know it must all seem very provincial, but when a woman in Kerala is engaged to someone, the father doesn’t really expect her to receive phone calls from other men.”
“So why did you come here tonight, then?” I asked, trying in vain not to sound annoyed.
“Because the management at Seven Days has been trying to secure an interview with Macaulay for over two years.”
“And that’s it,” I said, smirking. “Well I’m glad if I’ve helped to further your career. They might even let you go on honeymoon now, you never know.”
“And because I wanted to see you,” she added, more softly, ignoring my petulance. “To explain to you in person.”
We both sat in silence again, watching a moth circle the lamp on the pillar. Behind it a bat flitted low over the lawn and disappeared into the darkness. Her change of tone was encouraging.
“I wanted to see you as well,” I said, tentatively.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why? Because when we met in Delhi I thought there was something between us.”
“But you can see that’s irrelevant now,” she said, frustration creeping back into her voice again. “We met twice. It was fun.”
“Fun,” I replied, mockingly. “Clearly not fun enough.”
“It’s not like that, Raj,” she said, despairing. “I’ve met a few guys who were fun to be with, at school, college, work. But I always knew I would eventually end up with someone my parents had chosen. I’m sorry it worked out like this, that we happened to meet just before they started looking. It must all seem very callous.”
“And now that they have found someone?” I said.
“I would ask that you respect their choice, respect me.”
I contemplated asking about the new man in her life, but decided against it. She probably couldn’t have told me much about him, anyway.
“I was cross when you rang,” she continued. “You knew why I had come back to Kerala. It was so… presumptious.”
I knew as she chose the word that it was probably the best of a bad bunch. She was right, it had been presumptious, but I owed it to our brief time together in Delhi, to the serendipity that had brought me to Cochin. At least she acknowledged that something had happened. But now that I had seen her again, it was clear that I must leave her to get on with her life.
A moment later my resolve weakened as I noticed her wiping a finger across one eyelid. “I’m sorry,” she said, getting up. “I must go to the bathroom.”
*
Dinner turned out to be a surprisingly mundane affair, given the extravagant surrounds. Macaulay explained that he had built the house – it was an almost exact copy of a Lutyens bungalow – after hearing about an expatriate in Delhi who had constructed one in the depths of the Haryana countryside.
“Of course, Lutyens didn’t actually build all the bungalows in New Delhi,” Macaulay was saying, as we tucked into a bland moussaka. The first course had been tinned tomato soup. “Only four were his own work and they are in the grounds of Rasthrapati Bhavan. The rest were Baker’s.”
“But why did you look back for inspiration, rather than forward?” Priyanka asked, jotting something down in a notebook beside her plate. She had requested permission earlier to record the dinner but Macaulay had objected. He had, however, agreed to her “taking minutes”, if she must, during the meal. She was sitting opposite me near one end of a large dining-room table. Macaulay was at the head, in between us. We were all surprisingly close, bunched up with our plates and chairs, leaving three-quarters of the polished rosewood table empty.
“The simple answer is that I cannot bear air conditioning,” he said. “Lutyens didn’t have that luxury, if you can call it that, in his day. Instead he devised a brilliant solution to living in hot climates. His bungalows were spacious with high ceilings and always ventilated by cross breezes. That’s the important point. Nobody to my knowledge has managed to come up with anything better.”
It was certainly cool in the dining room, the air stirred by two long-stalked fans as it passed from the verandah through to a central courtyard, where a fountain was playing. The downward current from the fans occasionally disturbed thin strands of hair on the top of Macaulay’s balding head. He flipped them back as if he were closing a lid. As we talked, he struck me as an increasingly lonely figure, confident and busy, but perhaps out of fear he was also adept at keeping others at arm’s length, turning attention away from himself. My report for Sir Ian was going to be unacceptably thin unless the guard dropped.
I looked around the room for more clues about the man, his rumoured influence. The furniture was colonial and the pictures were mostly Daniell prints. The only sign of a past, of a family, was a collection of silver-framed photos on an Edwardian half-moon table.
“Can you tell me a bit more about your views on the British Raj” Priyanka was asking.
“I thought we went through this on the lawn,” Macaulay said, and then turned to me, grinning. “This is the bit that always lands me in hot water.” I smiled but didn’t like the conspiracy between us, th
e exclusion of Priyanka.
“You said earlier that there was no justice in India any more for the common man,” Priyanka continued. “What do you mean exactly? That there was more justice before Independence?”
“Of course. Under British rule, the District Collector was, generally speaking, an honest man. We had one or two scoundrels, but he could be counted on to be fair. He also provided moral leadership, a civilising influence. Can you see any evidence of that today in Bihar? Take a close look at this,” he said, gesturing towards a print behind him which I hadn’t noticed before. “Suttee, or sati – a grotesque practice outlawed by Lord Bentinck in 1829-” Macaulay stood up to look at the picture more closely. In it, a woman, her arms raised and breasts bare, was about to throw herself onto a raging fire. Priyanka stayed seated but I pushed my chair back and joined Macaulay.
“An eighteenth-century Dutchman called Baltazard Solvyns,” he said, as we moved along to the next picture. “He saw it all with his own eyes. They’re etchings. He did this one as well.” I shuffled behind him, pushing a chair in to make room. A woman with a bowl on her head had her hands clasped together in prayer. Next to her a bamboo ladder disappeared into a small, circular hole in the ground.
“Buried alive, wretched woman. The Joogee caste of weavers from Orissa. One of the few Hindus who bury their dead. And the living. The woman climbs down into the hole, usually about eight feet deep, and the ladder is quickly withdrawn. Her dead husband has already been lowered inside. She places his head on her knee, lights a lamp and then a priest on the surface says some prayers while friends and family walk round the hole, throwing in sandalwood, flowers and a few new clothes. Then they start chucking in the earth, gently at first. When it reaches the wife’s neck, they pause, before covering her up as quickly as possible, treading down the mud to ensure a speedy end. It usually takes five minutes for the woman to die, but at least her cries are muffled.”
